IN TRUST
IN the good days, just after we all left college, Ned Halidon and I
used to listen, laughing and smoking, while Paul Ambrose set forth
his plans.
They were immense, these plans, involving, as it sometimes seemed,
the ultimate aesthetic redemption of the whole human race; and
provisionally restoring the sense of beauty to those unhappy
millions of our fellow country-men who, as Ambrose movingly pointed
out, now live and die in surroundings of unperceived and unmitigated
ugliness.
"I want to bring the poor starved wretches back to their lost
inheritance, to the divine past they've thrown away--I want to make
'em hate ugliness so that they'll smash nearly everything in sight,"
he would passionately exclaim, stretching his arms across the shabby
black-walnut writing-table and shaking his thin consumptive fist in
the fact of all the accumulated ugliness in the world.
"You might set the example by smashing that table," I once suggested
with youthful brutality; and Paul, pulling himself up, cast a
surprised glance at me, and then looked slowly about the parental
library, in which we sat.
His parents were dead, and he had inherited the house in Seventeenth
Street, where his grandfather Ambrose had lived in a setting of
black walnut and pier glasses, giving Madeira dinners, and saying to
his guests, as they rejoined the ladies across a florid waste of
Aubusson carpet: "This, sir, is Dabney's first study for the
Niagara--the Grecian Slave in the bay window was executed for me in
Rome twenty years ago by my old friend Ezra Stimpson--" by token of
which he passed for a Maecenas in the New York of the 'forties,' and
a poem had once been published in the Keepsake or the Book of Beauty
"On a picture in the possession of Jonathan Ambrose, Esqre."
Since then the house had remained unchanged. Paul's father, a frugal
liver and hard-headed manipulator of investments, did not inherit
old Jonathan's artistic sensibilities, and was content to live and
die in the unmodified black walnut and red rep of his predecessor.
It was only in Paul that the grandfather's aesthetic faculty
revived, and Mrs. Ambrose used often to say to her husband, as they
watched the little pale-browed boy poring over an old number of the
_Art Journal:_ "Paul will know how to appreciate your father's
treasures."
In recognition of these transmitted gifts Paul, on leaving Harvard,
was sent to Paris with a tutor, and established in a studio in which
nothing was ever done. He could not paint, and recognized the fact
early enough to save himself much wasted labor and his friends many
painful efforts in dissimulation. But he brought back a touching
enthusiasm for the forms of beauty which an old civilization had
revealed to him and an apostolic ardour in the cause of their
dissemination.
He had paused in his harangue to take in my ill-timed parenthesis,
and the color mounted slowly to his thin cheek-bones.
"It _is_ an ugly room," he owned, as though he had noticed the
library for the first time.
The desk was carved at the angles with the heads of helmeted knights
with long black-walnut moustaches. The red cloth top was worn
thread-bare, and patterned like a map with islands and peninsulas of
ink; and in its centre throned a massive bronze inkstand
representing a Syrian maiden slumbering by a well beneath a
palm-tree.
"The fact is," I said, walking home that evening with Ned Halidon,
"old Paul will never do anything, for the simple reason that he's
too stingy."
Ned, who was an idealist, shook his handsome head. "It's not that,
my dear fellow. He simply doesn't see things when they're too close
to him. I'm glad you woke him up to that desk."
The next time I dined with Paul he said, when we entered the
library, and I had gently rejected one of his cheap cigars in favour
of a superior article of my own: "Look here, I've been looking round
for a decent writing-table. I don't care, as a rule, to turn out old
things, especially when they've done good service, but I see now
that this is too monstrous--"
"For an apostle of beauty to write his evangel on," I agreed, "it
_is_ a little inappropriate, except as an awful warning."
Paul colored. "Well, but, my dear fellow, I'd no idea how much a
table of this kind costs. I find I can't get anything decent--the
plainest mahogany--under a hundred and fifty." He hung his head, and
pretended not to notice that I was taking out my own cigar.
"Well, what's a hundred and fifty to you?" I rejoined. "You talk as
if you had to live on a book-keeper's salary, with a large family to
support."
He smiled nervously and twirled the ring on his thin finger. "I
know--I know--that's all very well. But for twenty tables that I
_don't_ buy I can send some fellow abroad and unseal his eyes."
"Oh, hang it, do both!" I exclaimed impatiently; but the
writing-table was never bought. The library remained as it was, and
so did the contention between Halidon and myself, as to whether this
inconsistent acceptance of his surroundings was due, on our friend's
part, to a congenital inability to put his hand in his pocket, or to
a real unconsciousness of the ugliness that happened to fall inside
his point of vision.
"But he owned that the table was ugly," I agreed.
"Yes, but not till you'd called his attention to the fact; and I'll
wager he became unconscious of it again as soon as your back was
turned."
"Not before he'd had time to look at a lot of others, and make up
his mind that he couldn't afford to buy one."
