On a red-gold throne in the heart of the sea,
And the youngest sat on her knee.
She combed its bright hair, and she tended it well,
When down swung the sound of a far-off bell.
She sighed, she look’d up through the clear green sea;
She said: ‘I must go, for my kinsfolk pray
In the little gray church on the shore to-day.
’Twill be Easter-time in the world—ah me!
And I lose my poor soul, Merman! here with thee.’ ”
The subject seemed to him made to his hand. It would enable him to fulfil his young ambitious dream of reconciling the decorative with the idea-picture; the composition should weave a beautiful pattern, and the coloring a scheme of harmony, and yet the picture should make a distinct emotional appeal. A woman, with a soul, throned amid a lower race, yet yearning for the higher spiritual fervors—that was an idea which lent itself beautifully to pictorial expression: a literary idea doubtless, but yet a visual, too, so that there was no need even to label it with the poet’s lines which had suggested it; it should be self-explanatory. And what sensuous glow in the accessories—the clear, green sea-depths, the red-gold throne, the child’s flowing hair! The thought of them was like wine in his veins. He set to work eagerly on a large scale, informed by his contemplation of the Old Masters with big ambitions—to do, not the little lyrics that satisfied contemporary cocksureness, but a great sustained poem.
What pleasures and pains the work brought him! The thrill of conception was deadened by inadequacy of execution, to revive when some charm of color and line flowered under happy accident. He had great joy in doing the heart of the sea with its “deep, divine, dark dayshine”—it was his sympathy with this marine fairy-land that had partly inspired his readiness to do old Coble’s misleading ensign of the shark and the sponge-diver. Around the red-gold throne of the Merman’s bride that stood on the sand-strewn sea-bed the submarine flora bloomed in strange, fantastic arabesques and subtle shades of amber and gray and white and crimson, and through the green translucent water, spent sunbeams quivered and gleamed, and vague tropical fish shot lovely notes of color, and a sea-snake coiled its glittering mail; and there were strange pied amorphous creatures and moss-like corallines and red-branching madrepores and gleaming shells, and mother-o’-pearl touched with purple and azure, yet all strictly subordinated to the two central figures of the composition—the throned woman with her youngest on her knee, which, despite the nudity and the strange accessories, took on a curious likeness to the Madonna and Child. The canvas indeed showed the influence upon him of those wistful Madonnas he had pored over so wistfully; the cold, strange eyes of the golden-haired child were in the imaginative vein of the poem, the form of the throned woman was inspired by merely Pagan ideals of beauty; and yet the yearning in her uplifted eyes for the world of prayer whose sound floated mystically down to her was the same that showed in the eyes of the Holy Mother. But this analogy was not consciously in the artist’s design, though it had doubtless influenced his choice of subject, nor, though he had certainly had in mind to suggest through her the yearning of humanity for a higher world, did he connect his work with the school of Symbolists which was just arising across the Channel, and which was capable of finding in the dominant green of his sea the color-symbol of Resurrection. Even the dead face which he had placed in a corner in the foreground, though it might well seem symbolic of the tragedy lurking amid this sensuous beauty, was in truth only the dead face of his father, and he had put it in less for its symbolic significance or its realistic appositeness than from an uncontrollable desire to have it there, as though thus to dispossess his mind of that ancient haunting image which the continuous thought of the sea had inevitably brought up again. He told himself it was but natural some drowned face should bob ghastly in this submarine paradise, but in reality he felt a morbid craving to put it there, to have something in his picture for himself alone, that no one else in the great wide world could possibly understand to the full.
For the rest the picture cost him infinite trouble, for his genius was an incapacity for not taking infinite pains. The poetry of paint is achieved by the prose of work, and as despite his Romanticism his hankerings for the Real persisted, his ambitious conception entailed much preliminary study, and the setting up in his studio of a little sea-water aquarium, in the construction of which his ancient experience at the Stepney bird-stuffing establishment in making cases of shells with mosses and sea-weeds and coral came in unexpectedly useful. But he could not get a satisfactory model for his principal figure, and curiously enough her left hand gave him more vexation than anything else in this complex composition. He could not settle its pose, scraped out finger after finger with an old sailor’s knife, relic of his mackerel-fishing voyage, specially ground down, painted out the whole hand fourteen times, and at last in despair weakly solved the problem by hiding the hand altogether. Two days later, working on the scales of the sea-snake that basked sinuously at the woman’s feet, he suddenly had a last furious dash at the refractory hand. This time it came right and brought rejoicing. Sometimes he seemed at the mercy of these haphazard inspirations; what came, came, quite irrespective of conscious will and training. “Als ixh Xan” (as I can), the old Flemish motto which Van Eyck put to his work, seemed to him apt for any painter.
When he began “The Merman’s Bride” he was already much more exigent towards himself than in his younger days; self-criticism had checked that fearless execution; by the time he had finished his picture, those very months of steady work, rigorously revised, had raised his ideal higher, so that though the actual picture pretty well corresponded with his first conception, it was still far removed from his later standard. The expression of the woman’s face seemed especially inadequate, and as great actresses do not sit as models, and the artist has to imagine emotional expression, he felt again, despite his Romanticism, that he had missed the subtleties of reality. But every genus of art has to sacrifice something, and sending-in day was drawing swiftly nigh, and he had to lay down his brushes at last, and through his frame-maker despatch the canvas to Burlington House, and await with what composure he could the verdict that should bring him the recognition he had struggled for during such long tedious years. Now that the absorbing task was over, he had time to think of its reward, to dwell on the thought of recognition, of Fame, the one thing on earth that still loomed before him, enshrouded in vague, misty splendors. In a world of illusions, this was the solid happiness it might yet be his to grasp.
