Gossamer Part 8

I spent a very pleasant fortnight in New York among people entirely unconnected with the Aschers or Gorman. I was kept busy dining, lunching, going to the theatre, driving here and there in motor cars, and enjoying the society of some of the least conventional and most brilliant women in the world. I only found time to call on the Aschers once and then did not see either of them. They were stopping in the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, and the young man in the office told me that Mrs.

Ascher spent the whole of every day in her studio. Her devotion to art was evidently very great. She could not manage to spend a holiday in New York without hiring a studio. I inquired whether any members of the Galleotti family were sitting for her, but the hotel clerk did not know that. He told me, however, that Mr. Ascher was in Was.h.i.+ngton. Gorman always says that the strings of government in modern states are pulled by financiers. Ascher was probably chucking at those which are fastened to the arms and legs of the President of the United States, with a view to making that potentate dance threateningly in the direction of Mexico.

I am sure that Ascher does this sort of thing very nicely and kindly if indeed he does it at all. He would not willingly destroy the self-respect even of a marionette.

Of Gorman I saw nothing more before I left New York. I think he went off to Detroit almost immediately after our interview with Ascher and Stutz. Gorman is not exactly the man to put his public duties before his private interests, but I am sure the public duties always come in a close second. Having settled, or thought he had settled, the affair of the cash register, he immediately turned his attention to that wealthy motor man in Detroit from whom he meant to get a subscription. The future of the Irish Party possibly, its comforts probably, depended on the success of Gorman's mission. And a party never deserved comfort more. The Home Rule Bill was almost pa.s.sed for the third and last time.

Nothing stood between Ireland and the realisation of Gorman's hopes for her except the obstinate perversity of the Ulster men. A few more subscriptions, generous subscriptions, and that would be overcome.

After enjoying myself in New York for a fortnight I went to Canada.

I did not gather much information about the companies in which I was interested. But I learned a good deal about Canadian politics. The men who play that game out there are extraordinarily clearsighted and honest. They frankly express lower opinions of each other than the politicians of any other country would dare to hold of the players in their particular fields. In the end the general frankness became monotonous and I tired of Canada. I went back to New York, hoping to pick up some one there who would travel home with me by way of the West Indies, islands which I had never seen. I thought it possible that I might persuade the Aschers, if they were still in New York, to make the tour with me. There was just a chance that I might come across Gorman again and that he would be taken with the idea of preaching the doctrines of Irish nationalism in Jamaica. I called on the Aschers twice and missed them both times. But the second visit was not fruitless. Mrs.

Ascher rang me up on the telephone and asked me to go to see her in her studio. She said that she particularly wanted to see me and had something very important to say.

I obeyed the summons, of course. I found Mrs. Ascher clad in a long, pale-blue pinafore. Over-all is, I believe, the proper name for the garment. But it looked to me like a child's pinafore, greatly enlarged.

It completely covered all her other clothes in front and almost completely covered them behind. I recognised it as the sort of thing a really earnest artist would wear while working. Her hair was hanging in loops and wisps about her head, a disorder which was effective with dark-red hair. Her hands were damp and dirty. Her face was smudged here and there, as if, in moments of artistic travail, she had pressed her muddy fingers against her forehead and chin. The room had very little furniture in it, but there were several tables, large and small. On these stood what seemed to me shapeless lumps of various sizes, swathed in damp rags. They reminded me a little of the shrouded objects on the tables of dissecting rooms after the students have gone home. There was the same suggestion of mutilated human forms. Mrs. Archer saw me looking at them.

"Some of my little things," she said, "but nothing finished. I don't know why it is, but here in New York I find it very difficult to finish anything."

"You're not singular in that," I said. "The New York people themselves suffer in exactly the same way. There isn't a street in their city that they've finished or ever will finish. If anything begins to look like completion they smash it up at once and start fresh. It must be something in the air, a restlessness, a desire of the perfection which can never be realised."

Mrs. Ascher very carefully unwrapped a succession of damp rags from one of the largest of her lumps which was standing on a table by itself. I have, since then, seen nurses unwrapping the bandages from the wounded limbs of men. The way they did it always reminded me of Mrs. Ascher.

The removal of the last bandage revealed to me a figure about eighteen inches high of a girl who seemed to me to be stretching herself after getting out of bed before stepping into her bath.

"Psyche," said Mrs. Ascher.

I had to show my admiration in some way. The proper thing, I believe, when shown a statue by a sculptor, is to stroke it with your fingers and murmur, "Ah!" I was afraid to stroke Psyche because she was certainly wet and probably soft. A touch might have dinted her, made a dimple in a wrong place. I dared not risk it. It became all the more necessary to speak.

The first thing I thought of was a quotation from Edgar Allan Poe.

"I pacified Psyche and kissed her," I murmured, "and tempted her out of the gloom."

I said the lines in what I am convinced is the proper way, as if they were forced from me, as if I spoke them to myself and did not mean them to be heard. I do not think Mrs. Ascher knew them. I fear she suspected me of making some sort of joke. I hastened to redeem my character.

"Psyche," I said, "the soul."

I was right so far. Psyche is the Greek for the soul. I ventured further.

"The human soul, the artistic soul."

Mrs. Ascher appeared to be absolutely hanging on my words. I plunged on.

"Aspiring," I said, "reaching after the unattainable."

I would not have said, "hoping for a yawn" for anything that could have been offered me; but the young woman who stood for Mrs. Ascher's Psyche must have longed for that relief. The att.i.tude in which she was posed suggested yawning all the time, and we all know how fatal it is to think of a yawn.

"Quite unfinished," said Mrs. Ascher with a sigh.

"The fault of New York," I said. "When you get home again----"

I hesitated. I did not wish to commit myself to a confession of ignorance, and I do not know whether a damp, soft Psyche can be packed up and transported across the Atlantic to be finished in London.

"But the aspiration is there," I said, "and you owe that to New York.

The air, the very same air which forbids completion, is charged with aspiration. We all feel it. The city itself aspires. Since the great days when men set out to build a tower the top of which should reach unto heaven, there has never been such aspiration anywhere in the world.

Look at the Woolworth Building."

I was maundering and I knew it Mrs. Ascher's statuette was very nice and graceful; a much better thing than I expected to see, but there was nothing in it, nothing at all in the way of thought or emotion. There must be hundreds of people who can turn out clay girls just as good as that Psyche. Somehow I had expected something different from Mrs.

Ascher, less skill in modelling, less care, but more temperament.

"There's nothing else worth showing," she said, "except perhaps this.

Yes, except this."

She unwrapped more bandages. A damp, pale-grey head appeared. It was standing in a large saucer or soup plate. At first I thought she had been at John the Baptist and had chosen the moment when his head lay in the charger ready for the dancing girl to take to her mother.

Fortunately I looked at it carefully before speaking. I saw that it was Tim Gorman's head.

"He sat to me," said Mrs. Ascher, "and by degrees I came to know him very well. One does, one cannot help it, talking to a person every day and watching, always watching. Do you think----?"

"I think it's wonderful," I said.

This time I spoke with real and entire conviction. I am no expert judge of anything in the world except perhaps a horse or a bottle of claret, but I was impressed by this piece of Mrs. Ascher's work. Tim Gorman's fine eyes were the only things about him which struck me as noticeable.

No artist can model eyes in clay. But Mrs. Ascher had got all that I saw in his eyes into the head before me--all and a great deal more. She had somehow succeeded in making the lips, the nostrils, the forehead, the cheek-bones, express the fact that Tim Gorman is an idealist, a dreamer of fine dreams and at the same time innocent as a child which looks out at the world with wonder. I do not know how the woman did it. I should not have supposed her capable of even seeing what she had expressed in her clay, but there it was.

"You really like it?"

She spoke with a curious note of humility in her voice. My impulse was to say that I liked her, for the first time saw the real good in her; but I could not say that.

"Like it!" I said. "It isn't for me to like or dislike it. I don't know anything about those things. I am not capable of judging. But this seems to me to be really great."

"Ah!" said Mrs. Ascher, "and this time you are sincere."

She looked at me quite gravely as she spoke. Then a smile slowly broadened her mouth.

"That's not the way you spoke of poor Psyche's aspiration," she said, "you were laughing at me then."

A cold sweat broke out on my forehead. The woman had understood every word I said to her, understood what I meant as well as what I wanted to convey to her, two very different things. She was immensely more clever than I suspected or could have guessed.

"Mrs. Ascher," I said, "I beg your pardon."

"You were quite right," she said. "That other thing isn't Psyche. It's just a silly little girl, the model---- There wasn't anything about her that I could see, nothing but just a pretty body."

So she dismissed my apology and turned to Tim Gorman's head again. She ran her finger lightly round the rim of the saucer.

"What shall I do with this?" she said. "What is his head to stand on, to rise from? I was thinking of water-lily leaves, as if the head were emerging----"

I felt that I owed Mrs. Ascher some frankness in return for my first insult to her intelligence. Besides, I was moved. I was, as I had not been for years, emotional. Tim Gorman's head gripped me in a curious way.

"Good G.o.d, Woman," I said, "anything in the world but that! Wrap up that chorus girl of a Psyche in leaves if you like. Sprinkle rose petals over her or any other d.a.m.ned sentimentalism. But this man is a mechanic. He has invented a cash register. What in the name of all that's holy has he got to do with water-lily leaves? Put hammers round his head, and pincers, and long nails."

I stopped. I realised suddenly that I was making an unutterable fool of myself. I was talking as I never talked in my life before, saying out loud the sort of things I have carefully schooled myself neither to feel nor to think.

"After all," said Mrs. Ascher, "you have an artist's soul."

I shuddered. Mrs. Ascher looked at me and smiled again, a half-pitiful smile.