More than two months later George came into the office in Russell Square an hour or so after his usual time. He had been to South Kensington Museum to look up, for professional purposes, some scale drawings of architectural detail which were required for a restaurant then rising in Piccadilly under the direction of Lucas & Enwright. In his room Mr. Everard Lucas was already seated. Mr. Lucas was another articled pupil of the firm; being a remote cousin of the late senior partner, he had entered on special terms. Although a year older than George he was less advanced, for whereas George had passed the Intermediate, Mr. Lucas had not. But in manly beauty, in stylishness, in mature tact, and especially in persuasive charm, he could beat George.
"Hallo!" Lucas greeted. "How do you feel? Fit?"
"Fit?" said George enthusiastically "I feel so fit I could push in the side of a house."
"What did I tell you?" said Lucas.
George rubbed his hand all over Lucas's hair, and Lucas thereupon seized George's other hand and twisted his arm, and a struggle followed. In this way they would often lovingly salute each other of a morning. Lucas had infected George with the craze for physical exercises as a remedy for all ills and indiscretions, including even late nights and excessive smoking. The competition between them to excel in the quality of fitness was acute, and sometimes led to strange challenges. After a little discussion about springing from the toes, Lucas now accused George's toes of a lack of muscularity, and upon George denying the charge, he asserted that George could not hang from the mantelpiece by his toes. They were both men of the world, capable of great heights of dignity, figures in an important business, aspirantsto a supreme art and profession. They were at that moment in a beautiful late-eighteenth-century house of a stately and renowned square, and in a room whose proportions and ornament admittedly might serve as an exemplar to the student; and not the least lovely feature of the room was the high carved mantelpiece. The morning itself was historic, for it was the very morning upon which, President McKinley having expired, Theodore Roosevelt ascended the throne and inaugurated a new era. Nevertheless, such was their peculiar time of life that George, a minute later, was as a fact hanging by his toes from the mantelpiece, while Lucas urged him to keep the blood out of his head. George had stood on his hands on a box and lodged his toes on the mantelpiece, and then raised his hands—and Lucas had softly pushed the box away. George's watch was dangling against his flushed cheek.
"Put that box back, you cuckoo!" George exploded chokingly.
Then the door opened and Mr. Enwright appeared. Simultaneously some shillings slipped out of George's pocket and rolled about the floor. The hour was Mr. Enwright's customary hour of arrival, but he had no fair excuse for passing through that room instead of proceeding along the corridor direct to the principals' room. His aspect, as he gazed at George's hair and at the revealed sateen back of George's waistcoat, was unusual. Mr. Enwright commonly entered the office full of an intense and aggrieved consciousness of his own existence—of his insomnia, of the reaction upon himself of some client's stupidity, of the necessity of going out again in order to have his chin lacerated by his favourite and hated Albanian barber. But now he had actually forgotten himself.
"Whatisthis?" he demanded.
Lucas having quickly restored the box, George subsided dangerously thereon, and arose in a condition much disarrayed and confused, and beheld Mr. Enwright with shame.
"I—I was just looking to see if the trap of the chimney was shut," said George. It was foolish in the extreme, but it was the best he could do, and after all it was a rather marvellous invention. Lucas sat down and made no remark.
"You might respect the mantelpiece," said Mr. Enwright bitterly, and went into the principals' room, where John Orgreave could be heard dictating letters.George straightened his clothes and picked up his money, and the two men of the world giggled nervously at each other.
Mr. Haim next disturbed them. The shabby, respectable old man smiled vaguely, with averted glance.
"I think he's heard the result," said he.
Both men knew that 'he' was Mr. Enwright, and that the 'result' was the result of the open competition for the £150,000 Law Courts which a proud provincial city proposed to erect for itself. The whole office had worked very hard on the drawings for that competition throughout the summer, while cursing the corporation which had chosen so unusual a date for sending-in day. Even Lucas had worked. George's ideas for certain details, upon which he had been engaged on the evening of his introduction to Mr. Haim's household, had been accepted by Mr. Enwright. As for Mr. Enwright, though the exigencies of his beard, and his regular morning habit of inveighing against the profession at great length, and his inability to decide where he should lunch, generally prevented him from beginning the day until three o'clock in the afternoon, Mr. Enwright had given many highly concentrated hours of creative energy to the design. And Mr. Haim had adorned the sheets with the finest lettering. The design was held to be very good. The principals knew the identity of all the other chief competitors and their powers, and they knew also the idiosyncrasies of the Assessor; and their expert and impartial opinion was that the Lucas & Enwright design ought to win and would win. This view, indeed, was widespread in the arcana of the architectural world. George had gradually grown certain of victory. And yet, at Mr. Haim's words, his hopes sank horribly away.
