A REVOLT
He turned furiously to his work, but, as the summer came on, he realized
that he was working with a desperation entirely heartless. He was not
only sure, now, that he had taken a wrong road, but that nameless
distress of his lady had left his desire benumbed. A fountain had gone
dry in him.
At the beginning of the warm days he went into the country on sketching
trips with Sydenham. To vales and little rivers north of the city, to
flat, green stretches on Long Island, to the Jersey hills, they had gone
with sketch traps wherever trolley or steam car could find Nature
quickly for them.
Ewing had looked forward to this. He had felt hampered in the studio,
where he must pass whole days in futile messing with colors, in rash
trials of this or that trick of tint, like an idling schoolboy playing
with slate and pencil. Once in the open, he had felt, there would
quickly show forth those gifts which Teevan was certain he possessed.
But day by day these excursions with the old painter had brought him to
believe that he had lost his way. That trick of color was not to be
learned, it was clear, by rough-and-ready advances. Teevan, who was ever
watchful of him, who betrayed, indeed, a strange little jealousy of any
other influence than his own, scanned his first studies eagerly, and
turned an inscrutable face on his young friend. He did not praise
loosely; he did not condemn outright. And he talked not too specifically
of the canvases before him. He showed little consciousness of a change
in the demeanor of his disciple, though Ewing's eye rested on him with a
long, unaccountable regard. Perhaps the boy was turning a little sullen.
This amused him. Meanwhile, the youth stood aghast before the dreadful
thing he saw in his heart. Hatred of a benefactor! All the good in him
struggled against it; all his gratitude pleaded with him to be fair to
the friend he had revered so long. Teevan talked more of Corot or
Constable, Diaz or Millet than he talked of Ewing; and the young man
came at last to the amazing conclusion not only that he was on a wrong
road, but that Teevan knew it--that the little man must long have known
it. This put him again in that rage of impotence that had seized him in
those last days at the League. But he bore it longer now. He felt there
was something final about this.
There were long days in the open to think on it, weigh it, and wring the
meaning from it. Sydenham placidly criticised his work; but Sydenham
could not feel his tragedy of defeat. A man who, at seventy, suffered
his own despairs with the poignant ecstasy of youth, could not take a
boy's failings seriously. Ewing now saw, moreover--for he was beginning
to use another pair of eyes than Teevan's--that Sydenham himself was a
hopeless mannerist, a color-mad voluptuary, painting always
subjectively, refusing all but the merest hints from his subject.
His last day of confessed futility, his last hour of inner rebellion,
came early in June. He carried his sketch trap out that day, but did not
unpack it. He lay, instead, pondering, resolving, raging, while
Sydenham, a little distance off, delicately corrected the errors of
Nature in a vista of meadow. Ewing chewed the juicy ends of long-stemmed
grasses and made phrases of disparagement for this sketch of Sydenham's,
picturing himself with the courage to utter them. He told himself
frankly what he thought of the old man's work--his "brush doddering," he
nerved himself to call it.
Immensely refreshed by this exercise in brutality, he rolled over on his
grassy bed to follow the shade of the oak under which he lay, and
dramatized a meeting with Teevan, in which the little man strangely
listened more than he spoke. He uttered his mind again concerning the
work of Sydenham, the master Teevan had prescribed, asserting that
unsuspecting toiler to be hopelessly "locoed" in the matter of color. He
saw Teevan's fine brows go elegantly up at this term, and he explained
it to him with a humble sort of boldness.
From this he warmed to sheer audacity, disclosing further to his
imagined hearer that the time had come for him to go his own way--still
grateful for advice, still yearning for that friendly intimacy, but
determined to be done with dreams. He saw Teevan applauding this mild
declaration of revolt, with his fine, dark little smile, and a courteous
inclination of the head, and he thereupon amplified it. He must go back
to himself and stay there stubbornly, wheresoever that self led him.
Millet might have a restricted sense of color, Corot might have had his
faults, and Rousseau have been less than Teevan could have wished him;
but these were dead men. And Ewing was alive, determined to do those
things that permitted him to feel the little power he might have. He was
through with efforts that brought him nothing but a sense of the folly
of all effort. And it was to this conviction, he made it plain, that his
amazed but still respectful listener had led him. He worked himself into
a glow of defiant self-assertion, feeling his own respect, and Teevan's
as well, mounting with his heat.
When the light faded he strolled over to look at Sydenham's sketch, bent
on testing his self-inspired temerity.
"I wonder if you've gotten that sky?" he began judicially, as the old
man invited his comment. Sydenham looked up in some surprise, but
Ewing's eyes were still on the sketch.
