The Fortunes of Oliver Horn Part 36

"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 cla.s.s 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 ma.s.s 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 sh.o.r.es 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 a.s.sociations 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 s.p.a.ce 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sed 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 st.i.tch 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 s.p.a.ce 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 sc.r.a.ping 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 s...o...b..ring 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."