"Have we won?" he asked sharply.
"That I can't say, Mr. Cannon," answered Haim.
"Well, then, how do you know he's heard? Has he told you?"
"No," said the factotum mysteriously. "But I think he's heard." And upon this Mr. Haim slouched off quite calmly. Often he had assisted at the advent of such vital news in the office—news obtained in advance by the principals through secret channels—and often the news had been bad. But the firm's calamities seemed never to affect the smoothness of Mr. Haim's earthly passage.
The door into the principals' room opened, and Mr.Enwright's head showed. The gloomy, resenting eyes fixed George for an instant.
"Well, you've lost that competition," said Mr. Enwright, and he stepped into full view. His unseen partner had ceased to dictate, and the shorthand-clerk could be heard going out by the other door.
"No!" said George, in a long, outraged murmur. The news seemed incredible and quite disastrous; and yet at the same time had he not, in one unvisited corner of his mind, always foreknown it? Suddenly he was distressed, discouraged, disillusioned about the whole of life. He thought that Everard Lucas, screwing up a compass, was strangely unmoved. But Mr. Enwright ignored Lucas.
"Who's got it?" George asked.
"Whinburn."
"That chap!... Where arewe?"
"Nowhere."
"Not placed?"
"Not in it. Skelting's second. And Grant third. I shouldn't have minded so much if Grant had got it. There was something to be said for his scheme. I knewweshouldn't get it. I knew that perfectly well—not with Corver assessing."
George wondered that his admired principal should thus state the exact opposite of what he had so often affirmed during the last few weeks. People were certainly very queer, even the best of them. The perception of this fact added to his puzzled woe.
"But Whinburn's design is grotesque!" he protested borrowing one of Mr. Enwright's adjectives.
"Of course it is."
"Then why does Sir Hugh Corver go and give him the award? Surely he must know——"
"Know!" Mr. Enwright growled, destroying Sir Hugh and his reputation and his pretensions with one single monosyllable.
"Then why did they make him Assessor—that's what I can't understand."
"It's quite simple," rasped Mr. Enwright. "They made him assessor because he's got so much work to do it takes him all his time to trot about from one job to another on his blooming pony. They made him assessor because his pony's a piebald pony. Couldn't you think of that for yourself? Or have you been stone deaf in this office for two years? Itstands to reason that a man who's responsible for all the largest new eyesores in London would impress any corporation. Clever chap, Corver! Instead of wasting his time in travel and study, he made a speciality of learning how to talk to committees. And he was always full of ideas like the piebald pony, ever since I knew him."
"It's that façade that did for us," broke in another voice. John Orgreave stood behind Mr. Enwright. He spoke easily; he was not ruffled by the immense disappointment, though the mournful greatness of the topic had drawn him irresistibly into the discussion. John Orgreave had grown rather fat and coarse. At one period, in the Five Towns, he had been George's hero. He was so no longer. George was still fond of him, but he had torn him down from the pedestal and established Mr. Enwright in his place. George in his heart now somewhat patronized the placid Orgreave, regarding him as an excellent person who comprehended naught that was worth comprehending, and as a husband who was the dupe of his wife.
"You couldn't have any other façade," Mr. Enwright turned on him, "unless you're absolutely going to ignore the market on the other side of the Square. Whinburn's façade is an outrage—an outrage. Give me a cigarette. I must run out and get shaved."
While Mr. Enwright was lighting the cigarette, George reflected in desolation upon the slow evolving of the firm's design for the Law Courts. Again and again in the course of the work had he been struck into a worshipping enthusiasm by the brilliance of Mr. Enwright's invention and the happy beauty of his ideas. For George there was only one architect in the world; he was convinced that nobody could possibly rival Mr. Enwright, and that no Law Courts ever had been conceived equal to those Law Courts. And he himself had contributed something to the creation. He had dreamed of the building erected and of being able to stand in front of some detail of it and say to himself: "That was my notion, that was." And now the building was destroyed before its birth. It would never come into existence. It was wasted. And the prospect for the firm of several years' remunerative and satisfying labour had vanished. But the ridiculous, canny Whinburn would be profitably occupied, and his grotesque building would actually arise, and people would praise it, and it would survive for centuries—at any rate for a century.
Mr. Enwright did not move.
