"We'll make a night of it," he laughed.
Lockwood looked at him, shrewdly affectionate.
"What you need," he spoke, "is a good drink and some fat street woman to
shake you out of it. You look kind of tied up."
"I am," grinned Dorn. "Wound up and ready to bust."
Lockwood nodded his head slowly.
"Uh-huh," he said, as if turning the matter over carefully in his
thought. "Why don't you buy a new hat like I do when I get feeling sort
of upside down? Buying a new hat or tie straightens a man out. Come on!"
He laughed suddenly. "This artist's name is Tony. He's an old
man--seventy years old."
They entered the street, Lockwood watching his companion with dark,
fixed eyes as if he were slowly arriving at some impersonal diagnosis.
"A lot of fools," he announced abruptly, waving his hand at the crowds.
"They don't know that something important's happening in Russia." He
pronounced it Rooshia. Dorn saw his eyes kindle with a kindliness as he
denounced the rabble about them.
"What do you figure is happening in Rooshia?" he inquired of the
novelist.
"I don't figure," smiled Lockwood. "I feel it. Something important that
these newspaper Neds around this town haven't got any conception of.
It's what old Carl calls the rising of the proletaire." He chuckled.
"Old Carl's sure gone daft on this proletaire thing." His face abruptly
hardened, the rugged features becoming set, the swart eyes paying a
far-away homage. "But old Carl's a great poet--the greatest in America.
God, but that old boy can write!"
Dorn nodded. In the presence of the novelist the unrest that had held
him by the throat through the day seemed to ebb. There was companionship
in the figure beside him. They walked in silence for several blocks. The
day was growing dark quickly and despite the crowds in the streets,
there seemed an inactivity in the air--the wait of a storm.
Into a ramshackle building on the corner of a vivaciously ugly street
Lockwood led his friend in quest of the greatest artist. An old man in a
skull cap, woolen shirt, baggy trousers and carpet slippers appeared in
a darkened doorway. With his long white beard he stood bent and
rheumatic before them, making a question mark in the gloom of the hall.
"Hello, Tony," Lockwood greeted him. "I've brought a friend of mine
along to look at your works."
The old man extended thin fingers and nodded his head. Dorn entered a
large room that reminded him of a tombstone factory. Figures in clay,
some broken and cracked, cluttered up its floor and walls. In a corner
partly hidden behind topsy-turvy busts and more figures was a cot with a
blanket over it. Dorn after several minutes of silence, looked
inquiringly at his friend. The works of art, despite an obvious vigor of
execution, were openly banal.
"He's got some more in the basement," announced Lockwood with an air of
triumph. "And there's some stuck away with the family upstairs. The
whole street here's full of his works."
The old man nodded.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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