“ ‘When Israel, of the Lord beloved,Out from the land of bondage came,Her fathers’ God before her moved,An awful guide in smoke and flame.’
“ ‘When Israel, of the Lord beloved,Out from the land of bondage came,Her fathers’ God before her moved,An awful guide in smoke and flame.’
“ ‘When Israel, of the Lord beloved,Out from the land of bondage came,Her fathers’ God before her moved,An awful guide in smoke and flame.’
“Now, then, sing up, children!” she cried.
Bewildered and still half asleep, they obeyed—in bleating, quavering tones that came through chattering teeth to an accompaniment of cloudy breath.
The woman and her children passed on into the night, singing. Amid the stretches of sky and space they seemed a group of black insects crawling across a great white plain.
Abner Preep, coming down before dawn, found a bunch of children on the great kitchen settee, asleep in their clothes. The mother sat on the floor before the open stove, smilinghappily and muttering to herself. They had quietly taken possession of the old familiar room and stirred up the slumbering fire.
For the first few seconds Abner wondered if he was dreaming, for the next if he were mad. But another look at the crouching woman convinced him that it was not he that was mad; while a phrase from her babbling lips sent something of the truth home to his beating heart. He roused Harriet and broke the news as gently as time permitted. The brave girl bade him drive at once to Deacon Hailey’s while she kept guard over her mother. Abner thereupon mounted his horse bare-back, to save time, and galloped to the farm.
To his relief he found the deacon little injured. The neglect of his beard had been “Ole Hey’s” salvation. It had sprouted thick and tangled about his throat, and the mad woman, armed with a blunt knife, had only inflicted a flesh-wound, leaving the trachea unsevered. The sleeping man, suddenly awakening to the strange spectacle of his wife in out-door attire brandishing a knife, had fainted from horror and loss of blood. But presently recovering consciousness, he had clamored for Ruth, and with her help bound up the wound, already half stanched by the clogging beard.
The matter was kept in the family, but the deacon swore he would have no more to do with the woman or her unmannerly brood beyond paying the minimum for her incarceration where she could do no more mischief; and so Abner took her forthwith by sleigh and train to the capital, and placed her in a private asylum.
In this manner Mrs. Strang went back to Halifax.
When Matt heard the awful tidings his air-castles crashed and fell as at the crack of doom. Abner Preep was the messenger of evil, for Matt’s painting tour had brought him near Halifax, and Abner thought it best to look up his boyish enemy ere he went back home.
Beneath all the tumult of consternation in Matt’s breast there throbbed an undertone of remorse—a vague feeling that this would never have happened had he been on the spot. His boyish wilfulness had received its death-blow.
“But it served him right,” he cried, with irresistible bitterness, when he heard the deacon had not only washed his hands of the family, but was now vindictively pressing Abner for the arrears of the mortgage interest which had been allowed to lapse while Abner was building up his position. Abner had always understood that Mrs. Strang had exacted the freedom of her property. But there was nothing in black and white.
“There’s no gettin’ out of it,” said Abner, gloomily. “But your poor father must hev made an everlastin’ mess of it, fur how there comes to be so much to pay arter all these years fur a few acres of ground an’ a wretched shanty, durned if I can make out.”
“He cheated father, you may depend,” said Matt, hotly.
“I wouldn’t go as fur nor thet,” said Abner. “It ain’t right to call a man a thief without proof. Anyway, I’ve got to stump up. I shouldn’t ha’ minded it in an ornery way, though Ihevgot two babies, bless their souls. But it comes hard jest now, with five extra mouths to feed.”
“Oh, but you are not going to feed them!”
“Who, then?”
“Me, of course.”
“Nonsense, nonsense, Matt!” said Abner. “You’ve got to go to London an’ larn paintin’. Harriet’s told me all ’bout you, an’ she’s got some o’ your picters, an’ they’re rael beautiful. There’s one in our bedroom. Besides, they’re all growed up now a’most, an’ they’ll soon be feedin’ theirselves. An’ then, you see, the house itself is your sister’s, not mine.”
“It’s mighty good of you,” said Matt, hoarsely, “but it isn’t fair.”
“No more it was o’ me fightin’ you thet thar time,” said Abner, smiling. “This evens things up.”
There was a great lump in Matt’s throat so that he could not speak. He held out his hand mutely, and Abner took it, and they gripped each other so heartily that the tears started to the eyes of both.
“Then thet’s settled,” said Abner, with husky cheeriness.
“No, that’s only to beg your pardon,” said Matt, recoveringhis voice. “I’ve been a skunk to you, that’s a fact. But I’m not going to behave badly again. I’m just raking in the dollars now hand over fist, and learning painting all the time into the bargain. I don’t want a bit to go to London, and I’ve put by two hundred and eighty dollars that aren’t the least use to me, and that ’ll just come in handy to pay the old scoundrel. And I can easily send you five dollars a week till I earn more. Billy alone ’ll cost you near that, I guess, and it’s my fault he can’t earn anything hardly.”
In the end the imperious Matt had his way, and, while the boy went on to see his mother, Abner returned home with the situation considerably lightened, the bearer of money for Deacon Hailey, and loving messages for all Matt’s brothers and sisters, even Harriet being now restored to grace.
Matt found his mother in a small padded room in a house that stood on the hill overlooking the harbor. She was gazing yearningly seaward, and tears trickled down her doleful cheeks. Matt stood silently near the door, surveying her askance with aching heart. Abner had told him that her life with Deacon Hailey had grown a blank to her, and he wondered if she would recognize him; in the last two years he had shot up from a hobbledehoy into a tall, stalwart youth.
When she turned her head at last and espied him she leaped up with a wild cry of joy, and folded him in her arms.
“Davie!” she cried, rapturously. “My own Davie! At last! I didn’t see your ship come in.”
A nervous thrill ran down Matt’s spine as he submitted to her embrace. The separate tragedies of his parents’ lives seemed poignantly knit together in this supreme moment.
“They’re so strict with me here, Davie,” she said. “Take me away from my folks, anywhere, where we can be happy and free. I don’t care what they say any more—I am so tired of all this humdrum life.”
Matt pacified her as best he could, and, promising to arrange it all soon, left her, his heart nigh breaking. He walked about the bustling streets like one in a dream, resenting the sunshine, and wondering why all these people should be so happy. Again that ancient image of his father’s dead face was tossedup on the waves of memory, to keep company henceforth with the death-in-life of his mother’s face. The breakdown of his ambition seemed a petty thing beside these vaster ironies of human destiny.
Ona dull February day a respectably clad steerage passenger disembarked at Southampton with little luggage and great hopes. He was only twenty, but he looked several years older. There were deep traces of thought and suffering in the face, bronzed though it was; and despite the vigorous set of the mouth and the jaw, the dark eyes were soft and dreamy. He was clean-shaven except for a dark-brown mustache, which combined with the little tangle of locks on his forehead to suggest the artistic temperament, and to repel the insinuation of rough open-air labor radiating from his sturdy frame and bearing.
