BARELY half an hour after Miss Mason’s sudden decision Barnabas set out for a small and rather unwholesome street somewhere in the direction of the World’s End. It was given by Pippa as the locality in which Mrs. Higgins had her residence.
It was not entirely on Miss Mason’s account that Barnabas was anxious to make further enquiries regarding the child. As he walked along the King’s Road, with its pavement slippery and muddy from the feet of many passers-by, his mind travelled back to memories which Pippa’s face had awakened in him.
They were memories some fourteen or fifteen years old, of the time when he was a young art student. A scene he had almost forgotten came clearly back to him. He saw a big class-room full of easels and men working and smoking. He saw himself, very young, very full of enthusiasm, yet at the moment very full of despair. He saw himself looking with disgust at his own somewhat feeble attempt to reproduce on canvas the figure of the nude model who was standing on the platform before [Pg 137]him. He saw the master coming near, and heard his words. They were few but sarcastic. He had felt that the whole room was listening to them. First an insane desire to sink into the floor had overwhelmed him, then a feeling that he had better take his canvas and brushes and fling them into the river. It had been mere presumption on his part to dream of art as a career. He had seen the other figures in the room through a kind of hazy blur. The voice of the master as he went from easel to easel had come to him as through cotton-wool. He did not notice that almost equally sarcastic remarks were being levelled at the other canvases, and were being received by their owners with indifference or with good-humoured laughter. He had heard the door close presently as the master left the room. Then he heard a voice at his elbow—a curiously musical voice:
“It’s a pity Saltby looks upon sarcasm in the light of instruction in art. He can paint quite decently himself, but he has no more notion of teaching than a tom cat.”
Barnabas remembered that he had turned to look at the speaker, and had seen a dark foreign-looking man standing beside him. The man had looked at him sharply.
“That fellow has worried you,” he said. “They’re just calling rest. Come along out and have a smoke.”
Barnabas remembered following him into the corridor. He remembered the curious feeling of restful strength the man had given him as they walked up and down together.
“I’m going to give you a bit of advice,” he had said suddenly. “Remember this, that the opinion of one man, even if he happens to be your master, counts for nothing. The moment you touch any art—painting, sculpture, music, or literature—you’re laying yourself open to criticism, and you’ll find any amount of it adverse. Don’t let it discourage you. If you’ve got the inner conviction that you can do something, forge ahead and do it. Don’t be damped by adverse criticism. If you can learn from it, learn; but don’t let it kill the germ of belief in yourself.”
“But can’t one be mistaken in the belief that one can do something?” Barnabas remembered asking.
“If you are mistaken you’ll find it out for yourself,” the man had replied earnestly. “My dear boy, the men who can’t, and never will, do anything are those who are so cocksure of themselves that they are impervious to sarcasm and every adverse criticism under the sun. It simply doesn’t hurt them. It does hurt us. It touches us on the raw. But we’ve got to go on. You felt like chucking the whole thing just now. I’ll be bound it wasn’t exactly that your self-vanity was wounded, but because you felt that it had been utterly presumptuous of you ever to have attempted to lift your eyes to the Immortal Goddess. My dear boy, she loves men to look at her and worship her, from however far off. It’s those who say they are paying her homage, but who all the time are looking at and worshipping themselves, for whom she has no use. Go on worshipping her. Keep big ideas before you and one day you may get near the foot of her throne. It’s not given to many to touch her knees. But to worship at the foot of the throne is something. Why, even to look at her from afar is worth years of struggle. Saltby keeps one eye on her I grant, but he keeps the other on himself, and it makes him the damned conceited and sarcastic ass he is....”
Barnabas seemed to hear the voice distinctly, to feel the magnetism of the man who had spoken the words so many years ago.
He remembered later in the evening hearing two students speaking of the man.
“Kostolitz is a weird chap,” one had said; “mad as a hatter.”
“Spends half his time like a tramp,” said the other, “going around the country and writing poetry, and the other half in sculpting. Every now and then he takes it into his head to come in here and draw a bit. He says it freshens him up to see beginners on their way to fame.”
Barnabas remembered that Kostolitz had come to him at the end of the morning and had suggested their walking back to Chelsea together. It had been the beginning of their friendship.
The man’s face came persistently before him this evening as he pursued his way towards the World’s End.
Other little speeches of his returned to his mind. “I love colour,” he seemed to hear him saying, “but I can’t work in paints. They aren’t my medium. I want to get to the solid. Give me a lump of clay and I’m happy. It’s nonsense to say there’s only colour in actual coloured things. There is colour in everything—words, music, thoughts—the world’s steeped in colour if you can only see it. Why, man, it may seem odd to you, but people even give me the sense of colour. Perhaps it’s the old Eastern idea of auras, I don’t know. Anyhow, that idea is too mixed up with spiritualism and closed rooms to appeal to me. Give me the open air, the sunshine, flowers, and singing birds. I can believe in fairies, gnomes, the People of the Wind, and the People of the Trees, anything that is of the Spirit of Nature. There they sit together—Nature and Art—the two great goddesses, bless them; and men try to separate Art from Nature. They can’t, man, I tell you they can’t.”
Barnabas could almost see the man’s eyes—passionate grey eyes—fixed on him as he remembered the words. And it was the memory of those eyes that Pippa’s eyes had awakened in him, and with their memory had brought the other scenes before him. The memory had awakened as he had [Pg 141]watched her listening entranced to the story of “The Sleeping Beauty.” He had seen the eyes of his friend Kostolitz looking at him from the small pale face, and suddenly he had seen the whole wonderful likeness the child bore to the man. Kostolitz was dead, had been dead now many years. Had he left behind him this scrap of humanity, holding perhaps a spirit as poetical and intense as his own, to battle with the world? If it were so, for the sake of that friendship, it must be protected. And something told Barnabas that he was not mistaken in his belief.
He turned now into the small dark street. He found the house whose number Pippa had given him, and knocked on the door. It was opened by a large, slatternly woman with a watery eye.
“That you, Pippa?” she exclaimed. “’Ere, you come in, and I’ll give you somethink staying hout like this.”
Then she saw Barnabas. Visions of N.S.P.C.C. inspectors rose suddenly before her mind. Mrs. Higgins quailed inwardly.
“Well?” she asked, and her voice was truculent because her spirit was quaking, “and wot can I do for you, sir?”
“Am I,” asked Barnabas suavely, “addressing Mrs. Higgins?”
“That’s my nime,” replied the lady, arms akimbo.
“I believe,” continued Barnabas, still suavely, “that you have had charge of a child—a little girl named Pippa.”
“I ’ave,” said Mrs. Higgins defiantly, “and a more hungrateful, huntruthful, little baggage I hain’t never set heyes on. Hif you ’ave hanythink to say about ’er, per’aps you’ll kindly step hinside.”
Barnabas stepped into the small passage. It was ill-smelling, redolent of dirt and boiled cabbage. Mrs. Higgins herself breathed gin. She was, however, at the moment tolerably sober.
“I understand,” said Barnabas, “that she came here with a Madame Fournier.”
Mrs. Higgins blazed. “She did. A French ’uzzy wot took and disappeared last June, leaving me with ’er child. Friend’s child she called it. I know them gimes. Just about as much a friend’s child as Madame ’ad a right to ’er title or ’er ring wot she wore so conspikus, I’ll be bound. Leaving me with the child on me ’ands, wot I kep’ from charity, and never so much has a penny piece to pay for ’er keep but wot she gets from them hartists as she goes to.”
“Then the child,” asked Barnabas, “is no relation of yours?”
“Relati............