“Young, gay,Radiant, adorned outside; a hidden groundOf thought and of austerity within.”
“Young, gay,Radiant, adorned outside; a hidden groundOf thought and of austerity within.”
“Young, gay,Radiant, adorned outside; a hidden groundOf thought and of austerity within.”
A sudden fear that he was not a genius himself was like a vivisector’s knife through his heart, laying bare with painful incision its secret hope.
“Do you think Clinch gets his effects without bothering?” he asked, with anxiety.
“O heavens! no,” said Matthew Strang, authoritatively. “I once watched him at work. He was squatted on a tiny stool, looking up at his picture, and painting upward. He had a cigarette in his mouth, which he was always relighting. Every now and then he would sigh heavily, or swear at himself or his model, and sometimes he would go and lie on the hearth-rug and stare solemnly at the canvas; then jump up, give one touch, swear if it went wrong, paint it out, and then go and stand in the corner with his face to the wall, probably in meditation, but looking exactly like a naughty little boy at school.”
Matt smiled, half at the picture of Clinch in the corner, half from relief at finding that even men who swore and drank farmore than he did suffered quite as acutely in the parturition of the Beautiful. He fell back on the theory of an essential inner delicacy behind the occasionally coarse envelope of artistic genius, just as grossness could lurk beneath a gentlemanly refinement.
They ultimately found Herbert in the billiard-room, with a cue in one hand and a “soda-and-whiskey” in the other. “I don’t want to look at the pictures,” he protested. “If they’re decent I’ll see them in the Academy, and if they’re rot it’s waste of time seeing them at all. As for the entertainment, you can get a better at any music-hall—at least, so I’ve been told.” Nevertheless, he himself took Matt to anotherconversazionethe same week, the far more homely gathering of the St. George’s Sketching Club, where the refreshmentsweregratis and evening dress was taboo, and really famous people scrambled for the bread-and-cheese and beer, of which there was not enough, and members disported themselves in their models’ costumes for the edification of a company which had turned its back on their pictures. For the Academy itself Matt paid his shilling, into such extravagant habits had he slipped since the days of his arrival in London, when a National Gallery catalogue was beyond his far fatter purse. But he came away much less inspired than from that momentous visit, his imagination untouched, save once or twice, as by Erle-Smith’s personalized projections of mediæval romance, in which the absence of real atmosphere seemed only natural. There were so many smooth portraits of uninteresting people that he was reminded drearily of his Nova-Scotian drudgery, when his heaven-scaling spirit had to stoop to portray and please some tedious farmer who was sometimes not even picturesque. It did not occur to him how unfair was the latent comparison with the National Gallery; he forgot that Art is short and the Academy long, that one can no more expect a batch of great pictures every year than a batch of great novels or of great symphonies.
Tarmigan had a picture of “The Rape of the Sabines.” It was hung on the line, and Grainger’s was very proud of it. In the discussion on the Academy (which supplied the class with the materials for a fortnight’s carping) it was the only picturethat escaped even “Bubbles’s” depreciation, though he declared he would never himself paint like that, which the curly-headed wag eagerly admitted. One of the students had secured a place in the “skies,” and his success made Matt regret he himself had not dared to send in.
Grainger’s own contribution had been rejected, which made his pupils think more highly of themselves.
Matt was more interested in the Azure Art Gallery, a little exhibition (mainly of landscapes with violet shadows) held by some young men about whom Herbert was enthusiastic; for they did not attempt, said he, to vie either with the camera or the conte. “If painting be an art at all,” he contended, “it can only be so by virtue of ignoring Nature. As Goethe said, ‘We call art Art because it is not Nature.’ The musician works up notes, the poet syllables into a music unlike anything in Nature, and so must the painter work up Nature’s colors and forms under the sole guidance of his artistic instinct. And whatever can be better expressed in words has no place in painting. These young men’s pictures tell no stories, and no truths either. They are merely concerned with color and line.”
Matt afterwards found that, with the exception of a couple of Scotchmen, these young men by no means accepted Herbert’s account of their aims; indeed, they rather regarded it as satirical, for to give truer impressions of Nature was precisely their boast and glory. Although Matt could not always credit them with success in this, still he found a note of life and fantasy in their work. He was especially struck by Cornpepper’s “Chimney on Fire in Fitzroy Street”—a flight of sparks falling and curving in a golden rain, in vivid contrast with the dark, starlit sky above and the black mass of spectators below, faintly illumined by street-lamps, and broken at the extreme end by the brassy gleam of the fire-engine tearing up the street. There were inaccuracies of detail, but Matt was immensely impressed by the originality of the subject and the touch of weirdness, and it was with joy that he accepted Herbert’s offer to take him to the Azure Art Club, where Cornpepper and his clique mostly forgathered. Since Herbert had misinterpreted them to his cousin, Matt had read a good deal about them in the papers, andthey had held forth brilliantly to interviewers on the veracity of their rendering of Nature, Cornpepper going so far as to claim that you could not look at his landscapes without feeling—from the color of stone and sea, from the tints of the sky and the disposition of the clouds—what o’clock it was. Whereupon the interviewer had consulted a study of poppies on a cliff, and reported that it was half-past eleven, Cornpepper crying “Correct!” All of which did not fail to provoke counterblasts from the Academic camp and from the irresponsible concocters of facetious paragraphs.
It was all very small—the feeble British refraction of the great Gallic battle then waging, of the campaign of plein air and modern subject against bituminous landscapes and classic conventions, the expurgated English edition of the eternal battle of youth and age, spiritless as the bouts of boxers in a Quaker land,sansprize-rings or hero-worshippers; the shadowy warfare of art in a Puritan country vibrating only to politics and religion, indifferent to style, gauging literature merely by its message and art by its idea.
But Matt was not a true-born Briton, and his own aversion from an unreal Nature doctored and tricked up, in which an artificial chiaroscuro took the place of observation and atmosphere, led him into instant sympathy with this painting of “real moments,” with this presentation of “Nature caught in the fact,” as Cornpepper brilliantly defined the Impressionism he had smuggled over from Paris. Even if Nature was not so violet as she was painted, Matt felt the mistake was on the right side. And who but Cornpepper had revealed and interpreted the mystery and poetry of the night? True, he was rather staggered to remember, it was impossible to paint the night with your eye on the object. The night side of Nature might be caught in the fact; it could not be arrested in the fact.
Herbert was not a member of the Azure Art Club; they had to call on a man in Kensington to get him to take them there. He proved to be no other than the moon-faced Rapper, whom Herbert had invited to invite them to dinner.
“He’s an awful duffer,” he said, enviously, “but he has a flat of his own and an income of his own, and he’s had the run ofCopenhagen, Paris, and Antwerp. They say Copenhagen is worse than Paris.”
Rapper made them stay to admire his rooms. “Don’t look at my pictures,” he said; “that’s only a portrait I’m doing of Riggs, the bucket-shop keeper. I’m an awful duffer; why I should get so many commissions at a hundred and fifty guineas when there’s lots of geniuses starving, I never can make out. I suppose it’s because I don’t want the money—I shall only blue it at Monte Carlo. I’ve only just come back from the country—a J.P., an awful screw. He made me do him and his wife for two-fifty. Still, they’re only half-lengths. Do try some of this Burgundy; it’s genuine. I import it direct from a small grower. I get a huge barrel for five pounds, and pay three pounds duty, and get hundreds of bottles out of it. People don’t know how to get wine in England. Oh, do please look at that Limoges enamel over the mantel-piece, Mr. Strang; it’s far better worth looking at than that daub of a library.”
