him.
At any rate, he appeared at the studio on the following afternoon,
completely sober and excessively critical. He examined the canvases
which Kirk had hauled from shelves and corners for his inspection. One
after another he gazed upon them in an increasingly significant
silence. When the last one was laid aside he delivered judgment.
"Golly!" he said.
Kirk flushed. It was not that he was not in complete agreement with the
verdict. Looking at these paintings, some of which he had in the old
days thought extremely good, he was forced to admit that "Golly" was
the only possible criticism.
He had not seen them for a long time, and absence had enabled him to
correct first impressions. Moreover, something had happened to him,
causing him to detect flaws where he had seen only merits. Life had
sharpened his powers of judgment. He was a grown man looking at the
follies of his youth.
"Burn them!" said Mr. Penway, lighting a cigar with the air of one
restoring his tissues after a strenuous ordeal. "Burn the lot. They're
awful. Darned amateur nightmares. They offend the eye. Cast them into a
burning fiery furnace."
Kirk nodded. The criticism was just. It erred, if at all, on the side
of mildness. Certainly something had happened to him since he
perpetrated those daubs. He had developed. He saw things with new eyes.
"I guess I had better start right in again at the beginning," he sad.
"Earlier than that," amended Mr. Penway.
* * * * *
So Kirk settled down to a routine of hard work; and, so doing, drove
another blow at the wedge which was separating his life from Ruth's.
There were days now when they did not meet at all, and others when they
saw each other for a few short moments in which neither seemed to have
much to say.
Ruth had made a perfunctory protest against the new departure.
"Really," she said, "it does seem absurd for you to spend all your time
down at that old studio. It isn't as if you had to. But, of course, if
you want to......"
And she had gone on to speak of other subjects. It was plain to Kirk
that his absence scarcely affected her. She was still in the rapids,
and every day carried her farther away from him.
It did not hurt him now. A sort of apathy seemed to have fallen on him.
The old days became more and more remote. Sometimes he doubted whether
anything remained of her former love for him, and sometimes he wondered
if he still loved her. She was so different that it was almost as if
she were a stranger. Once they had had everything in common. Now it
seemed to him that they had nothing, not even Bill.
He did not brood upon it. He gave himself no time for that. He worked
doggedly on under the blasphemous but efficient guidance of Mr. Penway.
He was becoming a man with a fixed idea, the idea of making good.
He began to make headway. His beginnings were small, but practical. He
no longer sat down when the spirit moved him to dash off vague
masterpieces which might turn into something quite unexpected on the
road to completion; he snatched at anything definite that presented
itself.
Sometimes it was a couple of illustrations to a short story in one of
the minor magazines, sometimes a picture to go with an eulogy of a
patent medicine. Whatever it was, he seized upon it and put into it all
the talent he possessed. And thanks to the indefatigable coaching of
Robert Dwight Penway, a certain merit was beginning to creep into his
work. His drawing was growing firmer. He no longer shirked
difficulties.
Mr. Penway was good enough to approve of his progress. Being free from
any morbid distaste for himself, he attributed that progress to its
proper source. As he said once in a moment of expansive candour, he
could, given a free hand and something to drink and smoke while doing
it, make an artist out of two sticks and a lump of coal.
"Why, I've made you turn out things that are like something on
earth, my boy," he said proudly. "And that," he added, as he reached
out for the bottle of Bourbon which Kirk had provided for him, "is
going some."
Kirk was far too grateful to resent the slightly unflattering note a
more spirited man might have detected in the remark.
* * * * *
Only once during those days did Kirk allow himself to weaken and admit
to himself how wretched he was. He was drawing a picture of Steve at
the time, and Steve had the sympathy which encourages weakness in
others.
It was a significant sign of his changed attitude towards his
profession that he was not drawing Steve as a figure in an allegorical
picture or as "Apollo" or "The Toiler," but simply as a well-developed
young man who had had the good sense to support his nether garments
with Middleton's Undeniable Suspenders. The picture, when completed,
would show Steve smirking down at the region of his waist-line and
announcing with pride and satisfaction: "They're Middleton's!" Kirk was
putting all he knew into the work, and his face, as he drew, was dark
and gloomy.
Steve noted this with concern. He had perceived for some time that Kirk
had changed. He had lost all his old boyish enjoyment of their
sparring-bouts, and he threw the medicine-ball with an absent gloom
almost equal to Bailey's.
It had not occurred to Steve to question Kirk about this. If Kirk had
anything on his mind which he wished to impart he would say it.
Meanwhile, the friendly thing for him to do was to be quiet and pretend
to notice nothing.
It seemed to Steve that nothing was going right these days. Here was
he, chafing at his inability to open his heart to Mamie. Here was Kirk,
obviously in trouble. And, a smaller thing, but of interest, as showing
how universal the present depression was, there was Bailey Bannister,
equally obviously much worried over something or other.
For Bailey had reinstated Steve in the place he had occupied before old
John Bannister had dismissed him, and for some time past Steve had
marked him down as a man with a secret trouble. He had never been of a
riotously cheerful disposition, but it had been possible once to draw
him into conversation at the close of the morning's exercises. Now he
hardly spoke. And often, when Steve arrived in the morning, he was
informed that Mr. Bannister had started for Wall Street early on
important business.
These things troubled Steve. His simple soul abhorred a mystery.
But it was the case of Kirk that worried him most, for he half guessed
that the latter's gloom had to do with Ruth; and he worshipped Ruth.
Kirk laid down his sketch and got up.
"I guess that'll do for the moment, Steve," he said.
Steve relaxed the attitude of proud satisfaction which he had assumed
in order to do justice to the Undeniable Suspenders. He stretched
himself and sat down.
"You certainly are working to beat the band just now, squire," he
remarked.
"It's a pretty good thing, work, Steve," said Kirk. "If it does nothing
else, it keeps you from thinking."
He knew it was feeble of him, but he was powerfully impelled to relieve
himself by confiding his wretchedness to Steve. He need not say much,
he told himself plausibly, only just enough to lighten the burden a
little.
He would not be disloyal to Ruth, he had not sunk to that!but, after
all Steve was Steve. It was not like blurting out his troubles to a
stranger. It would harm nobody, and do him a great deal of good, if he
talked to Steve.