Dear Matt,—I write not because there is anything fresh, but because there isn’t. Life here is so dreary and monotonous I can no longer endure it. It isn’t my health, for that is better, and the fits are very rare now, thank God; but sometimes I think I shall go mad or cut my throat if something doesn’t happen. Don’t you think I could come over and stay with you? You’ve seen so much of the world, and always enjoyed yourself, and I have always been tied down to one wretched little village. The people are so dismally religious, and between you and me I am losing faith in everything, the more I think of it, and how bad the good people are. Deacon Hailey and Ruth have quarrelled, and she has gone away to the States. She came to see us before she left—she is just lovely—I like to picture her before me. I should not be much extra expense, dear Matt, because you could deduct something from the amount you are soon going to send us monthly. I have mentioned this to Abner, and he is willing. I am very little use here in the fields, and in London I might perhaps earn money by writing. I feel I have it in me to write tales; I have already written one called “The Whale Hunters,” and another called “In the Burning Desert.” I do so long to be famous. We should be a pair, dear Matt. Do you think you could get these tales printed in a paper? I should not want money at first. I did not like to send them to you without asking, as the postage would be heavy, and the winter has been so unusually protracted we are delayed with the crops. Do please send me some books if you can; I have read everything in the school library twice over. Novels and books of travel are what I like best. The last we heard from Halifax was that mother was less violent. Do write and say I may come, and if you can let me have the fare I will repay you out of my tales. Abner and Harriet send their love, and so do all the boys and girls (Amy is getting quite podgy), and with the same from me, I remain,Your affectionate brother,Billy.P.S.—Don’t you think “William Strang” would look fine on the cover of a book?
Dear Matt,—I write not because there is anything fresh, but because there isn’t. Life here is so dreary and monotonous I can no longer endure it. It isn’t my health, for that is better, and the fits are very rare now, thank God; but sometimes I think I shall go mad or cut my throat if something doesn’t happen. Don’t you think I could come over and stay with you? You’ve seen so much of the world, and always enjoyed yourself, and I have always been tied down to one wretched little village. The people are so dismally religious, and between you and me I am losing faith in everything, the more I think of it, and how bad the good people are. Deacon Hailey and Ruth have quarrelled, and she has gone away to the States. She came to see us before she left—she is just lovely—I like to picture her before me. I should not be much extra expense, dear Matt, because you could deduct something from the amount you are soon going to send us monthly. I have mentioned this to Abner, and he is willing. I am very little use here in the fields, and in London I might perhaps earn money by writing. I feel I have it in me to write tales; I have already written one called “The Whale Hunters,” and another called “In the Burning Desert.” I do so long to be famous. We should be a pair, dear Matt. Do you think you could get these tales printed in a paper? I should not want money at first. I did not like to send them to you without asking, as the postage would be heavy, and the winter has been so unusually protracted we are delayed with the crops. Do please send me some books if you can; I have read everything in the school library twice over. Novels and books of travel are what I like best. The last we heard from Halifax was that mother was less violent. Do write and say I may come, and if you can let me have the fare I will repay you out of my tales. Abner and Harriet send their love, and so do all the boys and girls (Amy is getting quite podgy), and with the same from me, I remain,
Your affectionate brother,
Billy.
P.S.—Don’t you think “William Strang” would look fine on the cover of a book?
Matt suddenly felt faint and dizzy. Raising his eyes, he perceived that the landlady had not gone, that she was effervescing with unuttered speech.
“I am very sorry, Mrs. Lipchild,” he said, “I thought that your rent would have been in this letter.”
The lank, elderly woman looked grieved.
“Lor’ bless you, sir,” said she, “I’m not worryin’ about the rent. Don’t I know an honest face when I see it? Us landladies are always made out so bad. We’re always stealin’ the lodgers’ provisions and what not, and we can’t speak proper. I should like to see a book written on the other side. Why, last year I had an old maid in this very room—she took her meals here, and said I wasn’t to charge for attendance because she’d be always out; but bless me if the bell didn’t go tinkely-tinkely every minute, like an alarm-clock gone wrong in its inside. Believe me, Mr. Strang, it isn’t the lodgers as is always taken in. I’ve often wished my son was a writer instead of an artist; I’d get him to write the book.”
“Your son is an artist?” said Matt, in astonishment.
“Yes, Mr. Strang, though not near so clever as you. I could show you some of his work if you didn’t mind.”
“Oh, I should like to see it,” said Matt, half amused at this unexpected interlude, though his temples throbbed with a shooting pain.
“Would you mind comin’ down into the parlor, sir?”
“With pleasure,” said Matt.
He followed his landlady down the narrow stairs into the musty little room, resplendent with oleographs and a gilt mirror and two fruit-shades.
“There,” said Mrs. Lipchild, proudly. “Me and my husband in uniform.”
Matt surveyed the large colored presentments of Mr. and Mrs. Lipchild in their oval mounts, further astonished to discover that his landlord was a policeman.
“What did he do them with?” asked Matt, rather puzzled.
“With his own hand,” replied the proud mother. “They were taken quite plain, but he colored them lifelike, as you see. They would have charged half a crown more each, but for a shilling he bought a book telling him how to do it himself. My cousin Bob, who is in the Post-office, said he ought to be an artist, but I wouldn’t let him give up his place at Brown
“ ‘LOR’ BLESS YOU, SIR,’ SAID SHE, ‘I’M NOT WORRYIN’ ABOUT THE RENT’ ”“ ‘LOR’ BLESS YOU, SIR,’ SAID SHE, ‘I’M NOT WORRYIN’ ABOUT THE RENT’ ”
Brothers. He’s in the grocery department, and earnin’ good money, and I’ve seen such a heap of artists sittin’ on the pavement, with the risk any moment of the rain washin’ all the pictures out; don’t you think I was right, sir?”
“Quite right,” said Matt, heartily.
Mrs. Lipchild thereupon produced a bottle of brandy and what she called a “seedy-cake” from a cupboard under a sideboard, and insisted on Matt’s partaking of the same. To refuse would pain her, to accept would refresh him, so he accepted. In the conversation which ensued it transpired that Mrs. Lipchild’s daughter was about to marry a young man from Brown Brothers (haberdashery department), that the young couple were now furnishing, and that it had occurred to Mrs. Lipchild that they might get their parlor pictures from Matt instead of from a shop, if they could get them any cheaper.
So Matt and his art patroness remounted again to the bedroom studio and haggled over prices, Mrs. Lipchild pointing out that his pictures were far inferior to shop pictures, not only by their unsympathetic subjects, but by their absence of frames and glass, and that she could get much bigger sizes than any of his for five shillings apiece. But as it came to be understood that ready money would not be required, and that the price was to be reckoned off the rent, Mrs. Lipchild ultimately departed in possession of a month’s worth of pictures—six of the prettiest landscapes and ladies in the collection, with Rapper’s “Library” thrown in. The poetic street-scenes she scorned, much to Matt’s relief, for he set no value on the earlier Nova Scotian work she had carried off.
This was Matt’s first sale of pictures in the great Metropolis of Art.
Considerably exhilarated by the change in his fortunes, and revived by the brandy and the “seedy-cake,” he reviewed the situation again, proof even against Billy’s letter, which he put by for later consideration. He found himself actually smiling, for a phrase of Cornpepper’s kept vibrating in his brain—“Art’s neither moral nor immoral, any more than it’s lunar or calendar.” Mrs. Lipchild’s last words had been: “Very well, we’ll reckon it a month,” and he wondered whimsically whether the month was to be lunar or calendar.
Under the impulse of these gayer sentiments, he resolved to raise money by pawning whatever he could part with, and by persisting in the search for an adventurous dealer; and reflecting that, after all, the tailor would be satisfied with an instalment, he wound himself up to the pitch of applying to Herbert by letter, though he could not bring himself to a verbal request.
My dear Herbert,—I am sorry to bother you again, but if you could let me have only five guineas to offer the tailor I should be very grateful. I hope soon to find work, or sell some things; and you will be pleased to hear that I have got over the difficulty with the rent—at least for the moment.Yours sincerely,Matt Strang.P.S.—Don’t put yourself out if you cannot. You have been very kind to me, and I shall never forget it. I dare say I shall pull through somehow.”
