Arnus Beaton's studio looked at first glance like many other painters'
studios. A gray wall quadrangularly vaulted to a large north light; casts
of feet, hands, faces hung to nails about; prints, sketches in oil and
water-color stuck here and there lower down; a rickety table, with paint
and palettes and bottles of varnish and siccative tossed comfortlessly on
it; an easel, with a strip of some faded mediaeval silk trailing from it;
a lay figure simpering in incomplete nakedness, with its head on one
side, and a stocking on one leg, and a Japanese dress dropped before it;
dusty rugs and skins kicking over the varnished floor; canvases faced to
the mop-board; an open trunk overflowing with costumes: these features
one might notice anywhere. But, besides, there was a bookcase with an
unusual number of books in it, and there was an open colonial
writing-desk, claw-footed, brass-handled, and scutcheoned, with foreign
periodicals--French and English--littering its leaf, and some pages of
manuscript scattered among them. Above all, there was a sculptor's
revolving stand, supporting a bust which Beaton was modelling, with an
eye fixed as simultaneously as possible on the clay and on the head of
the old man who sat on the platform beside it.
Few men have been able to get through the world with several gifts to
advantage in all; and most men seem handicapped for the race if they have
more than one. But they are apparently immensely interested as well as
distracted by them. When Beaton was writing, he would have agreed, up to
a certain point, with any one who said literature was his proper
expression; but, then, when he was painting, up to a certain point, he
would have maintained against the world that he was a colorist, and
supremely a colorist. At the certain point in either art he was apt to
break away in a frenzy of disgust and wreak himself upon some other. In
these moods he sometimes designed elevations of buildings, very striking,
very original, very chic, very everything but habitable. It was in this
way that he had tried his hand on sculpture, which he had at first
approached rather slightingly as a mere decorative accessory of
architecture. But it had grown in his respect till he maintained that the
accessory business ought to be all the other way: that temples should be
raised to enshrine statues, not statues made to ornament temples; that
was putting the cart before the horse with a vengeance. This was when he
had carried a plastic study so far that the sculptors who saw it said
that Beaton might have been an architect, but would certainly never be a
sculptor. At the same time he did some hurried, nervous things that had a
popular charm, and that sold in plaster reproductions, to the profit of
another. Beaton justly despised the popular charm in these, as well as in
the paintings he sold from time to time; he said it was flat burglary to
have taken money for them, and he would have been living almost wholly
upon the bounty of the old tombstone-cutter in Syracuse if it had not
been for the syndicate letters which he supplied to Fulkerson for ten
dollars a week.
They were very well done, but he hated doing them after the first two or
three, and had to be punched up for them by Fulkerson, who did not cease
to prize them, and who never failed to punch him up. Beaton being what he
was, Fulkerson was his creditor as well as patron; and Fulkerson being
what he was, had an enthusiastic patience with the elusive, facile,
adaptable, unpractical nature of Beaton. He was very proud of his
art-letters, as he called them; but then Fulkerson was proud of
everything he secured for his syndicate. The fact that he had secured it
gave it value; he felt as if he had written it himself.
One art trod upon another's heels with Beaton. The day before he had
rushed upon canvas the conception of a picture which he said to himself
was glorious, and to others (at the table d'hote of Maroni) was not bad.
He had worked at it in a fury till the light failed him, and he execrated
the dying day. But he lit his lamp and transferred the process of his
thinking from the canvas to the opening of the syndicate letter which he
knew Fulkerson would be coming for in the morning. He remained talking so
long after dinner in the same strain as he had painted and written in
that he could not finish his letter that night. The next morning, while
he was making his tea for breakfast, the postman brought him a letter
from his father enclosing a little check, and begging him with tender,
almost deferential, urgence to come as lightly upon him as possible, for
just now his expenses were very heavy. It brought tears of shame into
Beaton's eyes--the fine, smouldering, floating eyes that many ladies
admired, under the thick bang--and he said to himself that if he were
half a man he would go home and go to work cutting gravestones in his
father's shop. But he would wait, at least, to finish his picture; and as
a sop to his conscience, to stay its immediate ravening, he resolved to
finish that syndicate letter first, and borrow enough money from
Fulkerson to be able to send his father's check back; or, if not that,
then to return the sum of it partly in Fulkerson's check. While he still
teemed with both of these good intentions the old man from whom he was
modelling his head of Judas came, and Beaton saw that he must get through
with him before he finished either the picture or the letter; he would
have to pay him for the time, anyway. He utilized the remorse with which
he was tingling to give his Judas an expression which he found novel in
the treatment of that character--a look of such touching, appealing
self-abhorrence that Beaton's artistic joy in it amounted to rapture;
between the breathless moments when he worked in dead silence for an
effect that was trying to escape him, he sang and whistled fragments of
comic opera.
