Erard moved uneasily. The gentle old man’s remark contained a special sting.
“That doesn’t go nowadays. To do his best work, the workman must have his proper atmosphere. It was all well enough in the Renaissance for those old fellows to bang about; there was so much going on that was inspiring; so much beauty in the world! But to-day he must cover himself up from the horrid impressions of reality. If he fought with cold and hunger and bad wall-paper, and all that, he would never be fit for his fine work. Either the harsh actualities would blunt his sensitiveness, or he would show that he hadn’t any, that he wasn’t of the temperament.”
Erard turned from the attentive old man to the young woman, whose fortune of contemporaneous birth might render her intelligent to the force of his remarks. Moreover, she was a woman, and Simeon Erard’s strong point was his management of women. He got at them on impersonal, sexless grounds. His rambling physique and flattened face were almost repulsive, and he had never quite lost the traces of the dull back alley in Jersey City, whence he had emerged upon the circle of patrons and patronesses who were to attend him on towards fame. With a subtle insight into his own resources, he knew that women would always be useful to him; that they were most excellent working-partners of fame. To have a chorus of women at your command was like subsidizing the press: it was a dangerous weapon to use, but its range was incalculable. And in manipulating women he was skilful enough to exclude the sexual basis. He never appeared to them in the light of a possible husband or lover. Further, he never included a stupid woman in his chorus merely because she made court to him.
Just now it seemed to him better worth while securing a new ally than opening the dangerous question started by the old man. So he led the party back to the salon and begged Miss Anthon to try the spinet. While he explained the working of the instrument, he threw out casually some remarks about music. The young woman struck a few thin chords, that rustled like yellowed parchment in the lofty room; her glance followed the artist as he looked after his guests.
Now he was talking to Wilbur, who was eagerly loquacious. She could catch phrases: “... run over for a few months ... business dull ... had a chance to be fixed up in a little job ... pretty good place ... am a University of Michigan man.” Erard’s little eyes were coolly judging the expansive young man, assigning him to his species, and calculating the exact amount of significance he might contain.
Who was this Erard? She had heard her mother refer often enough to Sebastian Anthon’s “folly” over that “painter-fellow” he had picked up in New York as a tutor for his daughter. She remembered many little details of his career: how her uncle had found him in a print-shop behind the counter, and had encouraged him in his efforts to worm his way through the art-school. Later he had come to Sebastian Anthon’s summer home, on the half-intimate footing of a tutor, and she remembered to have seen him there,—a sullen, ugly lad, with his material and stupid charge. Then Erard had gone abroad, first with Uncle Sebastian, then again for a long period by himself. And her mother accused him of “getting Sebastian to waste good money on pictures and such stuff.”
She was not aware that Erard had done much to justify all the Anthon money that had gone into his career. At least if you counted by tangible evidences! She did not know that one of the first precepts which the protégé had inculcated had been that you should not count by vulgar or tangible proofs, such as books published, pictures painted and sold, articles appearing in magazines, with accompanying checks and drafts.
For Erard’s initial ambition—to paint—had expanded in the atmosphere of Paris, until now it would be hard to say just where he proposed to apply his force.
A professorship in aesthetics, the editorship of a magazine devoted to the arts, the curatorship of a museum,—one or all, might have satisfied his present ambition. Yet he had never quite abandoned actual creative work. Now and then, whenever Sebastian Anthon was becoming unusually restless, some one “evidence” appeared to justify the interest that old Anthon was taking in him. Some clever article on the Salons for an American journal, a little essay on an early Italian master in an English magazine, a portrait of Mrs. George Payne,—the editor’s young wife,—which set the American colony in Paris agog with talk; at the worst, some bit of encouraging gossip from “a man who knew.” Perhaps Erard had been right in not forcing himself; Sebastian Anthon shivered at the thought of how he himself had been forced.
It had been superb in its way, Erard’s campaign thus far, or preparation for campaign. Once in Paris, the very pavement seemed familiar to him, the air in the streets to be intimate. “You are one of us,” it whispered. He prepared leisurely to realize far-reaching projects. He was never idle, and he was rarely dissipated. Quite early, it is probable, he suspected that his organism was not the artist’s; his blood was too thin. But his power was to comprehend, to enjoy and relate. Or, to use the phrase that he found for his patron, “to know the background.” So he had had the audacity to proceed from capital to capital, establishing large siege-lines,—the audacity, when to-morrow might find him at the pawn-shop with nothing to pawn. Perhaps he knew his world better than most; had he had more scrupulous doubts, he would have failed at the outset.