done to make his life at home as sweet and pleasant as a loving mother
could--as could a most charming sister--and others' sisters who were
charming too, and much disposed to worship at the shrine of this young
celebrity, who woke up one morning in their little village to find
himself famous, and bore his blushing honors so meekly. And among them
the vicar's daughter, his sister's friend and co-teacher at the
Sunday-school, "a simple, pure, and pious maiden of gentle birth,"
everything he once thought a young lady should be; and her name it was
Alice, and she was sweet, and her hair was brown--as brown!...
And if he no longer found the simple country pleasures, the junketings
and picnics, the garden-parties and innocent little musical evenings,
quite so exciting as of old, he never showed it.
Indeed, there was much that he did not show, and that his mother and
sister tried in vain to guess--many things.
And among them one thing that constantly preoccupied and distressed
him--the numbness of his affections. He could be as easily demonstrative
to his mother and sister as though nothing had ever happened to
him--from the mere force of a sweet old habit--even more so, out of
sheer gratitude and compunction.
But, alas! he felt that in his heart he could no longer care for them in
the least!--nor for Taffy, nor the Laird, nor for himself; not even for
Trilby, of whom he constantly thought, but without emotion; and of whose
strange disappearance he had been told, and the story had been confirmed
in all its details by Angèle Boisse, to whom he had written.
It was as though some part of his brain where his affections were seated
had been paralyzed, while all the rest of it was as keen and as active
as ever. He felt like some poor live bird or beast or reptile, a part
of whose cerebrum (or cerebellum, or whatever it is) had been dug out by
the vivisector for experimental purposes; and the strongest emotional
feeling he seemed capable of was his anxiety and alarm about this
curious symptom, and his concern as to whether he ought to mention it or
not.
He did not do so, for fear of causing distress, hoping that it would
pass away in time, and redoubled his caresses to his mother and sister,
and clung to them more than ever; and became more considerate of others
in manner, word, and deed than he had ever been before, as though by
constantly assuming the virtue he had no longer he would gradually coax
it back again. There was no trouble he would not take to give pleasure
to the humblest.
Also, his vanity about himself had become as nothing, and he missed it
almost as much as his affection.
Yet he told himself over and over again that he was a great artist, and
that he would spare no pains to make himself a greater. But that was no
merit of his own.
2+2=4, also 2×2=4; that peculiarity was no reason why 4 should be
conceited; for what was 4 but a result, either way?
Well, he was like 4--just an inevitable result of circumstances over
which he had no control--a mere product or sum; and though he meant to
make himself as big a 4 as he could (to cultivate his peculiar
_fourness_), he could no longer feel the old conceit and
self-complacency; and they had been a joy, and it was hard to do without
them.
At the bottom of it all was a vague, disquieting unhappiness, a constant
fidget.
And it seemed to him, and much to his distress, that such mild
unhappiness would be the greatest he could ever feel henceforward--but
that, such as it was, it would never leave him, and that his moral
existence would be for evermore one long, gray, gloomy blank--the
glimmer of twilight--never glad, confident morning again!
So much for Little Billee's convalescence.
Then one day in the late autumn he spread his wings and flew away to
London, which was very ready with open arms to welcome William Bagot,
the already famous painter, _alias_ Little Billee!
Part Fifth
LITTLE BILLEE
_An Interlude_
"Then the mortal coldness of the Soul like death itself comes down;
It cannot feel for others' woes, it dare not dream its own;
That heavy chill has frozen o'er the fountain of our tears,
And, though the eye may sparkle yet, 'tis where the ice appears.
"Though wit may flash from fluent lips, and mirth distract the breast,
Through midnight hours that yield no more their former hope of rest:
'Tis but as ivy leaves around a ruined turret wreathe,
All green and wildly fresh without, but worn and gray beneath."
When Taffy and the Laird went back to the studio in the Place St.
Anatole des Arts, and resumed their ordinary life there, it was with a
sense of desolation and dull bereavement beyond anything they could have
imagined; and this did not seem to lessen as the time wore on.
They realized for the first time how keen and penetrating and
unintermittent had been the charm of those two central figures--Trilby
and Little Billee--and how hard it was to live without them, after such
intimacy as had been theirs.
