Between Friends

He wrote to Cecile once: Hereafter keep clear of men like Graylock and like me.

We're both of a stripe--the same sort under our skins.

I've known him all my life. It all depends upon the

opportunity, the circumstances, and the woman. And, what

is a woman between friends--between such friends as

Graylock and I once were--or between the sort of friends

we have now become? Keep clear of such men as we are.

We were boys together.

For a week or two he kept his door locked and lived on what the

janitor provided for him, never going out of the studio at all.

He did no work, although there were several unexecuted commissions

awaiting his attention and a number of sketches, clay studies, and

one marble standing around the studio in various stages of progress.

The marble was the Annunciation. The head and throat and slender

hands were completed, and one slim naked foot.

Sometimes he wandered from one study to the next, vague-eyed,

standing for a long time before each, staring, lost in thought.

Sometimes, in the evening he read, choosing a book at random among

the motley collection in a corner case--a dusty, soiled assortment

of books, ephemeral novels of the moment, ponderous volumes which

are in everybody's library but which nobody reads, sets of

histories, memoirs, essays, beautifully bound and once cared for,

but now dirty from neglect--jetsam from a wrecked home.

There had been a time when law, order and neatness formed the basis

of Drene's going forth and coming in. He had been exact, precise,

fastidious; he had been sensitive to environment, a lover of

beautiful things, a man who deeply appreciated any symbol that

suggested home and hearth and family.

But when these three were shattered in the twinkling of an eye,

something else broke, too. And he gradually emerged from chaos,

indifferent to all that had formerly been a part of him, a silent

emotionless, burnt out thing, callous to all that he had once cared

for.

Yet something of what he had been must have remained latent within

him for with unimpaired precision and logic he constructed his clay

and chiseled his marble; and there must have been in him something

to express, for the beauty of his work, spiritual and material, had

set him high among the highest in his profession.

Sometimes sorrow changes the dross from the lamp of the spirit so

that it burns with a purity almost unearthly; sometimes sorrow

sears, rendering the very soul insensible; and sometimes sorrow

remains under the ashes, a living coal steadily consuming all that

is noble, hardening all that is ignoble; and is extinguished leaving

a devil behind it--fully equipped to slay the crippled soul.