WHEN the porter’s wife (she used to answer the house-bell), announced “A
gentleman—with a lady, sir,” I had, as I often had in those days, for the
wish was 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. However, there was nothing at first to indicate that they
might not 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 spoke immediately—they only prolonged the preliminary
gaze which suggested 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 were not 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 said at last, with a dim smile which
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 friction as
an exposed surface shows it. The hand of time had played over her
freely, but only to simplify. 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 inquired; and I added that it was
very kind of him, though I could reflect that, as he only painted
landscape, this was not 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 one 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 that I worked in black and white, for magazines, for
story-books, for sketches of contemporary life, and consequently had
frequent 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 to fit the case
so little.
“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 an awful bore,” said Mrs. Monarch.
They evidently wished to be discreet—to take care not to swagger because
they were gentlefolks. I perceived they would have been 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 got the best,” 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 rejoin: “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 immediately 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 someone’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
promptitude 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 she came back blushing, with her fluttered
eyes on her husband. 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 intrusted 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?” Mrs. Monarch appealed to her husband.
He 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_!” they both exclaimed.
“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,” 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.