“I always prefer to look at pictures,” said Matt, apologetically.
“Itisrather a strong bit of color,” admitted Rapper.
“Yes. Do you think the light is accounted for?” asked Matt. “That red glow—”
“Don’t you see the library lamp?” rejoined Rapper.
“Yes, but the shade’s off; and even then, isn’t it more like firelight?”
“Not a bit of it!” replied Rapper, hotly. “Do you suppose I didn’t study the effects with a lighted lamp? That’s a good bit of action in the old scholar’s arm, reaching for the book.”
Matt examined it carefully.
“The forearm is a little out of drawing, isn’t it—a little too long?” he asked, timidly.
“My dear fellow, the model had an unusually long forearm. You don’t suppose everybody is alike. Of course it isn’t near finished yet. But really I was trying for color more than for line; and, after all, it’s the careless draughtsmanship of a man who can draw. It attracted quite a lot of notice at the Azure Art Gallery last year, but I put a big price on it, so that it shouldn’t sell, and I’d have time to work it up. That’s a little bust ofmyself; it’s only plaster of Paris bronzed over. I model ever so much better than I paint, but nobody will give me a commission. Isn’t it funny? Do have some more of the Burgundy. I’m not much of an artist, but I flatter myself I do know a good wine.”
Before they left he presented them with photographs of his library picture, apparently forgetting that he hadn’t near finished it.
“I say, I can’t go about with you if you go on like this,” whispered Herbert to Matt, as Rapper lingered to extinguish his gas and lock his door. “Fancy telling a chap his faults. You mustn’t go by me and my Nebuchadnezzar. I rather like to be pitched into. It keeps a fellow from getting conceited.”
“I didn’t know,” Matt murmured, with a new admiration for Herbert, who had already become a hero to him, moving so brilliantly amid all these shining circles. The three young men got into a hansom and smoked Rapper’s cigars. At the little club, which was only ten minutes off, they dined in a long, narrow, drab-painted room, with a billiard-table near the door. Several men, whose work Matt had studied with interest, were dining in their vicinity. Matt strained his ears to catch their conversation, but it seemed to be all about the billiard-table, an apparently recent acquisition. At last, to his joy, he was introduced to some of the most famous—to Butler, tall, dark, muscular, and frock-coated, most erratic of etchers, most slap-dash of painters; to the foul-mouthed, dainty-fingered Clinch; to Gurney, slim, youthful, and old-faced, habited in tweeds, the latest recruit, an earnest disciple of every master in turn, old or new, always in superlatives of eulogy or abuse, and untaught by his own gyrations to respect a past adoration or to tone down a present; to Greme, more barefacedly boyish than even Herbert, a blonde youth credited by his admirers with a charming new blond vision of Nature, though the Philistines contended that all he did was to get water-color effects with oils; to Simpson, who ground his own colors, and had mysterious glazes and varnishes, and was consumed by an unshared anxiety as to the permanence of his pictures; and—oh, awful joy!—to the great Cornpepper, the most brilliant and the youngest of them all, a squat, juvenile figure, with a supercilious eye-glass in the righteye, a beak-like nose, and a habit of rasping the middle of his seat with his hands, like an owl on a perch. Matt was dying to talk to them—and especially to Cornpepper—of their art; as to men who had already done something in the world through which they moved, burdened with aspirations and haloed with dreams. But the talk would not veer round to painting, and the evening was entirely devoted to a general game of shell-out with halfpenny points. Matt was drawn into taking a cue, and lost one and threepence halfpenny in the first game, his inexperience being aggravated by Herbert’s whispered caution not to cut the cloth. However, his skilled eye and hand, practised with gun and brush, soon told, and he won his money back in the second, much to his relief, for his funds were running away at an appalling rate. The strenuous leaders of the newest art movement relaxed over the green table, highly hilarious as the white ball ran among the red balls like a sheep-dog, to drive them into the pockets, and stamping and contorting themselves in mock applause after a failure to score.
“That’s a fluke!” Herbert would say when the failure was his, and the jest became a catchword provocative of perpetual cachinnation.
There were so many hands in the game that Matt had plenty of time for occasional remarks between his turns, but nobody would speak of art except a venerable graybeard named Brinkside, who talked to him enthusiastically of the Azure Art campaign. He told him of the heroism of its leaders: of how Cornpepper had lived on dates and water while doing black-and-white illustrations for theChristian Home, salvation subjects at starvation prices; of how the even sturdier Butler had slept in a stable-loft, refusing to compromise with his genius or to modify the great dabs of paint that the world mistook for daubs. In answer to Matt’s inquiries, the old man explained to him how Cornpepper painted his night scenes, by putting down at fever heat in the morning some beautiful effect noted and absorbed the night before. In the evening Cornpepper would return to the spot, Brinkside said; but if, despite all his waiting, he could not see the same effect, he would wilfully forget the second impression, and return again and again till thefirst conditions were repeated. Matt, relieved to find that Cornpepper’s method was similar to his own, and that genius had no esoteric prerogatives of method, pointed out that in Nature’s infinite permutations an effect never recurred exactly as before, and that, therefore, he, for his part, contented himself with storing up in his mind the main values and color-planes, relying on deduction for the minutiæ. But, of course, it all depended on holding the total effect, the original sensation, vividly in the memory. On leaving he thanked Brinkside with touching humility for the instructive interest of his conversation.
“Funny to find an old man in a new movement,” he observed, suddenly, to Herbert, in their homeward hansom.
“Why not? Old men often creep in. It’s their last chance. But if it’s Brinkside you’re thinking of, he’s not an artist at all. He’s an artists’ colorman, who supplied ’em with their materials on tick before they caught on. Brinkside’s like a dress-maker I used to know at Brighton, who financed lovely woman till she married wealthy flats. He foresaw they would get on, and, by Jove, they are blazing away like a house on fire, or, perhaps I ought to say, like a chimney on fire.”
“Then the opposition to the Academy is flourishing!” cried Matt, joyfully. His vague, youthful sympathy with all that was fresh and young was strengthened and made concrete by the revelations of struggle and starvation in the lives of those that had preceded him, martyred for the faith that was in them.
“Yes, it is flourishing,” said Herbert; “so much so that in ten years’ time most of ’em will be Academicians or Associates. If I were the governor I’d buy ’em up now; but he’s got no insight.”
“Oh,” said Matt, disappointed. “Do you mean the Academy will win, after all?”
“Six of one and half a dozen of t’other. They’ll be half accepted and half toned down. Already Greme and Butler are married—and that’s the beginning of the end. Lucky beggars! supplied with enthusiasm in their youth, and comfort in their old age. I wish I was young myself.”
“What nonsense!”
“I never was young,” said Herbert, shaking his head. “I always saw through everything. Heigho! Give us a light from your cigar. I’ve sighed mine out.”
“I suppose they’re very grateful to Brinkside,” said Matt, when the fire of Herbert’s cigar was rekindled.
“They play billiards with him, but I don’t suppose they’ve squared up yet.”
“But they’re making money now,” urged Matt, horrified. Years of bitter slavery to domestic liabilities had unfitted him to understand this laxity of financial fibre.
