"Oh, certainly!" he replied cheerfully. "By all means! No, we can't stay—we only dropped in. We just thought we'd see how you were getting along. If I were you, Will, I'd make up my mind about that intoxicated tree and set it up straight—good-bye!"
They went out cheerfully enough, but he knew they were disappointed and hurt—they had expected so much from that picture. And he wished he cared more. He looked at it critically. Of course it was bad, but how could they tell what he had been doing? It was the plan of months changed utterly in three hours. The result was ridiculous, but he needed it no longer—he knew what he wanted now, what he had been fighting against all these days. He would paint it if he could—and till he could. The insistent artist-passion to express even bunglingly something of the unendurable beauty of that strange night was on him, and before the echo of his guests' departure had died away he was working as he had never worked before, the old picture lying unnoticed in the corner where he had thrown it.
He needed no models, he did not use his studies. Was it not printed on his brain, was it not etched into his heart, that weird vision of the storm, with the floating fairy creature that hardly touched the earth? Was there a lovely curve in all her melting postures, which slipped like water circles into new shapes, that he did not know? That haunting, elf-like look, that ineffably exquisite abandon, had he not studied it greedily then in the wood, and later, in his restless dreams? The trees were sentient, the bushes put out clasping fingers to detain him, the wind shrieked out its angry soul at him; and she, the white wonder with her floating wisps of stinging hair, had joined with them to mock at him, the startled witness of that mad revel of all the elements. He knew all this—he was drunk with it: could he paint it? Or would people see only a strange-eyed girl dancing in a wood?
He did not know how many days he had been at work on it; he ate what the cleaning-woman brought him; his face was bristled with a stubby growth; the cigarette boxes strewed the floor. Men appeared at the door, and he urged them peevishly to go away; people brought messages, and he said he was not in town, and returned the notes unread. In the morning he smiled and breathed hard and patted the easel; at night he bit his nails and cursed himself for a colour-blind fool.
There was a white birch, strained and bent in the wind, that troubled him still, and as he was giving it the last touches, in the cold, strong afternoon light, the door burst open.
"Look here, the thing closes at six! Are you crazy?" they called to him, exasperatedly. "Aren't you going to send it?"
"That's all right, that's all right," he muttered vaguely, "shut up, can't you?"
They stood over behind him, and there was a stillness in the room. He laid down his palette carefully and turned to them, a worried look on his drawn, bristled face.
"That's meant to be the ocean beyond the cliff there," he said, an almost childlike fear in his eyes, "did—did you know it?"
The older man drew in a long breath.