Murder in Any Degree. Owen Johnson

Modern portraiture has turned the galleries into an exhibition of wax works. What is wrong with painting to-day—do you know?"

      "Allons, tell us!" cried two or three, while others, availing themselves of the breathing space, filled the air with their orders:

      "Paul, another bock."

      "Two hard-boiled eggs."

      "And pretzels; don't forget the pretzels."

      "The trouble with painting to-day is that it has no point of view," cried Rantoul, swallowing an egg in the anaconda fashion. "We are interpreting life in the manner of the Middle Ages. We forget art should be historical. We forget that we are now in our century. Ugliness, not beauty, is the note of our century; turbulence, strife, materialism, the mob, machinery, masses, not units. Why paint a captain of industry against a François I tapestry? Paint him at his desk. The desk is a throne; interpret it. We are ruled by mobs. Who paints mobs? What is wrong is this, that art is in the bondage of literature—sentimentality. We must record what we experience. Ugliness has its utility, its magnetism; the ugliness of abject misery moves you to think, to readjust ideas. We must be rebels, we young men. Ah, if we could only burn the galleries, we should be forced to return to life."

      "Bravo, Rantoul!"

      "Right, old chap."

      "Smash the statues!"

      "Burn the galleries!"

      "Down with tradition!"

      "Eggs and more bock!"

      But where Rantoul differed from the revolutionary regiment was that he was not simply a painter who delivered orations; he could paint. His tirades were not a furore of denunciation so much as they were the impulsive chafing of the creative energy within him. In the school he was already a marked man to set the prophets prophesying. He had a style of his own, biting, incisive, overloaded and excessive, but with something to say. He was after something. He was original.

      "Rebel! Let us rebel!" he would cry to Herkimer from his agitated bedquilt in the last hour of discussion. "The artist must always rebel—accept nothing, question everything, denounce conventions and traditions."

      "Above all, work," said Herkimer in his laconic way.

      "What? Don't I work?"

      "Work more."

      Rantoul, however, was not vulnerable on that score. He was not, it is true, the drag-horse that Herkimer was, who lived like a recluse, shunning the cafes and the dance-halls, eating up the last gray hours of the day over his statues and his clays. But Rantoul, while living life to its fullest, haunting the wharves and the markets with avid eyes, roaming the woods and trudging the banks of the Seine, mingling in the crowds that flashed under the flare of arc-lights, with a thousand mysteries of mass and movement, never relaxed a moment the savage attack his leaping nature made upon the drudgeries and routine of technic.

      With the coveted admittance into the Salon, recognition came speedily to the two chums. They made a triumphal entry into a real studio in the Montparnasse Quarter, clients came, and the room became a station of honor among the young and enthusiastic of the Quarter.

      Rantoul began to appear in society, besieged with the invitations that his Southern aristocracy and the romance of his success procured him.

      "You go out too much," said Herkimer to him, with a fearful growl. "What the deuce do you want with society, anyhow? Keep away from it. You've nothing to do with it."

      "What do I do? I go out once a week," said Rantoul, whistling pleasantly.

      "Once is too often. What do you want to become, a parlor celebrity? Society c'est l'ennemie. You ought to hate it."

      "I do."

      "Humph!" said Herkimer, eying him across his sputtering clay pipe. "Get this idea of people out of your head. Shut yourself up in a hole, work. What's society, anyhow? A lot of bored people who want you to amuse them. I don't approve. Better marry that pretty girl in the creamery. She'll worship you as a god, make you comfortable. That's all you need from the world."

      "Marry her yourself; she'll sew and cook for you," said Rantoul, with perfect good humor.

      "I'm in no danger," said Herkimer, curtly; "you are."

      "What!"

      "You'll see."

      "Listen, you old grumbler," said Rantoul, seriously. "If I go into society, it is to see the hollowness of it all—"

      "Yes, yes."

      "To know what I rebel against—"

      "Of course."

      "To appreciate the freedom of the life I have—"

      "Faker!"

      "To have the benefit of contrasts, light and shade. You think I am not a rebel. My dear boy, I am ten times as big a rebel as I was. Do you know what I'd do with society?"

      He began a tirade in the famous muscular Rantoul style, overturning creeds and castes, reorganizing republics and empires, while Herkimer, grumbling to himself, began to scold the model, who sleepily received the brunt of his ill humor.

      In the second year of his success Rantoul, quite by accident, met a girl in her teens named Tina Glover, only daughter of Cyrus Glover, a man of millions, self-made. The first time their eyes met and lingered, by the mysterious chemistry of the passions Rantoul fell desperately in love with this little slip of a girl, who scarcely reached to his shoulder; who, on her part, instantly made up her mind that she had found the husband she intended to have. Two weeks later they were engaged.

      She was seventeen, scarcely more than a child, with clear, blue eyes that seemed too large for her body, very timid and appealing. It is true she seldom expressed an opinion, but she listened to every one with a flattering smile, and the reputations of brilliant talkers have been built on less. She had a way of passing her two arms about Rantoul's great one and clinging to him in a weak, dependent way that was quite charming.

      When Cyrus Glover was informed that his daughter intended to marry a dauber in paints, he started for Paris on ten hours' notice. But Mrs. Glover who was just as resolved on social conquests as Glover was in controlling the plate-glass field, went down to meet him at the boat, and by the time the train entered the St. Lazare Station, he had been completely disciplined and brought to understand that a painter was one thing and that a Rantoul, who happened to paint, was quite another. When he had known Rantoul a week; and listened open-mouthed to his eloquent schemes for reordering the universe, and the arts in particular, he was willing to swear that he was one of the geniuses of the world.

      The wedding took place shortly, and Cyrus Glover gave the bridegroom a check for $100,000, "so that he wouldn't have to be bothering his wife for pocketmoney." Herkimer was the best man, and the Quarter attended in force, with much outward enthusiasm. The bride and groom departed for a two-year's trip around the world, that Rantoul might inspire himself with the treasures of Italy, Greece, India, and Japan.

      Every one, even Herkimer, agreed that Rantoul was the luckiest man in Paris; that he had found just the wife who was suited to him, whose fortune would open every opportunity for his genius to develop.

      "In the first place," said Bennett, when the group had returned to Herkimer's studio to continue the celebration, "let me remark that in general I don't approve of marriage for an artist."

      "Nor I," cried Chatterton, and the chorus answered, "Nor I."

      "I shall never marry," continued Bennett.

      "Never," cried Chatterton, who beat a tattoo on the piano with his heel to accompany the chorus of assent.

      "But—I add but—in this case my opinion is that Rantoul has found a pure diamond."

      "True!"

      "In the first place, she knows nothing at all about art, which is an enormous advantage."

      "Bravo!"

      "In