"It's no use regretting the façade, Orgreave," he said suddenly. "There's such a thing as self-respect."
"I don't see that self-respect's got much to do with it," Orgreave replied lightly.
("Of course you don't," George thought. "You're a decent sort, but you don't see, and you never will see. Even Lucas doesn't see. I alone see." And he felt savage and defiant.)
"Better shove my self-respect away into this cupboard, I suppose!" said Mr. Enwright, with the most acrid cynicism, and he pulled open one door of a long, low cupboard whose top formed a table for portfolios, dusty illustrated books, and other accumulations.
The gesture was dramatic, and none knew it better than Mr. Enwright. The cupboard was the cupboard which contained the skeleton. It was full of designs rejected in public competitions. There they lay, piles and piles of them, the earliest dating from the late seventies. The cupboard was crammed with the futility of Enwright's genius. It held monuments enough to make illustrious a score of cities. Lucas & Enwright was a successful firm. But, confining itself chiefly to large public works, it could not escape from the competition system; and it had lost in far more competitions than it had won. It was always, and always would be, at the mercy of an Assessor. The chances had always been, and always would be, against the acceptance of its designs, because they had the fatal quality of originality combined with modest adherence to the classical tradition. When they conquered, it was by sheer force. George glanced at the skeleton, and he was afraid. Something was very wrong with architecture. He agreed with Mr. Enwright's tiresomely reiterated axiom that it was the Cinderella of professions and the chosen field of ghastly injustice. He had embraced architecture; he had determined to follow exactly in the footsteps of Mr. Enwright; he had sworn to succeed. But could he succeed? Suppose he failed! Yes, his faith faltered. He was intensely, miserably afraid. He was the most serious man in Russell Square. Astounding that only a few minutes ago he had hung triumphantly by his feet from the mantelpiece!
Mr. Enwright kicked-to the door of the cupboard.
"Look here," he said to his partner, "I shan't be back just yet. I have to go and see Bentley. I'd forgotten it."
Nobody was surprised at this remark. Whenever Mr. Enwright was inconveniently set back he always went off to visit Bentley, the architect of the new Roman Catholic Cathedral at Westminster, on the plea of an urgent appointment.
"Youhad a look at the cathedral lately?" he demanded of George as he left.
"No, I haven't," said George, who, by reason of a series of unaccountable omissions, and of the fullness of his life as an architect and a man of the world, had never seen the celebrated cathedral at all.
"Well," said Mr. Enwright sarcastically, "better take just a glance at it—some time—before they've spoilt the thing with decorations. There's a whole lot of 'em only waiting till Bentley's out of the way to begin and ruin it."
Before the regular closing hour of the office the two articled pupils had left and were walking side by side through Bloomsbury. They skirted the oval garden of Bedford Square, which, lying off the main track to the northern termini, and with nothing baser in it than a consulate or so, took precedence in austerity and selectness over Russell Square, which had consented to receive a grand hotel or 'modern caravanserai' and a shorthand school. Indeed the aspect of Bedford Square, where the great institution of the basement and area still flourished in perfection, and wealthy menials with traditional manners lived sensually in caves beneath the spacious, calm salons of their employers and dupes,—the aspect of Bedford Square gave the illusion that evolution was not, and that Bloomsbury and the whole impressive structure of British society could never change. Still, from a more dubious Bloomsbury, demure creatures with inviting, indiscreet eyes were already traversing the prim flags of Bedford Square on their way to the evening's hard diplomacy. Mr. Lucas made quiet remarks about their qualities, but George did not respond.
"Look here, old man," said Lucas, "there's no use in all this gloom. You might think Lucas & Enwright had never put up a building in their lives. Just as well to dwell now and then on what they have done instead ofon what they haven't done. We're fairly busy, you know. Besides——"
He spoke seriously, tactfully, with charm, and he had a beautiful voice.
"Quite right! Quite right!" George willingly agreed, swinging his stick and gazing straight ahead. And he thought: "This chap has got his head screwed on. He's miles wiser than I am, and he's really nice. I could never be nice like that."
In a moment they were at the turbulent junction of Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Street, where crowds of Londoners, deeply unconscious of their own vulgarity, and of the marvellous distinction of Bedford Square, and of the moral obligation to harmonize socks with neckties, were preoccupying themselves with omnibuses and routes, and constituting the spectacle of London. The high-heeled, demure creatures were lost in this crowd, and Lucas and George were lost in it.
"Well," said Lucas, halting on the pavement. "You're going down to the cathedral."