“And then? Why be rash? One can’t foresee the future.”
Before the magnificence of this rebuke Matt shrank abashed; he had a sneaking twinge of shame and concern for his own homely honesty, as for something inauspiciously inartistic.
“Talking of money,” went on Herbert, “I’m devilish hard up myself for a day or two—bills to meet at once, and my allowance don’t come due for a few days. You couldn’t advance me a trifle, I suppose?”
“Of course I could,” said Matt, eagerly.
“Do you think you could let me have a pony?”
“A pony?” repeated Matt, mystified.
“Twenty-five pounds. Don’t do it if it will at all inconvenience you.”
Matt was glad that it was too dark for Herbert to read his face. The sum was by far the greater portion of his worldly possessions. But he did not hesitate. Herbert would refund it in a day or two.
“I will bring it to the studio to-morrow,” he said.
“That’s a good chap,” said Herbert. “By-the-way, we’ve got to go to Cornpepper’s studio next Sunday week.”
“Really?” cried Matt, in delighted excitement.
“Yes; he told me he didn’t like to ask you direct, because you looked so serious and strait-laced.”
“Oh!” protested Matt, with a vague sense of insult.
“Well, you do, there’s no denying it. Remember how you preached to me about the governor the first time you saw me. Perhaps you’ll go lecturing Cornpepper because he economizes by domesticating his model when he has a big picture on theeasel. Personally, I like Cornpepper; he is the only fellow who has the courage of his want of principles in this whitewashed sepulchre of a country. But be careful that you don’t talk to him as you did to Rapper, for he lives up to his name. He is awfully peppery when you tread on his corns, though he has no objection to stamping on yours. Not that I believe there’s any real malice in him, but they say his master at the Beaux-Arts was a very quarrelsome fellow, and my opinion is that he models himself on him, and thinks that to quarrel with everybody is to be a great artist.”
“Oh, but don’t you think hewillbe a great artist?” said Matt.
“Heisa great artist, but he won’t be,” said Herbert. “He’ll be an R.A. By Jove! we nearly ran over that Guardsman. Mary Ann has been standing him too many drinks. Do you know the price of a Guardsman, Matt?”
“The price?”
“Yes; a nurse-maid who wishes to be seen walking out with a swagger soldier has to give him half a crown and his beer.”
Herbert never lost an opportunity of showing off to Matt his knowledge of the inner working of the great social machine. Madame, passing her white hand lovingly over her boy’s hair, had no idea of the serpentine wisdom garnered in the brain beneath.
At the Marble Arch, Matt, carefully bearing the photograph of Rapper’s “Library,” got out of the hansom to exchange to a ’bus which passed near his street. He offered to pay his share of the hansom, but Herbert waved the silver aside with princely magnificence.
Matt’sdesire to hear the brotherhood of the brush on Art was gratifiedad nauseamat Cornpepper’s, for a batch of artists of all ages, together with a couple of journalists, assembled in the big, bare, picture-littered studio to smoke their own pipesand to say “when” to the neat-handed model who dispensed the host’s whiskey. Some declared they wanted it neat, to take off the effects of a grewsome tale with which Rapper had started the evening. It was about the time when he had studied art in Berlin and attended Ringschneider’s anatomy class. (“I’m not much of an artist, but I do know anatomy,” he interpolated.) One day when the corpse upon which the professor was about to demonstrate was uncovered, the students recognized, to their horror, a favorite fellow-pupil, who had been away for a few days. He had been taken ill in his garret, conveyed to the hospital, and, being alone in the world, had been sold to the lecture-room. The startled class immediately subscribed for another corpse, and buried the unfortunate boy with due honors. Greme tried to counteract this tale by another one about a model, an old fellow named William Tell, who, after vainly applying at the Slade and Lambeth schools for work, had been taken up by the St. George’s Sketching Club for the sake of his picturesque corded breeches. When, at the end of the two hours’ spell, the men were criticising one another’s work, one said to another, “There doesn’t seem any leg under those breeches.” Overhearing which, William Tell fell to indignantly unbuttoning his gaiters.
The arrival of a twinkling-eyed caricaturist, joyously greeted by all as “Jimmy,” dispelled the last flavors of the mortuary. “Aren’t you in China?” everybody asked. Jimmy explained he had thrown up the commission, but was off to the West Indies next month, though he expected to find himself in Paris instead. He was a genius, with an infinite capacity for taking pains and making friends, and, being forced to rise in the small hours to get through his work before the countless callers arrived to distract him, was popularly supposed to be an idle scapegrace, who produced sketches as rapidly and copiously as the conjurer produces oranges from his coat-sleeve. Matt’s breath was almost taken away in a rush of reverence and rapture at the unexpected privilege of seeing him; for, despite his own craving for the Sublime and the Beautiful, Jimmy Raven’s sketches of low London life had for him a magnetic appeal whose strength surprised himself. Sometimes he fancied itwas the humor and the fun that held him, as being the qualities in which he himself was most deficient; sometimes it flashed upon him obscurely—as in a light thrown through a fog—that Jimmy Raven was teaching him to see the spectacle of life more deeply and truthfully through the medium of his humorous vision; at such instants he almost thought one of Jimmy’s loafers worth a whole Academy of poetic myths, but he suppressed the suspicion as absurd and perturbing to his own ideals and vision, telling himself it was only the truth and subtlety of the draughtsmanship that he admired. He listened to him now as eagerly and deferentially as to Cornpepper, his eyes fixed mainly on these two famous faces, as if to seize the secret of their gifts in some contour of nose or chin; but he had ample curiosity and respect to spend even on the other men, though below all his real modesty and diffidence was a curious bed-rock of self-conscious strength, as of a talent that might hope one day to be recognized even of these.
But there was little art-talk to be got out of Jimmy. Having likewise said “when,” he launched into an account of an East End girl he had sketched that morning in the Park, and quoted her idea of a coster gentleman. “My brother’s a toff,” he had overheard her boasting. “He wears three rows of buttons down his trousers, and sixteen wentilation ’oles in ’is ’at.” “And who do you think I saw in the Park?” he went on. “Egyptian Bill.”
“No?” cried various voices. “What was he preaching?”
“Buddhism,” said Jimmy. “He’s sitting to Winkelman, that old chap who became a Buddhist when he was painting those Eastern things the critics made such a fuss about.”
There was a laugh at the expense of the Mohammedan model, who always suited his religion to his employer’s.
“When I did him,” said Jimmy, “I pretended to be a Jew, and it was great fun after he became a Jew to tell him I was a Christian.... I don’t know which was the biggest lie,” he added, with his droll twinkle.
“Did you hear about the Hindoo who went to see Winkelman’s things at Dowdeswell’s?” said Butler. “He spat out. You see, he knew the real thing.” He smiled with grim satisfaction,for the things were licked and stippled into a meretricious poetry, and his own bold blobs of Oriental color had been laughed at.
“Don’t you wish they supplied spittoons at the Academy?” asked Jimmy.
It was the red rag. For the next ten minutes the absurdities of the Academy and the transcendent merits of the Salon (which most of them had run over to Paris to see) occupied the tapis, and then a spectacled Scotchman, who answered to the name of Mack, dilated upon the decadence of the grisette and the degeneracy of the students’ orgies.
