Sometimes even he was called upon
to paint other little pictures upon the sides of big express wagons--two
horses, one white and the other bay, galloping very free in an open
field, their manes and tails flying, or a bulldog, very savage, sitting
upon a green and black safe, or the head of a mastiff with a spiked
collar about his neck.
What with the pay for this sort of work and the interest of his bonds,
Vandover managed to lead a haphazard sort of life, living about in cheap
lodging-houses and cheap restaurants. But he was never more than a
second-class workman, and he was so irregular that he could never be
depended upon.
The moment he began to paint again--even to paint such pitiful little
pictures as these--the same familiar experience repeated itself, the
unwillingness of his fingers, their failure to rightly interpret his
ideas, the resulting crudity of his work, the sudden numbness in his
brain, the queer, tense sensation behind his eyes. But Vandover had long
since become accustomed to these symptoms and would not have minded them
at this time had it not been that they were occasionally followed by a
nervous twitching and jerking of his whole arm, so that sometimes he
could not hold the brush steady a minute at a time.
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