señoritas, while White posed conspicuously in the higher regions of art.
Two weeks after their arrival, the scheme began to bear fruit. An aide-de-camp of the president drove to the hotel in a dashing victoria. The president desired that Señor White come to the Casa Morena for an informal interview.
Keogh gripped his pipe tightly between his teeth. “Not a cent less than ten thousand,” he said to the artist— “remember the price. And in gold or its equivalent — don’t let him stick you with this bargain-counter stuff they call money here.”
“Perhaps it isn’t that he wants,” said White.
“Get out!” said Keogh, with splendid confidence. “I know what he wants. He wants his picture painted by the celebrated young American painter and filibuster now sojourning in his downtrodden country. Off you go.”
The victoria sped away with the artist. Keogh walked up and down, puffing great clouds of smoke from his pipe, and waited. In an hour the victoria swept again to the door of the hotel, deposited White, and vanished. The artist dashed up the stairs, three at a step. Keogh stopped smoking, and became a silent interrogation point.
“Landed,” exclaimed White, with his boyish face flushed with elation. “Billy, you are a wonder. He wants a picture. I’ll tell you all about it. By Heavens! that dictator chap is a corker! He’s a dictator clear down to his finger-ends. He’s a kind of combination of Julius Cæsar, Lucifer and Chauncey Depew done in sepia. Polite and grim — that’s his way. The room I saw him in was about ten acres big, and looked like a Mississippi steamboat with its gilding and mirrors and white paint. He talks English better than I can ever hope to. The matter of the price came up. I mentioned ten thousand. I expected him to call the guard and have me taken out and shot. He didn’t move an eyelash. He just waved one of his chestnut hands in a careless way, and said, ‘Whatever you say.’ I am to go back tomorrow and discuss with him the details of the picture.”
Keogh hung his head. Self-abasement was easy to read in his downcast countenance.
“I’m failing, Carry,” he said, sorrowfully. “I’m not fit to handle these man’s-size schemes any longer. Peddling oranges in a pushcart is about the suitable graft for me. When I said ten thousand, I swear I thought I had sized up that brown man’s limit to within two cents. He’d have melted down for fifteen thousand just as easy. Say — Carry — you’ll see old man Keogh safe in some nice, quiet idiot asylum, won’t you, if he makes a break like that again?”
The Casa Morena, although only one story in height, was a building of brown stone, luxurious as a palace in its interior. It stood on a low hill in a walled garden of splendid tropical flora at the upper edge of Coralio. The next day the president’s carriage came again for the artist. Keogh went out for a walk along the beach, where he and his “picture box” were now familiar sights. When he returned to the hotel White was sitting in a steamer-chair on the balcony.
“Well,” said Keogh, “did you and His Nibs decide on the kind of a chromo he wants?”
White got up and walked back and forth on the balcony a few times. Then he stopped, and laughed strangely. His face was flushed, and his eyes were bright with a kind of angry amusement.
“Look here, Billy,” he said, somewhat roughly, “when you first came to me in my studio and mentioned a picture, I thought you wanted a Smashed Oats or a Hair Tonic poster painted on a range of mountains or the side of a continent. Well, either of those jobs would have been Art in its highest form compared to the one you’ve steered me against. I can’t paint that picture, Billy. You’ve got to let me out. Let me try to tell you what that barbarian wants. He had it all planned out and even a sketch made of his idea. The old boy doesn’t draw badly at all. But, ye goddesses of Art! listen to the monstrosity he expects me to paint. He wants himself in the centre of the canvas, of course. He is to be painted as Jupiter sitting on Olympus, with the clouds at his feet. At one side of him stands George Washington, in full regimentals, with his hand on the president’s shoulder. An angel with outstretched wings hovers overhead, and is placing a laurel wreath on the president’s head, crowning him — Queen of the May, I suppose. In the background is to be cannon, more angels and soldiers. The man who would paint that picture would have to have the soul of a dog, and would deserve to go down into oblivion without even a tin can tied to his tail to sound his memory.”
Little beads of moisture crept out all over Billy Keogh’s brow. The stub of his blue pencil had not figured out a contingency like this. The machinery of his plan had run with flattering smoothness until now. He dragged another chair upon the balcony, and got White back to his seat. He lit his pipe with apparent calm.
“Now, sonny,” he said, with gentle grimness, “you and me will have an Art to Art talk. You’ve got your art and I’ve got mine. Yours is the real Pierian stuff that turns up its nose at bock-beer signs and oleographs of the Old Mill. Mine’s the art of Business. This was my scheme, and it worked out like two-and-two. Paint that president man as Old King Cole, or Venus, or a landscape, or a fresco, or a bunch of lilies, or anything he thinks he looks like. But get the paint on the canvas and collect the spoils. You wouldn’t throw me down, Carry, at this stage of the game. Think of that ten thousand.”
“I can’t help thinking of it,” said White, “and that’s what hurts. I’m tempted to throw every ideal I ever had down in the mire, and steep my soul in infamy by painting that picture. That five thousand meant three years of foreign study to me, and I’d almost sell my soul for that.”
“Now it ain’t as bad as that,” said Keogh, soothingly. “It’s a business proposition. It’s so much paint and time against money. I don’t fall in with your idea that that picture would so everlastingly jolt the art side of the question. George Washington was all right, you know, and nobody could say a word against the angel. I don’t think so bad of that group. If you was to give Jupiter a pair of epaulets and a sword, and kind of work the clouds around to look like a blackberry patch, it wouldn’t make such a bad battle scene. Why, if we hadn’t already settled on the price, he ought to pay an extra thousand for Washington, and the angel ought to raise it five hundred.”
“You don’t understand, Billy,” said White, with an uneasy laugh. “Some of us fellows who try to paint have big notions about Art. I wanted to paint a picture some day that people would stand before and forget that it was made of paint. I wanted it to creep into them like a bar of music and mushroom there like a soft bullet. And I wanted ’em to go away and ask, ‘What else has he done?’ And I didn’t want ’em to find a thing; not a portrait nor a magazine cover nor an illustration nor a drawing of a girl — nothing but the picture. That’s why I’ve lived on fried sausages, and tried to keep true to myself. I persuaded myself to do this portrait for the chance it might give me to study abroad. But this howling, screaming caricature! Good Lord! can’t you see how it is?”
“Sure,” said Keogh, as tenderly as he would have spoken to a child, and he laid a long forefinger on White’s knee. “I see. It’s bad to have your art all slugged up like that. I know. You wanted to paint a big thing like the panorama of the battle of Gettysburg. But let me kalsomine you a little mental sketch to consider. Up to date we’re out $385.50 on this scheme. Our capital took every cent both of us could raise. We’ve got about enough left to get back to New York on. I need my share of that ten thousand. I want to work a copper deal in Idaho, and make a hundred thousand. That’s the business end of the thing. Come down off your art perch, Carry, and let’s land that hatful of dollars.”
“Billy,” said White, with an effort, “I’ll try. I won’t say I’ll do it, but I’ll try. I’ll go at it, and put it through if I can.”
“That’s business,” said
