When they were alone again, Grief said: “I’m not going, anyhow. I hate that fellow.”
“Oh, fiddle,” said Wrinkles. “You’re an infernal crank. And besides, where’s your dinner coming from tomorrow night if you don’t go? Tell me that.”
Little Pennoyer said: “Yes, that’s so, Grief. Where’s your dinner coming from if you don’t go?”
Grief said: “Well, I hate him, anyhow.”
Little Pennoyer’s four dollars could not last for ever. When he received it he and Wrinkles and Great Grief went to a table d’hote. Afterwards little Pennoyer discovered that only two dollars and a half remained. A small magazine away down town had accepted one out of the six drawings that he had taken them, and later had given him four dollars for it. Penny was so disheartened when he saw that his money was not going to last for ever that, even with two dollars and a half in his pockets, he felt much worse than when he was penniless, for at that time he anticipated twenty-four. Wrinkles lectured upon “Finance.”
Great Grief said nothing, for it was established that when he received six dollar checks from comic weeklies he dreamed of renting studios at seventy-five dollars per month, and was likely to go out and buy five dollars’ worth of second-hand curtains and plaster casts.
When he had money Penny always hated the cluttered den in the old building. He desired then to go out and breathe boastfully like a man. But he obeyed Wrinkles, the elder and the wise, and if you had visited that room about ten o’clock of a morning or about seven of an evening you would have thought that rye bread, frankfurters, and potato salad from Second Avenue were the only foods in the world.
Purple Sanderson lived there too, but then he really ate. He had learned parts of the gas fitter’s trade before he came to be such a great artist, and when his opinions disagreed with that of every art manager in New York, he went to see a plumber, a friend of his, for whose opinion he had a great respect. In consequence, he frequented a very neat restaurant on Twenty-third Street, and sometimes on Saturday nights he openly scorned his companions.
Purple was a good fellow, Grief said, but one of his singularly bad traits was that he always remembered everything. One night, not long after little Pennoyer’s great discovery, Purple came in, and as he was neatly hanging up his coat, said: “Well, the rent will be due in four days.”
“Will it?” demanded Penny, astounded. Penny was always astounded when the rent came due. It seemed to him the most extraordinary occurrence.
“Certainly it will,” said Purple, with the irritated air of a superior financial man.
“My soul!” said Wrinkles.
Great Grief lay on the bed smoking a pipe and waiting for fame. “Oh, go home, Purple. You resent something. It wasn’t me—it was the calendar.”
“Try and be serious a moment, Grief.”
“You’re a fool, Purple.”
Penny spoke from where he was at work. “Well, if those Amazement people pay me when they said they would I’ll have money then.”
“So you will, dear,” said Grief, satirically. “You’ll have money to burn. Did the Amazement people ever pay you when they said they would? You’re wonderfully important all of a sudden, it seems to me. You talk like an artist.”
Wrinkles, too, smiled at little Pennoyer. “The Established Magazine people wanted Penny to hire models and make a try for them too. It will only cost him a big blue chip. By the time he has invested all the money he hasn’t got and the rent is two weeks overdue, he will be able to tell the landlord to wait seven months until the Monday morning after the day of publication. Go ahead, Penny.”
It was the habit to make game of little Pennoyer. He was always having gorgeous opportunities, with no opportunity to take advantage of his opportunities.
Penny smiled at them, his tiny, tiny smile of courage.
“You’re a confident little cuss,” observed Grief, irrelevantly.
“Well, the world has no objection to your being confident also, Grief,” said Purple.
“Hasn’t it?” said Grief. “Well, I want to know!”
Wrinkles could not be light-spirited long. He was obliged to despair when occasion offered. At last he sank down in a chair and seized his guitar. “Well, what’s to be done?” he said. He began to play mournfully.
“Throw Purple out,” mumbled Grief from the bed.
“Are you fairly certain that you will have money then, Penny?” asked Purple.
Little Pennoyer looked apprehensive. “Well, I don’t know,” he said.
