THE STONE MUGS
Frederick Stone, N.A., member of the Stone Mugs, late war correspondent
and special artist on the spot, paused before the cheerful blaze of his
studio fire, shaking the wet snow from his feet. He had tramped across
Washington Square in drifts that were over his shoe-tops, mounted the
three flights of steps to his cosey rooms, and was at the moment
expressing his views on the weather, in terms more forcible than
polite, to our very old friend, Jack Bedford, the famous
marine-painter. Bedford, on hearing the sound of Fred's footsteps, had
strolled in from his own studio, in the same building, and had thrown
himself into a big arm-chair, where he was sitting hunched up, his
knees almost touching his chin, his round head covered by a skull-cap
that showed above the chair-back.
"Nice weather for ducks, Jack, isn't it? Can't see how anybody can get
here to-night," cried Fred, striking the mantel with his wet cap, and
scattering the rain-drops over the hearth. "Just passed a Broadway
stage stuck in a hole as I came by the New York Hotel. Been there an
hour, they told me."
"Shouldn't wonder. Whose night is it, Fred?" asked Jack, stretching out
one leg in the direction of the cheery blaze.
"Horn's."
"What's he going to do?"
"Give it up. Ask me an easy one. Said he wanted a thirty by forty.
There it is on the easel," and Fred moved a chair out of his way, hung
his wet coat and hat on a peg behind the door, and started to clear up
a tangle of artillery harness that littered the floor.
"Thirty by forty, eh," grunted Jack, from the depths of his chair.
"Thunder and Mars! Is the beggar going to paint a panorama? Thought
that canvas was for a new cavalry charge of yours!" He had lowered the
other leg now, making a double-barrelled gun of the pair.
"No; it's Horn's. He's going to paint one of the fellows to-night."
"In costume?" Jack's head was now so low in the chair that his eyes
could draw a bead along his legs to the fire.
"Yes, as an old Burgomaster, or something with a ruff," and he kicked
an army blanket into a corner as he spoke. "There's the ruff hanging on
that pair of foils, Waller sent it over." Then his merry eyes fell on
Jack's sprawled-out figure, his feet almost in the grate--a favorite
attitude of his neighbor's when tired out with the day's work,
comfortable perhaps, but especially objectionable at the moment.
"Here--get up, you old stick-in-the-mud. Don't sit there, doubled up
like a government mule," he laughed. (The army lingo still showed
itself once in a while in Fred's speech.) "Help me get this room ready
or I'll whale you with this," and he waved one end of a trace over his
head. "If the fellows are coming they'll be here in half an hour. Shove
back that easel and bring in that beer--it's outside the door in a box.
I'll get out the tobacco and pipes."
Jack stretched both arms above his head, emitted a yawn that could be
heard in his room below, and sprang to his feet.
Fred, by this time, had taken down from a closet a tin box of crackers,
unwrapped a yellow cheese, and was trimming its raw edges with a
palette knife. Then they both moved out a big table from the inner room
to the larger one, and, while Jack placed the eatables on its bare top,
Fred mounted a chair, and began lighting a circle of gas-jets that hung
from the ceiling of the skylight. The war-painter was host to-night,
and the task of arranging the rooms for the comfort of his
fellow-members consequently devolved upon him.
The refreshments having been made ready, Fred roamed about the rooms
straightening the pictures on the walls--an old fad of his when guests
of any kind were expected--punching the cushions and Turkish
saddle-bags into plumpness, that he had picked up in a flying trip
abroad the year the war was over, and stringing them along the divan
ready for the backs and legs of the club-members. Next he stripped the
piano of a collection of camp sketches that had littered it up for a
week, dumped the pile into a closet, and, with a sudden wrench of his
arms, whirled the instrument itself close against the wall. Then some
fire-arms, saddles, and artillery trappings were hidden away in dark
corners, and a lay figure, clothed in fatigue cap and blue overcoat,
and which had done duty as "a picket" during the day, was wheeled
around with its face to the wall, where it stood guard over Fred's
famous picture of "The Last Gun at Appomattox." His final touches were
bestowed on the grate-fire and the coal-scuttle, both of which were
replenished from a big pine box in the hall.