My dear Herbert,—I am sorry to bother you again, but if you could let me have only five guineas to offer the tailor I should be very grateful. I hope soon to find work, or sell some things; and you will be pleased to hear that I have got over the difficulty with the rent—at least for the moment.
Yours sincerely,
Matt Strang.
P.S.—Don’t put yourself out if you cannot. You have been very kind to me, and I shall never forget it. I dare say I shall pull through somehow.”
Matt carried this request to the pillar-box through the stuffy splendor of a summer night in Holborn back streets. As he heard the slight thud of the letter in the box he had a sense of something achieved, and had no compunction in spending one of his nine remaining pennies on his supper of “baked fagot” in a muggy pork-butcher’s shop. Nightmare, followed by a giddy uprising with furred tongue and aching forehead, was the sequel of this devil-may-care diet, and early in the afternoon the nightmare seemed to resume its riot in the guise of a reply from Herbert.
Dear Matt,—What in the name of all that is unholy made you send that letter to my house instead of to the club? There’s been a devil of a row. The Old Gentleman opened the letter. He pretends he did so without noticing, as it came mixed up with his, and so few come for me to the house. When I got down to breakfast the mater was in tears and the Old Gentleman in blazes. Of course, he’d misread it altogether—imagined you wanted to borrow money instead of to get it back (isn’t it comical? It’s almost an idea for a farce for our dramatic society), and insisted you had been draining me all along (you did write you were sorry to bother me again, you old duffer). Of course I did my best to dispel the misconception, but it was no use my swearing till all was blue that this was the first application, he wouldn’t believe a word of it. He said he had had his suspicions all along, and he called the mater to witness that the first time he saw you in the shop he said you were a rogue. And at last the mater, who’d been standingup for you—I never thought she had so much backbone of her own—was converted, and confessed with tears that you had been here pretty nigh every day and swore you should never set foot here again, and the Old Gentleman dilated on the pretty return you had made for his kindness (sucking his boy’s blood, he called it, in an unusual burst of poetry), and he likewise offered some general observations on the comparative keenness of a serpent’s tooth and ingratitude. And that’s how it stands. There’s nothing to be done, I fear, but to let the thing blow over—he’ll cool down after a time. Meanwhile, you will have to write to me at the club if you want to meet me. I am awfully sorry, as I enjoyed your visits immensely. Do let me know if I can do anything for you. I’m in a frightful financial mess, but I might give you introductions here or there. I know chaps on papers and that sort of thing. I am sure you have sufficient talent to get along—and you can snap your fingers at creditors, as you haven’t got anything they can seize, and can flit any day you like. I wish I was you. With every good wish,Yours always,Herbert Strang.
Dear Matt,—What in the name of all that is unholy made you send that letter to my house instead of to the club? There’s been a devil of a row. The Old Gentleman opened the letter. He pretends he did so without noticing, as it came mixed up with his, and so few come for me to the house. When I got down to breakfast the mater was in tears and the Old Gentleman in blazes. Of course, he’d misread it altogether—imagined you wanted to borrow money instead of to get it back (isn’t it comical? It’s almost an idea for a farce for our dramatic society), and insisted you had been draining me all along (you did write you were sorry to bother me again, you old duffer). Of course I did my best to dispel the misconception, but it was no use my swearing till all was blue that this was the first application, he wouldn’t believe a word of it. He said he had had his suspicions all along, and he called the mater to witness that the first time he saw you in the shop he said you were a rogue. And at last the mater, who’d been standingup for you—I never thought she had so much backbone of her own—was converted, and confessed with tears that you had been here pretty nigh every day and swore you should never set foot here again, and the Old Gentleman dilated on the pretty return you had made for his kindness (sucking his boy’s blood, he called it, in an unusual burst of poetry), and he likewise offered some general observations on the comparative keenness of a serpent’s tooth and ingratitude. And that’s how it stands. There’s nothing to be done, I fear, but to let the thing blow over—he’ll cool down after a time. Meanwhile, you will have to write to me at the club if you want to meet me. I am awfully sorry, as I enjoyed your visits immensely. Do let me know if I can do anything for you. I’m in a frightful financial mess, but I might give you introductions here or there. I know chaps on papers and that sort of thing. I am sure you have sufficient talent to get along—and you can snap your fingers at creditors, as you haven’t got anything they can seize, and can flit any day you like. I wish I was you. With every good wish,
Yours always,
Herbert Strang.
Matt took this letter more stoically than he would have predicted. He even grinned like a Red Indian at the stake. In truth, he was already so prostrated by illness, hunger, and above all by the heat, that there was nothing left in him to be prostrated. He crawled out soon after the receipt of the letter, and recklessly bought a halfpenny currant loaf, which he washed down with water.
Thesummer rolled heavily along, bringing strange new experiences to Matt Strang, and strange glimpses of other art-worlds than Herbert’s. For he did not starve, though Herbert had gone quite out of his life, and he had none with whom to exchange the thoughts of youth.
Two pounds ten shillings lent on his dress-suit staved off hunger and his tailor (who got the pounds), till, by the aid of the landlady’s son’s book, he found out how to tint photographs, and earned sixpences and shillings by coloring cartes-de-visiteand cabinets for cheap touting photographers, censoriously critical and given to refusing the work of hours. By-and-by theChristian Hometook him to its hearth, situate at the summit of a cobwebbed ramshackle staircase in Bolt Court, and paid him seven and sixpence for a half-page illustration of an unworldly serial. “Pay-day” was a delightful weekly emotion, the staff adjourning to a public-house in Fleet Street to drink one another’s health and their own damnation. Matt was forced to join them because Dick Gattel, the puffy-faced author of the spiritual romance he was illustrating (“A Godly Atonement”), insisted on standing treat, declaring with odd oaths that he’d never been so well interpreted before by any blooming paper-smudger. He also initiated Matt into the secrets of his craft, summing up in a formula the experience of a quarter of a century of story-writing. “Emotion for the penny papers, excitement for the halfpenny, self-sacrifice for the religious.” Strange impecunious beings gathered in this public-house or outside it, uncouth, unclean, unshaven; many had drifted down from society, from the universities, from the army, from the navy, with reserve forces from India and America, the flotsam of life’s wreckage, and they consoled themselves by babbling of the seamy side of the successful, rolling under their tongues the money these others were making, and parading a confident familiarity with their doings and their pass-books. Matt shuddered at the thought that he might one day become even as these—the damned-before-death. There was another artist on the staff—a thick-set German, whose wife was wont to waylay him on “pay-day,” and who always wrote on professional paper girdled with his own designs in proof of his prowess, and expressive of his willingness to undertake wash-drawings, line-drawings, color-work, or lithography, at reasonable rates and with prompt deliveries.
Through this German, who was good-natured after his second glass, Matt procured extra employment in a comic-picture factory managed by a solemn, snuffy Scotchman, who selected from old comic papers the jokes that were to be illustrated by his “hands,” and, signing the sketches with his own name, peddled them in the offices of new comic papers. Matt waspaid half a crown per sketch, and his employer from four to five shillings; but when the young man tried to send original jokes and sketches direct to these papers, he got only the same two and sixpence for the few things they accepted. One editor, whose pages bristled with ballet-girls, took the trouble to explain to him that the presence of a clergyman in a sketch was a disqualification, as any attack on the Church would be distasteful to his public. From another, theMerry Miracle, whose proprietor was a philanthropist, a member of the school board, and a candidate for Parliament, he received a prospectus instructing him to eschew cross-hatching, solid black, line-work, and society figures, in favor of rough-and-tumble farce in bold outline. The more sober of the comic papers had settled staffs and settled jokes, and new-comers were not welcomed. Not that Matt’s jokes were very good: labored verbal oddities for the most part, intellectual quips and cranks which, he was quite aware, lacked the true humorous insight of Jimmy Raven, upon whom he modelled himself, feeling no first-hand impulse. Humor, indeed, was not his vocation; when he saw the world through Jimmy’s eyes he was tickled yet fortified, as one set face to face with the prose of the real, and finding it genial; but he could not see it like this himself. His was a world of beauty set over a strange, disquieting substratum of ugliness, from which it were best to avert one’s eyes, and which, perhaps, existed only as something to aspire away from.
