Such were the memories that overwhelmed Clementina Wing as she sat grim and lonely by the fire. In the tragedy the girl Clementina perished, and from her ashes arose the ph?nix of dingy plumage who had developed into the Clementina of to-day. As soon as she could envisage life again, she plunged into the strenuous art-world of Paris, living solitary, morose, and heedless of external things. The joyousness of the light-hearted crowd into which she was thrown jarred upon her. It was like Bacchanalian revelry at a funeral. She made no friends. Good-natured importunates she drove away with rough usage. The pairs of young men and maidens who flaunted their foolish happiness in places of public resort she regarded with misanthropic eye. She hated them—at one-and-twenty—because they were fools; because they deluded themselves into the belief that the world was rose and blue and gold, whereas she, of her own bitter knowledge, knew it to be drab. And from a drab world what was there more vain than the attempt to extract colour? Beauty left her unmoved because it had no basis in actuality. The dainty rags in which she had been accustomed to garb herself she threw aside with contempt. Sackcloth was the only wear.
It must be remembered that Clementina at this period was young, and that it is only given to youth to plumb the depths of existence. She was young, strong-fibred, desperately conscious of herself. She had left her home rejecting sympathy. To no one could she exhibit the torture of her soul; to no one could she confess the remorse and shame that consumed her. She was a failure in essentials. She had failed the man in his hour of need. She had let him go forth to his death. She, Clementina Wing, was a failure. She, Clementina Wing, was the world. Therefore was the world a failure. She saw life drab. Her vision was infallible. Therefore life was drab. Syllogisms, with the eternal fallacy of youth in their minor premises. Work saved her reason. She went at it feverishly, indefatigably, unremittingly, as only a woman can—and only a woman who has lost sense of values. Her talent was great—in those days she did not scout the suggestion of genius—and by her indomitable pains she acquired the marvellous technique which had brought her fame. The years slipped away. Suddenly she awakened. A picture exhibited in the Salon obtained for her a gold medal, which pleased her mightily. She was not as dead as she had fancied, having still the power to feel the thrill of triumph. Money much more than would satisfy her modest wants jingled in her pockets with a jocund sound. Folks whom she had kept snarlingly at bay whispered honeyed flattery in her ears. Philosophy, which (of a bitter nature) she had cultivated during her period of darkness, enabled her to estimate the flattery at its true value; but no philosophy in the world could do away with the sweetness of it. So it came to pass that on her pleasant road to success, Clementina realised that there was such a thing as light and shade in life as well as in pictures. But though she came out of the underworld a different woman from the one who had sojourned there, she was still a far more different woman from the girl who was flung herself into it headlong. She emerged cynical, rough, dictatorial, eccentric in speech, habits, and attire. As she had emancipated herself from the gloom of remorse and self-torture, so did she emancipate herself from convention. Youth had flown early, and with it the freshness that had given charm to her young face. Lines had come, bones had set, the mouth had hardened. She had lost the trick of personal adornment. Years of loose and casual corseting had ruined her figure. Even were she to preen and primp herself, what man would look at her with favour? As for women, she let them go hang. She was always impatient of the weaknesses, frailties, and vanities of her own sex, especially when they were marked by an outer show of strength. The helpless she had been known to take to her bosom as she would have taken a wounded bird—but her sex as a whole attracted her but little. Women could go hang, because she did not want them. Men could go hang likewise, because they did not want her. Thus dismissing from her horizon all the human race, she found compensation in the freedom so acquired. If she chose to run bareheaded and slipshod into the King’s Road and come back with a lump of beef wrapped in a bloodstained bit of newspaper (as her acquaintance, Mrs. Venables, had caught her doing—“My dear, you never saw such an appalling sight in your life,” she said when reporting the incident, “and she had the impudence to make me shake hands with her—and the hand, my dear, in which she had been holding the beef”)—if she chose to do this, what mattered it to any one of God’s creatures, save perhaps Mrs. Venables’s glove-maker to whom it was an advantage? Her servant had a bad cold, time—the morning light was precious—and the putting on of hat and boots a retarding vanity. If she chose to bring in a shivering ragamuffin from the streets and warm him before the fire and stuff him with the tomato sandwiches and plum-cake set out for a visitor’s tea, who could say her nay? The visitor in revolt against the sight and smell of the ragamuffin, could get up and depart. It was a matter of no concern to Clementina. Eventually folks recognised Clementina’s eccentricity, classed it in the established order of things, ceased to regard it—just as dwellers by a cataract lose the sound of the thunder, and as a human wife ceases to be conscious of the wart on her husband’s nose. To this enviable height of freedom had Clementina risen.
