Survivor

== SURVIVOR ==
=== by Wilbur Daniel Steele ===
From The Best Stories of Wilbur Daniel Steele 1946 
In the hollow of the block west of the State House,
Dobson was putting his studio shutters on, for it was class evening, and though
the model posed only in the "semi," this was Denver, not Paris. The
shutters were heavy and high from the ground. The elderly sculptor was glad
when the job was done and he could sit down on the box he had been carrying
around, breathe for a moment, mop his temples and sparsely whiskered cheeks,
and look at the mountains behind which the April sun was already a half hour
down. 
When he built the studio, in his early days out here
after he had begun to get the better of his lung trouble, he could see a great
spread of the snow, range that way across vacant lots; but the city had grown
in the quarter-century, and all that was left him now was a glimpse of the twin
peaks, Grays and Torreys, framed in an alley notch. 
How many thousands of nights had the alien sat and
watched the darkening of that bifurcated giant upland, cut out in the dilute
air so cleanly that even at half a hundred miles the ear strained for the note
of the incessant wind whining between the pinnacles, and the whisper of ice
dust polishing the rocks of the inhuman solitude! And how many times had the
exile started with a wince of nostalgia, wondering what he was doing on this
strange side of the world, dreaming his years away, and where were his eyes of
waking! 
Where were the lanes and hedgerows, the meadows and
folded moorlands of his native Oxfordshire? Where his friendly, dingy London?
And where his working, fighting, rollicking runways of Montmartre, smelly of
turpentine and bus horses, in a lilac haze? 
Now that Dobson had cooled off he was cold. It was
almost dark, and around on the cement of the court he heard the feet of his
pupils arriving. He went indoors. He spoke to Lincoln Hussack, as always the
first at his stand. The young man had been given a page in color to do at the
Post for the Sunday after the following, and the news tonight brought a glow to
the heart of his instructor. "Bravo, my lad! Good! Push on!" 
Dobson spoke to Miss Lukes, the serious schoolteacher;
to Roy Dickens, the governor's nephew; to the two sisters from the convent, and
to the ranchman, Kraus. But Mary Shannon had not yet come. He took his time
posing the model, the Indian, Frank Shoe, stripped to the waist for the anatomy
of the torso. He tried him first with one hand shading the eyes in the
immemorial gesture, then with both hands on his hips and his face slightly
lifted. But still Mary Shannon had not come. It was like her, Dobson reflected;
it was the atmosphere of the studio she liked, not the hard fashioning of a
beautiful thing. And since her mother was a widow without a fortune, Mary would
have to be more than an amateur at something or other before very long. 
Now Dobson knew of a sudden what he must do tonight,
and he tasted wormwood in his heart. He went into his own shop to get away from
it, turned on all the lights, removed the damp covering from the great
unfinished figure of his "Arapahoe," and gathered his tools with an
impatience that was rare in him. As he stood before the clay, the shape of the
aboriginal plainsman, noble in its nakedness, erect, implacable, stoic, shading
its gaze toward the doomful east (the commission was for the eastern entrance
to the Capitol grounds), Dobson tried to turn his misery into a temper against
the Philistines against whom he had fought so long. 
They would be coming again tomorrow. Again, with their
dull eyes and their stupid impatience, they would argue, protest, and threaten,
the politicians, the storekeepers. Three years ago this Art Committee of the
Legislature had begun its grumbling: "Looks like a finished statue to us;
why don't you go ahead with it?" Two years ago there had been a note of
exasperation: "Don't see how you can expect to improve it any more,
fussing with it. And if we're satisfied you should be. Frankly, Dobson, what's
holding it up now?" 
To look at them was enough to know there was no use in
trying to explain. How could they comprehend that, so long as a last knuckle
wanted a least wrinkle to make it right, though it might seem good enough in
their eyes, in the artist's the whole creation remained but an attempt, and a
foiled one, so much dead clay? They seemed not to realize that it was to last a
great deal longer than they. But they were like that, forever building things
in a hurry so as to be able the sooner to tear them down, in a greater hurry to
build newer ones. And Mary Shannon was like that. 
