XXXV.

PARTED OUR FELLOWSHIP.

Othello; ii.--I.

Tom Bently's studio that night was a sight well worth seeing.

Tom had two rooms in Studio Building, opening into each other by

folding doors, which were never known to be shut. The walls were hung

with old French tapestry, its rich, soft colors harmonizing exquisitely

with some dull-red velvet draperies from Venice. Bits of armor, some of

them very splendid, were disposed here and there, while a wealth of

_bric-à-brac_ enriched every nook and corner. In the doorway hung

an old altar-lamp of silver, with a cup of ruby glass, and from various

points depended other lamps of Moresque and antique shapes. A pair of

tall brass flambeau-stands, spoil of a Belgian cathedral sacked a

couple of centuries ago, upheld the heaviest candles Tom had been able

to find, which smoked and flared most picturesquely.

Bently had traveled widely, every where picking up graceful and

artistic trifles--stuffs from Algiers; rugs from Persia and Turkey;

weapons from Tripoli and India and Tunis; musical instruments from

Egypt and Spain; antiques from Greece and Germany and Italy; and

pottery from every where. His studio was the envy of all his brother

artists, although he himself growled about it profanely, declaring that

he had so much rubbish about him that he could not work, yet

nevertheless declining to part with a single object.

"I ought to clear the place out," he would say. "My pictures are

getting to look like advertisements of an old clo' shop, and if a man

doesn't change all his properties every year, the sapient critics say

he has become mannered. But I can't let them go; or rather they won't

let me go; they hang on like barnacles to an old hulk."

The Pagans were six that night, Fenton's place being unfilled. The

delinquency of the absent artist was a good deal commented upon, yet

always as if an effort were made to keep the subject out of the

conversation. It came up again and again, and that not unnaturally,

since it was necessarily in every man's thoughts.

"He's a mellifluous coward, now isn't he?" Bently remarked, with his

usual picturesque disregard of the conventional use of words. "The

average American couldn't have been more sneaking."

"He was always afraid of the rough grain of life," Rangely responded.

"I always told him he was a born coward. He could never serve any cause

that wouldn't give him a uniform of broadcloth. But he was born for

something better than tagging after Calvin and his tribe, heaven

knows."

"Bah!" went on Bently, "the bad taste of it! I could get over every

thing else, but the bad taste of proving a sneak, and giving up every

thing worth while."

Somebody threw in a quotation from Browning's _Lost Leader_, and

then Grant Herman, trying to turn the conversation, took up Bently's

remark.

"You're right, Tom," he said, "in your view of taste. Taste is

sublimated morality. It is the appreciation of the proportion and

fitness of all things in the universe, and of course it is above simple

morality, for that is founded upon a partial view. Taste is the

universal, where a system of morals is the local."

"Can't you say that of art?" asked Rangely. "I should think art is the

universal, where religion is the provincial. A religion expresses the

needs and the aspirations of a race or a country, while art embodies

the aspirations and attributes of humanity."

"Good!" Bently responded. "That is better than I should have said it,

but it's my belief, all the same. There are so few people who have

imagination enough even to understand what one means by saying that art

is the only thing in the world worth living for. Why, art is the

supreme expression of humanity; the apotheosis of all the best there is

in the race."

"I don't see that," objected another. "Isn't religion the expression of

the longings of the soul, or whatever there is in us we call soul? I

can't say it well, but it seems to me you talk of religions, not

religion."

"People seldom take the trouble to make that distinction. He who

attacks any of the religions is generally set down as striking at

religion itself."

"Religion," returned Bently, "is the expression of fear, and nothing

else, if you sift it to the bottom. Knowledge kills so-called religion

as surely as it does those lower forms of belief which it is nowadays

the fashion to dub superstition. It is precisely the same feeling that

builds churches and that rhymes the country hag's charms. Fairies and

saints are double and twisted cousins, after all."

"But religion," persisted the German, "is more than the expression of

fear; it is the embodiment of the aspirations of mankind; of the

instinct and desire for worship."

"For worshipping something," amended Tom. "That is the same thing

differently phrased."

"No, it isn't, either. To yearn for the higher is not to show that we

fear it, but that we long to grow like it. It is a confession of

incompleteness, of weakness, I grant you; but a thousand times no to

your calling it fear."

"I confess to having been hasty, and modify my words so far as to say;

an expression of fear or weakness."

"Is there then any shame in acknowledging weakness?" demanded the

German, pushing him as hard as he was able. "It certainly is honest."

"Is there any shame to formulating fear?" retorted the other, deftly

evading him.

