One day in the course of the following June there was ushered into my
studio a gentleman whom I had not yet seen but with whom I had been very
briefly in correspondence. A letter from him had expressed to me some
days before his regret on learning that my “splendid portrait” of Titras
Flora Louisa Saunt, whose full name figured by her own wish in the
catalogue of the exhibition of the Academy, had found a purchaser before
the close of the private view. He took the liberty of inquiring whether
I might have at his service some other memorial of the same lovely head,
some preliminary sketch, some study for the picture. I had replied
that I had indeed painted Miss Saunt more than once and that if he were
interested in my work I should be happy to show him what I had done.
Mr. Geoffrey Dawling, the person thus introduced to me, stumbled into
my room with awkward movements and equivocal sounds--a long, lean,
confused, confusing young man, with a bad complexion and large,
protrusive teeth. He bore in its most indelible pressure the postmark,
as it were, of Oxford, and as soon as he opened his mouth I perceived,
in addition to a remarkable revelation of gums, that the text of the
queer communication matched the registered envelope. He was full of
refinements and angles, of dreary and distinguished knowledge. Of his
unconscious drollery his dress freely partook; it seemed, from the gold
ring into which his red necktie was passed to the square toe-caps of his
boots, to conform with a high sense of modernness to the fashion before
the last. There were moments when his overdone urbanity, all suggestive
stammers and interrogative quavers, made him scarcely intelligible; but
I felt him to be a gentleman and I liked the honesty of his errand and
the expression of his good green eyes.
As a worshipper at the shrine of beauty however he needed explaining,
especially when I found he had no acquaintance with my brilliant model;
had on the mere evidence of my picture taken, as he said, a tremendous
fancy to her face. I ought doubtless to have been humiliated by the
simplicity of his judgment of it, a judgment for which the rendering was
lost in the subject, quite leaving out the element of art. He was like
the innocent reader for whom the story is “really true” and the author
a negligible quantity. He had come to me only because he wanted to
purchase, and I remember being so amused at his attitude, which I had
never seen equally marked in a person of education, that I asked him
why, for the sort of enjoyment he desired, it wouldn’t be more to the
point to deal directly with the lady. He stared and blushed at this:
it was plain the idea frightened him. He was an extraordinary
case--personally so modest that I could see it had never occurred to
him. He had fallen in love with a painted sign and seemed content just
to dream of what it stood for. He was the young prince in the legend
or the comedy who loses his heart to the miniature of the outland
princess. Until I knew him better this puzzled me much--the link was
so missing between his sensibility and his type. He was of course
bewildered by my sketches, which implied in the beholder some sense of
intention and quality; but for one of them, a comparative failure, he
ended by conceiving a preference so arbitrary and so lively that, taking
no second look at the others, he expressed the wish to possess it and
fell into the extremity of confusion over the question of the price.
I simplified that problem, and he went off without having asked me a
direct question about Miss Saunt, yet with his acquisition under his
arm. His delicacy was such that he evidently considered his rights to
be limited; he had acquired none at all in regard to the original of the
picture. There were others--for I was curious about him--that I wanted
him to feel I conceded: I should have been glad of his carrying away a
sense of ground acquired for coming back. To insure this I had probably
only to invite him, and I perfectly recall the impulse that made me
forbear. It operated suddenly from within while he hung about the door
and in spite of the diffident appeal that blinked in his gentle grin. If
he was smitten with Flora’s ghost what mightn’t be the direct force of
the luminary that could cast such a shadow? This source of radiance,
flooding my poor place, might very well happen to be present the next
time he should turn up. The idea was sharp within me that there were
complications it was no mission of mine to bring about. If they were to
occur they might occur by a logic of their own.
Let me say at once that they did occur and that I perhaps after all had
something to do with it. If Mr. Dawling had departed without a fresh
appointment he was to reappear six months later under protection no less
adequate than that of our young lady herself. I had seen her repeatedly
for months: she had grown to regard my studio as the tabernacle of her
face. This prodigy was frankly there the sole object of interest; in
other places there were occasionally other objects. The freedom of her
manners continued to be stupefying; there was nothing so extraordinary
save the absence in connection with it of any catastrophe. She was kept
innocent by her egotism, but she was helped also, though she had now put
off her mourning, by the attitude of the lone orphan who had to be a law
unto herself. It was as a lone orphan that she came and went, as a lone
orphan that she was the centre of a crush. The neglect of the Hammond
Synges gave relief to this character, and she paid them handsomely to
be, as every one said, shocking. Lord Iffield had gone to India to shoot
tigers, but he returned in time for the private view: it was he who had
snapped up, as Flora called it, the gem of the exhibition.
My hope for the girl’s future had slipped ignominiously off his back,
but after his purchase of the portrait I tried to cultivate a new faith.
The girl’s own faith was wonderful. It couldn’t however be contagious:
too great was the limit of her sense of what painters call values. Her
colours were laid on like blankets on a cold night. How indeed could a
person speak the truth who was always posturing and bragging? She was
after all vulgar enough, and by the time I had mastered her profile and
could almost with my eyes shut do it in a single line I was decidedly
tired of her perfection. There grew to be something silly in its eternal
smoothness. One moved with her moreover among phenomena mismated and
unrelated; nothing in her talk ever matched with anything out of it.
