They sat looking at one another, afraid to strike the new note. The next day Mrs. Wilbur and her friend left for the villa on Bello Sguardo.
CHAPTER IV
“We are prominent members of the Art Endeavour Circle,” Miss Parker wrote Thornton Jennings, after a month in the Villa Rosadina. “I may say that we have a salon for the young Genius. Erard has surrounded us with a lot of little Erards. There is Salters. He is a distinguished-looking young American with an easy income and leanings towards art. He copies Erard, picks up his ideas from the one source of pure criticism—at least Erard says so,—and then dilutes them. Even if Mr. Salters is a little ‘short’ of ideas, he is very nice and entertaining.
“To pass over a shabby artist who has quarrelled with his wife and can’t sell his pictures, and the Gorgon (she’s Vivian Vavasour and is as sour as her articles are sweetly wordy), we come to Mary Eleanor Bradley, the last enrolment. She is a young woman, rather portly, with a puffy face and flaxen hair, who speaks very intensely and slowly and talks all the time. She comes from a good family in Philadelphia and has been in some college or other. She made up her mind that the only way to see Europe was to come over alone and ‘be Bohemian.’ But she hasn’t found it much fun so far; she is trying desperately to hook on to our procession. Erard says nay. Her great feat was a tour in Lombardy with Erard, sans chaperone, for six days. Mr. Erard says she asked him, and he couldn’t refuse a lady. Then, horrid man! he smiles and says no man needs a chaperone with Miss Bradley except for self-protection. She says it was quite romantic, and ‘you couldn’t do it with a man—well, who was in good society.’ She talks a lot about it; the excursion makes her reputation in the Art Endeavour Circle.
“This Miss Bradley isn’t half so bad as she sounds. I believe she is nice enough when she is kept under restraint. She treats me as an amiable simpleton, and we get on splendidly. If she escapes soon enough from the Circle she will probably settle down and marry some nice little man who won’t let her cross the street alone after five in the evening.
“Besides these parasites who drink tea and take up our time in this dear Florence, Erard brings us better material sometimes—young French poets and journalists, a Jew critic on a London paper—cosmopolitan celebrities just budding. I have almost forgotten little Mr. Anthon, Adela’s younger brother. He came on from Paris last week. He doesn’t approve of Adela and thinks I should lecture her.
“He doesn’t know that I am tolerated only on my good behaviour and non-interference. Erard is master now. We came here to be awfully free and do as we liked, but we have to work hard at drawing and reading and taking notes for the master. You ought to see your regal Mrs. Wilbur getting up at eight every morning in order to finish her tasks and have some time for the galleries. Erard has a most useful assistant, all for nothing. For, you know, it isn’t painting now,—that is cheap, but it’s ideas about painting—‘prehensile values,’ the ‘folly of humanism,’ the ‘receptivity of the sensorium,’ and the ‘psychology of colour.’ We are engaged in dissecting art and in stewing the remains up into little dishes. One big dish the cooks are busy over now, and they are planning to go to Rome to put in the flavouring. I must be good, or I shan’t be invited. For they go off ‘for business’ quite by themselves, and aren’t bothered by conventionalities. They got ’way beyond what people say or think,—long ago.
“Sometimes it is dreary enough, this talk; it sounds like so much gibberish. Last Sunday they invited me to go to Prato with them, out of pure kindness. Erard got started on ‘the critic’s function,’ and we listened. He said that well-informed people all thought alike on art, and the real judges (those who had cultivated their sensoriums and had good sensoriums) always agreed about any object of art. Then when we came out atop of a hill before a lovely valley with a road winding through it, he began to experiment on us. He asked us where we felt the road. I said in my eyes, but Mrs. Wilbur gave the correct answer,—in the muscles of the forearm; then, as it mounted the hills beyond, in the muscles of the legs. They tightened up sympathetically when you looked hard enough. ‘Now,’ Mr. Erard said, ‘that’s the way the artist makes you feel when you see the road he paints.’ Some one told me that the psychology business Erard picked up from Prudler, the young psychologist at Bonn, whom he met in Switzerland two years ago, just as the measuring toes and ears, and all that, was taken from an old Italian. I don’t know; they all seem much bothered about the original source of ideas. Erard accuses the Gorgon of living on him, intellectually, and others say they both live on Symonds.
“Heigho! it’s a queer world, this,—but it is dreadfully like Chicago in some respects. I wonder where it will all end. This lovely Florence, how sweet it would be without the Art Endeavourers! My pals are old Luisa, our protecting house-saint, and the contadina who helps her, little Pinetta.”
Molly Parker’s jocular account of her friend’s doings was not exaggerated. Mrs. Wilbur had found the work suggested for her by Erard ready at hand and more and more engrossing. Whither it led she did not trouble herself about, any more than she speculated on the probable outcome of her present manner of life. Erard himself had come down to Italy when the winter was well on, and though he flitted up and down the peninsula on one errand or another, his centre of operations was Florence. There he had established himself, in a suite of rooms on the Piazza San Spirito, where the sun lay for long hours,—as usual, in the one completely suitable environment. Even Molly Parker could not find fault with his taking up his abode just there within a ten minutes’ rapid walk to the Villa Rosadina, nor with his frequent visits, which never seemed aimless. Yet she felt that his grasp on their actions grew firmer as the weeks passed: “we think Erard and feel Erard!”