"Oh you're a deep one," Nash went on.
"What's the matter?"
"Do you call your conduct that of a man of honour?"
"Scarcely perhaps. But when no one has seen them--!"
"That's your villainy. _C'est de l'exquis, du pur exquis_. Come, my dear
fellow, this is very serious--it's a bad business," said Gabriel Nash.
Then he added almost with austerity: "You'll be so good as to place
before me every patch of paint, every sketch and scrap, that this room
contains."
Nick complied in great good humour. He turned out his boxes and drawers,
shovelled forth the contents of bulging portfolios, mounted on chairs to
unhook old canvases that had been severely "skied." He was modest and
docile and patient and amused, above all he was quite thrilled--thrilled
with the idea of eliciting a note of appreciation so late in the day. It
was the oddest thing how he at present in fact found himself imputing
value to his visitor--attributing to him, among attributions more
confused, the dignity of judgement, the authority of knowledge. Nash was
an ambiguous character but an excellent touchstone. The two said very
little for a while, and they had almost half an hour's silence, during
which, after our young man had hastily improvised an exhibition, there
was only a puffing of cigarettes. Gabriel walked about, looking at this
and that, taking up rough studies and laying them down, asking a
question of fact, fishing with his umbrella, on the floor, amid a pile
of unarranged sketches. Nick accepted jocosely the attitude of suspense,
but there was even more of it in his heart than in his face. So few
people had seen his young work--almost no one who really counted. He had
been ashamed of it, never showing it to bring on a conclusion, since a
conclusion was precisely what he feared. He whistled now while he let
his companion take time. He rubbed old panels with his sleeve and dabbed
wet sponges on surfaces that had sunk. It was a long time since he had
felt so gay, strange as such an assertion sounds in regard to a young
man whose bridal-day had at his urgent solicitation lately been fixed.
He had stayed in town to be alone with his imagination, and suddenly,
paradoxically, the sense of that result had arrived with poor Nash.
"Nicholas Dormer," this personage remarked at last, "for grossness of
immorality I think I've never seen your equal."
"That sounds so well," Nick returned, "that I hesitate to risk spoiling
it by wishing it explained."
"Don't you recognise in _any_ degree the grand idea of duty?"
"If I don't grasp it with a certain firmness I'm a deadly failure, for I
was quite brought up on it," Nick said.
"Then you're indeed the wretchedest failure I know. Life is ugly, after
all."
"Do I gather that you yourself recognise obligations of the order you
allude to?"
"Do you 'gather'?" Nash stared. "Why, aren't they the very flame of my
faith, the burden of my song?"
"My dear fellow, duty is doing, and I've inferred that you think rather
poorly of doing--that it spoils one's style."
"Doing wrong, assuredly."
"But what do you call right? What's your canon of certainty there?" Nick
asked.
"The conscience that's in us--that charming, conversible, infinite
thing, the intensest thing we know. But you must treat the oracle
civilly if you wish to make it speak. You mustn't stride into the temple
in muddy jack-boots and with your hat on your head, as the Puritan
troopers tramped into the dear old abbeys. One must do one's best to
find out the right, and your criminality appears to be that you've not
taken the commonest trouble."
"I hadn't you to ask," smiled Nick. "But duty strikes me as doing
something in particular. If you're too afraid it may be the wrong thing
you may let everything go."
"Being is doing, and if doing is duty being is duty. Do you follow?"
"At a very great distance."
"To be what one _may_ be, really and efficaciously," Nash went on, "to
feel it and understand it, to accept it, adopt it, embrace it--that's
conduct, that's life."
"And suppose one's a brute or an ass, where's the efficacy?"
"In one's very want of intelligence. In such cases one's out of it--the
question doesn't exist; one simply becomes a part of the duty of others.
The brute, the ass," Nick's visitor developed, "neither feels nor
understands, nor accepts nor adopts. Those fine processes in themselves
classify us. They educate, they exalt, they preserve; so that to profit
by them we must be as perceptive as we can. We must recognise our
particular form, the instrument that each of us--each of us who carries
anything--carries in his being. Mastering this instrument, learning to
play it in perfection--that's what I call duty, what I call conduct,
what I call success."
Nick listened with friendly attention and the air of general assent was
in his face as he said: "Every one has it then, this individual pipe?"
"'Every one,' my dear fellow, is too much to say, for the world's full
of the crudest _remplissage_. The book of life's padded, ah but
padded--a deplorable want of editing! I speak of every one who's any
one. Of course there are pipes and pipes--little quavering flutes for
the concerted movements and big _cornets-a-piston_ for the great solos."
"I see, I see. And what might your instrument be?"
Nash hesitated not a moment; his answer was radiantly there. "To speak
to people just as I'm speaking to you. To prevent for instance a great
wrong being done."
"A great wrong--?"
"Yes--to the human race. I talk--I talk; I say the things other people
don't, the things they can't the things they won't," Gabriel went on
with his inimitable candour.
"If it's a question of mastery and perfection you certainly have them,"
his companion replied.
"And you haven't, alas; that's the pity of it, that's the scandal.
That's the wrong I want to set right before it becomes too public a
shame. If I called you just now grossly immoral it's on account of the
spectacle you present--a spectacle to be hidden from the eye of
ingenuous youth: that of a man neglecting his own fiddle to blunder away
on that of one of his fellows. We can't afford such mistakes, we can't
tolerate such licence."
"You think then I _have_ a fiddle?"--and our young man, in spite of
himself, attached to the question a quaver of suspense finer, doubtless,
than any that had ever passed his lips.
"A regular Stradivarius! All these things you've shown me are remarkably
interesting. You've a talent of a wonderfully pure strain."
"I say--I say--I say!" Nick exclaimed, hovering there with his hands in
his pockets and a blush on his lighted face, while he repeated with a
change of accent Nash's exclamation of half an hour before.
"I like it, your talent; I measure it, I appreciate it, I insist upon
it," that critic went on between the whiffs of his cigarette. "I have to
be awfully wise and good to do so, but fortunately I am. In such a case
that's my duty. I shall make you my business for a while. Therefore," he
added piously; "don't say I'm unconscious of the moral law."
"A Stradivarius?" said Nick interrogatively and with his eyes wide open.
The thought in his mind was of how different this seemed from his having
gone to Griffin.