THE MASTERPIECE
The third day after the _Mambare_ sailed found me southbound for
Sydney, with Paris as my ultimate objective. The thought that a
striking--possibly a great--picture might be painted about the face I
had already done came to me the first time I threw back the veiling rug
and encountered poor Allen's terror-haunted eyes staring back into my
own. In deciding to finish the work in Paris I missed whatever chance I
might have had of doing something really worth while. That I did finally
complete a picture that was striking, arresting--something to set the
tongues of the art world wagging for many a day--was due to the effort I
had already made--The Face.
With small chance of being able to do anything for Hartley Allen--at
that time believed to be permanently insane,--there was no reason for my
remaining longer in Townsville. As nothing that the good Chief of Police
had learned--or ever did learn, so far as I know--was calculated to
connect me with his failure to run Ranga to earth, he, naturally made no
objection to my leaving. The whole affair was a complete mystery to him.
The disappearance of Rona was rated only as a minor mystery. The amusing
part of it was that it never occurred to the dear man to connect the
two. The last thing that I fixed my glass upon as my southbound boat
steamed out of the harbour was a confused mass of wreckage, blurring
darkly against the mangroves a few miles north of the town. It was all
that the late storm had left of the grounded labour schooner, _Cora
Andrews_.
Missing the P. & O. boat by twenty-four hours at Melbourne--too late to
overtake it by train to Adelaide,--I found the next sailing was a
_Messageries Maritime_ steamer. Rather than wait a week for the next
Orient liner, I booked for the French boat. This was all against my
better judgment, especially in the light of the fact that I had work
ahead. The one most effective influence I had known in keeping my use of
absinthe at a point where it was not entirely beyond my control was the
scathing if unspoken contempt of men of my own race for another of that
race addicted to the insidious Latin habit. The nearest thing to a clean
break-away I had ever made up to this time came after a stony-faced
Cockney steward on a transatlantic Cunarder, who had put my
whisky-drunken cabin-mate to bed one night as a matter of course,
slammed the door with a snort when he surprised me pouring absinthe into
cracked ice the following afternoon. In France, in French colonies, on
French steamers--wherever the tri-colour flapped, in short--that
restraining contempt was non-existent. There one found palliation,
indulgence, even encouragement. That was the reason I had always become
so abject a slave of the "Green Lady" during my sojourns in Paris, in
Algiers, in Saigon, in Noumea. With no one to remind me of my shame, I
forgot it, sinking ever lower and lower the while. This time, it had
been my plan so to occupy myself with work on my picture in Paris that I
should be able to keep my absinthe appetite just about where I had
managed to hold it during the last six months in Kai and Australia. It
is quite possible I might have kept to this program had I caught the P.
& O. from Melbourne, or had the sense to wait for another British boat.
As it was, five weeks of _dolce far niente_ were too much for me. By the
time we reached Suez, I was seeing so green that the desert banks of the
Canal looked like verdant lawns to me, and at Marseilles they took me
straight from the ship to the hospital, pretty well all in mentally and
physically. As my case presented some interesting complications of
malaria and tropical anaemia, the doctors took a good deal of interest
in it. Under the circumstances, I was dead lucky to get out of their
hands at the end of a month.
Thoroughly disgusted with the world in general and myself in particular
on the day I was discharged from the hospital, it was a toss-up for a
few hours as to whether I should jump out for the Islands by the first
boat, or push on to Paris. That I finally plumped for the latter was due
more to the fact that there was no east-bound sailing for a couple of
days, than to any faith that remained in my ability to get on with the
picture. Considering all this, it seems to me that the effort I finally
did pull myself together for was fairly creditable in its results.
It was The Face itself--after I had unpacked and set up the canvas in a
studio that a former friend kindly placed at my disposal--that was
responsible for finally jolting me into action. Even at the end of ten
weeks, Hartley Allen's tortured features seemed as real to me as on the
night I had finished transferring them from my burning brain to the
canvas. It struck me then--as it seemed to strike the public later--as
the nearest thing to flesh and blood ever flicked off the tip of an
artist's brush; and I felt that I had only to daub in some kind of an
_ensemble_ around it to have a work that would at least give Parisian
art circles something to talk about for a while.
