Money Magic: A Novel

by Hamlin Garland

And she, with a sense of being distinguished above the great public, consented. Humiston rose animatedly. "Let's go over and see them now."

His gentle camaraderie, his eagerness, touched Bertha, and when he took her arm to help her into the elevator or to make sure she did not stumble at the crossing she was stirred—not as Ben's hand had moved her, but her blood nevertheless palpably quickened. Was it not wonderful that she, so lately from the mountains, should be walking here in the midst of the thronging multitudes of a great city street in the company of one of the chief artists of the world?

Humiston, crafty, cruel, unscrupulous, returned to his abuse of the city, and explained to her that American dealers had no real appreciation of art. "They sell anything that will sell, any cheap daub, and yet they dared to refuse to exhibit my best things! It was the same in Pittsburg and Buffalo; they're all alike. But what can you expect of these densely material towns? Beauty means only prettiness to them."

The salesman of the shop, accustomed to seeing Humiston pass in and out with friends, paid no special heed to the painter as he led Bertha into the farther room, where a few of his pictures hung among a dozen others. No one was in the gallery, and just as she was wondering where the other paintings could be, he opened a door (which was cut out of the wall and partly concealed by paintings), and smilingly said: "Here is the inner temple. Enter."

She obeyed with a little hesitation, for the storeroom was not well lighted, and she had a wild bird's distrust of dark, enclosing walls.

Humiston shut the door behind him and followed her, plaintively saying: "Isn't it hard lines to have to bring my friends into this hole to show my masterpieces?" And by this she inferred that there was nothing unusual in the experience.

It was a long, bare hall, filled with boxes and littered with bits of excelsior, and Bertha looked about her uneasily while Humiston bent over some canvases stacked on the floor. He seemed to be selecting one with care. An electric lamp was swinging from the ceiling, and under it stood a large easel, and on this he placed a canvas, and, stepping back with eyes fixed on her, said with spirit: "This is one of my best. It was in the new Salon—here is the number. And yet it may not be exhibited in this rotten town."

Bertha inwardly recoiled from the canvas, for it was a painting of a nude figure of a girl at the bath. The critics had said, "It is naked, rather than nude," and the dealers objected to it on this ground, and to the Western girl it was both shocking and ugly. Before she had caught her breath he continued, in a tone that was at once a seduction and a defence: "There is nothing more beautiful in the world than the female form; it is the flower of flowers. Why should it not be painted?" And then, while still he argued for the return of the Greek's love of beauty, covering his moral depravity with the mantle of the philosopher, he placed another canvas before her—something so unrefined, so animal, so destructive of womanly modesty and of all reserve, that any one looking upon it would instantly know that the man who had painted it was a degenerate demon—an associate of dissolute models, an anarchist in the world of women. It was fit only for the banquet-halls of the damned.

Bertha stared at it—fascinated by the sense of the tempter's nearness. It was as if a satyr had suddenly revealed his lawless soul to her. Her thinking for an instant chained her feet, and her silence emboldened him.

Even as she turned to flee she felt his arm about her waist, his breath upon her cheek. "Don't go!" he pleaded, and in his eyes was the same look she had seen in the face of Charles Haney. At last he stood revealed. His artist soul could stoop as low in purpose as a drunken tramp. Beating him off with her strong hands, she ran down the hall and burst into the brilliantly lighted exhibition room such a picture of affrighted, outraged girlhood that the salesman stared upon her in wonder. His look of surprise warned Bertha of her danger. Composing herself by tremendous effort of the will, she closed the door and walked slowly out into the street, her brain in a tumult of anger and shame.