_Wherein it is hinted that to be Famous is not necessarily to be
Great_
In a large and richly furnished studio that was the splendid workshop
of a fashionable portrait-painter there stood before an easel a
handsome fair-bearded man--handsome, though the head was small--a
fellow who held himself with self-reliance, straight and satisfied. And
with the calculated stroke of one who has mastered the technique of his
craft, he set down the loaded brush on the embrowned canvas, yielding
a touch of colour that told like living flesh on the portrait of the
pretty woman whose likeness he was building up into life.
The stroke of colour pleased him, and he stood back and peered at it.
He turned his head and glanced keenly at the pretty woman where she sat
in the handsome chair that stood on the painter’s throne before him,
her beauty enhanced and brought out by the carefully arranged crimson
draping that was set in the grand manner as a heavy curtain looped
behind her with golden cords and tassel--indeed, she made a telling
picture as she sat there framed in by the great screen that was placed
at her left hand to keep away the draught from the large double doors
near by.
The beauty of Lady Persimmon, as the world knows, had caught roving
royal eyes; and she was at the height of her vogue, gathering from this
strange source of public esteem such homage as is given to the toy of a
court. She was, in very truth, exquisite as a butterfly.
“Ah,” said she with languid, lazy accent that caressed the words she
uttered, “I should love to live in Bohemia.” And she added with a pout:
“Society is such a weary round--and so spiteful!”
Paul Pangbutt shrugged his shoulders:
“A part of the price you must pay for being a beautiful woman, my dear
lady,” he said--and he went back to his painting.
“What? Spite!” she asked, the handsome brows meeting in questioning
furrows. Her lips were very red--_half open with delicious whisperings
of scarlet sin_, a minor poet had it--so she would keep them half open,
though she most pronouncedly estranged herself from the minor poet for
close upon a fortnight in display of her deep resentment. Thus, too,
she was now being limned.
Pangbutt painted the corner of her pathetic mouth:
“Spite is the unwitting tribute of a petty mind,” he pronounced.
“I don’t see that that is any excuse for it,” she said smartly.
Pangbutt stood back; and he uttered a light laugh:
“The world is one vast engine of criticism,” he said. “A man is not
a critic because he writes for a newspaper. That act is generally
the mark of his incapacity. We are all discriminators. Bless my
soul--_conversation_ is criticism more than half the time! And why not?”
“That’s rather alarming, isn’t it?” she cooed. “Fancy if we criticised
our friends!”
“Exactly what you do!” he pshawed. “You give your friendship: it is
criticism in action. On others you turn a cold shoulder. You have said
no word--but you have passed criticism. You have--well!--you have
turned a very pretty but cruel back--uttered a more brutal verdict than
tongue ever spoke.”
She laughed lightly:
“You’re a charming colourist, Paul--but all your craft cannot whitewash
spite,” she said.
“No, no,” said he. “I only say that criticism has its shabby side.
Spite is criticism gone sour.... But, tsha! I don’t believe there is
all this venom in the world.” He laid down his palette: “It’s a very
comfortable old world.... I’m afraid the light has gone.”
He pushed the easel aside, and came to where she sat. He set a foot on
the throne, and leaned his elbow upon his knee, gazing into her eyes:
“The light has gone, and your great beauty calls for all the light--it
dares the sun’s severest cross-examination.”
He held out his hand and she placed her slender fingers in his; she
felt his admiring regard upon her. He pressed her fingers:
“You are firing my art as it has never been fired--you have given my
craft all that it has lacked--yet your beauty, that exquisite thing
over which you have no control, which is of no willing of yours,
not even your own gift to yourself, is so subtle, so elusive, so
wonderful, that all the colours of my art, all my knowledge of their
use, cannot give more than a hint of that which you have, and without
the asking. You are the living thing--I can at best but paint some poor
suggestion of it. And when I have done, what is there in all my effort
of the warmth and the sweetness, of the mystic fragrance of you?...
Yet”--he played with her fingers--“yet,” he added, “you are giving me
that inspiration that will set me above my fellows--the artist has
never been anything of moment until fired by the flame of a great
passion--and it may be that your beauty will make my art to glow and
live.”
“I am glad,” she said, “if I--have----”
She hesitated prettily, and he kissed her fingers.
She was really thinking that this was a doing of the thing handsomely,
but young Nick Bellenden of the Guards talked less and made of loving
a more exciting affair. After all, the embrace was chief part of the
business--not this dandified talk.