This last illusion was not destined to be dissipated yet awhile. He was sitting at the breakfast-table when he received a blue card inviting him to take back his picture. Burning with revolt and despair, he had to strive to appear calm, what time Rosina was unfolding a tale of woe concerning the maid-of-all-work, whom she had detected throwing away half-burned coals into the dust-hole. That, she reiterated monotonously, explained the mysteriously rapid disappearance of the coals—over a ton since quarter-day. An investigation of the dust-hole had revealed a veritable coal-mine. It was one of the most curious characteristics of Rosina that, with all her hardness, she flinched mentally before her servants, pouring out her grievances against them when they were out of ear-shot, so that her husband suffered vicariously for their sins of omission or commission. Usually he listened to her silently with the courteous deference he would have shown a guest, never provoked to an angry retort save by her absurd objections to his models. He had abandoned as hopeless the effort to unite their souls. But to-day he had no option but to cap her tragic narrative by telling her of his disappointment. The news excited her not to sympathy with his aspersed art, but to reproachful alarm for his pecuniary future.
This was the last straw. He might have stood out against the Academy, exhibiting elsewhere, and gradually building up an outside reputation; but the pecuniary independence to enable him to do this, which had been the main motive of his marriage, was the very thing that he now saw he must abandon. In his secret paroxysms of resentment—more against himself than against her—it became increasingly plain to him that he could not live on her money; that were intolerable to his reawakened manhood. He must make a financial success on his own account; he must become independent of her at any cost to Art. His entire preconception of his future had broken down, his marriage a failure from the financial point of view as from every other. Instead of having emancipated himself from the necessity of a monetary success, he had made life impossible without it. Well, he would compromise; he would recoil to leap the better; he would do what the public wanted, and then, having secured its attention, he would do what he wanted.
He went to the Academy and to the Grosvenor Gallery, he studied the most popular pictures of his day, and in a couple of large canvases—one domestic, the other Biblical—set himself to outdo them in anecdotage and obviousness of technique.
In a passion of irony he half parodied his own picture of “The Merman’s Bride” in an idyllic interior called “Motherhood,” representing a mother holding up a little girl, who in her turn nursed a doll. Rosina sat for this to save expense, her own little girl being now weaned. The other picture was a “Vashti,” and for the repudiated queen did Rosina pose likewise, and with unwonted interest in her husband’s work.
Both pictures were cleverly painted, for Matthew Strang strove to atone for his lack of interest in his subjects by painful impeccability of technique, and to Rosina’s joy both won acceptance from the Hanging Committee, though at the eleventh hour—on the Saturday night before Varnishing Day—husband and wife were alike disappointed to receive an intimation that, through lack of space, only the smaller—“Motherhood”—could be hung.
Despite all his contempt for his picture and for the Academy, it was a tingling sensation to move amid the crowd of artists on Varnishing Day, and to see some whose serious faces he remembered noting on the platform on that memorable “Gold Medal Night” pause before his picture in admiration of the vigorous brush-work. This was a sign of success he was destined to experience in far greater measure the following year, but the keenness of the thrill could never be matched again.
And when “Motherhood” was mentioned in the papers, and in the early days of the Exhibition he watched fashionably clad ladies gather in front of it to commend the “sweetly pretty” child and its touching foreshadowing of maternity, Matthew Strang found himself insensibly beginning to partake in the general admiration; and with that strain of weakness which London had exposed in him from the first, he was tickled by the praise of these pretty women with their rustle of silks and their atmosphere of scent and culture, and his American birth subtly lent added spice to his sensation, in the thought of conquering with his rude home-born genius these votaries of an elegant civilization. He was quite annoyed when he heard of Morrison’s mot, that the doll was hit off to the life, but the other two figures were wooden. But it was not till “Motherhood” sold for two hundred pounds that the process of corruption really began to set in.
The buyer—a provincial cotton-spinner in town for his holiday—wished to sit for his portrait. The painter did not like to ask him to the whitewashed studio. He told Rosina they must move to a better neighborhood. The economical Rosina would not consent to quit a quarter where rates and provisions were low, and where she had by this time acquired several cronies equally martyred by their maids-of-all-work, so ultimately he took a larger studio in a more fashionable district, going to his work every day, like a clerk to his office, relieved from his wife’s overpowering proximity, and from her personal vision of his models coming and going, though her morbid suspicion was always ready to flare up. Thus the estrangement had begun. People sent him cards, not knowing he was married; after some embarrassed refusals he weakly accepted, without explanation, an invitation to dinner—unable to decline it gracefully, and knowing Rosina unsuited to the company—and his reticence made subsequent explanation more and more difficult. After a still greater success in the next Academy, with an only less conventional picture, he was caught in a fashionable whirl of work and social engagements, finding commission after commission thrust upon him, driven to hasty production of imposing compositions to preserve his place in the rapidly recurrent Academy and other Exhibitions, and always postponing the time when he would start upon the real artistic work of his life, when he should have accumulated enough money to give him a couple of years of freedom for independent Art, for that fearless expression of his own individuality which alone makes Art, which alone adds aught to the world’s treasure of Beauty by contributing a new individual vision of the Beautiful, and which, so far from being demanded by the paying public, must be a revelation of unknown riches.
