Ainslee's Magazine/As He Reaped

by Achmed Abdullah

 

As He Reaped

By Achmed Abdullah

NOBODY in New York denied N that James W. Massingham, the Wall Street magnate, was one of the finest judges of paintings in America. Not only had he the passion of the wealthy collector and the cultured taste of the enthusiast, but, too, he had a flair, a second sight, where stretched canvas and twisted tubes of oil paint were concerned.

Yet, deep in the well of his inner consciousness, he knew that although he appreciated beauty in art, its real use for him lay in the fact that its acquisition constituted great luxury, the luxury of the very rich.

He said to himself that he was too big a man to love money, that he loved only money's full worth, but he was mistaken in this self-judgment. For the paintings in his gallery—with the single exception of the full-length portrait of his wife by Mark Cutter—meant to him the visualized achievements of so and so much force and energy, their very beauty representing a check of so and so many figures and, finally, the amount of brain strength that that it had taken to earn the cash equivalent of the check. The fact that he was a good judge of paintings and that he refused to buy inferior ones was really an added proof of his masterful business acumen.

He admired exactly two things—success and fairness; and he did not comprehend that there is nothing quite so futile as success in everything, nothing quite so unjust as fairness in everything. But he was an honest gentleman who saw without spectacles whatever he knew to exist. He was right—in his life and in his business—always right; yet one had a sneaking suspicion that at times he ought to have been wrong.

But that wasn't his fault.

He was forty-five, quiet, gray-haired, massive-hewn, when, after a tumultuous courtship that carried her off her feet, he married Judith Burton, who was twenty, with laughing purple-brown eyes, tight-curling russet hair, a broad, low forehead, the whitest teeth in the world, and a pretty and rather weak chin. It was the chin that had attracted him first.

There was no doubt of his love for her, nor was there a doubt of his harsh, honest moral rectitude. And so when, after their honeymoon, she asked him, a little shyly, if he loved her best of all, he replied, “Yes, my dear—best of all living things,” and he pronounced the last two words with such a purposeful accent that her small, earnest, shrill female soul flared up in jealousy, and she wanted to know more.

“What do you mean by 'living things?'” she demanded, and she slipped her tiny hand from between his two great hands; huge they were, hairy and short-fingered, with the high veins of a blooded racer.

“Do you really want to know, my dear?” he asked, smiling, glad, since he hated conscious semifalsities; and she gave a decidedly affirmative reply.

Then he told her.

“You are a woman,” he began, “and so the chances are that you won't forgive me for telling you. But here goes!” He rose and looked down on her small russet head. “I repeat that I love you best of all living creatures, but there is something else—something that I love best in all the world, even better than I love you, dear.”

“And that is?” impatiently.

“Success—power—a man's work—fairly achieved!” He spoke the words brutally, but without egotism, simply stating a fact he had always lived up to, always would live up to, regardless of everything and everybody.

There was silence—silence so thick and palpable that Judith could hear the minute sound of a poppy petal that detached itself from a mass of flowers in an enormous Chinese vase in the corner of the room and fluttered onto the rose-and-purple Tabriz rug. She looked at him, fascinated, a little frightened: and then he explained to her his creed—a blending of belief in force, in fairness, in fate, but having for basis the cult of self; a selfishness sublimely unself-conscious and serenely brutal—and always fair.

He told her some chapters of his life, chapters that Wall Street knew and hated and feared; how, two years before, one of his most trusted employees, a man with whom he had gone to school, had dipped his hands into the cash box of James W. Massingham & Co. in a moment of dire need, expecting to make the shortage good at the end of the month.

“You—you forgave him?” The girl's voice splintered and broke.

James Massingham was a deeply religious man.

“No,” he replied, frankly astonished at her question. “God will forgive him. I am only a man, with a man's duty, a man's fairness.”

“And”—her voice was hushed—“what did you do?”

He made a great gesture of finality.

“I had him arrested and prosecuted. They gave him five years.”

“But—but you ruined him!”

“I was fair and just.”

“But”—she shrieked out the words—“you did ruin him!”

“He ruined himself.”