Thus they played at half-revealed travesties of passion; she keeping
back much she would not have had him guess; he himself, perhaps, only
half-realizing how little he allowed her glamour to interfere with
his art until the light was gone and his craft at rest. The man had
not even the excuse of jumping blood, the plea of hot-headedness. He
never allowed his intrigues to interfere with his self-ordained task of
setting a crown of contemporary fame upon his achievement....
It was dusk when he said inquiringly:
“You’ll have some tea?”
He rang the bell.
She laughed gaily:
“You have not turned on the light,” she said.
He snapped the trigger of the electric switch, and the room burst into
light.
An old man-servant flung open the door and entered, bearing a
glittering tea-service on a silver salver. As he came into view round
the edge of the high screen, Pangbutt beckoned him towards the throne:
“Set the tray by her ladyship, Dukes,” said he.
The old butler set down the things on the throne at her feet.
Lady Persimmon lolled back in her chair:
“Nevertheless,” she said, “I should love, just for a little while, to
live in Bohemia.”
Pangbutt laughed. It had been borne in upon him that this gentle beauty
had deft resource and a somewhat confirmed habit in steering awkward
corners. He came back to argument:
“But Bohemia, too, has its shabby side,” he said--“there is spite even
in Bohemia.... I’m afraid I’m watering down some of your illusions,
Lady Persimmon.”
“Ah, it’s quite easy to see that _you_ were not long in Bohemia--not
long enough to be infected with its home-sickness.”
The butler passed stealthily out of the room on silent feet--and the
catch on the door faintly clicked.
The pretty woman nestled back amongst her cushions, and gazed through
half-closed lids with languorous eyes at the man who poured out the tea
near her feet.
“It’s so pleasant,” she said with a comfortable sigh, “to see the
tea--the silver--the china. The fragrance of it all----”
He stopped, the silver teapot in his hand, and smiled:
“But there are no footmen in Bohemia--very little silver--very
indifferent china.” He handed her a cup of tea. “They live as often as
not upon imagination--and mad cow is their chiefest dish.”
She raised inquiring eyebrows:
“Mad cow?” she asked.
He nodded:
“Hunger,” said he, and he laughed.... “It doesn’t sound an alluring
dish, does it?”
“How dreadful!” she purred, and sipped tea. “Still”--she sighed--“it
must be rather exciting. It must be so romantic--to starve.”
Pangbutt shrugged his shoulders:
“This is an age of romance, then,” said he.
She sighed, prattling on:
“And it must be delicious to be famous.”
The flattery sent a smirk to Pangbutt’s lips:
“Ah, Fame----!” he said.
The handle of the door moved, clicking in its turning, and Pangbutt,
looking over his shoulder, where he stood by the edge of the great
screen, saw the door open, and a haggard face look in. The intruder
came into the room a step or so.
Pangbutt gasped with frank surprise:
“Anthony? Good God, where have you sprung from?”
“Sorry to come before the light has quite gone, Paul; but I’m starving.”
“Starving?”
Anthony nodded his head:
“H’m, h’m! There you have the real devil in the machinery--and I’m
turning on the lime-light of confession.” He glanced round the great
studio deliberately: “This is rather a handsome room to confess in--a
palace to our rooms in the old Paris days, eh?”
Pangbutt was cudgelling his wits to say something that would discover
the presence of the seated lady behind the screen to the careless
intruder, when Anthony strode up to him; and as the corner of the
throne came into his range of vision beyond the end of the screen, he
caught sight of the tray with the bright tea-things upon it.
“Food, ye gods!” he cried, and strode towards the tray. “Paul,” he said
hoarsely--“I must have food.”
He stretched out his hand to the tray--halted--hesitated--stood up and
took off his hat, as, on passing the screen, the enthroned sitter came
into his view.
He bowed:
“Madame,” said he--“I apologize for my want of manners. The truth
is I pawned them weeks ago--with my waistcoat and the last family
portrait--a miniature of my uncle the general--a most polished person,
who would have died of an apoplectic fit to see himself coming to move
in such mixed company----”
Pangbutt coughed; and mumbling their names, as the fashion is, he
introduced them, adding:
“A friend of mine--from Bohemia.”
His eyes laughed to her. He turned to Anthony as the two bowed to each
other formally:
“Anthony,” said he--“the sight of you takes me back to Paris--and
makeshifts.”
“Makeshifts!” Anthony laughed sadly, and, rousing, added--“I say, Paul,
have you finished with the crumbs on that tray?”
Pangbutt uttered an embarrassed laugh, and went and rang the bell.
“Anthony was always impatient for the dinner-hour,” he said--and
turning to Dukes as he appeared at the door he added--“Take away the
tray, Dukes----”
Anthony put out his hand:
“I say--couldn’t he--leave the tray? I see some crumbs.... Bring
another tray, Dukes.”
