Ewing's Lady Part 27

But the little man dismissed woman, dismissed her with an exquisite shrug, to speak of his young friend's work, and of painting at large.

"A suggestion of the true manner in that late thing of yours, my boy, really, a hint of Dupre, and he was a colorist of the first rank. And there are fewer colorists, genuine masters of tone, than you'd think.

Turner was one, to be sure, but Millet had a restricted sense of color.

Corot was great only within a narrow range. Rousseau was only a bit broader, robuster. There's a wretchedly defective color sense in many of the old masters, and in heaven knows how many of the young ones. France must take the blame for that, I'm sure you'd agree with me. The academic sentiment there runs to form and against color. They insist that colorists do little work. It's not an unplausible sophism. One has only to begin counting to see that--counting the host of little niggling, mechanical stipplers it's responsible for. It's true, color has its pitfalls and its gins. There's a temptation to shirk form. Many an aspiring colorist has become at last a mushy mannerist, as vicious in his influence as the chaps who never get beyond smart drawing and clever grouping." The little man was "squeezing" his eyes now as if he judged a row of paintings. He talked on and drank frequently.

But Ewing left as soon as he could do so. Teevan pressed his hand with rare cordiality at parting, as if Ewing were one person in the world still worthy of belief. He wandered blindly home, awkwardly trying to mold this new chaos into an understandable scheme of things. He fell instinctively back on his studies of the drama.

Many nights he had sat before the painted curtain to feast a questing mind on the life it lifted to reveal. He had found its revelations more intimate, more specific, than those of the life outside, and he had seemed to learn many things. Lacking this study he would not have divined that actual men and women might be leading lives of domestic adventure, of romantic vicissitude, of sinister intrigue, lives crowded with love and hate and fear and a thousand lawless complexities.

He had studied the street crowds in the light thus thrown on their inner motives. It had been a fine thing to detect the plotting scoundrel under the placid, dissembling mask of some fellow who bought an evening paper and boarded a street car with elaborate airs of innocence; to probe the secret of the unhappy wife whose white face stared blankly from a pa.s.sing brougham; to identify the handsome but never culpable hero, unconscious of third-act toils tightening about him; to know the persecuted heroine, or the manly but comic chap who loved her with exquisite restraint, divining that she could never be his.

But, though he had stripped the masks from these mummers in the street crowds, and read their secrets of guilt or innocence, he had not supposed that the people he actually knew could be leading lives complicated in that way. And if Teevan had talked, then Teevan must have been drunk. He would see her to-morrow night, and she would speak casually of her call at Teevan's upon some trifling errand.

Yet, when night came again and he stood in her presence, the first devouring look at her shocked him momentarily out of all thought of Teevan's maunderings. She was drooping and wasted and flatly pale. He scarcely knew her face, with the eyes burning at him from black rings.

He took her hand, nursing it gently, standing helpless and hurt before her.

"You are so changed," he said fearfully, "so changed! Oh, you are so changed!"

But she laughed with her familiar gayety, tossing her head in denial. He still scanned her face. Some resemblance there, some sinister memory of her look on another face, was stirring him. He could almost remember what it meant. At last her eyes fell before his and she drew her hand quickly away.

"Really, I won't have any talk of myself. I hear too much of that. I'm a bit run down, that's all. We found Florida enervating. Even dad was affected by it and forgot his philosophy. So, an end to that. I must hear of you, of your work."

She sat down, drawing a white scarf about her shoulders, and leaning toward him in the old inviting way.

"Tell me what you have done--everything there is to tell about it."

All at once he remembered.

"Last night," he began uneasily--"I wanted to see you last night--"

"You couldn't have seen me last night." She smiled in a way that brought out all the weak, wasted look of her face. "I was busy--I was trying to adjust something that has troubled me more than I can tell you."

He stared at her, incredulous, believing he could not have heard.

"... an affair that has worried me," she repeated, noticing his blank look.

Stupefied as he was, he felt a great pity rush over him, an instant longing to be her knight and give battle for her--to be her squire, if she herself must be knight. Yet, if Teevan had spoken truly must it not be a thing in which he was powerless to help her ever so little? A sudden sickness of rage came over him at thought of Teevan. He had almost made a jest of her.

He could not talk of himself after that. She could get nothing from him of his own worries, though she could see that he had these in abundance.

