"'I knew it was good, my wine,' he said, 'but—' a shrug said the rest.
'Not so good as all that,' he meant….
"Then he gave us our candles, showed us to our rooms, shook hands, and marched off to his own room and the Prévosts.
"I dreamed of my old lady half the night.
"After coffee the next morning I put my hand into my pocket for my cigarette case and didn't find it. I went through all my pockets, and then I asked Carroll if he'd got it.
"'No,' he replied…. 'Think you left it behind at that place last night?'
"'Yes; did you?' Rangon popped in with a twinkle.
"I went through all my pockets again. No cigarette case….
"Of course, it was possible that I'd left it behind, and I was annoyed again. I didn't want to go back, you see…. But, on the other hand, I didn't want to lose the case—it was a present—and Rangon's smile nettled me a good deal, too. It was both a challenge to our truthfulness and a testimonial to that very good wine of his….
"'Might have done,' I grunted…. 'Well, in that case we'll go and get it.'
"'If one tried the restaurant first—?' Rangon suggested, smiling again.
"'By all means,' said I stuffily, though I remembered having the case after we'd left the restaurant.
"We were round at the restaurant by half-past nine. The case wasn't there. I'd known jolly well beforehand it wasn't, and I saw Rangon's mouth twitching with amusement.
"'So we now seek the abode of these English ladies, hein?' he said.
"'Yes,' said I; and we left the restaurant and strode through the village by the way we'd taken the evening before….
"That vigneron's smile became more and more irritating to me…. 'It is then the next village?' he said presently, as we left the last house and came out into the open plain.
"We went back….
"I was irritated because we were two to one, you see, and Carroll backed me up. 'A double door, with a grille in front of it,' he repeated for the fiftieth time…. Rangon merely replied that it wasn't our good faith he doubted. He didn't actually use the word 'drunk.'…
"'Mais tiens,' he said suddenly, trying to conceal his mirth. 'Si c'est possible… si c'est possible… a double door with a grille? But perhaps that I know it, the domicile of these so elusive ladies…. Come this way.'
"He took us back along a plantain-groved street, and suddenly turned up an alley that was little more than two gutters and a crack of sky overhead between two broken-tiled roofs. It was a dilapidated, deserted ruelle, and I was positively angry when Rangon pointed to a blistered old porte-cochère with a half-unhinged railing in front of it.
"'Is it that, your house?' he asked.
"'No,' says I, and 'No,' says Carroll … and off we started again….
"But another half-hour brought us back to the same place, and Carroll scratched his head.
"'Who lives there, anyway?' he said, glowering at the porte-cochère, chin forward, hands in pockets.
"'Nobody,' says Rangon, as much as to say 'look at it!' 'M'sieu then meditates taking it?'…
"Then I struck in, quite out of temper by this time.
"'How much would the rent be?' I asked, as if I really thought of taking the place just to get back at him.
"He mentioned something ridiculously small in the way of francs.
"'One might at least see the place,' says I. 'Can the key be got?'
"He bowed. The key was at the baker's, not a hundred yards away, he said….
"We got the key. It was the key of the inner wooden door—that grid of rusty iron didn't need one—it came clean off its single hinge when Carroll touched it. Carroll opened, and we stood for a moment motioning to one another to step in. Then Rangon went in first, and I heard him murmur 'Pardon, Mesdames.'…
"Now this is the odd part. We passed into a sort of vestibule or hall, with a burst lead pipe in the middle of a dry tank in the centre of it. There was a broad staircase rising in front of us to the first floor, and double doors just seen in the half-light at the head of the stairs. Old tubs stood against the walls, but the palms and aloes in them were dead—only a cabbage-stalk or two—and the rusty hoops lay on the ground about them. One tub had come to pieces entirely and was no more than a heap of staves on a pile of spilt earth. And everywhere, everywhere was dust—the floor was an inch deep in dust and old plaster that muffled our footsteps, cobwebs hung like old dusters on the walls, a regular goblin's tatter of cobwebs draped the little bracket inside the door, and the wrought-iron of the hand-rail was closed up with webs in which not even a spider moved. The whole thing was preposterous….
"'It is possible that for even a less rental—'
"Rangon murmured, dragging his forefinger across the hand-rail and leaving an inch-deep furrow….
"'Come upstairs,' said I suddenly….
"Up we went. All was in the same state there. A clutter of stuff came down as I pushed at the double doors of the salon, and I had to strike a stinking French sulphur match to see into the room at all. Underfoot was like walking on thicknesses of flannel, and except where we put our feet the place was as printless as a snowfield—dust, dust, unbroken grey dust. My match burned down….
"'Wait a minute—I've a bougie,' said Carroll, and struck the wax match….
"There were the old sconces, with never a candle-end in them. There was the large oval mirror, but hardly reflecting Carroll's match for the dust on it. And the broken chairs were there, all gutless, and the rickety old round table….
"But suddenly I darted forward. Something new and bright on the table twinkled with the light of Carroll's match. The match went out, and by the time Carroll had lighted another I had stopped. I wanted Rangon to see what was on the table….
"'You'll see by my footprints how far from that table I've been,' I said. 'Will you pick it up?'
"And Rangon, stepping forward, picked up from the middle of the table—my cigarette case."
* * * * *
Loder had finished. Nobody spoke. For quite a minute nobody spoke, and then Loder himself broke the silence, turning to me.
"Make anything of it?" he said.
I lifted my eyebrows. "Only your vigneron's explanation—" I began, but stopped again, seeing that wouldn't do.
"_Any_body make anything of it?" said Loder, turning from one to another.
I gathered from Smith's face that he thought one thing might be made of it—namely, that Loder had invented the whole tale. But even Smith didn't speak.
"Were any English ladies ever found to have lived in the place—murdered, you know—bodies found and all that?" young Marsham asked diffidently, yearning for an obvious completeness.
"Not that we could ever learn," Loder replied. "We made inquiries too…. So you all give it up? Well, so do I…."
And he rose. As he walked to the door, myself following him to get his hat and stick, I heard him humming softly the lines—they are from Oft in the Stilly Night—
"I seem like one who treads alone
Some banquet-hall deserted,
Whose guests are fled, whose garlands dead,
And all but he—departed!"
THE ROCKER
I
There was little need for the swart gipsies to explain, as they stood knee-deep in the snow round the bailiff of the Abbey Farm, what it was that had sent them. The unbroken whiteness of the uplands told that, and, even as they spoke, there came up the hill the dark figures of the farm men with shovels, on their way to dig out the sheep. In the summer, the bailiff would have been the first to call the gipsies vagabonds and roost-robbers; now … they had women with them too.
