Ewing's Lady Part 22

Ewing dined alone that night. He was in no mood for Teevan.

Back in his place next day, still incredulous of defeat so swift, he waited for the master. He watched him going the rounds of the other students, the light playing on the purple velvet of the garment that gave him his t.i.tle. His beard was a rich growth, his mustaches curled upward at the ends, his large, heavy eyelids drooped in a perpetual _ennui_. His usual criticism was a weary "Rub it out!"

When at last he stood beside Ewing's work he gave an effect of collapsing, as if his whole being cried out: "This is too much!" He took the drawing from the board and stuck it to the wall with two thumb tacks. Then, picking up a bit of charcoal, he wrote across it, "A perfect example of how not to do it."

He did not return to Ewing, but, after examining a few other drawings, he turned to leave the room. As he pa.s.sed, Ewing reached across two neighbors--who protested--and caught the velvet jacket.

"Perhaps you can give me an idea," he said. The other looked at him as if he had not seen him before.

"Use intelligence! Good G.o.d--use intelligence!" he almost wailed, and made his escape.

Ewing mechanically placed a fresh sheet before him and began again, but he rubbed out as fast as he drew. The next morning he found the paper foul from many erasures, and started afresh. He could see now that his first drawing, posted in irredeemable ignominy, was not all that it should be. It lacked the freedom of work he had done in his solitude. He tried to conjure back that old free feeling, but the days pa.s.sed and it drew farther away. Some of the students changed places and began on other casts. The better men went every other week into the life cla.s.s.

But Ewing stayed desperately by his crouching woman. He studied her until he loved and loathed her. The master came and went. Sometimes he ignored Ewing. When he did notice him it was always with a fresh blow on the sunk heart of the boy. Once he sat in his place and ran some of his own brusque, effective lines along the figure, the lines that every other youth in the room punctiliously imitated. They mingled with Ewing's strokes as a driving rain mingles with a bed of flowers.

"If you'd only give up your d.a.m.ned little way," he complained.

"I wish you'd explain a bit," pleaded the boy.

"Old Velvet" turned to the spectacled young man. "Give him your study.

There, do it like that."

Then came the beginning of the end. He lost himself in a crawling blindness of imitation. The old power that had made him draw without knowing how he did it gathered its splendid garments and withdrew as mysteriously as it had once come to possess him. He drew, but he would no longer have recognized what he did as the work of his own hand. He thought of Griggs, who had said, "Style?--I'd know a sc.r.a.p of your stuff if I found it in an ash barrel in Timbuctoo!"

The thought of those friendly men knowing his degradation was another stone on the grave of his self-esteem. It was this that made him wait when the others had gone one night, to take down that first crucified drawing from the wall where it had remained, torn and hanging by one tack.

"Will you give it to me?" said a voice, and, as he did not care one way or the other, the spectacled young man put it in his portfolio.

Afterwards Ewing thought of asking him why he wanted it, but he did not come back again. He had been advanced to the life cla.s.s.

The master did not speak to Ewing again. He made, at intervals as he pa.s.sed, the pantomime of rubbing out. And Ewing obeyed, beginning each time the task that grew day by day more hatefully useless. In the beginning he had felt that if he could get that plaster woman off by himself he could draw her. The long habit of solitude had left him confounded by the crowd. There had been something almost shameful to him about drawing publicly, and he had the impulse to curl an arm about his sketch to hide it a little as he worked. He felt sick with the hot, dry air and the breathing of the stallful of men. When the door was opened the odor of turpentine came from the room where they were painting. It had for him a familiar, happy smell.

"I wish I could go in there," he said once to a fat youth beside him.

"That's what the dubs always say," was the reply. "It's so much easier to paint."

He spent a day going around, looking at the better students' work, asking them how they had learned to draw as "Old Velvet" wanted them to.

They had a great many things to say that sounded technical, but he heard nothing that opened a way to him.

He hated the school; he hated the street that led to it, with a quiet ground swell of hatred. But, deepest of all, he hated his own despair.

