RICHARD H. LEE sat uneasily in an armchair in the high-ceilinged studio that was pungent with the smell of cigars, pipe tobacco, paint, and turpentine. He stroked his beard, graying now and much longer and stragglier than his neat goatee the day, twenty-one years ago, when John J. Cozad slipped off into the brush of the Platte River, leaving his son Robert to look after him, the youth not certain that he would ever see his father again.
Seventy-two now, the old community builder found himself uncomfortable in the new century with its curious notions. He felt an alien in a world where a place like Canfield’s over on East 44th Street could be raided as it was a few days ago. Run by the prince of gamblers, Canfield’s was a handsome, elaborate establishment, filled with works of art–statues, paintings, and fragile porcelains. Here men of wealth and position from all the world felt comfortable in a game of chance, no matter how casual or how steep, for it was said that Canfield treasured friendship and perhaps for that reason, too, kept half a million dollars in ready cash in a secret wall safe to cover any serious winnings immediately. More important was the confidence, the assurance, that here gentlemen encountered gentlemen and were safe from the importunes, even the casual presence, of cardsharps and vulgar cheats as well as from the poor-skate loser. Here they had felt secure from the recent custom of the police to come battering doors down, with the exposure to public gaze in the daily press if not the actual indignities of the hurrah wagon and the glare of night court. It seemed that when the recent raid did come, Canfield’s first, he managed it so he was the only person in the place, protesting when the police smashed a window in, pointing out that a genteel tap on the door would have opened it to them at once.
Next thing they would be shutting down Saratoga, which Richard Lee would also regret, even though he never expected to make another entrance there, well-known as he was, and welcomed, even during the years of anger and lawing down in Jersey.
It was not only his own world that Richard H. Lee no longer understood. He barely knew this son who was preparing to paint his portrait. He did not understand his leaning toward a writer like Bakunin and the philosophical anarchism that Robert and his students and the other artists gathered around him read and chewed over for long hours. At the suggestion of Robert and the others, he had read God and the State and then realized even more that his son was a stranger, an alien.
But he cherished Robert’s gifts in painting. He had sent him to the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts to study soon after the flight from Cozad, Nebraska, to work under Thomas Anshutz, and then to Julian’s in Paris, under Bouguereau and Fleury, and finally the Beaux-Arts. Robert still admired Rembrandt, ever since he saw the small painting that Duve-neck showed him when he was a boy back in Cincinnati. Now Robert had added Hals, Goya, Velàsquez, and the newcomer Rouault. But he Was the true son of his father and of pioneer America. He had chafed under the academic rigidity and dryness, feeling as tightly restricted as the hay that came through the press out on the Platte, the bales safe and salable for money that way, but with no life possible inside. So Robert struck out for himself, through Britanny, Italy, and Spain, looking into the faces of the people along the streets, on the waterfronts, along the peasant roads. And finally he returned, for the boy with all the broad sweep of the Platte valley in his breast could not endure the narrow confines of Europe.
Back in Philadelphia he attracted a group of young illustrators to his studio on Walnut Street, became an instructor in the Women’s School of Design, where the girls adored him. But he found not one with the dark blue eyes of the Richter daughter out on the Platte, the shy girl who could not lift her eyes to him but held out her crooked fingers for the whirling little dance.
Richard Lee liked his son’s paintings. He admired their darknesses, the rich reds and purple-reds against the blacks and near-blacks–the colors so familiar and so compatible from a lifetime around gambling houses, particularly the better ones, known for their dark wealth of velvet hangings and drapes, of carpets and upholsterings. He disliked the paintings that were called impressionistic or impressionism that Robert and his students and friends derided so, pictures made by millions of dots that were like buffalo gnats buzzing around on a quiet, hot day out in Nebraska, those with larger dots unhappy reminders of the pale grasshoppers that clung to everything in their shimmering fall, making it hard for him to breathe. He did not say these things, because Nebraska and any connection with the region were never mentioned, but the experience could not be shut from the mind.
