Each had an upper stream of thought That made all seem as it was not.         
          PETER BELL THE THIRD.

LAWRIE, Beecroft and Co. had not a monopoly in culture. Our City Fathers provided us with an art gallery, to which, with praiseworthy regularity they added two Academy pictures every year; the Town-hall had been decorated by a Pre-Raphaelite, and there was a whole network of Free Libraries, all equipped with thousands of books in a uniform binding, and with the smell proper to Free Libraries. In the cold weather they were always very full, in the hot weather they were always very empty; but in the hot weather the accumulated smells of the winter were distilled and concentrated. For music we had two or three series of concerts during the winter months. They were chiefly patronised by Germans and Jews, and the English bragged about them. We had a College of Music, and a School of Art in connection with the municipal technical school. This institution was presided over by a Socialistic disciple of William Morris, who spent a great part of his free time in designing banners for Friendly Societies—Buffaloes, Free Foresters, Hearts of Oak—and cartoons for Labour journals. It was situated in a square which was typical of the town. In the centre of it stood a huge ugly Anglican church, and three sides of it were filled with a Presbyterian chapel, a Wesleyan chapel, a Baptist chapel, a Secular hall, a Maternity Hospital and a Dental Hospital. Down a by-street was the headquarters of the Salvation Army, and down another a larger Roman Catholic church. Quite near was the office in which Bennett Lawrie worked, and all       [Pg 108]round were slums, public-houses, brothels, a wedge of infamy between the working centre and the outskirts. All round the Anglican church in the centre of the square ran a wide pavement on which were wooden benches. Here at night came hundreds of men, women and boys who had no resting-place. They spent half the night there until they were moved on by the police, when they went to a similar pavement with benches outside the Infirmary, meeting half-way their comrades in misery who had been moved on from that place—a sort of general post. In the day-time the square was always busy, for two main roads met in it, and tram-lines from four directions converged. Near at hand were many cheap shops, and the wives of the clerks came thither to make their daily purchases.

It was to this School of Art that Serge Folyat came as the result of his exhibition, which was an almost unredeemed failure. Beecroft banged the drum and old Lawrie blew the trumpet, but the local school of artists were contemptuous, and declared that the new genius could not draw. Serge quite agreed. He sold ten of his pictures, and went to see the disciple of William Morris and arranged to attend eight classes a week, four in the afternoon and four in the evening.

He found the school very amusing, though at first his position was a little difficult, for most of the students were very young and inclined to look askance at a man with a beard turning grey and his hair growing thin on the top of his head. The classes were very cheap, and he was able to pay for the first term himself and postponed discussion as to future ways and means, reckoning that in three months’ time his family would have digested and assimilated him, and added him to the already large number of habits which made their common existence tolerable. He worked very hard both at home and at the school, wrestling with the horrible difficulties of the human body. He had an intuitive feeling that he would never be able to draw hands, and he became very ingenious in concealing them.

The classes at the school were mixed. There were a few [Pg 109]serious students of both sexes, a great many who attended from the vanity of talent, and some to whom studying art was an occupation. A little hunchback with a malicious intense face had been there for thirteen years, and an old spinster of fifty-five had spent fifteen years without ever passing an examination or taking a single certificate. She was extremely hopeful, and one of the most cheerful persons in the school. On the whole it was not cheerful. It lacked spirit and enthusiasm. Many of the young men no doubt had a secret conviction that they had a great destiny, but they were rather ashamed of it, and only in rare moments of excitement did they dare to let it appear. Theodore Benskin, the Morrisian principal of the school, had been enthusiastic at twenty-five, but he had stopped there. However, he was a good teacher of a mechanical sort. His business was to turn out draughtsmen rather than artists, and he succeeded. Serge desired to become a draughtsman, and he followed Benskin’s directions, though all the while he had a feeling of the grotesque in what he was doing, and was inclined to think that a bushman’s drawings on the wall of a cave were of more value than all the finished studies turned out under Benskinian rules. However, he was nettled by the failure of his exhibition, and saw that it was quite useless to take keen pleasure in his work unless by the work he could communicate that pleasure to others. He had no concise theory of art beyond a conviction that unless it could create pleasure there was no excuse for it. As for making money by it, there were a thousand easier ways of doing that, ways that left more leisure and did not induce such profound depression. It was all very well, he thought, to gird, as did almost everybody he met, at the sordidness and grimness of the town in which they lived, but the most miserable of all the people in it were the supposed artists, the men who frequented the Arts Club. They were all men of talent, but none of them ever seemed to have used their gifts to any purpose. They were perpetually cursing the lack of appreciation of their fellow-citizens, but they had never made any really serious attempt to win them or to open up any new way for their minds. When it [Pg 110]came to the point their standards were those of the rich men, upon whose caprice they lived. Like everybody else in the town they put up with money as the sole channel of communication between one man and another. Serge used sometimes to try to talk to the waifs and strays on the benches outside the church in the square, but he found them nearly all brutalised and fuddled. They seemed to have no thought beyond the next meal, no programme beyond the next drink. They cadged.

