irst a Mexican stopped to watch the thin, long nosed man painting carefully on the inside of the bar window, next two Filipinos, then a man carrying a brief case, finally a dreamy-looking boy in a red, zipper-fronted shirt that he wore tunic-like outside his jeans. Probably just a high school student, but he was like a medieval page adrift from another century. The loiterers stood before the window of the bar and followed the painter's brush, which glided over the inner side of the pane, up, down, then suddenly around, smearing flesh-tint between the black lines that formed the woman's body. Slender, with one arm raised and hips curved, she would soon be there on the glass-a hula dancer about a foot high, with something flimsy around her middle.

The painter, tensely occupied with his work, seemed admirably unaware of the spectators: behind the plate glass he had something of the superior indifference of fish in an aquarium. He applied the paint evenly, never glancing at his audience, the veins emerging on his brow when he leaned forward and vanishing when he straightened up. His blue eyes, aloof and impersonal, had contact with nothing save the figure; they widened and contracted; the pupils were tiny and black against the light: they were not like ordinary eyes, which usually reflect a little the mood of the person who sees them and who is seen. These eyes were slightly inhuman, like those of a busy insect. The painter was about forty-five; his hair was beginning to wear out, leaving the scalp partly visible.

Busses and automobiles moved along the street; the sky was gray, the sidewalk wet from earlier rain. The boy glanced at the sky, as though fearing the rain might begin again. Then his gaze, indolent and thoughtful, returned to the half-formed painting on the window.

When he had first seen the painter behind the glass, the boy had been attracted by his quick, nervous movements; he had stopped and idly looked on. Gradually, he had become aware of the subject of the painting: the hula dancer and, above her, already completed on the upper third of the pane, a strip of tropical island with palm trees in the foreground. The careful, swift glide of the painter's hand, the caressing smear of the color, the emergence of the dancer's body, induced reverie in the boy. The street noises blended and withdrew, a warm feeling stole through him. With sleepy eyes, in an adolescent haze, the boy stood there, head lifted, face a bit sullen in repose, mouth slightly pouting. He was languorous and aloof in his red shirt among the others shabbily clad. The skin on his throat was soft, shadowed with little hollows where muscles played.

By this time the group of spectators had grown: a dozen men clustered on the wet sidewalk. Passersby would linger for a moment, then go on; in a car parked beside the curb a man sat with his arm across the steering wheel. Customers entered the bar. When they came out, they usually paused in the doorway to watch the painter.

He had now filled in with flesh color the outline of the torso and was drawing his brush slowly around the hip. To steady his hand he used a rod with a clothwrapped ball at one end that rested against the glass. Whenever the brush passed over the black outline, he quickly removed the superfluous paint with a rag that he kept hanging over his left wrist. Once, with a little gesture of annoyance, he wiped away the entire buttocks and twirled a finer brush in black to renew the outline. Then, after an unwavering and commendable stroke, he leaned back to consider not without pleasure what he had done, glancing for the first time at the men outside.

Nearest of them all to the window was the red-shirted boy: the painter gazed for an instant directly into his face. The boy's forehead was contracted with somnolent concentration; the eyes were heavy and gentle; the complexion was smooth; on the upper lip and chin down was barely visible. Turning back to his work, the painter completed the outline; then, changing brushes, he applied a layer of flesh-tint, holding his head to one side and compressing his lips.

But his eyes no longer had the praiseworthy indifference, the untroubled tension, which had given them a few minutes before the appearance of exactitude and objectivity. The irises of pale blue darkened, as if the most subtle films had descended over them; the whites seemed delicately clouded. Once again his eyes strayed sidelong to the boy and lingered, and the skin beneath them, as far as the rise of the cheek bones, became slightly suffused, so that the imperfections were more evident the tracery of tiny veins and wrinkles. His next stroke was inadequate: he had to draw the rag accurately between the black lines, breathing in deeply, his pointed nose close to the windowpane.

PASSING

STRANGER

clarkson crane

Recently deceased poetnovelist Clarkson Crane was one of the earliest writers of national repute to appear in ONE'S pages.