"The hares and foxes were down four days ago, and the liquid-manure pumps like a snow man," the bailiff said…. "Yes, you can lie in the laithes and welcome—if you can find 'em. Maybe you'll help us find our sheep too—"
The gipsies had done so. Coming back again, they had had some ado to discover the spot where their three caravans made a hummock of white against a broken wall.
The women—they had four women with them—began that afternoon to weave the mats and baskets they hawked from door to door; and in the forenoon of the following day one of them, the black-haired, soft-voiced quean whom the bailiff had heard called Annabel, set her babe in the sling on her back, tucked a bundle of long cane-loops under her oxter, and trudged down between eight-foot walls of snow to the Abbey Farm. She stood in the latticed porch, dark and handsome against the whiteness, and then, advancing, put her head into the great hall-kitchen.
"Has the lady any chairs for the gipsy woman to mend?" she asked in a soft and insinuating voice….
They brought her the old chairs; she seated herself on a box in the porch; and there she wove the strips of cane in and out, securing each one with a little wooden peg and a tap of her hammer. The child remained in the sling at her back, taking the breast from time to time over her shoulder; and the silver wedding ring could be seen as she whipped the cane, back and forth.
As she worked, she cast curious glances into the old hall-kitchen. The snow outside cast a pallid, upward light on the heavy ceiling-beams; this was reflected in the polished stone floor; and the children, who at first had shyly stopped their play, seeing the strange woman in the porch—the nearest thing they had seen to gipsies before had been the old itinerant glazier with his frame of glass on his back—resumed it, but still eyed her from time to time. In the ancient walnut chair by the hearth sat the old, old lady who had told them to bring the chairs. Her hair, almost as white as the snow itself, was piled up on her head à la Marquise; she was knitting; but now and then she allowed the needle in the little wooden sheath at her waist to lie idle, closed her eyes, and rocked softly in the old walnut chair.
"Ask the woman who is mending the chairs whether she is warm enough there," the old lady said to one of the children; and the child went to the porch with the message.
"Thank you, little missie—thank you, lady dear—Annabel is quite warm," said the soft voice; and the child returned to the play.
It was a childish game of funerals at which the children played. The hand of Death, hovering over the dolls, had singled out Flora, the articulations of whose sawdust body were seams and whose boots were painted on her calves of fibrous plaster. For the greater solemnity, the children had made themselves sweeping trains of the garments of their elders, and those with cropped curls had draped their heads with shawls, the fringes of which they had combed out with their fingers to simulate hair—long hair, such as Sabrina, the eldest, had hanging so low down her back that she could almost sit on it. A cylindrical-bodied horse, convertible (when his flat head came out of its socket) into a locomotive, headed the sad cortège; then came the defunct Flora; then came Jack, the raffish sailor doll, with other dolls; and the children followed with hushed whisperings.
The youngest of the children passed the high-backed walnut chair in which the old lady sat. She stopped.
"Aunt Rachel—" she whispered, slowly and gravely opening very wide and closing very tight her eyes.
"Yes, dear?"
"Flora's dead!"
The old lady, when she smiled, did so less with her lips than with her faded cheeks. So sweet was her face that you could not help wondering, when you looked on it, how many men had also looked upon it and loved it. Somehow, you never wondered how many of them had been loved in return.
"I'm so sorry, dear," Aunt Rachel, who in reality was a great-aunt, said.
"What did she die of this time?"
"She died of … Brown Titus … 'n now she's going to be buried in a grave as little as her bed."
"In a what, dear?"
"As little … dread … as little as my bed … you say it, Sabrina."
"She means, Aunt Rachel,
"Teach me to live that I may dread The Grave as little as my bed,"
Sabrina, the eldest, interpreted.
"Ah!… But won't you play at cheerful things, dears?"
"Yes, we will, presently, Aunt Rachel; gee up, horse!… Shall we go and ask the chair-woman if she's warm enough?"
"Do, dears."
Again the message was taken, and this time it seemed as if Annabel, the gipsy, was not warm enough, for she gathered up her loops of cane and brought the chair she was mending a little way into the hall-kitchen itself. She sat down on the square box they used to cover the sewing machine.
"Thank you, lady dear," she murmured, lifting her handsome almond eyes to Aunt Rachel. Aunt Rachel did not see the long, furtive, curious glance. Her own eyes were closed, as if she was tired; her cheeks were smiling; one of them had dropped a little to one shoulder, as it might have dropped had she held in her arms a babe; and she was rocking, softly, slowly, the rocker of the chair making a little regular noise on the polished floor.
The gipsy woman beckoned to one of the children.
"Tell the lady, when she wakes, that I will tack a strip of felt to the rocker, and then it will make no noise at all," said the low and wheedling voice; and the child retired again.
The interment of Flora proceeded….
An hour later Flora had taken up the burden of Life again. It was as
Angela, the youngest, was chastising her for some offence, that Sabrina,
the eldest, looked with wondering eyes on the babe in the gipsy's sling.
She approached on tiptoe.
"May I look at it, please?" she asked timidly.
The gipsy set one shoulder forward, and Sabrina put the shawl gently aside, peering at the dusky brown morsel within.
"Sometime, perhaps—if I'm very careful—"
Sabrina ventured diffidently, "—if I'm very careful—may I hold it?"
Before replying, the gipsy once more turned her almond eyes towards Aunt Rachel's chair. Aunt Rachel had been awakened for the conclusion of Flora's funeral, but her eyes were closed again now, and once more her cheek was dropped in that tender suggestive little gesture, and she rocked. But you could see that she was not properly asleep…. It was, somehow, less to Sabrina, still peering at the babe in the sling, than to Aunt Rachel, apparently asleep, that the gipsy seemed to reply.
"You'll know some day, little missis, that a wean knows its own pair of arms," her seductive voice came.
And Aunt Rachel heard. She opened her eyes with a start. The little regular noise of the rocker ceased. She turned her head quickly; tremulously she began to knit again; and, as her eyes rested on the sidelong eyes of the gipsy woman, there was an expression in them that almost resembled fright.
II
They began to deck the great hall-kitchen for Christmas, but the snow still lay thick over hill and valley, and the gipsies' caravans remained by the broken wall where the drifts had overtaken them. Though all the chairs were mended, Annabel still came daily to the farm, sat on the box they used to cover the sewing machine, and wove mats. As she wove them, Aunt Rachel knitted, and from time to time fragments of talk passed between the two women. It was always the white-haired lady who spoke first, and Annabel made all sorts of salutes and obeisances with her eyes before replying.
