The Pagans by Arlo Bates

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"What I am," he said brokenly, moved most of all by the tears upon her
cheeks, "is nothing. You have beaten this temptation, not I; I would
have done any thing if you had encouraged me. I am a very ordinary
mortal, Helen, when one really knows my littleness."

She smiled through her tears at him.

"You shall not abuse yourself;" she replied. "I will not have it."

There was not much further said between them. They remained together
until the dusk filled the studio, and it looked again like a
ghost-world as on the morning they two had come into it to see the dead
form modeled in red clay. Perhaps it was upon this remembrance that at
length Mrs. Greyson said:

"Will you give me, before I go to Europe, that figure you showed me?"

"I will give you any thing you ask," he answered; "I wish I might add
myself. Is it right," he added, with sudden fire, "for me to tie myself
to that model girl? Am I worth nothing better than that?"

"You are worth the best woman on earth; but--oh I cannot argue it, but
I feel it; I am sure that it cannot be right to deny the claim which
you yourself gave her, Grant. I know by myself what it would be to lose
you."

"But she is not the woman you are. Her feelings are those of an
ignorant peasant; she--"

Helen laid her fingers lightly upon his lips.

"No," she said, "don't go on. We have said it all once. You are trying
to out-argue your own convictions. I must go now. It is almost dark
already."

She took a step or two towards the door and again laid her hand upon
the rug _portiere_. Then as by a common impulse they turned
towards each other, and once more she was locked in his embrace.

And to-night, sitting alone in the dark, with dilated eyes, Helen felt
still the ecstasy of that moment, but murmured to herself:

"It must not be again; I will not see him alone."

XXXV.

PARTED OUR FELLOWSHIP.
Othello; ii.--I.

Tom Bently's studio that night was a sight well worth seeing.

Tom had two rooms in Studio Building, opening into each other by
folding doors, which were never known to be shut. The walls were hung
with old French tapestry, its rich, soft colors harmonizing exquisitely
with some dull-red velvet draperies from Venice. Bits of armor, some of
them very splendid, were disposed here and there, while a wealth of
_bric-a-brac_ enriched every nook and corner. In the doorway hung
an old altar-lamp of silver, with a cup of ruby glass, and from various
points depended other lamps of Moresque and antique shapes. A pair of
tall brass flambeau-stands, spoil of a Belgian cathedral sacked a
couple of centuries ago, upheld the heaviest candles Tom had been able
to find, which smoked and flared most picturesquely.

Bently had traveled widely, every where picking up graceful and
artistic trifles--stuffs from Algiers; rugs from Persia and Turkey;
weapons from Tripoli and India and Tunis; musical instruments from
Egypt and Spain; antiques from Greece and Germany and Italy; and
pottery from every where. His studio was the envy of all his brother
artists, although he himself growled about it profanely, declaring that
he had so much rubbish about him that he could not work, yet
nevertheless declining to part with a single object.

"I ought to clear the place out," he would say. "My pictures are
getting to look like advertisements of an old clo' shop, and if a man
doesn't change all his properties every year, the sapient critics say
he has become mannered. But I can't let them go; or rather they won't
let me go; they hang on like barnacles to an old hulk."

The Pagans were six that night, Fenton's place being unfilled. The
delinquency of the absent artist was a good deal commented upon, yet
always as if an effort were made to keep the subject out of the
conversation. It came up again and again, and that not unnaturally,
since it was necessarily in every man's thoughts.

"He's a mellifluous coward, now isn't he?" Bently remarked, with his
usual picturesque disregard of the conventional use of words. "The
average American couldn't have been more sneaking."

"He was always afraid of the rough grain of life," Rangely responded.
"I always told him he was a born coward. He could never serve any cause
that wouldn't give him a uniform of broadcloth. But he was born for
something better than tagging after Calvin and his tribe, heaven
knows."

"Bah!" went on Bently, "the bad taste of it! I could get over every
thing else, but the bad taste of proving a sneak, and giving up every
thing worth while."

Somebody threw in a quotation from Browning's _Lost Leader_, and
then Grant Herman, trying to turn the conversation, took up Bently's
remark.

"You're right, Tom," he said, "in your view of taste. Taste is
sublimated morality. It is the appreciation of the proportion and
fitness of all things in the universe, and of course it is above simple
morality, for that is founded upon a partial view. Taste is the
universal, where a system of morals is the local."

