Such were the memories that overwhelmed Clementina Wing as she sat grim
and lonely by the fire.
In the tragedy the girl Clementina perished, and from her ashes arose
the phœnix of dingy plumage who had developed into the Clementina of
to-day. As soon as she could envisage life again, she plunged into the
strenuous art-world of Paris, living solitary, morose, and heedless of
external things. The joyousness of the light-hearted crowd into which
she was thrown jarred upon her. It was like Bacchanalian revelry at a
funeral. She made no friends. Good-natured importunates she drove away
with rough usage. The pairs of young men and maidens who flaunted their
foolish happiness in places of public resort she regarded with
misanthropic eye. She hated them—at one-and-twenty—because they were
fools; because they deluded themselves into the belief that the world
was rose and blue and gold, whereas she, of her own bitter knowledge,
knew it to be drab. And from a drab world what was there more vain than
the attempt to extract colour? Beauty left her unmoved because it had no
basis in actuality. The dainty rags in which she had been accustomed to
garb herself she threw aside with contempt. Sackcloth was the only wear.
It must be remembered that Clementina at this period was young, and that
it is only given to youth to plumb the depths of existence. She was
young, strong-fibred, desperately conscious of herself. She had left her
home rejecting sympathy. To no one could she exhibit the torture of her
soul; to no one could she confess the remorse and shame that consumed
her. She was a failure in essentials. She had failed the man in his hour
of need. She had let him go forth to his death. She, Clementina Wing,
was a failure. She, Clementina Wing, was the world. Therefore was the
world a failure. She saw life drab. Her vision was infallible. Therefore
life was drab. Syllogisms, with the eternal fallacy of youth in their
minor premises. Work saved her reason. She went at it feverishly,
indefatigably, unremittingly, as only a woman can—and only a woman who
has lost sense of values. Her talent was great—in those days she did
not scout the suggestion of genius—and by her indomitable pains she
acquired the marvellous technique which had brought her fame. The years
slipped away. Suddenly she awakened. A picture exhibited in the Salon
obtained for her a gold medal, which pleased her mightily. She was not
as dead as she had fancied, having still the power to feel the thrill of
triumph. Money much more than would satisfy her modest wants jingled in
her pockets with a jocund sound. Folks whom she had kept snarlingly at
bay whispered honeyed flattery in her ears. Philosophy, which (of a
bitter nature) she had cultivated during her period of darkness, enabled
her to estimate the flattery at its true value; but no philosophy in the
world could do away with the sweetness of it. So it came to pass that on
her pleasant road to success, Clementina realised that there was such a
thing as light and shade in life as well as in pictures. But though she
came out of the underworld a different woman from the one who had
sojourned there, she was still a far more different woman from the girl
who was flung herself into it headlong. She emerged cynical, rough,
dictatorial, eccentric in speech, habits, and attire. As she had
emancipated herself from the gloom of remorse and self-torture, so did
she emancipate herself from convention. Youth had flown early, and with
it the freshness that had given charm to her young face. Lines had come,
bones had set, the mouth had hardened. She had lost the trick of
personal adornment. Years of loose and casual corseting had ruined her
figure. Even were she to preen and primp herself, what man would look at
her with favour? As for women, she let them go hang. She was always
impatient of the weaknesses, frailties, and vanities of her own sex,
especially when they were marked by an outer show of strength. The
helpless she had been known to take to her bosom as she would have taken
a wounded bird—but her sex as a whole attracted her but little. Women
could go hang, because she did not want them. Men could go hang
likewise, because they did not want her. Thus dismissing from her
horizon all the human race, she found compensation in the freedom so
acquired. If she chose to run bareheaded and slipshod into the King’s
Road and come back with a lump of beef wrapped in a bloodstained bit of
newspaper (as her acquaintance, Mrs. Venables, had caught her doing—“My
dear, you never saw such an appalling sight in your life,” she said when
reporting the incident, “and she had the impudence to make me shake
hands with her—and the hand, my dear, in which she had been holding the
beef”)—if she chose to do this, what mattered it to any one of God’s
creatures, save perhaps Mrs. Venables’s glove-maker to whom it was an
advantage? Her servant had a bad cold, time—the morning light was
precious—and the putting on of hat and boots a retarding vanity. If she
chose to bring in a shivering ragamuffin from the streets and warm him
before the fire and stuff him with the tomato sandwiches and plum-cake
set out for a visitor’s tea, who could say her nay? The visitor in
revolt against the sight and smell of the ragamuffin, could get up and
depart. It was a matter of no concern to Clementina. Eventually folks
recognised Clementina’s eccentricity, classed it in the established
order of things, ceased to regard it—just as dwellers by a cataract
lose the sound of the thunder, and as a human wife ceases to be
conscious of the wart on her husband’s nose. To this enviable height of
freedom had Clementina risen.
