Chapter VI: Part TWO: The American Madonna (2)

The same spirit met Arthur everywhere. He found the newspapers pouring adulation at the feet of men against whom every kind of crime might be alleged; but they had "made good," and therefore were unassailable. He remarked a cheerful disregard of morals, which was less disrespect than light-hearted ignorance; and the most curious thing of all was that the very men who talked as though honesty, faith, and trust did not exist were themselves men of amiable virtues. He found himself quickly and quietly appraised; a keen eye ran over him, reading his deficiencies, and his doom was pronounced with a smile. An insulting word would have been less difficult to bear than that disconcerting smile; but these arbiters of his destiny never failed in courtesy, nor in the sort of kindness which finds its outlet in easy generosity. They would invite him to lunch, introduce him to clubs, allow him to believe that he had made real progress in their friendship and esteem; but when it came to the enunciation of some plan by which he might earn his bread, they became strangely silent. They "gave him a good time," to use another cheerful American phrase--to do so appeared to be part of a definite system of international courtesy; but they were at no pains to conceal their sense that he was a virtual incompetent.

Again and again, in the still hours of the morning, he recounted the rebuffs and misadventures of the previous day with wonder and misgiving. The irony of his position was laughable, if it had not been so serious. He had been told by the eloquent Legion to go out and rise; and certainly it appeared, by the light of conspicuous examples, that he was in a land where multitudes of men had risen from the lowliest to the loftiest positions with a singular celerity. Yet no one believed him capable of rising, nor indeed did he himself venture to assert it with any vigour of conviction. And in such moments there came to him the recollection of his father. For the first time he realised with some approach to adequacy the vital elements in his father's character. He told himself that had his father been flung suddenly into the streaming tides of New York, he would not have lived through twenty-four hours without getting his feet securely planted on the rung of some ladder that led to eminence. And then, with a sudden heat of resolution, he would tell himself that he was his father's son, and he would rise and go forth once more to hammer on the barred gates of chance.

"To-day I will not fail," he would cry.

And when the day closed, recording nothing but defeat, he would still cry, "To-morrow I must succeed," and endeavour to believe it.

The real trouble was that he was assaulting the stern citadel of life with weapons not only imperfect, but nearly useless. He had been taught many things, but not the one thing needful; and he now perceived with humiliation that the humblest human creature who could work a typewriter, keep accounts, hew a stone, or shape a beam, was more efficient than he to wrest a living from the world. This discovery was the first real lesson he had ever learned from life. And it said much for his character, that he accepted it without resentment, without the bitterness and sulkiness of injured pride.

A fortnight after his first interview with Legion, he returned to the office of the literary agent, resolved to act upon his discovery.

The great man received him with friendliness, for it was one of his principles never to offend any one who might prove a valuable client at some future date.

"Ah! so you've come back," he began. "You've been studying our remarkable city, eh? And you've met some of our most remarkable men, no doubt?"

"I've certainly met some remarkable men."

"Yes, sir. New York has more remarkable men to the acre than any other city in the world. Genius has made its abode in Manhattan. 'Westward the course of Empire'--you know the rest. Paris and London must go down--they are old. New York will rule the world. Don't you think so?"

"I am afraid I have not thought upon the subject at all."

"No? Well, no doubt you've been absorbing the atmosphere of our wonderful city. That's a very wise step, for a novelist. Sampson E. Dodge always insisted on atmosphere. Have you written anything yet, any little thing that I can place for you?"

"I have written nothing, and I think I ought to tell you that I am not a novelist."

"Not a novelist! But, my dear sir, why then did your friend Vickars send you to me?"

"I suppose he did it out of consideration for me, Mr. Legion. Will you allow me to say that it is time we understood one another. I am not a novelist, not even a writer in your sense of the term. I am a young man with an excellent education, a good university degree, and a wide assortment of unmarketable knowledge. I believe that exhausts the statement of my assets, unless I add good health and a strong desire to live as honestly as I can. Upon the debit side of the account I must ask you to enter a total ignorance of business, which has been so carefully cultivated that it approaches the dignity of a fine art. I may further add that toward what is generally understood by business I entertain an invincible repugnance."

"Dear me!" interrupted Legion, "that is a most extraordinary statement."

"It has, at least, the merit of truth."

"And are there many young men like yourself in the Old Country, sir?"

"They are an innumerable army, which is constantly recruited by the credulous pride of parents who prefer accomplishments to efficiency. They call the process making their sons gentlemen."

"And what becomes of them?"

"Those who have money spend a vacuous existence in the pursuit of strenuous idleness; those who have no money and some remains of self-respect occasionally emigrate, as I have done. And that brings me to my point, Mr. Legion. I have been long enough in your remarkable city to understand that there is a welcome for the man who can do things, and for no one else. I don't flatter myself that I can do anything of much account, but I am willing to work, and I believe I am willing to learn. To be very plain, I need employment, and I ask you to give it me."

"Well, I like your honesty," said Legion. "But I think better of you than you do of yourself. A man of your splendid education must be able to write. Now, I'll tell you what--you go away and write me a descriptive sketch of your friend Vickars, and if it's the right kind of stuff I'll use it in the papers."

