[CHAPTER II]
In the very air and life that prevailed in the office of the Torch there was, as one may suppose, something strange, and at first repugnant to Dick Lancaster. To one of his bringing up, his earnest intentions, his thirst for real things, it seemed that all this was very like a gaudy sham, a bubble of pretense, of surface prattle. He could scarcely believe that the flippancy of these men was serious with them; their talk, their point of view astonished and horrified him. If they were to be believed, life was nothing but a skimming of more or less uneven surfaces; the only thing to be tried for was pleasure, and there was no moral line at all. And then again he rebuked himself for being, perhaps, a homesick young idiot, overgiven to morbid speculation. That was not what he had come to town for; he was going to do some good work and make a name and fame for himself.
He had found, very early in his career, that in order to get upon the first steps of the ladder he must become an illustrator. If he had had the means that would have enabled him to wait through studio-work, a trip to Paris, and the dreary years ere orders came from dealers, he would have clung to paint at any risk; but he saw himself forced to earn some bread-and-butter even while he waited for his dreams to come true. So, with some slight reluctance at first, to be sure, but afterwards with all his energy, he applied himself to pen and ink work. In course of time, as we have seen, he became the staff-artist of the Torch, He was making a very fair living for so young a man, and he made a great many acquaintances. And life every day showed him a new aspect.
One of the men he had so far taken the greatest liking to was Belden, the artist, who had, to all intents and purposes, put him into his present position with the Torch, Belden, whose name was Daniel Grant Belden, but whom his friends chaffingly called, on account of the similarity of the initials, Dante Gabriel, was one of the most happy-go-lucky individuals that ever breathed. His mania for art books kept him more or less hard-up; yet he undoubtedly had one of the finest collections, in that sort, in town. He got orders for work from a publisher; he took the manuscript that he was to illustrate home with him; he kept it three weeks; then, without having read it, he returned it saying he was too busy to attempt the commission. And if ever there was one in this present day of ours, he was a Bohemian. The peculiar part of it was that in addition to being a Bohemian by instinct, he was one by intention. He read Henri Murger with avidity, and thought of him always. On the street he was a curious object; his overcoat was a trifle shiny, and his hat was always an old, or at least, a misused one; his trousers were too tight at the knees; his boots rarely polished. He usually walked with a long, quick stride; and a long, peculiar cigar, of the sort the Wheeling people call "stogy," was almost always in his mouth. You rarely saw him on the Elevated except with an armful of books and papers. He would come home at one in the morning and sit down at his wide drawing table and work until dawn. Then, with not much more than his coat hastily thrown off, he would fling himself on the couch and be fast asleep in an instant. Often, too, he would go fast to sleep while his pen was traveling over the paper; in ten minutes, or sometimes half an hour, he would wake up and continue the stroke that had been interrupted; his pen would have not spilled a single drop. He did all his own cooking, and marvelous were the meals that resulted. He liked nothing better than to fill his rooms with a number of choice, congenial souls. They would talk art-shop for hours, or listen to music; he knew a great many clever young fellows who were gifted in playing the piano, the flute or the violin; and while his own musical tastes were barbaric, and called, chiefly, for the spirited rendition of darky-minstrelsies, he gave the rest of his company the freedom of their choice, also, and sat patiently through the most beautiful of operatic strains. Sunday was the day singled out more especially for those pleasant little "evenings" at Belden's flat.
Dick Lancaster had been asked up to these evenings a great many times before he ever went. For long, he could not make up his mind to it; in spite of all the thousand and one laxities that he saw in the daily life around him, to devote oneself to anything in the nature of sheer pleasure, on Sunday, still seemed to him a decided mis-step.
But one day, toward the beginning of winter, Belden, who had been in to call on his young protégée at the Torch office, said to him,
"Look here, Dick, why don't you come up some Sunday evening and join our gang? Goodness, you can't afford to be as straight-laced as all that, in this town. Besides, we don't do anything that's against the law and the prophets, you know. We talk a little shop, and some man reads something, perhaps, and Stanley plays a thing or two on the violin. Then we go out and help ourselves to whatever I may happen to have in the larder. And then you go home, or you bunk up there, and where's the harm done? Look at it sensibly, my boy; we are all slaves in the same bondage, in this town, and Sunday is our one off-day; you don't mean to say we're heathens and creatures of the devil if we seek the sweetest rest we can on that day? To some men, rest means church; to me and most of the men you know, it means relaxation, and relaxation means recreation. The others get their music in church, I get mine at home. Now, Dick, say you'll come up next Sunday."
And Dick, looking at Belden as if to make out whether that artist were an emissary of the Evil One or merely a man of the present day, coughed a little, and then said, rather sheepishly, "Very well, I'll come—to please you, Belden." He felt, the next minute, as if he had slipped and fallen; he grew a little faint; he thought he could hear the sound of the church bells as they used to come singing over the meadows in Lincolnville; he saw himself and his mother sitting side by side in the old pew, listening to the pleasant voice of Mr. Fairly droning out his prayer; then he shook himself together and blushed at his fancies. Belden had gone already, but Dick felt as if he would run after him and tell him, "No, no, I cannot, must not come!" He ran to the door; the corridor was empty; Belden was half way down the next block by this time. Then he solaced himself with the thought, "Surely it can be no great harm after all—besides, I have promised!"
He bent down over the drawing-board once more, but he could no longer chain his thoughts to the work before him. They flew round and round in a curious circling way about this new life that he had become a part of. It was, he was forced to admit to himself, not as beautiful a thing as he had expected; but it was certainly novel, and it interested him immensely, it kept his curiosity excited, it touched his senses. As he began to consider that quiet country village that he had left, out yonder on the plains, and this busy beehive of a metropolis, he came, also, to consider the men he was beginning to know. He leaned back in the chair, smiling a little. The office was nearly empty at this time; it was during the noon hour, and Dick was alone in the outer office. He passed over, in his thoughts, the men that he was thrown with in the Torch office. There was Wooton himself: tall, thin, with a face that was all profile—a wonderfully pure profile—with a mouth almost too small for a man, a nose that bent a little like those of the Cæsars. Dick did not know, yet, what to make of Wooton. The man had a wonderful charm; he could talk most entertainingly, most logically and he had some curiously interesting theories. There was a sort of laisser-aller negligence in his manner; his manners were admirable, and there was some occult fascination about him that one could scarcely define. As Dick considered him, he remembered that on several occasions, he had listened to Wooton's dissertations on subjects that otherwise would have offended him, merely because the man's charm of person and speech were so alluring. As to whether it was genuine or a mere veneer, well, how could one tell as soon as this? Time, which tells so many things, would doubtless tell that too.