Delphi complete works of.., p.546
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells, page 546
“Will you tell me all about it, then?”
“Yes. But it isn’t anything.”
At the end of the story Charmian sighed, “How romantic! Of course, he’s simply in a frenzy till he sees you again. I don’t believe he can live through the week.”
“He’ll have to live through several,” said Cornelia; “You can excuse me when you go. He’s very conceited, and he talks to you as if he were a thousand years old. I think Mr. Plaisdell is a great deal nicer. He doesn’t treat you as if you were — I don’t know what!”
XX.
The next day Cornelia found herself the object of rumors that filled the Synthesis. She knew that they all came from Charmian, and that she could not hope to overtake them with denial. The ridiculous romances multiplied themselves, and those who did not understand that Cornelia and Ludlow had grown up together in the same place, or were first cousins, had been encouraged to believe that they were old lovers, who had quarrelled, and never spoken till they happened to meet at Mrs. Maybough’s. Ludlow was noted for a certain reticence and austerity with women, which might well have come from an unhappy love-affair; once when he took one of the instructor’s classes at the Synthesis temporarily, his forbidding urbanity was so glacial, that the girls scarcely dared to breathe in his presence, and left it half-frozen. The severest of the masters, with all his sarcasm, was simply nothing to him.
Cornelia liked to hear that. She should have despised Ludlow if she had heard he was silly with girls, and she did not wish to despise him, though she knew that he despised her; she could bear that. The Synthesis praises made her the more determined, however, to judge his recent work when she came to see it, just as she would judge any one’s work. But first of all she meant not to see it.
She seemed to have more trouble in bringing herself back to this point than in keeping Charmian to it. Charmian came to believe her at last, after declaring it the rudest thing she ever heard of, and asking Cornelia what she expected to say to Mrs. Westley when she came for her. Cornelia could never quite believe it herself, though she strengthened her purpose with repeated affirmation, tacit and explicit, and said it would be very easy to tell Mrs. Westley she was not going, if she ever did come for her. She could not keep Charmian from referring the case to every one on the steps and window-sills in the Synthesis, and at the sketch-class, where Charmian published it the first time Cornelia came, and wove a romance from it which involved herself as the close friend and witness of so strange a being.
Cornelia tried not to let all this interfere with her work, but it did, and at the sketch-class where she might have shown some rebound from the servile work of the Preparatory, and some originality, she disappointed those whom Charmian had taught to expect anything of her. They took her rustic hauteur and her professed indifference to the distinction of Ludlow’s invitation, as her pose. She went home from the class vexed to tears by her failure, and puzzled to know what she really should say to that Mrs. Westley when she came; it wouldn’t be so easy to tell her she was not going, after all. Cornelia hated her, and wished she would not come; she had let the whole week go by, now, till Thursday, and perhaps she really would not come. The girl knew so little of the rigidity of city dates that she thought very likely Mrs. Westley had decided to put it off till another week.
She let herself into her boarding-house with her latch-key and stood confronted in the hall with Ludlow, who was giving some charge to the maid. “Oh, Miss Saunders,” he said, and he put the card he held into his pocket, “I’m so glad not to miss you; I was just leaving a written message, but now I can tell you.”
He hesitated, and Cornelia did not know what to do. But she said, “Won’t you come in?” with a vague movement toward the parlor.
“Why, yes, thank you, for a moment,” he said; and he went back with her.
“I hope I haven’t kept you waiting,” she said, with a severity which was for her own awkwardness.
He did not take it for himself. “Oh, no! I’ve just come from Mrs. Westley’s, and she’s charged me with a message for you.” He handed Cornelia a note. “She will call for you and Miss Maybough at the Synthesis rather earlier than you usually leave work, I believe, but I want you to have some daylight on my Manet. I hope half-past two won’t be too early?”