"Then see how religion always appeals to art to help out its ultimate

expression," observed Rangely.

"And how it has failed," added Bently, "when it has not had art to help

it. Puritanism tried to get on without art, and where is Puritanism?

You couldn't find a trace of it, if it hadn't come down on its

marrow-bones and begged art to build its churches, compose its music,

and regulate its rituals."

"It is no more fair to say that," objected another Pagan, doggedly,

"than to say that art has gone to religion for help. Their accounts are

pretty evenly balanced."

"Nonsense!" Rangely returned. "Art has never gained by being religious,

but by being art; but religion owes its hold largely to the help art

has given it."

"And it has paid its debts by blackguarding art from every pulpit it

has builded for it."

"As Fenton used to say," Ainsworth remarked, "art has been used as the

sugar-coating to the bitter pill of religion."

"Oh, Fenton again," Bently exclaimed impatiently. "What did you bring

him up for? Who the devil would have thought Fenton would have turned

out so?"

"I can tell you a piece of news," said Rangely. "The Election Committee

blackballed Calvin this afternoon."

"Good!" cried they all; and some body added: "But Fenton said he'd

resign if Calvin wasn't elected."

"Resign," echoed Rangely, "I guess he'll have to. He's been sent to

Coventry by half the Club now for that Graves affair."

"The Graves affair?" some one queried. "What's that? What else has he

been doing? If a man starts to go to the devil, it does seem as if he

never could get ahead fast enough."

"Miss Graves was going to buy one of Flackerman's pictures, and heaven

knows he needs the money; and Fenton, who has always pretended to be

Flack's friend, talked her into taking one of his instead; or rather he

got Calvin to go to her and do it. It was a stunning Flackerman, too;

and we were all rejoicing over his luck."

"I would not be too ready to believe that story," Grant Herman said. "I

don't think Fenton's gone utterly to the bad all at once. He's living

expensively, they say, and possibly he let Calvin go to Miss Graves;

but I don't believe Arthur ever originated that sneaking scheme, and I

shouldn't be surprised if he never knew the rights of the case."

"He's done what so many artists have been bullied into doing before,"

Ainsworth observed. "If he has sold his birthright for a mess of

pottage, that is precisely what the patrons of art in this country

demand that every man shall do who comes here. I could tell you of a

dozen good fellows who've been spoiled in that way. I am far enough

outside to look on in an unbiased way; but they treat us architects in

the same fashion. Lots of the most rubbishy and conventional men we

have, started out to be fair and work from conviction; and they simply

had the choice between subservience and starvation, and cases of the

choice of death from starvation haven't been over plenty."

"Oh, a man is known by the tailor he keeps," threw in Rangely;

"especially if he doesn't pay him."

"It's all a game of cut-throat," Bently remarked philosophically; "art

and business alike."

"I should hate to have my throat cut," observed the German Pagan in a

matter of fact tone; "it must let a dreadful draught into the system."

"Oh, if you were beheaded," cried Rangely, "you'd turn into a capital

beer fountain, so your friends would find some consolation, even in

your loss."

A diversion was caused here by the production of a splendid Japanese

punch-bowl, supported upon a teakwood stand. In it the host proceeded

to brew a potent and steaming mixture, whose fragrance must have

delighted the jocund gods of jollity and laughter. Tom was notorious

for being chronically in pecuniary difficulties, but he was always

adding to his collection of _bibelots_, and he never was known to

lack the means of concocting a glorious punch.

"Ye gods!" exclaimed Ainsworth, "how good that smells. It almost

overcomes the general mustiness of Tom's den here, which usually has

all the odors of the Ghetto from which his things are dragged."

"Casper is intoxicated already with the mere fumes," retorted Bently

good humoredly. "He's bound to fill a drunkard's grave sooner or

later."

"No; I never shall," chuckled the other. "I'm altogether too good

natured to crowd the drunkard out."

This sally was received with applause, and the glasses being filled,

the usual toasts to the goddess Pasht and to art were drank.

"And to our seven," went on Herman, holding up his glass, and going on

with the formula they had, half unconsciously, fallen into the habit of

using, although they made no pretense of having a ritual.

But he set his glass down untasted, suddenly remembering that their

ranks were broken, and the others followed his example.

"The difference between religion and art," broke out Rangely,

hurriedly, to cover the awkward silence which followed, "is that

religion is a matter of tradition, of convention; it rests upon

authority, while art springs from inner conviction."

"Sophistry," retorted the German, picking up the gauntlet; "there have

been a good many things said here to-night which sound well but won't

stand fire. It is precisely for following conventions in art that we

blame Fenton."

"And that proves my point."