Jimmy Raven had publishedA Sketch-Book of Beggarswhich Matt Strang had found vastly entertaining; and yet Matt Strang saw rather the tragedy of beggars than their humor, and this tragedy seemed to him outside the realm of Art. It was only their occasional picturesqueness that attracted his artistic interest at this period of his development, and all the figures of his so-called comic sketches were either pretty or picturesque. He studied extensively in the streets, note-book in hand, fearful of losing the subtleties of nature through his inability to afford even the cheap, casual models of his first days in London, and training himself to catch the salient points of character or movement at first glance. Probably no artist ever made comic pictures so seriously as Matt Strang, with suchscrupulous backgrounds, in the which, when they were done in wash, he strove with entirely unappreciated thoroughness, by careful adjustment of values, to make his black and white yield veracious color-effects. When the drawings were accepted, they came out so reduced and so badly reproduced that the subtleties were blurred away, and the values quite transmuted. Wood-engraving falsified the lines or photography the color, and thus their appearance in print was as much a pain as a pleasure.
Matt’s redemption from comic journalism was partly due to the prosperity of the proprietor of the comic-picture factory, who started a serious-art department, where Matt found less uncongenial work in painting figures into the landscapes of his less competent fellow-workmen. This gradually opened up to his astonished eyes a new section of the trade. He saw one of these landscapes near King’s Cross, resplendent in a gorgeous gold frame, and marked “Original oil-painting—two guineas only,” and another, in a poor neighborhood marked “Water-color, hand-painted—a bargain!” and he perceived that he had been flying too high in his early attempts to approach dealers of the type of Drücker. Henceforward he haunted furniture dealers, picture-frame makers, and artists’ colormen, and thus he occasionally obtained half a sovereign to despatch to his tailor. His drawings in theChristian Homeattracted the attention of the editor of theWorking Man, and Matt was commissioned to accompany a journalist through the East End to expose the evils of sweating. TheWorking Manwas owned by a syndicate, and Matt had to settle terms with the manager, a truculent gentleman with a double chin and a double watch-chain, who agreed to give him five shillings a sketch. Matt did several sketches for each article, and the pathetic series caused a great stir and much correspondence; but at the end of the month—when poor Matt, who had already nearly starved himself for his tailor’s sake, was expecting a goodly check to send to Abner Preep—he received only a quarter of what he had bargained for. He went to the editor, who referred him to the manager, who insisted the terms were five shillings for the illustration of a single article. “You must remember, too, what alift we are giving you, with our big circulation,” concluded the manager, his double watch-chain heaving pompously on his abdomen. “It is not every young man who gets such a chance of showing what he can do.”
“You’re a set of damned scoundrels!” cried Matt, with an access of ancient rage, and had wellnigh torn up the check and thrown it in the manager’s face, when his later chastened self plucked at his coat-tails and bade him begone with it. Who so helpless as the black-and-white artist, his work poorly paid, and reproduced again and again without his control; his very originals taken from him and sometimes sold at a profit?
It was not a happy time for Matt, this period of spiritless work by day and spiritless study by night, his soul chafing alike against the degradations of life and the routine of school. For what an actuality had he exchanged his dreams! Yet he had no option; the tailor must be paid, his family must be helped, and to these two ends, moreover, he himself must exist. But the friction of ideals and realities left him irritable and high-strung; and even when, towards the autumn, he won his way into theLadies’ Weekly, at a guinea an illustration, he lost his work by not concealing his contempt for the art editor, a pragmatic person, absolutely dead to art, but excessively fastidious about the drawings, which he refused whenever there was time for alterations.
“This is feeble, but we’re pressed for time,” was his encouraging apology to the artist for accepting his work, “and I’ll put it into the hands of a competent engraver.” His first self-revelation to Matt was his complaint about some rough shadows on the borders of a sketch: “I wish you would bear in mind, Mr. Strang, that we have to pay as much per inch for the reproduction of those blotches as for the most finished work.” But it was not till the “old lady” (as the other artists called the art editor of theLadies’ Weeklybehind his back) had insisted on his dressing his figures better that Matt lost control of his tongue and retorted, “I draw pictures, not fashion-plates.” In after-remorse, he would have been glad to get fashion-plates to do. He replaced the lost work by returning to photo-tinting, though he now obtained more importantwork on enlarged photographs, which he colored in oil at three and six apiece, managing to do two or three a day while the light held, without interfering with his black and white, which could be done at night; by which means he scraped together enough to pay off the tailor in full, and to send his promised contribution home, together with seven fourpenny halfpenny “Notable Novels” to reconcile Billy to his narrow existence. And then, with these burdens thrown off, his idealism resurged again, for beneath the placid everyday exterior of this homely young man, who trudged up foul staircases, portfolio under arm, or danced attendance on smug h-less photographers smoking twopenny cigars, a volcanic fire burned, and the thought of his precious youth wasted and abraded in this inartistic art-drudgery, under the yoke of vulgar souls, was a dull haunting torment. His qualms of self-distrust vanished under the pressure of obstacles, and the measure of his aversion from joyless commercial art became to him the measure of his genius. One gray windy forenoon of late autumn he had stopped to take a mental sketch of a strangely attired woman, who was listening to a Salvation Army exhortation, a woman who was a dab of color upon the dreary day. Below an enormous white hat with a recumbent ostrich feather and a broad brim with an upward slant, tied under the chin with black bands, shone through a black veil a glorious oval-shaped dark face with flashing eyes, full red lips, large shapely ears, and raven hair curling low over the forehead. She wore a black, half-masculine jacket, with big mother-of-pearl buttons and a yellow bow that was awry, and by a shapely hand cased in a white glove with three black stripes she held the skirts of a slaty gown clear of the mud.
While Matt was whimsically wondering what the editor of theChristian Homewould say to a sketch of her in his staid organ, he instinctively noted the other romantic touches about the scene, ineffably grimy though the roadway was to the inartistic eye, flanked on one side by a coal office, with a blear-eyed old man at the window, and on the other by a canal running lengthwise. There were fresh country faces among the girl-soldiers, and among the men was an ex-heathen in a turban, a flaring Paisley shawl, flowing robes, and sandals, bearing alofta red flag with a blue border and a central yellow star, around which ran the words “Blood and Fire.” And while his eye selected the picturesque points, the whole scene passed half insensibly into his sub-consciousness as into a camera, to be developed in after-years—the grotesque snag-toothed hags in the crowd, the collarless men with the air of being connected with the canal, one of them with a Mephistophelian red tuft on his chin; the ice-cream stall at the corner, where a postman, a baby of three, and an urchin with his collar paradoxically up against the cold were licking green glasses. And then a buxom work-girl with a tambourine began to hold forth, pouring out breathless sentences all running into one another, clutching her inspiration tight lest it should escape her, and repeating herself endlessly rather than pause for a moment.
“Only the blood of Christ can save only the blood of Christ has saved only the blood of Christ will save.”
And her fellow-soldiers, quivering with unction, punctuated her shapeless periods with soul-wrung ejaculations.
“Ah, yes.”
“Bless her.”
“Glory to God.”
“You may try earthly pleasures you may go to the theaytre,” she gasped, “but it brings no peace nothing brings peace but the Rock but the Lamb—”
“Hallelujah!”
“But the oldest of all religions proved over and over again Christianity tried in the furnace any day you may die no one knows the end now’s the time don’t put it off come are you prepared once I had bad companions—”
“A—a—ah!” groaned a melodramatic brother, with folded arms.
“But I gave them up—”
“Glory!” in a great sob of relief from all the palpitating figures.
Matt began to forget the visual aspects of the scene; the infectious emotion of the girl and her comrades gained upon him. What she was saying left no dint on his mind—to her dogmas he was become indifferent. But her earnestness thrilledhim, her impassioned ignorance flashed upon him a clearer sense of baseness, hollowness, insincere falling away from the ideals that had sailed with him to England, glorifying the noisome steerage. Turning his head, he saw tears rolling down the dark passionate face of his dashing neighbor, and he hurried away, shaken and troubled, pursued by the cacophonous melody into which the street congregation had broken.