In one of the hushes there came a blow on the outside of the door that
made Beaton jump, and swear with a modified profanity that merged itself
in apostrophic prayer. He knew it must be Fulkerson, and after roaring
"Come in!" he said to the model, "That'll do this morning, Lindau."
Fulkerson squared his feet in front of the bust and compared it by
fleeting glances with the old man as he got stiffly up and suffered
Beaton to help him on with his thin, shabby overcoat.
"Can you come to-morrow, Lindau?"
"No, not to-morrow, Mr. Peaton. I haf to zit for the young ladties."
"Oh!" said Beaton. "Wetmore's class? Is Miss Leighton doing you?"
"I don't know their namess," Lindau began, when Fulkerson said:
"Hope you haven't forgotten mine, Mr. Lindau? I met you with Mr. March at
Maroni's one night." Fulkerson offered him a universally shakable hand.
"Oh yes! I am gladt to zee you again, Mr. Vulkerson. And Mr. Marge--he
don't zeem to gome any more?"
"Up to his eyes in work. Been moving on from Boston and getting settled,
and starting in on our enterprise. Beaton here hasn't got a very
flattering likeness of you, hey? Well, good-morning," he said, for Lindau
appeared not to have heard him and was escaping with a bow through the
door.
Beaton lit a cigarette which he pinched nervously between his lips before
he spoke. "You've come for that letter, I suppose, Fulkerson? It isn't
done."
Fulkerson turned from staring at the bust to which he had mounted. "What
you fretting about that letter for? I don't want your letter."
Beaton stopped biting his cigarette and looked at him. "Don't want my
letter? Oh, very good!" he bristled up. He took his cigarette from his
lips, and blew the smoke through his nostrils, and then looked at
Fulkerson.
"No; I don't want your letter; I want you."
Beaton disdained to ask an explanation, but he internally lowered his
crest, while he continued to look at Fulkerson without changing his
defiant countenance. This suited Fulkerson well enough, and he went on
with relish, "I'm going out of the syndicate business, old man, and I'm
on a new thing." He put his leg over the back of a chair and rested his
foot on its seat, and, with one hand in his pocket, he laid the scheme of
'Every Other Week' before Beaton with the help of the other. The artist
went about the room, meanwhile, with an effect of indifference which by
no means offended Fulkerson. He took some water into his mouth from a
tumbler, which he blew in a fine mist over the head of Judas before
swathing it in a dirty cotton cloth; he washed his brushes and set his
palette; he put up on his easel the picture he had blocked on the day
before, and stared at it with a gloomy face; then he gathered the sheets
of his unfinished letter together and slid them into a drawer of his
writing-desk. By the time he had finished and turned again to Fulkerson,
Fulkerson was saying: "I did think we could have the first number out by
New-Year's; but it will take longer than that--a month longer; but I'm
not sorry, for the holidays kill everything; and by February, or the
middle of February, people will get their breath again and begin to look
round and ask what's new. Then we'll reply in the language of Shakespeare
and Milton, 'Every Other Week; and don't you forget it.'" He took down
his leg and asked, "Got a pipe of 'baccy anywhere?"
Beaton nodded at a clay stem sticking out of a Japanese vase of bronze on
his mantel. "There's yours," he said; and Fulkerson said, "Thanks," and
filled the pipe and sat down and began to smoke tranquilly.