He felt that his shattered courage would never heal. He was like a dishonored soldier whose sword has been publicly broken. He remembered the fine things he had said to Teevan about his ambition, and the blush that suffused him ached. At the thought of Mrs. Laithe bringing him from his wild beast's hole, as if he had been worth her splendid faith, his heart withered within him. At intervals he started as if he suddenly awoke, saying to himself, "And to think it could have ended like this!"

At the end of a fortnight he sat for three days without doing anything, a stick of charcoal in his hand. He did not come again, and his fat neighbor used up his charcoal paper, after putting fine mustaches on all his crouching Venuses.

He had shunned his acquaintances during this time of travail. But twice had he seen Teevan since his first day at the League. He had tried to be cheerful at those meetings, still hoping the lines would come right, but he felt each time that Teevan saw straight to his wretched heart of doubt; and he would not risk another meeting until he could report an overwhelming victory--or defeat, if it must be so.

That he did not for a day forget his good friend, there was ample testimony; though this was of a nature that Teevan must remain oblivious to. On the night of the day that saw his first buffeting he walked the streets until late, rejoicing mournfully that there were still so many people who did not know his shame. Half unwittingly he wandered into Ninth Street, and stood a long time opposite Teevan's house, finding a solace in his friend's possible nearness. Then, as the days of defeat followed with so deadly a sequence, this walk and vigil became his nightly habit. Sometimes the house was darkened. Then he felt free to gaze at it. Sometimes there were lights, and his survey was brief and furtive. Until the very last there was always a bit of hope to spice the melancholy of this adventure: to-morrow the thing might be done as they all did it, the master be moved from blame to praise, and himself be free to enter this street bravely, noisily, careless of recognition, to tell how the big way had been opened. He had pictured the pleasure that would light Teevan's face as he heard this tale of conquest.

CHAPTER XVIII

MRS. LAITHE IS IN

On the ultimate night of defeat Ewing walked as usual into Ninth Street for his vigil before Teevan's house. He had come to a wall that must be scaled. He could no longer believe in any chance way round it or gracious opening through it. Teevan would have to be told, and he was sorry for Teevan. The little man had believed so.

He scanned the starred strip of sky above him as if for words to renew the faith of his friend. His eye ran along the house fronts opposite, but they were blunt, uninspiring ma.s.ses with shut doors and curtained windows, houses turned away from him. He wished for another friend, less exacting than Teevan, who would take defeat lightly. Then one of the houses stood out familiarly, the Bartell house, with its generous width and its hospitable white door. He had not cared to go there in his time of suspense, but now he was overwhelmed with a sudden longing to see Mrs. Laithe, to feel her friendliness and confide to her, perhaps, a hint of his plight. At least he could look at her a little while, even if he told her nothing.

He crossed the street quickly, walked toward the avenue until he reached the marble steps, and rang the bell. It occurred to him dismally while he waited that she might not be in; still worse, that there might be people about who would keep him from her. It had been so most of the few times he had called. There was always friendliness in the look she gave him across those sh.o.r.eless seas of talk, but too often there had been little beside this look.

The man admitted him and was not sure if Mrs. Laithe was in; he would see. Ewing strolled back to the soothing snugness of the library and dropped on the couch. Even to be there alone was something: the room was alive with her, and the restful quietness of it made him conscious all at once of the long strain he had been under. Leaning his head back, he shut his eyes in a sort of desperate surrender, letting the tragedy of his failure swirl about him. But something from the woman he awaited seemed to have flowed in upon him, healing his hurt with gracious little reminders of her. He breathed a long sigh of relief, and for a moment almost lost himself in unconscious rest. It was good to stop thinking.

It was thus she saw him as she came softly in, with scarce a silken rustle. Her face, as she gazed, lost its look of welcome and ready speech, for she saw all his anguish uncovered there before her. It was in his young face, gaunt and jaded and bleached to the city pallor; in the closed eyes, the folded lips; and in the body wearily relaxed. So little life he showed, it seemed to her he might be sleeping, and again, as at the other time, she was shaken by a rush of tenderness for him--tenderness and fear, alike terrible.