What was the point of his life? What had he become?
At Grainger’s there were fellows who looked to Art as an escape from some worse-paid calling. That was not, had never been, his idea. To him Art was an end in itself; he was of those who live to paint, not paint to live. Even in his boyish days, when the vendibility of pictures first came within his ken, the money had always seemed to him a pleasant by-product, not a motive. And now, instead of pouring out on canvas all that effervescence of youthful poetry that flooded his soul, he was coloring photographs and illustrating foolish stories for foolish editors in contravention of all his own ideas of what illustrations should be. Why, even in Nova Scotia he had painted from the life; in his lowest days he had decorated furniture at his own pleasure. Oh, it was sordid, unworthy, humiliating! He would give it all up: if he could not pursue Art, at least he would not degrade it. Thanks to his Nova-Scotian training, his good right hand could do more than wield the brush. Better to earn bread and water for himself and his family by some honest craft, till such time as honest Art came within his means. Rather an honest artisan than a dishonest artist. And while he was still hot with the impulse he looked through the advertisement columns of theClerkenwell Chronicle, and answered three demands, one for a “joiner,” another for a “sugar-boiler,” and the third for a “harness-cleaner.”
The sugar-boiling firm alone answered, and he was asked to call. He stated that he had had considerable experience of the manufacture in Nova Scotia, but a brief conversation convinced the manager that the applicant knew nothing of scientific sugar-boiling, with its elaborate engines and differentiation of labor; but Matt’s sober, respectable appearance and his conviction ofhis capacity stood him in good stead, and he was given a fortnight’s trial at eighteen shillings a week, with a prospect of rising to forty. In his confidence of mastering the easy detail, and to clinch his resolution, he wrote to his art patrons throwing up his position in each establishment with due form and superfluous sarcasm, and one happy morning, soon after sunrise, repaired to the factory with a more buoyant tread than had been his since the memorable day when he crossed the great bridge which led to the heart of all the splendors.
The fortnight’s end found him spiritually seared and physically scalded. The depressing society of the British working-man, the ever-present contrast of the blank building with the free forest in which he had made sugar in his boyhood (how happy his boyhood seemed now!), and the overflowing contents of the seething boilers, demonstrated to him daily that he had made a mistake. He might have stayed on nevertheless, but the dread that an accidental scald on the hand might permanently injure his power with the brush made the trial fortnight his last. He scanned the advertisement columns again, with no suspicion of what now awaited him.
He had been misled by the comparative facility with which he had found work hitherto; he was now destined to re-experience—far more poignantly than in New Brunswick—the long-drawn agony of unemployment, the sickness of hope deferred; to bruise himself against the ruthless indifference of an overstaffed nation; to see and hear the blind, deaf forces of the social machine grind out happiness for all but him. At first he did not mind getting no replies, except for the waste of stamps, for he took feverish advantage of the hours of daylight thus left free for Art. But as day followed day, and week followed week, the perturbation of his soul and the weakness of his body, enfeebled by hunger and cold, made painting difficult; and he had not even the capital to expend on canvas. Broken in health and pride, he applied again for his old work, prepared even to tint cartes-de-visite. But his place had been filled up. The stream of human life had flowed on as if he had never been. The work he had got was the only work in London open to a man in his position, and this work he had thrown away. One ofthe papers he had so imprudently quarrelled with was willing to take him on again, but at half the price. Subdued as he was, a pride he afterwards felt to have been insane spurred him to refuse. He fancied he could get such terms from a score of other papers, but he was mistaken. In truth, black and white was no more hismétierthan humor. The rush into black and white, of which he had first heard at Cornpepper’s, had filled the ranks with abler men or of older standing, with a better appreciation of the market, and of how to draw for reproduction by the new processes just coming up. And he had yet to learn, also, that the world went very well without him; that it had no need for him either as artist or artisan, craftsman or clerk; that every hole had its peg, round or square; and that he was of no more account in the surging life of London than the fallen leaves blown about the bleak squares.
He earned a few odd shillings now and then for his old pictures by persuading some small skinflint dealer to cheat him; and that was all. Once he was cruelly tantalized—a five-pound commission to copy a National Gallery picture being dangled before him, only to be withdrawn. He parted with all but the barest necessities—with the fashionable morning suit, with his pistol, with the Gregson boots; his only luxury was the engraving of the “Angelus,” which he had retained because nobody offered more than eighteenpence for it. The bulk of the money thus raised was remitted to Abner Preep, as promised; the rest went to pay Mrs. Lipchild. Himself he so stinted that often when he went to Grainger’s (which he had fortunately prepaid) he took care to arrive first, not only because of the warmth, but because the girl students, whose class preceded his, left stale crusts lying about, whose crumb had been used up on their charcoal drawings. To such straits may a man sink in a few weeks, though he sinks slowly, for each week is a year to him. But outwardly he preserved dignity, brushing his one suit scrupulously, and glad that, owing to his interlude of fashionable tailoring, it was still in good condition; for the vision of the lost mortals was ever before his eyes, and he foresaw that without a decent appearance he would not be able to grasp an opportunity even when it came, but would be driven downto the deeps to join the damned souls outside that Fleet Street public-house, within which the happier staff of theChristian Homeushered in the Sabbath with beer.
And the more London refused him the more his consciousness of power grew. As he tramped the teeming streets in quest of a job or a customer, a thousand ideas for great pictures jostled in his sick brain, a thousand fine imaginings took form and shape in beautiful color-harmonies and majestic groupings. In the ecstatic frenzy of moments of hysterical revolt against the blind forces closing in upon him like a tomb to shut him out forever from the sunlight, he grew Titanic to his own thought, capable of masterpieces in any and every kind of art—great heroic frescos like Michael Angelo’s, great homely pictures like those of the Dutch, great classic canvases like Raphael’s, great portraits like Rembrandt’s, great landscapes like Turner’s, great modern street-pieces like Cornpepper’s, great mediæval romances like Erle-Smith’s, not to say great new pictures that should found the school of Strang, combining all the best points of all the schools, the ancient poetry with the modern realism. Nay, even literary impulses mingled with artistic in these spasms of nebulous emotion, his immature genius not having yet grasped the limitations of the paintable. Good God! what did he ask? Not the voluptuous round of the young men whose elegant silhouettes standing out against the black, silent night from the warm lighted windows of great houses athrob with joyous music filled him with a mad bitterness; not the soft rose-leaf languors of the beautiful white women who passed in shimmering silks and laces from gleaming spick-and-span carriages under canvas awnings over purple carpets amid spruce, obsequious footmen; not the selfish joys of these radiant shadows dancing their way to dusty oblivion, to be trodden under foot by the generations over which he would shine as a star, serene, immortal; but bread and water and a little money for models and properties, and a top-light straight in touch with heaven, and a few pounds to send home to his kith and kin; but to paint, to paint, to joy in conception and to glory in difficult execution, to express the poetry of the ideal through real flesh and real shadows and real foliage, and find a rapturous agony in the search for perfection; to paint, to paint,to exult fiercely in the passing of faces, with their pathos and their tragedy, to catch a smile on a child’s face and the grace of a girl’s movement and the passion in the eyes of a woman; to watch the sunrise consecrating tiles and chimneys, or the river, mirroring a thousand night-lights, glide on, glorifying its own uncleanness; to express the intense stimulus of the wonderful city, resonant with the tireless tread of millions of feet, vibrant with the swirl of perpetual currents of traffic, pulsating with the rough music of humanity-roaring markets, shrilling trains, panting steamships; to record in pigment not only the romance of his dreams or the glamour of the dead past, but the poetry of the quick—the rich, full life of the town, the restless day and the feverish night, with its mysterious perspectives of fitful gleams; to paint, to paint, anything, everything, for the joy of eternalizing the transient beauty that lurked everywhere—in the shimmer of a sunlit puddle, in the starry heaven, in the motions of barefoot children dancing to a barrel-organ, in the scarlet passing of soldiers, in the play of light on the fish in a huckster’s barrow, in the shadowy aisles of city churches throbbing with organ diapasons.
