Ewing's Lady Part 14

"Some of those you can sell, undoubtedly. The others show what you can do. They'll get your orders. The magazines are using a lot of Western stuff. That ranchman's wife there in her poor little flower garden, surrounded by a million miles of sage and cactus--fine! It's a story picture, and the story's good. The Knickerbocker might use that. They might want a series from you--six drawings or so--'Scenes of Ranch Life.'"

"It sounds too good."

"It's not, and you'll get stories to ill.u.s.trate. Can you draw a pretty cowboy?"

"Pretty?"

"The kind in the magazine story. Harvard man, half-back, old New York family, named Van-Something or other; unhappy love affair; tries ranch life; fearless rider, dead shot 'six feet of clean-limbed, virile young manhood,' is the approved phrase for him. He's a beautiful thing--his man keeps his chaps pressed, and he never is seen needing a shave----"

Ewing grinned appreciatively.

"Girl comes out from New York," continued Piersoll--"_the_ girl, with her fierce aunt--home on north side of Washington Square. I'm going to do an article on the story people who've had fine old homes on the north side of Washington Square--thousands! That one block would have to be ten miles long to hold 'em. Girl in tea gown, fierce aunt with lorgnon--threatened with death--flood, fire, Apaches, stage-robbers, vicious bull, rattler--anything! Rescued by cool, daring, clean-limbed Van-Soforth, who says 'By Jove!' as he risks his life. That is, if it's in one of the respectable magazines. If it's only a young ten-center he says 'd.a.m.n!' right out in print. Then, love scene on mesa, faithful cow pony and mountains in background, and return to New York by next train, with clean-limbed Harold in one of our gent's n.o.bby sack suits that sets off the unconscious grace of his slight but muscular figure--oh, you know the story."

"I have read it somewhere--something like it."

"You'll go on reading it. But you'll have to pretty your cowboys if you make the pictures for it. Hulston usually ill.u.s.trates it. He can draw a cowboy that would make a bunch of violets look coa.r.s.e."

"I'm afraid I couldn't----"

"Of course you couldn't. But you'll find work. Some of the magazines are becoming reckless and printing stories of cowboys that are almost real. Come along to the club. You'll meet some fellows there. The chap that printed my book is dining with me, but he'll slip off early and we can have the evening together."

"I liked your book," Ewing ventured, when they were in the street.

"Well, that's comforting. I dare say it was easier to read than it was to write. But about this club you're going to--it's a little place we've started lately--ill.u.s.trators, newspaper men, book writers and that ilk.

You must join. I believe I'll be safe in putting you up."

"I never joined a club," Ewing confessed. "Are there conditions?"

"Rigid ones--you must have ten dollars for the entrance-fee, and not be a leper."

"Well"--Ewing debated--"I have the money----"

"That's all _you_ need think about. The other part is ours. We have you in to dine and look you over. Lots of men go there with an idea that they must be witty. One fellow was turned down last week for springing 'made' jokes at the table. I believe he spoke of 'quail on trust' as we were served with that bird--and in the hearing of three members of the board of Abbots. That settled him, of course. They didn't need his imitations of a German dialect comedian, which he sought to convulse them with later. Another man was turned down lately for saying, 'Oh, how quaintly bohemian!' after he'd looked about the grill room. Another was ejected for playing 'chopsticks' on the piano with the edges of his hands. They didn't even let _him_ get to the table. That's the sort of thing--and we're strict, even though we need the money. I'm bursar and I know. There are weird jests about my decamping with the club funds, but I've never had enough surplus yet to take me beyond Rahway."

They ascended the steps of a dingy-fronted brick house in Clinton Place, a little out of the Broadway rush. Pa.s.sing through a bare, echoing hall, they entered one of the two dining rooms of the club, connected by immense sliding doors, now thrown open. They were broad, lofty rooms with stained floors, mantels of gray marble, and rich old doors of polished mahogany framed in white cas.e.m.e.nts--the drawing rooms of some staid family of a bygone generation, before the trade army had invaded this once quiet neighborhood.

