Fairfax's figure as he turned was dark against the light of the window
and the room was full of the shadows of the early January twilight. He
wore a pair of velveteen breeches whose original colour might have been
a dark, rich blue. His flannel shirt (no longer red) was fastened
loosely at the neck by a soft black cravat under a rolling collar. It
was Sunday and he was working, the clay white upon his fingers and
nails. He wore an old pair of slippers, and Dearborn on a couch in a
corner watched him, a Turkish drapery wound around his shoulders, for
the big room was chilly and it smelled of clay and tobacco smoke. The
studio was an enormous attic, running the length of an hotel once of
some magnificence, now a tumble-down bit of still beautiful
architecture. The room was portioned off for the use of two people. Two
couches served in the night-time as their beds, there was a small stove
guiltless of fire, a few pieces of studio property, a skylight, a desk
covered with papers and books and manuscripts, and in the part of the
room near the window and under the skylight, Tony Fairfax, now Thomas
Rainsford, worked among his casts and drawings, amidst the barrels of
clay and plaster. To him, in spite of being almost always hungry, in
spite of the discomfort, of the constant presence and companionship of
another when he often longed for solitude, in spite of this, his domain
was a heaven. He had come into the place in June with Dearborn.
Tony had paid a year's rent in advance. He was working as a common
journeyman in the studio of Barye, and early in the morning, late at
night, and on Sundays, worked for himself eagerly, hungrily, like the
slave of old in Albany, and yet, with what a difference! He had no one
but himself to consider, but had the interest of the atelier where he
studied, even as he sold his skill that it might be lost in the
creations of more advanced artists, and there, during the days of his
apprenticeship, his visions came to him, and what conceptions he then
had he tried to work out and to mature, when he had the chance, in his
own room.
Dearborn, who never left the studio except to eat, smoked and worked and
read all day.
The two men were sufficiently of a size to wear each other's clothes.
They had thought it out carefully and had preserved from the holocaust,
of the different financial crises, one complete out-of-door outfit, from
hat to boots--and those boots!
It was "deplorable" the bookseller, whose little shelf of books lay on
the stone wall of the quay, said, it was "deplorable" that such a fine
pair of men should be lame and in exactly the same fashion. Fairfax
could not walk at all in the other man's shoes, so his normal friend
made the sacrifice and the proper shoes were pawned, and Robert Dearborn
and Tony Fairfax had shared alternately the big boot and the small one,
the light and the heavy step. And they were directed by such different
individuals, the boots went through Paris in such diverse ways!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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