"Yes, they're all in there," said the watchman who stood, decorated with
a police star, in front of the partition of black walnut and frosted
glass. "But you can't see them now; they're busy."
"I can't, eh?" said Little O'Grady. "We'll find out if I can't!" He
dodged the watchman, wrenched open the flimsy door and threw himself upon
the board.
Yes, they were all there, including the two or three that Little O'Grady
had not seen the time before--that first time of all. And the Morrell
Twins were there too, one of them remorseful and the other defiant. And
Andrew P. Hill, who presided, was in a blue funk--O'Grady could see his
chin-beard waggle and could almost hear his teeth chatter; for it was
Andrew who had amassed all that Pin-and-Needle collateral, accepting it
at the street's own mad valuation. Pin-and-Needle, pushed too far, blown
too big, was now shaky at the knees, and Andrew and all the Nine were
trembling sympathetically from top to toe. The Grindstone might survive
in a single serviceable mass, or it might fly to pieces, dispersed in a
thousand useless fragments.
Little O'Grady looked round upon the other faces; they were all like
Andrew's. Remorse, shame, contrition sat upon them. Ah, these men knew
they had not given fair treatment to him and to Ignace and to Dill and to
Preciosa and all the rest. "Just see how they're looking at me!" he said
to himself. "Never mind; I won't let up on them. I'll rub it in; I'll
drive it home."
What drawn faces! What anxious eyes! What sharp noses!--who had been
grinding them? Answer: the Morrell Twins. Not for nothing their long
practice in sharpening pins and needles! It had come into play here.
Richard had turned the crank and Robin had held down each official
proboscis, and the board had winced. Then Richard and Robin had changed
places, and the board had groaned. Now Richard and Robin were changing
back, and soon the board might scream. "I'll take a hand too," said
O'Grady.
He began at once; he gave the discomfited directors no chance to
forestall him. He taxed them roundly with their delays, their
double-dealings, their invertebrate wabblings. They had blown hot and
cold. They had played fast and loose. He and his friends had worked, had
thought, had studied, had invented, had torn their very brains from their
heads; and what had they to show for it? Nothing; nothing at all. On the
contrary----
"Get out of here," said Andrew P. Hill sternly. "This is a business
meeting."
"Business meeting!" cried Little O'Grady scornfully. "What do any of you
know about business, I'd like to ask? Nobody who wanted to do business by
business methods would come here to do it, I'm thinking! No, sir; he'd go
to _our_ shop, where we do as we say we will, and do it up sharp and
ship-shape, no matter how unreasonable the demands of the
shilly-shallying old grannies we have to deal with. Business! You don't
bluff me!"
"Take care, young man," said Hill, "or----"
"Or nothing!" cried Little O'Grady undaunted. "And now, for a finisher,
you offer us a competition. You wind us, and then ask us to run against a
fresh batch that haven't even left the stable! After we've pulled our
brains out of our heads strand by strand, you'd have us stuff them back
and pull them out all over again, would you? Nobody but a man with
cotton-batting _for_ brains could ask a thing like that!"
"Brains!" said Dowd contemptuously. He had always looked upon himself as
a lofty intellectual force. In his view there was no great play for
intellect outside of finance and law.
Little O'Grady pounced upon this insolence at once. "There's not one of
you here, I'll venture, that has had an idea in the last twenty years.
You just sit beside your little old machine and turn the crank--why, the
crank almost turns itself. We, on the other hand, live on our ideas. We
keep alive on our own brains and hearts and blood and emotions----"
"Emotions!" said Dowd, carelessly crumpling up a paper and throwing it
into the waste-basket. He himself had not had an emotion--foolish,
superfluous things--in his life. Little O'Grady looked at his nose. It
was the sharpest of the lot.
"Get out of here, young man," said Simon Rosenberg. "This is no place for
you."
O'Grady passed over Rosenberg's nose in contempt.
"We turn in scheme after scheme," he pursued;--"schemes to be welcomed
and appreciated anywhere--but here. And what is your own? All you can
think of is a mongrel heap of cabins and spires and chimneys and shacks
that would set a tombstone to grinning. What chance is there for art in
such a hotch-potch as that? What could a self-respecting----"
Up rose Andrew P. Hill. He expressed all his nervous dread, his vexation,
his irritability by one tremendous whack of his fist on the table.
"To hell with art!" he said. "What I wanted to do was to advertise my
business."
Dead silence. Nobody had ever heard Andrew P. Hill swear before; nobody
had supposed that he could. But the unlooked-for, the impossible had
happened.
To Little O'Grady this profanity was no more than the profanity of
anybody else. It did not stop him.
"To advertise your business?" he mocked. "Then why didn't you say so
before? It ain't too late to do so yet, is it? I'll do it for you myself.
I'll advertise you and your business and your building fit to make you
dizzy. I'll make you celebrated. I'll make you talked about. You won't
have to pay twenty-five thousand dollars for it, either. Nor four. Nor
one. Just give me a week's time and a scaffolding--I worked on a panorama
once--and I'll see that you're advertised. I'll do it with my eyes
bandaged and with one hand--either one--tied behind me. I'll see to it
that you get the Merry Laugh. I'll see that you get the Broad Grin. I'll
see that you get the Unrestrained Cachinnation. I'll get you into the
guide-books and the art journals--nit! Why, you poor creatures"--Little
O'Grady's liberal glance took in the entire assembly--"who do you think
bestow the sort of celebrity you have presumed to hope for? _Your_ kind?
Not on your life. The cheap twaddlers of cheap daily stuff for cheap
people? Never imagine it. Who, then? The few, wherever they may be, who
_know_. Good work by good men; and then a single word from the right
source, however distant, starts the ball rolling and the stream running.
The city feels proud of your taste and liberality, travelling strangers
turn aside to see the fruit of it, and you get praise and celebrity
indeed. But nothing of that kind will ever happen to you, whether you
think yourselves art patrons or not;"--here O'Grady dealt a deadly look
at Roscoe Orlando Gibbons. "Do what you like; people will snicker and
guffaw and hold their sides and pant for somebody to fan them and bring
them to. As for me, I utterly scorn and loathe the whole pack of you. I
curse you; I rue the day when first I----"
Little O'Grady thrust out his angry hands to rend his garment, but found
that he had left it behind. Balked here, he was about to let them loose
on his hair, when the Morrell Twins, at a sign from Andrew P. Hill, now
speechless with anger, sprang up and seized Little O'Grady by both
shoulders and hustled him out of the room. Robin Morrell gave him a cuff
on the ear to boot--a cuff that was to cost him dearer than any other
action of his life. Little O'Grady paused on the other side of the
partition to curse the board again, but the watchman hustled him out into
the street. He paused on the curbstone to curse the bank, but a policeman
told him to move along. On his way back to the Warren, Little O'Grady
went a block out of his road to curse the new building, now almost ready
for occupancy. He lifted up his arm against it and anathematized it, and
a passing patrol-wagon almost paused, as if wondering whether he were not
best picked up.
"Don't bother about me," said Little O'Grady to the patrol-wagon. "I'm
all right." He looked again at the long row of columns: they were still
standing. "There yet?" he said. "Well, you'll be down before long, if I'm
any guesser."