George A. Birmingham

“ He would not write at all if he could find any easier and pleasanter way of making money. There was no use saying that to Mrs. Ascher. All I could do when she asked me to appeal to Gorman’s artistic soul was to shake my head. I shook it as decisively as I could.
“And my husband will listen to you,” she said.
“My dear lady! wouldn’t he be much more likely to listen to you?”
“But we never talk about such things,” she said. “Never, never. Our life together is sacred, hallowed, a thing apart,
“‘Above the smoke and stir of this dim spot
Which men call earth.’” ”

“ Ascher has certainly far more determination and force of character than I have; but he does not seem able to break himself of the habit of making money. His wife says that he hates doing it and wants to stop. But he goes on doing it. He has formed a habit of making money, and habit is almost unconquerable. It was plainly the path of wisdom for me to check my tendency towards art at the very beginning, not to allow the habit of feeling artistically, indeed of feeling at all, to form itself. ”

“ Ever since I thought about things at all, I have regarded the “artist” outlook upon life as a pose, and the claim to artistic temperament as an excuse for selfishness and bad temper in private life. Mrs. Ascher had convinced me that, in her case at least, the artist soul is a reality. She was hysterical and ridiculous when she talked to me, but she was sincere. She was not posing even when she crumpled herself upon the floor and looked like a sick serpent. She was in simple earnest when she mouthed her lines about money, money. ”

“ The thing born might apparently be anything except an ordinary baby. The true artist does not think much of babies. They are bourgeois things.
“Or a cash register,” she said. “It makes no difference. The man who creates, who brings into being, has only one desire, that his child, whatever it may be, shall live. If it is stifled, killed, a sword goes through his heart.”
It seemed to me even then with Mrs. Ascher’s eyes on me, that it was rather absurd to talk about a cash register living. I do not think that men have ever personified this machine. ”

“ I said. “The New York people themselves suffer in exactly the same way. There isn’t a street in their city that they’ve finished or ever will finish. If anything begins to look like completion they smash it up at once and start afresh. It must be something in the air, a restlessness, a desire of the perfection which can never be realised.”
Mrs. Ascher very carefully unwrapped a succession of damp rags from one of the largest of her lumps which was standing on a table by itself. ”

“ Of Gorman I saw nothing more before I left New York. I think he went off to Detroit almost immediately after our interview with Ascher and Stutz. Gorman is not exactly the man to put his public duties before his private interests, but I am sure the public duties always come in a close second. Having settled, or thought he had settled, the affair of the cash register, he immediately turned his attention to that wealthy motor man in Detroit from whom he meant to get a subscription. The future of the Irish Party possibly, its comforts probably, depended on the success of Gorman’s mission. ”

“ I said. “What would you suggest?”
“You mustn’t let them do that hateful thing,” she said. “You can stop them if you will.”
“I don’t believe I can,” I said. “I’m extraordinarily feeble and ineffectual in every way. ”

“ Ascher spent the whole of every day in her studio. Her devotion to art was evidently very great. She could not manage to spend a holiday in New York without hiring a studio. I inquired whether any members of the Galleotti family were sitting for her, but the hotel clerk did not know that. He told me, however, that Mr. Ascher was in Washington. Gorman always says that the strings of government in modern states are pulled by financiers. ”

“ I said, “and you owe that to New York. The air, the very same air which forbids completion, is charged with aspiration. We all feel it. The city itself aspires. Since the great days when men set out to build a tower the top of which should reach unto heaven, there has never been such aspiration anywhere in the world. Look at the Woolworth Building.”
I was maundering and I knew it. Mrs. Ascher’s statuette was very nice and graceful ”

“ There must be hundreds of people who can turn out clay girls just as good as that Psyche. Somehow I had expected something different from Mrs. Ascher, less skill in modelling, less care, but more temperament. ”

“ Ascher was making money, piling it up. He could stop if he liked. So I thought. So any sensible man must think. And as for living somewhere far, far away, what did the woman want to get away from? Every possible place of residence on the earth’s surface is near some other place. You cannot get far, far away from everywhere. The thing is a physical impossibility. I made an effort to get back to common sense.
“About Tim Gorman’s cash register?” ”