From a Bench in Our Square - Samuel Hopkins Adams
FROM A BENCH IN OUR SQUARE
BY
Samuel Hopkins Adams
1922
_Contents_
_A Patroness of Art_
_The House of Silvery Voices_
_Home-Seekers' Goal_
_The Guardian of God's Acre_
_For Mayme, Read Mary_
_Barbran_
_Plooie of Our Square_
_Triumph_
FROM A BENCH IN OUR SQUARE
A PATRONESS OF ART
I
Peter (flourish-in-red) Quick (flourish-in-green) Banta (period-in-blue)
is the style whereby he is known to Our Square.
Summertimes he is a prop and ornament of Coney, that isle of the blest,
whose sands he models into gracious forms and noble sentiments, in
anticipation of the casual dime or the munificent quarter, wherewith, if
you have low, Philistine tastes or a kind heart, you have perhaps
aforetime rewarded him. In the off-season the thwarted passion of color
possesses him; and upon the flagstones before Thornsen's Elite
Restaurant, which constitutes his canvas, he will limn you a full-rigged
ship in two colors, a portrait of the heavyweight champion in three, or,
if financially encouraged, the Statue of Liberty in four. These be,
however, concessions to popular taste. His own predilection is for
chaste floral designs of a symbolic character borne out and expounded by
appropriate legends. Peter Quick Banta is a devotee of his art.
Giving full run to his loftier aspirations, he was engaged, one April
day, upon a carefully represented lilac with a butterfly about to light
on it, when he became cognizant of a ragged rogue of an urchin regarding
him with a grin. Peter Quick Banta misinterpreted this sign of interest.
"What d'ye think of _that_?" he said triumphantly, as he sketched in a
set of side-whiskers (presumably intended for antennae) upon the
butterfly.
"Rotten," was the prompt response.
"_What_!" said the astounded artist, rising from his knees.
"Punk."
Peter Quick Banta applied the higher criticism to the urchin's nearest
ear. It was now that connoisseur's turn to be affronted. Picking himself
out of the gutter, he placed his thumb to his nose, and wiggled his
finger in active and reprehensible symbolism, whilst enlarging upon his
original critique, in a series of shrill roars:
"Rotten! Punk! No good! Swash! Flubdub! Sacre tas de--de--piffle!"
Already his vocabulary was rich and plenteous, though, in those days,
tainted by his French origin.
He then, I regret to say, spat upon the purple whiskers of the butterfly
and took refuge in flight. The long stride of Peter Quick Banta soon
overtook him. Silently struggling he was haled back to the profaned
temple of Art.
"Now, young feller," said Peter Quick Banta. "Maybe you think you could
do it better." The world-old retort of the creative artist to
his critic!
"Any fool could," retorted the boy, which, in various forms, is almost
as time-honored as the challenge.
Suspecting that only tactful intervention would forestall possible
murder, I sauntered over from my bench. But the decorator of sidewalks
had himself under control.
"Try it," he said grimly.
The boy avidly seized the crayons extended to him.
"You want me to draw a picture? There?"
"If you don't, I'll break every bone in your body."
The threat left its object quite unmoved. He pointed a crayon at Peter
Quick Banta's creation.
"What is that? A bool-rush?"
"It's a laylock; that's what it is."
"And the little bird that goes to light--"
"That ain't a bird and you know it." Peter Quick Banta breathed hard.
"That's a butterfly."
"I see. But the lie-lawc, it drop--so!" The gesture was inimitable. "And
the butterfly, she do not come down, plop! She float--so!" The grimy
hands fluttered and sank.
"They do, do they? Well, you put it down on the sidewalk."
From that moment the outside world ceased to exist for the urchin. He
fell to with concentrated fervor, while Peter Quick Banta and I diverted
the traffic. Only once did he speak:
"Yellow," he said, reaching, but not looking up.
Silently the elder artist put the desired crayon in his hand. When the
last touches were done, the boy looked up at us, not boastfully, but
with supreme confidence.
"There!" said he.
It was crude. It was ill-proportioned. The colors were raw. The
arrangements were false.
_But_--the lilac bloomed. _And_--the butterfly hovered. The artist had
spoken through his ordained medium and the presentment of life stood
forth. I hardly dared look at Peter Quick Banta. But beneath his uncouth
exterior there lay a great and magnanimous soul.
"Son," said he, "you're a wonder. Wanta keep them crayons?"
Unable to speak for the moment, the boy took off his ragged cap in one
of the most gracious gestures I have ever witnessed, raising dog-like
eyes of gratitude to his benefactor. Tactfully, Peter Quick Banta
proceeded to expound for my benefit the technique of the drawing, giving
the youngster time to recover before the inevitable questioning began.
