Part 12

I suppose I ought to have been contented, but the work seemed stupid to me. I tired of the everlasting talk of chorus girls. They all seemed to have but one interest, and that was the stage. Mind you not _acting_, but the _stage_ and all the cheap shop talk that goes with it. What is more, I was weary of Lil and her girl friends and their men friends. They sat up at the little flat so late that it was almost impossible to sleep; and there was too much drink and crazy laughter. It worked upon my nerves and I began to long for the atmosphere of the studios once more. I thought that posing for the artists was, after all, preferable to this cheap “acting.” So when an offer came to me of twenty-five dollars a week as a show girl in a popular “musical show,” I refused it, although Lil and the other girls exclaimed enviously over my “luck.” They seemed to think that I was out of my senses and shrieked at me:

“What on earth _do_ you want then?” And I replied wearily:

“I don’t know myself. I guess I just want to be let alone.”

How those girls did exclaim at that! Apparently, to them, I thought myself better than they were; but indeed this was not the case. I just realized that our interests were different. What seemed exciting and fine to them, seemed to me just stupid, and the miserable lot of little Willie boys who were always hovering about us with their everlasting cigarettes and silly short coats and foolish hats disgusted me. The artists for whom I had worked in Boston were _men_.

Thus I decided to leave Lil. Anyway there was some talk of their all going out with a road show and they expected to give up the flat soon.

XLI

I had had a furious letter from Reggie the day after I arrived in New York, and we had been quarreling by letter ever since. He accused me of deliberately leaving Boston when I knew that he was coming and he said: “It was a low-down trick and I shall never forgive you.” In his anger he also wrote that perhaps the reason for my leaving was that I knew that he would find out the kind of life I had been living there. He wrote:

“I met a few of your ‘friends’--a low-down bartender and a store clerk (Poor Billy Boyd’s room-mate, I suppose) and let me compliment you on your choice of associates. Your tastes certainly have not changed.”

I did not answer that first letter; but he wrote me another, apologizing, and at the same time insinuating things. To that second letter I did reply, hotly. And so it went on between us.

After leaving Lil’s, I found a little room on Fifteenth Street near Eighth Avenue. It was cheap and fairly comfortable and I soon got settled there. Then I started out to look up some artists whose addresses had been sent to me by the Boston men. Right away I secured several engagements. I found, moreover, that my room was only a couple of blocks from what the artists called “Paresis Row” on Fourteenth Street. Here many artists occupied the upper floors, which had been turned into studios in these buildings, once the pretentious homes of the mighty rich people. On the lower floors various businesses were carried on.

I was sent to a man who had a studio in Paresis Row. He was a friend of Mr. Sands and although he did not use models he said he would try and help me get work. He explained to me his own kind of painting as “old-master potboilers.” Sometimes, he said, he got a rush of orders for “old-masters” and then a number of fellows would get busy working on them. He declared humorously that he ran an “old-master” factory.

As I looked at his work, I felt sure I could do that kind of painting, and I said:

“Mr. Menna, would you let me try it, too?” And I told him about the work I had done for the Count and about my father, and he exclaimed:

“Fine! You’re just the girl I’m looking for.”

So I went to work for Mr. Menna, part of the day. I would paint in most of the start, and he would finish the pictures up; “clean them up and draw them together,” as he would say. We were able this way to turn out many “old-masters.” We worked for the dealers and frame-makers, who, in order to sell a frame, put these hastily made oil paintings in and sent them out as “genuine imported paintings.”

Mr. Menna and I became fast friends. He treated me just like another “fellow” and divided the profits with a generous hand. Besides helping him to paint, I acted as his agent. I would go down town and see the dealers, take orders, and sometimes sell to them the ones we made on speculation.

I found out many things in the “picture business” that I had never dreamed possible, but that is another story.

At times, too, I posed for Mr. Menna. He would take spells when he became disgusted with his “potboilers,” and would say he intended to do some “real stuff.” These spells never lasted long, for he would run short of money, and would start with renewed energy on the “painting business” as he disgustedly called it. He discovered that I was very good at copying, but he discouraged my doing it. He said:

“There’s mighty little money in copying, unless you pass it off as the original, and although the dealers do it, and I paint for them, I’m dashed if I’ll actually sell them myself as original. It’s not honest.”