She sat by the fire, overwhelmed by memories. They had been conjured up
by the girl with the terror at the back of her eyes; but their mass was
no longer crushing. They came over her like a weightless grey cloud that
had arisen from some remote past with which she had no concern. She had
grown to look upon the tragedy impersonally, as though it were a
melodramatic tale written by a young and inexperienced writer, in which
the characters were overdrawn and untrue to life. The reading of the
tale left her with the impression that Roland Thorne was an unprincipled
weakling, Clementina Wing an hysterical little fool.
Presently she rose, rubbed her face hard with both hands, a proceeding
which had the effect of spreading the paint smudge into a bright gamboge
over her cheeks, pushed the easel aside, and, taking down “Tristram
Shandy” from her shelves, read the story of the King of Bohemia and his
Seven Castles, by way of a change of fiction, till her maid summoned her
to her solitary dinner.
Early the next morning, as soon as she had entered the studio and had
begun to set her palette, preparatory to the day’s work, Tommy Burgrave
appeared on the gallery, with a “Hullo, Clementina!” and ran down the
spiral staircase. Clementina paused with a paint tube in her hand.
“Look, my young friend, you don’t live here, you know,” she said coolly.
“I’ll clear out in half a second,” he replied, smiling. “I’m bringing
you news. You ought to be very grateful to me. I’ve got you a
commission.”
“Who’s the fool?” asked Clementina.
“It isn’t a fool,” said Tommy, buttoning the belt of his Norfolk jacket,
as if to brace himself to the encounter. “It’s my uncle.”
“Lord save us!” said Clementina.
“I thought I would give you a surprise,” said Tommy.
Clementina shrugged her shoulders and went on squeezing paint out of
tubes.
“He must have softening of the brain.”
“Why?”
“First for wanting to have his portrait painted at all, and secondly for
thinking of coming to me. Go back and tell him I’m not a caricaturist.”
Tommy planted a painting-stool in the middle of the floor and sat upon
it, with legs apart.
“Let us talk business, Clementina. In the first place, he has nothing to
do with it. He doesn’t want his portrait painted, bless you. It’s the
other prehistoric fossils he foregathers with. I met chunks of them at
dinner last night. They belong to the Anthropological Society, you know,
they fool around with antediluvian stones and bones and bits of
iron—and my uncle’s president. They want to have his portrait to hang
up in the cave where they meet. They were talking about it at my end of
the table. They didn’t know what painter to go to, so they consulted me.
My uncle had introduced me as an artist, you know, and they looked on me
as a sort of young prophet. I asked them how much they were prepared to
give. They said about five hundred pounds—they evidently have a lot of
money to throw about—one of them, all over gold chains and rings,
seemed to perspire money, looked like a bucket-shop keeper. I think it’s
he who is presenting the Society with the portrait. Anyway that’s about
your figure, so I said there was only one person to paint my uncle and
that was Clementina Wing. It struck them as a brilliant idea, and the
end of it was that they told my uncle and requested me to sound you on
the matter. I’ve sounded.”
