Collected Stories

by Willa Cather

  “The studio is h’only open to the public on Saturdays and Sundays,” explained the man—he referred to himself as “Jymes”—“but of course we make exceptions in the case of pynters. Lydy Elling Treffinger ’erself is on the Continent, but Sir ’Ugh’s orders was that pynters was to ’ave the run of the place.” He selected a key from his pocket and threw open the door into the studio which, like the lodge, was built against the wall of the garden.

  MacMaster entered a long, narrow room, built of smoothed planks, painted a light green; cold and damp even on that fine May morning. The room was utterly bare of furniture—unless a step-ladder, a model throne, and a rack laden with large leather portfolios could be accounted such—and was windowless, without other openings than the door and the skylight, under which hung the unfinished picture itself. MacMaster had never seen so many of Treffinger’s paintings together. He knew the painter had married a woman with money and had been able to keep such of his pictures as he wished. These, with all of his replicas and studies, he had left as a sort of common legacy to the younger men of the school he had originated.

  As soon as he was left alone, MacMaster sat down on the edge of the model throne before the unfinished picture. Here indeed was what he had come for; it rather paralysed his receptivity for the moment, but gradually the thing found its way to him.

  At one o’clock he was standing before the collection of studies done for Boccaccio’s Garden when he heard a voice at his elbow.

  “Pardon, sir, but I was just about to lock up and go to lunch. Are you lookin’ for the figure study of Boccaccio ’imself?” James queried respectfully, “Lydy Elling Treffinger give it to Mr. Rossiter to take down to Oxford for some lectures he’s been a-giving there.”

  “Did he never paint out his studies, then?” asked MacMaster with perplexity. “Here are two completed ones for this picture. Why did he keep them?”

  “I don’t know as I could say as to that, sir,” replied James, smiling indulgently, “but that was ’is way. That is to say, ’e pynted out very frequent, but ’e always made two studies to stand; one in water colours and one in oils, before ’e went at the final picture,—to say nothink of all the pose studies ’e made in pencil before he begun on the composition proper at all. He was that particular. You see ’e wasn’t so keen for the final effect as for the proper pyntin’ of ’is pictures. ’e used to say they ought to be well made, the same as any other h’article of trade. I can lay my ’and on the pose studies for you, sir.” He rummaged in one of the portfolios and produced half a dozen drawings. “These three,” he continued, “was discarded: these two was the pose he finally accepted; this one without alteration, as it were.

  “That’s in Paris, as I remember,” James continued reflectively. “It went with the Saint Cecilia into the Baron H—’s collection. Could you tell me, sir, ’as ’e it still? I don’t like to lose account of them, but some ’as changed ’ands since Sir ’Ugh’s death.”

  “H—’s collection is still intact, I believe,” replied MacMaster. “You were with Treffinger long?”

  “From my boyhood, sir,” replied James with gravity. “I was a stable boy when ’e took me.”

  “You were his man, then?”

  “That’s it, sir. Nobody else ever done anything around the studio. I always mixed ’is colours and ’e taught me to do a share of the varnishin’; ’e said as ’ow there wasn’t a ’ouse in England as could do it proper. You aynt looked at the Marriage yet, sir?” he asked abruptly, glancing doubtfully at MacMaster, and indicating with his thumb the picture under the north light.

  “Not very closely. I prefer to begin with something simpler; that’s rather appalling, at first glance,” replied MacMaster.

  “Well may you say that, sir,” said James warmly. “That one regular killed Sir ’Ugh; it regular broke ’im up, and nothink will ever convince me as ’ow it didn’t bring on ’is second stroke.”

  When MacMaster walked back to High Street to take his bus, his mind was divided between two exultant convictions. He felt that he had not only found Treffinger’s greatest picture, but that, in James, he had discovered a kind of cryptic index to the painter’s personality—a clue which, if tactfully followed, might lead to much.

  Several days after his first visit to the studio, MacMaster wrote to Lady Mary Percy, telling her that he would be in London for some time and asking her if he might call. Lady Mary was an only sister of Lady Ellen Treffinger, the painter’s widow, and MacMaster had known her during one winter he spent at Nice. He had known her, indeed, very well, and Lady Mary, who was astonishingly frank and communicative upon all subjects, had been no less so upon the matter of her sister’s unfortunate marriage.

  In her reply to his note, Lady Mary named an afternoon when she would be alone. She was as good as her word, and when MacMaster arrived he found the drawing-room empty. Lady Mary entered shortly after he was announced. She was a tall woman, thin and stiffly jointed; and her body stood out under the folds of her gown with the rigour of cast-iron. This rather metallic suggestion was further carried out in her heavily knuckled hands, her stiff grey hair and long, bold-featured face, which was saved from freakishness only by her alert eyes.

  “Really,” said Lady Mary, taking a seat beside him and giving him a sort of military inspection through her nose-glasses, “Really, I had begun to fear that I had lost you altogether. It’s four years since I saw you at Nice, isn’t it? I was in Paris last winter, but I heard nothing from you.”

  “I was in New York then.”