“But, Mr. Menna,” I argued, “isn’t it also dishonest for us to do the copying and let the dealers pass it off and sell it as original?”

“Maybe it is,” he admitted, “but we don’t see them selling them to the ‘suckers’ who buy them, and damn it all, we certainly don’t get the price, so what the hell--”

Mr. Menna had raised his voice, and immediately we heard:

“What the hell--what the hell--what the hell! Do we care--do we care--do we care!”

The noise came from the studio across the hall.

“It’s that bunch of fellows at Fisher’s,” said Menna, grinning. “They get together and all chip in to pay for a model. Say, how would you like to pose for them? Most of them are illustrators, and they’d want you in street clothes and things like that. You can make an extra dollar or two. Go up and see Bonnat. He generally engages the model for the other fellows. You’ve met Fisher here. He’s that little red-haired chap. Talk to him about it, too. Now I’m off for lunch and a glass of beer. Come along if you like, Ascough.”

I went along with Menna. We ate in a little restaurant at the back of a saloon, corner of Eighth Avenue and Fourteenth Street. The lunch costs twenty-five cents each. Menna did not eat much, but he drank four glasses of beer, and he got cross with me when I at first refused to drink. So to please him I had a glass. He said:

“Now, you’re a good sport, and the beer will make you fat.”

“It’s not my ambition to be fat,” I laughed back.

“Get out,” he answered. “Did you hear that German fellow who was in the studio the other day, when Miss Fleming (Miss Fleming was Mr. Menna’s girl) asked him how he liked the American ladies? He said with a sad shake of his head: ‘They are too t’in. The German wimmens have the proportions,’ and he curved his hands in front of his chest as he said: ‘It is one treat to look at her.’”

Menna laughed heartily.

“You’re a German yourself,” I said.

“Not on your life. I’m not,” denied Menna vigorously. “I’m an American. Even my folks were born here. I studied in München. That’s the place!” He shook his head and sighed.

We got up to go, and Menna told me to hustle down town and see a dealer.

XLII

Jacobs, the dealer, was busy showing some customers the paintings. The place was softly lighted, and the paintings were shown off to the best advantage by the arrangement of the lights. There were a number of Oriental rugs about, helping to make the place look luxurious, and adding somehow to the value of the paintings. Jacobs nodded to me, and I sat down to wait.

As soon as the customers were gone, he called me over and pointing to a couple of paintings in elaborate gold frames, he said:

“Those people who were in are furnishing their new home on Riverside Drive, and I expect to sell them quite a few paintings. They got stuck on those two, and I made them a price on them. Now those two are already sold, and the party who bought them wants them delivered next week. You have just come in time, Miss Ascough, as I must have these copied right away. Can you get me an artist to do it?”

I looked at the paintings. They were about sixteen by twenty-eight inches, and the subject of one à la Breton fields of wheat and harvesters, and the other was of a priest or cardinal in his red robes, sitting reading in a richly furnished library. Menna, I knew, could not possibly do the work this week, for he was working on an order for another dealer, and I had come to Jacobs to collect for old work. I thought, however, that I could easily do it myself. So I said to Jacobs:

“I know a woman artist who’ll do it for you.”

“A woman! No, sir! I would not have a woman do any work for me,” said the dealer. “I have had all I want to do with women artists. They do much inferior work to the men, take twice as long, and get swelled heads about it. They whine if they don’t make a fortune out of their daubs. No--nothing doing with the women. Now I like Menna’s work. Take them to him. Don’t let any one see them, and I’ll very likely be able to have them copied again, as I think they’ll prove good sellers.”

“All right,” I said, but I made up my mind to do them myself, and I went out with those precious “imported” paintings under my arm.

Mr. Menna was showing some of his “potboilers” to a man when I returned. They were paintings of little ragged boys. The man did not care for them. As he was going out he said:

“I’ll come again some day when you have other pictures. Those little boy pictures are nice, and I like them, but they are not _parlor_ pictures, and my customers want parlor pictures.”

