The Veiled Lady, and Other Men and Women Part 14

Built in 1620, this inn of the Holland Arms--so the mildewed brick in the keystone over the arch of the doorway says--and once the home of a Dutchman made rich by the China trade, whose ships cast anchor where Fop Smit's steamboats now tie up (I have no interest in the Line); a grimy, green-moulded, lean-over front and moss-covered, sloping-roof sort of an inn, with big beams supporting the ceilings of the bedrooms; lumbering furniture blackened with the smoke of a thousand pipes flanking the walls of the coffee-room; bits of Delft a century old lining the mantel; tiny panes of gla.s.s with here and there a bull's-eye illumining the squat windows; rows of mugs with pewter tops crowding the narrow shelves beside the fireplace, and last, and by no means least, a big, bulky sun-moon-and-stars clock, with one eye always open, which strikes the hours as if it meant to beat the very life out of them.

But there is something more in this coffee-room--something that neither Mynheer Boudier of the Bellevue nor any other landlord in any other hostelry, great or small, up and down the Maas, can boast. This is the coffee-room picture gallery--free to whoever comes.

It began with a contribution from the first impecunious painter in payment of an overdue board-bill, his painting being hung on a nail beside the clock. Now; all over the walls--above the sideboard with its pewter plates and queer mugs; over the mantel holding the Delft, and between the squat windows--are pinned, tacked, pasted and hung--singly and in groups--sketches in oil, pastel, water color, pencil and charcoal, many without frames and most of them bearing the signature of some poor, stranded painter, preceded by the suggestive line, "To my dear friend, the landlord"--silent reminders all of a small cash balance which circ.u.mstances quite beyond their control had prevented their liquidating at the precise hour of their departure.

Mynheer had bowed and smiled as each new contribution was handed him and straightway had found a hammer and a nail and up it went beside its fellows. He never made objection: the more the merrier. The ice wind would soon blow across the Maas from Papendrecht, the tall gra.s.ses in the marshes turn pale with fright, and the lace-frost with busy fingers pattern the tiny panes, and then Johann would pack the kits one after another, and the last good-byes take place. But the sketches would remain. Oh! yes, the sketches would remain and tell the story of the summer and every night new mugs would be filled around the coal-fire, and new pipes lighted--mugs and pipes of the TOWNSPEOPLE this time, who came to feast their eyes,--and, although the summer was gone, the long winter would still be his. No, Mynheer never objected!

And this simple form of settlement--a note of hand (in color), payable in yearly patronage--has not been confined to modern times. Many an inn owes its survival to a square of canvas--the head of a child, a copper pot, or stretch of dune; and more than one collector now boasts of a masterpiece which had hung for years on some taproom wall, a sure but silent witness of the poverty of a Franz Hals, Wouverman or Van der Helst.

Each year had brought new additions to the impecunious group about Mynheer's table.

Dear old Marny, with his big boiler amidships, his round, sunburned face shaded by a wide-brimmed, slouch hat--the one he wore when he lived with the Sioux Indians--loose red tie tossed over one shoulder, and rusty velveteen coat, was an old habitue. And so was dry, crusty Malone, "the man from Dublin," rough outside as a potato and white inside as its meal. And so, too, was Stebbins, the silent man of the party, and the only listener in the group. All these came with the earliest birds and stayed until the boys got out their skates.

But there were others this year who were new. Pudfut, the Englishman, first--in from Norway, where he had been sketching on board some lord's yacht--he of the grizzly brown beard, brown ulster reaching to his toes, gray-checked steamer-cap and brierwood pipe--an outfit which he never changed--"slept in them," Marny insisted.

"Me name's Pudfut," he began, holding out his hand to Marny. "I've got a letter in my clothes for ye from a chap in Paris."

"Don't pull it out," had come the answer. "Put it there!" and within an hour the breezy fellow, his arm through the Englishman's, had trotted him all over Dort from the Groote Kerk to the old Gate of William of Orange, introducing him to every painter he met on the way, first as Pudfut, then as Puddy, then as Pretty-foot, then as Tootsie-Wootsie, and last as Toots--a name by which he is known in the Quartier to this day. This done, he had taken him up to his own room and had dumped him into an extra cot--his for the rest of the summer.

Then Schonholz wandered in--five gulden a week board was the magnet--a cheese-faced, good-natured German lad with forehead so high that when he raised his hat Marny declared, with a cry of alarm, that his scalp had slipped, and only regained his peace of mind when he had twisted his fat fingers in the lad's forelock to make sure that it was still fast. Schonholz had pa.s.sed a year at Heidelberg and carried his diploma on his cheek--two crisscross slashes that had never healed--spoke battered English, wore a green flat-topped cap, and gray bobtailed coat with two rows of horn b.u.t.tons ("Come to shoot chamois, have you?" Marny had asked when he presented his credentials.)--laughed three-quarters of the time he was awake, and never opened his kit or set a palette while he was in Dort. "Too vet and too fodgy all dime," was the way he accounted for his laziness.

