The Fortunes of Oliver Horn [139]
"But he doesn't know how," cried Munson from across the table. "I sat alongside of that fellow at the Ecole for two years. He can't draw, and never could. His flesh was beastly, his modelling worse, and his technique--a botch. You can see what color he uses," and he pointed to the palette Jack was trying to clean.
"Granted, my boy," said Waller. "I didn't say he could PAINT; I said he knew how to earn $4,000 in three months painting portraits."
"He never painted a portrait worth four cents. Why, I knew--"
"Dry up, Munson!" interrupted Jack. "Go on, Waller, tell us how he did it."
"By using some horse-sense and a little tact; getting in with the procession and bolding his cud up," retorted Waller, in a solemn tone.
"Give him room! Give him room!" cried Oliver, with a laugh, pouring a little dryer into his oil-cup. He loved to hear Waller talk. "He flings his words about as if they were chunks of coal," he would always say.
The great man wheeled his chair around and faced the room. Oliver's words had sounded like a challenge.
"Keep it up!--pound away," he cried, his face reddening. "I've watched Ridgway ever since he arrived here last spring, and I will give you his recipe for success. He didn't fall overboard into a second-rate club as soon as he got here and rub his brushes on his coat-sleeve to look artistic. Not much! He had his name put up at the Union; got Croney to cut his clothes, and Leary to make his hats, played croquet with the girls he knew, drove tandem--his brother-in-law's--and dined out every night in the week. Every day or two he would haul out one of his six-foot canvases, and give it a coat of bitumen. Always did this when some club swell was around who would tell about it,"
"Did it with a sponge," muttered Munson. "Old trick of his!"
"Next thing he did," continued Waller, ignoring Munson's aside, "was to refuse a thousand-dollar commission offered by a vulgar real-estate man to paint a two-hundred-pound pink-silk sofa-cushion of a wife in a tight-fitting waist. This spread like the measles. It was the talk of the club, of dinner-tables and piazzas, and before sundown Ridgway's exclusiveness in taste and artistic instincts were established. Then he hunted up a pretty young married woman occupying the dead-centre of the sanctified social circle, went into spasms over her beauty--so classic, such an exquisite outline; grew confidential with the husband at the club, and begged permission to make just a sketch only the size of his hand--wanted it for his head of Sappho, Berlin Exhibition. Next he rented a suite of rooms, crowded in a lot of borrowed tapestries, brass, Venetian chests, lamps and hangings; gave a tea--servants this time in livery--exhibited his Sappho; refused a big price for it from the husband; got orders instead for two half-lengths, $1,500 each, finished them in two weeks, declined more commissions on account of extreme fatigue; disappeared with the first frost and the best cottage people; booked three more full-lengths in New York --two to be painted in Paris and the other on his return in the spring; was followed to the steamer by a bevy of beauties, half-smothered in flowers, and disappeared in a halo of artistic glory just $4,000 in."
Fred broke out into a roar, in which the whole room joined.
"And you call that art, do you?" cried Munson, laying down his palette. His face was flushed, his eyes snapping with indignation.
"I do, my babbling infant," retorted Waller. "I call it the art of making the most of your opportunities and putting your best foot foremost. That's a thing you fellows never seem to understand. You want to shuffle around in carpet-slippers, live in a garret, and wait until some money-bags climbs up your crazy staircases to discover you. Ridgway puts. his foot in a patent-leather pump and silk stocking, and never steps on a carpet that isn't two inches thick. Merchants, engineers, manufacturers, and even scientists, when they have anything to sell, go where there is somebody to buy; why shouldn't an artist?"
"Just like