“Oh, no,” said Cornelia, and while she wondered how she could make this opening of assent turn to refusal in the end, Ludlow went on:
“There’s something of my own, that I’d like to have you look at. Of course, you won’t get away with the Manet, alone; I don’t suppose you expected that. I’ve an idea you can tell me where I’ve gone wrong, if I have; it’s all a great while ago. Have you ever been at the County Fair at Pymantoning since — —”
He stopped, and Cornelia perceived that it was with doubt whether it might not still be a tender point with her.
“Oh, yes, I’ve forgiven the Fair long ago.” She laughed, and he laughed with her.
“It’s best not to keep a grudge against a defeat, I suppose. If we do, it won’t help us. I’ve had my quarrel with the Pymantoning County Fair, too; but it wasn’t with the Fine Arts Committee.”
“No, I didn’t suppose you wanted to exhibit anything there,” said Cornelia.
“Why, I don’t know. It might be a very good thing for me. Why not? I’d like to exhibit this very picture there. It’s an impression — not just what I’d do, now — of the trotting-match I saw there that day.”
“Yes,” said Cornelia, letting her eyes fall, “Mrs. Burton said you had painted it, or you were going to.”
“Well, I did,” said Ludlow, “and nobody seemed to know what I was after. I wonder if they would in Pymantoning! But what I wanted to ask was that you would try to look at it from the Pymantoning point of view. I hope you haven’t lost that yet?”
“Well, I haven’t been away such a great while,” said Cornelia, smiling.
“No; but still, one sophisticates in New York very soon. I’ll tell you what I’ve got a notion of! Well, it’s all very much in the air, yet, but so far as I’ve thought it out, it’s the relation of our art to our life. It sounds rather boring, I know, and I suppose I’m a bit of a theorist; I always was. It’s easy enough to prove to the few that our life is full of poetry and picturesqueness; but can I prove it to the many? Can the people themselves be made to see it and feel it? That’s the question. Can they be interested in a picture — a real work of art that asserts itself in a good way? Can they be taught to care for my impression of the trotting-match at the Pymantoning County Fair, as much as they would for a chromo of the same thing, and be made to feel that there was something more in it perhaps?”
He sat fronting her, with his head down over the hat he held between his hands; now he lifted his face and looked into hers. She smiled at his earnestness, and for a little instant felt herself older and wiser in her practicality.
“You might send it out to the next County Fair, and see.”
“Why, that’s just what I thought of!” he said, and he laughed. “Do you suppose they would let me exhibit it in the Fine Arts Department?”
“I don’t believe they would give you the first premium,” said Cornelia.
“Well, well, then I should have to put up with the second! I should like to get the first, I confess,” Ludlow went on seriously. “The premium would mean something to me — not so much, of course, as a popular recognition. What do you think the chance of that would be?”
“Well, I haven’t seen the picture yet,” Cornelia suggested.
“Ah, that’s true! I forgot that,” he said, and they both laughed. “But what do you think of my theory? It seems to me,” and now he leaned back in his chair, and smiled upon her with that bright earnestness which women always found charming in him, “it seems to me that the worst effect of an artist’s life is to wrap him up in himself, and separate him from his kind. Even if he goes in for what they call popular subjects, he takes from the many and gives to the few; he ought to give something back to the crowd — he ought to give everything back. But the terrible question is whether they’ll have it; and he has no means of finding out.”
“And you’ve come to one of the crowd to inquire?” Cornelia asked. Up to that moment she had been flattered, too, by his serious appeal to her, and generously pleased. But the chance offered, and she perversely seized it.
He protested with a simple “Ah!” and she was ashamed.
“I don’t know,” she hurried on to say. “I never thought about it in that way.”
“Well, it isn’t so simple any more, after you once begin. I don’t suppose I shall be at peace quite till I try what I can do; and seeing you Sunday brought Pymantoning all so freshly back, that I’ve been wondering, from time to time, ever since, whether you could possibly help me.”
“I will try, as the good little boy said,” Cornelia assented.