But now Richard H. Lee had to settle himself in his chair with some appearance of comfort while the artist in Robert considered him not as his father but as a subject for his brush. He scraped a palette and sorted out a flat pan of paint tubes, not hurrying, letting the light from 57th Street settle upon his father’s face, upon the almost knife-thin nose and the gaunt, sunken cheeks, to bring the tight shine to the pale forehead, touch the upward twist of the brows and burn in the aging but still intense eyes.
Although Robert had been away from the brilliant sun of the Platte valley on snow or summer prairie for a long time, he still waited for more light then ever came, always finding Philadelphia, Paris, even Italy veiled as with a mist, and particularly New York.
But there was light enough to show the changes in Robert, the son of the community builder from the west. He was almost forty now, tall, very tall for the shortish face that seemed still shorter, cut as it was by the dark hair laid across the forehead, the heavy black line of the brows, and the dark mustache. There was a hint of Mongolian tightness of skin at his temples and across the cheekbones too, and yet with this and the old Cozad aloofness in him, there was humor about the face, even now as he considered, studied, his father with a curious shyness, perhaps because there was so much between these two men, so very much that was never told, never could be put into the crude vessel of words. Robert had said to his students back in Philadelphia long ago that to paint a portrait is to know the sitter, and that was perhaps why he hesitated now, not in doubt but in reticence, reluctant to invade the sacred premises that this man had kept inviolate so long.
Yet as Robert sketched in the first rapid outlines of the gaunt face he found it still very much like the one in the Brady photograph made almost thirty years ago, so much like it that the resemblance to anyone knowing John Cozad could not have escaped detection. Yet the story had not really ever come out, not even after Traber got the indictment for murder quieted and John Cozad made a short return to his town under his own name, hoping to win back something of the wide properties that had to be discarded so swiftly after Pearson’s death. The $10,000 it seemed he sacrificed to the Pearson family willingly enough even though the shot he fired was in self-defense, but that was only one crumbling bit of earth in all the land that the flood of that day swept off. Nor had those who knew the background of the Richard Lee who fought the long legal battle with Atlantic City and the state of New Jersey ever revealed it widely.
“You never changed your appearance as much as we planned—” the son said, almost without thought as he selected one of the large brushes he liked to use.
There was a slight softening in the gaunt lines of the father’s cheek, almost a smile on the hidden lips, perhaps. “You didn’t expect me to, not with the hat, the cane and the little black handsatchel I took along—” But the lightness was there only a moment, and then the bitterness of the dream destroyed came back into the deep-set eyes.
“I hope they didn’t make you too much trouble,” the son said as he squeezed dark blobs of paint out around the palette.
Well, some, the father admitted, his eyes focused far off. He had waited in the brush until dark to wade the Platte and then struck south over the prairie like a fleeing animal, with only, his cane out before him as a guide, like a blind man in the moonless night. It was so slow, and dangerous too, that he rested some, making a little fire down wind from a settler’s shack whose smoke would cover the smell. At dawn he brushed himself off and started south, hitting a plain trail but ready to hide any moment. A few miles farther on a wagon turned in behind him. The fleeing community builder made the quick decision of a gambler. He stuck his silk hat into a badger hole, knotted a handkercheif around the gold head of his cane and hid in a plum patch until he was certain the man was a stranger. Then he stepped out to the road as a land-seeker whose horse got away from him in the night. Now he was heading back to Pennsylvania but returning in the spring with his family.