"I have not seen your husband," Aunt Rachel said to Annabel one day. (The children at the other end of the apartment had converted a chest into an altar, and were solemnising the nuptials of the resurrected Flora and Jack, the raffish sailor-doll.)
Annabel made roving play with her eyes. "He is up at the caravans, lady dear," she replied. "Is there anything Annabel can bid him do?"
"Nothing, thank you," said Aunt Rachel.
For a minute the gipsy watched Aunt Rachel, and then she got up from the sewing machine box and crossed the floor. She leaned so close towards her that she had to put up a hand to steady the babe at her back.
"Lady dear," she murmured with irresistible softness, "your husband died, didn't he?"
On Aunt Rachel's finger was a ring, but it was not a wedding ring. It was a hoop of pearls.
"I have never had a husband," she said.
The gipsy glanced at the ring. "Then that is—?"
"That is a betrothal ring," Aunt Rachel replied.
"Ah!…" said Annabel.
Then, after a minute, she drew still closer. Her eyes were fixed on Aunt
Rachel's, and the insinuating voice was very low.
"Ah!… And did it die too, lady dear?"
Again came that quick, half-affrighted look into Aunt Rachel's face. Her eyes avoided those of the gipsy, sought them, and avoided them again.
"Did what die?" she asked slowly and guardedly….
The child at the gipsy's back did not need suck; nevertheless, Annabel's fingers worked at her bosom, and she moved the sling. As the child settled, Annabel gave Aunt Rachel a long look.
"Why do you rock?" she asked slowly.
Aunt Rachel was trembling. She did not reply. In a voice soft as sliding water the gipsy continued:
"Lady dear, we are a strange folk to you, and even among us there are those who shuffle the pack of cards and read the palm when silver has been put upon it, knowing nothing… But some of us see—some of us see."
It was more than a minute before Aunt Rachel spoke.
"You are a woman, and you have your babe at your breast now…. Every woman sees the thing you speak of."
But the gipsy shook her head. "You speak of seeing with the heart. I speak of eyes—these eyes."
Again came a long pause. Aunt Rachel had given a little start, but had become quiet again. When at last she spoke it was in a voice scarcely audible.
"That cannot be. I know what you mean, but it cannot be…. He died on the eve of his wedding. For my bridal clothes they made me black garments instead. It is long ago, and now I wear neither black nor white, but—" her hands made a gesture. Aunt Rachel always dressed as if to suit a sorrow that Time had deprived of bitterness, in such a tender and fleecy grey as one sees in the mists that lie like lawn over hedgerow and copse early of a midsummer's morning. "Therefore," she resumed, "your heart may see, but your eyes cannot see that which never was."
But there came a sudden note of masterfulness into the gipsy's voice.
"With my eyes—these eyes," she repeated, pointing to them.
Aunt Rachel kept her own eyes obstinately on her knitting needles. "None except I have seen it. It is not to be seen," she said.
The gipsy sat suddenly erect.
"It is not so. Keep still in your chair," she ordered, "and I will tell you when—"
It was a curious thing that followed. As if all the will went out of her, Aunt Rachel sat very still; and presently her hands fluttered and dropped. The gipsy sat with her own hands folded over the mat on her knees. Several minutes passed; then, slowly, once more that sweetest of smiles stole over Aunt Rachel's cheeks. Once more her head dropped. Her hands moved. Noiselessly on the rockers that the gipsy had padded with felt the chair began to rock. Annabel lifted one hand.
"Dovo se li" she said. "It is there."
Aunt Rachel did not appear to hear her. With that ineffable smile still on her face, she rocked….
Then, after some minutes, there crossed her face such a look as visits the face of one who, waking from sleep, strains his faculties to recapture some blissful and vanishing vision….
"Jal—it is gone," said the gipsy woman.
Aunt Rachel opened her eyes again. She repeated dully after Annabel:
"It is gone."
"Ghosts," the gipsy whispered presently, "are of the dead. Therefore it must have lived."
But again Aunt Rachel shook her head. "It never lived."
"You were young, and beautiful?…"
Still the shake of the head. "He died on the eve of his wedding. They took my white garments away and gave me black ones. How then could it have lived?"
"Without the kiss, no…. But sometimes a woman will lie through her life, and at the graveside still will lie…. Tell me the truth."
But they were the same words that Aunt Rachel repeated: "He died on the eve of his wedding; they took away my wedding garments…." From her lips a lie could hardly issue. The gipsy's face became grave….
She broke another long silence.
"I believe," she said at last. "It is a new kind—but no more wonderful than the other. The other I have seen, now I have seen this also. Tell me, does it come to any other chair?"
"It was his chair; he died in it," said Aunt Rachel.
"And you—shall you die in it?"
"As God wills."
"Has … other life … visited it long?"
"Many years; but it is always small; it never grows."
"To their mothers babes never grow. They remain ever babes…. None other has ever seen it?"
"Except yourself, none. I sit here; presently it creeps into my arms; it is small and warm; I rock, and then… it goes."
"Would it come to another chair?"
"I cannot tell. I think not. It was his chair."
Annabel mused. At the other end of the room Flora was now bestowed on Jack, the disreputable sailor. The gipsy's eyes rested on the bridal party….
"Yet another might see it—"
"None has."
"No; but yet…. The door does not always shut behind us suddenly. Perhaps one who has toddled but a step or two over the threshold might, by looking back, catch a glimpse…. What is the name of the smallest one?"
"Angela."
"That means 'angel'… Look, the doll who died yesterday is now being married…. It may be that Life has not yet sealed the little one's eyes. Will you let Annabel ask her if she sees what it is you hold in your arms?"
Again the voice was soft and wheedling….
"No, Annabel," said Aunt Rachel faintly.
"Will you rock again?"
Aunt Rachel made no reply.
"Rock…" urged the cajoling voice.
But Aunt Rachel only turned the betrothal ring on her finger. Over at the altar Jack was leering at his new-made bride, past decency; and little Angela held the wooden horse's head, which had parted from its body.
"Rock, and comfort yourself—" tempted the voice.
Then slowly Aunt Rachel rose from her chair.
"No, Annabel," she said gently. "You should not have spoken. When the snow melts you will go, and come no more; why then did you speak? It was mine. It was not meant to be seen by another. I no longer want it. Please go."
The swarthy woman turned her almond eyes on her once more.
"You cannot live without it," she said as she also rose….
And as Jack and his bride left the church on the reheaded horse, Aunt
Rachel walked with hanging head from the apartment.
