Three days ago there were almost a hundred. The cold breath of autumn had stricken its leaves from the vine until its skeleton branches clung, almost bare, to the crumbling bricks. An old, old ivy vine, gnarled and decayed at the roots, climbed half way up the brick wall. What was there to count? There was only a bare, dreary yard to be seen, and the blank side of the brick house twenty feet away. "Twelve," she said, and little later "eleven" and then "ten," and "nine" and then "eight" and "seven", almost together. She was looking out the window and counting - counting backward. Young artists must pave their way to Art by drawing pictures for magazine stories that young authors write to pave their way to Literature.Īs Sue was sketching a pair of elegant horseshow riding trousers and a monocle of the figure of the hero, an Idaho cowboy, she heard a low sound, several times repeated.
She arranged her board and began a pen-and-ink drawing to illustrate a magazine story. Sue stopped whistling, thinking she was asleep. Johnsy lay, scarcely making a ripple under the bedclothes, with her face toward the window. Then she swaggered into Johnsy's room with her drawing board, whistling ragtime. If you will get her to ask one question about the new winter styles in cloak sleeves I will promise you a one-in-five chance for her, instead of one in ten."Īfter the doctor had gone Sue went into the workroom and cried a Japanese napkin to a pulp.
But whenever my patient begins to count the carriages in her funeral procession I subtract 50 per cent from the curative power of medicines. "I will do all that science, so far as it may filter through my efforts, can accomplish. "Well, it is the weakness, then," said the doctor. "Is a man worth - but, no, doctor there is nothing of the kind." "A man?" said Sue, with a jew's-harp twang in her voice. "Paint? - bosh! Has she anything on her mind worth thinking twice - a man for instance?" "She - she wanted to paint the Bay of Naples some day." said Sue. Your little lady has made up her mind that she's not going to get well. This way people have of lining-u on the side of the undertaker makes the entire pharmacopoeia look silly. " And that chance is for her to want to live. "She has one chance in - let us say, ten," he said, as he shook down the mercury in his clinical thermometer. One morning the busy doctor invited Sue into the hallway with a shaggy, grey eyebrow. But Johnsy he smote and she lay, scarcely moving, on her painted iron bedstead, looking through the small Dutch window-panes at the blank side of the next brick house. A mite of a little woman with blood thinned by California zephyrs was hardly fair game for the red-fisted, short-breathed old duffer. Pneumonia was not what you would call a chivalric old gentleman. Over on the east side this ravager strode boldly, smiting his victims by scores, but his feet trod slowly through the maze of the narrow and moss-grown "places." In November a cold, unseen stranger, whom the doctors called Pneumonia, stalked about the colony, touching one here and there with his icy fingers. They had met at the table d'hôte of an Eighth Street "Delmonico's," and found their tastes in art, chicory salad and bishop sleeves so congenial that the joint studio resulted. One was from Maine the other from California. Then they imported some pewter mugs and a chafing dish or two from Sixth Avenue, and became a "colony."Īt the top of a squatty, three-story brick Sue and Johnsy had their studio.
Leaf on the wind shirt windows#
So, to quaint old Greenwich Village the art people soon came prowling, hunting for north windows and eighteenth-century gables and Dutch attics and low rents. Suppose a collector with a bill for paints, paper and canvas should, in traversing this route, suddenly meet himself coming back, without a cent having been paid on account! An artist once discovered a valuable possibility in this street. In a little district west of Washington Square the streets have run crazy and broken themselves into small strips called "places." These "places" make strange angles and curves.
0 kommentar(er)