A plethora of portrait commissions was not conducive to personal Art; people were much more clamorous for the likeness than in the days of Sir Joshua before photography had been invented, and every artist’s best portraits were always those unpaid, unchallenged portraits of his parents and friends—unflattered, yet touched with the higher beauty of truth. And portraits stood in the way of more complex work, though they got one a cheap reputation as a stylist. But there was a great run on Matthew Strang for portraits; almost as much as on one of his fellow-sufferers for marbles. The public would scarcely have anything else, and the voice of the public is the voice of the purse.
By fits and snatches he made attempts to express himself, but he never had time to find out what “himself” was. Sometimes, in a reversion to one of his earlier manners, he thought he wanted to express sensation, to transfer to the spectator of his landscape the sensation the original had given him, and from his country visits he would come back with studies of strange blue moonlight effects on cliffs, or weird dark seas, destined never to be worked up. He began a realistic picture of a winter view from Primrose Hill, with brownish trees in the foreground and gray in the background, and a white misty townlet to the left; but, fluctuating again, he abandoned it for an attempt to do the lyric of the brush, to express, as in balanced metres, harmonies of tree and sky and water, and this, again, was thrown aside for the picture of “Ideal Womanhood,” which, under the influence of a beautiful woman’s rebuke, he had felt was the real “himself” it behooved him to express. But the beautiful woman’s passage across his horizon had been momentary, and so even this piece of imaginative art had been finished hurriedly under the pressure of other work. And thus the years flew by like months, with incredible velocity. He could not escape from the net-work of engagements he had helped to weave, nor did he always desire to. There was a circumlapping consolation about the applause of the public, though it did not warm him. He found a bitter satisfaction, as of revenge, in the smiles of society dames, though he did not court them. He took no pleasure in the personal paragraphs and the notices of his work, though he knew they were necessary to his prices, and though he had no more liking for the severe estimates of the few who would have none of him. The breach with his wife widened imperceptibly, half involuntarily, though he was passively glad when she was not with him to complicate his life with her bourgeois ways, with her vulgar outlook.
He was driven to a more pretentious studio, which had sometimes to be the scene of responsive hospitalities, and which raised his prices. He fell into a semi-bachelor life. Late evening parties, early morning rides in the Park, visits for pleasure or portrait-painting or decoration to country houses (where his early familiarity with rod and gun gave him a valuable air of autochthonic aristocracy), excursions to Goodwood, to Henley, sketching tours, all tended to separate him from his wife, till at last an almost complete separation had grown up, so gradually that, except for her spasms of jealousy, Rosina seemed almost to have become reconciled to it in view of the popular success, the inflow of money, and the eternal economy of Camden Town, and instead of resenting his absence, to have come to welcoming his presence. When, on rare gala occasions, he took her out, the places she loved were those which no fashionable foot ever trod; and as the couple wandered—an obscure matrimonial molecule among the holiday masses—he was not sorry that his juvenile idea of fame as a blazoning vade mecum was only one of the many illusions of youth. And so none of the scented chattering crowd that gathered on Show Sunday before his pictures or his refreshments had any inkling of the more legitimate ménage in the less fashionable quarter. He absolved his occasional qualms of conscience by lavishing his earnings on her, which she hoarded—though he knew it not—partly from instinct, partly from a superstitious dread of a catastrophe when his hand should fail or her shares fall to zero. Too late he comprehended the hardness in money matters that had been at the root of her resentment against the defalcating Frenchman, and it was to spare her feelings, as well as to preserve peace, that he said never a word to her about the great sums with which he gladdened the Nova-Scotian household.
Not that Rosina knew much of his other affairs. In truth, she knew very little of her husband’s life, nor by how vast a sweep it circumscribed her own. She knew he had to be away from her a very great deal, that he had to stay in the country to paint great people; she was vaguely aware that the necessities of his profession made a wide sociality profitable. She had been once or twice to peep at his studio, horrified by the grandeur, and only consoled by the demonstration that its cost was repaid in the prices, like the luxurious fittings of the shops in the Holloway Road. But her imagination lacked the materials to construct a vision of the whirlpool which had sucked him away from her; her reading was limited to a weekly newspaper in which his name seldom appeared. And he, in his mental isolation from her, found scant self-reproach for his silence; reserve seemed more natural than communicativeness. She could never know the doings of his soul, his thoughts were not her thoughts, he had given up the attempt at communion, the effort to teach her to know his real self; why should he be less reticent concerning his outward movements, his superficial self? He was aloof from her spiritually; beside this, his material separation from her was insignificant. The children—a girl of seven and a boy of nearly four—were no bonds of union. The elder, christened Clara, after Rosina’s aunt, was sharp and lively enough, but given to passionate sulking; the younger—called after his grandfather, David—was a lymphatic, colorless youngster, sickly and rather slow-witted, with something of Billy’s pathos in his large gray eyes. Their father had tried hard to love them, as he had tried to love their mother, and had taken a certain proprietary interest in their infantile graces, and in the engaging ways of early childhood, but the claims of his Art left them in the mother’s hands, and the older they grew the less he grew to feel them his. Neither Clara nor David had as yet displayed any scintilla of artistic instinct. When he went home he usually had something for them in his pocket, as he would have had for the children of an acquaintance, but they gave him no parental thrill.
