"There is an initial stage of some characters which is purely parabolic,
though every phase of the stage has its analogy in the actual. The
difficulty is the tracing of corroborations. With so much promise one
looks for some fulfilment, but she contrives to make out of the very
postponement of promise a larger reiteration of it. She permits no
shadow of negation that might disappoint, no growth of hope that might
encourage. Her talk is so well conventionalised to suit the tonic and
dominant of social exigence that one must avoid the vulgarian error of
striving after a literal transcription of it."
A day later had been scrawled, with a dash of irritation in the
caligraphy, a third note:--
"Of dispositions like hers that are worthy analysis, it is expedient to
restrain the lesser deduction in order to gain the full breadth of the
greater; one must look through the eyelashes at the substantial flesh
and blood perfections to achieve the infinite spiritual possibilities
deduced by the instinctive calculus.... Spiritual possibilities! Am I
mad to seek for them in a woman-creature with the appetite of a
schoolboy and an avowed _penchant_ for periwinkles?"
"That last clause," Lorraine said as I came to it, "is merely an
ebullition of annoyance. I mean to proceed with my analysis more
cool-headedly. The subject is interesting."
"Yes, proceed with it; but I won't warrant the coolness."
"What do you bet?" smiled he thoughtfully.
"My dear fellow, I don't bet on certainties."
Just then the advent of visitors interrupted the discussion, and a whole
fortnight passed without my seeing either the poet or my sister.
I had begun to relegate the patchwork romance to the store-cupboard of
memory, when into my room rushed Sarah with almost juvenile impetuosity.
"Look at this! Did you ever hear anything so crazed?" She threw a scrap
of paper on the table. It was addressed to Clair, and I read it aloud:--
DEAR LADY,--You loathe poets. I therefore desire to adopt
another calling. Cab-driving might suit me, but I fear I am
lacking in the necessary command of language to ensure success.
I could sweep a crossing with neatness and precision, and can
pick periwinkles with unrivalled velocity. To this end I have
been practising daily with a darning-needle and a stop-watch.
Have you any objection to entering the lists against me, the
winner of course claiming whatever guerdon he or she may desire?
The note was in Lorraine's handwriting, and affixed to it was a copy of
Clair's answer:--
DEAR MR LORRAINE,--Your poetic gifts will, I fear, militate
against advance as a crossing sweeper. The occupation admits of
no impressionism, and requires uniform scrupulosity. With regard
to the tournament, I accept your challenge, provided, of course,
there is a competent umpire.
"What do you think of that?" questioned my sister with concern.
"I think, my good Sarah, it is the oddest piece of work you ever set
your hand to, and that you have let us both in for substantial damages
in the form of wedding presents."
"The Soul of Me."
"'The wrong was mine!' he cried. 'I left my dove'
(He flung him down upon the clay),
'And now I find her flown--ah, well away!'"
After long sauntering in the Antipodes, I was naturally anxious to hear
of him--of his inner life particularly--for his fame as a worldling had
skirted the globe. The north wind had trumpeted of it; the south had
whispered poetically, if insidiously; the east had contradicted the
poetry and accentuated the venom, and western zephyrs had harmonised the
whole with a dulcet cadence of admiration and pity. In his profession,
however, public opinion was unanimous in proclaiming him pre-eminent.
The signature of Wallace Wray--"Woll" we called him--at the corner of a
canvas lured the artist mind to praise and thanksgiving; it did more, it
loosed some sluggish thousands from speculative coffers--coffers that,
prompt enough to gape at safe investment, could stand in the face of the
divine afflatus, hermetically sealed. He had reached the peak on
Parnassus where criticism drops crippled and diagnosis wrings its hands;
his dexterity of brush had become a species of sleight-of-hand,
backgrounded by the mysterious tissue of philosophy, science, and
emotion, which, commonly called genius, defies ken or comparison.
He had been a singular youth, the solitary output of one of Nature's
quaintest moulds, and from what I learnt, the singularity had become
pronounced rather than mellowed by the glaze of time. Yet, as I
remembered him--it was five years since we had met--he was an excellent
fellow, a mass of incongruity, courageous, sensitive--morbidly
so--modest, with a humility deduced from keen self-knowledge, a generous
companion and a witty, dispensing the fine flavour of his humour through
a countenance as nearly classical as individuality of expression would
permit.
This countenance now showed its presentment on the Academy walls. It was
this portrait, done by his own hand, which roused my admiration and
awoke a greed for more of him. Around me, the wagging of gossip tongues
fanned the air, and scraps, hints, fragments of scandal were wafted to
my ears as I stood amazed to salute his art in the superb masterpiece of
portraiture.