She could not speak. She hovered a half step toward him, with a hand instinctively up to shelter and cherish, her eyes wide with pity and a great gladness. Poised so, she waited, breathless.

Though she had made no sound, he thrilled suddenly to the knowledge of her presence, and his eyes opened to hers. They stared dully an instant, then shone with a quick light that held her exposed and defenseless, while he came to himself--for the first time in her presence--as a man.

Helpless to stay it, she watched this consciousness unfolding within him, traced it lucidly from its birth to the very leaping of it from his lips in a smothered cry of want unutterable.

So he held her with his look. Though every nerve warned her to flight, she was powerless even when he started toward her, raising himself slowly from the couch with his hands; her own hand even groped a little toward him, blindly fighting its way into both his own. It turned and nestled there, unreasoningly, warming itself, clasping and unclasping.

He towered above her--she had never felt herself so small, so frail as now. His two hands fiercely smothered her own, and his eyes were on her with a look she had never seen there, a look she could not face. It was then that her tenderness was lost in fear of him, and she forced herself to laugh. She laughed in the desperate knowledge that his rising arm threatened her with some crushing, blinding enfoldment where no striving would avail her--laughed with a little easy, formal grace.

He fell back dazed, scanning her in uncomprehending dismay as they stood apart. Then he seemed to recover himself and smiled foolishly as she moved to a chair.

"I'm so glad you came," she began with nervous quickness. He dropped back on the couch, his eyes still on her--the man's eyes.

She endured the look, but she could not suppress the color she felt rising in her face. It seemed to her that her strength must go if the moment lasted a little longer. She knew now that in the weeks of his absence she had longed for this look--for the fearful joy of it--and the realization left her overpowered.

At last, to her relief, he muttered some conventional phrase of his own pleasure in seeing her. But the look of the man still held her, an implacable look. She felt that the shy, embarra.s.sed boy in him was gone forever. She had aged him all in a moment. There was something splendidly ruthless in his gaze, and in place of the confusion she was wont to wreak on him he showed a strange, dogged coolness.

"You've changed," he continued. "You're not well." The wondrous deep alarm of his tone warmed her through and through. She murmured a careless disavowal, and her low laugh, like the little comprehending chuckle of a pleased child, banished from her face for a moment its almost haggard set. But the face was flatly white again under the dark of her hair, and the white gown defined her frailness and drooping, as of some pale, long-stemmed flower fainting of languor in the still heat of late summer.

"You are whiter than ever," he insisted, "whiter and finer. You are like a white rose that is beginning to let its petals fall. You--you are beyond anything now." She laughed helplessly, as people laugh at something insupportable.

"You're going to tell me that people don't talk that way here," he went on, with his old fling of the head, like that of a horse about to gallop off, "but you understand me." He sighed, remembering his trouble for the first time. "But you understand me," he repeated, with a wistful attenuation of the words.

"Yes, I understand--everything," she said, seeing again the amazing sadness in him. Her look seized all the dejection of his att.i.tude, the listless lean of his head, once upheld so gayly on the strong neck. She had to exert her will not to go nearer to him. She turned away and closed her eyes for a moment to shut him out, then opened them quickly and began to berate him charmingly for having neglected her. "I've thought of you so much oftener than I've seen you," she concluded.

He floundered in the old shyness. It had come suddenly on him when he thought of himself.

"I've been--at work."

"Your face shows it," she said, with a swift, unsteady look. "You have changed, too. You actually look ill."

He reddened slowly under her scrutiny, stammering protestations, but her eyes were open to him. She shrugged herself together and a.s.sumed a brisk, motherly air.

"Is it as bad as _that_--truly? And you told me nothing of it! Come--I want to know." There was a ring of authority in her voice as she leaned toward him, her great eyes full of pity and succor. "Is the world different from what you thought? Let me know--where does it hurt? That's what they say to children."