CHAPTER I

SOME SHORT STORIES

BY HENRY JAMES

Contents:

Brooksmith

The Real Thing

The Story of It

Flickerbridge

Mrs. Medwin

BROOKSMITH

We are scattered now, the friends of the late Mr. Oliver Offord; but

whenever we chance to meet I think we are conscious of a certain

esoteric respect for each other. "Yes, you too have been in Arcadia," we

seem not too grumpily to allow. When I pass the house in Mansfield

Street I remember that Arcadia was there. I don't know who has it now,

and don't want to know; it's enough to be so sure that if I should ring

the bell there would be no such luck for me as that Brooksmith should

open the door. Mr. Offord, the most agreeable, the most attaching of

bachelors, was a retired diplomatist, living on his pension and on

something of his own over and above; a good deal confined, by his

infirmities, to his fireside and delighted to be found there any

afternoon in the year, from five o'clock on, by such visitors as

Brooksmith allowed to come up. Brooksmith was his butler and his most

intimate friend, to whom we all stood, or I should say sat, in the same

relation in which the subject of the sovereign finds himself to the

prime minister. By having been for years, in foreign lands, the most

delightful Englishman any one had ever known, Mr. Offord had in my

opinion rendered signal service to his country. But I suppose he had

been too much liked--liked even by those who didn't like IT--so that as

people of that sort never get titles or dotations for the horrid things

they've NOT done, his principal reward was simply that we went to see

him.

Oh we went perpetually, and it was not our fault if he was not

overwhelmed with this particular honour. Any visitor who came once came

again; to come merely once was a slight nobody, I'm sure, had ever put

upon him. His circle therefore was essentially composed of habitués, who

were habitués for each other as well as for him, as those of a happy

salon should be. I remember vividly every element of the place, down to

the intensely Londonish look of the grey opposite houses, in the gap of

the white curtains of the high windows, and the exact spot where, on a

particular afternoon, I put down my tea-cup for Brooksmith, lingering an

instant, to gather it up as if he were plucking a flower. Mr. Offord's

drawing-room was indeed Brooksmith's garden, his pruned and tended human

parterre, and if we all flourished there and grew well in our places it

was largely owing to his supervision.

Many persons have heard much, though most have doubtless seen little, of

the famous institution of the salon, and many are born to the depression

of knowing that this finest flower of social life refuses to bloom where

the English tongue is spoken. The explanation is usually that our women

have not the skill to cultivate it--the art to direct through a smiling

land, between suggestive shores, a sinuous stream of talk. My

affectionate, my pious memory of Mr. Offord contradicts this induction

only, I fear, more insidiously to confirm it. The sallow and slightly

smoked drawing-room in which he spent so large a portion of the last

years of his life certainly deserved the distinguished name; but on the

other hand it couldn't be said at all to owe its stamp to any

intervention throwing into relief the fact that there was no Mrs.

Offord. The dear man had indeed, at the most, been capable of one of

those sacrifices to which women are deemed peculiarly apt: he had

recognised--under the influence, in some degree, it is true, of physical

infirmity--that if you wish people to find you at home you must manage

not to be out. He had in short accepted the truth which many dabblers in

the social art are slow to learn, that you must really, as they say,

take a line, and that the only way as yet discovered of being at home is

to stay at home. Finally his own fireside had become a summary of his

habits. Why should he ever have left it?--since this would have been

leaving what was notoriously pleasantest in London, the compact charmed

cluster (thinning away indeed into casual couples) round the fine old

last-century chimney-piece which, with the exception of the remarkable

collection of miniatures, was the best thing the place contained. Mr.

Offord wasn't rich; he had nothing but his pension and the use for life

of the somewhat superannuated house.

When I'm reminded by some opposed discomfort of the present hour how

perfectly we were all handled there, I ask myself once more what had

been the secret of such perfection. One had taken it for granted at the

time, for anything that is supremely good produces more acceptance than

surprise. I felt we were all happy, but I didn't consider how our

happiness was managed. And yet there were questions to be asked,

questions that strike me as singularly obvious now that there's nobody

to answer them. Mr. Offord had solved the insoluble; he had, without

feminine help--save in the sense that ladies were dying to come to him

and that he saved the lives of several--established a salon; but I might

have guessed that there was a method in his madness, a law in his

success. He hadn't hit it off by a mere fluke. There was an art in it

all, and how was the art so hidden? Who indeed if it came to that was

the occult artist? Launching this inquiry the other day I had already

got hold of the tail of my reply. I was helped by the very wonder of

some of the conditions that came back to me--those that used to seem as

natural as sunshine in a fine climate.

How was it for instance that we never were a crowd, never either too

many or too few, always the right people WITH the right people--there

must really have been no wrong people at all--always coming and going,

never sticking fast nor overstaying, yet never popping in or out with an

indecorous familiarity? How was it that we all sat where we wanted and

moved when we wanted and met whom we wanted and escaped whom we wanted;

joining, according to the accident of inclination, the general circle or

falling in with a single talker on a convenient sofa? Why were all the

sofas so convenient, the accidents so happy, the talkers so ready, the

listeners so willing, the subjects presented to you in a rotation as

quickly foreordained as the courses at dinner? A dearth of topics would

have been as unheard of as a lapse in the service. These speculations

couldn't fail to lead me to the fundamental truth that Brooksmith had

been somehow at the bottom of the mystery. If he hadn't established the

salon at least he had carried it on. Brooksmith in short was the artist!

We felt this covertly at the time, without formulating it, and were

conscious, as an ordered and prosperous community, of his even-handed

justice, all untainted with flunkeyism. He had none of that

vulgarity--his touch was infinitely fine. The delicacy of it was clear

to me on the first occasion my eyes rested, as they were so often to

rest again, on the domestic revealed, in the turbid light of the street,

by the opening of the house-door. I saw on the spot that though he had

plenty of school he carried it without arrogance--he had remained

articulate and human. L'Ecole Anglaise Mr. Offord used laughingly to

call him when, later on, it happened more than once that we had some

conversation about him. But I remember accusing Mr. Offord of not doing

him quite ideal justice. That he wasn't one of the giants of the school,

however, was admitted by my old friend, who really understood him

perfectly and was devoted to him, as I shall show; which doubtless poor

Brooksmith had himself felt, to his cost, when his value in the market

was originally determined. The utility of his class in general is

estimated by the foot and the inch, and poor Brooksmith had only about

five feet three to put into circulation. He acknowledged the inadequacy

of this provision, and I'm sure was penetrated with the everlasting

fitness of the relation between service and stature. If HE had been Mr.

Offord he certainly would have found Brooksmith wanting, and indeed the

laxity of his employer on this score was one of many things he had had

to condone and to which he had at last indulgently adapted himself.

I remember the old man's saying to me: "Oh my servants, if they can live

with me a fortnight they can live with me for ever. But it's the first

fortnight that tries 'em." It was in the first fortnight for instance

that Brooksmith had had to learn that he was exposed to being addressed

as "my dear fellow" and "my poor child." Strange and deep must such a

probation have been to him, and he doubtless emerged from it tempered

and purified. This was written to a certain extent in his appearance; in

his spare brisk little person, in his cloistered white face and

extraordinarily polished hair, which told of responsibility, looked as

if it were kept up to the same high standard as the plate; in his small

clear anxious eyes, even in the permitted, though not exactly

encouraged, tuft on his chin. "He thinks me rather mad, but I've broken

him in, and now he likes the place, he likes the company," said the old

man. I embraced this fully after I had become aware that Brooksmith's

main characteristic was a deep and shy refinement, though I remember I

was rather puzzled when, on another occasion, Mr. Offord remarked: "What

he likes is the talk--mingling in the conversation." I was conscious I

had never seen Brooksmith permit himself this freedom, but I guessed in

a moment that what Mr. Offord alluded to was a participation more

intense than any speech could have represented--that of being

perpetually present on a hundred legitimate pretexts, errands,

necessities, and breathing the very atmosphere of criticism, the famous

criticism of life. "Quite an education, sir, isn't it, sir?" he said to

me one day at the foot of the stairs when he was letting me out; and

I've always remembered the words and the tone as the first sign of the

quickening drama of poor Brooksmith's fate. It was indeed an education,

but to what was this sensitive young man of thirty-five, of the servile

class, being educated?

Practically and inevitably, for the time, to companionship, to the

perpetual, the even exaggerated reference and appeal of a person brought

to dependence by his time of life and his infirmities and always

addicted moreover--this was the exaggeration--to the art of giving you

pleasure by letting you do things for him. There were certain things Mr.

Offord was capable of pretending he liked you to do even when he

didn't--this, I mean, if he thought YOU liked them. If it happened that

you didn't either--which was rare, yet might be--of course there were

cross-purposes; but Brooksmith was there to prevent their going very

far. This was precisely the way he acted as moderator; he averted

misunderstandings or cleared them up. He had been capable, strange as it

may appear, of acquiring for this purpose an insight into the French

tongue, which was often used at Mr. Offord's; for besides being habitual

to most of the foreigners, and they were many, who haunted the place or

arrived with letters--letters often requiring a little worried

consideration, of which Brooksmith always had cognisance--it had really

become the primary language of the master of the house. I don't know if

all the malentendus were in French, but almost all the explanations

were, and this didn't a bit prevent Brooksmith's following them. I know

Mr. Offord used to read passages to him from Montaigne and Saint-Simon,

for he read perpetually when alone--when THEY were alone, that is--and

Brooksmith was always about. Perhaps you'll say no wonder Mr. Offord's

butler regarded him as "rather mad." However, if I'm not sure what he

thought about Montaigne I'm convinced he admired Saint-Simon. A certain

feeling for letters must have rubbed off on him from the mere handling

of his master's books, which he was always carrying to and fro and

putting back in their places.

I often noticed that if an anecdote or a quotation, much more a lively

discussion, was going forward, he would, if busy with the fire or the

curtains, the lamp or the tea, find a pretext for remaining in the room

till the point should be reached. If his purpose was to catch it you

weren't discreet, you were in fact scarce human, to call him off, and I

shall never forget a look, a hard stony stare--I caught it in its

passage--which, one day when there were a good many people in the room,

he fastened upon the footman who was helping him in the service and who,

in an undertone, had asked him some irrelevant question. It was the only

manifestation of harshness I ever observed on Brooksmith's part, and I

at first wondered what was the matter. Then I became conscious that Mr.

Offord was relating a very curious anecdote, never before perhaps made

so public, and imparted to the narrator by an eye-witness of the fact,

bearing on Lord Byron's life in Italy. Nothing would induce me to

reproduce it here, but Brooksmith had been in danger of losing it. If I

ever should venture to reproduce it I shall feel how much I lose in not

having my fellow auditor to refer to.

The first day Mr Offord's door was closed was therefore a dark date in

contemporary history. It was raining hard and my umbrella was wet, but

Brooksmith received it from me exactly as if this were a preliminary for

going upstairs. I observed however that instead of putting it away he

held it poised and trickling over the rug, and I then became aware that

he was looking at me with deep acknowledging eyes--his air of universal

responsibility. I immediately understood--there was scarce need of

question and answer as they passed between us. When I took in that our

good friend had given up as never before, though only for the occasion,

I exclaimed dolefully: "What a difference it will make--and to how many

people!"

"I shall be one of them, sir!" said Brooksmith; and that was the

beginning of the end.

Mr. Offord came down again, but the spell was broken, the great sign

being that the conversation was for the first time not directed. It

wandered and stumbled, a little frightened, like a lost child--it had

let go the nurse's hand. "The worst of it is that now we shall talk

about my health--C'EST LA FIN DE TOUT," Mr. Offord said when he

reappeared; and then I recognised what a note of change that would

be--for he had never tolerated anything so provincial. We "ran" to each

other's health as little as to the daily weather. The talk became ours,

in a word--not his; and as ours, even when HE talked, it could only be

inferior. In this form it was a distress to Brooksmith, whose attention

now wandered from it altogether: he had so much closer a vision of his

master's intimate conditions than our superficialities represented.

There were better hours, and he was more in and out of the room, but I

could see he was conscious of the decline, almost of the collapse, of

our great institution. He seemed to wish to take counsel with me about

it, to feel responsible for its going on in some form or other. When for

the second period--the first had lasted several days--he had to tell me

that his employer didn't receive, I half expected to hear him say after

a moment "Do you think I ought to, sir, in his place?"--as he might have

asked me, with the return of autumn, if I thought he had better light

the drawing-room fire.

He had a resigned philosophic sense of what his guests--our guests, as I

came to regard them in our colloquies--would expect. His feeling was

that he wouldn't absolutely have approved of himself as a substitute for

Mr. Offord; but he was so saturated with the religion of habit that he

would have made, for our friends, the necessary sacrifice to the

divinity. He would take them on a little further, till they could look

about them. I think I saw him also mentally confronted with the

opportunity to deal--for once in his life--with some of his own dumb

preferences, his limitations of sympathy, WEEDING a little in prospect

and returning to a purer tradition. It was not unknown to me that he

considered that toward the end of our host's career a certain laxity of

selection had crept in.

At last it came to be the case that we all found the closed door more

often than the open one; but even when it was closed Brooksmith managed

a crack for me to squeeze through; so that practically I never turned

away without having paid a visit. The difference simply came to be that

the visit was to Brooksmith. It took place in the hall, at the familiar

foot of the stairs, and we didn't sit down, at least Brooksmith didn't;

moreover it was devoted wholly to one topic and always had the air of

being already over--beginning, so to say, at the end. But it was always

interesting--it always gave me something to think about. It's true that

the subject of my meditation was ever the same--ever "It's all very

well, but what WILL become of Brooksmith?" Even my private answer to

this question left me still unsatisfied. No doubt Mr. Offord would

provide for him, but WHAT would he provide?--that was the great point.

