"Nothing like it, is there?" asked the other. He spoke lazily, absorbed in his comfort. "We 've all got our game, every bally one of us. Mine was actin'."
"Acting?" Paul paused in his busy fingering to look up. "Were you an actor?"
The actors he knew looked out of frames in his mother's little parlor, intense, well-fed, with an inhuman brilliance of attire.
"Even me," replied the tramp equably. He did not move from his posture nor uncover his drowsy eyes; the swollen lids, in which the veins stood out in purple, did not move, but his voice took a rounder and more conscious tone as he went on: "And there was a time, my boy, when actin' meant me and I meant actin'. In '87, I was playing in 'The Demon Doctor,' and drawing my seven quid a week—you believe me. Talk of art—why! I 've had letters from Irving that 'd make you open your eyes."
"I 've heard about Irving," said Paul, glancing back and fore from his clay to the curiously pouched mouth of his recumbent model.
"Fancy," exclaimed the tramp softly. "But it was a great game, a great game. Sometimes, even now, I sort of miss it. And the funny thing is—it is n't the grub and the girls and the cash in my breeches pocket that I miss so much. It 's the bally work. It 's the work, my boy." He seemed to wonder torpidly at himself, and for some seconds he continued to repeat, as though in amazement: "It 's the work." He went on: "Seems as if once an actor, always an actor, don't it? A feller 's got talent in him and he 's got to empty it out, or ache. Some sing, some write, some paint; you prod clay about; but I 'm an actor. Time was, I could act a gas meter, if it was the part, and that 's my trouble to this day."
He ceased; he had delivered himself without once looking up or reflecting the matter of his speech by a change of expression. For all the part his body or his features had in his words, it might have been a dead man speaking. Paul worked on steadily, giving small thought to anything but the shape that came into being under his hands. His standard of experience was slight; he knew too little of men and their vicissitudes to picture to himself the processes by which the face he strove to reproduce sketchily could have been shaped to its cast of sorrowful pretense; he only felt, cloudily and without knowledge, that it signaled a strange and unlovely fate.
His knack served him well on that evening, and besides, there was not an elusive remembrance of form to be courted, but the living original before him. The tramp seemed to sleep; and swiftly, with merciless assurance, the salient thing about him came into existence between Paul's hands. Long before the light failed or the gourd-drum at the farmhouse door commenced its rhythmic call, the thing was done—a mere sketch, with the thumb-prints not even smoothed away, but stamped none the less with the pitiless print of life.
"Done it?" inquired the tramp, rousing as Paul uncrossed his legs and prepared to put the clay away. "Let 's have a look?"
"It wants to be made smooth," explained Paul, as he passed it to him. "And it's soft, of course, so don't squeeze it."