“Ah, but still Paris stands for the joy of life,” said Cornpepper. “They are not ashamed of living.”
“They ought to be,” said Matt, and the company laughed, as at a good joke.
“Our young friend thinks the artist should be moral,” said Herbert, paternally.
“He’ll say art should be moral next,” said Mack.
“It isn’t immoral, is it?” said Matt, feebly. As usual, he was half fascinated, half shocked by the freedom of the artistic standpoint, for which his intellect was ready, but not his deeper organization. He wondered again why he was so uncomfortably constructed, and he envied these others for whom their art seemed to flow in happy irrelation to conduct and character, or at least to the moral ideals of the bourgeois. He marvelled at them, too, not understanding how talents more subconscious than his own could lie in closed compartments, as it were, of the artists’ minds, apparently unaffected by the experiences of their temporary owners.
“Art’s neither moral nor immoral,” pronounced the little host, magisterially, as he grasped his perch more tightly, “any more than it’s lunar or calendar. The artist thinks and feels in line and color. He sees Nature green or gray, according to his temperament. There are as many views from Richmond Hill as there are artists. If two views are alike, one is a plagiarism. Nature will never be exhausted, for every man sees her differently.”
“And so long as he doesn’t see her double—” put in Jimmy.
“Quite so,” said Cornpepper. “So long as he isn’t too drunk to keep his brush steady, we ask no more of him. In fact, it’s always best to be in love with your sitter—that’s what giveschic.”
“Rot!” said a granite-faced, white-bearded septuagenarian who had been smoking in silent amusement. “Chiccomes merely from painting with brushes too large for the work.”
“Avast there, Rocks!” said Jimmy. “We don’t want any of your revolutionary notions here. What would you say if we denounced jammy shadows at the Academy dinner?”
“Avast yourself!” cried Cornpepper, rather angrily. “This is Liberty Hall. I won’t be classed with the new school, or with any school.” Cornpepper’s success had already made him feel the dead-weight of an extravagant school with which one is confounded. “Because I exhibit with you chaps, people credit me with all your views. You might as well say I agree with the president because I’m on the line in the Academy.”
“Have you got a picture in the Academy, Teddy? I didn’t notice it,” said Wilfred Smith, the journalist, thereby expressing what was in Matt’s mind too.
“There you are!” laughed Rocks. “When you come among us you’re lost. It’s only by our rejecting you that we make you famous. When you exhibit by yourselves, you stand out.”
“I allow Rocks to talk,” said little Cornpepper, with a good-natured smile. “He was the first to detect my talent, and I am really sorry to be the last to detect his. I think his big nudes are shocking. He and Tarmigan are a pair. Where is the point of painting heathen mythology?”
“I only paint the nude because I can’t paint clothes,” said Rocks, smiling. “You are all so versatile nowadays.”
“Ah, Teddy’ll come round to the classic, too, one day,” said Butler, with a weary expression on his strong, stern face. “You should have seen his joy when he got the invitation for varnishing-day.”
“Nothing of the sort,” cried little Cornpepper, glaring through his eye-glass and humping himself into a more owl-like curve. “I didn’t even accept the invitation. I wasn’t going to help the R.A.’s to correct their draughtsmanship.”The glare relaxed under his pleasure at the laugh, and he added, more quietly: “Do let us drop shop, for Heaven’s sake. I’m not one of a school—I’m myself. And I don’t say salvation lies with any sect. Give me style; that’s all I ask for.”
“Will you have it neat?” murmured Jimmy.
“Style, not school,” pursued Cornpepper, pleased with the phrase. “Take literature! There’s style in Boccaccio, and style in Flaubert, and style in Wycherley. Even a moral work may pass if it has style—Pope’s satires, for instance. So, too, in painting. I don’t find style in Bouguereau or Fred Walker, in Rocks or Tarmigan, who are only fit for chromos, but I do find it in Mantegna, in Fortuny, in Degas, in—”
“Good-bye!” said Jimmy, getting up. “I have to meet my wife at ten.”
“Oh, there’s lots of time,” said Cornpepper. “Carrie, pass Jimmy the whiskey. Sit down, there’s a good chap.” And Jimmy sat down.
“Style’s going to be a square touch and a feathery outline,” said Greme, sarcastically.
“Style’s merely a decorative appearance,” said Mack. “A picture is primarily a wall-decoration; it has no right to exist for itself.”
“Hear, hear!” cried Herbert. Mack lived up to his principles, for he always saw Nature as a pretty pattern.
“Style’s an accident; look at the blottesque effects you get in water-color,” said Rocks.
“The last and greatest art—the art to blot,” quoted Levison, the second journalist, who also posed as a war-artist in times of peace.
“When I was in Antwerp, under Villat,” said Rapper—”a fierce little man he was—he used to come and correct our canvases with big blotches of burnt sienna and lamp-black on the last day of a model. Rocks would call that a blottesque effect. Now I flatter myselfIcan tell you what style is, though I don’t profess to get it myself. Style is—”
“The art of leaving in—or leaving out—accidents,” finished Rocks. “You see that so well in Fortuny’s work.”
“Jimmy gets his effects by leaving out all the dead lines ofhis first sketch,” said Wilfred Smith, the journalist; “don’t you, Jimmy?”
“So I’m told,” said Jimmy.
“Styleisthe art of leaving out,” said Herbert. “They don’t leave out the R.A.’s pictures in the Academy. Hence the absence of style in the show.”
“Tut, tut, tut! Shop again!” cried Cornpepper, despairingly. “The only chance of progress for art is in neglecting values—not from ignorance, like the Germans, but from intention; not viewing Nature through a bit of black glass, like Millet, or toning down the violets of her shadows, but painting real sunlight.”
“But you can’t really paint sunlight,” put in Matt, timidly. “Paint’s only mud.”
“Quite so,” said Cornpepper. “But Delacroix said, ‘Give me mud, and I’ll paint you the skin of Venus.’ It depends on what you put round your mud.”
“Or how you put it on,” added Gurney. “The only way is to get optics to help you, and mix your primaries on the canvas, not on the palette, with a Bright’s brush.”
“I reckon you’ll be breaking out in ‘spots’ next,” laughed Rocks. “ThatVibristenonsense has been the ruin of young Dircks. He used to be quite second-rate, but since he crossed the Channel he squeezes his tubes on to his canvas, and it’s all streaks like a clown’s face.”
“Paint is neither mud nor sunlight,” interposed Butler, authoritatively. “It’s paint. Glory in it. Don’t pretend it’s silk or wood. According to the Academy, the highest art is to conceal paint.”
“Shop again!” groaned Cornpepper. “We’re an awfully narrow set, we artists—always girding at each other’s methods, though we’re all trying for the same thing.” Then, recalled by Butler’s frowning face to a sense of his position aschef d’école, a position he was not yet prepared to abdicate, he added, in more conciliatory accents: “All I object to in the Academy is its existence. No body of men has the right to say to the public,L’art, c’est moi. I don’t for a moment claim our work’s better than theirs, only—”
“That theirs is worse than ours,” suggested Jimmy.
“It’s all very well, but their ideal is smooth things,” persisted Butler, vehemently. “Smooth things in paint, in life, and in after-dinner speeches. I should have taken the Gold Medal in my year, and been spared years of grinding misery, if I had scraped out the life with a fish-shell or a razor-blade.”