III
Thenceforward, as day followed day, Aunt Rachel rocked no more; and with the packing and partial melting of the snow the gipsies up at the caravans judged it time to be off about their business. It was on the morning of Christmas Eve that they came down in a body to the Abbey Farm to express their thanks to those who had befriended them; but the bailiff was not there. He and the farm men had ceased work, and were down at the church, practising the carols. Only Aunt Rachel sat, still and knitting, in the black walnut chair; and the children played on the floor.
A night in the toy-box had apparently bred discontent between Jack and Flora—or perhaps they sought to keep their countenances before the world; at any rate, they sat on opposite sides of the room, Jack keeping boon company with the lead soldiers, his spouse reposing, her lead-balanced eyes closed, in the broken clockwork motor-car. With the air of performing some vaguely momentous ritual, the children were kissing one another beneath the bunch of mistletoe that hung from the centre beam. In the intervals of kissing they told one another in whispers that Aunt Rachel was not very well, and Angela woke Flora to tell her that Aunt Rachel had Brown Titus also.
"Stay you here; I will give the lady dear our thanks," said Annabel to the group of gipsies gathered about the porch; and she entered the great hall-kitchen. She approached the chair in which Aunt Rachel sat.
There was obeisance in the bend of her body, but command in her long almond eyes, as she spoke.
"Lady dear, you must rock or you cannot live."
Aunt Rachel did not look up from her work.
"Rocking, I should not live long," she replied.
"We are leaving you."
"All leave me."
"Annabel fears she has taken away your comfort."
"Only for a little while. The door closes behind us, but it opens again."
"But for that little time, rock—"
Aunt Rachel shook her head.
"No. It is finished. Another has seen…. Say good-bye to your companions; they are very welcome to what they have had; and God speed you."
"They thank you, lady dear…. Will you not forget that Annabel saw, and rock?"
"No more."
Annabel stooped and kissed the hand that bore the betrothal hoop of pearls. The other hand Aunt Rachel placed for a moment upon the smoky head of the babe in the sling. It trembled as it rested there, but the tremor passed, and Annabel, turning once at the porch, gave her a last look. Then she departed with her companions.
That afternoon, Jack and Flora had shaken down to wedlock as married folk should, and sat together before the board spread with the dolls' tea-things. The pallid light in the great hall-kitchen faded; the candles were lighted; and then the children, first borrowing the stockings of their elders to hang at the bed's foot, were packed off early—for it was the custom to bring them down again at midnight for the carols. Aunt Rachel had their good-night kisses, not as she had them every night, but with the special ceremony of the mistletoe.
Other folk, grown folk, sat with Aunt Rachel that evening; but the old walnut chair did not move upon its rockers. There was merry talk, but Aunt Rachel took no part in it. The board was spread with ale and cheese and spiced loaf for the carol-singers; and the time drew near for their coming.
When at midnight, faintly on the air from the church below, there came the chiming of Christmas morning, all bestirred themselves.
"They'll be here in a few minutes," they said; "somebody go and bring the children down;" and within a very little while subdued noises were heard outside, and the lifting of the latch of the yard gate. The children were in their nightgowns, hardly fully awake; a low voice outside was heard giving orders; and then there arose on the night the carol.
"Hush!" they said to the wondering children; "listen!…"
It was the Cherry Tree Carol that rose outside, of how sweet Mary, the
Queen of Galilee, besought Joseph to pluck the cherries for her Babe, and
Joseph refused; and the voices of the singers, that had begun
hesitatingly, grew strong and loud and free.
"… and Joseph wouldn't pluck the cherries," somebody was whispering to the tiny Angela….
"Mary said to Cherry Tree,
'Bow down to my knee,
That I may pluck cherries
For my Babe and me.'"
the carollers sang; and "Now listen, darling," the one who held Angela murmured….
"_The uppermost spray then
Bowed down to her knee;
'Thus you may see, Joseph,
These cherries are for me.'
"'O, eat your cherries, Mary,
Give them your Babe now;
O, eat your cherries, Mary,
That grew upon the bough._'"
The little Angela, within the arms that held her, murmured, "It's the gipsies, isn't it, mother?"
"No, darling. The gipsies have gone. It's the carol-singers, singing because Jesus was born."
"But, mother … it is the gipsies, isn't it?… 'Cos look…"
"Look where?"
"At Aunt Rachel, mother … The gipsy woman wouldn't go without her little baby, would she?"
"No, she wouldn't do that."
"Then has she lent it to Aunt Rachel, like I lend my new toys sometimes?"
The mother glanced across at Aunt Rachel, and then gathered the night-gowned figure more closely.
"The darling's only half awake," she murmured…. "Poor Aunt Rachel's sleepy too…."
Aunt Rachel, her head dropped, her hands lightly folded as if about some shape that none saw but herself, her face again ineffable with that sweet and peaceful smile, was once more rocking softly in her chair.
HIC JACET
A TALE OF ARTISTIC CONSCIENCE
INTRODUCTION
As I lighted my guests down the stairs of my Chelsea lodgings, turned up the hall gas that they might see the steps at the front door, and shook hands with them, I bade them good night the more heartily that I was glad to see their backs. Lest this should seem but an inhospitable confession, let me state, first, that they had invited themselves, dropping in in ones and twos until seven or eight of them had assembled in my garret, and, secondly, that I was rather extraordinarily curious to know why, at close on midnight, the one I knew least well of all had seen fit to remain after the others had taken their departure. To these two considerations I must add a third, namely, that I had become tardily conscious that, if Andriaovsky had not lingered of himself, I should certainly have asked him to do so.
It was to nothing more than a glance, swift and momentary, directed by Andriaovsky to myself while the others had talked, that I traced this desire to see more of the little Polish painter; but a glance derives its import from the circumstance under which it is given. That rapid turning of his eyes in my direction an hour before had held a hundred questions, implications, criticisms, incredulities, condemnations. It had been one of those uncovenanted gestures that hold the promise of the treasures of an eternal friendship. I wondered as I turned down the gas again and remounted the stairs what personal message and reproach in it had lumped me in with the others; and by the time I had reached my own door again a phrase had fitted itself in my mind to that quick, ironical turning of Andriaovsky's eyes: "Et tu, Brute!…"
He was standing where I had left him, his small shabby figure in the attitude of a diminutive colossus on my hearthrug. About him were the recently vacated chairs, solemnly and ridiculously suggestive of still continuing the high and choice conversation that had lately finished. The same fancy had evidently taken Andriaovsky, for he was turning from chair to chair, his head a little on one side, mischievously and aggravatingly smiling. As one of them, the deep wicker chair that Jamison had occupied, suddenly gave a little creak of itself, as wicker will when released from a strain, his smile broadened to a grin. I had been on the point of sitting down in that chair, but I changed my mind and took another.