"It'll please the old cock," answered George, anxious to disavow any higher motive. "You aren't coming?"
Lucas shook his head. "I shall just go and snatch a hasty".... 'Cup of tea' was the unuttered end of the sentence.
"Puffin's?"
Lucas nodded. Puffin's was a cosy house of sustenance in a half-new street on the site of the razed slums of St. Giles's. He would not frequent the orthodox tea-houses, which were all alike and which had other serious disadvantages. He adventured into the unusual, and could always demonstrate that what he found was subtly superior to anything else.
"That affair still on?" George questioned.
"It's not off."
"She's a nice little thing—that I will say."
"It all depends," Lucas replied sternly. "I don't mind telling you she wasn't so jolly nice on Tuesday."
"Wasn't she?" George raised his eyebrows.
Lucas silently scowled, and his handsomeness vanished for an instant.
"However——" he said.
As George walked alone down Charing Cross Road, he thought: "That girl will have to look out,"—meaning that in his opinion Lucas was not a man to be trifled with. Lucaswas a wise and an experienced man, and knew the world. And what he did could not be other than right. This notion comforted George, who had a small affair of his own, which he had not yet even mentioned to Lucas. Delicacy as well as diffidence had prevented him from doing so. It was a very different affair from any of Lucas's, and he did not want Lucas to misesteem it; neither did he want Lucas to be under the temptation to regard him as a ninny.
Not the cathedral alone had induced George to leave the office early. The dissembler had reflected that if he called in a certain conventional tea-shop near Cambridge Circus at a certain hour he would probably meet Marguerite Haim. He knew that she had an appointment with one of her customers, a firm of bookbinders, that afternoon, and that on similar occasions she had been to the tea-shop. In fact he had already once deliciously taken tea with her therein. To-day he was disappointed, to the extent of the tea, for he met her as she was coming out of the shop. Their greetings were rather punctilious, but beneath superficial formalities shone the proofs of intimacy. They had had large opportunities to become intimate, and they had become intimate. The immediate origin of and excuse for the intimacy was a lampshade. George had needed a lampshade for his room, and she had offered to paint one. She submitted sketches. But George also could paint a bit. Hence discussions, conferences, rival designs, and, lastly, an agreement upon a composite design. Before long, the lampshade craze increasing in virulence, they had between them re-lampshaded the entire house. Then the charming mania expired; but it had done its work. During the summer holiday George had written twice to Marguerite, and he had thought pleasurably about her the whole time. He had hoped that she would open the door for him upon his return, and that when he saw her again he would at length penetrate the baffling secret of her individuality. She had opened the door for him, exquisitely, but the secret had not yielded itself. It was astonishing to George, how that girl could combine the candours of honest intimacy with a profound reserve.
"Were you going in there for tea?" she asked, looking up at him gravely.
"No," he said. "I don't want any tea. I have to wend my way to the Roman Catholic Cathedral—you know, the new one, near Victoria. I suppose you wouldn't care to see it?"
"I should love to," she answered, with ingenuous eagerness. "I think it might do me good."
A strange phrase, he thought! What did she mean?
"Would you mind walking?" she suggested.
"Let me take that portfolio, then."
So they walked. She had her usual serious expression, as it were full of the consciousness of duty. It made him think how reliable she would always be. She held herself straight and independently, and her appearance was very simple and very trim. He considered it wrong that a girl with such beautiful lips should have to consult callous bookbinders and accept whatever they chose to say. To him she was like a lovely and valiant martyr. The spectacle of her was touching. However, he could not have dared to hint at these sentiments. He had to pretend that her exposure to the stresses of the labour-market was quite natural and right. Always he was careful in his speech with her. When he got to know people he was apt to be impatient and ruthless; for example, to John Orgreave and his wife, and to his mother and stepfather, and sometimes even to Everard Lucas. He would bear them down. But he was restrained from such freedoms with Enwright, and equally with Marguerite Haim. She did not intimidate him, but she put him under a spell.
Crossing Piccadilly Circus he had a glimpse of the rising walls and the scaffolding of the new restaurant. He pointed to the building without a word. She nodded and smiled.