Matt Strang’s foot had touched England at last. Two long, monotonous years of steadfast endurance, self-sacrifice, and sordid economies—two years of portrait and sign painting, interrupted by spells of wagon-striping at two and a half dollars a day, had again given him the mastery of three hundred dollars, despite his despatch of five dollars a week to Abner Preep, and of a final subsidy of one hundred dollars to bridge over the time till he should have a footing in England. Gradually the cloud of despondency had rolled off, the spring-time of life and aspiration would not be denied, and though the pity and terror of his mother’s tragedy had tamed his high spirit and snapped the springs of buoyancy, the passion for painting returned with an intensity that dulled him to every appeal of the blood in his veins; and with it a haunting fear that he could never live to see London or his artist uncle, that he would die in the flower of his youth, all his possibilities latent. So impatient was he to give this fear the lie that he suffered avexatious loss through his hurry to realize the bills and the goods in which his art had too often found payment. When the steamer floundered into a field of ice off Newfoundland, his semi-superstitious feeling wellnigh amounted to a quiet conviction that he would be shipwrecked in sight of port, the three hundred dollars serving but to sink him deeper.
Without stopping in Southampton to tempt Providence, he went straight on to London, every vein in him pulsing with feverish anticipations of mysterious splendors. The engine panted in answering exultation, and the rattle of the carriages was a rhythmic song of triumph. At last he was approaching the city of his dreams—the mighty capital of culture and civilization, where Art was loved and taught and honored. For some days now his whole being had been set in this key.
He sat at the window, gazing eagerly at the sunless landscapes that raced past him. Gradually he became aware of the approach of the monstrous city. Fields were interrupted by houses; later, houses were interrupted by fields; then the rural touches grew fewer and fewer, and at last he sped under a leaden sky amid appalling, endless, everlasting perspectives of chimney-pots and sooty tiles, and dingy houses and dead walls and vomiting columns and gasworks and blank-faced factories reeking with oppressive odors—on and on and on, as amid the infinities of a mean Inferno, whirring past geometrical rows of murky backyards with dust-bins and clothes-lines, and fleeting glimpses of grimy women and shock-headed children and slouching men, thundering over bridges that spanned gray streets relieved by motley traffic and advertisement hoardings, and flashing past gaunt mansions of poverty—bald structures with peeling fronts and bleared windows. There was a sombre impressiveness in the manifold frowziness, the squalid monotony; it was the sublime of the sordid. Fresh as Matt was from the immensities of sea and sky, the shabbiness of the spectacle caught at his throat; he thought chokingly of the unnumbered, unnoticed existences dragging dismally along within those bleak, congested barracks.
What had all this to do with Art? The glow of his blood died away, to be rekindled only by the seething streets intowhich he emerged from the clangorous maze of Waterloo Station; the throb of tumultuous life that beat as a drum and stirred the blood as a trumpet. Yet he had not come up to conquer London, but to sit at its feet. His bitter experience of life had destroyed every vestige of cocksureness, almost of confidence, leaving him shy and sometimes appalled at his own daring, as he realized the possibilities of self-delusion. He knew that fame and money were the guerdons of Art, but these were only indirectly in his mind. If they sometimes flashed to his heart in intoxicating instants of secret hope, he was too full of the consciousness of his disadvantages and imperfections to think much of anything beyond getting the necessary training. Far down the vista of thought and years lay this rosy rim of splendor, a faint haze dimly discerned, but the joy of learning and practising his art was the essence of his yearning. And yet there were moments, like this of feeling London under his foot for the first time, when a consciousness of power welled up in his soul—a sense of overflowing energy and immovable purpose that lifted him high above the crowd of shadows.
Escaping the touts and cabmen, he carried his valise across a great noiseful bridge to the nearest inexpensive-looking hotel, intending to secure a base of operations from which to reconnoitre London before looking up his uncle. But though he was at once booked for a room, the genteel air of the place, with its well-dressed customers and white-tied waiters, terrified him with the prevision of a portentous bill. He would have backed out at once had he dared, but, he thought, now that he was in for it, he would give it a week’s trial. He took only his breakfasts there, however, though the unnatural hour at which he took them made him an object of suspicion. He seemed always on the point of catching an early train. His other meals were taken at those modest restaurants where twopence is not a tip, but the price of a dish, and the menu is cut up into slips and pasted across the shop-window.
His first visit on the day of his arrival was to the National Gallery, not only to fulfil a cherished dream, but to see his uncle’s pictures, to talk of which might smooth the meeting. But he could nowhere come across the works of Matthew Strang,and a catalogue he could not afford; and he soon forgot the unseen pictures in the emotions excited by the seen, which plunged him into alternate heats of delight and chills of despair.
Despair alone possessed him at first in his passage through the Florentine and Sienese rooms. The symbolic figures of Catholicism had scant appeal for a soul which in its emergence from Puritan swaddlings had not opened out to mediævalism, and the strange draughtsmanship blinded him to everything else. If Margaritone or even Botticelli was Art, then his ideas must be even cruder than he had feared. He was relieved to find, as he continued his progress, that it must be the Madonnas that were crude, for he was apparently following the evolution of Art. But the sense of his own superior technique was brief—despair came back by another route. Before the later masters he was reduced to a worshipper, thrilled to tears. And, somewhat to his own astonishment, it was not only the poetic and imaginative that compelled this religious ecstasy; his soul was astrain for high vision, yet it was seized at once by Moroni’s “Portrait of a Tailor,” and by the exquisite modelling—though he did not know the word for it—of the head in his “Portrait of an Ecclesiastic.” To the young Nova Scotian, who had so chafed at having to paint uncouth farmers, it was an illumination to see how in the hands of a Teniers, or, above all, a Rembrandt, the commonplace could be transfigured by force of technique and sympathy. And yet he surrendered more willingly to the romantic, held by the later “Philip the Fourth” of Velasquez, as much for its truculent kingly theme as for the triumphantly subtle coloring, which got the effects of modelling almost without the aid of shadows. And the fever of inspiration and mastery, the sense of flowing paint which pervaded and animated the portrait of the Admiral, was the more entrancing because of the romantic figure of the Spanish sailor; while beside Rembrandt’s “Jewish Merchant,” with its haunting suggestion of suffering and the East, even the fine Vandyke, its neighbor, seemed to lose in poetry.
The brilliant and seizing qualities had his first vote; luminosity of color, richness of handling, grip of composition—all that leaped to the eye. Being alone, he had the courage ofhis first impressions; and having always been alone, he had the broadness that is clipped by school. The beautiful sense of form and landscape in Titian’s “Christ Appearing to Mary Magdalen” captivated him, though for subject he preferred the “Bacchus and Ariadne.” He was equally for Murillo’s “St. John and the Lamb,” and for Andrea del Sarto’s portrait of himself; for Palma’s Christ-like “Portrait of a Painter.” He wondered wistfully whence Bassano’s “Good Samaritan” took the glow of its color, or Greuze’s “Head of a Girl” its pathetic grace, and he was as struck by the fine personal, if sometimes unsure, touch of Gainsborough as by the vigorous handling and extraordinary painting force of Sir Joshua Reynolds, whose children alone he found unreservedly delicious.
Amid many sound if superficial judgments were many crude admirations and condemnations, destined to undergo almost annual revision. At the present stage of his growth, for example, the charming Correggio was his ideal of an artist—to wit, a skilful painter, suffusing poetical themes with poetical feeling.
Subject counted for him: a sympathetic theme seemed to him of the essence of Art.