"Where did you learn that?"
"Nowhere. Had a few drawing lessons at No. 19."
"Would you like to work for me?"
"How?"
Peter Quick Banta pointed to the sidewalk.
"That?" The boy laughed happily. "That ain't work. That's fun."
So the partnership was begun, the boy, whose name was Julien Tennier
(soon simplified into Tenney for local use), sharing Peter Quick Banta's
roomy garret. Success, modest but unfailing, attended it from the first
appearance of the junior member of the firm at Coney Island, where, as
the local cognoscenti still maintain, he revolutionized the art and
practice of the "sand-dabs." Out of the joint takings grew a bank
account. Eventually Peter Quick Banta came to me about the boy's
education.
"He's a swell," said Peter Quick Banta. "Look at that face! I don't care
if he did crawl outa the gutter. I'm an artist and I reco'nize
aristocracy when I see it. And I want him brung up accordin'."
So I inducted the youngster into such modest groves of learning as an
old, half-shelved pedagogue has access to, and when the Bonnie Lassie
came to Our Square to make herself and us famous with her tiny bronzes
(this was before she had captured, reformed, and married Cyrus the
Gaunt), I took him to her and he fell boyishly and violently in love
with her beauty and her genius alike, all of which was good for his
developing soul. She arranged for his art training.
"But you know, Dominie," she used to say, wagging her head like a
profound and thoughtful bird; "this is all very foolish and shortsighted
on my part. Five years from now that gutter-godling of yours will be
doing work that will make people forget poor little me and my poor
little figurines."
To which I replied that even if it were true, instead of the veriest
nonsense, about Julien Tenney or any one else ever eclipsing her, she
would help him just the same!
But five years from then Julien had gone over to the Philistines.
II
Justly catalogued, Roberta Holland belonged to the idle rich. She would
have objected to the latter classification, averring that, with the
rising cost of furs and automobile upkeep, she had barely enough to keep
her head above the high tide of Fifth Avenue prices. As to idleness, she
scorned the charge. Had she not, throughout the war, performed
prodigious feats of committee work, all of it meritorious and some of it
useful? She had. It had left her with a dangerous and destructive
appetite for doing good to people. Aside from this, Miss Roberta was a
distracting young person. Few looked at her once without wanting to look
again, and not a few looked again to their undoing.
Being-done-good-to is, I understand, much in vogue in the purlieus of
Fifth Avenue where it is practiced with skill and persistence by a large
and needy cult of grateful recipients. Our Square doesn't take to it. As
recipients we are, I fear, grudgingly grateful. So when Miss Holland
transferred her enthusiasms and activities to our far-away corner of the
world she met with a lack of response which might have discouraged one
with a less new and superior sense of duty to the lower orders. She came
to us through the Bonnie Lassie, guardian of the gateway from the upper
strata to our humbler domain, who--Pagan that she is!--indiscriminately
accepts all things beautiful simply for their beauty. Having arrived,
Miss Holland proceeded to organize us with all the energy of
high-blooded sweet-and-twenty and all the imperiousness of confident
wealth and beauty. She organized an evening sewing-circle for women
whose eyelids would not stay open after their long day's work. She
formed cultural improvement classes for such as Leon Coventry, the
printer, who knows half the literatures of the world, and MacLachan, the
tailor, to whom Carlyle is by way of being light reading. She delivered
some edifying exhortations upon the subject of Americanism to Polyglot
Elsa, of the Elite Restaurant (who had taken upon her sturdy young
shoulders the support of an old mother and a paralytic sister, so that
her two brothers might enlist for the war--a detail of patriotism which
the dispenser of platitudes might have learned by judicious inquiry).
And so forth and so on. Miss Roberta Holland meant well, but she had
many things to learn and no master to teach her.
Yet when the flu epidemic returned upon us, she stood by, efficient,
deft, and gallant, though still imperious, until the day when she
clashed her lath-and-tinsel sword of theory against the tempered steel
of the Little Red Doctor's experience. Said the Little Red Doctor (who
was pressed for time at the moment): "Take orders. Or get out. Which?"
She straightened like a soldier. "Tell me what you want done."
At the end of the onset, when he gave her her release from volunteer
service, she turned shining eyes upon him. "I've never been so treated
in my life! You're a bully and a brute."
"You're a brick," retorted the Little Red Doctor. "I'll send for you
next time Our Square needs help."
"I'll come," said she, and they shook hands solemnly.
Thereafter Our Square felt a little more lenient toward her
ministrations, and even those of us who least approved her activities
felt the stir of radiance and color which she brought with her.