And then began that memorable discussion, great in four minds. The tobacco was of the “Long John” brand. It smelled like burning mummies.
Once Purple Sanderson went to his home in St. Lawrence county to enjoy some country air, and, incidentally, to explain his life failure to his people. Previously, Great Grief had given him odds that he would return sooner than he had planned, and everybody said that Grief had a good bet. It is not a glorious pastime, this explaining of life failures.
Later, Great Grief and Wrinkles went to Haverstraw to visit Grief’s cousin and sketch. Little Pennoyer was disheartened, for it is bad to be imprisoned in brick and dust and cobbles when your ear can hear in the distance the harmony of the summer sunlight upon leaf and blade of green. Besides, he did not hear Wrinkles and Grief discoursing and quarreling in the den, and Purple coming in at six o’clock with contempt.
On Friday afternoon he discovered that he only had fifty cents to last until Saturday morning, when he was to get his check from the Gamin. He was an artful little man by this time, however, and it is as true as the sky that when he walked toward the Gamin office on Saturday he had twenty cents remaining.
The cashier nodded his regrets. “Very sorry, Mr.—er—Pennoyer, but our payday, you know, is on Monday. Come around any time after ten.”
“Oh, it don’t matter,” said Penny. As he walked along on his return he reflected deeply how he could invest his twenty cents in food to last until Monday morning any time after ten. He bought two coffee cakes in a Third Avenue bakery. They were very beautiful. Each had a hole in the center and a handsome scallop all around the edges.
Penny took great care of those cakes. At odd times he would rise from his work and go to see that no escape had been made. On Sunday he got up at noon and compressed breakfast and noon into one meal. Afterwards he had almost three-quarters of a cake still left to him. He congratulated himself that with strategy he could make it endure until Monday morning, any time after ten.
At three in the afternoon there came a faint-hearted knock. “Come in,” said Penny. The door opened and old Tim Connegan, who was trying to be a model, looked in apprehensively. “I beg pardon, sir,” he said at once.
“Come in, Tim, you old thief,” said Penny. Tim entered, slowly and bashfully. “Sit down,” said Penny. Tim sat down and began to rub his knees, for rheumatism had a mighty hold upon him.
Penny lit his pipe and crossed his legs. “Well, how goes it?”
Tim moved his square jaw upward and flashed Penny a little glance.
“Bad?” said Penny.
The old man raised his hand impressively. “I’ve been to every studio in the hull city and I never see such absences in my life. What with the seashore and the mountains, and this and that resort, I think all the models will be starved by fall. I found one man in up on Fifty-seventh Street. He ses to me: ‘Come around Tuesday—I may want yez and I may not.’ That was last week. You know, I live down on the Bowery, Mr. Pennoyer, and when I got up there on Tuesday, he ses: ‘Confound you, are you here again?’ ses he. I went and sat down in the park, for I was too tired for the walk back. And there you are, Mr. Pennoyer. What with tramping around to look for men that are thousand miles away, I’m near dead.”
“It’s hard,” said Penny.
“It is, sir. I hope they’ll come back soon. The summer is the death of us all, sir; it is. Sure, I never know where my next meal is coming until I get it. That’s true.”
“Had anything tod
ay?”
“Yes, sir—a little.”
“How much?”
“Well, sir, a lady gave me a cup of coffee this morning. It was good, too, I’m telling you.”
Penny went to his cupboard. When he returned, he said: “Here’s some cake.”
Tim thrust forward his hands, palms erect. “Oh, now, Mr. Pennoyer, I couldn’t. You—”
“Go ahead. What’s the odds?”
“Oh, now—”
“Go ahead, you old bat.”
Penny smoked.
When Tim was going out, he turned to grow eloquent again. “Well, I can’t tell you how much I’m obliged to you, Mr. Pennoyer. You—”
“Don’t mention it, old man.”
Penny smoked.
October 28, 1894
[New York Press, part 4, p. 6.]
