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 earn shillings and pence, they never had
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 which
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 were not 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 upon for cheerfulness. 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 liked them, but didn’t like 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 to 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—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 people 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 in
question, planned by a publisher of taste, was practically an act of high
reparation; the wood-cuts 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 that they had
hoped I might be able to work _them_ into my share 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—was to depend on the satisfaction
I should give. If this should be limited my employers would drop me
without a scruple. It was therefore a crisis for me, and naturally I was
making special preparations, looking about for new people, if they should
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 do 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. “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 would 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 rearrangements 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 portmanteaus; 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 have
drunk their wine, who have 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 she was 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 kind of
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, acutely.
“That’s the most you can ask. There are so many that 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 that she had known some and didn’t like them.
There, immediately, was a complication of a kind that 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
someone’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 down-stairs with Major and Mrs. Monarch.
“I think 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 lady-like,” 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 had enough without her?” I had often sociably denounced them to Miss
Churm.