In the lobby of a tall office building, where he stopped at a little cigar counter to get fresh tobacco for his pipe, he looked so fixedly at a woman clad in long soft furs, that in alarm she hurried out to her machine to wait for her escort, who had evidently gone up the elevator.
Once more in the street, Sam shuddered at the thought of the hands that had laboured that the soft cheeks and the untroubled eyes of this one woman might be. Into his mind came the face and figure of a little Canadian nurse who had once cared for him through an illness—her quick, deft fingers and her muscular little arms. “Another such as she,” he muttered, “has been at work upon the face and body of this gentlewoman; a hunter has gone into the white silence of the north to bring out the warm furs that adorn her; for her there has been a tragedy—a shot, and red blood upon the snow, and a struggling beast waving its little claws in the air; for her a woman has worked through the morning, bathing her white limbs, her cheeks, her hair.”
For this gentlewoman also there had been a man apportioned, a man like himself, who had cheated and lied and gone through the years in pursuit of the dollars to pay all of the others, a man of power, a man who could achieve, could accomplish. Again he felt within him a yearning for the power of the artist, the power not only to see the meaning of the faces in the street, but to reproduce what he saw, to get with subtle fingers the story of the achievement of mankind into a face hanging upon a wall.
In other days, in Caxton, listening to Telfer’s talk, and in Chicago and New York with Sue, Sam had tried to get an inkling of the passion of the artist; now walking and looking at the faces rolling past him on the long street he thought that he did understand.
Once when he was new in the city he had, for some months, carried on an affair with a woman, the daughter of a cattle farmer from Iowa. Now her face filled his vision. How rugged it was, how filled with the message of the ground underfoot; the thick lips, the dull eyes, the strong, bullet-like head, how like the cattle her father had bought and sold. He remembered the little room in Chicago where he had his first love passage with this woman. How frank and wholesome it had seemed. How eagerly both man and woman had rushed at evening to the meeting place. How her strong hands had clasped him. The face of the woman in the motor by the office building danced before his eyes, the face so peaceful, so free from the marks of human passion, and he wondered what daughter of a cattle raiser had taken the passion out of the man who paid for the beauty of that face.
On a side street, near the lighted front of a cheap theatre, a woman, standing alone and half concealed in the doorway of a church, called softly, and turning he went to her.
“I am not a customer,” he said, looking at her thin face and bony hands, “but if you care to come with me I will stand a good dinner. I am getting hungry and do not like eating alone. I want some one to talk to me so that I won’t get to thinking.”
“You’re a queer bird,” said the woman, taking his arm. “What have you done that you don’t want to think?”
Sam said nothing.
“There’s a place over there,” she said, pointing to the lighted front of a cheap restaurant with soiled curtains at the windows.