"Can't you say that of art?" asked Rangely. "I should think art is the
universal, where religion is the provincial. A religion expresses the
needs and the aspirations of a race or a country, while art embodies
the aspirations and attributes of humanity."

"Good!" Bently responded. "That is better than I should have said it,
but it's my belief, all the same. There are so few people who have
imagination enough even to understand what one means by saying that art
is the only thing in the world worth living for. Why, art is the
supreme expression of humanity; the apotheosis of all the best there is
in the race."

"I don't see that," objected another. "Isn't religion the expression of
the longings of the soul, or whatever there is in us we call soul? I
can't say it well, but it seems to me you talk of religions, not
religion."

"People seldom take the trouble to make that distinction. He who
attacks any of the religions is generally set down as striking at
religion itself."

"Religion," returned Bently, "is the expression of fear, and nothing
else, if you sift it to the bottom. Knowledge kills so-called religion
as surely as it does those lower forms of belief which it is nowadays
the fashion to dub superstition. It is precisely the same feeling that
builds churches and that rhymes the country hag's charms. Fairies and
saints are double and twisted cousins, after all."

"But religion," persisted the German, "is more than the expression of
fear; it is the embodiment of the aspirations of mankind; of the
instinct and desire for worship."

"For worshipping something," amended Tom. "That is the same thing
differently phrased."

"No, it isn't, either. To yearn for the higher is not to show that we
fear it, but that we long to grow like it. It is a confession of
incompleteness, of weakness, I grant you; but a thousand times no to
your calling it fear."

"I confess to having been hasty, and modify my words so far as to say;
an expression of fear or weakness."

"Is there then any shame in acknowledging weakness?" demanded the
German, pushing him as hard as he was able. "It certainly is honest."

"Is there any shame to formulating fear?" retorted the other, deftly
evading him.

"Then see how religion always appeals to art to help out its ultimate
expression," observed Rangely.

"And how it has failed," added Bently, "when it has not had art to help
it. Puritanism tried to get on without art, and where is Puritanism?
You couldn't find a trace of it, if it hadn't come down on its
marrow-bones and begged art to build its churches, compose its music,
and regulate its rituals."

"It is no more fair to say that," objected another Pagan, doggedly,
"than to say that art has gone to religion for help. Their accounts are
pretty evenly balanced."

"Nonsense!" Rangely returned. "Art has never gained by being religious,
but by being art; but religion owes its hold largely to the help art
has given it."

"And it has paid its debts by blackguarding art from every pulpit it
has builded for it."

"As Fenton used to say," Ainsworth remarked, "art has been used as the
sugar-coating to the bitter pill of religion."

"Oh, Fenton again," Bently exclaimed impatiently. "What did you bring
him up for? Who the devil would have thought Fenton would have turned
out so?"

"I can tell you a piece of news," said Rangely. "The Election Committee
blackballed Calvin this afternoon."

"Good!" cried they all; and some body added: "But Fenton said he'd
resign if Calvin wasn't elected."

"Resign," echoed Rangely, "I guess he'll have to. He's been sent to
Coventry by half the Club now for that Graves affair."

"The Graves affair?" some one queried. "What's that? What else has he
been doing? If a man starts to go to the devil, it does seem as if he
never could get ahead fast enough."

"Miss Graves was going to buy one of Flackerman's pictures, and heaven
knows he needs the money; and Fenton, who has always pretended to be
Flack's friend, talked her into taking one of his instead; or rather he
got Calvin to go to her and do it. It was a stunning Flackerman, too;
and we were all rejoicing over his luck."

"I would not be too ready to believe that story," Grant Herman said. "I
don't think Fenton's gone utterly to the bad all at once. He's living
expensively, they say, and possibly he let Calvin go to Miss Graves;
but I don't believe Arthur ever originated that sneaking scheme, and I
shouldn't be surprised if he never knew the rights of the case."

"He's done what so many artists have been bullied into doing before,"
Ainsworth observed. "If he has sold his birthright for a mess of
pottage, that is precisely what the patrons of art in this country
demand that every man shall do who comes here. I could tell you of a
dozen good fellows who've been spoiled in that way. I am far enough
outside to look on in an unbiased way; but they treat us architects in
the same fashion. Lots of the most rubbishy and conventional men we
have, started out to be fair and work from conviction; and they simply
had the choice between subservience and starvation, and cases of the
choice of death from starvation haven't been over plenty."

