The terrace to the south of Penalva Forest lay basking in the sunshine
of an early September afternoon, and the very bees which kept passing
in and out from the two hives beneath the laurel shrubbery to the right
seemed going about their work with most unproverbial drowsiness. A
flight of some eight steps led down from the centre of the terrace to
the lawn below, where a tennis-court was marked out, and by the bottom
of the steps ran a gravel-path which sloped up past the beehives to
join the terrace at the far end. In the gutter by this path lay a
tennis-ball, neglected and desolate. Below the lawn the ground sloped
quickly away in a stretch of stubbly hay-field, just shorn of its
aftermath, down to a fence, which lay straggling along a line of brown
seaweed-covered rocks, over which the waveless water of the estuary of
the Fal crept up silently at high tide.
A little iron staircase, the lower steps of which, and the clasp which
fastened it to the wall, were fringed with oozy, amphibious growth,
communicated with the beach on one side and the field on the other.
Except for this clearing to the south of the house, the woods climbed
up steeply from almost the water's edge to the back of a broad Cornish
moor, all purple and gold with gorse and heather, and resonant with
bees. Irresponsible drowsiness seemed the key-note of the scene.
At a corner of the lawn, lying full length on a wicker sofa beneath
the shade of the trees, lay Jack Armitage, also irresponsibly drowsy.
He would have said he was meditating. Being an artist, he conceded to
himself the right to meditate as often and as long as he pleased, but
just now his meditations were entirely confined to vague thoughts that
it was tea-time; and that, on the whole, he would not have another
pipe; so he thrust his hands into his coat-pockets and only thought
about tea. Perhaps the familiar and still warm bowl of his favorite
brierwood was responsible for his change of intention; in any case,
it is certain that he drew it out and began to fill it with the
careful precision of those who know that the good gift of tobacco is
squandered if it is bestowed aimlessly or carelessly into its censer.
He had been staying with Frank Trevor, the owner of this delightful
place, for nearly a month, and he had sketched and talked art, in
which he disagreed with his host on every question admitting two
opinions--and these are legion--all day and a considerable part of the
night. Frank, who was even more orthodox than himself on the subject
of meditation, had finished, some two months before, the portrait at
which he had been working; and, as his habit was, had worked much too
hard while he was at it, had knocked himself up, and for the last
eight weeks had spent his time in sitting in the sun serene and idle.
Jack was leaving next day, and had passed the morning in the woods
finishing a charming sketch of the estuary seen through a foreground
of trees. At lunch Frank had said he was going to sit in the garden
till tea-time, after which they were going on the river; but he had not
appeared, and Jack for the last hour or two had been intermittently
wondering what he was doing.
At this moment Frank was sitting in a low chair in his studio doing
nothing. But he had been having a rather emotional afternoon all by
himself, seeing little private ghosts of his own, and he looked excited
and troubled. In his idle intervals he always kept the door of his
studio locked, and neither went in himself nor allowed any one else
to. But this afternoon he had wanted a book which he thought might be
there, and before he found it he had found something else which had
raised all the ghosts of his Decameron, and had indirectly made him
resolve to begin work again at once.
In his search he had taken down from the shelves a book he had not
touched for some years, and out of its pages there slipped a torn
yellow programme of a concert at one of the Café Chantants in Paris. It
went on bowing and fluttering in its fall; and as he picked it up and
looked at it for a moment idly the ghosts began to rise. There was one
ghost in particular which, like Moses' rod, soon swallowed up all the
other ghosts. She had been to that concert with him--she had been to
other concerts with him; and in another moment he had crumpled up the
momentous little yellow programme and flung it into the grate.
He walked up and down the room for a minute or two, for the ghost was
still visible, and then, by a very natural effect of reaction, he
picked up the programme again, smoothed it out, and put it back on the
table.