It seemed to me that the most effective thing to do would be to make
Allen, lashed to the schooner's wheel, the central and dominating figure
on the canvas, and to have the other figures the creatures of his
imagination--the phantoms conjured up by his reeling brain. These would
include Bell, Rona, Ranga and a background of plague-stricken niggers.
It was not to be--as we had planned the "Black-birder"--an attempt to
portray some incident of the voyage. The "phantoms" were to be done in
greys and blues, filmy and indistinct, to differentiate them from the
solider flesh of the maniac tied to the wheel. It was not an uneffective
conception, had I been up to carrying it out--which I wasn't.
By a remarkable coincidence, as I have already mentioned, The Face was
in exactly the right place to fit into the _ensemble_ I had planned.
This was a good omen and I derived no little encouragement from it.
Fearful of the effect that terror-stricken gaze might have upon my
models, I stuck an opaque square of paper over the distorted features,
with the intention of leaving it there until the rest of the picture was
finished. This was a wise precaution, as the sequel proved.
The model whom I chanced to secure to pose for Allen's figure was an
especially fortunate choice. He had recently finished spending six or
eight hours a day lashed to a hollow canvas cross in connection with a
mural decoration at some cathedral--Sacré Coeur, I believe it was,--so
he stood up rather well under the strain being triced to the property
steering-gear I had contrived to borrow from the _Folies-Bergère_, where
the "marine" _revue_ in which it had figured was just over. Considering
the fact that I had never done anything but seascapes and was notably
weak in anatomy, my work on this figure was far from being as bad as
might have been expected. It was not seriously out of drawing, and, even
with The Face covered up, one was conscious of an unmistakable
suggestion of agony in the tensely-strained limbs and back-drawn torso.
From the artistic side, I would undoubtedly have done better to have
trimmed down my canvas and limited the picture to this single figure.
This, however, never occurred to me until a long time afterwards. At the
moment, my mind was quite incapable of running away from the track on
which I had started it.
Although I knew that one of the things that must have been in
Hartley Allen's mind was Bell's face, as he had described it to
me--pain-twisted, with the lower lip bitten clean through, and a bar of
light from the cracked binnacle slashing across it,--I could not bring
myself to attempt to dramatize the sufferings of my friend. (Indeed,
even at that time I had a guilty feeling that I was not doing the decent
thing in using that of Allen in a picture to be exhibited to the
public.) All that I did in Bell's case, therefore, was a back view of a
huddled figure, sitting on the rail of the cockpit, with a half-empty
whisky bottle rolling on the deck behind. It was not destined to draw
much attention or comment one way or the other, for which I was duly
thankful.
Ranga, as a consequence of being unable to find a model that would do
him justice, I finally omitted. Rona came near to elimination for a
similar reason, but in her case fortune, in the end, was more kind. It
may be remembered that there was a so-called Hindu dancer leading the
Oriental ballets at the _Comique_ about this time. She was really an
Eurasian half-caste--the daughter of a British "Tommy" and a Mahratta
girl, born in Poona. With little of Rona's beauty of face and
winsomeness of manner, she was still possessed of the same flaming
temperament and a figure that might have been poured from the same
mould. It was the lithe, sinewy, serpentine shape of her that caught my
eye when I chanced to drop in at the _Comique_ for a matinée of
_Marouf_, and (as she was still a few strokes short of the crest of the
wave of popularity on which she rode for the next season or two), I had
little difficulty in persuading her to give me a few sittings. She
insisted she was doing it for art's sake, but it was really vanity that
brought her into line. Also, as transpired shortly, she had a very sharp
weather eye for the main chance. In any event, the picture proved both
her immediate making and her ultimate undoing. The advertising she got
out of the fact that her living, breathing likeness had been painted
into the most talked-about picture at the spring _Salon_ of the _Société
Nationale des Beaux-Arts_ doubled and trebled her salary several times
in the course of the next year. But it was also a reproduction of that
same picture in a Vienna art journal that was directly responsible for
luring to Paris the young Serbian ex-prince who chopped the girl to
pieces with a curved Arabian scimitar--a part of her dancing toggery--as
she was dressing to go on at a gala night of _Aïda_.