Lord Iffield was dying of love for her, but his family was leading him a
life. His mother, horrid woman, had told some one that she would rather
he should be swallowed by a tiger than marry a girl not absolutely one
of themselves. He had given his young friend unmistakable signs, but he
was lying low, gaining time: it was in his father’s power to be, both
in personal and in pecuniary ways, excessively nasty to him. His father
wouldn’t last for ever--quite the contrary; and he knew how thoroughly,
in spite of her youth, her beauty and the swarm of her admirers, some of
them positively threatening in their passion, he could trust her to hold
out. There were richer, cleverer men, there were greater personages too,
but she liked her “little viscount” just as he was, and liked to think
that, bullied and persecuted, he had her there so luxuriously to rest
upon. She came back to me with tale upon tale, and it all might be
or mightn’t. I never met my pretty model in the world--she moved, it
appeared, in exalted circles--and could only admire, in her wealth of
illustration, the grandeur of her life and the freedom of her hand.
I had on the first opportunity spoken to her of Geoffrey Dawling, and
she had listened to my story so far as she had the art of such patience,
asking me indeed more questions about him than I could answer; then she
had capped my anecdote with others much more striking, revelations of
effects produced in the most extraordinary quarters: on people who had
followed her into railway-carriages; guards and porters even who had
literally stuck there; others who had spoken to her in shops and hung
about her house-door; cabmen, upon her honour, in London, who, to
gaze their fill at her, had found excuses to thrust their petrifaction
through the very glasses of four-wheelers. She lost herself in these
reminiscences, the moral of which was that poor Mr. Dawling was only
one of a million. When therefore the next autumn she flourished into my
studio with her odd companion at her heels her first care was to make
clear to me that if he was now in servitude it wasn’t because she had
run after him. Dawling hilariously explained that when one wished very
much to get anything one usually ended by doing so--a proposition which
led me wholly to dissent and our young lady to asseverate that she
hadn’t in the least wished to get Mr. Dawling. She mightn’t have wished
to get him, but she wished to show him, and I seemed to read that if
she could treat him as a trophy her affairs were rather at the ebb. True
there always hung from her belt a promiscuous fringe of scalps. Much at
any rate would have come and gone since our separation in July. She had
spent four months abroad, where, on Swiss and Italian lakes, in German
cities, in Paris, many accidents might have happened.
V
I had been again with my mother, but except Mrs. Meldrum and the gleam
of France had not found at Folkestone my old resources and pastimes.
Mrs. Meldrum, much edified by my report of the performances, as she
called them, in my studio, had told me that to her knowledge Flora would
soon be on the straw: she had cut from her capital such fine fat slices
that there was almost nothing more left to swallow. Perched on her
breezy cliff the good lady dazzled me as usual by her universal light:
she knew so much more about everything and everybody than I could ever
squeeze out of my colour-tubes. She knew that Flora was acting on system
and absolutely declined to be interfered with: her precious reasoning
was that her money would last as long as she should need it, that a
magnificent marriage would crown her charms before she should be really
pinched. She had a sum put by for a liberal outfit; meanwhile the proper
use of the rest was to decorate her for the approaches to the altar,
keep her afloat in the society in which she would most naturally
meet her match. Lord Iffield had been seen with her at Lucerne, at
Cadenabbia; but it was Mrs. Meldrum’s conviction that nothing was to be
expected of him but the most futile flirtation. The girl had a certain
hold of him, but with a great deal of swagger he hadn’t the spirit of
a sheep: he was in fear of his father and would never commit himself in
Lord Considine’s lifetime. The most Flora might achieve would be that
he wouldn’t marry some one else. Geoffrey Dawling, to Mrs. Meldrum’s
knowledge (I had told her of the young man’s visit) had attached himself
on the way back from Italy to the Hammond Synge group. My informant
was in a position to be definite about this dangler; she knew about his
people: she had heard of him before. Hadn’t he been, at Oxford, a friend
of one of her nephews? Hadn’t he spent the Christmas holidays precisely
three years before at her brother-in-law’s in Yorkshire, taking that
occasion to get himself refused with derision by wilful Betty, the
second daughter of the house? Her sister, who liked the floundering
youth, had written to her to complain of Betty, and that the young man
should now turn up as an appendage of Flora’s was one of those oft-cited
proofs that the world is small and that there are not enough people to
go round. His father had been something or other in the Treasury; his
grandfather, on the mother’s side, had been something or other in the
Church. He had come into the paternal estate, two or three thousand
a year in Hampshire; but he had let the place advantageously and was
generous to four ugly sisters who lived at Bournemouth and adored him.
