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The Art Of Terry Lute
by
“Is you quit?” his mother inquired.
“Ay, Mother.”
“H-m-m!” says Skipper Tom, puzzled. “I never knowed you t’ quit for the night afore I made you.”
Terry Lute shot his father a reproachful glance.
“I must take heed t’ my soul,” said he, darkly, “lest I be damned for my sins.”
Next night Terry Lute knelt at the penitent bench with old Bill Bull. It will be recalled now that he had heard never a word of Parson Down’s denunciations and appeals, that he had been otherwise and deeply engaged. His response had been altogether a reflection of Bill Bull’s feeling, which he had observed, received, and memorized, and so possessed in the end that he had been overmastered by it, though he was ignorant of what had inspired it. And this, Cobden says, is a sufficient indication of that mastery of subject, of understanding and sympathy, which young Terry Lute later developed and commanded as a great master should, at least to the completion of his picture, in the last example of his work, “The Fang.”
At any rate, it must be added that after his conversion Terry Lute was a very good boy for a time.
* * * * *
Terry Lute was in his fourteenth year when he worked on “The Fang.” Skipper Tom did not observe the damnable disintegration that occurred, nor was Terry Lute himself at all aware of it. But the process went on, and the issue, a sudden disclosure when it came, was inevitable in the case of Terry Lute. When the northeasterly gales came down with fog, Terry Lute sat on the slimy, wave-lapped ledge overhanging the swirl of water, and watched the spent breaker, streaked with current and flecked with fragments; and he watched, too, the cowering ledge beyond, and the great wave from the sea’s restlessness as it thundered into froth and swept on, and the cliff in the mist, and the approach of the offshore ice, and the woeful departure of the last light of day. But he took no pencil to the ledge; he memorized in his way. He kept watch; he brooded.
In this way he came to know in deeper truth the menace of the sea; not to perceive and grasp it fleetingly, not to hold it for the uses of the moment, but surely to possess it in his understanding.
His purpose, avowed with a chuckle, was to convey fear to the beholder of his work. It was an impish trick, and it brought him unwittingly into peril of his soul.
“I ‘low,” says he between his teeth to Skipper Tom, “that she’ll scare the wits out o’ you, father.”
Skipper Tom laughed.
“She’ll have trouble,” he scoffed, “when the sea herself has failed.”
“You jus’ wait easy,” Terry grimly promised him, “till I gets her off the stocks.”
At first Terry Lute tentatively sketched. Bits of the whole were accomplished,–flecks of foam and the lines of a current,–and torn up. This was laborious. Here was toil, indeed, and Terry Lute bitterly complained of it. ‘Twas bother; ’twas labor; there wasn’t no sense to it. Terry Lute’s temper went overboard. He sighed and shifted, pouted and whimpered while he worked; but he kept on, with courage equal to his impulse, toiling every evening of that summer until his impatient mother shooed him off to more laborious toil upon the task in his nightmares. The whole arrangement was not attempted for the first time until midsummer. It proceeded, it halted, it vanished. Seventeen efforts were destroyed, ruthlessly thrust into the kitchen stove with no other comment than a sigh, a sniff of disgust, and a shuddering little whimper.
It was a windy night in the early fall of the year, blowing high and wet, when Terry Lute dropped his crayon with the air of not wanting to take it up again.