Oh, the joy of life! Oh, the joy of Art that expressed the joy of life!
Yes, but in the absence of a few bits of metal, neither joy nor Art nor even life could be his. He must die, be swept off from among the surging crowds of which he was an unnoticed unit, and no one would ever know what mighty things he had dreamed and suffered in his little span of years. Every supper eaten by radiant couples at richly lit restaurants would have nourished him for weeks, nor did it diminish the bitter socialistic sentiment this reflection caused him to remember that he himself had fared as wantonly once and again. At least, he had earned his money. What gave those young men with the vacant faces, those women with the improbable complexions, the right to all the good things at the table of life? Even Herbert was splashed by this wave of bitterness; Herbert, the brilliant, with his battalion of boots. Ah! poor little Billy was right. It was impossible to believe in anything—to see any justice in life.
And was it worth while going on? The thought presented itself again and again, especially in those November days when London was as dark as his own soul; and it made him half sorry, half glad that a grim Providence had sent his pistol to the pawnshop. He was walking to Grainger’s one evening in such a double darkness of without and within, when the memory came to him of a newspaper paragraph concerning people who had wandered into the river, and, hypnotized by the idea, he bent his steps towards the docks, with a vague intention of giving death a chance. What did it matter what became of his brothers and sisters? It were better that they died too. In any case he could not help them any more; he had just scraped together the usual remittance, but he could not see where the next was to come from. But his semi-somnambulistic motion did not bear him towards the water-side; in the gray obscurity he erred endlessly in strange ghostly squares, whose chill iron-railed enclosures loomed like cemeteries through the sepulchral air.
London smelled like a boiled sponge; the raw air reeked with sulphurous grime, as if the chimneys of hell had been swept. It was not an inviting world to remain in. A gigantic brown head of a horse suddenly shot past his. He jumped back, but a shadowy wheel caught him in the pit of the stomach and hurled him across the road, where he fell on his back, hearing inarticulate noises from the cabman, and just seeing the hansom swallowed up again by the yellow sea. He got up, feeling dazed and indignant, rather than hurt, and staggered along in purposeless pursuit of the vanished cab. He found himself in a business street, where the illumined shop-fronts thinned the fog. A familiar face, with a strange green light upon it from a chemist’s window, burst upon him as unexpectedly as the horse. It was Tarmigan’s. He studied it abstractedly for a moment in its greenish pallor, with its deep furrows, seeming to read clearly a weariness and heart-sickness akin to his own, and struck for the first time by the shabbiness and flaccidity of the figure. Then the face took a more joyous expression than he had ever seen in it, and he heard Tarmigan saying:
“Hullo, Strang! Are you lost, too?”
“Yes, sir—at least, I don’t quite know, sir,” he replied, like one awaking from a dream.
“You’re usually at Grainger’s at this hour. I’m on my way there. If you are going to-night we had better keep together.”
“Thank you, sir,” said Matt.
He went into the chemist’s to inquire their whereabouts, and feeling a little stiff, had the sudden idea of laying out his last coppers in arnica; then he began to pilot his master with a sense of lofty responsibility. But they walked in silence, mutually embarrassed.
Tarmigan coughed lengthily.
“Ought you to be out on a night like this, sir?” Matt ventured to say.
“Duty, my boy, duty,” rejoined Tarmigan, gruffly.
“But you are not bound to go, are you, sir?” Matt remonstrated, remembering that Tarmigan’s services were a voluntary sacrifice at the shrine of Art.
“I am not forced by an outsider, if that’s what you mean,” said Tarmigan. “But that wouldn’t be duty, that would be necessity—at least, in my definition.”
“Then duty is only what you feel you ought to do,” said Matt.
“Decidedly. Any man who knows what true Art is is bound to hand it down to the next generation, especially in an age when there is so much false doctrine in the air.”
“But can’t each generation find out its own Art?” Matt asked, timidly.
“Can each generation find out its own science?” Tarmigan retorted, sharply. “In all things there is a great human tradition, and the torch is handed down from generation to generation; otherwise we should be in a nice fog,” he added, grimly, and coughed again. “And a nice fog the young men are in who reject the light of the past, with their azure Art, and their violet nonsense, and their slapdash sketchiness.”
“But they seem to be gaining the public ear,” Matt murmured, liking neither to contradict his master nor to agree with him.
“The public ear!” Tarmigan laughed scornfully. “Yes,they gain that, but not the public eye, thank God. That can still tell slipshod botchery from honest, faithful work.”
“But Cornpepper is in the Academy this year,” Matt reminded him.
“Yes; the Academy lets itself be outbawled,” said Tarmigan, sharply. “I wish I were a member!”
“I wish you were,” said Matt, fervently.
Tarmigan coughed.
“I didn’t mean what you mean,” he said, gruffly.
“Oh, but they ought to elect you, sir!” said Matt, rushing in on delicate ground in his enthusiasm for the man’s character. “Everybody says so.”
“Who’s everybody?” Tarmigan inquired, bitterly. “Society doesn’t say so, for I don’t go to its drawing-rooms; the R.A.’s don’t say so, for I’m unknown to their wives. But I am unjust. Let us drop the subject. After all, a man’s work stands, even if he is passed over in his lifetime.”
Matt felt a sharp pang of sympathy for this strong, stern man sustained by the false dream of immortality. He could not conceive that posterity would care a rap for Tarmigan’s cold classic pictures. Indeed, now that he had assimilated all that was good in Tarmigan’s teaching, he only went to the studio for the sake of the model and the practice. Emotion and embarrassment kept him silent.
“Do you live with your people?” Tarmigan asked, presently, in an interested tone.
“No,” said Matt; “they are in America.”
“Oh, ah, yes; so you told me. You’re not married?”
“No.”
“Nor engaged, I hope?”
“No,” said Matt, wonderingly.
“That’s right. No artist should marry. His wife is sure to drag him down to sacrifice his Art to her pleasures and wants. Fine feathers and fine houses are ruining English Art. I warn you of this, because you have the makings of an artist if you work hard.”
“You are very kind, sir,” said Matt, touched.
“Not at all. You have a fine natural talent, still undisciplined.So long as you keep yourself free from matrimonial complications you may hope to achieve something. A single man can live on bread and water. I am heartily glad to hear you have nobody to keep but yourself.”
Matt smiled grimly under the imagined cover of the fog.
“Ah, I know what you’re smiling at,” said Tarmigan, more genially than he had yet spoken. “You’re wondering whether the preacher is a bachelor. Well, I am proud to say I’m still single, though I can’t boast of living on bread and water. You see, it isn’t only the expense; marriage spoils the silent incubation of ideas; the wife wants her husband, not his Art.”
“But suppose an artist falls in love—isn’t it hard on him?” asked Matt.
“No man can serve two masters. Every artist has got to ask himself, Does he want Happiness, or does he want Art? That choice will faceyouone day, Mr. Strang.”
“I hope not,” said Matt. “But I guess Art’s enough for me.” He spoke in a tone of quiet conviction, and his bosom swelled. Happiness, forsooth! How could there be Happiness apart from Art? Or how could Art be apart from Happiness?
Their talk fell to a lower level. Matt casually expressed an ardent wish to see sundry R.A.’s, especially the president. He had only come across the second-rate painters or the young men. He felt vaguely that he was at one with Butler and Greme and Herbert, and apparently Tarmigan also, in despising them, though he had only seen one of their exhibitions; they were in power and popular, and therefore time-serving mediocrities. Yet beneath all this prejudice was a keen curiosity about them, and a latent respect for these oldsters who had arrived. Tarmigan promised to get him a ticket for the prize distribution of the Academy Schools next month, when he would see most of them. The suggestion of suicide slunk into the rear; the spectacle of the Academicians was something to live for. Then the old man and the young relapsed into silent thoughts of their art, projecting visions of ideal beauty on the background of yellow, grimy vapor that shrouded the great dreary city.
But when Matt sat down to paint that night he found himselfincapacitated, a mass of aches and bruises. He went home to anoint himself with his arnica; in the unconscious optimism of sickness the suggestion of suicide had vanished altogether.