CHAPTER II
“SUCCESS”
The studio bell had tinkled so often that afternoon that Mr. Matthew Strang refused to budge from the comfortable arm-chair in which he sat smoking his cigarette and reading the Nineteenth Century after the labors of the day. The model had sipped her tea, taken her silver, and was gone to resume her well-earned place among the clothed classes, and the hard-working artist was in no mood to open his door to the latest bell-ringer.
Probably it was only another model to inquire if he had any work, or to apprise him of a change of address or of wardrobe; or else it was a soi-disant decayed artist, who had tramped all the way from Camberwell, ignorant that his old patron had moved from the studio a year ago; or mayhap it was a child. He had been much worried by children lately, since he had picked up a couple in the gutter and placed them on the “throne.” The dingy court where the fortunate twain resided had been agitated from attic to cellar; the entire juvenile population had pulled his bell in quest of easy riches; mothers had quarrelled with one another over the chances of their young ones; the whole court had been torn with intestine war.
Ting-a-ting—ting-a-ting—ting—ting—ting—
The person had rung again, more ferociously. Ah, it must be that interminable Mrs. Filbert back again. Well, let her ring on, the old jade. Rather an hour of tintinnabulation than ten minutes of her tongue. Had his man been in, he might himself have been “out,” but he could scarcely appear at the door and deny himself. Her shrill falsetto voice resurged in the ear of memory, offering nude photos from Paris at exorbitant prices, or lists of models full of inaccurate addresses, or rare costumes, most of which could be picked up at any old clo’ shop. He smiled, recalling one of these costumes—something like a fishing-net with holes about an inch across. “This is Greek, and shows the figure.” Certainly it showed the figure, he thought, smiling more broadly. And now he remembered—she had threatened to bring her younger sister. “And I have also a little sister. I don’t know if you paint pretty girls,” here his memory inserted a giggle. “She sits for modern dress or the head. Not for the figure. Of course she doesn’t mind a light costume, something diaphanous. Though I’m not quite sure she has any time left. She is always with Mr. Rapper, who does those pastels for the Goupil Art Gallery. He is so very sweet to her. She goes to the theatre and dines with him. I sit myself sometimes, though you mightn’t think so” (giggle). “So of course she can’t sit in the evening, in case you want her for black and white.” (“Just like a woman,” he reflected, cynically, “too careless to take the trouble to discover that I am far too eminent for black and white.”) “I know I’m dressed carelessly just now, I really must be more careful” (giggle). “I have an Empire gown to sit in, very sweet. I will bring it you to look at.”
Ting-a-ting-ting-a-ting-ting-ting-ting-ting-ting.
Yes, it was the sweet Empire gown she was bringing him if it was not her sweeter sister. His experienced eye foresaw the Empire gown—something cut by herself out of muslin, with an old yellow silk sash. He let the last vibration of the bell-wire die away; the creature would know now he was not in. The smoke curled in a blue-gray cloud about his head, as, looking up from the page of the magazine, he gazed dreamily at his half-finished picture, standing on the easel at the other extremity of the great luxurious room, where the westering sun of June sent down a flood of light that brightened the gleam of the gold frames of hanging pictures, touched up rough sketches and preliminary studies standing about, and lay in a splash of brilliancy among the sheets of music and the dainty volumes of poetry and belles-lettres on the grand piano. Suddenly, as his gaze rested with a suspicion of wistfulness on this doubly artistic interior, in which the pictures were only pleasant spots of color in a larger harmony, a harmony of rugs and flowers and tapestry and picturesque properties and bric-à-brac, there shot up in his mind an image of an ancient episode. He saw himself, a shy, homely figure, standing in despairing bitterness on the threshold of an elegant studio—though not so elegant nor so commodious as this—the studio of the brilliant cousin whose life had intersected his own so many years ago. His face changed, a sad smile hovered about the corners of his mouth. Perhaps some unhappy young man was now outside his own less hospitable door, growing hopeless as the echoes alone answered him. He started up hastily, and hurrying into the passage drew back the handle of the door. A slim, fashionably attired gentleman, who was just walking off down the gravel pathway, turned, hearing the sound of the open door, his handsome, clean-shaven, bronzed face radiating joyous amusement.
“You duffer!” he exclaimed.
The famous painter turned pale. His cigarette fell from his mouth, so startled was he. That he should have just been thinking of Herbert Strang seemed almost supernatural. But the nervous feeling was submerged in a wave of happiness; to have Herbert again was an incredible bliss. How lucky he had opened the door!
“Herbert!” he cried, seizing his cousin’s delicately gloved hands with an affectionate impulsiveness worthy of Herbert’s mother.