She sat by the fire, overwhelmed by memories. They had been conjured up by the girl with the terror at the back of her eyes; but their mass was no longer crushing. They came over her like a weightless grey cloud that had arisen from some remote past with which she had no concern. She had grown to look upon the tragedy impersonally, as though it were a melodramatic tale written by a young and inexperienced writer, in which the characters were overdrawn and untrue to life. The reading of the tale left her with the impression that Roland Thorne was an unprincipled weakling, Clementina Wing an hysterical little fool.
Presently she rose, rubbed her face hard with both hands, a proceeding which had the effect of spreading the paint smudge into a bright gamboge over her cheeks, pushed the easel aside, and, taking down “Tristram Shandy” from her shelves, read the story of the King of Bohemia and his Seven Castles, by way of a change of fiction, till her maid summoned her to her solitary dinner.
Early the next morning, as soon as she had entered the studio and had begun to set her palette, preparatory to the day’s work, Tommy Burgrave appeared on the gallery, with a “Hullo, Clementina!” and ran down the spiral staircase. Clementina paused with a paint tube in her hand.
“Look, my young friend, you don’t live here, you know,” she said coolly.
“I’ll clear out in half a second,” he replied, smiling. “I’m bringing you news. You ought to be very grateful to me. I’ve got you a commission.”
“Who’s the fool?” asked Clementina.
“It isn’t a fool,” said Tommy, buttoning the belt of his Norfolk jacket, as if to brace himself to the encounter. “It’s my uncle.”
“Lord save us!” said Clementina.
“I thought I would give you a surprise,” said Tommy.
Clementina shrugged her shoulders and went on squeezing paint out of tubes.
“He must have softening of the brain.”
“Why?”
“First for wanting to have his portrait painted at all, and secondly for thinking of coming to me. Go back and tell him I’m not a caricaturist.”
Tommy planted a painting-stool in the middle of the floor and sat upon it, with legs apart.
“Let us talk business, Clementina. In the first place, he has nothing to do with it. He doesn’t want his portrait painted, bless you. It’s the other prehistoric fossils he foregathers with. I met chunks of them at dinner last night. They belong to the Anthropological Society, you know, they fool around with antediluvian stones and bones and bits of iron—and my uncle’s president. They want to have his portrait to hang up in the cave where they meet. They were talking about it at my end of the table. They didn’t know what painter to go to, so they consulted me. My uncle had introduced me as an artist, you know, and they looked on me as a sort of young prophet. I asked them how much they were prepared to give. They said about five hundred pounds—they evidently have a lot of money to throw about—one of them, all over gold chains and rings, seemed to perspire money, looked like a bucket-shop keeper. I think it’s he who is presenting the Society with the portrait. Anyway that’s about your figure, so I said there was only one person to paint my uncle and that was Clementina Wing. It struck them as a brilliant idea, and the end of it was that they told my uncle and requested me to sound you on the matter. I’ve sounded.”
She looked at his confident boyish face, and uttered a grim sound, halfway between a laugh and a sniff, which was her nearest approach to exhibition of mirth, and might have betokened amusement or pity or contempt or any two of these taken together or the three combined. Then she turned away and, screwing up her eyes, looked out for a few moments into the sodden back garden.
“Did you ever hear of a barber refusing to shave a man because he didn’t like the shape of his whiskers?”
“Only one,” said Tommy, “and he cut the man’s throat from ear to ear with the razor.”
He laughed loud at his own jest, and, going up to the window where Clementina stood with her back to him, laid a hand on her shoulder.
“That means you’ll do it.”
“Guineas, not pounds,” said Clementina, facing him. “Five hundred guineas. I couldn’t endure Ephraim Quixtus for less.”
“Leave it to me, I’ll fix it up. So long.” He ran up the spiral staircase, in high good-humour. On the gallery he paused and leaned over the balustrade.
“I say, Clementina, if the ugly young man calls to-day for that pretty Miss Etta, and you want any murdering done, send for me.”
She looked up at him smiling down upon her, gay and handsome, so rich in his springtide, and she obeyed a sudden impulse.
“Come down, Tommy.”
