THIRTY YEARS AFTER
A long time ago, when Duane Bellamy was at the height of his brilliant fame, and when I was a little girl, his daughter chanced to be a school-mate of mine for a winter. And one Sunday evening I was invited to their supper-table. I was very much impressed by the momentous occasion which it seemed to me, and I have not forgotten a word he said, nor a gesture he made, nor an expression of his face. I can still see his darkly handsome face, with his glossy black mane, his large bright eyes, his great curling Assyrian beard. And if ever I saw a human being saturated to the bone with satisfaction, it was at that Sunday evening supper. He was acclaimed as the greatest portrait painter in America, and he accepted this well-deserved reputation with no mock modesty. The knowledge of it did not make him coarsely vain or puffed up. It acted on him like a generous wine, made him extravagantly kind and over-flowing with high spirits. His little girl told me that night that her princely father had been known to stop a tired coal-heaver at his work, hand him a twenty-dollar bill and walk on. He was like a great fountain of enjoyment, splashing with its clear waters all who came near it, even the little schoolgirl at the other end of the table.
But there were people he could not help to enjoyment. The name of one of them came up in the conversation that evening: “Poor old Hendricks!” said our host, “what can you do for the poor old chap? He doesn’t even know what hit him!”
One of the younger painters there was a protégé of Bellamy’s, admiring him so greatly that his paintings were scarcely to be told from his master’s. He now answered, “Oh, the old Rip Van Winkle! He ought to be told to crawl into his hole and pull it in after him. Making a laughing-stock of himself with those sooty old landscapes of his, year after year.”
Our host took a great draught of the beer in his stein, wiped his great mustache with his fine damask napkin, and turned comfortably in his chair. “Hendrick got me in a tight place the other day,” he began, “At this year’s exhibition he marched me up to one of his bitumen-black, woolly horrors, and said, ‘Now, Bellamy, you’re an honest man. Tell me what it is you youngsters don’t like in that? It looks all right to me. I can’t see why they all jump on me so. I look at theirs, and then I look at mine.... I can’t see what they’re talking about.’”
“Well, for God’s sake, what nerve!” ejaculated the disciple, very much astonished. “What did you say?”
“What could I say?” said Bellamy. “I didn’t want to hurt the old man’s feelings. I hadn’t supposed till then that he’d so much as noticed how people feel about his work. I didn’t try to explain to him, of course. What’s the use? He can’t understand! If I’d talked to him all day about what we’re after—light, and shimmer, and vibration—he wouldn’t have known what I was talking about. If it were in him to understand, he’d die before he’d paint the way he does. So I just patted him on the back and said, ‘Oh, you’re all right, Mr. Hendricks. What makes you think there is anything the matter with your work?’ and pretended that somebody was calling to me from the other side of the gallery.”
He finished his beer at a draught. He thought himself magnificently kind and tolerant. And so did we.
That was a long time ago, thirty years ago, to be exact. The Bellamys took their little girl out of our school that spring, and I saw no more of them. But I always felt a slight personal interest at the sight of his name in a list of exhibitors, and in picture-galleries always went to look at whichever bright, high-keyed, dashing portrait he was exhibiting that year. Some years ago it began to seem to me that they did not look just the same; and yet when I looked straight at them, I saw that they were, quite miraculously, the same, the old Bellamy flowing brush-work, the masterly rendering of fabrics, the ringing color, the firm drawing, all lighted by that bold flood of sunlight with which he had shocked and enchanted the early American public groping its way out from Munich.
Presently, finding that the impression that they were different persisted, I set myself to analyze it, and found that their altered look came from the altered character of the paintings beside and above them ... and then, as the years went on, below them! For the time came when the annual Bellamy portrait was not in the center of the last gallery, to catch your eye as you entered, but was hung high in one of the side-rooms. It looked very queer and matter-of-fact with its solid surfaces honestly rendered in all their opacity, compared to the odd, subtle, sideways-glancing, arrestingly imaginative canvases about it. They took the eye far below the surfaces they depicted. They suggested far more than they said. For days afterwards, they haunted you like an unfinished cadence in a poem in a foreign language. The Bellamy canvas was in no unknown language, but in the speech used for the daily order to the grocer; nor was it in the least unfinished. It came finally to seem to me as literal and bald a statement of fact as a time-table.
One day this year, as I hung over an Arthur Davies, a strange, beautiful, white-fleshed, eerie, blonde woman, placed at the side of a luminous canvas, with, so it seemed to me, more pure imaginative beauty than anything since Botticelli, I heard voices behind me. A tall, splendid-looking old man, with a great white beard, fine dark eyes, and the carriage of a king was talking to a younger man, an unimpressive, slight, fair fellow, evidently very ill at ease.
“See here, Brehming, speak out, tell me what it’s all about. I honestly don’t know what you’re driving at, you kids. What’s the matter with good drawing? What do you want in a painting?” He waved a well-kept hand up towards a canvas above us, “Isn’t there light in that? And space? And interesting composition? And true values? I ought to know a good painting when I see one. What are you boys talking about when you slash at my things so? I’m not sore. Don’t think I’m sore. You’ve a right to your own opinion. Only, for the Lord’s sake, what is your opinion?”
He had said he was not sore, but there was a raw note of hurt in his voice, and his eyes rested anxiously on the young man beside him.
The other looked every way except at him and said in a vague, hurried, kindly voice, “Why, Mr. Bellamy, your work is all right, of course. It’s fine. Sure, it’s fine. We all admire it like anything....”
Yes, I did hear that! I heard it just exactly as I’m setting it down.