It did not hurt him now. A sort of apathy seemed to have fallen on him. The old days became more and more remote. Sometimes he doubted whether anything remained of her former love for him, and sometimes he wondered if he still loved her. She was so different that it was almost as if she were a stranger. Once they had had everything in common. Now it seemed to him that they had nothing—not even Bill.
He did not brood upon it. He gave himself no time for that. He worked doggedly on under the blasphemous but efficient guidance of Mr. Penway. He was becoming a man with a fixed idea—the idea of making good.
He began to make headway. His beginnings were small, but practical. He no longer sat down when the spirit moved him to dash off vague masterpieces which might turn into something quite unexpected on the road to completion; he snatched at anything definite that presented itself.
Sometimes it was a couple of illustrations to a short story in one of the minor magazines, sometimes a picture to go with an eulogy of a patent medicine. Whatever it was, he seized upon it and put into it all the talent he possessed. And thanks to the indefatigable coaching of Robert Dwight Penway, a certain merit was beginning to creep into his work. His drawing was growing firmer. He no longer shirked difficulties.
Mr. Penway was good enough to approve of his progress. Being free from any morbid distaste for himself, he attributed that progress to its proper source. As he said once in a moment of expansive candour, he could, given a free hand and something to drink and smoke while doing it, make an artist out of two sticks and a lump of coal.
“Why, I’ve made you turn out things that are like something on earth, my boy,” he said proudly. “And that,” he added, as he reached out for the bottle of Bourbon which Kirk had provided for him, “is going some.”
Kirk was far too grateful to resent the slightly unflattering note a more spirited man might have detected in the remark.
Only once during those days did Kirk allow himself to weaken and admit to himself how wretched he was. He was drawing a picture of Steve at the time, and Steve had the sympathy which encourages weakness in others.
It was a significant sign of his changed attitude towards his profession that he was not drawing Steve as a figure in an allegorical picture or as “Apollo” or “The Toiler,” but simply as a well-developed young man who had had the good sense to support his nether garments with Middleton’s Undeniable Suspenders. The picture, when completed, would show Steve smirking down at the region of his waist-line and announcing with pride and satisfaction: “They’re Middleton’s!” Kirk was putting all he knew into the work, and his face, as he drew, was dark and gloomy.