This seemed a feasible project at least. He went away and wrote the essay upon Vickars, and because he wrote in a spirit of genuine love and admiration, he wrote well.

On the following Sunday Legion invited him to his house in New Jersey, where he had the opportunity of making the acquaintance of the Legion family. His most immediate impression was of a Legion shorn of his beams, so to speak: no longer the arbiter of fame for struggling authors, but a singularly humble individual, whose authority in his own household was dubious and disputed. The real ruler of the household appeared to be that exceedingly smart boy, Ulysses E. Legion, whose self-confidence would have done credit to an aged diplomat whose voice had for half a century swayed the councils of kings and statesmen. He talked incessantly, making no scruple to express his views on a great variety of subjects, in such a way as to indicate that his father was mistaken in most of his opinions. At the dinner-table this young gentleman advised his father how to carve the joint, and directed him with unblushing precision toward the special tit-bits which he himself preferred. To see the great literary agent humbly obeying these directions, or listening with extreme docility to the opinions of this young patriarch of twelve, was a striking revelation of the amiability of the American parent. Of the qualities revealed in the child perhaps the less said the better. Yet it was to this young gentleman that Arthur owed a considerable advance in the esteem of Mr. Legion. It is one of the unpleasing characteristics of the American house to dispense with doors between the various living-rooms, and thus many things may be overheard that are not meant for general circulation. The parlour in Mr. Legion's house being divided from the dining-room by nothing more substantial than a flimsy curtain, Arthur could not avoid hearing a conversation which took place between the father and son after dinner.

"Say pop," said the boy, "is he a Britisher?"

"Why, yes, he comes from London."

"We always licked the Britishers, didn't we?"

To which the father replied with the popular mendacity which is taught in all American histories, "Of course, Americans have never been defeated."

"Well, I thought he was American. He looks like an American, any way."

This unsolicited testimonial to his personal appearance evidently impressed Mr. Legion, for when he returned to the dining-room there was a marked increase of geniality in his manner.

"And now let me hear what you've written about your friend," he said.

Arthur produced his manuscript, and began to read. It was an admirable paper, an uncoloured and just statement of his friend's aim and method, which a discerning critic would have readily recognised as excellent writing. It seemed, however, to produce a totally different impression on Mr. Legion. Looking up, Arthur saw the geniality fading from his face, and something like consternation displacing it. The moment he finished the reading, Legion spoke.

"My dear sir," he began, "it won't do--it won't do at all. It might suit your dull old English papers, but for the bright, smart, up-to-date American periodical, it won't do at all."

"What's wrong with it?" said Arthur, with a blush.

"Why, the trouble is, it's all wrong. Our readers don't want to know about the man's books, they want to know something about _him_. Couldn't you tell us how he looks, and what coloured ties he wears, and what he eats and drinks and how much he earns, and something about that interesting daughter of his? That's what our readers like, sir--bright, personal, spicy, snappy details. And look here, you haven't said a word about his having had a fever through bad drains. You might have worked that up, any way--how he lived among the poor on purpose to study their lives, and got the fever doing it, and that sort of stunt. You ought to have made him romantic and picturesque, and worked his lovely daughter in, and then people would have begun to ask about his books."

"I'm sorry, but that's not the English way of writing."

"English--nothing! You're in America now, and you must write the American way. I did hope for something better. You can write--I won't deny that--and you look smart enough to write any way you darn please. My boy Ulysses saw that at once. He said to me, 'Pop, he looks like an American.' And so you do, for my boy Ulysses is rarely mistaken, and yet you haven't got the first idea how to write the American way. What are those old colleges of yours for, any way, if they can't teach you to write livelier stuff that that?"

It was impossible to be angry with the man, for it was clear that his consternation was genuine and unaffected. And it was equally clear to Arthur that he meant well by him. To have argued literary ethics with Mr. Legion would have been the vainest of pursuits. This became evident a moment later, when the literary agent, following the suggestion opened up by the inability of the British colleges to impart the art of smart writing, gave some reminiscences of his own career in that spirit of innocent boastfulness which is common among men who have miraculously achieved positions for which nature never intended them.

"What I can't understand," he remarked, "is why it is you young fellows who have all the chances don't know how to use them properly. Now, look at me. I never had what may be rightly called a chance at all. I've worked for my bread since I was ten years old. I've been all sorts of things, clerk in a store, drummer on the roads, rail-roading, land-speculating, newspaper reporting, more things than I could count on my ten fingers. I never had time to ask what I wanted to do; I had to do what came to me, and do it the way those that paid me wanted it done. There was never anything superior about me, and I knew it. And that's why I've got on. That's why all the writers come to me to-day. They know very well I can't write worth a red cent, not compared with them, that is. But I've lived among the people all my life, and I know what they want. And if you'll take a word of advice from me, you'll just set yourself to find out what people like, and give it 'em hot and strong, and then you'll succeed fast enough."

"It is excellent advice--if one could take it."