Menna was puffing angrily on a big cigar. I laughed as the man went out, but Menna could not see the humor of it. He got angrier and angrier. He threw down his palette and brush and let out a big original curse. Wish I could print it here.

“I hope you feel better now, Mr. Menna,” I ventured.

“That’s the kind of thing one is up against,” he roared, “and that fool, Bonnat, was in here a while ago and told me he had refused to make some alteration in the portrait he is painting of the wife of that rich Dr. Craig, because the ass said he would not prostitute his art, and a lot of stuff like that. It makes me sick. He also lost a good chance he had to make illustrations for a magazine--best-paying magazine in New York. He had his own damned ideas about the illustrations, and as they were paying for the job they told him how they wanted them smoothed out. Bonnat belongs to the new school of painting, and he actually refused to please them--missed a chance almost any artist would be glad to get. He’s a chump.”

I was getting excited. In a dim way I was beginning to see something else in art than “the picture business.” It reminded me of how poor Wallace, Ellen’s husband, used to talk of literature. I secretly admired this Bonnat for his stand and his courage.

“Is Mr. Bonnat a Frenchman?” I asked.

“No-o.” Menna seemed uncertain of his nationality, but he said after a moment: “He went to college in America. Got his Ph.D. at Harvard, and was offered a professorship out West somewhere, but after studying all those years and wasting time, he turns around and takes up art. Says all he learned about those ’ologies will enable him to paint better. Did you ever hear such rot?”

“I think I know what he means,” I said eagerly.

“Oh, you do, Miss Wise-one? Well, what does he, then?” Menna was laughing at me, but I didn’t mind. I felt as if I really did understand Bonnat’s point of view, and I said:

“I think he means that he will understand human life better. I’ve heard artists in Boston discussing something about that, and I cannot explain it to myself. I only _feel_ that he is right.”

“Oh, rats!” answered Menna. “It’s all very well if one can afford to do it. I can’t, and Bonnat can’t. He went without food for a whole week, except some bread and milk, and he’s a big, hearty animal, and he went without his winter overcoat all last winter, because he gave it to that little consumptive Jew, Shubert. The joke of it was that Bonnat weighs nearly two hundred pounds, and little Shubert about seventy or ninety, if he weighs that, and he reaches only to Bonnat’s shoulder. It was a howling joke to see him going about in that big overcoat of Bonnat’s.”

Suddenly there flashed over me a memory of Reggie’s handsome fur-lined coat, with its rich collar of mink, and I remembered how mine had not been thick enough to keep the cruel cold out, and Reggie never even noticed how I shivered with the cold in those days. My heart went out to that big Bonnat who had given his coat to cover up a poor neighbor from the cold.

“The name is French,” I said to Menna. “Are you sure he’s not French?”

“His folks were originally, I believe, French Huguenots, and he’s partly German. You’re interested in him, aren’t you? Better not waste your time on a nut,” and Menna finally dismissed Bonnat with a laugh.

When I showed him the paintings he said that I could copy them as well as he could, and made me sit right down and go to work.

Somehow, as I copied those paintings, the pleasure was spoiled for me. There kept running into my head thoughts about _honesty in painting_, and again I recalled my brother-in-law’s remarks on literature, and I knew that it must be the same with all art. I could not get my mind off that man who would not for money be untrue to himself. I felt something stirring within me that I had never stopped to think of before. And I began to despise myself for the work I was doing, and I think I would have despised Menna, too; but suddenly I thought of my father, and I wanted to cry. I realized that there were times when we literally had to do the very things we hated. Ideals were luxuries that few of us could afford to have. Menna had said we had to live, and that was true enough. Most of us were destined to wade through, not above, the miry quicksands of life. Art then was only for the few and the rare and the fortunate.

Menna himself had had great promise as a youth. Moreover, his parents were wealthy, and they had sent him to study in Munich. But when his father died, there was found scarcely enough money left to support his mother and sisters, and Menna was sent for to do his share. He was only twenty-eight, and he tried to support himself with his brush. He was a good-natured, careless fellow, whose path had hitherto been smoothed for him, and so he chose the easiest way in art. He drifted into the potboiler painting, and alas! there he stayed, as is generally the case.

