Children of the Whirlwind

by Leroy Scott

  CHAPTER II

  When Maggie entered the studio on the Duchess's third floor, the big,red-haired, unkempt painter roared his rebukes at her. She stiffened,and in the resentment of her proud youth did not even offer anexplanation. Nodding to her father and Barney Palmer, she silentlycrossed to the window and stood sullenly gazing over the single mongreltree before the house and down the narrow street and across the littleSquare, at the swirling black tide which raced through East River. Thatpainter was a beast! Yes, and a fool!

  But quickly the painter was forgotten, and once more her mind revertedto Larry--at last Larry was coming back!--only to have the painter,after a minute, interrupt her excited imagination with:

  "What's the matter with your tongue, Maggie? Generally you stab backwith it quick enough."

  She turned, still sulky and silent, and gazed with cynical superiorityat the easel. "Nuts"--it was Barney Palmer who had thus lightlyrechristened the painter when he had set up his studio in the atticabove the pawnshop six months before--Nuts was transferring the seamy,cunning face of her father, "Old Jimmie" Carlisle, to the canvas withswift, unhesitating strokes.

  "For the lova Christ and the twelve apostles, including that pikerJudas," woefully intoned Old Jimmie from the model's chair, "lemme getdown off this platform!"

  "Move and I'll wipe my palette off on that Mardi Gras vest of yours!"grunted the big painter autocratically through his mouthful of brushes.

  "O God--and I got a cramp in my back, and my neck's gone tosleep!" groaned Old Jimmie, leaning forward on his cane. "Daughter,dear"--plaintively to Maggie--"what is the crazy gentleman doing to me?"

  "It's an awful smear, father." Maggie spoke slightingly, but with a toneof doubt. It was not the sort of picture that eighteen has been taughtto like--yet the picture did possess an intangible something thatprovoked doubt as to its quality. "You sure do look one old burglar!"

  "Not a cheap burglar?"--hopefully.

  "Naw!" exploded the man at the easel in his big voice, first taking thebrushes from his mouth. "You're a swell-looking old pirate!--ready toloot the sub-treasury and then scuttle the old craft with all hands onboard! A breathing, speaking, robbing likeness!"

  "Maggie's right, and Nuts's right," put in Barney Palmer. "It's sure arotten picture, and then again it sure looks like you, Jimmie."

  The smartly dressed Barney--Barney could not keep away from Broadwaytailors and haberdashers with their extravagant designs and colorschemes--dismissed the insignificant matter of the portrait, and resumedthe really important matter which had brought him to her.

  "Are you certain, Maggie, that the Duchess hasn't heard from Larry?"

  "If she has, she hasn't mentioned it. But why don't you ask heryourself?"

  "I did, but she wouldn't say a thing. You can't get a word out of theDuchess with a jimmy, unless she wants to talk--and she never wants totalk." He turned his sharp, narrowly set eyes upon the lean old man."It's got me guessing, Jimmie. Larry was due out of Sing Sing yesterday,and we haven't had a peep from him, and though she won't talk I'm surehe hasn't been here to see his grandmother."

  "Sure is funny," agreed Old Jimmie. "But mebbe Larry has broke straightinto a fresh game and is playing a lone hand. He's a quick worker, Larryis--and he's got nerve."

  "Well, whatever's keeping him we're tied up till Larry comes." Barneyturned back to Maggie. "I say, sister, how about robing yourself in yourraiment of joy and coming with yours truly to a palace of jazz, there todine and show the populace what real dancing is?"

  "Can't, Barney. Mr. Hunt"--the name given the painter at his originalchristening--"asked the Duchess and me to have dinner up here. He's tocook it himself."

  "For your sake I hope he cooks better than he paints." And slidingdown in his chair until he rested upon a more comfortable vertebra, theelegant Barney lit a monogrammed cigarette, and with idle patience swunghis bamboo stick.

  "You're half an hour late, Maggie," Hunt began at her again in hisrumbling voice. "Can't stand for such a waste of my time!"

