2.
Finnegan went to Manhattan with McGregor. McGregor was soon back to his normal weight and was sleeping again. Finnegan and the dog decided to put on the dog. They took up lodgings at the Waldorf. They became night-clubbers and first-nighters. They were seen around. That was the first step: to be seen around. Then Finnegan had cards printed up making himself to be Gregory Van Ghi. He rented a studio in the Village and began to grind out masterpieces in what he believed to be his third or orange period.
This was not his best work. His best work, by his very nature, would always remain undone. And the Orange Period of no artist is his best period. Yet these paintings by Finnegan were quite the best things being done in America at that time. This is on the opinion of those who know.
Finnegan rented a showroom uptown and became a one-man show. He had his barfly and showgirl acquaintances come in to give a semblance of a crowd, and he instructed them in arty remarks to drop. And Gregory Van Ghi was a success. He sold all the Orange Period paintings that he could turn out. When the showing was finished, he received a standing commission from a reputable dealer for all that he could paint.
Then Finnegan Van Ghi devised a set of eccentricities to draw attention to himself. He found a favorite lady taxi-driver who carried him piggyback every morning from his hotel lobby out to her taxi. People notice things like that.
He delivered lectures on Balance and Arrangement while standing on the shoulders of a showgirl friend. The added altitude gave him finer perspective, he said.
And he replaced the boa constrictor as shoulder-piece for the magnificent and hilarious dowager Nada Patkaniowska. Nada was beautiful, all six foot two inches and all three hundred pounds of her. She had an incredible amount of golden hair, and she liked to be escorted by Finnegan Van Ghi. She had been accustomed to making imposing entrances with the boa constrictor around her shoulders. Now she made really striking entrances with the painter Van Ghi sitting on her right shoulder in the crescent of her fine raised am.
Finnegan was not a drunk now. He was a personality. He met a higher class of liars than he had previously known and he found himself extended to keep up with them.
3.
Except for two things that happened the same day, Finnegan would still be reigning as the painter Van Ghi, and still adding color to and taking it from the narrow chameleon Island of Manhattan. These were two things that deeply shocked the moral character of Finnegan. Van Ghi as devised and constituted had no moral character, but this hit the man underneath, and Finnegan was the man underneath. The first thing happened when Finnegan was dressing that morning. He noted that he was getting fat. He had always been lean as a rail, but now the rail had a protuberance on it. This shocked Finnegan and determined him to go on the road again and regain his lost moral character.
“I should have suspected it,” he said to himself. “Mrs. Patkaniowski breathes a little heavier after she has swept up a flight of stairs with me on her shoulder lately. She is Brunhilde, the Northern Valkyrie (in forma rotunda et globosa). I voyaged on her when she was the Ship: but is she also the Argo?”
The second thing happened that afternoon. Finnegan was to paint the portrait of the wife of Putiphar. Putiphar was named Adrian Shapiro and his wife was Mercedes. These people were wealthy and known, and this could have been the beginning of a fine portraitist career. Shapiro was not prince of the armies of Egypt; and yet he was a more important man than the first Putiphar and he moved in higher circles.
To be a great portraitist requires more than genius. Finnegan had that. But it also requires that the subjects of the portraits have something very near to genius. This requirement would be fulfilled. The Shapiros were extraordinary, and their circle was a dazzling one.
But Mercedes was playful. And Finnegan would still be Joseph, albeit a goatish one. He took his coat, but he left his paints of many colors when he left with an outcry behind him. He knew he wouldn't be thrown into a dungeon, but he would be the goat of the stories. He really wanted an excuse to skip. He had been at one thing long enough.
He made only the necessary close-out call at the bank, and then taxied over to the Jersey Shore. He bought a half-dozen socks and a little hand grip, and set out on the road. He'd been lonesome for the road. The weather was nice, and probably it was summer by that time.