Jack Bedford, meanwhile, had busied himself rolling another table--a
long one--under the circle of gas-jets so that the men could see to
work the better, and loading it with palettes, china tiles, canvases,
etc., to be used by the members of the club in their work of the
evening. Last of all and not by any means the least important, Jack, by
the aid of a chair, gathered together, on the top shelf of the closet,
the unique collection of stone beer-mugs from which the club took its
name. These he handed down one by one to Fred, who arranged them in a
row on one end of the long table. The mugs were to hold the contents of
sundry bottles of beer, now safely stowed away in the lidless,
pigeon-holed box, standing in the hall, which Fred unloaded later,
placing the bottles on the window-sill outside to cool.
Before they had ended their preparations, the stamping of feet on the
stair was heard, the door was thrown back, and the several members of
the club began to arrive.
The great Waller came first, brushing the snow from his shaggy coat,
looking like a great bear, growling as he rolled in, as was his wont.
Close behind him, puffing with the run upstairs, and half-hidden behind
Waller's broad shoulders, trotted Simmons, the musician.
Not the tousled, ill-clad Waller, the "Walrus" of former days--no one
dared to call the painter by any such names since his picture took the
Medaille d'Honneur at Paris--and not the slender, smooth-faced Simmons,
who in the old days was content to take his chances of filling a
vacancy at Wallack's or the Winter Garden, when some one of the regular
orchestra was under the weather; but a sleek, prosperous, rotund
Waller, with a bit of red in his button-hole, a wide expanse of
shirt-front, and a waxed mustache; and a thoughtful, slightly bald, and
well-dressed Simmons, with gold eyeglasses, and his hair worn long in
his neck as befitted the leader of an orchestra whose concerts crowded
the Academy to the doors.
These two arrivals nodded to Jack and Fred, Waller cursing the weather
as he hung up his coat on a peg behind the door (unnecessary
formalities of every kind, including the shaking of hands and asking
after each other's health, were dispensed with by men who saw each
other several times a day at their different haunts), and Simmons,
without stopping to take off his wet coat, flung his hat on the divan,
crossed the room, and seated himself at the piano.
"Went this way, Waller, didn't it?" said Simmons striking the keys,
continuing the conversation the two had evidently had on the stairs.
"Never heard Parepa in better voice. She filled every corner of the
house. Crug told me he was up in Africa in the back row and never
missed a note. Do you remember this?" and the musician's fingers again
slipped over the keys, and one of the great singer's trills rippled
through the room, to which Waller nodded approvingly, mopping his wet
face with his handkerchief as he listened.
The opening and shutting of the door, the stamping of feet, the general
imprecations hurled at the climate, and the scattering of wet snow and
rain-drops about the entrance became constant. Crug bustled in--a
short, thick-set, rosy-cheeked young fellow in a black mackintosh and a
white silk muffler--a 'cellist of repute, who had spent two years at
the conservatoire, and who had once played for Eugenie at one of her
musicales at the Tuileries, a fact he never let you forget. And close
behind him came Watson, the landscape-painter, who had had two pictures
accepted by the Royal Academy--one of them hung on the line, a great
honor for an American; and after them blue-eyed, round-faced Munson, a
pupil of Kaulbach, and late from Munich; as well as Harry Stedman,
Post, the art-critic, and one or two others.
Each man as he entered divested himself of his wet garments, warmed his
hands at the blazing grate-fire, and, reaching over the long table,
picked up a clay or corn-cob pipe, stuffing the bowl full of tobacco
from a cracked Japanese pot that stood on the mantel. Then striking a
match he settled himself into the nearest chair, joining in the general
talk or smoking quietly, listening to what was being said about him.
