THE SCULPTOR’S FUNERAL

“A death in the desert”

The author wishes to thank McClure’s Magazine, The Century Magazine and Harper’s Magazine for their courtesy in permitting the re-publication of three stories in this collection.

The last four stories in the volume, Paul’s Case, A Wagner Matinee, The Sculptor’s Funeral, “A Death in the Desert,” are re-printed from the author’s first book of stories, entitled “The Troll Garden,” published in 1905.

Coming, Aphrodite!

I

Don Hedger had lived for four years on the top floor of an old house on the south side of Washington Square, and nobody had ever disturbed him.  He occupied one big room with no outside exposure except on the north, where he had built in a many-paned studio window that looked upon a court and upon the roofs and walls of other buildings.  His room was very cheerless, since he never got a ray of direct sunlight; the south corners were always in shadow.  In one of the corners was a clothes closet, built against the partition, in another a wide divan, serving as a seat by day and a bed by night.  In the front corner, the one farther from the window, was a sink, and a table with two gas burners where he sometimes cooked his food.  There, too, in the perpetual dusk, was the dog’s bed, and often a bone or two for his comfort.

The dog was a Boston bull terrier, and Hedger explained his surly disposition by the fact that he had been bred to the point where it told on his nerves.  His name was Caesar III, and he had taken prizes at very exclusive dog shows.  When he and his master went out to prowl about University Place or to promenade along West Street, Caesar III was invariably fresh and shining.  His pink skin showed through his mottled coat, which glistened as if it had just been rubbed with olive oil, and he wore a brass-studded collar, bought at the smartest saddler’s.  Hedger, as often as not, was hunched up in an old striped blanket coat, with a shapeless felt hat pulled over his bushy hair, wearing black shoes that had become grey, or brown ones that had become black, and he never put on gloves unless the day was biting cold.

Early in May, Hedger learned that he was to have a new neighbour in the rear apartment—­two rooms, one large and one small, that faced the west.  His studio was shut off from the larger of these rooms by double doors, which, though they were fairly tight, left him a good deal at the mercy of the occupant.  The rooms had been leased, long before he came there, by a trained nurse who considered herself knowing in old furniture.  She went to auction sales and bought up mahogany and dirty brass and stored it away here, where she meant to live when she retired from nursing.  Meanwhile, she sub-let her rooms, with their precious furniture, to young people who came to New York to “write” or to “paint”—­who proposed to live by the sweat of the brow rather than of the hand, and who desired artistic surroundings.