Part 33

He laughed slightly, without bitterness, and pushed one of the deep arm-chairs forward. “There: make yourself comfortable--and here are the cigars you like.”

He placed them at my elbow and continued to wander up and down the room, stopping now and then beneath the picture.

“How it happened? I can tell you in five minutes--and it didn’t take much longer to happen.... I can remember now how surprised and pleased I was when I got Mrs. Stroud’s note. Of course, deep down, I had always FELT there was no one like him--only I had gone with the stream, echoed the usual platitudes about him, till I half got to think he was a failure, one of the kind that are left behind. By Jove, and he WAS left behind--because he had come to stay! The rest of us had to let ourselves be swept along or go under, but he was high above the current--on everlasting foundations, as you say.

“Well, I went off to the house in my most egregious mood--rather moved, Lord forgive me, at the pathos of poor Stroud’s career of failure being crowned by the glory of my painting him! Of course I meant to do the picture for nothing--I told Mrs. Stroud so when she began to stammer something about her poverty. I remember getting off a prodigious phrase about the honour being MINE--oh, I was princely, my dear Rickham! I was posing to myself like one of my own sitters.

“Then I was taken up and left alone with him. I had sent all my traps in advance, and I had only to set up the easel and get to work. He had been dead only twenty-four hours, and he died suddenly, of heart disease, so that there had been no preliminary work of destruction--his face was clear and untouched. I had met him once or twice, years before, and thought him insignificant and dingy. Now I saw that he was superb.

“I was glad at first, with a merely aesthetic satisfaction: glad to have my hand on such a ‘subject.’ Then his strange life-likeness began to affect me queerly--as I blocked the head in I felt as if he were watching me do it. The sensation was followed by the thought: if he WERE watching me, what would he say to my way of working? My strokes began to go a little wild--I felt nervous and uncertain.

“Once, when I looked up, I seemed to see a smile behind his close grayish beard--as if he had the secret, and were amusing himself by holding it back from me. That exasperated me still more. The secret? Why, I had a secret worth twenty of his! I dashed at the canvas furiously, and tried some of my bravura tricks. But they failed me, they crumbled. I saw that he wasn’t watching the showy bits--I couldn’t distract his attention; he just kept his eyes on the hard passages between. Those were the ones I had always shirked, or covered up with some lying paint. And how he saw through my lies!

“I looked up again, and caught sight of that sketch of the donkey hanging on the wall near his bed. His wife told me afterward it was the last thing he had done--just a note taken with a shaking hand, when he was down in Devonshire recovering from a previous heart attack. Just a note! But it tells his whole history. There are years of patient scornful persistence in every line. A man who had swum with the current could never have learned that mighty up-stream stroke....

“I turned back to my work, and went on groping and muddling; then I looked at the donkey again. I saw that, when Stroud laid in the first stroke, he knew just what the end would be. He had possessed his subject, absorbed it, recreated it. When had I done that with any of my things? They hadn’t been born of me--I had just adopted them....

“Hang it, Rickham, with that face watching me I couldn’t do another stroke. The plain truth was, I didn’t know where to put it--I HAD NEVER KNOWN. Only, with my sitters and my public, a showy splash of colour covered up the fact--I just threw paint into their faces.... Well, paint was the one medium those dead eyes could see through--see straight to the tottering foundations underneath. Don’t you know how, in talking a foreign language, even fluently, one says half the time not what one wants to but what one can? Well--that was the way I painted; and as he lay there and watched me, the thing they called my ‘technique’ collapsed like a house of cards. He didn’t sneer, you understand, poor Stroud--he just lay there quietly watching, and on his lips, through the gray beard, I seemed to hear the question: ‘Are you sure you know where you’re coming out?’

“If I could have painted that face, with that question on it, I should have done a great thing. The next greatest thing was to see that I couldn’t--and that grace was given me. But, oh, at that minute, Rickham, was there anything on earth I wouldn’t have given to have Stroud alive before me, and to hear him say: ‘It’s not too late--I’ll show you how’?

“It WAS too late--it would have been, even if he’d been alive. I packed up my traps, and went down and told Mrs. Stroud. Of course I didn’t tell her THAT--it would have been Greek to her. I simply said I couldn’t paint him, that I was too moved. She rather liked the idea--she’s so romantic! It was that that made her give me the donkey. But she was terribly upset at not getting the portrait--she did so want him ‘done’ by some one showy! At first I was afraid she wouldn’t let me off--and at my wits’ end I suggested Grindle. Yes, it was I who started Grindle: I told Mrs. Stroud he was the ‘coming’ man, and she told somebody else, and so it got to be true.... And he painted Stroud without wincing; and she hung the picture among her husband’s things....”