In the Mall, where the red campanile of the cathedral was first descried, George began to get excited. And he perceived that Marguerite sympathetically responded to his excitement. She had never even noticed the campanile before, and the reason was that the cathedral happened not to be on the route between Alexandra Grove and her principal customers. Suddenly, out of Victoria Street, they came up against the vast form of the Byzantine cathedral. It was hemmed in by puny six-story blocks of flats, as ancient cathedrals also are hemmed in by the dwellings of townsfolk. But here, instead of the houses having gathered about the cathedral, the cathedral had excavated a place for itself amid the houses. Tier above tier the expensively curtained windows of dark drawing-rooms and bedrooms inhabited by thousands of the well-to-do blinked up at the colossal symbol that dwarfed them all. George knew that he was late. If the watchman's gate was shut for the night he would look a fool. But his confidence in his magic powersuccessfully to run risks sustained him in a gallant and assured demeanour. The gate in the hoarding that screened the west front was open. With a large gesture he tipped the watchman a shilling, and they passed in like princes. The transition to the calm and dusty interior was instantaneous and almost overwhelming. Immense without, the cathedral seemed still more immense within. On one side of the nave was a steam-engine; on the other some sort of a mill; and everywhere lay in heaps the wild litter of construction, among which moved here and there little parties of aproned pygmies engaged silently and industriously on sub-contracts; the main army of labourers had gone. The walls rose massively clear out of the white-powdered confusion into arches and high domes; and the floor of the choir, and a loftier floor beyond that, also rose clear. Perspectives ended in shadow and were illimitable, while the afternoon light through the stone grille of the western windows made luminous spaces in the gloom.
The sensation of having the mysterious girl at his elbow in that wonder-striking interior was magnificent.
He murmured, with pride:
"Do you know this place has the widest nave of any cathedral in the world? It's a much bigger cathedral than St. Paul's. In fact I'm not sure if it isn't the biggest in England."
"You know," he said again, "in the whole of the nineteenth century only one cathedral was built in England."
"Which was that?"
"Truro.... And you could put Truro inside this and leave a margin all round. Mr. Enwright says this is the last cathedral that ever will be built, outside America."
They gazed, more and more aware of a solemn miracle.
"It's marvellous—marvellous!" he breathed.
After a few moments, glancing at her, a strong impulse to be confidential mastered him. He was obliged to tell that girl.
"I say, we've lost that competition—for the Law Courts."
He smiled, but the smile had no effect.
"Oh!" She positively started.
He saw that her eyes had moistened, and he looked quickly away, as though he had seen something that he ought not to have seen. She cared! She cared a great deal! She was shocked by the misfortune to the firm, by the injustice to transcendent merit! She knew nothing whatever about any design in the competition. But it was herreligion that the Lucas & Enwright design was the best, and by far the best. He had implanted the dogma, and he felt that she was ready to die for it. Mystery dropped away from her. Her soul stood bare to him. He was so happy and so proud that the intensity of his feeling dismayed him. But he was enheartened too, and courage to surmount a thousand failures welled up in him as from an unimagined spring.
"I wonder who that is?" she said quietly and ordinarily, as if a terrific event had not happened.
On the highest floor, at the other extremity of the cathedral, in front of the apse, a figure had appeared in a frock-coat and a silk hat. The figure stood solitary, gazing around in the dying light.
"By Jove! It's Bentley! It's the architect!"
George literally trembled. He literally gave a sob. The vision of Bentley within his masterpiece, of Bentley whom Enwright himself worshipped, was too much for him. Renewed ambition rushed through him in electric currents. All was not wrong with the world of architecture. Bentley had succeeded. Bentley, beginning life as an artisan, had succeeded supremely. And here he stood on the throne of his triumph. Genius would not be denied. Beauty would conquer despite everything. What completed the unbearable grandeur of the scene was that Bentley had cancer of the tongue, and was sentenced to death. Bentley's friends knew it; the world of architecture knew it; Bentley knew it.... "Shall I tell her?" George thought. He looked at her; he looked at the vessel which he had filled with emotion. He could not speak. A highly sensitive decency, an abhorrence of crudity, restrained him. "No," he decided, "I can't tell her now. I'll tell her some other time."
With no clear plan as to his dinner he took her back to Alexandra Grove. The dusk was far advanced. Mounting the steps quickly Marguerite rang the bell. There was no answer. She pushed up the flap of the letter-aperture and looked within.
"Have you got your latchkey?" she asked, turning round on George. "Father's not come home—his hat's not hanging up. He promised me certain that he wouldbe here at six-thirty at the latest. Otherwise I should have taken the big key."
She did not show resentment against her father; nor was there impatience in her voice. But she seemed to be firmly and impassively judging her father, as his equal, possibly even as somewhat his superior. And George admired the force of her individuality. It flattered him that a being so independent and so strong should have been so meltingly responsive to him in the cathedral.