"And what's to prevent you?" he cried. "You've got good looks, you've got education, you've got ability. I'll tell you what I'll do. You come to my office for a couple of weeks, and be ready to do what I tell you. I'll pay you what I think just, and if you don't like it, you're under no obligation to remain."

"I'll come with pleasure," Arthur replied; "and whether I please you or not, I shall always be grateful to you for your kindness."

"Oh! that's nothing. I was a young cub myself once, and I shouldn't have been here now if some one hadn't licked me into shape."

It was not exactly a pleasant way of putting things, but Arthur had sense enough to perceive that it was uttered in a spirit of rough kindness. He believed himself quite incapable of moulding his mind to Mr. Legion's pattern, and it was with a sense of ingratitude that he found himself secretly despising that pattern. But a fortnight of New York had taught him this much, that beggars cannot be choosers, and, moreover, Mr. Legion's door was the only door that stood open to him. He could at least try to do what was asked of him, and in the secret of his heart pride whispered that he might even succeed in elevating Mr. Legion's sense of literary merit, and impart to it a dignity which it conspicuously lacked.

He went to the office on the following morning. To his surprise he found himself introduced to a typewriting lady not at all as an unfortunate person who had failed to master the American method of writing, but as "one of our brightest and smartest young men, who is destined to become one of the star writers of our time"; from which it appeared that Mr. Legion had already forgotten his demerits, or had yielded to that spirit of innocent effusiveness which was characteristic of his usual modes of speech. The typewriting lady had heard such phrases too often to attach much importance to them, and received them with a wearied smile. She readjusted the combs in her hair, nodded to him coldly, and went on with her work unmoved by the presence of this bright particular star of Mr. Legion's firmament. Later on, when Mr. Legion had left the office, this inaccessible lady thawed a little, and informed him with a pretty grimace that she guessed that a good many stars rose and set every month in Broadway.

"You must take no notice of Mr. Legion's superlatives," he replied.

"I don't."

"I am here only as a learner, a kind of apprentice."

"Then I guess you'll get some surprises."

Surprises he certainly did get in plenty in the course of that eventful fortnight. He found, for example, that Mr. Sampson E. Dodge, in common with most of Mr. Legion's authors, always wrote the preliminary press announcements of his novels himself, in which he declared his profound conviction that the present novel was the best he had ever written, ever could write, ever would write, being dramatic in a high degree, racy of the soil, full of vigorous situations, and worthy of the highest traditions of American fictional art. As if this were not enough, Mr. Dodge's humble statements of his own powers were further embroidered with resonant superlatives by the skilled hand of Legion himself, who lavished on him praise that would have sounded excessive had it been applied to Walter Scott or Victor Hugo. The whole thing was so humorous in its gross exaggeration that one day, in a spirit of mockery, Arthur drew up a description of the works of Dodge in which he outdid his model, ending with the statement that the day would come when America would be remembered in history chiefly as the birthplace of the famous author of _The Perambulator of a Thousand Wheels_. This burlesque, left carelessly upon his desk, fell into the hands of Legion, who, to his intense surprise, congratulated him upon it.

"That's what we want," he cried joyously. "I always said you could write, but I really didn't think you'd get hold of the American method so soon."

"But it's pure nonsense--in fact, a burlesque," said Arthur.

"A what?"

"A burlesque, a skit, a satire, if you will."

"You may call it what you like, but it's what I want, and what the public wants, and I'm going to print it."

"I hope you'll do nothing of the kind. You must see it is nonsense, and no one will believe it."

"The American public will believe anything," Legion retorted with grave conviction. "They like being fooled. It is what the papers exist for. And there's no sort of fooling pleases them so much as patriotic fooling. That reference of yours now to America being remembered as the birthplace of Dodge--why, it's a stroke of genius, sir. It may not be strictly true, of course; but it is impressive, and it makes folk feel proud of their native authors, and it sells the books, and that's what we want, isn't it?"

Remonstrance was so clearly useless that Arthur said no more, and in due time read with blushes his unlucky paragraph in the advertising columns of a New York paper, and found that it had been disseminated by the hand of Legion through a hundred inferior papers, where it was duly quoted as the valuable opinion of a celebrated English critic.

This was but one instance among many of the remarkable methods of Mr. Wilbur M. Legion. He pursued mendacity with an ardour which few persons have manifested in the quest of truth. He dwelt in an atmosphere of exaggeration so dense that the real values of things were totally obscured. Words were to him the golden balls of a juggler; he tossed them hither and thither with a sole eye to rapid effect and novel combination. Upon the question of Dodge he was fantastically sincere; he was really in love with the man and his writings; but the language which he used of Dodge was substantially the same language with which he decorated all his authors. It was his boast that he would make the worst book sell by daring methods of advertisement. He once expressed to Arthur with entire gravity the opinion that the true cause for the decay of religion was that the Bible had not been sufficiently advertised; it has been left to preachers instead of being handed over to the press agents. Let him have the handling of it for a month, and he would show them! For it must be noted that Mr. Legion was in his way a respecter of religion, a zealous opponent of heterodoxies, a man of excellent Sunday proprieties, who had won the gratitude of the sect to which he belonged by presenting an organ to his church. If he had been told that his chief achievement in life was to debase the literary currency, he would have been genuinely astonished, for so singular a thing is the mind of man that he actually believed that he had advanced its interests.

