The Complete Works of Stephen Crane (109 page)

“I’ll get my check from the Gamin on Saturday,” said Grief. “They bought that string of comics.”

“Well, then, we’ll arrange the present funds to last until Saturday noon,” said Wrinkles. “That gives us quite a lot. We can have a
table d’hôte
on Friday night.”

However, the cashier of the Gamin office looked under his respectable brass wiring and said: “Very sorry, Mr. — er — Warwickson, but our pay-day is Monday. Come around any time after ten.”

“Oh, it doesn’t matter,” said Grief.

When he plunged into the den his visage flamed with rage. “Don’t get my check until Monday morning, any time after ten!” he yelled, and flung a portfolio of mottled green into the danger zone of the casts.

“Thunder!” said Pennoyer, sinking at once into a profound despair

“Monday morning, any time after ten,” murmured Wrinkles, in astonishment and sorrow.

While Grief marched to and fro threatening the furniture, Pennoyer and Wrinkles allowed their under jaws to fall, and remained as men smitten between the eyes by the god of calamity.

“Singular thing!” muttered Pennoyer at last. “You get so frightfully hungry as soon as you learn that there are no more meals coming.”

“Oh, well — —” said Wrinkles. He took up his guitar.

Oh, some folks say dat a niggah won’ steal,
‘Way down yondeh in d’ cohn’-fiel’;
But Ah caught two in my cohn’-fiel’,
Way down yondeh in d’ cohn’-fiel’.

“Oh, let up!” said Grief, as if unwilling to be moved from his despair.

“Oh, let up!” said Pennoyer, as if he disliked the voice and the ballad.

In his studio, Hawker sat braced nervously forward on a little stool before his tall Dutch easel. Three sketches lay on the floor near him, and he glared at them constantly while painting at the large canvas on the easel.

He seemed engaged in some kind of a duel. His hair dishevelled, his eyes gleaming, he was in a deadly scuffle. In the sketches was the landscape of heavy blue, as if seen through powder-smoke, and all the skies burned red. There was in these notes a sinister quality of hopelessness, eloquent of a defeat, as if the scene represented the last hour on a field of disastrous battle. Hawker seemed attacking with this picture something fair and beautiful of his own life, a possession of his mind, and he did it fiercely, mercilessly, formidably. His arm moved with the energy of a strange wrath. He might have been thrusting with a sword.

There was a knock at the door. “Come in.” Pennoyer entered sheepishly. “Well?” cried Hawker, with an echo of savagery in his voice. He turned from the canvas precisely as one might emerge from a fight. “Oh!” he said, perceiving Pennoyer. The glow in his eyes slowly changed. “What is it, Penny?”

“Billie,” said Pennoyer, “Grief was to get his check to-day, but they put him off until Monday, and so, you know — er — well — —”

“Oh!” said Hawker again.

When Pennoyer had gone Hawker sat motionless before his work. He stared at the canvas in a meditation so profound that it was probably unconscious of itself.

The light from above his head slanted more and more toward the east.

Once he arose and lighted a pipe. He returned to the easel and stood staring with his hands in his pockets. He moved like one in a sleep. Suddenly the gleam shot into his eyes again. He dropped to the stool and grabbed a brush. At the end of a certain long, tumultuous period he clinched his pipe more firmly in his teeth and puffed strongly. The thought might have occurred to him that it was not alight, for he looked at it with a vague, questioning glance. There came another knock at the door. “Go to the devil!” he shouted, without turning his head.

Hollanden crossed the corridor then to the den.

“Hi, there, Hollie! Hello, boy! Just the fellow we want to see. Come in — sit down — hit a pipe. Say, who was the girl Billie Hawker went mad over this summer?”

“Blazes!” said Hollanden, recovering slowly from this onslaught. “Who — what — how did you Indians find it out?”

“Oh, we tumbled!” they cried in delight, “we tumbled.”

“There!” said Hollanden, reproaching himself. “And I thought you were such a lot of blockheads.”

“Oh, we tumbled!” they cried again in their ecstasy. “But who is she? That’s the point.”

“Well, she was a girl.”

“Yes, go on.”

“A New York girl.”

“Yes.”

“A perfectly stunning New York girl.”

“Yes. Go ahead.”

“A perfectly stunning New York girl of a very wealthy and rather old-fashioned family.”

“Well, I’ll be shot! You don’t mean it! She is practically seated on top of the Matterhorn. Poor old Billie!”

“Not at all,” said Hollanden composedly.