"Oh, it _has_ been a jolly time, though it didn't last long!" So Trilby
had written in her farewell letter to Taffy; and these words were true
for Taffy and the Laird as well as for her.
And that is the worst of those dear people who have charm: they are so
terrible to do without, when once you have got accustomed to them and
all their ways.
And when, besides being charming, they are simple, clever, affectionate,
constant, and sincere, like Trilby and Little Billee! Then the
lamentable hole their disappearance makes is not to be filled up! And
when they are full of genius, like Little Billee--and like Trilby, funny
without being vulgar! For so she always seemed to the Laird and Taffy,
even in French (in spite of her Gallic audacities of thought, speech,
and gesture).
All seemed to have suffered change. The very boxing and fencing were
gone through perfunctorily, for mere health's sake; and a thin layer of
adipose deposit began to soften the outlines of the hills and dales on
Taffy's mighty forearm.
Dodor and l'Zouzou no longer came so often, now that the charming Little
Billee and his charming mother and still more charming sister had gone
away--nor Carnegie, nor Antony, nor Lorrimer, nor Vincent, nor the
Greek. Gecko never came at all. Even Svengali was missed, little as he
had been liked. It is a dismal and sulky looking piece of furniture, a
grand-piano that nobody ever plays--with all its sound and its souvenirs
locked up inside--a kind of mausoleum! a lop-sided coffin--trestles and
all!
So it went back to London by the "little quickness," just as it had
come!
Thus Taffy and the Laird grew quite sad and mopy, and lunched at the
Café de l'Odéon every day--till the goodness of the omelets palled, and
the redness of the wine there got on their nerves and into their heads
and faces, and made them sleepy till dinner-time. And then, waking up,
they dressed respectably, and dined expensively, "like gentlemen," in
the Palais Royal, or the Passage Choiseul, or the Passage des
Panoramas--for three francs, three francs fifty, even five francs a
head, and half a franc to the waiter!--and went to the theatre almost
every night, on that side of the water--and more often than not they
took a cab home, each smoking a Panatella, which costs twenty-five
centimes--five sous--2-1/2_d._
Then they feebly drifted into quite decent society--like Lorrimer and
Carnegie--with dress-coats and white ties on, and their hair parted in
the middle and down the back of the head, and brought over the ears in a
bunch at each side, as was the English fashion in those days; and
subscribed to _Galignani's Messenger_; and had themselves proposed and
seconded for the Cercle Anglais in the Rue Sainte-n'y touche, a circle
of British philistines of the very deepest dye; and went to hear divine
service on Sunday mornings in the Rue Marboeuf!
Indeed, by the end of the summer they had sunk into such depths of
demoralization that they felt they must really have a change; and
decided on giving up the studio in the Place St. Anatole des Arts, and
leaving Paris for good; and going to settle for the winter in
Düsseldorf, which is a very pleasant place for English painters who do
not wish to overwork themselves--as the Laird well knew, having spent a
year there.
[Illustration: DEMORALIZATION]
It ended in Taffy's going to Antwerp for the Kermesse, to paint the
Flemish drunkard of our time just as he really is; and the Laird's going
to Spain, so that he might study toreadors from the life.
I may as well state here that the Laird's toreador pictures, which had
had quite a vogue in Scotland as long as he had been content to paint
them in the Place St. Anatole des Arts, quite ceased to please (or sell)
after he had been to Seville and Madrid; so he took to painting Roman
cardinals and Neapolitan pifferari from the depths of his
consciousness--and was so successful that he made up his mind he would
never spoil his market by going to Italy!
So he went and painted his cardinals and his pifferari in Algiers; and
Taffy joined him there, and painted Algerian Jews--just as they really
are (and didn't sell them); and then they spent a year in Munich, and
then a year in Düsseldorf, and a winter in Cairo, and so on.
And all this time Taffy, who took everything _au grand
sérieux_--especially the claims and obligations of
friendship--corresponded regularly with Little Billee, who wrote him
long and amusing letters back again, and had plenty to say about his
life in London--which was a series of triumphs, artistic and social--and
you would have thought from his letters, modest though they were, that
no happier young man, or more elate, was to be found anywhere in the
world.
It was a good time in England, just then, for young artists of promise;
a time of evolution, revolution, change, and development--of the
founding of new schools and the crumbling away of old ones--a keen
struggle for existence--a surviving of the fit--a preparation, let us
hope, for the ultimate survival of the fittest.