"That was just his excuse. He'd rather be thought mean than
insensible to ugliness. But the truth is that he doesn't mind the
table and is used to it. He knows his way about the drawers."
"But he could get another with the same number of drawers."
"Too much trouble," argued Halidon.
"Too much money," I persisted.
"Oh, hang it, now, if he were mean would he have founded three
travelling scholarships and be planning this big Academy of Arts?"
"Well, he's mean to himself, at any rate."
"Yes; and magnificently, royally generous to all the world besides!"
Halidon exclaimed with one of his great flushes of enthusiasm.
But if, on the whole, the last word remained with Halidon, and
Ambrose's personal chariness seemed a trifling foible compared to
his altruistic breadth of intention, yet neither of us could help
observing, as time went on, that the habit of thrift was beginning
to impede the execution of his schemes of art-philanthropy. The
three travelling scholarships had been founded in the first blaze of
his ardour, and before the personal management of his property had
awakened in him the sleeping instincts of parsimony. But as his
capital accumulated, and problems of investment and considerations
of interest began to encroach upon his visionary hours, we saw a
gradual arrest in the practical development of his plan.
"For every thousand dollars he talks of spending on his work, I
believe he knocks off a cigar, or buys one less newspaper," Halidon
grumbled affectionately; "but after all," he went on, with one of
the quick revivals of optimism that gave a perpetual freshness to
his spirit, "after all, it makes one admire him all the more when
one sees such a nature condemned to be at war with the petty
inherited instinct of greed."
Still, I could see it was a disappointment to Halidon that the great
project of the Academy of Arts should languish on paper long after
all its details had been discussed and settled to the satisfaction
of the projector, and of the expert advisers he had called in
council.
"He's quite right to do nothing in a hurry--to take advice and
compare ideas and points of view--to collect and classify his
material in advance," Halidon argued, in answer to a taunt of mine
about Paul's perpetually reiterated plea that he was still waiting
for So-and-so's report; "but now that the plan's mature--and _such_
a plan! You'll grant it's magnificent?--I should think he'd burn to
see it carried out, instead of pottering over it till his enthusiasm
cools and the whole business turns stale on his hands."
That summer Ambrose went to Europe, and spent his holiday in a
frugal walking-tour through Brittany. When he came back he seemed
refreshed by his respite from business cares and from the
interminable revision of his cherished scheme; while contact with
the concrete manifestations of beauty had, as usual, renewed his
flagging ardour.
"By Jove," he cried, "whenever I indulged my unworthy eyes in a long
gaze at one of those big things--picture or church or statue--I kept
saying to myself: 'You lucky devil, you, to be able to provide such
a sight as that for eyes that can make some good use of it! Isn't it
better to give fifty fellows a chance to paint or carve or build,
than to be able to daub canvas or punch clay in a corner all by
yourself?'"
"Well," I said, when he had worked off his first ebullition, "when
is the foundation stone to be laid?"
His excitement dropped. "The foundation stone--?"
"When are you going to touch the electric button that sets the thing
going?"
Paul, with his hands in his sagging pockets, began to pace the
library hearth-rug--I can see him now, setting his shabby red
slippers between its ramified cabbages.
"My dear fellow, there are one or two points to be considered
still--one or two new suggestions I picked up over there--"
I sat silent, and he paused before me, flushing to the roots of his
thin hair. "You think I've had time enough--that I ought to have put
the thing through before this? I suppose you're right; I can see
that even Ned Halidon thinks so; and he has always understood my
difficulties better than you have."
This insinuation exasperated me. "Ned would have put it through
years ago!" I broke out.
Paul pulled at his straggling moustache. "You mean he has more
executive capacity? More--no, it's not that; he's not afraid to
spend money, and I am!" he suddenly exclaimed.
He had never before alluded to this weakness to either of us, and I
sat abashed, suffering from his evident distress. But he remained
planted before me, his little legs wide apart, his eyes fixed on
mine in an agony of voluntary self-exposure.
"That's my trouble, and I know it. Big sums frighten me--I can't
look them in the face. By George, I wish Ned had the carrying out of
this scheme--I wish he could spend my money for me!" His face was
lit by the reflection of a passing thought. "Do you know, I
shouldn't wonder if I dropped out of the running before either of
you chaps, and in case I do I've half a mind to leave everything in
trust to Halidon, and let him put the job through for me."
"Much better have your own fun with it," I retorted; but he shook
his head, saying with a sigh as he turned away: "It's _not_ fun to
me--that's the worst of it."
Halidon, to whom I could not help repeating our talk, was amused and
touched by his friend's thought.
"Heaven knows what will become of the scheme, if Paul doesn't live
to carry it out. There are a lot of hungry Ambrose cousins who will
make one gulp of his money, and never give a dollar to the work.
Jove, it _would_ be a fine thing to have the carrying out of such a
plan--but he'll do it yet, you'll see he'll do it yet!" cried Ned,
his old faith in his friend flaming up again through the wet blanket
of fact.
