Under the Skylights Part 28

At last the Grindstone made a revolution. Andrew P. Hill, weary of waiting for the help of his a.s.sociates, none of whom save Roscoe Orlando Gibbons could be brought to the scratch, took hold of the handle and struck out a few sparks.

Together Hill and Gibbons considered "Science and Democracy." Prochnow had devised a scheme that was properly severe and monumental; though the intellectual cherubs and the muscular blacks were present in modified form, all odalisques and such had been suppressed. Still, the general tone was too luscious for Andrew, who, even in his young days, had been a pattern of sapless rect.i.tude; and on the other hand, it was not luscious enough for Roscoe Orlando, who, in _his_ young days, had been quite the reverse. Andrew had no affinity for fluttering garments and sensuously waving palm-fronds--little did they consort with the angular severity of "business." Roscoe Orlando, on the other hand, had an intense affinity for such things as the Fall of Madame Lucifer, and was hoping for something more of the same sort. Madame was falling in red tights and Parisian slippers, with black bat-wings inserted between her straight, slim legs and her outstretched arms, while Lucifer himself, a much smaller figure, fell some distance behind her; and her staring eyes and open mouth and streaming hair were a sight to see--even upside down. As Roscoe Orlando turned over Prochnow's sketches with a discontented hand he asked querulously where was the _chic_, the snap that he had hoped to see. No, no; the boy had done his best work already; he was on the down grade--that was plain.

"And then, all this allegory," objected Andrew. "It's too blind; it's too complicated. People can't stop to figure it out. Besides, I'm not so sure that every bit of it is perfectly proper."

So the Grindstone made another revolution and took off the tip of poor Prochnow's nose. He came into Little O'Grady's dirty and disorderly place, and O'Grady, even before he could scramble forward through his ruck of dusty casts and beplastered scantlings, saw that the blow had fallen.

He gave one look at Prochnow's face, drawn, haggard, black with disappointment and anger, and began to work himself out of his blouse.

"Where is my hat?" he muttered wildly.

"Where are you going?" asked Prochnow. His voice was hoa.r.s.e. O'Grady looked at him a second time, to make sure who was speaking.

"I got you into this, Ignace; and now I----"

"You did not," said Prochnow. His pride of intellect, still unhumbled, forbade his acknowledgment of any such claim.

"Oh, yes, I did, Ignace; and now I must get you out of it."

"Are you going to see those men?"

"I am."

"Don't. There is still some hope left," said Prochnow thickly, "and you would only make matters worse. A great deal of unsuspected talent has been developed, it appears, by these experiments, as I have heard them called," he went on chokingly, with blazing eyes, in a gallant attempt at cold irony; "and much more may be waiting still. Enough, in fact, to justify a _concours_--how do you say?--a compet.i.tion." He clenched his fists against his rigid thighs and turned his face away.

"A compet.i.tion? They say that now?" Little O'Grady threw off his blouse and jumped on it with both feet. "Where _is_ my hat?" he cried, running his fingers through his long, fluffy hair and toppling over a disregarded cast or two.

Prochnow caught him by the arm. "You must not go," he said.

But Little O'Grady was obsessed by a vision of the Grindstone directors--the whole Nine--a.s.sembled round the council-board in that shabby, out-of-date parlour. It had been hard to get them together for Dill and Giles and Prochnow and Adams, but there they sat now, waiting for him. A new figure entered the vision, the little Terence O'Grady they were expecting: the spokesman for honour, for fair play; the champion of the poor girls whose tenderest hopes had been blighted; the whip of scorpions that was to lash the ignorance, the inept.i.tude and the careless cruelty that had brought so many hearts and talents to fury and despair.

"Get out of my way!" cried Little O'Grady. He pushed Prochnow aside, clapped on his hat and rushed from the room.

He tumbled down five flights of stairs. At the bottom he met Gowan.

"A compet.i.tion!" cried O'Grady, with raging scorn.

"I know," returned Gowan. "But there's something later. They have formed a committee, under the lead of an 'expert'--somebody that _I_ never heard, of--to pa.s.s the Winter Exhibition in review. They want to see which of us do the best work and to determine whether any of us at all can do good enough for their wants."

"Ow!" shrieked O'Grady.

"Furthermore, old Rosenberg has proposed to cut down the appropriation for decorations from twenty-five thousand to four. If they're bad, after all, so much less will the loss be."

"Ow!" shrieked O'Grady again, as he tried to bolt past.

"Where are you going?" asked Gowan.

"To the Bank! To the Bank!" It was as if Revolutionary Paris were yelling, "_A la lanterne! a la lanterne!_"

Again O'Grady saw the Nine in conference. Again he heard their voices.

