The Pagans Part 6

In one corner a flight of stairs led to a gallery high up against the wall, over the rude railing of which looked the heads of a couple of legless statues. From this gallery the stairs continued to ascend until a door near the roof was reached, leading to unknown regions well up in the building behind which the studio had been built as an afterthought.

On shelves were confusedly disposed dusty bits of bronze, plaster, coa.r.s.e pottery and rare gla.s.s; things valueless and things beyond price standing in careless fellowship. A canvas of Corot looked down upon a grotesque, grimacing j.a.panese idol, a beautiful bronze reproduction of a vase by Michael Angelo stood shoulder to shoulder with a bean-pot full of tobacco; a crumpled cravat was thrown carelessly over the arm of a dancing faun, while a cl.u.s.ter of Barye's matchless animals were apparently making their way with great difficulty through a collection of pipes, broken modeling tools, faded flowers and loose papers. Every where it was evident that the studio of Herman differed from heaven in at least its first law.

Quite in keeping with the picturesque, richly stored room, was the group of men walking about the place or seated near the rough table upon which refreshments were placed. On this table were a couple of splendid punch-bowls of antique cut gla.s.s, which, if not full now, had unmistakable marks of having been so earlier in the evening. A coa.r.s.e dish of yellow earthen ware beside them held an ample supply of biscuits, and was in turn flanked by a couple of plates of cheese.

Fruit, beer, and tobacco in various forms, with abundant gla.s.ses and pipes, completed the furnishing of the board, upon which a newspaper supplied the place of a cloth.

Tom Bently's long, shapely limbs were disposed in a big easy-chair by the table, his tongue being just now employed in one of his not infrequent harangues upon art, his remarks being plentifully spiced with profanity.

"Whatever crazy ideas on art," Bently was saying, "aren't good for any thing else have to be put into a book. The surest recommendation in art circles is getting out a book or giving a rubbishy lecture. Every woman who has painted a few bunches of flowers or daubed a little pottery, writes a book to tell how she did it; as if it were the most astonishing thing in the world."

"Women are very like hens," interpolated Fenton; "they always cackle most over the smallest egg."

"If any one of the crew," continued Bently, "could appreciate a fiftieth part of the suggestions in a single sketch of an old master, she might have something to write about."

"But then she would know enough to keep still," said Rangely.

"Oh, a woman never knows enough to keep still," Bently retorted. "It is d.a.m.ned amusing to hear the average American----"

A chorus of protestations arose.

"We'll have nothing about the 'Average American,' Bently!"

"Start somebody else on his hobby," suggested Ainsworth; "that's the only way to choke Bently off. Where's Fenton? I never knew him quiet for so long in my life."

Arthur had been watching his companions and smoking in silence. He smiled brilliantly at Ainsworth's challenge.

"I'm overwhelmed by Bently's oaths," he said. "He outdoes himself to-night."

"When it comes time for Tom's epitaph," observed Rangely, "I shall suggest that it be a dash."

"Why do you swear so?" inquired Ainsworth. "Don't you think it in execrable taste?"

"Taste?" laughed Bently. "Yes; it's so far above all taste as to be a--sight higher and bigger."

"I make a distinction," Herman put in good naturedly, "between swearing and blasphemy; and Tom never blasphemes. His cursing is all in the interest of the highest virtues."

"Profanity is like smoking," added Tom. "Every thing depends upon how you do it. The English, for instance, smoke for the brutality of the thing; they never have any of the French _finesse,_ and their smoking is nothing less than a crime. But as the Arabs smoke it is one of the loftiest virtues; there's something G.o.dlike about it.

"It is from smoking," Fenton chimed in, "that the Orientals learned how to treat women; for a woman is like tobacco, the aroma should be enjoyed and the ashes thrown away."

"By George!" exclaimed one of the Pagans, moved by some rare compunction to remember that he had a wife at home, "that's infamous, Arthur."

"It is my belief," observed Ainsworth deliberately, "that Fenton lies awake nights to invent beastly things to say about women, and when he gets something that he thinks is smart he throws it into the conversation any where, without the slightest regard to whether it fits or not."

"What makes you so bitter against women?" asked Bently.

"Yes," added Rangely, with mock deprecation. "Why do you want to annihilate the s.e.x? What harm have women ever done to you?"