She stared at him; he saw the horror, the instinctive recoil, in her brown eyes, but he continued inexorably. He loved her. Of course. But she was his wife, and she must accept and honor him as God had made him. For, modern American business man though he was, his were olden Hebrew ideas—of the handmaiden whose eyes were upon the lips of her lord.

And so he went on, with that lean, wiry, terrible veracity of his:

“There is only one right and only one wrong. I do right—I act fairly—always!”

She had crouched Iow in the huge armchair covered with priceless Byzantine dalmatics. She looked like a small, helpless child, afraid of the dark. She remembered tales about this man—the great John Massingham—tales she had heard when he had been still a stranger to her. And now he was her husband—her husband! There was gray loneliness in the intimate word.

“Tell me,” she began. “Mother spoke to me once about—before I met you,” she added rapidly, afraid to look at him—“about—a man she knew—a friend of our family. Loomis Grant was his name. How you——” she faltered and stopped.

“I guess she told you neither more nor less than the truth,” he replied. “Loomis Grant had been a friend of mine. Then he did me a wrong——”

“And you?”

He inclined his massive head.

“I ruined him—on the Street. I broke him as a child breaks a brittle toy.”

“But—I remember now!—I was told that you didn't do it for gain—that you lost, yourself—by——”

“Yes. It cost me half a million. But I broke him. I broke his fortune and his ambition. I guess I must have broken his soul. He's now clerking in the Third National. He did me a great wrong—and he paid. It was fair.”

“Yes,” she echoed—she seemed to be hypnotized by his quiet gray eyes—“yes, you were fair!”

And James Massingham smiled, serene in his belief that he had mastered his wife, the woman whom he loved with all his rough strength and who was dearer to him than the dwelling of kings.

But it would have disturbed even his colossal equanimity had he known that Judith—Judith with the brown eyes and the pretty and rather weak chin—spoke to her mother a day or two later; saying with a lightly mocking sigh:

“Yes, mother dear, James is in the habit of pronouncing truths. But they are such tiresome, brutal truths—truths nobody wants to hear—or to believe in,” she added in a whisper.

Her mother looked up sharply.

“What do you mean?” she asked. “I don't understand you.”

But, deep in her heart, she did understand, since she had been married for over twenty-five years, and so she was a little afraid. For she knew Judith, and she knew nothing of her son-in-law except his enormous wealth, his reputation for commercial probity among her husband's friends, his well-known, terrible fairness—and his great appreciation of oil paintings.

 

It was during the third year of their marriage that James Massingham ordered a full-length portrait of his wife by Mark Cutter, a young artist from the West, who was fighting an uphill battle in New York in spite of the fact that he had been a Prix de Rome scholar. James Massingham's order and the recognition it implied “made” him; it brought him fame as well as money, since all the world knew the financier's unfailing flair in matters artistic. And the artist deserved it, for he was a great artist. The portrait was a masterpiece, and James Massingham loved the canvas only a shade less than he loved the original. For he still loved Judith, and he was so sure of his own love that he never even questioned whether she loved him or not.

And she?

She had lost her love for him during the interview, following their honeymoon, when he had spoken to her of his creed—success, power, fairness. From that day on, she had feared him and she was too small and too feminine to love a man whom she feared. For, in her case, the hoary saw about the woman and the cave man did no hold true. It never did hold true west of Central Park—or east, for that matter. She was not altogether indifferent to him—for he was James Massingham—but, on the other hand, she was not sufficiently attached to him to give the full loyalty of sacrifice. And so she lived next to him in the uncomfortable relation between two intimately allied persons one of whom realizes that the atmosphere is surcharged with a silent, ever-present loneliness which it were useless to allude to—quite useless.

It was there that Judith made her mistake. She should have alluded to it. She should have told her husband frankly, “I love you no more. Give me my freedom.” And he would have replied, “Of course, my dear. It is fair,” and he would have given her her freedom, though his great, rough soul would have cracked under the strain.

Instead of that, she fell in love with Mark Cutter, who was a fine artist, but who was, too, a man of flaming, headlong fancies, with a tendency to leap obstacles of his own deliberate building. He proved this by forgetting what James Massingham had done for him, what James Massingham might do against him; and one day—it was one of those grim days of fate when a heavy mantle of gray-and-lavender mist is soaking and shivering down from a leaden, puffed sky—he eloped with Judith.