On a day when the local philanthropy market was slack, and Miss Holland,
seated in the Bonnie Lassie's front window, was maturing some new and
benign outrage upon our sensibilities, she called out to the sculptress
at work on a group:
"There's a queer man making queer marks on your sidewalk."
"That's Peter Quick Banta. He's a fellow artist."
"And another man, young, with a big, maney head like an amiable lion;
quite a beautiful lion. He's making more marks."
"Let him make all he wants."
"They're waving their arms at each other. At least the queer man is. I
think they're going to fight."
"They won't. It's only an academic discussion on technique."
"Who is the young one?"
"He's the ruin of what might have been a big artist."
"No! Is he? What did it? Drink?"
"Does he look it?"
The window-gazer peered more intently at the debaters below. "It's a
peculiar face. Awfully interesting, though. He's quite poorly dressed.
Does he need money? Is that what's wrong?"
"That's it, Bobbie," returned the Bonnie Lassie with a half-smile. "He
needs the money."
The rampant philanthropist stirred within Miss Roberta Holland's fatally
well-meaning soul. "Would it be a case where I could help? I'd love to
put a real artist back on his feet. Are you sure he's real?"
On the subject of Art, the Bonnie Lassie is never anything but sincere
and direct, however much she may play her trickeries with lesser
interests, such as life and love and human fate.
"No; I'm not. If he were, I doubt whether he'd have let himself go so
wrong."
"Perhaps it isn't too late," said the amateur missionary hopefully. "Is
he a man to whom one could offer money?"
The Bonnie Lassie's smile broadened without change in its subtle
quality. "Julien Tenney isn't exactly a pauper. He just thinks he can't
afford to do the kind of thing he wants and ought to."
"What ought he to do?"
"Paint--paint--paint!" said the Bonnie Lassie vehemently. "Five years
ago I believe he had the makings of a great painter in him. And now look
what he's doing!"
"Making marks on sidewalks, you mean?"
"Worse. Commercial art."
"Designs and that sort of thing?"
"Do you ever look at the unearthly beautiful, graceful and gloriously
dressed young super-Americans who appear in the advertisements, riding
in super-cars or wearing super-clothes or brushing super-teeth with
super-toothbrushes?"
"I suppose so," said the girl vaguely.
"He draws those."
"Is that what you call pot-boiling?"
"One kind."
"And I suppose it pays just a pittance."
"Well," replied the Bonnie Lassie evasively, "he sticks to it, so it
must support him."
"Then I'm going to help him."
"'To fulfill his destiny,' is the accepted phrase," said the Bonnie
Lassie wickedly. "I'll call him in for you to look over. But you'd best
leave the arrangements for a later meeting."
Being summoned, Julien Tenney entered the house as one quite at home
despite his smeary garb of the working artist. His presentation to Miss
Holland was as brief as it was formal, for she took her departure
at once.
"Who is she?" asked Julien, staring after her.
"Bobbie Holland, a gilded butterfly from uptown."
"What's she doing here?"
"Good."
"O Lord!" said he in pained tones. "Has she got a Cause?"
"Naturally."
"Philanthropist?"
"Worse."
"There ain't no sich a animile."
"There is. She's a patron of art."
"Wow!"
"Yes. She's going to patronize you."
"Not if I see her first. How do _I_ qualify as a subject?"
"She considered you a wasted life."
"Where does she get that idea?"
The Bonnie Lassie removed a small, sharp implement from the left eye of
a stoical figurine and pointed it at herself.
"Do you think that's fair?" demanded the indignant youth.
The Bonnie Lassie reversed the implement and pointed it at him. "Do you
or do you not," she challenged, "invade our humble precincts in a
five-thousand-dollar automobile?"
"It's my only extravagance."
"Do you or do you not maintain a luxurious apartment in Gramercy Park,
when you are not down here posing in your attic as an honest
working-man?"
"Oh, see here, Mrs. Staten, I won't stand for that!" he expostulated.
"You know perfectly well I keep my room here because it's the only place
I can work in quietly--"
"And because Peter Quick Banta would break his foolish old heart if you
left him entirely," supplemented the sculptress.
Julien flushed and stood looking like an awkward child. "Did you tell
all this stuff to Miss Holland?" he asked.
"Oh, no! She thinks that your pot-boiling is a desperate and barely
sufficient expedient to keep the wolf from the door. So she is planning
to help you realize your destiny."
"Which is?" he queried with lifted brows.
"To be a great painter."
