eyes

bris flew past, Higgins shut his and pressed his face into the soft embankment. The top, he thought; good Lord, why didn't the top do something about it!

In a moment's silence he heard a tree-limb cracking, splitting slowly away from the trunk. Before it fell, there was another roar and the smoke was almost palpable.

From the right came a querulous voice: "I'm hit, 00-00-00, I'm hit. Don't leave me lay here. I'll bleed to death."

Heavy feet tramped doggedly about through the smoke-filled ravine. Officers shouted words of encouragement that were only half intelligible. The bombardment crashed maddeningly on. It was a thing of inexhaustible fury under which the unmaimed lay in silent helplessness.

The hurtling shells came out of the night and ended with the night. Dawn spread a ghastly quiet over the ravine, but Higgins remained looking out over the field that had now become a rolling sea of green wheat-stalks. He dreaded

to turn his head, for he knew that fear and horror had left their marks in his eyes and in the shape of his mouth...

After a while there were steps behind him. Somebody stopped within arm's length. Slowly and reluctantly Higgins twisted himself about.

The top sergeant stood before him, looking at him with bleary, uncertain eyes, his jaw drawn down and hanging loosely. "Jee-sus," gasped the top; "Jeesus; s-say, Higgins, you got a cigarette?"

Young Higgins dropped his head and his gray eyes slid away in embarrassment. Even in that place where the first dead men he had ever seen lay stiffening under the hot June suneven there he could not help being aware of the altered conduct of the top; and, knowing the way this man had once been and how he had so changed, young Higgins could not help feeling the indecency of the situation. It was with unconscious pity in his eyes that he reached beneath his service-belt for the package of cigarettes.

G

EORGE BELLOws's short life was a joyous, unaccompanied pursuit. He looked about on the face of the earth and said: "Not so bad--as raw material. I wonder what it would all mean if you could get it straightened out so you could see it. And I wonder what it could be made to look like to anybody else." Before the bright terrestrial flash should pass he meant to explore as far as possible. There was not much to guide one. Why not inform oneself and act as one's own guide? Why not? He had all the capacities of a "lone wolf."

In trying to understand what he was about, his family, his friends, and the public were always a step or two behind; in trying to anticipate the direction of his next move, they were always wrong. His mother early dreamed that her slender, light-haired son would become a bishop. Every Sunday morning he was hauled to church in the highwheeled surrey in the hope that his pushing young spirit would be impressed with the solemnity of mortal existence. Charley, a boy indentured by the family, had been so tremendously impressed that he decided to become an undertaker. In the back yard, in Columbus, Ohio, he fenced off a minia

ture cemetery and began with great enthusiasm to conduct funerals and inter remains. But George Bellows was interested only æsthetically: he made the designs for the tombstones that Charley erected. And as for the bishopric, the nearest he ever came to it was singing in a church choir-which is not necessarily a close approach. His father saw, evidently, that the bishopric was too far a reach. He proposed that his son become a banker. It would afford him an infinite peace in his last years to see this exploring son intrenched in an occupation of such solid respectability. But George said: “I don't want to be a banker. I'm going to Ohio State. I believe I can 'make' the baseball team."

In college he was a sprawling young barbarian very much concerned with finding something to do. When he reported for baseball and the coaches and fans said, "He looks like an outfielder," he replied: “Oh, no; I'm a shortstop." And, despite the fact that shortstops are usually not six feet two inches tall, he went daily with a team-mate and practised throwing to first base from every position on his side of the infield until he was accepted generally as the greatest shortstop that had ever played on an Ohio State team. He

played basket-ball too, and he sang in the glee club. Still there was energy left. So when his fellows had played or sung until they were exhausted and begged for sleep, he devised ingenious means of keeping them awake. But still there was energy left. So he made cartoons of his professors.

The newspapers were full of comment on this boisterous, good-natured athlete. Fellow collegians and fellow townsmen said he was good enough for the big leagues. "Of course you will into professional baseball." But he amazed them by replying: "Hu-uh! I'm going to be an artist.

go

"Whew!" was all they could say; and they said that under their breath. It had never occurred to him that there might be any doubt about his qualifications as an artist. He had begun the fundamentals early. In the rigid Methodist days of his childhood he had been permitted two activities on Sunday-reading and drawing. Since his mother always delighted in reading to him, he could draw undisturbed while he listened! That meant that he drew all the time on Sunday afternoons. This experience and he always thought it had much to do in determining his career-enabled him to draw better than any of his fellow pupils in school. He was known as "the artist." In college he illustrated undergraduate publications. Professor "Joey" Taylor, sympathetic confessor for all brave spirits at Ohio State, encouraged him to believe that his ability was important. But in New York he encountered people who were not so sure. How did they know that he was not merely another prodigal moth to be singed in the brightness of the Great White Way? He came from way out in Columbus, Ohio, did he not, or some other

unheard-of place? What did anybody know about art out there?