Matt’s eyes flashed sympathetic admiration at him.
“Bother the Academy!” said Herbert, hastily. “Pass me the jug.”
“Schools of Arts are barracks,” went on Butler, his resentment unexhausted. “They would fuse all talents in one mould, and put together what God has put asunder. You may teach craft; but Art—never!”
“The idea of setting a subject, too,” said Greme, who was very proud of his private color-vision. “They go on a false analogy. Art can’t be got at by a competitive examination. It isn’t like Latin or Greek, or the use of the globes; it’s the expression of individual temperament. And it’s always such a rotten, stilted subject they set for the Gold Medal. I wonder what it is this year?”
“Strang’s at the Academy,” said Rapper. “He’ll tell you.”
“Oh, confound the Academy!” said Herbert, crossly.
“Something Biblical, you bet your boots,” said Jimmy. “It makes the fellows read the Bible, anyhow. But I must really go and meet my wife.”
“I heard it was about Nebu—” Greme began.
“Here, shut up, Greme!” interrupted Herbert. “Isn’t it time to sing songs?”
He glanced anxiously at his cousin; but that enthusiastic young man was gazing at Butler with a hypnotized stare, lost in an inward vision of the youthful rebel painting in his stable-loft.
“It’s time to drop shop,” responded Cornpepper, sharply. “I’ve been trying to get the talk off art for the last half-hour. I want to discuss whiskey, woman, and song. What’s the difference who wins the Gold Medal, or even the Prix de Rome? That’s the last one ever hears of them.”
“Oh no,” said Rapper; “all the professors at the Beaux-Arts took the Prix de Rome.”
“Did the men with guts?” inquired Cornpepper, scathingly, as he glared through his monocle at his contradictor. “Did the biggest of all, Puvis de Chavannes? Now, you fellows define style, but it never occurs to you that it is simply the perfect handling of your medium, whatever it be. What makes the decorations of Puvis de Chavannes so great? Merely that the gray, cool color scheme just suits the stone of the Pantheon. The decorations of Laurens would be finer as easel pictures. They make the building look smaller. Those of Chavannes ennoble it, give the sense of space and atmosphere. The medium forced to yield its best—that is style. There is one glory of silver-point and another of chalk or pencil. Fritz’s pictures are damn bad because they are in the wrong medium. To preserve a chronicle of the time is the function of black and white. Only by—”
“I really must go,” said Jimmy, starting up again. “As a black-and-white man I preserve a chronicle of the time, and it tells me it’s a quarter-past ten, and I have got to meet my wife at the Monico at ten.”
“Oh, rot! There’s lots of time.” And a dozen hands pushed Jimmy into his seat, and Carrie brought him more whiskey.
“I never could see how you square that with your principles, Cornpepper,” argued Gurney, the gyrator, with a thoughtful wrinkle of his elderly face. “Every painter’s got to do his own time. Posterity won’t want Erle-Smith’s Greek gods with ginger-bread flesh, and sickly sea-nymphs with wooden limbs. A cod’s head, well painted, is better than a Madonna.” Erle-Smith had been his last idolized Master before he came to worship at the shrine of Cornpepper.
“But there’s imagination in Erle-Smith,” Matt protested, deferentially.
Gurney snorted out quintessence of contempt in an indecorous monosyllable. “ ‘Bus-drivers and ballet-girls—that’s the modern artist’s duty to posterity. And his duty to his contemporaries is to find the poetry and beauty around ’em and teach ’em to see it. That’s why your ‘Chimney on Fire in Fitzroy Street’ is the picture of the year.”
“Oh yes!” Matt burst forth, in the idiom of Granger’s, “it’s jolly stunning!”
Cornpepper made amoueof disgust. “Are we never going to get away from shop?” he asked, desperately. “What has my chimney to do with the chronicles of the time? You chaps have always misunderstood me. You all go by what O’Brien writes of me in theSaturday Spectator. I do wish he wouldn’t interpret me. I wish he’d leave me alone. It’s bad enough to have the papers writing about one’s sayings and doings, it’s bad enough to be afraid of your own friends when, like Levison and Wilfred Smith, they happen to be journalists; but to be interpreted in leading articles by O’Brien is the crowning blow. What right has he to meddle with art? Why the hell doesn’t he stick to his last? If I painted that chimney—”
“Instead of sweeping it,” murmured Jimmy. “Do let me go and meet my wife.”
“—it was because I saw an opportunity for style, and for giving an epic sense of London,” little Cornpepper went on, fixing Jimmy with his basilisk glare. “I don’t care a twopenny damn about posterity or my contemporaries. I paint as I do everything else—to please myself.”
“We know you don’t please anybody else,” retorted Jimmy. “Imustbe off.”
“Well, black and white is going to be the art of the future, anyhow,” said Butler. “Art is dead in England. Nobody disputes that.”
“Of course not,” said Cornpepper. “Painting’s a lost art. Not one of us can touch the old men—Watts, Millais, Whistler. No; we none of us can paint.”
“But English art’ll revive through black and white,” Butler maintained. “It’s the art of the people. I wish I had discovered that in the days when I refused to do it.”
“Black and white is not the art of the future, but the future of Art,” said Herbert. “Nothing else pays.”
“It’s surer than anything else,” admitted Gurney. “And a paper gives you a far wider appeal than a gallery. It’s the only way of elevating the people.” His eye lit up. He was meditating a new departure.
Matt pricked up his ears; Herbert had not yet repaid him the twenty-five pounds, borrowed for a day or two, and in any case he felt he must soon be earning money. In the stagnation of the picture market, of which he heard on every side, and on which the talk fell now, it was at once comforting and distressing to hear of another source of income. Black and white had scarcely entered into his thoughts before; he looked upon it as a degraded commercial form of art—a thing manufactured for the moment in obedience to editorial instructions. Perhaps if times had changed, if editors allowed the artist to express himself through their pages, one might think of it; otherwise it was too horrible. Art to order! The spirit whose essence was freedom chained to a cash-box! It were as well—and honester—to be a cobbler like William Gregson. He shuddered violently, remembering his sufferings as a portrait-painter in Nova Scotia, and very resolved to starve sooner than repeat those degrading efforts to please customers.
“I don’t talk about it,” said Cornpepper, after ten minutes of general tragic anecdotage, from which he gathered there was quite a rush into black and white—a subject concerning which both the journalists seemed fully posted. “I just go on working; I don’t care whether I sell or not. The dealers I hate and despise; they have no measure of Art but what it’ll fetch. I will have nothing to do with them. The world will come to me sooner or later. You never hearmegrumbling about the market.”
“The more I hear of the troubles of you chaps,” said Rapper, “the more surprised I am that I, with nothing like your talents, should be the one to get the commissions, as if I had any need of the shiners. I’m going to Birmingham again next week to do a municipal duffer in his robes. Even when I studied art in Brussels—”
“The real reason we’re coming to black and white,” broke in the spectacled Scotchman, “is that we’re all born color-blind. The dulness of our surroundings, the long centuries of homes without decorations, with unbeautiful furniture and crockery, have told, and now—”
There was a roar of laughter. “Stow that, Mack!” cried Rapper.
