grass was newly cut and blindingly green. Looking up the Avenue through
the Arch, one could see the young poplars with their bright, sticky
leaves, and the Brevoort glistening in its spring coat of paint, and
shining horses and carriages,—occasionally an automobile, misshapen and
sullen, like an ugly threat in a stream of things that were bright and
beautiful and alive.
While Caesar and his master were standing by the fountain, a girl
approached them, crossing the Square. Hedger noticed her because she wore
a lavender cloth suit and carried in her arms a big bunch of fresh
lilacs. He saw that she was young and handsome,—beautiful, in fact, with
a splendid figure and good action. She, too, paused by the fountain and
looked back through the Arch up the Avenue. She smiled rather
patronizingly as she looked, and at the same time seemed delighted. Her
slowly curving upper lip and half-closed eyes seemed to say: “You’re gay,
you’re exciting, you are quite the right sort of thing; but you’re none
too fine for me!”
In the moment she tarried, Caesar stealthily approached her and sniffed
at the hem of her lavender skirt, then, when she went south like an
arrow, he ran back to his master and lifted a face full of emotion and
alarm, his lower lip twitching under his sharp white teeth and his hazel
eyes pointed with a very definite discovery. He stood thus, motionless,
while Hedger watched the lavender girl go up the steps and through the
door of the house in which he lived.
“You’re right, my boy, it’s she! She might be worse looking, you know.”
When they mounted to the studio, the new lodger’s door, at the back of
the hall, was a little ajar, and Hedger caught the warm perfume of lilacs
just brought in out of the sun. He was used to the musty smell of the old
hall carpet. (The nurse-lessee had once knocked at his studio door and
complained that Caesar must be somewhat responsible for the particular
flavour of that mustiness, and Hedger had never spoken to her since.) He
was used to the old smell, and he preferred it to that of the lilacs, and
so did his companion, whose nose was so much more discriminating. Hedger
shut his door vehemently, and fell to work.
Most young men who dwell in obscure studios in New York have had a
beginning, come out of something, have somewhere a home town, a family, a
paternal roof. But Don Hedger had no such background. He was a foundling,
and had grown up in a school for homeless boys, where book-learning was a
negligible part of the curriculum. When he was sixteen, a Catholic priest
took him to Greensburg, Pennsylvania, to keep house for him. The priest
did something to fill in the large gaps in the boy’s education,—taught
him to like “Don Quixote” and “The Golden Legend,” and encouraged him to
mess with paints and crayons in his room up under the slope of the
mansard. When Don wanted to go to New York to study at the Art League,
the priest got him a night job as packer in one of the big department
stores. Since then, Hedger had taken care of himself; that was his only
responsibility. He was singularly unencumbered; had no family duties, no
social ties, no obligations toward any one but his landlord. Since he
travelled light, he had travelled rather far. He had got over a good deal
of the earth’s surface, in spite of the fact that he never in his life
had more than three hundred dollars ahead at any one time, and he had
already outlived a succession of convictions and revelations about his
art.
Though he was now but twenty-six years old, he had twice been on the
verge of becoming a marketable product; once through some studies of New
York streets he did for a magazine, and once through a collection of
pastels he brought home from New Mexico, which Remington, then at the
height of his popularity, happened to see, and generously tried to push.
But on both occasions Hedger decided that this was something he didn’t
wish to carry further,—simply the old thing over again and got
nowhere,—so he took enquiring dealers experiments in a “later manner,”
that made them put him out of the shop. When he ran short of money, he
could always get any amount of commercial work; he was an expert
draughtsman and worked with lightning speed. The rest of his time he
spent in groping his way from one kind of painting into another, or
travelling about without luggage, like a tramp, and he was chiefly
occupied with getting rid of ideas he had once thought very fine.
Hedger’s circumstances, since he had moved to Washington Square, were
affluent compared to anything he had ever known before. He was now able
to pay advance rent and turn the key on his studio when he went away for
four months at a stretch. It didn’t occur to him to wish to be richer
than this. To be sure, he did without a great many things other people
think necessary, but he didn’t miss them, because he had never had them.
He belonged to no clubs, visited no houses, had no studio friends, and he
ate his dinner alone in some decent little restaurant, even on Christmas
and New Year’s. For days together he talked to nobody but his dog and the
janitress and the lame oysterman.
After he shut the door and settled down to his paradise fish on that
first Tuesday in May, Hedger forgot all about his new neighbour. When the
light failed, he took Caesar out for a walk. On the way home he did his
marketing on West Houston Street, with a one-eyed Italian woman who
always cheated him. After he had cooked his beans and scallopini, and
drunk half a bottle of Chianti, he put his dishes in the sink and went up
on the roof to smoke. He was the only person in the house who ever went
to the roof, and he had a secret understanding with the janitress about
it. He was to have “the privilege of the roof,” as she said, if he opened
the heavy trapdoor on sunny days to air out the upper hall, and was
watchful to close it when rain threatened. Mrs. Foley was fat and dirty
and hated to climb stairs,—besides, the roof was reached by a
perpendicular iron ladder, definitely inaccessible to a woman of her
bulk, and the iron door at the top of it was too heavy for any but
Hedger’s strong arm to lift. Hedger was not above medium height, but he
practised with weights and dumb-bells, and in the shoulders he was as
strong as a gorilla.
So Hedger had the roof to himself. He and Caesar often slept up there on
hot nights, rolled in blankets he had brought home from Arizona. He
mounted with Caesar under his left arm. The dog had never learned to
climb a perpendicular ladder, and never did he feel so much his master’s
greatness and his own dependence upon him, as when he crept under his arm
for this perilous ascent. Up there was even gravel to scratch in, and a
dog could do whatever he liked, so long as he did not bark. It was a kind
of Heaven, which no one was strong enough to reach but his great,
paint-smelling master.
On this blue May night there was a slender, girlish looking young moon in
the west, playing with a whole company of silver stars. Now and then one
of them darted away from the group and shot off into the gauzy blue with
a soft little trail of light, like laughter. Hedger and his dog were
delighted when a star did this. They were quite lost in watching the
glittering game, when they were suddenly diverted by a sound,—not
from the stars, though it was music. It was not the Prologue to
Pagliacci, which rose ever and anon on hot evenings from an Italian