{[dhr]} She obtained a Dakota divorce a year later and married Mark Cutter, while New York held its breath and waited for James Massingham to strike—James Massingham, the man who was fair to friend and foe, the man with the Hebraic code of justice, the man who had never forgiven a wrong done him. New York waited—three months, four months. In the meantime, Mark Cutter, in spite of well-intentioned warnings, returned with his wife to his Tenth Street studio, and—nothing happened. James Massingham gave no sign. It was whispered that the portrait of Judith by Mark Cutter still held the same place of honor in the financier's gallery and that the spray of silvery roses in front of it was renewed every day.

Opinion was divided. Some of Massingham's older acquaintances opined that he was showing a greatness and fortitude of soul that they had never suspected in him, while a few of the younger men decided that he was getting old and feeble. So they attacked him in the Street—to their regret and discomfiture. For James Massingham turned on them like a lone wolf, cornered. He descended into the angry, shrill-voiced forum of the Street, he threw wide his gold-baited nets, and he left ruin behind him.

It was during that memorable Wall Street battle that he finally gained control of the K. T. & M.; and Montross Leveen, the Fifth Avenue art dealer, whispered to some of his intimates that, on the day following the memorable financial battle, James Massingham had given him a carte-blanche order to buy up the pictures of——

“Whose pictures, would you think?” demanded Leveen, and when nobody guessed, he said, after a finely timed dramatic pause, “Mark Cutter's!”

“But why—why?” Leveen had stammered, his surprise breaking through his professional tact, and Massingham had replied, “Because Cutter is a great artist, and because I am a great connoisseur. Go ahead. Don't ask questions. Buy—or——”

Leveen had bowed without another word. He knew what that “or” implied. There were other art dealers on Fifth Avenue.

But even that sensation passed, and New York was beginning to forget about Mark and Judith when the latter died, a year later, and once more the old scandal was revived—with new comments. For James Massingham came to the funeral, carrying in his great arms a mass of silvery roses and white orchids—the dead woman's favorite flowers—and walked straight up to the weeping husband, who was standing beside the open grave.

There was a shudder of expectancy, rapidly changing into surprise and relief. For James Massingham had offered his hand to Mark Cutter.

It was the beginning of a strange intimacy between the artist and the financier. It seemed as if the thought of Judith—the woman whom both men had loved and lost—was an unbreakable bond between them. They were always together, and yet it seemed that this constant companionship with a man who had done him a great wrong had not changed James Massingham's character and principles in his relations with the world at large. He went his surly, straight way, suppressing platitudes and ripping off futilities—brutal, selfish, successful, and more grim than ever in his belief in justice and fairness.

And presently the world thought that it understood, and once more it gave tribute to James Massingham as a shrewd business man and a splendid judge of paintings. For the sorrow that had come into Cutter's life had made of him an even greater artist than he had been before. Blended with his supreme technique, there was now a quality in his canvases that left the critics baffled and hushed; it was a mingling of tenderness and of sadness—an elusive something that finally made of him the greatest painter of the generation. And then, when the museums and the private collectors began clamoring for Cutter's work, it appeared that Massingham, with the help of Montross Leveen, had bought up all the master's works with the exception of a mediocre and juvenile canvas in the possession of the Boston Museum.

Not only that! When prospective purchasers approached Mark Cutter direct with offers of options for his future work, they discovered that there, too, James Massingham had got ahead of them. For the artist had signed a hard-and-fast contract by the terms of which he sold to the financier all his future paintings, at a price to be determined in each case by the board of directors of the Metropolitan Museum.

“It's fair,” Massingham said to the other, using his favorite word, “fair to you and fair. to art. You see”—they were in a tall, circular gallery which had been built especially to house the work of Mark Cutter and in which the place of honor had been given to the portrait of Judith—“here's all your work, under one roof. A monument to your genius! All your paintings!”

“All except one,” laughed the artist, flattered, contented; and James Massingham joined in the laugh.

“Yes,” he agreed, “that little Boston landscape. Well, you know yourself it's a poor piece of work. I don't want it.”

“And you're right,” replied Mark Cutter, as he bent over the silvery spray of roses in front of Judith's portrait.

