Chapter 17

The country parsons, left to themselves, would have admired the ingenuity of this zoological presentation, but Dr. Gowdy's intimidating strictures froze their appreciation. They pattered and shuffled along all the faster.

Meanwhile Jared, proud to have awakened the interest of the "Rev. Gowdy" (as the reading of the Ringgold County _Gazette_ had taught him to express it), was busy whirling the leaves of the hotel's directory to learn the good man's address.

VII

Before Jared could catch up with the Doctor a new tidal wave broke upon the town and slopped through the corridors of the hotels. The provincials (both clerical and lay) were enticed to the metropolis by a "Trade Carnival." The Squash met them everywhere. Here, in the midst of the city's strange and shifting life, was something simple, tangible, familiar, appealing. Jared had had the happy thought to mount one or two of his best pieces on easels fitted out with a receptacle for holding a real squash. "Which is which?" cried the dear people, delightedly. The country merchants expressed their appreciation to the commercial travellers, and these factors in modern life, whose business it was to know what the "public wanted" and to act accordingly, passed on the word (casually, perhaps) to the heads of the great mercantile houses. In this way the eminent firm of Meyer, Van Horn, and Co. became conscious of the Squash.

Now, individually considered, the members of this firm made no great figure. Nobody knew Meyer from Adam. Nobody knew Van Horn from a hole in the wall. Who the "Co." might be there was nobody outside of certain trade circles that had the slightest notion. But collectively these people were a power. Except the street-railway companies, they were the greatest influence of the town. They paved the thoroughfares around their premises to suit themselves; they threw out show-windows and bridged alleys in complete disregard of the city ordinances; they advertised so extensively that they dictated the make-up of the newspapers, and almost their policy. Above all, they were the arbiters of taste, the directors of popular education. That they sold shoes, hardware, soda-water, and sofa-pillows to myriads was nothing; that they pulled your teeth, took your photograph, kept your bank account, was little more. For they supplied the public with ideas and ideals. They determined the public's reading by booming this book and barring that; their pianos clanged all day with the kind of music people ought to like and to buy; and the display in their fifteen great windows (during the Christmas season people came from the remotest suburbs expressly to see them) solidified and confirmed the popular notions on art.

Well, Meyer, Van Horn, and Co. had set their minds on having a "ten-thousand-dollar painting." It would be a good advertisement.

They sent for Jared.

"Ten thousand dollars!" gasped the young fellow. He saw the heavens opening. "Why, I could get up a _great_ thing for that!"

"I guess you could!" retorted old Meyer brusquely. "You could do it for five hundred. That's what you _will_ do it for, if you do it at all." He treated Jared with no more consideration than he would have given a peddler vending shoe-strings and suspenders from the curb.

"Why," said Jared, abashed, indignant, "you said ten thou----"

"Let me explain," put in Van Horn, a little less inconsiderately. "We want a ten-thousand-dollar painting, and we're willing to pay five hundred dollars for it."

"Who'd come to see a painting billed at five hundred dollars, do you think?" snarled Meyer. "Nobody. You can see that kind of thing anywhere, can't you?"

"I s'pose you can," assented Jared, mindful of his first exhibition.

"But ten thousand will fetch 'em."

"Five hundred dollars, then," said Van Horn; "that's what we'll give you. And it wants to be bigger than anything you've got on show anywhere, and the frame wants to be twice as wide. I suppose you've got plenty more of that fence left?"

"Yes," assented Jared.

"Well," said Meyer, "you'll never have a chance to realize any more on it than you've got right here. And don't economize with your seeds--stick 'em on good and plenty."

"We'll give you a whole window, or a place at the foot of the main stairs close to the fountain," proceeded Van Horn. "We put it out as a ten-thousand-dollar production and bill you big as the artist. Everybody in town will see it, and the advertising you'll get--why, ten thousand won't begin to express it."

"And we want you to put in a lot of farm stuff," said Meyer junior, whose taste in window-dressing had often roused the admiration of the entire town. "Vines and grasses, and a lot of squashes--real ones. I suppose you've got enough faith in your work to face the comparison?"

"I s'pose I have," said Jared. "I guess I've faced it before this."

