Ewing's Lady Part 2

From the first room, a kitchen and general living room, such as she had learned to know in the other ranch houses, he conducted her up two steps to a doorway, from which he pushed aside a Navajo blanket with its rude coloring of black and red. There was disclosed beyond this an apartment of a sort with which she was more familiar, a s.p.a.cious studio with its large window giving to the north. In the clear light her eyes ran quickly over its details: the c.h.i.n.ked logs that made its walls, the huge stone fireplace on one side, the broad couch along the opposite wall, covered with another of the vivid Navajo weaves, the skins of bear and lynx and cougar on the stained floor, the easel before the window, a canvas in place on it; the branching antlers over the fireplace, contrived into a gun rack; a tall, roughly made cabinet, its single shelf littered with half-squeezed tubes of paint, a daubed palette, and a red-glazed jar from which brushes protruded. Above the couch were some shelves of books, and between it and the fireplace was a table strewn with papers, magazines, a drawing board with a sheet of paper tacked to it, and half a dozen sharpened pencils.

He indicated the couch. "It will be a good thing for you to rest a little," he said. She seated herself with a smile of a.s.sent. He rashly began to arrange the pillows for her, but left off in a sudden consciousness of his temerity, withdrawing a few paces to regard her.

He was still apprehensive, but his boy's eyes were full of delight, amus.e.m.e.nt, curiosity, and, more than all, of a wistfulness like that of a dumb creature. He stepped to the door for the pitcher of water and gla.s.s that Ben now brought.

She had studied him coolly as he spoke--the negligent out-of-doors carriage of the figure, not without a kind of free animal grace, the grace of a trampling horse rather than that of soft-going panthers. The floor boards reechoed to his careless, rattling tread, and occasionally, his attention being drawn to this reverberation, he was at great pains for a moment to go on tiptoe. He was well set up, with a sufficient length of thigh. Mrs. Laithe approved of this, for, in her opinion, many a goodly masculine torso in these times goes for nothing because of a shortness of leg. His hair was a lightish brown and so straight that a lock was p.r.o.ne to come out behind and point uncompromisingly toward distant things. This impropriety he wholly disregarded, whereas the more civilized man would have borne the fault in mind and remembered occasionally to apply a restrictive hand. His face was a long, browned square, with gray eyes, so imbedded under the brow that they had a look of fierceness. His lips showed only a narrow line of color, and trembled constantly with smiles. These he tried to restrain from time to time, with an air of pinning down the corners of his mouth.

She had noted so much while he poured out the water, and now he came to her, walking carefully so as not to thunder with his boots.

"You must have been frightened," he said, and his eyes sought hers with a young, sorry look.

"Not after we left the woods; it wasn't funny among those trees."

He brightened. "I'd always thought women don't like to look funny."

"They don't," said the lady incisively, "no more than men do."

"But you can laugh at yourself," he insisted.

"Can you?" She meditated a swift exposure of his own absurdity at their meetings in the valley, but forbore and spoke instead of his pictures.

"You must show me your work," she said.

For a moment it seemed that she had lost all she had gained with him. He patently meditated a flying leap through the door and an instant vanishing into the nearest thicket. She had an impulse to put out a hand and secure him by the coat. But he held his ground, though all his geniality was suddenly veiled, while he vibrated behind the curtain, scheming escape, like a child harried by invading grown people in its secret playhouse.

She looked cunningly away, examining a rip in her glove.

"I tried to paint a little myself once," she essayed craftily. Nothing came of it. He remained in ambush.

"But it wasn't in me," she continued, and was conscious that he at least took a breath.

"You see, I hadn't anything but the liking," she went on, "and so I had the sense to give it up. Still, I learned enough to help me see other people's work better--and to be interested in pictures."

"Did anyone try to teach you?" he asked.

"Yes, but they couldn't make me paint; they could only make me see."

"Perhaps you could tell me some things," he admitted at last, "if you've tried." He paltered a little longer. Then, "Ben Crider says this is the best thing I've ever done," and he quickly took a canvas from against the wall and placed it on a chair before her.

She considered it so quietly that he warmed a little, like a routed animal lulled once more into security by the stillness.

"Do you get the right light?" he asked anxiously.

She nodded, and managed a faint, abstracted smile, indicative of pleasure. She heard him emit a sigh of returning ease. He spoke in almost his former confiding tone.

"That's our lake, you know, painted in the late afternoon. Ben is set on my sending it down to the Durango fair next month."

It was the lake, indeed, but, alas! an elaborate, a labored parody of it. The dead blue water, the granite wall evenly gray in shadow, garishly pink where it caught the sun, the opaque green of the trees, the carefully arranged clouds in the flat blue sky--all smirked conscious burlesque. It recalled the things in gilt frames which Mrs.

Laithe remembered to have seen in front of "art emporiums," on Fourteenth Street, tagged "Genuine Oil Painting," the "$12.00" carefully crossed out and "$3.98" written despairingly below to tempt the alert connoisseur.

She knew the artist's eyes were upon her in appeal for praise. She drew in her under lip and narrowed her eyes as one in the throes of critical deliberation.