Now and then one would walk to the window, raise the sash, uncork a
bottle of beer where Fred had placed it, empty its contents into one of
the mugs, and resume his seat--mug in one hand, pipe in the other.
Up to this time no work had been done, the courtesies of the club
permitting none to begin until the member whose night it was had
arrived.
As the half-hour slipped away the men began to grow restless.
"If it's Horn's night why the devil doesn't he come, Fred?" asked
Waller, in a querulous tone. Although the great sheep-painter had lost
his sobriquet since the old days, he had never parted with his right to
growl.
"He'll be here," cried Simmons from his seat by the piano. His fingers
were still rippling gently over the keys, although he had stopped once
just long enough to strip off his wet overcoat. "I met him at Margaret
Grant's this afternoon. She had a little tea."
"There every afternoon, isn't he, Simmons?" asked Munson, who was
smoking quietly:
"Shouldn't wonder," came the response between the trills.
"How's that affair coming on?" came a voice out of the tobacco-smoke.
"Same old way," answered someone at the lower end of the table--"still
waiting for the spondulix."
"Seen her last picture?" remarked Watson, knocking the ashes from his
pipe. "The one she scooped the medal with?"
"Yes. Rouser, isn't it?" called out Waller. "Best thing she has done
yet. She's a great woman. Hello! there he is! This is a pretty time for
him to put in an appearance!"
The door opened and Oliver walked in, a wet umbrella in one hand, his
coat-collar turned up, his mustache beaded with melted snow-drops.
"What's it doing outside, Ollie, raining cats and dogs?" Jack called
out.
"No, going to clear up. It's stopped snowing and getting colder. Oh,
what a night! I love a storm like this, it sets my blood tingling.
Sorry to keep you waiting, gentlemen, but I couldn't help it. It won't
make any difference; I can't begin, anyway. Bianchi won't be here for
an hour. Just met him on the street--he's going to bring a guest, he
says."
"Who's he going to bring?" shouted Simmons, who had risen from his seat
at the piano, and was now sorting out some sheets of music that Fred
had just laid on its top.
"He won't tell; says it's a surprise," answered Oliver, slipping off
his coat.
"A surprise, is it?" grumbled Waller. "I'll bet it's some greasy
foreigner." He had left Simmons's side and was now standing by the
mantel, filling a pipe from the bowl. "Bianchi has always got a lot of
cranks about him."
Oliver hung his wet coat among the row of garments lining the wall--he
had come twice as far as the others--crowded his dripping umbrella into
a broken Chinese jar that did duty as a rack, and, catching sight of
the canvas, walked toward the easel holding the thirty by forty.
"Where did you get it, Freddie?" he said, putting his arms around the
shoulders of his old chum and dragging him toward the easel for a
closer inspection of the grain of the canvas.
"Snedecor's"
"Just right, old man. Much obliged," and he felt the grain of the cloth
with his thumb. "Got a ruff?" and he glanced about him. "Oh, yes; I
see. Thanks."
The men, now that Oliver had arrived, drew up around the long table.
Some began setting their palettes; others picked out, from the common
stock before them, the panels, canvases, china plates, or sheets of
paper, which, under their deft touches, were so soon to be covered with
dainty bits of color.
It was in many ways a remarkable club. Most of its members had already
achieved the highest rank in their several professions and outside the
walls of this eyrie were known as earnest, thoughtful men, envied and
sought after by those who respected their aims and successes.
Inside these cosey rooms all restraint was laid aside and each man's
personality and temperament expressed itself without reserve. Harry
Stedman, who, perhaps, had been teaching a class of students all the
morning in the new building of the National Academy of Design, each one
of whom hung upon his words as if he had been inspired, could be found
here a few hours later joining in a chorus with a voice loud enough to
rattle every mug on the table.
