It pointed to three minutes to twelve as he walked over to his desk, unfolded the contracts, and one by one affixed his signature. In a dim way he was conscious of how the interpretation of his first motive would be put upon it, how they would call him traitor and coward; but that mattered little. The very fact that the man for whom he was doing it would never see it as it was brought him no pang. And when he had carefully blotted the papers, affixed the seal and put them away, there was in his heart the clean, sweet joy of a child because he had been able to do this for a man in whom he believed.
The band was playing the opening strains as he closed the door behind him and started upstairs.
IX. — “OUT THERE”
The old man held the picture up before him and surveyed it with admiring but disapproving eye. “No one that comes along this way'll have the price for it,” he grumbled. “It'll just set here 'till doomsday.”
It did seem that the picture failed to fit in with the rest of the shop. A persuasive young fellow who claimed he was closing out his stock let the old man have it for what he called a song. It was only a little out-of-the-way store which subsisted chiefly on the framing of pictures. The old man looked around at his views of the city, his pictures of cats and dogs and gorgeous young women, his flaming bits of landscape. “Don't belong in here,” he fumed, “any more 'an I belong in Congress.”
And yet the old man was secretly proud of his acquisition. He seemed all at once to be lifted from his realm of petty tradesman to that of patron of art. There was a hidden dignity in his scowling as he shuffled about pondering the least ridiculous place for the picture.
It is not fair to the picture to try repainting it in words, for words reduce it to a lithograph. It was a bit of a pine forest, through which there exuberantly rushed an unspoiled little mountain stream. Chromos and works of art may deal with kindred subjects. There is just that one difference of dealing with them differently. “It ain't what you see, so much as what you can guess is there,” was the thought it brought to the old man who was dusting it. “Now this frame ain't three feet long, but it wouldn't surprise me a bit if that timber kept right on for a hundred miles. I kind of suspect it's on a mountain—looks cool enough in there to be on a mountain. Wish I was there. Bet they never see no such days as we do in Chicago. Looks as though a man might call his soul his own—out there.”
He began removing some views of Lincoln Park and some corpulent Cupids in order to make room in the window for the new picture. When he went outside to look at it he shook his head severely and hastened in to take away some ardent young men and women, some fruit and flowers and fish which he had left thinking they might “set it off.” It was evident that the new picture did not need to be “set off.” “And anyway,” he told himself, in vindication of entrusting all his goods to one bottom, “I might as well take them out, for the new one makes them look so kind of sick that no one would have them, anyhow.” Then he went back to mounting views with the serenity of one who stands for the finer things.