December Love Part 54

"You have painted so many brutes, that you seek for the brute in everyone who sits to you. If you were to paint me you'd--"

"Now, now! There you are at it again! I'll paint you if I ever feel like it--not a minute before."

"I was only going to say that if you ever painted me you'd try to find something horrible in me that you could drag to the surface."

"Well, d'you mean that you have the _toupet_ to tell me there is nothing horrible in you?"

"Now we are getting away from Arabian," she said, with cool self-possession.

"Owing to your infernal egoism, my girl!"

"Override it, then, with your equally infernal altruism, my boy!"

Garstin smiled, and for a moment looked a little less fatigued, but in a moment his almost morose preoccupation returned. He glanced again towards the sketch.

"I should like to slit it up with a palette knife!" he said. "The devil of it is that I felt I could do a really great thing with that fellow. I struck out a fine phrase that night. D'you remember?"

"Yes. You called him a king in the underworld."

Abruptly he got up and began to walk about the studio, stopping now here, now there, before his portraits. He paused for quite a long time before the portraits of Cora and the judge. Then he came back to the sketch of Arabian.

"You must help me!" he said at last.

"I!" she exclaimed, with almost sharp surprise. "How can I help you?"

He turned, and she saw the pin-points of light.

"What do you think of the fellow?" he said. "After all, you asked me to paint him. What do you think of him?"

"I think he's magnificently handsome."

"Blast his envelope!" Garstin almost roared out. "What do you think of his nature? What do you think of his soul? I'm not a painter of surfaces."

Miss Van Tuyn sat for a moment looking steadily at him. She was unusually natural and unself-conscious, like one thinking too strongly to bother about herself. At last she said:

"Arabian is a very difficult man to understand, and I don't understand him."

"Do you like him?"

"I couldn't exactly say that."

"Do you hate him?"

"No."

Garstin suddenly looked almost maliciously sly.

"I can tell you something that you feel about him."

"What?"

"You are afraid of him."

Miss Van Tuyn's silky fair skin reddened.

"I'm not afraid of anyone," she retorted. "If I have one virtue, I think it's courage."

"You're certainly not a Miss Nancy as a rule. In fact, your cheek is pretty well known in Paris. But you're afraid of Arabian."

"Am I really?" said the girl, recovering from her surprise and facing him hardily. "And how have you found that out?"

"You took a fancy to the fellow the first time you saw him."

"I did not take a fancy. I am not an under-housemaid."

"There's not really a particle of difference between an under-housemaid and a super-lady when it comes to a good-looking man."

"d.i.c.k, you're a great painter, but you're also a great vulgarian!"

"Well, my father was a national schoolmaster and my mother was a butcher's daughter. I can't help my vernacular. You took a fancy to this fellow in the Cafe Royal, and you begged me to paint him so that you might get to know him. I obeyed you--"

"The heavens will certainly fall before you become obedient."

"--and asked him here. Then I asked you. You came. He came. I started painting. How many sittings have I had?"

"Three."

"Then you've met him here four times?"

"Yes."

"And why have you always let him go away alone from the studio?"

"Why should I go with him? I much prefer to stay on here and have a talk with you. You are far more interesting than Arabian is. He says very little. Probably he knows very little. I can learn from you."

"That's all very well. I will say you're d.a.m.ned keen on acquiring knowledge. But Arabian interests you in a way I certainly don't; in a s.e.x way."

"That'll do, d.i.c.k!"

"And directly a woman gets to that all the lumber of knowledge can go to the devil for her! When Nature drives the coach brain interests occupy the back seat. That is a rule with women to which I've never yet found an exception. Every day you're longing to go away from here with Arabian; every day he does his level best to get you to go. Yet you don't go. Why's that? You're held back by fear. You're afraid of the fellow, my girl, and it's not a bit of use your denying it. When I see a thing I see it--it's there. I don't deal in hallucinations."

All this time his small eyes were fixed upon her, and the fierce little lights in them seemed to touch her like the points of two pins.

"You talk about fear! Does it never occur to you that Arabian's a man you picked up at the Cafe Royal, that we neither of us know anything about him, that he may be--"

"Anyhow, he's far more presentable than I am."

"Of course he's presentable, as you call it. He's very well dressed and very good-looking, but still--"