Eugene did not know how to reply to this. He did not quite understand the European seriousness of method, its appreciation of genius, which was thus so easily and sincerely expressed in a formal way. M. Charles meant every word he said. This was one of those rare and gratifying moments of his life when he was permitted to extend to waiting and unrecognized genius the assurance of the consideration and approval of the world. He stood there waiting to hear what Eugene would say, but the latter only flushed under his pale skin.
“I’m very glad,” he said at last, in his rather commonplace, off-hand, American way. “I thought they were pretty good but I wasn’t sure. I’m very grateful to you.”
“You need not feel gratitude toward me,” returned M. Charles, now modifying his formal manner. “You can congratulate yourself—your art. I am honored, as I tell you. We will make a fine display of them. You have no frames for these? Well, never mind, I will lend you frames.”
He smiled and shook Eugene’s hand and congratulated Angela. She had listened to this address with astonishment and swelling pride. She had perceived, despite Eugene’s manner, the anxiety he was feeling, the intense hopes he was building on the outcome of this meeting. M. Charles’ opening manner had deceived her. She had felt that he did not care so much after all, and that Eugene was going to be disappointed. Now, when this burst of approval came, she hardly knew what to make of it. She looked at Eugene and saw that he was intensely moved by not only a sense of relief, but pride and joy. His pale, dark face showed it. To see this load of care taken off him whom she loved so deeply was enough to unsettle Angela. She found herself stirred in a pathetic way and now, when M. Charles turned to her, tears welled to her eyes.
“Don’t cry, Mrs. Witla,” he said grandly on seeing this. “You have a right to be proud of your husband. He is a great artist. You should take care of him.”
“Oh, I’m so happy,” half-laughed and half-sobbed Angela, “I can’t help it.”
She went over to where Eugene was and put her face against his coat. Eugene slipped his arm about her and smiled sympathetically. M. Charles smiled also, proud of the effect of his words. “You both have a right to feel very happy,” he said.
“Little Angela!” thought Eugene. This was your true wife for you, your good woman. Her husband’s success meant all to her. She had no life of her own—nothing outside of him and his good fortune.
M. Charles smiled. “Well, I will be going now,” he said finally. “I will send for the pictures when the time comes. And meanwhile you two must come with me to dinner. I will let you know.”
He bowed himself out with many assurances of good will, and then Angela and Eugene looked at each other.
“Oh, isn’t it lovely, Honeybun,” she cried, half giggling, half crying. (She had begun to call him Honeybun the first day they were married.) “My Eugene a great artist. He said it was a great honor! Isn’t that lovely? And all the world is going to know it soon, now. Isn’t that fine! Oh dear, I’m so proud.” And she threw her arms ecstatically about his neck.
Eugene kissed her affectionately. He was not thinking so much of her though as he was of Kellner and Son—their great exhibit room, the appearance of these twenty-seven or thirty great pictures in gold frames; the spectators who might come to see; the newspaper criticisms; the voices of approval. Now all his artist friends would know that he was considered a great artist; he was to have a chance to associate on equal terms with men like Sargent and Whistler if he ever met them. The world would hear of him widely. His fame might go to the uttermost parts of the earth.
He went to the window after a time and looked out. There came back to his mind Alexandria, the printing shop, the Peoples’ Furniture Company in Chicago, the Art Students League, the Daily Globe. Surely he had come by devious paths.
“Gee!” he exclaimed at last simply. “Smite and MacHugh’ll be glad to hear this. I’ll have to go over and tell them.”
Chapter 7
The exhibition which followed in April was one of those things which happen to fortunate souls—a complete flowering out before the eyes of the world of its feelings, emotions, perceptions, and understanding. We all have our feelings and emotions, but lack the power of self-expression. It is true, the work and actions of any man are to some degree expressions of character, but this is a different thing. The details of most lives are not held up for public examination at any given time. We do not see succinctly in any given place just what an individual thinks and feels. Even the artist is not always or often given the opportunity of collected public expression under conspicuous artistic auspices. Some are so fortunate—many are not. Eugene realized that fortune was showering its favors upon him.
