The Adventures of Allegra Fullerton (19 page)

“Take your time, Mrs. Fullerton,” he said and heaved a sigh. “Excuse my fatigue, while you examine the canvas.”

I did not answer him. He had been standing for two hours by now. Under these circumstances, I could not help recalling Mr. Spooner asking me to sit for his painting of an ambivalent lady rising from her escritoire upon reading mysteriously discomforting news. Had this crude portraitist succeeded in his own way where Mr. Spooner had failed? But Spooner's was not a portrait of Allegra Fullerton herself, and I had been snatched away in the very midst of our final sittings.

“What do you think of it then, taken all around?” Chas finally asked, his legs stretched out before him.

I decided to pique him. “That your work is glib, and that the figures in your portraits are disproportionate and flat.” He raised his eyebrows theatrically. “But that is a common enough fault in country limners to be acceptable.”

A laugh rang out of his enormous chest. “Just so, Mrs. Fullerton! One cannot make a living by attaining perfection.”

I gathered my things to leave. “Yet the face, though a little askew and prettied up, is well enough done.”

He stood up. “Oh I assure you, Mrs. Fullerton, I paint without adding prettiness, as you say, or for that matter … uncertainty. There was beauty and mystery enough.”

“Your fancy gets the better of you, Mr. Sparhawk.”

“Come now. I painted the face you turned to me. I thought perhaps the face showed some … discomfort. As you said yourself, you'd never sat for your own portrait before, though you've painted scores of others.”

I said nothing in response, but turned to go. He took my arm gently, and I turned halfway toward him again.

“Perhaps it was some fancy or wish wandering through your mind. My conversation was insufficient, no doubt, to command your attention fully during the hours of your sitting.” He laughed mildly, as if at himself.

“But why are the wanderings of my mind a concern of yours?”

“My dear Mrs. Fullerton. Can we agree simply that I have exercised what many say is my one gift? Capturing
something
within. Now, I do not say that I always divine it perfectly. But I say that patrons do remark upon it. I never attribute something I don't see.” He faced my portrait again and gestured toward it. “It is you, in your bold new dress, brush and palette in hand, and the face, as I say, you presented. Please believe me, Mrs. Fullerton. It is nothing more.”

The fact is I did believe him. But it was disquieting that he caught with uncanny accuracy something I had been feeling yet thought quite hidden. As I had promised, Tom and I returned in two days for the portrait and to pay his modest fee. Tom was delighted with the painting, and I could not help noticing again that he too seemed to be taken by the very presence of this legendary traveler.

“Ah,” Chas said, standing up and raising a hand to stay us as we took our leave. “I would be honored if you would both join me at this hour for supper.”

Tom said that he would keep his appointment with Mr. Diddit, the tailor who was measuring him for a new suit of clothes.

I was just saying no thank you, when Sparhawk turned to me. “You have not told me enough about the great Mr. Spooner. I met him once, you know, at a public exhibition. Gouraud's first public exhibition, as I recall, at the Horticultural Rooms in Tremont Street.”

“Oh yes, the Daguerreotypist?”

“The same. He was introducing the New Process.”

“I didn't attend myself, but Mr. Spooner came away an unbeliever,” I said. “‘Another Faux-Messiah out of New York City,' he called Monsieur Gouraud. ‘Too sly and charming by half. A dark—one might say demonic—little Frenchman!' His very words,” I added.

Chas let loose a peal of laughter.

“Of course it was all new to us that spring,” he finally said. “And such a crowd of ladies and gentlemen in attendance! I can tell you
they
all fell for this Gouraud. But not so Mr. Spooner; I could see when we met. There was such a press of those seeking Spooner's opinions on the process, paying him their respects and the like, that I did not insist at the moment on further conversation about this ‘demonic little Frenchman,' as you say he put it. But I myself was most intrigued. Still am. What do
you
make of it?”

“That it might well put all you face-makers out of business,” Tom said. “Has in fact begun to do just that.”

“Ah! Yes. That too, no doubt.” He laughed softly.

“With the middling class of folks, perhaps,” I added.