Things came to a crisis at last, and, as it happened, over the very article which Arthur had written on Vickars. This article had remained in Legion's hands, and what was Arthur's astonishment when he found it duly head-lined in a sensational journal, and accompanied by a portrait which was certainly not that of Vickars. Here and there he could distinguish some remnants of his own handiwork, but the whole was overlaid by the most extraordinary flamboyant ornament, and abounded in passages which he recognised as pure Legionese. The things which he had said about Vickars in unsuspicious confidence were all remembered, but were twisted with such amazing ingenuity into novel forms that he blushed to recognise them. Vickars was described as living in a garret, existing upon the most exiguous of earnings, finding his comrades among all kinds of social outcasts, a hero, a saint, and a socialist, assisted in his sacrifice by a lovely daughter, whose personal charms were touched in with the bold hand of a police-court journalist. Arthur's heart flamed as he read the article. He could imagine what Vickars would think of it; what he would think of the pathetic fiction that he had nearly died of a fever caught in nursing a diseased outcast (this was the Legionese improvement on the drain-story), and with what feelings he would regard the exploitation of Elizabeth. It seemed to him that the world must ring with the infamous business; that Vickars would become the laughing-stock of London; and that since the article could be attributed to no one but himself, he would henceforth stand pilloried as a false friend, a liar, and a fool.

The moment Legion appeared in the office, he flung the article upon his desk, and cried in a voice shaken with anger, "Did you write that?"

"Why, what's the matter?" he replied, slowly adjusting his spectacles. "Oh! I see--the Vickars article. I meant to tell you about that. What you wrote was too good to waste, so I worked over it a bit, and I've got quite a satisfactory price for it. I wouldn't wonder if it created quite a demand for Vickars' books, and we ought to communicate with him at once about his new book."

He was going on, in the innocence of his heart, to explain how a Vickars boom might be worked, when Arthur interrupted him with a furious gesture.

"What I wrote was truth, and what you have written is lies. Why, even the portrait you have used isn't Vickars!"

"And who cares about that? No one knows any better. It's a good enough portrait, any way."

"I can't argue about it, Mr. Legion. You have done me incalculable harm. You have ruined me with Vickars. As for his ever allowing you to handle his books, let me tell you he wouldn't touch a dirty dog like you with a ten-foot pole."

"What's that?" cried Legion, his face pale with astonishment and indignation. "What was that you said?"

"I say you are a scoundrel, Mr. Legion--a mercenary, lying scoundrel!"

"Oh! come now, you're excited. I can make allowances--you don't know what you're saying."

"I know quite well what I'm saying, and I will repeat it, if you like: you're a scoundrel!"

Even Legion's good temper was not proof against this violence.

"Very good," he said. "I won't tell you what you are. But I'll tell you what's going to happen to you. You are going to starve in the streets of New York, my young friend. You're too darned superior for this country of commonsense business methods. You're the sort that comes to sleeping on the benches in Union Square, and fighting for a place in the bread-line."

"Very possibly," said Arthur. "I'm sure I don't know what sort I am, but I am sure of this, that I am not the sort you want in this office, and I beg to say good-morning."

He put on his hat and coat, and rushed for the door. Perhaps it was because Legion saw how white and drawn his face was, and how wild his eyes, that his heart relented towards him.

"Look here," he said, "hadn't you better think it over? I didn't mean what I said about starving in the streets. I hadn't ought to have said that. Besides, you know, there's some money owing to you. Don't go without that."

But the mention of money, instead of staying his flight, lent it new impulse. He was besmirched enough already without taking the wages of his defilement. He rushed out of the room, and the banging door cut short Mr. Legion's eirenicon.

XIV

HE FINDS A FRIEND

Arthur's first act on regaining his hotel was to terminate his residence therein. He ought to have done this long ago, for these thronged corridors, resounding night and day with the chink of innumerable dollars, was no place for one so poor as he. He had stayed there rather from natural heedlessness and inexperience than from choice; partly also in the hope that the invaluable Bundy would arrive; but now his fears were thoroughly aroused. Legion's phrase about the benches in Union Park and the breadline stuck in his mind. He had heard of such tragedies; he remembered a story which Vickars had told him of one of the most brilliant poets of the day who, in the course of his early struggles, had been reduced to holding horses at public-house doors for ha'pence in the Strand. It had also been the habit of his father, when he wished to inculcate habits of economy and perseverance on his childish mind, to do so by various realistic versions of the prodigal son, illustrated from the histories of certain men he had known who had not possessed the sense "to know which side their bread was buttered." It seemed that he was well upon the way to become such a prodigal. He was bound for the bread-line. Well, if this were the appointed night when he was to take farewell of respectability, the obsequies should be fitly celebrated. If to-morrow he must starve, to-night, at least, he would eat; he had lost so much that no further loss could make him poor; and from the extreme of fear his mind ran to the extreme of recklessness. From the clerk with the tooth-pick he learned the address of a small hotel near the docks, to which he ordered his trunks to be forwarded; having done which, and distributed various tips with a gentlemanly profusion, he stepped out into the gathering night of New York.