The circle had brought him back, and immediately, as
he fell to tooling a vein on the "Arapahoe's" ankle, he set off on
another circle. Reminiscence this time; dismayed by here and now, he made haste
to escape it; daydreaming, he ran back into there and then. 
Paris, and youth, and the haze of lilac. The court
called the Impasse Carre. The mountainous woman with three moles and three
whiskers, concierge at Number Eleven. At nine, Sven Lie's studio panes shining
with the sky. Old Mique and his barrow of snails in front of the librairie.
Alan Dumergue's diggings. Then the cafe tables under the soiled glass awning of
the Masque d'Or, carrying the corner around into the loud Rue Lac. 
Alan and his girl there, Sven and his. Loaves, cheese,
smoked fish, half liters of blond beer. Ivan Morvitch and Alan's brother, the
young playwright, and Freddy Webster from Des Moines, hatless, arm in arm, in
from the clattering dusk. "A bas V Aca-demie!" they chant. "Mort
aux vieux!" they roar. The battle cry of the comrades of the Impasse
Carre. Yes, down with the old ones and their old order, those established,
rich, stupid ones who think that there will never be another light in art but
their light! Away with the solemn fogies; tumble them off from the shoulders of
the genius that now at last will cure the sickness of the world! Down with
romanticism! It had its rope and hanged itself. Up impressionism! youth's new
last word. 
Beer and sausages for thirty centimes. " 'Alio,
Tom Dobson! 'Alio, Johnnie Bull!" 
"What do you think that old donkey of a dealer
said to my canvas, 'Loire Midi'? 'I can see only that it is a hodgepodge,' says
he. 'My little boy with chalks does better; at least I can see what his drawing
is meant to tell.' " 
"Moneybag, potbelly, let him wait ten years, and
weep." 
Dancing. Warm, eager, and wild. Celeste, Marie, Sven's
Lilla with her large bosom and her straw braids, Orma, Puvis's new model, and
Madeleine! And Madeleine! 
"Tom Dobson, how is it say en anglais— Ai lawv
you'?" 
Beastly sulks, angelic gaieties; Madeleine. An
immeasurable, inexhaustible vitality. That is her beauty, her vitality. The
long slope of her shoulders, the ivory pillar of her strong neck, the full red
overturn of the lip, the brown hair, so massive in growth— the devil! That's
not Madeleine. Madeleine was as blond as a Swede girl. Who is this dark one,
then? It's Mary. Mary Shannon. 
Dobson was cornered. He went to the window. There was
a full moonlight. Fifty miles away on the scallop between the twin peaks the
ice rim glittered. The wind would have died in that high, white night; there
would no longer be even the whistling of the thin wind to distract the
solitude. Dobson turned his back on it. 
He went out to the class, for it was time. To young
Hussack there was not much to say, hardly more than "Good! Push on!"
There was not much to be said to Roy Dickens either, but for the opposite
reason. This nephew of the governor was not serious. Educated in the East, now
that he had come home he was at a loss what to do with himself. He was here in
the modeling class simply because Mary Shannon was here. Dobson made no mistake
about that. As for the two sisters, they listened and tried, listened and tried
again. That was something. But Mary Shannon neither listened nor tried. 
What to say to Mary? For an instant, now that it no
longer mattered, Dobson had the impulse to mutter, "Good! Push on! "
without even looking at the clay she had clapped hastily upon an armature ill
bent. But then it was like a fever; he broke out chiding. 
"It's because you'll not look. What's the model
there for, Mary? You used to study at least the fundamental proportions before
committing them, but nowadays — But even if there were no model, you should
know from simple anatomy that, the shoulder line being so, the axis of the head
cannot possibly be so. A head is not an egg. You'll fix it up later, you tell
yourself. But I'll tell you— look, my child— by the very block-in of those arms
I can predict you this, the weight of the hands resting on the hips will never
rest on them, never. For all your 'fixing' later on " 
What was the use? Mary's ear might be for him, but her
eye was for Roy Dickens. 
"Oh, dear," it seemed to sigh, "the
same old line. When he's through jawing ..." 
Dobson had to swallow, and it was a bitter swallow.
"Well, push on!" 
