In March there was all the excitement of sending in to the Salon.
Clutton, characteristically, had nothing ready, and he was very
scornful of the two heads that Lawson sent; they were obviously the
work of a student, straight-forward portraits of models, but they had a
certain force; Clutton, aiming at perfection, had no patience with
efforts which betrayed hesitancy, and with a shrug of the shoulders
told Lawson it was an impertinence to exhibit stuff which should never
have been allowed out of his studio; he was not less contemptuous when
the two heads were accepted. Flanagan tried his luck too, but his
picture was refused. Mrs. Otter sent a blameless Portrait de ma Mere,
accomplished and second-rate; and was hung in a very good place.
Hayward, whom Philip had not seen since he left Heidelberg, arrived in
Paris to spend a few days in time to come to the party which Lawson and
Philip were giving in their studio to celebrate the hanging of Lawson’s
pictures. Philip had been eager to see Hayward again, but when at last
they met, he experienced some disappointment. Hayward had altered a
little in appearance: his fine hair was thinner, and with the rapid
wilting of the very fair, he was becoming wizened and colourless; his
blue eyes were paler than they had been, and there was a muzziness
about his features. On the other hand, in mind he did not seem to have
changed at all, and the culture which had impressed Philip at eighteen
aroused somewhat the contempt of Philip at twenty-one. He had altered a
good deal himself, and regarding with scorn all his old opinions of
art, life, and letters, had no patience with anyone who still held
them. He was scarcely conscious of the fact that he wanted to show off
before Hayward, but when he took him round the galleries he poured out
to him all the revolutionary opinions which himself had so recently
adopted. He took him to Manet’s Olympia and said dramatically:
“I would give all the old masters except Velasquez, Rembrandt, and
Vermeer for that one picture.”
“Who was Vermeer?” asked Hayward.
“Oh, my dear fellow, don’t you know Vermeer? You’re not civilised. You
mustn’t live a moment longer without making his acquaintance. He’s the
one old master who painted like a modern.”
He dragged Hayward out of the Luxembourg and hurried him off to the
Louvre.
“But aren’t there any more pictures here?” asked Hayward, with the
tourist’s passion for thoroughness.
“Nothing of the least consequence. You can come and look at them by
yourself with your Baedeker.”
When they arrived at the Louvre Philip led his friend down the Long
Gallery.
“I should like to see The Gioconda,” said Hayward.
“Oh, my dear fellow, it’s only literature,” answered Philip.
At last, in a small room, Philip stopped before The Lacemaker of
Vermeer van Delft.
“There, that’s the best picture in the Louvre. It’s exactly like a
Manet.”
With an expressive, eloquent thumb Philip expatiated on the charming
work. He used the jargon of the studios with overpowering effect.
“I don’t know that I see anything so wonderful as all that in it,” said
Hayward.
“Of course it’s a painter’s picture,” said Philip. “I can quite believe
the layman would see nothing much in it.”
“The what?” said Hayward.
“The layman.”
Like most people who cultivate an interest in the arts, Hayward was
extremely anxious to be right. He was dogmatic with those who did not
venture to assert themselves, but with the self-assertive he was very
modest. He was impressed by Philip’s assurance, and accepted meekly
Philip’s implied suggestion that the painter’s arrogant claim to be the
sole possible judge of painting has anything but its impertinence to
recommend it.
A day or two later Philip and Lawson gave their party. Cronshaw, making
an exception in their favour, agreed to eat their food; and Miss
Chalice offered to come and cook for them. She took no interest in her
own sex and declined the suggestion that other girls should be asked
for her sake. Clutton, Flanagan, Potter, and two others made up the
party. Furniture was scarce, so the model stand was used as a table,
and the guests were to sit on portmanteaux if they liked, and if they
didn’t on the floor. The feast consisted of a pot-au-feu, which Miss
Chalice had made, of a leg of mutton roasted round the corner and
brought round hot and savoury (Miss Chalice had cooked the potatoes,
and the studio was redolent of the carrots she had fried; fried carrots
were her specialty); and this was to be followed by poires flambees,
pears with burning brandy, which Cronshaw had volunteered to make. The
meal was to finish with an enormous fromage de Brie, which stood near
the window and added fragrant odours to all the others which filled the
studio. Cronshaw sat in the place of honour on a Gladstone bag, with
his legs curled under him like a Turkish bashaw, beaming good-naturedly
on the young people who surrounded him. From force of habit, though the
small studio with the stove lit was very hot, he kept on his
great-coat, with the collar turned up, and his bowler hat: he looked
with satisfaction on the four large fiaschi of Chianti which stood in
front of him in a row, two on each side of a bottle of whiskey; he said
it reminded him of a slim fair Circassian guarded by four corpulent
eunuchs. Hayward in order to put the rest of them at their ease had
clothed himself in a tweed suit and a Trinity Hall tie. He looked
grotesquely British. The others were elaborately polite to him, and
during the soup they talked of the weather and the political situation.