“You can’t keep Mack off shop,” cried Cornpepper. “I’m sick of this talk about principles. Art, life, nature, realism, the decorative! The decorative indeed! For what is Art? It isn’t studio-pictures, it’s—”
“It’s half-past ten,” groaned Jimmy, trying to shake off the detaining hands of his friends. “Where’s Sandstone? Why hasn’t he turned up? He goes my way.”
“I don’t know,” said Cornpepper. “He’s been quarrelling with the man who published his lithographs. What a quarrelsome beggar he is! I believe he’s quarrelled with Clinch now. By-the-way, whereisClinch? He said he was coming.”
Everybody supposed simultaneously that Clinch was drunk, and their light-hearted acceptance of the idea jarred upon Matt, who again became conscious of a curious aloofness from the company, from which he seemed as cut off on the moral side as from the despised bourgeoisie on the artistic side. What a strange isolation! The thought made him feel lonely, and then—by reaction—strong.
Even Rocks laughed. “I prefer Philip drunk to Philip sober,” he said. “It’s the only time he uses drawing-room English.”
“How can I sup with my wife at the Monico?” persisted Jimmy, plaintively. “The beastly place closes at eleven on Sundays.”
“Oh, the English Sunday!” said Herbert. “How can you have art and the English Sunday together? You talk of the art of the people, Curtis. The real national art of England is oratorio, and Elijah may not appear on the stage except in evening dress.”
“Don’t talk to me of the middle classes,” groaned Cornpepper. “They will never be saved till Boccaccio is read aloud in every parlor on Sunday afternoons.”
“Don’t be an ass, Teddy,” said Butler. “You’ll be moral some day.”
“I can get my stockings darned without marrying,” retorted Cornpepper, with an irritating laugh, and Butler reddened angrily. He had married a slipshod, artistic creature who neglected his shirt-buttons, and the thrust rankled.
“Mywife’s waiting at the Monico,” complained Jimmy, in a droll sing-song.
“Oh, bother! Carrie’s just making the coffee,” replied the host.
“I won’t have coffee,” said Jimmy; “I never mix drinks.”
The coffee came round, and with it sandwiches, and broke up the talk into duets and trios. Cornpepper planned a house-boat party for the summer to pick up nautical models and paint the river. Matt’s envious consciousness that he was too poor and too obscure to share in these delightful artistic experiences gave him a new and more disagreeable sense of aloofness. Then the proceedings became musical and remained so till the next morning, their refusal to depart before the advent of which the guests melodiously declared.
As the party was breaking up, Cornpepper cried: “Oh, I was nearly forgetting.”
“What?” said Jimmy. “To offer a prayer?”
“No, to take up a collection,” retorted Cornpepper, his eye-glass gleaming with joy of themot. “Lily’s broken her leg.”
“OurLily?” asked Greme. “But she doesn’t sit now—she’s on the stage.”
“I know; she’s dislocated her ankle, and can’t dance.”
“She never could dance,” observed Herbert. “How ever did she get an engagement?”
“Browney put her into his types of English beauty,” replied Cornpepper. “But she’s a good girl all the same, and she hasn’t got any money. I’ll lead off with five bob.”
In a few minutes two guineas were collected, Matt giving half a crown, which he could ill spare. As the men left, Cornpepper stood at the door exchanging a confidential word with each. “By Jove, you didn’t say a word during the whole discussion, Mossop,” he said, as he shook hands with a brown-bearded, middle-aged Scotchman, whose cranium bulged curiously at the side.
Mossop took his pipe out of his mouth and looked meditatively at the stem. “If art could be talked, it wouldn’t want to be painted,” he said, gravely. “Good-night.”
“Good-night, old chap. Ah, good-night, Wilfred!” said Cornpepper to the journalist. “Understand, this evening is private. I don’t object to your quoting what I or anybody else said—my opinions are common property—but, damn it, if you mention who were here in any of your papers you’ll never cross my door-step again. You don’t mind my frankness? Good-night, old man.”
“Good-night, Cornpepper,” said Herbert. “I’ll let the governor know about those things of yours,” he added, in a low tone.
“That’s a good fellow. He won’t regret taking me up. Mind you mention I’m not unreasonable—I’m open to an offer. I’m awfully glad to have made your acquaintance. Good-night, old chap. Ah, good-night, Levison!” he said, shaking hands with the other journalist. “Now, please do understand that what passes at my gatherings is strictly confidential. If you can earn half a dollar by mentioning who were here—Rocks is rather a lion just now—I’m not the man to stand in your light. But I won’t have what one says in private reported, and that’s straight. Good-night, old fellow.”
Two o’clock boomed from a neighboring steeple. “Good-night, Teddy,” said Jimmy, the last man to go. He added, lugubriously: “I’vestillgot to meet my wife.” Then, as he caught sight of himself in the hall-rack mirror, the gleam in his eye grew droller. “I’m going home in my own hat and coat,” he grumbled. “I’m sober.”
It was delicious to breathe the balmy night air after the smoky, alcoholic atmosphere of the studio. Rocks walked a little way with Herbert and Matt under the silent stars before they came upon a hansom.
“Are you also an artist?” he asked Matt.
“I hope to be,” said Matt, gravely, “but it’s awfully confusing to know what’s right. They all talk so cleverly, and they all seem to be right.” He was still worried about formulæ, not having discovered that there are only men.
Rocks emitted a short laugh. “Don’t you bother your head with theories, my boy,” he said, laying his hand kindly on Matt’s shoulder. “You just paint. Every man does what hecan, and runs down what he can’t. After all, Art is very old; there are no great sensational reforms left, like West’s discarding the toga for the clothes of the period. Theplein airschool is this century’s contribution; after that there can only be permutations and combinations of the old. What is new in the Azure Art Gallery is not good, and what is good is not new.”
“C’est fini!” said Herbert. “That’s what people always say till genius comes along. My belief is, going by literature and music, that painting hasn’t said its last word.”
“It may come back to its first,” admitted Rocks, laughing. “Things go in cycles. At present the last word of Art is azure.”
“But thereareazure shadows?” said Matt.
“Yes; sunshine on a yellow sand gives a suspicion of blue and violet where the yellow light is cut off. But you exaggerate it and call that a revolution.”
“Yes, but this intensified violet, made on your canvas out of light pigments, does produce the illusion of sunlight,” argued Matt. “And, to my mind, it doesn’t falsify nature or values one bit, because in bright sunlight the eye really sees the dazzle, not the values.”
“Perhaps you young men see the new ultra-shades at the end of the spectrum,” said Rocks, a little annoyed to find Matt restive under his patronizing geniality. “Apelles had only four colors, but his reputation has survived. It is the craze for novelty that makes these fads catch on.”
“On the contrary,” retorted Matt, hotly, “people are so accustomed to the false they have no eyes for the true. It’s the old fable of the man with the pig under his cloak. I read somewhere that in Sir Joshua’s day it was the convention to paint portraits with hats under their arm, and that Sir Joshua, having to paint a man with his hat on, automatically put a second hat under his arm. If he hadn’t found it out, I don’t believe the public would have. And weren’t the 1830 men laughed at in France, though now they’re thrown in the teeth of the Impressionists? It’s always the same tale—the revolutionary is always wrong till he’s right. Treason never prospers. What’s the reason? When ’tis successful, ’tis nolonger treason.’ Truth and light—that’s the right formula of landscape-painting.”
