nerves Lionel Montressor to repartee in the 'Dotty Dialogues.' So, in such good company I may introduce an absinthe drip -- one absinthe drip, dripped through a silver dripper, orderly, opalescent, cool, green-eyed -- deceptive.
Kerner was a fool. Besides that, he was an artist and my good friend. Now, if there is one thing on earth utterly despicable to another, it is an artist in the eyes of an author whose story he has illus- trated. Just try it once. Write a story about a mining camp in Idiho. Sell it. Spend the money, and then, six months later, borrow a quarter (or a dime), and buy the magazine containing it. You find a full-page wash drawing of your hero, Black Bill, the cowboy. Somewhere in your story you em- ployed the word 'horse.' Aha! the artist has grasped the idea. Black Bill has on the regulation trousers of the M. F. H. of the Westchester County Hunt. He carries a parlor rifle, and wears a mon- ocle. In the distance is a section of Forty-second Street during a search for a lost gas-pipe, and the Taj Mahal, the famous mausoleum in India.
'Enough! I hated Kerner, and one day I met him and we became friends. He was young and glori- ously melancholy because his spirits were so high and life bad so much in store for him. Yes, he was almost riotously sad. That was his youth. When a man begins to be hilarious in a sorrowful way you can bet a million that he is dyeing his hair. Ker- ner's hair was plentiful and carefully matted as an artist's thatch should be. He was a cigaretteur, and be audited his dinners with red wine. But, most of all, be was a fool. And, wisely, I envied him, and listened patiently while he knocked Velasquez and Tintoretto. Once he told me that he liked a story of mine that he bad come across in an anthology. He described it to me, and I was sorry that Mr. Fitz- James O'Brien was dead and could not learn of the eulogy of his work. But mostly Kerner made few breaks and was a consistent fool.
I'd better explain what I mean by that. There was a girl. Now, a girl, as far as I am concerned, is a thing that belongs in a seminary or an album; but I conceded the existence of the animal in order to retain Kerner's friendship. He showed me her picture in a locket -- she was a blonde or a brunette -- I have forgotten which. She worked in a factory for eight dollars a week. Lest factories quote this wage by way of vindication, I will add that the girl bad worked for five years to reach that supreme ele- vation of remuneration, beginning at $1.50 per week.
Kerner's father was worth a couple of millions He was willing to stand for art, but he drew the line at the factory girl. So Kerner disinherited his father and walked out to a cheap studio and lived on sausages for breakfast and on Farroni for dinner. Farroni had the artistic soul and a line of credit for painters and poets, nicely adjusted. Sometimes Ker- rier sold a picture and bought some new tapestry, a ring and a dozen silk cravats, and paid Farroni two dollars on account.
One evening Kerner had me to dinner with himself and the factory girl. They were to be married as soon as Kerner could slosh paint profitably. As for the ex-father's two millions -- pouf!
She was a wonder. Small and half-way pretty, and as much at her ease in that cheap cafe as though she were only in the Palmer House, Chicago, with a souvenir spoon already safely hidden in her shirt waist. She was natural. Two things I noticed about her especially. Her belt buckle was exactly in the middle of her back, and she didn't tell us that a large man with a ruby stick-pin had followed her up all the way from Fourteenth Street. Was Kerner such a fool? I wondered. And then I thought of the quantity of striped cuffs and blue glass beads that $2,000,000 can buy for the heathen, and I said to myself that he was. And then Elise -- certainly that was her name told us, merrily, that the brown spot on her waist was caused by her landlady knocking at the door while she (the girl -- confound the English language) was heating an iron over the gas jet, and she hid the iron under the bedclothes until the coast was clear, and there was the piece of chewing gum stuck to it when she began to iron the waist, and -- well, I wondered bow in the world the chewing gum came to be there -- don't they ever stop chewing it?
A while after that -- don't be impatient, the ab- sinthe drip is coming now -- Kerner and I were dining at Farroni's. A mandolin and a guitar were being attacked; the room was full of smoke in nice, long crinkly layers just like the artists draw the steam from a plum pudding on Christmas posters, and a lady in a blue silk and gasolined gauntlets was be- ginning to bum an air from the Catskills.
'Kerner,' said I, 'you are a fool.'
'Of course,' said Kerner, 'I wouldn't let her go on working. Not my wife. What's the use to wait? She's willing. I sold that water color of the Pali- sades yesterday. We could cook on a two-burner gas stove. You know the ragouts I can throw together? Yes, I think we will marry next week.'
'Kerner,' said I, 'you are a fool.'
'Have an absinthe drip?' said Kerner, grandly. 'To-night you are the guest of Art in paying quan- tities. I think we will get a flat with a bath.'
'I never tried one -- I mean an absinthe drip,' said I.
The waiter brought it and poured the water slowly over the ice in the dripper.
'It looks exactly like the Mississippi River water in the big bend below Natchez,' said I, fascinated, gazing at the be-muddled drip.
'There are such flats for eight dollars a week,' said Kerner.
'You are a fool,' said I, and began to sip the filtration. 'What you need,' I continued, 'is the official attention of one Jesse Holmes.'
Kerner, not being a Southerner, did not compre- hend, so he sat, sentimental, figuring on his flat in his sordid, artistic way, while I gazed into the green eyes of the sophisticated Spirit of Wormwood.
Presently I noticed casually that a procession of bacchantes limned on the wall immediately below the ceiling bad begun to move, traversing the room from right to left in a gay and spectacular pilgrimage. I did not confide my discovery to Kerner. The artistic temperament is too high-strung to view such devia- tions from the natural laws of the art of kalsomining. I sipped my absinthe drip and sawed wormwood.
One absinthe drip is not much -- but I said again to Kerner, kindly:
'You are a fool.' And then, in the vernacular: 'Jesse Holmes for yours.'
And then I looked around and saw the Fool-Killer, as he had always appeared to my imagination, sitting at a nearby table, and regarding us with his reddish, fatal, relentless eyes. He was Jesse Holmes from top to toe; he had the long, gray, ragged beard, the gray clothes of ancient cut, the executioner's look, and the dusty shoes of one who bad been called from afar. His eyes were turned fixedly upon Kerner. I shuddered to think that I bad invoked him from his assiduous southern duties. I thought of flying, and then I kept my seat, reflecting that many men bad es- caped his ministrations when it seemed that nothing short of an appointment as Ambassador to Spain could save them from him. I had called my brother Kerner a fool and was in danger of hell fire. That was nothing; but I would try to save him from Jesse Holmes.