It had been my original intention to paint Rona issuing from the
companionway, just as Allen had seen her rush out on the morning Bell
died. This, however, was far from meeting with the approval of Keeora
(that was what she called herself at the time; it was only in her
hey-day that she was known as Kismeta), who insisted upon breaking in
full length or not at all. I was so sodden with absinthe by this time,
so sick of the whole job, so anxious to get quit of it for good, that I
raised no objections. The flighty thing proposed a sort of near-aerial
posture on the deck-house that was something like a cross between the
wing-footed Mercury and one of Puck's getaways in Midsummer Night's
Dream. Rather than lose the girl outright, I let her have her own way.
Steadied by two or three convenient guy-wires and puffing contentedly at
one of my hemp-doped cigarettes, she held her painful pose with a
fortitude truly Oriental. I can see yet the queer little heart-shaped
pucker that dented the muscle-knotted calf of her leg when she swung up
to the tips of her toes.
I fancy it must have been a certain appeal the audacious minx made to my
physical senses that prodded on my flagging energies. Everything that
was left in me I devoted to making her absurd conception effective on
its own account. To make it so as an integral part of the picture was,
of course, out of the question. It is still a matter of a good deal of
wonder to me that I succeeded as well as I did. The pirouetting figure
on the _Cora's_ deck-house might just as well have symbolized _Peter
Pan_, or _The Spirit of Spring_, as _Rona Rampant_; but the fact
remained that it was exceedingly pleasing to the eye. In this connection
I thought an American tourist--from somewhere south of the Mason-Dixon
Line by his accent--expressed himself rather well. I overheard the
remark on my first and only visit to the _Salon_. "If that little filly
doan leave off kickin' up so neah them buck niggahs," he drawled,
"things ah suah fixin' fo' a lynchin' pa'ty. By cracky, if she doan look
good enuf to eat!"
It was "them big buck niggahs" that were responsible for bringing my
labours to a sudden end. I had managed to round up a half-dozen hulking
Senegambians from the docks at Havre to pose for my plague-stricken
Solomon Islanders, and for the first two or three days things went very
well. I was striving for a sort of Doré-esque effect, by painting a
tangled bunch of blacks writhing in the half-light of the shadowed waist
of the schooner. The lazy brutes found lolling round on the studio floor
a deal more congenial work than humping cotton bales, and I was getting
on very encouragingly considering my wretched condition, when one of the
prying rascals, taking advantage of a moment when my back was turned,
turned down a corner of the patch that hid the face of the man lashed to
the wheel. What damage was wrought was inflicted on such flimsy
furniture as chanced to be in a direct line of flight from the "models'
throne" to the door. Fortunately, the canvas was well to one side. The
Senegalese, it seems, have a raw, red terror of the "Evil Eye."
That little episode brought to an end my work with models. I simply
blocked in my plague-stricken blacks in a rough sort of way and let it
go at that. The effect was hardly as crude as one would think. The
remark of the Southern gentleman I have quoted proved that a man not
unfamiliar with niggers could at least distinguish of what the tangle in
the waist was intended to be made up.
I have definite recollection of only one further occasion on which I
tried to work. The interval in which I had anything approximating
command of my normal faculties had dwindled to a half-hour or so in the
afternoon, and I quickly found that I was utterly unable to concentrate
my mind sufficiently for connected effort even then. On the occasion I
have mentioned, I knocked off dead after discovering that I was trying
to decorate Keeora's brow with the wreath of maiden's hair fern that had
crowned the aviating "Green Lady" in her flight of the night before. I
chucked in my hand complete after that, and had the whole monkey-show
packed off to the Selection Committee. As might have been expected, the
picture nearly caused a riot in that temperamental bunch of "pickers,"
but, in the end, The Face won the day with them, just as it did with the
public.
