Few men have been able to get through the world with several gifts to advantage in all;and most men seem handicapped for the race if they have more than one.But they are apparently immensely interested as well as distracted by them.When Beaton was writing,he would have agreed,up to a certain point,with any one who said literature was his proper expression;but,then,when he was painting,up to a certain point,he would have maintained against the world that he was a colorist,and supremely a colorist.At the certain point in either art he was apt to break away in a frenzy of disgust and wreak himself upon some other.
In these moods he sometimes designed elevations of buildings,very striking,very original,very chic,very everything but habitable.
It was in this way that he had tried his hand on sculpture,which he had at first approached rather slightingly as a mere decorative accessory of architecture.But it had grown in his respect till he maintained that the accessory business ought to be all the other way:that temples should be raised to enshrine statues,not statues made to ornament temples;that was putting the cart before the horse with a vengeance.This was when he had carried a plastic study so far that the sculptors who saw it said that Beaton might have been an architect,but would certainly never be a sculptor.At the same time he did some hurried,nervous things that had a popular charm,and that sold in plaster reproductions,to the profit of another.Beaton justly despised the popular charm in these,as well as in the paintings he sold from time to time;he said it was flat burglary to have taken money for them,and he would have been living almost wholly upon the bounty of the old tombstone-cutter in Syracuse if it had not been for the syndicate letters which he supplied to Fulkerson for ten dollars a week.
They were very well done,but he hated doing them after the first two or three,and had to be punched up for them by Fulkerson,who did not cease to prize them,and who never failed to punch him up.Beaton being what he was,Fulkerson was his creditor as well as patron;and Fulkerson being what he was,had an enthusiastic patience with the elusive,facile,adaptable,unpractical nature of Beaton.He was very proud of his art-letters,as he called them;but then Fulkerson was proud of everything he secured for his syndicate.The fact that he had secured it gave it value;he felt as if he had written it himself.
One art trod upon another's heels with Beaton.The day before he had rushed upon canvas the conception of a picture which he said to himself was glorious,and to others (at the table d'hote of Maroni)was not bad.
He had worked at it in a fury till the light failed him,and he execrated the dying day.But he lit his lamp and transferred the process of his thinking from the canvas to the opening of the syndicate letter which be knew Fulkerson would be coming for in the morning.He remained talking so long after dinner in the same strain as he had painted and written in that he could not finish his letter that night.The next morning,while he was making his tea for breakfast,the postman brought him a letter from his father enclosing a little check,and begging him with tender,almost deferential,urgence to come as lightly upon him as possible,for just now his expenses were very heavy.It brought tears of shame into Beaton's eyes--the fine,smouldering,floating eyes that many ladies admired,under the thick bang--and he said to himself that if he were half a man he would go home and go to work cutting gravestones in his father's shop.But he would wait,at least,to finish his picture;and as a sop to his conscience,to stay its immediate ravening,he resolved to finish that syndicate letter first,and borrow enough money from Fulkerson to be able to send his father's check back;or,if not that,then to return the sum of it partly in Fulkerson's check.While he still teemed with both of these good intentions the old man from whom he was modelling his head of Judas came,and Beaton saw that he must get through with him before he finished either the picture or the letter;he would have to pay him for the time,anyway.He utilized the remorse with which he was tingling to give his Judas an expression which he found novel in the treatment of that character--a look of such touching,appealing self-abhorrence that Beaton's artistic joy in it amounted to rapture;between the breathless moments when he worked in dead silence for an effect that was trying to escape him,he sang and whistled fragments of comic opera.
In one of the hushes there came a blow on the outside of the door that made Beaton jump,and swear with a modified profanity that merged itself in apostrophic prayer.He knew it must be Fulkerson,and after roaring "Come in!"he said to the model,"That 'll do this morning,Lindau."Fulkerson squared his feet in front of the bust and compared it by fleeting glances with the old man as he got stiffly up and suffered Beaton to help him on with his thin,shabby overcoat.
"Can you come to-morrow,Lindau?"
"No,not to-morrow,Mr.Peaton.I haf to zit for the young ladties.""Oh!"said Beaton."Wet-more's class?Is Miss Leighton doing you?""I don't know their namess,"Lindau began,when Fulkerson said:
"Hope you haven't forgotten mine,Mr.Lindau?I met you with Mr.March at Maroni's one night."Fulkerson offered him a universally shakable hand.
"Oh yes!I am gladt to zee you again,Mr.Vulkerson.And Mr.Marge--he don't zeem to gome any more?""Up to his eyes in work.Been moving on from Boston and getting settled,and starting in on our enterprise.Beaton here hasn't got a very flattering likeness of you,hey?Well,good-morning,"he said,for Lindau appeared not to have heard him and was escaping with a bow through the door.
