Complete Works of Frank Norris

by Frank Norris

  Once in a while you see his pictures — still life “studies” of stone jugs and bunches of onions — in the exhibits. Occasionally these are noticed in the local papers. He cuts out these notices and carefully pastes them in his scrap-book, which he leaves about in conspicuous places in his studio.

  And his studio. His studio is his room at home (he lives with his people). He tries to hide the stationary wash-stand behind screens and hangings, and he softens the rigidity of the white marble mantelpiece by hanging a yellow “drape” upon one corner. The room is dirty and cluttered; studies of dusty stone jugs are pinned or tacked upon the walls; flattened paint tubes lie about the window-sills, and there is a strangling odor of turpentine and fixative in the air that mingles with the smell of tobacco and the odor of cooking food from the kitchen down-stairs.

  Art with him is paint. He condescends to no other medium than oil and colored earths. Bouguereau is his enthusiasm; he can rise no higher than that, and he looks down with an amused smile upon the illustrators, the pen-and-ink men, Gibson, Smedley, Remmington, and the rest. “Good in their way, oh, yes, but Gibson is very superficial, you know.” He is given to astonishing you in this way. Pictures that you admire he damns with a phrase; those you believe to be execrable, he enthuses over.

  He believes himself to be Bohemian, but by Bohemianism he understands merely the wearing of large soft felt hats and large bow scarfs and the drinking of beer in German “resorts.” His Bohemianism is not dangerous.

  What becomes of the “Art” student, I have often wondered. He starts early at his work. Even at the High School he covers the fly-leaves of all his books with pictures, and carves the head of the principal in chalk. At home he has made fearful copies of the sentimental pictures in the “Home Book of Art.” His parents are astonished, become vaguely ambitious, and send him to the Art School before he has hardly begun his education. Here, as I have told you, he toils away the best years of his life over “still life” studies, enthusiastic over little things, very ambitious in small ways. A year passes, two years, then five, six and ten, he is still working as hard as ever, and he is nearly a middle aged man now. You meet him on his way home in the evening and he takes you to supper and shows you his latest “piece.” It is a study of turnips and onions, grouped about a dusty, stone jug.

  He never sells a picture. He has given his life to his work. He grows older; he tries to make his “art” pay. He drifts into decorative art; is employed perhaps as a clerk in an art store. If he’s lucky he is taken on a newspaper and does the pen-and-ink work that he once affected to despise. He’s over thirty by this time, and is what he will be for the rest of his life. All his ambitions are vanished, his enthusiasm’s dead, but little by little he comes to be quite contented.

  THE OPINIONS OF LEANDER

  SKETCHES FROM THE WAVE OF JULY-AUGUST, 1897.

  I.’Holdeth forth upon our boys and the ways of them

  I was villifying the head waiter in The Drink and the other night, just after the play, because he would not let me sit in the main room where the orchestra plays, when Leander came up.

  “Come on, Just,” said he; “you know they won’t let you sit in here unless you are with ladies.”

  “We wouldn’t permit a lady to sit in here unless she was with a gentleman, sir,” interposed the autocrat. “The danger,” said I, “is due, I should suppose, to the mingling of the sexes, not to their separation — divided we stand, united we fall. You will, perhaps, recall the fable of AEsop, of the two jars floating in a cistern — Haec fabula docet that—”

  The autocrat wavered at this point.

  “I observe,” said I, pressing home, “a vacant table near the door with two places—”

  “Well, you know,” protested the autocrat, feebly, “it’s against all regulation.”

  We sat down.

  Leander began to bow to people he knew who were sitting at near-by tables. The place glittered with electricity and silverware. There was a staccato note of conversation in the air. The orchestra sobbed away at La Paloma.

  “Perfect! Perfect!” murmured Leander under his breath.

  “Theatre?” I asked, and looked at his clothes.

  “No-call.”

  “What! in a brown tweed suit, tan shoes, and a blue shirt with a white collar?”

  “Thanks for the collar. Yes, I have been making a call.”

  “In a sack suit? Good Lord!”

  “Remember this is San Francisco — 1897!”

  “True! true! But the suit is not even black, nor the shoes — really, Leander.”

