The Arm-Chair at the Inn

by Francis Hopkinson Smith

“Better split it,” remarked Louis, “than stop all driving. Poor fellow, I’m sorry for him; nothing hurts like having your pride dragged in the mud, and nothing brings keener suffering—I’ve seen it and know. Why didn’t you brace him up again, High-Muck?”

“I did try, but it was too late. Just before he died he wrote me the old refrain: ‘At twenty-five I might have weathered it, but not at fifty.’”

Herbert drew his chair closer, assuming his favorite gesture, his hands on the edge of the table.

“I say ‘poor fellow’ too, Louis, but High-Muck has not put his finger on the right spot. It was not the man’s pride that was wounded; nor did he die of a broken heart. He died because he had not reached his pinnacle, and that is quite a different thing. What blinded him and destroyed his reason—for it cannot be thought very sensible for a man to abandon a certain fixed income for a rainbow—was not your reviving his belief in himself, but your giving him, for the first time, an opportunity to spread his wings. But for that you could not have persuaded him to write a line. The pitiful thing was that the wings were not large enough—still they were wings to be used in the air of romance, and not legs with which to tread the roads of the commonplace, and he knew it. He had felt them growing ever since he was a boy. It is only a question of the spread of one’s feathers, after all, whether one succeeds soaring over mountains with a view of the never-ending Valley of Content below, or whether one keeps on grovelling in the mud.”

As Herbert paused a tremulous silence fell upon the group. That he, of all men, should thus penetrate, if not espouse, the cause of failure—the hardest of all things for a man of phenomenal success to comprehend or excuse in his fellows—came as a new note.

“To illustrate this theory,” he continued, unconscious of the effect he had produced, “I will tell you about a man whom I once came across in one of the studios of Paris, back of the Pantheon. All his life he had determined to be a sculptor—and when I say ‘determined’ I mean he had thought of nothing else. By day he worked in the atelier, at night he drew from a cast—a custom then of the young sculptors. In the Louvre and in the Luxembourg—out in the gardens of the Tuileries—wherever there was something moulded or cut into form, there at odd hours you could always find this enthusiast. At night too, when the other students were trooping through the Quartier, breaking things or outrunning the gendarmes, this poor devil was working away, doing Ledas and Venuses and groups of nudes, with rearing horses and chariots,—all the trite subjects a young sculptor attempts whose imagination outruns his ability.

“Year after year his things would come up before the jury and be rejected; and they deserved it. Soon it began to dawn on his associates, but never on him, that, try as he might, there was something lacking in his artistic make-up. With the master standing over him advising a bit of clay put on here, or a slice taken off there, he had seemed to progress; when, however, he struck out for himself his results were most disheartening. It was during this part of his life that I came to know him. He was then a man of forty, ten years younger than your dead novelist, High-Muck, and, like him, a man of many sorrows. The difference was that all his life my man had been poor; at no time for more than a week had he ever been sure of his bread. As he was an expert moulder and often gratuitously helped his brother sculptors in taking casts of their clay figures, he had often been begged to accept employment at good wages with some of the stucco people, but he had refused and had fought on, preferring starvation to pâtisserie, as he called this kind of work.

“Nor had he, like your novelist, happiness to look back upon. He had married young, as they all do, and there had come a daughter who had grown to be eighteen, and who had been lost in the whirl—slipped in the mud, they said, and the city had rolled over her. And then the wife died and he was alone. The girl had crept up his stairs one night and lay shivering outside his door; he had taken her in, put her to bed, and fed her. Later on her last lover discovered by chance her hiding-place, and in the mould-maker’s absence the two had found the earthen pot with the few francs he owned and had spent them. After that he had shut his door in her face. And so the fight went on, his ideal still alive in his heart, his one purpose to give it flight—‘soaring over the heads of the millions,’ as he put it, ‘so that even dullards might take off their hats in recognition.’

“When I again met him he was living in an old, abandoned theatre on the outskirts of Paris, a weird, uncanny ruin—rats everywhere—the scenery hanging in tatters, the stage broken down, the pit filled to the level of the footlights with a mass of coal—for a dealer in fuels had leased it for this purpose, his carts going in and out of the main entrance. One of the dressing-rooms over the flies was his studio, reached by a staircase from the old stage entrance. A former tenant had cut a skylight under which my friend worked.

“In answer to his ‘Entrez’ I pushed open his door and found him in a sculptor’s blouse cowering over a small sheet-iron stove on which some food was being cooked. He raised his head, straightened his back, and came toward me—a small, shrunken man now, prematurely old, his two burning eyes looking out from under his ledge of a forehead like coals beneath a half-burnt log, a shock of iron-gray hair sticking straight up from his scalp as would a brush. About his nose, up his cheeks, around his mouth, and especially across his throat, which was free of a cravat, ran pasty wrinkles, like those on a piece of uncooked tripe. Only half-starved men who have lived on greasy soups and scraps from the kitchens have these complexions.