The city hummed and sang like some monstrous wheel, driven by an unseen dynamo. It presented to the eye a riot of life and light; its lofty buildings flared like torches, its shops glowed like jewels, its streets were lanes of fire; and into the upper air, still coloured with the hues of sunset, there rose an immense reverberation, composed of human cries and shouts, wheels pounding on granite roads, wheels groaning on roads of steel, all resolved into a thunderous bass note, the raucous music of the human multitude. There are moods in which such a spectacle is exhilarating, moods in which it is dreadful; but there is another and a rarer mood, when it appears majestic. As Arthur surveyed the scene, it was this aspect of majesty that appealed to him. It overwhelmed his mind with an impression more commonly attributed to astronomy--viz., the entire insignificance of the individual in relation to physical magnitudes. His own particular troubles suddenly assumed dwarfed proportions; his little life appeared a mere bubble floating for an instant on the crest of disappearing waves; the city itself a streaming star-river, flowing out of dark eternities, peopled for an instant by a tribe of eager ants. To what avail the strife, the passion, the disorder of these tiny lives? Yet a little while, a few days it might be, a few years at most, and he would be lost to sight as though he had never been. But the wheel would spin on, with a million new Ixions bound upon its flaming spokes; the magnificent and monstrous city would go on, piling pyramid on pyramid above the bones of its exhausted slaves, and with not one light the less because he did not see it, not one softened moment in its raucous song because his ear was filled with the clods of the valley.

In that moment he understood why men commit suicide, why it may appear the soberest act of reason and of justice to fling away a life which has lost its value in losing its egoism. But over that abyss his thought hovered but an instant, and the horror of that instant produced a swift reaction. The dangerous moment passed, and left him with a new appetite for life. He felt the swift uprisal of faculties of enjoyment in himself such as the convalescent feels when the blood flows nimbly after sickness; and on a sudden he found himself convulsed with laughter. The absurdity of his position moved him like a caricature. He had blundered badly, but of what consequence was it in the vast sum of things? All things continued as they were, the stars still were steadfast in their courses, and from that upper silence fell a voice that made him, and all human perturbations, a vain thing that endured but for a moment. The spirit of derision was upon him, and, still laughing, he plunged into the moving crowd.

Presently he found himself in Sixth Avenue, and his eye recognised the sign of a small Italian restaurant of which he had heard an excellent report. The front of the house was mean and narrow; the door opened on a sanded vestibule, which, in turn, led to a long and crowded room. At its upper end was a daïs, on which an excellent orchestra was seated. As he entered the room, a man with a sweet and powerful tenor voice sang an Italian comic song, the chorus of which was taken up by the diners, who beat time with glasses and knives upon the tables. An extraordinary vivacity characterised this curiously mixed assembly; they appeared to have no cares in life, or, if they had, they were intent upon forgetting them. All types were present, from the city clergyman a little ill at ease in his environment to women of exotic beauty, whose sidelong glances left little doubt of their profession. Yet there was no element of disorder, no impression of vulgarity; there was freedom but no licence, the mingling of human creatures in a catholic amity; each content for the time to forget distinctions that elsewhere might be deemed important, each happy in a transient release from the servitudes of the long day, and perhaps from the memories of misfortune.

Arthur was fortunate in finding a single seat vacant at a narrow table next the wall. Here he took his place, and had already proceeded halfway with his meal before he noticed a man who sat on the other side of the table. He was a cheerful little fellow, with a good face, humorous eyes, and mobile mouth, who was evidently itching for conversation. Some trifling courtesy of the table brought them acquainted, and in a few moments they were deep in talk. It seemed that he was an Englishman, a wandering artist, a man with a wide and cheerful acquaintance with vicissitude, who gave his name as Horner. He had been born and bred in London, in an atmosphere of lower middle-class insularity and ignorance, from which he had escaped into a wider world by the means of art-classes and night-schools. He had thus reached the lower slopes of Parnassus, only to discover that there his progress ended; he had neither the education nor the means to carry him farther; and so he had slowly declined from the production of original work into a kind of Ishmael hanging on the borders of the art-world, an expert restorer of old paintings, and at times an amateur dealer. It is a curious fact that the Englishman, who at home is the most reticent of all human animals, often becomes the most communicative when he meets men of his own nation abroad. There the freemasonry of race tells, loneliness acts as a solvent of reserve, and the possession of common memories invites immediate intimacy. To hear the familiar Cockney dialect again, with its clipped vowels and reckless distribution of the aspirate, to remark phrases heard nowhere save upon the London streets, is to be transported instantly, as on a magic carpet, to the atmosphere of home, to see again the glitter of the Strand, the midnight throngs in Piccadilly Circus, the dear and dingy purlieus of Soho. The very words have an esoteric significance; they cannot be heard or uttered save with a thrilling heart; and among banished Englishmen they are the symbols of an irrecoverable joy, and constitute an instant bond of brotherhood.

