"My summer's work is there—Look? yes; but I can't promise what you'll see. You bring your own eyes. I can't make eyes, too. If I only could—" He spoke with a slow, soft gentleness, his blue eyes half shut and dreamily distant. As Ewing turned to study a landscape leaning against the wall on a table near by, the painter climbed to his stool and twined his thin legs confusingly among its supports. Then facing his canvas and working a brush into the color on his palette he continued:
"Line is a fact. Color is only a sensation. Anyone can prove line, but to know color you must have imagination. If you lack that and do have a gift for humorous abuse you can be an art critic and make quite a bit of money, I'm told." He had begun to paint as he talked. He spoke with the same slow gentleness, even when a hint of seasoned bitterness betrayed itself.
One close look at the sketches about him had made Ewing rejoice that his own paintings were safe with Ben Crider. He studied the canvases before him with pleasure and dismay: wooded hills, grassy meadows, a park slope with a single birch; mist rising over a marsh; a country road narrowing into a blaze of sumach. They showed plainly enough, he thought, that color must be conveyed rather by implication than by blunt directness, and there, he felt, had been his own great blunder. He had been brutally direct.
Some of the pictures before him left him wanting a sharper definition of line, a more explicit modeling of surface, a treatment less timid, and the color itself, though it never failed to interest him, often puzzled or even irritated. He sought for words to disclose what he felt, his admiration for some of the sketches, his doubt or his rank disbelief as to others. But the old man suddenly swept the half-formed sentences from his mind.
A crash of falling furniture had resounded from the room of Dallas, forward on their own floor. From the studios below came other crashes, the noise of falling bodies, and a ringing, metallic clangor. Sydenham had paused at the first crash, then skipped nimbly from his stool, shouting gleefully, "There goes Griggs's suit of armor!" Then, to Ewing's amazement, he twitched the end of a cord that led to a high mahogany sideboard, causing a cigar box, a copper kettle, and a heavy volume of prints to fall with resoundings that must have carried to the farthest studio. The old man faced him with the ecstatically deafened look of a child amid exploding firecrackers. Then, as he discerned Ewing's startled look, he explained:
"It's only a way the boys have every day at one o'clock. That Baldwin boy started it by upsetting a musket and a brace of cavalry sabers. Then Griggs followed with his armor. Then they all got to joining in. The Chalmers boy pulls over his easel, and I understand there's been a complaint from the people below; but it leaves us feeling rather friendly, you know, and we're sure it's time to eat." He looked at Ewing as if seeking to justify his complicity in so childish a performance. And Ewing, reading the look, helped him to reload his sideboard for the next day's disturbance. The copper kettle, book and cigar box—the latter containing half a dozen lumps of coal—were replaced on a thin board to which the string was attached.
Sydenham had meantime taken food from a curtained cabinet and was munching before his easel. He waved the freedom of his larder to Ewing. "There's bread and half a chicken, and pickles. There used to be ham, but I forget if it's there yet. Anyway, it wasn't the most expensive ham. I can't lose daylight by running out. The light changes while I eat. I'm no Joshua. What did Griggs say of you—crazy boy, that Griggs. Doing black and white, eh? Show me."
Ewing had helped himself to the bread and meat, and the two, eating casually, crossed the hall to his own room. His drawings were at hand and Sydenham looked at them as he munched, pausing critically now and then, a bit of bread midway to his mouth.
"Not bad, not bad! If you can do that well you ought to do better. But too many of you boys quit when you've learned to do something you can sell. It's respectable, of course, but shoemakers do as much, and you've no right to call yourselves artists for it. I'm afraid there isn't anything made in the world that some one won't buy. And people know if their boots fit them, or if their bread is good, but they buy pictures in the dark. There wouldn't be so many men calling themselves painters if the public wasn't a better judge of sawed lumber or iron castings than it is of pictures. Where did you study?"
"My father taught me drawing. He warned me to learn that first."