He was a man, and a huge one, down to his mid-thighs; and there he
ended in a couple of wooden stumps. His face, lapped in a very mask of
red bristle, was as savage as sin; and he growled and rumbled like an
interdicted volcano.
“Ay,” he thundered, “I’m Gogo, the Dutch tumbler. Who calls me by my
name?”
Holding with one hand by the banisters, he struck with the strong
stick he carried at the stairs, missed the tread, and was within an
inch of falling. The stick rattled down, and he swung and clung with
both hands to the rail. In an instant, some whimsical impulse sent me
tripping lightly up to help him.
“Take my arm,” I said, “down to the landing.”
The giggling servants paused in their task to stare up; but the
monster himself laboured round, with quite a stunned look.
“To help--_me_,” he whispered hoarsely; “the little scented rush to
prop the oak!”
I was in love with his changed voice at once. It was something to meet
only two-thirds of a man.
“No, no,” he said, touching my arm as if it were a relic. “I’m Gogo,
the colour-grinder, the bottle-washer--not worthy to latch your
ladyship’s little shoe. I’ll go down--I’ll go down. Ho-ho! it’s easy.
I’ve done it all my life.”
While he spoke, the odd creature had descended unaided, and,
recovering his stick, struck his wooden limbs fiercely with it.
“Do you see?” he cried. “A stiff-kneed dog as ever limped after
Fortune!”
He flounced upon the servants, and roared them into care of their
charge; then turned again to me, where I stood with my friend, who had
run trembling to my shelter.
“’Tis our market, ladies,” he said in apology. “I must be particular
in its custody. We deal in new lamps for old; in”--
He descended a few steps, then turned again.
“Ah!” he groaned, tragic and comical in one. “Pity the poor genii who
has to serve; pity him--pity him.”
He heaved a sigh that would have turned a windmill, and followed the
picture, and disappeared.
“Patty!” I whispered, when he was gone--“Patty! Lord, Patty! who _is_
the creature?”
“I’m terrified of him,” she gulped. “He’s Mr. de Crespigny’s dog, he
calls himself, and follows his master everywhere, loving and growling
at him. He used to say there was no such painter in the world, if he
could be kept to it; but he always frightened me dreadfully. I do hope
they won’t stop long.”
“H’m!” I said. “And is that queer name all he’s got?”
“I never heard of another,” she answered. “But anyhow, it suits him.”
“Yes,” I said--and sighed--“_if_ he only had legs!”
IX.
I AM COMMITTED TO THE ----
I learned, as you shall understand, to readjust my first impression
of de Crespigny. It is certain one must not judge the quality of the
wine by the vessel. He was a great artist, who ran quickly to waste in
the passions evoked of his own conceptions. From the mouth downwards
he was a sensualist, and not fit to trust himself with a fair model.
Shut into a monastery, he would have been a Fra Angelico.
At the first he captured me, when once I was familiarised with the
ungainly exterior of the creature. To see him work--ardent, engrossed,
unerring in the early enthusiasm of a subject--was a revelation. He
stood so slack, he ran so to moral exhaustion when delivered of his
inspiration, it was impossible to recognise the master of a moment ago
in this invertebrate body with the loose wrists and silly laugh. If he
could only have been kept always at the high pressure of his
conceptions! Sometimes I wondered if it was in me to make him great
and hold him. It would have been splendid to be the Hamilton to this
Romney. Yet in the end I found the game not worth the candle. He was
soft wax, indeed, for seven-eighths of his length, and the littlest
puff from red lips could blow all the flame out of his head.
Still, while it lasted, his influence over me was an education. His
portfolios were the very minutes of inspiration--suggestions,
impressions of loveliness, caught and recorded and passed by for
others. He finished little, and perhaps would have been a lesser
artist and a stronger man if he could have laboured to consolidate his
dreams. He taught me that not facts, but shadows of facts--the
reflections, most moving, most intimate which they cast--are the real
appeals to the emotions; that there is no landscape so beautiful as
its reflection in a mirror, no chord so pathetic as its silent
vibration in one’s heart. Perhaps the heavens are an eternity of
echoes, of spectral perfumes, of dreams derived from experience, and
we the authors of our own immortality. If so, we should live
passionately who would dream well.
What this man lacked in nerve and backbone, his strange servant and
comrade supplied, and many times over. He was the oddest
monstrosity--savage in criticism, caustic in humour, a Caliban
bellowing grief and tenderness through hairy lungs. How he could ever
have come to attach himself, and passionately, to so flaccid a
bear-leader, was a problem pure for psychology. Now, at least, the two
were inseparable as-- Ah, my friend! I was on the point of saying as
Valentine and Proteus, but the analogy, I protest, is too poignant;
for have not I too been cruelly declared the Sylvia who divided them?