And among the many glories of this particular period two names stand out
very conspicuously--for the immediate and (so far) lasting fame their
bearers achieved, and the wide influence they exerted, and continue to
exert still.
The world will not easily forget Frederic Walker and William Bagot,
those two singularly gifted boys, whom it soon became the fashion to
bracket together, to compare and to contrast, as one compares and
contrasts Thackeray and Dickens, Carlyle and Macaulay, Tennyson and
Browning--a futile though pleasant practice, of which the temptations
seem irresistible!
Yet why compare the lily and the rose?
These two young masters had the genius and the luck to be the
progenitors of much of the best art-work that has been done in England
during the last thirty years, in oils, in water-color, in black and
white.
They were both essentially English and of their own time; both
absolutely original, receiving their impressions straight from nature
itself; uninfluenced by any school, ancient or modern, they founded
schools instead of following any, and each was a law unto himself, and a
law-giver unto many others.
[Illustration: FRED WALKER]
Both were equally great in whatever they attempted--landscape, figures,
birds, beasts, or fishes. Who does not remember the fish-monger's shop
by F. Walker, or W. Bagot's little piebald piglings, and their venerable
black mother, and their immense, fat, wallowing pink papa? An ineffable
charm of poetry and refinement, of pathos and sympathy and delicate
humor combined, an incomparable ease and grace and felicity of
workmanship belong to each; and yet in their work are they not as wide
apart as the poles; each complete in himself and yet a complement to the
other?
And, oddly enough, they were both singularly alike in aspect--both small
and slight, though beautifully made, with tiny hands and feet; always
arrayed as the lilies of the field, for all they toiled and spun so
arduously; both had regularly featured faces of a noble cast and most
winning character; both had the best and simplest manners in the world,
and a way of getting themselves much and quickly and permanently
liked....
_Que la terre leur soit légère!_
And who can say that the fame of one is greater than the other's!
Their pinnacles are twin, I venture to believe--of just an equal height
and width and thickness, like their bodies in this life; but unlike
their frail bodies in one respect: no taller pinnacles are to be seen,
methinks, in all the garden of the deathless dead painters of our time,
and none more built to last!
* * * * *
But it is not with the art of Little Billee, nor with his fame as a
painter, that we are chiefly concerned in this unpretending little tale,
except in so far as they have some bearing on his character and his
fate.
"I should like to know the detailed history of the Englishman's first
love, and how he lost his innocence!"
"Ask him!"
"Ask him yourself!"
Thus Papelard and Bouchardy, on the morning of Little Billee's first
appearance at Carrel's studio, in the Rue des Potirons St. Michel.
And that is the question the present scribe is doing his little best to
answer.
* * * * *
A good-looking, famous, well-bred, and well-dressed youth finds that
London Society opens its doors very readily; he hasn't long to knock;
and it would be difficult to find a youth more fortunately situated,
handsomer, more famous, better dressed or better bred, more seemingly
happy and successful, with more attractive qualities and more condonable
faults, than Little Billee, as Taffy and the Laird found him when they
came to London after their four or five years in foreign parts--their
Wanderjahr.
He had a fine studio and a handsome suite of rooms in Fitzroy Square.
Beautiful specimens of his unfinished work, endless studies, hung on his
studio walls. Everything else was as nice as it could be--the furniture,
the bibelots, and bric-à-brac, the artistic foreign and Eastern
knick-knacks and draperies and hangings and curtains and rugs--the
semi-grand piano by Collard & Collard.
That immortal canvas, the "Moon-Dial" (just begun, and already
commissioned by Moses Lyon, the famous picture-dealer), lay on his
easel.
No man worked harder and with teeth more clinched than Little Billee
when he was at work--none rested or played more discreetly when it was
time to rest or play.
