The Pagans Part 32

"For worshipping something," amended Tom. "That is the same thing differently phrased."

"No, it isn't, either. To yearn for the higher is not to show that we fear it, but that we long to grow like it. It is a confession of incompleteness, of weakness, I grant you; but a thousand times no to your calling it fear."

"I confess to having been hasty, and modify my words so far as to say; an expression of fear or weakness."

"Is there then any shame in acknowledging weakness?" demanded the German, pushing him as hard as he was able. "It certainly is honest."

"Is there any shame to formulating fear?" retorted the other, deftly evading him.

"Then see how religion always appeals to art to help out its ultimate expression," observed Rangely.

"And how it has failed," added Bently, "when it has not had art to help it. Puritanism tried to get on without art, and where is Puritanism?

You couldn't find a trace of it, if it hadn't come down on its marrow-bones and begged art to build its churches, compose its music, and regulate its rituals."

"It is no more fair to say that," objected another Pagan, doggedly, "than to say that art has gone to religion for help. Their accounts are pretty evenly balanced."

"Nonsense!" Rangely returned. "Art has never gained by being religious, but by being art; but religion owes its hold largely to the help art has given it."

"And it has paid its debts by blackguarding art from every pulpit it has builded for it."

"As Fenton used to say," Ainsworth remarked, "art has been used as the sugar-coating to the bitter pill of religion."

"Oh, Fenton again," Bently exclaimed impatiently. "What did you bring him up for? Who the devil would have thought Fenton would have turned out so?"

"I can tell you a piece of news," said Rangely. "The Election Committee blackballed Calvin this afternoon."

"Good!" cried they all; and some body added: "But Fenton said he'd resign if Calvin wasn't elected."

"Resign," echoed Rangely, "I guess he'll have to. He's been sent to Coventry by half the Club now for that Graves affair."

"The Graves affair?" some one queried. "What's that? What else has he been doing? If a man starts to go to the devil, it does seem as if he never could get ahead fast enough."

"Miss Graves was going to buy one of Flackerman's pictures, and heaven knows he needs the money; and Fenton, who has always pretended to be Flack's friend, talked her into taking one of his instead; or rather he got Calvin to go to her and do it. It was a stunning Flackerman, too; and we were all rejoicing over his luck."

"I would not be too ready to believe that story," Grant Herman said. "I don't think Fenton's gone utterly to the bad all at once. He's living expensively, they say, and possibly he let Calvin go to Miss Graves; but I don't believe Arthur ever originated that sneaking scheme, and I shouldn't be surprised if he never knew the rights of the case."

"He's done what so many artists have been bullied into doing before,"

Ainsworth observed. "If he has sold his birthright for a mess of pottage, that is precisely what the patrons of art in this country demand that every man shall do who comes here. I could tell you of a dozen good fellows who've been spoiled in that way. I am far enough outside to look on in an unbiased way; but they treat us architects in the same fashion. Lots of the most rubbishy and conventional men we have, started out to be fair and work from conviction; and they simply had the choice between subservience and starvation, and cases of the choice of death from starvation haven't been over plenty."

"Oh, a man is known by the tailor he keeps," threw in Rangely; "especially if he doesn't pay him."

"It's all a game of cut-throat," Bently remarked philosophically; "art and business alike."

"I should hate to have my throat cut," observed the German Pagan in a matter of fact tone; "it must let a dreadful draught into the system."

"Oh, if you were beheaded," cried Rangely, "you'd turn into a capital beer fountain, so your friends would find some consolation, even in your loss."

A diversion was caused here by the production of a splendid j.a.panese punch-bowl, supported upon a teakwood stand. In it the host proceeded to brew a potent and steaming mixture, whose fragrance must have delighted the jocund G.o.ds of jollity and laughter. Tom was notorious for being chronically in pecuniary difficulties, but he was always adding to his collection of _bibelots_, and he never was known to lack the means of concocting a glorious punch.

"Ye G.o.ds!" exclaimed Ainsworth, "how good that smells. It almost overcomes the general mustiness of Tom's den here, which usually has all the odors of the Ghetto from which his things are dragged."