She looked at his confident boyish face, and uttered a grim sound,
halfway between a laugh and a sniff, which was her nearest approach to
exhibition of mirth, and might have betokened amusement or pity or
contempt or any two of these taken together or the three combined. Then
she turned away and, screwing up her eyes, looked out for a few moments
into the sodden back garden.
“Did you ever hear of a barber refusing to shave a man because he didn’t
like the shape of his whiskers?”
“Only one,” said Tommy, “and he cut the man’s throat from ear to ear
with the razor.”
He laughed loud at his own jest, and, going up to the window where
Clementina stood with her back to him, laid a hand on her shoulder.
“That means you’ll do it.”
“Guineas, not pounds,” said Clementina, facing him. “Five hundred
guineas. I couldn’t endure Ephraim Quixtus for less.”
“Leave it to me, I’ll fix it up. So long.” He ran up the spiral
staircase, in high good-humour. On the gallery he paused and leaned over
the balustrade.
“I say, Clementina, if the ugly young man calls to-day for that pretty
Miss Etta, and you want any murdering done, send for me.”
She looked up at him smiling down upon her, gay and handsome, so rich in
his springtide, and she obeyed a sudden impulse.
“Come down, Tommy.”
When he had descended she unhooked from the wall over the fireplace a
Della Robbia plaque—a child’s white head against a background of yellow
and blue—a cherished possession—and thrust it into Tommy’s arms. He
stared at her, but clutched the precious thing tight for fear of
dropping it.
“Take it. You can give it as a wedding present to your wife when you
have one. I want you to have it.”
He stammered, overwhelmed by her magnificent and unprecedented
generosity. He could not accept the plaque. It was too priceless a gift.
“That’s why I give it to you, you silly young idiot,” she cried
impatiently. “Do you think I’d give you a pair of embroidered braces or
a hymn-book? Take it and go.”
What Tommy did then, nine hundred and ninety-nine young men out of a
thousand would not have done. He held out his hand—“Rubbish,” said
Clementina; but she held out hers—he gripped it, swung her to him and
gave her a good, full, sounding, honest kiss. Then, holding the thing of
beauty against his heart he leaped up the stairs and disappeared, with
an exultant “Good-bye,” through the door.
A dark flush rose on the kissed spot on Clementina’s cheek. Softness
crept into her hard eyes. She looked at the vacant place on the wall
where the cherished thing of beauty had hung. By some queer optical
illusion it appeared even brighter than before.
Tommy, being a young man of energy and enthusiasm with modern notions as
to the reckoning of time, rushed the Anthropologists, who were
accustomed to reckon time by epochs instead of minutes, off their
leisurely feet. His uncle had said words of protest at this indecent
haste; “My dear Tommy, if you were more of a reflective human being and
less of a whirlwind, it would frequently add to your peace and comfort.”
But Tommy triumphed. Within a very short period everything was settled,
the formal letters had been exchanged, and Ephraim Quixtus found himself
paying a visit, in a new character, to Clementina Wing.
She received him in her prim little drawing-room—as prim and
old-maidish as Romney Place itself—a striking contrast to the
chaotically equipped studio which, as Tommy declared, resembled nothing
so much as a show-room after a bargain-sale. The furniture was the
stiffest of Sheraton, the innocent colour engravings of Tomkins,
Cipriani, and Bartolozzi hung round the walls, and in a corner stood a
spinning-wheel with a bunch of flax on the distaff. The room afforded
Clementina perpetual grim amusement. Except when she received puzzled
visitors she rarely sat in it from one year’s end to the other.
“I haven’t seen you since the Deluge, Ephraim,” she said, as he bent
over her hand in an old-fashioned un-English way. “How’s prehistoric man
getting on?”
“As well,” said he, gravely, “as can be expected.”
Ephraim Quixtus, Ph.D., was a tall gaunt man of forty, with a sallow
complexion, raven black hair thinning at the temples and on the crown of
his head, and great, mild, china-blue eyes. A reluctant moustache gave
his face a certain lack of finish. Clementina’s quick eye noted it at
once. She screwed up her face and watched him.