Witha step that faltered from nervousness even more than from the weakness due to a diet of one meal per diem, Matt Strang passed across the clangorous court-yard of Burlington House, nigh turned back by the imposing bustle of broughams and cabs, whose shadows were thrown sharply on the stones under the keen, frosty starshine of the December night. In the warm-lighted hall he shrank back, even more timidly, blinking at the radiance of the company, the white shirt-fronts of the men, the dazzling shoulders of the women. Before a counter a block of black figures struggled to get rid of their hats and coats in exchange for numbers. Matt hid his hat, fortunately flexible, in the pocket of his overcoat, which, being the least shabby of his vestments by reason of its summer vacation, he did not dare to take off; otherwise he would not have dared to keep it on. There were spots of discoloration on the concealed garments, for they had suffered from the week’s job, which, together with the expectation of this gala-night, had kept him alive since he had met Tarmigan in the fog three weeks before. As a house-painter and distemperer Matt had still hovered on the verge of Art, and if Butler was right in his interpretation of the Academy of his day, and the highest art was indeed to conceal paint, then was the young Nova Scotian strictly Academic in retaining his overcoat on this most Academic of occasions. He marched with the courage of desperation up a broad crimson staircase, keenly conscious of the frayed edges of his trousers, and mistily aware of overarching palms and bordering flower-pots and fashionable companions, and surrendered the ticket Tarmigan had given him to a sumptuousofficial who seemed a part of the ornamental avenue to the Academic salons. Once safely past this point the haze cleared, and he saw, to his joy, less fashionable figures in frock-coats and ladies in hats and jackets, and though he wished they had been more numerous and more dowdy, he felt a morsel more at ease. There seemed to be pictures on view, and he eagerly joined the sparse groups of spectators that promenaded the rooms, in curious contrast with the crush of the populace the last time he had walked, at the price of a shilling, within these historic walls. The exhibition was curious: in one room dozens of semi-detached heads, some evidently from the same model; in another, cartoons of draped figures; in a third, sculptures. He saw from a placard that they had been done in competition for the prizes that were to be adjudged to-night. He heard scraps of foolish criticism from the people about him, but his commerce with art-editors had blunted his once sensitive nerves, and he was only amused. From the pictures his eyes strayed to the spectators, and he wondered which were celebrities. It occurred to him, with a pang of dismay, that in the absence of any cicerone he might go away no wiser than he had come, and he remembered with regret the personally conducted tour he had made through the Reynolds Club. Would his uncle be here to-night? he thought, with apprehensive shrinking. As he moved aimlessly about, thinking of the Old Gentleman, his heart leaped to see—not Matthew Strang, but “Daniel before Nebuchadnezzar,” and not the “Daniel before Nebuchadnezzar” he knew, but other Daniels and other Nebuchadnezzars—a veritable vision of Daniels and Nebuchadnezzars, a gallery of Daniels and Nebuchadnezzars, perspectives of Daniels and Nebuchadnezzars, stretching away on both sides of the room; young clean-shaven Daniels and old gray-bearded Daniels and middle-aged Daniels with mustaches, Daniels with uplifted arms and Daniels with downcast eyes, Daniels dressed and Daniels undressed, Daniels with flashing faces and Daniels with turned backs, and Nebuchadnezzars analogously assorted, and palaces of equal variety and backgrounds of similar dissimilarity, each tableau differing in properties and supernumeraries, but all appearing only the more alike because of their differences, so conventional were the variations.
Matt divined instantly that the picture Herbert had painted must be among them, and he looked about ardently for the painted palace in which he had spent so many happy hours. Ah! there it was, the dear old canvas, though it had an undreamed-of grandeur in its broad gold frame; there was Daniel and there was “Nebby,” more finished than when he had last seen Herbert at work on them that fatal midsummer day, but essentially unchanged. He felt quite a small proprietary interest in it, unconscious how much it really owed to him; his touches on the actual final canvas had been but few, and these mainly suggestions in pastel, and his remembrance of the scaffolding work that preceded was hopelessly blurred by the countless discussions. He was shaken by a resurgence of pleasant memories of these artistic talks and merry lunches, with the bright sunshine streaming down on the skin rugs and the gleaming busts. He became absorbed in the painting, seeing episodes of the past in it, like a magician looking into a pool of ink. And then he was pierced to the marrow as by an icy wind; he heard an ecstatic voice ejaculating “Isn’t it beautiful? The dear boy!” in charming foreign accents, and he divined the Vandyke beard hovering haughtily in his rear. He felt the couple had come to see their son’s work, and he tried to sidle away unperceived, but an advancing group forced him to turn round, and he found himself eye to eye with Madame, whose radiant face of praise was exchanged for one of smiling astonished welcome when she caught sight of him.
“My dear young—” she began, in accents of lively affection. Then Matt saw her face freeze suddenly, and he quailed beneath the glooming eyebrows of her dignified consort, who swept round the other way with the frozen lady on one arm and Herbert on the other, turning three backs to his nephew in a sort of triple insult. The semicircular sweep which veered Madame off brought Herbert near, and Matt’s heart beat more rapidly as his whilom chum’s dress-coat, with its silk facings, brushed against his tightly buttoned overcoat. The glimpse he had of Herbert’s face showed it severe, impassive, and devoid of recognition; but ere the young gentleman had quite swept past he managed to give his homely cousin a droll dig in the ribs, whichwas as balm in Gilead to the lonely youth, and brought back in a great wave all his fondness for his dashing relative, with whom he now felt himself a fellow conspirator in a facetious imbroglio. The last lees of his bitterness were extruded by the dig; he gazed with affectionate admiration after the solemn swallow-tails of his cousin, receding staidly and decorously up the avenue of Daniels, at one or other of which his disengaged hand pointed with no faintest suggestion of droll digs in its immaculate cuff and delicately tapering fingers. Presently there was a marked move in a particular direction, and Matt, joining the current, was floated towards a great room filled with chairs, and already half full of gentlefolks. He made instinctively for the rear, but finding himself amid a mob of young fellows in evening dress, some of them sporting the ivory medal of studentship, he retreated farther towards the front, ultimately taking up a position on the last chair of the left extremity of the fourth row from the back, out of view of the incomers streaming through the oaken panels. It was a broad oblong room, with skylights in the handsome ceiling, and large watercolors hanging on the walls. A temporary dais covered by a crimson baize and ascended by a crimson step faced the audience, and at its central point stood a reading-desk lighted from the right by a lamp. Matt heard whispered comments on the new-comers from his neighbors; now it was a knighted brewer who rolled his corporeal cask into a front seat, now it was a musical conductor with an air of exile from the central desk. A few painters of eminence with neither handles nor tails to their names dotted Art about the audience, while wives and daughters of the Academically distinguished exhaled an aroma of fashion, striving to banish all reminiscences of paint from everything but their complexions; here and there was an actor out of employment or a strayed nondescript celebrity, and on a plush couch to the right of the platform a popular author chatted noisily with a pretty, vivacious lady journalist; the mixture was completed by a few favored relatives of the students, like Mr. and Madame Strang, whose anxious faces were clearly visible to Matt in a diagonal direction a few rows ahead. Herbert himself herded with his fellow-students, who had taken exclusivepossession of the back rows, where they stood in evening dress, a serried gallery of black-and-white figures, prophesying “all the winners.”
A great round of applause from their ranks set everybody peering towards the door, only to encounter the stern gaze of the magnificent beadle, whose entry had prompted the salvoes, and who, arrayed in what appeared to be a rich red dressing-gown, showed like a Venetian color-study amid a collection of engravings.
A more general outburst of clapping, accompanied by a buzz of interest, greeted the arrival of the less picturesque “train” of Academicians, headed by the president. The procession, bowing and smiling, defiled slowly towards the dais, especial enthusiasm being reserved for the more popular or the newest Academicians and Associates, the students having a ruling hand or hands in the distribution of the noise. Matt craned forward eagerly to see these pillars of English Art, whose names flew from lip to lip. As they only looked like men, he had a flash of self-confidence.
