PAGE 5
The Pot-Boiler
by
She looked at him superbly. “Well, do you?”
He embraced his bleak walls in a circular gesture. “Judge for yourself!”
“Ah, but it’s splendidly furnished!”
“With rejected pictures, you mean?”
“With ideals!” she exclaimed in a tone caught from her brother, and which would have been irritating to Stanwell if it had not been moving.
He gave a slight shrug and took up his hat; but she interposed to say that if it didn’t make any difference she would prefer to have him go and sit with poor Caspar, while she ran for the doctor and did some household errands by the way. Stanwell divined in her request the need for a brief respite from Caspar, and though he shivered at the thought of her facing the cold in the scant jacket which had been her only wear since he had known her, he let her go without a protest, and betook himself to Arran’s studio.
He found the little sculptor dressed and roaming fretfully about the melancholy room in which he and his plastic off-spring lodged together. In one corner, where Kate’s chair and work-table stood, a scrupulous order prevailed; but the rest of the apartment had the dreary untidiness, the damp grey look, which the worker in clay usually creates about him. In the centre of this desert stood the shrouded image of Caspar’s disappointment: the colossal rejected group as to which his friends could seldom remember whether it represented Jove hurling a Titan from Olympus or Science Subjugating Religion. Caspar was the sworn foe of religion, which he appeared to regard as indirectly connected with his inability to sell his statues.
The sculptor was too ill to work, and Stanwell’s appearance loosed the pent-up springs of his talk.
“Hullo! What are you doing here? I thought Kate had gone over to sit to you. She wanted a little fresh air? I should say enough of it came in through these windows. How like a woman, when she’s agreed to do a certain thing, to make up her mind at once that she’s got to do another! They don’t call it caprice–it’s always duty: that’s the humour of it. I’ll be bound Kate alleged a pressing engagement. Sorry she should waste your time so, my dear fellow. Here am I with plenty of it to burn–look at my hand shake; I can’t do a thing! Well, luckily nobody wants me to–posterity may suffer, but the present generation isn’t worrying. The present generation wants to be carved in sugar-candy, or painted in maple syrup. It doesn’t want to be told the truth about itself or about anything in the universe. The prophets have always lived in a garret, my dear fellow–only the ravens don’t always find out their address! Speaking of ravens, though, Kate told me she saw old Shepson coming out of your place–I say, old man, you’re not meditating an apostasy? You’re not doing the kind of thing that Shepson would look at?”
Stanwell laughed. “Oh, he looked at them–but only to confirm his reasons for rejecting them.”
“Ha! ha! That’s right–he wanted to refresh his memory with their badness. But how on earth did he happen to have any doubts on the subject? I should as soon have thought of his coming in here!”
Stanwell winced at the analogy, but replied in Caspar’s key: “Oh, he’s not as sure of any of us as he is of you!”
The sculptor received this tribute with a joyous expletive. “By God, no, he’s sure of me, as you say! He and his tribe know that I’ll starve in my tracks sooner than make a concession–a single concession. A fellow came after me once to do an angel on a tombstone–an angel leaning against a broken column, and looking as if it was waiting for the elevator and wondering why in hell it didn’t come. He said he wanted me to show that the deceased was pining to get to heaven. As she was his wife I didn’t dispute the proposition, but when I asked him what he understood by heaven he grabbed his hat and walked out of the studio. He didn’t wait for the elevator.”