The Romance of His Life Part 15

"Not quick enough for me, Giles," he said, "and you won't help me out, d---- you."

I put the goldfish on a chair in front of him. He looked at it for some moments without seeing it, and then reared himself slowly in his chair.

He began to speak in his broken husky voice, and for an instant I thought he had gone mad.

"Ha!" he said, leaning forward towards the picture. "You're portrayed, sir. Your unsympathetic personality, your unhealthy spots, your dorsal redness, and your abdominal pallor, your sullen eye turned upwards to your captors and their crumbs, all these are rendered with lynx-eyed fidelity. Privacy is not for you. Like Marie Antoinette, you are always in the full view of your gaolers."

He paused to take breath.

"This is England, a free country where we lock into tiny prisons for our amus.e.m.e.nt the swiftest of G.o.d's creatures, birds, squirrels, rabbits, mice, fishes. You are silhouetted against a background of incongruous foreign sh.e.l.ls strewn on a zinc floor: the nightmare of a mad conchologist. What tenderness, what beauty in the cowslips and primroses which encircle your prison and almost hide the iron grating--but not quite. The rapture of Spring is in them. They bloom, they bloom, every bud is opening. The contrast between their joyous immobility and your enforced immobility is complete. Nothing remains to you, to you once swift, once beautiful, once free, nothing remains to you in your corpulent despair except--the pleasures of the table."

M. leaned back exhausted, trembling a little.

"It is certainly a work of the imagination," I hazarded, "if you can read all that into it."

"Giles, my good fellow, confine yourself to your own sphere, how to keep in life against my will and all laws of humanity my miserable worn out carcase. That is not a work of the imagination. It is the work of close and pa.s.sionate observation, observation so close, and of such integrity that it fears nothing, evades nothing. It is tremendous."

There was a moment's silence. I was a little hurt. I knew I was ignorant about art, but after all I had brought the picture to M.'s notice.

"How old is she?"

"Nineteen."

"I've never had a pupil, but if I could live a few months longer I would take her. I suppose she's starving. I nearly starved at her age. I'll give her a hundred for it, and I'll see to its future. Send her round here to-morrow morning." He scrawled and flung me a cheque for a hundred guineas.

"Now, understand," I said, "I will bring the girl to see you to-morrow on one condition only, that you buy her husband's 'Last Farewell,'

and 'The dawn of love' for fifty pounds each. They are in this portfolio--and 'The Goldfish' by his wife for five. Is that a bargain?"

"If you say so it is. You always get your own way. I suppose he's jealous of her."

"He's just beginning to be, and he doesn't do things by halves."

Perhaps the happiest moment of poor Arthur's tawdry inflamed existence was when I told him that the great M. had bought his pictures. The latent suspicion and smouldering animosity died out of his eyes. He became radiant, boyish, for the moment sane. Perhaps he had looked like that before the shadow fell. Blanche, too, was suffused with delight.

Mrs. Robinson, hurrying in with an armful of lilac orchids, was overjoyed. She burst forth in loud jubilation, not unlike the screeches of the London "syrens" when they herald the coming in of the New Year.

She it seemed had _always_ known, _always_ seen her boy's genius. He would get into the Academy now, from which jealousy had so long kept him out. He would be hung on the line. He would be recognised. He would be as great as M. himself, greater, for she and others among her friends had never fancied his pictures. They had not the lofty moral tone of Arthur's.

I produced the cheque.

"One hundred pounds for Arthur," I said, "and five pounds for the goldfish."

Blanche started violently and looked incredulously at me.

Arthur's jaw dropped. Then he said patronizingly, "Well done, Blanche,"

and leaned back pallid and exhausted on the satin couch.

"I must see him," he said over and over again as his mother laid a warm rug over his knees, and his wife put a cus.h.i.+on behind his head. "He could tell me things, tricks of the trade. Art is all a trick."

"He found no fault with your work," I said, "but--don't be discouraged, Blanche--he did criticise yours. He said you could not put down all you saw."

"What have I always told you, Blanche?" said Arthur solemnly. "You put down what you _don't_ see. Look at that shadow where I had not put one."

"He is really too ill to see anyone, but he will speak to Blanche for a few minutes." I turned to her. "You must not mind if he is severe. He is a drastic critic. Would you like to put on your hat and come with me?

I am going on to him now."

I had some difficulty in getting her out of the house. Mrs. Robinson wanted to come too. Arthur was determined that she should wait till he was better, and they could go together. But I had long since established my authority in that household. I had my way.

Blanche asked no questions as we drove along. She did not seem the least surprised that the greatest painter of his day had bought her husband's pictures. Was she lacking in intelligence? Was there some tiny screw loose in her mind?

M. had not made a toilet as I half expected he would. When we came in he was standing with his back to us, leaning against the mantelpiece, his unshaved chin on his hands. His horrible old dressing gown, stained with paint, and showing numerous large patches of hostile colours, clung to him more tightly than ever. His decrepitness struck me afresh. He looked what, indeed, he was, an old and depraved man, repulsive, formidable--unwashed--a complex wreck, dying indomitably on his feet.

"And so you can do things like that," he said, turning towards Blanche a face contracted with pain, and pointing a lean finger at the goldfish, and the chrysanthemum shadow, propped side by side on the mantel piece.

"Yes."

"Where were you taught?"

She mentioned the school where she had studied.

"Why did you leave it?"

"Because Mother died, and I had not any money to go on with my education."

"And so you married for a home I suppose," he snarled, showing his black teeth, "for silken gowns and delicate fare and costly furs such as you are wearing now."

She did not answer.

"You had better have gone on the streets and stuck to your painting."

Blanche's dark eyes met the painter's horrible leer without flinching.

"I wish I had," she said.

They had both forgotten me. They were intent upon each other.

And she who never spoke about herself said to this stranger:

"I married because I did not want to go into a sisterhood, and because Arthur said he understood what I felt about painting, and that he felt the same, and that when we were married we would both study under S., and I was grateful to him, and I thought I loved him. But S. would not take him and wanted to take me. And Arthur was dreadfully angry, and would not let me go without him. And the years pa.s.sed, hundreds and hundreds of years, and Arthur changed to me. And he has to be humoured.

And now--I copy his pictures. I enlarge them. Sometimes I decrease them, but not often. He likes to watch me doing them. He does not care for me to be doing anything else."

There was a long silence.

They stood looking at each other, and it seemed as if the sword that had pierced her soul pierced his also.

"Leave all and follow me," said the painter at last. "That is the voice of art, as well as of Jesus of Nazareth. That is the law. There is no middle course. You have not left all, you have not followed. You have dallied and faltered and betrayed your gift. You have denied your Lord.

And your sin has found you out. You are miserable; you deserve to be miserable."

She made no answer.