The president takes his seat on the central chair, flanked and backed by the faithful forty and the trusty thirty, minus the absentees. The R.A.’s dispose themselves along the front bench, the A.R.A.’s occupy the rear—a younger set, on the whole, with more hair on their heads and less on their chins. The beadle solemnly slides the oak panels to, cloistering the scene from the world, and a religious silence spreads from him till it infects even the excited back rows. The president rises bland and stately. There is a roar of welcome, succeeded by a deeper hush. It is seen that he has papers on his desk, and is about to declare the results of the competitions, and to determine the destiny of dozens, if not the future of English Art. There is no vulgar sensationalism. With a simple dignity befitting the venerable self-sufficient institution, which still excludes great newspapers—and great painters—from its banquets, he disdains working up to a climax, and starts with the tidbit of the evening, “the gold medal and travelling studentship for £200,” awarded every two years for the best historical painting, the subject this year being “Daniel before Nebuchadnezzar.” The presidentpauses for a breathless instant. The ranks of black-and-white figures standing in the background have grown rigid with excitement. The president imperturbably announces “Herbert Strang.” There is a brief pause for mental digestion, then a great crash of applause—the harmonious cacophony of clapping hands, generous lungs, and frenzied feet. Matt, thrilling through and through with joy and excitement, shouting frantically, and applauding with all his limbs, turns to look for Herbert amid the students, but sees only rows of heaving shirt-fronts and animated black arms. Then he becomes aware of his cousin strolling leisurely along the near side of the room, through a mad tempest of cheering, towards the president’s desk, a faint smile playing about his beautiful boyish lips, which yet tremble a little. Matt feels proud of being the cousin of the hero of the moment, whose course he follows with tear-dimmed eyes. He sees him reach the presidential desk and receive a medal and an envelope from the great man, who shakes hands with him and evidently offers words of congratulation. He follows his passage back to his fellow-students through the undiminished tempest. Then his eye lights suddenly on Matthew Strang’s face, and sees great tears rolling down towards the Vandyke beard, while beside him Madame Strang, her face radiating sunshine, her eyes dancing, throws kisses towards the cynosure of all eyes, who, carrying his honors, and studiously avoiding the weakness of a glance in the direction of his parents, ploughs his way amid fraternal back-thumpings to his place among his cronies. There is a rapid exchange of criticism and gossip among the students, ejaculations of commiseration for Flinders, whose friends had convinced him that he would win, and for Rands, a poor devil of talent, the only hope of a desperately genteel family in Dalston. But comment must be hushed, for other prizes, some of them important enough, have to be announced. There is a steady succession of individual students, more or less blushing, moving to and from the president’s congratulatory hand, some stumbling nervously against the crimson step placed in front of his desk, probably by the beadle to disconcert the shy. Some fortunate prize-winners come up three times, and stumble threetimes. Sometimes they are girls. One wears spectacles and a yellow sash, and has the curved back of the student; another is pretty andpetite, and causes a furore by her multiplex successes and her engaging charm; a third is handsome, but gawky, with bare red arms. A young man who wins two events attracts special attention by his poetical head and his rapt air of mystic reverie, and goes back winking. Then the president commences his biennial address to an audience of students throbbing with excitement, afire with the after-glow of all that applause, anxious to canvass the awards, and dying to run out into the other rooms to look at the winning pictures, which have, in some instances, been dark horses which nobody remembers to have noticed.
His theme is the Evolution of Ecclesiastical Art. For half an hour the audience, always with the exception of the students he is addressing, listens patiently to the procession of ornate periods, classically chiselled, hoping to emerge from the dulness and gloom of obscure epochs into the light of familiar names. Then the seats begin to feel hard. By the aid of copious shufflings, wrigglings, and whisperings, they drag through another bad quarter of an hour, relieved only by the mention of Albrecht Dürer, whose name is unaccountably received with rapturous cheers, as if he were a political allusion. The next quarter of an hour is lightened by the feeling that it is to be the last. But, as the second hour arrives without a harbinger sentence, three brave men arise and pass through the beadle-guarded portal. There is tremendous cheering from the back, which is taken up and re-echoed from all parts of the room, and the president beams and turns over a new page.
The seats become granite, the presidential eloquence flows on as if it would wear them away; an endlessly trickling stream. He enters into painful analyses of vanished frescos, painted in churches long since swept away, and elaborates punctilious appreciations of artists and architects known only to biographical dictionaries. Some have fancy without imagination, some imagination without fancy, a few both fancy and imagination, and the rest neither imagination nor fancy. The stream strewn with dead names flows on slow and stately, with never a playful eddy, and another man, greatly daring,fortified by the example of his gallant predecessors, steals from the room, and blushes to find it fame. Amid the plaudits that ring around this manful deed, Matt suddenly finds Herbert at his side. His cousin slips a note into his hand and retreats hastily to his place. Excited and glad of the relief, he opens it and reads: “Meet me outside after this rot is over. Don’t let the Old Gentleman see you.” Matt smiles, proud and happy to resume his old relations with the hero of the evening, and pleased to find the ancient password of “the Old Gentleman” supplementing the droll dig in the ribs in re-setting their camaraderie on its ancient footing. In his eagerness to talk to Herbert again and to congratulate him personally, the presidential oration seems to him duller and the seat more adamantine than ever. He strains his ears to catch instead the babble of the students, who have finally given up any pretence of interest in mediæval Flemish cathedrals. His eye, long since satiate with the sight of the celebrities, roves again over the faces of the Academicians on their platform, austere in their striving to appear absorbed, and again he draws confidence from their merely human aspect. He watches the popular novelist gossiping with the vivacious lady journalist. He examines for the eighth time the water-colors on the walls, which he gathers, from one of the many conversations going on in his neighborhood, are by the competitors for the Turner prize. He sees that the hard-worked newspaper artist in the row in front of him has given up sketching and gone to sleep, despairing of escape. The pangs of his own stomach keep him awake; he looks forward wistfully to the hour of release, resolved to treat himself to two-pennyworth of supper in honor of Herbert’s triumph. But the interminable voice goes on, discoursing learnedly and elegantly of apses and groins and gargoyles. The wrigglings have ceased. All around, but especially in the quiet front rows under the presidential eye, apathetic listless beings droop on their chairs. Matt steals a glance towards his uncle, and finds him the only member of the audience genuinely alert and interested, his head perked up, his eyes gazing admiringly towards the rostrum, where perchance in imagination he already sees his son carrying on the time-honored tradition of the greatSir Joshua. At his side Madame sustains herself by furtive looks in the direction of the same young gentleman. Then Matt turns his attention to the speaker, watching his mouth open and shut, and his shapely hand turning the perpetual pages. He expects that every moment will be the orator’s last. But the great man is just warming to his work. His silvery voice, rising above the buzz and the murmur, descants dreamily on the spiritual aspirations of uncouthly christened architects, who had mouldered in their graves long centuries before his Gracious Majesty George III., patron of arts and letters, gave the Academy house-room. After an hour and a half he launches lightly into a treatise on glass-staining. The audience has now given up all hope. It has the sense of condemnation to an earthly inferno, in which the suave voice of a fiend of torture, himself everlastingly damned, shall forever amble on, unwinding endless erudition. A reference to “my young architectural friends,” greeted with suspicious thunders by all the students, affords a momentary break in the monotony. The end comes suddenly, after a “Lastly,” forgotten ten minutes before. There is a brief interval of incredulity. People awakened by the silence look up sleepily. Yes, there is no doubt. The president is actually down. Then a great roar of joy bursts out from all sides. The back benches go delirious, and then the meeting dissolves in a stampede towards the oaken panels, at last open in three places. The discharged prisoners swarm down the grand staircase and besiege the cloak-rooms; some parade the rooms to inspect the winning pictures, now ticketed, and to express their surprise at the judges’ decisions.
Outside in the cold air, which immediately began to make him sneeze through the compulsory imprudence of having worn his overcoat throughout, Matt lurked about looking for Herbert, and at last the hero appeared, carefully muffled and wrapped up, and with a murmur of “Wasn’t it awful? Wait by the Arcade till my people’s cab rolls off,” dashed back. When he reappeared, smiling sunnily, he explained that he had told his people he must show up at the Students’ Club in order not to appear caddish. “I’ve been slobbered over enough,” he added,whimsically flicking the traces of an imaginary maternal kiss off his fresh, smooth cheek.
