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I was just going to make a great hole in the picture, I had my arm all ready for the blow, when suddenly I seemed to see it." "See what?" "The picture. It was a work of art. I couldn't touch it. I was afraid." Stroeve was silent again, and he stared at me with his mouth open and his round blue eyes starting out of his head. "It was a great, a wonderful picture. I was seized with awe.
As Stroeve told me this he became as excited as when the incident occurred, and he took hold of a dinner-knife on the table between us, and brandished it. He lifted his arm as though to strike, and then, opening his hand, let it fall with a clatter to the ground. He looked at me with a tremulous smile. He did not speak. "Fire away," I said. "I don't know what happened to me.
And when the ambulance came and they put her on a stretcher, they made me go in the kitchen so that she shouldn't know I was there." While I dressed for Stroeve wished me to go at once with him to the hospital he told me that he had arranged for his wife to have a private room, so that she might at least be spared the sordid promiscuity of a ward.
I was furious with Strickland, and was indignant with myself, because Dirk Stroeve cut such an absurd figure that I felt inclined to laugh. "But what did your wife say?" "She'd gone out to do the marketing." "Is he going to let her in?" "I don't know." I gazed at Stroeve with perplexity. He stood like a schoolboy with whom a master is finding fault. "Shall I get rid of Strickland for you?"
He was silent for a long time, and then he said what I knew was in his mind. "If I'd only waited, perhaps it would have gone all right. I shouldn't have been so impatient. Oh, poor child, what have I driven her to?" I shrugged my shoulders, but did not speak. I had no sympathy for Blanche Stroeve, but knew that it would only pain poor Dirk if I told him exactly what I thought of her.
"Well, your Dutch people were furious with you. They thought you were having a joke with them." Dirk Stroeve took off his spectacles and wiped them. His flushed face was shining with excitement. "Why should you think that beauty, which is the most precious thing in the world, lies like a stone on the beach for the careless passer-by to pick up idly?
"It may be," answered the concierge indifferently. "<i En effet>, I have not seen him for several days." Stroeve ran up the stairs ahead of me, and when I reached the top floor I found him talking to a workman in his shirt-sleeves who had opened a door at which Stroeve had knocked. He pointed to another door. He believed that the person who lived there was a painter.
Her expression was so placid, it was hard to believe that she was capable of the violent emotion I had witnessed. "Has he ever thanked you for what you do for him?" "No," she smiled. "He's inhuman." "He's abominable." Stroeve was, of course, delighted with her. He could not do enough to show his gratitude for the whole-hearted devotion with which she had accepted the burden he laid on her.
In a handsome gold frame was a copy of Velasquez' Innocent X., that Stroeve had made in Rome, and placed so as to make the most of their decorative effect were a number of Stroeve's pictures, all in splendid frames. Stroeve had always been very proud of his taste.
My first thought was that she had come to the end of her forbearance with his infatuation for Strickland, and, goaded by the latter's cynical behaviour, had insisted that he should be turned out. I knew her capable of temper, for all the calmness of her manner; and if Stroeve still refused, she might easily have flung out of the studio with vows never to return.
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