The girl looked up with that hint of shyness he had before observed in her. The eyes instantly recalled his own mountain lake when the light showed it to far, green depths. But they fell at once, for she inclined her head toward him, seized a cup and demanded sternly, "Cream or lemon--I mean I"m very glad to know you. Do you take sugar?"
In his own embarra.s.sment he would have told her, but Mrs. Laithe broke in with her low laugh.
"He doesn"t want tea, child, he only wants----"
The girl interrupted defensively, with a flutter of eyelids toward Ewing: "I can"t remember _what_ they like when they come back the second time. It"s too much to expect."
"Your martyrdom is over, dear. No one wants more tea, and most of them are escaping. Talk to Mr. Ewing while I speed them."
The girl sank wearily into a chair, with a rueful glance at the table"s disarray of cups and plates.
"I"ll dream about tea to-night." Her hands met disconsolately in her lap.
"I suppose there was a lot of it," Ewing replied sympathetically.
"Why do they do so many insane things here?" demanded the girl. "They"re always at something. Town is tiresome."
"But don"t you live here?"
"Dear no! I went to live with mamma"s sister up in New Hampshire when I was small, after mamma died. There was no one here to raise me. And now that I"m raised they want me back, but I shy at things so--dad says I"m not city broke. I shall hold off another year before I get into this sort of thing--" She waved an ably disparaging hand toward the backs of several unsuspecting people who lingered. Then she looked up to meet his laugh and laughed prettily with him. The two had found common ground by some freemasonry of the shy.
"Does it seem like a play to you, too?" he asked; "everyone playing a part and making you wonder how it"s coming out?"
"Well"--she debated--"I used to have that, when I was at school and came here for holiday times. I was always expecting great things to happen then. But they never did. You"ll be disappointed if you expect them.
Everybody rides down Broadway in the morning and back again at night, and they make such a fuss about it that you think something worth while is coming off, but it doesn"t. _I_ know." She achieved this with an air of mellowed cynicism that almost won his respect.
"But things _must_ happen where there"s so much life," he insisted.
"You"re very young, aren"t you?" she retorted. "Quite a boy, I should think. Sister said so. You"ll see, though. It isn"t one bit more a happening life than ours up at Kensington. Yours must have been the happening life, there in the West. Tell me about Clarence. Is he a real cowboy yet? He says he"s a real one, but I couldn"t believe it. Those I saw in the Wild West show looked as if they"d had to study it a long time. Can Clarence la.s.so a wild cow yet?" She leaned toward him with friendly curiosity. They were amazed half an hour later when they looked up to find Mrs. Laithe standing by them, the only other occupant of the room.
"You must come oftener," urged Mrs. Laithe. Her sister gave him her hand with a grip that made him wonder at its force.
He pushed through the evening crowd of Broadway, pleasantly reviewing his talk with the girl. At Forty-second Street it occurred to him that this was the first time he had walked the street unconscious of its throng. He had been self-occupied, like most of its members.
But the girl, he reflected, would go away. The friend, the near one, to take and give, man or woman, was still to be found.
CHAPTER XIV
THE TRICK OF COLOR
The men of the Rookery toiled, in the season of toil, with that blithe singleness of purpose they brought to their play. Ewing learned this the following morning when, after an hour in his own place, correcting some of those hasty first arrangements, he began an idling tour of the other studios. These occupied the two upper floors of the building, those beneath flaunting signs of trade on the ground-gla.s.s doors one pa.s.sed in the long climb from the street.
From Baldwin"s studio--Baldwin was sketching in from the model a kneeling Filipino prisoner with head thrown back and hands bound behind him--Ewing descended to Chalmers"s place to find its owner finishing, with many swift pen strokes, the filmy gown of a debutante who underwent with downcast eyes the appraisal of an elderly beau. This absorbed and serious Chalmers was so unlike the frivolous night bird who reviled his art editor that Ewing forbore to distract him.
Griggs, in the studio back of Chalmers, was soberly work-bent over the wash-drawing of a sword fight, an ill.u.s.tration for what he confided to Ewing was the latest "high boots and hardware novel."
"One lovely thing," explained the artist, "they all take the same pictures--the plighted troth in the chateau garden; the lone hero spitting eight low-browed mercenaries of the scoundrelly duke at the end of the blind pa.s.sage; "nother fight on the main stairway of the palace, girl in view back of the hero, who"s still acting the village cut-up with his little rapier; and the last picture, reward of hero in front parlor of the chateau, my Lord the Cardinal standing by to bless the happy pair, and the wicked Duke Bazazas being dragged out by loyal serving men to be finished off in the woodshed. The caption for that one always is, "At Last, My Darling!" I just glance along the proofs until I light on those scenes. It saves a lot of reading, and I think of getting a set of rubber stamps to do the pictures with."
"You seem to be all black-and-white men here," remarked Ewing. "Aren"t any of you painters? I"ve thought I"d like to work in color--to learn the trick of it."
Griggs glanced up at him, then smiled largely.
"The trick of color, eh? Sure! There"s a boy upstairs next door to you--old Pop Sydenham. I"ll take you up now, but don"t let him hear you call it "the trick of color." Pop has been at that trick for over a century now--I believe he"s a hundred and nineteen years old to-morrow.
He"s got a darned refined sense of color, too. I guess he"s seen every color in the world, except some of those he puts on his own canvases.
Some of those I don"t believe he ever saw anywhere else. But Pop"s worth knowing if you"re keen to paint. He"s a whole Art Students" League in himself. Come on, he"ll be proud to have you notice him."
