The Adventures of a Modest Man. Chambers Robert William
rather an unusual story," he said. "Would you care to hear it?"
"Does it portray, with your well known literary skill, the confusion of a parent?" I inquired cautiously. "If it does, don't tell it."
"It doesn't."
"Oh. Nobody puts it all over the old man?"
"No, not in this particular instance. Shall I begin?"
"Shoot," I said.
He began with his usual graceful gesture:
Landon was dead broke.
As it had not been convenient for him to breakfast that morning, he was irritable. The mockery of handsome hangings and antique furniture in the outer studio increased his irritation as he walked through it into the rough, inner workshop, which was hung with dusty casts and dreary with clay and plaster.
Here Ellis found him, an hour later, smoking a cigarette to deceive his appetite, and sulkily wetting down the clay bust of a sheep-faced old lady – an order of the post-mortem variety which he was executing from a gruesome photograph.
"How," inquired Ellis, "is the coy Muse treating you these palmy, balmy days?"
Landon swore and squirted a spongeful of water over the old lady's side curls.
"My! my! As bad as that?" commented Ellis, raising his eyebrows. "I thought you expected to be paid for that tombstone."
"Man, I've been eating, drinking, and sleeping on that tombstone all winter. Last night I gnawed off the 'Hic Jacet' and washed it down with the date. There's nothing left."
"You've – ah – breakfasted, dear friend?"
"That's all right – "
"Have you?"
"No. But there's a man from Fourth Avenue coming to buy some of that superfluous magnificence in the show studio. Besides, I'll be paid for this old lady in a day or two – Where are you going?"
"Out," said Ellis, briefly.
Landon, left alone, threw a bit of wet clay at the doorknob, stood irresolutely, first on one foot, then on the other; then with a hearty scowl at the sheep-faced old lady washed her complacent face with a dripping sponge.
"Williams!" I interrupted violently, "how do you know all those details?"
"My Lord, man!" he retorted; "I write for a living. I've got to know them."
"Go on, then," I said.
He went on:
A few moments later Ellis came in with rolls, milk and fruit.
"That's very decent of you," said Landon, but the other cut him short, excitedly.
"Jim, who is the divinity I just met in your hallway? Yours?"
"What divinity?"
"Her hair," said Ellis, a little wildly, "is the color of Tuscan gold; her eyes, ultra marine; and the skin of her is just pure snow with a brushful of carmine across the lips – and the Great Sculptor Himself must have moulded her body – "
Landon shrugged and buttered a roll. "You let her alone," he said.
"Reveal to me instantly her name, titles, and quality!" shouted Ellis, unsheathing a Japanese sword.
"Her name," said Landon, "is O'Connor; her quality is that of a shopgirl. She is motherless and alone, and inhabits a kennel across the hall. Don't make eyes at her. She'll probably believe whatever the first gentlemanly blackguard tells her."
Ellis said: "Why may I not – in a delicately detached and gayly impersonal, yet delightfully and evasively irrational manner, calculated to deceive nobody – "
"That would sound very funny in the Latin Quarter. This is New York." He rose, frowning. Presently he picked up the sponge. "Better let a lonely heart alone, unless you're in earnest," he said, and flung the sponge back into a bucket of water, dried his hands, and looked around.
"Have you sold any pictures yet?"
"Not one. I thought I had a Copper King nailed to the easel, but Fate separated us on a clinch and he got away and disappeared behind the bars of his safe deposit. How goes the market with you?"
"Dead. I can live on my furniture for a while."
"I thought you were going in on that competition for the Department of Peace at Washington."
"I am, if I have enough money left to hire a model."
Ellis rose, twirled his walking-stick meditatively, glanced at his carefully brushed hat, and placed it gravely on his head.
"Soon," he said cheerfully, "it will be time for straw hats. But where I'm going to get one I don't know. Poverty used to be considered funny in the Quarter; but it's no idle jest in this town. Well – I'll let your best girl alone, Jim, if you feel that way about it."
They laughed and shook hands.
In the corridor Ellis looked hard at the closed door opposite, and his volatile heart gave a tortured thump; he twirled his stick and sauntered out into Stuyvesant Square.
CHAPTER V
DREAMLAND
As winter faded into spring the first tracery of green fringed the branches in Stuyvesant Square. The municipal authorities decorated the grass with tulips and later with geraniums. Later still, cannas and foliage plants were planted, over which two fountains spurted aqua Crotonis.
But in spite of tasteless horticulture it is a quaint old square, a little sad and shabby, perhaps, yet mercifully green inside its two iron-railed parallelograms. Above the great sycamores and elms the truncated towers of St. George's brood heavily; along the short, leafy reach of Rutherford Place an old-time Quaker meeting-house keeps gentle vigil; northward, aged mansions peer at the square through time-dimmed windows; south, above the Sisters of The Assumption, a painted Virgin clasps her stone hands and looks down on the little children of the poor.
Along the east side of the square runs Livingston Place; behind it an elevated railroad roars; in front lies the square, shabby, unkempt, but lovely always, when night lends to it her mystery. For at night the trees loom gigantic; lights sparkle over lawn and fountain; the illuminated dial of St. George's hangs yellow as a harvest moon above the foliage; and the pleasant bell sounds from the towers, changing, for a moment, the streets' incessant monotone to a harmony.
Into this square went Landon; oftener, as the summer grew hotter and work grew scarcer.
Once, at the close of a scorching afternoon, his pretty neighbour from across the corridor came slowly into the square and rested for a few moments on the same bench he occupied.
So lovely and fresh and sweet she seemed in the early dusk that he, for an instant, was tempted from his parched loneliness to speak to her; but before he could bring himself to it she turned, recognized him, rose and went back to the house without a second glance.
"We've been neighbours for a year," he thought, "and she has never been civil enough to look at me yet – and I've been too civil to look at her. I was an ass."
He was wrong; she had looked at him often, when unafraid that his eyes might surprise her.
He was amusingly wrong. Waking, she remembered him; during the long day she thought of him; at night, when she returned from business, the radiance from his studio lamp streaming through the transom had for her all the thrilling fascination that a lighted shop window, at Christmas, has for a lonesome child passing in darkness.
From the dim monotony of her own life she had, at times, caught glimpses through his open door of splendours scarcely guessed. In her eyes an enchanted world lay just beyond his studio's threshold; a bright, warm, mellow wonderland, indistinct in the golden lamplight, where only a detail here and there half revealed a figured tapestry or carved foliation – perhaps some soft miracle of ancient Eastern weaving on the floor, perhaps a mysterious marble shape veiled in ruddy shadow – enough to set her youthful imagination on fire, enough to check her breath and start the pulses racing as she turned the key in her own door and reëntered the white dusk of her own life once more.
The