“Art galleries nowadays,” said young Hal, “have got to have a punch to ’em. At least, the new ones have. You know—element of surprise, variety the spice of life, the dernier cri sort of thing. What little I know about law will show me how far I can go, without being arrested for speeding; and what little I know about art, if I spread it out thin enough, ought to carry me along quite a ways.”
Maurice Price shook his head. Frankly, he saw nothing in it at all, for Hal and his quartette. Nevertheless, Hal looked about manfully, head up, early and late. He found an old stable with a loft, in the East Fifties, and vigorously remodelled the building into a court with tiny upstairs galleries, decorating court, staircase, and rooms in a somewhat slapdash style, with results that were reminiscent both of his own room at college and his cousin’s studio. As a nucleus for his first show, he had several enigmatic Lithuanian sketches, painted with that fierce peasant coloring which attracts jaded civilizations. There were also some rather unusual unpublished posters by a needy French friend of Hal’s; and by great good luck, he had obtained a whole sequence of Harriet Higsbee’s famous landscape compositions in cut-up linoleum. (You remember Harriet in Paris? How she never washed a paint-brush, or anything?) Between the posters, the Lithuanian things and the linoleum, the Court of New Departures was modestly beginning to keep its promises, even before Hal, in a burst of inspiration, had arranged upon the staircase his own private collection of humorous sculptures in the baser metals, among them a certain ironic green elephant warranted to make the saddest mortal smile again.
“You see,” he explained to the bewildered Maurice, “I want the tone of this dive to be at once romantic, realistic, humorous, and ironic. I guess I’ve captured it all, now.” Maurice sighed as he helped his cousin to hang a pair of fine tapestries, begged from Hal’s trusting mother. “To draw the dowagers,” Hal said.
Odd as it seemed to the elder man, the dowagers were really drawn. After all, you never can tell; dowagers are not exempt. Through a judicious one-by-one exposition (a Japanese idea, borrowed by Hal from The Book of Tea), many valuable objects salvaged from the wreck of the Wrayne fortunes were disposed of at excellent prices; and before the year was out, the boy had succeeded in selling to his college friends, and their friends, a goodly number of little pictures, studies and sketches, mostly in the new manner, whatever that happened to be. His “quartette of skirts,” far from being an encumbrance, were, so he stoutly declared, “a high-class asset.” His sister Dodo was a wonder in throwing a bit of bargain-counter drapery over a mission stool, so as to make you think of a Doge’s palace. She and his wife organized those charming teas, which, when presided over by his lady-mother, with her authentic air of belle Marquise, made everything look thoroughly salable and artistic, from those queer Lithuanian sketches to Hal’s own models for stage sets. Prosperity was just around the corner; and the only singular circumstance was, Hal began to have ideals. “No junk, girlie,” he would warn the enterprising Dodo. “No Greenwich Village in mine! I mean to run a gallery fit for a refined limousine trade, and I don’t want my clients to think they’re slumming, just because I keep ’em in touch with the grand new movements in art.”
Maurice Price looked on, fascinated by the spectacle of his young relative’s start in a career that was neither law nor art, yet had been suggested to Hal by his slender knowledge of both.
“Why don’t you send me up some of your things?” the boy boldly asked Maurice. “They would sell like hot cakes, mixed in with my regular stuff.”
And Maurice, full of good-will, had replied, “Perhaps I may, if I can look up some inexpensive little bits your customers might like.”
“Not on your tintype!” retorted Hal. “Can’t you see, old Price-of-Great-Pearls, my quartette and I have to live on my thirty per cent? I don’t want your inexpensive little bits! I want your masterpieces, the costlier the better. Bet I can sell ’em for you, too, as easy as Farintosh, or MacDuff. Your being an Academician doesn’t stand in my way!”
Maurice flushed, not so much on account of being an Academician, as because he suddenly saw himself self-convicted of a lack of imagination in regard to his cousin.