The day was interminable and wasted. He spent the morning fidgeting
at his easel and lecturing Tootles with such severity that all
the smiles fled from that young reprobate’s countenance and he
sat gloomily on his stool, his head sinking into his collar,
turtle-fashion, for one glance of displeasure from Dangerfield
could plunge him into the caverns of despair. In the present case,
the unexampled duplicity of Pansy, whom he had seen with his own
eyes on the arm of the unthinkable Drinkwater, combined to send his
thoughts wandering among such appropriate subjects as suicide and
graveyards.
“What the deuce has he been up to?” he said to himself, watching
Dangerfield, who was switching up and down in front of his easel
like a circus leopard. “Drinking his head off last night, I
suppose.”
“Hold the pose,” said Dangerfield spitefully.
“I ain’t doin’ nothin’,” said Sassafras, startled.
“You shifted that left leg! Throw it forward! More, so! Now hold
it.”
“Hold it; hold it,” muttered Sassafras to himself.
“Mighty easy to say ‘Hold it; hold it!’ Like to see some one else
stand on one leg a whole mawnin’ and ‘hold it, hold it!’”
Sassafras glanced over indignantly, but Tootles shook his head in
mute warning.
“What the devil’s got into the charcoal!” said Dangerfield
presently. He flung aside the piece he was using and selected
another, but a few minutes later he broke out into an exclamation,
and taking the canvas, brought it down savagely across his knee
and flung it across the floor, after which he broke into a short,
nervous laugh.
“There--I feel better--can’t work this morning--not in the
mood--you go ahead--I’m through!”
He hesitated, picked up his hat, and went out. His mind had run
away from him. Try as he might, he had not been able to fix it on
the work before him. He felt upset, disorganized, restless, and
immeasurably irritated that he should have lost control of his
impulse at the very moment when he had been confident of a new
birth of inspiration.
He wandered restlessly through ways which he had gone with
Inga, ending up for luncheon at the little restaurant with the
oyster-bar, where he had sketched with such avidity. Only, nothing
interested him. The curious types of pedler and hybrid politician,
the melancholy of the old régime, and the audacity of the new
generation, which he had seen and studied with avid eye and
awakened imagination, to-day bored him immeasurably. He saw neither
color, character nor life. They were dirty, cheap, and commonplace.
The waiter, a young student from the University of Moscow, a year
over, with whom Inga and he had had long interested conversations,
came up eagerly, only to be greeted with glum monosyllables.
To some men, Inga’s evasion would have aroused eager senses of
pursuit and possession. Not so, Dangerfield. All his instincts
rebelled at this sudden disquieting and disorganizing intrusion
across the slow ascent toward reclamation which had lain so
clearly before him. Whatever her reason for her abrupt flight,
he resented the loss of the morning’s work, the interruption of
the happy impulse which had reordered the universe for him. He
was angry not simply at the incident and the memories of past
discouragement it awoke, but for what lay ahead--the fear of
the future, the wonder whether he had not reached that period
in his relations with Inga when his equanimity and the precious
poise of an artist were to be constantly upset by the necessity
of following vagrant moods. For he realized now how necessary the
girl had become to him, to his restless mind that took fright at
a moment’s solitude, to his awakening ambition, ready at a moment
to sink back in discouragement, and to something deeper than mind
or temperament--to the spark in him that still clung to his youth
through the glorious youth in her.
“Why were women sent into the world, anyway?” he thought savagely,
spearing a loaf of bread as though he were demolishing the whole
sex. “Why have men been given a hidden spring of sentiment that
makes a woman’s sympathy a necessity? And why must woman always
come into man’s life to divert him from his object?”
What most irritated him was that he had thought Inga of different
mold, and now she had suddenly been revealed to him as profoundly
disquieting as her frailest sister. This feeling of resentment
increased as the lack of her presence in his day made itself
felt. He resented that she should have fastened him to herself.
He resented that she should have shown a feminine capriciousness,
and, most of all, he resented the fact that he should feel such
resentment.
He was in this gloomy, destructive state of antagonism, amounting
almost to revulsion against Inga, when he looked up and saw her
entering the restaurant. She perceived him instantly, stopped, and
made as though to withdraw. The movement roused a fury in him. His
face grew stern and his glance remained coldly fixed.
“If she thinks I am going after, she’s mistaken,” he thought
bitterly.
Perceiving that he had seen her, she checked her movement of flight
and presently came over to his table, nodded, and sat down. He saw
the furrowed pain on her face and the torment in her eyes, and
divined the day of suffering through which she had passed. A sudden
lightening of the spirit flashed through him, scattering the bitter
clouds of dejection. He felt an uncontrollable gaiety, a leaping of
the pulses, a need of laughter, of singing out loud, of music, and
of sunlight. All his doubts vanished in a pervading sense of peace
and serenity. For he knew that she loved him.
Yet they did not speak a word of what lay nearest to their
hearts. Gregory, the young student, served them, and tarried to
discuss political developments in Russia. Dangerfield, in fine
feather, disputed eloquently, opposing his Tolstoyan theories of
non-resistance. The transition from moroseness to ecstatic gaiety
was so swift that he felt an impulse to work.
“What a pity I haven’t a sketching pad!” he said ruefully.
Gregory hastened to supply him paper and pencil. He laughed
and began a series of rapid sketches of the oyster-openers;
Mother Trekanova at the counter; a silhouette of a young Jewish
girl in tinsel finery with an old rabbi watching in critical
disapprobation. Inga, her hands clasped in front of her, continued
to stare at the table-cloth, scarcely raising her glance.
Dangerfield completed a dozen sketches and sprang up lightly and
satisfied, his mind busy with projects for paintings. Everything
attracted him; the whole world was rich with points of interest--a
black-haired woman leaning out of the window drying her hair, two
young mothers with babies at their shoulders chatting before a
kosher shop, a public school pouring out its color-flecked stream
of alien races--all these notes of humanity seemed to him vibrant
with the teeming will to live, to enjoy, and to drink in sensations
to the fullest. He began to talk in long, loquacious periods, as he
seldom talked in his sober moods--of the things that lay about him
to paint, of the new quarters which they should explore, planning
what they would do in the spring and the summer months, eager to
be off. For, of course, he took it for granted that her opposition
had ended. His enthusiasm was so obvious that she could not fail
to comprehend the cause. Several times she glanced at his radiant
face, wistfully and seriously, then looked away over the house tops
or deep into the city crowds. When they came to the Arcade, she
stopped him, and looked him full in the face.
“Mr. Dan, you don’t understand.”
His face clouded abruptly.
“Understand? What do you mean by that? And why--” he glanced
impatiently at the tenanted Arcade--“why say this to me here?”
“Go up, I’ll come in an hour. I want to think,” she said gently.
“Please don’t, don’t look at me like that.”
“Very well,” he said curtly, “You’ll be up in an hour?”
She nodded and stood while he went away, angry and in his blackest
mood.