Ewing at once noticed the walls. They had been covered with a grayish-brown cartridge paper, and on this the members of the Monastery had plied their charcoal in fancies more or less attuned to the spirit of the organization. There were monks in most of the pictures, monks combating or, alas! overborne by one or another of that meretricious trinity which ever conspires against G.o.dly living. Over the mantel in the first room a pink-fleshed nymph in simple garb of chef's cap allured an all but yielding St. Anthony with one of the club's dinner _menus_ held before his hunger-lit eyes. On a panel to the right of this a befuddled lay brother, having emptied a flagon of wine, perched on the arm of a chair and angled fatuously in a jar of mocking goldfish, to the refrain:

"For to-morrow will be Friday, and We've caught no fish to-day!"

To the left, Brother Hilarius furtively ignored his breviary as he pa.s.sed a gay _affiche_, from which a silken-limbed dancer beguiled him with nimble, worldly caperings, and smiles of the flesh and the devil.

"There's a vacant panel or two in the other room," said Piersoll. "We'll save one for you. Come down to the grill room--it's early yet."

They went out through the hall and down a narrow stairway. They heard the lively hum of voices, and Ewing found himself in a low, wainscoted room, finished in dull gray, where a dozen or so men talked loungingly in corners, awaiting the dinner hour.

Piersoll presented him to several of these in so quick a succession that their names became a many-syllabled murmur in his ears. They found seats on a red-cushioned corner bench of churchly pattern, and Piersoll ordered c.o.c.ktails.

Ewing tried to follow the talk running about him. A boyish-looking reporter for a morning paper was telling at a nearby table how he had been the first to reach the scene of a railroad wreck in Pennsylvania late the night before by fording a swollen river. At another table a successful playwright obligingly expounded the laws of dramatic construction to a respectful novice, who seemed puzzled by their simplicity. At their own table a youth of yellow melancholy confided to Piersoll that the afternoon had witnessed an important transaction in verse--the sale of his ballade, "She Was a Belle in the Days of Daguerre." "The editor of 'Quips' took it and paid on acceptance--let's have another," he added with deep significance.

The atmosphere of the place was unthinkingly democratic. The cub reporter here met his city editor as man to man. Piersoll identified various members of the gathering--the dramatic critic of an evening paper in busy talk with the Wall Street man of the same sheet; a promising young composer cornered by the star reporter of a morning paper, a grizzled knight of the world of war, crime, flood, fire, and all mischance of any news value, a man who had attained the dignity of signing his "stuff." Old men and young, they were compacted of nerves, vividly alive, even those in whom the desk stoop could be detected.

The movable feast of the c.o.c.ktail waned and the groups drifted upstairs.

The publisher for whom Piersoll waited came at last, a bland but keen-eyed gentleman of early middle age, introduced to Ewing as Mr.

Layton, of Layton & Company. They followed the others up to the dining room, and Piersoll found a table for three under the drawing of the earnest but miscalculating angler.

Ewing nervously apprehended talk of an abstruse literary character from which he would be debarred. The talk a.s.suredly became abstruse, but it dealt in literary values solely as related to public taste in the novel of commerce, and to the devices of Layton & Company for divining and stimulating that variable quant.i.ty.

Instead of descanting on Shakespeare, as Ewing had supposed a publisher would do, Layton, with the soup, plunged into a racy narrative of how he had "boomed" sales of "The Mask of Malcolm" the year before. That had been a success compounded of trifles. Witness Layton's chance view from a car window of a "Mask of Malcolm" poster on a watering cart that toiled through the dusty main street of a remote Western village. He had written to the postmaster of that town for the name of the cart's driver, sent him a copy of the novel inscribed by the author, and enough more posters to cover his cart. Result: a sale in the aroused village and surrounding country of two hundred and eighty "Masks," where otherwise not more than half a dozen would have been sold. Further result: the watering carts of the great mid-West were now cunningly blazoned with incitements to purchase Layton & Company's fiction.

Ewing still feared Shakespeare or Chaucer, or George Eliot, at the least; but the publisher clung to earth, launching into his plans for Piersoll's next book. "The Promotion of Fools" was in its hundredth thousand. The next book must go beyond this.

"You want a smashing good love scene at the end," urged the sapient Layton, "and plenty of good, plain, honest heart feeling all through it.

