And Rosamond Sayre said, “All right—I’ll bring you a thousand to-night—at Emmy Gardner’s. Be there by eleven?”
“I think so; or a few moments later.”
CHAPTER II
THE ARTISTS
The pretentiousness of a studio, especially a Washington Square studio, is quite often in inverse proportion to the merit of the pictures it gives up.
But Tommy Locke’s studio defeated this description by being a golden mean as to both propositions.
Indeed, Henry Post, the artist’s cynical friend, said that Locke’s draperies and his canvases showed a wonderfully similar lack of distinction.
And Kate Vallon had quickly added, “Let’s call them his appointments and disappointments.”
But Tommy Locke had only smiled comfortably and had gone on painting his interminable green and blue landscapes in which, if anybody cared for a certain vague misty charm—they did not find it entirely lacking.
And even if he had no high-backed, gilt-framed Italian arm-chairs and no armor or ragged priests’ robes, he often had good-looking bowls of even better looking flowers and he served first-rate tea, and somehow the neighbors loved to drift in and out of his nondescript rooms.
His ways were ways of pleasantness and all his paths were peace, yet though his chums were usually tolerant and broad-minded thinkers, there was little real Bohemianism in evidence, that is, the Bohemianism of what is known as The Village.
His few worthwhile bits of old furniture stood upon worthwhile old rugs and his specimens of artistic junk were few and far between.
Yet, strangely enough, Tommy Locke himself affected the manner of the comic paper artist—at least, to a degree.
He wore his black hair a bit longer than other men, he wore his big round glasses with very heavy tortoise-shell frames, and he wore his collar soft and loose, with a flowing Windsor tie, usually black.
He was chaffed a bit now and then as to his inconsistencies, but it was generally admitted futile to try to get a rise out of old Tommy.
In fact he calmly stated that his get-up was the only real claim he had to being one of the noble army of artists, and Henry Post had glanced at the misty landscapes and murmured, “Some of your titles show latent talent, I think.”
“It’s so nice to be understood!” Locke had exclaimed. “Yes, I’ll say my ‘Monotony in Sagebrush’ is both meanful and catching.”
“If that’s all you want you may well have called it ‘The Mumps,’ ” Kate Vallon had reported.
These three and another, one Pearl Jane Cutler, formed a sort of chummy quartette, and, though they chummed but seldom, they did most of it in Tommy’s non-committal studio.
“If you’d have a splash of color over that blank looking window,” Kate would suggest, and Tommy would wave away the suggestion without a word.
Then would Pearl Jane, who was remarkably suggestive of Little Annie in Enoch Arden, say, plaintively, “I like it all—just as it is,” and Tommy’s beaming smile would be for her.
They had all finished laughing at her baptismal absurdity—she had been named for the two neighbors on either side of her mother’s house—and without a nickname, they accepted her as Pearl Jane. It was as yet a question what she would sign her masterpieces of art, as she hadn’t, strictly speaking, produced them yet.
She hadn’t been in the city very long, but Washington Square claimed her for its own. She loved it—all four sides—and many of its byways. She dabbled away, with a brush that was, so far, incompetent and irrelevant, but she cheerfully insisted that she was finding herself, and that some day she would paint pictures like Tommy’s.
“Heaven forfend!” Post would cry out. “If you must copy, choose the billboard school, or the newspaper cartoon group, but don’t take aim for Tommy’s greenery dingles and blue glades.”
“Beautiful title!” Tommy mused; “ ‘The Blue Glades of Glengowrie’—I’ll do that next.”
“And that reminds me,” Kate said, she was always being inscrutably reminded, “our infant here, our Pearl Jane, has never been to a masquerade! A real one, I mean. She doesn’t count the Ivy Club Sociables in her Main Street home. Will you have one for her, Tommy? We’ll all help.”
“Better yet, I’ll paint one for her,” Locke said; “then she can see how one really looks.”
“No, she can’t,” Post declared. “You see, in your pictures, so much more is meant than meets the eye—and Pearl Jane wants her eyes met.”
“All right, then,” and Locke thought a minute. “Not a very big one, you said, didn’t you? And, no one asked but our own crowd, you insisted on, didn’t you? And you stipulated it would be small and early—am I not right? And if I am not mistaken, you said there’s no hurry about it.”
But he was set right on all these points, and the masquerade party for Pearl Jane was arranged in exactly the fashion Kate Vallon and Henry Post deemed fitting and proper.
However, their ideas were much in line with Locke’s own, and so they made it only a few hours later and a few people larger than he consented to.
Pearl Jane was in ecstasies, and when the night came, and she was togged out in her Dutch Peasant costume, her already bobbed fair hair flying from under her stiff lace cap, she couldn’t wait for the hour and ran round to Tommy’s early.
She found him, garbed in a monk’s robe and cowl, standing before an easel, gazing at one of his own pictures.
“Do you really like it, Pearl Jane?” he said, almost wistfully, as she came up and stood at his side in silence.
“Yes, I do. They can guy you all they like—there’s something in your work—something of Manet—I mean Monet——”
“Eeny, meeny, miney, mo!” he laughed, and turned to look at her. “Why, bless my soul, madam, you’ve suddenly grown up!”
“No, that’s ’cause this frock is longer than I usually wear. Do you like it?”
“Do blue and yellow make green? Yes, I like it. You’re a picture!”
“What’s the title?” asked another voice, and Kate and Post appeared.
“I think it might be called ‘The Puritan’s Carouse,’ Locke said, wresting his glance from the pretty Dutch girl. “Hello, Kate, you’re quite all right as a Contadina—Henry, not quite so good as a Spanish Don.”
“Ah, I’m not a Spanish Don—your mistake. I’m a Portuguese Man o’ War.”
“You look more like an Oscar Wilde.”
“Take that back! Call me anything but like that overrated, underbred gyastyockus!”
“I thought he was a great poet,” Pearl Jane said, wonderingly. “I never read any of his——”
“Don’t!” Post said, “I forbid it. There’s enough for you, yet unread. Pearl Jane, dear, without touching that Purple Jellyfish!”
“Some of his poems are fine,” Kate began, but Locke interrupted her:
“Only one—‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’ is a great poem, but nothing else of his is worthy of consideration.”
Kate Vallon began to quote:
And