  “It occurred to me that you might be. And why are you in London?”

  “Can you ask?” replied MacMaster gallantly.

  Lady Mary smiled ironically. “But for what else, incidentally?”

  “Well, incidentally, I came to see Treffinger’s studio and his unfinished picture. Since I’ve been here, I’ve decided to stay the summer. I’m even thinking of attempting to do a bíography of him.”

  “So that is what brought you to London?”

  “Not exactly. I had really no intention of anything so serious when I came. It’s his last picture, I fancy, that has rather thrust it upon me. The notion has settled down on me like a thing destined.”

  “You’ll not be offended if I question the clemency of such a destiny,” remarked Lady Mary dryly. “Isn’t there rather a surplus of books on that subject already?”

  “Such as they are. Oh, I’ve read them all,” here MacMaster faced Lady Mary triumphantly. “He has quite escaped your amiable critics,” he added, smiling.

  “I know well enough what you think, and I dare say we are not much on art,” said Lady Mary with tolerant good humour. “We leave that to peoples who have no physique. Treffinger made a stir for a time, but it seems that we are not capable of a sustained appreciation of such extraordinary methods. In the end we go back to the pictures we find agreeable and unperplexing. He was regarded as an experiment, I fancy; and now it seems that he was rather an unsuccessful one. If you’ve come to us in a missionary spirit, we’ll tolerate you politely, but we’ll laugh in our sleeve, I warn you.”

  “That really doesn’t daunt me, Lady Mary,” declared MacMaster blandly. “As I told you, I’m a man with a mission.”

  Lady Mary laughed her hoarse baritone laugh. “Bravo! and you’ve come to me for inspiration for your panegyric?”

  MacMaster smiled with some embarrassment. “Not altogether for that purpose. But I want to consult you, Lady Mary, about the advisability of troubling Lady Ellen Treffinger in the matter. It seems scarcely legitimate to go on without asking her to give some sort of grace to my proceedings, yet I feared the whole subject might be painful to her. I shall rely wholly upon your discretion.”

  “I think she would prefer to be consulted,” replied Lady Mary judicially. “I can’t understand how she endures to have the wretched affair continually raked up, but she does. She seems to feel a sort of moral responsibility. Ellen has always been singularly conscientious about this matter, in so fa
r as her light goes,—which rather puzzles me, as hers is not exactly a magnanimous nature. She is certainly trying to do what she believes to be the right thing. I shall write to her, and you can see her when she returns from Italy.”

  “I want very much to meet her. She is, I hope, quite recovered in every way,” queried MacMaster, hesitatingly.

  “No, I can’t say that she is. She has remained in much the same condition she sank to before his death. He trampled over pretty much whatever there was in her, I fancy. Women don’t recover from wounds of that sort; at least, not women of Ellen’s grain. They go on bleeding inwardly.”

  “You, at any rate have not grown more reconciled,” MacMaster ventured.

  “Oh, I give him his dues. He was a colourist, I grant you; but that is a vague and unsatisfactory quality to marry to; Lady Ellen Treffinger found it so.”

  “But, my dear Lady Mary,” expostulated MacMaster, “and just repress me if I’m becoming too personal—but it must, in the first place, have been a marriage of choice on her part as well as on his.”

  Lady Mary poised her glasses on her large forefinger and assumed an attitude suggestive of the clinical lecture room as she replied. “Ellen, my dear boy, is an essentially romantic person. She is quiet about it, but she runs deep. I never knew how deep until I came against her on the issue of that marriage. She was always discontented as a girl; she found things dull and prosaic, and the ardour of his courtship was agreeable to her. He met her during her first season in town. She is handsome, and there were plenty of other men, but I grant you your scowling brigand was the most picturesque of the lot. In his courtship, as in everything else, he was theatrical to the point of being ridiculous, but Ellen’s sense of humour is not her strongest quality. He had the charm of celebrity, the air of a man who could storm his way through anything to get what he wanted. That sort of vehemence is particularly effective with women like Ellen, who can be warmed only by reflected heat, and she couldn’t at all stand out against it. He convinced her of his necessity; and that done, all’s done.”

  “I can’t help thinking that, even on such a basis, the marriage should have turned out better,” MacMaster remarked reflectively.

  “The marriage,” Lady Mary continued with a shrug, “was made on the basis of a mutual misunderstanding. Ellen, in the nature of the case, believed that she was doing something quite out of the ordinary in accepting him, and expected concessions which, apparently, it never occurred to him to make. After his marriage he relapsed into his old habits of incessant work, broken by violent and often brutal relaxations. He insulted her friends and foisted his own upon her—many of them well calculated to arouse aversion in any well-bred girl. He had Ghillini constantly at the house—a homeless vagabond, whose conversation was impossible. I don’t say, mind you, that he had not grievances on his side. He had probably over-rated the girl’s possibilities, and he let her see that he was disappointed in her. Only a large and generous nature could have borne with him, and Ellen’s is not that. She could not at all understand that odious strain of plebeian pride which plumes itself upon not having risen above its sources.”