Of the furore created by "_Hell's Hatches_" in the _Salon_ it will
hardly be necessary for me to write. Most of the excitement it stirred
up was traceable to the haunting horror of the face of the wretch tied
to the wheel; the rest was due to its name, which only suggested itself
to me at the last moment. Perhaps the fact that everyone was baffled
from the outset in trying to discover the _motif_ of the bizarre thing
also contributed to the impulse of the whirlpool of morbid curiosity
with which it was engulfed. And who could blame them for failing to
discover any connection between a tied-up maniac, a hunched-up drunkard,
a kicking-up dancer and a bunch of tangled-up niggers? The avalanche of
surmises would have been highly diverting had not my sense of humour
already fallen a victim to the apathy that was rapidly settling upon my
mind and body.
My outstanding recollection of the whole affair is of a highly effective
by-play staged by that keen little publicist, Keeora, who had become a
bit piqued over the slowness of the Press to broadcast the identity of
the lady dancing on the deck-house. Utterly indifferent, I had avoided
the _Grand Palais_ not only on the opening day of the _Salon_, but also
during the week that followed, when it was reported that the _Avenue
Alexander III_ was at times blocked with the throngs striving to get
within sight of the most intriguing picture shown in years. My telephone
was disconnected; telegrams and letters by the stacks lay unopened; a
pile of newspapers were unread. Growing more sullen and sodden day by
day, I had eyes for nothing but the green bottle at my elbow and the
constantly replenished glass of cracked ice by its side. All the rest of
the world was one soft, verdant tunnel--nothing else. I had been
drinking steadily for days, afraid to face the reaction that must
inevitably follow the first break in the continuity of the flow of the
life-saving trickle of green.
In a way, I suppose, it is Keeora I have to thank for the fact that,
when I finally left my room in the _Continental_, it was to be headed
for the _Grand Palais_ instead of to _La Morgue_. I am quite convinced
that nothing short of the violent eruption of hysteria that soulful lady
brought off outside my door would have induced me to open it, and
probably no one else in Paris could have been equal to just that kind of
an outburst. In passionate French-Cockney, Keeora told how, after
failing for days to reach me by 'phone and telegraph, she had at last
come in person to bear me to the _Salon_ to share with her our common
triumph. That didn't move me greatly, but when she swore that she was
going to stay until she "jolly well croaked, G'bly'me," unless I let her
in, something inside of my head snapped and I gave way. (I always was
like that with hysterical women.) When I opened the door I discovered
that she was dressed in some Mogul princess sort of a rigout, and
accompanied by an Italian _Marchesa_ and two or three lesser satellites.
Between them and my valet they got me dressed and down to a waiting
carriage.
To get away from the mob at the main entrance, they took me around to
the _Avenue d'Antin_ side of the _Grand Palais_, where Keeora pointed
out with glee that the _Salon_ of the _Société des Artistes Français_,
which had opened a week or two previous to that of the _Beaux-Arts_
outfit, was almost deserted. "_Et tout, mon cher Monseer W'itney, por
raison de--de la grand success de 'Aykootillys don fur.'_"
"And what might they be?" I asked dully, rather fancying some new sort
of epidemic had broken out.
"Madame means to say '_Ecoutilles d'Enfer_,'" began the _Marchesa_
politely; "eet--eet ees--"
"Eat your bloomin' 'at!" cut in the lady impatiently, indignant that
anyone could be so stupid as to have her Parisian interpreted to him.
"Don't you twig me, old cock? That's wot them French Jo'nnys calls
'Ell's 'Atches."
The picture was extremely well hung, both for position and light; though
whether this had come about as a consequence of a reshuffle after it had
turned out to be the main drawing card, I did not learn. There was a
roped-off area in front of it, and through this a number of perspiring
attendants were feeding the crowd, working hard with tongue and hand to
keep the chattering line in motion. Keeora called my attention to a
woman who had fainted and was being carried out on a stretcher. "Bowls
'em over just like that right along," she giggled. "Six of 'em squealed
and keeled back just w'ile I was 'angin' on 'ere yustidy. But it ain't
_me_ wot gets 'em," she hastened to explain; "it's that crazy bloke at
the w'eel, wiv 'is bloomin' eyes borin' right through your chest an'
raspin' up an' down your spine. Don't see wot you wanted to put _'im_ in
for any'ow."