But at the third and final criticism of the evening he
broke out with it: 
"Now you see, Mary, once wrong, always wrong.
That head, it is an egg. And do you see what's happened to the arms? Where is
the weight? Not down. They don't push, they pull. See, there's Frank Shoe, the
redskin, poised, at ease, gazing up at the mountaintops, let's say. And what
have you given me here? You've given me a poor egg-head doing nothing but
trying rather desperately to hold his own trousers up. 'The Broken Braces,' you
must call it. You can see this one of yours thinking: 'Well, you've given me
this plaguy garment, and now what in the name of the happy hunting grounds am I
supposed to do with it?' Tell me, Mary, looking at Frank Shoe as he stands
there — But I see, he's got down. Next time, then — " Dobson put his teeth
into the flesh of his lip. "Mary, will you be so good as to come into the
shop for a moment? I've something to say." 
In the privacy of the shop he went straight at it, his
eyes fixed on the "Arapahoe's" great toe and a wrinkle of misery
between his brows. "Mary, I've been talking with your mother. I'm fond of
you, Mary. It's because I'm fonder of you than of anyone that I'm willing to be
brutal. Child, you're wasting your time; you'll never get anywhere with the
modeling; you haven't got it. But you've so many other gifts, you ought to be
busy finding them out while you're still a girl, Mary. So— you're not to come
here, Mary, any more." 
It was no good, his staring so desperately at the toe
of clay; his ears were worse than his eyes, to follow the havoc. "Oh!
Oh!" he heard her stifling the gasps wrung from her affronted pride.
"Oh! Oh!" Incredulity, bewilderment, comprehension, fury. But then
when he did turn his wretched eyes he saw that her resentment had passed with
those breaths. From the doorway she was looking back at his hunched figure with
a smile altogether enigmatical and a light curiously mingled of mockery and
ruth in her gaze. 
She did a thing that confounded him. Returning at a
dart, she bent over his head and brushed the bald spot with her lips, a
featherweight caress, then ran. 
It would have helped if he could have groaned, but he
hadn't even that defense against the silence. Presently, around the corner
outside, he heard the fall of four feet on the cement, and he knew by that that
Roy Dickens had waited for Mary. He could almost see the girl with the finger
of warning to her lips till they were out to the open of Broadway. It was from
the distance of the street then that he heard the release of their rebellious
mirth. 
It was springtime. Dobson felt it of a sudden a trap
in which he was imprisoned, a cell walled by the dry suns and sapless winds of
the tableland of the raw young West. 
He tried to re-escape. He sat and tried to remember.
The lilac haze. Blond beer, hard bread, gray sausages. Young mutiny when youth
was clear-eyed and mutiny fateful. u Mort aux vieux!" Death to the old
ones! Wild daylights, and clay on the hands; wild gaslights, and dancing. And
Aladeleine! Mary! 
Dobson got up and ran out into the other studio to
look at the travesty of childish clay that Mary had thrown together. It was
gone. Turntable, armature, everything. He understood now why one pair of the
retreating footfalls had sounded heavier than the other. At last he could
groan, for the pity of those youngsters. 
Once in the following winter Mrs. Shannon, Mary's
mother, came to the studio. Though she did not utter it in words, her attitude
said it: "It was you that started all this; you've got to help me end
it." 
Dobson had asked: "What's Mary doing with
herself, now she's given up the modeling?" 
"Given it up?" The sluice gates of the
widow's trouble were opened then. It had been bad enough when her daughter had
been studying with Dobson, and so in a measure justified. But now it was simply
mulishness, the child's hurt vanity. 
"My one best room, Mr. Dobson, always cluttered
up with her 'masterpieces.' Not that she really cares about them; if she did
she'd try and do them better, and make them look like something under the sun.
No, it's just that Mary's got the idea she must be in on this artist life—
'bohemian,' I suppose you'd call it. And I wish you'd see the kind of friends
she's got now. Where she ever found them " 
"I'll come and see her," Dobson said. 