When he had descended she unhooked from the wall over the fireplace a Della Robbia plaque—a child’s white head against a background of yellow and blue—a cherished possession—and thrust it into Tommy’s arms. He stared at her, but clutched the precious thing tight for fear of dropping it.
“Take it. You can give it as a wedding present to your wife when you have one. I want you to have it.”
He stammered, overwhelmed by her magnificent and unprecedented generosity. He could not accept the plaque. It was too priceless a gift.
“That’s why I give it to you, you silly young idiot,” she cried impatiently. “Do you think I’d give you a pair of embroidered braces or a hymn-book? Take it and go.”
What Tommy did then, nine hundred and ninety-nine young men out of a thousand would not have done. He held out his hand—“Rubbish,” said Clementina; but she held out hers—he gripped it, swung her to him and gave her a good, full, sounding, honest kiss. Then, holding the thing of beauty against his heart he leaped up the stairs and disappeared, with an exultant “Good-bye,” through the door.
A dark flush rose on the kissed spot on Clementina’s cheek. Softness crept into her hard eyes. She looked at the vacant place on the wall where the cherished thing of beauty had hung. By some queer optical illusion it appeared even brighter than before.
Tommy, being a young man of energy and enthusiasm with modern notions as to the reckoning of time, rushed the Anthropologists, who were accustomed to reckon time by epochs instead of minutes, off their leisurely feet. His uncle had said words of protest at this indecent haste; “My dear Tommy, if you were more of a reflective human being and less of a whirlwind, it would frequently add to your peace and comfort.” But Tommy triumphed. Within a very short period everything was settled, the formal letters had been exchanged, and Ephraim Quixtus found himself paying a visit, in a new character, to Clementina Wing.
She received him in her prim little drawing-room—as prim and old-maidish as Romney Place itself—a striking contrast to the chaotically equipped studio which, as Tommy declared, resembled nothing so much as a show-room after a bargain-sale. The furniture was the stiffest of Sheraton, the innocent colour engravings of Tomkins, Cipriani, and Bartolozzi hung round the walls, and in a corner stood a spinning-wheel with a bunch of flax on the distaff. The room afforded Clementina perpetual grim amusement. Except when she received puzzled visitors she rarely sat in it from one year’s end to the other.
“I haven’t seen you since the Deluge, Ephraim,” she said, as he bent over her hand in an old-fashioned un-English way. “How’s prehistoric man getting on?”
“As well,” said he, gravely, “as can be expected.”
Ephraim Quixtus, Ph.D., was a tall gaunt man of forty, with a sallow complexion, raven black hair thinning at the temples and on the crown of his head, and great, mild, china-blue eyes. A reluctant moustache gave his face a certain lack of finish. Clementina’s quick eye noted it at once. She screwed up her face and watched him.
“I could make a much more presentable thing of you if you were clean shaven,” she said brusquely.
“I couldn’t shave off my moustache.”
“Why not?”
He started in alarm.
“I think the Society would prefer to have their President in the guise in which he presided over them.”
“Umph!” said Clementina. She looked at him again, and with a touch of irony; “Perhaps it’s just as well. Sit down.”
“Thank you,” said Quixtus, seating himself on one of the stiff Sheraton chairs. And then, courteously; “You have travelled far since we last met, Clementina. You are famous. I wonder what it feels like to be a celebrity.”
She shrugged her shoulders. “In my case it feels like leading apes in hell. By the way, when did I last see you?”
“It was at poor Angela’s funeral, five years ago.”
“So it was,” said Clementina.
There was a short silence. Angela was his dead wife and her distant relation.
“What has become of Will Hammersley?” she asked suddenly. “He has given up writing to me.”
“Still in Shanghai, I think. He went out, you know, to take over the China branch of his firm—just before Angela’s death, wasn’t it? It’s a couple of years or more since I have heard from him.”
“That’s strange; he was an intimate friend of yours,” said Clementina.
“The only intimate friend I’ve ever had in my life. We were at school and at Cambridge together. Somehow, although I have many acquaintances and, so to speak, friends, yet I’ve never formed the intimacies that most men have. I suppose,” he added, with a sweet smile, “it’s because I’m rather a dry stick.”
“You’re ten years older than your age,” said Clementina, frankly. “You want shaking up. It’s a pity Will Hammersley isn’t here. He used to do you a lot of good.”
“I’m glad you think so much of Hammersley,” said Quixtus.