Pangbutt signed to the old butler to wait:
“A glass of wine, Anthony?” he asked.
“Tsah! you don’t understand, Paul. I’m not playing with my vitals--I’m
starving, man,” he said hoarsely.
“A chicken?”
“The man’s a god!”
“D’you mind it cold?”
“Heavens, Paul! I shall die in the midst of all these elaborate
courtesies--this rigid etiquette!”
He sank down wearily upon a corner of the painting throne, and fidgeted
with the tea-things on the tray.
Pangbutt gave an embarrassed laugh, and turned to the butler:
“Dukes, bring up a tray--cold chicken--wine--anything you can get.
Quick as you can.”
“Yessir!” said Dukes, and formally disappeared.
The beauty had been markedly uneasy; she now rose to take her leave.
“I must be running away, Mr. Pangbutt,” she said; and bowing over her
shoulder to Anthony, who rose and returned her bow with stiff precision
as she stepped lightly down from the throne: “So sorry!” she said.
As Pangbutt moved with her through the door she asked him in
confidential undertone:
“Who’s the savage? Where does he come from?”
“Bohemia,” he said, with a dry mocking smile; and he lingered about
her on the landing, to assist her with her cloak. He escorted her
downstairs to her carriage....
When they were gone from the studio, Anthony Baddlesmere rose from his
seat, carrying the last piece of a tea-cake in his hand, and, walking
over to the easel, as he ate the cake he regarded the picture with
critical eye:
“H’m! ’Tain’t bad!” he growled.
Pangbutt entered the room and shut the door.
He laughed:
“Her ladyship doesn’t seem to be so enamoured of Bohemia after all,” he
muttered.
“Eh?” asked Anthony.
“Oh--nothing--nothing,” said Pangbutt. “I am afraid we have spoilt a
pretty woman’s illusion.”
Anthony gazed at the canvas before him:
“To destroy a pretty woman’s illusions is cruel as plucking out a
child’s eyes,” he said, and added: “Who’s the doll?”
“Lady Persimmon; but----”
“What? Eleanor Persimmon, who married old Gilders Persimmon?... He dyed
his beard for the wedding--naughty old man--and he’s had to renew it
ever since----”
Pangbutt went to the fireplace, and he turned and said severely:
“Sir Gilders Persimmon is not in his youth, but----”
“No, no, Paul--I’m not blaming him for being a ruin--but he’s so
damned badly restored.” He turned to the picture. “So you are Eleanor
Persimmon, my lady!” He gazed at the portrait dreamily; and, suddenly
rousing, added: “Not much of a likeness, old boy, is it?”
Pangbutt smiled wryly.
Anthony peered round the easel at him:
“I suppose she babbles all the time!” said he.
Pangbutt stiffened before the fire:
“Lady Persimmon is a most charming woman,” he said.
“Yes, yes; it’s in the family,” Anthony said airily--“she’s a sort of
cousin of mine. My brother had rather a calf-love for her--when he was
seventeen--and a calf.”
Pangbutt flushed:
“I do not care to discuss Lady Persimmon,” he said stiffly.
“No, no; I can quite understand that,” said Anthony breezily. “Nor do
I--nor do I. She was always rather uninteresting.”
He walked over to the throne: “Ho, ho!” thought he. “H’m! ha! Paul
still worships the titled classes. He was always weak in the first
commandment.”
He sat down wearily and searched aimlessly under the little covers of
the cake-dishes on the tray.
“Paul,” said he, “I exaggerated when I said there were crumbs....”
And he added with a laugh--“I don’t suppose cousin Eleanor recognised
cousin Anthony--I was only sixteen--besides, she would not be prepared
for his rising at her pretty feet like a down-at-heels pantomime clown
in this Palace of Art--this lofty pleasure-house.”
“You wrong Lady Persimmon by insinuation,” said Pangbutt sulkily--“she
is a woman of most generous sentiments.”
Anthony uttered a funny little laughing grunt:
“Cousin Eleanor was always the soul of sentiment and--delicate
self-indulgence. She used to adore the portrait of Shelley--weep over
Chatterton--cry over Kit Marlowe--and--married a baronet in an advanced
state of decay.”
He got up, strode to the easel again, and examined the picture.
Pangbutt watched him under his brows with sulky attention, lolling
against the mantelpiece.
“Come, Paul, old boy,” Anthony said at last--“I’ve been sketching the
doll’s soul for you; but you’ve got none of _that_ into her picture....
