Under the Skylights Part 33

IV

Jared during his visit to the city had not confined his attention to the display of the Western artists. He had talked with several dealers, and had visited one or two makers of picture-frames, and had taken note of the prominence given to "art" in the offices and corridors of the great hotels.

"I tell _you_," he declared roundly, "paintin' 's got the call everywhere. You go into one of them bang-up hotels, and what is the first thing you notice? A painting--scenery; ten or twelve feet long, too--some of 'em. Well, that's all right; I can paint as big as they want 'em, and frame 'em too, I guess."

He had formed some ideas of his own about framing. The prices mentioned by the frame-makers astonished him as much as those entered in the sale catalogue by the fond artists themselves. "No gilt for me. That's clear."

He thought of a wide flat frame he had seen at the exhibition. "It was just a piece of plain boarding daubed over with some sort of gilt paint.

It had a fish-net kind o' strung round it, I recollect."

"What was that for?" asked Melissa.

"It was a sea view, with boats and things. Seemed a pretty good notion to me."

"Why, yes."

"But there was one old codger come along who didn't seem to like it.

Specs and white whiskers standing out. Lot of women with him. 'Well, I declare,' says he, 'what are we coming to? I can't understand how Mr.

English could have let in such a thing as that!' He was going for the frame. I stepped over to the girl at the desk----"

"Seems to me you talked a good deal to that girl."

"Well, I did. She was from Ringgold County too, it turned out; hadn't been in town but six months. She was up to all sorts of dodges, though--knew the whole show like a book."

"Oh, she did, did she?"

"Well, she wasn't so very young, nor so very good-looking, if that's what you're after."

"Oh, she wasn't, wasn't she?" said Melissa, somewhat mollified.

"'Who is that funny old feller?' says I to her. He was poking out his arms every which way and talking like all possessed.

"'Why,' says she, sort o' scared like, 'that's Doctor Gowdy.' You might have thought I had let drive at the President himself. I see I had put my foot in it, so I pulled out as fast as I could."

"Gowdy," reflected Melissa; "haven't I heard that name before?"

"It didn't seem altogether new, somehow," acknowledged Jared.

But neither of them immediately a.s.sociated this name with the authors.h.i.+p of _Onward and Upward._ They laid no more stress on the t.i.tle-page of a book than you, dear reader, lay on the ident.i.ty of the restaurant cook that gets up your dinner.

"It seemed all right enough," said Jared, reverting to the frame.

"Why, yes," a.s.sented Melissa. "I don't see what could have been more appropriate."

"Well, you watch me," said Jared, "and I'll get up something equally as good." For this choice collocation of words he was indebted to a political editorial in the county weekly.

Next morning he was strolling along the roadway, carefully scrutinizing a stretch of dilapidated fence.

"What you up to, Jared?" inquired Uncle Nathan Hoskins, who happened to be driving past. The fresh morning air had a tonic effect upon Uncle Nathan; he showed himself disposed to be sprightly and facetious.

"Lookin' after my fences," said Jared shortly.

"'Bout time, ain't it?--he, he!" continued Uncle Nathan.

"Just about," a.s.sented Jared.

"Might 'a' begun a little sooner, mebbe," proceeded Uncle Nathan, running his eye over several rods of flat, four-inch stuff, weather-worn and lichen-stained, that sagged and wobbled along the road-side. "So far gone ye hardly know where to begin, eh?"

"Where would _you_ begin?"

"Well, that len'th right in front of you has got a little more moss on it than 'most any of the others."

"All right; I'll begin here," returned Jared. He struggled up through the tangled growth of smartweed and bittersweet, tore a length of lichened boarding from the swaying posts, and walked down the road with it.

Here at last was a suitable setting for the Squash.

V

Yes, _the_ Squash, before which all other squashes were to pale. It was to be his best and biggest work, and worthy of the post he designed it to take at the next Exhibition of Western Artists. He enlarged its scope so as to take in a good part of the barn's interior; he boldly added a shovel--an implement that he had never attempted before; and he put in not only bins, but barrels--chancing a faulty perspective in the hoops.

All these things formed a repellent background of chill gray-blue, but they brought out the Squash. It shone. Yes, it shone like a beacon-light calling the weary and sophisticate town-dwellers back to the peace and simplicity of country life. And it was inclosed by four neatly mortised lengths of fencing, lichened and silvered by a half-century, it may be, of weather taken as it was sent. Furthermore, the abundance of simulated seeds developed by his bold halving of his model was re-enforced by a few real seeds pasted upon the lower part of the frame.

"If all that don't fetch 'em," said Jared, "what will?"

But the exhibition jury frowned upon this ingenuous offering. Stephen Giles pitied it; Daffingdon Dill, an influential member, and a painter not especially affiliated with the Circuit, derided it cruelly; Abner Joyce himself, when appealed to as a man and a brother by the disappointed farmer-artist, bleakly turned away. Not even the proprietors of the sales-galleries seemed willing to extend a welcome. Jared was puzzled and indignant. Then he bethought himself of the hotels, with their canons and jungles and views along the Canadian Pacific.

"Yes, the hotels--there's where I'll try. That's where you get your public, anyway."

But the hotels were cold. One after another they refused him. Just one was left, and this was so magnificent that he had never even thought of carrying his proposal into it.

He did so now--nothing else was left to do. The clerk was even more magnificent and intimidating than the house, but Jared faced him, and asked for s.p.a.ce in which to show his work.

Jared had one of his minor works under his arm--style of painting and style of framing being fully representative of his biggest and best.

"It's this kind, only larger," submitted Jared.

The clerk condescended to look, and was interested. He even became affable. His imposing facade was merely for use in the business, and for cloaking the dire fact that, but two short years back, he himself had been a raw country boy from a raw country town. He looked at the picture, and at Jared--his knuckles, his neck-tie, the scalloped hair on his forehead. "Could _I_ have been anything like that?" he thought. He refused consideration to such a calamitous possibility, and became a little more grandly formal as he went on listening to Jared's business.

"Oh, George!" he presently called across his slab of Mexican onyx; "come here."

George came. He was a "drummer": n.o.body could have supposed for an instant that he was anything else.

"What do you think of this?" The clerk took the picture out of Jared's hands and twirled it round on one corner of its clumsy frame.

George looked at it studiously. "Why, it ain't so worse," he said. "That squash is great--big as life and twice as natural."

"What do you think of the frame?" asked the clerk, venturing with no little fondness to run a ringer over the lichens.

"Made out of fencing, ain't it? Why, I like it first-rate. Maybe I haven't kicked my bare heels on just such a fence many a time!"