"I want some real squashes on the frame too," said the elder Meyer, from whom the son's fine taste was directly derived. "Ever tried that?"

"In a small way," said Jared.

"Try it now in a large way. Half a squash, like a big rosette, on each corner of the frame--the half with the handle on it, y'understand." Meyer saw the squash as a kind of minor pumpkin.

"If I put it in the window," said the son thoughtfully, "I shall want some saw-horses and bushel baskets and----"

"Take 'em right out of stock," said his fond father.

--"something to make a real country scene, in fact. And possibly a farmer sitting alongside in jeans. Just the place for the artist himself. It might be better, though, to put the whole show by the fountain. In that case I'd have a band, and it would play, 'On the Banks of the Kankakee.'"

"Have you got that song on hand?" asked his father.

"It ain't written yet, but it will be inside of a week; and in a week more the whole town will be going wild over it, or my name----"

Van Horn cut short the youthful visionary. "Well," he said to Jared, "you hustle off and get the show together. Check for five hundred on delivery. And mum's the word," he added, with good-natured vulgarity, "on both sides."

"Ain't nobody ever said I talked too much," mumbled Jared, reaching for his hat.

VIII

Soon the Squash dawned on the town--the Last, the Ultimate. Jared had soothed his ruffled feelings and gone back to his old barn and worked for a fortnight. The result was in all men's eyes: a "Golden Hubbard"--an agricultural novelty--backed up by all the pomp and circumstance a pillaged farm could yield.

"There it stands, Melissa," he said to the girl, who had come out with an admiring little company to bid Jared's masterpiece godspeed. "And here _I_ stand--a ten-thousand-dollar artist, and the only one in the country."

"I'm proud of you, Jared," panted Melissa, with little effort to conceal the affectionate admiration that filled her.

"And I'm grateful to you. You believed in me--you encouraged me----"

"Yes, I did, Jared," said Melissa shyly. They were alone, behind the shelter of the barn door.

"And next to Dr. Gowdy--"

"You've seen him? You've thanked him?"

"Not yet. But I'm going to as soon as I get this picture in place. This here ain't the end, Melissa; it ain't hardly the beginning. There ain't a picture of mine all over town that won't be worth double next week what it is this--and people anxious to pay the money, too. Just wait a little, Melissa; there's a good deal more to follow yet"--an ambiguous utterance to which the girl gave the meaning that her most vital hope required.

A few days later the city press was teeming with matter pertinent to young Mr. Meyer's newest display--the paper that refused to teem would have had to tell him why. Jared stood in the calcium-light of absolute unshaded publicity. "An American Boy's Triumph." "A New Idea in American Art." "The Western Angelus"--this last from a serf that submitted, indeed, yet grimaced in submitting. Under head-lines such as these were detailed his crude ideas and the scanty incidents of his life. And there were editorials, too, that contrasted the sturdy and wholesome truthfulness of his genius with the vain imaginings of so-called idealists. These accounts rolled back to Ringgold County. "Ten thousand dollars! ten thousand dollars!" rang through township after township. "Ten thousand dollars! ten thousand dollars!" murmured the crowds that blocked the street before the big entrance to Meyer, Van Horn, and Co.'s. All this homage helped Jared to gloss over the paltriness of their actual check. By reason of this double hosanna he was a ten-thousand-dollar man in very truth.

"And _now_," said Jared, "I will go and see Dr. Gowdy."

IX

"Dr. Gowdy is not at home this afternoon," they told Jared in response to his ring; "he is addressing a public meeting down town."

This would have applied to half the days of every calendar month throughout the year. When Dr. Gowdy let a day pass without making some public utterance, he counted that day as good as lost. He spoke at every opportunity, and was as much at home on the platform as in the pulpit. Perhaps even more so; there were those who said that he carried the style of the rostrum and the hustings into the house of prayer. Certainly his "way" was immensely "popular"--vigorous, nervous, downright, jocular, familiar. Whether he talked on Armenia, or Indian famines, or street-railway franchises, or primary-election reform, or the evils of department stores (he was very strong on this last topic), the reports--he was invariably reported--were sure to be sprinkled freely with "laughter" and "applause." To-day Dr. Gowdy was talking on art.

