Part 12

“Don’t say that; I don’t deserve it; it scorches me,” he protested with eyes suddenly grave and glowing. “The ‘one’ is of course one’s self, one’s conscience, one’s idea, the singleness of one’s aim. I think of that pure spirit as a man thinks of a woman he has in some detested hour of his youth loved and forsaken. She haunts him with reproachful eyes, she lives for ever before him. As an artist, you know, I’ve married for money.” Paul stared and even blushed a little, confounded by this avowal; whereupon his host, observing the expression of his face, dropped a quick laugh and pursued: “You don’t follow my figure. I’m not speaking of my dear wife, who had a small fortune—which, however, was not my bribe. I fell in love with her, as many other people have done. I refer to the mercenary muse whom I led to the altar of literature. Don’t, my boy, put your nose into that yoke. The awful jade will lead you a life!”

Our hero watched him, wondering and deeply touched. “Haven’t you been happy!”

“Happy? It’s a kind of hell.”

“There are things I should like to ask you,” Paul said after a pause.

“Ask me anything in all the world. I’d turn myself inside out to save you.”

“To ‘save’ me?” he quavered.

“To make you stick to it—to make you see it through. As I said to you the other night at Summersoft, let my example be vivid to you.”

“Why your books are not so bad as that,” said Paul, fairly laughing and feeling that if ever a fellow had breathed the air of art—!

“So bad as what?”

“Your talent’s so great that it’s in everything you do, in what’s less good as well as in what’s best. You’ve some forty volumes to show for it—forty volumes of wonderful life, of rare observation, of magnificent ability.”

“I’m very clever, of course I know that”—but it was a thing, in fine, this author made nothing of. “Lord, what rot they’d all be if I hadn’t been I’m a successful charlatan,” he went on—“I’ve been able to pass off my system. But do you know what it is? It’s cartonpierre.”

“Carton-pierre?” Paul was struck, and gaped.

“Lincrusta-Walton!”

“Ah don’t say such things—you make me bleed!” the younger man protested. “I see you in a beautiful fortunate home, living in comfort and honour.”

“Do you call it honour?”—his host took him up with an intonation that often comes back to him. “That’s what I want you to go in for. I mean the real thing. This is brummagem.”

“Brummagem?” Paul ejaculated while his eyes wandered, by a movement natural at the moment, over the luxurious room.

“Ah they make it so well to-day—it’s wonderfully deceptive!”

Our friend thrilled with the interest and perhaps even more with the pity of it. Yet he wasn’t afraid to seem to patronise when he could still so far envy. “Is it deceptive that I find you living with every appearance of domestic felicity—blest with a devoted, accomplished wife, with children whose acquaintance I haven’t yet had the pleasure of making, but who must be delightful young people, from what I know of their parents?”

St. George smiled as for the candour of his question. “It’s all excellent, my dear fellow—heaven forbid I should deny it. I’ve made a great deal of money; my wife has known how to take care of it, to use it without wasting it, to put a good bit of it by, to make it fructify. I’ve got a loaf on the shelf; I’ve got everything in fact but the great thing.”

“The great thing?” Paul kept echoing.

“The sense of having done the best—the sense which is the real life of the artist and the absence of which is his death, of having drawn from his intellectual instrument the finest music that nature had hidden in it, of having played it as it should be played. He either does that or he doesn’t—and if he doesn’t he isn’t worth speaking of. Therefore, precisely, those who really know don’t speak of him. He may still hear a great chatter, but what he hears most is the incorruptible silence of Fame. I’ve squared her, you may say, for my little hour—but what’s my little hour? Don’t imagine for a moment,” the Master pursued, “that I’m such a cad as to have brought you down here to abuse or to complain of my wife to you. She’s a woman of distinguished qualities, to whom my obligations are immense; so that, if you please, we’ll say nothing about her. My boys—my children are all boys—are straight and strong, thank God, and have no poverty of growth about them, no penury of needs. I receive periodically the most satisfactory attestation from Harrow, from Oxford, from Sandhurst—oh we’ve done the best for them!—of their eminence as living thriving consuming organisms.”

“It must be delightful to feel that the son of one’s loins is at Sandhurst,” Paul remarked enthusiastically.

“It is—it’s charming. Oh I’m a patriot!”

The young man then could but have the greater tribute of questions to pay. “Then what did you mean—the other night at Summersoft—by saying that children are a curse?”

“My dear youth, on what basis are we talking?” and St. George dropped upon the sofa at a short distance from him. Sitting a little sideways he leaned back against the opposite arm with his hands raised and interlocked behind his head. “On the supposition that a certain perfection’s possible and even desirable—isn’t it so? Well, all I say is that one’s children interfere with perfection. One’s wife interferes. Marriage interferes.”

“You think then the artist shouldn’t marry?”

“He does so at his peril—he does so at his cost.”

“Not even when his wife’s in sympathy with his work?”