There was a pause while they waited for the leg of mutton, and Miss
Chalice lit a cigarette.
“Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair,” she said suddenly.
With an elegant gesture she untied a ribbon so that her tresses fell
over her shoulders. She shook her head.
“I always feel more comfortable with my hair down.”
With her large brown eyes, thin, ascetic face, her pale skin, and broad
forehead, she might have stepped out of a picture by Burne-Jones. She
had long, beautiful hands, with fingers deeply stained by nicotine. She
wore sweeping draperies, mauve and green. There was about her the
romantic air of High Street, Kensington. She was wantonly aesthetic;
but she was an excellent creature, kind and good natured; and her
affectations were but skin-deep. There was a knock at the door, and
they all gave a shout of exultation. Miss Chalice rose and opened. She
took the leg of mutton and held it high above her, as though it were
the head of John the Baptist on a platter; and, the cigarette still in
her mouth, advanced with solemn, hieratic steps.
“Hail, daughter of Herodias,” cried Cronshaw.
The mutton was eaten with gusto, and it did one good to see what a
hearty appetite the pale-faced lady had. Clutton and Potter sat on each
side of her, and everyone knew that neither had found her unduly coy.
She grew tired of most people in six weeks, but she knew exactly how to
treat afterwards the gentlemen who had laid their young hearts at her
feet. She bore them no ill-will, though having loved them she had
ceased to do so, and treated them with friendliness but without
familiarity. Now and then she looked at Lawson with melancholy eyes.
The poires flambees were a great success, partly because of the brandy,
and partly because Miss Chalice insisted that they should be eaten with
the cheese.
“I don’t know whether it’s perfectly delicious, or whether I’m just
going to vomit,” she said, after she had thoroughly tried the mixture.
Coffee and cognac followed with sufficient speed to prevent any
untoward consequence, and they settled down to smoke in comfort. Ruth
Chalice, who could do nothing that was not deliberately artistic,
arranged herself in a graceful attitude by Cronshaw and just rested her
exquisite head on his shoulder. She looked into the dark abyss of time
with brooding eyes, and now and then with a long meditative glance at
Lawson she sighed deeply.
Then came the summer, and restlessness seized these young people. The
blue skies lured them to the sea, and the pleasant breeze sighing
through the leaves of the plane-trees on the boulevard drew them
towards the country. Everyone made plans for leaving Paris; they
discussed what was the most suitable size for the canvases they meant
to take; they laid in stores of panels for sketching; they argued about
the merits of various places in Brittany. Flanagan and Potter went to
Concarneau; Mrs. Otter and her mother, with a natural instinct for the
obvious, went to Pont-Aven; Philip and Lawson made up their minds to go
to the forest of Fontainebleau, and Miss Chalice knew of a very good
hotel at Moret where there was lots of stuff to paint; it was near
Paris, and neither Philip nor Lawson was indifferent to the railway
fare. Ruth Chalice would be there, and Lawson had an idea for a
portrait of her in the open air. Just then the Salon was full of
portraits of people in gardens, in sunlight, with blinking eyes and
green reflections of sunlit leaves on their faces. They asked Clutton
to go with them, but he preferred spending the summer by himself. He
had just discovered Cezanne, and was eager to go to Provence; he wanted
heavy skies from which the hot blue seemed to drip like beads of sweat,
and broad white dusty roads, and pale roofs out of which the sun had
burnt the colour, and olive trees gray with heat.
The day before they were to start, after the morning class, Philip,
putting his things together, spoke to Fanny Price.
“I’m off tomorrow,” he said cheerfully.
“Off where?” she said quickly. “You’re not going away?” Her face fell.
“I’m going away for the summer. Aren’t you?”
“No, I’m staying in Paris. I thought you were going to stay too. I was
looking forward….”
She stopped and shrugged her shoulders.
“But won’t it be frightfully hot here? It’s awfully bad for you.”
“Much you care if it’s bad for me. Where are you going?”
