“But I wonder if it is well, my friend, that you are seeing the best first! To lead up to it gradually might put less strain upon one’s understanding of what the artist intends. What do you think of it? Speak! Say, my friend!”
His excitement, as he watched Joan studying the picture through narrowed eyes, was childlike in its eager expectancy. But it was a full minute before she gave him any satisfaction. Then she merely said, with what appeared to be a quiet sincerity, “Yes. It is good. What do you suppose he used to get that tone in the white? Yet I don’t quite see the point of the introduction of the figure. I’m distressed for the unity, Michael.”
“No, no, no, no. See! It is like this—” The big man was off on a technical exposition of a new, a more subtle idea of unity, as discovered and used by Gregory Clare. “As for the way he got that white—well, Charlie Frye has told me in the most particular detail how Clare mixed his paints,—but only God knows how he moved the brush to get such effects!
“But you do not expand, Joan!” he halted his dissertation to expostulate. “You are not convinced?” Hugh was afraid that the Russian might burst into tears.
“Oh, yes. I am convinced that here we have something really important!” Joan admitted.
“Ha! You do.” He rubbed his hands. “Well, that is enough! All that I expect from anybody for the next hundred years or so. After that, we shall see! But there will be those, my friend, who will not admit even so much. You are aware of the stupidity abounding, particularly here in your New York. I should like to keep those stupid ones alive a few centuries, though, just to show them up to themselves. They are going to insist how the work of this painter is sentimental because of his insistence on the introduction of the dancer. Clare sentimental! A man who paints rocks like that, sees them like that! It is obvious that he is as hard as the rocks he paints. Spiritually hard and firm, a chiseled-out soul. Sound, through and through, and formed! Sentimental? Pff! But we will speak only technicalities, my friend, when they begin that rumpus. We will answer them with cold technicalities in their own jargon—for even there we will have them. And a hundred years from now, they’ll be groveling, eating from our hands, as it were. Not?”
Joan replied nothing, but went on viewing the painting from various angles.
“I shall buy you one, Joan,” Schwankovsky promised her. “Not an oil, perhaps. What you want of the finished work you will choose and invest in, yourself. At the exhibition. There I would not influence you. But there’s a sketch of the dancer you’d value. But no. That I must have myself. Life would be unthinkable, lacking it! Ha! There’s a pencil drawing of the studio itself. It is beautiful. It has a perfection. And when one realizes that the artist lived there all his painting years, and the dancer with him, it becomes too poignant. Perhaps I shall give you that one, Joan. It will ravish you. You will see!”
All the while Hugh was studying Joan, with narrowed eyes, much as she was studying “Noon.” He did not question her sincerity in praising the work at which she had shrugged once. That one grew in appreciation as well as in accomplishment he knew very well. But he saw that she was still disturbed, even angry, although she sought to hide it. Hugh’s problem was: was Joan angry with him or Ariel or her friend, Schwankovsky, or with herself? He came to the conclusion that she was angry with herself, and for the first time in his life he felt a motion of pity toward this woman he loved. He wanted to say to her: “Don’t be angry because you have grown big enough to grasp Gregory Clare’s essential spirit. Be glad, darling! No one blames you for changing. I have nothing to forgive you in this.”
Ah! Until this minute pity and magnanimity had been the elements lacking in his tormenting love for Joan. Pray God now that nothing more of poignancy be added to it until he died!