Arthur listened with delight to Horner's narrative of his adventures. It appeared that he knew most of the millionaires who collected pictures, and nearly all the dealers from whom they bought them. In describing these people he had the rare art of the vitalising touch. The millionaires moved before the eye in all their eager ignorance, the dealers in all their duplicity and craft. Manufactories of old masters existed for the sole purpose of meeting the demand of American millionaires. It was a known fact that sixteen thousand Corots had passed the New York Customs House in the last few years, whereas every one knew that Corot could not have painted more than two thousand pictures in a long life of the most unremitting toil.

"Why, I could paint better Corots myself than most of those that hang in American galleries," he remarked.

"Perhaps you've done so," laughed Arthur.

"I won't say I hav'n't," he replied with cheerful impudence. "But I've done with that sort of thing now. And I'll say one thing for myself, I never yet sold a picture that I knew was a fake. But, O Lor', these people are such children! They think they know everything, and on art they are as ignorant as dirt. They carry round little books of nothingness by Professor This and Professor That, and go into raptures over all sorts of rubbish because they're told to. And they won't be told better, that's the trouble. But I mean to tell them some day. Only, you see, I can't write the way it ought to be written. I suppose, now, you're not by any chance a writer, are you?"

"I suppose I'm a sort of writer. At all events, the last thing I did was to write something of which I am heartily ashamed."

"And did they sack you?"

"They did. Or, to be more precise, I sacked myself."

"Well, why shouldn't you and I join forces? Of course I wouldn't think of saying this to any one but an Englishman. I can give you lots of stuff, and you can write it up, you know. We might make a book, don't you think?"

"But I know nothing about art except in an amateur way."

"And what's that matter, I'd like to know? I'll be bound you know lots more than the folk that do the writing here. And as for the collections--oh my, you should see them! Constables done in Soho, and Raphaels painted in Paris; curtains hung over them, if you please, as if they were too precious to see the light; and when you mildly remark, 'But that picture's in Munich or Dresden or Buckingham Palace,' they reply indignantly, 'Oh no! that's the copy--this the original. I have a certificate of genuineness.' And then they produce a written pedigree, with the names of Prince This or Prince That, through whose hands their precious canvas has passed, when any one with half an eye can see that the paint is 'ardly dry upon it."

"Is it as bad as that?"

"Much worse, if I told you all."

And thereupon followed story after story, full of rapid etchings of the dupes and the dealers; with amazing biographies of adroit Jews born in garrets who now owned palaces and sported titles; and strange old men in London who hid behind shuttered windows genuine and priceless pictures, and credulous millionaires in New York, who bought what might by courtesy be called pictures by the yard, labelling them with august names, and taking care that the papers duly reported the immense sums they paid for them. It was all highly amusing, a backstairs view of life, so to speak, which somehow bore the stamp of the authentic. The time sped; the music and the company had become less restrained; and the hovering waiter reminded them by his black looks that they had sat too long.

"Where are you staying?" said Homer, as they rose to go.

Arthur mentioned the hotel to which he had sent his trunks.

"Oh my!" said Horner, "but, you know, that won't do. It isn't a safe district, that. What took you there?"

"Poverty, to be frank," said Arthur. "I find it necessary to choose the cheapest lodging I can find."

"But it won't do," said the little man gravely. He meditated for a moment, as if not quite sure of how to express what he wished to say. "Englishmen should stand together, shouldn't they?" he remarked at last. "Now look here, suppose you come to my rooms. You'll be very welcome. I can give you a shake-down of some sort, and to-morrow we'll talk over that book. I really shall be very much gratified if you'll come."

The offer was made with such unaffected kindness that Arthur's heart warmed toward the little man. He had already received a hard lesson in life that day, and it had left his heart sore and bitter. Here was another kind of lesson. A man whom the world had not used generously or perhaps justly, a total stranger, who had seen enough of the seamy side of life to make him reasonably suspicious or even cynical, was ready to share what he had with him on the mere ground of common nationality. "Englishmen should stand together," he had said, and was instantly prepared to act upon that simple ethic, although for all he knew the man to whom he offered hospitality might be a rascal or a thief. Such a lesson at such a moment was calculated to restore faith in human nature, faith in that radical goodness of the human heart which is the base of all decent living.

"Mr. Horner," he said, "I accept your offer thankfully. You don't know how much you've done for me by making it. I shall never forget it."

"Oh! that's all right," said the little man, with a deprecating gesture. "I've only done what I'd like some one to do for me." And he did not seem to be aware that the words uttered so carelessly, as if they expressed nothing more than the most ordinary commonplace, really contained the sum of all religion.

Arthur went home with his new friend, and found that his rooms consisted of a littered studio in one of the older houses of New York.

"When I'm doing pretty well, I always stay in a hotel," said Horner, "but at a pinch one can sleep here."

"Why apologise?" said Arthur. "Why, man, you have something here that the best hotel in New York can't give you. You've an open fireplace. It's like coming home again to see that."

