"Tst," said the beggar. "Move on. Here's a plain-clothes man."
The shepherd moved on as if he had been pricked by an awl; since it was
not among the police that he felt called upon to separate the black
sheep from the white.
The plain-clothes man approached loitering. He might have been a citizen
in good standing and with nothing better to do than hobnob with whatever
persons interested him upon his idle saunterings.
"How many pairs of laces have you sold this morning?" he asked.
"Nary a pair, charitable sir," returned the beggar.
"Speaking of shoe-laces," said the plain-clothes man, "what is your
opinion of head-gear?"
"Bullish," said the beggar. "Straw hats will be worn next winter."
The eyes of both men sparkled with a curious exhilaration. The
plain-clothes man drew a deep and sudden breath, and appeared to shiver.
So a soldier may breathe at the command to charge; so a thoroughbred
shivers when the barrier is about to fall.
"There will be nice pickings," said the beggar; "there will be enough
geese to feed ten thousand."
The plain-clothes man dropped a penny into the tin cup. "By the way,"
he asked professionally, "where can I lay hands on Red Monday?"
The beggar shook his strong head curtly. "Hands off," he said.
"When did _he_ join the church?"
"Last night, with tears and confession. A strong man Red, now that he
has seen the light."
The plain-clothes man laughed and passed on, still loitering.
The "Danse Macabre" had come to a timely end, if that which is without
tempo may be said to have any relation with time, and the trio of
Chopin's "Funeral March" was already in uneven progress. The legless man
sat on the bare pavement, his back against the handsome area railing of
No. 1 Fifth Avenue, and steadily revolved the mechanism of the organ
with his hairy, powerful hand.
Passers were now more frequent. Some looked at him and continued to look
after they had passed, others turned their eyes steadfastly away. Some
pitied him because he was a cripple; others, upon suddenly discovering
that he had no legs, were shocked with a sudden indecent hatred of him.
A lassie of the Salvation Army invited him to rise up and follow Christ;
he retorted by urging her to lie down and take a rest. Then, as if
premonition had laid strong hands upon him and twisted him about, he
turned, and looked upward into the fresh, rosy face of Barbara Ferris.
Their eyes met. Always the child of impulse, and careless of appearance
and opinion, she felt her thoughts, none too cheerful or optimistic that
morning during her long walk down the avenue, drawn by the expression
upon the legless man's face to a sudden focus of triumph and solution.
She struck the palm of one small workman-like hand with the back of the
other, and exclaimed: "By George!"
The face that was upturned to hers was no longer the insolent, heavy
face of success which we have attempted to describe, but one in which
the sudden leaping into evidence of a soul dismissed facts of color,
contour, and line as matters of no importance. If there was wickedness
in his glance, there were also awe and wonder. He had a tortured look,
the look of a man who has fallen from unknowable heights--from an
Elysium which he regrets and desires with all a strong man's strength,
but to which the way back is irrevocably barred by the degradation and
the sin of the descent--and who, all but overwhelmed by the knowledge
that he can never return whence he came, yet bears his eternal loss with
an iron courage that has about it a kind of splendor.
Barbara Ferris felt that she was looking upon Satan in that moment when
he first realized that his fall from heaven was for eternity and that,
against every torturing passion of conviction, he must turn his talents
and his fearful courage to the needs of hell.
In that first moment of their meeting, she realized nothing about the
man but the terribly moving expression of his face. Nothing else
mattered. If her plastic training was equal to catching and fixing that
expression in clay or marble, she would be made according to the mould
of her ambition. The flame of art burned white and clear in the inmost
shrine of her being. She saw before her, and beneath her, not a human
being, but an inspiration. And since inspiration is a thing swift,
electric, and trebly enticing from the fact that it presents itself
shorn of all those difficulties which afterward, during execution, so
terribly appear and multiply, her heart beat already with the exquisite
bliss of an immortal achievement. In her vocabulary at that instant it
would have been impossible to discover under B the aggressive But, or
under I the faltering If. She was inspired. It was enough.
Then she, in whose mind strong wings had suddenly sprouted, perceived
that the person directly responsible had not even a pair of legs, and
felt throughout her whole being a cold gushing of horror and revolt.
This was not lost upon Blizzard. It was an ordinary enough human
sensation, whose reflections had often enough given the iron that was in
his soul another twist and refreshed in him vengefulness and hatred. Yet
on the present occasion the knowledge that he was physically loathed
roused in the man a feeling rather of that despair which may be
experienced by the drowning at that precise moment when the straw so
eagerly clutched has proved itself a straw, and he winced as beneath a
shocking blow between the eyes.