“I suspect you're right, Tom,” Mr. Sparhawk said. “So then, one must change with the times?”

“Even when the times are out of joint?” I asked.

“Out of joint?” Mr. Sparhawk laughed again. “Very good, Mrs. Fullerton. Very good. Well, I mean to say there's a woman, for example, around Philadelphia. Have you heard of her? A Miss or Mrs. Henry, or Henri, I believe? Another French charmer …”

“Eliza Henry, I think you mean. Oh yes, I've heard of her.”

“Well then, there you have it, Mrs. Fullerton!”

“My dear sir, it has never occurred to me to throw over my painting for this … chemic process of rigid image-making.”

“Ah, I see then. Her Master's true apprentice.” He smiled manfully, generously. “I admire you for it. I do, believe me. Come what may, you follow your star, Mrs. Fullerton. Now, you must tell me more of your Mr. Spooner! He interests me.”

“You go ahead, Allegra,” Tom said. “I'll take the portrait to our rooms before I see Mr. Diddit.”

I was hungry and always willing to talk about my mentor, so ultimately I accepted Mr. Sparhawk's invitation.

He cleaned up, and we were soon in the tavern over our meal. He spoke for some time of what he had heard of Mr. Spooner. “Such manliness yoked to such sensibility,” he said, repeating a commonplace and washing his potatoes down with his beer. “Now, what is his instruction like, what are the great man's … principles?”

“Well, the first is that one should go to nature before going to school.”

“School? As to some foreign academy or whatever?”

“Yes. Because nature teaches us to observe the object itself first. Be it a person, animal, tree, or whatever, so that we learn to see the ‘individuality' therein; that is the word he uses, the individuality. So that we learn to see things in themselves before we learn the lore of academies. Seeing well he believes is the only source of painting with intelligence and sincerity.”

“That seems common enough sense.”

“He had me sketching painstakingly the details, for example, that differentiate one species from another—it may take months, he admonished me. Only then would he allow me to paint what I had already seen closely and drawn. The characteristic forms, I mean, of objects, or of animal and human figures.”

“Then do we unschooled limners have the advantage of those trained by great men in the academies of Europe?” He grinned, as if he did not believe a word of it.

“Except for the fact, as Mr. Spooner never tires of pointing out, that we make no progress beyond a certain crudity of style because of coarse commercial necessity. But, yes, in a sense we have the advantage of avoiding the ‘superstitions of art,' which he says are as distracting to us as are the superstitions of religion to others. That's what Mr. Spooner means by the difference between a ‘true landscape' and a ‘mere sensual and striking picture,' which depends over much on the stimulant of colors.”

“There is something in that,” he said.

“And it is through the simplest palette,” I continued, “(say, only red, yellow, blue, white, and black) and economy of means that one learns to use materials ingeniously to produce the desired effect, or enduring work.”

“Well, Mrs. Fullerton,” he said, “I wonder if there is not something in that too.” He was listening carefully.

“He is always careful of the methods of training, you see. And always warning of the dangers to a fine artist of resorting to making money from one's work too early, and becoming stuck ‘in the quagmires of mammon.' He never tired of reminding me that whoever embraces art chiefly for pecuniary reward, or worldly celebration, will find his work turned to dust even before his bones.”

We both laughed.

“He says that, does he?” Chas said. “It's easy enough to say such a thing once a host of wealthy patrons have beaten a path to your door.” He laughed again. He reached over and touched my arm near the shoulder with an unsettling familiarity. “But you and I have our livings to get, by painting a few heads a week if we can get 'em.”

“You're right, of course, about that.”

Mr. Sparhawk shook his head. “Such men are voices from another world, I'm afraid, Mrs. Fullerton.”

“One has to choose one's world, I suppose,” I said.

“But there may be as many dangers in the salon or drawing room, wouldn't you say?”

“Oh yes,” I agreed. “Mr. Spooner has always been the first to admit that great men have given us too many soulless decorations.”

“Well, then, as you see, I'm not in the least trained, unlike yourself, Mrs. Fullerton. Yet I paint what I truly see. Will you grant me that?”