"Too gray above, isn't it? I thought the gray was only down near the
horizon. By the way, I wish I'd roughed in that cow for you. A cow isn't
the easiest thing in the world to draw. They look easy, but they're not.
That bit of stone wall isn't bad, and your clover effect is first rate."
He paused. He had meant only to practice speaking his own mind against
the next interview with Teevan. He did not want to hurt Sydenham. The
latter was roping his stool and easel together. He had been a little
amazed at his pupil's outburst, but he looked up with a smile entirely
placid.
"That's the way they all say it. You've caught the trick of art
criticism, my boy, if you've caught nothing else."
Ewing saw that he was laughed at. There was a cool little flash to his
retort.
"I can make that into a real cow for you, if you like, after we get
home."
But the old man only chuckled at him, making him regret that he had ever
so little curbed his criticism. He had an impulse to fight, a craving
to arouse resistance. But he saw that Sydenham was no target for him,
save in a sort of subcaliber practice. He hoped this novel combativeness
would not wither under the first glance of Teevan's sharp little eyes.
It was dusk when they reached the city, and Ewing went to the Monastery
to dine. He had long shunned the place, for the men there talked of
things they had done or were doing, and they had made him, without
meaning to, feel "out of it," as he told himself. For he, if he talked,
could tell only of wonders he meant to do, and, lacking an audience
composed of Teevans, he was shrewd enough to see that these would sound
too wonderful and the future too distantly vague.
He had always been glad, however, of his drawing on the east wall. They
could not believe him wholly lacking after that, nor refuse him
fellowship if he sought it. He avoided the crowd when he entered the
room--the men he knew best were at a long table on the rear veranda just
outside the open windows--and chose a small table opposite his drawing.
He had thought of it often during the afternoon while he harangued
Teevan in imagination. It had occurred to him that this was the only
thing he had really done since coming to New York, and he had been
seized with a longing to look at it again, to prove to his own eyes that
the thing which was really his own--not Corot's nor Millet's nor even
Sydenham's--was not an inconsiderable thing, not a thing he need despair
of building on.
As he ate, his eyes eagerly retraced the lines. After the soup he had to
look down to his plate to know if his fork brought him fish or flesh.
The sketch delighted him. He was surprised that he had been able to do
it. He began to doubt his present mastery of the technique it
displayed, fearing he had wandered too long in the Teevan-prescribed
maze, dawdled too long in the little man's palace of illusions. One
thing he knew: he would not dare mount a table and try another such
drawing before them all. He had done this one as unthinkingly as he
would have saddled a horse or sighted a rifle, indifferent to observers.
It rushed upon him sickeningly that all his association with Teevan had
tended to destroy his belief in himself. The coffee found him
afraid--ragingly afraid.
The voices from the group outside came to him murmurously, and at
intervals he would listen to the careless, bantering talk. One voice
related that its wielder had smoked opium in Cairo. He heard cries of
mock horror, and the drawl of Chalmers--"Cairo--that's where the
'streets' come from." Griggs was presently extolling some ancient and
wonderful sherry. "Great stuff! You take a sip and you don't swallow
it--it just floats off through your being like a golden mist. He only
has about a dozen bottles--out of a lot that was put down for Napoleon
or somebody in 1830." Baldwin's voice floated in: "All right, old man,
but they had to put it down a long way to reach Napoleon in 1830."
There was a laugh at this, and it came to the lone listener as the
care-free echo of a world he had tried for and lost. Lost thus far--but
there was farther to go, other days to live, other wise men to counsel
with. He could have believed it heartily, if it were not for that
thought of Mrs. Laithe, the thought that was always like a beast
devouring his heart. Meantime, if he could only have a breathing spell,
some days of quiet. He wished his own hills were not so far away. He
was sure that a little time back in the cabin studio would give him his
old bearings.
His thought ran to Mrs. Laithe's brother, who had come to town the week
before, bronzed and bearded and violent with enthusiasm for his Western
life. He decided that a talk with Bartell would be tonic to his mood;
the bare mention of familiar names and places would hearten him--of the
Wimmenuche and Bar-7, Old Baldy and Dry Fork. And perhaps he had seen
Ben lately; the two might even have driven down to Pagosa together.
And it would be an excuse for seeing her. For two months he had sought
her only thus, with something he could hold in his mind as an excuse,
for he was abashed by that nameless thing that troubled her, and
troubled, as well, the little man who had meant so much to him--for
Teevan, when the brandy was low, continued to speak of women.