Waller, who doubtless that same night, had been the bright particular
star at some smart dinner uptown, and whose red ribbon had added such
eclat to the occasion, and whose low voice and quiet manners and
correct, conventional speeches had so charmed and captivated the lady
on his right, would, when once in this room, sit astride some chair, a
pipe in one hand, a mug of beer in the other. Here he would discuss
with Simmons or Jack or Oliver his preference of Chopin over Beethoven,
or the difference between Parepa-Rosa and Jenny Lind, or any topic
which had risen out of the common talk, and all too with a
grotesqueness of speech and manner that would have frozen his hostess
of the dinner-table dumb with astonishment could she have seen him.
And so with the others. Each man was frankly himself and in undress
uniform when under Fred's skylight, or when the club was enjoying any
one of its various festivals and functions.
Oliver's election into the organization had, therefore, been to him one
of the greatest honors he had received since his skill as a painter had
been recognized by his fellows--an honor not conferred upon him because
he had been one of the earlier members of the old Union Square
organization, many of whom had been left out, but entirely because he
was not only the best of fellows, but among the best of painters as
well. An honor too, which brought with it the possibility of a certain
satisfying of his tastes. Only once before had he found an atmosphere
so congenial and that was when the big hemlocks that he loved stood
firm and silent about him--companions in a wilderness that rested him.
The coming together of such a body of men representing, as they did,
the choicest the city afforded in art, literature and music, had been
as natural and unavoidable as the concentration of a mass of iron
filings toward a magnet. That insatiable hunger of the Bohemian, that
craving of the craftsman for men of his kind, had at last overpowered
them, and the meetings in Fred's studio were the inevitable result.
Many of these devotees of the arts had landed on the barren shores of
America--barren of even the slightest trace of that life they had
learned to love so well in the Quartier Latin in Paris and in the
Rathskellers of Munich and Dusseldorf--and had wandered about in the
uncongenial atmosphere of the commonplace until this retreat had been
opened to them. Some, like Fred Stone and Jack Bedford, who had
struggled on through the war, too much occupied in the whirl of their
life to miss at the time the associations of men of similar tastes, had
eagerly grasped the opportunity when it came, and others, like Oliver,
who had had all they could do to get their three meals during the day
and a shelter for the night, had hardly been conscious of what they
wanted until the club had extended to them its congenial surroundings.
On the trio of painters we knew best in the old days these privations
and the uncertainties and disappointments of the war had left their
indelible mark. You became aware of this when you saw them among their
fellow-workers. About Fred's temples many tell-tale gray hairs were
mingled with the brown, and about his mouth and eyes were deeper lines
than those which hard work alone would have cut. He carried a hole,
too, in his right arm--or did until the army surgeon sewed it up--you
could see it as a blue scar every time he rolled up his sleeve--a
slight souvenir of the Battle of Five Forks. It was bored out by a
bullet from the hands of a man in gray when Fred, dropping his
sketch-book, had bent to drag a wounded soldier from under an
overturned caisson. He carried no scar, however, in his heart. That
organ beat with as keen a sympathy and as warm a spirit of camaraderie
as it did when it first opened itself to Oliver's miseries in Union
Square.
Jack Bedford, gaunt and strong of limb, looking a foot taller, had more
than once been compelled to lay down his painter's palette and take up
the sign-painter's brush, and the tell-tale wrinkles about his eyes and
the set look about his mouth testified but too plainly to the keenness
of his sufferings.
And Oliver--
Ah! what of Oliver, and of the changes in him since that fatal night in
Kennedy Square when he had been driven away from his home and made an
outcast because he had been brave enough to defend a helpless man?
You can see at a glance, as you watch him standing by the big easel,
his coat off, to give his arm freer play, squeezing the tubes of color
on his palette, that he is not the boy you knew some years ago. He is,
you will admit, as strong and alert-looking as he was that morning when
he cleared the space in front of Margaret's brother with a cart-rung.
