Chapter 2

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 an
explanation. Nodding to her father and Barney Palmer, she silently
crossed to the window and stood sullenly gazing over the single mongrel
tree before the house and down the narrow street and across the little
Square, at the swirling black tide which raced through East River. That
painter was a beast! Yes, and a fool!

But quickly the painter was forgotten, and once more her mind reverted
to 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 back
with it quick enough.”

She turned, still sulky and silent, and gazed with cynical superiority
at the easel. “Nuts”--it was Barney Palmer who had thus lightly
rechristened the painter when he had set up his studio in the attic
above the pawnshop six months before--Nuts was transferring the seamy,
cunning face of her father, “Old Jimmie” Carlisle, to the canvas with
swift, unhesitating strokes.

“For the lova Christ and the twelve apostles, including that piker
Judas,” woefully intoned Old Jimmie from the model's chair, “lemme get
down 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 to
sleep!” 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 tone
of doubt. It was not the sort of picture that eighteen has been taught
to like--yet the picture did possess an intangible something that
provoked 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 the
brushes from his mouth. “You're a swell-looking old pirate!--ready to
loot the sub-treasury and then scuttle the old craft with all hands on
board! A breathing, speaking, robbing likeness!”

“Maggie's right, and Nuts's right,” put in Barney Palmer. “It's sure a
rotten picture, and then again it sure looks like you, Jimmie.”

The smartly dressed Barney--Barney could not keep away from Broadway
tailors and haberdashers with their extravagant designs and color
schemes--dismissed the insignificant matter of the portrait, and resumed
the 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 her
yourself?”

“I did, but she wouldn't say a thing. You can't get a word out of the
Duchess with a jimmy, unless she wants to talk--and she never wants to
talk.” 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 sure
he hasn't been here to see his grandmother.”

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

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

“Can't, Barney. Mr. Hunt”--the name given the painter at his original
christening--“asked the Duchess and me to have dinner up here. He's to
cook it himself.”

“For your sake I hope he cooks better than he paints.” And sliding
down in his chair until he rested upon a more comfortable vertebra, the
elegant Barney lit a monogrammed cigarette, and with idle patience swung
his bamboo stick.

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

“How about my time?” retorted Maggie, who indeed had a grievance. “I was
supposed to have the day off, but instead I had to carry that tray of
cigarettes around till the last person in the Ritzmore had finished
lunch. Anyhow,” she added, “I don't see that your time's worth so much
when 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. “I
pay you--that's enough for you!... Because you weren't on time, I stuck
Old Jimmie out there to finish off this picture. I'll be through with
the 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 his
brushes flicked at, and streaked across, the canvas she stood idly
watching him. He was in paint-smeared, baggy trousers and a soft shirt
whose open collar gave a glimpse of a deep chest matted with hair and
whose rolled-up sleeves revealed forearms that seemed absurdly large to
be fiddling with those slender sticks. A crowbar would have seemed
more in harmony. He was unromantically old--all of thirty-five Maggie
guessed; and with his square, rough-hewn face and tousled, reddish hair
he was decidedly ugly. But for the fact that he really did work--though
of course his work was foolish--and the fact that he paid his way--he
bought little, but no one could beat him by so much as a penny in a
bargain, not even the Duchess--Maggie might have considered him as one
of the many bums who floated purposelessly through that drab region.

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

Maggie shifted to her other foot and glanced casually at the canvases
which leaned against the walls of the shabby studio. There was the
Duchess: incredibly old, the face a web of wrinkles, the lips indrawn
over toothless and shrunken gums, the nose a thin, curved beak, the
eyes deep-set, gleaming, inscrutable, watching; and drawn tight over
the hair--even Maggie did not know whether that hair was a wig or the
Duchess's--the faded Oriental shawl which was fastened beneath her chin
and which fell over her thin, bent chest. There was O'Flaherty, the
good-natured policeman on the beat. There was the old watchmaker next
door. There was Black Hurley, the notorious gang leader, who sometimes
swaggered into the district like a dirty and evil feudal lord. There was
a Jewish pushcart peddler, white-bearded and skull-capped. There was an
Italian mother sitting on the curb, her feet in the gutter, smiling down
at the baby that was hungrily suckling at her milk-heavy breast. And so
on, and so on. Just the ordinary, uninteresting things Maggie saw around
the 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 settling
an unfinished picture on his easel. It had rather amused Jimmie and
filled in his idle time to sit for the crazy painter; and, incidentally,
another picture of him would do him no particular harm since the police
already had all the pictures they needed of him over at Headquarters. As
he gazed at Hunt's work Old Jimmie snickered.

“I say, Nuts, what you goin' to do with this mess of paint?”

“Going to sell it to the Metropolitan Museum, you old sinner!” snapped
Hunt.

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

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

“Junk! Funny!” Hunt swung around, one big hand closed about Jimmie's
lean neck and the other seized his thin shoulder. “You grandfather of
the devil and all his male progeny, you talk like that and I'll chuck
you through the window!”

Old Jimmie grinned. The grip of the big hands of the painter, though
powerful, was light. They all knew that the loud ravings of the painter
never presaged violence. They had grown to like him, to accept him as
almost one of themselves; though of course they looked down upon him
with amused pity for his imbecility regarding his paintings.

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

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

“You there, Maggie,” he ordered, “chin up a bit more, some flash in your
eyes, more pep in your bearing--as though you were asking all the dames
of the Winter Garden, and the Charity Ball, and the Horse Show, and that
gang of tea-swilling women at the Ritzmore you sell cigarettes to--as
though you were asking them all who the dickens they think they are... O
God, can't you do anything!”

“I'm doing the best I can, and I look more like those dames than you
look like a painter!”

“Shut up! I'm paying you a dollar an hour to pose, not to talk back to
me. And you'd have more respect for my money if you knew how hard I had
to work to earn it: carrying a motor car around in each hand. Wash off
that 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 the
canvas and Maggie. Maggie's dress was just the ordinary shirt-waist and
skirt that the shopgirl and her sisters wear; Hunt had ordered it so.
She was above the medium height, with thick black hair tinted with
shadowy blue, long dark lashes, dark scimitars of eyebrows, a full, firm
mouth, a nose with just the right tilt to it--all effective points for
Hunt in what he wished to do. But what had attracted him most and given
him his idea was her look; hardly pertness, or impudence--rather a
cynical, 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 his
picture a true portrait--and also make it a symbol of many things which
still were only taking shape in his own mind: of beauty rising from the
gutter to overcome beauty of more favored birth, and to reign above
it; also of a lower stratum surging up and breaking through the upper
stratum, becoming a part of it, or assimilating it, or conquering it.
Leading families replaced by other families, classes replaced by other
classes, nations replaced by other nations--such was the inevitable
social process--so read the records of the fifty or sixty centuries
since history began to be written. Oh, he was trying to say a lot in
this portrait of a girl of ordinary birth--even less than ordinary--in
her cheap shirt-waist and skirt!

And it pleased the sardonic element in Hunt's unmoral nature that this
Maggie, through whom he was trying to symbolize so much, he knew to be a
petty larcenist: shoplifting and matters of similar consequence. She
had been cynically frank about this to him; casual, almost boastful. Her
possessing 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 this
returning prison-bird, Larry Brainard.

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