Wiping his hands neatly on his jacket--plainly a long-established custom with him--Griggs led the way to a room across the hall from Ewing"s. He opened the door in answer to a call and pushed Ewing in before him.
Sydenham leaned back on his stool to peer at them around the corner of his easel.
He was an old man, as Griggs had said. White hair fell in spa.r.s.e locks over his ears, and his short, roughly pointed beard was scant enough to reveal sunken cheeks. But the face was tanned to a wholesome brown, and the eyes that glanced over his gold-rimmed spectacles were full of fresh good-humor. He nodded to Griggs and clambered down from his stool to greet Ewing.
"He"s a line man now," announced Griggs after the introduction, "but some busybody has gone and told him that there"s such a thing as real color. Of course I don"t pretend to know myself, but I told him you did.
He"s your neighbor on this floor. Run in often and make yourselves at home with each other," he concluded cordially. "I must hurry back and finish a fight."
"May I look?" asked Ewing, his eyes running about the room to the many canvases.
"My summer"s work is there--Look? yes; but I can"t promise what you"ll see. You bring your own eyes. I can"t make eyes, too. If I only could--"
He spoke with a slow, soft gentleness, his blue eyes half shut and dreamily distant. As Ewing turned to study a landscape leaning against the wall on a table near by, the painter climbed to his stool and twined his thin legs confusingly among its supports. Then facing his canvas and working a brush into the color on his palette he continued:
"Line is a fact. Color is only a sensation. Anyone can prove line, but to know color you must have imagination. If you lack that and do have a gift for humorous abuse you can be an art critic and make quite a bit of money, I"m told." He had begun to paint as he talked. He spoke with the same slow gentleness, even when a hint of seasoned bitterness betrayed itself.
One close look at the sketches about him had made Ewing rejoice that his own paintings were safe with Ben Crider. He studied the canvases before him with pleasure and dismay: wooded hills, gra.s.sy meadows, a park slope with a single birch; mist rising over a marsh; a country road narrowing into a blaze of sumach. They showed plainly enough, he thought, that color must be conveyed rather by implication than by blunt directness, and there, he felt, had been his own great blunder. He had been brutally direct.
Some of the pictures before him left him wanting a sharper definition of line, a more explicit modeling of surface, a treatment less timid, and the color itself, though it never failed to interest him, often puzzled or even irritated. He sought for words to disclose what he felt, his admiration for some of the sketches, his doubt or his rank disbelief as to others. But the old man suddenly swept the half-formed sentences from his mind.
A crash of falling furniture had resounded from the room of Dallas, forward on their own floor. From the studios below came other crashes, the noise of falling bodies, and a ringing, metallic clangor. Sydenham had paused at the first crash, then skipped nimbly from his stool, shouting gleefully, "There goes Griggs"s suit of armor!" Then, to Ewing"s amazement, he twitched the end of a cord that led to a high mahogany sideboard, causing a cigar box, a copper kettle, and a heavy volume of prints to fall with resoundings that must have carried to the farthest studio. The old man faced him with the ecstatically deafened look of a child amid exploding firecrackers. Then, as he discerned Ewing"s startled look, he explained:
"It"s only a way the boys have every day at one o"clock. That Baldwin boy started it by upsetting a musket and a brace of cavalry sabers. Then Griggs followed with his armor. Then they all got to joining in. The Chalmers boy pulls over his easel, and I understand there"s been a complaint from the people below; but it leaves us feeling rather friendly, you know, and we"re sure it"s time to eat." He looked at Ewing as if seeking to justify his complicity in so childish a performance.
And Ewing, reading the look, helped him to reload his sideboard for the next day"s disturbance. The copper kettle, book and cigar box--the latter containing half a dozen lumps of coal--were replaced on a thin board to which the string was attached.
Sydenham had meantime taken food from a curtained cabinet and was munching before his easel. He waved the freedom of his larder to Ewing.
"There"s bread and half a chicken, and pickles. There used to be ham, but I forget if it"s there yet. Anyway, it wasn"t the most expensive ham. I can"t lose daylight by running out. The light changes while I eat. I"m no Joshua. What did Griggs say of you--crazy boy, that Griggs.
Doing black and white, eh? Show me."
Ewing had helped himself to the bread and meat, and the two, eating casually, crossed the hall to his own room. His drawings were at hand and Sydenham looked at them as he munched, pausing critically now and then, a bit of bread midway to his mouth.
"Not bad, not bad! If you can do that well you ought to do better. But too many of you boys quit when you"ve learned to do something you can sell. It"s respectable, of course, but shoemakers do as much, and you"ve no right to call yourselves artists for it. I"m afraid there isn"t anything made in the world that some one won"t buy. And people _know_ if their boots fit them, or if their bread is good, but they buy pictures in the dark. There wouldn"t be so many men calling themselves painters if the public wasn"t a better judge of sawed lumber or iron castings than it is of pictures. Where did you study?"
"My father taught me drawing. He warned me to learn that first."
"Father, eh? Well--" His eyes rose from the drawings, ranged along the top of the couch, to the portrait of Ewing"s mother, hung between the two windows, and the speech died on his lips. He stepped back, bit into a reserve slice of bread and waved an inquiring chicken bone toward the picture.
"My mother," explained Ewing. "My father painted it."
Sydenham"s jaw fell, and looking again at the portrait he muttered some low, swift phrase of bewilderment. Ewing waited for him to speak, but the old man only stared.