He should have set an hour. When he went, next day,
Mary was out. He spent the waiting time in examining the "studio" and
its prodigies. They would have been pathetic if they had not been laughable,
and laughable, he told himself, if they had not been tragic. Steeled as she had
believed it, the mother's pride mutinied once. One piece, shrouded in the
working cloth, she would have passed over, getting Dobson on to another. When
he persisted and uncovered the figure, she could, as she said, have died. 
"Yes, die. It isn't even as if it was of a model;
I've got hardened to that. But it's actually one of Mary's friends, May Paige,
and wouldn't you think she'd be ashamed, and, on top of ashamed, furious? May's
really quite a passably pretty girl, in life." 
Dobson's humiliation was deeper than the mother's in a
way, for it was he that had had the faith. Blinded (he could see now) by the
appeal of her youthful vitality, he had been persuaded for nearly a year that
Mary was capable of more than ordinary things. She had progressed up to a
certain point. And now! The way the stick of that rocket had come down. It was
not merely that she had forgotten what she had learned; she had forgotten more
than she had learned. Given even a half -pretty girl for model, that the best
Mary could do now was this naive distortion of the human form, lopsided,
faceless, save for prehensile-looking lips bent in a V-shaped smirk, with the
neck of a vulture and the dugs of a cat— for a moment as Dobson dropped the
cloth back over it he felt sick. 
After that one, the purloined figure of Frank Shoe had
nothing to offer but ridiculousness. Pigheaded, Mary had not taken his word for
it; she had thought to right its wrongness by dint of superficial polish, till
she had polished even the little that was human of it away, leaving nothing but
glazed cylinders. Empty egg-head to an empty sky, there this "Indian"
stood, shoulder blades flared out like porcelain shelves, long, thin, tired
grasshopper arms and bewildered clod fists holding up the weight of pants as
hard and round as lengths of stovepipe, patiently. 
Mrs. Shannon was pouring out her troubles. "And
of course this riffraff, seeing they could never get into any other decent
house in town— except of course the Dickens boy, with his uncle the governor
—of course it's their game to pretend to encourage Mary. And she'll swallow it.
Now do you know what? Mary owns a bond her uncle left her, and now she's all
for selling it, so she can get these blobs cast into brass or bronze or
whatever it is. Oh, Mr. Dobson, isn't there something?" 
"I don't know," he groaned, suddenly worn
out. "I give you my word I don't know." 
He couldn't wait forever. After two hours, when Mary
had not returned, he had to go. Outside he saw a figure making off hurriedly,
as if to avoid meeting him, and it looked like Roy Dickens. 
Dobson finished the "Arapahoe" with a rush
that winter; by spring it was in the marble, Colorado stone. It was up in its
place in its swathings nearly a month before Decoration Day, when it was to be
unveiled in connection with the annual art exhibition held in the State House
basement. 
The Exhibition Committee, bewildered lawmakers from
the mountains, followed a precedent of twenty years' standing and came to
Dobson. "Here are the folks," they said in effect, "that want to
get their pictures and things in. You know them. You tell us." 
Halfway down the list stood the item: "Mary
Shannon, sculpture, 17 pieces." 
For the first time in years Dobson saw red. It was a
good thing, he had to confess to himself; there had been times when he had run
a dotard's danger of mixing this child up too confusedly with his sentimental
reminiscences. Now he was simply exasperated beyond bounds. If he had had her
here he would have turned her over his knees and given her a spanking.
Stubborn, wayward, blind— to persist in her vain innocence in wanting to make a
laughingstock of herself. 
He controlled his voice before the committeemen.
"This item you will do well not to accept," he said, drawing his
pencil through the line. 
The following day one of them was back at the studio.
"The governor, he wants to know if what is out about this item is that
there's too many pieces. Would it be better to cut it down from seventeen to
maybe eight or ten, Mr. Dobson? Or do you mean it 'out,' the whole shootin'
match?" 
"I mean it 'out,' decisively. Let there be no
mistake in that." 
Oh, miserable Mary, bad Mary! Happily, by and by,
Dobson saw the comic side of the thing. He sat down alone in his emptied shop
and chuckled. 
"Enfant terrible! Incredible child!" 
