The Deaves Affair - ebook

Contents

I. A PENNY CHANGE

II. A RICH MAN'S HOUSE

III. SNOOPING

IV. THE NEW LODGER

V. THE HAPPY LITTLE FAMILY

VI. THE LITTLE FELLOW IN GREY

VII. PLATONIC FRIENDSHIP

VIII. EVAN IS RE-ENGAGED

IX. THE COMPACT IS SMASHED

X. MAUD'S INTEREST

XI. THE STEAMBOAT ERNESTINA

XII. EVAN LOSES A ROUND

XIII. A LITTLE DETECTIVE WORK

XIV. NUMBER 11 VAN DORN STREET

XV. THE CLUB HOUSE

XVI. BACK TO EARTH

XVII. THE ERNESTINA AGAIN

XVIII. THE ACCIDENT

XIX. FOUR VISITS FROM GEORGE DEAVES

XX. THE BEGINNING OF THE NIGHT

XXI. LATER THAT NIGHT

XXII. TOWARDS MORNING

XXIII. SIMEON DEAVES TURNS PHILANTHROPIST

XXIV. CONCLUSION

POSTSCRIPTI. A PENNY CHANGE

EVAN WEIR’S pipe was foul; he threw it down with an exclamation of disgust. Its foulness was symbolic; everything was out of kilter. He looked at the picture he had been painting for a week–rotten! It was a still life; a broken jar and three books on a rag of Persian embroidery. Picking up his pen-knife he deliberately cut the canvas out of the stretcher, and setting a match to a corner of it, tossed it in the empty stove. He paced up and down the room wondering what the devil was the matter with him; he couldn’t work; he couldn’t read; his friends bored him; life was as flat as beer dregs.

His attic studio was lighted by a dormer window at a height convenient to receive his elbows on the sill. He came to a pause in that position morosely staring out on Washington Square basking in the summer morning sunshine. In some occult way the gilding on the green leaves stabbed at his breast and accused him of futility.

“What the deuce am I doing up here in this dusty garret painting bad pictures while the whole world is alive!” he thought.

He picked up his hat and went slowly down the three flights to the street. At the corner of the square he turned down Macdougall street into the Italian quarter.

This intimate thoroughfare was as crowded as a bee-hive. Happy, dirty, big-eyed children played in the gutters while their obese mothers squatted untidily on the stoops. No lack of the zest of life here. It shamed the pedestrian without cheering him.

“They haven’t much to live for,” he thought, “and they’re not complaining. Why can’t I take things as they come, as they do, without searching my soul?”

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