"You speak bitterly--but then, you"ve competed with that sort."
"My unhappy infant! You"d at least have found a barren sort of dignity in actual compet.i.tion. As it is----"
"You got her by a trick, I"ve heard, from the man who took her away from you when she"d found you out."
"Tell that to your grandmother--it may help you out of some money."
"Stop it, governor! I"ll quit if you will. Come!" He spoke with a drop of the voice, and lifted a hand in appeal.
"When you like--I"ve wasted no words."
"It"s true, all you"ve said? Grandmother knows?"
"Thirty seconds later and I"d have had to bless the pair."
"And now?"
"It"s safe for the present. She forgot. She"ll remember to-morrow. I"d trust him back there then. She"d see only an obscene excrescence."
"It"s a pleasant situation!"
"It"s h.e.l.lish! Can you imagine _my_ feelings? You"ve touched on them with your graceful, filial banter."
"What will you do?"
""What will you do?"" He mimicked the other with a snarl. "Well, I begin by having him to dine. I study him, I win him. I have him now. He will dine with me other times. I"m not so sure he won"t come to reverence me.
Oh, it"s an ideal situation! d.a.m.n it! How they fall! _We_ couldn"t contrive them half so cunningly. The fool hath said in his heart "There is no G.o.d"--a fool, indeed! There is a G.o.d, and He has a devil in Him, or He couldn"t have given me this to play out. I have him, I tell you, her son and his son, think of it--her lover"s son that they both loved--served up to me!"
"What can you do with him?"
"_Do_ with him?" The elder man eyed his son for a long minute, then dropped into a chair, and for an interval the young man pursued his rather uncomfortable reflections in silence. At last he broke this with another query. As there was no response, and his father"s face was turned away, he rose and sauntered in front of him. The eyes met his musingly, and he saw that the mouth was fixed in a rather hideous smile.
CHAPTER XVII
AN ELUSIVE VENUS
The days that followed were marked for Ewing with a puzzling discouragement; puzzling, because there had been no failure. A failure would have left him reliant, however battered, but nothing good had been disproved. He was fighting some black doubt of himself, insidiously nursed, he knew not how.
His friend, Randall Teevan, almost an intimate since the night they dined together, daily predicted great works of him. Where the careless picture makers of the Rookery were content with a.s.surances that he could turn out marketable "stuff," Teevan showed him far and lofty eminences that he might scale, had he a spirit for the feat.
Undoubtedly there were obstacles that would daunt a less spirited novice, or one with less than the supreme powers of his young friend, but he, the intrepid, the enduring one, could surmount them. The danger in this time of "prenticeship, Teevan suggested, was sluggish content with a cheap facility. The tyro learns to do a thing that sells, and remains commercially solvent but, spiritually, an example of arrested development--artistically dead.
He left Ewing at these times with a sense of his present futility, but also with a genial pity for the men who were doing things to sell--and selling them; all unconscious of the remote, the vacant summits, of true art. A little while before he would have rejoiced that his work could appear beside the work of these men. That would have been a triumph glorious enough. But he could no longer desire so mean a success. He must strive for the higher things, if for no other reason, because this fastidious critic expected him to accomplish them. He could not affront that captious taste with things done for a dollar. Teevan, it seemed, had found life wearing on his dearest illusions. Contact with the world had left him little to believe in. Yet he confessed to believe in Ewing; confessed it with a shamed, humorous _naivetee_, and with pleasant half doubts, as a man of tried unbelief laying a bed to fall back on at his next undeceiving.
Ewing was fired to high resolve by this witty, this tender betrayal of confidence in his powers. He could not bear to think that his friend should one day find him, too, a bit of specious insincerity. He consecrated himself to guard this last illusion. It was a pleasure, a duty, and an ambition whose rewards would magnify them both.
The hill boy no longer yearned solitary in the crowd for a day with Ben Crider, or perhaps an evening with him of little easy silences. Teevan filled his needs. In some sort the little man became his idol; a constant presence before which every act of his days must be judged.
Teevan was a smiling but inexorable arbiter of his destiny: a judge humane but incorruptible, a man experienced in the obliquities of human nature, but never tolerant of these.
Teevan showed him pictures, the work of masters, piloting him through galleries with instructive comment. Ewing instinctively felt the accuracy of his taste, and divined the soundness of his technical knowledge. Often he overlooked a blemish of bad drawing till Teevan pointed it out. Often Teevan defined to his eye some masterly bit of lining in a picture otherwise hopeless. And of color, that splendid mystery, thing of trick and pa.s.sion, the little man discoursed with rare sanity.
