Part 24 (1/2)

”As a matter of fact,” continued Leighton, ”those things are merely the progeny of art. Art itself is work, and its chief end is expression with repression. Remember that--with repression. Many an artist has missed greatness by mistaking license for originality and producing debauch. I don't want you to do that. I want you to stay here by yourself for a while and work; not with your hands, necessarily, but with your mind.

Get your perspective of life now. Most of the pathetic 'what-might-have-beens' in the lives of men and women are due to misplaced proportions that made them struggle greatly for little things.”

Lewis looked up and nodded.

”Dad, you've got a knack of saying things that are true in a way that makes them visible. When you talk, you make me feel as though some one had drawn back the screen from the skylight.”

Leighton shrugged his shoulders. For a long moment he was silent; then he said:

”A life like mine has no justification if it can't let in light, even though it be through stained gla.s.s.”

Lewis caught a wistful look in his father's eyes. He felt a sudden surge of love such as had come to him long years before when he had first sounded the depths of his father's tenderness. ”There's no light in all the world like cathedral light, Dad,” he said with a slight tremble in his voice, ”and it s.h.i.+nes through stained gla.s.s.”

”Thanks, boy, thanks,” said Leighton; then he smiled, and threw up his head. Lewis had learned to know well that gesture of dismissal to a mood.

”Just one more word,” continued his father. ”When you do get down to working with your hands, don't forget repression. Cla.s.sicism bears the relation to art that religion does to the world's progress. It's a drag-anchor--a sound measure of safety--despised when seas are calm, but treasured against the hour of stress. Let's go and eat.”

Lewis rose and put his hand on his father's arm.

”I'll not forget this talk, Dad,” he said.

”I hope you won't, boy,” said Leighton. ”It's harder for me to talk to you than you think. I'm driven and held by the knowledge that there are only two ways in which a father can lose his son. One is by talking too much, the other's by not talking enough. The old trouble of the devil and the deep, blue sea; the frying-pan and the fire. Come, we've been bandying the sublime; let's get down to the level of stomachs and smile.

The greatest thing about man is the range of his octaves.”

CHAPTER XXVIII

For a week Lewis missed his father very much. Every time he came into the flat its emptiness struck him, robbed him of gaiety, and made him feel as though he walked in a dead man's shoes. He was very lonely.

”Helton,” he said one night, ”I wish things could talk--these old chairs and the table and that big worn-out couch, for instance.”

”Lucky thing they can't, sir,” mumbled Helton, holding the seam of the table-cloth in his teeth while he folded it.

”Why?” said Lewis. ”Why should it be lucky they can't? Don't you suppose if they had the power of talk, they'd have the power of discretion as well, just as we have?”

”I don't know about that, sir,” said Helton. ”Things is servants just like us serving-men is. The more wooden a serving-man is in the matter of talk, the easier it is for 'im to get a plice. If you ask me, sir, I would s'y as chairs is wooden and walls stone an' brick for the comfort of their betters, an' that they 'aven't any too much discretion as it is, let alone talking.”

”Nelton,” said Lewis, ”I've been waiting to ask you something. I wonder if you could tell me.”

”Can't s'y in the dark,” said Nelton.

”It's this,” said Lewis. ”Everybody here--all dad's friends except Lady Derl--call him Grapes Leighton. Why? I've started to ask him two or three times, but somehow something else seems to crop up in his mind, and he doesn't give me a chance to finish.”

Nelton's lowered eyes flashed a shrewd look at Lewis's face.

”The exercise of discretion enn.o.bles the profession,” he said, and stopped, a dazed, pleased look in his face at hearing his own rhyme. He laid the table-cloth down, took from his pocket the stub of a pencil, and wrote the words on his cuff. Then he picked up the cloth, laid it over his arm, and opened the door. As he went out he paused and said over his shoulder: ”Master Lewis, it would hurt the governor's feelin's if you asked him or anybody else how he got the nime of Gripes.”

Let a man but feel lonely, and his mind immediately harks along the back trail of the past. In his lonely week Lewis frequently found himself thinking back. It was only by thinking back that he could stay in the flat at all. Now for the first time he realized that he had been stepping through life with seven-league boots. The future could not possibly hold for him the tremendous distances of his past. How far he had come since that first dim day at Consolation Cottage!

To every grown-up there is a dim day that marks the beginning of things, the first remembered day of childhood. Lewis could not fasten on any memory older than the memory of a rickety cab, a tall, gloomy man, and then a white-clad group on the steps of Consolation Cottage. Black mammy, motherly Mrs. Leighton, curly-headed Shenton, and little Natalie, with her 'wumpled' skirt, who had stood on tiptoe to put her lips to his, appeared before him now as part of the dawn of life.