The man motioned John Cozad into the seat, even tried to talk him into becoming a neighbor. At the station the new Mr. Lee bought a sack of apples to send back to the man’s family, got a slouch hat to cover his head, and took a train east. After that it was easier except the waiting, meaning about Pearson, Robert knew, although the name never passed the bearded lips of his father. There was the constant fear of recognition and extradition to Plum Creek, although he had stopped at a little Iowa town and bought an ordinary storm coat of small, neat black-and-white check to replace the beaver-collared broadcloth he had slipped, with the cane and the handsatchel, into a big drummer’s telescope he picked up secondhand. He got a checkered jacket too, instead of the frock coat, and clipped his mustache and neat goatee into ragged edges with the tiny folding card shears he carried in his cuff links. Then with the cold snipe of a black cigar stuck into the corner of his mouth and his fingernails broken and dirty, he presented a pretty casual and negligent contrast to the John J. Cozad the law was seeking. He laughed a little at the memory, but harshly, and still Robert regretted that he never saw this.
But something in his father’s face as the man talked seemed to disturb Robert about his sketching. He squinted critically at the canvas, not looking at the sitter. “We heard you were overtaken by a mob,” he said, trying to make it easy and very long ago. “I wouldn’t believe it but I knew there must have been a gang out for you that night. I sneaked down to the livery barns late and found them empty. Not a saddle horse around.”
Slowly the man who had been a community builder flexed his long bony fingers. “Yes, I hoped to spare you that knowledge. The horses located me, nickered in the dark, and the outfit rode me down. Had a rope around my neek and up against a telegraph pole. I had been listening to their voices, an old trick from my earlier–ah, business. I knew most of them by voice and ticked off the names of those with claims not proved up, saying we had written out protests on all of them for non-residence, and on fifty more, all to be dumped in at the land office tomorrow if I didn’t wire the code word in the morning. Be mighty expensive fighting the cases, even if they could win–with my pull at the land office, particularly after I was found strung up. No use torturing the code word out of me and hiding my carcass. Somebody in the mob standing around me in the dark would be sure to squeal. Men like that never trust each other. Later, with ranch cowboys it would have been different—–”
“But they let you go! A bluff, a good gambler’s bluff,” the son said in admiration, but uneasily too, frowning at his canvas. The outlines, the bit of paint that was to be the eyes and the smudge of black hair and mustache did not please him, did not suggest anything of what he had just seen. Impatiently, as was his habit, he slopped turpentine over a rag and wiped it rapidly across the canvas, the outlines of the man’s face melting sideways, streaking into a sort of angry blur of black mustache and brows. When the canvas was scrubbed clean, the painter started again with a stub of charcoal and more calculation.
After a while the father moved fretfully and Robert lifted an eyebrow. “You started over several times yourself, when one plan or another failed,” he said, with the finality of tone that made some insist that the son was a domineering teacher and man, brooking no doubt from any quarter, accepting none but his own.
“My case was different,” the father said bitterly. “I had outside opposition.”
“It’s the same. You started, weren’t accomplishing what you wanted so you went away–to a clean canvas.”
Robert longed to go on, drive the point farther. He knew that he would arouse something more of what he wanted in his father’s face, make it burn through the death that sat so quickly, so heavily upon the man, but he could not. He wanted to capture something of the day John Cozad rose up in court and called Handley a liar and was knocked down with a chair, his arm broken for it. And later, when, with Robert behind him, he stepped out to bull-whip the man and both were chased with the pitchfork. Or the exultation of the evening he had to flee from Cozad, an exultation in defeat unequaled by anything of success the son had ever seen there. But this was something that the man could never admit and that must never be laid out naked upon canvas. There would be greatness in such a portrayal if he could capture it, but the price of such betrayal would be too high even for greatness.
Robert knew this because today he realized he must not push the old man very far, not even show the anger that he, the son, felt again himself, otherwise the father would be compelled to rise and stalk out, go down and out the marble portals of the Sherwood Studios and never return. And this last pride, surely his last remaining pride, no one could deny him now.
So Robert set out a large pad of paper and with his swift pencil caught what he could of the head, the sharp line of the cheek, the sunken temple, the mustache, the eyes, always the eyes. He drew a dozen of them, some glancing cautiously, boldly, or veiled with the smoke of anger, some sunken deep to look inward. He drew the eyes in pairs too, lifted to the son in curiosity, in annoyance, turned this way and that, eyes with a point of light set here, set there. But the expression he wanted would not come and as the evening softened and there was a trooping of feet in the corridor, he pushed the easel back.