You will concede, too, that the muscles about his chest and throat are
as firmly packed, the eyes as keen, and the smile as winning, but you
will acknowledge that the boy in him ends there. As you look the closer
you will note that the line of the jaw is more cleanly cut than in his
younger days; that the ears are set closer to the finely modelled head;
that the nose is more aquiline, the eyes deeper, and that the
overhanging brow is wrinkled with one or more tight knots that care has
tied, and which only loosen when his face breaks into one of his
old-time smiles. The mustache is still there--the one which Sue once
laughed at; but it has lost its silky curl and stands straight out now
from the corners of his mouth, its points reaching almost to the line
of his ears. There is, too, beneath it a small imperial, giving to his
face the debonair look of a cavalier, and which accentuates more than
any other one thing his Southern birth and training. As you follow the
subtle outlines of his body you find too, that he is better
proportioned than he was in his early manhood; thinner around the
waist, broader across the shoulders; pressed into a closer mold; more
compact, more determined-looking. But for the gleam that now and then
flashes out of his laughing eyes and the winning smile that plays about
his mouth, you would, perhaps, think that the years of hardship through
which he has passed have hardened his nature. But you would be wrong
about the hardening process, although you would have been entirely
right about the hardship.
They had, indeed, been years of intense suffering, full of privations,
self-denial, and disappointments, not only in his New York home but in
Kennedy Square, whenever at long intervals he had gone back to the old
house to cheer its inmates in their loneliness--a loneliness relieved
only by the loyalty of old Malachi and Hannah and the affection and
sympathy of their immediate relatives and of such close friends as Amos
Cobb, who had never left his post, Miss Clendenning, Dr. Wallace,
Nathan and some others. But this sympathy had not always been extended
to Oliver--not, by his old schoolmates and chums at least. Even Sue had
passed him in the street with a cold stare and not a few of the other
girls--girls he had romped with many a night through the cool paths of
Kennedy Square, had drawn their skirts aside as he passed lest he
should foul them with his touch.
But his courage had not wavered nor had his strength failed him. The
same qualities that had made Richard stick to the motor were in his own
blood. His delicately modelled slender fingers, white as ivory, and as
sure as a pair of callipers--so like his father's--and which as we
watch him work so deftly arranging the colors on his palette, adjusting
the oil-cup, trying the points of the brushes on his thumb-nail,
gathering them in a sheaf in his left hand as they answer his purpose,
had served him in more ways than one since he took that midnight ride
back from his old home in Kennedy Square. These same hands that look so
white and well-kept as he stands by his easel in the full glare of the
gas-jets, had been his sole reliance during these days of toil and
suffering. They had provided all the bread that had gone into his
mouth, and every stitch of clothes that had covered his back. And they
had not been over-particular as to how they had accomplished it nor at
what hours or places. They had cleaned lithographic stones, the
finger-nails stained for weeks with colored inks; they had packed
hardware; they had driven a pen far into the night on space work for
the daily papers; they had carried a dinner-pail to and from his
lodgings to the factory two miles away where he had worked--very little
in this pail some of the time; they had posted ledgers, made
office-fires, swept out stores--anything and everything that his will
compelled, and his necessities made imperative. And they had done it
all forcefully and willingly, with the persistence and sureness of
machines accomplishing a certain output in so many hours. Joyfully too,
sustained and encouraged by the woman he loved and whose heart through
all his and her vicissitudes was still his own.
All this had strengthened him; had taught him that any kind of work, no
matter how menial, was worthy of a gentleman; so long as his object was
obtained--in this case his independence and his livelihood. It had been
a bitter experience at first, especially for a Southerner brought up as
he had been; but he had mastered it at last. His early training had
helped him, especially that part which he owed to his mother, who had
made him carry the market-basket as a boy, to humble a foolish and
hurtful pride. He was proud enough of it now.
But never through all these privations had these same white hands and
this tired body and brain been so occupied that they could not find
time during some one of the hours of the day and night to wield the
brush, no matter how urgent had been the call for the week's
board--wielding it, too, so lovingly and knowingly, and with such
persistency, that to-night although still poor--he stood recognized as
a rising man by the men in the front rank of the painters of his time.
