"Just so. It is Miss Andriaovsky's desire that we should pull together.
Now, in the firrst place, what is your idea about the forrm the book
should take?"
"In the first place, if you don't mind," I replied, "perhaps we'd better
run over together the things you've brought. The daylight will be gone
soon."
"Just as ye like, Harrison," he said, "just as ye like. It's all the same
to me...."
I cleared a space about my writing-table at the window, and we turned to
the artistic remains of Michael Andriaovsky.
I was astonished, first, at the enormous quantity of the stuff, and next
at its utter and complete revelation of the man. In a flash I realised
how superb that portion at least of the book was going to be. And
Schofield explained that the work he had brought represented but a
fraction of the whole that was at our disposal.
"Ye'll know with what foolish generosity poor Michael always gave his
things away," he said. "Hallard has a grand set; so has Connolly; and
from time to time he behaved varry handsomely to myself. Artists of varry
considerable talents both Hallard and Connolly are; Michael thought
varry highly of their abilities. They express the deepest interest in the
shape your worrk will take; and that reminds me. I myself have drafted a
rough scenario of the forrm it appeared to me the 'Life' might with
advantage be cast in. A purely private opinion, ye'll understand,
Harrison, which ye'll be entirely at liberty to disregard...."
"Well, let's finish with the work first," I said.
With boards, loose sheets, scraps of paper, notes, studies, canvases
stretched and stripped from their stretchers, we paved half the library
floor, Schofield keeping up all the time a running fire of "Grand,
grand! A masterpiece! A gem, that, Harrison!" They were all that he said,
and presently I ceased to hear his voice. The splendour of the work
issued undimmed even from the severe test of Schofield's praise; and I
thought again with pride how I, I, was the only man living who could
adequately write that "Life."....
"Aren't they grand? Aren't they great?" Schofield chanted monotonously.
"They are," I replied, coming to a consciousness of his presence again.
"But what's that?"
Secretively he had kept one package until the last. He now removed its
wrappings and set it against a chair.
_"There!"_ he cried. "I'll thank ye, Harrison, for your opinion of
_that!"_
It was the portrait Andriaovsky had refused to sell me--a portrait of
himself.
The portrait was the climax of the display. The Lancastrian still talked;
but I, profoundly moved, mechanically gathered up the drawings from the
floor and returned them to their proper packages and folios. I was dining
at home, alone, that evening, and for form's sake I asked this faithful
dog of Andriaovsky's to share my meal; but he excused himself--he was
dining with Hallard and Connolly. When the drawings were all put away,
all save that portrait, he gave an inquisitive glance round my library.
It was the same glance as Maschka had given when she had feared to
intrude on my time; but Schofield did these things with a much more heavy
hand. He departed, but not before telling me that even my mansion
contained such treasures as it had never held before.
That evening, after glancing at Schofield's "scenario," I carefully
folded it up again for return to him, lest when the book should appear
he should miss the pleasure of saying that I had had his guidance but
had disregarded it; then I sat down at my writing-table and took out
the loose notes I had made. I made other jottings, each on a blank sheet
for subsequent amplification; and the sheets overspread the large
leather-topped table and thrust one another up the standard of the
incandescent with the pearly silk shade. The firelight shone low and
richly in the dusky spaces of the large apartment; and the thick carpet
and the double doors made the place so quiet that I could hear my watch
ticking in my pocket.
I worked for an hour; and then, for the purpose of making yet other
notes, I rose, crossed the room, and took down the three or four
illustrated books to which, in the earlier part of his career,
Andriaovsky had put his name. I carried them to the table, and twinkled
as I opened the first of them. It was a book of poems, and in making the
designs for them Andriaovsky had certainly _not_ found for himself.
Almost any one of the "Art Shades," as he had called them, could have
done the thing equally well, and I twinkled again. I did not propose to
have much mercy on _that_. Already Schofield's words had given birth to a
suspicion in my mind--that Andriaovsky, in permitting these fellows,
Hallard, Connolly, and the rest, to suppose that he "thought highly" of
them and their work, had been giving play to that malicious humour of
his; and they naturally did not see the joke. That joke, too, was between
himself, dead, and me, preparing to write his "Life." As if he had been
there to hear me, I chuckled, and spoke in a low voice.
"You were pulling their legs, Michael, you know. A little rough on them
you were. But there's a book here of yours that I'm going to tell the
truth about. You and I won't pretend to one another. It's a rotten book,
and both you and I know it...."
I don't know what it was that caused me suddenly to see just then
something that I had been looking at long enough without seeing--that
portrait of himself that I had set leaning against the back of a chair at
the end of my writing-table. It stood there, just within the soft
penumbra of shadow cast by the silk-shaded light. The canvas had been
enlarged, the seam of it clumsily sewn by Andriaovsky's own hand; but in
that half-light the rough ridge of paint did not show, and I confess that
the position and effect of the thing startled me for a moment. Had I
cared to play a trick with my fancy I could have imagined the head
wagging from side to side, with such rage and fire was it painted. He had
had the temerity to dash a reflection across one of the glasses of his
spectacles, concealing the eye behind it. The next moment I had given a
short laugh.
"So you're there, are you?... Well, I know you agree very heartily about
that book of poems. Heigho! If I remember rightly, you made more money
out of that book than out of the others put together. But I'm going
to tell the truth about it. _I_ know better, you know...."
Chancing, before I turned in that night, to reopen one of his folios, I
came across a drawing, there by accident, I don't doubt, that confirmed
me in my suspicion that Andriaovsky had had his quiet joke with
Schofield, Hallard, Connolly and Co. It was a sketch of Schofield's,
imitative, deplorable, a dreadful show-up of incapacity. Well enough
"drawn," in a sense, it was ... and I remembered how Andriaovsky had ever
urged that "drawing," of itself, did not exist. I winked at the portrait.
I saw his point. He himself had no peer, and, rather than invite
comparison with stars of the second magnitude, he chose his intimates
from among the peddlers of the wares that had the least possible
connection with his Art. He, too, had understood that the Compromise
must be entirely accepted or totally refused; and while, in the
divergence of our paths, he had done the one thing and I the other, we
had each done it thoroughly, with vigour, and with persistence, and each
could esteem the other, if not as a co-worker, at least as an honourable
and out-and-out opposite.