"Yes," said Horner, with a whimsical air of wisdom, "the decay of marriage and the family in America dates from the hot-air register and the steam-heating business. People who never sit round an open fire never get a chance of knowing one another. I never had much of a home myself. I had to start out working pretty early; but there's one thing I never forget, and that's the open fire round which we kids sat on winter nights while mother told us stories. I used to see things in that fire--castles, and sunsets, and burning ships, like most kids do. But I wanted to paint 'em, and if it hadn't been for those times in the firelight I'd never have been an artist. But O Lor', look at these Americans!--the women standing over hot-air registers with their clothes blown out like balloons when they want to get warm, and the men getting as close as they can to a fizzling coil of steam-pipes. I don't call that being civilised, do you? It's a beastly way of living, I call it."

While he was thus delivering his views on the iniquity of steam heating, the little man had lit a fire of wood, which instantly blazed up, and filled the room with ruddy light. Having done this, he attacked with great vigour what appeared to be a wardrobe, tugging at it with might and main, until the whole front suddenly collapsed, revealing a concealed bed. From behind a curtain in a corner of the room he wheeled a small chair-bedstead, and at the same time produced a plate of fruit and a tin of tobacco.

"Now we can be comfortable," he remarked. "It's not exactly in the Waldorf Astoria style, but I guess it'll do. And now let us talk."

If Horner had talked well over dinner in the restaurant, he talked super-excellently well now in this friendly firelight. Arthur had little to do but listen, which he did for the most part with rising admiration. He remarked an unaffected innocence of spirit in the man which was entirely unsubdued by his hard experience of life; he talked like a good-natured, enthusiastic boy who had by some occult means possessed himself of the experience of a world-worn man; he entertained ideals of an almost pathetic impractibility; he had even written poetry, and at that moment, it appeared, designed a prose work on art which should be a magnificent compendium of the wisdom of the ages. Of these great designs he spoke at one moment with the ardent vanity of the amateur; the next, the man of the world popped up, to pour upon them humorous depreciation. The same spirit of contradiction coloured all his judgments. England he should have detested, for it had cast him out; but let a word of justest criticism be uttered of its customs or its manners, and he was in arms at once. America had befriended him, and yet he was more than candid in his apprehension of her faults, and had no word of praise for her institutions. In his judgments of men it was the same. He had seen enough of the baser side of life to fill him with the venom of Diogenes, and yet he spoke with kindliness even of those who had defrauded him. His mind moved in giddy flight among these crags of contradiction; he did not aim at consistency, nor did he value it; yet out of the turmoil of his thoughts there shone unmistakably a generous nature, a kindly disposition, a temperament of light-hearted courage, which made a jest of disadvantage and calamity. Courage was perhaps his most essential quality, and particularly that rare courage which is not depressed by past error; so that listening to him, Arthur thought that many a preacher he had heard had a much less vital message to declare than this irresponsible but philosophic Bohemian.

Arthur slept soundly that night, and awoke in a glow of spirits he had not known for many days. Horner's talk had given a tonic to his mind which he badly needed, and he awoke with many clear and definite resolutions to repay his debt in the best way he could. But here Destiny took a hand in the game, for no sooner was breakfast over than a telegram was handed in to his host which changed the whole situation.

"My!" he said, "here's a go! I'm wanted at once in Baltimore, and I suppose I'd best go. And just now too, when you and I were going to work together."

"Must you really go?"

"I fear I must. It's important. But look here, you know that need make no difference to you. You can stop here just as long as you like. It'll save you a hotel, anyhow."

"But----" began Arthur.

"No buts," said the little man, with dignity. "I shall be offended if you think of saying No. I know the room isn't all that I could wish to offer to a friend, but if you'll put up with it, it's yours as long as you like. And see here, I'll leave you my papers to run over while I'm gone. It'll be a fine thing for me to have you here, and I count it luck; so we'll take that as settled."

And so, waving aside all remonstrance, the little artist packed his valise, and half an hour later, with a final grip of the hand, disappeared down the narrow staircase, leaving Arthur monarch of all he surveyed.

And then began that period in the experience of our hero which, like the more obscure passages of history, may be passed over in silence, although they contain more of tragedy than many famous battlefields. Emptied of the vivacious presence of Horner, the room seemed singularly desolate, and life at once took a grayer aspect. Perhaps it was helped by the character of the day. The exquisite sky, which had shone brilliant as a jewel for so many weeks, was now filled with heavy clouds; a bitter wind blew, snow had begun to fall, and the city crouched like some frightened animal, waiting for the stroke of the impending blizzard. Arthur's first act was to light the fire, and go over the mass of papers which Horner had confided to him. In the innocence of his spirit Horner had informed him that it was no difficulty for him to write--the really difficult thing was to stop writing; and the fruits of this facility now lay before Arthur in an enormous pile of manuscript. It consisted of pencil jottings on a vast variety of themes, notes on pictures (often pungently sagacious), anecdotes of humorous frauds perpetrated on the credulous, the beginnings of an autobiography as frank as Benvenuto Cellini's, interspersed with fragments of poems, short stories, crude philosophies, and even the draft of a novel.

"What on earth does he expect me to do with all this?" groaned Arthur.

