PART IV
With a Detailed Account of a Dangerous Footpad.
Mac had invited three or four of us to luncheon—Boggs, Lonnegan, Marny, and myself. These feasts were "Dutch" in the strictest sense, the sum total paid being divided, share and share alike, between the host of the day and his guests. That was the custom among the students in Munich and Paris, even at Florian's in Venice, and the custom was still observed. It did away with unpleasant comparisons—Lonnegan's inherited bank-account, for instance, and Woods's income from his rich aunt, who refused him nothing, in contrast to my own and Boggs's annual earnings. The only liberty given to the host of the day was the choice of restaurants. At Maroni's we could get a hot sandwich and a glass of beer for fifteen cents; at Brown's, in Twenty-eighth Street, a chop, a baked potato, and a mug of bass for half of a trade dollar. When some one of the less opulent had sold a picture, and had become temporarily rich over and above the amount due for the month's rent, Lonnegan, or Woods, or Pitkin (Pitkin had a father who could cut off coupons) selected Delmonico's. These occasions were rare, and ever afterward became historic.
This day, it being Mac's turn, he selected Oscar Pusch's, on Fourth Avenue—a modest little beer-house near the corner of Twenty-fourth Street, its only distinguishing mark being a swinging, double shutter door and the advertisement of a brewery in the window. Inside was a long bar drenched with the foam of countless mugs of Hofbrau, facing a line of tables centred by cheap castors and dishes of cold slaw, and flanked at one end by a back room. This last apartment was for the elect. One table was always reserved for the exalted; of this group MacWhirter was High Priest.
Here often at night Mac held forth to an admiring crowd of young painters who believed in his brush and who loved the man who wielded it. When I look back now down the vista of twenty years and see how fine and strong and superb that brush was, how true, how wonderful in color, how much better than any other painter of his time—Barbizon, London, or Dusseldorf—and think of how many lies the resident picture dealer told his patrons to discredit Mac's genius, I always experience a peculiar hotness under my collar-button. It cools off, it is true, whenever I see one of his masterpieces hung to-day on the walls of the redeemed. My anger then turns to a genial warmth, suffusing my cheeks and permeating my being, especially when I learn the sum paid for the smallest product of his brush.
"One of MacWhirter's, sir; one of his choicest; painted in his best period," says this same fraud to-day (the period, remember, when he would say, "What can one expect of the Hudson Rivery School, sir?"), and then the dealer demands a price which, had it been paid in Mac's earlier days, would have resulted in his breaking all students' rules and setting up Johannesburg of '41 instead of the simple steins of the Hofbrau with which Lonnegan, Boggs, and the rest of us were being regaled.
The hospitable and ever alert Oscar did not welcome us this time, but a new waiter, who sprang at Mac as if he had been his lost brother—a joyous sort of waiter, clean-shaven as a priest, ruddy-cheeked, blue-eyed, with short, tan-colored hair sticking straight up on his head, looking as if at some time in his life he had been frightened half out of his wits and had never been able to keep his hair down since.
The appearance of this overjoyed individual produced a peculiar effect on Mac.
"Oh, Mr. Pusch found a place for you at last, did he, Carl?" he burst out. "Glad you're here," and Mac stepped forward and shook the waiter's hand with more than his usual warmth.
Boggs looked at me and winked. What would Mac be doing next?