"Yes--quite insensible to the irony. She wanted him vindicated--and by
me!"
He laughed again, and threw back his head to look up at the sketch of
the donkey. "There were days when I couldn't look at that
thing--couldn't face it. But I forced myself to put it here; and now
it's cured me--cured me. That's the reason why I don't dabble any more,
my dear Rickham; or rather Stroud himself is the reason."
For the first time my idle curiosity about my companion turned into a
serious desire to understand him better.
"I wish you'd tell me how it happened," I said.
He stood looking up at the sketch, and twirling between his fingers a
cigarette he had forgotten to light. Suddenly he turned toward me.
"I'd rather like to tell you--because I've always suspected you of
loathing my work."
I made a deprecating gesture, which he negatived with a good-humoured
shrug.
"Oh, I didn't care a straw when I believed in myself--and now it's an
added tie between us!"
He laughed slightly, without bitterness, and pushed one of the deep
arm-chairs forward. "There: make yourself comfortable--and here are the
cigars you like."
He placed them at my elbow and continued to wander up and down the
room, stopping now and then beneath the picture.
"How it happened? I can tell you in five minutes--and it didn't take
much longer to happen.... I can remember now how surprised and pleased
I was when I got Mrs. Stroud's note. Of course, deep down, I had always
_felt_ there was no one like him--only I had gone with the stream,
echoed the usual platitudes about him, till I half got to think he was
a failure, one of the kind that are left behind. By Jove, and he _was_
left behind--because he had come to stay! The rest of us had to let
ourselves be swept along or go under, but he was high above the
current--on everlasting foundations, as you say.
"Well, I went off to the house in my most egregious mood--rather moved,
Lord forgive me, at the pathos of poor Stroud's career of failure being
crowned by the glory of my painting him! Of course I meant to do the
picture for nothing--I told Mrs. Stroud so when she began to stammer
something about her poverty. I remember getting off a prodigious phrase
about the honour being _mine_--oh, I was princely, my dear Rickham! I
was posing to myself like one of my own sitters.
"Then I was taken up and left alone with him. I had sent all my traps
in advance, and I had only to set up the easel and get to work. He had
been dead only twenty-four hours, and he died suddenly, of heart
disease, so that there had been no preliminary work of destruction--his
face was clear and untouched. I had met him once or twice, years
before, and thought him insignificant and dingy. Now I saw that he was
superb.
"I was glad at first, with a merely aesthetic satisfaction: glad to
have my hand on such a 'subject.' Then his strange life-likeness began
to affect me queerly--as I blocked the head in I felt as if he were
watching me do it. The sensation was followed by the thought: if he
_were_ watching me, what would he say to my way of working? My strokes
began to go a little wild--I felt nervous and uncertain.
"Once, when I looked up, I seemed to see a smile behind his close
grayish beard--as if he had the secret, and were amusing himself by
holding it back from me. That exasperated me still more. The secret?
Why, I had a secret worth twenty of his! I dashed at the canvas
furiously, and tried some of my bravura tricks. But they failed me,
they crumbled. I saw that he wasn't watching the showy bits--I couldn't
distract his attention; he just kept his eyes on the hard passages
between. Those were the ones I had always shirked, or covered up with
some lying paint. And how he saw through my lies!
"I looked up again, and caught sight of that sketch of the donkey
hanging on the wall near his bed. His wife told me afterward it was the
last thing he had done--just a note taken with a shaking hand, when he
was down in Devonshire recovering from a previous heart attack. Just a
note! But it tells his whole history. There are years of patient
scornful persistence in every line. A man who had swum with the current
could never have learned that mighty up-stream stroke....
"I turned back to my work, and went on groping and muddling; then I
looked at the donkey again. I saw that, when Stroud laid in the first
stroke, he knew just what the end would be. He had possessed his
subject, absorbed it, recreated it. When had I done that with any of my
things? They hadn't been born of me--I had just adopted them....
"Hang it, Rickham, with that face watching me I couldn't do another
stroke. The plain truth was, I didn't know where to put it--_I had
never known_. Only, with my sitters and my public, a showy splash of
colour covered up the fact--I just threw paint into their faces....
Well, paint was the one medium those dead eyes could see through--see
straight to the tottering foundations underneath. Don't you know how,
in talking a foreign language, even fluently, one says half the time
not what one wants to but what one can? Well--that was the way I
painted; and as he lay there and watched me, the thing they called my
'technique' collapsed like a house of cards. He didn't sneer, you
understand, poor Stroud--he just lay there quietly watching, and on his
lips, through the gray beard, I seemed to hear the question: 'Are you
sure you know where you're coming out?'
"If I could have painted that face, with that question on it, I should
have done a great thing. The next greatest thing was to see that I
couldn't--and that grace was given me. But, oh, at that minute,
Rickham, was there anything on earth I wouldn't have given to have
Stroud alive before me, and to hear him say: 'It's not too late--I'll
show you how'?
"It _was_ too late--it would have been, even if he'd been alive. I
packed up my traps, and went down and told Mrs. Stroud. Of course I
didn't tell her _that_--it would have been Greek to her. I simply said
I couldn't paint him, that I was too moved. She rather liked the
idea--she's so romantic! It was that that made her give me the donkey.
But she was terribly upset at not getting the portrait--she did so want
him 'done' by some one showy! At first I was afraid she wouldn't let me
off--and at my wits' end I suggested Grindle. Yes, it was I who started
Grindle: I told Mrs. Stroud he was the 'coming' man, and she told
somebody else, and so it got to be true.... And he painted Stroud
without wincing; and she hung the picture among her husband's
things...."
He flung himself down in the arm-chair near mine, laid back his head,
and clasping his arms beneath it, looked up at the picture above the
chimney-piece.
"I like to fancy that Stroud himself would have given it to me, if he'd
been able to say what he thought that day."
And, in answer to a question I put half-mechanically--"Begin again?" he
flashed out. "When the one thing that brings me anywhere near him is
that I knew enough to leave off?"
He stood up and laid his hand on my shoulder with a laugh. "Only the
irony of it is that I _am_ still painting--since Grindle's doing it for
me! The Strouds stand alone, and happen once--but there's no
exterminating our kind of art."