“I don’t think much of most people, do I?” she said. “But Hammersley was a friend in need. He was to me, at any rate.”
“Are you still fond of Sterne?” he asked. “I think you are the only woman who ever was.”
She nodded. “Why do you ask?”
“I was thinking,” he said, in his quiet, courtly way, “that we have many bonds of sympathy, after all; Angela, Hammersley, Sterne, and my scapegrace nephew, Tommy.”
“Tommy is a good boy,” said Clementina, “and he’ll learn to paint some day.”
“I must thank you for your very great kindness to him.”
“Bosh!” said Clementina.
“It’s a great thing for a young fellow—wild and impulsive like Tommy—to have a good friend in a woman older than himself.”
“If you think, my good man,” snapped Clementina, reverting to her ordinary manner, “that I look after his morals, you are very much mistaken. What has it got to do with me if he kisses models and takes them out to dinner in Soho?”
The lingering Eve in her resented the suggestion of a maternal attitude towards the boy. After all, she was not five-and-fifty; she was younger, five years younger than the stick of an uncle who was talking to her as if he had stepped out of the pages of a Sunday-school prize.
“He never tells me of the models,” replied Quixtus, “and I’m very glad he tells you. It shows there is no harm in it.”
“Let us talk sense,” said Clementina, “and not waste time. You’ve come to me to have your portrait painted. I’ve been looking at you. I think a half-length, sitting down, would be the best—unless you want to stand up in evening-dress behind a table, with presidential gold chains and badges of office and hammers and water-bottles——”
“Heaven forbid!” cried Quixtus, who was as modest a man as ever stepped. “What you suggest will quite do.”
“I suppose you will wear that frock-coat and turn-down collar? Don’t you ever wear a narrow black tie?”
“My dear Clementina,” he cried horrified, “I may not be the latest thing in dandyism, but I’ve no desire to look like a Scotch deacon in his Sunday clothes.”
“Vanity again,” said Clementina. “I could have got something much better out of you in a narrow black tie. Still, I daresay I’ll manage—though what your bone-digging friends want with a portrait of you at all for, I’m blest if I can understand.”
With which gracious remark she dismissed him, after having arranged a date for the first sitting.
“A poor creature,” muttered Clementina, when the door closed behind him.
The poor creature, however, walked smartly homewards through the murky November evening, perfectly contented with God and man—even with Clementina herself. In this well-ordered world, even the tongue of an eccentric woman must serve some divine purpose. He mused whimsically on the purpose. Well, at any rate, she belonged to a dear and regretted past, which without throwing an absolute glamour around Clementina still shed upon her its softening rays. His thoughts were peculiarly retrospective this evening. It was a Tuesday, and his Tuesday nights for some years had been devoted to a secret and sacred gathering of pale ghosts. His Tuesday nights were mysteries to all his friends. When pressed for the reason of this perennial weekly engagement, he would say vaguely; “It’s a club to which I belong.” But what was the nature of the club, what the grim and ghastly penalty if he skipped a meeting, those were questions which he left, with a certain innocent mirth, to the conjecture of the curious.
The evening was fine, with a touch of shrewdness in the air. He found himself in the exhilarated frame of mind which is consonant with brisk walking. He looked at his watch. He could easily reach Russell Square by seven o’clock. He timed his walk exactly. It was five minutes to seven when he let himself in by his latchkey. The parlour-maid, emerging from the dining-room, met him in the hall and helped him off with his coat.
“The gentlemen have come, sir.”
“Dear, dear,” said Quixtus, self-reproachfully.
“They’re before their time. It isn’t seven yet, sir,” said the parlour-maid, flinging the blame upon the gentlemen. In speaking of them she had just the slightest little supercilious tilt of the nose.
Quixtus waited until she had retired, then, drawing something from his own pocket, he put something into the pocket of each of three greatcoats that hung in the hall. After that he ran upstairs into the drawing-room. Three men rose to receive him.
“How do you do, Huckaby? So glad to see you, Vandermeer. My dear Billiter.”
He apologised for being late. They murmured excuses for being early. Quixtus asked leave to wash his hands, went out and returned rubbing them, as though in anticipation of enjoyment. Two of the men standing in front of the fire made way for him. He thrust them back courteously.
“No, no, I’m warm. Been walking for miles. I’ve not seen an evening paper. What’s the news?”
Quixtus never saw an evening paper on Tuesdays. The question was a time-honoured opening to the kindly game he played with his guests.
