Children of the Whirlwind | Page 6

chest matted with hair and
whose rolled-up sleeves revealed forearms that seemed absurdly large
to be fiddling with those slender sticks. A crowbar would have seemed
more in harmony. He was unromantically old--all of thirty-five Maggie
guessed; and with his square, rough-hewn face and tousled, reddish hair
he was decidedly ugly. But for the fact that he really did work-- though
of course his work was foolish--and the fact that he paid his way--he
bought little, but no one could beat him by so much as a penny in a
bargain, not even the Duchess--Maggie might have considered him as
one of the many bums who floated purposelessly through that drab
region.
Also, had there not been so many queer people coming and going in
this neighborhood--Eads Howe, the hobo millionaire, settlement
workers, people who had grown rich and old in their business and
preferred to live near it--Maggie might have regarded Hunt with more
curiosity, and even with suspicion; but down here one accepted queer
people as a matter of course, the only fear being that secretly they
might be police or government agents, which Maggie and the others
knew very well Hunt was not. When Hunt had rented this attic as a
studio they had accepted his explanation that he had taken it because it
was cheap and he could afford to pay no more. Likewise they had
accepted his explanation that he was a mechanic by trade who had
roughed it all over the world and was possessed with an itch for
painting, that lately he had worked in various garages, that it was his
habit to hoard his money till he got a bit ahead and then go off on a
painting spree. All these admissions were indubitably plausible, for his
paintings seemed the unmistakable handiwork of an irresponsible,
hard- fisted motor mechanic.

Maggie shifted to her other foot and glanced casually at the canvases
which leaned against the walls of the shabby studio. There was the
Duchess: incredibly old, the face a web of wrinkles, the lips indrawn
over toothless and shrunken gums. the nose a thin, curved beak, the
eyes deep-set, gleaming, inscrutable, watching; and drawn tight over
the hair--even Maggie did not know whether that hair was a wig or the
Duchess's--the faded Oriental shawl which was fastened beneath her
chin and which fell over her thin, bent chest. There was O'Flaherty, the
good-natured policeman on the beat. There was the old watchmaker
next door. There was Black Hurley, the notorious gang leader, who
sometimes swaggered into the district like a dirty and evil feudal lord.
There was a Jewish pushcart peddler, white-bearded and skull- capped.
There was an Italian mother sitting on the curb, her feet in the gutter,
smiling down at the baby that was hungrily suckling at her milk-heavy
breast. And so on, and so on. Just the ordinary, uninteresting things
Maggie saw around the block. There was not a single pretty picture in
the lot.
Hunt swung the canvas from his easel and stood it against the wall.
"That'll be all for you, Jimmie. Beat it and make room for Maggie.
Maggie, take your same pose."
Old Jimmie ambled forward and gazed at his portrait as Hunt was
settling an unfinished picture on his easel. It had rather amused Jimmie
and filled in his idle time to sit for the crazy painter; and, incidentally,
another picture of him would do him no particular harm since the
police already had all the pictures they needed of him over at
Headquarters. As he gazed at Hunt's work Old Jimmie snickered.
"I say, Nuts, what you goin' to do with this mess of paint?"
"Going to sell it to the Metropolitan Museum, you old sinner!" snapped
Hunt.
Old Jimmie cackled at the joke. He knew pictures; that is, good pictures.
He had had an invisible hand in more than one clever transaction in
which handsome pictures alleged to have been smuggled in,
Gainsboroughs and Romneys and such (there had been most profit for

him in handling the forgeries of these particular masters), had been put,
with an air of great secrecy, into the hands of divers newly rich
gentlemen who believed they were getting masterpieces at bargain
prices through this evasion of customs laws.
"Nuts," chuckled Old Jimmie, "this junk wouldn't be so funny if you
didn't seem to believe you were really painting."
"Junk! Funny!" Hunt swung around, one big hand closed about
Jimmie's lean neck and the other seized his thin shoulder. "You
grandfather of the devil and all his male progeny, you talk like that and
I'll chuck you through the window!"
Old Jimmie grinned. The grip of the big hands of the painter, though
powerful, was light. They all knew that the loud ravings of the painter
never presaged violence.