"It's going to be a hot one!" said the students among themselves. And they packed the assembly-hall of the Academy half an hour before the Doctor's arrival.

The lecturer who was delivering the Wednesday afternoon course on Modern French Sculpture had failed to come to time, and Dr. Gowdy, almost on the spur of the moment, had volunteered to fill the breach. He telephoned down that he would talk on Recent Developments in Art. This meant the display of Meyer, Van Horn, and Co.

Dr. Gowdy had seen the abominable exhibition--who, during the past week, had not?--and had been stirred to wrath. He fumed, he boiled, he bubbled. But it was not merely this that had roused his blood to fever-heat. No; Jared Stiles, emboldened by his success in the shopping district, had applied to Mr. English, the director of the Academy, for a room in which to make a collective exhibit of the masterpieces at present scattered through various places of public resort and entertainment. Mr. English had of course refused, and Dr. Gowdy, of course, had warmly backed him up. But Mr. Hill, the vice-president, and Mr. Dale, the chairman of the finance committee, had taken the other side. They had both been country boys--one from Ogle County, the other from the ague belt of Indiana--and their hearts warmed to Jared's display over on Broad Street. Their eyes filled, their breasts heaved, their gullets gulped, their rustic boyhood was with them poignantly once more. They murmured that English was a hidebound New-Englander who was incapable of appreciating the expansive ideals of Western life, and that Gowdy, city-born and city-bred, was wholly out of sympathy with the sturdy aims and wholesome ambitions of the farm and prairie. For once Art might well take a back seat and give honest human feeling a fair show. They hinted, too, that the approaching annual election might bring a general shake-up; English might find himself supplanted by some other man more in touch with the local life and with that of the tributary territory; and Gowdy--well, Gowdy might be asked to resign, for there were plenty of citizens who would make quite as good a trustee as he had been.

Some inkling of these sentiments had come to Dr. Gowdy's ears. He scented the battle afar off. He said "Ha! ha!" to the trumpets. He pranced, he reared, he caracoled, he went through the whole _manege._ He outdid himself. The students, his to the last man, simply went mad.

For the past year there had been a feud between Dr. Gowdy and Andrew P. Hill. Hill, relying on his own taste and judgment, had presented the city with a symbolical group of statuary, which had been set up in the open space before the Academy. This group, done by a jobber and accepted by a crass lot of city officials, was of an awful, an incredible badness, and the better sentiment of the community had finally crystallized and insisted upon its removal. Dr. Gowdy and Professor English stood on the steps of the Academy and watched the departure of the truck that was carrying away the last section of this ambitious but mistaken monument.

"Well," said English, with a quizzical affectation of plaintive patience, "we learn by doing."

"And sometimes by undoing," retorted Dr. Gowdy tartly.

Hill heard of this observation, and came to the scratch with animadversions on Dr. Gowdy's maladroit management of the finances of the Famine Fund (a matter that cannot be gone into here). This was blow for blow, and ever since then Dr. Gowdy had panted to open the second round.

Jared Stiles, standing on his own merits or demerits, might have got off more lightly, but Jared Stiles, as a possible protege of Andrew P. Hill, was marked for slaughter. This new heresy and all its supporters must be stamped out--especially the supporters.

X

Dr. Gowdy stamped it out--and the crowd stamped with him. The fiery denunciations of the Doctor kindled an answering flame in the breasts of his youthful auditory. In five minutes hands, lungs, and feet were all at work. The youths before him awakened the hot, headlong youth still within him, and he launched forth upon a tirade of invective that was wild and reckless even for him.

"This folly, this falsity, this bumptious vulgarity--shall we not put an end to it?" cried the Doctor.

"Yes, yes," responded the house.

"No; go on," said a single voice.

The Doctor laughed with the rest, and a wave of delighted applause swept over the place.

"Shall we not purify the temple of art? Shall we not drive out the money-changers?"

"Yes, yes," called the audience. For Jared had never drawn from the antique--he was trying to climb in like a thief and a robber.

"Shall we not?" repeated the Doctor, searching the house for that single voice.