[Illustration: PLATONIC LOVE]
The glass on his mantel-piece was full of cards of invitation,
reminders, pretty mauve and pink and lilac-scented notes; nor were
coronets wanting on many of these hospitable little missives. He had
quite overcome his fancied aversion for bloated dukes and lords and the
rest (we all do sooner or later, if things go well with us); especially
for their wives and sisters and daughters and female cousins; even their
mothers and aunts. In point of fact, and in spite of his tender years,
he was in some danger (for his art) of developing into that type adored
by sympathetic women who haven't got much to do: the friend, the tame
cat, the platonic lover (with many loves)--the squire of dames, the
trusty one, of whom husbands and brothers have no fear!--the delicate,
harmless dilettante of Eros--the dainty shepherd who dwells "dans le
pays du tendre!"--and stops there!
The woman flatters and the man confides--and there is no danger
whatever, I'm told--and I am glad!
One man loves his fiddle (or, alas! his neighbor's sometimes) for all
the melodies he can wake from it--it is but a selfish love!
Another, who is no fiddler, may love a fiddle too; for its symmetry, its
neatness, its color--its delicate grainings, the lovely lines and curves
of its back and front--for its own sake, so to speak. He may have a
whole galleryful of fiddles to love in this innocent way--a harem!--and
yet not know a single note of music, or even care to hear one. He will
dust them and stroke them, and take them down and try to put them in
tune--pizzicato!--and put them back again, and call them ever such sweet
little pet names: viol, viola, viola d'amore, viol di gamba, violino
mio! and breathe his little troubles into them, and they will give back
inaudible little murmurs in sympathetic response, like a damp Æolian
harp; but he will never draw a bow across the strings, nor wake a single
chord--or discord!
And who shall say he is not wise in his generation? It is but an
old-fashioned philistine notion that fiddles were only made to be played
on--the fiddles themselves are beginning to resent it; and rightly, I
wot!
In this harmless fashion Little Billee was friends with more than one
fine lady _de par le monde_.
Indeed, he had been reproached by his more bohemian brothers of the
brush for being something of a tuft-hunter--most unjustly. But nothing
gives such keen offence to our unsuccessful brother, bohemian or
bourgeois, as our sudden intimacy with the so-called great, the little
lords and ladies of this little world! Not even our fame and success,
and all the joy and pride they bring us, are so hard to condone--so
imbittering, so humiliating, to the jealous fraternal heart.
Alas! poor humanity--that the mere countenance of our betters (if they
_are_ our betters!) should be thought so priceless a boon, so consummate
an achievement, so crowning a glory, as all that!
"A dirty bit of orange-peel,
The stump of a cigar--
Once trod on by a princely heel,
How beautiful they are!"
Little Billee was no tuft-hunter--he was the tuft-hunted, or had been.
No one of his kind was ever more persistently, resolutely, hospitably
harried than this young "hare with many friends" by people of rank and
fashion.
And at first he thought them most charming; as they so often are, these
graceful, gracious, gay, good-natured stoics and barbarians, whose
manners are as easy and simple as their morals--but how much
better!--and who, at least, have this charm, that they can wallow in
untold gold (when they happen to possess it) without ever seeming to
stink of the same: yes, they bear wealth gracefully--and the want of it
more gracefully still! and these are pretty accomplishments that have
yet to be learned by our new aristocracy of the shop and counting-house,
Jew or gentile, which is everywhere elbowing its irresistible way to
the top and front of everything, both here and abroad.
Then he discovered that, much as you might be with them, you could never
be _of_ them, unless perchance you managed to hook on by marrying one of
their ugly ducklings--their failures--their remnants! and even then life
isn't all beer and skittles for a rank outsider, I'm told! Then he
discovered that he didn't want to be of them in the least; especially at
such a cost as that! and that to be very much with them was apt to pall,
like everything else.
Also, he found that they were very mixed; good, bad, and
indifferent--and not always very dainty or select in their
predilections, since they took unto their bosoms such queer outsiders
(just for the sake of being amused a little while) that their capricious
favor ceased to be an honor and a glory--if it ever was! And, then,
their fickleness!
Indeed, he found, or thought he found, that they could be just as
clever, as liberal, as polite or refined--as narrow, insolent,
swaggering, coarse, and vulgar--as handsome, as ugly--as graceful, as
ungainly--as modest or conceited, as any other upper class of the
community--and, indeed, some lower ones!
Beautiful young women, who had been taught how to paint pretty little
landscapes (with an ivy-mantled ruin in the middle distance), talked
technically of painting to him, _de pair à pair_, as though they were
quite on the same artistic level, and didn't mind admitting it, in spite
of the social gulf between.