“Tomorrow,” he said. “There’s so much I want you to tell me.”
Gradually the sittings became a little better and the father began to talk in his old, rapid way, but without the hope, the unquenchable optimism of the early days. There was, instead, an urgency, as for one last thrust upon an enemy, one last communication, and Robert heard many things he had known only vaguely, or not at all. There was still anger at the leeching by a couple of the women of the long past, and attempts at blackmail more clever than King O’Dell’s, more dangerous even than the counterfeit trick by the faro tramps, with probably lynching plans. There was particularly much of this while he was still in the good graces of the Union Pacific, with what seemed a fair chance of becoming the railroad senator. Or a millionaire anyway, if the capital had been moved west. What a long time ago that was—–
Robert had never known much about his father’s early attempts to locate a community in South America, about the time that many defeated Confederates went there. But the primitiveness of everything, the health hazards, including his own, with the obvious political obstacles, the internal jealousies–these killed the venture dead as frost on the watermelons. Even at Cozaddale the builder had been prevented from getting the factories for which the town was planned, which it must have. Then there was the Platte-valley Cozad and later his final undertaking, Lee’s Pier at Atlantic City, a purely mercenary venture, an attempt to make a passable living for himself and his family by providing entertainment of various kinds on the Boardwalk. That brought the long years of trouble and lawing, ended, finally, by new legislation that froze him out.
Robert nodded. He had been away at school in Europe through much of this, but he knew that his father, with his talent for understanding population trends, had invested well the money that Theresa and Robert carried out of the Platte country sewed into their clothing. He bought a place on the Atlantic ocean front in the direct path of resort expansion. A January storm in 1884 wrecked much of the beach front and Boardwalk, including the new electric arc lights. That summer a new Boardwalk was put in twenty feet wide, without railing and about two miles long. Unfortunately a portion of it collapsed under a crowd gathered to a streopticon show, dropping many of them down into the sand, with some injuries and much bad publicity. But none of this touched Lee’s Pier, of course. Perhaps that helped bring a complaint against the scattered buildings outside the Boardwalk, including Lee’s, claiming they shut off the sea view and the breezes. When in 1890 the Walk was extended, two of these outsiders refused to pull down their buildings, one of them the bearded Richard H. Lee. He had been operating quietly enough in the midst of the raucous and noisy resort front, and profitably. The city went to court against him. When the Walk builders reached the Lee property they found a barricade up, manned by Richard Lee himself with pistols, some said with a shotgun, his foster sons, as John A. and Robert were known, backing him up. Lee had made a run over to Saratoga, it was said, and came back with enough money to buy up the adjoining land, the whole now called Lee’s Fort in the papers, and in the courts.
The new Boardwalk opened with a big celebration, a grand parade, and fireworks reflected in the glassy night Waters, but everything had to go around the barricades. In the end the city got the power to condemn a right-of-way through the property of the holdouts from the legislature. Lee’s Fort fell, and tfie owner left the community and moved to New York, seventy years old, without a dream–with nothing except the two sons making fine reputations, but never to be acknowledged as more than foster sons, never as his flesh and bone.
Johnny, as Dr. Frank Southern of Philadelphia, had even established a voting residence at Atlantic City, and Robert come hurrying back from Paris, but it had proved hopeless, and so now, after sixty years, John Cozad had no profession, no occupation, seemed without plan.
No one except Theresa could have been pleased. To her it was an end to public quarrelling, of Jawing and anger and violence. If she recalled the shivaree back at Malden and the raucous version of “Bride of the Gamblin’ Man” that night she may have been happy that the gambling too, seemed done. Except for brief business visits to Cozad, her departure from the Platte valley was her first separation from her parents and a complete separation it was, not only by distance but by name and necessity. Now that they were both dead there was no spot for even a brief release from the perptual necessity to guard her tongue, her feelings. Cut off from those of any refinement by her husband’s business on the Boardwalk, she had withdrawn more and more, taking satisfaction in those she must call foster sons, particularly in the good connections of Johnny, her Dr. Frank, who had married into the thread-company Clarks and gave her a lovely young granddaughter–the pride of Theresa’s heart. But the Clarks liked to travel and were often abroad. Still, now that her husband had finally retired to New York, she was near Robert and his warmhearted Linda, and Robert’s artistic circles, his artistic causes and boilings.