So the intimacy between the two men continued serenely. Only once was there a tiny rift, and that happened one Christmas when the artist called on James Massingham, bringing as gift an exquisite little painting he had just finished.

“No, no!” exclaimed the financier, waving the gift away with his large hairy hand. “Remember our contract. I buy your paintings—for cash. I cannot accept them as presents,” and half to himself he added, “It wouldn't be fair.”

So Mark Cutter accepted his usual check for the canvas, and thought no more about this strange refusal. He knew James Massingham, and, knowing him, he had long ago given up trying to solve the riddle of his soul.

{[dhr]} About a year later, the artist fell ill. He went to Florida, where the doctors told him that his case was hopeless—two weeks, perhaps three; and James Massingham, hearing the news, hurried South and brought the sick man back with him to New York, straight to his own house, where a bed had been made up in the great circular gallery that housed Mark Cutter's lifework. For the artist had expressed a wish to see his paintings before he died.

There he lay, the greatest painter of his generation, quite fearless, surrounded by the work of his lifetime, serene in the judgment of posterity. And straight across from the foot of his bed was the portrait of Judith—with the spray of roses in front of it.

A week passed, and Thornton Mills, the eminent specialist, gave judgment that Mark Cutter had one more day to live, one day at the utmost. On that day James Massingham sent away the nurses. He himself would see the other through his dying moments.

He entered the gallery, and Mark Cutter read the sentence in the calm gray eyes. But he smiled.

“It's all right,” he said. “I'm not afraid to die.” He pointed a feeble hand at the pictures. “I've done well. I know I shall leave something behind me—my life's work—my own——”

“Your work? Yours?” interrupted Massingham suddenly, in a strange, high-pitched voice. “It is mine! I paid for it! By God, man—it's mine!”

“Yes, yes,” whispered the artist, excited, but conciliatory, “of course it's yours, old man. You paid for it.”

“I paid for it—fairly! That painting—Christmas—the one you offered me as a present—I even paid you for that, didn't I?”

“Yes, yes—of course you paid for it! Don't get so excited, old man,” begged Mark Cutter. “The stuff is yours,” and he tried to laugh.

There was a span of silence. Then Massingham stepped up close to the bed.

“Mine,” he said, “all mine!” pointing at the gallery. “And so—and so was Judith! She, too, was mine—before you came—and stole her——”

“I thought you—had——”

“Forgotten? Forgiven? Forgiven a sin—a black sin? I? I?” His voice rose to a shriek.

“You call yourself a religious man,” mockingly interposed the artist, and James Massingham inclined his head.

“Yes,” he said, “I am a religious man—and even in the Bible there are words about debtor and creditor! 'As ye sow, so shall ye reap.'”

Mark Cutter was not a coward.

“You're too late with your revenge, old man,” he said. “I'm nearly dead.”

James Massingham had walked away from the bed. Now he turned.

“No,” he said, his voice lowered to its usual even pitch, “I am not too late. For”—he gave a short, mirthless laugh—“I own your work—all your work—the immortal work of the immortal artist. Mark Cutter, the greatest painter of his generation! Only one painting is missing—the little banality up in Boston—and I would not buy that. Do you know why? Because that is the painting by which posterity will judge the great Mark Cutter!”

“What do you mean?” came a cry from the bed, and then came the flash of steel and the rip-rip-rip of stretched canvas being slashed to pieces.

“I mean this—and this—and this!” cried James Massingham, mutilating canvas after canvas. “You took my wife—and I—I take your life's work—your fame—your immortality! Fair, isn't it? An eye for an eye!” and he went the round of the gallery, slashing, slashing, while the dying artist looked on, helpless, agonized.

James Massingham came to the portrait of Judith. He lifted up his knife and then, quite suddenly, he dropped it. He fell on his knees and cried, stupidly, clumsily, as men cry.

 

And that is the reason why, in all the world, there exist only two paintings by the brush of Mark Cutter—one, an inferior daub in the Boston Museum, and the other, a portrait of a young girl in the Metropolitan Museum, bequeathed to it by the late James W. Massingham, with the single stipulation that every day the spray of silvery roses in front of it be renewed.