He flung himself down in the arm-chair near mine, laid back his head, and clasping his arms beneath it, looked up at the picture above the chimney-piece.

“I like to fancy that Stroud himself would have given it to me, if he’d been able to say what he thought that day.”

And, in answer to a question I put half-mechanically--“Begin again?” he flashed out. “When the one thing that brings me anywhere near him is that I knew enough to leave off?”

He stood up and laid his hand on my shoulder with a laugh. “Only the irony of it is that I AM still painting--since Grindle’s doing it for me! The Strouds stand alone, and happen once--but there’s no exterminating our kind of art.”

The End of The Verdict

THE RECKONING

August, 1902

“The marriage law of the new dispensation will be: THOU SHALT NOT BE UNFAITHFUL--TO THYSELF.”

A discreet murmur of approval filled the studio, and through the haze of cigarette smoke Mrs. Clement Westall, as her husband descended from his improvised platform, saw him merged in a congratulatory group of ladies. Westall’s informal talks on “The New Ethics” had drawn about him an eager following of the mentally unemployed--those who, as he had once phrased it, liked to have their brain-food cut up for them. The talks had begun by accident. Westall’s ideas were known to be “advanced,” but hitherto their advance had not been in the direction of publicity. He had been, in his wife’s opinion, almost pusillanimously careful not to let his personal views endanger his professional standing. Of late, however, he had shown a puzzling tendency to dogmatize, to throw down the gauntlet, to flaunt his private code in the face of society; and the relation of the sexes being a topic always sure of an audience, a few admiring friends had persuaded him to give his after-dinner opinions a larger circulation by summing them up in a series of talks at the Van Sideren studio.

The Herbert Van Siderens were a couple who subsisted, socially, on the fact that they had a studio. Van Sideren’s pictures were chiefly valuable as accessories to the MISE EN SCÈNE which differentiated his wife’s “afternoons” from the blighting functions held in long New York drawing-rooms, and permitted her to offer their friends whiskey-and-soda instead of tea. Mrs. Van Sideren, for her part, was skilled in making the most of the kind of atmosphere which a lay-figure and an easel create; and if at times she found the illusion hard to maintain, and lost courage to the extent of almost wishing that Herbert could paint, she promptly overcame such moments of weakness by calling in some fresh talent, some extraneous re-enforcement of the “artistic” impression. It was in quest of such aid that she had seized on Westall, coaxing him, somewhat to his wife’s surprise, into a flattered participation in her fraud. It was vaguely felt, in the Van Sideren circle, that all the audacities were artistic, and that a teacher who pronounced marriage immoral was somehow as distinguished as a painter who depicted purple grass and a green sky. The Van Sideren set were tired of the conventional color-scheme in art and conduct.

Julia Westall had long had her own views on the immorality of marriage; she might indeed have claimed her husband as a disciple. In the early days of their union she had secretly resented his disinclination to proclaim himself a follower of the new creed; had been inclined to tax him with moral cowardice, with a failure to live up to the convictions for which their marriage was supposed to stand. That was in the first burst of propagandism, when, womanlike, she wanted to turn her disobedience into a law. Now she felt differently. She could hardly account for the change, yet being a woman who never allowed her impulses to remain unaccounted for, she tried to do so by saying that she did not care to have the articles of her faith misinterpreted by the vulgar. In this connection, she was beginning to think that almost every one was vulgar; certainly there were few to whom she would have cared to intrust the defence of so esoteric a doctrine. And it was precisely at this point that Westall, discarding his unspoken principles, had chosen to descend from the heights of privacy, and stand hawking his convictions at the street-corner!

It was Una Van Sideren who, on this occasion, unconsciously focussed upon herself Mrs. Westall’s wandering resentment. In the first place, the girl had no business to be there. It was “horrid”--Mrs. Westall found herself slipping back into the old feminine vocabulary--simply “horrid” to think of a young girl’s being allowed to listen to such talk. The fact that Una smoked cigarettes and sipped an occasional cocktail did not in the least tarnish a certain radiant innocency which made her appear the victim, rather than the accomplice, of her parents’ vulgarities. Julia Westall felt in a hot helpless way that something ought to be done--that some one ought to speak to the girl’s mother. And just then Una glided up.

“Oh, Mrs. Westall, how beautiful it was!” Una fixed her with large limpid eyes. “You believe it all, I suppose?” she asked with seraphic gravity.

“All--what, my dear child?”

The girl shone on her. “About the higher life--the freer expansion of the individual--the law of fidelity to one’s self,” she glibly recited.

Mrs. Westall, to her own wonder, blushed a deep and burning blush.