The colour and technique may be all there--and it is splendidly
handled--_but where’s the woman?_”
Anthony’s frank criticism, his just and keen appreciation of the
good and the weak side of a work of art, had always won Pangbutt’s
admiration; and the scowl left his eyes now as the praise bit into his
conceit. The detraction passed by him:
“D’you know, Anthony,” he said--“sometimes I suspect I am too
successful--too easily successful--and I have a horror of becoming
commonplace.”
His eyes followed the other as he slouched carelessly back to the
throne and flung himself upon it.
“Pooh! Nonsense, Paul.” He searched aimlessly amongst the empty plates
again: “That’s all cant. Look at _me_. I’m as empty as a bubble--but
it’s just as difficult to write sparkling prose on an empty stomach as
to be a poetic alderman.”
Pangbutt gazed down at his own shining boots complacently:
“I have not forgotten what personal discomfort was, in the old Paris
days. I detested it. I determined from the first to be rid of it....
Where are you living?”
The man that sat on the throne shrugged his shoulders, gazing at
vacancy sadly:
“In a very shabby corner of Bohemia, Paul, where, in the streets,
every vagrant wind makes whirlpools of stray papers--that shuffle
by--like the damned restless whispering ghosts of rejected poems--or
other stammerings that are the inky outpourings of broken literary
careers.... Not at all the sort of place that you would like,
old boy.... But, Paul”--he looked round the room--“you muttered
something--about--a chicken--just now----”
Paul laughed--a little embarrassedly; and rang the bell:
“You’d like to take off your overcoat?” he asked.
Anthony laughed drily:
“Tsh! Paul!--we’ll avoid delicate subjects, please. But since I am in
the confessional, I ought to add that I haven’t a coat or waistcoat.
Misfortune makes us acquainted with strange underclothes.”
Paul Pangbutt smiled; but a frown followed close upon the smile, and
blackened it. He was possessed of that peculiar egoism which, at the
sight of the pitiful, is but roused to a delicious self-pity.
“Ah,” said he; and a little suspicion of patronage slipped into his
manner, as it does when we are content to comfort our friends with
phrases--“I have not forgotten what makeshifts were in Paris--before I
made my mark.... I always detested frayed cuffs.”
A funny little smile played about the lips of the seated man; he nodded
grimly:
“H’m, yes. Having no shirt at all has _that_ advantage--the cuffs do
not fray.”
Pangbutt’s scowl came flitting back:
“Yes; I know.... You and the others always made a jest of the
disgusting pinch and meanness of it all----”
The weary man nodded:
“Ah, yes, it’s true,” said he, and he sighed--“the road was very
weary--very dusty--sometimes--in Paris.”
The other strode vigorously up and down the room, with that vigour that
had set him on the road to success: his eyes were fixed within:
“But _I_ determined at the first chance I got to shake off that dust
of the students’ quarter of Paris. I detested the untidiness of them
all--the leanness and the grim jest of it--and the everlasting loans
that were never paid.”
Anthony’s face, as he watched the impatient striding from under his
brows, listening to the triumphant note of success, flickered with
a grim smile. Paul Pangbutt had not been exactly notorious for the
lending of loans. It came to him that his quest for help was not going
to be an easy one.
The other suddenly came to a halt, and looked keenly at Anthony where
he sat; remembering that this brooding man was the real subject of
talk, he added:
“But--are things really as low with you as you say, Anthony?... You
always made a jest of hard work.”
Anthony laughed sadly:
“And sometimes we got a good deal of hard work out of a jest; eh,
Paul?” The smile died out of his eyes as soon as he had spoken:
“No,” he added, “there’s no jest in it--unless the gods laugh at
misfortune.... I am about at the end of things.”
Pangbutt assumed the fatherly note:
“Anthony,” said he--“I hope you will not mind my saying so, but you
were always most reckless in your expenditure--or rather in your loans
to all that army of hangers-on about you.”
It came to Anthony, as he stood in the withering blight of this man’s
lack of sympathy, that if he were going to ask for help he must set
aside all delicacy and put the situation before him bluntly. He made an
unwilling start:
“Some years ago, Paul,” he said, “after you had made your mark in
Paris, and were doing the round of the foreign courts, you no doubt
heard that Caroline made rather a sensation with a book.”
Pangbutt nodded:
“I have read it,” he said--but his attitude was enigma.
Anthony was relieved to find there was to be no oratorial protest in
honour of Style. He went on as though repeating a distasteful task he
had set himself:
“It has been attacked from all sides. It is as dead--as--a railway
sandwich.”
“That is rather a misfortune,” said Pangbutt.
Anthony laughed. He felt strangely ashamed--of himself--of his friend.
And it flashed through his thinking parts, with lightning stroke, that
this was the man whom Caroline had nursed through the typhoid.