Herbert laughed. “My stars, Matt!” he cried, gayly, “that’s the longest speech I’ve ever heard you make! Is Cornpepper’s whiskey so much better than mine?”
It was, perhaps, not so much the whiskey as the reaction after the long, respectful self-repression of the evening. But Rocks caught fire in his turn.
“Revolution!” he cried, scornfully. “Doing things literally by halves—there’sa revolution,there’sa revelation for you. The new art! If the modern young man can’t draw, color’s the thing; and if he’s got no sense of color, color is vulgar. And even if he doesn’t offend my sense of line by figures that couldn’t stand and limbs that don’t fit on he won’t finish his work. He leaves it half-cooked to show hischic; to take it further would be Academic. It’s mere notes for pictures, not pictures. And even at that half the ideas come from Paris, like our ladies’ gowns; if you ran over there as often as I do you could put your finger on most of these azure fellows’ inspirations. If they would only search like the French! If they would only really imitate their Monet! That’s a real worker for you—how he slaves at his hay-stacks! More science than art to my thinking; but how he searches! These chaps are such dwarfs. Think of Leonardo, think of Raphael, think of Millet—real men, with big brains and big souls. No; this Azure Art Club’s a set of bounders and bad draughtsmen. There’s too much mutual admiration; it prevents men getting on; they’ll find themselves stranded with a half-talent.”
“And hasn’t Butler got a big soul?” cried Matt, boiling over. “And hasn’t Cornpepper got a big brain?”
“Cornpepper?—oh, but this is shop again. He’s a good little chap at bottom, but he’s succeeding too young.” And in Rocks’s hearty guffaw the storm-clouds rolled away.
“You mustn’t fancy I agree with him altogether, Mr. Rocks,” said Matt, simmering down in his turn. “About the morality of Art, now, isn’t there—”
“Ah, there’s the Methodist parson again,” interrupted Herbert, laughing. “Hang it all, man, you’re not a virgin, are you?”
“No, of course not,” faltered Matt, mendaciously. He went on in haste: “There’sa cab!”
“No, I hate four-wheelers!” said Herbert. “Then why the devil do you always talk such rot? Hansom!”
“They don’t seem as united as the papers make out, anyway,” said Matt, in shame-faced evasion. He was ashamed of the lie, and ashamed of its not being true.
“No, there’s noesprit de corpsamong artists,” returned Rocks. “People always imagine there are schools. But in London there’s only the camaraderie of success and the camaraderie of unsuccess. Good-night.”
“Can’t we give you a lift?” said Herbert.
“No, thanks; I’m successful,” rejoined Rocks, and went off chuckling.
“I wishIwas,” Herbert grumbled to Matt. “Fancy not being able to join that house-boat party, but to be stuck down in town by the Old Gentleman to paint Nebuchadnezzar. I wish I was you, Matt.”
Matt was on the point of consoling him by confessing he was on the brink of ruin, but that would have seemed like dunning a friend, to whom he owed so much, for the twenty-five pounds, so he postponed the inevitable explanation.
Itwas midsummer, and everybody who was anybody was pent in the sweltering city.
“The sort of weather to make one want to be a figure-model,” Herbert said, wearily, as he flicked finically at “Daniel before Nebuchadnezzar,” now well on its way to completion. “But it seems to suit the Old Gentleman. You might laugh, Matt. I’m too languid myself.”
Matt did not reply; he was leaning against the marble mantel-piece, pale and perspiring.
“What do you think is his latest move?” pursued Herbert. “Though that’s rather a bull, for the mischief is that he refuses to go on our annual autumn jaunt abroad, lest it should interfere with Daniel and Nebby. However, I am to have a horse of my own, and that’s some consolation. Talking of horses, how do you like Nebby’s left leg? You see I’ve repainted it as you marked it.” He got up, walked backward, and surveyed the picture approvingly, brush in hand. “By Jove, it’s coming on splendidly! I could imagine I was in the palace. Thereissomething in following Nature, after all. The creative part lies in the invention and color.... What’s the matter with you this morning, Matt? You don’t say a word. Are you sunstruck? or moonstruck?”
“Both,” said Matt, with a ghastly smile.
“Why, what’s up?” Herbert scrutinized his cousin’s face for the first time.
Matt looked towards the model.
“You know his English is limited,” Herbert remarked, reassuringly. “Unless you are bent on talking Arabic.” But Matt still hesitated. At last, as in desperation, he extracted a letter from his breast-pocket and tendered it to Herbert, who took it wonderingly, cast a glance at it, and frowned.
“The scoundrel!” he said. “How dare he send it in so soon? I shall never recommend him to anybody again.”
“It isn’t soon,” corrected Matt; “it’s more than three months.”
“You’re not going to take any notice of him yet?”
“Oh, I must.”
“Oh, nonsense! Why, the shock would drive him silly. He only sends it in as a matter of form.”
“I don’t like not to pay.”
“All right,” said Herbert, sulkily; “only you’ll spoil the market for us poor devils who’re not Crœsuses, that’s all. But don’t give him the fifteen guineas at once; give him five on account.”
Matt struggled with himself. “I can’t even do that,” he faltered at last, “unless you can manage to pay me something.”
“Oh, by Jove!” said Herbert, whistling lugubriously. “I’d forgotten you were among my creditors. But I’m stony-broke just now. So the old scoundrel will have to wait, after all. Ha! ha! ha! When do you expect to be flush again? I suppose you draw interest on bonds or something. All Americans do.”
“I—I don’t,” said Matt, his head drooping shame-stricken. Then, with the courage of despair, he burst out, “I’ve only got tenpence in the world; that’s a fact.”
Herbert gave a shrill whistle of surprise and dismay, and let himself drop upon his painting-stool. “Here, go and play a little, Haroun al Raschid,” he called over to the model; and Nebuchadnezzar, shedding his purpureal splendors, cantered joyously down-stairs.
“Now then,” he said, sternly. “What in the devil have you been up to, my Methodist parson? Gambling, horse-racing, women?”
Matt shook his head, a wan smile struggling with his shame-faced expression. He already felt happier—the false atmosphere in which he had moved was dissipated forever. “I’ve never had any money to lose,” he confessed. “I only saved up fifty or sixty pounds to study in London for a year, and now it’s all gone—unless you can manage to repay me the twenty-five pounds.”
“Well, of all the—” cried Herbert, and did not finish the mysterious phrase. He leaned his elbows on his knees, and supporting his face upon his palms, stared severely at his cousin. “So this is the man who thinks Art should be moral,” he said, half musingly, half indignantly. “To go and let us all think you were a capitalist! And to let me in for borrowing money of a man who was practically a pauper! Why, I must have taken almost your last penny!”
Matt, flushing afresh under his reproachful gaze, did not attempt to deny it.
“Well, if that’s your idea of cousinly behavior, or even decent behavior—” said Herbert, witheringly.
“I—I didn’t mean to deceive you,” Matt stammered, apologetically. “You all took it for granted I was well-to-do. AllI said was I had money enough to go along with, and so I thought I had.”
“Yes, but when I asked you for the pony, you consented at once. I gave you an opportunity to explain, but instead of that you intensified the original false impression.”
Matt was silent.
“And now you’ve put me into the wretched position of owing money, which I can’t pay, to a poor relation from whom I never would have borrowed it, had he been frank and truthful.”
Now both were silent, meditating the painful situation.
