Before a week had elapsed he met Miss Fancourt in Bond Street, at a
private view of the works of a young artist in “black-and-white” who had
been so good as to invite him to the stuffy scene. The drawings were
admirable, but the crowd in the one little room was so dense that he felt
himself up to his neck in a sack of wool. A fringe of people at the
outer edge endeavoured by curving forward their backs and presenting,
below them, a still more convex surface of resistance to the pressure of
the mass, to preserve an interval between their noses and the glazed
mounts of the pictures; while the central body, in the comparative gloom
projected by a wide horizontal screen hung under the skylight and
allowing only a margin for the day, remained upright dense and vague,
lost in the contemplation of its own ingredients. This contemplation sat
especially in the sad eyes of certain female heads, surmounted with hats
of strange convolution and plumage, which rose on long necks above the
others. One of the heads Paul perceived, was much the so most beautiful
of the collection, and his next discovery was that it belonged to Miss
Fancourt. Its beauty was enhanced by the glad smile she sent him across
surrounding obstructions, a smile that drew him to her as fast as he
could make his way. He had seen for himself at Summersoft that the last
thing her nature contained was an affectation of indifference; yet even
with this circumspection he took a fresh satisfaction in her not having
pretended to await his arrival with composure. She smiled as radiantly
as if she wished to make him hurry, and as soon as he came within earshot
she broke out in her voice of joy: “He’s here—he’s here—he’s coming back
in a moment!”
“Ah your father?” Paul returned as she offered him her hand.
“Oh dear no, this isn’t in my poor father’s line. I mean Mr. St. George.
He has just left me to speak to some one—he’s coming back. It’s he who
brought me—wasn’t it charming?”
“Ah that gives him a pull over me—I couldn’t have ‘brought’ you, could
I?”
“If you had been so kind as to propose it—why not you as well as he?” the
girl returned with a face that, expressing no cheap coquetry, simply
affirmed a happy fact.
“Why he’s a père de famille. They’ve privileges,” Paul explained. And
then quickly: “Will you go to see places with _me_?” he asked.
“Anything you like!” she smiled. “I know what you mean, that girls have
to have a lot of people—” Then she broke off: “I don’t know; I’m free.
I’ve always been like that—I can go about with any one. I’m so glad to
meet you,” she added with a sweet distinctness that made those near her
turn round.
“Let me at least repay that speech by taking you out of this squash,” her
friend said. “Surely people aren’t happy here!”
“No, they’re awfully mornes, aren’t they? But I’m very happy indeed and
I promised Mr. St. George to remain in this spot till he comes back.
He’s going to take me away. They send him invitations for things of this
sort—more than he wants. It was so kind of him to think of me.”
“They also send me invitations of this kind—more than _I_ want. And if
thinking of _you_ will do it—!” Paul went on.
“Oh I delight in them—everything that’s life—everything that’s London!”
“They don’t have private views in Asia, I suppose,” he laughed. “But
what a pity that for this year, even in this gorged city, they’re pretty
well over.”
“Well, next year will do, for I hope you believe we’re going to be
friends always. Here he comes!” Miss Fancourt continued before Paul had
time to respond.
He made out St. George in the gaps of the crowd, and this perhaps led to
his hurrying a little to say: “I hope that doesn’t mean I’m to wait till
next year to see you.”
“No, no—aren’t we to meet at dinner on the twenty-fifth?” she panted with
an eagerness as happy as his own.
“That’s almost next year. Is there no means of seeing you before?”
She stared with all her brightness. “Do you mean you’d _come_?”
“Like a shot, if you’ll be so good as to ask me!”
“On Sunday then—this next Sunday?”
“What have I done that you should doubt it?” the young man asked with
delight.
Miss Fancourt turned instantly to St. George, who had now joined them,
and announced triumphantly: “He’s coming on Sunday—this next Sunday!”
“Ah my day—my day too!” said the famous novelist, laughing, to their
companion.
“Yes, but not yours only. You shall meet in Manchester Square; you shall
talk—you shall be wonderful!”
“We don’t meet often enough,” St. George allowed, shaking hands with his
disciple. “Too many things—ah too many things! But we must make it up
in the country in September. You won’t forget you’ve promised me that?”
