The gospel of freedom

Simeon Erard tiptoed deftly across the room, tugging at his thin, sandy heard. Fumbling among the curtains which draped one corner of the best light, he pulled the cord, after carefully eyeing his visitors to see that all were placed properly. The light silk folds fell apart, revealing a small canvas,--a cool deep slit of grey water let into a marble floor, which was cut in two by the languorous reach of a woman’s back done in hard green. The large masses of auburn hair of the bent head floated on the creamy slab. The artist coughed.

“Well!” exclaimed Mrs. Anthon, in a puff of surprise. “A bath-room, I declare!”

“Is that your exhibition-picture?” inquired her brother-in-law, Sebastian Anthon, a little dubiously. Erard took no notice of these wavering remarks. To him they were the necessary comment of the world, to which he habitually paid as marked disrespect as he dared.

“You see, don’t you, Miss Anthon,” his voice was persuasively patronizing, “what I have tried to do? You grasp the difficulties, don’t you? Of course to the crowd it’s nothing but a modern bath, half full of water, with a young woman in it, whose hair is red. But you see the vigor of that leg, the coolness of that water shot with light. You feel it. The artist--and the rare person--will stop before that picture; he will know what it means. And the artist paints for the artist; shouldn’t he, Miss Anthon?”

The young woman thus distinguished by the special appeal waived the responsibility of assent to the last proposition. But she moved away from the little group of suspicious critics, drawing near to the picture, as if she were willing to represent the sympathetic intelligence.

“Yes,” she murmured slyly, “that leg half in the water, half out, is subtle. The flesh gives itself to the coolness.”

Mrs. Anthon began ostentatiously to use her lorgnette on the room. Sebastian Anthon turned one or two canvases to the light.

“Ah!” the young artist responded, “my dear Miss Anthon, you are the right sort; you understand. Don’t you feel that back rippling into the new medium? To do the little bit where the lights change,” he indicated hastily a patch of rough brushwork, “that was the keenest delight of the past year, the best minutes of intense existence, and for that we artists live, don’t we?”

The girl half smiled as if something vaguely humorous crossed her mind, yet again her impulse was to take his part against his antipathetic fellow-countrymen.

“Well, that cornfield didn’t grow in the States, I’d bet!” This ejaculation came from a young man, who had unearthed a sketch in bright yellows. He stood with his cane behind his back, his light coat thrown open, in an attitude of eager expectation, and anxiety to lose nothing that was going on, while hunting for appropriate expression. The dull Paris sunlight of a November afternoon sobered the robust hue of his face and his broad hands. “Eh!” Erard remarked indifferently, “that’s a sketch I made in Calabria, an effort in yellows.” He turned the canvas back to the wall, as if he would take from a child a fragile toy.

“This impressionistic business is beyond me,” the young man remarked defiantly, addressing Mrs. Anthon for support.

“Adela hasn’t done much in it yet,” Mrs. Anthon answered. “You know, Mr. Wilbur, she’s at Jerome’s. He’s good for the drawing, they say, and then he has so many studios, and one is up our way, just behind the Madeleine. And Jerome has such a good class of young women. I couldn’t have Adela running about and living as the common art-students do. No Trilby stuff for me, I said to Sebastian, when he advised me to take Adela over here and let her have a chance to culture herself. Adela rather wanted to try it by herself for a year, but her father made her keep on at Bryn Mawr, that school down near Baltimore, where they wear caps and gowns. But when her father died,--her elder brother was married and living out to Denver, and Walter was just finishing school at Harvard,--I said I couldn’t be left alone. What are children good for, if they’re going to run away to college and to art-schools? It is bad enough to have them marry, but a girl, when she isn’t obliged to work,--and Addie won’t have to teach, I guess--”

Mrs. Anthon was fast unwinding her philosophy of life, in the sympathetic manner of Western Americans, that takes for granted a neighbour’s interest in one’s affairs and does not comprehend reticence. Wilbur was apparently interested. But Miss Anthon, who had practised the power of watching ever for her mother’s garrulous tongue, while she attended to other matters, interfered.

“Mr. Erard will show us his den, mamma. Isn’t the apartment delightful and interesting? It’s an old swell’s house. Louis seize complete, just as it was, without any change. Mr. Erard found it quite by accident, he says, one day when he was wandering about in this quarter among the convents. He came down a side lane that runs into the rue Vaugirard. Just as he was leaving it, his eye happened to fall upon that old cypress in the court. He prowled about and found this nest.”

Animation returned once more to the party. Erard led them from the studio--a fine old room, with open-timbered ceiling, left almost ostentatiously bare--into the adjoining salon. In the sombre studio there had been only the warm woodwork; here were many living qualities,--the lofty windows hung with dark stuffs, the fireplace adorned by a delicate relief of nymphs. In one corner was a spinet, and along the sides of the room couches, with a few low tables and aristocratic chairs. Some little bronzes, one or two pastels, and a cast of a group by a young American sculptor, completed the obvious contents.