But the craftsman in him was not to be suppressed. When he was absorbed in Raphael’s “Pope Julius II.,” his practical self suggested that the reds needed varnishing to bring up the head from the background; and though the fine feeling of Joseph Ribera’s “Dead Christ” awoke long-dormant chords of religious emotion, what moved him most was the modelling of the foot caressed by the Magdalen’s hair. His emotion subsided in the study of the painter’s mannerisms, his heavy blacks and shadows. His delight in the luminous quality of Bordone’s “Portrait of a Lady” was modified by an uneasy conviction that the left hand was unnatural. Even in Moroni’s portraits the hands seemed slightly too small. Though he was astonished at the triviality of subject in Gerard Dow’s “Fish and Poultry Shop,” he must fain admire the exquisite quality of the still-life passages and the loving patience of the infinite touches; in Van Mieris’ treatment of the same subject he found a resentful pleasure in the discovery that, despite themarvellous accuracy of the dish of fish and the vegetables, the woman’s head was too little, her left arm too heavy and too big for the right, her flesh more like fish, and her very cat purring in contented ignorance of its wrong proportions.
In the landscape galleries he was puzzled by the old classic landscape; the occasional fineness of line, the masterly distribution of masses, did not counterbalance his sense of unreality before these brown trees and sombre backgrounds. Where were the sunlight and atmosphere of Nature as he had known her, the sky over all, subtly interfused with all the living hues, the fresh, open-air feeling which he had tried to put into his own humble sketches of Nova-Scotian forest, and by virtue of which he found more of the great mother in Peter de Hoogh’s pictures of the courts of Dutch houses than in all the templed woodlands of the pre-Gainsborough period? But Constable revealed to him the soul of loveliness of rural England, setting in his heart a pensive yearning for those restful woods and waters; Crome touched his imagination with the sweep of his lonely heaths; and Turner dazzled him with irisations of splendid dream, and subdued him with the mystery and poetry of sea and sky.
And the total effect of this first look round was inspiration. Over all the whirling confusion of the appeal of so many schools and ages, over all his bewilderment before early Italian pictures that seemed to him badly drawn and modern English that seemed banal, over all his dispiriting diffidence before the masterpieces, was an exultant sense of brotherhood, as of a soul come home at last. There were pictures to which he returned again and again with a feeling of reverential kinship, a secret audacious voice whispering that he understood those who had painted them—that he too was of their blood and race, though come from very far, and lonely and unknown; that he too had thrilled with the beauty and mystery of things; that he too had seen visions and heard voices. Quitting the gallery with regret tempered by the prospect of many magic hours in the society of its treasures, he found out the whereabouts of the Limners’ Club, and took his way towards Bond Street, every sense thrilling with vivid perceptions, receiving pleasant impressions from the shop-windows, exhilarated by the pretty womenthat brushed by him with a perfume of fashion, and keenly enjoying the roar of the town.
On the threshold of the club he inquired for Mr. Matthew Strang. The door-keeper eyed him surlily, and said there was no such member. The world grew suddenly dark and bleak again. He stammered in piteous apology that Mr. Strang had given him that address; and the janitor, a whit softened by his evident distress, admitted that Mr. Strang was sometimes about the club, and volunteered to send the boy to see—an offer which Matt gratefully accepted with a sense of taking alms. But Mr. Strang was not on the premises, and Matt was further driven to inquire where hecouldbe found. The door-keeper, tired of him, replied to the effect that he was not Mr. Strang’s keeper, and that it was not unusual to look for gentlemen in their own homes; whereupon Matt turned miserably away, too disheartened to ask where his uncle’s own home was situate, and feeling that there was nothing for it but to keep watch over the club door till the great painter should appear. He lingered about at a safe distance (for to be seen by the door-keeper were terrible), scanning with eager glances the faces of the few men who passed through the swinging glass doors, his imagination glorifying them, and seeing rather halos than silk hats on their heads. But at last the futility of his sentinelship dawned upon him; he could not be sure of recognizing his uncle; he could not accost the celestials and question them; he must come again and again till he found his uncle at the club. The thought of facing the door-keeper made him flinch, but he knew the road to Art was thorny and precipitous.
It was three o’clock, but he had forgotten to lunch. Now that his emotions had been chilled, he remembered he was hungry. He looked around in vain for a mean eating-house, then reluctantly slipped into a public-house and ordered a glass of ale and something brown and dumpy which he saw under a glass cover. The wench who served him smiled so amiably that he was emboldened to ask if by chance she knew where Matthew Strang lived. Her smile died away, and nothing succeeded it.
“Matthew Strang, the painter,” said Matt, with a ghastly suspicionthat the girl did not even know the name. London to him meant largely Matthew Strang; it was to Matthew Strang that he had taken his ticket and booked his passage, it was to get to Matthew Strang that he had starved and pinched himself, and it depressed him to discover the limitations of fame—to find that Matthew Strang was not hung in the air like Mohammed’s coffin, ’twixt earth and heaven, for all to see.
“There’s the Directory,” said the girl, lugging it down when she perceived that the good-looking young man with the curious drawling accent was not quizzing her. “You’ll find painters in the Trade Directory.”
The barmaid’s satire was unconscious. Understanding the bulky red volume but dimly, Matt hunted up “Strang” in the general section. He was surprised to see there was more than one person of that name. But fortunately there was only one Matthew Strang, and he lived in a side street off Cavendish Square. Warmly thanking the girl, Matt gulped down his ale and hurried out to inquire the way, munching the relics of the cake as he hastened towards the long-elusive goal. Very soon, scanning the numbers, his eye flashed and his heart leaped up. There it was—the magic name—actually ’twixt earth and heaven, painted above a shop-window. Surprised, he came to a stand-still.
The window was one which would have arrested him in any case, for it was illumined with paintings and engravings, and through the doorway Matt saw enchanting stacks of pictures mounting from floor to ceiling, and the side wall was a gallery of oils and water-colors, and an aroma of art and refinement and riches seemed over everything, from the gold of the frames of the oil-colors to the chaste creamy margins of the engravings. He entered the shop with beating heart. His eyes lit first on a sweet-faced matron in a cap standing at the far end of the shop, reverentially surveying a faded “Holy Family,” and while he was wondering whether she was the artist’s wife, a dapper young gentleman, installed behind a broad desk near the door, startled him by asking his business.
He coughed uneasily, overcome by sudden diffidence. The series of barriers between him and his uncle gave the great painter an appalling aloofness.
“I want to see Mr. Matthew Strang,” he stammered.
The dapper young gentleman looked inquiringly towards the sweet-faced matron. “Can this gentleman see Mr. Strang, Madame?” he said. Matt noticed that he wore a pearl horseshoe in his cravat.
“Certainly, sir. Be seated,” said the lady, with grave courtesy and a pleasant touch of foreign accent, such as Matt had heard in the French families of Acadia. She disappeared for a moment, and returned in the wake of a saturnine-looking elderly gentleman, with interrogative eyebrows, a pointed beard, and a velvet jacket, the first sight of whom gave Matt the heart-sickness of yet another disappointment. But though his keen eye soon snipped off the pointed beard and wiped off the sallowness of civilization, revealing the David Strang interblent with the Matthew, his heart-sickness remained. The gap between him and this fine gentleman and great artist seemed too great to be bridged over thus suddenly. He became acutely conscious of his homely clothes, of his coarse, unlettered speech, of the low, menial occupations he had followed; he saw himself furling the sail and carrying the hod and sawing the wood; he felt himself far below the dapper young shopman with the pearl horse-shoe, and his throat grew parched and his eyes misty.
“Good-afternoon, sir,” said his uncle, rubbing his hands with chilling geniality. “What can I have the pleasure of doing for you?”
In that instant Matt perceived all the perversity of which he had been guilty, he remembered he had flown in the face of his uncle’s kind advice, and had not even apprised him of his departure from America.
“I want to buy some colors,” he faltered.