  “I know her rather well.”

  “Still—”

  “My boy (I am Leander’s senior by six years), you come from a place near Brooklyn, called New York, where everybody must conform to a certain mold in clothes as well as ideas. We in the freer West avons change tout cela. Out here a man does not always have to appear in evening dress after six, nor even wear a high hat of a Sunday afternoon, unless he wants to.”

  We ordered our drinks. Leander, I think, had an oyster cocktail. After a moment’s reflection he looked about the place, and exclaimed, nodding his head: “For the young man with a small salary, who lives at home, San Francisco is the best place in the world.”

  “Or the worst,” I observed.

  “Huh!” exclaimed Leander, “there’s something in that. But it charms you.”

  “So does a snake,” I added, sepulchrally, “only to bite and poison you afterward.”

  “I say! I say!” exclaimed Leander, looking at me in some alarm; “what’s up — been bitten?”

  “Not yet — only charmed.”

  “Say, Just,” exclaimed Leander, “last week we said something about the girls out here. How about ‘Our Boys?’ We — I mean you and I, and all the rest of us — are we desirable — are we very particularly fine?”

  “We are,” said I, “what our English cousins would call a jolly rum lot.”

  “Perhaps not quite as bad as that. But we’re not very nice.”

  “Let’s see — how aren’t we nice?”

  “We lack purpose, aim, ambition. We are content with little things — little glasses of liqueur, for instance” (this significantly; I was drinking a creme de menthe myself) “We do not rise to the dignity of champagne, or even to the height of straight Bourbon. Life,” began Leander, rhetorically, “life in this city of ours is like a little glasslet of liqueur — pungent, sweet, heady, but without foundation, without stability — an appetizer that creates only small desires, easily gratified, and we are content with those. We are like this, we men — you and I and the rest of the fellows — at our best.”

  “Heavens! What must we be at our worst?”

  “At our worst,” said Leander, severely, “we get drunk and come to dances that way.”

  “Come, now—”

  “Hoh! My dear fellow, it’s a common sight.”

  “A fellow under the influence —— — —”

  “No, drunk — I choose to call it drunk.”

  “At a dance?”

  “Worse — dancing.”

  “With a girl?”

  “Whom, perhaps, you know and admire.”

  “Why not punch his head on the spot?”

  “Bad form, head-punching, at a function.”

  “But not drunkenness?”

  Leander shrugged.

  “Who are they — what class do they trot in, in Heaven’s name?”

  “Ours. Many of them are college chaps in their junior and senior years.”

  “Little fools.”

  “Hear! Hear! and some even among the older men; but it’s mostly the younger boys. Now, when these boys grow up and begin to associate with the kind of girl we were talking about last week — the kind of girl who smokes a cigarette on the sly and drinks a cocktail — then—”

  “Leander, spare me the picture! After us the deluge.”

  “There’s one of them now. Look at the third table.”

  “The slend
er chap with the pinkish eyelids and the impossible tie?”

  “Sure! I know him — he’s a Junior at Berkeley. That’s his fifth pousse cafe.”

  “Little beast.”

  “He’s drunk already, and I saw him just like that on a yachting party last Thursday, when there were a lot of nice girls along.”

  “Faugh!”

  “And everybody knew it, and the girls — some of them — said, ‘Oh, well, you know it’s only little Jack Spratt.’”

  “And yet we would call that a gentleman out here.”

  “As Doctor Pow Len says in Mr. Powers’ admirable little play, ‘such is the lamentable fact.’”

  “A gentleman, that.”

  “In New York we would tell him his carriage was ready.”

  “Here he’s received and called good form.”

  “I say, Leander, who is that broad-shouldered chap behind him, sitting with his back towards us? He’s got a good pair of shoulders on him, and I don’t think his tailor is responsible for ‘em, either.”

  “Rather well put up, to be sure. Oh, I say, Just, look what he’s ordered.”

  “Well, I declare! Tea and toast and a little fruit! Now, imagine a chap asking for tea and toast and a little fruit in The Drinkand! What a jay! Say, Leander, I think he must be a Christian Endeavorer who’s blown into the wrong place.”