Herbert surveyed him roguishly. “You’re a nice old pal to make me ring three times. What’s going on inside?”
“Nothing at all,” laughed the painter, in effusive happiness. “Only tea, and that’s cold. But come in.”
“You’re sure I’m not disturbing you,” said Herbert, mischievously.
“No, I’m all by myself.”
“It must be awfully convenient to have a back door,” murmured Herbert.
The painter shook his head. “You haven’t changed one bit,” he said, in laughing reproach, as they moved within.
“Oh, but you have,” said Herbert, pausing in the doorway to take him by the shoulders, and looking affectionately into his face. “Why, there’s quite a dash of gray in your hair. You must have been killing yourself with work.”
And, indeed, there were lines of premature age on the handsome face, too, though the rather tall, sturdy figure was still alert and unbent. The dark eyes had lost something of their old softness, the light of dream was rarer in them, but the little tangle of locks on his forehead still co-operated with the dark brown mustache and the smoothness of the firm chin to suggest the artist behind the practical man of the world.
“You forget I’m getting old,” he replied, only half jocosely.
“What nonsense! Why, I’m several years older than you.”
“No, are you?”
“Of course I am. Don’t you remember I was your senior, instructing you in the ways of this wicked world?”
“Well, you’re still looking a boy, anyhow,” said Mr. Strang.
“That’s what I want to look,” said Herbert, laughing. “It makes pretty women pet you and hold your hand. Why, in Italy I was the envy of all the cavaliers. Per Dio, this is a change!” he exclaimed, as he entered the fashionable studio. “Do you remember the time you came to me and wanted to borrow tenpence, or something? Ha, ha, ha! Not that I’m surprised, old boy, not a bit. I’ve heard your name come up quite half a dozen times in the few days I’ve been back in stony old London. No, thanks, I’ll sit on the couch. It’s cooler there. And I won’t have any cold tea in this frightfully hot weather. I’m still faithful to soda-and-whiskey, if you’ve got any.”
“Lots,” said Mr. Strang. “A cigar?”
“Not before dinner, thanks. I don’t mind a cigarette. But I’m not interrupting your work?”
“Don’t be ridiculous, old fellow. The idea of my turning you away!”
“Well, considering you nearly did it! But you’re a celebrity now. Your time’s valuable.”
“Oh, but I’ve struck work for to-day.”
“What, with all this light left? This is indeed a change from the tenpenny days.”
“Yes, I suppose one gets tired,” the painter sighed. “Do you like Turkish or Egyptians?”
“In cigarettes Turkish, in women Egyptians,” he answered, laconically. “But what a joke to find you tired of painting! You’re beginning to feel like I felt, eh? That it’s one demnition grind. And I’m tired of travelling, and wouldn’t mind doing a little painting now, ha, ha, ha! How funnily things do turn out, to be sure. Why, you’ve changed inside almost as much as outside,” he said, looking up languidly into his host’s face, as he selected a cigarette from the box. “I wonder if I should have recognized you if I had met you in the streets instead of tracking the lion to his own den. I shouldn’t have thought half a dozen years would have made such a difference.”
“Half a dozen years! It’s nearer ten since we met.”
“Nearer ten? Is it possible? Let me see. It must be quite seven years since the governor died, poor old chap. We haven’t met since then, have we?”
“No,” said the painter.
“No, of course; I’ve been careering about the world ever since. You know he died in Egypt?”
“No, I didn’t know that,” said Mr. Strang. “I only heard of his death from the dealer who took over the connection.”
“Yes, he had to go there pretty sharp for his lungs, and I was compelled to leave Paris in my second year to go with him and the mater. But he died happy. That blessed gold medal of mine made him sure the name of Strang would be immortal in the history of Art. I always said there was a certain pathos about the poor old gentleman. But perhaps his assurance wasn’t so wrong after all, because you are going to make the name glorious, aren’t you, you lucky beggar! And his own name, too; which ought to make him happy, even in heaven.”
The great man smiled sadly, but he only said, “And your mother—how is she? I’ve often wished to see her again.”
“Oh, she’s living now at Lyons with some distant relatives of hers. Of course, she soon tired of gadding about with me. She sent me a cutting about you once from a French paper. So you see how your fame has spread! I’ve often been meaning to write to you, but you know how it is, always moving about, and I always intended to look you up when I came to London. I was here two years ago on a flying visit, but some paper said you were in Rome. Yes, and I saw a colored reproduction of a picture of yours, ‘Motherhood,’ decorating a miner’s cabin in the Rockies—the Christmas supplement of the Illustrated London News, if I remember aright. It was a mother nursing a little girl, while the kid herself nursed a doll.”
The painter turned away and struck a match.
“And then there were a couple of years before your father died,” he said. “The last time we met was at the Students’ Club in Seven Dials on Gold Medal Night.”
