When Rainham pushed back the door of the dim little restaurant in
Turk Street, Soho, he stood a moment, blinking his eyes a little in
the sudden change from the bright summer sunshine, before he assured
himself that his friend had not yet arrived. Half a dozen men were
sitting about smoking or discussing various drinks. The faces of
several were familiar to him, but there were none of them whom he
knew; so he took his seat at a table near the door and ordered a
vermouth to occupy him until Lightmark, whose unpunctuality was
notorious, should put in an appearance. In the interim his eyes
strayed round the establishment, taking stock of the walls with
their rough decorations, and the _clientèle_, and noting, not without
a certain pleasure, that during the six months in which he had been
absent neither had suffered much alteration.
Indeed, to Philip Rainham, who had doubtless in his blood the taint
of Bohemia, Brodonowski's and the enthusiasm of its guests had a
very definite charm. They were almost all of them artists; they were
all of them young and ardent; and they had a habit of propounding
their views, which were always of the most advanced nature, with a
vehemence which to Rainham represented all the disinterestedness of
youth. Very often they were exceedingly well worth knowing, though
in the majority of cases the world had not found it out. He knew
very few of them personally; he had been taken there first by
Lightmark, when the latter was fresh from Paris, and had been
himself more in touch with them. But he had often sat smoking
silently a little outside the main group, listening, with a
deferential air that sat upon his age somewhat oddly, to their
audacious propaganda.
In his mind he would sometimes contrast the coterie with certain
artistic houses, more socially important, which he had from
time to time frequented: where earnest-eyed women in graceful
garments--which certainly afforded a rest to the eye--dispensed tea
from a _samovar_, and discoursed discreetly of the current Academy and
the most recent symptomatic novel.
The delight of a visible, orderly culture permeating their manners
and their conversation was a real one, and yet, Rainham reflected,
it left one at the last a trifle weary, a little cold. It seemed to
him that this restaurant, with its perennial smell of garlic, its
discoloured knife-handles, its frequentation of picturesque poverty,
possessed actually an horizon that was somewhat less limited.
Indeed, the dingy room, its assemblage apart, had many traces of an
artistic patronage. The rough walls were adorned, in imitation of
the familiar Roman haunt, of which this was, so to speak, a colony,
with a host of fantastic sketches: rapid silhouettes in charcoal,
drawn for illustration or refutation in the heat of some strenuous
argument; caricatures in the same medium, some of them trenchantly
like, of the customers as well as of certain artistic celebrities,
whose laurels Brodonowski's had not approved, varied here and there
by an epigram or a doggerel couplet, damning the Philistine.
Rainham smiled as he recognised occasionally the grotesque travesty
of a familiar face. Presently his eyes were arrested by a drawing
which was new to him, a face of striking ugliness, offering
advantages to the caricaturist of which, doubtless, he had not
omitted to avail himself. It imposed itself on Rainham, for the
savage strength which it displayed, and for an element in its
hideousness which suggested beauty. He was still absorbed in the
study of this face when Lightmark entered and took his place
opposite him with a brief apology for his tardiness. He was dressed
well, with a white orchid in his button-hole, and looked prosperous
and rosy. Some light badinage on this score from his various
acquaintances in the restaurant he parried with a good-humoured
nonchalance; then he betook himself to consideration of the _menu_.
"I have been calling on your friends, the Sylvesters," he explained
after a while, "and I could not get away before. My uncle was there,
by the way. You have heard me speak of him?"
"Your uncle, who holds such a lax view of the avuncular offices?"
Lightmark smiled a little self-congratulatory smile.
"Ah, that's changed. The old boy was deuced friendly--gave me his
whole hand instead of two fingers, and asked me to dine with him. I
think," he went on after a moment, "the Sylvesters have been putting
in a good word for me. Or perhaps it was Mrs. Sylvester's portrait
which did the job."
"Ah," said Rainham, "you have painted her, have you?"
Their fish occupied them in silence. Lightmark, a trifle flushed
from his rapid walk, smiled from time to time absently, as though
his thoughts were pleasant ones. The older man thought he had seldom
seen him looking more boyishly handsome. Presently his eyes again
caught the head which had so struck his fancy.
"Is that yours, Dick?" he asked.
Lightmark followed the direction of his eyes to the opposite wall.
"I believe it is," he remarked, with a shade of deprecation in his
manner. "It is Oswyn. Don't you know him?"
"I don't know him," said the other, sipping his thin Médoc. "But I
think I should like to. What is he?"
"He will be here soon, no doubt, and then you will see for yourself.
