Ewing's Lady

by Harry Leon Wilson

He did not return to Ewing, but, after examining a few other drawings, he turned to leave the room. As he passed, Ewing reached across two neighbors—who protested—and caught the velvet jacket.

"Perhaps you can give me an idea," he said. The other looked at him as if he had not seen him before.

"Use intelligence! Good God—use intelligence!" he almost wailed, and made his escape.

Ewing mechanically placed a fresh sheet before him and began again, but he rubbed out as fast as he drew. The next morning he found the paper foul from many erasures, and started afresh. He could see now that his first drawing, posted in irredeemable ignominy, was not all that it should be. It lacked the freedom of work he had done in his solitude. He tried to conjure back that old free feeling, but the days passed and it drew farther away. Some of the students changed places and began on other casts. The better men went every other week into the life class. But Ewing stayed desperately by his crouching woman. He studied her until he loved and loathed her. The master came and went. Sometimes he ignored Ewing. When he did notice him it was always with a fresh blow on the sunk heart of the boy. Once he sat in his place and ran some of his own brusque, effective lines along the figure, the lines that every other youth in the room punctiliously imitated. They mingled with Ewing's strokes as a driving rain mingles with a bed of flowers.

"If you'd only give up your damned little way," he complained.

"I wish you'd explain a bit," pleaded the boy.

"Old Velvet" turned to the spectacled young man. "Give him your study. There, do it like that."

Then came the beginning of the end. He lost himself in a crawling blindness of imitation. The old power that had made him draw without knowing how he did it gathered its splendid garments and withdrew as mysteriously as it had once come to possess him. He drew, but he would no longer have recognized what he did as the work of his own hand. He thought of Griggs, who had said, "Style?—I'd know a scrap of your stuff if I found it in an ash barrel in Timbuctoo!"

The thought of those friendly men knowing his degradation was another stone on the grave of his self-esteem. It was this that made him wait when the others had gone one night, to take down that first crucified drawing from the wall where it had remained, torn and hanging by one tack.

"Will you give it to me?" said a voice, and, as he did not care one way or the other, the spectacled young man put it in his portfolio. Afterwards Ewing thought of asking him why he wanted it, but he did not come back again. He had been advanced to the life class.