IN WAY OF TASTE.
Troilus and Cressida; iii.--3.
Grant Herman's studio, in which the Pagans met that night, was in
its way no less unique than the company there gathered. It was a
great, misshapen place, narrow, half a hundred feet long, and
disproportionately high, with undressed brick walls and cement floor.
The upper half of one of the end walls was taken up with large windows,
before which were drawn dingy curtains. Here and there about the place
were scattered modeling stands, water tanks mounted upon rude tripods,
casts, and the usual lumber of a sculptor's studio; while upon the
walls were stuck pictures, sketches, and reproductions in all sorts of
capricious groupings.
In one corner a flight of stairs led to a gallery high up against the
wall, over the rude railing of which looked the heads of a couple of
legless statues. From this gallery the stairs continued to ascend until
a door near the roof was reached, leading to unknown regions well up in
the building behind which the studio had been built as an afterthought.
On shelves were confusedly disposed dusty bits of bronze, plaster,
coarse pottery and rare glass; things valueless and things beyond price
standing in careless fellowship. A canvas of Corot looked down upon a
grotesque, grimacing Japanese idol, a beautiful bronze reproduction of
a vase by Michael Angelo stood shoulder to shoulder with a bean-pot
full of tobacco; a crumpled cravat was thrown carelessly over the arm
of a dancing faun, while a cluster of Barye's matchless animals were
apparently making their way with great difficulty through a collection
of pipes, broken modeling tools, faded flowers and loose papers. Every
where it was evident that the studio of Herman differed from heaven in
at least its first law.
Quite in keeping with the picturesque, richly stored room, was the
group of men walking about the place or seated near the rough table
upon which refreshments were placed. On this table were a couple of
splendid punch-bowls of antique cut glass, which, if not full now, had
unmistakable marks of having been so earlier in the evening. A coarse
dish of yellow earthen ware beside them held an ample supply of
biscuits, and was in turn flanked by a couple of plates of cheese.
Fruit, beer, and tobacco in various forms, with abundant glasses and
pipes, completed the furnishing of the board, upon which a newspaper
supplied the place of a cloth.
Tom Bently's long, shapely limbs were disposed in a big easy-chair by
the table, his tongue being just now employed in one of his not
infrequent harangues upon art, his remarks being plentifully spiced
with profanity.
"Whatever crazy ideas on art," Bently was saying, "aren't good for any
thing else have to be put into a book. The surest recommendation in art
circles is getting out a book or giving a rubbishy lecture. Every woman
who has painted a few bunches of flowers or daubed a little pottery,
writes a book to tell how she did it; as if it were the most
astonishing thing in the world."
"Women are very like hens," interpolated Fenton; "they always cackle
most over the smallest egg."
"If any one of the crew," continued Bently, "could appreciate a
fiftieth part of the suggestions in a single sketch of an old master,
she might have something to write about."
"But then she would know enough to keep still," said Rangely.
"Oh, a woman never knows enough to keep still," Bently retorted. "It is
damned amusing to hear the average American----"
A chorus of protestations arose.
"We'll have nothing about the 'Average American,' Bently!"
"Start somebody else on his hobby," suggested Ainsworth; "that's the
only way to choke Bently off. Where's Fenton? I never knew him quiet
for so long in my life."
Arthur had been watching his companions and smoking in silence. He
smiled brilliantly at Ainsworth's challenge.
"I'm overwhelmed by Bently's oaths," he said. "He outdoes himself
to-night."
"When it comes time for Tom's epitaph," observed Rangely, "I shall
suggest that it be a dash."
"Why do you swear so?" inquired Ainsworth. "Don't you think it in
execrable taste?"
"Taste?" laughed Bently. "Yes; it's so far above all taste as to be
a--sight higher and bigger."
"I make a distinction," Herman put in good naturedly, "between swearing
and blasphemy; and Tom never blasphemes. His cursing is all in the
interest of the highest virtues."
"Profanity is like smoking," added Tom. "Every thing depends upon how
you do it. The English, for instance, smoke for the brutality of the
thing; they never have any of the French _finesse,_ and their
smoking is nothing less than a crime. But as the Arabs smoke it is one
of the loftiest virtues; there's something godlike about it.
"It is from smoking," Fenton chimed in, "that the Orientals learned how
to treat women; for a woman is like tobacco, the aroma should be
enjoyed and the ashes thrown away."
"By George!" exclaimed one of the Pagans, moved by some rare
compunction to remember that he had a wife at home, "that's infamous,
Arthur."
"It is my belief," observed Ainsworth deliberately, "that Fenton lies
awake nights to invent beastly things to say about women, and when he
gets something that he thinks is smart he throws it into the
conversation any where, without the slightest regard to whether it fits
or not."