The awful thing happened. Dobson had dealt with
politicians before, so he should have misdoubted. As it was, the first he knew
of it was when, surrounded by the notables on the afternoon of the unveiling,
in glancing through the leaflet cataloging the annual exhibition inside, he
saw: "Bureau of Claims Room: Shannon, Mary A., sculpture, 17." 
"The governor!" He remembered. "The
governor's nephew, Roy!" Dobson saw the ugly light. 
His day of days was spoiled. Throughout the length of
Senator Woodson's speech he could think of nothing but the catastrophe brewing
in the basement behind him. His own few words sounded remote and inane, and so
did the applause at the actual uncovering of the "Arapahoe." There
was no thrill in it for the perturbed man. 
Afterward it was worse. He ought to have gone inside.
There were works of old pupils of his on exhibition, and they would think it
queer of him not to. He made an effort to listen to the kind things that
prominent people were saying to him, the indulgence of Mrs. E. D. Bragford, the
parrot patter of Mrs. Winn Constable, the gush of Mrs. Colbine. It came as a
relief, though, when Abrahams, the art dealer, stopped to add his
congratulations. 
"I'm glad to see you, Abrahams. I heard you were
back— yesterday, wasn't it? Tell me about your trip. Did you find anything
worth while?" 
Abrahams sketched his fifty days, Chicago, New York,
London, Paris, Provincetown. 
"And back here for today and your 'Arapahoe,'
best of all, old friend." 
"Thank you, Abrahams. No, I've not been in yet;
I'll go presently. By the way, I see your truck parked out there on Colfax;
have you a loan in the show in there?" 
The dealer laughed. "What a man! For one thing,
there's your own 'Young Circe,' as usual. What would their show be without
that?" 
It was a comfort to Dobson to reflect what would
Abrahams' own gallery be without that same "Young Circe"? What would
his window in Seventeenth Street have done any time in these past ten years
without its mainstay and keystone in the marble shard of loveliness, the
masterpiece of Dobson's later middle life? It would be pleasant if it would
sell, of course, but sometimes Dobson was almost glad it hadn't been taken and
shut away in privacy. There in Abrahams' window it did its bit in leavening
with beauty the daily ugliness, a monument almost as public as the others, the
"Grizzly at Bay" before the courthouse, the "Scout" in City
Park, and now the "Arapahoe" here. 
People who had been in to the exhibition were coming
out again, and now the worst of the ordeal began. Dobson could keep his eyes
wherever he wanted them, but against derisive or scandalized whisperings he
could not stop his ears. 
"Did you ever in your life! Who is this Shannon
person?" 
"Isn't there someone supposed to handle these
exhibitions, someone responsible?" 
"But what I can't understand— I'm told she's
actually a pupil of Mr. Dob — " 
"Shhhhh! (Right there.)" 
Ears crimson, eyes averted, Dobson kept silence, and
denied Mary once. 
There was the voice of Mrs. Dickens, the governor's
wife: "Why, of course Earle didn't realize— never had laid eyes on the
girl's work. It was simpJ.y that Roy, his brother's boy (he has a crush on the
girl), plagued him— and believing she was a protege of Mr. Dobson's —Roy made
that up out of whole cloth, as we can now see . . ." 
Deeper crimson, farther away, Dobson denied Mary
twice. 
"I'd rather be anything than embarrassed."
That was Mrs. E. D. Bragford, president of the State Confederation. "I
think this will teach them that it should be strictly limited to entries having
some art education, and by that I mean in some recognized course devoted to it,
such as Mr. Dobson's — " 
It was startling then. It was the sculptor himself,
red-jowled, bright-blue-eyed. 
"If you are speaking of Mary Shannon, Mrs.
Bragford, she is something of a protege of mine." 
It had nothing to do with Dobson's intelligence or
with his will. It was simply a year's accumulated explosives going off
disastrously. Snickering at Mary Shannon, were they? Sneering at Mary!
Wheeling, he marched into the basement of the Capitol. 
He knew he was being an idiot, and worse than an
idiot, a renegade. He knew it with his head, though not with his heart or his
feet. 