  “I’ve seen that chap somewhere, though,” said Leander, perplexedly; “wonder where it could have been?”

  “Hoh! Tea and toast and a little fruit! What a dead farmer — and — there! he’s just declined to smoke. Poor little dear — if his mamma could only see him now! Bet he’s got a C. E. badge on as long as your arm.”

  “Where in snakes,” muttered Leander, “have I seen those shoulders and that head? Wish he’d turn around.”

  “There — he’s getting up.”

  The tea and toast chap turned about, and we saw his face. Leander uttered an exclamation:

  “It’s Spider Kelly, the prize-fighter.”

  “Nonsense! Would he take tea and toast? — he—”

  “Training, y’know. Fights Lon Agnew next week. Ten rounds, with a decision.”

  “Leander — let’s take a walk. I’ll pay for the drinks.”

  “You’d better.”

  There was a long silence after this, then Leander said:

  “Anyhow, I’ve more respect just at this moment for the Spider than I have for the little college chap.”

  “At least he has a purpose, even if he is not ‘good form,’” I murmured.

  And with that we went away.

  “JUSTIN STURGIS”

  II. Commenteth at length upon letters received

  Last Tuesday afternoon I went around to my favorite Chinese restaurant — the one on the top floor, of the See Yup silk-merchant’s, that overlooks the Plaza. I have lately contracted the habit of betaking myself thitherward for an afternoon cup of tea and a quiet half hour with a book and a cigar. It ought to be cigarettes, but I’ve promised a girl that — I mean that it’s very charming in this golden balcony, tea is never so delicious as it is here, and your book never so interesting, and your cigar — cigar, I say, mark you — never so delicious. I like to go to this place alone, for I feel it is mine by right of discovery, but on Tuesday last I caromed against Leander at the street corner. He was in Chinatown for Heaven knows what purpose. Of course I had to take him along.

  “I say, Just,” he remarked, as he sat down on a teak-wood stool and plucked up his trousers at the knee; “I say, old man, this is completely out of sight. Say, Just, wouldn’t this be a great place to bring the One Particular Girl to?”

  I said something or other here.

  Leander grinned with bland incredulity, then added: “Would it be good form, now?” Then suddenly: “Apropos of that, Just, you and your good form and your bad form and your confounded ‘opinions’ have brought me into trouble.”

  “Oh, get out!”

  “I won’t — they have!”

  “I’ve been getting letters.”

  “Well?”

  “From girls — girls that I don’t know — who—”

  “Well, there’s the police, you know. The law will protect you.”

  “Oh, shut up! Wait till I finish. I’ve been getting letters from girls, and they — and they — well, they say things.”

  “It’s a habit girls have. What do they say?”

  “Here,” said Leander, gravely unfolding a sheet, “is one of them. Read it.”

  I took the letter in his hands.

  “Hum!” said I; “unglazed paper, and ruled at that! Mph! Reeks of sachet, too!”

  “Oh, never mind that; it’s what she says.”

  “Mr. Leander — Dear Sir: I read with great attention your strictures upon the young ladies of San Francisco Society (‘spells it with a big S,’ I commented) and I wish to take this opportunity of refuting and denying your unmanly (‘say, that’s rough!’) and malicious charges. The young ladies of this city,” I continued, “are as well bred and refined as any of the world, and though I have been in Society for over ten years (‘that’s a give-away!’ I cried, and, I’m afraid, I cackled) and I have never seen the slightest approach to any of the practices (‘practices! Good Lord!’) to which you are pleased to allude with such shameful publicity (‘Oh, well, she’s a chaperone — you can see that with one hand tied behind you.’) In closing, all I can say is that you and your frivolous friend—”

  “That’s you, Just!” exclaimed Leander, grimly.

  “ — must have been associated with a very peculiar (‘peculiar, underscored’) kind of young women. You should not, I scarcely need remind you, judge all other ladies according to their own somewhat limited experiences.” No signature.

  “Well!” said Leander.

  “Well!” said I.

  “What did you get me into this thing for?” complained Leander; “do you think I like getting that kind of a letter?”

  “No,” said I, “I shouldn’t think you would.”

