He sprang back up the stairs after Combes, found him after a search through the galleries, and insisted on his coming down with him.
“Look at it, man!” he cried with enthusiasm. “See how he’s handled that sky. Look at the truth and clearness of his shadows. Knew where to stop, too, didn’t he——”
“Very original, Crane,” confessed the connoisseur. “Um! Very original, indeed. A new method, as you say—but not a very interesting subject——”
“What’s the subject got to do with it?” retorted Enoch testily. “I tell you a fellow who can do that can do anything. It opens a brand-new field in water-color. It’s his vigorous handling, never mind the subject. How many architectural drawings have you seen that come within a mile of it? Why, the boy’s a genius.”
“Know him?” ventured the connoisseur, fearing a fresh outburst.
“Know him! I should think I did know him. One of the cheeriest and best fellows in the world. Lives in my house. Simple as they make them. You’ll hear more of him some day, my friend, mark my word.”
Then the two strolled out together, Enoch’s exit being noticed by more than one painter with relief. He had expressed his opinions openly before in the galleries, and was not popular. He had also made several speeches relative to his views on modern art at several public dinners, which did not increase his popularity, either. Furthermore, he had taken the pains to write a series of articles—one upon the lack of good taste in both modern painting and architecture, which made him enemies—strongly accenting, as he did, the timely necessity of giving architecture a far more distinguished place in art than it was given. “A place,” he would thunder away, “which Greece gave it, and which the world has recognized for centuries.” He used to expound upon the beauty and plain common sense in the classic compared with the hodgepodge of new styles—or, rather, the attempt to create a new style, which always amounted to the usual jumble and stupid elaboration. “There’s no jumble in the classic,” he’d declare hotly, with all the vehemence of his conviction. “Start from the very ground—the foundations of their buildings, and you can trace a logical growth of base, column, capital, and architrave, to the apex of roof, not an unnecessary detail—more than that, the Greeks knew the value of a plain surface as a rest for the eye.” At which there was always sound applause from the architects, and a doubtful grumbling among the painters, whose failing it was, declared Enoch, “always to overelaborate.”
“Some of you fellows,” he’d cry out, “never seem to know when to stop.” It was a favorite expression with him to say the next day:
“I got on my hind legs, and gave it to them straight from the shoulder.”
If he was often a convincing orator, despite his almost savage brusqueness at times, it was because he was (and few people knew it) a most able lawyer, though his business life was always more or less of a mystery. That he actually had an office was known only to a few friends. It was many years since he had practised law. Somehow that modest office of Enoch’s in South Street contained memories that were dear to him. He was loyal to it. Did he not pay its rent in its old age? And now and then came to see it, to spend an hour there in the company of his old desk—a solid, friendly old piece of oak, with eighteen deep and comfortable drawers and plenty of room for his legs beneath. Here he would sit thinking of many things of the past, of hard fights that had won legal victories, under the spell of that pleasing sensation that no human being could disturb him. Old McCarthy, the janitor, attended to that, and kept his snug library of law-books very decently dusted, and I verily believe that faithful Irishman would have gone as far as to tell an inquisitive visitor that “Mr. Crane was long since dead and buried, and his office sealed up by the estate”—if such a thing were possible.