“Yes, by Jove, you’re right,” said Herbert, thoughtfully. “If I didn’t wish to avoid a platitude I should say that time flies. It’s been a jolly good time, though, for me, with nothing to do except spend the poor old governor’s savings, and a jolly big hole I’ve knocked in them, too. And you haven’t come out of it so badly, eh? That’s a stunning thing of yours in the Academy. Aren’t you glad I made you promise to send a picture to it in those tenpenny times? I’ve just come from there. Got your address from the catalogue. I congratulate you heartily. It’s not the sort of thing I expected from you; but it’s well put in, and I suppose it pays. It is astonishing,” he went on, after pausing to sip from his glass, “how paltry English art looks to me after all these years and seeing everything everywhere. The picture of the year is exactly like the lid of a bon-bon box. There aren’t half a dozen things in to-day’s show that I’d care to look at again. You’re in the running, don’t look so glum, ha, ha, ha! Frankly, old man, your ‘Triumph of Bacchus’ is jolly good work. You know I never cared much for subject, but the modelling is A 1, and that sunlight effect is ripping! And what a crowd there was before it! Phew! I nearly got suffocated trying to see it, and I had to retire to the Architectural Room to cool. I don’t like Cornpepper’s picture one bit, though he is an A.R.A.”
“You mean because he is,” said Matthew Strang, with melancholy facetiousness.
“No, nothing of the kind; that rather prejudices me in his favor. You mustn’t forget I prophesied it. You don’t mean to say you admire his ‘Ariadne in Naxos’? ‘Poached lady on greens,’ I marked it in my catalogue. Do laugh! You look as dull and faded as an Old Master. I think I shall have to restore you. Here, have some whiskey yourself. You’re damned unsociable.”
“I rarely drink,” the host said, feebly.
“You used to drink my whiskey,” Herbert reminded him, and as he poured himself out a little in deference to his brilliant cousin, he thought how queerly things had inverted themselves.
“The Triumph of Bacchus,” said Herbert, laughing. “Now I’ve put in the good spirit, I’ll exorcise the bad, as David did to Saul.” And crossing over to the piano he played a lively air.
“I picked up that from a Spanish gypsy,” he said. “Not George Eliot’s. But I’m sinking to puns. It’s the English climate. You’ve got no wit here, and there isn’t even a word for esprit. Let’s examine your pictures. Ha! Hum! I see you’ve got quite a number on your hands. I suppose they must be the good ones. Ah! What do you call that thing—the lady in blue and the harp?”
“ ‘Ideal Womanhood,’ ” answered the painter, adding, hastily: “It’s just been returned from Australia. I lent it to an international exhibition. They beguiled me with the prospect it would be bought by the Government.”
“Ideal moonshine, I should call it,” laughed Herbert. “There never was such moonlight on sea or land. And does the ideal woman play the harp on snowy mountain-tops at midnight without a chaperon?”
“It’s supposed to be symbolic, you know, of her inspiring man to nobler heights,” explained the artist, with an embarrassed air.
He wondered vaguely what had become of that beautiful woman—what was her name?—whose casual words at a garden-party had driven him back for a time into what he thought was the true path of his Art.
“Dear me. There’s quite a mystic feeling about it. Isn’t that the right phrase? Do you know, I’m seriously thinking of becoming an art critic. Yes, really! As I told you, I’ve had my fill of travelling, and now I’m going to try and settle down here, and I rather like getting a reputation for something or other. It makes real woman more interested in one. The only thing I’m afraid of is, I know too much about the subject, and have actually handled the brush. I’m going to paint, too, but I’ve neglected to keep my hand in, so I’ve not much hopes of that. Unless I came out as a stylist, who sees the world as he fails to paint it. You’ve got several new men like that, I hear. There’s money in myopia and diseases of the eye generally. And per Dio! how photography has come along since I was one of the pioneers of its use in art!”
Matthew Strang shrugged his shoulders.
“What does it matter?” he said, wearily. “The whole thing’s a farce.”
“Here, I say, must I play another gypsy dance? I came here expecting to find you a harmony in gold, and lo! you’re a discord in the blues. What’s the matter with you? You’re jealous of Cornpepper. How is it they haven’t made you an A.R.A. yet? Don’t you go out enough?”
The painter’s lips essayed a melancholy smile.
“I go out all I want to.”
“There are enough cards stuck over your mantel.”
“Yes, I have to go out a good deal in the season. It doesn’t pay to offend patrons.”
“Or Ideal Womanhood. I reckon you’ll be making a fine marriage one of these days when you’re an A.R.A., as you must be. Lady Bettina Modish, or something of that sort, eh?”
“Won’t you have another cigarette?” said the painter, jerkily.
“Thanks. Oh, by-the-way, ha, ha, ha! What’s become of that woman, you rogue?”
“What woman?”
“Real womanhood. The woman you were living with in Paris. Ha, ha, ha! You didn’t think I knew that. But I met Cornpepper there on my return from Egypt, and he told me he’d seen you going about with her. How we laughed over our Methodist parson, who wanted art to be moral! What’s the matter?”
The painter’s face had grown white and agitated.
“I’m sorry if I’ve said anything to annoy you,” Herbert protested. “Perhaps I oughtn’t to have given Cornpepper away. But the affair is so ancient. I didn’t know you’d mind a reference to it now.”
“The woman I was living with in Paris,” said Matthew Strang, hoarsely, “was my wife.”
“Non—sense,” said Herbert, in low, long-drawn incredulity. But his cousin’s face was only too convincing.
“She’s not alive now?” he asked.
The painter nodded his head hopelessly.
Herbert sprang to his feet.