The family was hideous all round, but the salt of the earth. He was
supposed to be unspeakably clever; he was fond of London, fond of books,
of intellectual society and of the idea of a political career. That such
a man should be at the same time fond of Flora Saunt attested, as
the phrase in the first volume of Gibbon has it, the variety of his
inclinations. I was soon to learn that he was fonder of her than of all
the other things together. Betty, one of five and with views above her
station, was at any rate felt at home to have dished herself by her
perversity. Of course no one had looked at her since and no one would
ever look at her again. It would be eminently desirable that Flora
should learn the lesson of Betty’s fate.
I was not struck, I confess, with all this in my mind, by any symptoms
on our young lady’s part of that sort of meditation. The only moral
she saw in anything was that of her incomparable countenance, which Mr.
Dawling, smitten even like the railway porters and the cabmen by the
doom-dealing gods, had followed from London to Venice and from Venice
back to London again. I afterwards learned that her version of this
episode was profusely inexact: his personal acquaintance with her had
been determined by an accident remarkable enough, I admit, in connection
with what had gone before--a coincidence at all events superficially
striking. At Munich, returning from a tour in the Tyrol with two of his
sisters, he had found himself at the _table d’hôte_ of his inn opposite
to the full presentment of that face of which the mere clumsy copy
had made him dream and desire. He had been tossed by it to a height so
vertiginous as to involve a retreat from the table; but the next day he
had dropped with a resounding thud at the very feet of his apparition.
On the following, with an equal incoherence, a sacrifice even of his
bewildered sisters, whom he left behind, he made an heroic effort to
escape by flight from a fate of which he already felt the cold breath.
That fate, in London, very little later, drove him straight before
it--drove him one Sunday afternoon, in the rain, to the door of the
Hammond Synges. He marched in other words close up to the cannon that
was to blow him to pieces. But three weeks, when he reappeared to me,
had elapsed since then, yet (to vary my metaphor) the burden he was to
carry for the rest of his days was firmly lashed to his back. I don’t
mean by this that Flora had been persuaded to contract her scope; I mean
that he had been treated to the unconditional snub which, as the event
was to show, couldn’t have been bettered as a means of securing him. She
hadn’t calculated, but she had said “Never!” and that word had made a
bed big enough for his long-legged patience. He became from this moment
to my mind the interesting figure in the piece.
Now that he had acted without my aid I was free to show him this, and
having on his own side something to show me he repeatedly knocked at my
door. What he brought with him on these occasions was a simplicity so
huge that, as I turn my ear to the past, I seem even now to hear it
bumping up and down my stairs. That was really what I saw of him in the
light of his behaviour. He had fallen in love as he might have broken
his leg, and the fracture was of a sort that would make him permanently
lame. It was the whole man who limped and lurched, with nothing of him
left in the same position as before. The tremendous cleverness, the
literary society, the political ambition, the Bournemouth sisters all
seemed to flop with his every movement a little nearer to the floor. I
hadn’t had an Oxford training and I had never encountered the great
man at whose feet poor Dawling had most submissively sat and who had
addressed him his most destructive sniffs; but I remember asking myself
if such privileges had been an indispensable preparation to the career
on which my friend appeared now to have embarked. I remember too making
up my mind about the cleverness, which had its uses and I suppose in
impenetrable shades even its critics, but from which the friction of
mere personal intercourse was not the sort of process to extract a
revealing spark. He accepted without a question both his fever and
his chill, and the only thing he showed any subtlety about was this
convenience of my friendship. He doubtless told me his simple story, but
the matter comes back to me in a kind of sense of _my_ being rather the
mouthpiece, of my having had to thresh it out for him. He took it from
me without a groan, and I gave it to him, as we used to say, pretty hot;
he took it again and again, spending his odd half-hours with me as if
for the very purpose of learning how idiotically he was in love. He told
me I made him see things: to begin with, hadn’t I first made him see
Flora Saunt? I wanted him to give her up and luminously informed him
why; on which he never protested nor contradicted, never was even
so alembicated as to declare just for the sake of the drama that he
wouldn’t. He simply and undramatically didn’t, and when at the end of
three months I asked him what was the use of talking with such a fellow
his nearest approach to a justification was to say that what made him
want to help her was just the deficiencies I dwelt on. I could only
reply without pointing the moral: “Oh, if you’re as sorry for her as
that!” I too was nearly as sorry for her as that, but it only led me to
be sorrier still for other victims of this compassion. With Dawling as
with me the compassion was at first in excess of any visible motive;
so that when eventually the motive was supplied each could to a certain
extent compliment the other on the fineness of his foresight.
After he had begun to haunt my studio Miss Saunt quite gave it up, and
I finally learned that she accused me of conspiring with him to put
pressure on her to marry him. She didn’t know I would take it that way;
else she wouldn’t have brought him to see me. It was in her view a part
of the conspiracy; that to show him a kindness I asked him at last to
sit to me. I daresay moreover she was disgusted to hear that I had ended
by attempting almost as many sketches of his beauty as I had attempted
of hers. What was the value of tributes to beauty by a hand that
luxuriated in ugliness? My relation to poor Dawling’s want of modelling
was simple enough. I was really digging in that sandy desert for the
buried treasure of his soul.