His uncle’s eyebrows mounted. “We do not sell colors, young man,” he said, frigidly.
“I thought—” Matt stammered.
Matthew Strang contemptuously turned on his heel and withdrew. His nephew lingered desperately in the shop, without the strength either to go or to stay.
The lady, who had half followed her husband, turned back hesitatingly,and with reassuring sweetness said: “You will get colors near at hand, in Oxford Street. We only sell pictures.”
Under her penetrating sympathy Matt found courage to say: “I’m sorry Mr. Strang got streaked.”
“Streaked?” echoed Madame, opening her eyes, as with a vision of broadcloth brushing against wet canvases.
“I mean angry,” said Matt, confusion streaking his own face with red.
“Yes, I remember now,” said madam, sweetly. “It’s an American word.”
“Yes; it was in America that I heard of Mr. Strang,” he replied, slowly, striving to accentuate his words, as though he were reading them from a school-book.
“Indeed?” Madame flushed now.
“Yes, I heard of his fame as a painter.”
“Ah.” Her eyes sparkled. Roses leaped into her blond cheeks. “I always told him his work was admirable,” she cried, in exultant excitement, “but he is so easily discouraged.”
Matt thrilled with a sense of the man’s greatness.
“So you see,” he said, with a quaver of emotion in his voice, “I was just wild to see him.”
“I am so glad,” cried Madame, with a charming smile. “I will go and tell my husband. He really must see you. Matthew,” she called out, tremulously, fluttering towards the passage.
The saturnine figure in the velvet coat descended again.
“You must talk to the young gentleman, dear. He has heard of your fame in America.”
Matthew Strang’s interrogative eyebrows reached their highest point, and Matt’s face got more streaked than ever. He felt he was in a false position.
“I heard of you from my father,” he said, hurriedly. “What is the price of this?” he asked in his confusion, half turning towards the shopman.
“This etching of Millet’s ‘Angelus’? Three guineas, sir.” He added, gauging his man, “We have a photogravure of the same subject—a little smaller—for half a guinea.”
“Your father!” repeated Mr. Strang, gruffly. “He was a brother artist, I presume.”
Matt would have given much to say he was not an artist, but a brother. But he replied instead: “No, not exactly. He was a captain.” He felt somehow as if the whole guilt of his father’s calling rested upon himself, and it was mean of him to cross the Atlantic to impose some of it on the dignified figure before him.
“Oh, I love soldiers,” murmured Madame Strang.
Matt felt things were now entangled beyond the possibility of even future extrication, so he desperately consented to purchase the photogravure, threw down a sovereign, and, snatching up the change and the picture-roll, hurried from the establishment.
“What a charming young man!” said Madame Strang.
But Matthew Strang tapped his forehead significantly.
“You always will run yourself down, dear,” murmured Madame.
“Josephine,” replied Matthew Strang, in low, solemn tones, “the fellow is either a fool or a rogue.”
“He’s left sixpence on the desk,” broke in the voice of the shopman.
“Ha! a fool! It is enough for me to live in my son. He has advantages which I was denied.”
“The dear boy,” breathed Madame.
The extravagant purchaser of the “Angelus” divided the rest of his week between the National Gallery, where he concluded his uncle had not yet been canonized, and the streets of London, which he explored fearlessly. In a few days of industrious investigation he saw more than many a Londoner sees in a lifetime. He had experience of the features and cook-shops of Peckham, Rotherhithe, Clapton, Westminster, Covent Garden, the East India Docks, the Tower, wandering wherever the shapeless city stretched its lubber limbs, and seeing things and places that made him glad of the protection of the pistol he carried in his hip-pocket. The very formlessness of the city fascinated even while it dazed him. He ceased to wonder that artists found inspiration in this atmosphere, in which the fog itself seemed but the visible symbol of the innumerable mysteriousexistences swarming in its obscure vastness. The unexpected was everywhere, green closes in the heart of commerce, quiet quadrangles in the byways of Fleet Street, quaint old churches by the river-side, bawling market-places behind stately mansions, great parks set in deserts of arid poverty, bustling docks hidden away in back streets, and elegant villas at the end of drab, dismal, long-trailing East-end thoroughfares, redolent of slush and cabbage-leaves and public-houses and fried fish. Miles were of light account to one who had lived in a land of great spaces, yet Matt was wearied by the lengthy sweep of the great arteries and the multiplicity of their ramifications, by this vastness that was but reiterated narrowness in its lack of the free open horizons to which his eye was used.
But the Titanic city awoke strange responses in his soul; something in him vibrated to the impulse of the endless panorama. Often his fingers itched for the brush, as if to translate into color and line all this huge pageant of life; for the spell of youthful poesy was still on his eyes, and if he could not see London as he had seen his native fields and sky and ocean, all fresh and pure and beautiful, if in the crude day its sordid streets seemed labyrinths in an underworld, unlovely, intolerable, there were atmospheres and lights in which it still loomed upon his vision through the glamour of fantasy, and chiefly at night, when the mighty city brooded in sombre majesty, magnificently transfigured by the darkness, and the solemn river stretched in twinkling splendor between enchanted warehouses, or shadowed itself with the inverted architecture of historic piles, or lapped against the gray old Tower dreaming of ancient battle. But he could only take rough pencil or mental notes of the romance of it all, and it was almost always the fantastic that touched his imagination and found expression in the pictorial short-hand of his sketch-book—lurid splotches of sunset against tall, grimy chimneys; tawny barges gliding over black canal-waters shot with quivering trails of liquid gold from the morning sun; ragged Rembrandtesque figures asleep under glooming railway arches, over which trains flew with shining windows; street perspectives at twilight, with strange, livid skies; filmy evening rain blurring the lights of the town to a tender haze; late omnibusestearing by glistering, moonlit pavements, and casting the shadows of the outside passengers on the sleeping houses; foggy forenoons, with the eye of day inflamed and swollen in the yellow heaven. With his purchase of the “Angelus,” on the other hand, he was not greatly taken, despite its sentiment. He had seen too much of peasants; he had himself stooped over the furrows when his heart was elsewhere; his soul turned from the mean drudgeries and miseries of the human lot, yearning for the flash of poetry, the glow of romance, the light of dream.
In spite of his boarding out, his bill for the week’s bed, breakfast, and attendance reached as far as £1 19s.3d.—a terrifying total that drove him headlong into the frowsiest coffee-house to be found in the slums round Holborn. Here he spent a wretched, interminable night, provoked by insects and mysterious noises into dressing again and keeping his hand on his pistol as he sat shivering on a chair. The staircases resounded with the incessant tramp of feet mounting and descending, and there were bursts of rowdy laughter and blows and tipsy jeers, and once his locked door was shaken, and Matt thought he had fallen into a thieves’ den, and trembled for his savings. In the morning he called for his account and left, not without having discovered the real character of the place into which he had strayed. After some trouble he chanced upon a clean furnished room in the same neighborhood for four shillings and sixpence a week, attendance included. It was a back room on the third floor, and it gave on a perspective of tiles and shabby plaster, and the evidences of jerry-building in the doors and windows discomforted the whilom joiner’s apprentice; but he calculated that for less than twenty of his pounds he would have a foothold in London for a year. He wellnigh cried to think of the weeks he had lost in that week of hotel luxury. On sixpence a day he could sustain life. On ninepence he could live in clover. Why, even making lavish allowance for the technical expenses of which his uncle had warned him, he would easily be able to stay on for a whole year. In a year—a year of ceaseless painting—what might he not achieve?