After these provings of his expertness, Ewing was humble when Teevan chose to point out the more striking deficiencies of his own work. If Teevan made him feel that he must unlearn the vicious little he knew, he performed the duty with a tact that left the youth as large with grat.i.tude as with discouragement. It was by Teevan"s counsel that he went to the school. The men of the Rookery tried to dissuade him from that.
"They can"t give you anything you haven"t got," warned Baldwin. "And if you don"t act stubborn they may spoil what you have. You"ve learned your A B C"s, and they"ll only tell you at the school to learn them another way. They"ll make you feel like a clumsy a.s.s. Stay away."
Well-meant advice, but superficial, as Teevan observed when he heard of it.
"Your friend confirms what I suspected," he went on, with a pleasant glint in his eyes. "Those chaps would have you become a decent hack on the pitiful facility you"ve already acquired. Pitiful, mark me, as compared with your capacity. But I"ve learned to expect little in this world of weak purpose. I dare say you won"t endure it long at the school. I grant you a fortnight there; then you"ll tell me you give up."
He began his lessons at the League next day, fired with intent to please his friend. He would fail, yes--fail seventy times seven, but he would stand up.
He went, however, a little weighed down by the memory of his various advisers. From the entrance he was directed above by an official-looking person who yawned. Then he found himself in one of many cramped, stall-like compartments, facing a plaster woman who crouched on one knee. His position was between two youths who were annoyed by his nearness. When he edged from the glowering of one the other nudged his drawing board with an indignant elbow. There was no retreat, for the students were packed closely about him. The one behind him made disparaging remarks about the dimensions of his back, which seemed unkind, considering that he did not hesitate to use the back from time to time as an easel.
The air was hot and thick with charcoal dust. The crowded disorder confused him. He tried to think only of the cast. He began at the head, as was his custom, and felt a moment"s exhilaration in studying the delicate shadows beneath the filleted curls.
He was aroused by sounds of derision from behind, and ominous prophecies of what "Old Velvet" would do to him when he caught sight of that pompadour. He observed then that the other men were not working at the head first, but mapping out the entire figure at once with long, raking, angular lines that blocked the shadows in square ma.s.ses. He half rose and looked about. They were all working alike, with their drawing boards far out, and with blunt charcoal. He had spent half an hour sharpening his, and had hugged his drawing board.
He sat down again, impelled by protests from behind and drew the entire figure, but he could not bring himself to do it in those rude angles. He drew it with a single line--down the curving flank, about the gracious knees, skirting the feet, and up once more to round the farther shoulder that drooped above the nestling breast. Although he did not know it, this was a feat; the swing of the body was almost perfect, yet he had not skirmished a moment.
The youth behind him was now peering through spectacles above his shoulder.
"You"re a queer duck!" he said; "but he"ll make you do it his way. What do you mean by drawing like that?"
"Why?" asked Ewing, confused. "Let"s see yours."
The other exhibited. There was no outline, there were no gracious curves, only a suggestion of angular shadows, scratched across with brutal straightness. Yet, when Ewing squinted his eyes a bit the thing stood out.
"Wait till I get _my_ shadows in," he said.
"Cart before the horse!" rejoined the critic. "I see your finish with the old man."
Ewing started to lay in his shadows as the other had done, but it seemed as if that delicate body appealed for gentler treatment. He rubbed out the vandal lines and began swinging around the figure in the curving strokes habitual with him, strokes that nursed each lovely rondure like caresses. Then, until the closing hour, he polished, picking out the precious little reflected lights that saved her treasures from shadow.
"Red ruin for you, my boy!" exclaimed the spectacled one behind him.
"Ravage and slaughter! Old Velvet will scalp you."
Ewing stood up, released by his neighbors, who now rose in a clatter of toppled stools.
"What"s the matter with it?" he asked.
"Finicky! You"ve _fussed_ it to death. Velvet will slay you for those reflected lights alone--and your nice curly lines--oh, Lord!"
"But they"re there, those lights," protested Ewing. "And it"s the way I"ve always drawn. I suppose there are different methods."
"There"s only one way with Velvet, and that"s Velvet"s way." Then with a d.a.m.natory waving-away of the offensive drawing he sauntered off to put his stuff in his locker.