An adventurous idea occurred to him in a flash and he impulsively adopted it. His latchkey was in his pocket, but if the house door was once opened he would lose her—he would have to go forth and seek his dinner and she would remain in the house; whereas, barred out of the house, she would be bound to him—they would be thrust together into exquisite contingencies, into all the deep potentialities of dark London.
"Dash it!" he said, first fumbling in one waistcoat pocket, and then ledging the portfolio against a step and fumbling in both waistcoat pockets simultaneously. "I must have left it in my other clothes."
It is doubtful whether his conscience troubled him. But he had a very exciting sense of risk and of romance and of rapture, as though he had done something wonderful and irremediable.
"Ah! Well!" she murmured, instantly acquiescent, and without the least hesitation descended the steps.
How many girls (he demanded) would or could have made up their minds and faced the situation like that? Her faculty of decision was simply masculine! He looked at her in the twilight and she was inimitable, unparalleled. And yet by virtue of the wet glistening of her eyes in the cathedral she had somehow become mystically his! He. permitted himself the suspicion: "Perhaps she guesses that I'm only pretending about the latchkey." The suspicion which made her an accessory to his crime did not lower her in his eyes. On the contrary, the enchanting naughtiness with which it invested her only made her variety more intoxicant and perfection more perfect. His regret was that the suspicion was not a certainty.
Before a word could be said as to the next move, a figure in a grey suit and silk hat, and both arms filled with packages, passed in front of the gate and then halted.
"Oh! It's Mr. Buckingham Smith!" exclaimedMarguerite. "Mr. Buckingham Smith, we're locked out till father comes." She completed the tale of the mishap, to George's equal surprise and mortification.
Mr. Buckingham Smith, with Mr. Alfred Prince, was tenant of the studio at the back of No. 8. He raised his hat as well as an occupied arm would allow.
"Come and wait in the studio, then," he suggested bluntly.
"You know Mr. Cannon, don't you?" said Marguerite, embarrassed.
George and Mr. Buckingham Smith had in fact been introduced to one another weeks earlier in the Grove by Mr. Haim. Thereafter Mr. Buckingham Smith had, as George imagined, saluted George with a kind of jealous defiance and mistrust, and the acquaintance had not progressed. Nor, by the way, had George's dreams been realized of entering deeply into the artistic life of Chelsea. Chelsea had been no more welcoming than Mr. Buckingham Smith. But now Mr. Buckingham Smith grew affable and neighbourly. Behind the man's inevitable insistence that George should accompany Miss Haim into the studio was a genuine, eager hospitality.
The studio was lofty and large, occupying most of the garden space of No. 8. Crimson rep curtains, hung on a thick, blackened brass rod, divided it into two unequal parts. By the wall nearest the house a staircase ran up to a door high in the gable, which door communicated by a covered bridge with the second floor of No. 8, where the artists had bedrooms. The arrangement was a characteristic example of the manner in which building was added to building in London contrary to the intention of the original laying-out, and George in his expert capacity wondered how the plans had been kept within the by-laws of the borough, and by what chicane the consent of the ground-landlord had been obtained.
Mr. Alfred Prince, whom also George knew slightly, was trimming a huge oil-lamp which depended by a wire from the scarcely visible apex of the roof. When at length the natural perversity of the lamp had been mastered and the metal shade replaced, George got a general view of the immense and complex disorder of the studio. It was obviously very dirty—even in the lamplight the dust could be seen in drifts on the moveless folds of the curtains—it was a pigsty; but it was romantic with shadowed spaces, and gleams of copper and of the pale arms of the etching-press, and glimpses of pictures;and the fellow desired a studio of his own! He was glad, now, that Mr. Buckingham Smith had invited them in. He had wanted to keep Marguerite Haim to himself; but it was worth while to visit the studio, and it was especially worth while to watch her under the illumination of the lamp.
"Lucky we have a clean tablecloth," said Mr. Buckingham Smith, opening his packages and setting a table. "Brawn, Miss Haim! And beer, Miss Haim! That is to say, Pilsener. From the only place in Chelsea where you can get it."
And his packages really did contain brawn and beer (four bottles of the Pilsener); also bread and a slice of butter. The visitors learnt that they had happened on a feast, a feast which Mr. Buckingham Smith had conceived and ordained, a feast to celebrate the triumph of Mr. Alfred Prince. An etching by Mr. Prince had been bought by Vienna. Mr. Buckingham Smith did not say that the etching had been bought by any particular gallery in Vienna. He said 'by Vienna,' giving the idea that all Vienna, every man, woman, and child in that distant and enlightened city where etchings were truly understood, had combined for the possession of a work by Mr. Prince. Mr. Buckingham Smith opined that soon every gallery in Europe would be purchasing examples of Alfred Prince. He snatched from a side-table and showed the identical authentic letter from Vienna to Mr. Alfred Prince, with its official heading, foreign calligraphy, and stilted English. The letter was very complimentary.