“Moret.”
“Chalice is going there. You’re not going with her?”
“Lawson and I are going. And she’s going there too. I don’t know that
we’re actually going together.”
She gave a low guttural sound, and her large face grew dark and red.
“How filthy! I thought you were a decent fellow. You were about the
only one here. She’s been with Clutton and Potter and Flanagan, even
with old Foinet—that’s why he takes so much trouble about her—and now
two of you, you and Lawson. It makes me sick.”
“Oh, what nonsense! She’s a very decent sort. One treats her just as if
she were a man.”
“Oh, don’t speak to me, don’t speak to me.”
“But what can it matter to you?” asked Philip. “It’s really no business
of yours where I spend my summer.”
“I was looking forward to it so much,” she gasped, speaking it seemed
almost to herself. “I didn’t think you had the money to go away, and
there wouldn’t have been anyone else here, and we could have worked
together, and we’d have gone to see things.” Then her thoughts flung
back to Ruth Chalice. “The filthy beast,” she cried. “She isn’t fit to
speak to.”
Philip looked at her with a sinking heart. He was not a man to think
girls were in love with him; he was too conscious of his deformity, and
he felt awkward and clumsy with women; but he did not know what else
this outburst could mean. Fanny Price, in the dirty brown dress, with
her hair falling over her face, sloppy, untidy, stood before him; and
tears of anger rolled down her cheeks. She was repellent. Philip
glanced at the door, instinctively hoping that someone would come in
and put an end to the scene.
“I’m awfully sorry,” he said.
“You’re just the same as all of them. You take all you can get, and you
don’t even say thank you. I’ve taught you everything you know. No one
else would take any trouble with you. Has Foinet ever bothered about
you? And I can tell you this—you can work here for a thousand years and
you’ll never do any good. You haven’t got any talent. You haven’t got
any originality. And it’s not only me—they all say it. You’ll never be
a painter as long as you live.”
“That is no business of yours either, is it?” said Philip, flushing.
“Oh, you think it’s only my temper. Ask Clutton, ask Lawson, ask
Chalice. Never, never, never. You haven’t got it in you.”
Philip shrugged his shoulders and walked out. She shouted after him.
“Never, never, never.”
Moret was in those days an old-fashioned town of one street at the edge
of the forest of Fontainebleau, and the Ecu d’Or was a hotel which
still had about it the decrepit air of the Ancien Regime. It faced the
winding river, the Loing; and Miss Chalice had a room with a little
terrace overlooking it, with a charming view of the old bridge and its
fortified gateway. They sat here in the evenings after dinner, drinking
coffee, smoking, and discussing art. There ran into the river, a little
way off, a narrow canal bordered by poplars, and along the banks of
this after their day’s work they often wandered. They spent all day
painting. Like most of their generation they were obsessed by the fear
of the picturesque, and they turned their backs on the obvious beauty
of the town to seek subjects which were devoid of a prettiness they
despised. Sisley and Monet had painted the canal with its poplars, and
they felt a desire to try their hands at what was so typical of France;
but they were frightened of its formal beauty, and set themselves
deliberately to avoid it. Miss Chalice, who had a clever dexterity
which impressed Lawson notwithstanding his contempt for feminine art,
started a picture in which she tried to circumvent the commonplace by
leaving out the tops of the trees; and Lawson had the brilliant idea of
putting in his foreground a large blue advertisement of chocolat Menier
in order to emphasise his abhorrence of the chocolate box.
Philip began now to paint in oils. He experienced a thrill of delight
when first he used that grateful medium. He went out with Lawson in the
morning with his little box and sat by him painting a panel; it gave
him so much satisfaction that he did not realise he was doing no more
than copy; he was so much under his friend’s influence that he saw only
with his eyes. Lawson painted very low in tone, and they both saw the
emerald of the grass like dark velvet, while the brilliance of the sky
turned in their hands to a brooding ultramarine. Through July they had
one fine day after another; it was very hot; and the heat, searing
Philip’s heart, filled him with languor; he could not work; his mind
was eager with a thousand thoughts. Often he spent the mornings by the
side of the canal in the shade of the poplars, reading a few lines and
then dreaming for half an hour. Sometimes he hired a rickety bicycle
and rode along the dusty road that led to the forest, and then lay down
in a clearing. His head was full of romantic fancies. The ladies of
Watteau, gay and insouciant, seemed to wander with their cavaliers
among the great trees, whispering to one another careless, charming
things, and yet somehow oppressed by a nameless fear.