Last came Joplin--a man of thirty-five; bald as an egg and as shiny.

("Dangerous to have a hen around," Marny would say, rubbing the pate after the manner of a phrenologist.) Gaunt, wiry; jerky in his movements as a Yankee clock and as regular in his habits: hot water when he got up--two gla.s.ses, sipped slowly; cold water when he went to bed, head first, feet next, then the rest of him; window open all night no matter how hard it blew or rained; ate three meals a day and no more; chewed every mouthful of food thirty times--coffee, soup, even his drinking-water (Gladstone had taught him that, he boasted)--a walking laboratory of a man, who knew it all, took no layman's advice, and was as set in his ways as a chunk of concrete.

And his fads did not stop with his food; they extended to his clothes--everything he used, in fact. His baggy knickerbockers ended in leather leggins to protect his pipe-stem shanks; his shirts b.u.t.toned all the way down in front and went on like a coat; he wore health flannels by day and a health shirt at night ("Just like my old Aunt Margaret's wrapper," whispered Marny in a stage voice to Pudfut); sported a ninety-nine-cent silver watch fastened to a leather strap (sometimes to a piece of twine); stuck a five-hundred-dollar scarab pin in his necktie--"Nothing finer in the Boston Museum," he maintained, and told the truth--and ever and always enunciated an English so pure and so undefiled that Stebbins, after listening to it for a few minutes, proposed, with an irreverence born of good-fellowship, that a subscription be started to have Joplin's dialect phonographed so that it might be handed down to posterity as the only real and correct thing.

"Are you noticing, gentlemen, the way in which Joplin handles his mother tongue?" Stebbins had shouted across the table: "never drops his 'g's,' never slights his first syllable; says 'HUmor' with an accent on the 'HU.' But for the fact that he p.r.o.nounces 'bonnet' 'BUNNIT' and 'admires' a thing when he really ought only to 'like' it, you could never discover his codfish bringing up. Out with your wallets--how much do you chip in?"

These peculiarities soon made Joplin the storm-centre of every discussion. Not only were his views on nutrition ridiculed, but all his fads were treated with equal disrespect. "Impressionism," "plein air,"

the old "line engraving" in contrast to the modern "half-tone"

methods--any opinion of Joplin's, no matter how sane or logical, was jostled, sat on, punched in the ribs and otherwise maltreated until every man was breathless or black in the face with a.s.sumed rage--every man except the man jostled, who never lost his temper no matter what the provocation, and who always came up smiling with some such remark as: "Smite away, you Pharisees; harmony is heavenly--but stupid. Keep it up--here's the other cheek!"

On this particular night Joplin, as I have said, had broken out on diet. Some movement of Marny's connected with the temporary relief of the lower b.u.t.ton of his waistcoat had excited the great Bostonian's wrath. The men were seated at dinner inside the coffee-room, Johann and Tine serving.

"Yes, Marny, I'm sorry to say it, but the fact is you eat too much and you eat the wrong things. If you knew anything of the kinds of food necessary to nourish the human body, you would know that it should combine in proper proportions proteid, fats, carbohydrates and a small percentage of inorganic salts--these are constantly undergoing oxidation and at the same time are liberating energy in the form of heat."

"Hear the b.l.o.o.d.y bounder!" bawled Pudfut from the other end of the table.

"Silence!" called Marny, with his ear cupped in his fingers, an expression of the farthest-away-boy-in-the-cla.s.s on his face.

Joplin waved his hand in protest and continued, without heeding the interruption: "Now, if you're stupid enough to stuff your epigastrium with pork, you, of course, get an excess of non-nitrogenous fats, and in order to digest anything properly you must necessarily cram in an additional quant.i.ty of carbohydrates--greens, potatoes, cabbage--whatever Tine shoves under your nose. Consult any scientist and see if I am not right--especially the German doctors who have made a specialty of nutrition. Such men as Fugel, Beenheim and--"

Here a slice of Tine's freshly-cut bread made a line-shot, struck the top of Joplin's scalp, caromed on Schonholz's shirt-front and fell into Stebbins's lap, followed instantly by "Order, gentlemen!" from Marny.

"Don't waste that slab of proteid. The learned Bean is most interesting and should not be interrupted."

