“What is art?” he cried, “if it be not pleasure? And 227 pleasure ceases where effort begins. For me, I am all heart, all art, like there never was in all the history of the Renaissance. As expresses itself the little innocent bird in song, so in my pictures I express myself. It is no effort. It is in me. It is born. Behold! Art has given birth to Beauty!”
“And the result,” added Skidder, “is a ne plus ultra par excellence which gathers in the popular coin every time. And say, if we had a Broadway theatre to run our stuff, and Angelo Puma to soopervise the combine––oh boy!––” He smote Mr. Pawling upon his bony back and dug him in the ribs with his thumb.
Mr. Pawling’s mouth sagged and his melancholy eyes shifted around him from Tessa Barclay––who was now attempting to balance a bon-bon on her nose and catch it between her lips––to Vanna Brown, teaching Miss West to turn cart-wheels on one hand.
Evidently Art had its consolations; and the single track genius who lived for art alone got a bonus, too. Also, what General Sherman once said about Art seemed to be only too obvious.
A detail, however, worried Mr. Pawling. Financially, he had always been afraid of Jews. And the nose of Angelo Puma made him uneasy every time he looked at it.
But an inch is a mile on a man’s nose; and his own was bigger, yet entirely Yankee; so he had about concluded that there was no racial occasion for financial alarm.
What he should have known was that no Jew can compete with a Connecticut Yankee; but that any half-cast Armenian is master of both. Especially when born in Mexico of a Levantine father.
Now, in spite of Angelo Puma’s agile gaiety and exotic exuberances, his brain remained entirely occupied with two matters. One of these concerned the possibility of interesting Mr. Pawling in a plot of ground on Broadway, now defaced by several taxpayers.
The other matter which fitfully preoccupied him was his unpleasant and unintentional interview with Sondheim.