Ah, what hopes harbored, what dreams hovered in that bleak little room! The vague, troubled rumor of the great city rolledup in inspiring mystery; the light played with instructive fascination upon the sooty tiles; high over the congested chaos of house-tops he saw the evening mists rifted with sunset, and on starry nights he touched the infinite through his rickety casement.
Only, where to learn? There was the rub. He had looked to his uncle to put him in the way of instantly acquiring art, and here had he wasted a week without acquiring even information. But in the British Museum he lighted upon young men and women drawing from the antique, and entering into conversation with the shabbiest of the men, who was working at the head of a Roman emperor in chalk, pecking at it with a pointed pellet of bread, he learned that the Roman emperor’s head was intended, in alliance with the torso of a Greek river-god, to force the doors of the Royal Academy Schools, the privileges of which gratuitous establishment the aspirant duly recounted. But the examination would not take place for some time, and Matt, though he felt it hard to have to pay fees elsewhere in the meantime, was secretly pleased at being able to shelve temporarily the thought of partaking in this examination, for the Roman emperor’s head was appallingly stippled, and the student said he had been at work on it for four months, and evidently meditated touching and retouching it till the very eve of the examination. Matt did not think he could ever muster sufficient interest in Roman emperors to live with the head of one for more than a week. His heart sank at the thought of what he might have to go through to please professors and examiners, but he would have willingly tried his hand at copying a bust had not the student informed him he must apply for permission and give a reference to a reputable householder. With the exception of his unclaimed uncle, Matt knew no one, reputable or disreputable, householder or vagrant. But he obtained from the shabby delineator of the Roman emperor the addressof a cheap, good art-school, though he found, to his dismay, that even at the cheapest he could only afford to take the night class, from seven to ten, three times a week. He saw he would have to study form apart from natural color, and apply during the days the preachings of the three nights. Impatient, and holding his paint-box tight against his palpitating heart, he set out that very night to join the class, but losing himself in a labyrinth of squares exactly alike, did not find the school till half-past seven. Passing through an open door marked “Grainger’s Academy of Art” in ugly and faded lettering, he found himself in a long, gloomy passage that led away from the rest of the house; and, following the indication of a dirty finger painted on the wall, he stole cautiously along the deserted corridor, which grew momentarily drearier as it receded from the naked jet of gas in the doorway, till it reached its duskiest at the point where it was bordered by a pair of cloak-rooms. Matt peered eagerly into their shadowy depths, which seemed to contain coals and a bicycle and litter, as well as clothing, and to exhale a flavor of ancient stuffiness; but he could detect no movement among the congested overcoats. At last, at the end of the passage, he stumbled against a boy in buttons kneeling with his eye to the key-hole of a door. Apologetically he asked the boy if this was Grainger’s, and the boy, jumping up quickly, told him to walk in, and retreated in haste.
Matt opened the door. A wave of insufferably hot air, reeking of tobacco, smote his face and his nostrils; a glare of light dazzled his eyes. He was vaguely aware of a great square room crowded with young men in uncouth straw hats sitting or standing at work in their shirt-sleeves before easels; but the whole scene was a blur compared with the central point that stood out in disconcerting clearness. Immediately facing him, on a platform at the other end of the room, a nude woman was standing. He started back shocked, and was meditating flight, when a student near him growled to him to shut the door. He obeyed, and had an instant of awful loneliness and embarrassment amid this crowd of gifted strangers, in the rear of which he stood, paint-box under arm, wondering why nobody challenged his entry, and where Grainger was. Turning to look forhim, he upset a rickety easel and a disengaged stool, both of which seemed to topple over at the slightest touch. But his awkwardness saved the situation; the owner of the easel was good-natured and, perceiving he was a new-comer, bade him seat himself on the stool and fix up an easel next to him, the number painted on the oilcloth of the floor being unappropriated. As Matt had no canvas, he even went outside to buy him one for two-and-ninepence from the boy in buttons. Matt handed him the money with a feeling of eternal gratitude.
While his amiable fellow was thus busied in his behalf, the new student’s keen eye absorbed the scene in detail. A great square dusty room, rimmed as to the roof by skylights, and lighted to-night from above by a great circular gas-flare; round two of the walls, patched here and there by the crumbling away of the plaster, ran a rack on which innumerable canvases and drawing-boards were stacked, and underneath the rack a streak of wood permeated the plaster to hold the pins by which crude sketches were fastened up, evidently for criticism; here and there hung notices of the meetings of Grainger’s Sketching Club, mixed up with photographs and advertisements of studios, and of a drawing competition instituted by the proprietors of a soap, and the mural ornamentation was completed by clever nude studies, rapidtours de forceof the visiting artists, as Matt discovered later; everywhere about the floor were canvases, boards, and an unstable assortment of three-legged easels, donkeys, quaintly carved chairs, and stools, high and low, upon which last students of all figures and complexions, some of them smoking, sat perched, crowned with the uncouth straw hats to keep the glare out of their eyes, and reduced to the shirt-sleeves by the heat from so many lights and breaths; the pendent gas-jets being supplemented by the paraffine lamp that lighted a shadowy corner where a skull grinned on a shelf, and by the big fire that was needed to keep the model from shivering on the throne, where she stood statuesque against the white background of a dirty sheet, her head resting against her arm.
And from everything breathed an immemorial dust—from the fire in the centre of the right-hand wall an impalpable ash seemed to drift; dust covered the mantel-piece and coatedthe bottles of linseed-oil and fixative and the boxes of charcoal that stood upon it, dust draped in gray the dilapidated squash-nosed lay-figure that leaned drunkenly against the right side of the throne. In the corners of the room the dust had an air of legal possession, as if the statute of limitations had secured it against the broom. There were dusty mysteries doubled up on shelves, a visible leopard’s skin suggesting infinite romantic possibilities for the others, and within a dusty barrel in a corner near him Matt saw dusty bits of velvet and of strange, splendid stuffs which he divined were for costume models, and the floor seemed a land of lost drawing-pins and forgotten fragments of charcoal. And then his heart gave a great leap, for his eye, returning timidly to the throne where it had scarcely dared as yet to rest, encountered a man’s head bending over a writing-desk in the compartment of the floor to the left of it. Surely it could be no other than Grainger himself, that thin, austere man with the big bald forehead and the air of Wellington, and Matt thrilled with proportionate reverence, and turned his eye away, as if dazzled, to repose it on the inchoate paintings of the students who were squinting scientifically at the model, and measuring the number of heads with sticks of charcoal or their brush-handles. Some had her large, some small; some turned her head this way, some that; some were painting her, some drawing her—each from his point of sight.
As soon as his own canvas arrived, altogether forgetting his startled modesty in the delightful interest of the work, he fell to touching in the head with rapid strokes of a flowing brush. The woman vanished in the woman’s form: what a privilege to enjoy and reproduce those beautiful curves, those subtle fleshtones, those half-tints of cream and rose, seen under gaslight!
“What are you about?” said his mentor, presently.
“Painting her portrait,” he replied, pausing, with painful foreboding.
“But where’s the charcoal outline?”
“The charcoal outline!”
“Yes. You can’t paint her without sketching her first in charcoal.”
