A Puritan Bohemia/Chapter 3
CHAPTER III
"Don't stop working," begged Mrs. Kent. "I do so like to watch you."
Anne pushed the ruffle of her blue gingham painting-apron away from her face, and took up her brushes again. She was retouching, from memory, a study of an old sailor.
Mrs. Kent stooped to pat Miserere, the studio cat, then looked at the pictures on the walls,—an old woman, drinking tea; a white-haired man, warming his fingers over the last coals of his fire; a young Italian mother, with a brown baby in her arms.
"The things you do have an unusual charm for me," said the caller.
"Yet I am an utter failure, so far as any recognition of my work is concerned," responded the artist cheerfully.
"You have not been working long enough."
"Ever since I came back to America. That is four whole years. I haven't exhibited a single picture, nor sold one. But I'm having a beautiful time. Maybe if it weren't so hopeless I should not be so enthusiastic about it."
"That is hard philosophy," said Mrs. Kent, with her sad little smile. "Do you suppose that I could apply it in my charity work?"
It was a peculiar room. The old-fashioned furniture had brought into the world of art a suggestion of serious and ascetic New England life. A tall old clock stood by the cast of Psyche. The cherry desk, where the artist's father had written sermons for thirty years, was crowned by a Venus de Milo. From claw-footed table and high-backed chairs reminders of the Vermont parsonage stole across the warmth and colour of the studio. Over the door Anne had hung a sketch of her father's face—stern, spiritual, Puritan.
The studio was like Miss Bradford. So were the pictures. Mrs. Kent looked at them again, wondering at the likeness between the artist and her work. There was careful rendering of the wrinkles, the lines about the mouth, the curving of the lips; but the eyes were Anne's own. Into them all had crept that look of mingled thirst for life and fear of life, and they looked out wistfully from the canvases, full of sadness, as if trying to understand.
Mrs. Kent glanced at the artist's clear gray eyes, determined mouth, and smooth, parted hair.
"You must never give up."
"I can't," Anne responded, putting the finishing touches on a thumb. "The work won't give me up. It holds me as a cat does a mouse. You see, it has always been the one thing in the world for me, and life has had no meaning apart from it. I want to be genuine—not like other women. Most women wear their careers as if they were jewelry. Work is only a new species of ornament. They aren't great enough to lose themselves in it.
"Only I should like one wee bit of encouragement! The master never stopped at my easel, as he always does in books, to say, 'You have a touch. There is a future before you.' I've got nothing to depend on but my belief in myself."
"It is all very wonderful to me," said Mrs. Kent, rising to go. "How can you interpret people's faces in that way without having had their experience?"
"I don't know. I have an idea that you can interpret other people's lives better if your own isn't too much tangled up. Lack of life is life's best interpreter."
There was a knock at the door. The janitor had brought Miss Bradford a card. She stood for a minute, turning it over in paint-stained fingers.
"Say that I will come down directly."
Then she went back to her canvas and spoiled the thumb.
Five minutes later Anne walked down-stairs with Howard Stanton's card in her hand. Miserere accompanied her to the reception-room door, then dashed away to play with the other studio cats, Victoria Regina, and Albert Edward, Prince of Wales.
Anne tore up the card, then wondered helplessly what to do with the pieces. It was strange that Howard should come just now. But then, it was strange that he had not come before. She must be rather formal at first. Memories drifted to her of scenes where she had met him in imagination. In imagination she had been quite self-possessed. Now she was undeniably ill at ease. This was only because of her haunting anxiety lest she had spoiled this man's life.
As she entered, the young man rose and held out his hand. He, apparently, was not embarrassed.
"I am presuming upon our old acquaintance," he said. "Chance has brought me to the city"
"Why, Howard!" gasped Anne. She had not meant to be so formal as that.
He had not changed, she thought, as he drew a wicker chair out for her from its position by the Van Dyck portrait. He had the same voice, the same light brown hair, though the lock over the forehead was gone. Anne suppressed a desire to tell him that he had grown, remembering that he was six feet two when she saw him last. She wondered vaguely at her own surprise in finding him so robust.
"When did you return from Europe?" she asked stiffly, then repented having spoken. That seemed like alluding to their last meeting.
"A year and a half ago. I studied in Paris first, then went to London for inspiration."
"London!"
"People do not usually go to London for art. But French art is dead, except for the Symbolists."
This sweeping assertiveness seemed very familiar.
"I got hold of some good ideas among the London Socialists. There's a movement afoot for the popularization of art. It is indirectly the work of Ruskin. After I came home I taught a year, just to send the message on."
Anne lifted her eyebrows.
"You have a new theory?"
"I have," he answered. "Moreover, I've got a commission, to design frescoes for a room in the City Hall."
"Here?" cried Anne eagerly. Then she corrected her manner.
"You have been very successful. I saw notices of your two Sâlon pictures. Why did the Art Review call you an impressionist?"
"It's a perfectly harmless term, as it doesn't mean anything."
"You always were something of an impressionist in temperament!"
Howard changed the subject abruptly. He had come to bespeak Miss Bradford's interest in a pupil of his, Miss Wistar, now at the Rembrandt Studios. Anne politely promised to call.
The difficulties of finding their bearings in these new waters increased. They talked of Hazleton, of their childhood, of the water-colour exhibition. Finally they drifted into a half-merry quarrel over theories of work. Once again the old, boyish, emphatic manner broke through the new reserve.
"Realism! There's nothing in it, French realism anyway, but impure taste and false accuracy."
The caller accepted with apparent interest an invitation to come again. In the street he fell to thinking.
"Anne has not changed in the least, but she looks tired. She has been working too hard. And her father's death was hard for her."
He had not expected the reminder of old days to be so poignant.
Anne went back to the studio and picked up her brushes. Howard had improved beyond her best hopes for him. He was not a blighted being, but was self-poised, interested in his work.
"I am glad it has all ended sensibly," she said to herself. "He's very satisfactory, almost too satisfactory."
Then her eyes clouded, and she could not see the thumb.