The Genius (26 page)

Eugene could not tell by his manner whether he were merely
curious or interested.

"All of them done in oil, I fancy."

"Yes, all."

"They are not bad, I must say," he observed cautiously. "A
little persistently dramatic but—"

"These reproductions—" began Eugene, hoping by criticising the
press work to interest him in the superior quality of the
originals.

"Yes, I see," M. Charles interrupted, knowing full well what was
coming. "They are very bad. Still they show well enough what the
originals are like. Where is your studio?"

"61 Washington Square."

"As I say," went on M. Charles, noting the address on Eugene's
card, "the opportunity for exhibition purposes is very limited and
our charge is rather high. We have so many things we would like to
exhibit—so many things we must exhibit. It is hard to say when the
situation would permit—If you are interested I might come and see
them sometime."

Eugene looked perturbed. Two hundred dollars! Two hundred
dollars! Could he afford it? It would mean so much to him. And yet
the man was not at all anxious to rent him the show room even at
this price.

"I will come," said M. Charles, seeing his mood, "if you wish.
That is what you want me to do. We have to be careful of what we
exhibit here. It isn't as if it were an ordinary show room. I will
drop you a card some day when occasion offers, if you wish, and you
can let me know whether the time I suggest is all right. I am
rather anxious to see these scenes of yours. They are very good of
their kind. It may be—one never can tell—an opportunity might
offer—a week or ten days, somewhere in between other things."

Eugene sighed inwardly. So this was how these things were done.
It wasn't very flattering. Still, he must have an exhibition. He
could afford two hundred if he had to. An exhibition elsewhere
would not be so valuable. He had expected to make a better
impression than this.

"I wish you would come," he said at last meditatively. "I think
I should like the space if I can get it. I would like to know what
you think."

M. Charles raised his eyebrows.

"Very well," he said, "I will communicate with you."

Eugene went out.

What a poor thing this exhibiting business was, he thought. Here
he had been dreaming of an exhibition at Kellners which should be
brought about without charge to him because they were tremendously
impressed with his work. Now they did not even want his
pictures—would charge him two hundred dollars to show them. It was
a great come down—very discouraging.

Still he went home thinking it would do him some good. The
critics would discuss his work just as they did that of other
artists. They would have to see what he could do should it be that
at last this thing which he had dreamed of and so deliberately
planned had come true. He had thought of an exhibition at Kellner's
as the last joyous thing to be attained in the world of rising art
and now it looked as though he was near it. It might actually be
coming to pass. This man wanted to see the rest of his work. He was
not opposed to looking at them. What a triumph even that was!

It was some little time before M. Charles condescended to write
saying that if it was agreeable he would call Wednesday morning,
January 16th, at 10 A. M., but the letter finally did come and this
dispelled all his intermediary doubts and fears. At last he was to
have a hearing! This man might see something in his work, possibly
take a fancy to it. Who could tell? He showed the letter to Angela
with an easy air as though it were quite a matter of course, but he
felt intensely hopeful.

Angela put the studio in perfect order for she knew what this
visit meant to Eugene, and in her eager, faithful way was anxious
to help him as much as possible. She bought flowers from the
Italian florist at the corner and put them in vases here and there.
She swept and dusted, dressed herself immaculately in her most
becoming house dress and waited with nerves at high tension for the
fateful ring of the door bell. Eugene pretended to work at one of
his pictures which he had done long before—the raw jangling wall of
an East Side street with its swarms of children, its shabby
push-carts, its mass of eager, shuffling, pushing mortals, the
sense of rugged ground life running all through it, but he had no
heart for the work. He was asking himself over and over what M.
Charles would think. Thank heaven this studio looked so charming!
Thank heaven Angela was so dainty in her pale green gown with a
single red coral pin at her throat. He walked to the window and
stared out at Washington Square, with its bare, wind-shaken
branches of trees, its snow, its ant-like pedestrians hurrying here
and there. If he were only rich—how peacefully he would paint! M.
Charles could go to the devil.

The door bell rang.