He is Oswyn! I knew him in Paris better than I do now. He was in
B----'s studio; and B---- swore that he had a magnificent genius. He
painted a monstrous picture which the Salon wouldn't hang; but B----
bought it, and hung it in his studio, where it frightened his models
into fits. Last year he came to London, where he makes enough, when
he is sober, by painting pot-boilers for the dealers, to keep him in
absinthe and tobacco, which are apparently his sole sustenance. In
the meanwhile he is painting a masterpiece; at least, so he will
tell you. He is a virulent fanatic, whose art is the most monstrous
thing imaginable. He is--but talk of the devil----"
He broke off and nodded to a little, lean man of ambiguous age, in a
strained coat, who entered at this moment with a rapid lurching
gait. He sat down immediately opposite them, under Lightmark's
presentment, with which Rainham curiously compared him. And it
struck him that there was something in that oddly repulsive figure
which Lightmark's superficial crayon had missed. The long, haggard
face was there, with its ill-kempt hair and beard; and the lips,
which, when they parted in a smile that was too full of irony,
revealed the man's uneven, discoloured teeth. Rainham lost sight of
his uncouthness in a sense of his extreme power. His eyes, which
were restless and extraordinarily brilliant, met Rainham's
presently; and the latter was conscious of a certain fascination in
their sustained gaze. In spite of the air of savagery which pervaded
the man, it was a movement of sympathy which, on the whole, he
experienced towards him. And it seemed as if this sentiment were
reciprocal, for when the German youth, who was the cupbearer of the
establishment, had taken Oswyn's order, and had brought him absinthe
in a long glass, he motioned it abruptly to the opposite table. Then
he crossed over and accosted Lightmark, whom he had not hitherto
appeared to recognise, with a word of greeting. Lightmark murmured
his name and Rainham's, and the strange, little man nodded to him
not unamiably.
"I must smoke, if you don't mind," he said, after a moment.
They nodded assent, and he produced tobacco in a screw of newspaper
from the pocket of his coat, and began rapidly to make cigarettes.
Rainham watched the dexterous movements of his long nervous
hands--the colour of old ivory--and found them noticeable.
"You are not an artist, I think," he suggested after a moment,
fixing his curiously intent eyes on Rainham.
"No," admitted the other, smiling, "I am afraid I am not. I am only
here on sufferance. I am a mender of ships."
"He is a connoisseur," put in Lightmark gaily. "It's an accident
that he happens to be connected with shipping--a fortunate one,
though, for he owns a most picturesque old shanty in the far East.
But actually he does not know a rudder post from a jib-boom."
"I suppose you have been painting it?" said Oswyn shortly.
Lightmark nodded.
"I have been painting the river from his wharf. The picture is just
finished, and on the whole I am pleased with it. You should come in
and give it a look, Oswyn, some time. You haven't seen my new
studio."
"I never go west of Regent Street," said Oswyn brusquely.
Lightmark laughed a little nervously.
"Oswyn doesn't believe in me, you know, Philip," he explained
lightly. "It is a humiliating thing to have to say, but I may as
well say it, to save him the trouble. He is so infernally frank
about it, you know. He thinks that I am a humbug, that I don't take
my art seriously, and because, when I have painted my picture, I
begin to think about the pieces of silver, he is not quite sure that
I may not be a descendant of Judas. And then, worst of all, I have
committed the unpardonable sin: I have been hung at Burlington
House. Isn't that about it, Oswyn?"
The elder man laughed his low, mirthless laugh.
"We understand each other, Dick; but you don't quite do yourself
justice--or me. I have an immense respect for your talent. I feel
sure you will achieve greatness--in Burlington House."
"Well, it's a respectable institution," said the young man soberly.
Oswyn finished his drink at a long, thirsty gulp, watching the young
man askance with his impressive eyes. Rainham noticed for the first
time that he had a curious trick of smiling with his lips only--or
was it of sneering?--while the upper part of his face and his heavy
brows frowned.
"By the way, Lightmark," he observed presently, "I have to
congratulate you on your renown. There is quite a long panegyric on
your picture in the _Outcry_ this week. Do you know who wrote it?"
"Damn it, man!" broke out Lightmark, with a vehemence which, to
Rainham, seemed uncalled for, "how should I know? I haven't seen the
rag for an age."
There was an angry light in his eyes, but it faded immediately.
Oswyn continued apologetically:
"I beg your pardon. It must be very annoying to you to be puffed
indiscreetly. But I fancied, you know----"
Lightmark, flushing a little, interrupted him, laying his hand with
a quick gesture, that might have contained an appeal in it, on the
painter's frayed coat-sleeve.
"Your glass is empty, and we are about ready for our coffee. What
will you take?"