He regretted only that he had not stopped to pick up McGregor. But McGregor was a smart dog and would make his way in the world. And besides he, like Finnegan, had begun to get fat. It was time he was on his own again.
4.
There are wild stretches of New Jersey. There are bogs and bog-men. There are Barrens; there are low mountains and high seas; there are hard sands and soft rocks. There are hillbillies more remote than any in Tennessee or Arkansas. And when one is afoot, those stretches are disproportionately long.
It was in this back country that Finnegan met the goat-man. Sometimes he and his goats lived in a barn or a shack on the outskirts of a town. Often they were forced to move on by the populace. In winter he had to take them to a cave to live.
They had not an easy time of it. The goat-man carried a scythe that made him look like Father Time; but this was not for effect, it was an economic necessity. He would sweep the tall wild grass, and rake it into caves and cotes for the goats to eat. Otherwise they would have starved in winter.
We often think of Pan as a young man, or one in vigorous hairy middle age. So he was once. But nobody stays young forever. For twenty-odd centuries now his beard had been dirty-white and his hair gray and tangled. But he was not as dirty as he smelled. It was only that he used a soap which he made himself from goat's fat.
We do not mean to imply that the goat-man was actually Pan. That was just a light fancy that Finnegan developed after he had lived with him for a week. But he did look very like Pan looks today, now that he has grown old and tacky.
They met in this way. Finnegan encountered the seven youngest kids one afternoon, whose names, though he did not know them then, were Bownee, Luin, Mairt, Keadin, Ordin, Haoine, and Sahirn. That goat-man always gave hebdomadal names to his seven youngest kids from a fancy of his.
The seven were very close kindred, being three sets of twins and a singling from four young sisters, and all were bound by affection as well as consanguinity, by mutual devotion and admiration, by loyalty to a common ideal and dedication to its furtherance.
The common ideal was the climbing of the bole of an ancient and dishonored sycamore tree which lay over from its broken base into the arms of its fellows. The little kids would attack it with a run, a scamper, a lunge, and a leap, to lodge triumphant in the crotch of the old tree. Those who were already up would cry encouragement. Those still to go would whimper anticipation.
After considerable clamor of black hooves on white trunk, all were up except Luin or Monday: and she could not achieve it. Here it was that Finnegan gained the friendship of the unholy seven when he gave the little goat a boost, and was thanked by all.
The goat-man came along and fell into conversation with Finnegan. He was a friendly old man. It had always been the world that was unfriendly. He was associated with about forty goats. It was not an association of equals; but the goats thought that it was, and he let them think so.
“Oh yes, I have to slaughter them,” the goat-man said, “about ten of the older ones a year. There is no resentment on their part. I don't believe that the goats quite understand what death is, or what I am doing when I skin and dismember one of their fellows. They are interested, and they often watch. But they do not recognize either the purpose or the effect, nor do they properly perceive the origin of the goat meat that I eat. We are likely to overestimate the intelligence of goats. Though shrewd in particulars, they lack mental scope and the power of abstract thought.”
The goats were bivouacked that week on a fine grassy spine in the middle of a swamp. The goat-man had a little tent set up, and he spread another pallet for Finnegan. As it was a small tent, only the seven smallest kids wer
e allowed to sleep with them in it.
Finnegan was an old swamp rat and he soon caught a mixed string of fish, partly from the several intermingling streams and creeks, partly from the still pools, and some out of the grass roots themselves. The grass here looked solid but it was not so. It was tufted at the top, but the spaced clumps were growing out of eighteen inches of water.
And after dark, Finn took a spot lantern of the goat-man and speared a sackful of frogs. Meanwhile, the goat-man called up the goats in turn by name, and they came. He milked them into wooden buckets. He milked fourteen goats and he made lots of cheese. Then he set a low fire to burn all night.
“Not that I care for a campfire myself,” he said, “but the goats enjoy it and are disappointed if I don't build it. This is one of the things that they cannot do for themselves and I must do for them.”