On discovering that the creature was maimed it had been Barbara's first
impulse to pass swiftly on. But another glance at the face which had
arrested her held her. She took some coins from her purse and dropped
them into the tin cup which the beggar held out to her. And he looked
upward into her face.
"Did you ever pose for any one?" she asked.
"Yes, miss."
"I should like to make a bust of you. I'll see that it pays you better
than--better than earning a living this way."
For the first time Blizzard smiled. "Do you want me to come now?" he
asked.
"Yes," she said. "My studio is in No. 17 McBurney Place." Here she
stopped upon a somewhat embarrassing thought. But the legless man read
what was in her mind.
"Two flights up?" he queried. "Three? I can climb. Don't trouble about
that."
"You will come as soon as you can?"
"I have to meet a man here in half an hour. Then I'll come."
"Please," she said, "ask for Miss Ferris."
[Illustration: She took some coins from her purse and dropped them into
the tin cup]
At the name a tremor went through the legless man from head to stump. He
blanched, and for the thousandth part of a second all that was devil in
him rushed with smouldering lights to his eyes. But of this Barbara
perceived nothing; her repugnance mastered, she had already brightly
smiled, nodded, and was walking swiftly away, her head high, spring air
in her lungs and inspiration in her heart.
The beggar's eyes playing upon her, she passed through the peaceful warm
sunshine of the quiet old square, and vanished at last into the still
brighter sunshine and still older quiet of McBurney Place.
To work with her own hands, at least until she had made something
beautiful, seemed to her a better aim than any other which the world
offers. She had at first been the victim of private lessons, amusedly
approved by her father, and only intermittently attended by herself,
since it is not in a day that a fashionable idler is turned into a
steadily toiling aspirant for eternal honors. Just so long as she
remained an amateur and occasional potterer in her father's house she
was applauded by him and assumed by the world in general to be a very
talented young lady; but when, her artistic impulses--if not her
technique--having strengthened amazingly, she insisted upon the steadier
routine of an art school, she met with an opposition as narrow, it
seemed to her, as it was firm. Her own will in the matter, however,
proved the stronger. And having passed with excellent rapidity through
those grades of the school in which the student is taught to make cubes
and spheres, she modelled from the antique, and at last, upon a day
almost sacred in her memory, was promoted to the life class.
And here, one morning, Dr. Ferris, interested in spite of himself in
her swift progress, found her, with a number of other young ladies and
gentlemen, earnestly at work making, from different angles of vision,
greenish clay statuettes of a handsome young Italian laborer who had
upon his person no clothes whatever. That fastidious surgeon, to whom
naked bodies, and indeed naked hearts, could have been nothing new, was
shocked almost out of his wits. He had left only the good sense and the
good manners not to make a scene. He beat instead a quiet, if
substantial, retreat, and put off the hour of reckoning. His daughter
was soiled in his eyes, and when she explained to him that a naked man
was not a naked man to her, but a "stunning" assemblage of planes,
angles, curves, lights, and shadows, he could not understand. And they
quarrelled as furiously as it is possible for well-bred persons to
quarrel. He commanded. She denied his right to command. He threatened.
She denied his right first to create a life, and then to spoil it. He
advanced the duty of children to parents, and she the duty of parents to
children. Finally Barbara, thoroughly incensed at having her mind and
her ambition held so cheap, flung out with: "Have you _never_ made a
mistake of judgment?" And was astounded to see her father wither, you
may say, and all in an instant show the first tremors she had ever seen
in him of age and a life of immense strain and responsibility. From that
moment the activity of his opposition waned. She knew that her will had
conquered, and the knowledge distressed her so that she burst
into tears.
"My dear," said her father, "I once made a very terrible mistake of
judgment. There isn't a day of my life altogether free from remorse and
regret. I have given you money and position. It isn't enough, it seems.
My dear, take the benefit of the doubt into the bargain. If I am making
another terrible mistake, you must bear at least a portion of the
responsibility."
It is curious, or perhaps only natural, that Barbara was at the moment
more interested to know what her father's great mistake of judgment had
been than in the fact that her ambition had won his tolerance and
consent, if not his approval and support. If she had asked him then and
there, for he was still greatly moved, he might have told her, but
reticence caught the question by the wings, and the moment passed.
And they resumed together their life of punctilious thoughtfulness and
good manners. Dr. Ferris continued to cut up famous bodies for famous
fees, while Barbara continued to do what she could to reproduce the
bodies of more humble persons, for no reward greater than the voice of
her teacher with his variously intonated; "Go to eet, Mees Barbara!
go to eet."