THE SILVER PAGEANT
“It’s rotten,” said Grief.
“Oh, it’s fair, old man. Still, I would not call it a great contribution to American art,” said Wrinkles.
“You’ve got a good thing, Gaunt, if you go at it right,” said little Pennoyer.
These were all volunteer orations. The boys had come in one by one and spoken their opinions. Gaunt listened to them no more than if they had been so many match peddlers. He never heard anything close at hand, and he never saw anything excepting that which transpired across a mystic wide sea. The shadow of his thoughts was in his eyes, a little gray mist, and, when what you said to him had passed out of your mind, he asked: “Wha—a—at?” It was understood that Gaunt was very good to tolerate the presence of the universe, which was noisy and interested in itself. All the younger men, moved by an instinct of faith, declared that he would one day be a great artist if he would only move faster than a pyramid. In the meantime he did not hear their voices. Occasionally when he saw a man take vivid pleasure in life, he faintly evinced an admiration. It seemed to strike him as a feat. As for him, he was watching that silver pageant across a sea.
When he came from Paris to New York somebody told him that he must make his living. He went to see some book publishers, and talked to them in his manner—as if he had just been stunned. At last one of them gave him drawings to do, and it did not surprise him. It was merely as if rain had come down.
Great Grief went to see him in his studio, and returned to the den to say: “Gaunt is working in his sleep. Somebody ought to set fire to him.”
It was then that the others went over and smoked, and gave their opinions of a drawing. Wrinkles said: “Are you really looking at it, Gaunt? I don’t think you’ve seen it yet, Gaunt.”
“What?”
“Why don’t you look at it?”
When Wrinkles departed, the model, who was resting at that time, followed him into the hall and waved his arms in rage. “That feller’s crazy. Yeh ought t’ see—” and he recited lists of all the wrongs that can come to models.
It was a superstitious little band over in the den. They talked often of Gaunt. “He’s got pictures in his eyes,” said Wrinkles. They had expected genius to blindly stumble at the preface and ceremonies of the world, and each new flounder by Gaunt made a stir in the den. It awed them, and they waited.
At last one morning Gaunt burst into the room. They were all as dead men.
“I’m going to paint a picture.” The mist in his eyes was pierced by a Coverian gleam. His gestures were wild and extravagant. Grief, stretched out smoking on the bed, Wrinkles and little Pennoyer working at their drawing boards tilted against the table, were suddenly frozen. If bronze statues had come and danced heavily before them, they could not have been thrilled further.
Gaunt tried to tell them of something, but it became knotted in his throat, and then suddenly he dashed out again.
Later they went earnestly over to Gaunt’s studio. Perhaps he would tell them of what he saw across the sea.
He lay dead upon the floor. There was a little gray mist before his eyes.
When they finally arrived home that night they took a long time to undress for bed, and then came the moment when they waited for some one to put out the gas. Grief said at last, with the air of a man whose brain is desperately driven: “I wonder—I—what do you suppose he was going to paint?”
Wrinkles reached and turned out the gas, and from the sudden profound darkness, he said: “There is a mistake. He couldn’t have had pictures in his eyes.”
1894?
[Last Words. London: Digby, Long & Co. (March, 1902), pp. 145–148.]
WHEN EVERY ONE IS PANIC STRICKEN
[The Fire]
We were walking on one of the shadowy side streets, west of Sixth Avenue. The midnight silence and darkness was upon it save where at the point of intersection with the great avenue, there was a broad span of yellow light. From there came the steady monotonous jingle of streetcar bells and the weary clatter of hoofs on the cobbles. While the houses in this street turned black and mystically silent with the night, the avenue continued its eternal movement and life, a great vein that never slept nor paused. The gorgeous orange-hued lamps of a saloon flared plainly, and the figures of some loungers could be seen as they stood on the corner. Passing to and fro, the tiny black figures of people made an ornamental border on this fabric of yellow light.