They talked most of the night, for neither Finnegan nor the goat-man had any hours to be kept. The goat-man often lay up in the daytime and wandered at night. And Finnegan had the same habit.
The goat-man had come over from the South of France in 1908, bringing only six goats with him. They had been hooted out of New York City. Nobody would rent a room or flat to a man with goats, not even if they had money, and the goat-man did have it. Now those had been good goats and there was no reason for the fuss. A goat is entitled to enjoy a big city as much as anyone else. A goat likes a city; he is the most cosmopolitan of animals. He likes people and noise and lights.
The goats would have liked the theaters and restaurants. But only a few of the more dingy places had even admitted them; and after a week, the seven little aliens were told firmly that they had to leave town. They've never been back.
In forty years they had roamed most of the Atlantic states, but now they stayed in Jersey the year around and holed up as best they could in the winter. The goats remained as young and spry as ever, renewing themselves from generation to generation. But there was no way for the goat-man to be renewed. He did not travel as well as once he did.
He had a name indeed. It was Gautier. But the yokels pronounced it Goat-Ear in derision of the goat-life he led and the undeniable fact that he did have hairy ears. He did not like to be called Goat-Ear; he would rather be just the goat-man.
He was not destitute. He was a one-man Gypsy cap. He had three carts or small wagons, each pulled by four strong goats. He had an assortment of tools, and a loom and a wheel. He was master of all crafts. He made nets and seines and lines and traps. He ate a pound of cheese a day, and made two pounds to barter.
He made berry jelly and berry wine, and corn beer, and potato whisky. He never bothered with bread, but he traded for wheat in hundred pound sacks. He boiled it and ate it like a cereal with milk and honey. He had a score of bee trees along his route that he tapped yearly.
He cut the goat meat into strips and dried it in the wind; then he chopped it up fine with melted fat and honey and poured it into jars or skin bags to carry. He gathered fox skins, for both he and the goats hated foxes. And once a year he killed a deer. And the goat-man, who was of old world stock, ate acorns, as did his goats.
Naturally the goat-man who was collateral with pan had a syrinx, or several of them. He would play those, and also the bagpipes. He was the source of much of the ghost music that came from the wasteland and the swamps.
He may even have been the ghost of the Harlow House.
This was an old and once fine house on an abandoned farm. The goat-man lived there often with his goats. But he knew of no ghost there except himself. He had heard that the house was haunted, of course, but he had never quite believed it. There were some indications of it, but nothing that you could put your two hands on.
Just as a pig can see the wind and a horse can see the thunder, so can a goat see ghosts. But a goat is not afraid of ghosts, and it is hard to tell when he really sees them. He will hop around and follow an unseen figure, just as he will a man; but it may be just an imaginary figure that he is playing with. Goats have a good imagination and they often play around imaginary figures. And they often play around ghosts.
There were quite a few ghosts in the Barrens and in the brush, and most of the old shacks were haunted. But whether the Harlow House was haunted is not certain. The descriptions of the Harlow House are from the goat-man. Finnegan never saw the house himself, but he often thought that he might go back and visit it.
It had a very large cellar, and the house was built big to cover it. On the ground floor, everything that was not gone was broken. But the fireplace was still the finest place for a fire, and the goat-man had built many a one there, sometimes for weeks at a time. The dining room was the goats’ room; it was understood that it belonged to them entirely. They would clatter up on the walnut sideboards and dance on the long sway-backed table that was broken in the middle.
The library was looted and forlorn, but some of the best of it remained. It had long ago been explained to the goats, and handed down by them from mother to son and daughter, that they could eat only hymn books, and devotional books, and novels of years of bad vintage, and collected speeches, and works of dead poetesses, and funeral orations, and autobiographies.
The goat in his own line is shrewd, and once he has a thing in his mind he never forgets it. A healthy weeding-out of the library had been going on for twenty years since they had begun to visit the house. Books otherwise indigestible were digested, and otherwise unnourishing had given nourishment.
