keep looking at those silly ivy leaves."
"Tell me as soon as you have finished," said Johnsy, closing her
eyes, and lying white and still as fallen statue, "because I want to
see the last one fall. I'm tired of waiting. I'm tired of thinking. I
want to turn loose my hold on everything, and go sailing down,
down, just like one of those poor, tired leaves."
"Try to sleep," said Sue. "I must call Behrman up to be my model
for the old hermit miner. I'll not be gone a minute. Don't try to
move 'til I come back."
Old Behrman was a painter who
lived on the ground floor beneath
them. He was past sixty and had
a Michael Angelo's Moses beard
curling down from the head of a
satyr along with the body of an
imp. Behrman was a failure in art.
Forty years he had wielded the
brush
without
getting
near
enough to touch the hem of his
Mistress's robe. He had been
always
about
to
paint
a
masterpiece, but had never yet
begun it. For several years he had
painted nothing except now and then a daub in the line of
commerce or advertising. He earned a little by serving as a model
to those young artists in the colony who could not pay the price
of a professional. He drank gin to excess, and still talked of his
coming masterpiece. For the rest he was a fierce little old man,
who scoffed terribly at softness in any one, and who regarded
himself as especial mastiff-in-waiting to protect the two young
artists in the studio above.
Sue found Behrman smelling strongly of juniper berries in his
dimly lighted den below. In one corner was a blank canvas on an
easel that had been waiting there for twenty-five years to receive
63