“I could make a much more presentable thing of you if you were clean
shaven,” she said brusquely.
“I couldn’t shave off my moustache.”
“Why not?”
He started in alarm.
“I think the Society would prefer to have their President in the guise
in which he presided over them.”
“Umph!” said Clementina. She looked at him again, and with a touch of
irony; “Perhaps it’s just as well. Sit down.”
“Thank you,” said Quixtus, seating himself on one of the stiff Sheraton
chairs. And then, courteously; “You have travelled far since we last
met, Clementina. You are famous. I wonder what it feels like to be a
celebrity.”
She shrugged her shoulders. “In my case it feels like leading apes in
hell. By the way, when did I last see you?”
“It was at poor Angela’s funeral, five years ago.”
“So it was,” said Clementina.
There was a short silence. Angela was his dead wife and her distant
relation.
“What has become of Will Hammersley?” she asked suddenly. “He has given
up writing to me.”
“Still in Shanghai, I think. He went out, you know, to take over the
China branch of his firm—just before Angela’s death, wasn’t it? It’s a
couple of years or more since I have heard from him.”
“That’s strange; he was an intimate friend of yours,” said Clementina.
“The only intimate friend I’ve ever had in my life. We were at school
and at Cambridge together. Somehow, although I have many acquaintances
and, so to speak, friends, yet I’ve never formed the intimacies that
most men have. I suppose,” he added, with a sweet smile, “it’s because
I’m rather a dry stick.”
“You’re ten years older than your age,” said Clementina, frankly. “You
want shaking up. It’s a pity Will Hammersley isn’t here. He used to do
you a lot of good.”
“I’m glad you think so much of Hammersley,” said Quixtus.
“I don’t think much of most people, do I?” she said. “But Hammersley was
a friend in need. He was to me, at any rate.”
“Are you still fond of Sterne?” he asked. “I think you are the only
woman who ever was.”
She nodded. “Why do you ask?”
“I was thinking,” he said, in his quiet, courtly way, “that we have many
bonds of sympathy, after all; Angela, Hammersley, Sterne, and my
scapegrace nephew, Tommy.”
“Tommy is a good boy,” said Clementina, “and he’ll learn to paint some
day.”
“I must thank you for your very great kindness to him.”
“Bosh!” said Clementina.
“It’s a great thing for a young fellow—wild and impulsive like
Tommy—to have a good friend in a woman older than himself.”
“If you think, my good man,” snapped Clementina, reverting to her
ordinary manner, “that I look after his morals, you are very much
mistaken. What has it got to do with me if he kisses models and takes
them out to dinner in Soho?”
The lingering Eve in her resented the suggestion of a maternal attitude
towards the boy. After all, she was not five-and-fifty; she was younger,
five years younger than the stick of an uncle who was talking to her as
if he had stepped out of the pages of a Sunday-school prize.
“He never tells me of the models,” replied Quixtus, “and I’m very glad
he tells you. It shows there is no harm in it.”
“Let us talk sense,” said Clementina, “and not waste time. You’ve come
to me to have your portrait painted. I’ve been looking at you. I think a
half-length, sitting down, would be the best—unless you want to stand
up in evening-dress behind a table, with presidential gold chains and
badges of office and hammers and water-bottles——”
“Heaven forbid!” cried Quixtus, who was as modest a man as ever stepped.
“What you suggest will quite do.”
“I suppose you will wear that frock-coat and turn-down collar? Don’t you
ever wear a narrow black tie?”
“My dear Clementina,” he cried horrified, “I may not be the latest thing
in dandyism, but I’ve no desire to look like a Scotch deacon in his
Sunday clothes.”
“Vanity again,” said Clementina. “I could have got something much better
out of you in a narrow black tie. Still, I daresay I’ll manage—though
what your bone-digging friends want with a portrait of you at all for,
I’m blest if I can understand.”
With which gracious remark she dismissed him, after having arranged a
date for the first sitting.
“A poor creature,” muttered Clementina, when the door closed behind him.
