Children of the Whirlwind, Leroy Scott [read full novel txt] 📗

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.


CHAPTER III


Presently Hunt's mind shifted to Larry Brainard, whom Barney Palmer and Old Jimmie Carlisle had come here to see. Hunt had a mind curious about every thing and every one; and blustering, bullying creature though he was, he had the gift, possessed by but few, of audaciously thrusting himself into other people's affairs without arousing their resentment. He was keen to learn Maggie's attitude toward Larry; and he spoke not so much to gain knowledge of Larry as to draw her out.

"This Larry - what sort of chap is he, Maggie?" As with most artists, talking did not interfere with Hunt's painting.

Warm color slowly tinted Maggie's cheeks. "He's clever," she said positively. "You already know that. But I was only a girl when he was sent away."

Hunt smiled at her idea of her present maturity, implied by her last sentence. "But you lived with the Duchess for a year before he was sent away. You must have seen a lot of him, and got to know him well."

"Oh, he used to come down now and then to see his grandmother - I was only fifteen or sixteen then - just a girl, and he didn't pay much attention to me. Father can tell you better just how smart he is."

Old Jimmie spoke up promptly. He knew Hunt was not a police stool, and he liked the painter as much as it was in him to like any man; so he felt none of the reserve or caution that might have controlled him in other company.

"You bet Larry's smart! Got the quickest brain of any con man in the business - and him only about twenty-seven now. Some think I'm a smooth proposition myself, but Larry puts it all over me. That's why I'm willing to let him be my boss. He's a wonder at thinking up new stunts, and then at working out safe new ways of putting them across."

"But the police landed him at last," commented Hunt.

"Yes, but that was only because another man muffed his end of the job."

The handsome Barney Palmer had been restless during Old Jimmie's eulogy. "Oh, Larry's all to the good - but he's not the only party that's got real ideas."

"Huh!" grunted Old Jimmie. "But you'll remember that we haven't put over any big ones since Larry's been in stir."

"That's been because you wouldn't listen to any of my ideas!" retorted Barney. "And I handed out some peaches."

Even during the period of Larry's active reign it had irked Barney to accept another man as leader, and it had irked him even more during the interregnum while Larry was guest of the State. For Barney believed in his own Napoleonic strain.

"Don't let yourself get sore, Barney," Old Jimmie said appeasingly. "You'll have plenty of chances to try out your ideas as the main guy before you cash in. You know the outfit wanted to lay low for a while, anyhow. But we'll be putting over a lot of the big stuff when Larry gets out."

Hunt had noted a quick light come into Maggie's dark eyes while her father praised the absent leader. He himself suddenly perceived a new possibility.

"Maggie, ever think about teaming up with Larry?" he demanded, with his audacious keenness.

She flushed, and hesitated. He did not wait for her slow-coming reply, but turned to her father.

"Jimmie, did Larry ever use women in his stunts?"

"Never. Whenever we suggested using a skirt, Larry absolutely said there was nothing doing. That's one point where he was all wrong. Nothing helps so much, when the sucker is at all sentimental, as a clever, good-looking woman. And Larry'll come around to it all right. He'll see the sense of it, now that he's older and has had two years to think things over."

Old Jimmie nodded, showing his yellow teeth in a sly grin. "You said something a second ago: Maggie and Larry!