The Streets of Ascalon

"Now all this letter has been devoted to matters concerning myself and not one line to you and the exciting success you and Lord Dankmere are making of your new business.

"Oh, Rix, I am not indifferent; all the time I have been writing to you, that has been surging and laughing in my heart – like some delicious aria that charmingly occupies your mind while you go happily about other matters – happy because the ceaseless melody that enchants you makes you so.

"I have read your letter so many times, over and over; and always the same thrill of excitement begins when I come to the part where you begin to suspect that under the daubed surface of that canvas there may be something worth while.

"Is it really and truly a Van Dyck? Is there any chance that it is not? Is it possible that all these years none of Dankmere's people suspected what was hidden under the aged paint and varnish of that tiresome old British landscape?

"And it remained for you to suspect it! – for you to discover it? Oh, Rix, I am proud of you!

"And how perfectly wonderful it is that now you know its history, when it was supposed to have disappeared, where it has remained ever since under its ignoble integument of foolish paint.

"No, I promise not to say one word about it until I have your permission. I understand quite well why you desire to keep the matter from the newspapers for the present. But – won't it make you and Lord Dankmere rich? Tell me – please tell me. I don't want money for myself any more, but I do want it for you. You need it; you can do so much with it, use it so intelligently, so gloriously, make the world better with it, – make it more beautiful, and people happier.

"What a chasm, Rix, between what we were a year ago, and what we care to be – what we are trying to be to-day! Sometimes I think of it, not unhappily, merely wondering.

"Toward what goal were we moving a year ago? What was there to be of such lives? – what at the end? Why, there was, for us, no more significance in living than there is to any overfed animal! – not as much!

"Oh, this glorious country of high clouds and far horizons! – and alas! for the Streets of Ascalon where such as I once was go to and fro – 'clad delicately in scarlet and ornaments of gold.'

"'Tell it not in Gath, publish it not in the Streets of Ascalon' – that the pavements of the Philistines have bruised my feet, and their Five Cities weary me, and Philistia's high towers are become a burden to my soul. For their gods are too many and too strange for me. So I am decided to remain here – ere 'they that look out of their windows be darkened' and 'the doors be shut in the Streets' – 'and all the daughters of music shall be brought low.'

"My poor comrade! Must you remain a prisoner in the Streets of Ascalon? Yet, through your soul I know as free and fresh a breeze is blowing as stirs the curtains at my open window! – You wonderful man to evoke in imagery – to visualise and conceive all that had to be concrete to cure me soul and body of my hurts!

"I have been reading Karl Westguard's new novel. Rix, there is no story in it, nothing at all that I can discover except a very earnest warming over of several modern philosophers' views and conclusions concerning social problems.

"I hate to speak unkindly of it; I wanted to like it because I like Karl Westguard. But it isn't fiction and it isn't philosophy, and its treatment of social problems seems to follow methods already obsolete.

"Do you think people will buy it? But I don't suppose Karl cares since he's made up his quarrel with his aunt.

"Poor old lady! Did you ever see anybody so subdued and forlorn? Something has gone wrong with her. She told me that she had had a most dreadful scene with Langly and that she had not been well since.

"I'm afraid that sounds like gossip, but I wanted you to know. Is it gossip for me to tell you so much? I tell you about everything. If it's gossip, make me stop.

"And now – when are you coming to see me? I am still at Molly's, you know. My house is being cleaned and sweetened and papered and chintzed and made livable and lovable.

"When? – please.

    "Your friend and comrade,
    Strelsa."

Quarren telegraphed:

"I'll come the moment I can. Look for me any day this week. Letter follows."

Then he wrote her a long letter, and was still at it when Jessie Vining went to lunch and when Dankmere got onto his little legs and strolled out, also. There was no need to arouse anybody's suspicions by hurrying, so Dankmere waited until he turned the corner before his little legs began to trot. Miss Vining would be at her usual table, anyway – and probably as calmly surprised to see him as she always was. For the repeated accident of their encountering at the same restaurant seemed to furnish an endless source of astonishment to them both. Apparently Jessie Vining could never understand it, and to him it appeared to be a coincidence utterly unfathomable.

