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 waistline 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.
Steve noted this with concern. He had perceived for some time that Kirk had changed. He had lost all his old boyish enjoyment of their sparring-bouts, and he threw the medicine-ball with an absent gloom almost equal to Bailey’s.
It had not occurred to Steve to question Kirk about this. If Kirk had anything on his mind which he wished to impart he would say it. Meanwhile, the friendly thing for him to do was to be quiet and pretend to notice nothing.
It seemed to Steve that nothing was going right these days. Here was he, chafing at his inability to open his heart to Mamie. Here was Kirk, obviously in trouble. And—a smaller thing, but of interest, as showing how universal the present depression was—there was Bailey Bannister, equally obviously much worried over something or other.
For Bailey had reinstated Steve in the place he had occupied before old John Bannister had dismissed him, and for some time past Steve had marked him down as a man with a secret trouble. He had never been of a riotously cheerful disposition, but it had been possible once to draw him into conversation at the close of the morning’s exercises. Now he hardly spoke. And often, when Steve arrived in the morning, he was informed that Mr. Bannister had started for Wall Street early on important business.
These things troubled Steve. His simple soul abhorred a mystery.
But it was the case of Kirk that worried him most, for he half guessed that the latter’s gloom had to do with Ruth; and he worshipped Ruth.
Kirk laid down his sketch and got up.
“I guess that’ll do for the moment, Steve,” he said.
Steve relaxed the attitude of proud satisfaction which he had assumed in order to do justice to the Undeniable Suspenders. He stretched himself and sat down.
“You certainly are working to beat the band just now, squire,” he remarked.
“It’s a pretty good thing, work, Steve,” said Kirk. “If it does nothing else, it keeps you from thinking.”
He knew it was feeble of him, but he was powerfully impelled to relieve himself by confiding his wretchedness to Steve. He need not say much, he told himself plausibly—only just enough to lighten the burden a little.
He would not be disloyal to Ruth—he had not sunk to that—but, after all Steve was Steve. It was not like blurting out his troubles to a stranger. It would harm nobody, and do him a great deal of good, if he talked to Steve.
He relit his pipe, which had gone out during a tense spell of work on the suspenders.
“Well, Steve,” he said, “what do you think of life? How is this best of all possible worlds treating you?”
Steve deposed that life was pretty punk.
“You’re a great describer, Steve. You’ve hit it first time. Punk is the word. It’s funny, if you look at it properly. Take my own case. The superficial observer, who is apt to be a bonehead, would say that I ought to be singing psalms of