He couldn't provide society; and society had become a necessity of

Brooksmith's nature. I must add that he never showed a symptom of what I

may call sordid solicitude--anxiety on his own account. He was rather

livid and intensely grave, as befitted a man before whose eyes the

"shade of that which once was great" was passing away. He had the

solemnity of a person winding up, under depressing circumstances, a

long-established and celebrated business; he was a kind of social

executor or liquidator. But his manner seemed to testify exclusively to

the uncertainty of OUR future. I couldn't in those days have afforded

it--I lived in two rooms in Jermyn Street and didn't "keep a man"; but

even if my income had permitted I shouldn't have ventured to say to

Brooksmith (emulating Mr. Offord) "My dear fellow, I'll take you on."

The whole tone of our intercourse was so much more an implication that

it was I who should now want a lift. Indeed there was a tacit assurance

in Brooksmith's whole attitude that he should have me on his mind.

One of the most assiduous members of our circle had been Lady Kenyon,

and I remember his telling me one day that her ladyship had in spite of

her own infirmities, lately much aggravated, been in person to inquire.

In answer to this I remarked that she would feel it more than any one.

Brooksmith had a pause before saying in a certain tone--there's no

reproducing some of his tones--"I'll go and see her." I went to see her

myself and learned he had waited on her; but when I said to her, in the

form of a joke but with a core of earnest, that when all was over some

of us ought to combine, to club together, and set Brooksmith up on his

own account, she replied a trifle disappointingly: "Do you mean in a

public-house?" I looked at her in a way that I think Brooksmith himself

would have approved, and then I answered: "Yes, the Offord Arms." What I

had meant of course was that for the love of art itself we ought to look

to it that such a peculiar faculty and so much acquired experience

shouldn't be wasted. I really think that if we had caused a few

black-edged cards to be struck off and circulated--"Mr. Brooksmith will

continue to receive on the old premises from four to seven; business

carried on as usual during the alterations"--the greater number of us

would have rallied.

Several times he took me upstairs--always by his own proposal--and our

dear old friend, in bed (in a curious flowered and brocaded casaque

which made him, especially as his head was tied up in a handkerchief to

match, look, to my imagination, like the dying Voltaire) held for ten

minutes a sadly shrunken little salon. I felt indeed each time as if I

were attending the last coucher of some social sovereign. He was royally

whimsical about his sufferings and not at all concerned--quite as if the

Constitution provided for the case about his successor. He glided over

OUR sufferings charmingly, and none of his jokes--it was a gallant

abstention, some of them would have been so easy--were at our expense.

Now and again, I confess, there was one at Brooksmith's, but so

pathetically sociable as to make the excellent man look at me in a way

that seemed to say: "Do exchange a glance with me, or I shan't be able

to stand it." What he wasn't able to stand was not what Mr. Offord said

about him, but what he wasn't able to say in return. His idea of

conversation for himself was giving you the convenience of speaking to

him; and when he went to "see" Lady Kenyon for instance it was to carry

her the tribute of his receptive silence. Where would the speech of his

betters have been if proper service had been a manifestation of sound?

In that case the fundamental difference would have had to be shown by

their dumbness, and many of them, poor things, were dumb enough without

that provision. Brooksmith took an unfailing interest in the

preservation of the fundamental difference; it was the thing he had most

on his conscience.

What had become of it however when Mr. Offord passed away like any

inferior person--was relegated to eternal stillness after the manner of

a butler above-stairs? His aspect on the event--for the several

successive days--may be imagined, and the multiplication by funereal

observance of the things he didn't say. When everything was over--it was

late the same day--I knocked at the door of the house of mourning as I

so often had done before. I could never call on Mr. Offord again, but I

had come literally to call on Brooksmith. I wanted to ask him if there

was anything I could do for him, tainted with vagueness as this inquiry

could only be. My presumptuous dream of taking him into my own service

had died away: my service wasn't worth his being taken into. My offer

could only be to help him to find another place, and yet there was an

indelicacy, as it were, in taking for granted that his thoughts would

immediately be fixed on another. I had a hope that he would be able to

give his life a different form--though certainly not the form, the

frequent result of such bereavements, of his setting up a little shop.

That would have been dreadful; for I should have wished to forward any

enterprise he might embark in, yet how could I have brought myself to go

and pay him shillings and take back coppers, over a counter? My visit

then was simply an intended compliment. He took it as such, gratefully

and with all the tact in the world. He knew I really couldn't help him

and that I knew he knew I couldn't; but we discussed the situation--with

a good deal of elegant generality--at the foot of the stairs, in the

hall already dismantled, where I had so often discussed other situations

with him. The executors were in possession, as was still more apparent

when he made me pass for a few minutes into the dining-room, where

various objects were muffled up for removal.

Two definite facts, however, he had to communicate; one being that he

was to leave the house for ever that night (servants, for some

mysterious reason, seem always to depart by night), and the other--he

mentioned it only at the last and with hesitation--that he was already

aware his late master had left him a legacy of eighty pounds. "I'm very

glad," I said, and Brooksmith was of the same mind: "It was so like him

to think of me." This was all that passed between us on the subject, and

I know nothing of his judgement of Mr. Offord's memento. Eighty pounds

are always eighty pounds, and no one has ever left ME an equal sum; but,

all the same, for Brooksmith, I was disappointed. I don't know what I

had expected, but it was almost a shock. Eighty pounds might stock a

small shop--a VERY small shop; but, I repeat, I couldn't bear to think

of that. I asked my friend if he had been able to save a little, and he

replied: "No, sir; I've had to do things." I didn't inquire what things

they might have been; they were his own affair, and I took his word for

them as assentingly as if he had had the greatness of an ancient house

to keep up; especially as there was something in his manner that seemed

to convey a prospect of further sacrifice.

"I shall have to turn round a bit, sir--I shall have to look about me,"

he said; and then he added indulgently, magnanimously: "If you should

happen to hear of anything for me--"

I couldn't let him finish; this was, in its essence, too much in the

really grand manner. It would be a help to my getting him off my mind to

be able to pretend I COULD find the right place, and that help he wished

to give me, for it was doubtless painful to him to see me in so false a

position. I interposed with a few words to the effect of how well aware

I was that wherever he should go, whatever he should do, he would miss

our old friend terribly--miss him even more than I should, having been

with him so much more. This led him to make the speech that has remained

with me as the very text of the whole episode.

"Oh sir, it's sad for YOU, very sad indeed, and for a great many

gentlemen and ladies; that it is, sir. But for me, sir, it is, if I may

say so, still graver even than that: it's just the loss of something

that was everything. For me, sir," he went on with rising tears, "he was

just ALL, if you know what I mean, sir. You have others, sir, I

daresay--not that I would have you understand me to speak of them as in

any way tantamount. But you have the pleasures of society, sir; if it's

only in talking about him, sir, as I daresay you do freely--for all his

blest memory has to fear from it--with gentlemen and ladies who have had

the same honour. That's not for me, sir, and I've to keep my

associations to myself. Mr. Offord was MY society, and now, you see, I

just haven't any. You go back to conversation, sir, after all, and I go

back to my place," Brooksmith stammered, without exaggerated irony or

dramatic bitterness, but with a flat unstudied veracity and his hand on

the knob of the street-door. He turned it to let me out and then he

added: "I just go downstairs, sir, again, and I stay there."

"My poor child," I replied in my emotion, quite as Mr. Offord used to

speak, "my dear fellow, leave it to me: WE'LL look after you, we'll all

do something for you."

"Ah if you could give me some one LIKE him! But there ain't two such in

the world," Brooksmith said as we parted.

He had given me his address--the place where he would be to be heard of.

For a long time I had no occasion to make use of the information: he

proved on trial so very difficult a case. The people who knew him and

had known Mr. Offord didn't want to take him, and yet I couldn't bear to

try to thrust him among strangers--strangers to his past when not to his

present. I spoke to many of our old friends about him and found them all

governed by the odd mixture of feelings of which I myself was

conscious--as well as disposed, further, to entertain a suspicion that

he was "spoiled," with which, I then would have nothing to do. In plain

terms a certain embarrassment, a sensible awkwardness when they thought

of it, attached to the idea of using him as a menial: they had met him

so often in society. Many of them would have asked him, and did ask him,

or rather did ask me to ask him, to come and see them, but a mere

visiting-list was not what I wanted for him. He was too short for people

who were very particular; nevertheless I heard of an opening in a

diplomatic household which led me to write him a note, though I was

looking much less for something grand than for something human. Five

days later I heard from him. The secretary's wife had decided, after

keeping him waiting till then, that she couldn't take a servant out of a

house in which there hadn't been a lady. The note had a P.S.: "It's a

good job there wasn't, sir, such a lady as some."

A week later he came to see me and told me he was "suited," committed to

some highly respectable people--they were something quite immense in the

City--who lived on the Bayswater side of the Park. "I daresay it will be

rather poor, sir," he admitted; "but I've seen the fireworks, haven't I,

sir?--it can't be fireworks EVERY night. After Mansfield Street there

ain't much choice." There was a certain amount, however, it seemed; for

the following year, calling one day on a country cousin, a lady of a

certain age who was spending a fortnight in town with some friends of

her own, a family unknown to me and resident in Chester Square, the door

of the house was opened, to my surprise and gratification, by Brooksmith

in person. When I came out I had some conversation with him from which I

gathered that he had found the large City people too dull for endurance,

and I guessed, though he didn't say it, that he had found them vulgar as

well. I don't know what judgement he would have passed on his actual

patrons if my relative hadn't been their friend; but in view of that

connexion he abstained from comment.

None was necessary, however, for before the lady in question brought her

visit to a close they honoured me with an invitation to dinner, which I

accepted. There was a largeish party on the occasion, but I confess I

thought of Brooksmith rather more than of the seated company. They

required no depth of attention--they were all referable to usual

irredeemable inevitable types. It was the world of cheerful commonplace

and conscious gentility and prosperous density, a full-fed material

insular world, a world of hideous florid plate and ponderous order and

thin conversation. There wasn't a word said about Byron, or even about a

minor bard then much in view. Nothing would have induced me to look at

Brooksmith in the course of the repast, and I felt sure that not even my

overturning the wine would have induced him to meet my eye. We were in

intellectual sympathy--we felt, as regards each other, a degree of

social responsibility. In short we had been in Arcadia together, and we

had both come to THIS! No wonder we were ashamed to be confronted. When

he had helped on my overcoat, as I was going away, we parted, for the

first time since the earliest days of Mansfield Street, in silence. I

thought he looked lean and wasted, and I guessed that his new place

wasn't more "human" than his previous one. There was plenty of beef and

beer, but there was no reciprocity. The question for him to have asked

before accepting the position wouldn't have been "How many footmen are

kept?" but "How much imagination?"

The next time I went to the house--I confess it wasn't very soon--I

encountered his successor, a personage who evidently enjoyed the good

fortune of never having quitted his natural level. Could any be higher?

he seemed to ask--over the heads of three footmen and even of some

visitors. He made me feel as if Brooksmith were dead; but I didn't dare

to inquire--I couldn't have borne his "I haven't the least idea, sir." I

despatched a note to the address that worthy had given me after Mr.

Offord's death, but I received no answer. Six months later however I was

favoured with a visit from an elderly dreary dingy person who introduced

herself to me as Mr. Brooksmith's aunt and from whom I learned that he

was out of place and out of health and had allowed her to come and say

to me that if I could spare half an hour to look in at him he would take

it as a rare honour.

I went the next day--his messenger had given me a new address--and found

my friend lodged in a short sordid street in Marylebone, one of those

corners of London that wear the last expression of sickly meanness. The

room into which I was shown was above the small establishment of a dyer

and cleaner who had inflated kid gloves and discoloured shawls in his

shop-front. There was a great deal of grimy infant life up and down the

place, and there was a hot moist smell within, as of the "boiling" of

dirty linen. Brooksmith sat with a blanket over his legs at a clean

little window where, from behind stiff bluish-white curtains, he could

look across at a huckster's and a tinsmith's and a small greasy

public-house. He had passed through an illness and was convalescent, and

his mother, as well as his aunt, was in attendance on him. I liked the

nearer relative, who was bland and intensely humble, but I had my doubts

of the remoter, whom I connected perhaps unjustly with the opposite

public-house--she seemed somehow greasy with the same grease--and whose

furtive eye followed every movement of my hand as to see if it weren't

going into my pocket. It didn't take this direction--I couldn't,

unsolicited, put myself at that sort of ease with Brooksmith. Several

times the door of the room opened and mysterious old women peeped in and

shuffled back again. I don't know who they were; poor Brooksmith seemed

encompassed with vague prying beery females.

He was vague himself, and evidently weak, and much embarrassed, and not

an allusion was made between us to Mansfield Street. The vision of the

salon of which he had been an ornament hovered before me however, by

contrast, sufficiently. He assured me he was really getting better, and

his mother remarked that he would come round if he could only get his

spirits up. The aunt echoed this opinion, and I became more sure that in

her own case she knew where to go for such a purpose. I'm afraid I was

rather weak with my old friend, for I neglected the opportunity, so

exceptionally good, to rebuke the levity which had led him to throw up

honourable positions--fine stiff steady berths in Bayswater and

Belgravia, with morning prayers, as I knew, attached to one of them.

Very likely his reasons had been profane and sentimental; he didn't want

morning prayers, he wanted to be somebody's dear fellow; but I couldn't

be the person to rebuke him. He shuffled these episodes out of sight--I

saw he had no wish to discuss them. I noted further, strangely enough,

that it would probably be a questionable pleasure for him to see me

again: he doubted now even of my power to condone his aberrations. He

didn't wish to have to explain; and his behaviour was likely in future

to need explanation. When I bade him farewell he looked at me a moment

with eyes that said everything: "How can I talk about those exquisite

years in this place, before these people, with the old women poking

their heads in? It was very good of you to come to see me; it wasn't my

idea--SHE brought you. We've said everything; it's over; you'll lose all

patience with me, and I'd rather you shouldn't see the rest." I sent him

some money in a letter the next day, but I saw the rest only in the

light of a barren sequel.