"That's right," said Andriaovsky, in that wonderful English which he had picked up in less than three years, "don't sit in the wisdom-seat; you might profane it."
I knew what he meant. I felt for my pipe and slowly filled it, not replying. Then, slowly wagging his head from side to side, with his eyes humorously and banteringly on mine, he uttered the very words I had mentally associated with that glance of his.
"Et tu, Brute!" he said, wagging away, so that with each wag the lenses of his spectacles caught the light of the lamp on the table.
I too smiled as I felt for a match.
"It was rather much, wasn't it?" I said.
But he suddenly stopped his wagging, and held up a not very clean forefinger. His whole face was altogether too confoundedly intelligent.
"Oh no, you don't!" he said peremptorily. "No getting out of it like that the moment they've turned their backs! No running—what is it?—no running with the hare and hunting with the hounds! You helped, you know!"
I confess I fidgeted a little.
"But hang it all, what could I do? They were in my place," I broke out.
He chuckled, enjoying my discomfiture. Then his eyes fell on those absurd and solemn chairs again.
"Look at 'em—the Art Shades in conference!" he chuckled. "That rush-seated one, it was talking half an hour ago about 'Scherzos in Silver and Grey!' … Nice, fresh green stuff!"
To shut him up I told him that he would find cigarettes and tobacco on the table.
"'Scherzos in Silver and Grey'!" he chuckled again as he took a cigarette….
All this, perhaps, needs some explanation. It had been the usual thing, usual in those days, twenty years ago—smarming about Art and the Arts and so forth. They—"we," as apparently Andriaovsky had lingered behind for the purpose of reminding me—had perhaps talked a little more soaringly than the ordinary, that was all. There had been Jamison in the wicker chair, full to the lips and running over with the Colour Suggestions of the late Edward Calvert; Gibbs, in a pulpy state of adoration of the less legitimate side of the painting of Watts; and Magnani, who had advanced that an Essential Oneness underlies all the Arts, and had triumphantly proved his thesis by analogy with the Law of the Co-relation of Forces. A book called Music and Morals had appeared about that time, and on it they—we—had risen to regions of kite-high lunacy about Colour Symphonies, orgies of formless colour thrown on a magic-lantern screen—vieux jeu enough at this time of day. A young newspaper man, too, had made mental notes of our adjectives, for use in his weekly (I nearly spelt it "weakly") half-column of Art Criticism; and—and here was Andriaovsky, grinning at the chairs, and mimicking it all with diabolical glee.
"'Scherzos in Silver and Grey'—'Word Pastels'—' Lyrics in Stone!'" he chuckled. "And what was it the fat fellow said?' A Siren Song in Marble!' Phew!… Well, I'll get along. I shall just be in time to get a pint of bitter to wash it all down if I'm quick… Bah!" he broke out suddenly. "Good men build up Form and Forms—keep the Arts each after its kind—raise up the dikes so that we shan't all be swept away by night and nothingness—and these rats come nosing and burrowing and undermining it all!… Et tu, Brute!"
"Well, when you've finished rubbing it in—" I grunted.
"As if you didn't know better!… Is that your way of getting back on 'em, now that you've chucked drawing and gone in for writing books? Phew I… Well, I'll go and get my pint of beer—"
But he didn't go for his pint of beer. Instead, he began to prowl about my room, pryingly, nosingly, touching things here and there. I watched him as he passed from one thing to another. He was very little, and very, very shabby. His trousers were frayed, and the sole of one of his boots flapped distressingly. His old bowler hat—he had not thought it necessary to wait until he got outside before thrusting it on the back of his head—was so limp in substance that I verily believed that had he run incautiously downstairs he would have found when he got to the bottom that its crown had sunk in of its own weight. In spite of his remark about the pint of beer, I doubt if he had the price of one in his pocket.
"What's this, Brutus—a concertina?" he suddenly asked, stopping before the collapsible case in which I kept my rather old dress suit.
I told him what it was, and he hoisted up his shoulders.
"And these things?" he asked, moving to something else.
They were a pair of boot-trees of which I had permitted myself the economy. I remember they cost me four shillings in the old Brompton Road.
"And that's your bath, I suppose…. Dumb-bells too…. And—oh, good
Lord!…"
He had picked up, and dropped again as if it had been hot, somebody or other's card with the date of a "day" written across the corner of it….
As I helped him on with his overcoat he made no secret of the condition of its armholes and lining. I don't for one moment suppose that the garment was his. I took a candle to light him down as soon as it should please him to depart.
"Well, so long, and joy to you on the high road to success," he said with another grin for which I could have bundled him down the stairs….
In later days I never looked to Andriaovsky for tact; but I stared at him for his lack of it that night. And as I stared I noticed for the first time the broad and low pylon of his forehead, his handsome mouth and chin, and the fire and wit and scorn that smouldered behind his cheap spectacles. I looked again; and his smallness, his malice, his pathetic little braggings about his poverty, seemed all to disappear. He had strolled back to my hearthrug, wishing, I have no doubt now, to be able to exclaim suddenly that it was too late for the pint of beer for which he hadn't the money, and to curse his luck; and the pigmy quality of his colossusship had somehow gone.
As I watched him, a neighbouring clock struck the half-hour, and he did even as I had surmised—cursed the closing time of the English public-houses….
I lighted him down. For one moment, under the hall gas, he almost dropped his jesting manner.
"You do know better, Harrison, you know," he said. "But, of course, you're going to be a famous author in almost no time. Oh, ca se voit! No garrets for you! It was a treat,' the way you handled those fellows—really … Well don't forget us others when you're up there—I may want you to write my 'Life' some day…."
I heard the slapping of the loose sole as he shuffled down the path. At the gate he turned for a moment.
"Good night, Brutus," he called.
When I had mounted to my garret again my eyes fell once more on that ridiculous assemblage of empty chairs, all solemnly talking to one another. I burst out into a laugh. Then I undressed, put my jacket on the hanger, took the morrow's boots from the trees and treed those I had removed, changed the pair of trousers under my mattress, and went, still laughing at the chairs, to bed.
This was Michael Andriaovsky, the Polish painter, who died four weeks ago.
I
I knew the reason of Maschka's visit the moment she was announced. Even in the stressful moments of the funeral she had found time to whisper to me that she hoped to call upon me at an early date. I dismissed the amanuensis to whom I was dictating the last story of the fourth series of Martin Renard, gave a few hasty instructions to my secretary, and told the servant to show Miss Andriaovsky into the drawing-room, to ask her to be so good as to excuse me for five minutes, to order tea at once, and then to bring my visitor up to the library.
A few minutes later she was shown into the room.
She was dressed in the same plainly cut costume of dead black she had worn at the funeral, and had pushed up her heavy veil over the close-fitting cap of black fur that accentuated her Sclavonic appearance. I noticed again with distress the pallor of her face and the bistred rings that weeks of nursing had put under her dark eyes. I noticed also her resemblance, in feature and stature, to her brother. I placed a chair for her; the tea-tray followed her in; and without more than a murmured greeting she peeled off her gloves and prepared to preside at the tray.
She had filled the cups, and I had handed her toast, before she spoke.
Then:
"I suppose you know what I've come about," she said.
I nodded.
"Long, long ago you promised it. Nobody else can do it. The only question is 'when.'"
"That's the only question," I agreed.
"We, naturally," she continued, after a glance in which her eyes mutely thanked me for my implied promise, "are anxious that it should be as soon as possible; but, of course—I shall quite understand—"
She gave a momentary glance round my library. I helped her out.
"You mean that I'm a very important person nowadays, and that you're afraid to trespass on my time. Never mind that. I shall find time for this. But tell me before we go any further exactly how you stand and precisely what it is you expect."
Briefly she did so. It did not in the least surprise me to learn that her brother had died penniless.
"And if you hadn't undertaken the 'Life,'" she said, "he might just as well not have worked in poverty all these years. You can, at least, see to his fame."
I nodded again gravely, and ruminated for a moment. Then I spoke.
"I can write it, fully and in detail, up to five years ago," I said. "You know what happened then. I tried my best to help him, but he never would let me. Tell me, Maschka, why he wouldn't sell me that portrait."
I knew instantly, from her quick confusion, that her brother had spoken to her about the portrait he had refused to sell me, and had probably told her the reason for his refusal. I watched her as she evaded the question as well as she could.
"You know how—queer—he was about who he sold his things to. And as for those five years in which you saw less of him, Schofield will tell you all you want to know."
I relinquished the point. "Who's Schofield?" I asked instead.
"He was a very good friend of Michael's—of both of us. You can talk quite freely to him. I want to say at the beginning that I should like him to be associated with you in this."
I don't know how I divined on the spot her relation to Schofield, whoever he was. She told me that he too was a painter.
"Michael thought very highly of his things," she said.
"I don't know them," I replied.
"You probably wouldn't," she returned….
But I caught the quick drop of her eyes from their brief excursion round my library, and I felt something within me stiffen a little. It did not need Maschka Andriaovsky to remind me that I had not attained my position without—let us say—splitting certain differences; the looseness of the expression can be corrected hereafter. Life consists very largely of compromises. You doubtless know my name, whichever country or hemisphere you happen to live in, as that of the creator of Martin Renard, the famous and popular detective; and I was not at that moment disposed to apologise, either to Maschka or Schofield or anybody else, for having written the stories at the bidding of a gaping public. The moment the public showed that it wanted something better I was prepared to give it. In the meantime, I sat in my very comfortable library, securely shielded from distress by my balance at my banker's.
"Well," I said after a moment, "let's see how we stand. And first as to what you're likely to get out of this. It goes without saying, of course, that by writing the 'Life' I can get you any amount of 'fame'—advertisement, newspaper talk, and all the things that, it struck me, Michael always treated with especial scorn. My name alone, I say, will do that. But for anything else I'm by no means so sure. You see," I explained, "it doesn't follow that because I can sell hundreds of thousands of… you know what… that I can sell anything I've a mind to sign." I said it, confident that she had not lived all those years with her brother without having learned the axiomatic nature of it. To my discomfiture, she began to talk like a callow student.
"I should have thought that it followed that if you could sell something—" she hesitated only for a moment, then courageously gave the other stuff its proper adjective, "—something rotten, you could have sold something good when you had the chance."
"Then if you thought that you were wrong," I replied briefly and concisely.
"Michael couldn't, of course," she said, putting Michael out of the question with a little wave of her hand, "because Michael was—I mean, Michael wasn't a business man. You are."
"I'm speaking as one," I replied. "I don't waste time in giving people what they don't want. That is business. I don't undertake your brother's 'Life' as a matter of business, but as an inestimable privilege. I repeat, it doesn't follow that the public will buy it."
"But—but—" she stammered, "the public will buy a Pill if they see your name on the testimonial!"
"A Pill—yes," I said sadly…. Genius and a Pill were, alas, different things. "But," I added more cheerfully, "you can never tell what the public will do. They might buy it—there's no telling except by trying—"
"Well, Schofield thinks they will," she informed me with decision.
"I dare say he does, if he's an artist. They mostly do," I replied.
"He doesn't think Michael will ever be popular," she emphasised the adjective slightly, "but he does think he has a considerable following if they could only be discovered."
I sighed. All artists think that. They will accept any compromise except the one that is offered to them…. I tried to explain to Maschka that in this world we have to stand to the chances of all or nothing.
"You've got to be one thing or the other—I don't know that it matters very much which," I said. "There's Michael's way, and there's… mine. That's all. However, we'll try it. All you can say to me, and more, I'll say to a publisher for you. But he'll probably wink at me."
For a moment she was silent. Then she said: "Schofield rather fancies one publisher."
"Oh? Who's he?" I asked.
She mentioned a name. If I knew anything at all of business she might as well have offered The Life of Michael Andriaovsky to The Religious Tract Society at once….
"Hm!… And has Mr. Schofield any other suggestions?" I inquired.
He had. Several. I saw that Schofield's position would have to be defined before we went any further.
"Hm!" I said again. "Well, I shall have to rely on Schofield for those five years in which I saw little of Michael; but unless Schofield knows more of publishing than I do, and can enforce a better contract and a larger sum on account than I can, I really think, Maschka, that you'll do better to leave things to me. For one thing, it's only fair to me. My name hasn't much of an artistic value nowadays, but it has a very considerable commercial one, and my worth to publishers isn't as a writer of the Lives of Geniuses."
I could see she didn't like it; but that couldn't be helped. It had to be so. Then, as we sat for a time in silence over the fire, I noticed again how like her brother she was. She was not, it was true, much like him as he had been on that last visit of mine to him … and I sighed as I remembered that visit. The dreadful scene had come back to me….
On account, I suppose, of the divergence of our paths, I had not even heard of his illness until almost the finish. Immediately I had hastened to the Hampstead "Home," only to find him already in the agony. He had not been too far gone to recognise me, however, for he had muttered something brokenly about "knowing better," that a spasm had interrupted. Besides myself, only Maschka had been there; and I had been thankful for the summons that had called her for a moment out of the room. I had still retained his already cold hand; his brow had worked with that dreadful struggle; and his eyes had been closed.
