Love's Usuries Part 12

With a wry sneer of dissatisfaction he bade me good-bye, and I continued my way to the studio.

Lawrence Vane's view struck me as narrow and one-sided. He ignored the fact that Wray was one of the most courted men in London, that in England and America his genius drew to him followers, patrons, friends of all ranks, and that, as a natural consequence, there were warm corners in women's hearts for this spoilt child of fortune. With the world beckoning, the fair s.e.x flinging petals from the rose gardens of love and admiration, he had needed more than human dexterity to pick his way through the scented labyrinths that were continually twining around his feet.

I found him in, and he greeted me with his rare smile. In an instant I observed that he was no longer the same Wray, whose presentiment he himself had painted for the Corporation of H----, no longer the harum-scarum painter I had known five years ago; it seemed as though he had thrown all the buoyancy of colour and tissue--the veritable body of him--on the canvas, and had left merely a shadow of the original to walk the earth.

The studio, a temporary one, was on the ground floor. It looked out on the bustle and swarm of the Buckingham Palace Road, where the roar of traffic was accompanied by wafts of martial music from the adjacent parade ground. It made a bizarre accompaniment to our reunion.

I strained his hand, shook it more than once as an a.s.surance. I wished to convey to him that I was not ignorant, nor curious--in fact, that I believed in him. My allegiance was unshaken by Lawrence Vane's history.

I gave him the faith of friends.h.i.+p, which is a closer grained quality than the faith of love.

We stood among his pictures and gossiped of art, praising H's brush-work, wondering at R's anatomy, arguing L's historical accuracy, and talking of everything warily--on the brink, as it were, of a plunge, like timid girls at a river, dipping now a finger, a foot, an arm, in the chilly depths, and wavering. When at last we were seated he took a header.

"You've seen my portrait?"

"At the Academy? Just come from it."

"You think I've flattered myself?" he said, with his head on one side, his eyes asking more than the question.

"It would not have done you justice three years ago," I evaded.

"Good! I wished the husk to be a thing of beauty. You think it a work that will live?"

"a.s.suredly, or the Corporation of H----would not have unb.u.t.toned to it.

It keeps its heart well within the limits of its waistcoat."

"And the other--the kernel?"

I looked at him and arched an interrogative eyebrow.

"The other picture? 'The Soul of Me?'"

"Of course I've seen it. It's magnificent work, Woll, but I don't like it."

"Crude realism, eh?" he said, leaning sideways and bending a palette knife backwards and forwards on the back of his chair.

"More," I said--"exaggeration."

He paled. I thought it was in offence at my critical presumption.

"There was none," he averred. "You shall see the original sketch," and he paced to an easel that stood, covered with a cloth, in a distant corner. He unveiled it.

"Ugh!" My cry was inevitable. I resisted the impulse to shroud my eyes, but my teeth clenched on words.

It was the same picture with a terrible difference. Vivid, almost glaring, in the black gloom and silence, the woman's form represented a combination of all the debas.e.m.e.nt and degradation of the world. Evil spirits seemed to mock and writhe and gibber in the sludge of the foreground; the iridescent atmosphere hung with noisome miasmic dews, even the face of the bargee glowed like a fiend in the glare of his lamp, held viciously aloft to reveal in its completeness the whole squalid history of spiritual failure.

"Who was she?" I whispered at last--it was a sight to shackle the tongue--and his answer hissed back like the sound of searing iron on sweating flesh:--

"It was my _wife_."

Heaven forgive me, I shrank from him. The man who could thus portray accurately, unmercifully, this tale of hideous defilement--the victim his wife, however sinning--must be himself either morally debased or partially insane.

He saw the gesture, and moved away to the foot of the model throne and waited.

I could think of nothing but the ghastly achievement, could stand only with bulged eyes staring at it, a dry, dusty flavour parching my tongue.

At last I broke from the horrible fascination--a fascination that almost prompted me to s.n.a.t.c.h his knife and rip the canvas from end to end.

I flung down the cloth.

"Sit there," he almost commanded, and pointed to an arm-chair at some distance from him.

"You may shun me. It is what I wanted--deserved. To that end I confessed it, 'The Soul of Me.'"

Then on a sudden his meaning dawned.

"The body," he went on, "was painted before I learnt what colour the soul was. I will tell you."

"No, no!" I remonstrated, perceiving the tension of his set jaws. "It will pain you, and do no good."

"Pain?" he said. "There is no pain that eats into the heart like silence. The knowledge of guilt hidden corrodes like an acid. It must have been that which taught the Catholic Church the value of confession."

"Possibly," I said, moving from my distant chair to his side, and grasping his hand. "But remember I am not a priest; I am only, and always, a friend."

"I know, I know," he said, hurriedly, staring out across the room at the humming, busy road. "My confession is not to you. All that humanity can do the priests have done. You stare? Yes, I've turned myself inside out for them; but all their altar flowers cannot scent a foul soul, nor can their sanctuary lights illumine its crooked corners. I'm no historian, but I've heard of cases where private penance, remorse, and religious absolution have totally failed to wipe clean the hearts of intellectual men--they of the world, sinners, needing absolution of the world. Such men, who live in the open, and trumpet their triumphs there, need, too, to howl their confessions from the housetop, carve their contrition, like the wisdom of Asoka, on the immemorial rocks as an outcry to the generations."

He started up, and began to stride about the room. His face was full of pa.s.sionate grief, and his wandering eyes pa.s.sed beyond me as though watching a sunset.

I thought of the loganstone, and of the frail woman, the stalk of asphodel, who had unhinged it. The great painter, sensitive ever to colour and beauty and flattery and happiness, to pin-p.r.i.c.ks and to sneers, had dropped in pieces before a real strain--sin for which he held himself responsible, remorse that found no outlet wide enough for his great transcendent heart.

Presently he stood still before his picture, threw back the curtain, and surveyed it with folded arms.

"She was pure," he muttered, half to himself; "sweet, sweet as new milk from warm udders in cowslip time, and I--I brought her to my cobwebbed life without so much as a preliminary sweep of the broom. She thought me like herself, and I dared not undeceive her; but others--curse them!--they taught her. She was pure as milk, I said--ay, for milk absorbs poison quicker than things less pure. She breathed the taint from the loathly atmosphere of my world--of the world that had been mine.... But I loved her ... would have won her back--cringed to her.

She spurned me, spited me through herself, evaded me, till"--a shuddering horror stifled his voice--"till, by chance, I came on _that_."

I followed him to the easel, and placed an affectionate arm on his shoulder.

"Well, old man, you must clear out of this. Come along with me back to the Bush, and drop this nightmare."

"Drop it?" he flouted; "why, the world reeks of it!"

"Not now. You say that even the priests absolve you."

"Cheap contrition! cheap absolution! how one cuddles them at first--at first! But in time we feel our canker--it grows under the clean Church wrappings--in time we learn that where our sanctuary is, there, alone, can our penance be. Hence this picture. It accompanies the portrait, a gift to the nation. You can't think what a going down on the marrow bones it was--down on the stones for every rascal to gaze and prod at, an att.i.tude for eternity."

"You'll come to Australia?" I repeated, adhering obstinately to my matter-of-fact bent.

"As you please. I feel clean enough for your company now, for I have committed suicide--not vulgarly, by murdering myself, but suicide spiritually. I have given up the ghost by working out the pitch through the point of my brush, and the carca.s.s is yours to bury where or how you will."