<h2><SPAN name="XLIII" id="XLIII"></SPAN>XLIII</h2>
<p class="nind"><span class="letra">I</span> FINISHED my copies in four days, and they were scarcely dry when I
carried them down to Jacobs. He examined them as if he were buying some
material by the yard. I felt very nervous as he looked at them. Then he
grunted, went over to his desk and wrote me a check for thirty dollars
and fifteen cents. Menna told me he sold them for a couple of hundred if
not more. He handed me the check with the remark:</p>
<p>“They will do. It takes a <i>man</i> to do a piece of work right.”</p>
<p>For a time Menna had very little work for me. There were slack times
when he had not enough for himself, and he would get very discouraged.
Sometimes he would gather up all the paintings he had made and say:</p>
<p>“Go and slaughter them to those damned frame-makers, Ascough, and sell
them for what you can get—anything.”</p>
<p>I would remonstrate with him, and point out<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="page_259" id="page_259">{259}</SPAN></span> that if he would wait and
not be in such a hurry for his money we could get better prices.</p>
<p>“Hang it all,” he would shout, “what’s the use?”</p>
<p>So long as he had a few dollars to sit at some table with friends and
order beer, he would sacrifice, or as he called it “slaughter,” anything
and everything.</p>
<p>As work was now very scarce, I decided to see Fisher about the posing.
So I went across the hall and knocked at his door.</p>
<p>“Hello, Miss Ascough,” he called out cheerily, as I came in. “Come on in
and sit down. You seem pretty busy in Menna’s studio. What are you doing
for him?”</p>
<p>“Oh, I help him paint,” I said, “and sell his work for him, and
sometimes I pose. That’s what I want to ask you about now. Wouldn’t you
like me to pose for you and your friends? I hear you all sketch together
once a week.”</p>
<p>“We’ll be glad to have you,” he declared cordially, his eye scanning me
admiringly. “Why didn’t you speak before?”</p>
<p>“Well, I’ve been pretty busy with Mr. Menna, but work’s slack now. So,
if you like, I can give you some time.”</p>
<p>“Good. See Bonnat about it. He generally engages the model, and we’re to
work in his room next time. Have you met him?<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="page_260" id="page_260">{260}</SPAN></span>”</p>
<p>“No.”</p>
<p>“Well, I guess you have <i>heard</i> him,” laughed Fisher. “He certainly
makes enough noise. When he first moved in here, we used to be wakened
up early in the morning by him stamping up the stairs from the bathroom,
carrying his bucket of water. There’s no water on his floor, and the way
he stamped and cussed as he went up those two flights of stairs was
enough to awaken the dead, and all the stairs would be splashed with
water. We thought that cross old Mary, the caretaker, would go for him
(as she <i>can</i>), but she never said a word to him. Just went to work and
wiped up the water every morning. That comes of being a good-looker.”</p>
<p>“Is he so handsome, then?”</p>
<p>Fisher himself was a homely, red-haired little fellow.</p>
<p>“You bet he is,” he said, “as handsome as they make ’em, so don’t get
stuck on him, as we want to keep Bonnat here. What’s more, he paints
like he looks—great! wonderful! He’ll make his mark yet. Go along and
see him now. ‘Raus mit you!”</p>
<p>So, leaving Fisher’s studio, I climbed the stairs to the top floor, and,
turning to the left, I saw a door with a card nailed on it, bearing the
name of Paul Bonnat. I stood and looked at the door for some time, and
then I knocked. The door<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="page_261" id="page_261">{261}</SPAN></span> was opened with a jerk, and standing in the
doorway was a young giant, whose head seemed to reach the top of the
door. His hair was all sticking up. It was fair, and the eyes that
looked at me questioningly were blue. He had a wide, clever mouth, and a
chin that was like a cleft rock. As I stared up at him, his face smiled
all over, so that I was forced to smile in return, and I thought to
myself:</p>
<p>“Why, he looks like a young viking.” Somehow he made me think of my
father, in coloring and the northern type of face, but this man had a
more distinct personality that seemed almost to strike one. Papa was
gentle and a dreamer. Bonnat was vitally alive.</p>
<p>“Mr. Fisher told me you wanted a model.”</p>
<p>He nodded and his big glance, still smiling, looked me over.</p>
<p>“Come in, come in.”</p>
<p>He was about twenty-six or seven, and in spite of the two hundred pounds
Menna told me he weighed, he was not the least bit fat.</p>
