And as they were both conscious of how much had been left unsaid, how much still waited to be faced, they swayed towards each other, tears in their eyes, and clung to each other passionately, as though with a sudden unquenchable loneliness.
XLVII
With the first exodus of the summer travelers from the city a new spirit of work possessed Dangerfield. With the clearing of the horizon of all that was glittering and superficial, the city with its great sanity and moving vital currents returned to him. He put off his departure for the country from month to month, fascinated by the summer moods of the metropolis, the brilliance on the Avenues, the extravagance in the lighted air, the teeming boisterous sweltering hordes on the beaches. He felt himself possessed with new enthusiasms. It was a new city he discovered, the city of the outer air, swept together in a friendlier fraternity by the mutual necessity for crowded pleasure after the long day.
In these ardent excursions he gathered around him other men, younger men, ardent disciples who wished to see what he saw, men interested in his new exposition of the treasures of beauty near at hand.
He found that success had brought him this—that isolation was no longer possible. The world paid him its full tribute but claimed him for its own, absorbing him into the rank and file of its groping masses, delegating to him his servitude of leadership. Yet he felt a certain content in fitting into the procession. The believers who surrounded him, communicated to him a certain strength which surprised him. Perhaps at bottom they convinced him of his power, the last and most fleeting sensation of the true artist. Then, too, he found that in expounding his views and seeking to open their eyes and inspire them, he taught himself, translating what at one time had been pure instinct into the intellectual possession of conscious knowledge.
Tootles was usually of these pilgrimages. The young fellow had steadied amazingly with the opportunity of entering the privileged gatherings. He had begun to perceive that beyond all the fine fervor of inspiration and enthusiasm, is the long hard routine which alone can bring self-satisfaction in the knowledge that the building is rising on a firm foundation. He had a quick eye and a gift of absorbing with almost the imitativeness of a monkey, conceptions which were still logically beyond him. Yet there was no doubt of his earnestness. As a sort of announcement to the world that he had put behind youthful follies he even allowed his face to be disfigured by a scrubby mustache,—the sort of sacrifice a young doctor feels called upon to make on assuming the dignity of a practice.
In the beginning Inga had been of the party—Dangerfield was always eager to have her with him—but gradually, almost imperceptibly, she had dropped out, giving as an excuse the need of her own work. On his return to the Arcade he found her installed in her old studio. The first afternoon on which he made this discovery he had gone angrily to her door, so profoundly hurt by her action that for the first time he was in a mood for reproaches. He found her busy at her easel, model on the stand. He stopped, hesitated, and said with enforced restraint:
“I don’t want to interrupt you. When you are through come in, there’s something I want to see you about.”