The men, now that Oliver had arrived, drew up around the long table. Some began setting their palettes; others picked out, from the common stock before them, the panels, canvases, china plates, or sheets of paper, which, under their deft touches, were so soon to be covered with dainty bits of color.
It was in many ways a remarkable club. Most of its members had already achieved the highest rank in their several professions and outside the walls of this eyrie were known as earnest, thoughtful men, envied and sought after by those who respected their aims and successes.
Inside these cosey rooms all restraint was laid aside and each man's personality and temperament expressed itself without reserve. Harry Stedman, who, perhaps, had been teaching a class of students all the morning in the new building of the National Academy of Design, each one of whom hung upon his words as if he had been inspired, could be found here a few hours later joining in a chorus with a voice loud enough to rattle every mug on the table.
Waller, who doubtless that same night, had been the bright particular star at some smart dinner uptown, and whose red ribbon had added such eclat to the occasion, and whose low voice and quiet manners and correct, conventional speeches had so charmed and captivated the lady on his right, would, when once in this room, sit astride some chair, a pipe in one hand, a mug of beer in the other. Here he would discuss with Simmons or Jack or Oliver his preference of Chopin over Beethoven, or the difference between Parepa-Rosa and Jenny Lind, or any topic which had risen out of the common talk, and all too with a grotesqueness of speech and manner that would have frozen his hostess of the dinner-table dumb with astonishment could she have seen him.
And so with the others. Each man was frankly himself and in undress uniform when under Fred's skylight, or when the club was enjoying any one of its various festivals and functions.
Oliver's election into the organization had, therefore, been to him one of the greatest honors he had received since his skill as a painter had been recognized by his fellows--an honor not conferred upon him because he had been one of the earlier members of the old Union Square organization, many of whom had been left out, but entirely because he was not only the best of fellows, but among the best of painters as well. An honor too, which brought with it the possibility of a certain satisfying of his tastes.
Only once before had he found an atmosphere so congenial and that was when the big hemlocks that he loved stood firm and silent about him--companions in a wilderness that rested him.
The coming together of such a body of men representing, as they did, the choicest the city afforded in art, literature and music, had been as natural and unavoidable as the concentration of a mass of iron filings toward a magnet. That insatiable hunger of the Bohemian, that craving of the craftsman for men of his kind, had at last overpowered them, and the meetings in Fred's studio were the inevitable result.
Many of these devotees of the arts had landed on the barren shores of America--barren of even the slightest trace of that life they had learned to love so well in the Quartier Latin in Paris and in the Rathskellers of Munich and Dusseldorf--and had wandered about in the uncongenial atmosphere of the commonplace until this retreat had been opened to them. Some, like Fred Stone and Jack Bedford, who had struggled on through the war, too much occupied in the whirl of their life to miss at the time the associations of men of similar tastes, had eagerly grasped the opportunity when it came, and others, like Oliver, who had had all they could do to get their three meals during the day and a shelter for the night, had hardly been conscious of what they wanted until the club had extended to them its congenial surroundings.
On the trio of painters we knew best in the old days these privations and the uncertainties and disappointments of the war had left their indelible mark.
You became aware of this when you saw them among their fellow-workers. About Fred's temples many tell-tale gray hairs were mingled with the brown, and about his mouth and eyes were deeper lines than those which hard work alone would have cut. He carried a hole, too, in his right arm--or did until the army surgeon sewed it up--you could see it as a blue scar every time he rolled up his sleeve--a slight souvenir of the Battle of Five Forks. It was bored out by a bullet from the hands of a man in gray when Fred, dropping his sketch-book, had bent to drag a wounded soldier from under an overturned caisson.
He carried no scar, however, in his heart. That organ beat with as keen a sympathy and as warm a spirit of camaraderie as it did when it first opened itself to Oliver's miseries in Union Square.
Jack Bedford, gaunt and strong of limb, looking a foot taller, had more than once been compelled to lay down his painter's palette and take up the sign-painter's brush, and the tell-tale wrinkles about his eyes and the set look about his mouth testified but too plainly to the keenness of his sufferings.
And Oliver--Ah! what of Oliver, and of the changes in him since that fatal night in Kennedy Square when he had been driven away from his home and made an outcast because he had been brave enough to defend a helpless man?