“Then you’ve got no money at all?” said Herbert at last, in stern accents, in which a note of astonishment still lingered.
Matt shook his head. His throat felt parched. “Unless you can pay me,” he murmured.
Herbert’s face softened, his tones became sympathetic.
“Then what are you going to do?” he asked, anxiously.
Matt was touched by the transition from reproach to solicitude.
“Oh, I shall manage somehow,” he said, huskily. “I don’t want to worry you—you’ve always been very good to me.”
“Yes, that’s all very well, but suppose you starve?” said Herbert, sharply.
“Oh, I shall find something to do,” said Matt. “In fact, I’ve already done some illustrations for theChristian Home, though they haven’t paid yet. I wouldn’t have told you if it hadn’t been for this tailor’s bill.”
“Confound him!” cried Herbert, savagely. “I’ll never recommend him another customer as long as I live.” He started promenading the studio angrily, muttering maledictions against the snip as the source of all the mischief.
“What a pity the governor won’t touch a new man’s work!” he said, pausing.
“Oh, I’d rather not trouble him,” said Matt, shrinking from a supplementary explanation with the Vandyke beard.
Herbert resumed his promenade with knitted brow. “I wonder if Drücker would take them. If you did sea-pieces—”
“Oh, please don’t worry,” pleaded Matt, concerned at his cousin’s anxiety. “I dare say I shall fall on my feet.”
“Yes, but while falling? Tenpence isn’t enough to fall with. You don’t owe any money into the bargain, I hope.”
Matt turned red. “Three weeks’ rent,” he murmured.
“How much is that?”
Matt shrank weakly from shredding his last rag of dignity.
“Not much,” he said. “She hasn’t said anything yet; I always paid her so regularly. But I don’t see any reason to despair; it looks as if I can make my bread and cheese by black and white. They were all agreed that that was the most paying kind of Art. You remember that night at Cornpepper’s?”
“Yes, I remember,” said Herbert, curtly. “But I can’t let you go away with tenpence in your pocket. I wonder if I’ve got anything.” He drew a handful of silver and copper coins out of his trousers-pocket. “Eight and fourpence halfpenny,” he announced, dolefully. “And I shall want seven for Haroun al Raschid this evening. I told you I was stony-broke. I suppose it’s no use offering you one and fourpence halfpenny.”
“No; thenyou’dhave nothing,” said Matt. “Don’t bother.”
“Oh, but I must bother. I wish I knew how to raise a little cash for you to keep you going till you get work.”
The grave anxiety of his tones troubled Matt sympathetically. He was pained to see Herbert so distressed. Suddenly his eyes fell on Herbert’s battalion of boots ranged against the wall—brown boots, black boots, patent boots, riding boots, shoes, slippers—and a wild, impish idea flew into his brain, breathing malicious suggestion, and even kindling a flash of resentment: “Why should not Herbert sell some of those serried boots if he was really in earnest?” But the impish idea was extruded in a moment. It savored of ungenerous cynicism, and, in so far as it meditated diminishing Herbert’s wardrobe, touched indecency; it was impossible to imagine Herbert with only a single pair of breeches or without sub-varieties of ornamental shoes. He moved in a large atmosphere of discriminate waistcoats and superfluous neckties.
“I’ll give you an introduction to Drücker, if you like,” said Herbert. “I dare say you have some little things by you.”
“I—I’ve already been to Drücker,” Matt admitted. “A fellowat Grainger’s told me about him. But he won’t look at my work.”
There was another embarrassing pause. Matt’s eyes wandered distractedly towards Herbert’s boots. The spotless battalion fascinated him; the buttons winked maliciously.
“How about portraits?” said Herbert, suddenly. “I thought you did portraits in Nova Scotia. Was that also—was that, er—true?”
Matt did not at once answer; it had suddenly occurred to him that there was probably another battalion of boots in Herbert’s dressing-room. When Herbert’s question at last penetrated to his consciousness, he replied with a start:
“Oh yes. Perhaps I may get sitters here, too. The only thing that really worries me is that bill.”
“Oh, well, if that’s all, you can make your mind easy. He can’t touch you; you’ve no money.” Herbert laughed gleefully. “It’ll serve him right, the scoundrel!”
“But he can put me in prison,” said Matt, blanching at the mere idea; “and that I could never survive.”
Herbert’s laugh became more boisterous.
“Oh, you innocent!” he gasped. “We’re not living in the dark ages. A man without a farthing is the king of creation. Nothing can touch him.”
“Oh, but they put people in prison for debt in Nova Scotia,” said Matt, surprised.
“Really?” ejaculated Herbert, surprised in his turn. “Well, I had no idea the country was so uncivilized as that. No, don’t funk. And even suppose youwereput into quod for debt? What then? Why, debt is the breath of the artistic nostril. Read your Bankruptcy Court daily in your paper, and cheer up, d’ye hear? Why should you take other people’s worries on your shoulders?”
“Other people’s?” quoth Matt, puzzled.
“Yes; the worry is for the tailor who can’t get his money, not for you,” explained Herbert, with the gay smile that showed his white teeth.
“Imustpay him,” Matt repeated, stolidly, and, lunch coming up, he took himself off in spite of every protest. Now that Herbertknew him in his true colors, his pride would not endure sitting as a pauper at the mid-day banquet, though he had eaten nothing all day except a halfpenny roll. He saw Haroun al Raschid in the street luxuriating in the sultry sunshine, and sent him up to luncheon, then dragged himself along the hot pavements to his back room, brightened now with unsaleable sketches, and threw himself upon the little iron bed, and abandoned himself to bitter reflection. Why, indeed, could he not take life as lightly as the artistic temperament demanded?
He had already tried other dealers than Drücker, with as little success. The Irishman at Grainger’s was wont to boast that he always sold his work by pawning it. Matt had essayed to imitate him, speculating the outlay for a gold frame; but either his face betrayed him to the pawnbrokers, or his picture, and it eventually went for less than the price of the frame. And—O vanity of resolutions and ideals!—his horror at doing Art to order had dwindled daily. In the actual imminence of starvation, in the impossibility of sending any further subsidies to his family, he had broached to other students his desire to get on this or that paper, but could gain no sympathetic information from them, except that they had already refused the positions he coveted. On the strength of some specimens sent by post he had been permitted to illustrate five short stories for theChristian Home, but only two had yet been published, and none had yet been paid for. And so the dregs of his savings had dripped away, slowly, slowly, like honey from an inverted pot, more and more slowly the less there remained, till only twenty drops (for he had come down to counting in halfpennies) divided him from starvation. The arrears of rent had been an agony more gnawing than that at his stomach, and now this tailor’s bill had come as the crowning catastrophe.
Yet none of his bitterness was for Herbert, despite the impish suggestions of the buttons; he did not even blame himself much. In a sense he had had value for his money, he had bought experience, if not quite of the kind for which he had saved up his dollars. But for those frightful fifteen guineas he might have weathered starvation-point, even though by the practice of a form of art he had not contemplated. To pawnor sell the unfortunate clothes would be but to cut himself off from gentility without surmounting the crisis. His hopeless reverie was interrupted by a tap at the door, and the landlady entered, bearing a letter. He jumped up from the bed in excitement—it must be his check for the drawings. But the letter bore an American stamp, and was in Billy’s writing, and he tore it open, fearful of new evils.