A whole year after my visit to him I became aware once, in dining out,

that Brooksmith was one of the several servants who hovered behind our

chairs. He hadn't opened the door of the house to me, nor had I

recognised him in the array of retainers in the hall. This time I tried

to catch his eye, but he never gave me a chance, and when he handed me a

dish I could only be careful to thank him audibly. Indeed I partook of

two ENTRÉES of which I had my doubts, subsequently converted into

certainties, in order not to snub him. He looked well enough in health,

but much older, and wore in an exceptionally marked degree the glazed

and expressionless mask of the British domestic DE RACE. I saw with

dismay that if I hadn't known him I should have taken him, on the

showing of his countenance, for an extravagant illustration of

irresponsive servile gloom. I said to myself that he had become a

reactionary, gone over to the Philistines, thrown himself into religion,

the religion of his "place," like a foreign lady SUR LE RETOUR. I

divined moreover that he was only engaged for the evening--he had become

a mere waiter, had joined the band of the white-waistcoated who "go

out." There was something pathetic in this fact--it was a terrible

vulgarisation of Brooksmith. It was the mercenary prose of butlerhood;

he had given up the struggle for the poetry. If reciprocity was what he

had missed where was the reciprocity now? Only in the bottoms of the

wine-glasses and the five shillings--or whatever they get--clapped into

his hand by the permanent man. However, I supposed he had taken up a

precarious branch of his profession because it after all sent him less

downstairs. His relations with London society were more superficial, but

they were of course more various. As I went away on this occasion I

looked out for him eagerly among the four or five attendants whose

perpendicular persons, fluting the walls of London passages, are

supposed to lubricate the process of departure; but he was not on duty.

I asked one of the others if he were not in the house, and received the

prompt answer: "Just left, sir. Anything I can do for you, sir?" I

wanted to say "Please give him my kind regards"; but I abstained--I

didn't want to compromise him; and I never came across him again.

Often and often, in dining out, I looked for him, sometimes accepting

invitations on purpose to multiply the chances of my meeting him. But

always in vain; so that as I met many other members of the casual class

over and over again I at last adopted the theory that he always procured

a list of expected guests beforehand and kept away from the banquets

which he thus learned I was to grace. At last I gave up hope, and one

day at the end of three years I received another visit from his aunt.

She was drearier and dingier, almost squalid, and she was in great

tribulation and want. Her sister, Mrs. Brooksmith, had been dead a year,

and three months later her nephew had disappeared. He had always looked

after her a bit since her troubles; I never knew what her troubles had

been--and now she hadn't so much as a petticoat to pawn. She had also a

niece, to whom she had been everything before her troubles, but the

niece had treated her most shameful. These were details; the great and

romantic fact was Brooksmith's final evasion of his fate. He had gone

out to wait one evening as usual, in a white waistcoat she had done up

for him with her own hands--being due at a large party up Kensington

way. But he had never come home again and had never arrived at the large

party, nor at any party that any one could make out. No trace of him had

come to light--no gleam of the white waistcoat had pierced the obscurity

of his doom. This news was a sharp shock to me, for I had my ideas about

his real destination. His aged relative had promptly, as she said,

guessed the worst. Somehow, and somewhere he had got out of the way

altogether, and now I trust that, with characteristic deliberation, he

is changing the plates of the immortal gods. As my depressing visitant

also said, he never HAD got his spirits up. I was fortunately able to

dismiss her with her own somewhat improved. But the dim ghost of poor

Brooksmith is one of those that I see. He had indeed been spoiled.

THE REAL THING

CHAPTER I

When the porter's wife, who used to answer the house-bell, announced "A

gentleman and a lady, sir," I had, as I often had in those days--the

wish being father to the thought--an immediate vision of sitters.

Sitters my visitors in this case proved to be; but not in the sense I

should have preferred. There was nothing at first however to indicate

that they mightn't have come for a portrait. The gentleman, a man of

fifty, very high and very straight, with a moustache slightly grizzled

and a dark grey walking-coat admirably fitted, both of which I noted

professionally--I don't mean as a barber or yet as a tailor--would have

struck me as a celebrity if celebrities often were striking. It was a

truth of which I had for some time been conscious that a figure with a

good deal of frontage was, as one might say, almost never a public

institution. A glance at the lady helped to remind me of this

paradoxical law: she also looked too distinguished to be a

"personality." Moreover one would scarcely come across two variations

together.

Neither of the pair immediately spoke--they only prolonged the

preliminary gaze suggesting that each wished to give the other a chance.

They were visibly shy; they stood there letting me take them in--which,

as I afterwards perceived, was the most practical thing they could have

done. In this way their embarrassment served their cause. I had seen

people painfully reluctant to mention that they desired anything so

gross as to be represented on canvas; but the scruples of my new friends

appeared almost insurmountable. Yet the gentleman might have said "I

should like a portrait of my wife," and the lady might have said "I

should like a portrait of my husband." Perhaps they weren't husband and

wife--this naturally would make the matter more delicate. Perhaps they

wished to be done together--in which case they ought to have brought a

third person to break the news.

"We come from Mr. Rivet," the lady finally said with a dim smile that

had the effect of a moist sponge passed over a "sunk" piece of painting,

as well as of a vague allusion to vanished beauty. She was as tall and

straight, in her degree, as her companion, and with ten years less to

carry. She looked as sad as a woman could look whose face was not

charged with expression; that is her tinted oval mask showed waste as an

exposed surface shows friction. The hand of time had played over her

freely, but to an effect of elimination. She was slim and stiff, and so

well-dressed, in dark blue cloth, with lappets and pockets and buttons,

that it was clear she employed the same tailor as her husband. The

couple had an indefinable air of prosperous thrift--they evidently got a

good deal of luxury for their money. If I was to be one of their

luxuries it would behove me to consider my terms.

"Ah Claude Rivet recommended me?" I echoed and I added that it was very

kind of him, though I could reflect that, as he only painted landscape,

this wasn't a sacrifice.

The lady looked very hard at the gentleman, and the gentleman looked

round the room. Then staring at the floor a moment and stroking his

moustache, he rested his pleasant eyes on me with the remark: "He said

you were the right one."

"I try to be, when people want to sit."

"Yes, we should like to," said the lady anxiously.

"Do you mean together?"

My visitors exchanged a glance. "If you could do anything with ME I

suppose it would be double," the gentleman stammered.

"Oh yes, there's naturally a higher charge for two figures than for

one."

"We should like to make it pay," the husband confessed.

"That's very good of you," I returned, appreciating so unwonted a

sympathy--for I supposed he meant pay the artist.

A sense of strangeness seemed to dawn on the lady. "We mean for the

illustrations--Mr. Rivet said you might put one in."

"Put in--an illustration?" I was equally confused.

"Sketch her off, you know," said the gentleman, colouring.

It was only then that I understood the service Claude Rivet had rendered

me; he had told them how I worked in black-and-white, for magazines, for

story-books, for sketches of contemporary life, and consequently had

copious employment for models. These things were true, but it was not

less true--I may confess it now; whether because the aspiration was to

lead to everything or to nothing I leave the reader to guess--that I

couldn't get the honours, to say nothing of the emoluments, of a great

painter of portraits out of my head. My "illustrations" were my

pot-boilers; I looked to a different branch of art--far and away the

most interesting it had always seemed to me--to perpetuate my fame.

There was no shame in looking to it also to make my fortune but that

fortune was by so much further from being made from the moment my

visitors wished to be "done" for nothing. I was disappointed; for in the

pictorial sense I had immediately SEEN them. I had seized their type--I

had already settled what I would do with it. Something that wouldn't

absolutely have pleased them, I afterwards reflected.

"Ah you're--you're--a--?" I began as soon as I had mastered my surprise.

I couldn't bring out the dingy word "models": it seemed so little to fit

the case.

"We haven't had much practice," said the lady.

"We've got to do something, and we've thought that an artist in your

line might perhaps make something of us," her husband threw off. He

further mentioned that they didn't know many artists and that they had

gone first, on the off-chance--he painted views of course, but sometimes

put in figures; perhaps I remembered--to Mr. Rivet, whom they had met a

few years before at a place in Norfolk where he was sketching.

"We used to sketch a little ourselves," the lady hinted.

"It's very awkward, but we absolutely must do something," her husband

went on.

"Of course we're not so VERY young," she admitted with a wan smile.

With the remark that I might as well know something more about them the

husband had handed me a card extracted from a neat new

pocket-book--their appurtenances were all of the freshest--and inscribed

with the words "Major Monarch." Impressive as these words were they

didn't carry my knowledge much further; but my visitor presently added:

"I've left the army and we've had the misfortune to lose our money. In

fact our means are dreadfully small."

"It's awfully trying--a regular strain,", said Mrs. Monarch.

They evidently wished to be discreet--to take care not to swagger

because they were gentlefolk. I felt them willing to recognise this as

something of a drawback, at the same time that I guessed at an

underlying sense--their consolation in adversity--that they HAD their

points. They certainly had; but these advantages struck me as

preponderantly social; such for instance as would help to make a

drawing-room look well. However, a drawing-room was always, or ought to

be, a picture.

In consequence of his wife's allusion to their age Major Monarch

observed: "Naturally it's more for the figure that we thought of going

in. We can still hold ourselves up." On the instant I saw that the

figure was indeed their strong point. His "naturally" didn't sound vain,

but it lighted up the question. "SHE has the best one," he continued,

nodding at his wife with a pleasant after-dinner absence of

circumlocution. I could only reply, as if we were in fact sitting over

our wine, that this didn't prevent his own from being very good; which

led him in turn to make answer: "We thought that if you ever have to do

people like us we might be something like it. SHE particularly--for a

lady in a book, you know."

I was so amused by them that, to get more of it, I did my best to take

their point of view; and though it was an embarrassment to find myself

appraising physically, as if they were animals on hire or useful blacks,

a pair whom I should have expected to meet only in one of the relations

in which criticism is tacit, I looked at Mrs. Monarch judicially enough

to be able to exclaim after a moment with conviction: "Oh yes, a lady in

a book!" She was singularly like a bad illustration.

"We'll stand up, if you like," said the Major; and he raised himself

before me with a really grand air.

I could take his measure at a glance--he was six feet two and a perfect

gentleman. It would have paid any club in process of formation and in

want of a stamp to engage him at a salary to stand in the principal

window. What struck me at once was that in coming to me they had rather

missed their vocation; they could surely have been turned to better

account for advertising purposes. I couldn't of course see the thing in

detail, but I could see them make somebody's fortune--I don't mean their

own. There was something in them for a waistcoat-maker, an hotel-keeper

or a soap-vendor. I could imagine "We always use it" pinned on their

bosoms with the greatest effect; I had a vision of the brilliancy with

which they would launch a table d'hôte.

Mrs. Monarch sat still, not from pride but from shyness, and presently

her husband said to her: "Get up, my dear, and show how smart you are."

She obeyed, but she had no need to get up to show it. She walked to the

end of the studio and then came back blushing, her fluttered eyes on the

partner of her appeal. I was reminded of an incident I had accidentally

had a glimpse of in Paris--being with a friend there, a dramatist about

to produce a play, when an actress came to him to ask to be entrusted

with a part. She went through her paces before him, walked up and down

as Mrs. Monarch was doing. Mrs. Monarch did it quite as well, but I

abstained from applauding. It was very odd to see such people apply for

such poor pay. She looked as if she had ten thousand a year. Her husband

had used the word that described her: she was in the London current

jargon essentially and typically "smart." Her figure was, in the same

order of ideas, conspicuously and irreproachably "good." For a woman of

her age her waist was surprisingly small; her elbow moreover had the

orthodox crook. She held her head at the conventional angle, but why did

she come to ME? She ought to have tried on jackets at a big shop. I

feared my visitors were not only destitute but "artistic"--which would

be a great complication. When she sat down again I thanked her,

observing that what a draughtsman most valued in his model was the

faculty of keeping quiet.

"Oh SHE can keep quiet," said Major Monarch. Then he added jocosely:

"I've always kept her quiet."

"I'm not a nasty fidget, am I?" It was going to wring tears from me, I

felt, the way she hid her head, ostrich-like, in the other broad bosom.

The owner of this expanse addressed his answer to me. "Perhaps it isn't

out of place to mention--because we ought to be quite business-like,

oughtn't we?--that when I married her she was known as the Beautiful

Statue."

"Oh dear!" said Mrs. Monarch ruefully.

"Of course I should want a certain amount of expression," I rejoined.

"Of COURSE!"--and I had never heard such unanimity.

"And then I suppose you know that you'll get awfully tired."

"Oh we NEVER get tired!" they eagerly cried.

"Have you had any kind of practice?"

They hesitated--they looked at each other. "We've been

photographed--IMMENSELY," said Mrs. Monarch.

"She means the fellows have asked us themselves," added the Major.

"I see--because you're so good-looking."

"I don't know what they thought, but they were always after us."

"We always got our photographs for nothing," smiled Mrs. Monarch.

"We might have brought some, my dear," her husband remarked.

"I'm not sure we have any left. We've given quantities away," she

explained to me.

"With our autographs and that sort of thing," said the Major.

"Are they to be got in the shops?" I inquired as a harmless pleasantry.

"Oh yes, HERS--they used to be."

"Not now," said Mrs. Monarch with her eyes on the floor.

CHAPTER II

I could fancy the "sort of thing" they put on the presentation copies of

their photographs, and I was sure they wrote a beautiful hand. It was

odd how quickly I was sure of everything that concerned them. If they

were now so poor as to have to cam shillings and pence they could never

have had much of a margin. Their good looks had been their capital, and

they had good-humouredly made the most of the career that this resource

marked out for them. It was in their faces, the blankness, the deep

intellectual repose of the twenty years of country-house visiting that

had given them pleasant intonations. I could see the sunny

drawing-rooms, sprinkled with periodicals she didn't read, in which Mrs.