  "How about my time?" retorted Maggie, who indeed had a grievance. "I wassupposed to have the day off, but instead I had to carry that tray ofcigarettes around till the last person in the Ritzmore had finishedlunch. Anyhow," she added, "I don't see that your time's worth so muchwhen you spend it on such painty messes as these."

  "It's not up to you to tell me what my time's worth!" retorted Hunt. "Ipay you--that's enough for you!... Because you weren't on time, I stuckOld Jimmie out there to finish off this picture. I'll be through withthe old cut-throat in ten minutes. Be ready to take his place."

  "All right," said Maggie sulkily.

  For all his roaring she was not much afraid of the painter. While hisbrushes flicked at, and streaked across, the canvas she stood idlywatching him. He was in paint-smeared, baggy trousers and a soft shirtwhose open collar gave a glimpse of a deep chest matted with hair andwhose rolled-up sleeves revealed forearms that seemed absurdly large tobe fiddling with those slender sticks. A crowbar would have seemedmore in harmony. He was unromantically old--all of thirty-five Maggieguessed; and with his square, rough-hewn face and tousled, reddish hairhe was decidedly ugly. But for the fact that he really did work--thoughof course his work was foolish--and the fact that he paid his way--hebought little, but no one could beat him by so much as a penny in abargain, not even the Duchess--Maggie might have considered him as oneof the many bums who floated purposelessly through that drab region.

  Also, had there not been so many queer people coming and going in thisneighborhood--Eads Howe, the hobo millionaire, settlement workers,people who had grown rich and old in their business and preferred tolive near it--Maggie might have regarded Hunt with more curiosity, andeven with suspicion; but down here one accepted queer people as a matterof course, the only fear being that secretly they might be police orgovernment agents, which Maggie and the others knew very well Hunt wasnot. When Hunt had rented this attic as a studio they had acceptedhis explanation that he had taken it because it was cheap and he couldafford to pay no more. Likewise they had accepted his explanation thathe was a mechanic by trade who had roughed it all over the world andwas possessed with an itch for painting, that lately he had worked invarious garages, that it was his habit to hoard his money till he got abit ahead and then go off on a painting spree. All these admissionswere indubitably plausible, for his paintings seemed the unmistakablehandiwork of an irresponsible, hard-fisted motor mechanic.

  Maggie shifted to her other foot and glanced casually at the canvaseswhich leaned against the walls of the shabby studio. There was theDuchess: incredibly old, the face a web of wrinkles, the lips indrawnover toothless and shrunken gums, the nose a thin, curved beak, theeyes deep-set, gleaming, inscrutable, watching; and drawn tight overthe hair--even Maggie did not know whether that hair was a wig or theDuchess's--the faded Oriental shawl which was fastened beneath her chinand which fell over her thin, bent chest. There was O'Flaherty, thegood-natured policeman on the beat. There was the old watchmaker nextdoor. There was Black Hurley, the notorious gang leader, who sometimesswaggered into the district like a dirty and evil feudal lord. There wasa Jewish pushcart peddler, white-bearded and skull-capped. There was anItalian mother sitting on the curb, her feet in the gutter, smiling downat the baby that was hungrily suckling at her milk-heavy breast. And soon, and so on. Just the ordinary, uninteresting things Maggie saw aroundthe block. There was not a single pretty picture in the lot.

  Hunt swung the canvas from his easel and stood it against the wall."That'll be all for you, Jimmie. Beat it and make room for Maggie.Maggie, take your same pose."

  Old Jimmie ambled forward and gazed at his portrait as Hunt was settlingan unfinished picture on his easel. It had rather amused Jimmie andfilled in his idle time to sit for the crazy painter; and, incidentally,another picture of him would do him no particular harm since the policealready had all the pictures they needed of him over at Headquarters. Ashe gazed at Hunt's work Old Jimmie snickered.

  "I say, N
uts, what you goin' to do with this mess of paint?"

  "Going to sell it to the Metropolitan Museum, you old sinner!" snappedHunt.

