"Adjectives be hanged! I can't talk theory in the precious daylight. If you can't see—!"
"I can see that you are painting something you haven't seen. You haven't been in the East, have you?"
"If I had, I haven't got time to jaw about it now. Come and have an absinthe at the Café Victor—in memory of old Paris days—Sixth Avenue—any of the boys will tell you. Let me see, daylight till six—half-past six. Au 'voir, au 'voir."
As I went down the steep, dark stairs, "Same old Dan," I thought. "Who would imagine I was a stranger in New York looking up an old fellow-struggler on his native heath? If I didn't know better, I might fancy his tremendous success had given him the same opinion of himself that America has of him. But no, nothing will change him; the same furious devotion to his canvas once he has quietly planned his picture, the same obstinate conviction that he is seeing something in the only right way. And yet something has changed him. Why has his brush suddenly gone East? Why this new kind of composition crowded with figures—ancient Jews, too? Has he been taken with piety, and is he going henceforward ostentatiously to proclaim his race? And who is the cheerful central figure with the fine, open face? I don't recollect any such scene in Jewish history, or anything so joyous. Perhaps it's a study of modern Jerusalem Jews, to show their life is not all Wailing Wall and Jeremiah. Or perhaps it's only decorative. America is great on decoration just now. No; he said the picture had a meaning. Well, I shall know all about it to-night. Anyhow, it's a beautiful thing."
"Same old Dan!" I thought even more decisively as, when I opened the door of the little café, a burly, black-bearded figure with audacious eyes came at me with a grip and a slap and a roar of welcome, and dragged me to the quiet corner behind the billiard tables.
"I've just been opalizing your absinthe for you," he laughed, as we sat down. "But what's the matter? You look kind o' scared."
"It's your Inferno of a city. As I turned the corner of Sixth Avenue, an elevated train came shrieking and rumbling, and a swirl of wind swept screeching round and round, enveloping me in a whirlpool of smoke and steam, until, dazed and choked in what seemed the scalding effervescence of a collision, I had given up all hope of ever learning what your confounded picture meant."
"Aha!" He took a complacent sip. "It stayed with you, did it?" And the light of triumph, flushing for an instant his rugged features, showed when it waned how pale and drawn they were by the feverish tension of his long day's work.
"Yes it did, old fellow," I said affectionately. "The joy and the glow of it, and yet also some strange antique simplicity and restfulness you have got into it, I know not how, have been with me all day, comforting me in the midst of the tearing, grinding life of this closing nineteenth century after Christ."
A curious smile flitted across Dan's face. He tilted his chair back, and rested his head against the wall.