What a hot, stifling night it had been! Paris lay gasping and choking
as in a vapor-bath. They had soon left the concert, and walked about
in the garden. Even the moonlight seemed hot, and every now and then
a little peevish wind ruffled the tree-tops, and then grabbed at the
earth below, raising a cloud of stinging dust--a horrible night!
He had left Paris next day for a holiday, and had spent a month at New
Quay, on the north coast of Cornwall. How restful and delicious it was!
It seemed the solution of all difficulties to pass quiet, uneventful
days in that little backwater of life, away from towns and jostling
crowds; above all, away from Paris--beautiful, terrible Paris! He lived
a good deal with the artist set there, charming and intelligent folk,
who prattled innocently of sunsets and foregrounds, and led a simple,
healthy life. He had fallen in love with simple, healthy lives; he
began to hate the thought of the streets and the gas and the glitter
of Paris. He spent long days on the shore listening to the low murmur
of the sound-quenched waves, and long nights with the fisher-folks on
the sea, catching mackerel. In those long, still hours he could think
that the sea was like some living thing, breathing slowly and steadily
in sleep, and he a child leaning on her breast, safe in her care, alone
with the great tender mother of mankind.
One morning--how well he remembered it!--after a night on the sea, he
had landed a mile or so from the village, and had walked along the
shore alone as the dawn was breaking, and, coming round a little
jutting promontory of rock, he had found two or three fishermen who had
just pulled their net to land, naked but for a cloth round the waist,
gathered round a little fire they had made on the beach, where they had
broiled a few of their haul; and as he paused and spoke to them, for
they were old friends, one offered him a piece of broiled fish, and
another, who had not been out, but had helped them to bring in the net,
had brought down some bread and honey-comb, and he ate the fish and
honey-comb on the shore of the sea as day broke....
And it was on that same morning he first met Margery his wife. She
had come with some friends of his from London by the night train, and
they were all going down to the bathing-machine, after their night's
journey, when Frank arrived at the village. He had known at once that
the world only held one woman for him.
Their days of courtship were few. Within three weeks of the time they
had met Frank had proposed to her and been accepted. One afternoon,
with the fine, bold honesty of love, he had told her that he had led
such a life as other men lead, that his record was not stainless, and
that she ought to know before she bound up her life with him. But
Margery had stopped him. She had said she did not wish to know; that
she loved him, and was not that enough? But Frank still felt that
she had better know; if ghosts were to rise between them it was less
startling if she knew what ghosts to expect. But she had started as if
in pain, and said:
"Ah, don't, Frank; you hurt me when you talk like that. It is dead and
past. Ah, I knew that. Well, then, bury it--let us bury it together."
And he obeyed her, and buried it.
He thought over all this as he sat with the crumpled programme in
his hand. Was it ever possible to bury a thing entirely? Had not
everything which we thought dead a terrible faculty of raising itself
at most unexpected moments? A scrap of paper--a few words in a printed
book--these could be the last trump for a buried sin, and it would rise.
He got up off the sofa--these were ugly thoughts--and went on looking
for the book he had come to find. Ah, there it was in its paper
cover--_Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_. He had bought it on his way down from
London, but had not yet looked at it.
He opened it and glanced at a few pages; and then, sitting down where
he had been before, read the whole book straight through. He was
strangely excited and wrought upon by it, and his mind was beginning
to grope in the darkness after an idea. Yes, surely, this was the
essence of portrait-painting: not to present a man as he was at a
particular moment, in one particular part, with the emblem of one
particular pursuit by him--an artist with his canvas, a sculptor with
his clay--but the whole man, his Jekyll and his Hyde together in one
picture.
Then in a moment his mind, as it were, found the handle of the door
for which it had been groping in darkness, and flung it open, letting
in the full blaze of a complete idea. There is only one human being on
earth whom any artist who ever lived could paint completely. It is only
a man himself who wholly knows both the side he turns to the world and
the side he would hide even from himself but cannot.
Frank's hands trembled nervously, and his breath came and went quickly.