XLIII

I finished my copies in four days, and they were scarcely dry when I carried them down to Jacobs. He examined them as if he were buying some material by the yard. I felt very nervous as he looked at them. Then he grunted, went over to his desk and wrote me a check for thirty dollars and fifteen cents. Menna told me he sold them for a couple of hundred if not more. He handed me the check with the remark:

“They will do. It takes a _man_ to do a piece of work right.”

For a time Menna had very little work for me. There were slack times when he had not enough for himself, and he would get very discouraged. Sometimes he would gather up all the paintings he had made and say:

“Go and slaughter them to those damned frame-makers, Ascough, and sell them for what you can get--anything.”

I would remonstrate with him, and point out that if he would wait and not be in such a hurry for his money we could get better prices.

“Hang it all,” he would shout, “what’s the use?”

So long as he had a few dollars to sit at some table with friends and order beer, he would sacrifice, or as he called it “slaughter,” anything and everything.

As work was now very scarce, I decided to see Fisher about the posing. So I went across the hall and knocked at his door.

“Hello, Miss Ascough,” he called out cheerily, as I came in. “Come on in and sit down. You seem pretty busy in Menna’s studio. What are you doing for him?”

“Oh, I help him paint,” I said, “and sell his work for him, and sometimes I pose. That’s what I want to ask you about now. Wouldn’t you like me to pose for you and your friends? I hear you all sketch together once a week.”

“We’ll be glad to have you,” he declared cordially, his eye scanning me admiringly. “Why didn’t you speak before?”

“Well, I’ve been pretty busy with Mr. Menna, but work’s slack now. So, if you like, I can give you some time.”

“Good. See Bonnat about it. He generally engages the model, and we’re to work in his room next time. Have you met him?”

“No.”

“Well, I guess you have _heard_ him,” laughed Fisher. “He certainly makes enough noise. When he first moved in here, we used to be wakened up early in the morning by him stamping up the stairs from the bathroom, carrying his bucket of water. There’s no water on his floor, and the way he stamped and cussed as he went up those two flights of stairs was enough to awaken the dead, and all the stairs would be splashed with water. We thought that cross old Mary, the caretaker, would go for him (as she _can_), but she never said a word to him. Just went to work and wiped up the water every morning. That comes of being a good-looker.”

“Is he so handsome, then?”

Fisher himself was a homely, red-haired little fellow.

“You bet he is,” he said, “as handsome as they make ’em, so don’t get stuck on him, as we want to keep Bonnat here. What’s more, he paints like he looks--great! wonderful! He’ll make his mark yet. Go along and see him now. ‘Raus mit you!”

So, leaving Fisher’s studio, I climbed the stairs to the top floor, and, turning to the left, I saw a door with a card nailed on it, bearing the name of Paul Bonnat. I stood and looked at the door for some time, and then I knocked. The door was opened with a jerk, and standing in the doorway was a young giant, whose head seemed to reach the top of the door. His hair was all sticking up. It was fair, and the eyes that looked at me questioningly were blue. He had a wide, clever mouth, and a chin that was like a cleft rock. As I stared up at him, his face smiled all over, so that I was forced to smile in return, and I thought to myself:

“Why, he looks like a young viking.” Somehow he made me think of my father, in coloring and the northern type of face, but this man had a more distinct personality that seemed almost to strike one. Papa was gentle and a dreamer. Bonnat was vitally alive.

“Mr. Fisher told me you wanted a model.”

He nodded and his big glance, still smiling, looked me over.

“Come in, come in.”

He was about twenty-six or seven, and in spite of the two hundred pounds Menna told me he weighed, he was not the least bit fat.

I was now in the room, and I glanced about me. Never have I seen such an untidy room in my life. It was not dirty, but simply littered up with things.

“Sit down,” he said, sweeping off some drawings and papers on to the floor from a chair that was loaded. There was also a glass of water on the chair, and he tipped that off, too, and the water ran on the floor.

