The Common Law | Page 8

her pose. "Ought I to stifle the vigour, the energy, the restless desire that drives me to express myself--that will not tolerate the inertia of calculation and ponderous reflection? Ought I to check myself, consider, worry, entangle myself in psychologies, seek for subtleties where none exist--split hairs, relapse into introspective philosophy when my fingers itch for a lump of charcoal and every colour on my set palette yells at me to be about my business?"
He passed the flat tip of his wet brush through the mass of rags in his left hand with a graceful motion like one unsheathing a sword:
"I tell you I do the things which I do, as easily, as naturally, as happily as any fool of a dicky-bird does his infernal twittering on an April morning. God knows whether there's anything in my work or in his twitter; but neither he nor I are likely to improve our output by pondering and cogitation.... Please resume the pose."
She did so, her dark young eyes on him; and he continued painting and talking in his clear, rapid, decisive manner:
"My name is Louis Neville. They call me Kelly--my friends do," he added, laughing. "Have you ever seen any of my work?"
"Yes."
He laughed again: "That's more soothing. However, I suppose you saw that big canvas of mine for the ceiling of the Metropolitan Museum's new northwest wing. The entire town saw it."
"Yes, I saw it."
"Did you care for it?"
She had cared for it too intensely to give him any adequate answer. Never before had her sense of colour and form and beauty been so exquisitely satisfied by the painted magic of any living painter. So this was the man who had enveloped her, swayed her senses, whirled her upward into his ocean of limpid light! This was the man who had done that miracle before which, all day long, crowds of the sober, decent, unimaginative--the solid, essentials of the nation--had lingered fascinated! This was the man--across there on a stepladder. And he was evidently not yet thirty; and his name was Neville and his friends called him Kelly.
"Yes," she said, diffidently, "I cared for it."
"Really?"
He caught her eye, laughed, and went on with his work.
"The critics were savage," he said. "Lord! It hurts, too. But I've simply got to be busy. What good would it do me to sit down and draw casts with a thin, needle-pointed stick of hard charcoal. Not that they say I can't draw. They admit that I can. They admit that I can paint, too."
He laughed, stretched his arms:
"Draw! A blank canvas sets me mad. When I look at one I feel like covering it with a thousand figures twisted into every intricacy and difficulty of foreshortening! I wish I were like that Hindu god with a dozen arms; and even then I couldn't paint fast enough to satisfy what my eyes and brain have already evoked upon an untouched canvas.... It's a sort of intoxication that gets hold of me; I'm perfectly cool, too, which seems a paradox but isn't. And all the while, inside me, is a constant, hushed kind of laughter, bubbling, which accompanies every brush stroke with an 'I told you so!'--if you know what I'm trying to say--do you?"
"N-not exactly. But I suppose you mean that you are self-confident."
"Lord! Listen to this girl say in a dozen words what I'm trying to say in a volume so that it won't scare me! Yes! That's it. I am confident. And it's that self-confidence which sometimes scares me half to death."
From his ladder he pointed with his brush to the preliminary sketch that faced her, touching figure after figure:
"I'm going to draw them in, now," he said; "first this one. Can you catch the pose? It's going to be hard; I'll block up your heels, later; that's it! Stand up straight, stretch as though the next moment you were going to rise on tiptoe and float upward without an effort--"
He was working like lightning in long, beautiful, clean outline strokes, brushed here and there with shadow shapes and masses. And time flew at first, then went slowly, more slowly, until it dragged at her delicate body and set every nerve aching.
"I--may I rest a moment?"
"Sure thing!" he said, cordially, laying aside palette and brushes. "Come on, Miss West, and we'll have luncheon."
She hastily swathed herself in the wool robe.
"Do you mean--here?"
"Yes. There's a dumb-waiter. I'll ring for the card."
"I'd like to," she said, "but do you think I had better?"
"Why not?"
"You mean--take lunch with you?"
"Why not?"
"Is it customary?"
"No, it isn't."
"Then I think I will go out to lunch somewhere--"
"I'm not going to let you get away," he said, laughing. "You're too good to be real; I'm worried half to death for fear that you'll vanish in a golden cloud, or something equally