"Better out than in," continued Joplin, brushing the crumbs from his plate. "Bread--fresh bread particularly--is the very worst thing a man can put into his stomach."

"And how about pertaties?" shouted Malone. "I s'pose ye'd rob us of the only thing that's kep' us alive as a nation, wouldn't ye?"

"I certainly would, 'Loney, except in very small quant.i.ties. Raw potatoes contain twenty-two per cent. of the worst form of non-nitrogenous food, and seventy-eight per cent. of water. You, Malone, with your sedentary habits, should never touch an ounce of potato. It excites the epigastric nerve and induces dyspepsia. You're as lazy as the devil and should only eat nitrogenous food and never in excess. What you require is about one hundred grams of protein, giving you a fuel value of twenty-seven hundred calories, and to produce this fifty-five ounces of food a day is enough. When you exceed this you run to flesh--unhealthy bloat really--and in the wrong places. You've only to look at Marny's sixty-inch waist-line to prove the truth of this theory. Now look at me--I keep my figure, don't I? Not a bad one for a light-weight, is it? I'm in perfect health, can run, jump, eat, sleep, paint, and but for a slight organic weakness with my heart, which is hereditary in my family and which kills most of us off at about seventy years of age, I'm as sound as a nut. And all--all, let me tell you, due to my observing a few scientific laws regarding hygiene which you men never seem to have heard of."

Malone now rose to his feet, pewter mug in hand, and swept his eye around the table.

"Bedad, you're right, Joppy," he said with a wink at Marny--"food's the ruination of us all; drink is what we want. On yer feet, gintlemen--every mother's son of ye! Here's to the learned, livin'

skeleton from Boston! Five per cint. man and ninety-five per cint.

crank!"

II

The next morning the group of painters--all except Joplin, who was doing a head in "smears" behind the Groote Kerk a mile away--were at work in the old shipyard across the Maas at Papendrecht. Marny was painting a Dutch lugger with a brown-madder hull and an emerald-green stern, up on the ways for repairs. Pudfut had the children of the Captain posed against a broken windla.s.s rotting in the tall gra.s.s near the dock, and Malone and Schonholz, pipe in mouth, were on their backs smoking. "It wasn't their kind of a mornin'," Malone had said.

Joplin's discourse the night before was evidently lingering in their minds, for Pudfut broke out with: "Got to sit on Joppy some way or we'll be talked to death," and he squeezed a tube of color on his palette. "Getting to be a b.l.o.o.d.y nuisance."

"Only one way to fix him," remarked Stebbins, picking up his mahlstick from the gra.s.s beside him.

"How?" came a chorus.

"Scare him to death."

The painters laid down their brushes. Stebbins rarely expressed an opinion; any utterance from him, therefore, carried weight.

"Go for him about his health, I tell you," continued Stebbins, dragging a brush from the sheaf in his hand.

"But there's nothing the matter with him," answered Marny. "He's as skinny as a coal-mine mule, but he's got plenty of kick in him yet."

"You're dead right, Marny," answered Stebbins, "but he doesn't think so. He's as big a fool over every little pain as he is over his theories."

"Niver cracked his jaw to me about it," sputtered Malone from between the puffs of his pipe.

"No, and he won't. I don't jump on him as you fellows do and so I get his confidence. He's in my room two or three times every night going over his symptoms. When his foot's asleep he thinks he's got creeping paralysis. Every time his breath comes short, his heart's giving out."

"That's hereditary!" said Marny; "he said so."

"Hereditary be hanged! Same with everything else. Last night he dug me out of bed and wanted me to count his pulse--thought it intermitted.

He's hipped, I tell you, on his health!"

"That's because he lives on nothing," rejoined Marny. "Tine puts the toast in the oven over night so it will be dry enough for him in the morning--she told me so yesterday. Now he's running on sour milk and vinegar--'blood too alkaline,' he says--got a chalky taste in his mouth!"

"Well, whatever it is, he's a rum-nuisance," said Pudfut, "and he ought to be jumped on."

"Yes," retorted Stebbins, "but not about his food. Jump on him about his health, then he'll kick back and in pure obstinacy begin to think he's well--that's his nature."

"Don't you do anything of the kind," protested Marny. "Joppy's all right--best lad I know. Let him talk; doesn't hurt anybody and keeps everything alive. A little hot air now and then helps his epigastric."

Malone and Schonholz had raised themselves on their elbows, twisted their shoulders and had put their heads together--literally--without lifting their lazy bodies from the warm, dry gra.s.s--so close that one slouch hat instead of two might have covered their conspiring brains.

From under the rims of these thatches came smothered laughs and such unintelligible mutterings as: