Murder in Any Degree | Page 3

by imagining he really is in love. Take
portrait-painting. Charming lady sits for portrait, painter takes up his
brushes, arranges his palette, seeks inspiration,--what is below the
surface?--something intangible to divine, seize, and affix to his canvas.
He seeks to know the soul; he seeks how? As a man in love seeks,
naturally. The more he imagines himself in love, the more completely

does the idea obsess him from morning to night--plain as the nose on
your face. Only there are other portraits to paint. Enter the wife."
"Charming," said Stibo, who had not ceased twining his mustaches in
his pink fingers.
"Ah, that's the point. What of the wife?" said Steingall, violently.
"The wife--the ideal wife, mind you--is then the weapon, the refuge. To
escape from the entanglement of his momentary inspiration, the artist
becomes a man: my wife and bonjour. He returns home, takes off the
duster of his illusion, cleans the palette of old memories, washes away
his vows, protestations, and all that rot, you know, lies down on the
sofa, and gives his head to his wife to be rubbed. Curtain. The comedy
is over."
"But that's what they don't understand," said Steingall, with enthusiasm.
"That's what they will never understand."
"Such miracles exist?" said Towsey with a short, disagreeable laugh.
"I know the wife of an artist," said Quinny, "whom I consider the most
remarkable woman I know--who sits and knits and smiles. She is one
who understands. Her husband adores her, and he is in love with a
woman a month. When he gets in too deep, ready for another
inspiration, you know, she calls up the old love on the telephone and
asks her to stop annoying her husband."
"Marvelous!" said Steingall, dropping his glasses.
"No, really?" said Rankin.
"Has she a sister?" said Towsey.
Stibo raised his eyes slowly to Quinny's but veiled as was the look, De
Gollyer perceived it, and smilingly registered the knowledge on the
ledger of his social secrets.
"That's it, by George! that is it," said Steingall, who hurled the

enthusiasm of a reformer into his pessimism. "It's all so simple; but
they won't understand. And why--do you know why? Because a woman
is jealous. It isn't simply of other women. No, no, that's not it; it's worse
than that, ten thousand times worse. She's jealous of your art! That's it!
There you have it! She's jealous because she can't understand it,
because it takes you away from her, because she can't share it. That's
what's terrible about marriage--no liberty, no individualism, no
seclusion, having to account every night for your actions, for your
thoughts, for the things you dream--ah, the dreams! The Chinese are
right, the Japanese are right. It's we Westerners who are all wrong. It's
the creative only that counts. The woman should be subordinated,
should be kept down, taught the voluptuousness of obedience. By Jove!
that's it. We don't assert ourselves. It's this confounded Anglo-Saxon
sentimentality that's choking art--that's what it is."
At the familiar phrases of Steingall's outburst, Rankin wagged his head
in unequivocal assent, Stibo smiled so as to show his fine upper teeth,
and Towsey flung away his cigar, saying:
"Words, words."
At this moment when Quinny, who had digested Steingall's argument,
was preparing to devour the whole topic, Britt Herkimer, the sculptor,
joined them. He was a guest, just in from Paris, where he had been
established twenty years, one of the five men in art whom one counted
on the fingers when the word genius was pronounced. Mentally and
physically a German, he spoke English with a French accent. His hair
was cropped en brosse, and in his brown Japanese face only the eyes,
staccato, furtive, and drunk with curiosity, could be seen. He was direct,
opinionated, bristling with energy, one of those tireless workers who
disdain their youth and treat it as a disease. His entry into the group of
his more socially domesticated confrères was like the return of a
wolf-hound among the housedogs.
"Still smashing idols?" he said, slapping the shoulder of Steingall, with
whom and Quinny he had passed his student days, "Well, what's the
row?"

"My dear Britt, we are reforming matrimony. Steingall is for the
importation of Mongolian wives," said De Gollyer, who had written
two favorable articles on Herkimer, "while Quinny is for founding a
school for wives on most novel and interesting lines."
"That's odd," said Herkimer, with a slight frown.
"On the contrary, no," said De Gollyer; "we always abolish matrimony
from four to six."
"You didn't understand me," said Herkimer, with the sharpness he used
in his classes.
From his tone the group perceived that the hazards had brought to him
some abrupt coincidence. They waited with an involuntary silence,
which in itself was a rare tribute.
"Remember Rantoul?" said Herkimer,