“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.