He met one teacher, however, who immediately supported his confidence in himself Robert Henri. Henri had come from the Middle West himself, and he liked this stalwart chap with the intent face and the healthy will. A pupil who was always gay, always full of deviltry, yet always serious about the business of painting, was not to be found in the New York School of Art every day. From every word his original-minded teacher uttered, from every movement he made, from every criticism he offered, Bellows learned with white-hot mind. Henri never criticised any one else so severely. He knew Bellows could stand what would crush others. But he also encouraged him. "You will succeed," he assured him; "some degree of success is certain. The quality of your success will depend upon the personal development you make." So, after all, maybe he might paint just as good a picture as anybody!

His fellow students looked upon him with inquiring, amused eyes. He was so little acquainted with the life of New York that the only social organization he knew when he arrived was the Y. M. C. A. It maintained a swimmingpool and a basket-ball floor, and he knew how to use both. In appearance nothing marked him as a devotee of the asthetic. He was self-conscious in the presence of so many artistic strangers; he sprawled there was so much of him that it was difficult to be graceful except when standing up; and he laughed with such untrammelled heartiness that everybody turned and stared at him whenever anything set him going. But how much did he care? Perhaps, if he only knew the truth, they were all just as raw as he was. Maybe

they didn't know half as much about painting! Certainly they didn't know one-tenth as much about it as he meant to know some day.

No one could deny that he was interesting. His fellow students soon became busy in trying to make him out. His clumsy externals could not prevent them from seeing his essential good nature, his essential dignity of spirit, and his sound emotional and intellectual power. They liked especially his glowing vigor. When the school had its first dance of the year he took a very beautiful Scandinavian girl-from Minnesota. His friends stood in wonder at the magnificence of this light-haired couple. "Wouldn't they make a prize-winning bride and groom?" every one asked. But when the whisperings came to Bellows he exclaimed: "Oh, no! You are absolutely wrong! I'm going to marry that dark-haired girl from Upper Montclair!"

This girl from Upper Montclair, Miss Emma Louise Story, out of sheer pity for an overgrown boy who was spending his long Christmas vacation away from home, invited him to come to her father's house for a meal. "The steak," she assured her mother, "must be the biggest one you can find; for I never saw such an eater as he is." But George was so nervous he could not handle the silverware, much less eat. His embarrassment was increased, too, by the young lady's father. He did not care much for male artists. He had known one, a man who could paint a feather so perfectly that you couldn't tell it from the real thing; but, apart from being able to do that, he did not count for much. This feeling against artists was accentuated, too, when George Bellows began to appear on the landscape with a degree of regularity.

But George was ready to contest with the father as well as with the hesitant daughter. What does a little matter of waiting around for six years amount to?

All the while he was painting, painting with unequalled persistence. "No time to waste! No time to waste!” One day John W. Alexander went home from his duties as a juror in the National Academy's annual exhibit and said to his wife: "There's a picture over there, by a young fellow named Bellows, from out West somewhere— 'Forty-Two Kids' he calls it-that you must see. There's genius in it." Others saw it and were startled. "But," some of them asked, "is it an artistic subject? Do such things as boys in swimming lend themselves to artistic treatment?" "Why not?" Bellows asked in reply, and went on painting. He painted the river front, the prize-ring, the crowd in the steaming street, the city cliff-dwellers, the circus, the stevedores on the docks. All the things possessing every-day dignity and significance but long treated with disdain, all the unglorified struggle of his kind, cried to him for expression. The uncomprehending dismissed it as wild art, decadent art, drab art! They declared that Billy Sunday had broken into the asthetic world. Those who were more sympathetic said: "Now we are getting him. He believes in painting the redblooded American life. He is the painter with the punch!"

So he was hailed as the artist who made things anybody would understand; so, too, was he as completely misunderstood as ever. For if he was the painter of the vigorous, the physically dramatic, he was to be even more the painter of the subtle and the intimate. If he could produce "Sharkey's," he