The New York Stories of Edith Wharton by Edith Wharton

Author:Edith Wharton
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-59017-436-4
Publisher: New York Review Books

Stanwell had to wait a long time for the doctor; and when the latter came out he looked grave. Worse? No, he couldn’t say that Caspar was worse—but then he wasn’t better. There was nothing mortal the matter, but the question was how long he could hold out. It was the kind of case where there is no use in drugs—he had merely scribbled a prescription to quiet Miss Arran.

“It’s the cold, I suppose,” Stanwell groaned. “He ought to be shipped off to Florida.”

The doctor made a negative gesture. “Florida be hanged! What he wants is to sell his group. That would set him up quicker than sitting on the equator.”

“Sell his group?” Stanwell echoed. “But he’s so indifferent to recognition—he believes in himself so thoroughly. I thought at first he would be hard hit when the Exhibition Committee refused it, but he seems to regard that as another proof of its superiority.”

His visitor turned on him the keen eye of the confessor. “Indifferent to recognition? He’s eating his heart out for it. Can’t you see that all that talk is just so much whistling to keep his courage up? The name of his disease is failure—and I can’t write the prescription that will cure that. But if somebody would come along and take a fancy to those two naked parties who are breaking each other’s heads we’d have Mr. Caspar putting on a pound a day.”

The truth of this diagnosis became suddenly vivid to Stanwell. How dull of him not to have seen before that it was not cold or privation which was killing Caspar—not anxiety for his sister’s future, nor the ache of watching her daily struggle—but simply the cankering thought that he might die before he had made himself known! It was his vanity that was starving to death, and all Mungold’s hampers could not appease that hunger. Stanwell was not shocked by the discovery—he was only the more sorry for the little man, who was, after all, denied that solace of self-sufficiency which his talk so noisily proclaimed. His lot seemed hard enough when Stanwell had pictured him as buoyed up by the scorn of public opinion—it became tragic if he was denied that support. The artist wondered if Kate had guessed her brother’s secret, or if she were still the dupe of his stoicism. Stanwell was sure that the sculptor would take no one into his confidence, and least of all his sister, whose faith in his artistic independence was the chief prop of that tottering pose. Kate’s penetration was not great, and Stanwell recalled the incredulous smile with which she had heard him defend poor Mungold’s “sincerity” against Caspar’s assaults; but she had the insight of the heart, and where her brother’s happiness was concerned she might have seen deeper than any of them. It was this last consideration which took the strongest hold on Stanwell—he felt Caspar’s sufferings chiefly through the thought of his sister’s possible disillusionment.

IV

Within three months two events had set the studio building talking.

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