  Old Jimmie cackled at the joke. He knew pictures; that is, goodpictures. He had had an invisible hand in more than one clevertransaction in which handsome pictures alleged to have been smuggled in,Gainsboroughs and Romneys and such (there had been most profit for himin handling the forgeries of these particular masters), had been put,with an air of great secrecy, into the hands of divers newly richgentlemen who believed they were getting masterpieces at bargain pricesthrough this evasion of customs laws.

  "Nuts," chuckled Old Jimmie, "this junk wouldn't be so funny if youdidn't seem to believe you were really painting."

  "Junk! Funny!" Hunt swung around, one big hand closed about Jimmie'slean neck and the other seized his thin shoulder. "You grandfather ofthe devil and all his male progeny, you talk like that and I'll chuckyou through the window!"

  Old Jimmie grinned. The grip of the big hands of the painter, thoughpowerful, was light. They all knew that the loud ravings of the painternever presaged violence. They had grown to like him, to accept him asalmost one of themselves; though of course they looked down upon himwith amused pity for his imbecility regarding his paintings.

  "Get out of here," continued Hunt, "or cut out all this noise that comesfrom your having a brain that rattles. I've got to work."

  Hunt turned again to his easel, and Old Jimmie, still grinning, loweredhimself into a chair, lit a cigar, and winked at Barney. Hunt, withbrush poised, regarded Maggie a moment.

  "You there, Maggie," he ordered, "chin up a bit more, some flash in youreyes, more pep in your bearing--as though you were asking all the damesof the Winter Garden, and the Charity Ball, and the Horse Show, and thatgang of tea-swilling women at the Ritzmore you sell cigarettes to--asthough you were asking them all who the dickens they think they are... OGod, can't you do anything!"

  "I'm doing the best I can, and I look more like those dames than youlook like a painter!"

  "Shut up! I'm paying you a dollar an hour to pose, not to talk back tome. And you'd have more respect for my money if you knew how hard I hadto work to earn it: carrying a motor car around in each hand. Wash offthat scowl and try to look as I said... There, that's better. Hold it."

  He began to paint rapidly, with quick glances back and forth between thecanvas and Maggie. Maggie's dress was just the ordinary shirt-waist andskirt that the shopgirl and her sisters wear; Hunt had ordered it so.She was above the medium height, with thick black hair tinted withshadowy blue, long dark lashes, dark scimitars of eyebrows, a full, firmmouth, a nose with just the right tilt to it--all effective points forHunt in what he wished to do. But what had attracted him most and givenhim his idea was her look; hardly pertness, or impudence--rather acynical, mature, defiant certainty in herself.

  Erect in her cheap shirt-waist, she gazed off into space with a smiling,confident challenge to all the world. Hunt was trying to make hispicture a true portrait--and also make it a symbol of many things whichstill were only taking shape in his own mind: of beauty rising from thegutter to overcome beauty of more favored birth, and to reign aboveit; also of a lower stratum surging up and breaking through the upperstratum, becoming a part of it, or assimilating it, or conquering it.Leading families replaced by other families, classes replaced by otherclasses, nations replaced by other nations--such was the inevitablesocial process--so read the records of the fifty or sixty centuriessince history began to be written. Oh, he was trying to say a lot inthis portrait of a girl of ordinary birth--even less than ordinary--inher cheap shirt-waist and skirt!

  And it pleased the sardonic element in Hunt's unmoral nature that thisMaggie, through whom he was trying to symbolize so much, he knew to be apetty larcenist: shoplifting and matters of similar consequence. Shehad been cynically frank about this to him; casual, almost boastful. Herpossessing a bent toward such activities was hardly to be wondered at,with her having Old Jimmie as her father, and the Duchess as a landlady,and having for acquaintances such gentlemen as Barney Palmer and thisreturning prison-bird, Larry Brainard.

  But petty crime, thought Hunt, would not be Maggie's forte if shedeveloped her possibilities. With her looks, her boldness, hercleverness, she had the makings of a magnificent adventuress. As hepainted, he wondered what she was going to do, and become; and hewatched her not only with a painter's eye intent upon the present, butwith keen speculation upon the future.