[CHAPTER IX]
"It's dark as an inferno, and the stairs make a man's back ache," said Laurence Stanley dismally to himself, as he climbed up to the Philistine Club, "but," as he caught his breath again and consequently began to feel more cheerful, "it's comfortable when you get there."
Which was distinctly true. The furniture, the carpets, the hangings in the spacious, rambling old rooms were all ancient and worn, but comfort was as common to them all as was age. When you came in and slid down into the shiny leather cavern of an arm chair you felt that you were at home. At least, the men who were members did. They were a queer lot, these members. Just what they had in common, no man might say; there were artists, and writers, and musicians, and men-about-town. To outsiders it seemed as if a certain sort of cleverness was the open sesame to the membership rolls. In the matter of name, it was doubtless, the effect of a stroke of humor that came to one of the founders. Perhaps, for the very reason that most of the members were men of the sort that one instinctively knew to be modern, and broad and untramelled by dogmas or doctrines, the club had been named the Philistine Club. It was no longer in its first youth. The walls were behung with the portraits of former presidents—portraits that were all alike in their effect of displaying an execrable sort of painting; it was evident that in its selection of painters in ordinary the club had lived strictly up to its name. The building that housed the club was an old one, on one of the busiest business thoroughfares in the city. It was very convenient, as the hard-working fellows among the members phrased it; in a minute you could drop out of the rush and roar of the street-traffic into the quiet gloom of the club, a lounge, and a book.
Stanley had not been in the dark corner that he usually affected very long before Vanstruther came in, his beard more pointed than ever. He dropped limply into a chair, put his feet on one of the whist tables, and said, as he lit a cigar: "Do you know this is about the time of year that I realize that this town is a hole? I repeat it—a hole! A hole, moreover, with the bottom out. I tell you there's not a soul in town just now."
"Most true," assented Stanley, "for neither you nor I have anything that deserves the name."
"Bosh! What I mean is that the place is a howling desert. Everybody is still at the seashore, or the mountains, or the mineral springs. Newport or the White Mountains, or Manitou, or Mackinac Island—there's where every self-respecting person is at this time; not in this old sweat-box. Why, it's a positive fact that there are no pretty girls at all on the avenue these days; or, if there are any, you can tell at a glance that they're from Podunk or Egypt."
"In other words, there is a scarcity of 'Mrs. Tomnoddy received yesterday,' and 'there will be a meeting of the Contributors' Club at Mrs. Mausoleum's on Friday.' People who like to see their names in the daily papers are out of town, so the society journalist waileth; is it not so? It all comes down to bread and butter in this country. Just as soon as we get away from bread and butter, we'll be greater idiots than the others ever knew how to be." He waved a hand carelessly to some remote space in which he inferred the continent of Europe.
"That's all very well," rejoined the other, "you are always great on magniloquent generalizations, but you never trouble about the concrete things. I'm up a tree for copy, day in, day out, and I groan just once, and what do you do? You moralize loftily. But do you help me with a real bit of news? Not a bit of it."
"Well, you know," Stanley said, lazily, "I'm the last man in the world to come to for items of news concerning le monde où l'on s'amuse. But if you want something a notch or two lower—say about the grade of members of this club. Do you notice that Dante Belden's sofa is empty today?"
The journalist looked around to the other side of the room where an old black leather lounge stood. It was the sofa that had long since become the special property, in the eyes of the other members, of the artist, Dante Gabriel Belden. He used to sleep there a great deal; and he used to dream also. Occasionally he waxed talkative, and then there usually grew up around him a circle of chairs. In such conclave, there passed anecdotes that were delightful, criticisms that were incisive, and, in total, nothing that was altogether stupid.