Murder in Any Degree. Owen Johnson
She is one who understands. Her husband adores her, and he is in love with a woman a month. When he gets in too deep, ready for another inspiration, you know, she calls up the old love on the telephone and asks her to stop annoying her husband."
"Marvelous!" said Steingall, dropping his glasses.
"No, really?" said Rankin.
"Has she a sister?" said Towsey.
Stibo raised his eyes slowly to Quinny's but veiled as was the look, De Gollyer perceived it, and smilingly registered the knowledge on the ledger of his social secrets.
"That's it, by George! that is it," said Steingall, who hurled the enthusiasm of a reformer into his pessimism. "It's all so simple; but they won't understand. And why—do you know why? Because a woman is jealous. It isn't simply of other women. No, no, that's not it; it's worse than that, ten thousand times worse. She's jealous of your art! That's it! There you have it! She's jealous because she can't understand it, because it takes you away from her, because she can't share it. That's what's terrible about marriage—no liberty, no individualism, no seclusion, having to account every night for your actions, for your thoughts, for the things you dream—ah, the dreams! The Chinese are right, the Japanese are right. It's we Westerners who are all wrong. It's the creative only that counts. The woman should be subordinated, should be kept down, taught the voluptuousness of obedience. By Jove! that's it. We don't assert ourselves. It's this confounded Anglo-Saxon sentimentality that's choking art—that's what it is."
At the familiar phrases of Steingall's outburst, Rankin wagged his head in unequivocal assent, Stibo smiled so as to show his fine upper teeth, and Towsey flung away his cigar, saying:
"Words, words."
At this moment when Quinny, who had digested Steingall's argument, was preparing to devour the whole topic, Britt Herkimer, the sculptor, joined them. He was a guest, just in from Paris, where he had been established twenty years, one of the five men in art whom one counted on the fingers when the word genius was pronounced. Mentally and physically a German, he spoke English with a French accent. His hair was cropped en brosse, and in his brown Japanese face only the eyes, staccato, furtive, and drunk with curiosity, could be seen. He was direct, opinionated, bristling with energy, one of those tireless workers who disdain their youth and treat it as a disease. His entry into the group of his more socially domesticated confrères was like the return of a wolf-hound among the housedogs.
"Still smashing idols?" he said, slapping the shoulder of Steingall, with whom and Quinny he had passed his student days, "Well, what's the row?"
"My dear Britt, we are reforming matrimony. Steingall is for the importation of Mongolian wives," said De Gollyer, who had written two favorable articles on Herkimer, "while Quinny is for founding a school for wives on most novel and interesting lines."
"That's odd," said Herkimer, with a slight frown.
"On the contrary, no," said De Gollyer; "we always abolish matrimony from four to six."
"You didn't understand me," said Herkimer, with the sharpness he used in his classes.
From his tone the group perceived that the hazards had brought to him some abrupt coincidence. They waited with an involuntary silence, which in itself was a rare tribute.
"Remember Rantoul?" said Herkimer, rolling a cigarette and using a jerky diction.
"Clyde Rantoul?" said Stibo.
"Don Furioso Barebones Rantoul, who was in the Quarter with us?" said Quinny.
"Don Furioso, yes," said Rankin. "Ever see him?"
"Never."
"He's married," said Quinny; "dropped out."
"Yes, he married," said Herkimer, lighting his cigarette. "Well, I've just seen him."
"He's a plutocrat or something," said Towsey, reflectively.
"He's rich—ended," said Steingall as he slapped the table. "By Jove! I remember now."
"Wait," said Quinny, interposing.
"I went up to see him yesterday—just back now," said Herkimer. "Rantoul was the biggest man of us all. It's a funny tale. You're discussing matrimony; here it is."
II
In the early nineties, when Quinny, Steingall, Herkimer, little Bennett, who afterward roamed down into the Transvaal and fell in with the Foreign Legion, Jacobus and Chatterton, the architects, were living through that fine, rebellious state of overweening youth, Rantoul was the undisputed leader, the arch-rebel, the master-demolisher of the group.
Every afternoon at five his Gargantuan figure came thrashing through the crowds of the boulevard, as an omnibus on its way scatters the fragile fiacres. He arrived, radiating electricity, tirades on his tongue, to his chair among the table-pounders of the Café des Lilacs, and his first words were like the fanfare of trumpets. He had been christened, in the felicitous language of the Quarter, Don Furioso Barebones Rantoul, and for cause. He shared a garret with his chum, Britt Herkimer, in the Rue de l'Ombre, a sort of manhole lit by the stars—when there were any stars, and he never failed to come springing up the six rickety flights with a song on his lips.
An old woman who kept a fruit store gave him implicit credit; a much younger member of the sex at the corner creamery trusted him for eggs and fresh milk, and leaned toward him over the counter, laughing into his eyes as he exclaimed:
"Ma belle, when I am famous, I will buy you a silk gown, and a pair of earrings that will reach to your shoulders, and it won't be long. You'll see."
He adored being poor. When his canvas gave out, he painted his ankles to caricature the violent creations that were the pride of Chatterton, who was a nabob. When his credit at one restaurant expired, he strode confidently up to another proprietor, and announced with the air of one bestowing a favor:
"I am Rantoul, the portrait-painter. In five years my portraits will sell for five thousand francs, in ten for twenty thousand. I will eat one meal a day at your distinguished establishment, and paint your portrait to make your walls famous. At the end of the month I will immortalize your wife; on the same terms, your sister, your father, your mother, and all the little children. Besides, every Saturday night I will bring here a band of my comrades who pay in good hard silver. Remember that if you had bought a Corot for twenty francs in 1870, you could have sold it for five thousand francs in 1880, fifty thousand in 1890. Does the idea appeal to you?"
But as most keepers of restaurants are practical and unimaginative, and withal close bargainers, at the end of a week Rantoul generally was forced to seek a new sitter.
"What a privilege it is to be poor!" he would then exclaim enthusiastically to Herkimer. "It awakens all the perceptions; hunger makes the eye keener. I can see colors to-day that I never saw before. And to think that if Sherman had never gotten it in his head to march to the sea I should never have experienced this inspiration! But, old fellow, we have so short a time to be poor. We must exhibit nothing yet. We are lucky. We are poor. We can feel."
On the subject of traditions he was at his best.
"Shakspere is the curse of the English drama," he would declare, with a descending gesture which caused all the little glasses to rattle their alarm. "Nothing will ever come out of England until his influence is discounted. He was a primitive, a Preraphælite. He understood nothing of form, of composition. He was a poet who wandered into the drama as a sheep strays into the pasture of the bulls, a colorist who imagines he can be a sculptor. The influence of Victoria sentimentalized the whole artistic movement in England, made it bourgeois, and flavored