"Oh, a man is known by the tailor he keeps," threw in Rangely;
"especially if he doesn't pay him."

"It's all a game of cut-throat," Bently remarked philosophically; "art
and business alike."

"I should hate to have my throat cut," observed the German Pagan in a
matter of fact tone; "it must let a dreadful draught into the system."

"Oh, if you were beheaded," cried Rangely, "you'd turn into a capital
beer fountain, so your friends would find some consolation, even in
your loss."

A diversion was caused here by the production of a splendid Japanese
punch-bowl, supported upon a teakwood stand. In it the host proceeded
to brew a potent and steaming mixture, whose fragrance must have
delighted the jocund gods of jollity and laughter. Tom was notorious
for being chronically in pecuniary difficulties, but he was always
adding to his collection of _bibelots_, and he never was known to
lack the means of concocting a glorious punch.

"Ye gods!" exclaimed Ainsworth, "how good that smells. It almost
overcomes the general mustiness of Tom's den here, which usually has
all the odors of the Ghetto from which his things are dragged."

"Casper is intoxicated already with the mere fumes," retorted Bently
good humoredly. "He's bound to fill a drunkard's grave sooner or
later."

"No; I never shall," chuckled the other. "I'm altogether too good
natured to crowd the drunkard out."

This sally was received with applause, and the glasses being filled,
the usual toasts to the goddess Pasht and to art were drank.

"And to our seven," went on Herman, holding up his glass, and going on
with the formula they had, half unconsciously, fallen into the habit of
using, although they made no pretense of having a ritual.

But he set his glass down untasted, suddenly remembering that their
ranks were broken, and the others followed his example.

"The difference between religion and art," broke out Rangely,
hurriedly, to cover the awkward silence which followed, "is that
religion is a matter of tradition, of convention; it rests upon
authority, while art springs from inner conviction."

"Sophistry," retorted the German, picking up the gauntlet; "there have
been a good many things said here to-night which sound well but won't
stand fire. It is precisely for following conventions in art that we
blame Fenton."

"And that proves my point."

"No, it doesn't; there's as much art that depends upon tradition as
there is religion."

"No," replied Rangely. "In so far as art gets its inspiration from
fossil tradition it is lifeless and indeed ceases to be art. Religion
presupposes something exterior; while art is the outgrowth of the
individual's own mind, the best expression of his inner strength."

"Religion," Herman threw in, "demands the existence of the unknown; art
only the existence of the inexpressible."

"Yet art devotes itself to expression."

"Yes, but more to suggesting. It phrases the possible so as to suggest
that which is above and beyond expression, yet toward which it helps
the emotions and the imagination. I think a man's soul a matter of very
little moment as compared to his imagination, and it is because art
ministers to the latter that I place it above religion."

The talk was diverted here by some laughing remark which led on to a
train of gay badinage. The German tried to bring the conversation back
to serious levels, but in vain.

"Oh, what fustian we've given ourselves up to to-night," laughed
Rangely.

"It amuses me to hear you fellows discuss religion," Tom Bently
observed. "You wander round the subject as aimlessly as the young women
in the first half hour of a Harvard symphony concert."

"Never you mind, Bently," rejoined Ainsworth. "You are sure of coming
out all right; the gods are bound to protect humbug, for on it depends
their own existence."

They drifted in little groups to different parts of the studio,
admiring this or that bit of grace or beauty. Then the German, who was
a professional musician, tuned an old mandolin with which a Venetian
lover some star-lit night centuries ago, may have serenaded his loved
one from his gondola; and to its trembling accompaniment sang a quaint
chansonette, his Teutonic accent making havoc among its liquid Italian
syllables. Then Rangely possessed himself of a strange African
instrument, a crooked gourd, hollowed and strung with twisted tree
fibers, and joined to the notes of the mandolin, its weird, cicada-like
harshness. The duet moved Bently to clear a miscellaneous collection of
articles from the lid of a spinnet of the time of Louis XIV., upon
which be-powdered and be-patched dames, long forgotten, had strummed
pretty little tinkling tunes, while all about them other
marionette-like ladies and gallants played at little tinkling loves, as
pretty and as empty.

The three instruments, so strangely matched, went off together in a
variety of music, imparting to every thing an uncanny, ghostly flavor,
as if these airs came in wild echoes from the shores of some dead past.