The poor creature, however, walked smartly homewards through the murky
November evening, perfectly contented with God and man—even with
Clementina herself. In this well-ordered world, even the tongue of an
eccentric woman must serve some divine purpose. He mused whimsically on
the purpose. Well, at any rate, she belonged to a dear and regretted
past, which without throwing an absolute glamour around Clementina still
shed upon her its softening rays. His thoughts were peculiarly
retrospective this evening. It was a Tuesday, and his Tuesday nights for
some years had been devoted to a secret and sacred gathering of pale
ghosts. His Tuesday nights were mysteries to all his friends. When
pressed for the reason of this perennial weekly engagement, he would say
vaguely; “It’s a club to which I belong.” But what was the nature of the
club, what the grim and ghastly penalty if he skipped a meeting, those
were questions which he left, with a certain innocent mirth, to the
conjecture of the curious.
The evening was fine, with a touch of shrewdness in the air. He found
himself in the exhilarated frame of mind which is consonant with brisk
walking. He looked at his watch. He could easily reach Russell Square by
seven o’clock. He timed his walk exactly. It was five minutes to seven
when he let himself in by his latchkey. The parlour-maid, emerging from
the dining-room, met him in the hall and helped him off with his coat.
“The gentlemen have come, sir.”
“Dear, dear,” said Quixtus, self-reproachfully.
“They’re before their time. It isn’t seven yet, sir,” said the
parlour-maid, flinging the blame upon the gentlemen. In speaking of them
she had just the slightest little supercilious tilt of the nose.
Quixtus waited until she had retired, then, drawing something from his
own pocket, he put something into the pocket of each of three greatcoats
that hung in the hall. After that he ran upstairs into the drawing-room.
Three men rose to receive him.
“How do you do, Huckaby? So glad to see you, Vandermeer. My dear
Billiter.”
He apologised for being late. They murmured excuses for being early.
Quixtus asked leave to wash his hands, went out and returned rubbing
them, as though in anticipation of enjoyment. Two of the men standing in
front of the fire made way for him. He thrust them back courteously.
“No, no, I’m warm. Been walking for miles. I’ve not seen an evening
paper. What’s the news?”
Quixtus never saw an evening paper on Tuesdays. The question was a
time-honoured opening to the kindly game he played with his guests.
Now there is a reason for most things, even for a parlour-maid’s tilt of
the nose. The personal appearance of the guests would have tilted the
nose of any self-respecting parlour-maid in Russell Square. They were a
strange trio. All were shabby and out-at-elbows. All wore the insecure,
apologetic collar which is one of the most curious badges of the
down-at-heel. All bore on their faces the signs of privation and
suffering; Huckaby, lantern-jawed, black-bearded and watery-eyed;
Vandermeer, small, decrepit, pinched of feature, with crisp, sparse red
hair and the bright eyes of a hungry wolf; Billiter, the flabby remains
of a heavily built florid man, with a black moustache turning grey. They
were ghosts of the past, who once a week came back to the plentiful
earth, lived for a few brief hours in the land that had been their
heritage, talked of the things they had once loved, and went forth (so
Quixtus hoped) cheered and comforted for their next week’s wandering on
the banks of Acheron. Once a week they sat at a friend’s table and ate
generous food, drank generous wine, and accepted help from a friend’s
generous hand. Help they all needed, and like desperate men would snatch
it from any hand held out to them. Huckaby had been a successful coach
at Cambridge; Vandermeer, who had forsaken early in life a banking
office for the Temple of Literary Fame, had starved for years on
free-lance journalism; Billiter, of Rugby and Oxford, had run through a
fortune. All waste products of the world’s factory. Among the many
things they had in common was an unquenchable thirst, which they
dissimulated in Russell Square; but they made up for it by patronising
their host. When a beneficiary is humble he is either deserving or has
touched the lowest depths of degradation.