When the time came, M. Charles was so kind as to send for the pictures and to arrange all the details. He had decided with Eugene that because of the vigor of treatment and the prevailing color scheme black frames would be the best. The principal exhibition room on the ground floor in which these paintings were to be hung was heavily draped in red velvet and against this background the different pictures stood out effectively. Eugene visited the show room at the time the pictures were being hung, with Angela, with Smite and MacHugh, Shotmeyer and others. He had long since notified Norma Whitmore and Miriam Finch, but not the latter until after Wheeler had had time to tell her. This also chagrined her, for she felt in this as she had about his marriage, that he was purposely neglecting her.
The dream finally materialized—a room eighteen by forty, hung with dark red velvet, irradiated with a soft, illuminating glow from hidden lamps in which Eugene’s pictures stood forth in all their rawness and reality—almost as vigorous as life itself. To some people, those who do not see life clearly and directly, but only through other people’s eyes, they seemed more so.
For this reason Eugene’s exhibition of pictures was an astonishing thing to most of those who saw it. It concerned phases of life which in the main they had but casually glanced at, things which because they were commonplace and customary were supposedly beyond the pale of artistic significance. One picture in particular, a great hulking, ungainly negro, a positively animal man, his ears thick and projecting, his lips fat, his nose flat, his cheek bones prominent, his whole body expressing brute strength and animal indifference to dirt and cold, illustrated this point particularly. He was standing in a cheap, commonplace East Side street. The time evidently was a January or February morning. His business was driving an ash cart, and his occupation at the moment illustrated by the picture was that of lifting a great can of mixed ashes, paper and garbage to the edge of the ungainly iron wagon. His hands were immense and were covered with great red patched woolen and leather gloves—dirty, bulbous, inconvenient, one would have said. His head and ears were swaddled about by a red flannel shawl or strip of cloth which was knotted under his pugnacious chin, and his forehead, shawl and all, surmounted by a brown canvas cap with his badge and number as a garbage driver on it. About his waist was tied a great piece of rough coffee sacking and his arms and legs looked as though he might have on two or three pairs of trousers and as many vests. He was looking purblindly down the shabby street, its hard crisp snow littered with tin cans, paper, bits of slop and offal. Dust—gray ash dust, was flying from his upturned can. In the distance behind him was a milk wagon, a few pedestrians, a little thinly clad girl coming out of a delicatessen store. Over head were dull small-paned windows, some shutters with a few of their slats broken out, a frowsy headed man looking out evidently to see whether the day was cold.
Eugene was so cruel in his indictment of life. He seemed to lay on his details with bitter lack of consideration. Like a slavedriver lashing a slave he spared no least shade of his cutting brush. “Thus, and thus and thus” (he seemed to say) “is it.” “What do you think of this? and this? and this?”
People came and stared. Young society matrons, art dealers, art critics, the literary element who were interested in art, some musicians, and, because the newspapers made especial mention of it, quite a number of those who run wherever they imagine there is something interesting to see. It was quite a notable two weeks’ display. Miriam Finch (though she never admitted to Eugene that she had seen it—she would not give him that satisfaction) Norma Whitmore, William McConnell, Louis Deesa, Owen Overman, Paynter Stone, the whole ruck and rabble of literary and artistic life, came. There were artists of great ability there whom Eugene had never seen before. It would have pleased him immensely if he had chanced to see several of the city’s most distinguished social leaders looking, at one time and another, at his pictures. All his observers were astonished at his virility, curious as to his personality, curious as to what motive, or significance, or point of view it might have. The more eclectically cultured turned to the newspapers to see what the art critics would say of this—how they would label it. Because of the force of the work, the dignity and critical judgment of Kellner and Son, the fact that the public of its own instinct and volition was interested, most of the criticisms were favorable. One art publication, connected with and representative of the conservative tendencies of a great publishing house, denied the merit of the collection as a whole, ridiculed the artist’s insistence on shabby details as having artistic merit, denied that he could draw accurately, denied that he was a lover of pure beauty, and accused him of having no higher ideal than that of desire to shock the current mass by painting brutal things brutally.