"Oh, stop that," Herman cried, at last. "It's too melancholy. Your
instruments are all dead; and it's no use trying to get live music out
of them."

For reply the German led off in a drearisome minor folk-tune, Rangely
and Bently improvising their parts with some skill, albeit not always
with perfect harmony.

"Ye Gods!" cried Ainsworth, seizing the mandolin out of the player's
grasp. "Is this a Hottentot funeral? Here, Fred, give me that
diabolical gourd; it is haunted by the soul of a Caffre medicine man."

"I say, fellows," spoke Rangely, as the din subsided, "I move we make
this a funeral, by breaking up the Pagans. Of course there is nothing
to hinder our meeting round at each other's places whenever we want to;
but we've either got to turn Fenton out or break up. I, for one, am
coward enough to prefer to break up."

"So say I," said Herman. "When once a circle like this is broken, there
is an end of it. It can't be patched together."

They looked at each other in silence a moment. To disband seemed like
an acknowledgment of defeat. Many another band of ardent souls has
known the feeling, with its dreary ache, although it oftener happens
that a circle of this kind disappears by the gradual dropping away of
its numbers one by one rather than that its members are brought face to
face with the necessity of owning that its existence had resulted in
failure. Whatever their faults and extravagances, whatever their errors
and intolerance, they were sincere, self sacrificing and ardent beyond
the men who made up the world about them; a group of eager lovers of
truth and art who had been drawn together by mutual aims and
enthusiasms. Their fierceness had been in defense of honesty and
sincerity, their disinterestedness was attested by the fact that any
one of them might have made his peace with Philistia and been rewarded
for his complaisance had he so chosen. Doubtless they had their faults
and foibles, yet their comradeship, in its essential purport had been
true and noble.

They in no wise abandoned their aims in agreeing with the proposition
to disband, but about their fellowship had been a certain un-phrased
tenderness, at which, if put in word, any one of them might have
scoffed, yet which nevertheless they all felt strongly in their secret
hearts, and all were conscious that after this defection of Fenton, the
circle could never be perfect again. They did not discuss the matter
now, but in the interval of silence each acknowledged to himself that
to disband was best; and briefly each gave his assent; all soberly,
some almost gruffly.

And so it came about that the goddess Pasht lost her last band of
followers, and the Pagans assembled no more forever.

XXXVI.

AS FALSE AS STAIRS OF SAND.
Merchant of Venice; v.--2.

"Very likely you cannot see it," Arthur Fenton said, striking in the
background of a portrait with vicious roughness. "Women and brutes
differ from men in lacking reason; if you were logical you'd see."

"See that you are right in selling your convictions for patronage,"
Helen returned gravely, ignoring the insult. "Then I am glad I am not
logical."

"If you choose to put it that way," he retorted doggedly, "I must still
say yes."

It was Friday morning, and Helen was to sail the next day. She had come
to Fenton's studio to bid him good-by, knowing that they should have
that to say which could not be freely spoken before Edith, and yet not
choosing to have him come to her own house without his wife.

"Poverty," he went on aggressively, "is nature's protest against
civilization, and still more against art. I am bound to fight nature on
her own ground, am I not?"

"If I were a little more orthodox," she replied, "I might quote
Scripture upon life's being some thing more than meat. Oh, Arthur, what
is the use of all this fencing? All that is asked of you is to be
honest; and to be honest the life of an artist in America to-day must
be a protest against dominant Philistinism; nobody has ever
acknowledged that oftener or more emphatically than you have."

"But the artists," returned he, not meeting her eyes, "are too
self-centered. Look at the Pagans; what efforts have they ever made to
win society? Society is ready enough to take them in."

"Arthur! Is it you who say that? To quote yourself against yourself,
'every work of art is an effort to conquer Philistinism.' Patronage
seems already to have sucked the life out of you."

"You may say what you like," Fenton remarked defensively; "you cannot
make me angry."

"That may be your misfortune," rejoined she sadly, "but I fear it is
your fault."

"The sin of a thing," he said, putting down his brushes impatiently,
"oftener consists in regarding it as a sin than in the thing itself."

He went to the round window, for his studio was high up in the
building, and removed the Japanese umbrella which served as its screen.
He threw himself upon a pile of cushions, regarding darkly the tops of
the trees in the Old Granary burying-ground opposite.

