When his father entered Teddy was eating his breakfast propped up in
bed, balancing a tray on his humped-up legs.
“Well, shrimp, you seem to have had a lucky tumble. Can’t say there
seems to be much the matter.”
A large bite of hot buttered toast threatened to impede conversation.
“It’s the brown stuff,” Teddy mumbled; “she wanted to see if it ’ud
make me wet.”
“Kind of vivisection, eh? And did it?”
“All over--like in a bath playing ship-wrecked sailors.” The excavation
of an egg absorbed the little boy’s attention. His father seated himself
on the edge of the bed. He was a large childish man, unconsciously
unconventional His brown velvet jacket smelt strongly of tobacco and
varnish. It was spotted with bright colors, especially on the left
sleeve between the wrist and elbow, where he had tested his paints
instead of on his palette. His trousers bagged at the knees from
neglect rather than from wear; their shabbiness was made up for by an
extravagant waistcoat, sprigged with lilac. Double-breasted and cut
low in a V shape, it exposed a soft silk shirt and a large red tie with
loosely flowing ends. His head was magnificent--the head of a rebel
enthusiast, too impatient to become a leader of men. It was broad in
the forehead and heavy with a mane of coal-black ringlets. His mouth
was handsome--a rare thing in a man. His nose was roughly molded,
Cromwellian, giving to his face a look of rude strength and purpose. A
tuft of hair immediately beneath his lower lip bore the same relation
to his mustache that a tail bears to a kite--it lent to his expression
balance. It was his eyes that astonished--they ought to have been
fiercely brown to be in keeping with the rest of his gypsy appearance;
instead they were a clear gray, as though with gazing into cloudy
distances, as are the eyes of men who live by seafaring.
He had made repeated efforts to curb his picturesqueness; he knew that
it didn’t pay in an age when the ideal for males is to be undecorative.
He knew that his appearance appealed as affectation and bred distrust in
the minds of the escutcheoned tradesmen who are England’s art patrons.
When they came to confer a favor, they liked to find a gentlemanly
shopkeeper--not a Phoenician pirate, with a voice like a gale. His
untamedness impressed them as immorality. He always felt that they left
him thoroughly convinced that he and Dearie were not married.
Whatever editors, art patrons and publishers might think about James
Gurney, Teddy followed in his mother’s footsteps: to him James Gurney
was Jimmie Boy, the biggest-hearted companion that a son ever had--a
father of whom to be inordinately proud. There was no one as great as
his father, no one as clever, no one as splendid to look at in the whole
wide world. When he walked down the street, holding his father’s hand,
he liked to fancy that people stared after him for his daring, just
as they would have stared had he walked with his hand in the mane of
a shaggy lion. It was wonderful to be friends with a father so fierce
looking. And then his father treated him as a brother artist and
borrowed notions from him--really did, without pretense; he’d seen the
notions carried out in illustrations. His father had come to borrow from
him now.
“Any ideas this morning, partner--any ideas that you don’t want
yourself?”
Teddy hitched himself upon the pillow, trying to look as grave and
important as if he wore spectacles. “Yes. A room like this, only lonely
with a fire burning and an old, old woman sitting over there.” He
pointed to the window and the gilded harp. “I’d let her be playing,
Daddy; and a big white bird, that you can see through, must be beating
its wings against the panes, trying and always trying to get out.”
“A ghost bird?” his father suggested.
“Don’t know--just a big white bird and a woman so old that she might be
dead.”
“What’s the meaning of the bird, old chap? Dreams, or hopes, or
memories--something like that?”
Teddy could find nothing more in the egg. “Don’t know; that’s the way I
saw it” He ceased to be elderly, took off his imaginary spectacles and
looked up like a dog who stands wagging his tail, waiting to be patted.
“Was that an idea, Daddy?”
His father nodded.
“A good idea?”
“Quite a good idea. But, oh, while I remember it, Mr. Sheerug wanted
to see you. You and he must have struck up a great friendship. The
faery-godmother won’t let him--says you’re not well. He seems quite
upset.”
Teddy was puzzled. “Mr. Sheerug!”
“Yes, a big fat man with whom you have a secret. He followed me up the
stairs and asked me to thank you for not telling.”
