O'Day had stood smiling at the painter, Masie's hand fast in his, Fudge tiptoeing softly about, divided between a sense of the strangeness of the place and a certainty of mice behind the canvases. Felix knew the old fellow's kind, and recognized the note of attempted gayety in the voice—the bravado of the poor putting their best, sometimes their only, foot foremost.
“No, I won't sit down—not yet,” he answered pleasantly; “I will look around, if you will let me, and I will try one of your pipes before I begin. What a jolly place you have here! Don't move”—this to the model, a slip of a girl, her eyes muffled in a lace veil, one of Ganger's Oriental costumes about her shoulders—“I am quite at home, my dear, and if you have been a model any length of time you will know exactly what that means.”
“Oh, she's my Fatima,” exclaimed Ganger. “Her real name is Jane Hoggson, and her mother does my washing, but I call her Fatima for short. She can stop work for the day. Get down off the platform, Jane Hoggson, and talk to this dear little girl. You see, Mr. O'Day, now that the art of the country has gone to the devil and nobody wants my masterpieces, I have become an Eastern painter, fresh from Cairo, where I have lived for half a century—principally on Turkish paste and pressed figs. My specialty at present—they are all over my walls, as you can see—is dancing-girls in silk tights or without them, just as the tobacco shops prefer. I also do sheiks, muffled to their eyebrows in bath towels, and with scimitars—like that one above the mantel. And very profitable, too; MOST profitable, my dear sir. I get twenty doldars for a real odalisk and fifteen for a bashi-bazouk. I can do one about every other day, and I sell one about every other month. As for Sam Dogger here—Sam, what is your specialty? I said landscapes, Sam, when Mr. O'Day came in, but you may have changed since we have been talking.”
The wizened old gentleman thus addressed sidled nearer. He was ten years younger than Ganger, but his thin, bloodless hands, watery eyes, their lids edged with red, and bald head covered by a black velvet skull-cap made him look that much older.
“Nat talks too much, Mr. O'Day,” he piped in a high-keyed voice. “I often tell Nat that he's got a loose hinge in his mouth, and he ought to screw it tight or it will choke him some day when he isn't watching. He! He!” And a wheezy laugh filled the room.
“Shut up, you old sardine! You don't talk enough. If you did you'd get along better. I'll tell you, Mr. O'Day, what Sam does. Sam's a patcher-up—a 'puttier.' That's what he is. Sam can get more quality out of a piece of sandpaper, a pot of varnish, and a little glue than any man in the business. If you don't believe it, just bring in a fake Romney, or a Gainsborough, or some old Spanish or Italian daub with the corners knocked off where the signature once was, or a scrape down half a cheek, or some smear of a head, with half the canvas bare, and put Sam to work on it, and in a week or less out it comes just as it left the master's easel—'Found by his widow after his death' or 'The property of an English nobleman on whose walls it has hung for two centuries.' By thunder! isn't it beautiful?” He chuckled. “Wonderful how these bullfrogs of connoisseurs swallow the dealers' flies! And here am I, who can paint any blamed thing from a hen-coop to a battle scene, doing signs for tobacco shops; and there is Sam, who can do Corots and Rousseaus and Daubignys by the yard, obliged to stick to a varnish pot and a scraper! Damnable, isn't it? But we don't growl, do we, Sammy? When Sammy has anything left over, he brings half of it down to me—he lives on the floor above—and when I get a little ahead and Sammy is behind, I send it up to him. We are the Siamese twins, Sammy and I, aren't we, Sam? Where are you, anyway? Oh, he's after the dog, I see, moving the canvases so the little beggar won't run a thumb-tack in his paw. Sam can no more resist a dog, my dear Mr. O'Day, than a drunkard can a rum-mill, can you, Sam?”
“At it again, are you, Nat?” wheezed the wizened old gentleman, dusting his fingers as he reappeared from behind the canvases, his watery eyes edged with a deeper red, due to his exertions. “Don't pay any attention to him, Mr. O'Day. What he says isn't half true, and the half that is true isn't worth listening to. Now tell me about that frame he's ordered. He don't want it, and I've told him so. If you are willing to lend it to him, he'll pay you for it when the picture is sold, which will never be, and by that time he'll—”
“Dry up, you old varnish pot!” shouted Ganger, “how do you know I won't pay for it?”
“Because your picture will never be hung—that's why!”
“Mr. Ganger did not want to buy it,” broke in Felix, between puffs from one of his host's corn-cob pipes. “He wanted to exchange something for it—'swap' he called it.”