PAGE 5
A Question Of Art
by
“Come to work,” said Miss Marston, at last.
“That’s no go,” he replied, “that subject we selected.”
“I dare say you won’t do much with it, but it will do as well as any other for experiment and practice.”
“I see that you want those arms preserved.”
The little woman shrank into her shell for a moment: her lazy artist could scatter insults as negligently as epigrams. Then she blazed out.
“Mr. Clayton, I didn’t come here to be insulted.”
Clayton, utterly surprised, opened his sleepy eyes in real alarm.
“Bless you, my dear Miss Marston, I can’t insult anybody. I never mean anything.”
“Perhaps that’s the trouble,” replied Miss Marston, somewhat mollified. But the sitting was hardly a success. Clayton wasted almost all his time in improvising an easel and in preparing his brushes. Miss Marston had to leave him just as he was ready to throw himself into his work. He was discontented, and, instead of improving the good light and the long day, he took a pipe and went away into the hills. The next morning he felt curiously ashamed when Miss Marston, after examining the rough sketch on the easel, said:
“Is that all?”
And this day he painted, but in a fit of gloomy disgust destroyed everything. So it went on for a few weeks. Miss Marston was more regular than an alarm-clock; sometimes she brought some work, but oftener she sat vacantly watching the young man at work. Her only standard of accomplishment was quantity. One day, when Clayton had industriously employed a rainy afternoon in putting in the drapery for the figure, she was so much pleased by the quantity of the work accomplished that she praised him gleefully. Clayton, who was, as usual, in an ugly mood, cast an utterly contemptuous look at her and then turned to his easel.
“You mustn’t look at me like that,” the woman said, almost frightened.
“Then don’t jabber about my pictures.”
Her lips quivered, but she was silent. She began to realize her position of galley-slave, and welcomed with a dull joy the contempt and insults to come.
One morning Clayton was not to be found. He did not appear during that week, and at last Miss Marston determined to find him. She made an excuse for a journey to Boston, and divining where Clayton could be found, she sent him word at a certain favorite club that she wanted to see him. He called at her modest hotel, dejected, listless, and somewhat shamefaced; he found Miss Marston calm and commonplace as usual. But it was the calm of a desperate resolve, won after painful hours, that he little recognized. Her instinct to attach herself to this strange, unaccountable creature, to make him effective to himself, had triumphed over her prejudices. She humbled herself joyfully, recognizing a mission.
“Della said that I might presume on your escort home,” she remarked dryly, trembling for fear that she had exposed herself to some contemptuous retort. One great attraction, however, in Clayton was that he never expected the conventional. It did not occur to him as particularly absurd that this woman, ten years his senior, should hunt him up in this fashion. He took such eccentricities as a matter of course, and whatever the circumstances or the conversation, found it all natural and reasonable. Women did not fear him, but talked indiscreetly to him about all things.
“What’s the use of keeping up this ridiculous farce about my work?” he said, sadly. Then he sought for a conventional phrase. “Your unexpected interest and enthusiasm in my poor attempts have been most kind, my dear Miss Marston. But you must allow me to go to the dogs in my own fashion; that’s the inalienable right of every emancipated soul in these days.” The politeness and mockery of this little epigram stung the woman.
“Don’t be brutal, as well as good for nothing,” she said, bitterly. “You’re as low as if you took to drink or any other vice, and you know it. I can’t appreciate your fine ideas, perhaps, but I know you ought to do something more than talk. You’re terribly ambitious, but you’re too weak to do anything but talk. I don’t care what you think about my interference. I can make you work, and I will make you do something. You know you need the whip, and if none of your pleasant friends will give it to you, I can. Come!” she added, pleadingly.