Monarch had continuously sat; I could see the wet shrubberies in which

she had walked, equipped to admiration for either exercise. I could see

the rich covers the Major had helped to shoot and the wonderful garments

in which, late at night, he repaired to the smoking-room to talk about

them. I could imagine their leggings and waterproofs, their knowing

tweeds and rugs, their rolls of sticks and cases of tackle and neat

umbrellas; and I could evoke the exact appearance of their servants and

the compact variety of their luggage on the platforms of country

stations.

They gave small tips, but they were liked; they didn't do anything

themselves, but they were welcome. They looked so well everywhere; they

gratified the general relish for stature, complexion and "form." They

knew it without fatuity or vulgarity, and they respected themselves in

consequence. They weren't superficial: they were thorough and kept

themselves up--it had been their line. People with such a taste for

activity had to have some line. I could feel how even in a dull house

they could have been counted on for the joy of life. At present

something had happened--it didn't matter what, their little income had

grown less, it had grown least--and they had to do something for

pocket-money. Their friends could like them, I made out, without liking

to support them. There was something about them that represented

credit--their clothes, their manners, their type; but if credit is a

large empty pocket in which an occasional chink reverberates, the chink

at least must be audible. What they wanted of me was help to make it so.

Fortunately they had no children--I soon divined that. They would also

perhaps wish our relations to be kept secret: this was why it was "for

the figure"--the reproduction of the face would betray them.

I liked them--I felt, quite as their friends must have done--they were

so simple; and I had no objection to them if they would suit. But

somehow with all their perfections I didn't easily believe in them.

After all they were amateurs, and the ruling passion of my life was--the

detestation of the amateur. Combined with this was another

perversity--an innate preference for the represented subject over the

real one: the defect of the real one was so apt to be a lack of

representation. I liked things that appeared; then one was sure. Whether

they WERE or not was a subordinate and almost always a profitless

question. There were other considerations, the first of which was that I

already had two or three recruits in use, notably a young person with

big feet, in alpaca, from Kilburn, who for a couple of years had come to

me regularly for my illustrations and with whom I was still--perhaps

ignobly--satisfied. I frankly explained to my visitors how the case

stood, but they had taken more precautions than I supposed. They had

reasoned out their opportunity, for Claude Rivet had told them of the

projected ÉDITION DE LUXE of one of the writers of our day--the rarest

of the novelists--who, long neglected by the multitudinous vulgar, and

dearly prized by the attentive (need I mention Philip Vincent?) had had

the happy fortune of seeing, late in life, the dawn and then the full

light of a higher criticism; an estimate in which on the part of the

public there was something really of expiation. The edition preparing,

planned by a publisher of taste, was practically an act of high

reparation; the woodcuts with which it was to be enriched were the

homage of English art to one of the most independent representatives of

English letters. Major and Mrs. Monarch confessed to me they had hoped I

might be able to work THEM into my branch of the enterprise. They knew I

was to do the first of the books, Rutland Ramsay, but I had to make

clear to them that my participation in the rest of the affair--this

first book was to be a test--must depend on the satisfaction I should

give. If this should be limited my employers would drop me with scarce

common forms. It was therefore a crisis for me, and naturally I was

making special preparations, looking about for new people, should they

be necessary, and securing the best types. I admitted however that I

should like to settle down to two or three good models who would do for

everything.

"Should we have often to--a--put on special clothes?" Mrs. Monarch

timidly demanded.

"Dear yes--that's half the business."

"And should we be expected to supply our own costumes?

"Oh no; I've got a lot of things. A painter's models put on--or put

off--anything he likes."

"And you mean--a--the same?"

"The same?"

Mrs. Monarch looked at her husband again.

"Oh she was just wondering," he explained, "if the costumes are in

GENERAL use." I had to confess that they were, and I mentioned further

that some of them--I had a lot of, genuine greasy last-century

things--had served their time, a hundred years ago, on living,

world-stained men and women; on figures not perhaps so far removed, in

that vanished world, from THEIR type, the Monarchs', QUOI! of a breeched

and bewigged age. "We'll put, on anything that FITS," said the Major.

"Oh I arrange that--they fit in the pictures."

"I'm afraid I should do better for the modern books. I'd come as you

like," said Mrs. Monarch.

"She has got a lot of clothes at home: they might do for contemporary

life," her husband continued.

"Oh I can fancy scenes in which you'd be quite natural." And indeed I

could see the slipshod re-arrangements of stale properties--the stories

I tried to produce pictures for without the exasperation of reading

them--whose sandy tracts the good lady might help to people. But I had

to return to the fact that--for this sort of work--the daily mechanical

grind--I was already equipped: the people I was working with were fully

adequate.

"We only thought we might be more like SOME characters," said Mrs.

Monarch mildly, getting up.

Her husband also rose; he stood looking at me with a dim wistfulness

that was touching in so fine a man. "Wouldn't it be rather a pull

sometimes to have--a--to have--?" He hung fire; he wanted me to help him

by phrasing what he meant. But I couldn't--I didn't know. So he brought

it out awkwardly: "The REAL thing; a gentleman, you know, or a lady." I

was quite ready to give a general assent--I admitted that there was a

great deal in that. This encouraged Major Monarch to say, following up

his appeal with an unacted gulp: "It's awfully hard--we've tried

everything." The gulp was communicative; it proved too much for his

wife. Before I knew it Mrs. Monarch had dropped again upon a divan and

burst into tears. Her husband sat down beside her, holding one of her

hands; whereupon she quickly dried her eyes with the other, while I felt

embarrassed as she looked up at me. "There isn't a confounded job I

haven't applied for--waited for--prayed for. You can fancy we'd be

pretty bad first. Secretaryships and that sort of thing? You might as

well ask for a peerage. I'd be ANYTHING--I'm strong; a messenger or a

coalheaver. I'd put on a gold-laced cap and open carriage-doors in front

of the haberdasher's; I'd hang about a station to carry portmanteaux;

I'd be a postman. But they won't LOOK at you; there are thousands as

good as yourself already on the ground. GENTLEMEN, poor beggars, who've

drunk their wine, who've kept their hunters!"

I was as reassuring as I knew how to be, and my visitors were presently

on their feet again while, for the experiment, we agreed on an hour. We

were discussing it when the door opened and Miss Churm came in with a

wet umbrella. Miss Churm had to take the omnibus to Maida Vale and then

walk half a mile. She looked a trifle blowsy and slightly splashed. I

scarcely ever saw her come in without thinking afresh how odd it was

that, being so little in herself, she should yet be so much in others.

She was a meagre little Miss Churm, but was such an ample heroine of

romance. She was only a freckled cockney, but she could represent

everything, from a fine lady to a shepherdess, she had the faculty as

she might have had a fine voice or long hair. She couldn't spell and she

loved beer, but she had two or three "points," and practice, and a

knack, and mother-wit, and a whimsical sensibility, and a love of the

theatre, and seven sisters,--and not an ounce of respect, especially for

the H. The first thing my visitors saw was that her umbrella was wet,

and in their spotless perfection they visibly winced at it. The rain had

come on since their arrival.

"I'm all in a soak; there WAS a mess of people in the 'bus. I wish you

lived near a stytion," said Miss Churm. I requested her to get ready as

quickly as possible, and she passed into the room in which she always

changed her dress. But before going out she asked me what she was to get

into this time.

"It's the Russian princess, don't you know?" I answered; "the one with

the 'golden eyes,' in black velvet, for the long thing in the

CHEAPSIDE."

"Golden eyes? I SAY!" cried Miss Churm, while my companions watched her

with intensity as she withdrew. She always arranged herself, when she

was late, before I could turn round; and I kept my visitors a little on

purpose, so that they might get an idea, from seeing her, what would be

expected of themselves. I mentioned that she was quite my notion of an

excellent model--she was really very clever.

"Do you think she looks like a Russian princess?" Major Monarch asked

with lurking alarm.

"When I make her, yes."

"Oh if you have to MAKE her--!" he reasoned, not without point.

"That's the most you can ask. There are so many who are not makeable."

"Well now, HERE'S a lady"--and with a persuasive smile he passed his arm

into his wife's--"who's already made!"

"Oh I'm not a Russian princess," Mrs. Monarch protested a little coldly.

I could see she had known some and didn't like them. There at once was a

complication of a kind I never had to fear with Miss Churm.

This young lady came back in black velvet--the gown was rather rusty and

very low on her lean shoulders--and with a Japanese fan in her red

hands. I reminded her that in the scene I was doing she had to look over

some one's head. "I forget whose it is but it doesn't matter. Just look

over a head."

"I'd rather look over a stove," said Miss Churm and she took her station

near the fire. She fell into Position, settled herself into a tall

attitude, gave a certain backward inclination to her head and a certain

forward droop to her fan, and looked, at least to my prejudiced sense,

distinguished and charming, foreign and dangerous. We left her looking

so while I went downstairs with Major and Mrs. Monarch.

"I believe I could come about as near it as that," said Mrs. Monarch.

"Oh you think she's shabby, but you must allow for the alchemy of art."

However, they went off with an evident increase of comfort founded on

their demonstrable advantage in being the real thing. I could fancy them

shuddering over Miss Churm. She was very droll about them when I went

back, for I told her what they wanted.

"Well, if SHE can sit I'll tyke to bookkeeping," said my model.

"She's very ladylike," I replied as an innocent form of aggravation.

"So much the worse for YOU. That means she can't turn round."

"She'll do for the fashionable novels."

"Oh yes, she'll DO for them!" my model humorously declared. "Ain't they

bad enough without her?" I had often sociably denounced them to Miss

Churm.

CHAPTER III

It was for the elucidation of a mystery in one of these works that I

first tried Mrs. Monarch. Her husband came with her, to be useful if

necessary--it was sufficiently clear that as a general thing he would

prefer to come with her. At first I wondered if this were for

"propriety's" sake--if he were going to be jealous and meddling. The

idea was too tiresome, and if it had been confirmed it would speedily

have brought our acquaintance to a close. But I soon saw there was

nothing in it and that if he accompanied Mrs. Monarch it was--in

addition to the chance of being wanted--simply because he had nothing

else to do. When they were separate his occupation was gone, and they

never HAD been separate. I judged rightly that in their awkward

situation their close union was their main comfort and that this union

had no weak spot. It was a real marriage, an encouragement to the

hesitating, a nut for pessimists to crack. Their address was humble--I

remember afterwards thinking it had been the only thing about them that

was really professional--and I could fancy the lamentable lodgings in

which the Major would have been left alone. He could sit there more or

less grimly with his wife--he couldn't sit there anyhow without her.

He had too much tact to try and make himself agreeable when he couldn't

be useful; so when I was too absorbed in my work to talk he simply sat

and waited. But I liked to hear him talk--it made my work, when not

interrupting it, less mechanical, less special. To listen to him was to

combine the excitement of going out with the economy of staying at home.

There was only one hindrance--that I seemed not to know any of the

people this brilliant couple had known. I think he wondered extremely,

during the term of our intercourse, whom the deuce I DID know. He hadn't

a stray sixpence of an idea to fumble for, so we didn't spin it very

fine; we confined ourselves to questions of leather and even of

liquor-saddlers and breeches-makers and how to get excellent claret

cheap--and matters like "good trains" and the habits of small game. His

lore on these last subjects was astonishing--he managed to interweave

the station-master with the ornithologist. When he couldn't talk about

greater things he could talk cheerfully about smaller, and since I

couldn't accompany him into reminiscences of the fashionable world he

could lower the conversation without a visible effort to my level.

So earnest a desire to please was touching in a man who could so easily

have knocked one down. He looked after the fire and had an opinion on

the draught of the stove without my asking him, and I could see that he

thought many of my arrangements not half knowing. I remember telling him

that if I were only rich I'd offer him a salary to come and teach me how

to live. Sometimes he gave a random sigh of which the essence might have

been: "Give me even such a bare old-barrack as this, and I'd do

something with it!" When I wanted to use him he came alone; which was an

illustration of the superior courage of women. His wife could bear her

solitary second floor, and she was in general more discreet; showing by

various small reserves that she was alive to the propriety of keeping

our relations markedly professional--not letting them slide into

sociability. She wished it to remain clear that she and the Major were

employed, not cultivated, and if she approved of me as a superior, who

could be kept in his place, she never thought me quite good enough for

an equal.

She sat with great intensity, giving the whole of her mind to it, and

was capable of remaining for an hour almost as motionless as before a

photographer's lens. I could see she had been photographed often, but

somehow the very habit that made her good for that purpose unfitted her

for mine. At first I was extremely pleased with her ladylike air, and it

was a satisfaction, on coming to follow her lines, to see how good they

were and how far they could lead the pencil. But after a little

skirmishing I began to find her too insurmountably stiff; do what I

would with it my drawing looked like a photograph or a copy of a

photograph. Her figure had no variety of expression--she herself had no

sense of variety. You may say that this was my business and was only a

question of placing her. Yet I placed her in every conceivable position

and she managed to obliterate their differences. She was always a lady

certainly, and into the bargain was always the same lady. She was the

real thing, but always the same thing. There were moments when I rather

writhed under the serenity of her confidence that she WAS the real

thing. All her dealings with me and all her husband's were an

implication that this was lucky for ME. Meanwhile I found myself trying

to invent types that approached her own, instead of making her own

transform itself--in the clever way that was not impossible for instance

to poor Miss Churm. Arrange as I would and take the precautions I would,

she always came out, in my pictures, too tall--landing me in the dilemma

of having represented a fascinating woman as seven feet high, which (out

of respect perhaps to my own very much scantier inches) was far from my

idea of such a personage.

The case was worse with the Major--nothing I could do would keep HIM

down, so that he became useful only for the representation of brawny

giants. I adored variety and range, I cherished human accidents, the

illustrative note; I wanted to characterise closely, and the thing in

the world I most hated was the danger of being ridden by a type. I had

quarrelled with some of my friends about it; I had parted company with

them for maintaining that one HAD to be, and that if the type was

beautiful--witness Raphael and Leonardo--the servitude was only a gain.