Now there is a reason for most things, even for a parlour-maid’s tilt of the nose. The personal appearance of the guests would have tilted the nose of any self-respecting parlour-maid in Russell Square. They were a strange trio. All were shabby and out-at-elbows. All wore the insecure, apologetic collar which is one of the most curious badges of the down-at-heel. All bore on their faces the signs of privation and suffering; Huckaby, lantern-jawed, black-bearded and watery-eyed; Vandermeer, small, decrepit, pinched of feature, with crisp, sparse red hair and the bright eyes of a hungry wolf; Billiter, the flabby remains of a heavily built florid man, with a black moustache turning grey. They were ghosts of the past, who once a week came back to the plentiful earth, lived for a few brief hours in the land that had been their heritage, talked of the things they had once loved, and went forth (so Quixtus hoped) cheered and comforted for their next week’s wandering on the banks of Acheron. Once a week they sat at a friend’s table and ate generous food, drank generous wine, and accepted help from a friend’s generous hand. Help they all needed, and like desperate men would snatch it from any hand held out to them. Huckaby had been a successful coach at Cambridge; Vandermeer, who had forsaken early in life a banking office for the Temple of Literary Fame, had starved for years on free-lance journalism; Billiter, of Rugby and Oxford, had run through a fortune. All waste products of the world’s factory. Among the many things they had in common was an unquenchable thirst, which they dissimulated in Russell Square; but they made up for it by patronising their host. When a beneficiary is humble he is either deserving or has touched the lowest depths of degradation.
Quixtus presided happily at the meal. With strangers he was shy and diffident; but here he was at his ease, among old friends none the less valued because they had fallen by the wayside. Into the reason of their fall it did not concern him to inquire. All that mattered was their obvious affection and the obvious brightness that fortune had enabled him to shed on their lives.
“I wonder,” said he, with one of his sudden smiles, “I wonder if you fellows know how I prize these evenings of ours.”
“They’re Attic Symposia,” said Huckaby.
“I’ve been thinking of a series of articles on them, after the manner of the Noctes Ambrosian?,” said Vandermeer.
“They would quite bear it,” Huckaby agreed. “I think we get better talk here than anywhere else I know. I’m a sometime Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge,”—he rolled out the alliterative phrase with great sonority—“and I know the talk in the Combination Room; but it’s pedantic—pedantic. Not ripe and mellow like ours.”
“I’m not a brainy chap like you others,” said Billiter, wiping his dragoon’s moustache, “but I like to have my mind improved, now and then.”
“Do you know the Noctes, Huckaby?” asked Quixtus. “Of course you do. What do you think of them?”
“I suppose you like them,” replied Huckaby, “because you are an essentially scientific and not a literary man. But I think them dull.”
“I don’t call them dull,” Quixtus argued, “but to my mind they’re pretentious. I don’t like their sham heartiness, their slap-on-the-back-and-how-are-you-old-fellow tone, their impossible Pantagruelian banquets——”
The hungry wolf’s face of Vandermeer lit up. “That’s what I like about them—the capons—the pies—the cockaleeky—the haggises——”
“I remember a supper-party at Oxford,” said Billiter, “when there was a haggis, and one chap who was awfully tight insisted that a haggis ought to be turned like an omelette or tossed like a pancake. He tossed it. My God! You never saw such a thing in your life!”
So they all talked according to the several necessities of their natures, and at last Quixtus informed his guests that he was to sit for his portrait to Miss Clementina Wing.
“I believe she is really quite capable,” said Huckaby, judicially, stroking his straggling beard.
“I know her,” cried Vandermeer. “A most charming woman.”
Quixtus raised his eyebrows.
“I’m glad to hear you say so,” said he. “She is a sort of distant connection of mine by marriage.”
“I interviewed her,” said Vandermeer.
“Good Lord!” The exclamation on the part of Quixtus was inaudible.
“I was doing a series of articles—very important articles,” said Vandermeer, with an assertive glance around the table, “on Women Workers of To-day, and of course Miss Clementina Wing came into it. I called and put the matter before her.”
He paused dramatically.
“And then?” asked Quixtus amused.
“We went out to lunch in a restaurant and she gave me all the material necessary for my article. A most charming woman, who I think will do you justice, Quixtus.”
