So Horace became a student in the life class. It was a bit of a shock to him at first. He came from a decent family of safe crackers, holdup men, and pickpockets. He didn’t approve of naked women posing on a stand while a lot of people sat round painting them.
To do him credit, Horace seldom looked at the models. He sat behind his easel and looked most of the time at Nancy Reeves. Naturally he did very little painting — but he saw a lot of Nancy Reeves.
She was a nice girl. She soon realized that Horace was almost pure bone from the shoulders up; but she was a great believer in the releasing power of art, and she was convinced that Horace would never have joined the class if there had not been some deep-buried longing in him for expression.
Now Horace, of course, had not the faintest talent for drawing or painting; but, realizing that he could not sit in the class and do nothing, he would just smack an occasional daub of paint on his canvas in a way that loosely conformed to the naked shape of the model before him. Nancy Reeves soon decided that Horace was — if he was going to be anything — an abstract painter. She would come and stand behind him at times and her talk went straight over his head — but Horace enjoyed every moment of it.
After two weeks of this, Horace finally got to the point of asking her if she would go to a dance with him. Surprisingly, she agreed, and she enjoyed it because, whatever else he was not, Horace was quick on his feet at that time and a good dancer.
Now, a week after the dance, Horace and Lancelot had fixed up a little private business which Lancelot had carefully planned for some time. This was to grab the payroll bag of a local building firm when the messenger came out of the bank on a Friday morning.
Lancelot Pike had the whole thing worked out to the dot. Horace would sit in the car outside the bank, and Lancelot would grab the moneybag as the man came to the bottom of the steps and they would be away before anyone could make a move to stop them. It was a bit crude, but it had the merit of simple directness and nine times out of ten — if you read your papers — it works.
It worked this time — except for one thing. The man came down the steps carrying the bag, Lancelot grabbed it and jumped into the car, and Horace started away; but at that moment the messenger shoved his hand through the rear window and fired at Lancelot Pike.
But the gun wasn’t an ordinary one. It was a dye gun full of a vivid purple stain. The charge got Lancelot full on the right side of the face, ran down his neck, and ruined a good suit and a silk shirt.
Well, there it was. They got back to the Head house, where Lancelot had a room, without any trouble from the police. Lancelot nipped inside with the moneybag and Horace drove off to ditch the car.
When Horace returned he found Lancelot hanging over the wash basin trying to get the dye off. But it wouldn’t budge. It was a good rich purple dye that meant to stay until time slowly erased it.
“You won’t be able to go out for a while,” said Horace. “Months, maybe. The police will be looking for a purple-faced man.”
“Lovely,” said Lancelot savagely. “So I’m a hermit. Stuck here for weeks. You know what that’s going to do to a gregarious person like me?”
Horace shook his head. He didn’t know what a gregarious person was.
“We got the money,” he said.
“And can’t spend it. Can’t put it to work to make more. Cooped up like a prisoner in the Tower. Me, Lancelot Pike, who lives for color, movement, people, the big pageant of life, and golden opportunities waiting to be seized.”
“I could go to the chemist and ask him if he’s got anything to take it off,” suggested Horace.
“And have him go to the police once he’s read the story in the evening newspaper!”
“I see what you mean,” said Horace.
So Lancelot — very bad-tempered — was confined to his room. For the first few days he kept Horace busy running to and from the public library getting books for him. Lancelot was a talented, not far from cultured type — things came easily to him and idleness was like a poison in his blood that has to be worked out of his system. But it was people and movement that he missed. Every evening Horace had to recount to him all that he had done during the day and, particularly, how he was getting on with Miss Nancy Reeves at the Art School.
Curiously enough, Horace was getting on very well with her. There was something simple, earthy, and engagingly wooden about Horace which had begun to appeal to Nancy Reeves. It happens that way — like calling to unlike... think of the number of men, ugly as all get-out, with beautiful wives, or of dumb women trailing around with top intellects.
Anyway, Lancelot began to take a great interest in Horace’s romance, and he knew that the time would come when Horace would ask the girl to marry him, and he was offering ten to four that she would not accept.
Horace wouldn’t take the bet, but he was annoyed that Lancelot should think he had such a poor chance.
“What’s wrong with me?” he asked.
“Nothing,” said Lancelot, “except that you really aren’t her type. To her you’re just a big ape she’s trying to educate.”
“You calling me a big ape?”
“Figuratively, not literally.”
“What does that mean?”
“That you don’t have to knock my head off for an imagined insult.”
“I see.”
“I wonder,” said Lancelot. “However, forget it. You ask her and see what answer you’ll get.”
Meanwhile Lancelot helped Horace with his homework from the Art School.
Each week each student did a home study composition on any subject he liked to choose. Lancelot got hold of canvas and paints and went to work for Horace. And then the painting bug hit him — and hit him hard.
He gave up reading books and papers, gave up listening to the radio and watching television, and just painted. It became a mania with him in his enforced seclusion — and it turned out that he was good. He had a kind of rugged, primitive quality, with just a lick of sophistication here and there which really made you stop and look.
Naturally, Nancy Reeves noticed the great improvement in Horace’s work and her spirit expanded with delight at the thought that she was drawing from the mahogany depths of Horace’s mind a flowering of his true personality and soul. There’s nothing a woman likes more than to make a man over. They’re great ones for improving on the original model.
Well, one week when Lancelot’s face had faded to a pale lilac, Horace came back from the Art School saying that the home study that week had to be “The Head of a Friend,” and Lancelot said, “Leave it to me, Horace. Self-portrait by Rubens. Self-portrait by Van Gogh—”
“It’s got to be a friend,” said Horace. “I don’t know no Rubens—”
“Quiet,” said Lancelot, and he began to ferret for a canvas in the pile Horace had bought for him. As he set it up and fixed a mirror so that he could see himself in it, he went on, “How’s tricks with the delicious Nancy?”
“Today,” said Horace, “I asked her to marry me. A couple more good fights and with my share of the wages snatch, I can fix up the furniture and a flat.”
“And what did she say?”
“She got to think it over. Something about it being a big decision, a reckonable step.”
“Irrevocable step.”
“That’s it. That’s what she said.”
“Means she don’t believe in divorce. If she says Yes, which she won’t, you’ll have her for life. When do you get your answer?”
“End of the week.”
“Twenty to one she says No.”
“You’ve lengthened the odds,” said Horace, wounded.