I was neither Leonardo nor Raphael--I might only be a presumptuous young

modern searcher; but I held that everything was to be sacrificed sooner

than character. When they claimed that the obsessional form could easily

BE character I retorted, perhaps superficially, "Whose?" It couldn't be

everybody's--it might end in being nobody's.

After I had drawn Mrs. Monarch a dozen times I felt surer even than

before that the value of such a model as Miss Churm resided precisely in

the fact that she had no positive stamp, combined of course with the

other fact that what she did have was a curious and inexplicable talent

for imitation. Her usual appearance was like a curtain which--she could

draw up at request for a capital performance. This performance was

simply suggestive; but it was a word to the wise--it was vivid and

pretty. Sometimes even I thought it, though she was plain herself, too

insipidly pretty; I made it a reproach to her that the figures drawn

from her were monotonously (BÊTEMENT, as we used to say) graceful.

Nothing made her more angry: it was so much her pride to feel she could

sit for characters that had nothing in common with each other. She would

accuse me at such moments of taking away her "reputytion."

It suffered a certain shrinkage, this queer quantity, from the repeated

visits of my new friends. Miss Churm was greatly in demand, never in

want of employment, so I had no scruple in putting her off occasionally,

to try them more at my ease. It was certainly amusing at first to do the

real thing--it was amusing to do Major Monarch's trousers. They WERE the

real thing, even if he did come out colossal. It was amusing to do his

wife's back hair--it was so mathematically neat--and the particular

"smart" tension of her tight stays. She lent herself especially to

positions in which the face was somewhat averted or blurred, she

abounded in ladylike back views and PROFILS PERDUS. When she stood erect

she took naturally one of the attitudes in which court-painters

represent queens and princesses; so that I found myself wondering

whether, to draw out this accomplishment, I couldn't get the editor of

the CHEAPSIDE to publish a really royal romance, "A Tale of Buckingham

Palace." Sometimes however the real thing and the make-believe came into

contact; by which I mean that Miss Churm, keeping an appointment or

coming to make one on days when I had much work in hand, encountered her

invidious rivals. The encounter was not on their part, for they noticed

her no more than if she had been the housemaid; not from intentional

loftiness, but simply because as yet, professionally, they didn't know

how to fraternise, as I could imagine they would have liked--or at least

that the Major would. They couldn't talk about the omnibus--they always

walked; and they didn't know what else to try--she wasn't interested in

good trains or cheap claret. Besides, they must have felt--in the

air--that she was amused at them, secretly derisive of their ever

knowing how. She wasn't a person to conceal the limits of her faith if

she had had a chance to show them. On the other hand Mrs. Monarch didn't

think her tidy; for why else did she take pains to say to me--it was

going out of the way, for Mrs. Monarch--that she didn't like dirty

women?

One day when my young lady happened to be present with my other

sitters--she even dropped in, when it was convenient, for a chat--I

asked her to be so good as to lend a hand in getting tea, a service with

which she was familiar and which was one of a class that, living as I

did in a small way, with slender domestic resources, I often appealed to

my models to render. They liked to lay hands on my property, to break

the sitting, and sometimes the china--it made them feel Bohemian. The

next time I saw Miss Churm after this incident she surprised me greatly

by making a scene about it--she accused me of having wished to humiliate

her. She hadn't resented the outrage at the time, but had seemed

obliging and amused, enjoying the comedy of asking Mrs. Monarch, who sat

vague and silent, whether she would have cream and sugar, and putting an

exaggerated simper into the question. She had tried intonations--as if

she too wished to pass for the real thing--till I was afraid my other

visitors would take offence.

Oh they were determined not to do this, and their touching patience was

the measure of their great need. They would sit by the hour,

uncomplaining, till I was ready to use them; they would come back on the

chance of being wanted and would walk away cheerfully if it failed. I

used to go to the door with them to see in what magnificent order they

retreated. I tried to find other employment for them--I introduced them

to several artists. But they didn't "take," for reasons I could

appreciate, and I became rather anxiously aware that after such

disappointments they fell back upon me with a heavier weight. They did

me the honour to think me most their form. They weren't romantic enough

for the painters, and in those days there were few serious workers in

black-and-white.

Besides, they had an eye to the great job I had mentioned to them--they

had secretly set their hearts on supplying the right essence for my

pictorial vindication of our fine novelist. They knew that for this

undertaking I should want no costume--effects, none of the frippery of

past ages--that it was a case in which everything would be contemporary

and satirical and presumably genteel. If I could work them into it their

future would be assured, for the labour would of course be long and the

occupation steady.

One day Mrs. Monarch came without her husband--she explained his absence

by his having had to go to the City. While she sat there in her usual

relaxed majesty there came at the door a knock which I immediately

recognised as the subdued appeal of a model out of work. It was followed

by the entrance of a young man whom I at once saw to be a foreigner and

who proved in fact an Italian acquainted with no English word but my

name, which he uttered in a way that made it seem to include all others.

I hadn't then visited his country, nor was I proficient in his tongue;

but as he was not so meanly constituted--what Italian is?--as to depend

only on that member for expression he conveyed to me, in familiar but

graceful mimicry, that he was in search of exactly the employment in

which the lady before me was engaged. I was not struck with him at

first, and while I continued to draw I dropped few signs of interest or

encouragement. He stood his ground however--not importunately, but with

a dumb dog-like fidelity in his eyes that amounted to innocent

impudence, the manner of a devoted servant--he might have been in the

house for years--unjustly suspected. Suddenly it struck me that this

very attitude and expression made a picture; whereupon I told him to sit

down and wait till I should be free. There was another picture in the

way he obeyed me, and I observed as I worked that there were others

still in the way he looked wonderingly, with his head thrown back, about

the high studio. He might have been crossing himself in Saint Peter's.

Before I finished I said to myself "The fellow's a bankrupt

orange-monger, but a treasure."

When Mrs. Monarch withdrew he passed across the room like a flash to

open the door for her, standing there with the rapt pure gaze of the

young Dante spellbound by the young Beatrice. As I never insisted, in

such situations, on the blankness of the British domestic, I reflected

that he had the making of a servant--and I needed one, but couldn't pay

him to be only that--as well as of a model; in short I resolved to adopt

my bright adventurer if he would agree to officiate in the double

capacity. He jumped at my offer, and in the event my rashness--for I had

really known nothing about him--wasn't brought home to me. He proved a

sympathetic though a desultory ministrant, and had in a wonderful degree

the SENTIMENT DE LA POSE. It was uncultivated, instinctive, a part of

the happy instinct that had guided him to my door and helped him to

spell out my name on the card nailed to it. He had had no other

introduction to me than a guess, from the shape of my high north window,

seen outside, that my place was a studio and that as a studio it would

contain an artist. He had wandered to England in search of fortune, like

other itinerants, and had embarked, with a partner and a small green

hand-cart, on the sale of penny ices. The ices had melted away and the

partner had dissolved in their train. My young man wore tight yellow

trousers with reddish stripes and his name was Oronte. He was sallow but

fair, and when I put him into some old clothes of my own he looked like

an Englishman. He was as good as Miss Churm, who could look, when

requested, like an Italian.

CHAPTER IV

I thought Mrs. Monarch's face slightly convulsed when, on her coming

back with her husband, she found Oronte installed. It was strange to

have to recognise in a scrap of a lazzarone a competitor to her

magnificent Major. It was she who scented danger first, for the Major

was anecdotically unconscious. But Oronte gave us tea, with a hundred

eager confusions--he had never been concerned in so queer a process--and

I think she thought better of me for having at last an "establishment."

They saw a couple of drawings that I had made of the establishment, and

Mrs. Monarch hinted that it never would have struck her he had sat for

them. "Now the drawings you make from US, they look exactly like us,"

she reminded me, smiling in triumph; and I recognised that this was

indeed just their defect. When I drew the Monarchs I couldn't anyhow get

away from them--get into the character I wanted to represent; and I

hadn't the least desire my model should be discoverable in my picture.

Miss Churm never was, and Mrs. Monarch thought I hid her, very properly,

because she was vulgar; whereas if she was lost it was only as the dead

who go to heaven are lost--in the gain of an angel the more.

By this time I had got a certain start with "Rutland Ramsay," the first

novel in the great projected series; that is I had produced a dozen

drawings, several with the help of the Major and his wife, and I had

sent them in for approval. My understanding with the publishers as I

have already hinted, had been that I was to be left to do my work, in

this particular case, as I liked, with the whole book committed to me;

but my connexion with the rest of the series was only contingent. There

were moments when, frankly, it WAS a comfort to have the real thing

under one's hand for there were characters in "Rutland Ramsay" that were

very much like it. There were people presumably as erect as the Major

and women of as good a fashion as Mrs. Monarch. There was a great deal

of country-house life-treated, it is true, in a fine fanciful ironical

generalised way--and there was a considerable implication of

knickerbockers and kilts. There were certain things I had to settle at

the outset; such things for instance as the exact appearance of the hero

and the particular bloom and figure of the heroine. The author of course

gave me a lead, but there was a margin for interpretation. I took the

Monarchs into my confidence, I told them frankly what I was about, I

mentioned my embarrassments and alternatives. "Oh take HIM!" Mrs.

Monarch murmured sweetly, looking at her husband; and "What could you

want better than my wife?" the Major inquired with the comfortable

candour that now prevailed between us.

I wasn't obliged to answer these remarks--I was only obliged to place my

sitters. I wasn't easy in mind, and I postponed a little timidly perhaps

the solving of my question. The book was a large canvas, the other

figures were numerous, and I worked off at first some of the episodes in

which the hero and the heroine were not concerned. When once I had set

THEM up I should have to stick to them--I couldn't make my young man

seven feet high in one place and five feet nine in another. I inclined

on the whole to the latter measurement, though the Major more than once

reminded me that he looked about as young as any one. It was indeed

quite possible to arrange him, for the figure, so that it would have

been difficult to detect his age. After the spontaneous Oronte had been

with me a month, and after I had given him to understand several times

over that his native exuberance would presently constitute an

insurmountable barrier to our further intercourse, I waked to a sense of

his heroic capacity. He was only five feet seven, but the remaining

inches were latent. I tried him almost secretly at first, for I was

really rather afraid of the judgement my other models would pass on such

a choice. If they regarded Miss Churm as little better than a snare what

would they think of the representation by a person so little the real

thing as an Italian street-vendor of a protagonist formed by a public

school?

If I went a little in fear of them it wasn't because they bullied me,

because they had got an oppressive foothold, but because in their really

pathetic decorum and mysteriously permanent newness they counted on me

so intensely. I was therefore very glad when Jack Hawley came home: he

was always of such good counsel. He painted badly himself, but there was

no one like him for putting his finger on the place. He had been absent

from England for a year; he had been somewhere--I don't remember

where--to get a fresh eye. I was in a good deal of dread of any such

organ, but we were old friends; he had been away for months and a sense

of emptiness was creeping into my life. I hadn't dodged a missile for a

year.

He came back with a fresh eye, but with the same old black velvet

blouse, and the first evening he spent in my studio we smoked cigarettes

till the small hours. He had done no work himself, he had only got the

eye; so the field was clear for the production of my little things. He

wanted to see what I had produced for the CHEAPSIDE, but he was

disappointed in the exhibition. That at least seemed the meaning of two

or three comprehensive groans which, as he lounged on my big divan, his

leg folded under him, looking at my latest drawings, issued from his

lips with the smoke of the cigarette.

"What's the matter with you?" I asked.

"What's the matter with you?"

"Nothing save that I'm mystified."

"You are indeed. You're quite off the hinge. What's the meaning of this

new fad?" And he tossed me, with visible irreverence, a drawing in which

I happened to have depicted both my elegant models. I asked if he didn't

think it good, and he replied that it struck him as execrable, given the

sort of thing I had always represented myself to him as wishing to

arrive at; but I let that pass--I was so anxious to see exactly what he

meant. The two figures in the picture looked colossal, but I supposed

this was not what he meant, inasmuch as, for aught he knew to the

contrary, I might have been trying for some such effect. I maintained

that I was working exactly in the same way as when he last had done me

the honour to tell me I might do something some day. "Well, there's a

screw loose somewhere," he answered; "wait a bit and I'll discover it."

I depended upon him to do so: where else was the fresh eye? But he

produced at last nothing more luminous than "I don't know--I don't like

your types." This was lame for a critic who had never consented to

discuss with me anything but the question of execution, the direction of

strokes and the mystery of values.

"In the drawings you've been looking at I think my types are very

handsome."

"Oh they won't do!"

"I've been working with new models."

"I see you have. THEY won't do."

"Are you very sure of that?"

"Absolutely--they're stupid."

"You mean I am--for I ought to get round that."

"You can't--with such people. Who are they?"

I told him, so far as was necessary, and he concluded heartlessly: "CE

SONT DES GENS QU'IL FAUT METTRE A LA PORTE."

"You've never seen them; they're awfully good"--I flew to their defence.

"Not seen them? Why all this recent work of yours drops to pieces with

them. It's all I want to see of them."

"No one else has said anything against it--the CHEAPSIDE people are

pleased."

"Every one else is an ass, and the CHEAPSIDE people the biggest asses of

all. Come, don't pretend at this time of day to have pretty illusions

about the public, especially about publishers and editors. It's not for

SUCH animals you work--it's for those who know, COLORO CHE SANNO; so

keep straight for me if you can't keep straight for yourself. There was

a certain sort of thing you used to try for--and a very good thing it

was. But this twaddle isn't in it." When I talked with Hawley later

about "Rutland Ramsay" and its possible successors he declared that I

must get back into my boat again or I should go to the bottom. His voice

in short was the voice of warning.