And with his mother's consent, too. Not that he had asked it in so many
words and stood hesitating, fearing to take the divergent path until he
could take her willing blessing with him. He had made his decision
firmly and against her wishes. She had kept silent at first, and had
watched his progress as she had watched his baby steps,
tearfully--prayerfully at times--standing ready to catch him if he
fell. But that was over now. The bigness of her vision covering margins
wide enough for new impressions, impressions which her broad mind,
great enough and honest enough to confess its mistakes, always welcomed
and understood, had long since made clear to her what in her early
anxiety she had ignored:--that if her son had inherited the creative
and imaginative gifts of his father (those gifts which she so little
understood), he had also inherited from her a certain spirit of
determination, together with that practical turn of mind which had
given the men of her own family their eminence. In proof of this she
could not but see that the instability which she had so dreaded in his
earlier years had given way to a certain fixedness of purpose and firm
self-reliance. The thought of this thrilled her as nothing else in his
whole career had ever done. All these things helped reconcile her to
his choice of a profession.
Oliver, now thoroughly warm and dry, busied himself getting his brushes
and paints together and scraping off one of Fred's palettes. Bianchi's
bald head and fat, red, smooth-shaven face with its double chin--time
had not dealt leniently with the distinguished lithographer--had
inspired our hero to attempt a "Franz Hals smear," as Waller called it,
and the Pole, when he arrived, was to sit for him in the costume of an
old Dutch burgomaster, the big white ruff furnishing the high lights in
the canvas.
By the time Oliver had arranged his palette the club had settled itself
for work, the smoke from the pipes floating in long lines toward the
ceiling, befogging the big white albatross that hung from a wire in the
skylight. Munson, who had rubbed in a background of bitumen over a
square tile, sat next to Fred, who was picking out, with the end of a
wooden match, the outlines of an army-wagon sketched on a plate smeared
with color. Simmons was looking over a portfolio that Watson, a new
member, had brought with him, filled with a lot of his summer sketches
made on the Normandy coast.
One view of the fish-market at Dieppe caught Oliver's eye. The slant of
light burnishing the roof of the church to silver and flooding the
pavement of the open square, crowded with black figures, the white caps
of the fish-women indicated by crisp pats of the brush, pleased our
painter immensely.
"Charming, old man," said Oliver, turning to Watson. "How long did it
take you?"
"About four hours."
"Looks like it," growled Waller, reaching over Oliver's shoulder and
drawing the sketch toward him. "That's the gospel of 'smear,' Horn,"
and he tossed it back. "Not a figure in the group has got any drawing
in it."
Waller had set his face against the new out-door school, and never lost
a chance to ridicule it.
"That's not what Watson is after," exclaimed Oliver. "The figures are
mere accessories. The dominating light is the thing; he's got
that"--and he held the sketch close to the overhead gas-jets so that
the members could see it the better.
"Dominating light be hanged! What's the use of slobbering puddles of
paint over a canvas and calling it plein air, or impressionism, or
out-of-doors, or some such rot? Get down to business and DRAW. When you
have done that you can talk. It can't be done in four hours, and if
some of you fellows keep on the way you're going, you'll never do it in
four years."
"A four hours' sketch handled as Watson has this," said Oliver,
thoughtfully, "is better than four years' work on one of your Hudson
Rivery things. The sun doesn't stand still long enough for a man to get
more than an expression of what he sees--that is if he's after truth.
The angle of shadow changes too quickly, and so do the reflected
lights."
"What's the matter with the next day?" burst out Waller. "Can't you
take up your sketch where you left off? You talk as if every great
picture had to be painted before luncheon."
"But there is no 'next day,'" interrupted Watson. "I entirely agree
with Horn." He had been listening to the discussion with silent
interest. "No next day like the one on which you began your canvas. The
sky is different--gray, blue, or full of fleecy, sunny clouds. Your
shadows are more purple, or blue or gray, depending on your sky
overhead, and so are your reflections. If you go on and try to piece
out your sketch, you make an almanac of it--not a portrait of what you
saw. I can pick out the Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays on that kind
of a sketch as soon as I see it. Nature is like a bird--if you want to
surprise her, you must let go both barrels when she rises; if you miss
her at your first shot you will never have another chance--not at that
particular bird."