  As MacMaster drove back to his hotel, he reflected that Lady Mary Percy had probably had good cause for dissatisfaction with her brother-in-law. Treffinger was, indeed, the last man who should have married into the Percy family. The son of a small tobacconist, he had grown up a sign painter’s apprentice; idle, lawless, and practically letterless until he had drifted into the night classes of the Albert League, where Ghillini sometimes lectured. From the moment he came under the eye and influence of that erratic Italian, then a political exile, his life had swerved sharply from its old channel. This man had been at once incentive and guide, friend and master, to his pupil. He had taken the raw clay out of the London streets and moulded it anew. Seemingly he had divined at once where the boy’s possibilities lay, and had thrown aside every canon of orthodox instruction in the training of him. Under him Treffinger acquired his superficial, yet facile, knowledge of the classics; had steeped himself in the monkish Latin and mediæval romances which later gave his work so naive and remote a quality. That was the beginning of the wattle fences, the cobble pave, the brown roof beams, the cunningly wrought fabrics that gave to his pictures such a richness of decorative effect.

  As he had told Lady Mary Percy, MacMaster had found the imperative inspiration of his purpose in Treffinger’s unfinished picture, the Marriage of Phædra. He had always believed that the key to Treffinger’s individuality lay in his singular education; in the Roman de la Rose, in Boccaccio, and Amadis, those works which had literally transcribed themselves upon the blank soul of the London street boy, and through which he had been born into the world of spiritual things. Treffinger had been a man who lived after his imagination; and his mind, his ideals and, as MacMaster believed, even his personal ethics, had to the last been coloured by the trend of his early training. There was in him alike the freshness and spontaneity, the frank brutality and the religious mysticism which lay well back of the fifteenth century. In the Marriage of Phædra MacMaster found the ultimate expression of this spirit, the final word as to Treffinger’s point of view.

  As in all Treffinger’s classical subjects, the conception was wholly mediæval. This Phædra, just turning from her husband and maidens to greet her husband’s son, giving him her first fearsome glance from under her half lifted veil, was no daughter of Minos. The daughter of heathenesse and the early church she was; doomed to torturing visions and scourgings, and the wrangling of soul and flesh. The venerable Theseus might have been victorious Charlemagne, and Phædra’s maidens belonged rather in the train of Blanche of Castile than at the Cretan court. In the earlier studies Hippolytus had been done with a more pagan suggestion, but in each successive drawing the glorious figure had been deflowered of something of its serene unconsciousness; until, in the canvas under the skylight, he appeared a very Christian knight. This male figure, and the face of Phædra, painted with such magical preservation of tone under the heavy shadow of the veil, were plainly Treffinger’s highest achievements of craftsmanship. By what labour he had reached the seemingly inevitable composition of the picture—with its twenty figures, its plenitude of light and air, its restful distances seen through white porticoes—countless studies bore witness.

  From James’s attitude toward the picture, MacMaster could well conjecture what the painter’s had been. This picture was always uppermost in James’s mind; its custodianship formed, in his eyes, his occupation. He was manifestly apprehensive when visitors—not many came now-a-days—lingered near it. “It was the Marriage as killed ’im,” he would often say, “and for the matter ’o that, it did like to ’ave been the death of all of us.”

  By the end of his second week in London, MacMaster had begun the notes for his study of Hugh Treffinger and his work. When his researches led him occasionally to visit the studios of Treffinger’s friends and erstwhile disciples, he found their Treffinger manner fading as the ring of Treffinger’s personality died out in them. One by one they were stealing back into the fold of national British art; the hand that had wound them up was still. MacMaster despaired of them and confined himself more and more exclusively to the studio, to such of Treffinger’s letters as were available—they were for the most part singularly negative and colourless—and to his interrogation of Treffinger’s man.

  He could not himself have traced the successive steps by which he was gradually admitted into James’s confidence. Certainly most of his adroit strategies to that end failed humiliatingly, and whatever it was that built up an understanding between them, must have been instinctive and intuitive on both sides. When at last James became anecdotal, personal, there was that in every word he let fall which put breath and blood into MacMaster’s book. James had so long been steeped in that penetrating personality that he fairly exuded it. Many of his phrases, mannerisms and opinions were impressions that he had taken on like wet plaster in his daily contact with Treffinger. Inwardly he was
lined with cast off epithelia, as outwardly he was clad in the painter’s discarded coats. If the painter’s letters were formal and perfunctory, if his expressions to his friends had been extravagant, contradictory and often apparently insincere—still, MacMaster felt himself not entirely without authentic sources. It was James who possessed Treffinger’s legend; it was with James that he had laid aside his pose. Only in his studio, alone, and face to face with his work, as it seemed, had the man invariably been himself. James had known him in the one attitude in which he was entirely honest; their relation had fallen well within the painter’s only indubitable integrity. James’s report of Treffinger was distorted by no hallucination of artistic insight, coloured by no interpretation of his own. He merely held what he had heard and seen; his mind was a sort of camera obscura. His very limitations made him the more literal and minutely accurate.