He walked quickly round to the house in Ninth Street, where he asked for
Bartell. But only Mrs. Laithe was at home. This embarrassed him, great
as was his solicitude for her. She had sought his confidence more than
once of late, but he could not tell her of doubts only half defined, of
fears vague to absurdity, of anxieties that might well be baseless. He
thought that now he could have talked, finding her alone, but for once
she seemed rather curiously preoccupied. They sat together in the
library with only a half light, the two windows opened for random
breezes. Suddenly, as her face was toward him, dim though the light was,
he caught the look that had troubled him so hauntingly in the spring. He
knew that look now; it was the look he had seen on his father's face in
the last year of his life--the look of a spirit divesting itself of the
flesh.
"You _are_ ill," he said, trying to speak lightly under his sudden
alarm. "Let me have a better look at you." He turned the light to a full
blaze. Her wonted paleness was warmed to a sinister flush about the eyes
and the upper face, and, though her eyes flashed bravely at him in
denial, the bones were sharp above her hollowed cheeks, and her once
rounded chin had become lean. She shivered as she spoke.
"I'm a little exhausted by the heat; nothing more. Lower the light,
please. I don't care to be studied just now."
"But I know you're not well. You ought to go off some place. Get out to
pasture at once. You've been 'over-packed,' kept too long on the trail."
"You, too? They all say it. It's so easy to say."
"And easy to do."
"It's hard to do, and yet I'm afraid I must. I've felt that I ought to
be here with my charges--you have been one of them." She brightened with
a sudden inspiration. "You need rest yourself. Your face shows it.
You've been depressed a long time, you are worried now. Let us both
rest. My aunt up at Kensington has wanted me there--the aunt my sister
is with. She'd be glad to have you as well. It's a big house and she
likes young people. There! Will you go with me?"
She rose, waiting, electrified, for his answer. Instantly he felt that
he wished this above all things. There he could find himself, fortify
his soul for any number of Teevans--perhaps fortify her own.
"I'll go," he answered heartily. "It will be good for us both."
She fell into her chair with a long "Ah!" then she gave the purring
little laugh, like that of a child made happy. "We shall go for two
blessed weeks and forget this place with its wretched tangles."
"I'm your man!" he said, rising and taking her hand with his old boyish
enthusiasm. "Can we start early?"
She kept her hand in his while she laughed again. "The train goes from
the Grand Central at one. I'll wire Aunt Joyce."
Outside Ewing met Bartell, but he did not talk of the San Juan.
"You must see to your sister," he said. "She looks the way my father
did. You ought to get her out of here. She's going off for two weeks,
but that won't set her right. Go look at her!"
Bartell found his sister where Ewing had left her.
"Well, Nell, how is it now? What did Birley say?"
She stirred impatiently in her chair. "He wouldn't commit himself. He
told me to rest away from here for two weeks and then come back to see a
specialist he'd send me to, a man who knows--such things."
"I just met Ewing--he spoke of how badly you look. I'm worried, Nell.
You're not going to be left here."
"I must tell you something, dear--oh, a ghastly joke, if ever there was
one: You know that one death trap of a tenement I've had so much trouble
with----"
"Where all those consumptives were? Yes."
"They've died there like sheep. I had it inspected--I wanted to have the
owner compelled to build it over or something, but we always found that
the law had been cunningly met with--not the spirit of it, but the
letter. The airshafts and drains were bad enough to kill, but not bad
enough to hurt the owner. Yesterday I determined to find out who the
owner was, to make a personal appeal. I was willing to buy the place
myself."
She stopped in a fit of coughing, a dry, hard, tearing cough that left
her exhausted.
"Well, Sis?"
"I went to the agents--this will make you cry or laugh; I did both--and
I found they were my agents--the house was my house."
"Poor Sis!"
"One of those Dick left--_mine_, you understand. I've been spending the
blood of those people, eating, wearing, amusing myself with it."
"Yes, and going down there to get caught in the same trap. I don't see
anything funny about that."
"Alden Teevan would. I must tell him of it--my own dungeon closing in on
me."
"Nonsense! You're morbid, girl. Tenements have got to be dirty. Trinity
Church itself has a fine bunch of the worst kind."
"I'm not a church, dear. This tenement is coming down. I gave orders
to-day."
"Well, you stay away from it. You're in bad shape, my girl."
"Two weeks at Kensington will put me right."
"Two weeks nothing! See here, if you act up, I'll rope you and hustle
you out to the ranch and close herd you there for about six months."
She smiled weakly at him.
"I shall be all right, dear--but you can help me upstairs now."
"Too tired for a roof garden?"
"I'm afraid so."
"Or a broiled lobster?"
"Not to-night, dear."
He helped her up the stairs, alternately scolding her for her weakness
and protesting that broiled lobsters were all that kept him from
forgetting the existence of Manhattan.