"Well, but suppose you DO happen to have two days alike," insisted
Waller. "I have seen thirty days on a stretch in Venice without a
cloud. What then?" The bird simile had evidently not appealed to the
great critic.
"Then ten chances to one you are not the same man you were the day
before," replied Watson, calmly, laying down his pipe. "You have had
bad news from home or your liver is out of order, or worse still, you
have seen some new subject which has taken hold of you and your first
enthusiasm has oozed away. If you persist in going on you will either
undo what you did yesterday or you will trust to your memory of what
you THINK yesterday was, to finish your sketch by. The first fills it
full of lies and the second full of yourself; neither have anything to
do with nature. Four hours, Waller, not a minute more. You'll come to
it before you die."
"That depends on what you have got to paint with," snapped out Jack
Bedford, who was trying to clean a dingy-looking palette with a knife.
"Whose dirt-dump is this, anyhow?" and he held it up to view. "Might as
well try to get sunlight out of powdered brick. Look at that pile of
mud," and he pointed to some dry color near the thumb-hole.
"Which palette?" came a voice.
Jack held it up for the inspection of the room.
"Oh, that's Parker Ridgway's," answered Fred. "He was here the other
day and made a half-hour's sketch of a model I had."
The announcement of Ridgway's name was greeted with shouts of laughter.
He was a society painter of the day, pupil of Winterhalter and Meyer
von Bremen, and had carried off more portraits and at higher prices
than all the other men put together.
"Keep on! keep on! Laugh away," grumbled Waller squeezing a tube of
Prussian blue on his palette. "When any one of you fellows can get
$4,000 for a season's work you can talk; until you do, you can keep
your mouths shut as tight as Long Island clams."
"Who got it?"
"The Honorable Parker Ridgway, R.A., P.Q., and I don't know but
X.Y.Z.," roared Waller.
"I'd like to know how?" asked Watson, reaching over Fred's arm for the
bottle of turpentine.
"That's what he did," snapped out Waller.
"Did what?"
"Knew how."
"But he doesn't know how," cried Munson from across the table. "I sat
alongside of that fellow at the Ecole for two years. He can't draw, and
never could. His flesh was beastly, his modelling worse, and his
technique--a botch. You can see what color he uses," and he pointed to
the palette Jack was trying to clean.
"Granted, my boy," said Waller. "I didn't say he could PAINT; I said he
knew how to earn $4,000 in three months painting portraits."
"He never painted a portrait worth four cents. Why, I knew--"
"Dry up, Munson!" interrupted Jack. "Go on, Waller, tell us how he did
it."
"By using some horse-sense and a little tact; getting in with the
procession and bolding his cud up," retorted Waller, in a solemn tone.
"Give him room! Give him room!" cried Oliver, with a laugh, pouring a
little dryer into his oil-cup. He loved to hear Waller talk. "He flings
his words about as if they were chunks of coal," he would always say.
The great man wheeled his chair around and faced the room. Oliver's
words had sounded like a challenge.
"Keep it up!--pound away," he cried, his face reddening. "I've watched
Ridgway ever since he arrived here last spring, and I will give you his
recipe for success. He didn't fall overboard into a second-rate club as
soon as he got here and rub his brushes on his coat-sleeve to look
artistic. Not much! He had his name put up at the Union; got Croney to
cut his clothes, and Leary to make his hats, played croquet with the
girls he knew, drove tandem--his brother-in-law's--and dined out every
night in the week. Every day or two he would haul out one of his
six-foot canvases, and give it a coat of bitumen. Always did this when
some club swell was around who would tell about it."
"Did it with a sponge," muttered Munson. "Old trick of his!"
