Heavens! No one _aimerait avoir affaire avec cette animal de_ Buldy
Jones. He was from Chicago (but, of course, he couldn’t help that!),
and was taller than even Haushaulder, and much broader. The desire for
art had come upon him all of a sudden while he was studying law at
Columbia. For "This Animal of a Buldy Jones" had gone into law after
leaving Yale. Here we touch his great weakness. He was a Yale man!
Why, he was prouder of that fact than he was of being an American, or
even a Chicagoan—and that is saying much. Why, he couldn’t talk of Yale
without his face flushing. Why, Yale was almost more to him than his
mother. I remember, at the students’ ball at Bulliers, he got the
Americans together, and with infinite trouble taught us all the Yale
"yell", which he swore was a transcript from Aristophanes, and for three
hours he gravely headed a procession that went the rounds of a hall
howling "Brek! Kek! Kek! Kek! Co-ex!" and all the rest of it.
More than that, "This Animal of a Buldy Jones" had pitched on his
Varsity baseball nine. In his studio—quite the swellest in the Quarter,
by the way—he had a collection of balls that he had pitched in match
games at different times, and he used to show them to us reverently, and
if we were his especial friends, would allow us to handle them. They
were all written over with names and dates. He would explain them to us
one by one.
"This one," he would say, "I pitched in the Princeton game, and here’s
two I pitched in the Harvard game—hard game that—our catcher gave
out—guess he couldn’t hold me" (with a grin of pride), "and Harvard made
it interesting for me until the fifth inning; then I made two men fan
out one after the other, and then, just to show ’em what I could do,
filled the bases, got three balls called on me, and then pitched two
inshoots and an outcurve, just as hard as I could deliver. Printz of
Harvard was at the bat. He struck at every one of them—and fanned out.
Here’s the ball I did it with. Yes, sir. Oh, I can pitch a ball all
right."
Now think of that! Here was this man, "This Animal of a Buldy Jones," a
Beaux Arts man, one of the best colour and line men on our side, who had
three _esquisses_ and five figures "on the wall" at Julien’s (any Paris
art student will know what that means), and yet the one thing he was
proud of, the one thing he cared to be admired for, the one thing he
loved to talk about, was the fact that he had pitched for the Yale
’varsity baseball nine.
All this by way of introduction.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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