Murder in Any Degree | Page 4

rolling a cigarette and using a
jerky diction.
"Clyde Rantoul?" said Stibo.
"Don Furioso Barebones Rantoul, who was in the Quarter with us?"
said Quinny.
"Don Furioso, yes," said Rankin. "Ever see him?"
"Never."
"He's married," said Quinny; "dropped out."
"Yes, he married," said Herkimer, lighting his cigarette. "Well, I've just
seen him."
"He's a plutocrat or something," said Towsey, reflectively.
"He's rich--ended," said Steingall as he slapped the table. "By Jove! I
remember now."

"Wait," said Quinny, interposing.
[Illustration: From his tone the group perceived that the hazards had
brought to him some abrupt coincidences]
"I went up to see him yesterday--just back now," said Herkimer.
"Rantoul was the biggest man of us all. It's a funny tale. You're
discussing matrimony; here it is."

II
In the early nineties, when Quinny, Steingall, Herkimer, little Bennett,
who afterward roamed down into the Transvaal and fell in with the
Foreign Legion, Jacobus and Chatterton, the architects, were living
through that fine, rebellious state of overweening youth, Rantoul was
the undisputed leader, the arch-rebel, the master-demolisher of the
group.
Every afternoon at five his Gargantuan figure came thrashing through
the crowds of the boulevard, as an omnibus on its way scatters the
fragile fiacres. He arrived, radiating electricity, tirades on his tongue, to
his chair among the table-pounders of the Café des Lilacs, and his first
words were like the fanfare of trumpets. He had been christened, in the
felicitous language of the Quarter, Don Furioso Barebones Rantoul,
and for cause. He shared a garret with his chum, Britt Herkimer, in the
Rue de l'Ombre, a sort of manhole lit by the stars,--when there were
any stars, and he never failed to come springing up the six rickety
flights with a song on his lips.
An old woman who kept a fruit store gave him implicit credit; a much
younger member of the sex at the corner creamery trusted him for eggs
and fresh milk, and leaned toward him over the counter, laughing into
his eyes as he exclaimed:
"Ma belle, when I am famous, I will buy you a silk gown, and a pair of
earrings that will reach to your shoulders, and it won't be long. You'll
see."

He adored being poor. When his canvas gave out, he painted his ankles
to caricature the violent creations that were the pride of Chatterton,
who was a nabob. When his credit at one restaurant expired, he strode
confidently up to another proprietor, and announced with the air of one
bestowing a favor:
"I am Rantoul, the portrait-painter. In five years my portraits will sell
for five thousand francs, in ten for twenty thousand. I will eat one meal
a day at your distinguished establishment, and paint your portrait to
make your walls famous. At the end of the month I will immortalize
your wife; on the same terms, your sister, your father, your mother, and
all the little children. Besides, every Saturday night I will bring here a
band of my comrades who pay in good hard silver. Remember that if
you had bought a Corot for twenty francs in 1870, you could have sold
it for five thousand francs in 1880, fifty thousand in 1890. Does the
idea appeal to you?"
But as most keepers of restaurants are practical and unimaginative, and
withal close bargainers, at the end of a week Rantoul generally was
forced to seek a new sitter.
"What a privilege it is to be poor!" he would then exclaim
enthusiastically to Herkimer. "It awakens all the perceptions; hunger
makes the eye keener. I can see colors to-day that I never saw before.
And to think that if Sherman had never gotten it in his head to march to
the sea I should never have experienced this inspiration! But, old fellow,
we have so short a time to be poor. We must exhibit nothing yet. We
are lucky. We are poor. We can feel."
On the subject of traditions he was at his best.
"Shakspere is the curse of the English drama," he would declare, with a
descending gesture which caused all the little glasses to rattle their
alarm. "Nothing will ever come out of England until his influence is
discounted. He was a primitive, a Preraphælite. He understood nothing
of form, of composition. He was a poet who wandered into the drama
as a sheep strays into the pasture of the bulls, a colorist who imagines
he can be a sculptor. The influence of Victoria sentimentalized the

whole artistic movement in England, made it bourgeois, and flavored it
with mint sauce. Modern portraiture has turned the galleries into an
exhibition of wax works. What is wrong with painting to-day--do you
know?"
"Allons, tell us!" cried two or three, while others, availing themselves
of the breathing space, filled the air with