The Wood Fire in No. 3 Part 20

Murphy was back in London; cabled for, and left without being able to bid anybody good-by. "Throw on another stick," he had written Mac by the pilot-boat, "and give the dear old logs a friendly punch and tell 'em it is from that wild Irishman, Murphy. I'd give you a tract of woodland if I had one, and build you a fireplace as big as the nave of a church. I shall never forget my afternoons around your fire, MacWhirter. You and your back-logs and the dear boys warmed me clear through to my heart.

Keep my chair dusted, I'm coming back if I live."

With the budding trees and soft air and all the delights of the out-of-doors, the attendance even of those members who still remained in town began to drop off. Only when a raw, chill wind blew from the east, reminding us of the winter and the welcome of Mac's fire, would the chairs about the hearth be filled. Boggs, Pitkin, Woods, Marny, and I were the only ones who came with any regularity.

"Got to cover them up, Colonel," Mac said to me the last afternoon the fire was alight. I had arrived ahead of the others and had found him crooning over the smouldering logs, looking into the embers. "They've been mighty good to us all winter--never sulked, never backed out; start them going and give them a pat or two on their backs and away they went." He spoke as if the logs were alive. "Lots of comfort we've had out of them; going to have a lot more next year, too. I shall bury the embers of the last fire--perhaps this one, I can't tell--in its ashes and keep the whole till we start them up in the autumn. It will seem then like the same old fire. The flowers lie dead all winter but they bloom from the same old charred ember of a root. All the root needs is the sun and all the coals need is warmth. And the two never bloom in the same season--that's the best part of it."

He had not once looked at me as he spoke; he knew me by my tread, and he knew my voice, but his eyes had not once turned my way, not even when I took the chair beside him.

"And what are _you_ going to do, Mac, all summer? Got any plans?"

"Got plenty of plans, but no money. Heard there was a man nibbling around my 'East River'--but you can't tell. Brown, the salesman, says it's as good as sold, but I've heard Brown say those things before.

Exhibition closes this week. Guess the distinguished connoisseur, Mr. A.

MacWhirter, will add that picture to his collection: that closet behind us is full of 'em."

"Where would you like to go, old man?"

"Oh, I don't know, Colonel. I'd like to try Holland once more and get some new skies--and boats."

"Nothing on this side, Mac?" I was not probing for subjects for Mac's brush.

"No, don't seem so. Can't sell them anyhow. I thought my 'East River'

was about the best I had done, but n.o.body wants it. Cook calls it a 'Melancholy Monochrome,' and that other critic--I forget his name--says it lacks 'spontaneity,' whatever that is. I ought to have stayed at home and helped my Governor instead of roaming round the world deluding myself with the idea that I could paint. About everything I've tried has failed: Had to borrow the money to get me to Munich; took me three years to pay it back, doing pot-boilers; even painted signs one time. Been chasing these phantoms now for a good many years, but I haven't got anywhere. I'd rather paint than eat, but I've got to eat--that's the worst of it. A little encouragement, too, would help. I try not to mind what Cook says about my things, but it hurts all the same. And yet if he ever over-praised my work it would be just as offensive. What I want is somebody to come along and get underneath the paint and find something of myself and what I am trying to do with my brush. It may be monotonous to Cook; it isn't to me. I could crisp up my 'East River' with a lot of cheap color and a boat or two with figures in the foreground, but it was that vast silence of the morning that I was after, and the silvering quality of the dawn. Doesn't everybody see that? Some of them can't.

Well, in she goes with the rest; you'll all have a fine bonfire when I'm gone. I'll keep out the one hanging over the lounge and maybe another back somewhere in that mausoleum of a closet. I'll give one to you, old man, if you'll promise to take care of it," and Mac took an unframed canvas from the wall and propped it up on a chair. There were dozens of others around it and so it had never attracted my attention.

"Not much--just a garden wall and a bench--pretty black--too much bitumen, I guess," and he wet his finger and rubbed the canvas.

I took the sketch in my hand and examined it carefully. It was dated "Lucerne," and signed with two initials, not Mac's.

"Old sketch?"

"Yes, about fifteen years ago."