One thing he could see very plainly--viz., that here was a prodigious mine of excellent material for any one who knew how to use it. The storm beat without, the long day passed, and he was still at his task. He struggled through the snow to a cheap restaurant, came back, rekindled the fire, and sat down to reflect for the hundredth time on the strangeness of his position. Here he was, in the room of a man whom he scarcely knew, and, as it appeared, the custodian of his most private memoranda. As he read on and on, there gradually grew before his mind's eye an authentic portrait of the man. He saw him at once shrewd and guileless, sagacious and impractical, full of innocent vanities and idealisms, unworldly as a child, and also, like a child, attaining moments of naïve wisdom, of unintentional philosophic insight; and he suddenly perceived what might be done with this mass of memoranda. There was no doubt what Horner wished to have done; he designed a book of some sort. Why not edit it? And, as if in answer to this question, there came next noon a hurried line from Horner, saying he would be detained in Baltimore for at least a month, and begging him to do anything he liked with his papers, with the fullest discretionary power. Here was an unsought task imposed upon him by what seemed the whim of circumstance. He could take Horner's partly written novel, fill in the gaps from his own abundant autobiographic material, and perhaps succeed in producing a human document that would at least arrest attention by its realistic truth. As for himself, he smiled grimly as he counted the few remaining dollars in his purse. Christmas and the elusive Bundy were six weeks away; he was destined to a hard siege, with the bread-line as a not negligible possibility. Providence had put a roof over his head; here was a task recommended to him by his gratitude, and if it would bring him no financial gain, yet it afforded him an inestimable distraction from the uncertainties of his own situation. It seemed he was predestined to become a writer after all.

Then began a form of life which in after years appeared to him fantastic as a dream. He measured out his money with the strictest parsimony, existed on the cheapest forms of food, and amid the riot of New York lived the life of an anchorite in his cell. The days passed unregarded; he went nowhere, saw no one; and at length there came a night when his task was done. Does the reader recollect a novel called _The Amateur Artist_, by Cyril Horner, which a short time ago became the sensation of the season? That was the book which Arthur finished late one night at Horner's room, and expressed next morning with almost his last penny to the office of Mr. Wilbur M. Legion.

He felt weak and ill, and for the first time a thrill of fear shot through his heart. Toward evening he dined exiguously on a dish of milk and porridge, and remembered hazily a dispute with the waiter on the question of a tip. He went out into the streets. A slender curve of moon rode in a sky of ice, the air was bitter cold, a sharp wind eddied round the corners of the streets, and took him by the throat. He walked on and on, with the illusion of the city slipping past him like a river full of glittering reflections, himself treading upon air. Once he found himself shambling; it horrified him, for it was so that tramps and outcasts walked. A little later he found himself gazing on the bread-line; he stood an instant in fascinated pity, and fled.

About midnight he found himself once more before the doors of the old Astor House, and felt that he could walk no farther. He gathered courage to enter, and blessed the undesigned humanitarianism of America, which makes an hotel lobby an open rendezvous. Here, at least, was light and warmth. A night clerk was at the desk--not he of the toothpick and the supercilious back. He made a shift to ask him if Bundy had arrived.

"When do you expect him?" asked the clerk.

"Hourly."

"Where does he come from?"

"The West--Oklahoma, I believe."

"Then he'll get in at seven on the Pennsylvania, most likely."

"Can I wait for him?"

The clerk eyed him narrowly.

"You used to stay here, didn't you?"

"I was here for a fortnight."

"I don't know but you can," he remarked ungraciously. "But say, you ought to take a room, you know."

"I'd rather not till I know if Mr. Bundy comes."

"Down on your luck?"

"Down on my luck," said Arthur gravely.

The clerk laughed.

"Parlour A. might suit you. Don't let me see you, that's all."

In Parlour A. he took refuge, and was soon asleep, his head bowed upon the table. He woke from time to time with a strong shudder. "Not that, O God--not that!" he moaned, for it was of the bread-line he had dreamed.

He was still asleep when a sudden hand was laid upon his shoulder.

He awoke, and looked into the face of Bundy.

XV

THE MILLIONAIRE

He could hardly believe his good fortune. The mist of sleep and weakness was upon his eyes, hysteric laughter shook him. He rose, trembling. He saw the good-natured night-clerk in the doorway, heard him say, "I guess he's been up against it good and hard," and the next moment found himself sinking through an abyss of coloured lights into an unfathomable darkness. The descent lasted but for an instant; when he opened his eyes again it was to protest that there was nothing whatever the matter with him.

"Been out on the bat," said the clerk laconically.

"Been starving," said another voice.

And then the owner of that second voice grew clear to him--a kindly face of inimitable shrewdness, the gray hair neatly parted in the middle, the gray moustache closely trimmed, and a pair of big, dreamy eyes fixed on him in anxious consideration.

"Poor lad!--poor lad!" said Bundy. "It seems I'm just in time. I got your letter--only a week ago. I got one from home, too--trust Mrs. Bundy for telling a man what his duty is. So I hustled, and came off at once. Now tell me, you aren't ill, are you?"

"I don't think so," said Arthur weakly.