“What
you
see, perhaps, I'll grant you, Mr. Sparhawk. But one has to study to see what is there; the truth or the soul of the object or person is perhaps another matter… .”

“And that I have none of the superstitions, as you say, of the academies?”

“Yes, Mr. Sparhawk. None of the painterly superstitions.”

He smiled. “One works with whatever one has,” he said. Then he changed the subject. “But what are your plans now? Return to Boston, I suppose.”

I told him that Tom and I planned to travel west, saying nothing about our being set on a journey out of Massachusetts for Tom's sake. He spoke against such a plan, reminding me that by my own testimony the work of my ambitions lay in Boston—without or with Mr. Spooner. “I'd be happy to accompany you to Boston, in a few weeks time,” he said. “Tom seems to have some dislike, some distrust of the place.”

“Oh, he would return with me, if we decided to go. But we are rather set on this other adventure just now, as more lucrative, you understand.”

“Ah, I see. And I can't dissuade you, then?” His gaze was penetrating.

“We plan to leave Springfield before the end of next week,” I assured him.

L
ATER, AS WE WERE LEAVING
the tavern, we met a most curious man lounging on the front stoop and smoking his pipe. With him were a boy of about ten or so and a small, energetic dog.

“Say! Chas Sparhawk!” the man called out, jumping up and shaking Chas's hand. “Well I'll be darn'd, if it aint ol' Chas hisself. How's the painting game? Good as ever?”

“Oh yes. Can't complain.”

The man stole a glance at me and made a little bow and doffing of his hat. “And as much luck with the pretty ladies, I see, as ever.”

Chas said the man's name was Gardner, 'Tant Gardner, but I never discovered the derivation of 'Tant. He was tall and thin as a pole, and unaware as a pole of the impression his clothes might make. Besides his crushed hat, he wore a shabby brown coat and mixed pantaloons, not unlike a harlequin, it struck me, and clumsy cowhide boots; he was ill-shaven. His ragamuffin of a boy and the little dog immediately, and without a word, began to move to a sort of table that had been set up under an elm near the tavern. Here, I now saw, they had laid out some notions from sacks they had settled behind the table. They had been selling their wares by auction earlier, as it happened, and had left certain of them out on display, catching the evening traffic. Papers of pins, lead pencils, steel pens, a shaving box and cakes of shaving soap, gilt finger rings, bracelets and clasps, cards of pearl and of steel buttons, wooden combs, suspenders, and so on.

He had ushered us over to this table before we knew it and his boy—dressed in a threadbare jacket, full-breeched trousers, and his own bare feet—began showing me those items he thought I might be induced to purchase. “I'm sure, ma'am, a smart lady like yourself has th' dosh to buy plenty a' pretty notions,” the young saucebox said.

In the meantime, 'Tant had taken Chas aside and shown him some other items out of one of the sacks, all the while talking business and comparing notes. One book in plain white cover he held secretively out of the bag, as if it were a stolen item, glancing at me as he did so, to insure that I paid no attention to them. But there was that peculiar masculine sort of laughter mingled with such phrases as “that's a fact,” “right good,” and “go the whole hog,” as if I might have been rendered deaf as a post by the array of notions this ragamuffin had spread before me.

I did purchase two lead pencils, for they appeared of good quality, and a comb. But I called to Chas shortly, saying that I needed to get back to my rooms before Tom became worried. He immediately left the peddler and came to my side. We said good-bye; he took my arm softly and we walked back to my rooms.

“What was he being so secretive about?” I asked.

“Secretive?”

“That book.”

“Oh that. Well, just a bit of shady goods, such as peddlers like to have about for the right customers.”

“And what was it, then?” I persisted.

“Oh, an old volume.” He glanced down at me. “
Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure
. But I doubt you've heard of it.”

“No, I haven't,” I said. I tried to keep my composure, while the nightmare of my captivity in Dudley's hired room flooded my memory. “But from the title I can see why.”

“They sell them by the dozen on a trip, these old peddlers, other books of the sort too, but that's an old favorite. 'Tant tells me it sells the best among those who buy such articles.”

When we reached my rooms, he stood in the corridor for a moment.