Among the students at the school was a young man whom Serge had marked out from the very first moment. He was short, and had a large head, dark hair, bright eyes, and he was always merry. He had a joke for everyone, and he was always in love with one or other of the girl-students. Benskin was proud of him, for he won all possible prizes and was always solidly working. His name was Basil Haslam, brother of that spotty-faced youth who was Frederic’s boon companion. They made acquaintance quickly but did not become friends until they both entered for a competition for a prize, the subject being a sea-piece. Haslam won it, and protested with Benskin that Folyat’s was the best, because Folyat knew about the sea and he didn’t.

He was delighted when Serge told him that he had been a sailor.

“Ah! That’s it,” he said. “That’s it. I’ve never been anything. I can just draw but I don’t understand about men and how they live.”

“That’s not very difficult,” replied Serge. “They are much the same everywhere. They are all born in the same way, and death has not many variations. What lies in between is largely a matter of eating, drinking, and sleeping.”

“And loving.”

“Just a few get as far as that. Not many.”

“But all of them seem to think about getting married.”

“That has surprisingly little to do with love. How much love do you get in your own house?”

“Not much. But then they think I’m queer. My father’s a doctor. He wanted me to be a doctor, but I’ve [Pg 111]got a hundred-and-fifty of my own, so I can do what I like. I shall go to London as soon as I’m through here. It’s no good being a painter here. They all think it’s a joke, a sort of excuse for doing nothing.”

“I know. They think pictures are produced automatically—like everything else.”

“Old Benskin’s automatic enough.”

“Exactly. He can work just as he can go to sleep, almost without knowing that he’s doing it. It’s a matter of habit. He’s almost forgotten how he used to despise that sort of thing.”

“Do you think he ever did?”

“Of course, or his work wouldn’t be as good as it is.”

“I can’t understand people ceasing to be keen.”

“I can. You only need to wobble a very little to come down on the wrong side. Then you’re done for—in Hell. And after a bit you find that you quite like it, except in awful moments when you realise that after all it is Hell and that you might so easily have been in Heaven.”

“I know what you mean. You mean that the whole thing rests with yourself. But it’s rotten luck when you’re weak and can’t help doing the wrong thing though you see the right thing the whole time.”

“But we’re all like that. We only go to Hell when we do the wrong thing and pretend that it’s the right.”

“How did you find that out?”

“By a careful study of Hell and its inhabitants.”

“Then you don’t mean the Hell one’s people talk about?”

“No. I mean here and now, the world as it is. I’m not interested in any other.”

“Neither am I. Hurray!”

This conversation was the first of many. Haslam used to wait for Serge and walk with him as far as their roads lay together. He was an ambitious young man with his eyes set on the road to London, not so much because he was eager for fame and material rewards as because he was hotly impatient of art which stopped short at Benskin and Beecroft.

[Pg 112]

“But,” Serge would say, “Benskin and Beecroft will both die.”

“I know, but there’ll be a new Beecroft and a new Benskin by that time.”

“That’s true. We shall never be rid of them.”

“I expect London is crammed full of Benskins and Beecrofts.”

“Maybe, but there are more of the other sort there too.”

“If I don’t reach London by the time I’m twenty-seven I shall throw up the sponge.”

“Why twenty-seven?” asked Serge, smiling.

“Oh! if a man hasn’t done something by the time he’s twenty-seven he never will.”

“I’m a good deal more than that. . .”

“But you’ve done everything. You’ve made yourself. You’re not really any older than I am, and everybody here is so horribly old.”

“Yes, they all come to a bad and perfectly respectable end.”

Haslam swung his fist in the air and shouted indignantly:

“Respectable! Respectable! Give me a list of any ten men living in respectable suburban villas and I warrant you there’ll be more dishonesty and cowardly misdoing in their lives than in ten of the so-called criminal classes. I don’t understand it. I do rotten things myself—who doesn’t?—but I can’t shut my eyes to them when they’re done. Take my brother. He’s a beastly idiot or an idiotic beast, always getting into scrapes and shuffling out of them. By the time he’s thirty he’ll still be doing the same things, but he’ll have learned how to prevent them coming to the surface. He’ll marry, settle down, enjoy a comfortable income, be a pillar of the Church and a smug, hard Pharisee like all the rest, with all............