With the first exodus of the summer travelers from the city a
new spirit of work possessed Dangerfield. With the clearing of
the horizon of all that was glittering and superficial, the city
with its great sanity and moving vital currents returned to him.
He put off his departure for the country from month to month,
fascinated by the summer moods of the metropolis, the brilliance
on the Avenues, the extravagance in the lighted air, the teeming
boisterous sweltering hordes on the beaches. He felt himself
possessed with new enthusiasms. It was a new city he discovered,
the city of the outer air, swept together in a friendlier
fraternity by the mutual necessity for crowded pleasure after the
long day.
In these ardent excursions he gathered around him other men,
younger men, ardent disciples who wished to see what he saw, men
interested in his new exposition of the treasures of beauty near at
hand.
He found that success had brought him this--that isolation was no
longer possible. The world paid him its full tribute but claimed
him for its own, absorbing him into the rank and file of its
groping masses, delegating to him his servitude of leadership.
Yet he felt a certain content in fitting into the procession.
The believers who surrounded him, communicated to him a certain
strength which surprised him. Perhaps at bottom they convinced
him of his power, the last and most fleeting sensation of the
true artist. Then, too, he found that in expounding his views and
seeking to open their eyes and inspire them, he taught himself,
translating what at one time had been pure instinct into the
intellectual possession of conscious knowledge.
Tootles was usually of these pilgrimages. The young fellow had
steadied amazingly with the opportunity of entering the privileged
gatherings. He had begun to perceive that beyond all the fine
fervor of inspiration and enthusiasm, is the long hard routine
which alone can bring self-satisfaction in the knowledge that the
building is rising on a firm foundation. He had a quick eye and
a gift of absorbing with almost the imitativeness of a monkey,
conceptions which were still logically beyond him. Yet there was no
doubt of his earnestness. As a sort of announcement to the world
that he had put behind youthful follies he even allowed his face
to be disfigured by a scrubby mustache,--the sort of sacrifice a
young doctor feels called upon to make on assuming the dignity of a
practice.
In the beginning Inga had been of the party--Dangerfield was always
eager to have her with him--but gradually, almost imperceptibly,
she had dropped out, giving as an excuse the need of her own work.
On his return to the Arcade he found her installed in her old
studio. The first afternoon on which he made this discovery he had
gone angrily to her door, so profoundly hurt by her action that for
the first time he was in a mood for reproaches. He found her busy
at her easel, model on the stand. He stopped, hesitated, and said
with enforced restraint:
“I don’t want to interrupt you. When you are through come in,
there’s something I want to see you about.”
“Shall I come now?” she said instantly, observing and perhaps
divining the reason of his agitation.
“No, no,” he said hastily, respecting the mood. “After working
hours, not before.”
He crossed to his own studio, rebelling bitterly at the persistence
of her self-sacrifice. But providentially, the model he had
engaged was already waiting for him, an old toper, scavenger of
small beers and wine drippings from the fragrant hogsheads of West
Franklin Street, who had caught his fancy the day before. He was
placidly asleep in a sort of musty drowsiness and he did not stir
at Dangerfield’s entrance. Something grotesquely humorous in the
gourd-like head, sunk in childish slumber, caught his imagination
immediately. He tiptoed over to his easel, brought out a canvas and
stealthily prepared for a rapid sketch. At the noise of a falling
tube the blissful Falstaff slowly opened one eye and prepared to
awake.
“Don’t move!” said Dangerfield hastily.
“Eh? What you mean?”
“Go to sleep immediately,” said Dangerfield sternly, too interested
to perceive the humor of the situation.
“Sleep? That all you want?” said the amateur without astonishment.
“Go to sleep at once,--just as you are,” said Dangerfield, with the
voice of a drill master.
His sitter, nothing loth, nodded drowsily, the heavy lids slowly
settled against the bloated cheek, and in a moment a kettle-like
breathing announced that he had obeyed to the letter.
When, an hour later, Inga came in, Dangerfield sent her a warning
sign. She tiptoed over and took her seat by his side, waiting
quietly until another half hour had brought the end of the
afternoon’s painting.
The model gone, Dangerfield, all else forgotten, stood eagerly
contemplating the little masterpiece which a fortunate hazard had
thrown in his way.
“What luck!” he said joyfully, his knuckles pressed against his
teeth in that intimate gesture of excitement which she had come
to know so well. “The beggar was fast asleep dreaming of running
spigots and seas of beer when I came in. What luck! I never would
have gotten this in the world.”
“It is you at your best,” she said, nodding with a pleased smile.
“By the way, what was it you wanted to see me about?”
He looked at her, suddenly remembering, surprised at how quickly
his irritation had passed.
“Oh, yes, and it’s very serious, too,” he said hastily, and then in
order to reassemble all the resentment he had felt he took a turn
or two about the room, drew off his blouse and flung it viciously
across the room. “You know, Inga, I’m very angry with you.”