Oswyn repeated his order, smiling still a little remotely, as he let
the water trickle down from a scientific height to his glass,
whipping the crystal green of its contents into a nebulous yellow.
Rainham, who had listened to the little passage of arms in silence,
felt troubled, uneasy. The air seemed thunderous, and was heavy with
unspoken words. There appeared to be an under-current of
understanding between the two painters which was the reverse of
sympathetic, and made conversation difficult and volcanic. It caused
him to remind himself, a trifle sadly, how little, after all, one
knew of even one's nearest friend--and Lightmark, perhaps, occupied
to him that relation--how much of the country of his mind remains
perpetually undiscovered; and it made him wonder, as he had
sometimes wondered before, whether the very open and sunny nature of
the young painter, which was so large a part of his charm, had not
its concealed shadows--how far, briefly, Lightmark's very frankness
might not be a refinement of secretiveness?
If, however, a word here and there, a trait surprised, indefinable,
led him on occasion to doubt of his dominant impression of
Lightmark's character, these doubts were never of long duration; and
he would dismiss them, barely entertained, even as a sort of
disloyalty, to the limbo of stillborn fancies. And so now, with his
accustomed generosity, he speedily flung himself into the breach,
and did his best to drive the conversation into impersonal and
presumably safer channels. He touched on the prospects of the
Academy, of academic art, and art in general, and by-and-by, as
Oswyn rose to the discussion, he became himself interested, and was
actuated less by a wish to make conversation than to draw his new
friend out. And as the artist leant forward, grew excited, with his
white, lean face working into strange contortions--as he shot out
his savage paradoxes, expounding the gospel of the new art a trifle
thickly now, and rolling and as rapidly smoking perpetual
cigarettes, he found him again strangely attractive.
He had flashes of insight, it seemed to Rainham; there was something
in his caustic criticism which led him to believe that he could at
another time have justified himself, defended reasonably and sanely
a position that was at least tenable.
But the tide of his spleen invariably overtook him, and he abandoned
exegesis for tirade. The _bourgeois_, limited scope of the art in
vogue--this was the burden of his reiterated rabid attacks; art
watered down to suit the public's insipid palate, and he quoted
Chamfort furiously: "Combien de sots faut-il pour faire un
public?"--the art of simpering prettiness, without root or fruit in
life, the art of absolute convention. He ran over a list of
successful names with an ever-growing rancour--artistic hacks, the
crew of them, the journalists of painting--with a side glance at
Lightmark, who sat pulling his flaxen moustache, looking stiff and
nervous--he would hang the lot of them to-morrow if he had his way,
for corrupters of taste, or, better still, condemn them to perpetual
incarceration in the company of their own daubs. These people, in
fine, the mutual admiration society of incompetents--where was their
justification, where would they be in a decade or so? The hangers-on
of the fashionable world, caring for their art as a means of
success, of acquiring guineas or a baronetcy or a couple of
initials, who dropped the little technique they possessed as soon as
they had a competency, and foisted their pictures most on people
when they had forgotten how to paint. _Pompiers_, _fumistes_, makers of
respectable _pommade_--as the painter's potations increased, his
English became less fluent, and he was driven back constantly to the
dialect of the Paris _ateliers_, which was more familiar to him than
his mother tongue. Ah! how he hated these people and their
thread-paper morality, and their sordid conception of art--a
prettiness that would sell!
Rainham had heard it all before; it was full of spleen and rancour,
unnecessarily violent, and, conceivably, unjust. But what he could
not help recognising, in spite of his repulsion, was a certain
nobility and singleness in the man, ruin as he was. Virtue came out
of him; he had the saving quality of genius, and it was a veritable
burning passion of perfection, which masqueraded in his spleen. His
conception of art for the sake of art only might be erroneous, but
it was at least exalted; and the instinct which drove him always for
his material directly to life, rejecting nothing as common or
unclean--in the violence of his revolt, perhaps dwelling too
uniformly on what was fundamentally ugly--might be disputable, but
was obviously sincere. The last notion which Rainham took away with
him, when they parted late in the evening (Oswyn having suddenly
lapsed from the eloquence to the incoherency of drunkenness), was a
wish to see more of him. He had given him his card, and he waited
until he had seen him place it--after observing it for some moments
attentively with lack-lustre eyes--in the security of his waistcoat.
And as the two friends walked towards Charing Cross, Rainham
observed that he hoped he would call.
"He is a disreputable fellow," said Lightmark a little sullenly,
"and an unprofitable acquaintance. You will find it less difficult
to persuade him to make you a visit than to finish it." At which
Rainham had merely shrugged his shoulders, finding his friend,
perhaps for the first time, a little _banal_.