Angela clicked a button and up came M. Charles quietly. They
could hear his steps in the hall. He knocked and Eugene answered,
decidedly nervous in his mind, but outwardly calm and dignified. M.
Charles entered, clad in a fur-lined overcoat, fur cap and yellow
chamois gloves.

"Ah, good morning!" said M. Charles in greeting. "A fine bracing
day, isn't it? What a charming view you have here. Mrs. Witla! I'm
delighted to meet you. I am a little late but I was unavoidably
detained. One of our German associates is in the city."

He divested himself of his great coat and rubbed his hands
before the fire. He tried, now that he had unbent so far, to be
genial and considerate. If he and Eugene were to do any business in
the future it must be so. Besides the picture on the easel before
him, near the window, which for the time being he pretended not to
see, was an astonishingly virile thing. Of whose work did it remind
him—anybody's? He confessed to himself as he stirred around among
his numerous art memories that he recalled nothing exactly like it.
Raw reds, raw greens, dirty grey paving stones—such faces! Why this
thing fairly shouted its facts. It seemed to say: "I'm dirty, I am
commonplace, I am grim, I am shabby, but I am life." And there was
no apologizing for anything in it, no glossing anything over. Bang!
Smash! Crack! came the facts one after another, with a bitter,
brutal insistence on their so-ness. Why, on moody days when he had
felt sour and depressed he had seen somewhere a street that looked
like this, and there it was—dirty, sad, slovenly, immoral,
drunken—anything, everything, but here it was. "Thank God for a
realist," he said to himself as he looked, for he knew life, this
cold connoisseur; but he made no sign. He looked at the tall, slim
frame of Eugene, his cheeks slightly sunken, his eyes bright—an
artist every inch of him, and then at Angela, small, eager, a
sweet, loving, little woman, and he was glad that he was going to
be able to say that he would exhibit these things.

"Well," he said, pretending to look at the picture on the easel
for the first time, "we might as well begin to look at these
things. I see you have one here. Very good, I think, quite
forceful. What others have you?"

Eugene was afraid this one hadn't appealed to him as much as he
hoped it would, and set it aside quickly, picking up the second in
the stock which stood against the wall, covered by a green curtain.
It was the three engines entering the great freight yard abreast,
the smoke of the engines towering straight up like tall
whitish-grey plumes, in the damp, cold air, the sky lowering with
blackish-grey clouds, the red and yellow and blue cars standing out
in the sodden darkness because of the water. You could feel the
cold, wet drizzle, the soppy tracks, the weariness of "throwing
switches." There was a lone brakeman in the foreground, "throwing"
a red brake signal. He was quite black and evidently wet.

"A symphony in grey," said M. Charles succinctly.

They came swiftly after this, without much comment from either,
Eugene putting one canvas after another before him, leaving it for
a few moments and replacing it with another. His estimate of his
own work did not rise very rapidly, for M. Charles was persistently
distant, but the latter could not help voicing approval of "After
The Theatre," a painting full of the wonder and bustle of a night
crowd under sputtering electric lamps. He saw that Eugene had
covered almost every phase of what might be called the dramatic
spectacle in the public life of the city and much that did not
appear dramatic until he touched it—the empty canyon of Broadway at
three o'clock in the morning; a long line of giant milk wagons,
swinging curious lanterns, coming up from the docks at four o'clock
in the morning; a plunging parade of fire vehicles, the engines
steaming smoke, the people running or staring open-mouthed; a crowd
of polite society figures emerging from the opera; the bread line;
an Italian boy throwing pigeons in the air from a basket on his arm
in a crowded lower West-side street. Everything he touched seemed
to have romance and beauty, and yet it was real and mostly grim and
shabby.