It was a common habit of Purple Sanderson to call attention at night to the resemblance of the den to some little ward in a hospital. Upon this night, when Sanderson and Grief were buried in slumber, Pennoyer moved restlessly. “Wrink!” he called softly into the darkness in the direction of the divan which was secretly a coal-box.

“What?” said Wrinkles in a surly voice. His mind had evidently been caught at the threshold of sleep.

“Do you think Florinda cares much for Billie Hawker?”

Wrinkles fretted through some oaths. “How in thunder do I know?” The divan creaked as he turned his face to the wall.

“Well — —” muttered Pennoyer.

The harmony of summer sunlight on leaf and blade of green was not known to the two windows, which looked forth at an obviously endless building of brownstone about which there was the poetry of a prison. Inside, great folds of lace swept down in orderly cascades, as water trained to fall mathematically. The colossal chandelier, gleaming like a Siamese headdress, caught the subtle flashes from unknown places.

Hawker heard a step and the soft swishing of a woman’s dress. He turned toward the door swiftly, with a certain dramatic impulsiveness. But when she entered the room he said, “How delighted I am to see you again!”

She had said, “Why, Mr. Hawker, it was so charming in you to come!”

It did not appear that Hawker’s tongue could wag to his purpose. The girl seemed in her mind to be frantically shuffling her pack of social receipts and finding none of them made to meet this situation. Finally, Hawker said that he thought Hearts at War was a very good play.

“Did you?” she said in surprise. “I thought it much like the others.”

“Well, so did I,” he cried hastily—”the same figures moving around in the mud of modern confusion. I really didn’t intend to say that I liked it. Fact is, meeting you rather moved me out of my mental track.”

“Mental track?” she said. “I didn’t know clever people had mental tracks. I thought it was a privilege of the theologians.”

“Who told you I was clever?” he demanded.

“Why,” she said, opening her eyes wider, “nobody.”

Hawker smiled and looked upon her with gratitude. “Of course, nobody. There couldn’t be such an idiot. I am sure you should be astonished to learn that I believed such an imbecile existed. But — —”

“Oh!” she said.

“But I think you might have spoken less bluntly.”

“Well,” she said, after wavering for a time, “you are clever, aren’t you?”

“Certainly,” he answered reassuringly.

“Well, then?” she retorted, with triumph in her tone. And this interrogation was apparently to her the final victorious argument.

At his discomfiture Hawker grinned.

“You haven’t asked news of Stanley,” he said. “Why don’t you ask news of Stanley?”

“Oh! and how was he?”

“The last I saw of him he stood down at the end of the pasture — the pasture, you know — wagging his tail in blissful anticipation of an invitation to come with me, and when it finally dawned upon him that he was not to receive it, he turned and went back toward the house ‘like a man suddenly stricken with age,’ as the story-tellers eloquently say. Poor old dog!”

“And you left him?” she said reproachfully. Then she asked, “Do you remember how he amused you playing with the ants at the falls?”

“No.”

“Why, he did. He pawed at the moss, and you sat there laughing. I remember it distinctly.”

“You remember distinctly? Why, I thought — well, your back was turned, you know. Your gaze was fixed upon something before you, and you were utterly lost to the rest of the world. You could not have known if Stanley pawed the moss and I laughed. So, you see, you are mistaken. As a matter of fact, I utterly deny that Stanley pawed the moss or that I laughed, or that any ants appeared at the falls at all.”

“I have always said that you should have been a Chinese soldier of fortune,” she observed musingly. “Your daring and ingenuity would be prized by the Chinese.”

“There are innumerable tobacco jars in China,” he said, measuring the advantages. “Moreover, there is no perspective. You don’t have to walk two miles to see a friend. No. He is always there near you, so that you can’t move a chair without hitting your distant friend. You — —”

“Did Hollie remain as attentive as ever to the Worcester girls?”

“Yes, of course, as attentive as ever. He dragged me into all manner of tennis games — —”

“Why, I thought you loved to play tennis?”

“Oh, well,” said Hawker, “I did until you left.”

“My sister has gone to the park with the children. I know she will be vexed when she finds that you have called.”

Ultimately Hawker said, “Do you remember our ride behind my father’s oxen?”

“No,” she answered; “I had forgotten it completely. Did we ride behind your father’s oxen?”

After a moment he said: “That remark would be prized by the Chinese. We did. And you most graciously professed to enjoy it, which earned my deep gratitude and admiration. For no one knows better than I,” he added meekly, “that it is no great comfort or pleasure to ride behind my father’s oxen.”

She smiled retrospectively. “Do you remember how the people on the porch hurried to the railing?”