He had not seen Mary for months till he saw her across
the shoulders of the people there in the Bureau of Claims. Her head up, her
face a mask, her stubborn shoulders squared against the affront of muffled gasp
and giggle, she stood withdrawn in a farther corner, hemmed in by shadowy
figures. Whether they were the figures of the living or of her own distorted
bronzes Dobson could not have said; Mary, cornered, was all he could see.
Miserable child, she had nothing to thank for it but her own vain folly. But
who cared? 
Half a quiet had fallen at his appearance in the
doorway, a gesture of the crowd's curiosity and vague illness at ease. It
became a whole one as he began to make a circuit of the exhibit. Halting
heavily before each successive prodigy, he appeared to study it with
deliberation; he scarcely saw it, as a matter of fact. He was too upset. The
strongest impression he carried out of it all, indeed, was not of the dead
casts but of the living faces that watched his as he deliberated, some of them
hard, dull, and old, some, scattered here and there, the faces of the strangest
youth, intractable and vigilant. 
"Who are these?" Dobson found himself
wondering. 
There was one face triangular and sallow, save for a
hectic feather on either cheek ridge, and with long black hair. Another, a
truculent young fellow, had mine dust bitten into his neck pores. They were all
different, but somehow or other they were less different than they were alike. 
"Where did they come from," Dobson wondered,
"and what are they doing here?" 
Against almost the last of the pediments in the
gantlet a placard was propped: "Survivor." When Dobson lifted his
eyes to find the figure above it that pipe-limbed, egg-headed travesty of an
Indian holding his pants up patiently, he shivered a little, said "God
forgive me!" to himself, and closed his eyes tight. But then he opened
them. 
His voice was harsh and loud, for he spoke, purposely,
across the width of the room. 
"Splendid, Mary! Do your own thing in your own
way, and don't bother about the fatheads. They come to scoff now. They'll
remain to pray." On impulse he raised one hand to his temple. It was a
funny little old-man salute, as prim as it was unpracticed, and by so much the
more impressive. "Good!" he cried. "Push on!" 
He nearly collided with Abrahams in, the doorway, but
cleared himself and escaped into the corridor. His legs, he found, were as
rickety as an old rag doll's. Outside he avoided the crowd and followed the
building's shadow around, wanting no more of his day of days, wanting only to
get home.  
He tried his rooms, above the drugstore, but found no
peace there. Driven out to his studio, it was little better. If he had had
something to work at, something to beat and mold with his hands, in place of
the vacancy left enormous by the "Arapahoe's" departure, it would
have helped. Helpless, he wandered or sat. 
He could see now. He had made a fool of himself. 
To what end? Thinking in his quixotic zeal to fend off
mockery from Mary, what he had done in all probability was only to double it by
his transparent clowning. 
And at what price? At the price of the oldest and deepest
loyalty he had, his faith in the virtue of beauty and in the dignity of its
creating. 
The sun went down, leaving for a moment between the
peaks a glitter in the shape of a curving sword. "The coward does it with
a kiss," he recollected, "the brave man with a sword." He had
done it with a kiss. 
As it grew dark he made an effort, jumped to his feet,
shook himself. "What the devil! All this stew over nothing, practically.
It's late and I haven't eaten: I'm hungry; that's the trouble." Hurrying
to his rooms, he began to tidy himself, and decided abruptly on evening
clothes. "What the devil! I have finished a piece. Such days don't come
too often. Tonight I'll have nothing but the best. I'll go to the Laville Cafe,
order a sole and little beans and white wine. Swank it." On the way,
turning into Fifteenth Street, the ferrule of his stick faltered in its
resolute tattoo. "People. There'll be a crowd there." But then with
relief and a little shame he recollected: "It's too late and too early;
I'll have the place to myself; quiet, that's the ticket," and strode on. 
White wine? This night itself was white wine as he
walked. Still spring, already summer. Moonlight and arc light, weaving beauty
between them out of raw brick ugliness. And people had liked the "Arapahoe"
uncommonly. 
On Dobson's right was the better commercial quarter,
on the left the poorer. From the poorer came the greater noise of life, gossip,
hails, fall of feet, muffled music, instrument and voice. It bothered the
sculptor, affronted him somehow. He increased his pace, turning his silk-hatted
head a little away. Soon he would reach the cross street where he could make to
the east. 