“Oh,” I gasped, “do you always throw everything on the floor like that?”

“Not everything,” he answered, grinning. Then he handed me a box of cigarettes. I took one, and he began to look for a match. On the couch, the table and on all the chairs were piled papers, paints, brushes, clothes, boots and all manner of articles. It looked as if he never put anything where it belonged. Even his clothes were not hung up. On the walls were sketches, paintings, a pair of fencing swords, and the floor could scarcely be seen, as it also was covered with articles, and there were boxes of cigarette stumps and several empty glasses and bottles. As he hunted for the matches, he tumbled one thing after another on the floor.

I was possessed with a desire to tidy up that room. My hands were literally itching to go to work upon it. He seemed so helpless among all his belongings.

“Got it at last!” he laughed, as he discovered the box of matches on the window sill, and, striking one, he offered me a light. I never cared for smoking, but as I was always expected to smoke I usually accepted to save the bother of refusing and being urged.

“It’s the devil to be in such a small hole,” he said. “I seem to spend all my time looking for things. Well, now, let’s see. You’re going to pose for us, are you? Is next Sunday all right, or do you have to go to confess something?” He asked the question teasingly, as if he enjoyed poking fun at me.

“No, I never go to church,” I admitted.

A shocked look came into his face, and he opened his mouth wide.

“What? You are a heathen!”

He threw back his head and burst into the loudest and most infectious laughter I have ever heard.

“Then it’s all settled,” he said. “Now I have to go to lunch. Want to come along and have a bum lunch with me?”

I nodded, and he said: “Good!” hunted around for his hat, stuck it jauntily on his head, and, taking me by the arm, we went down the stairs.

When we were sitting in the little restaurant near Sixth Avenue, he asked me a lot of questions about myself, and before I knew it I had told him all about my father and mother and brothers and sisters and the work I had done in Montreal. Then I told him of the hard times I had in Boston. He seemed intensely interested, and when I got through he rattled off a lot of hard-luck stories about the artists, and told me something about the exigencies and makeshifts that all of them had had. He’d tell one story of hard luck after another, not as if it were something to feel badly about, but as if it were the common lot of every one. I think he did that so I wouldn’t think I myself had been especially singled out by fate.

He told me how only a few months before Fisher and he and “a couple of other guys” were all “broke,” and none of them had enough cash to buy a separate meal-ticket which entitled him to six meals for one dollar and a quarter, instead of twenty-five cents each meal. So they had all chipped in together and bought one ticket between them on the third of July. Well, when they went to dinner on the fourth of July to the Little Waldorf on Eighth Avenue, they were confronted by this sign:

“The landlord has gone away for a holiday, and will return next week.”

Bonnat seemed to think that an immense joke. He said every one in Paresis Row had had some such experience.

He wanted to know where I lived and I told him Fifteenth Street, and then he asked suddenly:

“Alone?” When I answered “yes” he smiled beamingly at me. Then he took me home, and lifting his hat in going, said:

“You’re engaged then. Sunday. Good-bye.” I could see him striding down the street, his head up, and his broad shoulders thrown back. He whistled as he went along.

XLIV

Sunday morning was bleak and cold. It had been raining for the last three days, and as I crossed the corner of Eighth Avenue and Fourteenth Street the puddles were so deep that I splashed the mud all over my raincoat. It was cold and chilly when I reached Paul Bonnat’s studio.

There were, besides Fisher and Paul Bonnat, two other men, one named Enfield, who was an illustrator, and a Mr. Christain, who worked as a lithographer on week days and painted in his spare time on Sundays.

When I got in Fisher seized me by the arm, and with a mock of proud gesture he showed me Bonnat’s renovated room:

“Look, Miss Ascough. Can you beat this for a studio de luxe--and all in your honor! Gee! Look at that beautiful pile of rubbish he has swept under the table there, where he thought you wouldn’t see it. He’s trying to impress you with the beauty of his home.”

“Shut up!” shouted Bonnat. “I’m the only one of the bunch who patronizes the bath here at any rate.”