“It makes me feel like a good little boy to have asked it.” Ludlow did not profit by the chance which the conclusion of their agreement offered him, to go. He stayed and talked on, and from time to time he recurred to what he had asked, and said he was afraid she would think he was using her, and tried to explain that he really was not, but was approaching her most humbly for her opinion. He could not make it out, but they got better and better acquainted in the fun they had with his failures. It went on till Cornelia said, “Now, really, if you keep it up, I shall have to stand you in the corner, with your face to the wall.”
“Oh, do!” he entreated. “It would be such a relief.”
“You know I was a teacher two winters,” she said, “and have actually stood boys in corners.”
That seemed to interest him afresh; he made her tell him all about her school-teaching. He stayed till the bell rang for dinner, and he suffered a decent moment to pass before he rose then.
“After all,” he said at parting, “I think you’d better decide that it’s merely my Manet you’re coming to see.”
“Yes, merely the Manet,” Cornelia assented. “If I choose, the Ludlows will all be stood in the corners with their faces to the wall.”
She found her own face very flushed, when she climbed up to her room for a moment before going in to dinner, and her heart seemed to be beating in her neck. She looked at Mrs. Westley’s note. It stated everything so explicitly that she did not see why Mr. Ludlow need have come to explain. She remembered now that she had forgotten to tell him she was not going.
XXI.
Cornelia thought Mrs. Westley would come for Charmian and herself in her carriage; but when they went down to her in the Synthesis office, they found that she had planned to walk with them to Ludlow’s studio. She said it was not a great way off; and she had got into the habit of walking there, when he was painting her; she supposed they would rather walk after their work. Cornelia said “Oh, yes,” and Charmian asked, at her perfervidest, Had Mr. Ludlow painted her? and Mrs. Westley answered calmly. Yes; she believed he did not think it very successful; her husband liked it, though. Charmian said, Oh, how much she should like to see it, and Mrs. Westley said she must show it her some time. Cornelia thought Mrs. Westley very pretty, but she decided that she did not care to see Ludlow’s picture of her.
His studio stood a little back from the sidewalk; it was approached by a broad sloping pavement, and had two wide valves for the doorway. He opened the door himself, at their ring, and they found themselves in a large, gray room which went to the roof, with its vaulted ceiling; this was pierced with a vast window, that descended half-way down the northward wall. “My studio started in life as a gentleman’s stable; then it fell into the hands of a sculptor, and then it got as low as a painter.” He said to Charmian, “Mr. Plaisdell has told me how ingeniously you treated one of your rooms that you took for a studio.”
Charmian answered with dark humility, “But a studio without a painter in it!” and there were some offers and refusals of compliment between them, which ended in his saying that he would like to see her studio, and her saying that Mrs. Maybough would always be glad to see him. Then he talked with Mrs. Westley, who was very pleasant to Cornelia while the banter with Charmian went on, and proposed to show his pictures; he fancied that was what he had got them there, for; but he would make a decent pretence of the Manet, first.
The Manet was one of that painter’s most excessive; it was almost insolent in its defiance of the old theory and method of art. “He had to go too far, in those days, or he wouldn’t have arrived anywhere,” Ludlow said, dreamily, as he stood looking with them at the picture. “He fell back to the point he had really meant to reach.” He put the picture away amidst the sighs and murmurs of Mrs. Westley and Charmian, and the silence of Cornelia, which he did not try to break. He began to show his own pictures, taking them at random, as it seemed, from the ranks of canvasses faced against the wall. “You know we impressionists are nothing if not prolific,” he said, and he kept turning the frame on his easel, now for a long picture, and now for a tall one. The praises of the others followed him, but Cornelia could not speak. Some of the pictures she did not like; some she thought were preposterous; but there were some that she found brilliantly successful, and a few that charmed her with their delicate and tender poetry. He said something about most of them, in apology or extenuation; Cornelia believed that she knew which he liked by his not saying anything of them.
Suddenly he set a large picture on the easel that quite filled the frame. “Trotting Match at the Pymantoning County Fair,” he announced, and he turned away and began to make tea in a little battered copper kettle over a spirit-lamp, on a table strewn with color-tubes in the corner.