“Was that Mr. Sheerug?” Teddy’s eyes became large and round. “Why, he’s
the mur----I mean, the man who was in the garden.”
“That’s right He carried you in when you fainted. What made you faint,
Teddy?”
The little boy looked blank. If he were to tell, he would get the fat
man into trouble; an aggravated murderer, living only six doors removed,
would make an awkward neighbor. There was another reason why he looked
blank: were he to tell his father of Mr. Sheerug’s special hobby, he
would certainly be forbidden to enter Orchid Lodge, and then--why, then
he might never meet Vashti. He weighed his fear against his adoration,
and decided to keep silent.
His father had fallen into a brown study. He had forgotten his inquiry
as to the cause of Teddy’s fainting. “Theo.”
Something important was coming. To be called Theo was a warning.
“Theo, it hasn’t happened. When it’s so difficult to earn a living, I
don’t know whether we ought to be sorry or glad.”
“What hasn’t happened?”
“There’s still only you and me and, thank God, Dearie.”
“But--” the small brain was struggling to discover a meaning--“but could
there have been any one else?”
The large man took the little boy’s hand. “You don’t understand. Yes,
there could have been several other people; but not now.” Rising, he
walked over to the window and stood there, looking out. “Perhaps it’s
just as well, with a fellow like me for your father, who spends all his
time in chasing clouds and won’t--can’t get on in the world.”
Teddy couldn’t see his father’s face, but he thought he knew what was
the matter. If Dearie had been there, she would have slipped her arms
round the big man’s neck, calling him “Her Boy,” and would have
made everything happy in a second. In her absence Teddy borrowed her
comforting words--he had heard them so often. “Your work’s too good,” he
said emphatically. “Every great man has been neglected.”
The phrase, uttered parrot-wise by the lips of a child, stirred the man
to a grim humor. He saw himself as that white bird, battering itself
into exhaustion against invisible panes that shut it out from the
heavens. Every time it ceased to struggle the dream music recommenced,
maddening it into aspiration; the old woman, so old that she might be
dead, who fingered the strings of the harp was Fate.
He stared across the wintry gardens, blackened and impoverished
by frost; each one like a man’s life--curtailed, wall-surrounded,
monotonously similar, yet grandly roofed with eternity. Along the walls
cats crept like lean fears; trees, stripped of leaves, wove spiders’
webs with their branches. So his work was too good and every great man
had been neglected! His boy said it confidently now; as he grew older he
might say it with less and less sincerity.
He laughed quietly. “So you’ve picked up my polite excuse, Ted! Yes,
that’s what we all say of ourselves--we failures: ’My work’s too
good.’”
“But it needn’t be an excuse, Mr. Gurney. It may be the truth. I often
use the same consolation.”
Mrs. Sheerug stood, a burlesque figure of untidy optimism, smiling
severely in the doorway. She was clad in her muddled plum-colored
dressing-gown; her gray hair was disordered and sprayed about her neck;
her tired blue eyes, peering above the silver-rimmed spectacles, took in
the room with twinkling merriment. She came to the foot of the bed with
the ponderous dignity of a Cochin-China hen, important with feathers.
“Yes, my dear sir,” she said, “you may not know it, but I, too, consider
myself a genius. I believe all my family to be geniuses--that’s why I
never interfere with the liberty of my children. Even my husband, he’s
a genius in his fashion--a stifled fashion, I tell him; I let him go his
own way in case it may develop. Genius must not be thwarted--so we all
live our lives separately in this house and--and, as I dare say you
know, run into debt. There’s a kind of righteousness about that--running
into debt; the present won’t acknowledge our greatness, so we make
it pay for our future. But, my dear sir, I caught you indulging in
self-pity. It’s the worst of all crimes. You men are always getting
sorry for yourselves. Look at me--I’ve not succeeded. I ask you, do I
show it?”
“If to be always smiling---” Mr. Gurney broke off.
“This is really a remarkable meeting, Mrs. Sheerug--three geniuses in
one room! Oh, yes, if Teddy’s not told you yet, he will soon: he’s quite
certain that he’s going to be a very big man. Aren’t you, Teddy?”