"Oh," retorted the artist, "it is on theoretical principles, purely. I adore that masculine ideal which man calls woman, but only finds in his brain. The highest on earth is reached only by the absolute elimination of the feminine. Ah! man is at his best in war," he went on, his att.i.tude becoming less studied and more forcible, as he allowed his intellectual interest to overpower his vanity; "there he is all masculine; man without the limitations that the presence of woman imposes upon him. There woman is ignored, and even if she has been the cause of the war--and to be the cause of war is woman's n.o.blest prerogative!--she is for the time being as completely forgotten as if she had never existed. She slips into oblivion as does the horn of grog which gives his courage."

Fenton was in a mood when he fancied he was talking well, a conviction which was not always an accurate measure of the real worth of his remarks. He delighted in presenting half truths in forcible phraseology, relishing the taste of an epigram quite without reference to its verity. He amused himself and his friends with talk more or less brilliant, of which no one knew better than himself the fallacy, but whose cleverness atoned with him for all defects. The intellectual excitement of giving free rein to his fancy and his tongue was dangerously pleasant to Arthur, who often more than half convinced himself of the verity of his extravagant theories, and oftener still involved himself in their defense by yielding to the mere whim of phrasing them effectively.

"You are on your high horse to-night, Fenton," cried Rangely, "you make no more of a metaphor than a racer of a hurdle."

"Don't stop him," Ainsworth said. "Let him run the course out now he's on the track."

"When man comes into his kingdom," Fenton broke out again, too fully aroused to mind the banter, yet with a sort of double consciousness enjoying the absurdity of the whole conversation, "when man comes into his kingdom, when we get to the perfection of the race, there will be no women. The ultimate man will be masculine--men, only men; gloriously and eternally masculine!" "But how will the race perpetuate itself?"

asked Tom in as matter of fact a tone as he might have inquired the time of day.

"Perpetuate itself!" blazed the other. "The race will not need to perpetuate itself. The world will be peopled with G.o.ds! When once women are gone the race will have become immortal!"

A shout of mingled applause and derision greeted this outburst, amid which Fenton threw himself back in a lounging chair and lighted a fresh cigar. He was intoxicated with himself, and few draughts are more dangerous.

"Take to the lecture platform, Fenton," jeered Ainsworth. "You'll make your mark in the world yet."

"I wonder you stopped at immortality," remarked Fred Rangely. "You usually go on to dispose of the future state."

"Impossible," retorted the artist, "for you never heard me say I believed in one."

"That's a fact," confessed the other, "but you insist so emphatically that women have no moral sense that your philosophy certainly would dispose of them if it allow any future state."

"For my part," declared Herman, "I've heard Fenton talk nonsense as long as I want to; let's look at the pictures."

An informal exhibition had been arranged, consisting of pictures loaned by friends, and including several by members of the club. The most important of the latter was a gypsy which Bently had just completed, and which exhibited that artist's defects and excellences in the emphatic manner usual with his productions. The _motif_ was better than the _technique_, but Bently's splendid feeling for color somehow carried him through, and made the picture not only striking but rich and suggestive.

"If you could learn to draw, Tom," Fenton said, as they stood looking at it, "you'd be the biggest man in America."

"Is that the new model you were talking about?" asked Rangely.

"Yes," Bently answered. "Isn't she a stunner?"

"I thought that shoulder was something new," put in Fenton. "The girl poses well; trust a woman with shoulders like that to know how to display them."

"Good heavens!" exclaimed Grant Herman in sudden and rare irritation, "can you never have done slurring at women? Didn't you have a mother?

In heaven's name let some woman escape your tongue for her sake!"

Such an outburst from their host produced a profound sensation upon the Pagans. The most tolerant of men, he was accustomed to listen to their wholesale denunciations of all things with a good natured smile, contenting himself with a calm contradiction now and then. Proverbial for his patience and good temper, he produced the greater sensation now when he gave vent to his anger upon a subject which not only Fenton but every guest present usually considered fair game.

"I'm sorry I vexed you, Herman," Fenton said, turning to him after a moment's silence, "but however much I've abused women, you never heard me blackguard a woman in your life."

"You are right," the sculptor replied, catching the other's slender hand in his stalwart grasp. "I beg your pardon. I'm out of sorts, I suppose, or I shouldn't be quarreling like a Christian. Let's brew a new bowl and drink to Pagan harmony."

VIII.

THE INLY TOUCH OF LOVE.

Two Gentlemen of Verona; ii.--7.