I noted the warning, but I didn't turn my friends out of doors. They

bored me a good deal; but the very fact that they bored me admonished me

not to sacrifice them--if there was anything to be done with

them--simply to irritation. As I look back at this phase they seem to me

to have pervaded my life not a little. I have a vision of them as most

of the time in my studio, seated against the wall on an old velvet bench

to be out of the way, and resembling the while a pair of patient

courtiers in a royal antechamber. I'm convinced that during the coldest

weeks of the winter they held their ground because it saved them fire.

Their newness was losing its gloss, and it was impossible not to feel

them objects of charity. Whenever Miss Churm arrived they went away, and

after I was fairly launched in "Rutland Ramsay" Miss Churm arrived

pretty often. They managed to express to me tacitly that they supposed I

wanted her for the low life of the book, and I let them suppose it,

since they had attempted to study the work--it was lying about the

studio--without discovering that it dealt only with the highest circles.

They had dipped into the most brilliant of our novelists without

deciphering many passages. I still took an hour from them, now and

again, in spite of Jack Hawley's warning: it would be time enough to

dismiss them, if dismissal should be necessary, when the rigour of the

season was over. Hawley had made their acquaintance--he had met them at

my fireside--and thought them a ridiculous pair. Learning that he was a

painter they tried to approach him, to show him too that they were the

real thing; but he looked at them across the big room, as if they were

miles away: they were a compendium of everything he most objected to in

the social system of his country. Such people as that, all convention

and patent-leather, with ejaculations that stopped conversation, had no

business in a studio. A studio was a place to learn to see, and how

could you see through a pair of feather-beds?

The main inconvenience I suffered at their hands was that at first I was

shy of letting it break upon them that my artful little servant had

begun to sit to me for "Rutland Ramsay." They knew I had been odd

enough--they were prepared by this time to allow oddity to artists--to

pick a foreign vagabond out of the streets when I might have had a

person with whiskers and credentials; but it was some time before they

learned how high I rated his accomplishments. They found him in an

attitude more than once, but they never doubted I was doing him as an

organ-grinder. There were several things they never guessed, and one of

them was that for a striking scene in the novel, in which a footman

briefly figured, it occurred to me to make use of Major Monarch as the

menial. I kept putting this off, I didn't like to ask him to don the

livery--besides the difficulty of finding a livery to fit him. At last,

one day late in the winter, when I was at work on the despised Oronte,

who caught one's idea on the wing, and was in the glow of feeling myself

go very straight, they came in, the Major and his wife, with their

society laugh about nothing (there was less and less to laugh at); came

in like country-callers--they always reminded me of that--who have

walked across the park after church and are presently persuaded to stay

to luncheon. Luncheon was over, but they could stay to tea--I knew they

wanted it. The fit was on me, however, and I couldn't let my ardour cool

and my work wait, with the fading daylight, while my model prepared it.

So I asked Mrs. Monarch if she would mind laying it out--a request which

for an instant brought all the blood to her face. Her eyes were on her

husband's for a second, and some mute telegraphy passed between them.

Their folly was over the next instant; his cheerful shrewdness put an

end to it. So far from pitying their wounded pride, I must add, I was

moved to give it as complete a lesson as I could. They bustled about

together and got out the cups and saucers and made the kettle boil. I

know they felt as if they were waiting on my servant, and when the tea

was prepared I said: "He'll have a cup, please--he's tired." Mrs.

Monarch brought him one where he stood, and he took it from her as if he

had been a gentleman at a party squeezing a crush-hat with an elbow.

Then it came over me that she had made a great effort for me--made it

with a kind of nobleness--and that I owed her a compensation. Each time

I saw her after this I wondered what the compensation could be. I

couldn't go on doing the wrong thing to oblige them. Oh it WAS the wrong

thing, the stamp of the work for which they sat--Hawley was not the only

person to say it now. I sent in a large number of the drawings I had

made for "Rutland Ramsay," and I received a warning that was more to the

point than Hawley's. The artistic adviser of the house for which I was

working was of opinion that many of my illustrations were not what had

been looked for. Most of these illustrations were the subjects in which

the Monarchs had figured. Without going into the question of what HAD

been looked for, I had to face the fact that at this rate I shouldn't

get the other books to do. I hurled myself in despair on Miss Churm--I

put her through all her paces. I not only adopted Oronte publicly as my

hero, but one morning when the Major looked in to see if I didn't

require him to finish a CHEAPSIDE figure for which he had begun to sit

the week before, I told him I had changed my mind--I'd do the drawing

from my man. At this my visitor turned pale and stood looking at me. "Is

HE your idea of an English gentleman?" he asked.

I was disappointed, I was nervous, I wanted to get on with my work; so.

I replied with irritation: "Oh my dear Major--I can't be ruined for

YOU!"

It was a horrid speech, but he stood another moment--after which,

without a word, he quitted the studio. I drew a long breath, for I said

to myself that I shouldn't see him again. I hadn't told him definitely

that I was in danger of having my work rejected, but I was vexed at his

not having felt the catastrophe in the air, read with me the moral of

our fruitless collaboration, the lesson that in the deceptive atmosphere

of art even the highest respectability may fail of being plastic.

I didn't owe my friends money, but I did see them again. They reappeared

together three days later, and, given all the other facts, there was

something tragic in that one. It was a clear proof they could find

nothing else in life to do. They had threshed the matter out in a dismal

conference--they had digested the bad news that they were not in for the

series. If they weren't useful to me even for the CHEAPSIDE their

function seemed difficult to determine, and I could only judge at first

that they had come, forgivingly, decorously, to take a last leave. This

made me rejoice in secret that I had little leisure for a scene; for I

had placed both my other models in position together and I was pegging

away at a drawing from which I hoped to derive glory. It had been

suggested by the passage in which Rutland Ramsay, drawing up a chair to

Artemisia's piano-stool, says extraordinary things to her while she

ostensibly fingers out a difficult piece of music. I had done Miss Churm

at the piano before--it was an attitude in which she knew how to take on

an absolutely poetic grace. I wished the two figures to "compose"

together with intensity, and my little Italian had entered perfectly

into my conception. The pair were vividly before me, the piano had been

pulled out; it was a charming show of blended youth and murmured love,

which I had only to catch and keep. My visitors stood and looked at it,

and I was friendly to them over my shoulder.

They made no response, but I was used to silent company and went on with

my work, only a little disconcerted--even though exhilarated by the

sense that this was at least the ideal thing--at not having got rid of

them after all. Presently I heard Mrs. Monarch's sweet voice beside or

rather above me: "I wish her hair were a little better done." I looked

up and she was staring with a strange fixedness at Miss Churm, whose

back was turned to her. "Do you mind my just touching it?" she went

on--a question which made me spring up for an instant as with the

instinctive fear that she might do the young lady a harm. But she

quieted me with a glance I shall never forget--I confess I should like

to have been able to paint that--and went for a moment to my model. She

spoke to her softly, laying a hand on her shoulder and bending over her;

and as the girl, understanding, gratefully assented, she disposed her

rough curls, with a few quick passes, in such a way as to make Miss

Churm's head twice as charming. It was one of the most heroic personal

services I've ever seen rendered. Then Mrs. Monarch turned away with a

low sigh and, looking about her as if for something to do, stooped to

the floor with a noble humility and picked up a dirty rag that had

dropped out of my paint-box.

The Major meanwhile had also been looking for something to do, and,

wandering to the other end of the studio, saw before him my

breakfast-things neglected, unremoved. "I say, can't I be useful HERE?"

he called out to me with an irrepressible quaver. I assented with a

laugh that I fear was awkward, and for the next ten minutes, while I

worked, I heard the light clatter of china and the tinkle of spoons and

glass. Mrs. Monarch assisted her husband--they washed up my crockery,

they put it away. They wandered off into my little scullery, and I

afterwards found that they had cleaned my knives and that my slender

stock of plate had an unprecedented surface. When it came over me, the

latent eloquence of what they were doing, I confess that my drawing was

blurred for a moment--the picture swam. They had accepted their failure,

but they couldn't accept their fate. They had bowed their heads in

bewilderment to the perverse and cruel law in virtue of which the real

thing could be so much less precious than the unreal; but they didn't

want to starve. If my servants were my models, then my models might be

my servants. They would reverse the parts--the others would sit for the

ladies and gentlemen and THEY would do the work. They would still be in

the studio--it was an intense dumb appeal to me not to turn them out.

"Take us on," they wanted to say--"we'll do ANYTHING."

My pencil dropped from my hand; my sitting was spoiled and I got rid of

my sitters, who were also evidently rather mystified and awestruck.

Then, alone with the Major and his wife I had a most uncomfortable

moment. He put their prayer into a single sentence: "I say, you

know--just let US do for you, can't you?" I couldn't--it was dreadful to

see them emptying my slops; but I pretended I could, to oblige them, for

about a week. Then I gave them a sum of money to go away, and I never

saw them again. I obtained the remaining books, but my friend Hawley

repeats that Major and Mrs. Monarch did me a permanent harm, got me into

false ways. If it be true I'm content to have paid the price--for the

memory.

THE STORY OF IT

CHAPTER I

The weather had turned so much worse that the rest of the day was

certainly lost. The wind had risen and the storm gathered force; they

gave from time to time a thump at the firm windows and dashed even

against those protected by the verandah their vicious splotches of rain.

Beyond the lawn, beyond the cliff, the great wet brush of the sky dipped

deep into the sea. But the lawn, already vivid with the touch of May,

showed a violence of watered green; the budding shrubs and trees

repeated the note as they tossed their thick masses, and the cold

troubled light, filling the pretty saloon, marked the spring afternoon

as sufficiently young. The two ladies seated there in silence could

pursue without difficulty--as well as, clearly, without

interruption--their respective tasks; a confidence expressed, when the

noise of the wind allowed it to be heard, by the sharp scratch of Mrs.

Dyott's pen at the table where she was busy with letters.

Her visitor, settled on a small sofa that, with a palm-tree, a screen, a

stool, a stand, a bowl of flowers and three photographs in silver

frames, had been arranged near the light wood-fire as a choice

"corner"--Maud Blessingbourne, her guest, turned audibly, though at

intervals neither brief nor regular, the leaves of a book covered in

lemon-coloured paper and not yet despoiled of a certain fresh crispness.

This effect of the volume, for the eye, would have made it, as

presumably the newest French novel--and evidently, from the attitude of

the reader, "good"--consort happily with the special tone of the room, a

consistent air of selection and suppression, one of the finer aesthetic

evolutions. If Mrs. Dyott was fond of ancient French furniture and

distinctly difficult about it, her inmates could be fond--with whatever

critical cocks of charming dark-braided heads over slender sloping

shoulders--of modern French authors. Nothing had passed for half an

hour--nothing at least, to be exact, but that each of the companions

occasionally and covertly intermitted her pursuit in such a manner as to

ascertain the degree of absorption of the other without turning round.

What their silence was charged with therefore was not only a sense of

the weather, but a sense, so to speak, of its own nature. Maud

Blessingbourne, when she lowered her book into her lap, closed her eyes

with a conscious patience that seemed to say she waited; but it was

nevertheless she who at last made the movement representing a snap of

their tension. She got up and stood by the fire, into which she looked a

minute; then came round and approached the window as if to see what was

really going on. At this Mrs. Dyott wrote with refreshed intensity. Her

little pile of letters had grown, and if a look of determination was

compatible with her fair and slightly faded beauty, the habit of

attending to her business could always keep pace with any excursion of

her thought. Yet she was the first who spoke.

"I trust your book has been interesting."

"Well enough; a little mild."

A louder throb of the tempest had blurred the sound of the words. "A

little wild?"

"Dear no--timid and tame; unless I've quite lost my sense."

"Perhaps you have," Mrs. Dyott placidly suggested--"reading so many."

Her companion made a motion of feigned despair. "Ah you take away my

courage for going to my room, as I was just meaning to, for another."

"Another French one?"

"I'm afraid."

"Do you carry them by the dozen--?"

"Into innocent British homes?" Maud tried to remember. "I believe I

brought three--seeing them in a shop-window as I passed through town. It

never rains but it pours! But I've already read two."

"And are they the only ones you do read?"

"French ones?" Maud considered. "Oh no. D'Annunzio."

"And what's that?" Mrs. Dyott asked as she affixed a stamp.

"Oh you dear thing!" Her friend was amused, yet almost showed pity. "I

know you don't read," Maud went on; "but why should you? YOU live!"

"Yes--wretchedly enough," Mrs. Dyott returned, getting her letters

together. She left her place, holding them as a neat achieved handful,

and came over to the fire, while Mrs. Blessingbourne turned once more to

the window, where she was met by another flurry.

Maud spoke then as if moved only by the elements. "Do you expect him

through all this?"

Mrs. Dyott just waited, and it had the effect, indescribably, of making

everything that had gone before seem to have led up to the question.

This effect was even deepened by the way she then said "Whom do you

mean?"

"Why I thought you mentioned at luncheon that Colonel Voyt was to walk

over. Surely he can't."

"Do you care very much?" Mrs. Dyott asked.

Her friend now hesitated. "It depends on what you call 'much.' If you

mean should I like to see him--then certainly."

"Well, my dear, I think he understands you're here."

"So that as he evidently isn't coming," Maud laughed, "it's particularly

flattering! Or rather," she added, giving up the prospect again, "it

would be, I think, quite extraordinarily flattering if he did. Except

that of course," she threw in, "he might come partly for you."

"'Partly' is charming. Thank you for 'partly.' If you ARE going

upstairs, will you kindly," Mrs Dyott pursued, "put these into the box

as you pass?"

The younger woman, taking the little pile of letters, considered them

with envy. "Nine! You ARE good. You're always a living reproach!"

Mrs. Dyott gave a sigh. "I don't do it on purpose. The only thing, this

afternoon," she went on, reverting to the other question, "would be

their not having come down."

"And as to that you don't know."

"No--I don't know." But she caught even as she spoke a rat-tat-tat of

the knocker, which struck her as a sign. "Ah there!"

"Then I go." And Maud whisked out.