At last she tired of striving against him and let him go, out of sheer longing for the touch of his hand at parting. He had regarded her with a moody, almost savage tenderness that made her weak.

As he walked home he felt new to the streets again. They were strange streets in a strange world. But one thing he was sure of; one thing stood clearly out of the puzzle: he must not intrude, must not bother her; must not see her often. In a drama so alien to him he could not act without direction. He knew his own longing too well to trust himself. He sat a long time with his arms clasped across his breast. The anguish in it seemed physical; it was as if a beast were devouring his heart.

CHAPTER XXII

A REVOLT

He turned furiously to his work, but, as the summer came on, he realized that he was working with a desperation entirely heartless. He was not only sure, now, that he had taken a wrong road, but that nameless distress of his lady had left his desire benumbed. A fountain had gone dry in him.

At the beginning of the warm days he went into the country on sketching trips with Sydenham. To vales and little rivers north of the city, to flat, green stretches on Long Island, to the Jersey hills, they had gone with sketch traps wherever trolley or steam car could find Nature quickly for them.

Ewing had looked forward to this. He had felt hampered in the studio, where he must pa.s.s whole days in futile messing with colors, in rash trials of this or that trick of tint, like an idling schoolboy playing with slate and pencil. Once in the open, he had felt, there would quickly show forth those gifts which Teevan was certain he possessed.

But day by day these excursions with the old painter had brought him to believe that he had lost his way. That trick of color was not to be learned, it was clear, by rough-and-ready advances. Teevan, who was ever watchful of him, who betrayed, indeed, a strange little jealousy of any other influence than his own, scanned his first studies eagerly, and turned an inscrutable face on his young friend. He did not praise loosely; he did not condemn outright. And he talked not too specifically of the canvases before him. He showed little consciousness of a change in the demeanor of his disciple, though Ewing's eye rested on him with a long, unaccountable regard. Perhaps the boy was turning a little sullen.

This amused him. Meanwhile, the youth stood aghast before the dreadful thing he saw in his heart. Hatred of a benefactor! All the good in him struggled against it; all his grat.i.tude pleaded with him to be fair to the friend he had revered so long. Teevan talked more of Corot or Constable, Diaz or Millet than he talked of Ewing; and the young man came at last to the amazing conclusion not only that he was on a wrong road, but that Teevan knew it--that the little man must long have known it. This put him again in that rage of impotence that had seized him in those last days at the League. But he bore it longer now. He felt there was something final about this.

There were long days in the open to think on it, weigh it, and wring the meaning from it. Sydenham placidly criticised his work; but Sydenham could not feel his tragedy of defeat. A man who, at seventy, suffered his own despairs with the poignant ecstasy of youth, could not take a boy's failings seriously. Ewing now saw, moreover--for he was beginning to use another pair of eyes than Teevan's--that Sydenham himself was a hopeless mannerist, a color-mad voluptuary, painting always subjectively, refusing all but the merest hints from his subject.

His last day of confessed futility, his last hour of inner rebellion, came early in June. He carried his sketch trap out that day, but did not unpack it. He lay, instead, pondering, resolving, raging, while Sydenham, a little distance off, delicately corrected the errors of Nature in a vista of meadow. Ewing chewed the juicy ends of long-stemmed gra.s.ses and made phrases of disparagement for this sketch of Sydenham's, picturing himself with the courage to utter them. He told himself frankly what he thought of the old man's work--his "brush doddering," he nerved himself to call it.

Immensely refreshed by this exercise in brutality, he rolled over on his gra.s.sy bed to follow the shade of the oak under which he lay, and dramatized a meeting with Teevan, in which the little man strangely listened more than he spoke. He uttered his mind again concerning the work of Sydenham, the master Teevan had prescribed, a.s.serting that unsuspecting toiler to be hopelessly "locoed" in the matter of color. He saw Teevan's fine brows go elegantly up at this term, and he explained it to him with a humble sort of boldness.

From this he warmed to sheer audacity, disclosing further to his imagined hearer that the time had come for him to go his own way--still grateful for advice, still yearning for that friendly intimacy, but determined to be done with dreams. He saw Teevan applauding this mild declaration of revolt, with his fine, dark little smile, and a courteous inclination of the head, and he thereupon amplified it. He must go back to himself and stay there stubbornly, wheresoever that self led him.