The ladies exclaimed. Wilbur observed thoughtfully, “I should think you would rattle around a little.”

“Ah! I don’t live here,” Erard answered airily, pushing open the large folding doors beside the fireplace. “_This_ is my den, and beyond are the bedrooms.”

The inner room was of the same dignified height as the rest of the apartment. A bit of tapestry on one side, and shelves for books and photographs on another, hid the walls. In one corner was a simple ormolu table, where notes lay half opened, and beside it a lounge. A few high-backed chairs, each one a precious find, were ranged like solemn lackeys along the walls. A second piece of tapestry cut off a dimly lighted alcove, where a bed of state could be seen,--“also of the period,” as Erard remarked complacently. The visitors were still admiring when the servant opened the door into the dining salon.

“We will have some punch,” Erard sighed, throwing himself into the deep chair at the head of the table, in which his small figure seemed engulfed. While Pierre, like an attentive mouse, passed the punch and cakes, the Americans let their eyes roam over the room. It was sombre with heavy furniture, but scrupulously confined to “the period,” from the few plates that looked down from the lofty sideboard, to the andirons on the hearth.

“An ideal nest,” Miss Anthon murmured.

“Your man makes such good punch,” Mrs. Anthon added.

“You must have put a mine into this,” Wilbur commented, as he sipped his punch. “Fixed it up for a permanent residence?”

“Ah! I can’t say,” the artist replied negligently. “Paris bores me a good deal. I do my best work at Giverney or San Geminiano. This is a kind of office.”

“Not much like the old garret where genius was once supposed to blossom,” Sebastian Anthon reflected in his weary voice, as if making propositions for himself.

Erard moved uneasily. The gentle old man’s remark contained a special sting.

“That doesn’t go nowadays. To do his best work, the workman must have his proper atmosphere. It was all well enough in the Renaissance for those old fellows to bang about; there was so much going on that was inspiring; so much beauty in the world! But to-day he must cover himself up from the horrid impressions of reality. If he fought with cold and hunger and bad wall-paper, and all that, he would never be fit for his fine work. Either the harsh actualities would blunt his sensitiveness, or he would show that he hadn’t any, that he wasn’t of the temperament.”

Erard turned from the attentive old man to the young woman, whose fortune of contemporaneous birth might render her intelligent to the force of his remarks. Moreover, she was a woman, and Simeon Erard’s strong point was his management of women. He got at them on impersonal, sexless grounds. His rambling physique and flattened face were almost repulsive, and he had never quite lost the traces of the dull back alley in Jersey City, whence he had emerged upon the circle of patrons and patronesses who were to attend him on towards fame. With a subtle insight into his own resources, he knew that women would always be useful to him; that they were most excellent working-partners of fame. To have a chorus of women at your command was like subsidizing the press: it was a dangerous weapon to use, but its range was incalculable. And in manipulating women he was skilful enough to exclude the sexual basis. He never appeared to them in the light of a possible husband or lover. Further, he never included a stupid woman in his chorus merely because she made court to him.

Just now it seemed to him better worth while securing a new ally than opening the dangerous question started by the old man. So he led the party back to the salon and begged Miss Anthon to try the spinet. While he explained the working of the instrument, he threw out casually some remarks about music. The young woman struck a few thin chords, that rustled like yellowed parchment in the lofty room; her glance followed the artist as he looked after his guests.

Now he was talking to Wilbur, who was eagerly loquacious. She could catch phrases: “... run over for a few months ... business dull ... had a chance to be fixed up in a little job ... pretty good place ... am a University of Michigan man.” Erard’s little eyes were coolly judging the expansive young man, assigning him to his species, and calculating the exact amount of significance he might contain.

Who was this Erard? She had heard her mother refer often enough to Sebastian Anthon’s “folly” over that “painter-fellow” he had picked up in New York as a tutor for his daughter. She remembered many little details of his career: how her uncle had found him in a print-shop behind the counter, and had encouraged him in his efforts to worm his way through the art-school. Later he had come to Sebastian Anthon’s summer home, on the half-intimate footing of a tutor, and she remembered to have seen him there,--a sullen, ugly lad, with his material and stupid charge. Then Erard had gone abroad, first with Uncle Sebastian, then again for a long period by himself. And her mother accused him of “getting Sebastian to waste good money on pictures and such stuff.”

She was not aware that Erard had done much to justify all the Anthon money that had gone into his career. At least if you counted by tangible evidences! She did not know that one of the first precepts which the protégé had inculcated had been that you should not count by vulgar or tangible proofs, such as books published, pictures painted and sold, articles appearing in magazines, with accompanying checks and drafts.