In George's estimation Mr. Prince did not look the part of an etcher of continental renown. He was a small, pale man, with a small brown beard, very shabby, and he was full of small nervous gestures. He had the innocently-red nose which pertains to indigestion. His trousers bagged horribly at the knees, and he wore indescribable slippers. He said little, in an extremely quiet, weak voice. His eyes, however, were lively and attractive. He was old, probably at least thirty-five. Mr. Buckingham Smith made a marked contrast to him. Tall, with newish clothes, a powerful voice and decisive gestures, Mr. Buckingham Smith dominated, though he was younger than his friend. He tried to please, and he mingled the grand seigneurial style with the abrupt. It was he who played both the parlourmaid and the host. He forced Marguerite to have some brawn, serving her with a vast portion; but he could not force her to take Pilsener.
"Now, Mr. Cannon," he said, pouring beer into a glasswith an up-and-down motion of the bottle so as to put a sparkling head on the beer.
"No, thank you," said George decidedly. "I won't have beer."
Mr. Buckingham Smith gazed at him challengingly out of his black eyes. "Oh! But you've got to," he said. It was as if he had said: "I am generous. I love to be hospitable, but I am not going to have my hospitality thwarted, and you needn't think it."
George accepted the beer and joined in the toasting of Mr. Alfred Prince's health.
"Old chap!" Mr. Buckingham Smith greeted his chum, and then to George and Marguerite, informingly and seriously: "One of the best."
It was during the snack that Mr. Buckingham Smith began to display the etchings of Mr. Alfred Prince, massed in a portfolio. He extolled them with his mouth half-full of brawn, or between two gulps of Pilsener. They impressed George deeply—they were so rich and dark and austere.
"Old Princey boy's one of the finest etchers in Europe to-day, if you ask me," said Mr. Buckingham Smith off-handedly, and with the air of stating the obvious. And George thought that Mr. Prince was. The etchings were not signed 'Alfred Prince,' but just 'Prince,' which was quietly imposing. Everybody agreed that Vienna had chosen the best one.
"It's a dry-point, isn't it?" Marguerite asked, peering into it. George started. This single remark convinced him that she knew all about etching, whereas he himself knew nothing. He did not even know exactly what a dry-point was.
"Mostly," said Mr. Prince. "You can only get that peculiar quality of line in dry-point."
George perceived that etching was an entrancing subject, and he determined to learn something about it—everything about it.
Then came the turn of Mr. Buckingham Smith's paintings. These were not signed 'Smith' as the etchings were signed 'Prince.' By no means! They were signed 'Buckingham Smith.' George much admired them, though less than he admired the etchings. They were very striking and ingenious, in particular the portraits and the still-life subjects. He had to admit that these fellows to whom he had scarcely given a thought, these fellows who existed darkly behind the house, were prodigiously accomplished.
"Of course," said Mr. Buckingham Smith negligently, "you can't get any idea of them by this light—though," he added warningly, "it's the finest artificial light going. Better than all your electricity."
There was a pause, and Mr. Prince sighed and said:
"I was thinking of going up to the Promenades to-night, but Buck won't go."
George took fire at once. "The Glazounov ballet music?"
"Glazounov?" repeated Mr. Prince uncertainly. "No. I rather wanted to hear the new Elgar."
George was disappointed, for he had derived from Mr. Enwright positive opinions about the relative importance of Elgar and Glazounov.
"Go often?" he asked.
"No," said Mr. Prince. "I haven't been this season yet, but I'm always meaning to." He smiled apologetically. "And I thought to-night——" Despite appearances, he was not indifferent after all to his great Viennese triumph; he had had some mild notion of his own of celebrating the affair.
"I suppose this is what etchings are printed with," said George to Mr. Buckingham Smith, for the sake of conversation, and he moved towards the press. The reception given to the wonderful name of Glazounov in that studio was more than a disappointment for George; he felt obscurely that it amounted to a snub.
