continued to look, simply because he had never seen a woman’s body so
beautiful as this one,—positively glorious in action. As she swung her
arms and changed from one pivot of motion to another, muscular energy
seemed to flow through her from her toes to her finger-tips. The soft
flush of exercise and the gold of afternoon sun played over her flesh
together, enveloped her in a luminous mist which, as she turned and
twisted, made now an arm, now a shoulder, now a thigh, dissolve in pure
light and instantly recover its outline with the next gesture. Hedger’s
fingers curved as if he were holding a crayon; mentally he was doing the
whole figure in a single running line, and the charcoal seemed to explode
in his hand at the point where the energy of each gesture was discharged
into the whirling disc of light, from a foot or shoulder, from the
up-thrust chin or the lifted breasts.
He could not have told whether he watched her for six minutes or sixteen.
When her gymnastics were over, she paused to catch up a lock of hair that
had come down, and examined with solicitude a little reddish mole that
grew under her left arm-pit. Then, with her hand on her hip, she walked
unconcernedly across the room and disappeared through the door into her
bedchamber.
Disappeared—Don Hedger was crouching on his knees, staring at the golden
shower which poured in through the west windows, at the lake of gold
sleeping on the faded Turkish carpet. The spot was enchanted; a vision
out of Alexandria, out of the remote pagan past, had bathed itself there
in Helianthine fire.
When he crawled out of his closet, he stood blinking at the grey sheet
stuffed with laundry, not knowing what had happened to him. He felt a
little sick as he contemplated the bundle. Everything here was different;
he hated the disorder of the place, the grey prison light, his old shoes
and himself and all his slovenly habits. The black calico curtains that
ran on wires over his big window were white with dust. There were three
greasy frying pans in the sink, and the sink itself—He felt desperate.
He couldn’t stand this another minute. He took up an armful of winter
clothes and ran down four flights into the basement.
“Mrs. Foley,” he began, “I want my room cleaned this afternoon,
thoroughly cleaned. Can you get a woman for me right away?”
“Is it company you’re having?” the fat, dirty janitress enquired. Mrs.
Foley was the widow of a useful Tammany man, and she owned real estate in
Flatbush. She was huge and soft as a feather bed. Her face and arms were
permanently coated with dust, grained like wood where the sweat had
trickled.
“Yes, company. That’s it.”
“Well, this is a queer time of the day to be asking for a cleaning woman.
It’s likely I can get you old Lizzie, if she’s not drunk. I’ll send Willy
round to see.”
Willy, the son of fourteen, roused from the stupor and stain of his fifth
box of cigarettes by the gleam of a quarter, went out. In five minutes he
returned with old Lizzie,—she smelling strong of spirits and wearing
several jackets which she had put on one over the other, and a number of
skirts, long and short, which made her resemble an animated dish-clout.
She had, of course, to borrow her equipment from Mrs. Foley, and toiled
up the long flights, dragging mop and pail and broom. She told Hedger to
be of good cheer, for he had got the right woman for the job, and showed
him a great leather strap she wore about her wrist to prevent dislocation
of tendons. She swished about the place, scattering dust and splashing
soapsuds, while he watched her in nervous despair. He stood over Lizzie
and made her scour the sink, directing her roughly, then paid her and got
rid of her. Shutting the door on his failure, he hurried off with his dog
to lose himself among the stevedores and dock labourers on West Street.
A strange chapter began for Don Hedger. Day after day, at that hour in
the afternoon, the hour before his neighbour dressed for dinner, he
crouched down in his closet to watch her go through her mysterious
exercises. It did not occur to him that his conduct was detestable; there
was nothing shy or retreating about this unclad girl,—a bold body,
studying itself quite coolly and evidently well pleased with itself,
doing all this for a purpose. Hedger scarcely regarded his action as
conduct at all; it was something that had happened to him. More than once
he went out and tried to stay away for the whole afternoon, but at about
five o’clock he was sure to find himself among his old shoes in the dark.
The pull of that aperture was stronger than his will,—and he had always
considered his will the strongest thing about him. When she threw herself
upon the divan and lay resting, he still stared, holding his breath. His
nerves were so on edge that a sudden noise made him start and brought out
the sweat on his forehead. The dog would come and tug at his sleeve,
knowing that something was wrong with his master. If he attempted a
mournful whine, those strong hands closed about his throat.
When Hedger came slinking out of his closet, he sat down on the edge of
the couch, sat for hours without moving. He was not painting at all now.
This thing, whatever it was, drank him up as ideas had sometimes done,
and he sank into a stupor of idleness as deep and dark as the stupor of
work. He could not understand it; he was no boy, he had worked from
models for years, and a woman’s body was no mystery to him. Yet now he
did nothing but sit and think about one. He slept very little, and with
the first light of morning he awoke as completely possessed by this woman
as if he had been with her all the night before. The unconscious
operations of life went on in him only to perpetuate this excitement. His
brain held but one image now—vibrated, burned with it. It was a
heathenish feeling; without friendliness, almost without tenderness.
Women had come and gone in Hedger’s life. Not having had a mother to
begin with, his relations with them, whether amorous or friendly, had
been casual. He got on well with janitresses and wash-women, with Indians
and with the peasant women of foreign countries. He had friends among the
silk-skirt factory girls who came to eat their lunch in Washington
Square, and he sometimes took a model for a day in the country. He felt
an unreasoning antipathy toward the well-dressed women he saw coming out
of big shops, or driving in the Park. If, on his way to the Art Museum,
he noticed a pretty girl standing on the steps of one of the houses on
upper Fifth Avenue, he frowned at her and went by with his shoulders
hunched up as if he were cold. He had never known such girls, or heard
them talk, or seen the inside of the houses in which they lived; but he
believed them all to be artificial and, in an aesthetic sense, perverted.
He saw them enslaved by desire of merchandise and manufactured articles,
effective only in making life complicated and insincere and in
embroidering it with ugly and meaningless trivialities. They were enough,
he thought, to make one almost forget woman as she existed in art, in
thought, and in the universe.
He had no desire to know the woman who had, for the time at least, so
broken up his life,—no curiosity about her every-day personality. He
shunned any revelation of it, and he listened for Miss Bower’s coming and
going, not to encounter, but to avoid her. He wished that the girl who
wore shirt-waists and got letters from Chicago would keep out of his way,