“Can’t I?” asked Matt, with a sudden remorseful recollection of his first sitter, the Acadian legislator whose portrait had paved his way to sign-painting. He hastened to efface his ignorance with a palette-knife, and to obliterate it with a rag moistened with turpentine; but he was frightened and nervous and denuded of confidence in himself, and when he attempted to outline the figure the charcoal boggled at the greasy surface of the canvas; and while he was wrestling with his medium he became conscious that the great Grainger was behind him, and a nervousness that he had not felt when he pointed his gun at the bear in his forest home paralyzed his hand. Grainger stood for some moments watching his fumbling strokes, then he said:
“You want to join the Life class?”
Matt, flushing furiously, stammered an affirmative.
“Don’t you think you’d better begin with the Antique?” asked Grainger.
Matt murmured that he didn’t care about the Antique anyhow, and Grainger shook his austere head.
“Ah! there’s no getting on without slogging away; it’s no good shirking the ground-work. The living figure is all subtle lines. You can’t expect to be equal to them without years of practice at the Antique and Still-life.”
Matt plucked up courage to guess that he would have another try at the figure, and Grainger, having pocketed a quarter’s fees, moved off, leaving Matt amazed at his own temerity.
“Do you think he’ll be annoyed if I stay on here?” he asked his mentor, as he resumed his work with the determination to prove himself not unworthy of the privilege.
“If you want to chuck your money away, it’s your lookout,” said his mentor, candidly. “You don’t hurt him.”
“Then he won’t say anything?”
“It doesn’t matter what he says. He’s not up to much.”
“No?” queried Matt, astonished. “Isn’t he a great painter?”
The student laughed silently. “A great painter keep a school!” he said. “No; it’s only the failures that do that!”
“Then how can one learn?” asked Matt, in dismay.
“Oh, well, we have a visitor once a week—he’s rather a goodman. Tarmigan! He’s not an R.A., but he can knock off a head in twenty minutes.”
“But the R.A.’s—what are they for?” inquired Matt, only partially reassured.
“For show,” said the young man, smartly. “Youarea green un, to think that you’re going to get Academicians for thirty bob a month. You’ve got to go to the Academy Schools if you wantthem. And then the chaps say they’re not much use. Most of them are out of date, and you get a different man every month who contradicts all the others. A fellow I know says the best of the visitors is Marmor, but he’s awfully noisy and facetious, and claps you on the back, and tells you a story, and forgets to criticise. And then there’s Peters—he sighs and says ‘Very tender,’ and you think you’ve improved, till you hear him say ‘Very tender’ to the next man too. The chief advantage of going to a school is that you get a model which you couldn’t afford to hire for yourself, and you learn from the other fellows. And then, of course, there’s composition—Tarmigan’s jolly good for that.”
By this time Matt had sketched his outline, and he was about to resume the brush when the clock struck eight. The model stretched herself and retired behind the dirty sheet, which now operated as a screen, and there was a rising, a putting down of palettes (each with its brushes stuck idly in its thumb-hole), an outburst of exclamations, a striking of matches, a mechanical rolling of cigarettes, a sudden lowering of the lights, and a general air of breaking up.
“School over already?” he asked, in a disappointed tone.
“No, they’re only turning the gas down for coolness while the model has a rest. You see, she can’t stand two hours straight off the reel.”
“No, I guess not,” said Matt, and then repented of having said “guess,” for he was trying to prune away his humble expressions and to remember the idioms of the educated people with whom his new life was bringing him into contact. “It must be awful hard,” he added.
“Yes; especially in a school where a lot of chaps are working at once, and she can’t rest a limb because somebody mightjust be painting it. One woman told me she’d rather scrub floors so as to feel her limbs moving about. But posing pays better. This is a new model—first time she’s been here. Pity women with such fine figures haven’t got prettier faces. Have a cigarette?”
“No, thanks,” said Matt.
“Don’t smoke?”
“I did smoke once, but I gave it up.” Matt did not like to confess it was because he could not afford the luxury.
“You can’t be an artist without tobacco,” said his mentor, laughingly. “Ah, here’s the model. I’ll just go and get her address.”
He went up to the model, who had re-emerged and seated herself at ease upon the throne, where a group of students, with pipes or cigarettes in their mouths, was in conversation with her.
Matt followed his mentor, interested in this new specimen of humanity, and thinking that he would prefer to paint her as she was sitting then, nude in that dim, mysterious light, surrounded by smoke-wreathed figures in tropic headgear, her face alive, her feet crossed gracefully, playing a part in a real scene, yet withal unreal to the point of grotesqueness.
“Oh, I’ve sat a lot forhim,” she was saying when Matt came up. “I stand every morning for the portrait of Letty Gray, the skirt-dancer; it’s for the Academy. She can’t come much, and she’s awfully unpunctual. Of course I’m only for the figure.”
“Weren’t you in the Grosvenor Gallery last summer?” asked a bald middle-aged man.
“Yes; I was Setter’s ‘Moonbeam,’ ” began the model, proudly.
“I thought I recognized you,” said the middle-aged man, with an air of ancient friendship.
“And I was also on the line in the big room,” she added—“Colin Campbell’s ‘Return of the Herring-Boats.’ And I got into the Royal Institute as well—Saxon’s ‘Woman Wailing for Her Demon Lover.’ ”
“Ah, here you are, then!” said a red-haired young man, producing an illustrated catalogue.
“Yes,” said she, turning over a few pages. “And there’s my husband—Sardanapalus, 223. They often have him at the Academy Schools,” she wound up, with conscious pride.
“Ah, perhaps we shall get him here one week,” said the middle-aged man.
While his mentor was taking down her address, Matt looked round the room. The austere Grainger, with a cigarette in his mouth, was reading a yellowish paper embellished with comic cuts. Most of the students were moving about, looking at one another’s easels, the work on which, with few exceptions, Matt was surprised to find mediocre; a few sat stolidly humped on their stools, feet on rail and pipe in mouth; one group was examining photographs which its central figure had taken, and which he loudly declared knocked the painting of the Fishtown School to fits. From all sides the buzz of voices came through the stifling, smoky, darkened atmosphere.
“Have you seen Piverton’s new picture?”
“Rather! Another S,” contemptuously replied a very young man, seated, smoking a very long pipe before a very indifferent canvas.
“What do you mean, Bubbles?” asked a by-stander.
“What, haven’t you noticed,” he answered, with ineffable disdain, swinging his arm in illustration, “that the lines of his compositions are all curly—they always make S?”
“I thought they always made £s.d.,” interjected a curly-headed wag. And all except the very young man laughed.
“Bubbles is gone on Whistler,” observed a freckle-faced student, compassionately.
“I admire him,” admitted the very young man, candidly, “but I don’t say he’s the end of art.”
“No; that’s reserved for Bubbles,” laughed the freckle-faced student.
“Whatisthe end of art, Bubbles?” said another man.
“T, of course,” put in the curly-headed wag. “Five o’clock and fashionable.”
“I say, Grainger says Miss Hennery used to work in his day class,” said a handsome young Irishman, strolling up with a bag of cakes, from which the model had just helped herself in the pervasive spirit ofcamaraderie.
“Well, I don’t see anything to boast of in that,” pronounced Bubbles, puffing at his long hookah. “She’s only a feeble female imitation of Tarmigan. Her color’s muddy, and her brother comes into all her men’s heads.”
“I suppose she can’t afford models,” said the Irishman, charitably. “Have a banbury.”
Bubbles accepted, and the by-standers helped to empty the bag. Matt moved back towards his easel, passing a little dark man with a mane, who was explaining to a derisive audience that the reason he went to music-halls was to study character, and brushing by a weedy giant, who was boasting that he hardly ever went to bed, so tied was he to his anatomy. During his progress a meagre, wrinkled old man, with pepper-and-salt hair and a stoop, approached him, and said, in a husky whisper:
“Excuse me introducin’ myself, but I do admire your feet so!”