"No, it doesn't; there's as much art that depends upon tradition as

there is religion."

"No," replied Rangely. "In so far as art gets its inspiration from

fossil tradition it is lifeless and indeed ceases to be art. Religion

presupposes something exterior; while art is the outgrowth of the

individual's own mind, the best expression of his inner strength."

"Religion," Herman threw in, "demands the existence of the unknown; art

only the existence of the inexpressible."

"Yet art devotes itself to expression."

"Yes, but more to suggesting. It phrases the possible so as to suggest

that which is above and beyond expression, yet toward which it helps

the emotions and the imagination. I think a man's soul a matter of very

little moment as compared to his imagination, and it is because art

ministers to the latter that I place it above religion."

The talk was diverted here by some laughing remark which led on to a

train of gay badinage. The German tried to bring the conversation back

to serious levels, but in vain.

"Oh, what fustian we've given ourselves up to to-night," laughed

Rangely.

"It amuses me to hear you fellows discuss religion," Tom Bently

observed. "You wander round the subject as aimlessly as the young women

in the first half hour of a Harvard symphony concert."

"Never you mind, Bently," rejoined Ainsworth. "You are sure of coming

out all right; the gods are bound to protect humbug, for on it depends

their own existence."

They drifted in little groups to different parts of the studio,

admiring this or that bit of grace or beauty. Then the German, who was

a professional musician, tuned an old mandolin with which a Venetian

lover some star-lit night centuries ago, may have serenaded his loved

one from his gondola; and to its trembling accompaniment sang a quaint

chansonette, his Teutonic accent making havoc among its liquid Italian

syllables. Then Rangely possessed himself of a strange African

instrument, a crooked gourd, hollowed and strung with twisted tree

fibers, and joined to the notes of the mandolin, its weird, cicada-like

harshness. The duet moved Bently to clear a miscellaneous collection of

articles from the lid of a spinnet of the time of Louis XIV., upon

which be-powdered and be-patched dames, long forgotten, had strummed

pretty little tinkling tunes, while all about them other

marionette-like ladies and gallants played at little tinkling loves, as

pretty and as empty.

The three instruments, so strangely matched, went off together in a

variety of music, imparting to every thing an uncanny, ghostly flavor,

as if these airs came in wild echoes from the shores of some dead past.

"Oh, stop that," Herman cried, at last. "It's too melancholy. Your

instruments are all dead; and it's no use trying to get live music out

of them."

For reply the German led off in a drearisome minor folk-tune, Rangely

and Bently improvising their parts with some skill, albeit not always

with perfect harmony.

"Ye Gods!" cried Ainsworth, seizing the mandolin out of the player's

grasp. "Is this a Hottentot funeral? Here, Fred, give me that

diabolical gourd; it is haunted by the soul of a Caffre medicine man."

"I say, fellows," spoke Rangely, as the din subsided, "I move we make

this a funeral, by breaking up the Pagans. Of course there is nothing

to hinder our meeting round at each other's places whenever we want to;

but we've either got to turn Fenton out or break up. I, for one, am

coward enough to prefer to break up."

"So say I," said Herman. "When once a circle like this is broken, there

is an end of it. It can't be patched together."

They looked at each other in silence a moment. To disband seemed like

an acknowledgment of defeat. Many another band of ardent souls has

known the feeling, with its dreary ache, although it oftener happens

that a circle of this kind disappears by the gradual dropping away of

its numbers one by one rather than that its members are brought face to

face with the necessity of owning that its existence had resulted in

failure. Whatever their faults and extravagances, whatever their errors

and intolerance, they were sincere, self sacrificing and ardent beyond

the men who made up the world about them; a group of eager lovers of

truth and art who had been drawn together by mutual aims and

enthusiasms. Their fierceness had been in defense of honesty and

sincerity, their disinterestedness was attested by the fact that any

one of them might have made his peace with Philistia and been rewarded

for his complaisance had he so chosen. Doubtless they had their faults

and foibles, yet their comradeship, in its essential purport had been

true and noble.

They in no wise abandoned their aims in agreeing with the proposition

to disband, but about their fellowship had been a certain un-phrased

tenderness, at which, if put in word, any one of them might have

scoffed, yet which nevertheless they all felt strongly in their secret

hearts, and all were conscious that after this defection of Fenton, the

circle could never be perfect again. They did not discuss the matter

now, but in the interval of silence each acknowledged to himself that

to disband was best; and briefly each gave his assent; all soberly,

some almost gruffly.

And so it came about that the goddess Pasht lost her last band of

followers, and the Pagans assembled no more forever.