"_Que voulez-vous_?" he demanded coolly, after a moment's silence.
"You are unreasonable; you always are. I must live. I don't know why
you have a right to object to that. I have married a wife who is well
connected, and I always meant to make her connections help me,
Philistines or not. Even the godly Israelites made a virtue of spoiling
the Egyptians."

"But that was in departing from their country."

"We won't argue," the artist declared sulkily. "Argument is only
disputing about definitions, and we should never agree. I don't expect
you to think I'm right. As a matter of fact I have my doubts myself.
You might at least allow me the satisfaction of humbugging myself if I
am able."

She regarded him sadly. The chance remarks about Edith's relatives
seemed to throw a new and sinister light upon the reasons of his
marriage. She wondered if she had not been mistaken in following her
impulse to come here, and whether words could effect any thing.

"But Edith?" she said at length, and as if half to herself; "does not
her honesty rebuke you? Don't you feel unworthy of her?"

"Well, and if her severe virtue does repel me?" he asked, a hard look
coming into his face, "am I to blame for that also?"

"You are speaking of your wife!"

"_C'est vrai_" with a shrug, "but the one lie I never tell to or
of any woman is that my passion for her will be eternal, and I am long
ago tired of Edith. Her innocence bores me. She urges me, too, to do
precisely the things you condemn. And after all what is my crime?
Simply that I am following the intelligence of the majority instead of
being governed by the growls of the discontented minority, any one of
whom would be glad of the chance to follow my example."

"It is not with whom you side," Helen answered. "It is the simple
question of having the courage of your convictions. The dry rot of
hypocrisy is ruining you. I can see Peter Calvin's smirk in every brush
mark of your canvas there!"

For reply he threw a brush at the picture upon the easel. Then he sat
upright in his cushions and faced her.

"Well," he ejaculated, half-angrily, half bitterly, "you are right. You
cannot scorn me half as much as I scorn myself, and have ever since I
asked Edith Caldwell to marry me. I meant then to make my peace with
the Philistines!"

He sprang to his feet impetuously and shook himself as if to shake off
some disgusting touch.

"I like a comfortable home at the West End," he continued impetuously,
"far better than I do dreary bachelor lodgings, now here, now there. I
prefer faring sumptuously every day, to dining in an attic. Whatever
else may be said of that terrible Calvin--my God! Helen, how I would
like to choke him!--he certainly has plenty of money, and he patronizes
me beautifully."

He walked up to the easel and regarded the half-finished portrait
contemptuously.

"Honesty," he began again with cool irony, "is doubtless a charming
thing for digestive purposes, but it is a luxury too expensive for me.
The gods in this country bid for shams, and shams I purpose giving
them. I am not sure I shall not go into chromos eventually. I don't
enjoy this especially, but after all that is a mere matter of
standards, and I have resolved to change mine, so that I shall end by
enjoying or even honoring my eminently respectable self. As for art,
she is a jade that can't give her lovers even a fire to sit by while
they woo her. I'm sorry for her, but I don't see clearly how I can help
her by sitting down to starve in her company; so I've made friends with
the mammon of unrighteousness--you see my orthodox education was not
wholly lost upon me! _Voila tout!_ Honesty, I say, is for the most
part cant, and at any rate only a relative term. I prefer substantial
good. If you despise me, _tant pis pour_--one of us; whichever you
choose."

He spoke defiantly, but faltered a little at the last words. She rose
as he finished.

"Good-by," she said. "You have taught me forever to distrust my own
judgments, for I had mistaken you for a man! I am sorry that I have
ever known you. You lower my respect for all the race."

"But I acknowledge my faults."

"Acknowledge!" she retorted in disdain. "What of that? Acknowledgment
is not reparation, though many try to make it so."

She walked towards the door, but he reached it first and laid his hand
upon the latch.

"You are going away," he said. "Who knows when we shall ever meet
again. At least remember that I condemn myself as sharply as you can."

"That is the degradation of it," was her retort, her eyes blazing at
him. "If you could plead ignorance, I could pity you."

"Edith is a saint," he went on, not heeding, "but her good is my evil.
I do not plead it as an excuse; I have and I want no excuse: but it is
true that temptation could come to me in no shape so insidious as
through her sincerity."

"Then you will be honest!" pleaded Helen.

"I do not say that. I think I shall go on as I am; but I have changed
my idea of my epitaph. It shall be only the word 'Pardon.'"

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