Matt flushed, startled.
“My name’s Gregson—William Gregson—and I’ve made a speciality of feet. The ’uman form divine is beautiful everywhere, sir, but the foot—ah! there you have the combination of graces, all the beautiful curves in a small compass; the arch of the foot, the ankle, instep, the beautiful proportions of it all when you do get a really beautiful foot such as yours. I come here, sir, every night to study the beautiful—for in daily life the foot is ’idden, distorted by boots and shoes that ignore the subtleties and delicacies of nature—and the foot is the first thing I look at; but how rarely does a model, man or woman, ex’ibit a truly beautiful foot! Oh, how I wish I could paint your foot, or take a cast of it—a study from the nude, of course! But no—you will not allow me, I know. May I at least be allowed to measure it, to take the proportions, to add to my knowledge of the laws of the beautiful foot?”
Matt faltered that he didn’t know he had anything extraordinary in the way of feet.
“My dear sir!” protested William Gregson, showing the whites of his eyes.
Just then the light was turned up, and William Gregson retreatedabruptly to his easel. The model’s court scattered, and she herself resumed her inglorious occupation of the throne, placing her feet within a chalked-out line, and her arm against a mark in the sheet.
Matt, returning to his canvas, worked enthusiastically to finish the figure by closing-time, and laid down his brush with some minutes to spare, thereby drawing upon himself the attention of his mentor, who exclaimed:
“By Jove! What made you rush along like that?”
“There was no time,” said Matt.
“Time! Why, there’s four more evenings. Every model sits a fortnight—six nights, you know.”
“Well, she’s done, anyhow,” said Matt, in rueful amusement.
“Yes, sheisdone anyhow.” And his mentor laughed. “Why, that ’ll never do. You can’t show work like that.”
“Why not? It’s like her.”
“Yes, but there’s no finish in it. It’s only a sketch. You’re supposed to make a careful study of it. Tarmigan insists on the exact character of the model. He always says even Velasquez’s early things were tight and careful.”
But Matt felt he could not take the thing any further—at any rate, not that night; the fury of inspiration was over. He sat abstractedly watching the quivering of the model’s tired limbs and her shadows on the screen, a dusky silhouette with lighter penumbras, till the hour was up.
On Matt’s homeward journey he was overtaken by old Gregson, who discovered that their routes coincided, and renewed his admiration of Matt’s foot and his request to gauge its beauties, till at last, unwilling to disoblige a brother artist, but feeling rather ridiculous, the young man slipped off his boot in the shelter of a doorway, under the light of a street-lamp, and the wrinkled old man, producing a tape-measure, ecstatically recorded, on a crumpled envelope, the varied perfections of its form.
At the next lesson Matt set to work and painted away all the force of his study in the effort to reach the standard prevailing at Grainger’s. But he worked dispirited and joyless, like a war-horse between the shafts of an omnibus, or a savage in astiff shirt and a frock-coat; suppressing himself with the same sense of drear duty as when he had sawn logs or drilled potatoes. During the “rest,” while Matt was listening in amazement to some secret information concerning royal personages, who seemed to have confided all their intrigues to Bubbles, William Gregson drew him mysteriously into the anteroom.
“Do you know, I couldn’t sleep the other night?” said the meagre, wrinkled old man with the pathetic stoop.
“Were you ill?” said Matt, sympathetically.
“No. Your foot kept me awake.”
Matt cast a furtive look at it, as if to read marks of guilt thereon.
“Yes; you must know I’m a shoemaker by trade, and love art, but I can’t devote myself to it like you young fellows. I work ’ard all day ’ammerin’ and stitchin’; it’s only in the evenings that I can spare an hour for paintin’.”
Matt’s eyes moistened sympathetically. “I’m so sorry,” he murmured.
“I knew you would be. I knew you had a beautiful nature. It always goes with beautiful feet. Ah, you smile! I’m an enthusiast, I admit, and you will smile more when you ’ear I sat up half the last two nights to create an artistic boot with your beautiful lines. You had given me the inspiration. I had to create there and then. I was tired of my day’s work, I was poor, and my time was valuable; but before all I am an artist. Sir, I have brought the boots with me”—here he produced a brown-paper parcel from under his arm—”and I shall be proud if you will accept them as a ’umble tribute from a lover of the beautiful.”
“No, no; I couldn’t think of taking them,” said Matt, blushing furiously.
“Oh, but you will vex me, sir, if you do not. It pains me enough already to think of you wearin’ the cumbrous, inartistic pair I see.”
“I won’t take them unless I pay you for them.”
“No, no. What is a guinea between artists?” And he pressed the parcel into Matt’s hand.
Matt shook his head. He was appalled at the price, but hefelt it wouldn’t be fair to take the poor old man’s work for nothing. A vague suspicion that he was being tricked flitted beneath his troubled mind, but his worldly experiences had not yet robbed him of his guilelessness, and there was such a fire of abnegation in the homely face that Matt felt ashamed of his doubt, and drew out the money with a feeling that he was, at any rate, helping a worthy artistic soul.
“Here is the price of them,” he said.
The artist took the money and looked at it.
“A guinea would give me nearly another month’s lessons,” he said, wistfully.
“Put it in your pocket, then,” insisted Matt, his last doubt dissolving in fellow-feeling.
But the cobbler shook his head. “No, no, sir, you mustn’t rob me of my impulse. I cannot charge you full price. Take back the shilling. Concede something to my feelings.”
“There—if that ’ll satisfy you,” said Matt, reaccepting it.
“You won’t tell the chaps,” besought the shoemaker, pathetically. “They wouldn’t understand us. They would laugh at our innocent enthusiasm.”
As Matt shared this distrust of the sympathy of the studio, he was not backward with assurances of secrecy, while he was laboriously bulking his overcoat-pocket with the parcel.
At the end of the four lessons, when Matt’s painting seemed to him to be getting almost as smooth as a wax figure, and as dead, Tarmigan came—a stern, ill-dressed man, prematurely gray—at whose approach Matt’s heart was in his mouth. The famous artist moved leisurely but inevitably towards him, shedding criticism by grunts and phrases and gestures; expressing the ineffable by an upward snap of the fingers, accompanied by a Russian-sounding sibilation; inquiring sarcastically whether one student was drawing the model or the lay-figure, and sneeringly recommending another to move his drawing “if the model moved.” Every now and again he sat down at an easel to get the man’s point of view, and, taking up his brush, suggested tone and color, or, if it was a draughtsman’s easel, borrowed his charcoal, and showed him how to put the head on the shoulders or fit on an extremity. When at length Matt felt the great man’s breath on his neck a cold shiver ran down his spine, the brush clove to his paralyzed hand.
“Ah, a new man!” said the visitor. “Not bad.”
All the blood in Matt’s body seemed to be rushing to his face. His hand began to tremble.
The visitor did not pass on immediately. He said: “Where do you come from? There’s a want of sharpness in the shadows.”
“From America,” breathed Matt.
“I mean from what school?”
“I haven’t been to school since I was a boy.”
“Not been to an art school?” queried the visitor, in surprise. “Nonsense! Impossible! The face is very well, but the rest is not taken far enough. A little too clever! Search! search! Even Velasquez’s early things were—But you must have had a deal of practice.”
“I have painted quite a little,” admitted Matt, “but not rightly, though I did study artistic anatomy out of a book. I’ve painted hundreds of portraits and signs and ceilings.”