From the confused babble I was straining to sift a grain of truth. It
seemed that Wallace Wray had been outraging the feelings of his
admirers, had dealt them a slap in the face as cleanly, or rather as
dirtily, as a realistic brush could deal it. In the nick of time, Spry,
a brother of the craft and the very sieve I needed, jostled at my elbow.
"Splendid likeness--the best he has ever done, eh? He calls it 'The Body
of Me.' Ha! ha! The Corporation of H---- commissioned, it, and luckily
he got it finished before he took leave of his senses."
"Senses!" I echoed, stupidly. "What is wrong? What has he been saying,
doing?"
"More antics! Haven't you seen 'The Soul of Me,' there, in the next
room?"
And Spry, scarcely waiting for dissent, led off, inviting me, by
backward twists of the head, to follow his pioneering.
The crowd was too great for conversation, but it was easy to know from
the congested state of the room in a particular spot where Wray's work
must be hung. When patience was nearly exhausted we reached it. Comments
and criticisms were freely bandied aloud.
"Decidedly morbid," spake a sightseer in disgust.
"Hideous! I wouldn't own such a picture for worlds," confided one woman
to another.
"It is astounding," an art critic remarked to his companion, whose face
I knew. "What power, what genius, yet----"
"Genius is a loganstone," said the other, shaking his head. "It rocks
and rocks, but a stalk of asphodel may shift it from its centre."
"For 'asphodel' translate 'woman,'" the critic replied, "and you solve
the riddle."
At this moment a gap opened; it was sufficiently wide to reveal the
subject without the frame of the picture.
On a slab of wood in semi-darkness lay a drowned woman. The rays from a
lamp, held aloft by a bargee or coal-heaver, flickered down on the
green-grey features that had already lost the expression which
accompanies the first beatitude of death. Some outcast, as the worn
finery proved; young in years, we knew by the modelling of her throat;
aged in worldliness, by the hard set of her features, the sparse strands
of faded hair that might once have glittered. The folds of the frayed
gown hung lank, heavy with dark drops of liquid mud which oozed and fell
slowly to the ground, already a morass of wharf drippings that reflected
pallidly the meagre gleams of the uplifted lamp. The magnificent anatomy
of a beautiful arm, a shapely bosom--bared, it seemed, in an effort to
reanimate--showed that this was no plebeian waif driven by stress of
poverty over the water's edge. On the elbow was grim evidence of Wray's
realistic mood--a bruise, wide and purple, and higher up, the dull
indenture of a water-rat's tooth.
"Well," said Spry, watching my mute amazement, "he has left no part of
his gruesome task undone; he has gloated in it--look!--even to the
snipping of the linen."
A definite jag on the front of the shift--the place which is usually
inscribed with the name of the owner--was carefully insisted on. It was
the highest light in the picture, and seemed to emphasise a piteous
degradation and still more piteous consciousness thereof.
"Wray turned moralist?" a bystander sneered.
"We may find sermons in stones, but we don't want 'em on canvas,"
bounced another, a "port-wine-flavoured" personage, who ogled for
applause with the confidence of the self-crowned wag.
I eyed him with swelling spleen, and shot a dart at Spry which was
intended to ricochet.
"Wasn't it Flaubert who said that, in the hands of an artist, a
disembowelled ox would make as fine a subject as any other?"
"I don't know," returned Spry, "but, anyway, about this work there are
ugly tales afloat. It is too true--unpleasantly, unnecessarily true."
It indeed appeared to be inhumanly horrible--a vulture swoop of the
brush--and, much as I appreciated Wray as a friend and worshipped him as
a disciple, I was forced to recognise a want of reserve, some lack of
sentiment in the handling--say, rather, over-handling--of so repellant a
subject. His aim seemed to lie in choking sentiment--suffocating it in
loathliness and disgust. There was a violence of passion that suggested
the manner of Prudhon--suggested it, but, giant-like, overshadowed it
with the brawny vigour of modern actuality.
I turned from the picture to the crowd, blinked dazedly to find myself
again facing daylight and colour, and stretched myself awake as far as
environing shoulders would allow. Looking away from this squalid scene,
I became suddenly aware of an unusual amount of paint and gilding on the
walls--an art tawdriness that had not before obtruded itself. My taste
for the reproduction of veined marble and glossy parquet, for pretty
pussies and portraits of gentlefolk was exhausted. I made for the
turnstiles, and nodded to Spry to get quit of him.
"I'm off," I said, curtly, "to look up Wray and offer my
congratulations."
* * * * *
Green Park, bedecked in spring raiment, seemed to me at that moment a
welcome oasis of verdure in the midst of the swirl of Piccadilly; it
offered no impediment to the bubbling flood of conjecture that Wray's
strange _chef d'oeuvre_ had let loose.