Quixtus presided happily at the meal. With strangers he was shy and
diffident; but here he was at his ease, among old friends none the less
valued because they had fallen by the wayside. Into the reason of their
fall it did not concern him to inquire. All that mattered was their
obvious affection and the obvious brightness that fortune had enabled
him to shed on their lives.
“I wonder,” said he, with one of his sudden smiles, “I wonder if you
fellows know how I prize these evenings of ours.”
“They’re Attic Symposia,” said Huckaby.
“I’ve been thinking of a series of articles on them, after the manner of
the _Noctes Ambrosianæ_,” said Vandermeer.
“They would quite bear it,” Huckaby agreed. “I think we get better talk
here than anywhere else I know. I’m a sometime Fellow of Corpus Christi
College, Cambridge,”—he rolled out the alliterative phrase with great
sonority—“and I know the talk in the Combination Room; but it’s
pedantic—pedantic. Not ripe and mellow like ours.”
“I’m not a brainy chap like you others,” said Billiter, wiping his
dragoon’s moustache, “but I like to have my mind improved, now and
then.”
“Do you know the _Noctes_, Huckaby?” asked Quixtus. “Of course you do.
What do you think of them?”
“I suppose you like them,” replied Huckaby, “because you are an
essentially scientific and not a literary man. But I think them dull.”
“I don’t call them dull,” Quixtus argued, “but to my mind they’re
pretentious. I don’t like their sham heartiness, their
slap-on-the-back-and-how-are-you-old-fellow tone, their impossible
Pantagruelian banquets——”
The hungry wolf’s face of Vandermeer lit up. “That’s what I like about
them—the capons—the pies—the cockaleeky—the haggises——”
“I remember a supper-party at Oxford,” said Billiter, “when there was a
haggis, and one chap who was awfully tight insisted that a haggis ought
to be turned like an omelette or tossed like a pancake. He tossed it. My
God! You never saw such a thing in your life!”
So they all talked according to the several necessities of their
natures, and at last Quixtus informed his guests that he was to sit for
his portrait to Miss Clementina Wing.
“I believe she is really quite capable,” said Huckaby, judicially,
stroking his straggling beard.
“I know her,” cried Vandermeer. “A most charming woman.”
Quixtus raised his eyebrows.
“I’m glad to hear you say so,” said he. “She is a sort of distant
connection of mine by marriage.”
“I interviewed her,” said Vandermeer.
“Good Lord!” The exclamation on the part of Quixtus was inaudible.
“I was doing a series of articles—very important articles,” said
Vandermeer, with an assertive glance around the table, “on Women Workers
of To-day, and of course Miss Clementina Wing came into it. I called and
put the matter before her.”
He paused dramatically.
“And then?” asked Quixtus amused.
“We went out to lunch in a restaurant and she gave me all the material
necessary for my article. A most charming woman, who I think will do you
justice, Quixtus.”
When his friends had gone, each, by the way, diving furtive and
searching hands into their great-coat pockets, as soon as they had been
helped into these garments by the butler—and here, by the way also, be
it stated that, no matter how sultry the breath of summer or how frigid
that of fortune, they never failed to bring overcoats to hang, for all
the world like children’s stockings for Santa Claus, on the familiar
pegs—when his friends were gone, Quixtus, who had an elementary sense
of humour, failed entirely to see an expansive and notoriety-seeking
Clementina lunching tête-à-tête at the Carlton or the Savoy with
Theodore Vandermeer. In point of fact, he fell asleep smiling at the
picture.
The next day, while he was at breakfast—he breakfasted rather
late—Tommy Burgrave was announced. Tommy, who had already eaten with
the appetite of youth, immediately after his cold bath, declined to join
his uncle in a meal, but for the sake of sociability trifled with
porridge, kidneys, cold ham, hot rolls and marmalade, while Quixtus
feasted on a soft-boiled egg and a piece of dry toast. When his
barmecide meal was over, Tommy came to the business of the day. For some
inexplicable, unconjecturable reason his monthly allowance had gone,
disappeared, vanished into the _Ewigkeit_. What in the world was he to
do?
