“Yes--quite insensible to the irony. She wanted him vindicated--and by
me!”
He laughed again, and threw back his head to look up at the sketch
of the donkey. “There were days when I couldn’t look at that
thing--couldn’t face it. But I forced myself to put it here; and now
it’s cured me--cured me. That’s the reason why I don’t dabble any more,
my dear Rickham; or rather Stroud himself is the reason.”
For the first time my idle curiosity about my companion turned into a
serious desire to understand him better.
“I wish you’d tell me how it happened,” I said.
He stood looking up at the sketch, and twirling between his fingers a
cigarette he had forgotten to light. Suddenly he turned toward me.
“I’d rather like to tell you--because I’ve always suspected you of
loathing my work.”
I made a deprecating gesture, which he negatived with a good-humoured
shrug.
“Oh, I didn’t care a straw when I believed in myself--and now it’s an
added tie between us!”
He laughed slightly, without bitterness, and pushed one of the deep
arm-chairs forward. “There: make yourself comfortable--and here are the
cigars you like.”
He placed them at my elbow and continued to wander up and down the room,
stopping now and then beneath the picture.
“How it happened? I can tell you in five minutes--and it didn’t take
much longer to happen.... I can remember now how surprised and pleased
I was when I got Mrs. Stroud’s note. Of course, deep down, I had always
FELT there was no one like him--only I had gone with the stream, echoed
the usual platitudes about him, till I half got to think he was a
failure, one of the kind that are left behind. By Jove, and he WAS left
behind--because he had come to stay! The rest of us had to let ourselves
be swept along or go under, but he was high above the current--on
everlasting foundations, as you say.
“Well, I went off to the house in my most egregious mood--rather moved,
Lord forgive me, at the pathos of poor Stroud’s career of failure being
crowned by the glory of my painting him! Of course I meant to do the
picture for nothing--I told Mrs. Stroud so when she began to stammer
something about her poverty. I remember getting off a prodigious phrase
about the honour being MINE--oh, I was princely, my dear Rickham! I was
posing to myself like one of my own sitters.
“Then I was taken up and left alone with him. I had sent all my traps in
advance, and I had only to set up the easel and get to work. He had been
dead only twenty-four hours, and he died suddenly, of heart disease,
so that there had been no preliminary work of destruction--his face
was clear and untouched. I had met him once or twice, years before, and
thought him insignificant and dingy. Now I saw that he was superb.
“I was glad at first, with a merely aesthetic satisfaction: glad to have
my hand on such a ‘subject.’ Then his strange life-likeness began
to affect me queerly--as I blocked the head in I felt as if he were
watching me do it. The sensation was followed by the thought: if he WERE
watching me, what would he say to my way of working? My strokes began to
go a little wild--I felt nervous and uncertain.
“Once, when I looked up, I seemed to see a smile behind his close
grayish beard--as if he had the secret, and were amusing himself by
holding it back from me. That exasperated me still more. The secret?
Why, I had a secret worth twenty of his! I dashed at the canvas
furiously, and tried some of my bravura tricks. But they failed me,
they crumbled. I saw that he wasn’t watching the showy bits--I couldn’t
distract his attention; he just kept his eyes on the hard passages
between. Those were the ones I had always shirked, or covered up with
some lying paint. And how he saw through my lies!
“I looked up again, and caught sight of that sketch of the donkey
hanging on the wall near his bed. His wife told me afterward it was the
last thing he had done--just a note taken with a shaking hand, when he
was down in Devonshire recovering from a previous heart attack. Just
a note! But it tells his whole history. There are years of patient
scornful persistence in every line. A man who had swum with the current
could never have learned that mighty up-stream stroke....
“I turned back to my work, and went on groping and muddling; then I
looked at the donkey again. I saw that, when Stroud laid in the first
stroke, he knew just what the end would be. He had possessed his
subject, absorbed it, recreated it. When had I done that with any of my
things? They hadn’t been born of me--I had just adopted them....
“Hang it, Rickham, with that face watching me I couldn’t do another
stroke. The plain truth was, I didn’t know where to put it--I HAD NEVER
KNOWN. Only, with my sitters and my public, a showy splash of colour
covered up the fact--I just threw paint into their faces.... Well, paint
was the one medium those dead eyes could see through--see straight to
the tottering foundations underneath. Don’t you know how, in talking
a foreign language, even fluently, one says half the time not what one
wants to but what one can? Well--that was the way I painted; and as he
lay there and watched me, the thing they called my ‘technique’ collapsed
like a house of cards. He didn’t sneer, you understand, poor Stroud--he
just lay there quietly watching, and on his lips, through the gray
beard, I seemed to hear the question: ‘Are you sure you know where
you’re coming out?’
“If I could have painted that face, with that question on it, I should
have done a great thing. The next greatest thing was to see that I
couldn’t--and that grace was given me. But, oh, at that minute, Rickham,
was there anything on earth I wouldn’t have given to have Stroud alive
before me, and to hear him say: ‘It’s not too late--I’ll show you how’?
“It WAS too late--it would have been, even if he’d been alive. I packed
up my traps, and went down and told Mrs. Stroud. Of course I didn’t
tell her THAT--it would have been Greek to her. I simply said I couldn’t
paint him, that I was too moved. She rather liked the idea--she’s so
romantic! It was that that made her give me the donkey. But she was
terribly upset at not getting the portrait--she did so want him ‘done’
by some one showy! At first I was afraid she wouldn’t let me off--and at
my wits’ end I suggested Grindle. Yes, it was I who started Grindle: I
told Mrs. Stroud he was the ‘coming’ man, and she told somebody else,
and so it got to be true.... And he painted Stroud without wincing; and
she hung the picture among her husband’s things....”
He flung himself down in the arm-chair near mine, laid back his head,
and clasping his arms beneath it, looked up at the picture above the
chimney-piece.
“I like to fancy that Stroud himself would have given it to me, if he’d
been able to say what he thought that day.”
And, in answer to a question I put half-mechanically--“Begin again?”
he flashed out. “When the one thing that brings me anywhere near him is
that I knew enough to leave off?”
He stood up and laid his hand on my shoulder with a laugh. “Only the
irony of it is that I AM still painting--since Grindle’s doing it
for me! The Strouds stand alone, and happen once--but there’s no
exterminating our kind of art.”