Mine Were All The
Rights Of Social Intercourse, Craft By Craft, That India,
Stony-Hearted Step-Mother Of Collectors, Has Swindled Us Out Of.
Treading soft carpets and breathing the incense of superior
cigars, I wandered from room to room studying the paintings in
which the members of the club had caricatured themselves, their
associates, and their aims.
There was a slick French audacity
about the workmanship of these men of toil unbending that went
straight to the heart of the beholder. And yet it was not
altogether French. A dry grimness of treatment, almost Dutch,
marked the difference. The men painted as they spoke - with
certainty. The club indulges in revelries which it calls
"jinks" - high and low, at intervals - and each of these gatherings
is faithfully portrayed in oils by hands that know their
business. In this club were no amateurs spoiling canvas, because
they fancied they could handle oils without knowledge of shadows
or anatomy - no gentleman of leisure ruining the temper of
publishers and an already ruined market with attempts to write
"because everybody writes something these days."
My hosts were working, or had worked for their daily bread with
pen or paint, and their talk for the most part was of the
shop - shoppy - that is to say, delightful. They extended a large
hand of welcome, and were as brethren, and I did homage to the
owl and listened to their talk. An Indian club about
Christmas-time will yield, if properly worked, an abundant
harvest of queer tales; but at a gathering of Americans from the
uttermost ends of their own continent, the tales are larger,
thicker, more spinous, and even more azure than any Indian
variety. Tales of the war I heard told by an ex-officer of the
South over his evening drink to a colonel of the Northern army,
my introducer, who had served as a trooper in the Northern Horse,
throwing in emendations from time to time. "Tales of the Law,"
which in this country is an amazingly elastic affair, followed
from the lips of a judge. Forgive me for recording one tale that
struck me as new. It may interest the up-country Bar in India.
Once upon a time there was Samuelson, a young lawyer, who feared
not God, neither regarded the Bench. (Name, age, and town of the
man were given at great length.) To him no case had ever come as
a client, partly because he lived in a district where lynch law
prevailed, and partly because the most desperate prisoner shrunk
from intrusting himself to the mercies of a phenomenal stammerer.
But in time there happened an aggravated murder - so bad, indeed,
that by common consent the citizens decided, as a prelude to
lynching, to give the real law a chance. They could, in fact,
gambol round that murder. They met - the court in its
shirt-sleeves - and against the raw square of the Court House
window a temptingly suggestive branch of a tree fretted the sky.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 10 of 53
Words from 4677 to 5178
of 26974