“Why?” she said with just the trace of a smile.
“What the deuce do you mean by going back to your studio? I don’t
like it. This is as much yours as it is mine. If you are going to
work, work here with me. You always used to.”
“Yes, I used to, but that was different.”
“Why?”
“I can tell you now,” she said. “When I worked here, it was to help
you, quiet you, because you needed to have me near you, always near
you,--all the time.”
“And now you’ve made up your mind you’d be in my way,” he said
irritably; “that’s it, that’s what you mean, isn’t it?”
“No,” she said, shaking her head, “I wasn’t thinking of you; I was
thinking of myself.”
He believed this an evasion, and the way his eyebrows came together
in the old bear-like stare plainly showed it.
“Inga, is that the truth?”
“Yes, it is,” she said in her low musical voice. “What we do is so
different. If I should work here with you I should be overpowered
by you. I must get by myself, do the little things I can do. Don’t
you understand?”
“Is that the effect I have on you now?” he said slowly.
“If I tried to work here with you I should only sit and watch what
you are doing, and I want to work--I must work, for myself!”
“I misunderstood you then,” he said, his voice returning to
gentleness. “Thought you were thinking of me and I can’t bear to
feel that you are always making the sacrifice.”
“No, no, Mr. Dan,” she said hastily, fingers clutching the covering
of the table against which she stood, “I must think of myself, too,
don’t you see?”
“Yes, yes, of course, dear,” he said hastily. He looked at her,
hesitated and once more they retreated before the issue which lay
implacably ahead.
* * * * *
Afterward he wondered if she had told him all the truth, if his own
needs had not been in question as well as her own, for he needed
the privacy of his own room as every artist beyond the intimacy of
friendship and love must retain a certain sanctuary of isolation
where he can close out the distracting, intruding world and reign
as absolute lord over a dominion where his every mood is a law.
His sense of loyalty to her never wavered. The world in which he
moved was a world of workers. The rest he persistently shut away,
resolutely declining all invitations to wander back along pleasant
paths that opened to him at every point. Where she could not go,
or rather, where she would not wish to follow him he refused
to enter. In fact he did not even refer to the multiplicity of
invitations which he continuously declined. He would have been
very much surprised indeed had he suspected how intuitively she
had divined his sacrifice. A great gentleness encompassed them,
a deference toward each other that had about it the tenderness of
their happiest days, but it was the deference of strangers towards
each other. He never put a question to her, he never asked her for
an account of her days, he made no reference to the man who had
written to her in his need nor sought to learn what her decision
had been. Once when she started to open the subject he stopped her,
saying gently:
“You don’t need to give me any explanations, Inga. You must feel
this. I don’t want you to change your life in the slightest on
account of me. For the rest, I have absolute faith in you.”
But from day to day he watched her--wondering.
* * * * *
Meanwhile in the ordinary routine of the Arcade an event had
happened which threw the inhabitants of the sixth floor into a
flurry of astonishment.
Without the slightest warning, out of a clear sky, King O’Leary’s
wife turned up. She was a frail, rather tired, rather bored little
woman who vouchsafed not the slightest explanation but came back
weak and discouraged to be taken care of. Which was exactly the
thing King O’Leary did, with a shrug of his shoulders, despite the
protestations of all his friends.
“I’m down and out, King,” she said, by way of excuse. “You’re the
only real man I know. I haven’t no right, but--if you don’t take
care of me, it’s all over.”
He looked at her and the illusion which had lived in his heart
through all the years suddenly snapped. She meant nothing to him
now, could mean nothing, but she had been a part of his youth.
“Well, I guess you’re still Mrs. O’Leary,” he said slowly, “and
if there’s no one else to see you’ve got a roof over your head, I
guess it’s up to me. That’s law and that’s religion.”
She broke down and wept at this, which annoyed him more than her
return. But in a day she recovered her spirits and seemed to be
thoroughly content to be lounging about the studios, smoking
endless cigarettes, slumbering through the day time and waking to
laughter and boisterousness at night. He installed her in the room
that had been Myrtle Popper’s, and probably gave her generously of
his savings for she appeared in several new dresses of a rather
Oriental suggestion.
During these weeks a cloud hung over the face of King O’Leary and
all his usual good humor fled. He was irritable, resented the
slightest expression of friendliness of his old associates to such
an extent that they hardly dared note his coming and going. For
this the cause was evident. The attitude of his wife had become
that of a petty tyrant. Knowing the extent of his pride and the
depth of his chivalry, she seemed to take a malicious pleasure in
tormenting him before others, snapping him up at the slightest
opportunity, lecturing him, seizing every chance to turn him into
ridicule with such persistent vindictiveness that his friends
wondered how he managed to hold himself in.
Then one day, as suddenly as she had come, she disappeared, taking
with her all of her belongings and in addition one or two other
small objects which had pleased her fancy, leaving behind her
the following note scrawled on a stray leaf of paper, pinned to
O’Leary’s pillow: