Tom Merivale laughed quietly.
“It means exactly what I have said,” he answered. “Come down to my home sometime, and you shall see. It is all quite simple and quite true. It is all as old as love and as new as love. It is also perfectly commonplace. It must be so. I have only taken the trouble to verify it.”
Philip’s cool business qualities came to his aid, or his undoing.
“You mean you can convey a message to a bird or a beast?” he asked.
“Oh, yes. Why not? The idea is somehow upsetting to you. Pray don’t let it upset you. Nothing that happens can ever be upsetting. It is only the things that don’t happen that are such anxieties, for fear they may. But when they have happened they are never alarming.”
He pushed his chair back and got up.
“Ah, I have learned one thing in this last year,” he said, “and that is to be frightened at nothing. Fear is the one indefensible emotion. You can do nothing at all if you are afraid. You know that yourself in business. But whether you embark on business or on—what shall I call it?—nature-lore, the one thing indispensable is to go ahead. To take your stand firmly on what you know, and deduce from that. Then to test your deduction, and as soon as one will bear your weight to stand on that and deduce again, being quitesure all the time that whatever is true is right. Perhaps sometime the world in general may see, not degradation in the origin of man from animals, but the extraordinary nobility of it. And then perhaps they will go further back—back to Pagan things, to Pan, the God of nature.”
“To see whom meant death,” remarked Philip.
“Yes, or life. Death is merely an incident in life. And it seems to me now to be rather an unimportant one. One can’t help it. Whereas the important events are those which are within one’s control; one’s powers of thought, for instance.”
Philip rose also.
“And love,” he said. “Is that in one’s control?”
Tom took a long breath.
“Love?” he said. “It is not exactly in one’s control, because it is oneself. There, the dear bird has got home.”
And again from the trees below the bubble of liquid melody sounded.
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EVELYN DUNDAS was sitting next morning after breakfast on the terrace, where what he alluded to as “the nightingale trick” had been performed the evening before, in company with the conjurer who had performed it. Philip and Madge Ellington had just gone down to the river, Lady Ellington who was to have accompanied them having excused herself at the last moment. But since a mother was in closer and more intimate connection with a girl than a mere chaperone, she had seen not the smallest objection to the two going alone. Indeed she had firmly detained Evelyn by a series of questions which required answers, from joining them, and, though deep in a discussion about art, she had dropped it in its most critical state when she judged that the other two had been given time to get under way. It had required, indeed, all her maternal solicitude to continue it so long, for she cared less for art or Evelyn’s theories about it than for a week-old paper.
Like most artists, Evelyn had a somewhat egoistic nature, and since his personality was so graceful and interesting, it followed that many people found his talk equally so, especially when he talked about himself. For his egoism he had an admirably probable explanation, and he was at this moment explaining it to Tom Merivale, who had made the soft impeachment with regard to its undoubted existence.
“Ah, yes,” he was saying, “an artist’s business is not to put things down as they are, but to put them down as they strike him. Actual truth has nothing to do with the value of a landscape. The point is that the picture should be beautiful. And the same with portraits, only beauty there is unnecessary. You have to put down what you think you see, or what you choose to see.”
“That shouldn’t lead to egoism,” remarked Tom. “It should lead you to the study of other people.”
Evelyn shook his head.
“No, no,” he said, “it leads you to devote yourself entirely almost to the cultivation of your own faculty of seeing. All fine portraits show a great deal of the artist, and perhaps comparatively little of the sitter. Why are Rembrandts so unmistakable? Not because the type of his sitters themselves was almost identical, but because there is lots of Rembrandt in each. You can’t have style unless you are egoistic. In fact, for an artist style means egoism. I have heaps. I don’t say or pretend it’s good, but there it is. Take it or leave it.”
Tom Merivale laughed.
“You are perfectly inimitable,” he said. “I love your serious, vivid nonsense. That you are an egoist is quite, quite true. But how much better an artist you would be if you weren’t. What you want is deepening. You don’t like the deeps, you know. You haven’t got any. You don’t like what you don’t understand; that very simple little affair last night, for instance, frightened you.”
Egoists are invariably truthful—according to their lights—about themselves. Evelyn was truthful now.
“Yes, that is so,” he said. “I don’t pretend to wish to seek out the secrets of the stars. But I know what I like. And I don’t like anything that leads into the heart of things. I don’t like interiors and symbolism. There is quite enough symbol for me on the surface. What I mean is that the eyebrow itself, the curve of the mouth, will tell you quite as much as one has any use for about the brain that makes the eyebrow frown or the mouth smile. Beauty may be skin deep only, but it is quite deep enough. Skin deep! Why, it is as deep as the sea!”
Tom Merivale was silent a little.
“Do you know, you are an interesting survival of the Pagan spirit?” he said at length.
Evelyn laughed.
“Erect me an altar then at once, and crown me with roses,” he remarked. “But what have I said just now that makes you think that?”
“Nothing particular this moment,” he answered, “though your remarking that beauty was enough for you is thoroughly Greek in its way. No; what struck me was that never have I seen in you the smallest rudiment or embryo of a conscience or of any moral sense.”
Evelyn looked up with real interest at this criticism.
“Oh, that is perfectly true,” he said. “Certainly I never have remorse; it must be awful, a sort of moral toothache. All the same, I don’t steal or lie, you know.”
“Merely because lying and stealing are very inartistic performances,” said Tom. “But no idea of morality stands in your way.”
Evelyn got up, looking out over the heat-hazed green of the woods below them with his brilliant glance.
“Is that very shocking?” he asked, with perfectly unassumednaïvetê.
“I suppose it is. Personally, I am never shocked at anything. But it seems to me very dangerous. You ought to wear a semaphore with a red lamp burning at the end of it.”
Evelyn half shut his eyes and put his head on one side.
“I don’t think that would compose well,” he said.
“That is most consistently spoken,” said Tom. “But really, if you are ever in earnest about anything beside your art, you would be a public danger.”
Evelyn turned round on this.
“You call me a Pagan,” he said. “Well, what are you, pray, with your communings with nature and conjuring tricks with nightingales? You belong to quite as early a form of man.”
“I know. I am primeval. At least I hope to be before I die.”
“What’s the object?”
“In order to see Pan. I am getting on. Come down to the New Forest sometime, and you shall see very odd things, I promise you. Really, Evelyn, I wish you would come. It would do you no end of good.”
He got up, and taking the arm of the other man, walked with him down the terrace.
“You are brilliant, I grant you,” he said; “but you are like a mirror, only reflecting things. What you want is to be lit from within. Who is it who talks of the royalty of inward happiness? That is such a true phrase. All happiness from without is not happiness at all; it is only pleasure. And pleasure is always imperfect. It flickers and goes out, it has scratching nails——”
Evelyn shook himself free.
“Ah, let me be,” he said. “I don’t want anything else.Besides, as you have told me before, you yourself dislike and detest suffering or pain. But how can you hope to understand Nature at all if you leave all that aside? Why, man, the whole of Nature is one groan, one continuous preying of creature on creature. In your life in the New Forest you leave all that out.”
Tom Merivale paused.
“I know I do,” he said, “because I want to grasp first, once and for all the huge joy that pervades Nature, which seems to me much more vital in itself than pain. It seems to me that pain may be much more rightly called absence of joy than joy be called absence of pain. What the whole thing starts from, the essential spring of the world is not pain and death, but joy and life.”
“Ah, there I am with you. But there is so much joy and life on the surface of things that I don’t wish to probe down. Ah, Tom, a day like this now; woven webs of blue heat, hot scents from the flower beds, the faces of our friends. Is that not enough? It is for me. And, talking of faces, Miss Ellington has the most perfectly modelled face I ever saw. The more I look at it, the more it amazes me. I stared at her all breakfast. And the charm of it is its consistent irregularity; not a feature is anything like perfect, but what a whole! I wish I could do her portrait.”
Tom laughed.
“There would not be the slightest difficulty about that, I should say,” he remarked, “if you promise to present it to her mother.”
“Why, of course, I would. How funny it must feel to be hard like that. She is very bruising; I feel that I am being hit in the eye when she talks to me. And she knows how many shillings go to a sovereign.”
“Twenty,” remarked Tom.
“Ah, that is where you are wrong. She gets twenty-one for each of her sovereigns. And thirteen pence for each of her shillings, and the portrait of her daughter for nothing at all. Oh, Tom, think of it—with a background of something blue, cornflower, forget-me-nots, or lilac, to show how really golden her hair is. There’s Mrs. Home.”
Evelyn whistled with peculiar shrillness on his fingers to the neat little figure on the croquet lawn below them. Shestarted, not violently, for nothing she did was violent, but very completely.
“Ah, it is only you,” she said. “I thought it might be an express train loose. Are you not going on the river, dear Evelyn?”
“I was prevented,” he said, jumping down the steps in one flying leap. “Dear Philippina——”
“What next? What next?” murmured Mrs. Home. “Oh, do behave, Evelyn.”
“Well, Philip is your son, so you are Philippina. But why have prize-fighters in your house?”
“Prize-fighters?”
“Yes. Lady Ellington had my head in Chancery for ten minutes just now. She delivered a series of quick-firing questions. I know why, too; it was to prevent my going on the river. She was perfectly successful—I should think she always was successful; she mowed me down. Now will you tell me the truth or not?”
“No, dear Evelyn,” said Mrs. Home rather hastily, guessing what was coming.
“Then you are a very wicked woman; but as I now know you are going to tell an untruth, it will do just as well for my purpose. Now, is Philip engaged to Miss Ellington?”
“No, dear; indeed he is not,” said Mrs. Home.
“Oh, why not lie better than that?” said Evelyn.
Mrs. Home clasped her white, delicate little hands together.
“Ah, but it is true,” she said. “It really is literally true, as far as I know.”
Evelyn shook his head at her.
“But they have been gone half an hour,” he said. “You mean—I tell you, you mean that they may be now, for all you know.”
Mrs. Home turned her pretty, china-blue eyes on to him, with a sort of diminutive air of dignity.
“Of course you are at liberty to put any construction you please on anything I say,” she remarked.
“I am,” said he, “and I put that. Now, are you pleased at it?”
“She is charming,” said Mrs. Home, hopelessly off her guard.
“That is all I wanted to know,” said Evelyn. “But whata tangled web you weave, without deceiving me in the least, you old darling.”
Tom Merivale had not joined Evelyn, but strolled along the upper walk through herbaceous borders. He had not stayed away from his home now for the past year, and delighted though he was to see these two old friends of his again, he confessed to himself that he found the call on sociability which a visit tacitly implied rather trying. More than that, he found even the presence of other people in the house with whom he was not on terms of intimacy a thing a little upsetting, for his year of solitude had given some justification to his nickname. For solitude is a habit of extraordinary fascination, and very quick to grow on anyone who has sufficient interest in things not to be bored by the absence of people. And with Tom Merivale, Nature, the unfolding of flowers, the lighting of the stars in the sky, the white splendour of the moon, the hiss of the rain on to cowering shrubs and thirsty grass was much more than an interest; it was a passion which absorbed and devoured him. For Nature, to the true devotee, is a mistress far more exacting and far more infinite in her variety and rewards than was ever human mistress to her adorer. Tom Merivale, at any rate, was faithful and wholly constant, and to him now, after a year spent in solitude in which no man had ever felt less alone, no human tie or affection weighed at all compared to the patient devotion with which he worshipped this ever young mistress of his. To some, indeed, as to Mrs. Home, this cutting of himself off from all other human ties might seem to verge on insanity; to others, as to Philip, it might equally well be construed into an example of perfect sanity. For he had left the world, and cast his moorings loose from society in no embittered or disappointed mood; the severance of his connection with things of human interest had been deliberate and sanely made. He believed, in fact, that what his inner essential self demanded was not to be found among men, or, as he had put it once to Philip, it was to be found there in such small quantities compared to the mass of alloy and undesirable material from which it had to be extracted, that it was false economy to quarry in the world of cities. More than this, too, he had renounced, though this second renunciation had not been deliberate, but had followed, so he found, as a sequel to the other; for he had been a writerof fiction who, though never widely read, had been prized and pored over by a circle of readers whose appreciation was probably far more worth having than that of a wider circle could have been. Then, suddenly, as far as even his most intimate friends knew, he had left London, establishing himself instead in a cottage, of the more comfortable sort of cottages, some mile outside Brockenhurst. In the tea-cup way this had made quite a storm in the set that knew him well, those, in fact, by whom he was valued as an interpreter and a living example of the things of which he wrote. These writings had always been impersonal in note, slightly mystical, and always with the refrain of Nature running through them. But none, when he disappeared as completely as Waring, suspected how vital to himself his disappearance had been. Anything out of the way is labelled, and rightly by the majority, to be insane. By such a verdict Tom Merivale certainly merited Bedlam. He had gone away, in fact, to think, while the majority of those who crowd into the cities do so, not to think, but to be within reach of the distractions that leave no time for thought. For action is always less difficult than thought; a man can act for more hours a day than he can think in a week, and action, being a productive function of the brain, is thus (rightly, also, from the social point of view) considered the more respectable employment.
The subject of this difficult doctrine, however, was more than content; as he had said, he was happy, a state far on the sunward side of the other. He seemed to himself, indeed, to be sitting very much awake and alert on some great sunlit slope of the world, untenanted by man, but peopled with a million natural marvels unconjectured as yet by the world, but which slowly coming into the ken of his wondering and patient eyes. For a year now he had consciously and solely devoted himself to the study and contemplation of life, that eternal and ever-renewed life of Nature, and the joy manifested therein. He had turned his back with the same careful deliberation on all that is painful in Nature, all suffering, all that hinders and mars the fulness of life, on everything, in fact, which is an evidence of imperfection. In this to a large extent he was identically minded with Christian Scientists, but having faced the central idea of Christianity, namely, the suffering which was necessary as atonementfor sin, he had confessed himself unable to accept, at present at any rate, the possibility of suffering being ever necessary, and could no longer call himself a Christian. Happiness was his gospel, and the book in which he studied it was Nature, omitting always such chapters as dealt with man. For man, so it seemed to him, had by centuries of evolution built himself into something so widely different from Nature’s original design, that the very contemplation of and association with man was a thing to be avoided. Absence of serenity, absence of happiness, seemed the two leading characteristics of the human race, whereas happiness and serenity were the chief of those things for which he sought and for which he lived.
This year’s solitude and quest for joy had already produced in him remarkable results. He had been originally himself of a very high-strung, nervous, and irritable temperament; now, however, he could not imagine the event which should disturb his equanimity. For this, as far as it went alone, he was perfectly willing to accept the possible explanation that a year’s life in the open air had wrought its simple miracle of healing on his nerves, and, as he had said to Lady Ellington, the perfection of health had eliminated the possibility of discontent.
But other phenomena did not admit of quite so obvious an interpretation; and it was on these that he based his belief that, though all that occurred must necessarily be natural, following, that is to say, laws of nature, he was experiencing the effects of laws which were to the rest of the world occult or unknown. For in a word, youth, with all its vivid vigour, its capacity for growth and expansion, had returned to him in a way unprecedented; his face, as Evelyn had noticed, had grown younger, and in a hundred merely corporeal ways he had stepped back into early manhood. Again, and this was more inexplicable, he had somehow established, without meaning to, a certain communion with birds and beasts, of which the “nightingale trick” had been a small instance, which seemed to him must be a direct and hitherto unknown effect of his conscious absorption of himself in Nature. How far along this unexplored path he would be able to go he had no idea; he guessed, however, that he had at present taken only a few halting steps along a road that was lost in a golden haze of wonder.
He strolled along out through the garden into a solitary upland of bush-besprinkled turf. Wild flowers of downland, the rock-rose, the harebell, orchids, and meadow-sweet carpeted the short grass, and midsummer held festival. But this morning his thoughts were distracted from the Nature-world in which he lived, and he found himself dwelling on the human beings among whom for a few days he would pass his time. It was natural from the attitude of this last year that Evelyn Dundas and Mrs. Home should be of the party in the house the most congenial to him, and the simplicity of them both seemed to him far more interesting than the greater complexity of the others. It would, it is true, be hard to find two examples of simplicity so utterly unlike each other, but serene absence of calculation or scheming brought both under one head. They were both, in a way, children of Nature; Mrs. Home on the one hand having arrived at her inheritance by cheerful, unswerving patience and serenity with events external to herself; while in the case of the other, his huge vitality, coupled with his extreme impressionableness to beauty, brought him, so it seemed to Tom Merivale, into very close connection with the essentials of life. But, as he had told his friend, Evelyn’s attitude to life was instinctively Pagan; immoral he was not, for his fastidiousness labelled such a thing ugly, but he had apparently no rudiments even of conscience or sense of moral obligation. And somehow, with that curious sixth sense of prescience, so common in animals, so rare among civilized human beings who, by means of continued calculation and reasoned surmise of the future, which has caused it to wither and atrophize, Tom felt, just as he could feel approaching storms, a vague sense of coming disaster.
The sensation was very undefined, but distinctly unpleasant, and, following his invariable rule to divert his mind from all unpleasantness, he lay down on the short turf and buried his face in a great bed of thyme which grew there. All summer was in that smell, hot, redolent, the very breath of life, and with eyes half-closed and nostrils expanded he breathed it deeply in.
The place he had come to was very remote and solitary, a big clearing in the middle of trees, well known to him in earlier years. No road crossed it, no house lay near it, but the air was resonant with the labouring bees, and the birdscalled and fluted to each other in the trees. But suddenly, as he lay there, half lost in a stupor of happiness, he heard very faintly another noise, to which at first he paid but little attention. It was the sound apparently of a flute being played at some great distance off, but what soon arrested his attention was the extremely piercing character of the notes. Remote as the sound was, and surrounded as he was by the hundred noises of the summer noon, it yet seemed to him perfectly clear and distinct through them all. Then something further struck him, for phrase after phrase of delicious melody was poured out, yet the same phrase was never repeated, nor did the melody come to an end; on the top of every climax came another; it was a tune unending, eternal, and whether it came from earth or heaven, from above or below, he could not determine, for it seemed to come from everywhere equally; it was as universal as the humming of the bees.
Then suddenly a thought flashed into his mind; he sprang up, and a strange look of fear crossed his face. At the same instant the tune ceased.
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IT was not in Lady Ellington’s nature to be enthusiastic, since she considered enthusiasm to be as great a waste of the emotional fibres as anger, but she was at least thoroughly satisfied when, two evenings after this, Madge came to her room before dinner after another punting expedition with Philip, and gave her news.
“It is quite charming,” said her mother, “and you have shown great good sense. Dear child, I must kiss you. And where is Mr. Home—Philip I must call him now?”
“He is outside,” said Madge. “I said I would go down again for a few minutes before dinner.”
Lady Ellington got up and kissed her daughter conscientiously, first on one cheek and then on the other.
“I will come down with you,” she said, “just to tell him how very much delighted I am. I shall have to have a long talk to him to-morrow morning.”
There was no reason whatever why the engagement should not be announced at once, and in consequence congratulations descended within the half hour. Mrs. Home was a little tearful, with tears of loving happiness on behalf of her son, which seemed something of a weakness to Lady Ellington; Tom Merivale was delighted in a sort of faraway manner that other people should be happy; Evelyn Dundas alone, in spite of his previous preparation for the news, felt somehow slightly pulled up. For with his complete and instinctive surrender to every mood of the moment, he had permitted himself to take great pleasure in the contemplation—it was really hardly more than that—of Madge’s beauty, and he felt secretly, for no shadow obscured the genuineness of his congratulations, a certain surprise and sense of being ill-used. He was not the least in love with Madge, but even in so short a time they had fallen into ways of comradeship, and her engagement, he felt, curtailed theliberties of that delightful relationship. And again this evening, having cut out of a bridge table, he wandered with her in the perfect dusk. Lady Ellington this time observed their exit, but cheerfully permitted it; no harm could be done now. It received, in fact, her direct and conscious sanction, since Philip had suggested to Madge that Evelyn should paint her portrait. He knew that Evelyn was more than willing to do so, and left the arrangement of sitting to sitter and artist. In point of fact, it was this subject that occupied the two as they went out.
“We shall be in London for the next month, Mr. Dundas,” Madge was saying, “and of course I will try to suit your convenience. It is so good of you to say you will begin it at once.”
Evelyn’s habitual frankness did not desert him.
“Ah, I must confess, then,” he said. “It isn’t at all good of me. You see, I want to paint you, and I believe I can. And I will write to-morrow to a terrible railway director to say that in consequence of a subsequent engagement I cannot begin the—the delineation of his disgusting features for another month.”
Madge laughed; as is the way of country-house parties, the advance in intimacy had been very rapid.
“Oh, that would be foolish,” she said. “Delineate his disgusting features if you have promised. My disgusting features will wait.”
“Ah, but that is just what they won’t do,” said Evelyn.
“Do you mean they will go bad, like meat in hot weather? Thank you so much.”
“My impression will go bad,” said he. “No, I must paint you at once. Besides”—and still he was perfectly frank—“besides Philip is, I suppose, my oldest friend. He has asked me to do it, and friendship comes before cheques.”
They walked in silence a little while.
“I am rather nervous,” said Madge. “I watched you painting this afternoon for a bit.”
“Oh, a silly sketch,” said he, “flowers, terrace, woods behind; it was only a study for a background.”
“Well, it seemed to affect you. You frowned and growled, and stared and bit the ends of your brushes. Am I going to be stuck up on a platform to be growled at and stared at? I don’t think I could stand it; I should laugh.”
Evelyn nodded his head in strong approval.
“That will be what I want,” he said. “I will growl to any extent if it will make you laugh. I shall paint you laughing, laughing at all the ups and downs of the world. I promise you you shall laugh. With sad eyes, too,” he added. “Did you know you had sad eyes?”
Madge slightly entrenched herself at this.
“I really haven’t studied my own expression,” she said. “Women are supposed to use mirrors a good deal, but they use them, I assure you, to see if their hair is tidy.”
“Your’s never is quite,” said he. “And it suits you admirably.”
Again the gravel sounded crisply below their feet, without the overscore of human voices.
Then he spoke again.
“And please accept my portrait of you as my wedding present to you—and Philip,” he said with boyish abruptness.
Madge for the moment was too utterly surprised to speak.
“But, Mr. Dundas,” she said at length, “I can’t—I—how can I?”
He laughed.
“Well, I must send it to Philip, then,” he said, “if you won’t receive it. But—why should you not? You are going to marry my oldest friend. I can’t send him an ivory toothbrush.”
This reassured her.
“It is too kind of you,” said she. “I had forgotten that. So send it to him.”
“Certainly. But help me to make it then as good as I can.”
“Tell me how?” she asked, feeling inexplicably uneasy.
“Why, laugh,” he said. “That is how I see you. You laugh so seldom, and you might laugh so often. Why don’t you laugh oftener?”
Then an impulse of simple honesty came to her.
“Because I am usually bored,” she said.
“Ah, you really mustn’t be bored while I am painting you,” he said. “I could do nothing with it if you were bored. Besides, it would be so uncharacteristic.”
“How is that, when I am bored so often?” she asked.
“Oh, it isn’t the things we do often that are characteristicof us,” said he. “It is the things we do eagerly, with intention.”
She laughed at this.
“Then you are right,” she said. “I am never eagerly bored. And to tell you the truth, I don’t think I shall be bored when I sit to you. Ah, there is Philip. He does not see us; I wonder whether he will?”
Philip’s white-fronted figure had appeared at this moment at the French window leading out of the drawing-room, and his eyes, fresh from the bright light inside, were not yet focussed to the obscurity of the dusk. At that moment Madge found herself suddenly wishing that he would go back again. But as soon as she was conscious she wished that, she resolutely stifled the wish and called to him.
“Evelyn there, too?” he asked. “Evelyn, you’ve got to go in and take my place.”
“And you will take mine,” said he with just a shade of discontent in his voice.
“No, my dear fellow,” said Philip. “I shall take my own.”
He laughed.
“I congratulate you again,” he said, and left them.
Philip stood for a moment in silence by the girl, looking at her with a sort of shy, longing wonder.
“Ah, what luck!” he said at length. “What stupendous and perfect luck.”
“What is luck, Philip?” she asked.
“Why, this. You and me. Think of the chances against my meeting you in this big world, and think of the chances against your saying ‘Yes.’ But now—now that it has happened it couldn’t have been otherwise.”
Some vague, nameless trouble took possession of the girl, and she shivered slightly.
“You are cold, my darling?” he said quickly.
She had been leaning against the stone balustrade of the terrace, but stood upright, close to him.
“No, not in the least,” she said.
“What is it, then?” he asked.
“It is nothing. Only I suppose I feel it is strange that in a moment the whole future course of one’s life is changed like this.”
He took her hands in his, and the authentic fire of love burned in his eyes.
“Strange?” he said. “Is it not the most wonderful of miracles? I never knew anything so wonderful could happen. It makes all the rest of my life seem dim. There is just this one huge beacon of light. All the rest is in shadow.”
She raised her face to him half imploringly.
“Oh, Philip, is it all that to you?” she asked. “I—I am afraid.”
“Because you have made me the happiest man alive?”
A sudden, inevitable impulse of honesty prompted Madge to speak out.
“No, but because I have perhaps meddled with great forces about which I know nothing. I like you immensely; I have never liked anyone so much. I esteem you and respect you. I am quite willing to lead the rest of my life with you; I want nothing different. But will that do? Is that enough? I have never loved as I believe you love me. I do not think it is possible to me. There, I have told you.”
Philip raised her hands to his lips and kissed them.
“Ah, my dearest, you give me all you have and are, and yet you say, ‘Is that enough?’” he whispered. “What more is possible?”
She looked at him a moment, the trouble not yet quite gone from her face. Then she raised it to his.
“Then take it,” she said.
The night was very warm and windless, and for some time longer they walked up and down, or stood resting against the terrace wall looking down over the hushed woods. A nightingale, the same perhaps that had been charmed to Tom’s finger two evenings ago, poured out liquid melody, and the moon began to rise in the East. Gradually their talk veered to other subjects, and Madge mentioned that Evelyn was willing to do her portrait.
“He will begin at once,” she said, “because it appears his impression of me isn’t a thing that will keep. He is putting off another order for it.”
“That is dreadfully immoral,” said Philip, “but I am delighted to hear it.”
“Oh, and another thing. He gives it us—to you and me I think he said—as a wedding present.”
“Ah, I can’t have that,” said Philip quickly. “That isEvelyn all over. There never was such an unthinking, generous fellow. But it is quite impossible. Why, it would mean a sixth part of his year’s income.”
“I know; I felt that.”
Philip laughed rather perplexedly.
“I really don’t know what is to be done with him,” he said. “Last year he gave my mother a beautiful pearl brooch. That sort of thing is so embarrassing. And if she had not accepted it, he would have been quite capable of throwing it into the Thames. Indeed he threatened to do so. And he will be equally capable of throwing his cheque into the fire.”
“All the same, I like it enormously,” she said; “his impulse, I mean.”
“I know, but it offends my instincts as a man of business. I might just as well refuse to charge interest on loans. However, I will see what I can do.”
They went in again soon after this, for it was growing late, and found Lady Ellington preparing to leave the table of her very complete conquests. It had fallen to Evelyn to provide her with a no-trump hand containing four aces, and she was disposed to be gracious. The news, furthermore, that he would begin her daughter’s portrait at once was gratifying to her, and she was anxious that the sittings should begin at once. As both they and he would be in town for the next month, the matter was easily settled, and it was arranged that the thing should be put in hand immediately.
Philip followed Evelyn to the billiard-room as soon as the women went upstairs, and found him alone there.
“The Hermit has gone to commune with Nature,” he said. “He will die of natural causes if he doesn’t look out. He called me a Pagan this morning, Philip. Wasn’t it rude? And the fact that it is true seems to me to make it ruder.”
Philip lit his cigarette.
“I’m going to be rude too, old chap,” said he. “Evelyn, you really mustn’t make a present of the portrait to Madge and me. It is awfully good of you, and just like you, but I simply couldn’t accept it.”
Evelyn shrugged his shoulders.
“Then there will be no portrait at all,” he said shortly. “I tell you I won’t paint it as an order.”
Philip held out his hand.
“I appreciate it tremendously,” he said. “It is most awfully good of you. But it’s your profession. Hullo, here’s the Hermit back.”
Tom Merivale entered at this moment.
“Aren’t we going to sit out to-night?” he said.
Evelyn rose.
“Yes, let’s go out,” he said. “Well, Philip, not a line will I draw unless you take it. Or I’ll give it to Miss Ellington and not you.”
“You really musn’t,” said Philip.
“But don’t you see I want to paint her? I said so to you only the other day. Hang it all, I tell you that I do it for pleasure. I shall also be the vast gainer artistically. I’ve got an idea about her, in fact, and if you don’t let me paint her I shall do it from memory, in which case it will not be so good.”
An idea struck Philip.
“Well, paint me as well,” he said, “and let me pay you for that.”
Evelyn followed Tom out.
“Oh, I can’t haggle,” he said. “Yes, I’ll paint you if you like. But I will paint Miss Ellington first. In fact, you shall be painted when I’ve nothing else to do. Well, Hermit, seen Pan to-day?”
“No, you scoffer,” said Tom.
“Call me when you do. I should like to see him, too. Let’s see, he was a man with goat’s legs; sort of things you see in Barnum’s.”
Tom shifted in his chair.
“Some day, perhaps, you may think it serious,” he said.
“I daresay; a man with goat’s legs is not to be taken lightly,” said Evelyn. “And he sits by the roadside, doesn’t he, or so Browning says, playing the pipes? What pipes, I wonder? Bagpipes, do you suppose?”
Tom laughed; his equanimity was quite undisturbed even by chaff upon what was to him the most serious subject in the world.
“Ah, who was frightened at a nightingale coming to sit on my finger a few nights ago? Evelyn, if you are not serious, I’ll frighten you again.”
“Well, but is it bagpipes?” asked he.
Tom suddenly got grave.
“No, it sounded more like a glass flute very far off,” he said. “No explanations are forthcoming, because I haven’t got any.”
Evelyn was silent a moment.
“And when did you hear this glass flute very far off?” he asked.
“Two mornings ago, up above the house in that big clearing in the woods,” he answered. “I know nothing more about it. It frightened me rather, and then it stopped.”
“What did it play?” asked Philip.
“A world-without-end tune,” he said. “The catechising is now over. I shall go to bed, I think. I must leave to-morrow, Philip.”
“I hoped you would stop a day or two longer. Must you really go?”
“I must, I find.”
“Appointment with Pan in the New Forest,” remarked Evelyn, dodging the cushion that was thrown at him.
Philip had to spend the inside of the next day in London, and left with Tom Merivale by an early train, leaving Evelyn alone with his mother, Lady Ellington, and Madge. It came about very naturally that Lady Ellington gravitated to Mrs. Home, and Evelyn, finishing his background sketch in front of a great clump of purple clematis, found Madge on the terrace when he went out, with an unopened book on her lap.
The book had lain there, indeed, in the same state for half an hour before he came, for Madge had been very fully occupied with her own thoughts. She had had a talk to her mother the night before, which this morning seemed to her to be more revealing of herself than even her own confession to Philip in their stroll on the terrace had been. She had told her just what she had told him, namely, that she gave him very willingly all that she knew of herself, liking, esteem, respect, adding out of Philip’s mouth that this more than contented him. But then Lady Ellington, for the first time perhaps for many years, had made a strategical error, allowing her emotion, not her reason, to dictate to her, and had said—
“Ah, Madge, how clever of you.”
She had seen her mistake a moment afterwards, and just a moment too late, for Madge had asked the very simplequestion “Why?” And the unsatisfactory nature of her mother’s reply had given her food for thought.
For Lady Ellington had applauded as clever what was to her the very rudiment of honour, and she had supposed that her mother would say “How very stupid of you.” Clearly, then, while extremely uncalculating to herself, Madge had succeeded in giving the impression of calculation to one who, she well knew, calculated. What, then, she asked herself, was the secret of this love of which she was ignorant, that rendered her confession of ignorance so satisfactory a reply?
Effusive pleasure on her mother’s part at the termination of this recital had not consoled her. Somehow, according to Lady Ellington’s view, an almost quixotic honesty appeared clever. And it was over this riddle that she was puzzling when Evelyn appeared, with brilliance, so to speak, streaming from him. Brilliance certainly streamed from his half-finished sketch, and brilliance marked his exposition of it.
“Oh, I lead a dog’s life,” he said, as he planted his easel down on the gravel. “Do you know Lady Taverner, for whom this is to be a background? No? I congratulate you. She is pink, simply pink, like a phlox, with butter-coloured hair, probably acquired. Well, put a pat of butter and a phlox on a purple plate, and you will see that the phlox is pinker than ever and the butter more buttery. Therefore, since I really am very thorough, I make a sketch of clematis to see how the flowers really grow, and shall plaster her with them—masses behind her, sapphires round her neck; and a pink Jewess in the middle,” he added, in a tone of extraordinary irritation.
Madge let her book slide to the ground.
“Do you want to be talked to or not?” she asked. “If you don’t, say so, and I will go away.”
Evelyn looked up from his purple clematis.
“I lead a dog’s life,” he said, “but sometimes somebody throws me a bone. So throw me one.”
“You seem to growl over it,” said she.
“I know I do. That is because, though I lead a dog’s life, nobody shall take my bone from me.”
He bit the end of his brush.
“And the filthy thing casts purple shadows upwards,” he said. “At least the sun shines on the purple, and reflectsthe purple on leaves that overhang it. I wish I had been born without any sense of colour. I should have made such ripping etchings.”
Madge had no immediate reply to this, and he painted for some ten minutes in silence. She had picked up her book again, and read the words of it—reading it could not be called.
“You haven’t given me many bones,” said he at length.
Madge looked up.
“I know I haven’t,” she said; “but seriously I considered if I had got anything to say, and found I hadn’t. So I decided to say nothing.”
Evelyn dabbed in a purple star.
“But surely one has always something in one’s mind,” he said. “One can’t help that, so why not say it? A penny for your thoughts now.”
Madge laughed.
“No, they are worth far more. In fact, they are not in the market,” she said.
Evelyn grew portentously grave.
“Mrs. Gummidge,” he said.
“Oh, what do you mean?” she asked.
“You’ve been thinking of the old one,” said Evelyn. “Philip.”
“Quite true, I was,” she said. “He is such a dear.”
“So glad you like him,” muttered Evelyn, again frowning and biting his brushes. “Lord love us, what a blue world it is this morning! There, I can’t paint any more just now.”
“That’s rather sudden, isn’t it?”
“Oh, I always stop like that,” said Evelyn. “I go on painting and painting, and then suddenly somebody turns a tap off in my head, and I’ve finished. I can’t see any more, and I couldn’t paint if I did. I suppose the day will come when the tap will be turned permanently off. Shortly afterwards I shall be seen to jump off Westminster Bridge. I only hope nobody will succeed in rescuing me.”
“I will try to remember if I happen to be there,” said she.
Evelyn put his sketch to dry in the shadow of the terrace wall.
“The law is so ridiculous,” he said. “They punish you if you don’t succeed in committing suicide when you try to, and say you are temporarily insane if you do. Whereas thebungler is probably far more deranged than the man who does the job properly.”
“I shall never commit suicide,” said Madge with conviction.
“Ah, wait till you care about anything as much as I care about painting,” said Evelyn, “and then contemplate living without it. Why, I should cease without it. The world would be no longer possible; it wouldn’t, so to speak, hold water.”
“Ah, do you really feel about it like that?” said she. “Tell me what it’s like, that feeling.”
Evelyn laughed.
“You ought to know,” he said, “because I imagine it’s like being permanently in love.”
Here was as random an arrow as was ever let fly; he had been unconscious of even drawing his bow, but to his unutterable surprise it went full and straight to its mark. The girl’s face went suddenly expressionless, as if a lamp within had been turned out, and she rose quickly, with a half-stifled exclamation.
“Ah, what nonsense we are talking,” she said quickly.
Evelyn looked at her in genuine distress at having unwittingly caused her pain.
“Why, of course we are,” he said. “How people can talk sense all day beats me. They must live at such high pressure. Personally I preserve any precious grains of sense I may have, and put them into my pictures. Some of my pictures simply bristle with sense.”
The startled pain had not died out of Madge’s eyes, but she laughed, and Evelyn, looking at her, gave a little staccato exclamation.
“And what is it now?” she asked.
“Why, you—you laughed with sad eyes. You were extraordinarily like what my picture will be at that moment.”
The girl glanced away. That sudden, unexplained little stab of pain she had experienced had left her nervous. Her whole nature had winced under it, and, like a man who feels some sudden moment of internal agony for the first time, she was frightened; she did not know what it meant.
“I expect that is nonsense, too,” she said. “At least, it is either nonsense or very obvious, for I suppose when anyone laughs, however fully he laughs, there is always somethingtragic behind. Ah, how nice to laugh entirely just once from your hair to your heels.”
“Can’t you do that ever?” asked Evelyn sympathetically.
“No, never, nor can most people, I think. We are all haunted houses; there is always a ghost of some kind tapping at the door or lurking in the dusk. Only a few people have no ghosts. I should think your’s were infinitesimal. You are much to be envied.”
Evelyn listened with all his ears to this; partly because he and Madge were already such good friends, and anything new about her was interesting; partly because, though, as he had said, surface was enough for him—it bore so very directly on his coming portrait of her.
“Yes, I expect that is true,” he said; “most people certainly have their ghosts. But it is wise to wall up one’s haunted room, is it not?”
Madge shook her head.
“Yes, but it is still there,” she said.
She got up from the low chair in which she was sitting with an air of dismissing the subject of their talk.
“Come, ask me some more of those very silly riddles,” she said. “I think they are admirable in laying ghosts. So, too, are you, Mr. Dundas. I am sure you will not resent it when I say it is because you are so frightfully silly. Ghosts cannot stand silliness.”
Evelyn laughed.
“It is so recuperative to be silly,” he said, “because it requires no effort to a person of silly disposition, that is to say. One has to be oneself. How easy!”
She opened her eyes at this.
“That means you find it easy to be natural,” she said. “Why, I should have thought that was almost the most difficult thing in the world to be. Now a pose is easy; it is like acting; you have got to be somebody else. But to be oneself! One has to know what one is, first of all, one has to know what one likes.”
Evelyn laughed again.
“Not at all. You just have to shut your eyes, take a long breath, and begin talking. Whatever you say is you.”
The girl shook her head.
“Ah, you don’t understand,” she said. “You, you, I, everybody, are really all sorts of people put into one envelope.Am I to say what one piece of me is prompting me to say or what another is thinking about? And it’s just the same with one’s actions; one hardly ever does a thing which every part of one wants to do; one’s actions, just like one’s words, are a sort of compromise between the desires of one’s different components.”
She paused a moment, and, with a woman’s quickness of intuition provided against that which might possibly be in his mind.
“Of course, when a big choice comes,” she said, “one’s whole being has to consent. But one only has half a dozen of those in one’s life, I expect.”
She had guessed quite rightly, for the idea of her marriage had inevitably suggested itself to Evelyn when she said “one hardly ever does a thing which every part of one wants to do.” But in the addition she had made to her speech there was even a more direct allusion to it, which necessarily cancelled from his mind the first impression. He was bound, in fact, to accept her last word. But he fenced a little longer.
“I don’t see that one choice can really be considered bigger than another,” he said. “The smallest choice may have the hugest consequences which one could never have foretold, because they are completely outside one’s own control. I may, for instance, settle to go up to London to-morrow by the morning train or the later one. Well, that seems a small enough choice, but supposing one train has a frightful accident? What we can control is so infinitesimal compared to what lies outside us—engine-drivers, bullets, anything that may kill.”
The girl shuddered slightly.
“It is all so awful,” she said, “that. An ounce of lead, a fall, and one is extinguished. It is so illogical, too.”
“Ah, anything that happens to one’s body, or mind either, is that,” said Evelyn.
“How? Surely one is responsible for what happens to one’s mind.”
“Yes, in the way of learning ancient history, if we choose, or having drawing-lessons. But all the big things that can happen to one are outside one’s control. Love, hate, falling in love particularly is, I imagine, completely independent of one’s will.”
The girl gave a short, rather scornful laugh.
“But one sees a determined effort to marry someone,” she said, “often productive of a very passable imitation of falling in love.”
Had she boxed his ears, Evelyn could not have been more astonished. If this was an example of shutting the eyes; drawing a long breath and being natural, he felt that there was after all something to be said for the artificialities in which we are most of us wont to clothe ourselves. There was a very Marah of bitterness in the girl’s tone; he felt, too, as if all the time she had concealed her hand, so to speak, behind her back, and suddenly thrown a squib at him, an explosive that cracked and jumped and jerked in a thoroughly disconcerting manner. And she read the blankness of his face aright, and hastened to correct the impression she had made.
“Did you ever get behind a door when you were a child,” she asked, “and jump out calling ‘Bo!’? That is what I did just then, and it was a complete success.”
He looked at her a moment with his head on one side, as if studying an effect.
“But it was you who jumped out?” he asked rather pertinently.
“Ah, I wouldn’t even say that,” said she. “I think it was only a turnip-ghost that I had stuck behind the door.”
Evelyn gave a sort of triumphant shout of laughter.
“Well, for the moment it took me in,” he said. “I really thought it was you.”
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THE season in London this year had been particularly amusing; there had been a quite unusually large number of balls, the opera had been one perpetual coruscation of evening stars that sang together, the conduct of May and early June from a meteorological point of view had been impeccable, and in consequence when the world in general came back after Whitsuntide they came for the most part with a pleasurable sense of returning for the second act of a play of which the first had been really enchanting. Like taking one’s seat again for a play was the sense that various unfinished situations which had been left in an interesting stage would now move forward to their dramatic climaxes. One, however—this was rather unfair—had developed itself to a happy close in the country, and Madge Ellington’s engagement to Philip was generally pronounced to be very nice indeed. On both sides, indeed, it was very nice; for it had not been seemly that a millionaire should be unmarried so long, and on the other hand it had not been seemly that Madge should be unmarried so long. But now they had both seen the error of their ways, and had agreed to marry each other.
And above all, it was very nice for Lady Ellington, about whom it was generally known that she had made a considerable sum in speculation lately. To do that was universally recognised as being an assured advance towards the bankruptcy court, but to have captured a wealthy son-in-law who was a magnate in the South African market turned her steps, or might be hoped to turn them, away from the direction of the courts, and point instead towards the waters of comfort and cash. Another thing that excited to some extent the attention and applause of the world was a certain change of demeanor in Madge, which was very noticeable after her return to London from the Whitsuntide holiday. She had always been rather given to put her head in the air, andappear not to notice people; but her engagement had brought to her an added geniality. Hitherto she had been something of “a maid on yonder mountain height,” but the shepherd, Philip Home, had, it appeared, convinced her that “love was of the valley,” and she had quite distinctly come down. This, at any rate, was the conclusion at which Gladys Ellington, the present Lady Ellington, arrived within two minutes of the time when she met Madge next.
She was of about Madge’s own age, and the two, in spite of old Lady Ellington’s rooted dislike to her nephew, had always been friends. Gladys was charmingly pretty, most successful in all she did, and universally liked. This was only fair, for she took immense trouble to be liked, and never did an ill-natured thing to anyone, unless it was quite certain that she would not be found out. She had come to tea on the afternoon succeeding Madge’s return to London, and, though she professed regrets at the absence of Madge’s mother, was really delighted to find her friend alone. She had a perfect passion for finding things out, and her method of doing so was to talk with extreme volubility herself, so that no one could possibly conjecture that she had any object of the sort in her mind. But her pauses were well calculated, and her questions few, while with regard to these, she always gave the appearance of not attending to the answers, which further disarmed suspicion. She was, however, a little afraid of Madge’s mother, who always gave her the idea of seeing through her. This made her volubility a little threadbare at times, and consequently she bore her absence with more than equanimity.
“Darling, I think it is too charming,” she was saying, “and I always hoped that you would do just this. Mr. Home is perfectly adorable, I think, and though it sounds horribly worldly to say so, it is an advantage, you know, to marry a very rich man. We’re as poor as mice, you see, and so I know. Yes, please—a cup of tea, though we’re told now that a cup of tea is the most unwholesome thing in the world. And you had a nice party? Mrs. Home, too, just like a piece of china scented with lavender. And who else was there?”
“Only two more men,” said Madge, “Mr. Merivale and Mr. Evelyn Dundas.”
“The Hermit of the New Forest!” cried Gladys, directing her remarks to him because she wished to hear more of theother. “How too exciting! He lives on cherry jam and brown bread, does he not, and whistles to the cows, who lay their heads on his shoulder and purr. I used to know him in the old days before he was a hermit at all. And Mr. Dundas, too! Do you like him?”
“Yes, very much, very much indeed,” said Madge gravely. “He is such a child, you know, and he makes one laugh because he is so silly. He is going to do my portrait, by the way; mine and Philip’s.”
“How delightful! He ought to make a really wonderful thing of you, dear Madge. Do tell me, how much does he charge? I’m dying to be painted by him, but he is so frightfully expensive, is he not? And you liked him; what a good thing, as you are going to sit to him. It must be awful being painted by a man who irritates you.”
Madge laughed.
“He doesn’t irritate me in the slightest,” she said. “In fact, I don’t think I ever got to know a man so quickly. I don’t know how it is; somehow he is like clear water. You can see straight to the bottom.”
Gladys regarded her rather closely as she nibbled with rather a bird-like movement at a sugared bun.
“Madge, you’ve quite changed,” she said. “You are actually beginning to take an interest in your fellow-creatures. That is so wise of you. Of course Evelyn Dundas is adorable; I’m hopelessly in love with him myself, but I should have thought he was just the sort of man who would not have interested you in the least. Nor would he have a few weeks ago. Dearest, you’ve stepped down from your pedestal, where you really used to be rather a statue, you know, like Galatea, and it does improve you so. I saw it the moment I came into the room. And just falling in love has done it all.”
A sudden look of pain came over Madge’s face, and her companion, with a well-chosen pause, waited for her to express it in words.
“Ah, Gladys, are you sure you are right?” she said. “Because I think I must tell you this even as I told Philip—I don’t feel as if I had fallen in love. I like him, I esteem and respect him, but—but it isn’t what I expected. I’m not—I hate the word—but I’m not thrilled.”
Gladys rustled sympathetically, and Madge went on:
“I had it all out with my mother, too,” she said, “who very sensibly said that as I had lived twenty-five years without falling in love in that sort of sense, I was very unlikely to begin now. On the other hand, she said that it was much better that I should be married than remain single. And so I am going to marry Philip Home.”
Again Gladys rustled sympathetically, and gave a murmured “Yes,” for Madge evidently had more to say.
“Anyhow, I have been honest with him,” she said, “and I have told him that. And he seems to think that it can easily form the basis for happiness, and accepts it. But tell me, am I frightfully cold-blooded? And have I any right to marry him?”
Gladys’ quick little brain had hopped over a dozen aspects of this question, and pecked, so to speak, at a dozen different fruits, while Madge was speaking; but with a whirr of wings she was back again, up to time as usual.
“No, not the least cold-blooded, and you have every right to marry him,” she said. “For you may be quite sure that you soon will be in love with him, because I assure you that already it has made an enormous difference in you. How do I know that? I can’t possibly tell you, any more than you can tell exactly why a person looks ill. You say her face looks drawn. What’s drawn? Why, the same as ill. You’ve woke up, dearest; you’ve come to life. Life! there’s nothing in the world so good as that.”
Madge leaned forward, and spoke more eagerly.
“Yes, you’re right,” she said, “though I don’t know that your reason is right I have somehow come to life. But it puzzles me a little to know how it has happened, or why.”
Gladys nodded her head with an air of wisdom, and got up. At this time of the year she seldom spent more than an hour in any one place, and still more seldom with only one person, and both Madge and Madge’s house had now enjoyed their full share of her time.
“Ah, I am very bad at riddles,” she said, “and, besides, none of us know ‘why’ about anything, and, on the whole, reasons and motives matter very little. Things that happen are so numerous and so interesting that one has literally not time to probe into them and ask how and why. And after all, dear, when anything so very nice has happened as your engagement, which too has brought such a gain to you inyourself, I am more than content, and so should you be, to accept that as it is. Now, I must simply fly; I am dining out and going to the opera, and to a dance afterwards. What a pity there are not forty-eight hours in every day.”
This regret was subsequently shared by Madge herself, who found that the life of a young woman who is going to be married in six weeks’ time, for the wedding had been fixed for the end of July, implies a full engagement book. And in addition to the ordinary calls on her time, hours were further claimed from her by Evelyn Dundas, who apparently had insisted to another sitter on the prior rights of this subsequent engagement, and announced himself free to begin her portrait at once, to give her sittings whenever she could sit, and finish it as quickly as his powers of brush would permit him. His impetuousness, as usual, swept away all difficulties, and before a fortnight had elapsed, Madge had already given him four sittings, and the picture itself was beginning to live and breathe on his canvas.
These sittings, or rather the artist’s manners and moods during them, were strangely various. Sometimes for half-an-hour, as Madge complained, he would do nothing but stare at her, grunting to himself, and biting the ends of his brushes. Then in a moment all would be changed, and instead of staring and grunting with idle hands, he would glance at her and record, record and glance again, absorbed in the passion of his creation, whistling sometimes gently to himself, or at other times silent, but with a smiling mouth. Then that wind of inspiration that bloweth where it listeth would leave him again, and he would declare roundly that he did not know what she was like, or what his picture was like, but that the only thing quite certain was that his picture was not like her. Then, even while these gloomy announcements were on his lips, even in the middle of a sentence, he would murmur to himself, “Oh, I see,” and the swish of the happy brush would alone break the silence. At other times there was no silence to break, and from the time she stepped up on to the platform till when she left it, he would pour out a perfect flood of inconsequent nonsense. Or, again, the hours passed in unbroken conversation between the two, the talk sometimes flitting like a butterfly over all the open flowers of life, but at other times, as it had done once or twice at Philip’s house, dropping suddenly into theheart of things, finding sometimes honey there, but sometimes shadows only.
A sitting of this latter kind had just come to an end, and Evelyn, after seeing his sitter into her carriage, had returned to his studio, still palette in hand, meaning to work for an hour at the background. Certainly in this short space of time he had made admirable progress, and he knew within himself that this was to be a landmark of his work, and up to the present, at any rate, his high-water mark. He had drawn the girl standing very upright, as was her wont, but with head a little thrown back, and her face, eyes, and mouth alike laughed. It was a daring conception, but the happiness of the execution was worthy of it, and the fore-shortening of the face owing to the throw-back of the head, the drawing, too, of the open mouth and of the half-closed eyes was a triumph. Her figure was shown in white evening dress, with hands locked together, carrying a feather fan, and arms at full length in front of her; over her shoulders, half thrown back, was a scarlet opera cloak, the one note of high colour in all the scheme. Behind her, on the wall, he had introduced, by one of those daring feats that were labelled by detractors as “cheeky,” but by any who estimated fairly the excellence of the execution, a round gilt-framed mirror, with a convex glass in it, on which was distortedly reflected the room itself and the back of the girl’s figure. It was at this that he had returned to work now.
Evelyn’s studio, like all rooms much used by anyone who has at all a vivid personality, had caught much of the character of its owner. He had made it out of the top floor in his house in the King’s Road, by throwing all the attics into one big room. Often for a whole day he would not stir from it till it was too dark to paint, having a tray of lunch brought him which sometimes he would savagely devour, at other times leave untouched till he was literally faint with hunger. It was easy to see, too, how the room had grown, so to speak, how it had picked up his characteristics. The big divan, for instance, in the window, piled with brightly-coloured cushions, had evidently been of the early furniture, a remnant of imperishable childhood; so, too, no doubt, was the open Dutch-tiled fireplace, the Chippendale table, the few big chairs that stood about, and the Japanese screen by the door. After that, however, all sorts of various tastes showed themselves.A heap of dry modelling clay in one corner recorded a fit of despair, when he had asserted that the only real form of art was form itself, not colour; a violin with two strings missing denoted that after hearing Sarasate he was convinced, for several hours at least, that the music of strings was alone the flower worth plucking, and showed also a delightful conviction that it was never too late to learn, though the broken strings might imply that it was now too late to mend. A set ofPunch, complete from the beginning, lay like a heap of morraine stones round the sofa, a bag of rusty golf-clubs stood in a corner, and behind the Japanese screen leaned a bicycle on which dust had collected, an evidence of its being, for the time at any rate, out of date far as its owner was concerned. But three months before or three months afterwards a visitor might scarcely have recognised the room again. A portrait might have been finished, and with disengaged eyes Evelyn would survey what he would certainly call his pigsty. The bicycle would be sent to the cellar with the golf clubs slung on to it, the heap of modelling clay be dumped on the dustheap, the Japanese screen banished to the kitchen, because for the moment Japanese art was a parody and a profanation, and the violin, perhaps, have its strings mended. Or again, instead of the Japanese screen being banished, Japan might have flooded the whole studio as its armies flood Manchuria, and an equally certain and uncompromising gospel pronounce that it alone was good.