When his friends had gone, each, by the way, diving furtive and searching hands into their great-coat pockets, as soon as they had been helped into these garments by the butler—and here, by the way also, be it stated that, no matter how sultry the breath of summer or how frigid that of fortune, they never failed to bring overcoats to hang, for all the world like children’s stockings for Santa Claus, on the familiar pegs—when his friends were gone, Quixtus, who had an elementary sense of humour, failed entirely to see an expansive and notoriety-seeking Clementina lunching tête-à-tête at the Carlton or the Savoy with Theodore Vandermeer. In point of fact, he fell asleep smiling at the picture.
The next day, while he was at breakfast—he breakfasted rather late—Tommy Burgrave was announced. Tommy, who had already eaten with the appetite of youth, immediately after his cold bath, declined to join his uncle in a meal, but for the sake of sociability trifled with porridge, kidneys, cold ham, hot rolls and marmalade, while Quixtus feasted on a soft-boiled egg and a piece of dry toast. When his barmecide meal was over, Tommy came to the business of the day. For some inexplicable, unconjecturable reason his monthly allowance had gone, disappeared, vanished into the Ewigkeit. What in the world was he to do?
Now it must be explained that Tommy Burgrave was an orphan, the son of Ephraim Quixtus’s only sister, and his whole personal estate a sum of money invested in a mortgage which brought him in fifty pounds a year. On fifty pounds a year a young man cannot lead the plenteous life as far as food and raiment are concerned, rent a studio (even though it be a converted first-floor back, as Tommy’s was) and a bedroom in Romney Place, travel (even on a bicycle, as Tommy did) about England, and entertain ladies to dinner at restaurants—even though the ladies may be only models, and the restaurants in Soho. He must have other financial support. This other financial support came to him in the guise of a generous allowance from his uncle. But as the generosity of his instincts—and who in the world would be a cynic, animated blight, curmudgeon enough to check the generous instincts of youth?—as, I say, the generosity of his instincts outran the generosity of his allowance, towards the end of every month Tommy found himself in a most naturally inexplicable position. At the end of the month, therefore, Tommy came to Russell Square and trifled with porridge, kidneys, cold ham, hot rolls and marmalade, while his uncle feasted on a soft-boiled egg and a piece of dried toast, and, at the end of his barmecide feast, came to business.
On the satisfactory conclusion thereof (and it had never been known to be otherwise) Tommy lit a cigar—he liked his uncle’s cigars.
“Well,” said he, “what do you think of Clementina?”
“I think,” said Quixtus, with a faint luminosity lighting his china-blue eyes, “I think that Clementina, being an artist, is a problem. But if she weren’t an artist and in a different class of life, she would be a model old family servant in a great house in which the family, by no chance whatever, resided.”
Tommy laughed. “It seemed tremendously funny to bring you two together.”
Quixtus smiled indulgently. “So it was a practical joke on your part?”
“Oh no!” cried Tommy, flaring up. “You mustn’t think that. There’s only one painter living who has, her power—and I’m one of the people who know it—and I wanted her to paint you. Besides, she is a thorough good sort—through and through.”
“My dear boy, I was only jesting,” said Quixtus, touched by his earnestness. “I know that not only are you a devotee—and very rightly so—of Clementina—but that she is a very great painter.”
“All the same,” said Tommy, with a twinkle in his eyes, “I’m afraid that you’re in for an awful time.”
“I’m afraid so, too,” said Quixtus, whimsically, “but I’ll get through it somehow.”
He did get through it; but it was only “somehow.” This quiet, courtly, dreamy gentleman irritated Clementina as he had irritated her years ago. He was a learned man; that went without saying; but he was a fool all the same, and Clementina had not trained herself to suffer fools gladly. The portrait became her despair. The man had no character. There was nothing beneath the surface of those china-blue eyes. She was afraid, she said, of getting on the canvas the portrait of a congenital idiot. His attitude towards life—the dilettante attitude which she as a worker despised—made her impatient. By profession he was a solicitor, head of the old-fashioned firm of Quixtus and Son; but, on his open avowal, he neglected the business, leaving it all in the hands of his partner.
“He’ll do you, sure as a gun,” said Clementina.
Quixtus smiled. “My father trusted him implicitly, and so do I.”
“A man or a woman’s a fool to trust anybody,” said Clementina.
“I’ve trusted everybody around me all my life, and no one has done me any harm, and therefore I’m a happy man.”
“Rubbish,” said Clementina. “Any fraud gets the better of you. What about your German friend Tommy was telling me of?”