Sitting for his portrait in the light of the long studio windows before the son who had so much of the Cozad fire, not for community building, but for the integrity and freedom of the painter, Richard H. Lee found himself reviewing the possibilities of one last venture for himself. He wished that it might be in a region not too rigorous for Theresa, although she had aged little, it seemed to him. The elegance of her handsome nose was unchanged, and the fine sweep of her neck to the soft pile of gray hair upon her head, the black velvet flow of her gowns. A fine figure of a woman.
But Richard H. Lee found himself reverting to 1872, when he strode westward with silk hat and gold-headed cane to the sign at the hundredth meridian. Since the raid on Canfield’s he had written to a man working to settle northwest Nebraska and the sandhills to which he himself had once gone with Dave Claypool about a railroad spur from Cozad to the Black Hills. Now there was a railroad survey through the heart of those sandhills, 250 miles up one long valley, surely with several good places for new communities. Not to be called Cozad–Traber had managed to get Gould P.O. changed back to Cozad in Cleveland’s administration. Perhaps Theresa? Ironically, he might call his new community Plum Creek, since that town had changed its name to Lexington to escape the stigma, the shame of old Plum.
Since Robert started the portrait, Richard Lee had written more urgently to the sandhill locator who offered, for a $25 fee, to help settlers find homes on free land, the lines run and the corners located, the only other charge the government’s regular $14. Robert had seen the man’s letters in newspapers that went to laborers, farmers, and foreign groups, here and in Europe. He was sympathetic. He had painted such people all through Southern Europe and from back in his childhood understood their dream of a corner of land that was their own. He enjoyed reading his father’s letters from this Sandoz, this sandhill locator, with a story so familiar to them both:
The cattlemen still have most of the land covered but we are working with President Theodore Roosevelt who is determined that the hogging of the government range must stop. The illegal fences are to come down, the land thrown open to settlers without the danger of a bullet through the head from some blowout. If the planned 640 acre homestead bill is passed there will be a land boom here such as the country has never seen.
Richard H. Lee took the letter from Robert’s outstretched hand and put it away in his wallet. He had a scheme to work up excursions, get Sandoz to charge a $100 locating fee to be split with him, in addition to a Cozad-built town on the new railroad survey. If he felt better in the spring he was determined to go out to see.
Of course it would be difficult to convince Theresa, content in their apartment across from Morningside Park, her husband knew. He realized it even more now as she came in with her furs flecked with the new snow, her cheeks still smooth and glowing with the cold, to take him home.
She brought two large scrapbooks she had made for Robert from his notices and clippings that she had collected all these years. “To go with your diaries,” she said. “I gathered some about your teaching in Philadelphia and your Paris exhibitions, particularly the time the French government bought Snow for the Luxembourg, and about your medal from the Pan American and so on. Traveling around the way you do such things get lost—–”
Linda came in, her tall pompadour lifting her warm features, making even her long thighs seem longer in her softly flowing gown, the curls from the coil at the crown falling to her nape, giving her neck a sweeping line too. She kissed Robert’s parents and settled beside Theresa to glance through the scrapbooks, stopping at items she had never seen, particularly the silly ones of reporters and newspaper comment denouncing Robert as a radical painter because they didn’t like Eakins and particularly not Anshutz and his darkness that came out in the work of his prize student.
Amused, she lifted her thick-lashed eyes in a teasing look to Robert. “Some of these crows sing pretty as nightingales now,” she said.
“Yes,” Theresa agreed, “but only since that Paris show.”
