The Empty Sack Part 2

"Clear out, friend guy. Can't you see you're in the way?"

She continued to take the tone she was trying to make second nature, since it was not first.

"That's something he wouldn't notice if a car was running over him. But please let me go. There's a quarter of an hour left on to-day, but I'll make it up some other time."

She moved down the studio with as much seeming unconcern as if she didn't know that two pairs of eyes were following her. Picking her way between old English chairs with canvases stacked against their legs, past dusty brocade hangings, and beneath an occasional plaster cast lifted on a pedestal, she went out at the model's exit without a glance behind her.

Bob spoke only when she had disappeared.

"Listen, Hubert. I'm going to marry that girl."

Wray stepped back to the front of the easel, flicking in a touch or two on the rough sketch of the Greek girl kneeling before Aphrodite.

"I was afraid you were getting some such bug in your head."

Bob limped to a table on which he had thrown his hat and the stick that helped his lameness.

People at Marillo Park, where the Collinghams lived for most of the year, said that, with the wounds he had got while in the French army in the early days of the war, he had brought back with him a real enhancement of manhood. Having come through Groton and Harvard little better than an uncouth boy, his experience in France had shaped his outlook on life into something like a purpose. It was not very clear as yet, or sharply defined; but he knew that certain preliminary conditions must be met before he could settle down. One of these had to do with Miss Jennie Follett; and what Hubert called "a bug in his head" was, in his own mind, at least, as vital to his development as his braving his family in going to the war.

That had been in the famous year when the American nation was trying to be "neutral in thought." "I'm not neutral in thought," Bob, who had only that summer left Harvard, had declared to his father. "I'm not neutral in any way. Give me my ticket over, dad, and I'll do the rest myself."

He got his ticket over, and fifteen months later, bandaged and crippled, a ticket back. On the return voyage he had as his companion a young American stretcher-man who had helped to carry him off the battlefield, and who, a few weeks later, nervously shattered, had joined him in the hospital. Wray, who, on the outbreak of war, had been painting in Latoul's atelier, had now got what he called "a sickener of Europe," and was glad to hang out his shingle in New York. A New England man of Gallicized ways of thinking, he had means enough to wait for recognition, so long as he kept his expenses within relatively narrow bounds.

With his soft hat plastered provisionally on the back of his head, Bob leaned heavily on his stick.

"I've got to marry some one," he said, as if in self-defense. "I'm that kind. I can't begin fitting my jig saw together till I do it."

Wray kept on painting.

"Why don't you pick out a girl in your own cla.s.s? Lots of nice ones at Marillo."

"You don't marry girls just because they're nice, old thing. You take the one who's the other half of yourself."

"I don't see that you're the other half of Miss Follett."

"Well, I am."

"Miss Follett herself doesn't think so."

"She'll think so, all right, when I show her that she can't do without me."

"Some job!" Wray grunted, laconically.

"Sure it's some job; but the bigger the job the more you're on your mettle. That's the way we're made."

The artist continued to add small touches to the shadows of the Aphrodite cast as he changed his tactics.

"If you married Miss Follett, wouldn't your family raise h.e.l.l?"

"They'd raise h.e.l.l at first, and put a can on it afterward. Families always do."

"And what would Miss Follett feel-before they'd put on the can?"

Bob limped uneasily toward the door.

"Life wouldn't be all slip-and-go-down for her, of course; but that's what I should have to make up to her."

"Oh, you'd make it up to her."

With his hand on the k.n.o.b, Collingham turned in mild indignation.

"Say, Hubert, what do you think I'm made of? A girl I'm crazy about-"

"Oh, I only wondered how you were going to do it."

"Well, wonder away." A steely glint came into the deep-set, small gray eyes as he added, "That's something I don't have to explain to you beforehand, now do I?"

Left alone, the painter went on painting. As it always does, the house of Art opened its door to the troubles of the artist. Wray neither turned his head as his friend went out nor muttered a farewell. He merely laid on his strokes with an emotional vigor which hardened the surface of the plaster cast into marble. Neither did he turn his head nor utter a greeting when he became aware that Jennie, in her sport suit of tobacco color set off with collar and cuffs of ruby red, was moving toward him among the studio properties. It was easier to work his desire to look at her into this swift, sure wielding of the brush.

In the spirit rather than with the eyes he knew that she had paused within ten or twelve feet of him, that her kind, soft, bantering glance was resting on him as he worked, and that a kind, soft, bantering smile was flickering about her lips. With a deft force, he found the colors and gave this expression to the mouth and eyes of the kneeling girl. It was the work of a second-the merest twist of the fingers.

"I just wanted to say," Jennie explained, after waiting for him to see her, "that I'm sorry to have been so horrid just now, and I'd like to know when I'm to come again."

"You could marry Bob Collingham-if you wanted to."

His efforts had become so pa.s.sionately living that he couldn't afford to look up at her now, even had he wished to do so. He did not so wish, because he knew, still in the spirit, how she would take this announcement-without the change of a muscle, without a change of any kind beyond a flame in the amber depths of the irises. It would be a tawny flame, with an indescribable red in it, and he managed, on the instant, to translate it into paint. The girl on her knees was getting a soul as the lumpish white of the plaster cast was taking on the gleam of ancient, long-worshiped stone.

"And would you advise me to do that?"

The voice had the charm of the well-placed mezzo, the enunciation a melodious precision. Born in Halifax, where she had spent her first twelve years, the English tradition of musical speech, which in that old fortified town makes its last tottering stand on the American continent, had been part of her inheritance.

Still working at his highest pitch of tensity, Wray considered his answer.

"I shouldn't advise you to do that-if I thought about myself."

"Then why say anything about it?"

"Because I thought I ought to put you wise."

"What's the good of that, when I don't like him?"

"Girls often marry men they don't like when they have as much money as he'll have."

"Money's an object, of course; but when a fellow-"

"He's not so bad. I like him. Most men do."

"Most men wouldn't have to stand his pawing them about. I like him, too-except for the physical."