Hideous old frumps (osseous or obese, yet with unduly bared neck, and
shoulders that made him sick) patronized him and gave him good advice,
and told him to emulate Mr. Buckner both in his genius and his
manners--since Mr. Buckner was the only "gentleman" who ever painted for
hire; and they promised him, in time, an equal success!
Here and there some sweet old darling specially enslaved him by her
kindness, grace, knowledge of life, and tender womanly sympathy, like
the dowager Lady Chiselhurst--or some sweet young one, like the lovely
Duchess of Towers, by her beauty, wit, good-humor, and sisterly interest
in all he did, and who in some vague, distant manner constantly reminded
him of Trilby, although she was such a great and fashionable lady!
But just such darlings, old or young, were to be found, with still
higher ideals, in less exalted spheres; and were easier of access, with
no impassable gulf between--spheres where there was no patronizing,
nothing but deference and warm appreciation and delicate flattery, from
men and women alike--and where the aged Venuses, whose prime was of the
days of Waterloo, went with their historical remains duly shrouded, like
ivy-mantled ruins (and in the middle distance!).
[Illustration: "DARLINGS, OLD OR YOUNG"]
So he actually grew tired of the great before they had time to tire of
him--incredible as it may seem, and against nature; and this saved him
many a heart-burning; and he ceased to be seen at fashionable drums or
gatherings of any kind, except in one or two houses where he was
especially liked and made welcome for his own sake; such as Lord
Chiselhurst's in Piccadilly, where the "Moon-Dial" found a home for a
few years, before going to its last home and final resting-place in the
National Gallery (R. I. P.); or Baron Stoppenheim's in Cavendish Square,
where many lovely little water-colors signed W. B. occupied places of
honor on gorgeously gilded walls; or the gorgeously gilded bachelor
rooms of Mr. Moses Lyon, the picture-dealer in Upper Conduit Street--for
Little Billee (I much grieve to say it of a hero of romance) was an
excellent man of business. That infinitesimal dose of the good old
Oriental blood kept him straight, and not only made him stick to his
last through thick and thin, but also to those whose foot his last was
found to match (for he couldn't or wouldn't alter his last).
He loved to make as much money as he could, that he might spend it
royally in pretty gifts to his mother and sister, whom it was his
pleasure to load in this way, and whose circumstances had been very much
altered by his quick success. There was never a more generous son or
brother than Little Billee of the clouded heart, that couldn't love any
longer!
* * * * *
As a set-off to all these splendors, it was also his pleasure now and
again to study London life at its lower end--the eastest end of all.
Whitechapel, the Minories, the Docks, Ratcliffe Highway, Rotherhithe,
soon got to know him well, and he found much to interest him and much to
like among their denizens, and made as many friends there among
ship-carpenters, excisemen, longshoremen, jack-tars, and what not, as in
Bayswater and Belgravia (or Bloomsbury).
He was especially fond of frequenting sing-songs, or "free-and-easys,"
where good, hard-working fellows met of an evening to relax and smoke
and drink and sing--round a table well loaded with steaming tumblers and
pewter pots, at one end of which sits Mr. Chairman in all his glory, and
at the other "Mr. Vice." They are open to any one who can afford a pipe,
a screw of tobacco, and a pint of beer, and who is willing to do his
best and sing a song.
[Illustration: "THE MOON-DIAL"]
No introduction is needed; as soon as any one has seated himself and
made himself comfortable, Mr. Chairman taps the table with his long clay
pipe, begs for silence, and says to his vis-à-vis: "Mr. Vice, it strikes
me as the gen'l'man as is just come in 'as got a singing face. Per'aps,
Mr. Vice, you'll be so very kind as juster harsk the aforesaid gen'l'man
to oblige us with a 'armony."
Mr. Vice then puts it to the new-comer, who, thus appealed to, simulates
a modest surprise, and finally professes his willingness, like Mr.
Barkis; then, clearing his throat a good many times, looks up to the
ceiling, and after one or two unsuccessful starts in different keys,
bravely sings "Kathleen Mavourneen," let us say--perhaps in a touchingly
sweet tenor voice:
"Kathleen Mavourneen, the gry dawn is brykin',
The 'orn of the 'unter is 'eard on the 'ill." ...