"I congratulate you, Mr. Witla," finally exclaimed M. Charles,
moved by the ability of the man and feeling that caution was no
longer necessary. "To me this is wonderful material, much more
effective than the reproductions show, dramatic and true. I
question whether you will make any money out of it. There is very
little sale for American art in this country. It might almost do
better in Europe. It
ought
to sell, but that is another
matter. The best things do not always sell readily. It takes time.
Still I will do what I can. I will give these pictures a two weeks'
display early in April without any charge to you whatever." (Eugene
started.) "I will call them to the attention of those who know. I
will speak to those who buy. It is an honor, I assure you, to do
this. I consider you an artist in every sense of the word—I might
say a great artist. You ought, if you preserve yourself sanely and
with caution, to go far, very far. I shall be glad to send for
these when the time comes."

Eugene did not know how to reply to this. He did not quite
understand the European seriousness of method, its appreciation of
genius, which was thus so easily and sincerely expressed in a
formal way. M. Charles meant every word he said. This was one of
those rare and gratifying moments of his life when he was permitted
to extend to waiting and unrecognized genius the assurance of the
consideration and approval of the world. He stood there waiting to
hear what Eugene would say, but the latter only flushed under his
pale skin.

"I'm very glad," he said at last, in his rather commonplace,
off-hand, American way. "I thought they were pretty good but I
wasn't sure. I'm very grateful to you."

"You need not feel gratitude toward me," returned M. Charles,
now modifying his formal manner. "You can congratulate
yourself—your art. I am honored, as I tell you. We will make a fine
display of them. You have no frames for these? Well, never mind, I
will lend you frames."

He smiled and shook Eugene's hand and congratulated Angela. She
had listened to this address with astonishment and swelling pride.
She had perceived, despite Eugene's manner, the anxiety he was
feeling, the intense hopes he was building on the outcome of this
meeting. M. Charles' opening manner had deceived her. She had felt
that he did not care so much after all, and that Eugene was going
to be disappointed. Now, when this burst of approval came, she
hardly knew what to make of it. She looked at Eugene and saw that
he was intensely moved by not only a sense of relief, but pride and
joy. His pale, dark face showed it. To see this load of care taken
off him whom she loved so deeply was enough to unsettle Angela. She
found herself stirred in a pathetic way and now, when M. Charles
turned to her, tears welled to her eyes.

"Don't cry, Mrs. Witla," he said grandly on seeing this. "You
have a right to be proud of your husband. He is a great artist. You
should take care of him."

"Oh, I'm so happy," half-laughed and half-sobbed Angela, "I
can't help it."

She went over to where Eugene was and put her face against his
coat. Eugene slipped his arm about her and smiled sympathetically.
M. Charles smiled also, proud of the effect of his words. "You both
have a right to feel very happy," he said.

"Little Angela!" thought Eugene. This was your true wife for
you, your good woman. Her husband's success meant all to her. She
had no life of her own—nothing outside of him and his good
fortune.

M. Charles smiled. "Well, I will be going now," he said finally.
"I will send for the pictures when the time comes. And meanwhile
you two must come with me to dinner. I will let you know."

He bowed himself out with many assurances of good will, and then
Angela and Eugene looked at each other.

"Oh, isn't it lovely, Honeybun," she cried, half giggling, half
crying. (She had begun to call him Honeybun the first day they were
married.) "My Eugene a great artist. He said it was a great honor!
Isn't that lovely? And all the world is going to know it soon, now.
Isn't that fine! Oh dear, I'm so proud." And she threw her arms
ecstatically about his neck.

Eugene kissed her affectionately. He was not thinking so much of
her though as he was of Kellner and Son—their great exhibit room,
the appearance of these twenty-seven or thirty great pictures in
gold frames; the spectators who might come to see; the newspaper
criticisms; the voices of approval. Now all his artist friends
would know that he was considered a great artist; he was to have a
chance to associate on equal terms with men like Sargent and
Whistler if he ever met them. The world would hear of him widely.
His fame might go to the uttermost parts of the earth.

He went to the window after a time and looked out. There came
back to his mind Alexandria, the printing shop, the Peoples'
Furniture Company in Chicago, the Art Students League, the
Daily Globe
. Surely he had come by devious paths.

"Gee!" he exclaimed at last simply. "Smite and MacHugh'll be
glad to hear this. I'll have to go over and tell them."