<p>I was now in the room, and I glanced about me. Never have I seen such an
untidy room in my life. It was not dirty, but simply littered up with
things.</p>
<p>“Sit down,” he said, sweeping off some drawings and papers on to the
floor from a chair that was loaded. There was also a glass of<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="page_262" id="page_262">{262}</SPAN></span> water on
the chair, and he tipped that off, too, and the water ran on the floor.</p>
<p>“Oh,” I gasped, “do you always throw everything on the floor like that?”</p>
<p>“Not everything,” he answered, grinning. Then he handed me a box of
cigarettes. I took one, and he began to look for a match. On the couch,
the table and on all the chairs were piled papers, paints, brushes,
clothes, boots and all manner of articles. It looked as if he never put
anything where it belonged. Even his clothes were not hung up. On the
walls were sketches, paintings, a pair of fencing swords, and the floor
could scarcely be seen, as it also was covered with articles, and there
were boxes of cigarette stumps and several empty glasses and bottles. As
he hunted for the matches, he tumbled one thing after another on the
floor.</p>
<p>I was possessed with a desire to tidy up that room. My hands were
literally itching to go to work upon it. He seemed so helpless among all
his belongings.</p>
<p>“Got it at last!” he laughed, as he discovered the box of matches on the
window sill, and, striking one, he offered me a light. I never cared for
smoking, but as I was always expected to smoke I usually accepted to
save the bother of refusing and being urged.</p>
<p>“It’s the devil to be in such a small hole,” he<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="page_263" id="page_263">{263}</SPAN></span> said. “I seem to spend
all my time looking for things. Well, now, let’s see. You’re going to
pose for us, are you? Is next Sunday all right, or do you have to go to
confess something?” He asked the question teasingly, as if he enjoyed
poking fun at me.</p>
<p>“No, I never go to church,” I admitted.</p>
<p>A shocked look came into his face, and he opened his mouth wide.</p>
<p>“What? You are a heathen!”</p>
<p>He threw back his head and burst into the loudest and most infectious
laughter I have ever heard.</p>
<p>“Then it’s all settled,” he said. “Now I have to go to lunch. Want to
come along and have a bum lunch with me?”</p>
<p>I nodded, and he said: “Good!” hunted around for his hat, stuck it
jauntily on his head, and, taking me by the arm, we went down the
stairs.</p>
<p>When we were sitting in the little restaurant near Sixth Avenue, he
asked me a lot of questions about myself, and before I knew it I had
told him all about my father and mother and brothers and sisters and the
work I had done in Montreal. Then I told him of the hard times I had in
Boston. He seemed intensely interested, and when I got through he
rattled off a lot of hard-luck stories about the artists, and told me<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="page_264" id="page_264">{264}</SPAN></span>
something about the exigencies and makeshifts that all of them had had.
He’d tell one story of hard luck after another, not as if it were
something to feel badly about, but as if it were the common lot of every
one. I think he did that so I wouldn’t think I myself had been
especially singled out by fate.</p>
<p>He told me how only a few months before Fisher and he and “a couple of
other guys” were all “broke,” and none of them had enough cash to buy a
separate meal-ticket which entitled him to six meals for one dollar and
a quarter, instead of twenty-five cents each meal. So they had all
chipped in together and bought one ticket between them on the third of
July. Well, when they went to dinner on the fourth of July to the Little
Waldorf on Eighth Avenue, they were confronted by this sign:</p>
<p>“The landlord has gone away for a holiday, and will return next week.”</p>
<p>Bonnat seemed to think that an immense joke. He said every one in
Paresis Row had had some such experience.</p>
<p>He wanted to know where I lived and I told him Fifteenth Street, and
then he asked suddenly:</p>
<p>“Alone?” When I answered “yes” he smiled beamingly at me. Then he took
me home, and lifting his hat in going, said:<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="page_265" id="page_265">{265}</SPAN></span></p>
<p>“You’re engaged then. Sunday. Good-bye.” I could see him striding down
the street, his head up, and his broad shoulders thrown back. He
whistled as he went along.<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="page_266" id="page_266">{266}</SPAN></span></p>
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