The other winced. "As you know, I've meant all along, as soon as I've
saved enough--"
"Oh, yes; _I_ know," broke in the Bonnie Lassie, who can be quite
ruthless where Art is concerned, "and _you_ know; but time flies and
hell is paved with good intentions, and if you want to be that kind of a
pavement artist--well, I think Peter Quick Banta is a better."
"Do you suppose she'd let me paint her?" he asked abruptly.
If statuettes could blink, the one upon which the Bonnie Lassie was
busied would certainly have shrouded its vision against the dazzling
radiance of her smile, for this was coming about as she had planned it
from the moment when she had caught the flash of startled surprise and
wonder in his eyes, as they first rested on Bobbie Holland. Here, she
had guessed, might be the agency to bring Julien Tenney to his artistic
senses; and even so it was now working out. But all she said was--and
she said it with a sort of venomous blandness--"My dear boy, you
can't paint."
"Can't I! Just because I'm a little out of practice--"
"Two years, isn't it, since you've touched a palette?"
"Give me a chance at such a model as she is! That's all I ask."
"Do you think her so pretty?" inquired the sculptress disparagingly.
"Pretty? She's the loveliest thing that--" Catching his hostess's smile
he broke off. "You'll admit it's a well-modeled face," he said
professionally; "and--and--well, unusual."
"Pooh! 'Dangerous' is the word. Remember it," warned the Bonnie Lassie.
"She's a devastating whirlwind, that child, and she comes down here
partly to get away from the wreckage. Now, if you play your part
cleverly--"
"I'm not going to play any part."
"Then it's all up. How is a patroness of Art going to patronize you,
unless you're a poor and struggling young artist, living from hand to
mouth by arduous pot-boiling? You won't have to play a part as far as
the pot-boiling goes," added his monitress viciously. "Only, don't let
her know that the rewards of your shame run to high-powered cars and
high-class apartments. Remember, you're poor but honest. Perhaps she'll
give you money."
"Perhaps she won't," retorted the youth explosively.
"Oh, it will be done tactfully; never fear. I'll bring her around to see
you and you'll have to work the sittings yourself."
As a setting for the abode of a struggling beginner, Julien's attic
needed no change. It was a whim of his to keep it bare and simple. He
worked out his pictorial schemes of elegance best in an environment
where there was nothing to distract the eye. One could see that Miss
Roberta Holland, upon her initial visit, approved its stark and cleanly
poverty. (Yes, I was there to see; the Bonnie Lassie had taken me along
to make up that first party.) Having done the honors, Julien dropped
into the background, and presently was curled up over a drawing-board,
sketching eagerly while the Bonnie Lassie and I held the doer of good
deeds in talk. Now the shrewd and able tribe of advertising managers do
not pay to any but a master-draughtsman the prices which "J.T."--with
an arrow transfixing the initials--gets; and Julien was as deft and
rapid as he was skillful. Soon appreciating what was in progress, the
visitor graciously sat quite still. At the conclusion she held out her
hand for the cardboard.
To be a patroness of Art does not necessarily imply that one is an
adequate critic. Miss Holland contemplated what was a veritable little
gem in black-and-white with cool approbation.
"Quite clever," she was pleased to say. "Would you care to sell it?"
"I don't think it would be exactly--" A stern glance from the Bonnie
Lassie cut short the refusal. He swallowed the rest of the sentence.
"Would ten dollars be too little?" asked the visitor with bright
beneficence.
"Too much," he murmured. (The Bonnie Lassie says that with a little
crayoning and retouching he could have sold it for at least fifty
times that.)
The patroness delicately dropped a bill on the table.
"Could you some day find time to let me try you in oils?" he asked.
"Does that take long?" she said doubtfully. "I'm very busy."
"You really should try it, Bobbie," put in the crafty Bonnie Lassie. "It
might give him the start he needs."
What arguments she added later is a secret between the two women, but
she had her way. The Bonnie Lassie always does. So the bare studio was
from time to time irradiated with Bobbie Holland's youthful loveliness
and laughter. For there was much laughter between those two. Shrewdly
foreseeing that this bird of paradise would return to the bare cage only
if it were made amusing for her, Julien exerted himself to the utmost to
keep her mind at play, and, as I can vouch who helped train him, there
are few men of his age who can be as absorbing a companion as Julien
when he chooses to exert his charm. All the time, he was working with a
passionate intensity on the portrait; letting everything else go;
tossing aside the most remunerative offers; leaving his mail unopened;
throwing himself intensely, recklessly, into this one single enterprise.
The fact is, he had long been starved for color and was now satiating
his soul with it. Probably it was largely impersonal with him at first.
