Under the Skylights

by Henry Blake Fuller

The new Grindstone, of all the Temples of Finance within the town, was to be the most impressive, the most imposing, the most unmitigatedly monumental. The bold young architect had loftily renounced all economies of space, time, material, and had imagined a grandiose facade with a long colonnade of polished blue-granite pillars, a pompous attic story above, and a wide flight of marble steps below. The inside was to be quite as overbearingly classical as the outside. There was to be a sort of arched and columned court under a vast prismatic skylight; lunettes, spandrels, friezes and the like were to abound; and the opportunities for interior decoration were to be lavish, limitless.

Now these lunettes and spandrels were the things that were making all the trouble. The building itself was moving on well enough: the walls were all up; and half the columns—despite the groans of Simon Rosenberg—were in place. Here no hitch worth speaking of had occurred: merely a running short of material at the quarry, the bankruptcy of the first contractor, and a standstill of a month or two when all the bricklayers on the job had declined to work or to allow anybody else to work. Such trifles as these could be foreseen and allowed for; but not one of the Grindstone's devoted little band had ever grappled with a general decorative scheme for the embellishment of a great edifice raised to the greater glory of Six-per-cent, or had attempted to adjust the rival claims of a horde of painters, sculptors, modellers, and mosaickers all eager for a chance to distinguish themselves and to cut down the surplus and the undivided profits. No wonder that Jeremiah McNulty scratched his chin, and that Simon Rosenberg puckered up his yellow old face, and that Roscoe Orlando Gibbons ran his fingers through his florid side-whiskers as he tried to find some sanction and guidance in Berlin or in Rome, and that Andrew P. Hill frowned blackly upon all the rest for being as undecided as he was himself.

"This is awful!" he moaned. "We may have to calcimine the whole place in pale pink and let it go at that!"

The door opened and a deferential clerk announced the waiting presence of one of the Morrell Twins. Andrew, giving a sigh of relief, swept the drawings quickly aside and rose. Here, at last, his feet were back once more on solid ground.

II

While Richard Morrell charmed the ears of the Grindstone's directors with his tuneful periods, and dazzled their eyes by the slow waving to and fro of certain elegantly engraved certificates of stock, and made his determined chin and his big round shoulders say to the assembled body that there was no chance of his going away before he had carried his point, Eudoxia Pence was taking tea at the Temple of Art. The early twilight of mid-December had descended. "It's too late for any more shopping," said Eudoxia, "and I'm too tired." Though she was still on the right side of forty by a year or two, this advantage of youth was counterbalanced by the great effort of pushing her abundant bulk through the throng of Christmas strugglers that crowded shop and sidewalk alike. "Only to sit down for half an hour in some quiet place!" she panted. "I believe I'll just drop up and see Daffingdon for a bit. That will give me a chance at the same time to keep half an eye on Virgilia," she added soberly. "A hundred to one she'll be there; and if anybody's to blame for her being there, I'm that body."

The Temple of Art, after rooting itself in drama and oratory, after throwing out a sturdy limb of chaste traffic in bibelots here and instruments of music there and books and engravings elsewhere, and after putting forth much foliage in the shape of string-scraping and key-teasing and anguished vocalizing and determined paper-reading and indomitable lecture-hearing, blossomed forth at last in a number of skylights, and under one of these lofty covers Daffingdon Dill carried on his professional activities. Eudoxia sank down upon his big settle covered with Spanish leather, and took her tea and her biscuits, and declined the pink peppermints, and looked around to discover, by the dim help of the Japanese lantern and the battered old brass lamp from Damascus, just who might be present. Several people were scattered about in various dusky corners, and Virgilia Jeffreys was no doubt among them. "I don't know just how all this is going to end," sighed Eudoxia dubiously. "I presume I'm as responsible as anybody else," she added, in a reflective, judicial tone. "More so," she tacked on. "Altogether so," she added further, as she took a first sip.

Daffingdon Dill was a newcomer, but he had taken hold of things in a pretty confident, competent fashion and had made more of an impression in one year than many of his confreres had made in five or ten. To begin with, he had unhesitatingly quartered himself in the most desirable building the town could boast. Many of his colleagues, no less clever (save in this one respect), still lingered in the old Rabbit-Hutch, a building which had been good enough in its day but which belonged, like the building that Andrew P. Hill was preparing to leave, to a day now past. Fearful of the higher rents that more modern quarters exacted, they went on paying their monthly stipend to old Ezekiel Warren, with such regularity as circumstances would admit, and made no effort to escape the affectionate banter that grouped them under the common name of the Bunnies.

Dill kept his studio up to the general level of the Temple, and himself up to the general level of the studio. There was little trace of Bohemia about either. Society found his workroom a veritable salon de reception. He himself never permitted the painter to eclipse the gentleman. People who came late in the afternoon found his tall, slender figure inclosed in a coat of precisely the right length, shape, cut. People who came earlier found him in guise more professional but no less elegant. He took a great deal of pains with his handsome hands, which many visitors pressed with cautious, admiring respect, as something a little too good to be true, as something a little too fine for this workaday world, and with his well-grown beard, which hugged his cheeks closely to make a telling manifestation upon his chin, after the manner of Van Dyck. This beard cried, almost clamoured, for picturesque accessories, and when Daffingdon went to a costume ball he generally wore a ruff and carried a rapier. All these things had their effect, and when people said, "How much?" and Daffingdon with unblinking serenity said, "So much," they quailed sometimes, but they never tried to beat him down.

"Why, after all, you know," they would say to one another, as they reconsidered his effective presence and his expensive surroundings,—"why, after all, it isn't as if——" Then they would think of the Rabbit-Hutch and acknowledge that here was a great advance. The poor Bunnies would have blinked—and often had, you may be sure.