"Next thing he did," continued Waller, ignoring Munson's aside, "was to
refuse a thousand-dollar commission offered by a vulgar real-estate man
to paint a two-hundred-pound pink-silk sofa-cushion of a wife in a
tight-fitting waist. This spread like the measles. It was the talk of
the club, of dinner-tables and piazzas, and before sundown Ridgway's
exclusiveness in taste and artistic instincts were established. Then he
hunted up a pretty young married woman occupying the dead-centre of the
sanctified social circle, went into spasms over her beauty--so classic,
such an exquisite outline; grew confidential with the husband at the
club, and begged permission to make just a sketch only the size of his
hand--wanted it for his head of Sappho, Berlin Exhibition. Next he
rented a suite of rooms, crowded in a lot of borrowed tapestries,
brass, Venetian chests, lamps and hangings; gave a tea--servants this
time in livery--exhibited his Sappho; refused a big price for it from
the husband; got orders instead for two half-lengths, $1,500 each,
finished them in two weeks, declined more commissions on account of
extreme fatigue; disappeared with the first frost and the best cottage
people; booked three more full-lengths in New York--two to be painted
in Paris and the other on his return in the spring; was followed to the
steamer by a bevy of beauties, half-smothered in flowers, and
disappeared in a halo of artistic glory just $4,000 in."
Fred broke out into a roar, in which the whole room joined.
"And you call that art, do you?" cried Munson, laying down his palette.
His face was flushed, his eyes snapping with indignation.
"I do, my babbling infant," retorted Waller. "I call it the art of
making the most of your opportunities and putting your best foot
foremost. That's a thing you fellows never seem to understand. You want
to shuffle around in carpet-slippers, live in a garret, and wait until
some money-bags climbs up your crazy staircases to discover you.
Ridgway puts his foot in a patent-leather pump and silk stocking, and
never steps on a carpet that isn't two inches thick. Merchants,
engineers, manufacturers, and even scientists, when they have anything
to sell, go where there is somebody to buy; why shouldn't an artist?"
"Just like a fakir peddling cheap jewelry," said Stedman, in a low
voice, sending a cloud of smoke to the ceiling.
"Or a bunco-man trading watches with a farmer," remarked Jack Bedford.
"What do you say, My Lord Tom-Noddy"--and he slapped Oliver on the
back. The sobriquet was one of Jack's pet names for Oliver--all the
Kennedy Square people were more or less aristocrats to Jack Bedford,
the sign-painter--all except Oliver.
"I think Waller's about half-right, Jack. As far as Ridgway's work
goes, you know and I know that there isn't one man or woman out of a
hundred among his brother-in-law's friends who knows whether it's good
or bad--that's the pity of it. If it's bad and they buy it, that's
their fault for not knowing any better, not Ridgway's fault for doing
the best he knows how. By silk stockings and pumps I suppose Waller
means that Ridgway dressed himself like a gentleman, had his hair cut,
and paid some attention to his finger-nails. That's why they were glad
to see him. The day has gone by when a painter must affect a bob-tailed
velveteen jacket, long hair, and a slouch hat to help him paint, just
as the day has gone by when an artist is not an honored guest in any
gentleman's house in town."
"Bravo, Tom-Noddy!" shouted Jack and Fred in a breath. "Drink, you dear
old pressed brick. Put your nose into this!" and Fred held a mug of
beer to Oliver's lips.
Oliver laid down his sheaf of brushes--buried his nose in the cool rim
of the stone mug, the only beverage the club permitted, and was about
to continue his talk, when his eye rested on Bianchi, who was standing
in the open door, his hand upraised so as to bespeak silence.
"Here--you beautiful, bald-headed old burgomaster!" shouted Oliver.
"Get into your ruff right away. Been waiting half an hour for you and--"
Bianchi put his fingers to his lips with a whispered hush, knit his
brow, and pointed significantly behind him. Every eye turned, and a
breathless silence fell upon the group, followed by a scraping of
chairs on the floor as each man sprang to his feet.
Bianchi's surprise had arrived!