Millet might have a restricted sense of color, Corot might have had his faults, and Rousseau have been less than Teevan could have wished him; but these were dead men. And Ewing was alive, determined to do those things that permitted him to feel the little power he might have. He was through with efforts that brought him nothing but a sense of the folly of all effort. And it was to this conviction, he made it plain, that his amazed but still respectful listener had led him. He worked himself into a glow of defiant self-a.s.sertion, feeling his own respect, and Teevan's as well, mounting with his heat.

When the light faded he strolled over to look at Sydenham's sketch, bent on testing his self-inspired temerity.

"I wonder if you've gotten that sky?" he began judicially, as the old man invited his comment. Sydenham looked up in some surprise, but Ewing's eyes were still on the sketch.

"Too gray above, isn't it? I thought the gray was only down near the horizon. By the way, I wish I'd roughed in that cow for you. A cow isn't the easiest thing in the world to draw. They look easy, but they're not.

That bit of stone wall isn't bad, and your clover effect is first rate."

He paused. He had meant only to practice speaking his own mind against the next interview with Teevan. He did not want to hurt Sydenham. The latter was roping his stool and easel together. He had been a little amazed at his pupil's outburst, but he looked up with a smile entirely placid.

"That's the way they all say it. You've caught the trick of art criticism, my boy, if you've caught nothing else."

Ewing saw that he was laughed at. There was a cool little flash to his retort.

"I can make that into a real cow for you, if you like, after we get home."

But the old man only chuckled at him, making him regret that he had ever so little curbed his criticism. He had an impulse to fight, a craving to arouse resistance. But he saw that Sydenham was no target for him, save in a sort of subcaliber practice. He hoped this novel combativeness would not wither under the first glance of Teevan's sharp little eyes.

It was dusk when they reached the city, and Ewing went to the Monastery to dine. He had long shunned the place, for the men there talked of things they had done or were doing, and they had made him, without meaning to, feel "out of it," as he told himself. For he, if he talked, could tell only of wonders he meant to do, and, lacking an audience composed of Teevans, he was shrewd enough to see that these would sound too wonderful and the future too distantly vague.

He had always been glad, however, of his drawing on the east wall. They could not believe him wholly lacking after that, nor refuse him fellowship if he sought it. He avoided the crowd when he entered the room--the men he knew best were at a long table on the rear veranda just outside the open windows--and chose a small table opposite his drawing.

He had thought of it often during the afternoon while he harangued Teevan in imagination. It had occurred to him that this was the only thing he had really done since coming to New York, and he had been seized with a longing to look at it again, to prove to his own eyes that the thing which was really his own--not Corot's nor Millet's nor even Sydenham's--was not an inconsiderable thing, not a thing he need despair of building on.

As he ate, his eyes eagerly retraced the lines. After the soup he had to look down to his plate to know if his fork brought him fish or flesh.

The sketch delighted him. He was surprised that he had been able to do it. He began to doubt his present mastery of the technique it displayed, fearing he had wandered too long in the Teevan-prescribed maze, dawdled too long in the little man's palace of illusions. One thing he knew: he would not dare mount a table and try another such drawing before them all. He had done this one as unthinkingly as he would have saddled a horse or sighted a rifle, indifferent to observers.

It rushed upon him sickeningly that all his a.s.sociation with Teevan had tended to destroy his belief in himself. The coffee found him afraid--ragingly afraid.

The voices from the group outside came to him murmurously, and at intervals he would listen to the careless, bantering talk. One voice related that its wielder had smoked opium in Cairo. He heard cries of mock horror, and the drawl of Chalmers--"Cairo--that's where the 'streets' come from." Griggs was presently extolling some ancient and wonderful sherry. "Great stuff! You take a sip and you don't swallow it--it just floats off through your being like a golden mist. He only has about a dozen bottles--out of a lot that was put down for Napoleon or somebody in 1830." Baldwin's voice floated in: "All right, old man, but they had to put it down a long way to reach Napoleon in 1830."

There was a laugh at this, and it came to the lone listener as the care-free echo of a world he had tried for and lost. Lost thus far--but there was farther to go, other days to live, other wise men to counsel with. He could have believed it heartily, if it were not for that thought of Mrs. Laithe, the thought that was always like a beast devouring his heart. Meantime, if he could only have a breathing spell, some days of quiet. He wished his own hills were not so far away. He was sure that a little time back in the cabin studio would give him his old bearings.