Arrived at his house—which was more pretentious than most of its one-story neighbors—for it had a basement sublet to a blind woman whose insignia read, “Chairs neatly cained on reasonable terms,” and its parlor window was gay with wax fruits and stuffed birds—the aged gentleman, who gave the name of Ground, discovered that he had no skin to operate on, and, being spent from the walk, directed Matt to buy a dead canary for sixpence from a bird-fancier “in the Eye Road.”
“There’s the tanner,” he said. “Now if you don’t come back with the bird you may stuff me for a old goose.”
Matt came back with the bird, but the aged gentleman put it to his nose and contorted his aged snuff-colored nostrils.
“I want a bird, not manure,” he said. “A bird fresh from this wale of tears. Why, if I began to skin this the feathers ’ould drop out. You’ve been took in, but you haven’t took me in, so here’s another tanner.”
In great anxiety Matt stood outside the bird-fancier’s shop-window, staring wistfully at the frowsy-looking birds roosting in the cages, and hoping that some kindly canary would drop off to eternal sleep under his very nose so that he might be sure of its freshness. But the poor little creatures all clung to existence and their perches. Suddenly he began to laugh. There was an owl in a cage, and it looked like Cornpepper. On its head was an erectile tuft like Cornpepper’s hair after argument, and, though devoid of an eye-glass, the creature regarded him from its great feather-fringed eyes with the same large, profound gaze.
“Give me style,” he heard it saying, “give me style.”
And then he thought of Cornpepper’s theories, of which he had heard more on that glad mad night when the juvenile celebrity had been his partner in the waltz.
“Erle-Smith is all wrong,” Cornpepper had pronounced, testily. “But I don’t want to talk shop to-night. Imagination is shown in treatment, not in subject. There may be more imagination in the painting of a dressing-gown than of an allegory. Painters are called poets when they can’t paint. And the Saturday Spectator is quite at sea when it claims me as the champion of modern subject against ancient, mediæval, or imaginary. Subject, indeed! What I demand is modern treatment. I do wish O’Brien would leave off interpreting me.”
And Matt Strang fell into a reverie, wondering what he should paint for the Academy, and gazing into the owl’s eyes. What if he were destined to waltz to fame in company with Cornpepper! And then he remembered Gurney’s enthusiastic talk during the pauses of the wild waltz in denunciation of the “real moments” of Cornpepperism, and in acclamation of the simpler harmonies of Outamaro, the great Japanese master, from whose work Cornpepper’s was a rotten retrogression rather than a legitimate evolution. Matt speculatively surrendered his fancy to Japanese images. A gallery of beautiful dream-pictures passed before his eyes like a panorama. A brusque tap on the shoulder roused him from his day-dream, and turning, he saw the animated face of the aged gentleman beneath the rusty silk hat.
“Where’s the bloomin’ bird?” cried Mr. Ground, relieved to find Matt not run off, for during the suspense of waiting it had struck him that even the first bird might have been picked up in the gutter.