"There's n.o.body here," said Holbrook, making, to do him justice, his first and only suggestion; "send East." "There's n.o.body here," said Gibbons,--oh, how Little O'Grady hated him now!--"send abroad." "No,"

came the voice of Hill, "we need not go outside of our own city. Surely we can find within the corporate limits somebody or other to do our bidding;" and Jeremiah McNulty agreed with him. "Why spend four thousand dollars?" asked Simon Rosenberg; "why spend one? Calcimine and have done, and save the money;" and Oliver Dowd took the same view. All these enormities rang clearly in Little O'Grady's ears and put wings to his heels.

"Get out of my way, Gowan!" he cried, and ran full speed down the street.

XXI

"Yes, they're all in there," said the watchman who stood, decorated with a police star, in front of the part.i.tion of black walnut and frosted gla.s.s. "But you can't see them now; they're busy."

"I can't, eh?" said Little O'Grady. "We'll find out if I can't!" He dodged the watchman, wrenched open the flimsy door and threw himself upon the board.

Yes, they were all there, including the two or three that Little O'Grady had not seen the time before--that first time of all. And the Morrell Twins were there too, one of them remorseful and the other defiant. And Andrew P. Hill, who presided, was in a blue funk--O'Grady could see his chin-beard waggle and could almost hear his teeth chatter; for it was Andrew who had ama.s.sed all that Pin-and-Needle collateral, accepting it at the street's own mad valuation. Pin-and-Needle, pushed too far, blown too big, was now shaky at the knees, and Andrew and all the Nine were trembling sympathetically from top to toe. The Grindstone might survive in a single serviceable ma.s.s, or it might fly to pieces, dispersed in a thousand useless fragments.

Little O'Grady looked round upon the other faces; they were all like Andrew's. Remorse, shame, contrition sat upon them. Ah, these men knew they had not given fair treatment to him and to Ignace and to Dill and to Preciosa and all the rest. "Just see how they're looking at me!" he said to himself. "Never mind; I won't let up on them. I'll rub it in; I'll drive it home."

What drawn faces! What anxious eyes! What sharp noses!--who had been grinding them? Answer: the Morrell Twins. Not for nothing their long practice in sharpening pins and needles! It had come into play here.

Richard had turned the crank and Robin had held down each official proboscis, and the board had winced. Then Richard and Robin had changed places, and the board had groaned. Now Richard and Robin were changing back, and soon the board might scream. "I'll take a hand too," said O'Grady.

He began at once; he gave the discomfited directors no chance to forestall him. He taxed them roundly with their delays, their double-dealings, their invertebrate wabblings. They had blown hot and cold. They had played fast and loose. He and his friends had worked, had thought, had studied, had invented, had torn their very brains from their heads; and what had they to show for it? Nothing; nothing at all. On the contrary----

"Get out of here," said Andrew P. Hill sternly. "This is a business meeting."

"Business meeting!" cried Little O'Grady scornfully. "What do any of you know about business, I'd like to ask? n.o.body who wanted to do business by business methods would come here to do it, I'm thinking! No, sir; he'd go to _our_ shop, where we do as we say we will, and do it up sharp and s.h.i.+p-shape, no matter how unreasonable the demands of the s.h.i.+lly-shallying old grannies we have to deal with. Business! You don't bluff me!"

"Take care, young man," said Hill, "or----"

"Or nothing!" cried Little O'Grady undaunted. "And now, for a finisher, you offer us a compet.i.tion. You wind us, and then ask us to run against a fresh batch that haven't even left the stable! After we've pulled our brains out of our heads strand by strand, you'd have us stuff them back and pull them out all over again, would you? n.o.body but a man with cotton-batting _for_ brains could ask a thing like that!"

"Brains!" said Dowd contemptuously. He had always looked upon himself as a lofty intellectual force. In his view there was no great play for intellect outside of finance and law.

Little O'Grady pounced upon this insolence at once. "There's not one of you here, I'll venture, that has had an idea in the last twenty years.

You just sit beside your little old machine and turn the crank--why, the crank almost turns itself. We, on the other hand, live on our ideas. We keep alive on our own brains and hearts and blood and emotions----"

"Emotions!" said Dowd, carelessly crumpling up a paper and throwing it into the waste-basket. He himself had not had an emotion--foolish, superfluous things--in his life. Little O'Grady looked at his nose. It was the sharpest of the lot.

"Get out of here, young man," said Simon Rosenberg. "This is no place for you."

O'Grady pa.s.sed over Rosenberg's nose in contempt.

"We turn in scheme after scheme," he pursued;--"schemes to be welcomed and appreciated anywhere--but here. And what is your own? All you can think of is a mongrel heap of cabins and spires and chimneys and shacks that would set a tombstone to grinning. What chance is there for art in such a hotch-potch as that? What could a self-respecting----"

Up rose Andrew P. Hill. He expressed all his nervous dread, his vexation, his irritability by one tremendous whack of his fist on the table.

"To h.e.l.l with art!" he said. "What I wanted to do was to advertise my business."

Dead silence. n.o.body had ever heard Andrew P. Hill swear before; n.o.body had supposed that he could. But the unlooked-for, the impossible had happened.