But now there was a sweaty yellow window to get past,
a cheap restaurant, full of hubbub. The door opened and a fellow came out,
loafing, perhaps for a breath of air. Starting at sight of Dobson, leaning to
peer, he turned back and began to bellow. 
"Hey, everybody, out here! Look! It's himself—
the old man." 
A rush, hurly-burly, violence. There was no room for
defense, no chance for protest, hardly time for dismay. And Dobson was inside. 
A few tables dressed in greasy oilcloth at one' side,
at the other a lunch counter backed by gas burners and a hot plate, on which a
stout woman, worried and none too clean, was busy turning wheat cakes. Steam of
cooking, steam of life. 
A body leaping, athletic, reaching in one leap the
height of the counter, erect, arms spread. Whose voice was that? It was Roy
Dickens's. 
"Come on now, all together, three long, loud,
lusty cheers for the grand old man!" 
Like the crashing of avalanches. 
Confusion of the ears, confusion of the eyes. Who was
that foreignlooking blond girl with the thick brows, sliding pie into a magenta
mouth with one hand and waving a cup of milk-muddied coffee in the other? Why,
it was the girl from the afternoon and the Bureau of Claims room, no longer
sulkily vigilant, but almost a wanton for triumph now. And there above his
plate of cakes doused with sirup was the fellow with the long black hair and
the triangular, consumptive face, exulting: "Fatheads, you were right,
sir; they've had the earth, and look what they've done with it; out with 'em;
give us the room!" And back there was the mine-dust-bitten boy, his
shoulders rounded over an accordion and his eyes as rapt as if it were real
music he was playing for the dancers, not jazz. 
And who danced? Who was this coming from the dancing,
luminous with perspiration, eyes shining, hands out, this strong angel, wild
and young? Mary Shannon, Mary herself. 
"This is our day, Mr. Dobson, yours and mine.
Won't you ask me to dance?" 
What did she mean, her day? Had she been taken in?
Consternation, exasperation, pity. Or— or was it he that was being
"had"? His face aflame, he dropped his eyes. 
"I am too old for dancing." 
He turned and fought his way out, as though someone
were trying to stop him. Not till he was clear away on the sidewalk was a hand
laid on him. It was Mary's. 
"Please; I must tell you. They may talk, Mr.
Dobson, but I am the only one that really knows how brave you've been. How wise
and brave when you turned me out on my own when you did, and how fine and brave
today." Bending quickly over the hand she held, she kissed the back of it,
squeezed it, and let it go. "I thank you, sir," she said. 
It was the bitterest thing he had ever known, the
misgiving that went with him as he went away. If it was all malice, tongue in
cheek —and certainly, flushed and self-deluded as they were, they couldn't all
have been fooled by his folly of the afternoon— then this of Mary's was the
blackest worst. 
Where was he going, dropping one wooden foot in front
of the other so? He had forgotten. Passing by the Laville Cafe without even
seeing its rosy globes, he let himself be carried on to the east. When he
reached Seventeenth he turned down it, north. Espying the white illumination in
Abrahams' Art Gallery a block ahead, he realized what had brought him drifting,
the want of something to see in the wilderness that was his own thing. 
The dealer had been in late in consequence of his
loans to the exhibition. He was locking the shop door when he saw the sculptor
approaching, twenty yards or so away. He hurried toward him, his hand thrust
far out. 
"Well, Dobson, old friend, where are you bound in
your splendor? If nowhere in particular, why not come along with me to— back
to— the Laville? I haven't dined." 
"Thanks, I will. One moment, though. You— you've
got your pieces back from— my piece— back from the show?" 
Abrahams could find no way to hold him from going
forward. He followed, agitated, stumbling among his words. "I— I've been
thinking, Dobson— I've decided it's poor selling policy to keep that marble of
your always on view, on the street practically. Why buy it— that's the
psychology— when you can see it every day just by " 
But there the sculptor stood before the shop, pale to
the temples, mouth ajar. 
"What the devil, Abrahams!" 