The Bonnie Lassie, wise of heart that she is, thinks so. But that could
not last. Men who are not otherwise safeguarded do not long retain a
neutral attitude toward such creatures of grace and splendor as
Bobbie Holland.
Between them developed a curious relation. It was hardly to be called
friendship; he was not, to Bobbie's recognition, a habitant of her
world. Nor, certainly, was it anything more. Julien would as soon have
renounced easel and canvas as have taken advantage of her coming to make
love to her. In this waif of our gutters and ward of our sidewalk artist
inhered a spirit of the most punctilious and rigid honor, the gift,
perhaps, of some forgotten ancestry. More and more, as the intimacy
grew, he deserted his uptown haunts and stuck to the attic studio above
the rooms where, in the dawning days of prosperity, he had installed
Peter Quick Banta in the effete and scandalous luxury of two rooms, a
bath, and a gas stove. Yet the picture advanced slowly which is the more
surprising in that the exotic Bobbie seemed to find plenty of time for
sittings now. Between visits she took to going to the Metropolitan
Museum and conscientiously studying pictures and catalogues with a view
to helping her protege form sound artistic tastes. (When the Bonnie
Lassie heard that, she all but choked.) As for Julien!
"This is all very well," he said, one day in the sculptress's studio;
"but sooner or later she's going to catch me at it."
"What then?" asked the Bonnie Lassie, not looking up from her work.
"She'll go away."
"Let her go. Your portrait will be finished meantime, won't it?"
"Oh, yes. That'll be finished."
This time the Bonnie Lassie did look up. Immediately she looked back
again.
"In any case she'll have to go away some day--won't she?"
"I suppose so," returned he in a gloomy growl.
"I warned you at the outset, 'Dangerous,'" she pointed out.
They let it drop there. As for the effect upon the girl of Julien
Tenny's brilliant and unsettling personality, I could judge only as I
saw them occasionally together, she lustrous and exotic as a budding
orchid, he in the non-descript motley of his studio garb, serenely
unconscious of any incongruity.
"Do you think," I asked the Bonnie Lassie, who was sharing my bench one
afternoon as Julien was taking the patroness of Art over to where her
car waited, "that she is doing him as much good as she thinks she is, or
ought to?"
"Malice ill becomes one of your age, Dominie," said the Bonnie Lassie
with dignity.
"I'm quite serious," I protested.
"And very unjust. Bobbie is an adorable little person, when you know
her."
"Does Julien know her well enough to have discovered a self-evident
fact?"
"Only," pursued my companion, ignoring the question, "she is bored and a
little spoiled."
"So she comes down here to escape being bored and to get more spoiled."
"Julien won't spoil her."
"He certainly doesn't appear to bore her."
"She's having the tables turned on her without knowing it. Julien is
doing her a lot of good. Already she's far less beneficent and bountiful
and all that sort of stuff."
"Lassie," said I, "what, if I may so express myself, is the big idea?"
"Slang is an execrable thing from a professed scholar," she reproved.
"However, the big idea is that Julien is really painting. And it's
_mine_, that big idea."
"Mightn't it be accompanied by a little idea to the effect that the
experience is likely to cost him pretty dear? What will be left when
Bobbie Holland goes?"
"Pooh! Don't be an oracular sphinx," was all that I got for my pains.
Nor did Miss Bobbie show any immediate symptoms of going. If the
painting seemed at times in danger of stagnation, the same could not be
said of the fellowship between painter and paintee. That nourished
along, and one day a vagrant wind brought in the dangerous element of
historical personalities. The wind, entering at the end of a session,
displaced a hanging above the studio door, revealing in bold script upon
the plastering Beranger's famous line:
"Dans un grenier qu'on est bien a vingt ans!"
"Did you write that there?" asked the girl.
"Seven long years ago. And meant it, every word."
"How did you come to know Beranger?"
"I'm French born."
"'In a garret how good is life at twenty,'" she translated freely. "I
wouldn't have thought"--she turned her softly brilliant regard upon
him--"that life had been so good to you."
"It has," was the rejoinder. "But never so good as now."
"I've often wondered--you seem to know so many things--where you got
your education?"
"Here and there and everywhere. It's only a patchwork sort of thing."
(Ungrateful young scoundrel, so to describe my two-hours-a-day of
brain-hammering, and the free run of my library.)
"You're a very puzzling person," said she And when a woman says that to
a man, deep has begun to call to deep. (The Bonnie Lassie, who knows
everything, is my authority for the statement.)
To her went the patroness of Art, on leaving Julien's "grenier" that
day.
"Cecily," she said, in the most casual manner she could contrive, "who
_is_ Julien Tenney?"