The little boy wriggled his toes beneath the counterpane and watched
them working. “I have ideas,” he said seriously.
“What did I tell you?”
Mrs. Sheerug signified by the closing of her eyes that she considered
it injudicious to discuss little boys in their presence. When she opened
them again it was to discuss herself.
“As between artists, Mr. Gurney, I want your frank opinion. If you don’t
like my work, say so.”
“Your work!” He looked about. “Oh, this!” His eyes fell on the
unfinished woolwork picture on the easel. “It has--it has a kind
of power,” he said--“the power of amateurishness and oddity. You’re
familiar with the impelling crudity of Blake’s sketches? Well, it’s
something like that What I mean is this: your colors are all impossible,
your drawing’s all wrong and there’s no attempt at accuracy. And yet----
The result is something so different from ordinary conceptions that it’s
almost impressive.”
Mrs. Sheerug, not sure whether she was being praised or blamed, shook
her head with dignity. “You’re trying to let me down lightly, Mr.
Gurney.”
“No, I’m not and I’ll prove it Joseph is supposed to be in the process
of being tempted. Well, he isn’t tempted in your picture; he’s simply
scared. I don’t know whether you intended it or whether it’s the
unconscious way in which your mind works, but your prize-fighting
negress, in the rôle of Mrs. Potiphar threatening a Cockney consumptive
in an abbreviated nightgown, is a distinctly original interpretation
of the Bible story; it achieves the success that Hogarth aimed at--the
effect of the grotesque. It’s the same with your Absalom. You were so
prejudiced against him that you even extended your prejudice to his
horse. Every time you stuck your needle in the canvas you must have
murmured, ’Serve him jolly well right. So perish all sons who fight
against their fathers.’ So, instead of remembering that he was a prince
of Israel, you’ve made him an old-clothes blood from Whitechapel who’s
got into difficulties on a hired nag at Hampstead. I think I catch your
idea: you’re a Dickens writing novels in woolwork. You’re Pickwickizing
the Old Testament. In its way the idea’s immense.”
Mrs. Sheerug jerked her spectacles up the incline of her nose till they
covered her eyes. “If I have to leave you now, don’t think that I’m
offended.”
Mrs. Sheerug went out of the room like a cottage-loaf on legs. The door
closed behind her trotting, kindly figure.
Mr. Gurney turned helplessly to Teddy. “And I meant to flatter her. In
a worthless way they’re good. I was trying not to tell her the
worthless part of it. Believe I’ve hurt her feelings, and after all her
kindness---- I’m horribly sorry.”
“Father, when people marry, must they live together always?”
The irrelevancy of the question rather startled Mr. Gurney; Teddy’s
questions had a knack of being startling. “Eh! What’s that? Live
together always! Why, yes, it’s better. It’s usual.”
“But must they begin from the moment they marry?”
Mr. Gurney laughed. “If they didn’t, they wouldn’t marry. It’s because
they think that they’ll go on wanting to be every minute of their lives
together that they do it.”
“Ah, yes.” Teddy sighed sentimentally. His sigh said plainly, “Whatever
else I don’t know, I know that.” He cushioned his face against the
pillow. “But what I meant,” he explained, “is supposing one hasn’t any
money, and one’s father can’t give one any, and one wants to be with
some one every minute, and--and very badly. Would they live together
then from the beginning?”
Mr. Gurney gave up thinking about Mrs. Sheerug; Teddy’s questions grew
interesting. “If any one hadn’t any money and the lady hadn’t any money,
I don’t believe they’d marry. But the lady might have money.”
Teddy gave himself away completely. “But to live on her money! Oh, I
don’t think I’d like that.”
His father seated himself on the bed, with one leg curled under him.
“Hulloa, what’s this? Been losing your heart to Mrs. Sheerug? She’s got
a husband. It won’t do, old man.”
“It isn’t Mrs. Sheerug. It’s just--just curiosity, I expect.”
No encouragement could lure him into a more explicit confession. All
that day, after his father had left, he lay there with his face against
the pillow, endeavoring to dis-cover a plan whereby a little boy
might procure the money to marry a beautiful lady, of whom he knew
comparatively nothing.