Make a quaintly humorous character, simple-minded, trusting, but still shrewd, and win the reader's sympathy for him by giving him some sort of hard luck--a crippled child that dies isn't bad, if the father has been harsh to him some time, not meaning to be, you know. And not too much dialect; enough to contrast well with the Fifth Avenue people. Then, with the kind of hero you know how to draw--swell family, handsome, refined, a real gentleman, and all that sort of thing, with an English valet--you'll have a story that will _go_. You can write a winner, Piersoll, if you'll listen to your publisher. We keep our fingers on the public pulse; we know the taste better than you can know it, shut up in your office. And have a good, catchy dedication--people are interested in your personality. Couldn't you have in the next book something like 'To my Mother in Heaven, whose Memory----'"

"Our people are all Unitarians," suggested Piersoll.

"What difference does _that_ make----"

"And my mother has been graciously spared to us----"

"Well, then, 'To my Gray-haired Mother, whose Loving Counsel has ever--'

_you_ know the sort of thing, short and snappy, but full of feeling. It helps, let me tell you, with the people who pick up a book on the stands."

Ewing lost the run of this talk for a time, entertaining himself with a study of the other diners. The rooms had rapidly filled, and two waiters scurried among the tables. His attention focused on a long table in the center of the room, whose occupants made savage and audible comment on diners at other tables, and confided to one another, in loud, free tones, their frank impressions of late comers.

The door opened upon a goodly youth in evening dress. Seven pairs of eyes from the big table fixed him coldly as he removed his overcoat.

A voice, affectedly mincing: "As I live--handsome Harold Armytage!"

Another voice, hoa.r.s.e with rage: "Curse ye, devil that ye are, with yer oily tongue and city ways! where's me daughter Letty, me little la.s.s, that ye took up to the big city and threatened to make a lady of?"

A voice, hushed and slow: "They--say--the--child--is--in--London."

The newcomer, flicking the ash from his cigarette, glowered at the last speaker and hissed: "As for you, Black Bart, alias Jasper Vinton, remember that one word from me would set all Scotland Yard on your trail!"

A new voice from the table: "Stand back, Hector Walsingham! I would rather be the poor working girl I am than the gilded toy your wealth would make me--and besides, you wear made ties! I'll have to speak to the stage manager about that," continued the speaker in less dramatic tones. "Look, it's one of those horrible made things that fasten at the back of his neck with a harness buckle--see his hand go up to it!"

The newcomer emitted a mocking laugh, but judiciously sought a seat in the next room.

"Say--new idea for a melodrama," came another voice from the long table.

"The old thing with an Ibsen twist. Stern father ready to drive erring daughter from his door in a snowstorm, but _it won't snow_! Of course he can't send her off in pleasant weather. It clouds up every few days, and the old man hopefully gets his speech ready--'Curse ye, ye are no longer a daughter of mine!' but the sun comes out again. Girl gets nervous.

Young squire gets nervous, too, though he's married the girl in secret.

He begs the old man to put her out and have it over with, even if the weather is pleasant. Old man won't hear of such a thing. Got to have a howling snowstorm. His mind fails; he sits in the chimney corner driveling about the horrible winters they used to have when you could curse a daughter out almost any day in the week. Everybody disgusted at the way things are dragging. Young people quarrel. Divorce! Young squire sails for Labrador to try it again, where you can count on the winters.

Girl watches ship out of sight, and _it snows_! Snows hard. But too late--ah, G.o.d, too late! She rushes back home to find the old man delirious with joy. He starts in to do his speech at last, but she slowly strangles him with her muscular young hands. Rather good curtain, that--yes?" He looked around the table appealingly, but the others had turned from him to another newcomer, a young man of dark and sinister aspect, whom they greeted as Simon Legree. Ewing heard Eliza's despairing cry, "Merciful Heavens, the river is choked with ice!" above the deep baying of bloodhounds that issued from half a dozen able throats. The newcomer was obliging enough to scowl and demand fiercely, "Tom, you black rascal, ain't you mine, body and soul?"

A fair-haired youth at the table, with the face of an overfed Cupid, responded pleadingly: "No--no, Ma.s.sa! Mah body may b'long to yo' but mah soul to de good Lawd who made it!"