But suddenly he had opened them, and the next moment had sat up on his pillow. He had striven to draw his hand from mine.
"Who are you?" he had suddenly demanded, not knowing me.
I had come close to him. "You know me, Andriaovsky—Harrison?" I had asked sorrowfully.
I had been on the point of repeating my name but suddenly, after holding my eyes for a moment with a look the profundity and familiarity of which I cannot express, he had broken into the most ghastly haunting laugh I have ever heard.
"Harrison?" the words had broken throatily from him…. "Oh yes; I know you!… You shall very soon know that I know you if… if…"
The cough and rattle had come as Maschka had rushed into the room. In ten seconds Andriaovsky had fallen back, dead.
II
That same evening I began to make notes for Andriaovsky's "Life." On the following day, the last of the fourth series of the Martin Renards occupied me until I was thankful to get to bed. But thereafter I could call rather more of my time my own, and I began in good earnest to devote myself to the "Life."
Maschka had spoken no more than the truth when she had said that of all men living none but I could write that "Life." His remaining behind in my Chelsea garret that evening after the others had left had been the beginning of a friendship that, barring that lapse of five years at the end, had been for twenty years one of completest intimacy. Whatever money there might or might not be in the book, I had seen my opportunity in it—the opportunity to make it the vehicle for all the aspirations, faiths, enthusiasms, and exaltations we had shared; and I myself did not realise until I began to note them down one tithe of the subtle links and associations that had welded our souls together.
Even the outward and visible signs of these had been wonderful. Setting out from one or other of the score of garrets and cheap lodgings we had in our time inhabited, we had wandered together, day after day, night after night, far down East, where, as we had threaded our way among the barrels of soused herrings and the stalls and barrows of unleavened bread, he had taught me scraps of Hebrew and Polish and Yiddish; up into the bright West, where he could never walk a quarter of a mile without meeting one of his extraordinary acquaintances—furred music-hall managers, hawkers of bootlaces, commercial magnates of his own Faith, touts, crossing-sweepers, painted women; into Soho, where he had names for the very horses on the cab-ranks and the dogs who slumbered under the counters of the sellers of French literature; out to the naphtha-lights and cries of the Saturday night street markets of Islington and the North End Road; into City churches on wintry afternoons, into the studios of famous artists full of handsomely dressed women, into the studios of artists not famous, at the ends of dark and break-neck corridors; to tea at the suburban homes of barmaids and chorus girls, to dinner in the stables of a cavalry-barracks, to supper in cabmen's shelters. He was possessed in some mysterious way of the passwords to doors in hoardings behind which excavations were in progress; he knew by name the butchers of the Deptford yards, the men in the blood-caked clothes, so inured to blood that they may not with safety to their lives swear at one another; he took me into an opium-cellar within a stone's-throw of Oxford Street, and into a roof-chamber to call upon certain friends of his … well, they said they were fire extinguishers, so I'd better not say they were bombs. Up, down; here, there; good report, but more frequently evil … we had known this side of our London as well as two men may. And our other adventures and peregrinations, not of the body, but of the spirit … but these must be spoken of in their proper place.
I had arranged with Maschka that Schofield should bring me the whole of the work Andriaovsky had left behind him; and he arrived late one afternoon in a fourwheeler, with four great packages done up in brown paper. I found him to be a big, shaggy-browed, red-haired, raw-boned Lancashire man of five-and-thirty, given to confidential demonstrations at the length of a button-shank, quite unconscious of the gulf between his words and his right to employ them, and bent on asserting an equality that I did not dispute by a rather aggressive use of my surname. Andriaovsky had appointed him his executor, and he had ever the air of suspecting that the appointment was going to be challenged.
"A'm glad to be associated with ye in this melancholy duty, Harrison," he said. "Now we won't waste words. Miss Andriaovsky has told me precisely how matters stand. I had, as ye know, the honour to be poor Michael's close friend for a period of five years, and my knowledge of him is entirely at your disposal."
I answered that I should be seriously handicapped without it.
"Just so. It is Miss Andriaovsky's desire that we should pull together. Now, in the firrst place, what is your idea about the forrm the book should take?"
"In the first place, if you don't mind," I replied, "perhaps we'd better run over together the things you've brought. The daylight will be gone soon."
"Just as ye like, Harrison," he said, "just as ye like. It's all the same to me…."
I cleared a space about my writing-table at the window, and we turned to the artistic remains of Michael Andriaovsky.
I was astonished, first, at the enormous quantity of the stuff, and next at its utter and complete revelation of the man. In a flash I realised how superb that portion at least of the book was going to be. And Schofield explained that the work he had brought represented but a fraction of the whole that was at our disposal.
"Ye'll know with what foolish generosity poor Michael always gave his things away," he said. "Hallard has a grand set; so has Connolly; and from time to time he behaved varry handsomely to myself. Artists of varry considerable talents both Hallard and Connolly are; Michael thought varry highly of their abilities. They express the deepest interest in the shape your worrk will take; and that reminds me. I myself have drafted a rough scenario of the forrm it appeared to me the 'Life' might with advantage be cast in. A purely private opinion, ye'll understand, Harrison, which ye'll be entirely at liberty to disregard…."
"Well, let's finish with the work first," I said.
With boards, loose sheets, scraps of paper, notes, studies, canvases stretched and stripped from their stretchers, we paved half the library floor, Schofield keeping up all the time a running fire of "Grand, grand! A masterpiece! A gem, that, Harrison!" They were all that he said, and presently I ceased to hear his voice. The splendour of the work issued undimmed even from the severe test of Schofield's praise; and I thought again with pride how I, I, was the only man living who could adequately write that "Life."….
"Aren't they grand? Aren't they great?" Schofield chanted monotonously.
"They are," I replied, coming to a consciousness of his presence again.
"But what's that?"
Secretively he had kept one package until the last. He now removed its wrappings and set it against a chair.
"There!" he cried. "I'll thank ye, Harrison, for your opinion of that!"
It was the portrait Andriaovsky had refused to sell me—a portrait of himself.
The portrait was the climax of the display. The Lancastrian still talked; but I, profoundly moved, mechanically gathered up the drawings from the floor and returned them to their proper packages and folios. I was dining at home, alone, that evening, and for form's sake I asked this faithful dog of Andriaovsky's to share my meal; but he excused himself—he was dining with Hallard and Connolly. When the drawings were all put away, all save that portrait, he gave an inquisitive glance round my library. It was the same glance as Maschka had given when she had feared to intrude on my time; but Schofield did these things with a much more heavy hand. He departed, but not before telling me that even my mansion contained such treasures as it had never held before.