Mrs. Dyott, left alone, moved with an air of selection to the window,

and it was as so stationed, gazing out at the wild weather, that the

visitor, whose delay to appear spoke of the wiping of boots and the

disposal of drenched mackintosh and cap, finally found her. He was tall

lean fine, with little in him, on the whole, to confirm the titular in

the "Colonel Voyt" by which he was announced. But he had left the army,

so that his reputation for gallantry mainly depended now on his fighting

Liberalism in the House of Commons. Even these facts, however, his

aspect scantily matched; partly, no doubt, because he looked, as was

usually said, un-English. His black hair, cropped close, was lightly

powdered with silver, and his dense glossy beard, that of an emir or a

caliph, and grown for civil reasons, repeated its handsome colour and

its somewhat foreign effect. His nose had a strong and shapely arch, and

the dark grey of his eyes was tinted with blue. It had been said of

him--in relation to these signs--that he would have struck you as a Jew

had he not, in spite of his nose, struck you so much as an Irishman.

Neither responsibility could in fact have been fixed upon him, and just

now, at all events, he was only a pleasant weather-washed wind-battered

Briton, who brought in from a struggle with the elements that he

appeared quite to have enjoyed a certain amount of unremoved mud and an

unusual quantity of easy expression. It was exactly the silence ensuing

on the retreat of the servant and the closed door that marked between

him and his hostess the degree of this ease. They met, as it were,

twice: the first time while the servant was there and the second as soon

as he was not. The difference was great between the two encounters,

though we must add in justice to the second that its marks were at first

mainly negative. This communion consisted only in their having drawn

each other for a minute as close as possible--as possible, that is, with

no help but the full clasp of hands. Thus they were mutually held, and

the closeness was at any rate such that, for a little, though it took

account of dangers, it did without words. When words presently came the

pair were talking by the fire and she had rung for tea. He had by this

time asked if the note he had despatched to her after breakfast had been

safely delivered.

"Yes, before luncheon. But I'm always in a state when--except for some

extraordinary reason--you send such things by hand. I knew, without it,

that you had come. It never fails. I'm sure when you're there--I'm sure

when you're not."

He wiped, before the glass, his wet moustache. "I see. But this morning

I had an impulse."

"It was beautiful. But they make me as uneasy, sometimes, your impulses,

as if they were calculations; make me wonder what you have in reserve."

"Because when small children are too awfully good they die? Well, I AM a

small child compared to you--but I'm not dead yet. I cling to life."

He had covered her with his smile, but she continued grave. "I'm not

half so much afraid when you're nasty."

"Thank you! What then did you do," he asked, "with my note?"

"You deserve that I should have spread it out on my dressing-table--or

left it, better still, in Maud Blessingbourne's room."

He wondered while he laughed. "Oh but what does SHE deserve?"

It was her gravity that continued to answer. "Yes--it would probably

kill her."

"She believes so in you?"

"She believes so in YOU. So don't be TOO nice to her."

He was still looking, in the chimney-glass, at the state of his

beard--brushing from it, with his handkerchief, the traces of wind and

wet. "If she also then prefers me when I'm nasty it seems to me I ought

to satisfy her. Shall I now at any rate see her?"

"She's so like a pea on a pan over the possibility of it that she's

pulling herself together in her room."

"Oh then we must try and keep her together. But why, graceful, tender,

pretty too--quite or almost as she is--doesn't she re-marry?"

Mrs. Dyott appeared--and as if the first time--to look for the reason.

"Because she likes too many men."

It kept up his spirits. "And how many MAY a lady like--?"

"In order not to like any of them too much? Ah that, you know, I never

found out--and it's too late now. When," she presently pursued, "did you

last see her?"

He really had to think. "Would it have been since last November or

so?--somewhere or other where we spent three days."

"Oh at Surredge? I know all about that. I thought you also met

afterwards."

He had again to recall. "So we did! Wouldn't it have been somewhere at

Christmas? But it wasn't by arrangement!" he laughed, giving with his

forefinger a little pleasant nick to his hostess's chin. Then as if

something in the way she received this attention put him back to his

question of a moment before: "Have you kept my note?"

She held him with her pretty eyes. "Do you want it back?"

"Ah don't speak as if I did take things--!"

She dropped her gaze to the fire. "No, you don't; not even the hard

things a really generous nature often would." She quitted, however, as

if to forget that, the chimney-place. "I put it THERE!"

"You've burnt it? Good!" It made him easier, but he noticed the next

moment on a table the lemon-coloured volume left there by Mrs.

Blessingbourne, and, taking it up for a look, immediately put it down.

"You might while you were about it have burnt that too."

"You've read it?"

"Dear yes. And you?"

"No," said Mrs. Dyott; "it wasn't for me Maud brought it."

It pulled her visitor up. "Mrs. Blessingbourne brought it?"

"For such a day as this." But she wondered. "How you look! Is it so

awful?"

"Oh like his others." Something had occurred to him; his thought was

already far. "Does she know?"

"Know what?"

"Why anything."

But the door opened too soon for Mrs. Dyott, who could only murmur

quickly--"Take care!"

CHAPTER II

It was in fact Mrs. Blessingbourne, who had under her arm the book she

had gone up for--a pair of covers showing this time a pretty, a candid

blue. She was followed next minute by the servant, who brought in tea,

the consumption of which, with the passage of greetings, inquiries and

other light civilities between the two visitors, occupied a quarter of

an hour. Mrs. Dyott meanwhile, as a contribution to so much amenity,

mentioned to Maud that her fellow guest wished to scold her for the

books she read--a statement met by this friend with the remark that he

must first be sure about them. But as soon as he had picked up the new,

the blue volume he broke out into a frank "Dear, dear!"

"Have you read that too?" Mrs. Dyott inquired. "How much you'll have to

talk over together! The other one," she explained to him, "Maud speaks

of as terribly tame."

"Ah I must have that out with her! You don't feel the extraordinary

force of the fellow?" Voyt went on to Mrs. Blessingbourne.

And so, round the hearth, they talked--talked soon, while they warmed

their toes, with zest enough to make it seem as happy a chance as any of

the quieter opportunities their imprisonment might have involved. Mrs.

Blessingbourne did feel, it then appeared, the force of the fellow, but

she had her reserves and reactions, in which Voyt was much interested.

Mrs. Dyott rather detached herself, mainly gazing, as she leaned back,

at the fire; she intervened, however, enough to relieve Maud of the

sense of being listened to. That sense, with Maud, was too apt to convey

that one was listened to for a fool. "Yes, when I read a novel I mostly

read a French one," she had said to Voyt in answer to a question about

her usual practice; "for I seem with it to get hold more of the real

thing--to get more life for my money. Only I'm not so infatuated with

them but that sometimes for months and months on end I don't read any

fiction at all."

The two books were now together beside them. "Then when you begin again

you read a mass?"

"Dear no. I only keep up with three or four authors."

He laughed at this over the cigarette he had been allowed to light. "I

like your 'keeping up,' and keeping up in particular with 'authors.'"

"One must keep up with somebody," Mrs. Dyott threw off.

"I daresay I'm ridiculous," Mrs. Blessingbourne conceded without heeding

it; "but that's the way we express ourselves in my part of the country."

"I only alluded," said Voyt, "to the tremendous conscience of your sex.

It's more than mine can keep up with. You take everything too hard. But

if you can't read the novel of British and American manufacture, heaven

knows I'm at one with you. It seems really to show our sense of life as

the sense of puppies and kittens."

"Well," Maud more patiently returned, "I'm told all sorts of people are

now doing wonderful things; but somehow I remain outside."

"Ah it's THEY, it's our poor twangers and twaddlers who remain outside.

They pick up a living in the street. And who indeed would want them in?"

Mrs. Blessingbourne seemed unable to say, and yet at the same time to

have her idea. The subject, in truth, she evidently found, was not so

easy to handle. "People lend me things, and I try; but at the end of

fifty pages--"

"There you are! Yes--heaven help us!"

"But what I mean," she went on, "isn't that I don't get woefully weary

of the eternal French thing. What's THEIR sense of life?"

"AH VOILÀ!" Mrs. Dyott softly sounded.

"Oh but it IS one; you can make it out," Voyt promptly declared. "They

do what they feel, and they feel more things than we. They strike so

many more notes, and with so different a hand. When it comes to any

account of a relation say between a man and a woman--I mean an intimate

or a curious or a suggestive one--where are we compared to them? They

don't exhaust the subject, no doubt," he admitted; "but we don't touch

it, don't even skim it. It's as if we denied its existence, its

possibility. You'll doubtless tell me, however," he went on, "that as

all such relations ARE for us at the most much simpler we can only have

all round less to say about them."

She met this imputation with the quickest amusement. "I beg your pardon.

I don't think I shall tell you anything of the sort. I don't know that I

even agree with your premiss."

"About such relations?" He looked agreeably surprised. "You think we

make them larger?--or subtler?"

Mrs. Blessingbourne leaned back, not looking, like Mrs. Dyott, at the

fire, but at the ceiling. "I don't know what I think."

"It's not that she doesn't know," Mrs. Dyott remarked. "It's only that

she doesn't say."

But Voyt had this time no eye for their hostess. For a moment he watched

Maud. "It sticks out of you, you know, that you've yourself written

something. Haven't you--and published? I've a notion I could read YOU."

"When I do publish," she said without moving, "you'll be the last one I

shall tell. I HAVE," she went on, "a lovely subject, but it would take

an amount of treatment--!"

"Tell us then at least what it is."

At this she again met his eyes. "Oh to tell it would be to express it,

and that's just what I can't do. What I meant to say just now," she

added, "was that the French, to my sense, give us only again and again,

for ever and ever, the same couple. There they are once more, as one has

had them to satiety, in that yellow thing, and there I shall certainly

again find them in the blue."

"Then why do you keep reading about them?" Mrs. Dyott demanded.

Maud cast about. "I don't!" she sighed. "At all events, I shan't any

more. I give it up."

"You've been looking for something, I judge," said Colonel Voyt, "that

you're not likely to find. It doesn't exist."

"What is it?" Mrs. Dyott desired to know.

"I never look," Maud remarked, "for anything but an interest."

"Naturally. But your interest," Voyt replied, "is in something different

from life."

"Ah not a bit! I LOVE life in art, though I hate it anywhere else. It's

the poverty of the life those people show, and the awful bounders, of

both sexes, that they represent."

"Oh now we have you!" her interlocutor laughed. "To me, when all's said

and done, they seem to be--as near as art can come--in the truth of the

truth. It can only take what life gives it, though it certainly may be a

pity that that isn't better. Your complaint of their monotony is a

complaint of their conditions. When you say we get always the same

couple what do you mean but that we get always the same passion? Of

course we do!" Voyt pursued. "If what you're looking for is another,

that's what you won't anywhere find."

Maud for a while said nothing, and Mrs. Dyott seemed to wait. "Well, I

suppose I'm looking, more than anything else, for a decent woman."

"Oh then you mustn't look for her in pictures of passion. That's not her

element nor her whereabouts."

Mrs. Blessingbourne weighed the objection. "Does it not depend on what

you mean by passion?"

"I think I can mean only one thing: the enemy to behaviour."

"Oh I can imagine passions that are on the contrary friends to it."

Her fellow-guest thought. "Doesn't it depend perhaps on what you mean by

behaviour?"

"Dear no. Behaviour's just behaviour--the most definite thing in the

world."

"Then what do you mean by the 'interest' you just now spoke of? The

picture of that definite thing?"

"Yes--call it that. Women aren't ALWAYS vicious, even when they're--"

"When they're what?" Voyt pressed.

"When they're unhappy. They can be unhappy and good."

"That one doesn't for a moment deny. But can they be 'good' and

interesting?"

"That must be Maud's subject!" Mrs. Dyott interposed. "To show a woman

who IS. I'm afraid, my dear," she continued, "you could only show

yourself."

"You'd show then the most beautiful specimen conceivable"--and Voyt

addressed himself to Maud. "But doesn't it prove that life is, against

your contention, more interesting than art? Life you embellish and

elevate; but art would find itself able to do nothing with you, and, on

such impossible terms, would ruin you."

The colour in her faint consciousness gave beauty to her stare. "'Ruin'

me?"

"He means," Mrs. Dyott again indicated, "that you'd ruin 'art.'"

"Without on the other hand"--Voyt seemed to assent--"its giving at all a

coherent impression of you."

"She wants her romance cheap!" said Mrs. Dyott.

"Oh no--I should be willing to pay for it. I don't see why the

romance--since you give it that name--should be all, as the French

inveterately make it, for the women who are bad."

"Oh they pay for it!" said Mrs. Dyott.

"DO they?"

"So at least"--Mrs. Dyott a little corrected herself--"one has gathered

(for I don't read your books, you know!) that they're usually shown as

doing."

Maud wondered, but looking at Voyt, "They're shown often, no doubt, as

paying for their badness. But are they shown as paying for their

romance?"

"My dear lady," said Voyt, "their romance is their badness. There isn't

any other. It's a hard law, if you will, and a strange, but goodness has

to go without that luxury. Isn't to BE good just exactly, all round, to

go without?" He put it before her kindly and clearly--regretfully too,

as if he were sorry the truth should be so sad. He and she, his pleasant

eyes seemed to say, would, had they had the making of it, have made it

better. "One has heard it before--at least I have; one has heard your

question put. But always, when put to a mind not merely muddled, for an

inevitable answer. 'Why don't you, CHER MONSIEUR, give us the drama of

virtue?' 'Because, CHÈRE MADAME, the high privilege of virtue is

precisely to avoid drama.' The adventures of the honest lady? The honest

lady hasn't, can't possibly have, adventures."

Mrs. Blessingbourne only met his eyes at first, smiling with some

intensity. "Doesn't it depend a little on what you call adventures?"

"My poor Maud," said Mrs. Dyott as if in compassion for sophistry so

simple, "adventures are just adventures. That's all you can make of

them!"

