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
she was away from him his occupation was gone—she never _had_ been away
from him. 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 bear them with his wife—he
couldn’t bear them without her.
He had too much tact to try and make himself agreeable when he couldn’t
be useful; so he simply sat and waited, when I was too absorbed in my
work to talk. But I liked to make him talk—it made my work, when it
didn’t interrupt it, less sordid, 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
he and his wife 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 good 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 clever enough. I remember
telling him that if I were only rich I would offer him a salary to come
and teach me how to live. Sometimes he gave a random sigh, of which the
essence was: “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 if she were
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
lady-like 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 few times 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, was only a
question of placing her. I placed her in every conceivable position, but
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 was
oppressed by 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, in my pictures, came out 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 averred that the haunting type in question
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 perceived more clearly
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 that 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 lady-like 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 guess that 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 was not a person to conceal her scepticism if she
had had a chance to show it. 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—I 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 had not
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 they were not.
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 conscious, rather anxiously, that after such
disappointments they fell back upon me with a heavier weight. They did
me the honour to think that it was I who was most _their_ form. They
were not picturesque enough for the painters, and in those days there
were not so many 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
anxious stiffness 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 easily perceived 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 had not 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 emitted rough sounds of
discouragement and dismissal. He stood his ground, however, not
importunately, but with a dumb, dog-like fidelity in his eyes which
amounted to innocent impudence—the manner of a devoted servant (he might
have been in the house for years), unjustly suspected. Suddenly I saw
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 St.
Peter’s. Before I finished I said to myself: “The fellow’s a bankrupt
orange-monger, but he’s 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 made up my mind 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 known
nothing about him), was not 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 which 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 handcart,
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 required,
like an Italian.