“Oh, but I don’t wonder your people are delighted,” said Matt; “I know I am. I haven’t congratulated you yet.” And he shook his cousin’s hand heartily.
“Thank you, old fellow; it’s very good of you. Oh, by-the-way, don’t mention to anybody I let you see the picture on the easel, will you? One is supposed to keep it to one’s self, don’t you know. That’s why I didn’t tell you I was doing it for the Gold Medal.”
“Oh, who should I mention it to?” asked Matt, reassuringly.
“That’s a good chap. You see, if it got out that I talked it over with you there might be a bother; people are so jealous, especially now that it has won.”
“Oh, I sha’n’t tell a soul, you may depend,” said Matt. “It was very good of you to let me come so often and chat about it; and even if I did save you a little trouble in working out the perspective, I learned a great deal about composition from you.”
“Don’t mention it,” said Herbert.
“Oh, I won’t,” said Matt, gravely; whereat Herbert laughed, and replied: “Nowyoumust do an Academy picture, old fellow. There’s three months’ time yet.”
“Would there be any chance of my getting in?” asked Matt, wistfully. He had been fluttered by the applause of the evening; it seemed impossibly grand to be the centre of an admiring fashionable assemblage, instead of a shabby alien hovering on its outside rim. In such company the colossal self-confidence of his solitary exaltations dwindled to a pitiful sense of his real insignificance.
“Rather,” replied Herbert. “Why, I thank my stars you weren’t a competitor. I should never have got the medal if you had been.”
Matt shook his head deprecatingly, but Herbert rattled on with increasing enthusiasm. “Wouldn’t it be jolly if you got a picture in and it was hung on the line next to mine? Now that I’ve taught you composition and educated you up to the Academy’s ideas, you could easily do something that would take the old buffers’ fancy, and then, once you got a show in theAcademy, the Old Gentleman would take up your work and run you.”
“I don’t think they’d take what I wanted to do.”
“Oh, but you mustn’t want to do it,” said Herbert. “At least, not till you can afford it. Besides, I’m not so sure that there isn’t something in the Academy’s ideas, after all. Candidly, I don’t quite see how Daniel and Nebuchadnezzar could have been treated any better.”
“I don’t want to treat them at all,” said Matt.
“Well, anyway, do something, you old duffer. You don’t want to go grubbing along at ten bob a week—or was it tenpence a day? I forget. Promise me to do a picture for the next show, or I sha’n’t feel easy in my mind about you.”
“I promise,” Matt murmured.
“That’s right,” said Herbert, considerably relieved. He went on heartily: “The Academy is the stepping-stone. It’s no good kicking it out of the way. Put a picture in the Academy, by fair means if thou canst, but—put a picture in the Academy. You see, even Cornpepper had to come to us. And even if youwilldo new-fangled stuff, you can always get in if you make the picture a certain queer size—just to fit an awkward corner. I forget the exact measurements, but the Old Gentleman knows; he took care to find out in case I couldn’t get in legitimately. I’ll make a point of asking him. Poor old governor! I don’t suppose he’ll sleep to-night. Why, he was quite blubbery when the cab drove off. Do you know, there’s a certain pathos about the Old Gentleman.”
“He’s been very good to you,” said Matt.
“Well, and now he is happy. Virtue rewarded. The cream of the joke is that now I’ve got to go abroad in spite of him—travelling studentship, you see—and he can’t possibly chuck business for a year to come with me.”
“Was the money in that envelope?” Matt asked.
“Only the first quarterly instalment. What a shame I can’t pay you out of that! Only I must study abroad with the money. It wouldn’t be honest to use it for any other purpose, would it?”
“Don’t talk of it,” said Matt, flushing from a sense of the misconstruction of his thoughtless query.
“Oh, don’t be so shocked. You look as if I had already misappropriated it. I can’t tell you how glad I was to see your dear old phiz to-night. What have you been doing with yourself? I often wondered why you didn’t look me up at the club. By-the-way, here we are at the club.”
“Here?” echoed Matt, interrogatively. They had been walking automatically as they conversed, and had come to a stand-still before a blank, cheerless building in Golden Square.
“Yes, this is the shanty. Notmyclub, you duffer. This is only the students’ little ken. I told my people the truth, you know. Itwouldbe snobbish not to drop in to-night. They make rather a night of it, though I hadn’t intended to go otherwise. Hang it all, I had an appointment to sup with a girl at half-past ten! I forgot all about her—she’ll be mad.” He took out his watch. “Ten past eleven. Why, Ecclesiastical Art must have evolved till close on eleven! It isn’t my fault, anyhow. Do you mind trotting round to the Imperial? She’s in the first ballet. We’d better have a hansom.”
The young men drove round to the stage door, but the fair one had departed after a few impatient instants. “I think I heard her tell the cabby ‘Rule’s,’ ” was the sixpenny worth of information obtained from the janitor.
“Let’s go there,” said Matt, who was now quite faint with hunger, and who had a lurking wish that Herbert would stand a supper—one of the olden heroic suppers that he had not tasted for half a year—a wild riot of a supper, with real meat and wholesome vegetables and goodly sauces—nay, even red wine, and a crowning cup of coffee made of real beans, not the charred crust of over-baked loaves, out of which he had been making his own lately; getting the burned bread cheaper with a double economy; a supper fit for well-fed gods, which a starving man having eaten might be well content to die. But Herbert, unaware of what was going on in Matt’s inner man, replied, cruelly, “No, it’s too late to look for her at the restaurant. I know her address, but she won’t be there yet. Besides, I ought to show up at the club.”
So they strolled back to the bleak building (Matt suddenly bethinking himself that even here supper might lie in wait), and passing through a dark hall, mounted a stone corkscrew staircase that led to a hubbub of voices and a piano jingling music-hall tunes. The doorway of the first room was congested by black backs over-circled with clouds of smoke. Herbert and Matt peered in unseen for a few moments. The little room, decorated only by a few sketches from the hands of members, and separated from the second room by the primitive partition of a screen, was crowded with young men in evening dress sitting round on chairs or knees or coal-scuttles, with glasses in their hands and cigars in their mouths, and new men were squeezing in from the inner room, the advent of each being greeted by facetious cheers. Plaudits more genuine in their ring welcomed Flinders, who, it was understood, had been in the final running. He came in, trying to make his naturally long face look short, and exclaiming with punctilious carelessness, “Where’s my whiskey?” Rands, who, it was whispered, had lost by only a few votes, was not present; he had, apparently, gone home to the heart-broken gentility at Dalston. Matt caught sight of Cornpepper on the right of the doorway, and his heart rejoiced as at the sight of a laid supper. The little painter was clutching the middle of his chair with his most owl-like expression. His single eye-glass glittered in the gaslight.
“Why, there’s Cornpepper!” Matt whispered, in awed accents.
“Oh, has he come in?” yawned Herbert. “I saw him marching Greme about among the Daniels, and giving them hell in emulation of Clinch—looking round after every swear, as if half hoping the ladies hadn’t heard him, and half hoping they had.” But Matt had only half heard Herbert. He was listening to the oracles of Cornpepper. But listeners rarely hear any good of themselves.
“Strang’s not in it with you,” Cornpepper was saying to Flinders. “There’s no blooming style in his technique. It might have been done by an R.A.”
“They do say the result would have been very different ifmore R.A.’s had come down,” said the semi-consoled Flinders, somewhat illogically. “But Barbauld had the gout, and Platt is in Morocco, and—”
At this point shouts of “Strang!” made the cousins start, but it was only the playfulness of the room greeting a new-comer as the victor. The youth acquiesced humorously in the make-believe, slouching round the room with a comical shuffle and a bow to each chair. Then a man got up and began a burlesque lecture on Ecclesiastical Art “to my young architectural friends.” Every reference to apses, groins, or gargoyles was received with yells of delight, a demoniac shriek being reserved for Albrecht Dürer.