Owen Johnson

“ Happiness is the enemy of the artist. It puts to sleep the faculties. Contentment is a drug. My dear men, an artist should always be unhappy. Perpetual state of fermentation sets the nerves throbbing, sensitive to impressions. Exaltation and remorse, anger and inspiration, all hodge-podge, chemical action and reaction, all this we are blessed with when we are unhappily married. Domestic infelicity drives us to our art; happiness makes us neglect it. Shall I tell you what I do when everything is smooth, no nerves, no inspiration, fat, puffy Sunday-dinner-feeling, too happy, can't work? ”

“ Now I won't be jealous any more, and every morning I will come with you and inspire you.'"
"Every morning," said Herkimer, softly.
"Yes," said Rantoul, with a little hesitation, "every morning. She fluttered about the studio like a pink-and-white butterfly, sending me a kiss from her dainty fingers whenever I looked her way. She watched over my shoulder every stroke, and when I did something that pleased her, I felt her lips on my neck, behind my ear, and heard her say, 'That is your reward.'"
"Every day?" said Herkimer.
"Every day." ”

“ I say that an artist who marries might just as well tie a rope around his neck and present it to his wife and have it over."
"On the contrary," said Quinny, with a sudden inspiration reorganizing his whole battle front, "every artist should marry. The only danger is that he may marry happily."
"What?" cried Steingall. "But you said—"
"My dear boy, I have germinated some new ideas," said Quinny, unconcerned. "The story has a moral,—I detest morals,—but this has one. An artist should always marry unhappily, and do you know why? Purely a question of chemistry. Towsey, when do you work the best?" ”

“ The comedy is over."
"But that's what they don't understand," said Steingall, with enthusiasm. "That's what they will never understand."
"Such miracles exist?" said Towsey with a short, disagreeable laugh.
"I know the wife of an artist," said Quinny, "whom I consider the most remarkable woman I know—who sits and knits and smiles. She is one who understands. Her husband adores her, and he is in love with a woman a month. When he gets in too deep, ready for another inspiration, you know, she calls up the old love on the telephone and asks her to stop annoying her husband." ”

“ Only there is in such a love something of the tiger—a fierce animal jealousy of every one and everything which could even for a moment take my thoughts away. At this moment she is probably suffering untold pangs because she thinks I am regretting the days in which she was not in my life."
"And because she could not understand your art, she hated it," said Herkimer, with a growing anger.
"No, it wasn't that. It was something more subtle, more instinctive, more impossible to combat," said Rantoul, shaking his head. "Do you know what is the great essential to the artist—to whoever creates? ”

“ 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!" ”

“ I have listened to many confidences, understood many lives that others would not understand. I have always maintained that it is the natural thing for a human being to love many times—even that there might he in the same heart a great, overpowering love and a little one. I still believe it—with my mind. I know it is so. These are the things we like to analyze in human nature together. I know it is true, but it is not true for me. No, I would never understand it in you. I know myself too well, I am jealous of everything of the past—oh, insanely jealous. ”

“ De Gollyer, at forty-two, showed a responsive face, invincibly, gravely sympathetic, patiently awaiting his climax, knowing that nothing is so cumulatively dangerous as confession.
Lightbody took up his glass and again approached it to his lips, frowning at the thought of what he had revealed. All at once a fresh impulse caught him, he put down his glass untasted, blurting out:
"Do you want to know one thing more? Do you want to know the truth, the real truth?" ”

“ From the spectacular bluffs of the educated village of Stockbridge nothing can be imagined more charming than the panorama that the course presents on a busy day. Across the soft, green stretches, diminutive caddies may be seen scampering with long buckling-nets, while from the river-banks numerous recklessly exposed legs wave in the air as the more socially presentable portions hang frantically over the swirling current. ”

“ Ten minutes later De Gollyer nervously slipped into the room. He was a quick, instinctive ferret of a man, one to whose eyes the hidden life of the city held no mysteries; who understood equally the shadows that glide on the street and the masks that pass in luxurious carriages. In one glance he had caught the disorder in the room and the agitation in his friend. He advanced a step, balanced his hat on the desk, perceived the crumpled letter, and, clearing his throat, drew back, frowning and alert, correctly prepared for any situation. ”

“ Fair on the course, at the edge of the green itself, lay the ball, which soon was sunk for a four. Pickings felt a strange, unaccountable desire to leap upon Booverman like a fluffy, enthusiastic dog; but he fought it back with the new sense of responsibility that came to him. So he said artfully: "By George! old man, if you hadn't missed on the fourth or the sixth, you'd have done even threes!"
"You know what I ought to do now—I ought to stop," said Booverman, in profound despair—"quit golf and never lift another club. It's a crime to go on; it's a crime to spoil such a record. ”

“ 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." ”

“ Stibo raised his eyes slowly to Quinny's but veiled as was the look, De Gollyer perceived it, and smilingly registered the knowledge on the ledger of his social secrets.
"That's it, by George! that is it," said Steingall, who hurled the enthusiasm of a reformer into his pessimism. "It's all so simple; but they won't understand. And why—do you know why? Because a woman is jealous. It isn't simply of other women. No, no, that's not it; it's worse than that, ten thousand times worse. She's jealous of your art! ”

“ It is not the woman he seeks, but the hypnotic influence which the woman can exert on his faculties if she is able to inspire him with a passion."
"But that is precisely why he marries," said De Gollyer.
"Precisely," said Quinny, who, having seized the argument by chance, was pleasantly surprised to find that he was going to convince himself. "But here the great distinction. To be an inspiration, a woman should always represent to the artist a form of the unattainable: it is the search for something beyond him that makes him challenge the stars, and all that sort of rot, you know." ”