"Sure," said the voice, and another wave of applause rolled from the foyer to the rostrum.

"Ten thousand dollars!" shouted the Doctor. "The man who says he paid ten thousand dollars for that agglomeration of barn-yard truck is one of two things: if he did pay it, he's a fool; and if he didn't, he's a liar! Which is he?"

"He's a fool!" cried half the men.

"He's a liar!" cried the other half.

"Oh--h!" shrilled the young women.

The Doctor wiped his streaming brow.

"What kind of a community is this, anyhow?" he resumed, stuffing back his handkerchief into his pocket. "Here we have this magnificent school [applause] that for the past fifteen years has been offering the highest possible grade of art instruction. A corps of thirty earnest and competent teachers [loud applause and a few cat-calls] are ministering to the needs of three thousand promising and talented young people, the flower of our great Northwest----" [Tremendous and long-continued applause, during which the continuity of the speaker's remarks was lost.] The Doctor filled in the minutes of tumult by taking several sips of water.

"Why, you, we, this Academy, should be the leaven, the yeast, to work upon our great metropolis; not merely the flower, but the self-raising flour"--a pause for appreciation of the pun--"the self-raising flour [loud laughter, easily yielded and unnecessarily prolonged] that is to lift yourselves, and the city with you, from the abyss of no-art, and from the still deeper abyss of false art. That's where we're groping; that's where we're floundering. I declare, when I was elbowing my way through that struggling, gaping crowd [cries of "Oh, Doctor!" and laughter], I could only ask myself the question that I have just asked you here: what kind of a community is this, anyhow?"

Up popped a shock of black hair from northern Michigan.

"It's rotten!" Shouts. Cat-calls.

"I should think it was!" vociferated the Doctor.

He went ahead for half an hour longer, crowding on more steam, acquiring a more perilous momentum, throwing out an ever-widening torrent of reckless personalities, not forgetting the ill-fated monument of Andrew P. Hill. ("Applause" and "laughter" were very frequent just here.) He ended his improvisation without the clearest idea in the world of just what he had said, and went home well pleased.

XI

When Dr. Gowdy took up the _Daily Task_ next morning--there were sixteen pages of it--the first thing that met his eye was a picture of himself--the familiar two-column cut that had not had an airing for more than three months. "Gowdy Gives Us Up," said the head-line.

"What now?" wondered the good Doctor. "Or rather, which?" For he knew that every public utterance reported in the daily press of the town was given one of two twists, the local or the personal. This was apparently the local. The personal was to follow--and it did.

Yes, the _Daily Task_ had been represented at the Academy, and its young man, by a marvel of mutilation and misrepresentation, had put together a column to convey the impression that Dr. Gowdy was a carping Jeremiah, intent upon inflicting a deadly wound on local pride. "Oh, shucks!" said the worthy man, and went on with his toast and coffee.

But the other papers, though unrepresented at the Academy, had quickly detected the possibilities resident in Dr. Gowdy's abounding personalities, and the evening sheets were full of interviews. What did Jared Stiles think of the attack on him as a representative Western artist? What did Meyer, Van Horn, and Co. think of Dr. Gowdy's characterization of their enterprise and the pointed alternative it presented? What did Andrew P. Hill, as the representative of local wealth and culture, think of Dr Gowdy's strictures on the self-made man's endeavour to adorn the city that had given him success and fortune? What did the distinguished members of the Western Art Circuit think of such treatment toward their most promising and conspicuous protege? All these people had thoughts, and none of them was slow in expressing them.

"I can't understand it, nohow; I swan, I'm completely knocked off my feet," said Jared to the young man of the _Evening Rounder_, in the rustic dialect of the vaudeville. "Why, that there man--I've allus looked on him as my best friend. It was that book of his'n that give me my start, and now he turns agen me. But he's wrong, and I've got the hull town to prove it. And if he's wrong, by gum, he'll have to pay for it. He can't trip up the heels of an honest country boy and not get tripped up hisself. I don't know yet just what I'll do, but----"