"Casper is intoxicated already with the mere fumes," retorted Bently good humoredly. "He's bound to fill a drunkard's grave sooner or later."

"No; I never shall," chuckled the other. "I'm altogether too good natured to crowd the drunkard out."

This sally was received with applause, and the gla.s.ses being filled, the usual toasts to the G.o.ddess Pasht and to art were drank.

"And to our seven," went on Herman, holding up his gla.s.s, and going on with the formula they had, half unconsciously, fallen into the habit of using, although they made no pretense of having a ritual.

But he set his gla.s.s down untasted, suddenly remembering that their ranks were broken, and the others followed his example.

"The difference between religion and art," broke out Rangely, hurriedly, to cover the awkward silence which followed, "is that religion is a matter of tradition, of convention; it rests upon authority, while art springs from inner conviction."

"Sophistry," retorted the German, picking up the gauntlet; "there have been a good many things said here to-night which sound well but won't stand fire. It is precisely for following conventions in art that we blame Fenton."

"And that proves my point."

"No, it doesn't; there's as much art that depends upon tradition as there is religion."

"No," replied Rangely. "In so far as art gets its inspiration from fossil tradition it is lifeless and indeed ceases to be art. Religion presupposes something exterior; while art is the outgrowth of the individual's own mind, the best expression of his inner strength."

"Religion," Herman threw in, "demands the existence of the unknown; art only the existence of the inexpressible."

"Yet art devotes itself to expression."

"Yes, but more to suggesting. It phrases the possible so as to suggest that which is above and beyond expression, yet toward which it helps the emotions and the imagination. I think a man's soul a matter of very little moment as compared to his imagination, and it is because art ministers to the latter that I place it above religion."

The talk was diverted here by some laughing remark which led on to a train of gay badinage. The German tried to bring the conversation back to serious levels, but in vain.

"Oh, what fustian we've given ourselves up to to-night," laughed Rangely.

"It amuses me to hear you fellows discuss religion," Tom Bently observed. "You wander round the subject as aimlessly as the young women in the first half hour of a Harvard symphony concert."

"Never you mind, Bently," rejoined Ainsworth. "You are sure of coming out all right; the G.o.ds are bound to protect humbug, for on it depends their own existence."

They drifted in little groups to different parts of the studio, admiring this or that bit of grace or beauty. Then the German, who was a professional musician, tuned an old mandolin with which a Venetian lover some star-lit night centuries ago, may have serenaded his loved one from his gondola; and to its trembling accompaniment sang a quaint chansonette, his Teutonic accent making havoc among its liquid Italian syllables. Then Rangely possessed himself of a strange African instrument, a crooked gourd, hollowed and strung with twisted tree fibers, and joined to the notes of the mandolin, its weird, cicada-like harshness. The duet moved Bently to clear a miscellaneous collection of articles from the lid of a spinnet of the time of Louis XIV., upon which be-powdered and be-patched dames, long forgotten, had strummed pretty little tinkling tunes, while all about them other marionette-like ladies and gallants played at little tinkling loves, as pretty and as empty.

The three instruments, so strangely matched, went off together in a variety of music, imparting to every thing an uncanny, ghostly flavor, as if these airs came in wild echoes from the sh.o.r.es of some dead past.

"Oh, stop that," Herman cried, at last. "It's too melancholy. Your instruments are all dead; and it's no use trying to get live music out of them."

For reply the German led off in a drearisome minor folk-tune, Rangely and Bently improvising their parts with some skill, albeit not always with perfect harmony.

"Ye G.o.ds!" cried Ainsworth, seizing the mandolin out of the player's grasp. "Is this a Hottentot funeral? Here, Fred, give me that diabolical gourd; it is haunted by the soul of a Caffre medicine man."

"I say, fellows," spoke Rangely, as the din subsided, "I move we make this a funeral, by breaking up the Pagans. Of course there is nothing to hinder our meeting round at each other's places whenever we want to; but we've either got to turn Fenton out or break up. I, for one, am coward enough to prefer to break up."

"So say I," said Herman. "When once a circle like this is broken, there is an end of it. It can't be patched together."