He was roused from his reflections by Pangbutt’s sharp question:
“And you?”
He searched about in his mind for what he had last said:
“Eh? Me? Oh, ah, yes; I tried to grow a garden of literature in Fleet
Street--to bring to blossom the tender buds of the new school of
thought. But my star was not in journalism. My paper was burnt up
in the fire of the young immortals who flocked to my office, whose
masterpieces few would buy--or read.” He smiled a wan smile, and
sighed: “The paper has gone into ash.... That’s why, when the wind
blows keen, there is so much dust in Fleet Street.”
Pangbutt’s eyes were fixed critically upon his own survey of this man’s
past, and he had but half listened to the other’s words:
“On the whole,” said he drily, “you have not been very fortunate, then?”
Anthony laughed sadly, but said nothing.
It was definitely borne in upon him that he would never be able to ask
this man for money.
The other was embarrassed by the silence:
“What are you going to do?” he asked uncomfortably.
Anthony roused himself. He took up the thread of his appeal, but he now
went on vaguely--he felt that it was hopeless:
“Oh, ah, yes.... Well, my verse is sunk to the honour of neglect--which
is not a matter wholly wanting in subtle flattery, since all the
clever young men tell me it is the reward of true poetry. But--here’s
food!” he cried, as the door opened and the butler entered, carrying
a tray, well laden: “Here’s food--so poetry go hang!” He seized the
carving-knife almost before Dukes had set down the tray; and the
austere servant took up the other discarded empty tray and softly
withdrew from the room. “A most radiant fowl!” cried Anthony, carving
it with swift precision.... “I say, Paul--you won’t mind my taking the
wings in my pocket for the youngster--he’s been a little sickly of
late!”
He carved off the wings and breast, and his searching glance fell on a
large handsome quarto that lay upon the throne by his side.
“Hullo!” said he--“a large-paper edition!” He turned it over and saw
that it was verse. “What idiot has been writing verses now?”
Pangbutt smiled:
“That’s a volume of collected poems by Sir Gilders Persimmon,” he said.
“Indecent old thing!... May I have the fly-leaf for the chicken?”
Pangbutt almost put out his hand in panic, fearing sacrilege; but he
said instead, rather stiffly:
“It is an autograph copy from my friend, Sir Gilders Persimmon; and----”
“Yes, yes--quite so. It’s luxury to write poetry when you’re rich,” he
said--“poetry should be handsomely treated.”
“Ah, Anthony--we scoff at riches----”
“Who scoffs at riches?” Anthony looked up sharply.
“We all sneer at times.”
Anthony laughed:
“They don’t trouble _my_ sleep much--not half so much as the lack of
them.”
Pangbutt smiled drily:
“Well,” said he--“you confess by insinuation that it’s very pleasant to
be even so discredited a thing as a millionaire?”
“I don’t know, Paul. I don’t call on ’em. When all’s said, they are
no worse than the folk who do call on ’em. The rich man, too, stands
before his abysses--he has his blood-curdlings like the poorest....
There are honest men and dishonest, even amongst the rich. Look at your
speculative millionaire--your mighty company-promoter! He don’t sleep
too well, thank God; but look at him.... To-day, society is licking his
boots--licking them, Paul--for who so sublime a boot-licker as your
hereditary flunkey of the Court? To-morrow---- Hang it, I’m talking
like a curate.” He laughed. “I always gabble of millionaires in my
sleep when the landlady is pressing for the rent.”
Pangbutt shrugged his shoulders:
“Nevertheless,” said he--“there’s something rather wonderful about a
millionaire.”
“A very proper and right sentiment, Paul! Of course, a millionaire is
a colossal article of commerce. Bigness appeals to the imagination. So
a school-boy looks at a bishop and thinks the works of God are very
wonderful.... But riches are comparative--there’s a millionaire who
cannot buy a digestion. Give me a competency----”
Pangbutt’s lip curled:
“How much is a competency?” he asked.
“H’m--well----”
He stood up suddenly, listening.
There was a distant ring of a bell.
Anthony hurriedly folded his handkerchief over the scraps of food, and
thrust them into his pocket.
He strode towards Pangbutt as though to say something--hesitated--he
could not bring himself to ask for money. There was a second peal at
the bell.
“I must be off,” he said--“I hear visitors.”
And waving his hand to Pangbutt he stepped quickly to the doorway.
When he reached the door he again hesitated--shook his head--and
letting himself quietly out, closed the door gently after him.
Paul Pangbutt was alone.
He stood brooding.
His lips moved into a complacent smile:
“I believe my success awed him,” he said.