“Why he’s coming on the twenty-fifth—you’ll see him then,” said the girl.
“On the twenty-fifth?” St. George asked vaguely.
“We dine with you; I hope you haven’t forgotten. He’s dining out that
day,” she added gaily to Paul.
“Oh bless me, yes—that’s charming! And you’re coming? My wife didn’t
tell me,” St. George said to him. “Too many things—too many things!” he
repeated.
“Too many people—too many people!” Paul exclaimed, giving ground before
the penetration of an elbow.
“You oughtn’t to say that. They all read you.”
“Me? I should like to see them! Only two or three at most,” the young
man returned.
“Did you ever hear anything like that? He knows, haughtily, how good he
is!” St. George declared, laughing to Miss Fancourt. “They read _me_,
but that doesn’t make me like them any better. Come away from them, come
away!” And he led the way out of the exhibition.
“He’s going to take me to the Park,” Miss Fancourt observed to Overt with
elation as they passed along the corridor that led to the street.
“Ah does he go there?” Paul asked, taking the fact for a somewhat
unexpected illustration of St. George’s moeurs.
“It’s a beautiful day—there’ll be a great crowd. We’re going to look at
the people, to look at types,” the girl went on. “We shall sit under the
trees; we shall walk by the Row.”
“I go once a year—on business,” said St. George, who had overheard Paul’s
question.
“Or with a country cousin, didn’t you tell me? I’m the country cousin!”
she continued over her shoulder to Paul as their friend drew her toward a
hansom to which he had signalled. The young man watched them get in; he
returned, as he stood there, the friendly wave of the hand with which,
ensconced in the vehicle beside her, St. George took leave of him. He
even lingered to see the vehicle start away and lose itself in the
confusion of Bond Street. He followed it with his eyes; it put to him
embarrassing things. “She’s not for _me_!” the great novelist had said
emphatically at Summersoft; but his manner of conducting himself toward
her appeared not quite in harmony with such a conviction. How could he
have behaved differently if she _had_ been for him? An indefinite envy
rose in Paul Overt’s heart as he took his way on foot alone; a feeling
addressed alike strangely enough, to each of the occupants of the hansom.
How much he should like to rattle about London with such a girl! How
much he should like to go and look at “types” with St. George!
The next Sunday at four o’clock he called in Manchester Square, where his
secret wish was gratified by his finding Miss Fancourt alone. She was in
a large bright friendly occupied room, which was painted red all over,
draped with the quaint cheap florid stuffs that are represented as coming
from southern and eastern countries, where they are fabled to serve as
the counterpanes of the peasantry, and bedecked with pottery of vivid
hues, ranged on casual shelves, and with many water-colour drawings from
the hand (as the visitor learned) of the young lady herself,
commemorating with a brave breadth the sunsets, the mountains, the
temples and palaces of India. He sat an hour—more than an hour, two
hours—and all the while no one came in. His hostess was so good as to
remark, with her liberal humanity, that it was delightful they weren’t
interrupted; it was so rare in London, especially at that season, that
people got a good talk. But luckily now, of a fine Sunday, half the
world went out of town, and that made it better for those who didn’t go,
when these others were in sympathy. It was the defect of London—one of
two or three, the very short list of those she recognised in the teeming
world-city she adored—that there were too few good chances for talk; you
never had time to carry anything far.
“Too many things—too many things!” Paul said, quoting St. George’s
exclamation of a few days before.
“Ah yes, for him there are too many—his life’s too complicated.”
“Have you seen it _near_? That’s what I should like to do; it might
explain some mysteries,” her visitor went on. She asked him what
mysteries he meant, and he said: “Oh peculiarities of his work,
inequalities, superficialities. For one who looks at it from the
artistic point of view it contains a bottomless ambiguity.”
She became at this, on the spot, all intensity. “Ah do describe that
more—it’s so interesting. There are no such suggestive questions. I’m
so fond of them. He thinks he’s a failure—fancy!” she beautifully
wailed.
“That depends on what his ideal may have been. With his gifts it ought
to have been high. But till one knows what he really proposed to
himself—? Do _you_ know by chance?” the young man broke off.
“Oh he doesn’t talk to me about himself. I can’t make him. It’s too
provoking.”