“Good God!” he said. “You don’t mean to say you were such an ass as to marry! No wonder you’re in the blues.”
Matthew Strang was silent. There was a painful pause.
“But you’ve kept it pretty dark,” Herbert said, at last. “Everybody seems to look upon you as a bachelor.”
“I know,” replied the painter. “I’ve always lived a lonely life, and I don’t speak about my affairs.”
“I’m sorry I touched upon them, then.”
“No. I can talk with you.”
“Thanks, old man.” And Herbert took his friend’s hand and pressed it sympathetically. “You’re not living with her, anyhow, and that’s something.”
“Oh, but I am living with her—at least, I go home sometimes. It’s not quite my fault—it’s grown up gradually. She lives in Camden Town.”
“Alone?”
“Oh no! There’s Billy—that’s my young brother—to keep her company. And then there’s the children.”
“What! kids as well?”
“Only two.”
Herbert looked glum. “I suppose she’s an impossible person,” he said.
“Do you mean to live with?”
“No, to be seen with.”
“We’ve never been out together in London,” replied the painter, simply. “We drifted apart before I was asked out. Oh, but it’s no use going into it—it’s all too sordid.”
“Poor chap!” said Herbert. “Well, you may rely on my respecting your confidence. I suppose it is a secret?”
“It seems to be. I make none of it, except negatively. You will find Mrs. Strang in the directory as a householder in Camden Town; she took the house, as it happened. She has a little money of her own.”
Herbert smiled sadly. “That’s what I always say. The safest secret in the world is the open secret. If you had hidden her away in Patagonia, or tried to put her into a lunatic asylum, it would have been the talk of the town. As you simply let her live quietly in the heart of London, nobody’s provoked into inquisitiveness, and if anybody knows—as no doubt an odd person does here and there—he doesn’t tell anybody else because he doesn’t know it’s a secret. I shouldn’t be surprised to hear the marriage was duly advertised in the first column of the Times.”
Mr. Matthew Strang’s smile faintly reflected his cousin’s. “No, we were married in Nova Scotia,” he replied. “But what are you doing to-night?”
“How improbable life is,” mused Herbert. “Only yesterday I heard that Jackson, the Cabinet Minister, has been secretly married these last twenty years. What am I doing to-night? Oh, nothing particular. I thought of dropping into a music-hall. I can’t stand the English theatre. It’s so unintellectual.”
“Well, why not dine with me at the Limners’?”
“Sure you haven’t got any other engagement?” And Herbert peered curiously at the large chalked-over engagement slate hung on the wall.
“Oh, I said I would dine en famille at Lady Conisbrooke’s, but I can easily send a wire. As it isn’t a formal dinner-party, and as I’m rather a privileged person with her, I dare say she’ll forgive me.”
“It’s awfully naughty of you,” said Herbert. “But then, there, you’re a genius! And it would be jolly to dine together as in the days of auld lang syne. I’ve got an awful lot to yarn about, and so have you. I’ll rush to my rooms and dress.”
“Oh, why bother to dress? Though I must, if you don’t mind. I’ve got to go on to one or two places. If you don’t mind waiting a few minutes while I wash my brushes and put on my war-paint, we can go at once. Unless you’re too fashionable to dine prematurely.”
“No, but I think I’d rather dress. It’s cooler in this frightful weather. Shall I come back or meet you at the club?”
“As you like.”
“Well, you go on to the club, and I’ll be there just as quick as I can. Oh, by-the-way, write out that wire, and I’ll send it for you.”
“Thanks; perhaps you had better, though I expect my man back in a few minutes. He’s seeing about the delivery of a picture to the London agents of the Liverpool Autumn Exhibition.”
When Herbert was gone Matthew Strang did not at once mount to his dressing-room. The advent of this visitor from the past had stirred up all its muddy depths, and the knowledge that he had a little time to spare kept him brooding over it all, recalling the episodes of their camaraderie; and blended with them, as faded scents with old letters, he caught faint, elusive whiffs of that freshness of feeling and aspiration which had impregnated them in those dear, divine days of youth, when even his darkest hours were tinged with a rose-light of dawn. Never again would he feel that glow, that fervor, those strange stirrings of romance, that delicious sadness sweeter than all mirth, when a perfect blue day could bring tears to the eyes, and the melancholy patter of rain at twilight was like a dying fall of music, and something strange and far away subtly interfused itself with the loveliness of nature, with flowers and sunsets and summer nights, a haunting grace, intangible, inexpressible, hinting somehow of divine archetypes of beauty in some celestial universe.
No; even his spasmodic strivings to escape from the rut of false Art were becoming fewer and farther between. Perhaps he was not a genius, after all, he had begun to think. Why should he vex himself? That sentiment of Constable at which he had winced when he first came across it, “People may say what they like of my art, what I know is that it is my art,” was losing its power to sting. The stirrings of his astral self were subsiding. He felt himself hardening steadily into a mere unit of the Club world of tired and successful men, who, having blunted their emotions by heavy feeding of all their appetites, could no longer feel the primal things, taking even their vices with the joyless sobriety of virtue. And though he himself was temperate enough and had not been unfaithful to Rosina, but only to the spirit of the marriage contract, yet this same drought of feeling, this furred tongue of the emotional being, was becoming unpleasantly familiar.