Where from a time that began to seem immemorial
Dobson's "Young Circe" had been wont to grace the center of that big
window with her pure-white, tristful loveliness, Mary Shannon's dark atrocity,
the "Survivor," stood. To the right was the smaller bronze of what
might have been meant for a tiger, but looked like a mangy cat. To the left was
the bust of an apparent idiot, apparently done with a mason's trowel. 
"What the devil, Abrahams!" The old man's
voice broke high. "You too?" The dealer looked everywhere.
"Well— you see— old friend — " 
"You don't mean to tell me you swallowed that
today? You can't be simple enough to have believed I saw anything"— Dobson
pointed a shaking finger at the nearest, the idiotic bust— "anything but
the fumbling of a kindergarten child in that thing of Mary Shannon's
there?" 
Abrahams gasped. "Heavens, that isn't a Shannon,
man. That's an Epstein I picked up in London, and they made me go to the bottom
of my pocket for it, don't forget. The other, the animal piece, is an Ed
Villon; but tell me, you must have seen the plate of that one in Studio this
spring. I had to dig for that one too. Deep." 
Perceiving Dobson dumb, Abrahams rushed on: "A
gamble, of course, in this town. I shall not sell them this month nor next. But
by Christmas I shall have sold them; wait and see. I know my people: I can
predict definitely. The Ed Villon I shall sell to Mrs. E. D. Bragford, and she
will pay for it— through the nose. The Epstein, Mrs. Earle Dickens, the
governor's wife, will take; Mrs. Bragford will have told her to by then. The
Shannon piece I shall not offer here, but in Chicago. A prophet in his own
country, you know." 
Abrahams had been talking against a thing that failed
him now. With a catch in his throat, "Old friend," he cried, stepping
forward to throw an arm around the smaller, grayer man, "as for me,
myself, I see more truth and worth and beauty in your 'Circe' than in all of
these. That is my taste. Added to that is my loyalty. But these days are other
days, and my old taste will not pay my assistants' wages, nor loyalty my
rent." 
Dobson shook the arm off and stood away. He tried to
keep his voice level, but it trembled for all of that, like a blade in an
infuriated hand. 
"I have owned up that I have made an ass of
myself, Abrahams. It seems to me that you at least might accept it at that, and
drop the ragging." Dobson wheeled round, stiff-legged, and marched away. 
It grew midnight and past midnight in Dobson's
workshop. 
It is curious what the human mind can be when it is
driven to defend itself. He no longer thought of Abrahams, but he had not yet
managed not to think of Mary Shannon. It seemed to him he would have given
anything to be able to forget her as he had last seen her, flushed with what
seemed to him her self-delusion of achievement, surrounded by bragging
riffraff, in that squalid eating place. Flapjacks and raisin pie, fried-egg
sandwiches and muddy coffee, stamping, wild hallooing, perspiration, jazz. Ugh!
By an effort of the will, in panic, Dobson ran away
into his memory. Ah, but this was better! Loaves and cheese, smoked fish and
gray sausages, under the flaking gilt trelliswork of the Masque d'Or. Alan and
his girl there, Sven and his Lilla. Ivan Morvitch and Freddy Webster from Des
Moines with his half a shirt and patched trousers, bellowing "Mort aux
vieux!" Down with the old fogies! Up youth! "What do you think that
old donkey of a dealer ... a hodgepodge," says he. "My little boy
with chalks . . ." "Moneybag, potbelly, let him wait ten years . .
." Dancing, when dancing was dancing, warm, eager, and wild. Gas-lit
nights of dancing, lilac-lit days of working— working when work was a true,
fierce, rebellious matter, sweet clay on the hands. 
Work! Dobson got out of his chair, stood on his two
feet, and began shaping with a thumb before his eye the vacancy where the
"Arapahoe" had been. 
"Tomorrow I will go about it. A— uh— the— 'Indian
Mother.' So. And so. Yes, 'Arapahoe Mother'— companion piece— the west approach
will want something now to fill it. So. And so. Marching toward the sunset,
bowed a little, burdened. But unbeaten, untired. So." 
With a sweep of the thumb the old man finished the
line of the shadow of a noble beauty. 
"Good! Push on!"
Category:Published
Category:Steele