With the _Evening Pattern_ Jared was more academic. "I acknowledge that this attack comes as a great surprise. I had always regarded the reverend gentleman as the chief of my friends. His own book for young men [name not mentioned--Print, Push, and Co. did not advertise in the _Pattern_] was my earliest inspiration. Such conduct seems as inconsistent as inconsiderate. The public, I think, will be certain to support me. And if the words of the address are correctly reported, I shall be found, I believe, to have good grounds for an action at law. An intelligent jury, I make no doubt----"

The two Meyers were delighted. This was advertising indeed! Van Horn, a shade less thick-skinned, stuck at the animadversions made so spiritedly by the Doctor and so vociferously supported by his audience. They wore upon him; they seemed almost actionable. He sent for the son of their credit man, a youth enrolled at the Academy, where he was learning to design carpets and curtains, and tried to get from him just what the Doctor had really said. This solicitude reacted upon the Meyers, and Meyer junior, who gave the interview, intimated that such language was actionable beyond a doubt. "Our Mr. Levy will attend to this. We have the endorsement of the general public, and that makes us still less willing to have anybody challenge our business acumen"--all this was but an elegant paraphrase of Sidney Meyer's actual remarks, for he had left school at sixteen and had never looked into a book since--"or our business integrity."

Abner Joyce, on behalf of the Circuit, gave out a grave interview in a few guarded words. Though Joyce by no means looked upon Jared as a protege of his organization, yet his essential sympathy with the country still held full sway, and he felt it possible to regard young Stiles not as a mere freak, but as a human creature like ourselves, and struggling upward, like the rest of us and to the best of his powers, toward the light. But the town did not want restraint and reason just then, and Joyce's well-considered words went--much to his mortification--for next to nothing. Bond, who better apprehended the spirit of the hour, let himself loose in a vein of pure fantasy,--he ventured on the whimsical, the sprightly, the paradoxical. The poor fellow sent to interview him might as well have tried to grasp a bundle of sunbeams or a handful of quicksilver. His report turned out a frightful bungle; the wretched Bond, made clumsy, fatuous, pointless, sodden, when he had meant to show himself as witty and brilliant as possible, was completely crushed. With Joyce going for next to nothing and Bond for worse than nothing, the Art Circuit could hardly be said to shine. It paled, it sickened, it drooped away, and presently it died.

As for Andrew P. Hill, he did not wait for the interviewer; he wrote to his favourite journal over his own signature. If he himself, straying outside of his legitimate field (banking and investments), had failed with "Our City Enlightening the Universe," Dr. Gowdy, astray in the field of finance, had failed no less egregiously. Yes, his handling of the Famine Fund had been maladroit and eccentric to the point that permitted doubts as to his own personal integrity: why, then, should he be casting doubts upon the veracity, the business honour, of others.

This was a word for Meyer, Van Horn, and Co., who were tenants of Hill's. Landlord and tenant were just now in the midst of some delicate negotiations, and Hill hoped that a word of the right kind from him might help to make adjustment easier. Meyer, Van Horn, and Co. were intending to arrange a summer garden on their roof. Query: was the roof theirs--was it included in the lease? Hill felt sure of carrying his point,--decidedly the roof was an entirely distinct matter from the ten floors beneath it; but the situation might well stand a little lubrication if good feeling were to endure. Therefore Meyer, Van Horn, and Co. had the satisfaction of reading that William S. Gowdy was altogether too impulsive, erratic and unreliable--happily Hill did not employ the word "untrustworthy"--for holding a quasi-public position of some importance. Age was impairing his judgment and setting a term to his usefulness.

Dr. Gowdy flew into a passion. Threatened with legal proceedings!--he, the blameless citizen. Accused of dishonesty!--he, the pattern of integrity. Taunted with failing powers!--he, the inexhaustible reservoir of vigour, of energy! What, after all this, were the pin-pricks daily, hourly inflicted by the press, the post, the tongues of indignant associates, all intent on vindicating the honour of a community he had so wantonly attacked? What were squibs, caricatures, saucy verses, anonymous letters, cold looks from former friends, hot taunts from casual acquaintances? For art had been attacked in the very home and haunt of art! The town had been knifed under the ribs by one of her own sons!--made ridiculous in the eyes of the ribald East, and dubious in the regard of the trusting, tributary West!