That evening, after glancing at Schofield's "scenario," I carefully folded it up again for return to him, lest when the book should appear he should miss the pleasure of saying that I had had his guidance but had disregarded it; then I sat down at my writing-table and took out the loose notes I had made. I made other jottings, each on a blank sheet for subsequent amplification; and the sheets overspread the large leather-topped table and thrust one another up the standard of the incandescent with the pearly silk shade. The firelight shone low and richly in the dusky spaces of the large apartment; and the thick carpet and the double doors made the place so quiet that I could hear my watch ticking in my pocket.
I worked for an hour; and then, for the purpose of making yet other notes, I rose, crossed the room, and took down the three or four illustrated books to which, in the earlier part of his career, Andriaovsky had put his name. I carried them to the table, and twinkled as I opened the first of them. It was a book of poems, and in making the designs for them Andriaovsky had certainly not found for himself. Almost any one of the "Art Shades," as he had called them, could have done the thing equally well, and I twinkled again. I did not propose to have much mercy on that. Already Schofield's words had given birth to a suspicion in my mind—that Andriaovsky, in permitting these fellows, Hallard, Connolly, and the rest, to suppose that he "thought highly" of them and their work, had been giving play to that malicious humour of his; and they naturally did not see the joke. That joke, too, was between himself, dead, and me, preparing to write his "Life." As if he had been there to hear me, I chuckled, and spoke in a low voice.
"You were pulling their legs, Michael, you know. A little rough on them you were. But there's a book here of yours that I'm going to tell the truth about. You and I won't pretend to one another. It's a rotten book, and both you and I know it…."
I don't know what it was that caused me suddenly to see just then something that I had been looking at long enough without seeing—that portrait of himself that I had set leaning against the back of a chair at the end of my writing-table. It stood there, just within the soft penumbra of shadow cast by the silk-shaded light. The canvas had been enlarged, the seam of it clumsily sewn by Andriaovsky's own hand; but in that half-light the rough ridge of paint did not show, and I confess that the position and effect of the thing startled me for a moment. Had I cared to play a trick with my fancy I could have imagined the head wagging from side to side, with such rage and fire was it painted. He had had the temerity to dash a reflection across one of the glasses of his spectacles, concealing the eye behind it. The next moment I had given a short laugh.
"So you're there, are you?… Well, I know you agree very heartily about that book of poems. Heigho! If I remember rightly, you made more money out of that book than out of the others put together. But I'm going to tell the truth about it. I know better, you know…."
Chancing, before I turned in that night, to reopen one of his folios, I came across a drawing, there by accident, I don't doubt, that confirmed me in my suspicion that Andriaovsky had had his quiet joke with Schofield, Hallard, Connolly and Co. It was a sketch of Schofield's, imitative, deplorable, a dreadful show-up of incapacity. Well enough "drawn," in a sense, it was … and I remembered how Andriaovsky had ever urged that "drawing," of itself, did not exist. I winked at the portrait. I saw his point. He himself had no peer, and, rather than invite comparison with stars of the second magnitude, he chose his intimates from among the peddlers of the wares that had the least possible connection with his Art. He, too, had understood that the Compromise must be entirely accepted or totally refused; and while, in the divergence of our paths, he had done the one thing and I the other, we had each done it thoroughly, with vigour, and with persistence, and each could esteem the other, if not as a co-worker, at least as an honourable and out-and-out opposite.
III
Within a fortnight I was so deep in my task that, in the realest sense, the greater part of my life was in the past. The significance of those extraordinary peregrinations of ours had been in the opportunity they had afforded for a communion of brain and spirit of unusual rarity; and all this determined to my work with the accumulated force of its long penning-up. I have spoken of Andriaovsky's contempt for such as had the conception of their work that it was something they "did" as distinct from something they "were"; and unless I succeed in making it plain that, not as a mere figure of speech and loose hyperbole, but starkly and literally, Andriaovsky was everything he did, my tale will be pointless.
There was not one of the basic facts of life—of Faith, Honour, Truth-speaking, Falsehood, Betrayal, Sin—that he did not turn, not to moral interpretations, as others do, but to the holy purposes of his noble and passionate Art. For any man, Sin is only mortal when it is Sin against that which he knows to be immortally true; and the things Andriaovsky knew to be immortally true were the things that he had gone down into the depths in order to bring forth and place upon his paper or canvas. These things are not for the perusal of many. Unless you love the things that he loved with a fervour comparable in kind, if not in degree, with his own, you may not come near them. "Truth, 'the highest thing a man may keep,'" he said, "cannot be brought down; a man only attains it by proving his right to it"; and I think I need not further state his views on the democratisation of Art. Of any result from the elaborate processes of Art-education he held out no hope whatever. "It is in a man, or it isn't," he ever declared; "if it is, he must bring it out for himself; if it isn't, let him turn to something useful and have done with it." I need not press the point that in these things he was almost a solitary.
He made of these general despotic principles the fiercest personal applications. I have heard his passionate outbreak of "Thief! Liar! Fool!" over a drawing when it has seemed to him that a man has not vouched with the safety of his immortal soul for the shapes and lines he has committed to it. I have seen him get into such a rage with the eyes of the artist upon him. I have heard the ice and vinegar of his words when a good man, for money, has consented to modify and emasculate his work; and there lingers in my memory his side of a telephone conversation in which he told a publisher who had suggested that he should do the same thing precisely what he thought of him. And on the other hand, he once walked from Aldgate to Putney Hill, with a loose heel on one of his boots, to see a man of whom he had seen but a single drawing. See him he did, too, in spite of the man's footman, his liveried parlourmaid, and the daunting effect of the electric brougham at the door.
"He's a good man," he said to me afterwards, ruefully looking at the place where his boot-heel had been. "You've got to take your good where you find it. I don't care whether he's a rich amateur or skin-and-grief in a garret as long as he's got the stuff in him. Nobody else could have fetched me up from the East End this afternoon…. So long; see you in a week or so—"
This was the only time I ever knew him break that sacred time in which he celebrated each year the Passover and the Feast of Tabernacles. I doubt whether this observance of the ritual of his Faith was of more essential importance to him than that other philosophical religion towards which he sometimes leaned. I have said what his real religion was.
But to the "Life."
With these things, and others, as a beginning, I began to add page to page, phase to phase; and, in a time the shortness of which astonished myself, I had pretty well covered the whole of the first ten years of our friendship. Maschka called rather less, and Schofield rather more frequently, than I could have wished; and my surmise that he, at least, was in love with her, quickly became a certainty. This was to be seen when they called together.