So far as I knew him--and our friendship, though spasmodic by reason of
my wanderings, had existed since our teens--he was the last man to sneak
voluntarily into the shadowy niches of life; his nature clung to
radiance and his sentiment revolted at the opacity of pessimism. Why,
then, this sudden hectic of the sensational? Why, indeed, unless the
genius, the loganstone, as suggested by the fellow in the exhibition,
had rocked till it tilted?
In the midst of my mental tussle, while twisting the pros and cons in
favour of lunacy, and walking with bent head and irresponsible stride, I
fell foul of an obstacle. It was Lawrence Vane, the poet, who, being
well known to me, chose this mode of salute.
"Your _moutons_ are causing you trouble," he laughed. "Debts?--love
affairs?"
"I have neither," I replied, without a vestige of humour.
He was a breezy fellow, good tempered and sound, but at the moment he
was out of place. Despite my abruptness he wheeled round and kept pace
with me.
"You were totting up your virtues then?" he pursued.
"I can do that on my fingers. It was Wray's vagaries that puzzled me. I
am on my way to him."
His cheery mood vanished.
"Don't go near him," he burst out. "He is a beast; I loathe him."
"He is my friend." (This with an accent on the last word.)
"I expected that. They were my friends once, but I never go there now."
"They?" I inquired. I had forgotten the report of Wray's marriage, five
years before. It had taken place in Rome on the eve of my departure from
England.
"He and his wife. You met her? No? She was the sweetest girl that ever
stept."
"Was?" I exclaimed. "Is she dead?"
"Dead to us, to society, to happiness. She left her husband within the
year."
"Poor fellow!"
It was well to have met Lawrence before going to Wray's studio--awkward
situations might have ensued. I delved for more of the domestic history.
"She was the prey of mischief-makers--there were so many who envied her.
People whispered cruelly of her mysterious elfish beauty, and women
coveted her golden hair; for nothing women resent so much as Nature's
own coronation of sovereignty. She was only eighteen, and believed in
him--worse luck for her. Afterwards she became jealous and tried the
spur. It makes some beasts go and some stand stock still. He gibbed.
Rash people--men--quoted Byron, told her that constancy was woman's
greatest vice; others--women--bragged of the equality of man and woman,
hinted at levelling down when you can't level up."
"He had cared for her?"
"It was a love match. But you can't plant figs in the midst of thistles.
He was easygoing, hated a smart, so there was no uprooting, and the fig
tree perished!"
There were tears in Lawrence's eyes, but he began whistling a music hall
air in affectation of nonchalance.
"Well," I said, extending a hand as we neared Buckingham Gate, "it is
miserably sad, but thanks for instructing me. I shall be saved unlucky
allusions."
"You mean to see him?" he asked, dejectedly.
"Certainly."
With a wry sneer of dissatisfaction he bade me good-bye, and I continued
my way to the studio.
Lawrence Vane's view struck me as narrow and one-sided. He ignored the
fact that Wray was one of the most courted men in London, that in
England and America his genius drew to him followers, patrons, friends
of all ranks, and that, as a natural consequence, there were warm
corners in women's hearts for this spoilt child of fortune. With the
world beckoning, the fair sex flinging petals from the rose gardens of
love and admiration, he had needed more than human dexterity to pick his
way through the scented labyrinths that were continually twining around
his feet.
I found him in, and he greeted me with his rare smile. In an instant I
observed that he was no longer the same Wray, whose presentiment he
himself had painted for the Corporation of H----, no longer the
harum-scarum painter I had known five years ago; it seemed as though he
had thrown all the buoyancy of colour and tissue--the veritable body of
him--on the canvas, and had left merely a shadow of the original to walk
the earth.
The studio, a temporary one, was on the ground floor. It looked out on
the bustle and swarm of the Buckingham Palace Road, where the roar of
traffic was accompanied by wafts of martial music from the adjacent
parade ground. It made a bizarre accompaniment to our reunion.
I strained his hand, shook it more than once as an assurance. I wished
to convey to him that I was not ignorant, nor curious--in fact, that I
believed in him. My allegiance was unshaken by Lawrence Vane's history.
I gave him the faith of friendship, which is a closer grained quality
than the faith of love.
We stood among his pictures and gossiped of art, praising H's
brush-work, wondering at R's anatomy, arguing L's historical accuracy,
and talking of everything warily--on the brink, as it were, of a plunge,
like timid girls at a river, dipping now a finger, a foot, an arm, in
the chilly depths, and wavering. When at last we were seated he took a
header.
"You've seen my portrait?"
"At the Academy? Just come from it."
"You think I've flattered myself?" he said, with his head on one side,
his eyes asking more than the question.
"It would not have done you justice three years ago," I evaded.
"Good! I wished the husk to be a thing of beauty. You think it a work
that will live?"
"Assuredly, or the Corporation of H----would not have unbuttoned to it.
It keeps its heart well within the limits of its waistcoat."
"And the other--the kernel?"