The door closed, leaving King O’Leary, who had met women, good, bad, and indifferent, in many climes and held his own with Irish audacity, so thoroughly perplexed that he stood staring at the warm light playing on the glass of the door a long moment before he squared his shoulders and advanced to the next test.
II
Tootles shared the studio, which was a curiosity in itself, and a sort of refuge for indigent artists, transient reporters and just plain-a-day human beings, with Mr. Flick Wilder, who numbered among his activities (without tarrying overlong in any) journalism, all grades of publicity and press-work, advance agent, and odd theatrical jobs, special stories, and occasionally minor editorial positions, briefly held. As he aspired to a liberal position in the literary world—and by liberal, he understood a position in which he should originate the ideas that others were laboriously to execute—he had decided to take up as a steady profession (steady being used in a relative sense) the occupation of joke-smith, or joke-cracker, as he himself termed it, as one which necessitated only a trifling expense in the shape of a note-book, developed the memory, and made the companionship of witty associates a lucrative necessity. He pounded out the pun ordinary by the dozen for the comic weeklies at fifty cents an item. He dressed up anecdotes skimmed from current journalism, and fitted them to celebrities, a process which he termed “developing the property.” He seasoned English humor with the pepper of American wit. He tagged an inscription to a cartoon and supplied ideas for others ad libitum, and occasionally, by astutely padding two lines into a paragraph or a paragraph into a section, realized the colossal sum of five dollars. Daily contemplation of all things in their humorous possibilities had settled upon him a fixed gravity, a sort of distant look in the eyes, of seeking to determine whether the last man had uttered anything of value, and where others broke into laughter, he resorted to his note-book. He had seen many sides of New York in the periodic lapses which kept him constantly in search of a new profession. He had even been a dog-catcher during a week of financial stringency, when he was seeking to earn his fare from Chattanooga back to the metropolis, but he never referred to this except in moments of full confession. He had a play and a novel which he intended to complete. In tribute to this literary productivity, he liked to refer to himself as “Literature,” while addressing Tootles as “Art.”
Their association had come about six months previously, in a quite accidental manner. Tootles, who was of extravagant tastes, was immersed in a fit of hard work, in an effort to catch up with the rent, which, though only thirty dollars a month, was beyond his powers of concentration. He was at his easel, finishing up a series of commercial sketches depicting certain Olympian young men, beautiful as men are not, lolling on the seashore in the new spring styles of Wimpfheimer & Goldfinch’s twenty-five-dollar suits—a degradation which he endured against the day when the galleries of the world should contend for his masterpieces, on the practical theory that it not only kept the landlord in good humor but gave the artist himself exceptional opportunities in the matter of his own wardrobe.
The door was open, and he was aware that something unusual was taking place along the hall—from the intermittent sounds which rolled down, of loud and angry conversation—when there abruptly entered the room, and by the same token his own immediate existence, Mr. Flick Wilder, a sandy-haired, freckled Westerner, with a watery eye and an impudent tilt to his nose, a heavy, thirsty underlip, about thirty, of middle height but so abnormally thin that he appeared back-bone et præterea nihil.
“Hello, kid!” said Mr. Wilder, with a friendly though suspiciously enthusiastic greeting.
“Hello, you human hatpin,” Tootles immediately retorted. “What’s your line of goods?”