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.