"What makes you so bitter against women?" asked Bently.
"Yes," added Rangely, with mock deprecation. "Why do you want to
annihilate the sex? What harm have women ever done to you?"
"Oh," retorted the artist, "it is on theoretical principles, purely. I
adore that masculine ideal which man calls woman, but only finds in his
brain. The highest on earth is reached only by the absolute elimination
of the feminine. Ah! man is at his best in war," he went on, his
attitude becoming less studied and more forcible, as he allowed his
intellectual interest to overpower his vanity; "there he is all
masculine; man without the limitations that the presence of woman
imposes upon him. There woman is ignored, and even if she has been the
cause of the war--and to be the cause of war is woman's noblest
prerogative!--she is for the time being as completely forgotten as if
she had never existed. She slips into oblivion as does the horn of grog
which gives his courage."
Fenton was in a mood when he fancied he was talking well, a conviction
which was not always an accurate measure of the real worth of his
remarks. He delighted in presenting half truths in forcible
phraseology, relishing the taste of an epigram quite without reference
to its verity. He amused himself and his friends with talk more or less
brilliant, of which no one knew better than himself the fallacy, but
whose cleverness atoned with him for all defects. The intellectual
excitement of giving free rein to his fancy and his tongue was
dangerously pleasant to Arthur, who often more than half convinced
himself of the verity of his extravagant theories, and oftener still
involved himself in their defense by yielding to the mere whim of
phrasing them effectively.
"You are on your high horse to-night, Fenton," cried Rangely, "you make
no more of a metaphor than a racer of a hurdle."
"Don't stop him," Ainsworth said. "Let him run the course out now he's
on the track."
"When man comes into his kingdom," Fenton broke out again, too fully
aroused to mind the banter, yet with a sort of double consciousness
enjoying the absurdity of the whole conversation, "when man comes into
his kingdom, when we get to the perfection of the race, there will be
no women. The ultimate man will be masculine--men, only men; gloriously
and eternally masculine!" "But how will the race perpetuate itself?"
asked Tom in as matter of fact a tone as he might have inquired the
time of day.
"Perpetuate itself!" blazed the other. "The race will not need to
perpetuate itself. The world will be peopled with gods! When once women
are gone the race will have become immortal!"
A shout of mingled applause and derision greeted this outburst, amid
which Fenton threw himself back in a lounging chair and lighted a fresh
cigar. He was intoxicated with himself, and few draughts are more
dangerous.
"Take to the lecture platform, Fenton," jeered Ainsworth. "You'll make
your mark in the world yet."
"I wonder you stopped at immortality," remarked Fred Rangely. "You
usually go on to dispose of the future state."
"Impossible," retorted the artist, "for you never heard me say I
believed in one."
"That's a fact," confessed the other, "but you insist so emphatically
that women have no moral sense that your philosophy certainly would
dispose of them if it allow any future state."
"For my part," declared Herman, "I've heard Fenton talk nonsense as
long as I want to; let's look at the pictures."
An informal exhibition had been arranged, consisting of pictures loaned
by friends, and including several by members of the club. The most
important of the latter was a gypsy which Bently had just completed,
and which exhibited that artist's defects and excellences in the
emphatic manner usual with his productions. The _motif_ was better
than the _technique_, but Bently's splendid feeling for color
somehow carried him through, and made the picture not only striking but
rich and suggestive.
"If you could learn to draw, Tom," Fenton said, as they stood looking
at it, "you'd be the biggest man in America."
"Is that the new model you were talking about?" asked Rangely.
"Yes," Bently answered. "Isn't she a stunner?"
"I thought that shoulder was something new," put in Fenton. "The girl
poses well; trust a woman with shoulders like that to know how to
display them."
"Good heavens!" exclaimed Grant Herman in sudden and rare irritation,
"can you never have done slurring at women? Didn't you have a mother?
In heaven's name let some woman escape your tongue for her sake!"
Such an outburst from their host produced a profound sensation upon the
Pagans. The most tolerant of men, he was accustomed to listen to their
wholesale denunciations of all things with a good natured smile,
contenting himself with a calm contradiction now and then. Proverbial
for his patience and good temper, he produced the greater sensation now
when he gave vent to his anger upon a subject which not only Fenton but
every guest present usually considered fair game.
"I'm sorry I vexed you, Herman," Fenton said, turning to him after a
moment's silence, "but however much I've abused women, you never heard
me blackguard a woman in your life."
"You are right," the sculptor replied, catching the other's slender
hand in his stalwart grasp. "I beg your pardon. I'm out of sorts, I
suppose, or I shouldn't be quarreling like a Christian. Let's brew a
new bowl and drink to Pagan harmony."