Robert laughed as he would have out on the Platte when some criticism of his father was half disproved. He wiped the paint from his hands, slipped out of his dark smock, adjusted his bow tie, and smoothed his mustache. The scrapbooks were put aside for tea, but not the talk of art. Robert was full of plans for a show next year at the National Arts Club, to be made up of some of the group from Philadelphia, perhaps seven or eight. John Sloan came in, and then some of Robert’s students from the School of Art across the street wandered in too, and the talk went to the student days in Philadelphia and the gang that hung around Robert’s studio on Walnut Street.
The next day Richard H. Lee was almost loquacious, recalling Eakins and the shock he caused some Philadelphians by posing male and female models together to contrast their anatomy, and later Thomas Anshutz, Eakins’ student.
“Tom was the only man that ever gave me a moment of jealousy over you–” the father finally said.
“But he was my teacher, and a great teacher, carrying on Eakins’ search for the truth in the heart of American life– Eakins’ and Walt Whitman’s.”
The old man looked away a long time, with a shadowing of regret in his black eyes. At last he stiffened and straightened himself for the sitting. “I guess I got a better look at it all yesterday, hearing you and the students talking. And John Sloan. John told me you make every painter feel like a genius. He thinks you are the leader, the great teacher who strikes fire in his followers.”
Robert, always with a little western embarrassment over praise, wiped a brush carefully on a rag. “Oh, he was just talking, like you used to talk about the Platte valley.”
“But I was telling the truth! Although John wasn’t your student it’s plain he considers you his father in art.”
But Robert wasn’t listening any further. He was working fast to catch the hint of regret he had seen in his father’s face, grabbing at the big paint-tipped brushes, one after the other, held ready between his fingers, so many that his fist bristled with them.
“I sometimes think of you, a kid in knee pants, going out to stand off those pistol-armed cowboys and their herds eating up my hay meadows, even standing off your Uncle Traber at the hay press, to keep it from being wrecked. Last night you sounded a lot like that boy, like you might drag out the old bull whip against some of the stodgies deciding who’ll be—” he started to say “hung,” but even now he shied from the word that called up the lynchings of Plum Creek– “deciding which artists will be included in the shows.”
“I still have the old whip. Used it once in those plays we put on back in Philadelphia.”
The man who was John Cozad, gambler, nodded uneasily. He remembered the parodies that Robert wrote in those days and staged with Sloan, Shinn, Glackens and some others, Luks usually around, full of sports talk. There was Twillbe; a parody on the fantastically popular Trilby with John Sloan as the girl, in a fancy wig and a huge pair of vaudeville comedian’s shoes. Robert, as Svengali, made his father uneasy, even angry because in his getup the son seemed so thoroughly a caricature of his father as a gambler. Perhaps he also resented Robert’s poking fun at established taste and slapping success, which was really slapping Lady Luck sacrilege to the gambler. Besides, Robert had also offended what remained of the colonizer in the father because he seemed to be drawing people by tearing down instead of building up.
Now, sitting in the tall-ceilinged studio, John Cozad admitted that Robert was all the magnet his father had ever been, drawing the young illustrators of a Philadelphia newspaper into painting, and firing their deepest resources into flame. His humor, his fondness for intellectual horseplay, seemed important in this, perhaps most important in glossing over his domineering, his drive and force that compelled the young artists to see what he saw, outside and within themselves, even though he insisted that each one must paint in his own way, each one must see what was great in his native American tradition and take from that. Painting was a man’s vocation, not for the tender-minded, the halfhearted, the fashionably superficial, the dilettante.
As Robert scraped at the portrait of his father, repainting here and here, starting over again, and again, the man who was John Cozad finally burst out in impatience. “What do expect, Robert? What is it you want?”
The son did not lift his head for a long time. He had the reply ready, one he had thought over for himself a hundred, a thousand times the last few years. What did he want? He wanted most of all to live his life as himself, not only as the final of the Three B’s his mother taught her sons years ago: “Be yourself,” but he wanted to live the truth, live it as Robert Henry Cozad, the son of John J. and Theresa Cozad. Be what he was; yes, live his life as himself.