Beaton saw that he would have to speak now. "And what do you want with
me?"
"You? Oh yes," Fulkerson humorously dramatized a return to himself from a
pensive absence. "Want you for the art department."
Beaton shook his head. "I'm not your man, Fulkerson," he said,
compassionately. "You want a more practical hand, one that's in touch
with what's going. I'm getting further and further away from this century
and its claptrap. I don't believe in your enterprise; I don't respect it,
and I won't have anything to do with it. It would--choke me, that kind of
thing."
"That's all right," said Fulkerson. He esteemed a man who was not going
to let himself go cheap. "Or if it isn't, we can make it. You and March
will pull together first-rate. I don't care how much ideal you put into
the thing; the more the better. I can look after the other end of the
schooner myself."
"You don't understand me," said Beaton. "I'm not trying to get a rise out
of you. I'm in earnest. What you want is some man who can have patience
with mediocrity putting on the style of genius, and with genius turning
mediocrity on his hands. I haven't any luck with men; I don't get on with
them; I'm not popular." Beaton recognized the fact with the satisfaction
which it somehow always brings to human pride.
"So much the better!" Fulkerson was ready for him at this point. "I don't
want you to work the old-established racket the reputations. When I want
them I'll go to them with a pocketful of rocks--knock-down argument. But
my idea is to deal with the volunteer material. Look at the way the
periodicals are carried on now! Names! names! names! In a country that's
just boiling over with literary and artistic ability of every kind the
new fellows have no chance. The editors all engage their material. I
don't believe there are fifty volunteer contributions printed in a year
in all the New York magazines. It's all wrong; it's suicidal. 'Every
Other Week' is going back to the good old anonymous system, the only fair
system. It's worked well in literature, and it will work well in art."
"It won't work well in art," said Beaton. "There you have a totally
different set of conditions. What you'll get by inviting volunteer
illustrations will be a lot of amateur trash. And how are you going to
submit your literature for illustration? It can't be done. At any rate, I
won't undertake to do it."
"We'll get up a School of Illustration," said Fulkerson, with cynical
security. "You can read the things and explain 'em, and your pupils can
make their sketches under your eye. They wouldn't be much further out
than most illustrations are if they never knew what they were
illustrating. You might select from what comes in and make up a sort of
pictorial variations to the literature without any particular reference
to it. Well, I understand you to accept?"
"No, you don't."
"That is, to consent to help us with your advice and criticism. That's
all I want. It won't commit you to anything; and you can be as anonymous
as anybody." At the door Fulkerson added: "By-the-way, the new man--the
fellow that's taken my old syndicate business--will want you to keep on;
but I guess he's going to try to beat you down on the price of the
letters. He's going in for retrenchment. I brought along a check for this
one; I'm to pay for that." He offered Beaton an envelope.
"I can't take it, Fulkerson. The letter's paid for already." Fulkerson
stepped forward and laid the envelope on the table among the tubes of
paint.
"It isn't the letter merely. I thought you wouldn't object to a little
advance on your 'Every Other Week' work till you kind of got started."
Beaton remained inflexible. "It can't be done, Fulkerson. Don't I tell
you I can't sell myself out to a thing I don't believe in? Can't you
understand that?"
"Oh yes; I can understand that first-rate. I don't want to buy you; I
want to borrow you. It's all right. See? Come round when you can; I'd
like to introduce you to old March. That's going to be our address." He
put a card on the table beside the envelope, and Beaton allowed him to go
without making him take the check back. He had remembered his father's
plea; that unnerved him, and he promised himself again to return his
father's poor little check and to work on that picture and give it to
Fulkerson for the check he had left and for his back debts. He resolved
to go to work on the picture at once; he had set his palette for it; but
first he looked at Fulkerson's check. It was for only fifty dollars, and
the canny Scotch blood in Beaton rebelled; he could not let this picture
go for any such money; he felt a little like a man whose generosity has
been trifled with. The conflict of emotions broke him up, and he could
not work.