At a word from Keeora's sedulous satellites, the attendants opened up a
line through the mob and cleared a space in front of the picture. Then,
assuring herself with a critically comprehensive glance that the setting
was all correct, she rushed in, threw her arms around my neck, kissed me
smackingly on both cheeks, French-fashion, and began declaiming in her
best Parisio-Whitechapel how I had earned her undying gratitude and
affection (_mon amours eternel_) in making her the central figure in the
greatest work of art of modern times. It was all extremely well
done--from Keeora's standpoint, that is. She had a solid phalanx of
reporters massed in the background, as a consequence of which, after the
next morning, there was no chance for anyone to remain longer in
ignorance of the fact that the nymph hot-footing around the coamings of
"Hell's Hatches" was Keeora of the _Comique_. The following Saturday the
management came round voluntarily to her hotel with a new contract worth
several thousand francs a week to their rising _danseuse orientale_.
For myself, groggy in head and knees as I was, the experience was rather
trying. Breaking away from her stranglehold at the first opportunity, I
told Keeora to keep her "eternel amours" for those who wanted them, and
bolted. There was some pretence at pursuit, but, with the real magnet
drawing in the other direction, I finally managed to elbow clear.
Hailing a cab in the _Champs-Elysées_, I returned to my hotel.
But the interruption, as I have said, was a fortunate one. It checked my
downward slide dangerously near the point where a crash was due. I was
far from being out of the woods yet, but the interval of comparative
lucidity had given me enough courage to try to pull up. Unloading all
the firearms I had about my suite and giving them to my man, I told him
to go away for the night and not to return until noon of the following
day. Then, as restrainedly as I could, I drank during the first three or
four hours of the evening, before allowing myself to go to sleep. The
crisis--the dread reaction I had feared to face--I knew would come on
awakening in the morning. It arrived on schedule--two hours of teetering
on the edge of hell and cursing myself for putting the guns beyond my
reach. Even with the _absintheteur's notorious_ dread of cold steel, I
fingered Hartley Allen's Portuguese throwing-knife a long time before
mustering up the courage to drop it out of the street window. That gave
me a new idea, and I held lengthy debate with myself about following the
knife to the pavement. If I had been on the fourth floor instead of the
second, I might have tried it. As it was, fifteen feet to a glass
marquee didn't look good enough. But at last I won through--just. It was
a sorry looking figure that shivered back at me from the mirror after I
had got up my nerve to ring for a pot of black coffee at seven; but I
was off the toboggan, at any rate, with my face set unflinchingly toward
the one place in the world where I felt there was at least a fighting
chance for me to pull up again. I had arrived at the end of the day of
which I had dreamed so long--"My Day," I had called it. Paris had come
fawning to my feet--and brought me Dead Sea Fruit. I was going back to
work out my own salvation in the Islands.
I had a rather trying time of it, getting packed up and away on such
short notice; but I simply did what I could and let the rest go. Putting
Paris behind me was the thing. It took all that was in me to do it, but
I caught the Brindisi Express from the P.L.M. station that night.
My last act before leaving the hotel was to sign a paper brought there
by a well-known art dealer, with whom I had talked by 'phone earlier in
the day. It authorized him to sell to the highest bidder a painting in
oil known by the name of "Hell's Hatches," delivery to be made
immediately after the closing of the spring _Salon_ of the _Société
Nationale des Beaux-Arts_. It also provided that he should receive a
liberal commission for his services. It must have been something like a
month later that he collected ten per cent. on three hundred thousand
_francs_ less about five hundred paid some second-rate artist for
executing a slight alteration in one of the figures. It was a petty
Sultan from Morocco (high card with Keeora at the moment) to whom the
picture was knocked down after a spirited run of bidding with an Irish
distiller and a Chicago soap-maker. The buyer's only condition was that
the man lashed to the wheel should be changed to a _burnoused_ Arab.
That would tend to give the picture an atmosphere more in keeping with
his desert palace, he said; also, he wanted the _efrangi's_ face covered
up. The eyes made him jumpy.