The stranger was imparting to me some grim midnight reflections upon existence, and in the heavy shadows and in the great stillness pierced only by the dull thunder of the avenue, they were very impressive.
Suddenly the muffled cry of a woman came from one of those dark, impassive houses near us. There was the sound of the splinter and crash of broken glass, falling to the pavement. “What’s that?” gasped the stranger. The scream contained that ominous quality, that weird timber which denotes fear of imminent death.
A policeman, huge and panting, ran past us with glitter of buttons and shield in the darkness. He flung himself upon the fire alarm box at the corner where the lamp shed a flicker of carmine tints upon the pavement. “Come on,” shouted the stranger. He dragged me excitedly down the street. We came upon an old four story structure, with a long sign of a bakery over the basement windows, and the region about the quaint front door plastered with other signs. It was one of those ancient dwellings which the churning process of the city had changed into a hive of little industries.
At this time some dull gray smoke, faintly luminous in the night, writhed out from the tops of the second story windows, and from the basement there glared a deep and terrible hue of red, the color of satanic wrath, the color of murder. “Look! Look!” shouted the stranger.
It was extraordinary how the street awakened. It seemed but an instant before the pavements were studded with people. They swarmed from all directions, and from the dark mass arose countless exclamations, eager and swift.
“Where is it? Where is it?”
“No. 135.”
“It’s that old bakery.”
“Is everybody out?”
“Look—gee—say, lookut ’er burn, would yeh?”
The windows of almost every house became crowded with people, clothed and partially clothed, many having rushed from their beds. Here were many women, and as their eyes fastened upon that terrible growing mass of red light one could hear their little cries, quavering with fear and dread. The smoke oozed in greater clouds from the spaces between the sashes of the windows, and urged by the fervor of the heat within, ascended in more rapid streaks and curves.
Upon the sidewalk there had been a woman who was fumbling mechanically with the buttons at the neck of her dress. Her features were lined in anguish; she seemed to be frantically searching her memory—her memory, that poor feeble contrivance that had deserted her at the first of the crisis, at the momentous time. She really struggled and tore hideously at some frightful mental wall that upreared between her and her senses, her very instincts. The policeman, running back from the fire alarm box, grabbed her, intending to haul her away from danger of falling things. Then something came to her like a bolt from the sky. The creatu
re turned all gray, like an ape. A loud shriek rang out that made the spectators bend their bodies, twisting as if they were receiving sword thrusts.
“My baby! My baby! My baby!”
The policeman simply turned and plunged into the house. As the woman tossed her arms in maniacal gestures about her head, it could then be seen that she waved in one hand a little bamboo easel, of the kind which people sometimes place in corners of their parlors. It appeared that she had with great difficulty saved it from the flames. Its cost should have been about thirty cents.
A long groaning sigh came from the crowd in the street, and from all the thronged windows. It was full of distress and pity, and a sort of cynical scorn for their impotency. Occasionally the woman screamed again. Another policeman was fending her off from the house, which she wished to enter in the frenzy of her motherhood, regardless of the flames. These people of the neighborhood, aroused from their beds, looked at the spectacle in a half-dazed fashion at times, as if they were contemplating the ravings of a red beast in a cage. The flames grew as if fanned by tempests, a sweeping, inexorable appetite of a thing, shining, with fierce, pitiless brilliancy, gleaming in the eyes of the crowd that were upturned to it in an ecstasy of awe, fear and, too, half-barbaric admiration. They felt the human helplessness that comes when nature breaks forth in passion, overturning the obstacles, emerging at a leap from the position of a slave to that of a master, a giant. There became audible a humming noise, the buzzing of curious machinery. It was the voices of the demons of the flame. The house, in manifest heroic indifference to the fury that raged in its entrails, maintained a stolid and imperturbable exterior, looming black and immovable against the turmoil of crimson.
Eager questions were flying to and fro in the street.
“Say, did a copper go in there?”
“Yeh! He come out again, though.”
“He did not! He’s in there yet!”
“Well, didn’t I see ’im?”