They were alone in the hotel but for a fat Frenchwoman of middle age, a
Rabelaisian figure with a broad, obscene laugh. She spent the day by
the river patiently fishing for fish she never caught, and Philip
sometimes went down and talked to her. He found out that she had
belonged to a profession whose most notorious member for our generation
was Mrs. Warren, and having made a competence she now lived the quiet
life of the bourgeoise. She told Philip lewd stories.
“You must go to Seville,” she said—she spoke a little broken English.
“The most beautiful women in the world.”
She leered and nodded her head. Her triple chin, her large belly, shook
with inward laughter.
It grew so hot that it was almost impossible to sleep at night. The
heat seemed to linger under the trees as though it were a material
thing. They did not wish to leave the starlit night, and the three of
them would sit on the terrace of Ruth Chalice’s room, silent, hour
after hour, too tired to talk any more, but in voluptuous enjoyment of
the stillness. They listened to the murmur of the river. The church
clock struck one and two and sometimes three before they could drag
themselves to bed. Suddenly Philip became aware that Ruth Chalice and
Lawson were lovers. He divined it in the way the girl looked at the
young painter, and in his air of possession; and as Philip sat with
them he felt a kind of effluence surrounding them, as though the air
were heavy with something strange. The revelation was a shock. He had
looked upon Miss Chalice as a very good fellow and he liked to talk to
her, but it had never seemed to him possible to enter into a closer
relationship. One Sunday they had all gone with a tea-basket into the
forest, and when they came to a glade which was suitably sylvan, Miss
Chalice, because it was idyllic, insisted on taking off her shoes and
stockings. It would have been very charming only her feet were rather
large and she had on both a large corn on the third toe. Philip felt it
made her proceeding a little ridiculous. But now he looked upon her
quite differently; there was something softly feminine in her large
eyes and her olive skin; he felt himself a fool not to have seen that
she was attractive. He thought he detected in her a touch of contempt
for him, because he had not had the sense to see that she was there, in
his way, and in Lawson a suspicion of superiority. He was envious of
Lawson, and he was jealous, not of the individual concerned, but of his
love. He wished that he was standing in his shoes and feeling with his
heart. He was troubled, and the fear seized him that love would pass
him by. He wanted a passion to seize him, he wanted to be swept off his
feet and borne powerless in a mighty rush he cared not whither. Miss
Chalice and Lawson seemed to him now somehow different, and the
constant companionship with them made him restless. He was dissatisfied
with himself. Life was not giving him what he wanted, and he had an
uneasy feeling that he was losing his time.
The stout Frenchwoman soon guessed what the relations were between the
couple, and talked of the matter to Philip with the utmost frankness.
“And you,” she said, with the tolerant smile of one who had fattened on
the lust of her fellows, “have you got a petite amie?”
“No,” said Philip, blushing.
“And why not? C’est de votre age.”
He shrugged his shoulders. He had a volume of Verlaine in his hands,
and he wandered off. He tried to read, but his passion was too strong.
He thought of the stray amours to which he had been introduced by
Flanagan, the sly visits to houses in a cul-de-sac, with the
drawing-room in Utrecht velvet, and the mercenary graces of painted
women. He shuddered. He threw himself on the grass, stretching his
limbs like a young animal freshly awaked from sleep; and the rippling
water, the poplars gently tremulous in the faint breeze, the blue sky,
were almost more than he could bear. He was in love with love. In his
fancy he felt the kiss of warm lips on his, and around his neck the
touch of soft hands. He imagined himself in the arms of Ruth Chalice,
he thought of her dark eyes and the wonderful texture of her skin; he
was mad to have let such a wonderful adventure slip through his
fingers. And if Lawson had done it why should not he? But this was only
when he did not see her, when he lay awake at night or dreamed idly by
the side of the canal; when he saw her he felt suddenly quite
different; he had no desire to take her in his arms, and he could not
imagine himself kissing her. It was very curious. Away from her he
thought her beautiful, remembering only her magnificent eyes and the
creamy pallor of her face; but when he was with her he saw only that
she was flat-chested and that her teeth were slightly decayed; he could
not forget the corns on her toes. He could not understand himself.
Would he always love only in absence and be prevented from enjoying
anything when he had the chance by that deformity of vision which
seemed to exaggerate the revolting?
He was not sorry when a change in the weather, announcing the definite
end of the long summer, drove them all back to Paris.