Under the Skylights | Page 2

who read his book happened to meet him personally,
and one or two of this number--clever but inconspicuous
people--lucidly apprehended him for what he was: that rare
phenomenon, the artist (such he was already calling himself)--the artist
whose personality, whose opinions and whose work are in exact accord.
The reading public--a body rather captious and blase,
possibly--overlooked his rugged diction in favour of his novel point of
view; and when word was passed around that the new author was
actually in town a number of the illuminati expressed their gracious
desire to meet him.

II
But Abner remained for some time ignorant of "society's" willingness
to give him welcome. He was lodged in a remote and obscure quarter
of the city and was already part of a little coterie from which
earnestness had quite crowded out tact and in which the development of
the energies left but scant room for the cultivation of the amenities.

With this small group reform and oratory went hand in hand; its
members talked to spare audiences on Sunday afternoons about the
Readjusted Tax. Such a combination of matter and manner had pleased
and attracted Abner from the start. The land question was the question,
after all, and eloquence must help the contention of these ardent spirits
toward a final issue in success. Abner thirstily imbibed the doctrine and
added his tongue to the others. Nor was it a tongue altogether
unschooled. For Abner had left the plough at sixteen to take a course in
the Flatfield Academy, and after some three years there as a pupil he
had remained as a teacher; he became the instructor in elocution. Here
his allegiance was all to the old-time classic school, to the ideal that
still survives, and inexpugnably, in the rustic breast and even in the
national senate; the Roman Forum was never completely absent from
his eye, and Daniel Webster remained the undimmed pattern of all that
man--man mounted on his legs--should be.
Abner, then, went on speaking from the platform or distributing
pamphlets, his own and others', at the door, and remained unconscious
that Mrs. Palmer Pence was desirous of knowing him, that Leverett
Whyland would have been interested in meeting him, and that Adrian
Bond, whose work he knew without liking it, would have been glad to
make him acquainted with their fellow authors. Nor did he enjoy any
familiarity with Clytie Summers and her sociological studies, while
Medora Giles, as yet, was not even a name.
Mrs. Palmer Pence remained, then, in the seclusion of her "gilded
halls," as Abner phrased it, save for occasional excursions and alarums
that vivified the columns devoted by the press to the doings of the
polite world; and Adrian Bond kept between the covers of his two or
three thin little books--a confinement richly deserved by a writer so
futile, superficial and insincere; but Leverett Whyland was less easily
evaded by anybody who "banged about town" and who happened to be
interested in public matters. Abner came against him at one of the
sessions of the Tax Commission, a body that was hoping--almost
against hope--to introduce some measure of reason and justice into the
collection of the public funds.

"Huh! I shouldn't expect much from him!" commented Abner, as
Whyland began to speak.
Whyland was a genial, gentlemanly fellow of thirty-eight or forty. He
was in the world and of it, but was little the worse, thus far, for that. He
had been singled out for favours, to a very exceptional degree, by that
monster of inconsistency and injustice, the Unearned Increment, but his
intentions toward society were still fairly good. If he may be capitalized
(and surely he was rich enough to be), he might be described as
hesitating whether to be a Plutocrat or a Good Citizen; perhaps he was
hoping to be both.
Abner disliked and doubted him from the start. The fellow was almost
foppish;--could anybody who wore such good clothes have also good
motives and good principles? Abner disdained him too as a public
speaker;--what could a man hope to accomplish by a few quiet
colloquial remarks delivered in his ordinary voice? The man who
expected to get attention should claim it by the strident shrillness of his
tones, should be able to bend his two knees in eloquent unison, and
send one clenched hand with a driving swoop into the palm of the
other--and repeat as often as necessary. Abner questioned as well his
mental powers, his quality of brain-fibre, his breadth of view. The
feeble creature rested in no degree upon the great, broad, fundamental
principles--principles whose adoption and enforcement would reshape
and glorify human society as nothing else ever had done or ever could
do. No, he fell back on mere expediency, mere practicability, weakly
acquiescing in acknowledged and