“Ah, yes,” said Mrs. Westley. “I remember this at the American Artists; three or four years ago, wasn’t it? But you’ve done something to it, haven’t you?”
“Improved with age,” said Ludlow, with his back toward them, bent above his tea-kettle. “That’s all.”
“It seems like painting a weed, though,” said Charmian. “How can you care for such subjects?”
Ludlow came up to her with the first cup of tea. “It’s no use to paint lilies, you know.”
“Do you call that an answer?”
“A poor one.”
He brought Mrs. Westley some tea, and then he came to Cornelia with a cup in each hand, one for her, and one for himself, and frankly put himself between her and the others. “Well, what do you think of it?” he asked, as if there were no one else but they two.
She felt a warm flush of pleasure in his boldness. “I don’t know. It’s like it; that’s the way I’ve always seen it; and it’s beautiful. But somehow — —”
“What?”
“It looks as if it were somewhere else.”
“You’ve hit it,” said Ludlow. “It serves me right. You see I was so anxious to prove that an American subject was just as susceptible of impressionistic treatment as a French one, that I made this look as French as I could. I must do it again and more modestly; not be so patronizing. I should like to come out there next fall again, and see another trotting-match. I suppose they’ll have one?”
“They always have them; it wouldn’t be the Fair without them,” said Cornelia.
“Well, I must come, and somehow do it on the spot; that’s the only way.” He pulled himself more directly in front of her and ignored the others, who talked about his picture with faded interest to each other, and then went about, and looked at the objects in the studio. “I don’t think I made myself quite clear the other day, about what I wanted to do in this way.” He plunged into the affair again, and if Cornelia did not understand it better, it was not for want of explanation. Perhaps she did not listen very closely. All the time she thought how brilliantly handsome he was, and how fine, by every worldly criterion. “Yes,” he said, “that is something I have been thinking of ever since my picture failed with the public; it deserved to fail, and you’ve made it so clear why, that I can’t refuse to know, or to keep myself in the dark about it any longer. I don’t believe we can take much from the common stock of life in any way, and find the thing at all real in our hands, without intending to give something back. Do you?”
Cornelia had never thought about it before; she did not try to pretend that she had; it seemed a little fantastic to her, but it flattered her to have him talk to her about it, and she liked his seriousness. He did not keep up the kind of banter with her that he did with Charmian; he did not pay her compliments, and she hated compliments from men.
Ludlow went off to speak to Mrs. Westley of something he saw her looking at; Charmian edged nearer to Cornelia. “I would give the world to be in your place. I never saw anything like it. Keep on looking just as you are! It’s magnificent. Such color, and that queenly pose of the head! It would kill those Synthesis girls if they knew how he had been talking to you. My, if I could get anybody to be serious with me! Talk! Say something! Do you think its going to rain before we get home? His eyes keep turning this way, all the time; you can’t see them, but they do. I am glad I brought my umbrella. Have you got your waterproof? I’m going to make you tell me every word he said when he came to see you yesterday; it’ll be mean if you don’t. No, I think I shall go up by the elevated, and then take the surface-car across. It’s the most romantic thing I ever heard of. No, I don’t believe it will be dark. Speak! Say something! You mustn’t let me do all the talking; he’ll notice.”
Cornelia began to laugh, and Charmian turned away and joined Mrs. Westley and Ludlow, who were tilting outward some of the canvasses faced against the wall, and talking them over. Cornelia followed her, and they all four loitered over the paintings, luxuriously giving a glance at each, and saying a word or two about it. “Yes,” Ludlow said, “sometimes I used to do three or four of them a day. I work more slowly now; if you want to get any thinking in, you’ve got to take time to it.”
It was growing dark; Ludlow proposed to see them all home one after another. Mrs. Westley said no, indeed; the Broadway car, at the end of the second block, would leave her within three minutes of her door.