The portrait, on that first afternoon, was carried down to a
convenient closet on the ground floor; and there de Crespigny worked
on it, always alone, or in the sole company of his henchman. When
finished for the day, he would invariably lock the canvas into a
press, and none, not even I (there is virtue in that parenthesis), was
permitted to see it. The room was held sacred to him; and madam
herself refrained so religiously from intruding on its privacy as to
evoke, in her guileless trust of the singleness of his conversion, the
very hypocrisy which to her faith was inconceivable. For, indeed, he
converted this closet--which stood safely remote and approached by a
back-stair way--into a sanctuary for deceit. Often, to confess the
whole truth, when she supposed me engrossed in books or the
construction of celestial samplers, was I closeted with de Crespigny
and Gogo, learning to handle a brush, or inspire one, while Patty,
with a code of signals, kept panic watch on the stairs.
Madam’s exclusion, no doubt, cost her many a patient sigh. She
wondered over the idiosyncrasies of genius, which preferred, or
professed to prefer, to labour its mental impressions rather than toil
to record the living and mechanical pose. Still, it was true, the
Sophia of to-day, however rejuvenated, was scarcely the model of that
older time; and that he could finish that beautiful inspiration from
her staider personality was what it was folly, perhaps, in her to
expect.
Poor woman! Though I had my grudge, and no taste or reason to
commiserate such vanity, I suffered some qualms of remorse for the
part I was led to play. It is natural, after all, for the sex to see
itself never so immortal as through the eyes of love; and, when a man
has once praised its complexion, to claim for itself an eternity of
roses.
Father Pope, the old spiritual curmudgeon, never quite credited, I
think, the genuineness of this late conversion. I daresay, from his
experience in the confessional box, he knew his man pretty well, and
the value of such emotional abjurations. The sick devil turned monk
was not to his taste; and, if he ventured to intimate as much, the
coldness which certainly befell between madam and him at this time was
easily to be accounted for. It all amused me hugely; and I felt
delightfully wicked while the fun lasted. But retribution, my friend,
was to overtake your naughty little Diana.
One day, stealing into the studio, I found Gogo alone, grinding
colours into a little mortar.
“God ye good e’en, little serpent,” said he. “You can sit and beguile
me for practice till my master comes.”
“Gogo,” I said, shocked. “Why do you call me by such a name?”
“Because you are as like Eve as two peas,” growled he.
“Eve was not a serpent, but a beautiful woman,” I answered, pouting.
“And so was Lamia; and yet she was a serpent,” he grunted.
“I don’t know what you mean. You said Eve.”
“Well, why not?” he replied, turning his red, morose-looking eyes on
me. “Eve accused the serpent of beguilement, didn’t she? and Adam Eve?
But Eve was made out of the man, therefore Adam accused himself. But
Eve accused the serpent; therefore Adam accused the serpent. Yet he
accused Eve; therefore Eve was the serpent, which is what she would,
and will, never understand. O, God bless her! God bless her! Which, if
He would do, blessing the serpent, might unriddle this sinful problem
of life!”
He set to pounding vigorously with his pestle, and for a minute I
watched him in a bewildered silence. There was always something in
this shorn Cyclops which oddly attracted me.
“Gogo,” I said quite softly.
He threw down his pestle at once, and faced round, writhing his hands
together, and glaring at me.
“Who spoke?” he said, in hoarse, trembling tones. “A voice from the
garden making me in love with my own clown name. O, always so, always
so, thou spirit of Eve; and, though it lost the world to God, I’d take
the apple from thy hand.”
I laughed a little tremulously, as he stumped across the floor and
stood close before me. The vision of this great storm of a creature,
condemned to play the “comic relief” in the tragedy of his own
manhood, came as near my heart as anything.
“Look!” he cried, his rugged chest heaving; “I can’t kneel to you, and
I’m your slave. I walk open-eyed, hating and adoring you, into the
toils you spread for our feet. Feet!” he groaned, looking down, with a
despairing gesture. “Perhaps--who knows?--having them, I might have
escaped.”
“How did you lose them, poor Gogo?” I said.
“Hating and adoring,” he groaned, unheeding my question, “hating and
adoring. Look, little serpent: I could crush your slender throat for
what you do, and hold on, and sob my soul away to see you die. Why
have you come between us? United, we were strong, he and I. I drove
his genius on, and loved the poor ape for its spark of divinity, and
propped the weak spirit while it wrought. You knock the prop away, you
knock the prop away, and we both fall; and where is _my_ compensation
for the injury?” He clasped his great hands to me: “Give me back my
genius,” he cried in pain, “and let us go.”