"Yes, I should recognize the spot at once," she dared to say at last.

"How well you've drawn the rock."

"I hoped you'd like it. I don't mind telling you I put in a lot of time on that thing. I 'carried it along' as my father used to say. I don't believe I could better that. And here are some others."

He displayed them without further urging, his shyness vanished by his enthusiasm, in his eye a patent confusion of pride and anxiety. She found them in quality like the first. In one the valley of the Wimmenuche from the east bench was as precisely definite as a topographical map; in another the low-lying range of hills to the south had lost all their gracious and dignifying haze.

"They are immensely interesting," observed his critic with animation, "It may be"--she searched for a tempering phrase--"it is just possible there's a trick of color you need to learn yet. You know color is so difficult to convict. It's shifty, evasive, impalpable. I dare say that lake isn't as flatly blue as you've painted it, nor that cliff as flatly pink in sunlight. And those hills--isn't there a mistiness that softens their lines and gives one a sense of their distance? Color is _so_ difficult--_so_ tricky!"

She had spoken rapidly, her eyes keeping to the poor things before her.

Now she ventured a glance at the painter and met a puzzled seriousness in his look.

"You may be right," he a.s.sented at last. "Sometimes I've felt I was on the wrong track. I see what you mean. You mean you could reach over a mile and pick up the ranch house at Bar-7--that it's like a little painted doll's house; and you mean you could push your finger into those hills, though they're meant to be a hundred miles away. Well, it serves me right, I guess. My father warned me about color. And I never saw any good pictures but his, and that was years ago. I've forgotten how they ought to look. He sold all his when I was young--all but one."

"You've done well, considering that."

"He said I must learn to draw first--really to draw--and he taught me to do that. I _can_ draw. But black and white is so dingy, and these colors are always nagging you, daring you to try them. If I could only learn to get real air between me and those hills. I wonder, now, if my colors seem like those Navajo blankets to you." He flung himself away from the canvases like an offended horse.

"Let me see your black-and-whites," she suggested hastily.

"Oh, those! They don't amount to much, but I'll show you." He thrust aside the canvases and opened a portfolio on the chair.

She saw at a glance that he had been right when he said he could draw.

She let her surprise have play and expanded in the pleasure of honest praise. She had not realized how her former disappointment had taken her aback. But he could draw. Here were true lines and true modeling, not dead, as he had warned her, but quick with life, portrayed not only with truth but with a handling all his own, free from imitative touches. He had achieved difficult feats of action, of foreshortening, with an apparently effortless facility--the duck of a horse's head to avoid the thrown rope; the poise of the man who had cast it; the braced tension of a cow pony holding a roped and thrown steer while his rider dismounted; the airy grace of Red Phinney at work with a stubborn broncho, coming to earth on his stiff-legged mount and raking its side from shoulder to flank with an effective spur. There was humor in them, the real feeling in one of the last. Mrs. Laithe lingered over this.

"It's Beulah Pierce's wife in that flower garden of hers," the artist explained. "It seems kind of sad when she goes out there alone sometimes. You know how tired she generally is, and how homesick she's been for twenty years or so--'all gaunted up,' as Ben says, like every ranchman's wife--they have to work so hard. And in the house she's apt to be peevish and scold Beulah and the boys like she despised them. But when she goes out into that garden----"

"Tell me," said his listener, after waiting discreetly a moment.

"Well, she's mighty different. She stands around mooning at the hollyhocks and petunias and geraniums and things, the flowers that grew in her garden back East, and I reckon she kind of forgets and thinks she's a girl back home again. Her face gets all gentled up. I've watched her when she didn't notice me--she's looking so far off--and when she goes into the house again her voice is queer, and she forgets to rampage till Shane Riley lets the stew burn, or Beulah tracks mud into the front room, or something. I tried to show her there, looking soft, just that way." He sounded a little apologetic as he finished.

"It's delightful," she insisted, "and they're all good--I can't tell you how good. You must do more of them, and"--she paused and shot him a careful glance to determine how wary it behooved her to be--"and I believe you should let color alone for awhile, until you've had a teacher show you some things. You must learn the trick."

"Oh, I'd try to learn fast enough, if I had the chance." His eyes lighted with a kind of furtive wistfulness, as if he would not have her wholly fathom his longing.

"Of course you could learn. I believe you can do something--something fine."

She rose from the couch and glanced over his books, with an air of wishing to touch other matters before they dwelt long on this. She noticed with some surprise a set of Meredith.

"Do you read these?" she asked, taking down one of the volumes.

There was an instant return of his former shyness, a hint of the child and the invaded playhouse. But she knew what to do. Without further remark she calmly lost herself in "Diana."

"Those books were my father's," he said at last, with the air of addressing an explanation to some third person. She ignored this, not even glancing at him. "But I've read them," he added, still as if to another person.

At last, after studying her face a bit, he ventured, "Have you read them all?" He spoke low, so as not to interrupt her too pointedly. She did not look up, but nodded, with a smile that said confidentially, "Well, I should think so!" He edged nearer then, like one who would be glad, if pressed, to share his secrets.