“ The porch windows were open, and in the golden lamplight Herkimer saw the figure of Tina Glover bent intently over an embroidery, drawing her needle with uneven stitches, her head seeming inclined to catch the faintest sound. The waiting, nervous pose, the slender figure on guard, brought to him a strange, almost uncanny sensation of mystery, and feeling the sudden change in the mood of the man at his side, he gazed at the figure of the wife and said to himself:
"I'd give a good deal to know what's passing through that little head. ”

“ Now, what you call inspiration may be communicated in many ways—by the spectacle of a mob, by a panorama of nature, by sudden and violent contrasts of points of view; but, above all, as a continual stimulus, it comes from that state of mental madness which is produced by love."
"Hanh?" said Stibo.
"Anything that produces a mental obsession, une idée fixe, is a form of madness," said Quinny, rapidly. "A person in love sees only one face, hears only one voice; at the base of the brain only one thought is constantly drumming. ”

“ Greenfield had walked thirty miles into the country and taken the train for Rio Mendoza on the route across the Andes to Valparaiso.
Frawley followed the same day, somewhat mystified at this sudden change of base. In the train the thermometer stood at 116°. The heat made of everything a solitude. Frawley, lifeless, stifling, and numbed, glued himself to the air-holes with eyes fastened on the horizon, while the train sped across the naked, singeing back of the plains like the welt that springs to meet the fall of the lash. ”

“ Lord! if I only could put!"
"One under three," said Pickings to his fluttering inner self. "He can't realize it. If I can only keep his mind off the score!"
The seventh tee is reached by a carefully planned, fatiguing flight of steps to the top of a bluff, where three churches at the back beckon so many recording angels to swell the purgatory lists. As you advance to the abrupt edge, everything is spread before you; nothing is concealed. In the first plane, the entangling branches of a score of apple-trees are ready to trap a topped ball and bury it under impossible piles of dry leaves. ”

“ About the latticed porch, which ran around the sanded yard with its feeble fountain and futile evergreens, other groups were eying one another, or engaging in desultory conversation, oppressed with the heaviness of the night.
At the round table, Quinny alone, absorbing energy as he devoured the conversation, having routed Steingall on the Germans and archæology and Rankin on the origins of the Lord's Prayer, had seized a chance remark of De Gollyer's to say:
"There are only half a dozen stories in the world. Like everything that's true it isn't true." ”

“ 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. ”

“ Madeleine, you know that our life together has been without the slightest shadow from the first. You know we have proved to each other how immense our love has been. In all these years I have grown in maturity and understanding. I regret only one thing, and I have regretted it bitterly, every day—that I once asked you, if—if ever for a moment another man came into your life to hide it from me, to tell me a lie. It was a great mistake. I have never ceased to regret it. Our love has been so above all worldly things that there ought not to be the slightest concealment between us. ”

“ Pickings, thrilled at the possibility of another miracle, sliced badly.
"This is one of the most truly delightful holes of a picturesque course," said Booverman, taking out an approaching cleek for his second shot. "Nothing is more artistic than the tiny little patch of putting-green under the shaggy branches of the willows. The receptive graveyard to the right gives a certain pathos to it, a splendid, quiet note in contrast to the feeling of the swift, hungry river to the left, which will now receive and carry from my outstretched hand this little white floater that will float away from me. ”

“ But as most keepers of restaurants are practical and unimaginative, and withal close bargainers, at the end of a week Rantoul generally was forced to seek a new sitter.
"What a privilege it is to be poor!" he would then exclaim enthusiastically to Herkimer. "It awakens all the perceptions; hunger makes the eye keener. I can see colors to-day that I never saw before. And to think that if Sherman had never gotten it in his head to march to the sea I should never have experienced this inspiration! But, old fellow, we have so short a time to be poor. We must exhibit nothing yet. We are lucky. ”

“ For the first time Booverman's shot went wide of the mark, straight into the trees that bordered the river to the left.
"I'm sorry," said Pickings with a feeble groan.
"My dear Picky, it had to come," said Booverman, with a shrug of his shoulders. "The ball is now lost, and all the score goes into the air, the most miraculous score any one ever heard of is nothing but a crushed egg!"
"It may have bounded back on the course," said Pickings, desperately.
"No, no, Picky; not that. In all the sixty thousand times I have hit trees, barns, car-tracks, caddies, fences,—"
"There it is!" ”

“ Then she said calmly, with that deep conviction which always moved him: "Ben, when you asked me that, I told you I would never lie. I have told you the truth. No man has ever had the pressure of my fingers, and no man ever will."
So intense had been his emotion that he had almost a paroxysm. When he opened his eyes he found her face wet with tears.
"Ah, Madeleine," he said, "I am brutal with you. I cannot help it."
"I would not have you love me differently," she said gently, and through her tears he seemed to see a faint, elusive smile, that was gone quickly if it was ever there at all. ”

“ They approached the green on a drunken run in the wild hope that a short put was possible. Unfortunately the ball lay thirty feet away, and the path to the hole was bumpy and riddled with worm-casts. Still, there was a chance, desperate as it was.
Pickings let his bag slip to the ground and sat down, covering his eyes while Booverman with his putter tried to brush away the ridges.
"Stand up!"
Pickings rose convulsively.
"For heaven's sake, Picky, stand up! Try to be a man!" said Booverman, hoarsely. "Do you think I've any nerve when I see you with chills and fever? Brace up!" ”

“ I shall probably never again speak to you with such absolute truth, or even acknowledge it to myself. I accept the necessity of separation. I know all the sufferings it will bring, all the doubts, the unreasoning jealousies. I am big enough in experience to understand what you have just suggested to me, but as a man who loves you, Madeleine, I will never understand it. I know that a dozen men may come into your life, interest you intensely, even absorb you for a while, and that they would still mean nothing to you the moment I come. Well, I am different. A man is different. ”