But this could not be, not in the face of that curious mixture of pride and fear that seemed at the bottom of the father’s long persistence in his assumed name. That curious romanticism, perhaps inseparable from the gambler. As Robert thought of this now he laid his brushes down and reached into the cigar box, always open, waiting. When fragrant smoke crept in blue layerings along the room he spoke. “I want the truth, as near to it as possible. I want to grasp that esssence of everything which is its final truth.”
The father thought of what this man before him had seen in his boyhood, the gun-carrying cowboys of outfits like the Olives, even Man-burner Print Olive himself, and the constant menace of such men. Then he had to see his own father and, yes, his brother too, fugitives from possible lynch mobs.
John Cozad knew how some of the Easterners, particularly art critics, were inclined to look upon this presumably pampered foster son of a wealthy family. He knew that some considered Robert’s art the cry of youth untouched by sorrow.
“Untouched—” John Cozad thought. “Sorrow–” What did such words mean to those men.
The portrait was nearing the end. The father had not seen it yet, perhaps because he had not been invited to look. But several of Robert’s artist friends had walked around to stand before it a little, silent. Then one day a buyer who had heard about the artist and had seen his Snow in the Luxembourg stopped off to look over what Robert might have on hand. It was after the day’s posing was done and Robert had remained alone in the studio, sitting hunched over, chin in his palm, considering his fathers portrait. He got up to let the man in, showed him what seemed advisable on the walls and from the rick of canvases set face to back along a corner. The man made a few notes in a memo book, arranged an appointment for his colleague, and then noticed the canvas on the easel. He went over to it, sized it up this way and that.
“This is a fine piece of work,” he admitted guardedly, “has great personal feeling. Is it commissioned or for sale?”
“Not for sale,” Robert said curtly, suddenly shocked that there might be a price, a money price on this painting. And from this he knew that it was about done.
The next afternoon he brought his father’s talk around to the long fight at Atlantic City, but there were few sparks. He tried Todd, Handley, the faro tramps, and finally even Pearson but there was less injured will, less hurt pride or smoldering anger and outrage than he had already seen here at the easel, seen, and had captured or missed. But it seemed that he got something else, a hint, a sort of sharp alertness coming into the eyes, almost as though the man were guarding himself against the son, against the artist’s probing, and Robert recalled what he usually said to his students too. “Paint a portrait to know the sitter.” Perhaps the sitter here realized this, and had put up barricades, as this man could, barricades with pistols of his own kind here.
A smile lifted the black mustache of the artist as he stood back and considered the painting, turning his head to this side and that, the heavy sweep of dark hair across his forehead unstirred.
“Come,” he said to his father.
But the gambler who risked everything a thousand times in his life hesitated now. At last he came, bowed somewhat, and moving slowly, his eyes down as though considering every step. He stopped a little aloof from the son as though to keep himself free from any domination, free to see this in his own way.
A long time he looked at the dark intensity of the eyes, the whiteness of the face, the fine, thin nose, the heightened temples, the streaks in the hair and beard, the white linen sharp against the darkness of background and broadcloth. He began to tremble a little and his eyes to water as though suddenly very old. He shook his head hard, as when he had to shake back a mass of black hair falling forward in the heat of a big play. But it served now too, and in a moment he was steady once more, the impersonal gambler, as he held out his hand to the son, saying no more than he did the evening he slipped into the brush after shooting Pearson–leaving so much to the judgment and responsibility of a boy, a seventeen-year-old boy.
But when Robert took the hand in both of his, the man dared let his face soften.
“My son, my beloved son,” he murmured.
Now finally, smiling into his father’s eyes, the artist picked up a brush, dipped it into the black, and in the left-hand corner signed the portrait. He did it firmly, as always: Robert Henri, dotting the i very carefully.
The End