Meanwhile Quarren had mailed his letter to Strelsa and had returned to his workshop in the basement where several canvases awaited his attention.

And it was while he was particularly busy that the front door-bell rang and he had to go up and open.

At first he did not recognise the figure standing on the steps in the glare of the sun; then, surprised, he held out his rather grimy hand with that instinct of kindness toward anything that seemed to need it; and the thin pallid hand of Ledwith fell limply into his, contracting nervously the next second.

"Come in," said Quarren, pleasantly. "It's very nice of you to think of me, Ledwith."

The man's hollow eyes avoided his and roamed restlessly about the gallery, looking at picture after picture and scarcely seeing them. Inside his loose summer clothing his thin, nervous frame was shifting continually even while he stood gazing almost vacantly at the walls of the gallery.

For a little while Quarren endeavoured to interest him in the canvases, meaning only charity to a man who had clearly lost his grip on things; then, afraid of bewildering and distressing a mind so nearly extinct, the young fellow remained silent, merely accompanying Ledwith as he moved purposelessly hither and thither or halted capriciously, staring into space and twitching his scarred fingers.

"You're busy, I suppose," he said.

"Yes, I am," said Quarren, frankly. "But that needn't make any difference if you'd care to come to the basement and talk to me while I'm at work."

Ledwith made no reply for a moment, then, abruptly:

"You're always kind to me, Quarren."

"Get over that idea," laughed the younger man. "Strange as it may seem my natural inclination is to like people. Come on downstairs."

In the littered disorder of the basement he found a chair for his visitor, then, without further excuse, went smilingly about his work, explaining it as it progressed:

"Here's an old picture by some Italian gink – impossible to tell by whom it was painted, but not difficult to assign it to a certain date and school… See what I'm doing, Ledwith?

"That's what we call 'rabbit glue' because it's made out of rabbits' bones – or that's the belief, anyway. It's gilder's glue.

"Now I dissolve this much of it in hot water – then I glue over the face of the picture three layers of tissue-paper, one on top of the other – so!

"Now here is a new chassis or stretcher over which I have stretched a new linen canvas. Yesterday I sponged it as a tailor sponges cloth; and now it's dry and tight.

"Now I'm going to reline this battered old Italian canvas. It's already been relined – perhaps a hundred years ago. So first I take off the old relining canvas – with hot water – this way – cleaning off all the old paste or glue from it with alcohol…

"Now here's a pot of paste in which there is also glue and whitening; and I spread it over the back of this old painting, and then, very gingerly, glue it over the new linen canvas on the stretcher.

"Now I smooth it with this polished wooden block, and then – just watch me do laundry work!"

He picked up a flat-iron which was moderately warm, reversed the relined picture on a marble slab, and began to iron it out with the skill and precaution of an expert laundress doing frills.

Ledwith looked on with a sort of tremulously fixed interest.

"In three days," said Quarren, laying the plastered picture away, "I'll soak off that tissue paper with warm water. I have to keep it on, you see, so that no flakes of paint shall escape from the painting and no air get in to blister the surface."

He picked up another picture and displayed it:

"Here's a picture that I believe to be a study by Greuze. You see I have already relined it and it's fixed on its new canvas and stretcher and is thoroughly dry and ready for cleaning. And this is how I begin."

He took a fine sponge, soaked it in a weak solution of alcohol, and very gingerly washed the blackened and dirty canvas. Then he dried it. Then he gave it a coat of varnish.

"Looks foolish to varnish over a filthy and discoloured picture like this, doesn't it, Ledwith? But I'll tell you why. When that varnish dries hard I shall place my hand on the face of that canvas and begin very cautiously but steadily to rub the varnished surface with my fingers and thumb. And do you know what will happen? The new varnish has partly united with the old yellow and opaque coating of varnish and dust, and it all will turn to a fine gray powder under the friction and will come away leaving the old paint underneath almost as fresh – very often quite as fresh and delicate as when the picture was first painted.