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 seen such a queer 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 that 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, somehow, get
away from them—get into the character I wanted to represent; and I had
not 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
connection 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 straight 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,
the particular bloom 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 was not obliged to answer these remarks—I was only obliged to place my
sitters. I was not easy in mind, and I postponed, a little timidly
perhaps, the solution of the 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 anyone. 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
different times 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 judgment 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 was not 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 done 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, on a folded
leg, 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 majestic 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 that. I maintained that I was
working exactly in the same way as when he last had done me the honour to
commend me. “Well, there’s a big hole 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 had a couple of 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, as far as was necessary, and he declared, heartlessly: “_Ce
sont des gens qu’il faut mettre à la porte_.”
“You’ve never seen them; they’re awfully good,” I compassionately
objected.
“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.”
“Everyone 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’s
a certain sort of thing you tried for from the first—and a very good
thing it is. 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 would 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 looking like a pair of patient courtiers in a royal
ante-chamber. I am 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 that they were
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 that 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 them discover how my artful little servant had begun
to sit to me for “Rutland Ramsay.” They knew that 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 (he caught one’s idea
in an instant), and was in the glow of feeling that I was going very
straight, they came in, the Major and his wife, with their society laugh
about nothing (there was less and less to laugh at), 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 saw at this rate I shouldn’t get the other books to do. I
hurled myself in despair upon 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
figure for the _Cheapside_, for which he had begun to sit the week
before, I told him that I had changed my mind—I would 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_!”
He stood another moment; then, without a word, he quitted the studio. I
drew a long breath when he was gone, for I said to myself that I
shouldn’t see him again. I had not 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
re-appeared together, three days later, and under the circumstances there
was something tragic in the fact. It was a proof to me that 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 were not 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, intensely, 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 picture 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 was 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 upon 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 have 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, 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_.”
When all this hung before me the _afflatus_ vanished—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 a second-rate trick. If it be true
I am content to have paid the price—for the memory.