As he sat now moodily reviewing the situation he burst into a spasmodic, bitter laugh. It had struck him for the first time that his life had come to be not unlike his father’s—a life apart from his wife’s, with a rare stay under the domestic roof, the wife the more amiable for his absences. A sudden intuition seemed a flash-light on his father’s past. He felt drawn to the dead sailor with a new sympathy. He rose in agitation, extending his arms towards a visionary form.
“Father, father!” he cried aloud. “Did you suffer like me?”
“Did you call, sir?” And Claydon, his man-servant, who had come in quietly through the back door, descended from the bedroom, where he had been laying out his master’s things.
“Yes,” said his master. “Is my shaving-water ready? I’m going out a little earlier than usual.”
“Yes, sir.” And the painter, recalled to reality, hastened to perform his toilet. But his mind still ran in the grooves of the past, remote from all the new interests and distractions of a brilliant career.
When he sprang from the hansom and walked through the door of the Limners’ Club, he remembered that this was the very club he had come to on his first day in London—nay, that the gray-headed, deferential door-keeper was the very man whose majesty had chilled him. He wondered now whether the old fellow ever connected the popular painter with the homely, diffident youth who had inquired for Mr. Matthew Strang.
“Gentleman waiting for you, sir.”
Curious! Now it was Herbert that was waiting for Mr. Matthew Strang.
But the thought of the whirligig of time gave him no pleasure. In his early struggles in London, when no one would buy his work, he had gloated in anticipation over the humility of the dealers when he should have made his position; now he had long since forgotten and forgiven their contempt; how could they know he was worth taking up? There was nothing but the palest shadow of satisfaction in the thought that they would scour London in search of those despised pictures if they only knew. He wondered sometimes if those early things of his would ever come up into the light, whether the daughter of his ancient landlady still treasured her mother’s wedding-present, and what had become of “The Paradise of the Birds.”
A bluff graybeard in the hall shook his hand heartily. It was Erle-Smith. Matthew Strang knew now that Erle-Smith, whom he had imagined to pass his days encamped before the beatific vision, was a jolly good fellow with sheaves of amusing anecdotes. But he remembered the first time Erle-Smith had spoken to him—at a City banquet in the beginnings of his fame.
“We oldsters will have to be looking to our laurels,” he had said, placing his hand on the young man’s shoulder. After the banquet Erle-Smith had given him a lift in his open carriage, and as they rolled through the busy, flashing London night a voice in Matt’s breast kept crying out, “This is Erle-Smith! Look! This is the great Erle-Smith I am driving with. Why don’t you look, you stupid multitudes? Do you not know this is Erle-Smith—Erle-Smith himself?” Oh, why did not some of the people who knew Matthew Strang come along and see him driving with Erle-Smith? Perhaps they did—there must surely be one acquaintance, at least, among all those crowds, and he would tell the others. He had scarcely been able to reply rationally to Erle-Smith’s conversation, so intoxicated was he by the great man’s proximity. And now he himself was a popular celebrity—shown with the finger—on the eve of Academic honors; had he not, of all the younger men among the guests, been called upon (with disconcerting unexpectedness) to respond to a toast at the Academy Greenwich Dinner only last month? Was he not already on the Council of minor artistic societies? Yes; doubtless he himself was already the cause of like foolish flutterings in the breasts of youthful hero-worshippers—he whose heart could no longer flutter, not even when the youthful hero-worshipper was a woman and beautiful.
He dined with Herbert at a little table. His burst of communicativeness had exhausted itself, and he was glad to let the returned traveller do the bulk of the talking as well as of the dining. He himself ate little, though the cuisine was excellent, and the cellar took high rank. Over dinner Herbert bubbled over in endless reminiscences of the rare dishes and vintages he had consumed, the operas and symphonies he had heard, the women who had loved him—a veritable rhapsody of wine, woman, and song. In an access of unmalicious bitterness, like that which had overcome him on the threshold of Herbert’s studio, Matthew Strang felt that Herbert was the real Master—the Master of life.
In the smoking-room other men gathered round. There was Grose, whose colossal canvases were exhibited at a shilling a head with explanatory pamphlets by high ecclesiastical authorities, and there was Thornbury, who succeeded him in the same gallery with colossal nudes that needed no explanation from ecclesiastical authorities.
Matthew introduced Herbert to Trapp, the realistic novelist, and Herbert introduced Matthew to Sir Frederick Boyd, the composer, who related with gusto a story of how he had exposed a cheat at Monte Carlo. A Scotch landscape-painter asked Matthew to recommend him a model. Two Associates joined the group. One was a vigorous painter who painted everything à premier coup, the other was Cornpepper, externally unchanged, save for a round beard.
He had long since cut himself adrift from the Azure Art Club, though he still counted his disciples, whose experimental fumblings in development of his methods he boasted of observing in sapient passivity. “Try it on the dog,” he used to chuckle to his familiars. “I’ve done searching—let my imitators search, and risk the bogs and the blind-alleys. If they do strike a path, I’m on the spot instantly to lead them along it. That’s the only way one can learn from one’s followers.” He used to tell with glee how one of them had ruined a picture by putting it out in the rain to mellow it. “Some of those modern