This was a sore point. A most innocent, spectacled, bearded, but obviously poverty-stricken German had called on him a few weeks before with a collection of flint instruments for sale, which he alleged to have come from the valley of the Weser, near Hameln. They were of shapes and peculiarities which he had not met with before, and, after a cursory and admiring examination, he had given the starving Teuton twice as much as he had asked for the collection, and sent him on his way rejoicing. With a brother pal?ontologist summoned in haste he had proceeded to a minute scrutiny of his treasures. They were impudent forgeries.
“I told Tommy in confidence. He ought not to have repeated the story,” he said, with dignity.
“Which shows,” said Clementina, pausing so as to make her point and an important brush-stroke—“which shows that you can’t even trust Tommy.”
On another occasion he referred to Vandermeer’s famous interview.
“You know a friend of mine, Vandermeer,” said he.
Clementina shook her head.
“Never heard the name.”
He explained. Vandermeer was a journalist. He had interviewed her and lunched with her at a restaurant.
Clementina could not remember. At last her knitted brow cleared.
“Good lord, do you mean a half-starved, foxy-faced man with his toes through his boots?”
“The portrait is unflattering,” said he, “but I’m afraid there’s a kind of resemblance.”
“He looked so hungry and was so hungry—he told me—that I took him to the ham-and-beef shop round the corner and stuffed his head with copy while he stuffed himself with ham and beef. To say that he lunched with me at a restaurant is infernal impudence.”
“Poor fellow,” said Quixtus. “He has to live rather fatly in imagination so as to make up for the meagreness of his living in reality. It’s only human nature.”
“Bah,” said Clementina, “I believe you’d find human nature in the devil.”
Quixtus smiled one of his sweet smiles.
“I find it in you, Clementina,” he said.
Thus it may be perceived that the sittings were not marked by the usual amenities of the studio. The natures of the two were antagonistic. He shrank from her downrightness; she disdained his ineffectuality. Each bore with the other for the sake of past associations; but each drew a breath of relief when freed from the presence of the other. Although he was a man of wide culture beyond the bounds of his own particular subject, and could talk well in a half-humorous, half-pedantic manner, her influence often kept him as dumb as a mummy. This irritated Clementina still further. She wanted him to talk, to show some animation, so that she could seize upon something to put upon the dismaying canvas. She talked nonsense, in order to stimulate him.
“To live in the past as you do without any regard for the present is as worthless as to go to bed in a darkened room and stay there for the rest of your life. It’s the existence of a mole, not of a man.”
He indicated, with a wave of the hand, a Siennese predella on the wall. “You go to the past.”
“For its lessons,” said Clementina. “Because the Old Masters can teach me things. How on earth do you think I should be able to paint you if it hadn’t been for Velasquez? To say nothing of the ?sthetic side. But you only go to the past to satisfy an idle curiosity.”
“Perhaps I do, perhaps I do,” he assented, mildly. “A knowledge of the process by which a prehistoric lady fashioned her petticoat out of skins by means of a flint needle and reindeer sinews would be of no value to Worth or Paquin. But it soothes me personally to contemplate the intimacies of the toilette of the prehistoric lady.”
“I call that abnormal,” said Clementina, “and you ought to be ashamed of yourself.”
And that was the end of that conversation.
Meanwhile, in spite of her half-comic despair, the portrait progressed. She had seized, at any rate, the man’s air of intellectuality, of aloofness from the practical affairs of life. Unconsciously she had invested the face with a spirituality which had eluded her conscious analysis. The artist had worked with the inner vision, as the artist always does when he produces a great work. For the great work of an artist is not that before which he stands, and, sighing, says; “This is fair, but how far away from my dreams!” That is the popular fallacy. The great work is that which, when he regards it on completion, causes him to say in humble admiration and modest stupefaction: “How on earth did the dull clod that is I manage to do it?” For he does not know how he accomplished it. When a man is conscious of every step he takes in the execution of a work of art, he is obeying the letter and not the spirit; he is a juggler with formulas; and formulas, being mere analytical results, have no place in that glorious synthesis which is creation—either of a world or a flower or a poem. Clementina, to her astonishment, regarded the portrait of Ephraim Quixtus, and, like the First Creator regarding His work, saw that it was good.
“I should never have believed it,” she said.
“What?” asked Quixtus.
“That I should have got all this out of you,” said Clementina.