Now it must be explained that Tommy Burgrave was an orphan, the son of
Ephraim Quixtus’s only sister, and his whole personal estate a sum of
money invested in a mortgage which brought him in fifty pounds a year.
On fifty pounds a year a young man cannot lead the plenteous life as far
as food and raiment are concerned, rent a studio (even though it be a
converted first-floor back, as Tommy’s was) and a bedroom in Romney
Place, travel (even on a bicycle, as Tommy did) about England, and
entertain ladies to dinner at restaurants—even though the ladies may be
only models, and the restaurants in Soho. He must have other financial
support. This other financial support came to him in the guise of a
generous allowance from his uncle. But as the generosity of his
instincts—and who in the world would be a cynic, animated blight,
curmudgeon enough to check the generous instincts of youth?—as, I say,
the generosity of his instincts outran the generosity of his allowance,
towards the end of every month Tommy found himself in a most naturally
inexplicable position. At the end of the month, therefore, Tommy came to
Russell Square and trifled with porridge, kidneys, cold ham, hot rolls
and marmalade, while his uncle feasted on a soft-boiled egg and a piece
of dried toast, and, at the end of his barmecide feast, came to
business.
On the satisfactory conclusion thereof (and it had never been known to
be otherwise) Tommy lit a cigar—he liked his uncle’s cigars.
“Well,” said he, “what do you think of Clementina?”
“I think,” said Quixtus, with a faint luminosity lighting his china-blue
eyes, “I think that Clementina, being an artist, is a problem. But if
she weren’t an artist and in a different class of life, she would be a
model old family servant in a great house in which the family, by no
chance whatever, resided.”
Tommy laughed. “It seemed tremendously funny to bring you two together.”
Quixtus smiled indulgently. “So it was a practical joke on your part?”
“Oh no!” cried Tommy, flaring up. “You mustn’t think that. There’s only
one painter living who has, her power—and I’m one of the people who
know it—and I wanted her to paint you. Besides, she is a thorough good
sort—through and through.”
“My dear boy, I was only jesting,” said Quixtus, touched by his
earnestness. “I know that not only are you a devotee—and very rightly
so—of Clementina—but that she is a very great painter.”
“All the same,” said Tommy, with a twinkle in his eyes, “I’m afraid that
you’re in for an awful time.”
“I’m afraid so, too,” said Quixtus, whimsically, “but I’ll get through
it somehow.”
He did get through it; but it was only “somehow.” This quiet, courtly,
dreamy gentleman irritated Clementina as he had irritated her years ago.
He was a learned man; that went without saying; but he was a fool all
the same, and Clementina had not trained herself to suffer fools gladly.
The portrait became her despair. The man had no character. There was
nothing beneath the surface of those china-blue eyes. She was afraid,
she said, of getting on the canvas the portrait of a congenital idiot.
His attitude towards life—the dilettante attitude which she as a worker
despised—made her impatient. By profession he was a solicitor, head of
the old-fashioned firm of Quixtus and Son; but, on his open avowal, he
neglected the business, leaving it all in the hands of his partner.
“He’ll do you, sure as a gun,” said Clementina.
Quixtus smiled. “My father trusted him implicitly, and so do I.”
“A man or a woman’s a fool to trust anybody,” said Clementina.
“I’ve trusted everybody around me all my life, and no one has done me
any harm, and therefore I’m a happy man.”
“Rubbish,” said Clementina. “Any fraud gets the better of you. What
about your German friend Tommy was telling me of?”
This was a sore point. A most innocent, spectacled, bearded, but
obviously poverty-stricken German had called on him a few weeks before
with a collection of flint instruments for sale, which he alleged to
have come from the valley of the Weser, near Hameln. They were of shapes
and peculiarities which he had not met with before, and, after a cursory
and admiring examination, he had given the starving Teuton twice as much
as he had asked for the collection, and sent him on his way rejoicing.
With a brother palæontologist summoned in haste he had proceeded to a
minute scrutiny of his treasures. They were impudent forgeries.
“I told Tommy in confidence. He ought not to have repeated the story,”
he said, with dignity.
“Which shows,” said Clementina, pausing so as to make her point and an
important brush-stroke—“which shows that you can’t even trust Tommy.”
On another occasion he referred to Vandermeer’s famous interview.
“You know a friend of mine, Vandermeer,” said he.
Clementina shook her head.
“Never heard the name.”
He explained. Vandermeer was a journalist. He had interviewed her and
lunched with her at a restaurant.
Clementina could not remember. At last her knitted brow cleared.
“Good lord, do you mean a half-starved, foxy-faced man with his toes
through his boots?”
“The portrait is unflattering,” said he, “but I’m afraid there’s a kind
of resemblance.”
“He looked so hungry and _was_ so hungry—he told me—that I took him to
the ham-and-beef shop round the corner and stuffed his head with copy
while he stuffed himself with ham and beef. To say that he lunched with
me at a restaurant is infernal impudence.”
“Poor fellow,” said Quixtus. “He has to live rather fatly in imagination
so as to make up for the meagreness of his living in reality. It’s only
human nature.”
“Bah,” said Clementina, “I believe you’d find human nature in the
devil.”
Quixtus smiled one of his sweet smiles.
“I find it in you, Clementina,” he said.
Thus it may be perceived that the sittings were not marked by the usual
amenities of the studio. The natures of the two were antagonistic. He
shrank from her downrightness; she disdained his ineffectuality. Each
bore with the other for the sake of past associations; but each drew a
breath of relief when freed from the presence of the other. Although he
was a man of wide culture beyond the bounds of his own particular
subject, and could talk well in a half-humorous, half-pedantic manner,
her influence often kept him as dumb as a mummy. This irritated
Clementina still further. She wanted him to talk, to show some
animation, so that she could seize upon something to put upon the
dismaying canvas. She talked nonsense, in order to stimulate him.
“To live in the past as you do without any regard for the present is as
worthless as to go to bed in a darkened room and stay there for the rest
of your life. It’s the existence of a mole, not of a man.”
He indicated, with a wave of the hand, a Siennese _predella_ on the
wall. “You go to the past.”
“For its lessons,” said Clementina. “Because the Old Masters can teach
me things. How on earth do you think I should be able to paint you if it
hadn’t been for Velasquez? To say nothing of the æsthetic side. But you
only go to the past to satisfy an idle curiosity.”
“Perhaps I do, perhaps I do,” he assented, mildly. “A knowledge of the
process by which a prehistoric lady fashioned her petticoat out of skins
by means of a flint needle and reindeer sinews would be of no value to
Worth or Paquin. But it soothes me personally to contemplate the
intimacies of the toilette of the prehistoric lady.”
“I call that abnormal,” said Clementina, “and you ought to be ashamed of
yourself.”
And that was the end of that conversation.
Meanwhile, in spite of her half-comic despair, the portrait progressed.
She had seized, at any rate, the man’s air of intellectuality, of
aloofness from the practical affairs of life. Unconsciously she had
invested the face with a spirituality which had eluded her conscious
analysis. The artist had worked with the inner vision, as the artist
always does when he produces a great work. For the great work of an
artist is not that before which he stands, and, sighing, says; “This is
fair, but how far away from my dreams!” That is the popular fallacy. The
great work is that which, when he regards it on completion, causes him
to say in humble admiration and modest stupefaction: “How on earth did
the dull clod that is I manage to do it?” For he does not know how he
accomplished it. When a man is conscious of every step he takes in the
execution of a work of art, he is obeying the letter and not the spirit;
he is a juggler with formulas; and formulas, being mere analytical
results, have no place in that glorious synthesis which is
creation—either of a world or a flower or a poem. Clementina, to her
astonishment, regarded the portrait of Ephraim Quixtus, and, like the
First Creator regarding His work, saw that it was good.
“I should never have believed it,” she said.
“What?” asked Quixtus.
“That I should have got all this out of you,” said Clementina.