He would paint himself as no man yet had ever painted either himself or
any one else. He would put his Jekyll and Hyde on the canvas for men
to wonder at and to be silent before. He would do what no artist had
ever yet done. He thought of that room in the Uffizi at Florence which
holds the portrait of the Italian families, each painted by himself:
Raphael, with his young, beardless face--Raphael, the painter, and no
more; Andrea del Sarto, not the painter, but the liver. Each of them
had painted marvellously outside themselves--one gift, one way of love.
But he would do more: he would paint himself as the husband and lover
of Margery, the Jekyll of himself, who had known and knew the best
capabilities for loving in his nature; and he would paint his Hyde,
the man who had lived as other men in Paris--a Bohemian, careless,
worthless, finding this thing and that honey at the moment, but to the
soul wormwood and bitterness. The wormwood should be there, and the
honey; his love for his wife and his rejection and loathing of those
earlier days which he had thought were dead, but which had risen and
without their honey. His own face, painted by himself, should be the
book out of which he should be judged; for love and lust, happiness and
misery, innocence and guilt--all unite their indelible marks there, and
no one can ever efface the other.
Then, because he felt he was on the threshold of something new,
and because all men, the strongest and weakest alike, are afraid,
desperately afraid, of everything which they know nothing of, he became
suddenly frightened.
What would this thing be? he asked himself. What would happen to
himself when he had done it? Would he have raised his dead permanently?
Would they refuse to be buried again now that he had of his own will
perpetuated them in his art? And Margery, what would she have to say to
the ghosts she would not allow him to tell her about?
But he was not a coward, and he did not mean to turn back because
of this sudden spasm of fright. He would begin to-morrow; he could
not help beginning at once, for, as he often told Margery, when the
idea was ready he had to record it; the artist's inexorable need for
expression could not be gainsaid or trifled with. It must come out.
Frank Trevor had a very mobile face, a face which his feelings played
on freely as a breeze ruffling a moorland pool of water. His dark-gray
eyes, set deep under their black eyebrows, were kindled and glowing
with excitement. In such moments he looked strikingly handsome, though
his features, taken singly, were not faultless. His mouth was too short
and too full-lipped for actual beauty; but now, as he sat there, the
very eagerness and vitality that came and went, as now one aspect of
his idea and now another struck him, gave a fineness to every feature
that made it worthy of an admiration which a more perfectly moulded
face might well have failed to deserve.
But there was another fear as well, a fear so fantastic that he was
almost ashamed of it; but, as he thought of it, it grew upon him. He
had always felt when he painted a portrait that virtue went out of him;
that he put actually a part of his personality into his picture. What,
then, would happen if he painted his own portrait completely? He knew
his idea was fantastic and unreasonable; but the fear--a fear again
of something that was new--was there, lurking in a shaded corner of
his mind. But of this he could speak to Margery, and Margery's cool,
smiling way of dealing with phantasms always had a most evaporating
effect on them. Of the other fear he had wished to speak to her once,
but she did not wish to hear, and he wished to speak to her of it no
longer.
He looked at his watch and found it was nearly tea-time; he had been
there over two hours, and he wondered to himself whether it had seemed
more like two years or two minutes. He rose to go, but before leaving
the room he took a long look round it, feeling that he was looking at
it for perhaps the last time; at any rate, that it could never look the
same again.
"We only register a change in ourselves," he thought, "by the
impression that other things make on us. If our taste changes we say
that a thing we used to think beautiful is ugly. It is not so--it is
the same as it always was. I cannot paint this picture without changing
myself. What will the change be?"
The yellow, crumpled programme and the copy of _Jekyll and Hyde_ lay
together unregarded on the table. When we have drunk our medicine
we do not concern ourselves with the medicine-bottle--unless, like
the immortal Mrs. Pullet, we take a vague, melancholy pleasure in
recalling how much medicine we have taken. But that dear lady's worst
enemies could not have found a single point in common between her and
Frank Trevor.