“I had a trained slave who could make him kneel,” he explained, “but I lost Abu over on Ninth Avenue—the drunken rascal!”
Finally they maneuvered Elsie against the side of a truck, and Tootles scrambled into place, amid the jeers of the neighborhood. Wilder placed himself courageously at the head, with the leading-strap, and they started. Unfortunately it was only four o’clock, and he did not wish to reach his rendezvous before five, and, in a luckless moment, decided to cross the park and explore the East Side. This, too, might have resulted without accident, had not Flick, whose sense of geography was becoming misty, happened to remember Abu, and stopped at each saloon to conduct a personal search, despite the frantic remonstrances of Tootles, who did not relish these moments of lonely and lofty splendor. Elsie, the camel, however, was of a sociable, man-loving nature, and no harm might have come, had not Wilder, whose sobriety was perceptibly being cured, remembered, as a humane man with an investigating turn of mind, that Elsie must be getting thirsty, and offered her a can of foaming beer.
The consequence was that the camel suddenly awoke and assumed the direction of the party, heading due east (with an instinct, perhaps, toward the fatherland) at an accelerated pace, despite Tootles’ objurgations and Flick’s frantic efforts to head her off. The rest was a painful memory—a weird, reeling flight of excited tenements, balking horses, swearing policemen, and a sudden entangling plunge into an Italian wedding, in which camel, bride, coupés, and guests became fantastically intermingled, while Tootles, hanging to the top of a providential lamp-post, saw Flick, Elsie, the policemen and wedding-party rolling away in a whirling mist.
A week later, Flick Wilder reappeared, having beaten his way back from Buffalo, where he had landed, he knew not how and asked shelter, while he made certain cautious inquiries as to the fate of Elsie and the propriety of a public reappearance.
From this hectic beginning, they became fast chums. Tootles, who never touched a drop, unconsciously exercised a sobering influence over Mr. Flick Wilder, gradually leading him into the paths of ambition while following him through a series of incredible escapades. Lonely, each in his own struggling beginning, they found a divine measure of comradeship in their exuberant youth, dreaming away at night under the stars that came down to them through the open skylight; Tootles of fame and masterpieces; Flick of more worldly ambitions, of rolling down the avenue, not on camels but in glaring limousines, of being saluted obsequiously by precipitate head waiters conducting him through luxurious restaurants where beautiful women with diamonds in their hair sent him imploring glances. But as these dreams, though immensely satisfying to the inner needs, had the one serious defect of not being discountable, the rent loomed over them like the sword of Damocles, compelling them, much as the outer world called to their curiosity and love of adventure, to the cruel necessity of doing a certain amount of work—menial, brutalizing periods, which set upon them in the closing week of the month, with consequent scurrying to editorial offices.
During the free, happy weeks, Tootles dreamed and dabbled at painting, executing lurid portraits of Belle Shaler and Pansy Hartmann, models who roomed together down the hall, and who, under promise of possessing these treasures of art, agreed to sit for him at special rates, payable at some radiant future date. Occasionally Tootles wandered into the studios of artists in the Sixty-seventh Street district for such crumbs of knowledge as they good-humoredly threw him. The truth is, he had unusual talent but too much youth. Occasionally, too, Flick Wilder, impressed with his serious view of life, would get out his copybooks, sharpen his pencil and prepare to think.
The studio was a capacious one, arranged in compromise between Flick’s yearning for splendor and Tootles’ feeling for the decorative in art. At first glance, it looked like a theatrical storehouse, from which parentage most of its furnishings had found their way, so that one versed in dramatic necrology would have fancied himself on the reef of last season’s plays. The studio was lit by two windows on the street and a great, slanting skylight overhead. On one side was a huge back drop depicting a sunset in the Grand Cañon, while on the other was a bucolic view of southern plantations, secured from a broken-down troupe of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” for a price between two and three dollars. The introduction of these novel effects in mural decoration, a relic of Flick Wilder’s friendship with a convivial property-man, was at first strenuously opposed by Tootles, who, however, ceded his position when Flick pertinently pointed out, first, that the bare walls were in a shocking state and could not be replastered unless one month’s rent could be guaranteed in advance, and, second, that the scenery would serve as invaluable backgrounds for the production of Wimpfheimer & Goldfinch’s pastorales.
In a back corner, four property spears, from a popular failure of “Julius Cæsar,” upheld a yellowish-green silk curtain which, when parted, disclosed two bunks, one above the other, for greater economy of space—Tootles occupying the more exposed position in deference to Flick’s uncertain habits.
The opposite corner by the windows was consecrated to Art, paint-boxes, easel, and canvases; while the home of Literature was a damaged roll-top desk from the first act of a deceased melodrama, with easy refuge at hand in a second-hand easy chair and a divan with the front spring still in good order. Another sofa and a hanging couch burned with pipe-ashes were known as the guest-rooms, while the studio was artfully divided into zones by three pseudo-Japanese screens, red, yellow, and violet, which swore at everything else and at themselves. Behind one was the bathroom, so-called as a compliment to the presence of a wash-basin and running water. A second screen, with memories of “Zaza,” concealed the culinary preparations when, indeed, there was anything in the larder to conceal; while behind a third was a wardrobe containing Tootles’ multiple suits, which had come to him in part payment (dress suits excepted) of his services to the house of Wimpfheimer & Goldfinch.
All the electric bulbs were concealed in varicolored globes representing several varieties of the fish and animal kingdom and capable of flooding the studio with red, blue, or green tints, while perched in the high, dusky corners of the ceiling were two cast-iron owls so wired that Flick, from his couch, could cause four yellowish eyes to spring out of the darkness. Finally, the pride of the floor, where it dominated gorgeously the collection of vagrant mats, was a genuine if moldy bear-rug, with which Flick had unaccountably made his appearance one night, insisting that it had attacked him without warning. Tootles was considerably worried, but a closer inspection of the animal convinced him that Flick had more probably rescued it from an ash-can than carried it off by any act of grand larceny. Consequently he set to work with enthusiasm to restore it to some of its original ferocity, and with the aid of odd scraps of furs succeeded in reconstructing a semblance of a body, but one of such unusual colors that it might have passed as a specie of the Go-to-fro—that mythological animal which has the left leg shorter than the right in order that it may run around a hill the faster.