CHAPTER XII
Ever since that memorable tea at Enoch’s, when he had covered Sue’s hand with his own in the twilight, and sat there under the spell of her voice, Joe had been working like a beaver. A whole week had passed, and though they lived under the same roof, he had only seen Sue twice. Once in the presence of her mother, and two days after Lamont’s visit, which she did not mention, when he had taken her to see the menagerie in Central Park. Those few moments in the twilight at Enoch’s had made them friends—good friends—a brotherly sort of friendship, which Joe was too frank and honest, and too timid to develop into anything like Mr. Lamont’s European love-making, and which Sue was the happier for, since she had not yet quite recovered from that tragic afternoon that had left her dazed, and in a state of remorse that took all her courage to conceal from her mother. There is nothing that wins the heart of a pure young girl more than implicit confidence. Yet no one was more in ignorance of this than Joe. In the Park they talked on before the eagle and the bear, the sleepy lioness, and the alert pacing wolves, of a lot of happy, wholesome things, and when he finally brought her home she left him with her promise to walk with him again “whenever he pleased,” and with that he left her, elated, remembering he had also promised her a variety of things, one being that he was going to do his best to make a success in his profession.
To Atwater’s slow amazement, a change had come over his partner—this time for the better. Joe got down to the office on time, and left it late. Atwater had a punctilious idea about time that disgusted Joe. He even went so far as to place a neatly ruled pad in the entrance of their modest office, with a pencil tethered by a string attached, so that their two aids, the conscientious Swiss draftsman and the silent Swede, whose methodical calculations on building strains guaranteed that Joe’s artistic architectural dreams would not fall down and kill people, might truthfully record the hour of the Swiss and the Swede’s coming and their going. Joe considered it an insult. He appealed to the dignity of his partner about it, as suggesting the rigorous discipline of a sweat-shop or a penitentiary. He argued that both the Swiss and the Swede were honorable fellows, whose heart and soul were in their work, and that it was no way to get the best work out of a man by treating him every morning and evening with humiliating distrust and forcing him to swear to his presence to the minute over his signature. Atwater was adamant, however. He could not see the idyllic loyalty which Joe imagined. He explained to Joe that the Swiss was a high-priced man; that time was money, and that they were paying him fifty dollars a week; as for the Swede, he got thirty. Then there was that baseball maniac of a red-headed office boy, who got five, and who hoped some day to escape from slavery and pitch ball for a salary. Atwater proved he was right. The Swede got to be popular in a near-by café, and the conscientious Swiss fell in love with a girl who lived on the horizon of Brooklyn; whereas the office boy forged the lack of promptitude of both for remuneration enough to provide himself liberally with pink ice-cream and cigarettes. And when finally Atwater fired all three and replaced them by three seemingly worthy successors, Joe began to see the wisdom of the time system, and even signed it himself.
There were late afternoons now when Joe lighted the whistling gas-jet over his drawing-board and kept on working after the closing hour—Atwater often leaving word with the janitor that “Mr. Grimsby was still up-stairs.” More than this, Joe had been pegging away over his new idea in gauche and gray paper, and had already made a stunning big drawing in color for the Lawyers Consolidated Trust Company Building, a job he and Atwater had recently tackled in competition, with the result that it was hung in the crypt of the Academy, away down underneath the stairs in a corner, where a prowling critic with a lighted match discovered it and gave it an honorable mention in an evening paper.
“A clever and original rendering,” said he, “is shown by Mr. Joseph Grimsby in his competition drawing for the Lawyers Consolidated Trust Company. We predict for this young architect a brilliant future.” It was on the tip of his pen, no doubt, to add: “Call again, Joe,” since the beginning of his career as an art critic dated scarcely two weeks previous, when he had been a reporter on the weekly news of his home town on the Hudson, a journal devoted to live stock and visiting.
What the painters said was different. These strongly opinionated personages spoke a different language. They considered Joe’s basement effort “clever,” but were frank in saying that his somewhat amusing trick in gauche and gray paper had no artistic value whatsoever. Certain important members of the hanging committee poohpoohed it, hesitated—and condescended finally to send it to the basement. Certainly it was not allowed to mar the ensemble of the galleries up-stairs, hung with the product of good, bad, and indifferent painters, many of whom had a highly estimated opinion of their own work, and deplored the lack of artistic sense in the general public to appreciate it. Narrow minds and narrow lives make few friends. For several years Enoch had seen the exhibition open. It always seemed to him to be the same exhibition—revarnished and rehung. The same cows came down to drink, the same fishing-smacks put out to sea in melodramatic weather, and the same sweet and unapproachable girl in the colonial doorway smiled on with her constant companion, a red, red rose. There were soggy wood interiors with rippling turpentined brooks; slick sunsets and sunrises, stippled beyond a finish; but what were lacking, Enoch declared, “were men who saw nature freshly and vigorously, with open eyes, and the dear courage of their convictions to smash pat upon a canvas something that was really real.”
Enoch had again made his annual tour of the galleries and came down-stairs in so savage a humor, grumbling to himself over the “rot,” he called it, he had seen, that more than once he stopped on the broad flight to express his views to a painter of his acquaintance, finally opening up on Mr. Combes, the famous collector, with so much vibrancy, that it took the old connoisseur’s breath away.
“Rot, Combes,” he repeated; “scarcely a canvas in the lot that has a vigorous note in it. A lot of tomfoolery in paint. That’s what our modern art is coming to—and what’s more, Combes,” he exclaimed out loud (unheeding that he was in ear-shot of others, and not caring if he was), “it gets worse yearly,” and with this he started to go out, chucking the catalogue he had purchased away in the vestibule, when he caught sight of the small exhibit beneath the stairs, turned back and glanced hurriedly over it, and to his surprise and delight found Joe’s competition drawing.
“By the gods!” he exclaimed, rewiping his spectacles and searching out every inch of the big drawing in gauche. “And so that good fellow did that, did he? No wonder they stuck it out of sight—too good for ’em.”