Ewing's Lady

by Harry Leon Wilson

But day by day these excursions with the old painter had brought him to believe that he had lost his way. That trick of color was not to be learned, it was clear, by rough-and-ready advances. Teevan, who was ever watchful of him, who betrayed, indeed, a strange little jealousy of any other influence than his own, scanned his first studies eagerly, and turned an inscrutable face on his young friend. He did not praise loosely; he did not condemn outright. And he talked not too specifically of the canvases before him. He showed little consciousness of a change in the demeanor of his disciple, though Ewing's eye rested on him with a long, unaccountable regard. Perhaps the boy was turning a little sullen. This amused him. Meanwhile, the youth stood aghast before the dreadful thing he saw in his heart. Hatred of a benefactor! All the good in him struggled against it; all his gratitude pleaded with him to be fair to the friend he had revered so long. Teevan talked more of Corot or Constable, Diaz or Millet than he talked of Ewing; and the young man came at last to the amazing conclusion not only that he was on a wrong road, but that Teevan knew it—that the little man must long have known it. This put him again in that rage of impotence that had seized him in those last days at the League. But he bore it longer now. He felt there was something final about this.

There were long days in the open to think on it, weigh it, and wring the meaning from it. Sydenham placidly criticised his work; but Sydenham could not feel his tragedy of defeat. A man who, at seventy, suffered his own despairs with the poignant ecstasy of youth, could not take a boy's failings seriously. Ewing now saw, moreover—for he was beginning to use another pair of eyes than Teevan's—that Sydenham himself was a hopeless mannerist, a color-mad voluptuary, painting always subjectively, refusing all but the merest hints from his subject.

His last day of confessed futility, his last hour of inner rebellion, came early in June. He carried his sketch trap out that day, but did not unpack it. He lay, instead, pondering, resolving, raging, while Sydenham, a little distance off, delicately corrected the errors of Nature in a vista of meadow. Ewing chewed the juicy ends of long-stemmed grasses and made phrases of disparagement for this sketch of Sydenham's, picturing himself with the courage to utter them. He told himself frankly what he thought of the old man's work—his "brush doddering," he nerved himself to call it.

Immensely refreshed by this exercise in brutality, he rolled over on his grassy bed to follow the shade of the oak under which he lay, and dramatized a meeting with Teevan, in which the little man strangely listened more than he spoke. He uttered his mind again concerning the work of Sydenham, the master Teevan had prescribed, asserting that unsuspecting toiler to be hopelessly "locoed" in the matter of color. He saw Teevan's fine brows go elegantly up at this term, and he explained it to him with a humble sort of boldness.

From this he warmed to sheer audacity, disclosing further to his imagined hearer that the time had come for him to go his own way—still grateful for advice, still yearning for that friendly intimacy, but determined to be done with dreams. He saw Teevan applauding this mild declaration of revolt, with his fine, dark little smile, and a courteous inclination of the head, and he thereupon amplified it. He must go back to himself and stay there stubbornly, wheresoever that self led him. Millet might have a restricted sense of color, Corot might have had his faults, and Rousseau have been less than Teevan could have wished him; but these were dead men. And Ewing was alive, determined to do those things that permitted him to feel the little power he might have. He was through with efforts that brought him nothing but a sense of the folly of all effort. And it was to this conviction, he made it plain, that his amazed but still respectful listener had led him. He worked himself into a glow of defiant self-assertion, feeling his own respect, and Teevan's as well, mounting with his heat.

When the light faded he strolled over to look at Sydenham's sketch, bent on testing his self-inspired temerity.

"I wonder if you've gotten that sky?" he began judicially, as the old man invited his comment. Sydenham looked up in some surprise, but Ewing's eyes were still on the sketch.

"Too gray above, isn't it? I thought the gray was only down near the horizon. By the way, I wish I'd roughed in that cow for you. A cow isn't the easiest thing in the world to draw. They look easy, but they're not. That bit of stone wall isn't bad, and your clover effect is first rate." He paused. He had meant only to practice speaking his own mind against the next interview with Teevan. He did not want to hurt Sydenham. The latter was roping his stool and easel together. He had been a little amazed at his pupil's outburst, but he looked up with a smile entirely placid.

"That's the way they all say it. You've caught the trick of art criticism, my boy, if you've caught nothing else."

Ewing saw that he was laughed at. There was a cool little flash to his retort.