"Doesn't look like your work."

"It isn't."

"Who did it?"

"A pupil of mine."

"Girl?"

Mac nodded, replaced the sketch on the wall and sank into his chair again.

"Only pupil I ever had. She and her mother had spent the winter in Munich--that's where I met her."

"It is signed 'Lucerne,'" I said.

"Yes, I followed her there."

"To teach?"

"No; because I loved her."

The announcement came so suddenly that for a moment I could not answer.

He often gave me his confidence, and I thought I knew his life, but this was news to me. I had always suspected that some love affair had sweetened and mellowed his nature, but he always avoided the subject and I had, of course, never pressed my inquiries. If he was ready to tell me now I was willing to listen with open ears.

"You loved her, Mac?" I said simply.

"Yes, as a boy loves; without thought--crazily--only that one idea in his mind; ready to die for her; no sleep; sometimes a whole day without tasting a mouthful; floating on soap-bubbles. Ah! we never love that way but once. It was all burned out of me though, that summer. I've just lived on ever since--painting a little, nursing these old logs, hobn.o.bbing with you boys; getting older--most forty now--getting poorer."

"And did she love you, Mac?"

"Yes, same way. Only she got over it and I didn't."

"Some other fellow?"

"No, her father. Oh, there's no use going into it! But sometimes when I do my level best and put my heart into a thing, as I have done into that picture at the Academy, or as I poured it out to that girl in that old garden at Lucerne, and it all comes to naught, I lose my grip for a time and feel like putting my foot through my canvases and hiring out somewhere for a dollar a day."

I made no comment. My long years of intimacy with my friend had taught me never to interrupt him when he was in one of these moods, and never to ask him any question outside the trend of his thoughts.

"Self-made, dominating man, her father; began life as a bra.s.s-moulder.

'Worked with my hands, sir,' he would tell me, holding out his stubs of fingers. Didn't want any loafers and spongers around him. He didn't say that to me, of course, but he did to her. The mother was different, like the daughter; she believed in me. She believed in anything Nell liked.

Behind in her music--that's what she came to Munich for; and when she wanted to paint, hunted me up to teach her. She was eighteen and I was twenty-three. Well, you can fill in the rest. Every day, you know; sometimes at my hole in the wall, sometimes at her apartment. Went on all winter. In May he came over and wired them to meet him in Lucerne.

We tried parting; sat up half the night, we three, talking it over--the dear mother helping. She loved us both by that time! I tried it for two days and then locked up my place and started. That old garden was where we met and where we continued to meet. He came down one morning to see what we were doing; we were doing that sketch--had been doing it for two weeks. Some days it got a brushful of paint and some days it didn't. You know how hard you would work when the girl you loved best in the world sat beside you looking up into your face. Sometimes the dear mother would be with us, and sometimes she would make believe she was. In the intervals she was working on the old gentleman, trying to break it to him easy. 'You have worked all your life,' she would say to him, 'and you have, outside of me, only two things left--your money and your daughter. The money won't make her happy unless there is somebody to share it with her. This boy loves her; he is clean'--I'm just quoting her words, old man; I was in those days--'honest, has an honorable profession, and will succeed the better once he has Nellie to help him and your money to relieve his mind for the time of anxiety. When he becomes famous, as he is sure to be, he will return it to you with interest.' That was the sort of talk, and it occurred about every day.

Nellie would hear it and add her voice, and we would talk it over in the garden.

"One day he came down himself. The garden was up the hill behind the Schweitzerhoff--you remember it--in one of those smaller hotels--Lucerne was crowded.

"'Let me see what you two are doing,' he said, with a sort of police-officer air.

"I turned the easel toward him. The sketch was about as you see it--all except the signature and the word 'Lucerne'--that I added afterward.

"'How long have you been at this?'

"'About two weeks,' I said. I thought I'd give it its full time, so as to prove to him how carefully it had been painted.

"'Two weeks, eh?' he repeated slowly. 'Done anything else?'

"'No.'

"'What's it worth?'

"'Well, it's only a study, sir.'

"'Well, but what's it worth?'

"I thought for a moment, and then, knowing how he valued everything by his own standard, said: