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 assurances 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 passion, 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
gratitude 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 ass. 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 masses. 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
damnatory waving-away of the offensive drawing he sauntered off to put
his stuff in his locker.
Ewing dined alone that night. He was in no mood for Teevan.
Back in his place next day, still incredulous of defeat so swift, he
waited for the master. He watched him going the rounds of the other
students, the light playing on the purple velvet of the garment that
gave him his title. His beard was a rich growth, his mustaches curled
upward at the ends, his large, heavy eyelids drooped in a perpetual
_ennui_. His usual criticism was a weary "Rub it out!"
When at last he stood beside Ewing's work he gave an effect of
collapsing, as if his whole being cried out: "This is too much!" He took
the drawing from the board and stuck it to the wall with two thumb
tacks. Then, picking up a bit of charcoal, he wrote across it, "A
perfect example of how not to do it."
He did not return to Ewing, but, after examining a few other drawings,
he turned to leave the room. As he passed, Ewing reached across two
neighbors--who protested--and caught the velvet jacket.
"Perhaps you can give me an idea," he said. The other looked at him as
if he had not seen him before.
"Use intelligence! Good God--use intelligence!" he almost wailed, and
made his escape.
Ewing mechanically placed a fresh sheet before him and began again, but
he rubbed out as fast as he drew. The next morning he found the paper
foul from many erasures, and started afresh. He could see now that his
first drawing, posted in irredeemable ignominy, was not all that it
should be. It lacked the freedom of work he had done in his solitude. He
tried to conjure back that old free feeling, but the days passed and it
drew farther away. Some of the students changed places and began on
other casts. The better men went every other week into the life class.
But Ewing stayed desperately by his crouching woman. He studied her
until he loved and loathed her. The master came and went. Sometimes he
ignored Ewing. When he did notice him it was always with a fresh blow on
the sunk heart of the boy. Once he sat in his place and ran some of his
own brusque, effective lines along the figure, the lines that every
other youth in the room punctiliously imitated. They mingled with
Ewing's strokes as a driving rain mingles with a bed of flowers.
"If you'd only give up your damned little way," he complained.
"I wish you'd explain a bit," pleaded the boy.
"Old Velvet" turned to the spectacled young man. "Give him your study.
There, do it like that."
Then came the beginning of the end. He lost himself in a crawling
blindness of imitation. The old power that had made him draw without
knowing how he did it gathered its splendid garments and withdrew as
mysteriously as it had once come to possess him. He drew, but he would
no longer have recognized what he did as the work of his own hand. He
thought of Griggs, who had said, "Style?--I'd know a scrap of your stuff
if I found it in an ash barrel in Timbuctoo!"
The thought of those friendly men knowing his degradation was another
stone on the grave of his self-esteem. It was this that made him wait
when the others had gone one night, to take down that first crucified
drawing from the wall where it had remained, torn and hanging by one
tack.
"Will you give it to me?" said a voice, and, as he did not care one way
or the other, the spectacled young man put it in his portfolio.
Afterwards Ewing thought of asking him why he wanted it, but he did not
come back again. He had been advanced to the life class.
The master did not speak to Ewing again. He made, at intervals as he
passed, the pantomime of rubbing out. And Ewing obeyed, beginning each
time the task that grew day by day more hatefully useless. In the
beginning he had felt that if he could get that plaster woman off by
himself he could draw her. The long habit of solitude had left him
confounded by the crowd. There had been something almost shameful to him
about drawing publicly, and he had the impulse to curl an arm about his
sketch to hide it a little as he worked. He felt sick with the hot, dry
air and the breathing of the stallful of men. When the door was opened
the odor of turpentine came from the room where they were painting. It
had for him a familiar, happy smell.
"I wish I could go in there," he said once to a fat youth beside him.
"That's what the dubs always say," was the reply. "It's so much easier
to paint."
He spent a day going around, looking at the better students' work,
asking them how they had learned to draw as "Old Velvet" wanted them to.
They had a great many things to say that sounded technical, but he heard
nothing that opened a way to him.
He hated the school; he hated the street that led to it, with a quiet
ground swell of hatred. But, deepest of all, he hated his own despair.
He felt that his shattered courage would never heal. He was like a
dishonored soldier whose sword has been publicly broken. He remembered
the fine things he had said to Teevan about his ambition, and the blush
that suffused him ached. At the thought of Mrs. Laithe bringing him from
his wild beast's hole, as if he had been worth her splendid faith, his
heart withered within him. At intervals he started as if he suddenly
awoke, saying to himself, "And to think it could have ended like this!"
At the end of a fortnight he sat for three days without doing anything,
a stick of charcoal in his hand. He did not come again, and his fat
neighbor used up his charcoal paper, after putting fine mustaches on all
his crouching Venuses.
He had shunned his acquaintances during this time of travail. But twice
had he seen Teevan since his first day at the League. He had tried to be
cheerful at those meetings, still hoping the lines would come right, but
he felt each time that Teevan saw straight to his wretched heart of
doubt; and he would not risk another meeting until he could report an
overwhelming victory--or defeat, if it must be so.
That he did not for a day forget his good friend, there was ample
testimony; though this was of a nature that Teevan must remain oblivious
to. On the night of the day that saw his first buffeting he walked the
streets until late, rejoicing mournfully that there were still so many
people who did not know his shame. Half unwittingly he wandered into
Ninth Street, and stood a long time opposite Teevan's house, finding a
solace in his friend's possible nearness. Then, as the days of defeat
followed with so deadly a sequence, this walk and vigil became his
nightly habit. Sometimes the house was darkened. Then he felt free to
gaze at it. Sometimes there were lights, and his survey was brief and
furtive. Until the very last there was always a bit of hope to spice the
melancholy of this adventure: to-morrow the thing might be done as they
all did it, the master be moved from blame to praise, and himself be
free to enter this street bravely, noisily, careless of recognition, to
tell how the big way had been opened. He had pictured the pleasure that
would light Teevan's face as he heard this tale of conquest.