After a moment, he said:
“We won’t bother about those dealers you speak of, but I’d like to see
your work.”
“I get ten dollars for a painting sometimes,” I said, thinking that
would be an added inducement to him to let me help him sell his
paintings. He smiled when I said that and after a moment he said:
“Ten dollars are a mighty comfortable thing, and so are two pairs of
darned socks, as Oliver Twist would have said; but there’s something
besides the selling question in all these efforts of ours--don’t you
know that?”
“You mean self-expression?” I asked timidly. I had heard studio talk
before.
“Yes--self-expression, and a good many other things besides.”
He paused, studying me musingly.
“I wonder if you will understand,” he said almost to himself, and then
he added, with a beaming look: “Yes, I am sure you will. It’s this way:
If our art is our life, then perhaps we had best follow Goethe’s advice
and live resolutely in the good, the whole and the true. To do that we
must know _values_--values on the canvas and values in life.”
Reggie’s scale of values flashed to my mind.
“To be well informed,” he went on, “generally helps us to recognize
values.”
“The value of one’s paintings?” I asked slyly.
“I have an inclination to regard you as a little mouse,” he said, “but
if you bite like that, I shall call you a flea instead. Yes, that value,
and the value of money, too, by--hearsay.”
As he talked I had a sense of excitement, a certain uplifting thrill, as
it were. It seemed to me he was opening the doors into a world that I
had previously merely sensed. I knew dimly of its existence. The girls
at Lil’s had said: “Well, what _do_ you want then?” I did not know
myself. I think it was simply a blind, intuitive reaching after the
light of understanding. I _felt_ these things, but I could not express
my needs. I was of the inarticulate, but not the unfeeling. Bonnat must
have realized this quality in me, else he would not have revealed
himself so freely to me. He talked with an odd mixture of seriousness
and lightness. It was almost as if he slowly chose his words, to make
himself clear, just as if he were speaking to a child--a child he was
not entirely sure of, but whom he wanted to reach.
“I do know what you mean,” I cried. “Do you know Kipling’s
‘L’Envoi?’--because that expresses it exactly.”
“Let’s hear it.”
And I recited warmly, for I loved it:
“When earth’s last picture is painted
And the tubes are twisted and dry,
When the oldest colors are faded,
And the youngest critic has died,
We shall rest, and, faith, we shall need it--
Lie down for an æon or two,
Till the Master of all good workmen
Shall set us to work anew.
And those who are good shall be happy;
They shall sit in a Golden Chair;
They shall splash at a ten-league canvas
With brushes of Comet’s hair;
They shall find real saints to draw from--
Magdalene, Peter and Paul;
They shall work for an age at a sitting,
And never be tired at all;
And only the Master shall praise us,
And only the Master shall blame;
And no one shall work for money,
And no one shall work for Fame:
But each for the joy of the working;
And each in his separate star
Shall draw the thing as he sees it
For the God of Things as They are!”
“Bully!” cried Bonnat. “Your dramatic training was not lost. Only one
thing--”
“What?”
He put his two hands on my shoulders, and gave me a friendly little
shake and hug:
“You--lithp!” (lisp) he said.
Before I could protest at that deadly insult he took my hands and
squeezed them hard, and he said:
“I believe we speak the same language after all. We _think_ it, anyway,
don’t we?”