“It was too late—it would
have been, even if he’d been alive. I packed
up my traps, and went down and told Mrs. Stroud.
Of course I didn’t tell her that—it
would have been Greek to her. I simply said I
couldn’t paint him, that I was too moved.
She rather liked the idea—she’s so
romantic! It was that that made her give me the
donkey. But she was terribly upset at not getting
the portrait—she did so want him ‘done’
by some one showy! At first I was afraid she
wouldn’t let me off—and at my wits’
end I suggested Grindle. Yes, it was I who started
Grindle: I told Mrs. Stroud he was the ‘coming’
man, and she told somebody else, and so it got to be
true. . . . And he painted Stroud without wincing;
and she hung the picture among her husband’s
things. . . .”
He flung himself down in the arm-chair near mine,
laid back his head, and clasping his arms beneath
it, looked up at the picture above the chimney-piece.
“I like to fancy that Stroud himself would have
given it to me, if he’d been able to say what
he thought that day.”
And, in answer to a question I put half-mechanically—“Begin
again?” he flashed out. “When the
one thing that brings me anywhere near him is that
I knew enough to leave off?”
He stood up and laid his hand on my shoulder with
a laugh. “Only the irony of it is that
I am still painting—since Grindle’s
doing it for me! The Strouds stand alone, and
happen once—but there’s no exterminating
our kind of art.”
The studio faced north, looking out over a dismal
reach of roofs and chimneys, and rusty fire-escapes
hung with heterogeneous garments. A crust of
dirty snow covered the level surfaces, and a December
sky with more snow in it lowered over them.
The room was bare and gaunt, with blotched walls and
a stained uneven floor. On a divan lay a pile
of “properties”—limp draperies,
an Algerian scarf, a moth-eaten fan of peacock feathers.
The janitor had forgotten to fill the coal-scuttle
over-night, and the cast-iron stove projected its
cold flanks into the room like a black iceberg.
Ned Stanwell, who had just added his hat and great-coat
to the miscellaneous heap on the divan, turned from
the empty stove with a shiver.
“By Jove, this is a little too much like the
last act of Boheme,” he said, slipping
into his coat again after a vain glance at the coal-scuttle.
Much solitude, and a lively habit of mind, had bred
in him the habit of audible soliloquy, and having
flung a shout for the janitor down the seven flights
dividing the studio from the basement, he turned back,
picking up the thread of his monologue. “Exactly
like Boheme, really—that crack in
the wall is much more like a stage-crack than a real
one—just the sort of crack Mungold would
paint if he were doing a Humble Interior.”
