Harvey J. O'Higgins

“ But now, in the days that followed his arrival in New York, when he walked in the crowd of lower Broadway, or when he was carried past miles of packed houses on the elevated road, or when he wandered in the tenement district where every block of houses sheltered the population of a village, his faith in the importance of his personality began to fail. He began to fear that no man could live undiscouraged in such multitudinous obscurity. ”

“ Hecker had the sort of masculine mind that is always gruff with any one who is sick—the gruffness being a disguise for tenderness, of course. And he went directly to Walcott's drawing-table and portfolio without more than an embarrassed growl of sympathy as he passed the bed. "I suppose you can draw all right," he conceded, after glancing over a few sketches. "The trouble with you fellows is you've learned too much about what you call art—when you mean esthetics!" ”

“ Vanhoesen said courteously, "but I don't agree with it."
"And you never will," Hecker replied, "until you're 'born again.'" And he helped himself to salt with an air of having finished his outburst.
They all laughed in a way that showed Hecker to be a privileged character. Miss Dyckman tried to stir him up again, but he said: "No. No use preaching to the congenitally deaf." The only person who did not smile was a young woman, down the table, whom Walcott had been watching.
There was on her thin face, in her tired eyes, an expression of intense interest that was almost painful. ”

“ You're just beginning in New York, you know, and of course it's always hard at first. I don't care how much anybody owes me. I only keep the house up for Mr. Vanhoesen. If he were to leave me, I'd stop to-morrow. I lose money every year, but not any more than it would cost me to live, any way, and I like the company I have, and I don't like living with relatives, and I've been here so long I suppose I'll go on till I drop dead. ”

“ And he began to pour out a steady stream of contemptuous comment upon esthetics—of which poor Walcott caught only such floating short sentences as: "Esthetics is to art what theology is to religion—the killing thing—the killing thing." ”

“ See anything with sympathy and you'll see it beautiful. Get next to people. Like them—understand them—learn what they have to say and say it for them."
Walcott lay there staring up at the ceiling, and tried not to hate the man who talked to him. It was this very point of view of Hecker's that was to make the boy what he afterward became as an artist; but he was so little grateful for it. and so far from understanding it now, that he let Hecker take away a dozen of his sketches without even thanking him, feeling nothing but relief when the man was gone—even though he went with Miss Cooper. ”

“ Mr. Vanhoesen likes you. He likes young people. He likes to see them at the table. Ssh!"
He had begun to protest that Mr. Vanhoesen could not possibly like him. because he had never—
"Go to sleep," she ordered. "You're not to talk—" and tiptoed heavily out of the room.
He was still pondering dizzily over that incredible lack of commercialism in a New York boarding-house keeper when Mr. Vanhoesen himself peeped in the doorway, and, seeing him awake, came in to condole with him upon his symptoms. (He knew what the grip was, he said; it always took him in the small of the back.) ”

“ Or: "Taste's about the same thing as table manners. Good taste! Bad taste! There's nothing good or bad in taste but thinking makes it so." And: "Never mind about taste, about beauty, about esthetics—all that dogmatic theology of art. Get to life. ”

“ While he was trying it, she talked of Hecker, who, it seemed, was editor of a "labor paper." She talked of Mrs. Scales, and he learned that she had kept a boarding-house since the days of Poe and Bryant—and had had them both in her house—to say nothing of General Grant. ("Really?" Walcott said. "Well, I'll be hanged!") Mr. Vanhoesen and Miss Dyckman, it appeared, had been with her for twenty years or more: and Miss Dyckman was a lady of straitened means but distinguished birth ”

“ III BUT the illustrator, like the actor, can not prove what he can do until he has the opportunity to do it; and he finds it almost impossible to get the opportunity until he has given the proof. Walcott soon learned the uselessness of besieging art editors with his "studies"; and on Miss Cooper's advice he tried making sample illustrations for well-known scenes in "Tom Sawyer" and "Treasure Island" and "Robinson Crusoe" and such other favorites of his immature youth. Miss Cooper posed for them in the parlor, of an evening, when he needed her ”