And now there was left only a fascinating collection of Old American Blood and Thunder in paper and hard backs, Old Wild West, Train Robber, Buffalo Hunter and Indian Scalper, Bank Robber and Brigand, the blue-jowled romances that the old goat-man loved.
And there were the French books that he read out loud to the goats, to hear again the tongue of his young manhood at to let the goats hear the language of their ancestors. Les Contes Drolatiques was a favorite.
“It is a filthy book,” the goat-man told Finnegan. “I really shouldn't read it to the young goats. And yet it's so damned Gothic, as it were. I ought to burn it. But the goats love it. There is something in Balzac that appeals to goats, and to the goat in man.”
The younger kids could not understand Stendhall, and went to sleep listening. But the older and wiser ones were enchanted by the devious machinations of Gina Pietranera and her nephew Fabrizio, and Count Mosco, and all their mistresses and lovers.
Tartarin of Tarascon they loved, the incomparable Gil Blas, the compelling Count of Monte Cristo. These the goat-man read to his friends, these tales of the old country whence they had sprung. He read them on the winter nights while the wind moved like a wraith through the windowless house. And when, one by one, the goats had all fallen asleep, he put away the French books and read to himself silently the Old American Blood and Thunder.
Finnegan essayed a joke about goats. “Did you ever hear about the Castrador-Capros?” he asked them and the goat-man. “He was a joker and a dancer. They called him that because he cut capers.”
“No, I never heard of him,” the goat-man said, and the goats hadn't either.
“That was a joke,” Finn explained. “To cut capers means to dance and play tricks, fare delle capriole. And also castrare becchi.”
“I understand what it means,” the goat-man said. “It would be a better pun in the Old French. With you in Italian you have only capra a nanny, and capro is lost. In the Spanish they have yet carbon for the he-goat, and capar and cabriolar for the two goatish verbs. But you were going to tell a joke?”
“I have already done so.”
“That little pun in goat Latin, that was a joke?”
But several older goats appreciated it, even if the goat-man did not.
The goat-man was a spoofer. He was also a little wild. It was all right for a week or two in the summertime, but Finnegan would not want to spend a winter with him in a cave or shack or haunted house. Some of the goats were a little apprehensive also.
Finnegan missed an opportunity here. The goa
t-man had offered to make him his heir. He would not live forever; he would not live much longer. Finnegan thought about it, and in many ways the life would have suited him. But he declined.
The goat-man was odd, no question of that. He was odd even to the goats. There was a clique among them who wanted to go with Finnegan when he left; but he explained to them that this was not possible. He did not quite know where he was going, and the life he led was no life for a goat. There would be mean people and mean dogs, and he would not always be able to protect them.
Finnegan had begun to talk to the goats when he was with them. It was a contagious habit and easily fallen into. He assumed that they understood him. Some of them did. Apathy and Hermione, and Cecille and Diocletian. These were the smartest of the goats. But Mephistopheles, who was the oldest of the goats, was not smart at all. The oldest male goat was always named Mephistopheles, and when he died or was killed his name was given to another. But the present leader was a dope and was not respected by the flock. His maiden name was Sciocco, and that is the kind of goat he was.
5.
After Finnegan had left the goat-people he traveled for many days without finding harbor. In later memories it seemed that it had always been foggy that summer. This may or may not have been a physical aspect. Finnegan walked mostly in the three or four hours before dawn and lay up when the sun rose. He traveled much towards the West. He had been on a riverboat for some days. And then he had been put off in a very rough way, and had been told never to show again. This meant that he had been fired and it distressed him. Always he had worked well when he had a job; always he had quit, but he had never been fired. This meant that he was coming apart. He no longer had any control over himself, and he was sick. He went down the River on another boat, and he worked well and was kept on. Then he came to the River Itself and went down it.
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