Mr. Buckingham Smith instantly became the urbane and alert showman. He explained how the pressure was regulated. He pulled the capstan-like arms of the motive wheel and the blanketed steel bed slid smoothly under the glittering cylinder. Although George had often been in his stepfather's printing works he now felt for the first time the fascination of manual work, of artisanship, in art, and he regretted that the architect had no such labour. He could indistinctly hear Mr. Prince talking to Marguerite.
"This is a monotype," said Mr. Buckingham Smith, picking up a dusty print off the window-sill. "I do one occasionally."
"Did you do this?" asked George, who had no idea what a monotype was and dared not inquire.
"Yes. They're rather amusing to do. You just use a match or your finger or anything."
"It's jolly good," said George. "D'you know, it reminds me a bit of Cézanne."
Of course it was in Paris that he had heard of the great original, the martyr and saviour of modern painting. Equally of course it was Mr. Enwright who had inducted him into the esoteric cult of Cézanne, and magically made him see marvels in what at the first view had struck him as a wilful and clumsy absurdity.
"Oh!" murmured Buck, stiffening.
"What do you think of Cézanne?"
"Rule it out!" said Buck, with a warning cantankerous inflection, firmly and almost brutally reproving this conversational delinquency of George's. "Rule it out, young man! We don't want any of that sort of mountebanking in England. We know what it's worth."
George was cowed. More, his faith in Cézanne was shaken. He smiled sheepishly and was angry with himself. Then he heard Mr. Prince saying calmly and easily to Miss Haim—the little old man could not in fact be so nervous as he seemed:
"I supposeyouwouldn't come with me to the Prom?"
George was staggered and indignant. It was inconceivable, monstrous, that those two should be on such terms as would warrant Mr. Prince's astounding proposal. He felt that he simply could not endure them marching off together for the evening. Her acceptance of the proposal would be an outrage. He trembled. However, she declined, and he was lifted from the rack.
"I must really go," she said. "Father's sure to be home by now."
"May I?" demanded Mr. Buckingham Smith, stooping over Marguerite's portfolio of designs, and glancing round at her for permission to open it. Already his hand was on the tape.
"On no account!" she cried. "No! No!... Mr. Cannon, please take it from him!" She was serious.
"Oh! All right! All right!" Mr. Buckingham Smith rose to the erect good-humouredly.
After a decent interval George took the portfolio under his arm. Marguerite was giving thanks for hospitality. They left. George was singularly uplifted by the fact that she never concealed from him those designs upon which Mr. Buckingham Smith had not been allowed to gaze. And, certain contretemps and disappointments notwithstanding, he was impressed by the entity of the studio. It had made a desirable picture in his mind: the romantic paraphernalia, the etchings, the canvases, the lights and shadows, the informality, the warm odours of the lamp and of the Pilsener,the dazzling white of the tablecloth, the quick, positive tones of Buckingham Smith, who had always to be convincing not only others but himself that he was a strong man whose views were unassailable, the eyes of Buckingham Smith like black holes in his handsome face, the stylish gestures and coarse petulance of Buckingham Smith, the shy assurance of little old Prince. He envied the pair. Their existence had a cloistral quality which appealed to something in him. They were continually in the studio, morning, afternoon, evening. They were independent. They had not to go forth to catch omnibuses and trains, to sit in offices, to utilize the services of clerks, to take orders, to consider the idiosyncrasies of superiors. They were self-contained, they were consecrated, and they were free. No open competitions for them! No struggles with committees and with contractors! And no waiting for the realization of an idea! They sat down and worked, and the idea came at once to life, complete, without the necessity of other human co-operation! They did not sit in front of a painting or etching and say, as architects had too often to say in front of their designs: "That is wasted! That will never come into being." Architecture might be the art of arts, and indeed it was, but there were terrible drawbacks to it....
And next he was outside in the dark with Marguerite Haim, and new, intensified sensations thrilled him. She was very marvellous in the dark.
Mr. Haim had not returned.
"Well!" she muttered; and then dreamily: "What a funny little man Mr. Prince is, isn't he?" She spoke condescendingly.
"Anyhow," said George, who had been respecting Mr. Alfred Prince, "anyhow, I'm glad you didn't go to the concert with him."
"Why?" she asked, with apparent simplicity. "I adore the Proms. Don't you?"
"Let's go, then," he suggested. "We shan't be very late, and what else is there for you to do?"
His audacity frightened him. There she stood with him in the porch, silent, reflective. She would never go. For sundry practical and other reasons she would refuse. She must refuse.
"I'll go," she said, as if announcing a well-meditated decision. He could scarcely believe it. This could not be London that he was in.
They deposited the portfolio under the mat in the porch.