But her friend talked for their companion and as if without hearing.

"Doesn't it depend a good deal on what you call drama?" Maud spoke as

one who had already thought it out. "Doesn't it depend on what you call

romance?"

Her listener gave these arguments his very best attention. "Of course

you may call things anything you like--speak of them as one thing and

mean quite another. But why should it depend on anything? Behind these

words we use--the adventure, the novel, the drama, the romance, the

situation, in short, as we most comprehensively say--behind them all

stands the same sharp fact which they all in their different ways

represent."

"Precisely!" Mrs. Dyott was full of approval.

Maud however was full of vagueness. "What great fact?"

"The fact of a relation. The adventure's a relation; the relation's an

adventure. The romance, the novel, the drama are the picture of one. The

subject the novelist treats is the rise, the formation, the development,

the climax and for the most part the decline of one. And what is the

honest lady doing on that side of the town?"

Mrs. Dyott was more pointed. "She doesn't so much as FORM a relation."

But Maud bore up. "Doesn't it depend again on what you call a relation?"

"Oh," said Mrs. Dyott, "if a gentleman picks up her

pocket-handkerchief--"

"Ah even that's one," their friend laughed, "if she has thrown it to

him. We can only deal with one that is one."

"Surely," Maud replied. "But if it's an innocent one--"

"Doesn't it depend a good deal," Mrs. Dyott asked, "on what you call

innocent?"

"You mean that the adventures of innocence have so often been the

material of fiction? Yes," Voyt replied; "that's exactly what the bored

reader complains of. He has asked for bread and been given a stone. What

is it but, with absolute directness, a question of interest or, as

people say, of the story? What's a situation undeveloped but a subject

lost? If a relation stops, where's the story? If it doesn't stop,

where's the innocence? It seems to me you must choose. It would be very

pretty if it were otherwise, but that's how we flounder. Art is our

flounderings shown."

Mrs. Blessingbourne--and with an air of deference scarce supported

perhaps by its sketchiness--kept her deep eyes on this definition. "But

sometimes we flounder out."

It immediately touched in Colonel Voyt the spring of a genial derision.

"That's just where I expected YOU would! One always sees it come."

"He has, you notice," Mrs. Dyott parenthesised to Maud, "seen it come so

often; and he has always waited for it and met it."

"Met it, dear lady, simply enough! It's the old story, Mrs.

Blessingbourne. The relation's innocent that the heroine gets out of.

The book's innocent that's the story of her getting out. But what the

devil--in the name of innocence--was she doing IN?"

Mrs. Dyott promptly echoed the question. "You have to be in, you know,

to GET out. So there you are already with your relation. It's the end of

your goodness."

"And the beginning," said Voyt, "of your play!"

"Aren't they all, for that matter, even the worst," Mrs. Dyott pursued,

"supposed SOME time or other to get out? But if meanwhile they've been

in, however briefly, long enough to adorn a tale?"

"They've been in long enough to point a moral. That is to point ours!"

With which, and as if a sudden flush of warmer light had moved him,

Colonel Voyt got up. The veil of the storm had parted over a great red

sunset.

Mrs. Dyott also was on her feet, and they stood before his charming

antagonist, who, with eyes lowered and a somewhat fixed smile, had not

moved.

"We've spoiled her subject!" the elder lady sighed.

"Well," said Voyt, "it's better to spoil an artist's subject than to

spoil his reputation. I mean," he explained to Maud with his indulgent

manner, "his appearance of knowing what he has got hold of, for that, in

the last resort, is his happiness."

She slowly rose at this, facing him with an aspect as handsomely mild as

his own. "You can't spoil my happiness."

He held her hand an instant as he took leave. "I wish I could add to

it!"

CHAPTER III

When he had quitted them and Mrs. Dyott had candidly asked if her friend

had found him rude or crude, Maud replied--though not immediately--that

she had feared showing only too much how charming she found him. But if

Mrs. Dyott took this it was to weigh the sense. "How could you show it

too much?"

"Because I always feel that that's my only way of showing anything. It's

absurd, if you like," Mrs. Blessingbourne pursued, "but I never know, in

such intense discussions, what strange impression I may give."

Her companion looked amused. "Was it intense?"

"_I_ was," Maud frankly confessed.

"Then it's a pity you were so wrong. Colonel Voyt, you know, is right."

Mrs. Blessingbourne at this gave one of the slow soft silent headshakes

to which she often resorted and which, mostly accompanied by the light

of cheer, had somehow, in spite of the small obstinacy that smiled in

them, a special grace. With this grace, for a moment, her friend,

looking her up and down, appeared impressed, yet not too much so to take

the next minute a decision. "Oh my dear, I'm sorry to differ from any

one so lovely--for you're awfully beautiful to-night, and your frock's

the very nicest I've ever seen you wear. But he's as right as he can

be."

Maud repeated her motion. "Not so right, at all events as he thinks he

is. Or perhaps I can say," she went on, after an instant, "that I'm not

so wrong. I do know a little what I'm talking about."

Mrs. Dyott continued to study her. "You ARE vexed. You naturally don't

like it--such destruction."

"Destruction?"

"Of your illusion."

"I HAVE no illusion. If I had moreover it wouldn't be destroyed. I have

on the whole, I think, my little decency."

Mrs. Dyott stared. "Let us grant it for argument. What, then?"

"Well, I've also my little drama."

"An attachment?"

"An attachment."

"That you shouldn't have?"

"That I shouldn't have."

"A passion?"

"A passion."

"Shared?"

"Ah thank goodness, no!"

Mrs. Dyott continued to gaze. "The object's unaware--?"

"Utterly."

Mrs. Dyott turned it over. "Are you sure?"

"Sure."

"That's what you call your decency? But isn't it," Mrs. Dyott asked,

"rather his?"

"Dear no. It's only his good fortune."

Mrs. Dyott laughed. "But yours, darling--your good fortune: where does

THAT come in?"

"Why, in my sense of the romance of it."

"The romance of what? Of his not knowing?"

"Of my not wanting him to. If I did"--Maud had touchingly worked it

out--"where would be my honesty?"

The inquiry, for an instant, held her friend, yet only, it seemed, for a

stupefaction that was almost amusement. "Can you want or not want as you

like? Where in the world, if you don't want, is your romance?"

Mrs. Blessingbourne still wore her smile, and she now, with a light

gesture that matched it, just touched the region of her heart. "There!"

Her companion admiringly marvelled. "A lovely place for it, no

doubt!--but not quite a place, that I can see, to make the sentiment a

relation."

"Why not? What more is required for a relation for me?"

"Oh all sorts of things, I should say! And many more, added to those, to

make it one for the person you mention."

"Ah that I don't pretend it either should be or CAN be. I only speak for

myself."

This was said in a manner that made Mrs. Dyott, with a visible mixture

of impressions, suddenly turn away. She indulged in a vague movement or

two, as if to look for something; then again found herself near her

friend, on whom with the same abruptness, in fact with a strange

sharpness, she conferred a kiss that might have represented either her

tribute to exalted consistency or her idea of a graceful close of the

discussion. "You deserve that one should speak FOR you!"

Her companion looked cheerful and secure. "How CAN you without

knowing--?"

"Oh by guessing! It's not--?"

But that was as far as Mrs. Dyott could get. "It's not," said Maud, "any

one you've ever seen."

"Ah then I give you up!"

And Mrs. Dyott conformed for the rest of Maud's stay to the spirit of

this speech. It was made on a Saturday night, and Mrs. Blessingbourne

remained till the Wednesday following, an interval during which, as the

return of fine weather was confirmed by the Sunday, the two ladies found

a wider range of action. There were drives to be taken, calls made,

objects of interest seen at a distance; with the effect of much easy

talk and still more easy silence. There had been a question of Colonel

Voyt's probable return on the Sunday, but the whole time passed without

a sign from him, and it was merely mentioned by Mrs. Dyott, in

explanation, that he must have been suddenly called, as he was so liable

to be, to town. That this in fact was what had happened he made clear to

her on Thursday afternoon, when, walking over again late, he found her

alone. The consequence of his Sunday letters had been his taking, that

day, the 4.15. Mrs. Voyt had gone back on Thursday, and he now, to

settle on the spot the question of a piece of work begun at his place,

had rushed down for a few hours in anticipation of the usual collective

move for the week's end. He was to go up again by the late train, and

had to count a little--a fact accepted by his hostess with the hard

pliancy of practice--his present happy moments. Too few as these were,

however, he found time to make of her an inquiry or two not directly

bearing on their situation. The first was a recall of the question for

which Mrs. Blessingbourne's entrance on the previous Saturday had

arrested her answer. Had that lady the idea of anything between them?

"No. I'm sure. There's one idea she has got," Mrs. Dyott went on; "but

it's quite different and not so very wonderful."

"What then is it?"

"Well, that she's herself in love."

Voyt showed his interest. "You mean she told you?"

"I got it out of her."

He showed his amusement. "Poor thing! And with whom?"

"With you."

His surprise, if the distinction might be made, was less than his

wonder. "You got that out of her too?"

"No--it remains in. Which is much the best way for it. For you to know

it would be to end it."

He looked rather cheerfully at sea. "Is that then why you tell me?"

"I mean for her to know you know it. Therefore it's in your interest not

to let her."

"I see," Voyt after a moment returned. "Your real calculation is that my

interest will be sacrificed to my vanity--so that, if your other idea is

just, the flame will in fact, and thanks to her morbid conscience,

expire by her taking fright at seeing me so pleased. But I promise you,"

he declared, "that she shan't see it. So there you are!" She kept her

eyes on him and had evidently to admit after a little that there she

was. Distinct as he had made the case, however, he wasn't yet quite

satisfied. "Why are you so sure I'm the man?"

"From the way she denies you."

"You put it to her?"

"Straight. If you hadn't been she'd of course have confessed to you--to

keep me in the dark about the real one."

Poor Voyt laughed out again. "Oh you dear souls!"

"Besides," his companion pursued, "I wasn't in want of that evidence."

"Then what other had you?"

"Her state before you came--which was what made me ask you how much you

had seen her. And her state after it," Mrs. Dyott added. "And her

state," she wound up, "while you were here."

"But her state while I was here was charming."

"Charming. That's just what I say."

She said it in a tone that placed the matter in its right light--a light

in which they appeared kindly, quite tenderly, to watch Maud wander away

into space with her lovely head bent under a theory rather too big for

it. Voyt's last word, however, was that there was just enough in it--in

the theory--for them to allow that she had not shown herself, on the

occasion of their talk, wholly bereft of sense. Her consciousness, if

they let it alone--as they of course after this mercifully must--WAS, in

the last analysis, a kind of shy romance. Not a romance like their own,

a thing to make the fortune of any author up to the mark--one who should

have the invention or who COULD have the courage; but a small scared

starved subjective satisfaction that would do her no harm and nobody

else any good. Who but a duffer--he stuck to his contention--would see

the shadow of a "story" in it?

FLICKERBRIDGE

CHAPTER I

Frank Granger had arrived from Paris to paint a portrait--an order given

him, as a young compatriot with a future, whose early work would some

day have a price, by a lady from New York, a friend of his own people

and also, as it happened, of Addie's, the young woman to whom it was

publicly both affirmed and denied that he was engaged. Other young women

in Paris--fellow-members there of the little tight transpontine world of

art-study--professed to know that the pair had "several times" over

renewed their fond understanding. This, however, was their own affair;

the last phase of the relation, the last time of the times, had passed

into vagueness; there was perhaps even an impression that if they were

inscrutable to their friends they were not wholly crystalline to each

other and themselves. What had occurred for Granger at all events in

connexion with the portrait was that Mrs. Bracken, his intending model,

whose return to America was at hand, had suddenly been called to London

by her husband, occupied there with pressing business, but had yet

desired that her displacement should not interrupt her sittings. The

young man, at her request, had followed her to England and profited by

all she could give him, making shift with a small studio lent him by a

London painter whom he had known and liked a few years before in the

French atelier that then cradled, and that continued to cradle, so many

of their kind.

The British capital was a strange grey world to him, where people

walked, in more ways than one, by a dim light; but he was happily of

such a turn that the impression, just as it came, could nowhere ever

fail him, and even the worst of these things was almost as much an

occupation--putting it only at that--as the best. Mrs. Bracken moreover

passed him on, and while the darkness ebbed a little in the April days

he found himself consolingly committed to a couple of fresh subjects.

This cut him out work for more than another month, but meanwhile, as he

said, he saw a lot--a lot that, with frequency and with much expression,

he wrote about to Addie. She also wrote to her absent friend, but in

briefer snatches, a meagreness to her reasons for which he had long

since assented. She had other play for her pen as well as, fortunately,

other remuneration; a regular correspondence for a "prominent Boston

paper," fitful connexions with public sheets perhaps also in cases

fitful, and a mind above all engrossed at times, to the exclusion of

everything else, with the study of the short story. This last was what

she had mainly come out to go into, two or three years after he had

found himself engulfed in the mystery of Carolus. She was indeed, on her

own deep sea, more engulfed than he had ever been, and he had grown to

accept the sense that, for progress too, she sailed under more canvas.

It hadn't been particularly present to him till now that he had in the

least got on, but the way in which Addie had--and evidently still more

would--was the theme, as it were, of every tongue. She had thirty short

stories out and nine descriptive articles. His three or four portraits

of fat American ladies--they were all fat, all ladies and all

American--were a poor show compared with these triumphs; especially as

Addie had begun to throw out that it was about time they should go home.

It kept perpetually coming up in Paris, in the transpontine world, that,

as the phrase was, America had grown more interesting since they left.

Addie was attentive to the rumour, and, as full of conscience as she was

of taste, of patriotism as of curiosity, had often put it to him

frankly, with what he, who was of New York, recognised as her New

England emphasis: "I'm not sure, you know, that we do REAL justice to

our country." Granger felt he would do it on the day--if the day ever

came--he should irrevocably marry her. No other country could possibly

have produced her.