"Dr. Gowdy is not at home this afternoon," they told Jared in response to
his ring; "he is addressing a public meeting down town."
This would have applied to half the days of every calendar month
throughout the year. When Dr. Gowdy let a day pass without making some
public utterance, he counted that day as good as lost. He spoke at every
opportunity, and was as much at home on the platform as in the pulpit.
Perhaps even more so; there were those who said that he carried the style
of the rostrum and the hustings into the house of prayer. Certainly his
"way" was immensely "popular"--vigorous, nervous, downright, jocular,
familiar. Whether he talked on Armenia, or Indian famines, or
street-railway franchises, or primary-election reform, or the evils of
department stores (he was very strong on this last topic), the
reports--he was invariably reported--were sure to be sprinkled freely
with "laughter" and "applause." To-day Dr. Gowdy was talking on art.
"It's going to be a hot one!" said the students among themselves. And
they packed the assembly-hall of the Academy half an hour before the
Doctor's arrival.
The lecturer who was delivering the Wednesday afternoon course on Modern
French Sculpture had failed to come to time, and Dr. Gowdy, almost on the
spur of the moment, had volunteered to fill the breach. He telephoned
down that he would talk on Recent Developments in Art. This meant the
display of Meyer, Van Horn, and Co.
Dr. Gowdy had seen the abominable exhibition--who, during the past week,
had not?--and had been stirred to wrath. He fumed, he boiled, he bubbled.
But it was not merely this that had roused his blood to fever-heat. No;
Jared Stiles, emboldened by his success in the shopping district, had
applied to Mr. English, the director of the Academy, for a room in which
to make a collective exhibit of the masterpieces at present scattered
through various places of public resort and entertainment. Mr. English
had of course refused, and Dr. Gowdy, of course, had warmly backed him
up. But Mr. Hill, the vice-president, and Mr. Dale, the chairman of the
finance committee, had taken the other side. They had both been country
boys--one from Ogle County, the other from the ague belt of Indiana--and
their hearts warmed to Jared's display over on Broad Street. Their eyes
filled, their breasts heaved, their gullets gulped, their rustic boyhood
was with them poignantly once more. They murmured that English was a
hidebound New-Englander who was incapable of appreciating the expansive
ideals of Western life, and that Gowdy, city-born and city-bred, was
wholly out of sympathy with the sturdy aims and wholesome ambitions of
the farm and prairie. For once Art might well take a back seat and give
honest human feeling a fair show. They hinted, too, that the approaching
annual election might bring a general shake-up; English might find
himself supplanted by some other man more in touch with the local life
and with that of the tributary territory; and Gowdy--well, Gowdy might be
asked to resign, for there were plenty of citizens who would make quite
as good a trustee as he had been.
Some inkling of these sentiments had come to Dr. Gowdy's ears. He scented
the battle afar off. He said "Ha! ha!" to the trumpets. He pranced, he
reared, he caracoled, he went through the whole _manege._ He outdid
himself. The students, his to the last man, simply went mad.
For the past year there had been a feud between Dr. Gowdy and Andrew P.
Hill. Hill, relying on his own taste and judgment, had presented the city
with a symbolical group of statuary, which had been set up in the open
space before the Academy. This group, done by a jobber and accepted by a
crass lot of city officials, was of an awful, an incredible badness, and
the better sentiment of the community had finally crystallized and
insisted upon its removal. Dr. Gowdy and Professor English stood on the
steps of the Academy and watched the departure of the truck that was
carrying away the last section of this ambitious but mistaken monument.
"Well," said English, with a quizzical affectation of plaintive patience,
"we learn by doing."
"And sometimes by undoing," retorted Dr. Gowdy tartly.
Hill heard of this observation, and came to the scratch with
animadversions on Dr. Gowdy's maladroit management of the finances of the
Famine Fund (a matter that cannot be gone into here). This was blow for
blow, and ever since then Dr. Gowdy had panted to open the second round.
Jared Stiles, standing on his own merits or demerits, might have got off
more lightly, but Jared Stiles, as a possible protege of Andrew P. Hill,
was marked for slaughter. This new heresy and all its supporters must be
stamped out--especially the supporters.
X
Dr. Gowdy stamped it out--and the crowd stamped with him. The fiery
denunciations of the Doctor kindled an answering flame in the breasts of
his youthful auditory. In five minutes hands, lungs, and feet were all at
work. The youths before him awakened the hot, headlong youth still within
him, and he launched forth upon a tirade of invective that was wild and
reckless even for him.
"This folly, this falsity, this bumptious vulgarity--shall we not put an
end to it?" cried the Doctor.
"Yes, yes," responded the house.
"No; go on," said a single voice.
The Doctor laughed with the rest, and a wave of delighted applause swept
over the place.
"Shall we not purify the temple of art? Shall we not drive out the
money-changers?"
"Yes, yes," called the audience. For Jared had never drawn from the
antique--he was trying to climb in like a thief and a robber.
"Shall we not?" repeated the Doctor, searching the house for that single
voice.
"Sure," said the voice, and another wave of applause rolled from the
foyer to the rostrum.
"Ten thousand dollars!" shouted the Doctor. "The man who says he paid ten
thousand dollars for that agglomeration of barn-yard truck is one of two
things: if he did pay it, he's a fool; and if he didn't, he's a liar!
Which is he?"
"He's a fool!" cried half the men.
"He's a liar!" cried the other half.
"Oh--h!" shrilled the young women.
The Doctor wiped his streaming brow.
"What kind of a community is this, anyhow?" he resumed, stuffing back his
handkerchief into his pocket. "Here we have this magnificent school
[applause] that for the past fifteen years has been offering the highest
possible grade of art instruction. A corps of thirty earnest and
competent teachers [loud applause and a few cat-calls] are ministering to
the needs of three thousand promising and talented young people, the
flower of our great Northwest----" [Tremendous and long-continued
applause, during which the continuity of the speaker's remarks was lost.]
The Doctor filled in the minutes of tumult by taking several sips of
water.
"Why, you, we, this Academy, should be the leaven, the yeast, to work
upon our great metropolis; not merely the flower, but the self-raising
flour"--a pause for appreciation of the pun--"the self-raising flour
[loud laughter, easily yielded and unnecessarily prolonged] that is to
lift yourselves, and the city with you, from the abyss of no-art, and
from the still deeper abyss of false art. That's where we're groping;
that's where we're floundering. I declare, when I was elbowing my way
through that struggling, gaping crowd [cries of "Oh, Doctor!" and
laughter], I could only ask myself the question that I have just asked
you here: what kind of a community is this, anyhow?"
Up popped a shock of black hair from northern Michigan.
"It's rotten!" Shouts. Cat-calls.
"I should think it was!" vociferated the Doctor.
He went ahead for half an hour longer, crowding on more steam, acquiring
a more perilous momentum, throwing out an ever-widening torrent of
reckless personalities, not forgetting the ill-fated monument of Andrew
P. Hill. ("Applause" and "laughter" were very frequent just here.) He
ended his improvisation without the clearest idea in the world of just
what he had said, and went home well pleased.