  “Well, then, what the devil—”

  Leander’s voice rose to a shrill wail.

  “Leander, there’s nothing heroic about you. You are not willing to suffer in a good cause. You want to do all the hitting, and when someone — someone who’s been ten years in society — hits back, you squeal. Shame on you! Now, I, too, have received a letter,” said I, proudly; “in fact, several of them on this same subject.”

  “You have?” cried Leander, blankly; “let’s hear ‘em.”

  “No, one will do; they’re much alike.”

  “Much like mine?”

  “Much unlike,” I returned, loftily. “Observe now,” (I held the letter towards him) “pale blue paper, rather heavy, and suggestive of parchment — very faint odor of heliotrope — and, you see, she had a monogram, because, you notice, she has cut it out to conceal her identity.”

  “Let’s hear what she has to say.”

  “Dear Mr. Sturgis—” I read.

  “That’s better than Mr. Leander — Dear Sir,” moaned Leander.

  “I should say so,” said I, very proudly. “Dear Mr. Sturgis: I read your article last Saturday on ‘Girls,’ and I think if more people had the sense to write similar articles, it might do the San Francisco girl some good.”

  “Huh!” said I, breaking off; “your girl said it was an unmanly and malicious charge.”

  “She wasn’t young, I’ll bet a hat,” grumbled Leander; “and her paper was ruled — go on.”

  I went on: “ — some good, and open their eyes to what men really think of them—”

  “But we think very well of them,” cried Leander; “that’s just why we deplore their — their — vagaries.”

  “ — they think it’s funny and that the men laugh, but indeed they don’t. I am one of the girls that are ‘out,’ but believe me, we are not all that way.”

  “Hear! Hear!” cried Leander, pounding with his stick.

  “ — and those of us that have—�
�

  “She will use ‘that’ for ‘who’; but never mind.”

  “ — that have some sense of refinement feel just as the men do. Although I do not sign my name, I know you and you know me quite well.”

  “There!” said I, putting back the letter; “what do you say to that?”

  “Corking fine little girl,” commented Leander; “wish she’d written to me. May be, though, she comes from Oakland.”

  “No; she bought this paper at Robertson’s. It’s stamped on the flap of the envelope.”

  Leander drank off the rest of his tea, and chewed a pickled watermelon rind thoughtfully. Then:

  “Just,” said he, “who’s to blame?”

  “Who’s to blame for what?”

  “Who’s to blame for the whole blooming show. Why do the girls smoke cigarettes and drink cocktails on the sly, and why do men come to functions drunk?”

  “Leander, this brutal frankness —— —”

  “Well, call it the vagaries of the younger set, if you like. Are the men at fault, or the girls, or is it the chaperons, or is it — by Jove, we have never thought of that! — is it the girls’ mothers?”

  “There’s one thing,” said I, “that’s certain; the girls wouldn’t smoke if they didn’t think the men found it amusing.”

  “But that’s just it,” cried Leander. “The men don’t. The girls don’t know — they don’t believe that the very men who encourage them to smoke have a sort of secret contempt for them after all.”

  “But they say they like a girl better because she’s daring and chic and independent of convention. They call her fin-de-siecle and all that.”

  “Yes, that’s what they tell the girl. But amongst ourselves, now, did you ever, in all your life, hear one man tell another that he liked to see a girl smoke, or that he liked her better because she knew to handle a cigarette?”

  I reflected. I tried to remember one — I am still trying.

  “No, you never did, and more than that, the girls only know what the man says to them. He says, ‘Oh, go on; what’s a cigarette? Pshaw! I like to see a girl do everything a man does. I like to see a girl up to date.’ But we — you and I and the rest of the fellows — know what these same men say of such girls among ourselves. They ‘Hoh, yes; that little girl;’ then they shrug one shoulder and smile a bit out of one side of their mouth (you know the meaning of that!); ‘yes, that little girl,’ they say, ‘she’s gay all right. You can have the hell of a good time with her.’ I wonder what the girl would say if she could see and hear him? I wonder if she’d think it was so damned funny to smoke a cigarette then? Admit that I’m right, now. Say, ain’t I right?”