Murder in Any Degree | Page 5

their orders:
"Paul, another bock."
"Two hard-boiled eggs."
"And pretzels; don't forget the pretzels."
"The trouble with painting to-day is that it has no point of view," cried
Rantoul, swallowing an egg in the anaconda fashion. "We are
interpreting life in the manner of the Middle Ages. We forget art should
be historical. We forget that we are now in our century. Ugliness, not
beauty, is the note of our century; turbulence, strife, materialism, the
mob, machinery, masses, not units. Why paint a captain of industry
against a François I tapestry? Paint him at his desk. The desk is a
throne; interpret it. We are ruled by mobs. Who paints mobs? What is
wrong is this, that art is in the bondage of literature--sentimentality. We
must record what we experience. Ugliness has its utility, its magnetism;
the ugliness of abject misery moves you to think, to readjust ideas. We
must be rebels, we young men. Ah, if we could only burn the galleries,
we should be forced to return to life."
"Bravo, Rantoul!"
"Right, old chap."
"Smash the statues!"
"Burn the galleries!"
"Down with tradition!"
"Eggs and more bock!"

But where Rantoul differed from the revolutionary regiment was that
he was not simply a painter who delivered orations; he could paint. His
tirades were not a furore of denunciation so much as they were the
impulsive chafing of the creative energy within him. In the school he
was already a marked man to set the prophets prophesying. He had a
style of his own, biting, incisive, overloaded and excessive, but with
something to say. He was after something. He was original.
"Rebel! Let us rebel!" he would cry to Herkimer from his agitated
bedquilt in the last hour of discussion. "The artist must always
rebel--accept nothing, question everything, denounce conventions and
traditions."
"Above all, work," said Herkimer in his laconic way.
"What? Don't I work?"
"Work more."
Rantoul, however, was not vulnerable on that score. He was not, it is
true, the drag-horse that Herkimer was, who lived like a recluse,
shunning the cafes and the dance-halls, eating up the last gray hours of
the day over his statues and his clays. But Rantoul, while living life to
its fullest, haunting the wharves and the markets with avid eyes,
roaming the woods and trudging the banks of the Seine, mingling in the
crowds that flashed under the flare of arc-lights, with a thousand
mysteries of mass and movement, never relaxed a moment the savage
attack his leaping nature made upon the drudgeries and routine of
technic.
With the coveted admittance into the Salon, recognition came speedily
to the two chums. They made a triumphal entry into a real studio in the
Montparnasse Quarter, clients came, and the room became a station of
honor among the young and enthusiastic of the Quarter.
Rantoul began to appear in society, besieged with the invitations that
his Southern aristocracy and the romance of his success procured him.

"You go out too much," said Herkimer to him, with a fearful growl.
"What the deuce do you want with society, anyhow? Keep away from it.
You've nothing to do with it."
"What do I do? I go out once a week," said Rantoul, whistling
pleasantly.
"Once is too often. What do you want to become, a parlor celebrity?
Society c'est l'ennemie. You ought to hate it."
"I do."
"Humph!" said Herkimer, eying him across his sputtering clay pipe.
"Get this idea of people out of your head. Shut yourself up in a hole,
work. What's society, anyhow? A lot of bored people who want you to
amuse them. I don't approve. Better marry that pretty girl in the
creamery. She'll worship you as a god, make you comfortable. That's
all you need from the world."
"Marry her yourself; she'll sew and cook for you," said Rantoul, with
perfect good humor.
"I'm in no danger," said Herkimer, curtly; "you are."
"What!"
"You'll see."
"Listen, you old grumbler," said Rantoul, seriously. "If I go into society,
it is to see the hollowness of it all--"
"Yes, yes."
"To know what I rebel against--"
"Of course."
"To appreciate the freedom of the life I have--"

"Faker!"
"To have the benefit of contrasts, light and shade. You think I am not a
rebel. My dear boy, I am ten times as big a rebel as I was. Do you know
what I'd do with society?"
He began a tirade in the famous muscular Rantoul style, overturning
creeds and castes, reorganizing republics and empires, while Herkimer,
grumbling to himself, began to scold the model, who sleepily received
the brunt of his ill humor.
In the second year of his success Rantoul, quite by accident, met a girl
in her teens named Tina Glover, only daughter of Cyrus Glover, a man
of millions, self-made. The