The artist was examining the work more minutely. “Don’t you call that practice?” he said, a little triumphant smile flitting across his wintry face. “Hundreds of portraits—why, that means hundreds of models! Why, however did you get all those commissions? It’s more than I can boast of. Try and keep that lower in tone, and don’t use that color at all,” he added, his fingers tattooing kindly on Matt’s shoulder. The class had pricked up its ears, for the artist spoke by habit in a loud tone, so that all might benefit by his criticism of the individual, and his remarks to the new-comer were quite out of the ordinary run.
“It was only in the country places in Nova Scotia,” said Matt, apologetically, “and people didn’t know anything about it. So long as I made a handsome likeness, it was all they cared for. And then, of course, they were never—never naked.”
“No?” said the celebrity, with a little laugh.
“No; they always wore their best clothes,” said Matt, smiling, too. “So this is the first time I’ve done one like this.”
“You haven’t done it yet,” said Tarmigan, moving on. “There’s that foot yet to be studied. Search! Finish!”
“If you please, sir,” said Matt, with an unconscious reversion to the idiom of McTavit’s school-room, “Ihavefinished the foot.”
“Nonsense,” said Tarmigan. “You’ve got another toe to paint in.”
“I thought I had to copy the model exactly,” said Matt, meekly.
“Well, sir?” said Tarmigan, puzzled.
“Well, I only see four toes on that foot.”
The artist was startled; he cast a rapid glance at the model. “Good Lord! the man’s right,” he murmured, for the model was indeed minus a toe.
“I say, you men,” he said, “where are your eyes? You’ve given the model an extra toe. How often have I told you to look before you paint?”
All eyes were bent on the foot; the model reddened. Those whose work had not yet been examined hastened to amputate the toe; the others took on an air of injury.
“You might have told a chap,” whispered his mentor.
“I thought you knew,” said Matt. “I saw it as soon as I began to paint, but I didn’t take any notice of it in my first rough sketch. It was only when you told me I must copy the model exactly that I put it in, or, rather, left it out.”
For some time longer the fusillade of Tarmigan’s criticisms rang out intermittently: “Not bad.” “Humph! I wouldn’t make too much of those little things! Keep it broader!” “That’s very well!” “Psch!” “That’s better!” “Don’t get your shadows too hot!” “That’s a good bit!” “That leg’s too long from the knee down!” “Don’t lick ittoomuch!” “Not bad!” “No, no; that won’t do at all!” “You’ll never get her feet into that canvas!” “Look at the model with your eyes nearly closed and compare the tones!” Then Tarmigan set a composition to be done at home in illustration of “Charity,” and stalked through the door amid a chorus of “Good-nights” in incongruous keys, and then there was a silence so tense that the creak of his departing boots could be heard dying away in the long passage; but it was not till the “rest” arrived, and the model, wrapping a cloak roundher, had left the room, and Grainger had silently disappeared after his wont, that the storm burst.
Bubbles led off.
“Who ever saw a picture of a woman with four toes?” he cried, disgustedly.
“Yes. How could he expect us to examine her blooming toes?” said the freckle-faced student.
“Oh, I saw she had four toes right enough,” said Bubbles. “But a painter hasn’t got to paint accidents—he’s got to paint pictures.”
“It ’ll be an accident if you paint pictures,” put in the curly-headed wag.
“Isaw the missing toe,” asserted the handsome young Irishman, “when I set her for the class. But I wasn’t going to spoil the study. One can easily imagine a toe. He’s got no sense of poetry.”
“I saw a scratch on her wrist,” volunteered the middle-aged man. “I wonder he didn’t want us to paint that.”
“I suppose he’ll put a background to it, and send it to the Academy,” cackled the red-headed young man.
“They’ve got blue noses in Nova Scotia, I believe. I wonder if he puttheminto his portraits?” the weedy giant remarked in a loud whisper to the little man with the mane.
Though the last two remarks were so impersonal, Matt knew well enough they were aimed at him, and he seemed to feel an undercurrent of resentment against himself beneath the animadversions on Tarmigan, whom he knew the studio revered. He sat uneasily on his stool, poring mechanically over his unhappy study from the nude, and morbidly misreading animosity into this good-humored badinage. Before his mother’s living death he might have replied violently with word or even fist, but life had broken him in. Seeing the new man spiritless, another student took up the parable:
“He’s going to leave it to the nation.”
“Then he’ll have to leave it on the door-step when nobody’s looking,” replied the weedy giant.
Then the stream of wit ran dry, and comparative silence fell upon the room.
Abruptly the voice of the curly-headed wag shot across the silence: “Four-toes, R.A.”
The cry was taken up in a great shout of laughter, even the uninterested joining in from sheer joy in a catchword. It seemed to Matt he had not a friend in the room. But he mistook. The grizzled old shoemaker sidled up to him.
“You’ve licked me, sir,” he said, in emotional accents. “You’ve shamed me; me, whose speciality is feet. I never noticed there was a toe missin’. No, sir; not even me. Your hand, sir. I bear you no malice.”
Gratefully Matt gripped the cobbler’s extended hand, and he took occasion to apologize for not enduing the artistic boots, explaining that he was reserving them for high days and holidays. He let the bantering cry die away unanswered, but at heart he was sick with the thought he was to repeat the experience of the St. John paint-shop, and he had a fierce impulse to shake the dust of the studio off his feet, even as he had thrown up his position in New Brunswick, and in his resentful bitterness he allowed his sense of the inferiority of the jeerers’ work to well up into clear consciousness. And thus he brought himself round to the remembrance of the great Tarmigan’s words, and to a softening sense of gratitude for the strange way in which he had been acquiring art in his own land, even while he was yearning and planning to get it across the seas. And so, though the nickname stuck to him—for, indeed, Grainger’s scarcely knew his real name—he remained at the studio, learning to take its humors more genially, and even to partake in them, and drawn to itshabituésby the discovery that they, too, were fighting their way to art from the shop, the school, or the office, but never losing altogether the shyness and sensitiveness of a lonely alien and high-spirited soul.
From Tarmigan, whose executive faculty and technical knowledge were remarkable, and who, despite surface revolts behind his back, was worshipped by the whole school, Matt got many “pointers,” as he called them in his transatlantic idiom—traditions of the craft which he might never have hit out for himself; though, on the other hand, in the little studies he made at home and sometimes showed to Tarmigan, he produced effects instinctively,the technique of which he was puzzled to explain to the master-craftsman, who for the rest did not approve of the strange warm luminosities Matt professed to see on London tiles, or the misty coruscations that glorified his chimney-pots. Grainger himself never offered criticisms to his pupils except casually, and mainly by way of conversation, when he was bored with his own thoughts.
To the science of art which Tarmigan taught, and which was based upon inductions from great pictures, Matt in his turn did not always take kindly; the reduction of æsthetics to rule chafed him; he was distressed by Tarmigan’s symmetrical formulæ against symmetry, and though some of the canons of composition seemed to him self-evident when once pointed out, and others not unreasonable, he could not always relish the mechanical application of the general law to his particular case; but he suppressed his untutored instincts, much as in her day his mother had wrestled with Satan, and in faith, hope, and self-distrust submitted himself duteously to law and Tarmigan. He worked fluently for the most part, but every now and then came a sudden impotency not always due to lack of sympathy with the model; an inability to get the exact effect he wanted, which tortured him even more than Tarmigan’s strait-waistcoat of dogma.