Paul was on the point of asking what then he did talk about, but
discretion checked it and he said instead: “Do you think he’s unhappy at
home?”
She seemed to wonder. “At home?”
“I mean in his relations with his wife. He has a mystifying little way
of alluding to her.”
“Not to me,” said Marian Fancourt with her clear eyes. “That wouldn’t be
right, would it?” she asked gravely.
“Not particularly; so I’m glad he doesn’t mention her to you. To praise
her might bore you, and he has no business to do anything else. Yet he
knows you better than me.”
“Ah but he respects _you_!” the girl cried as with envy.
Her visitor stared a moment, then broke into a laugh. “Doesn’t he
respect you?”
“Of course, but not in the same way. He respects what you’ve done—he
told me so, the other day.”
Paul drank it in, but retained his faculties. “When you went to look at
types?”
“Yes—we found so many: he has such an observation of them! He talked a
great deal about your book. He says it’s really important.”
“Important! Ah the grand creature!”—and the author of the work in
question groaned for joy.
“He was wonderfully amusing, he was inexpressibly droll, while we walked
about. He sees everything; he has so many comparisons and images, and
they’re always exactly right. C’est d’un trouvé, as they say.”
“Yes, with his gifts, such things as he ought to have done!” Paul sighed.
“And don’t you think he _has_ done them?”
Ah it was just the point. “A part of them, and of course even that
part’s immense. But he might have been one of the greatest. However,
let us not make this an hour of qualifications. Even as they stand,” our
friend earnestly concluded, “his writings are a mine of gold.”
To this proposition she ardently responded, and for half an hour the pair
talked over the Master’s principal productions. She knew them well—she
knew them even better than her visitor, who was struck with her critical
intelligence and with something large and bold in the movement in her
mind. She said things that startled him and that evidently had come to
her directly; they weren’t picked-up phrases—she placed them too well.
St. George had been right about her being first-rate, about her not being
afraid to gush, not remembering that she must be proud. Suddenly
something came back to her, and she said: “I recollect that he did speak
of Mrs. St. George to me once. He said, apropos of something or other,
that she didn’t care for perfection.”
“That’s a great crime in an artist’s wife,” Paul returned.
“Yes, poor thing!” and the girl sighed with a suggestion of many
reflexions, some of them mitigating. But she presently added: “Ah
perfection, perfection—how one ought to go in for it! I wish _I_ could.”
“Every one can in his way,” her companion opined.
“In _his_ way, yes—but not in hers. Women are so hampered—so condemned!
Yet it’s a kind of dishonour if you don’t, when you want to _do_
something, isn’t it?” Miss Fancourt pursued, dropping one train in her
quickness to take up another, an accident that was common with her. So
these two young persons sat discussing high themes in their eclectic
drawing-room, in their London “season”—discussing, with extreme
seriousness, the high theme of perfection. It must be said in
extenuation of this eccentricity that they were interested in the
business. Their tone had truth and their emotion beauty; they weren’t
posturing for each other or for some one else.
The subject was so wide that they found themselves reducing it; the
perfection to which for the moment they agreed to confine their
speculations was that of the valid, the exemplary work of art. Our young
woman’s imagination, it appeared, had wandered far in that direction, and
her guest had the rare delight of feeling in their conversation a full
interchange. This episode will have lived for years in his memory and
even in his wonder; it had the quality that fortune distils in a single
drop at a time—the quality that lubricates many ensuing frictions. He
still, whenever he likes, has a vision of the room, the bright red
sociable talkative room with the curtains that, by a stroke of successful
audacity, had the note of vivid blue. He remembers where certain things
stood, the particular book open on the table and the almost intense odour
of the flowers placed, at the left, somewhere behind him. These facts
were the fringe, as it were, of a fine special agitation which had its
birth in those two hours and of which perhaps the main sign was in its
leading him inwardly and repeatedly to breathe “I had no idea there was
any one like this—I had no idea there was any one like this!” Her
freedom amazed him and charmed him—it seemed so to simplify the practical
question. She was on the footing of an independent personage—a
motherless girl who had passed out of her teens and had a position and
responsibilities, who wasn’t held down to the limitations of a little
miss. She came and went with no dragged duenna, she received people
alone, and, though she was totally without hardness, the question of
protection or patronage had no relevancy in regard to her. She gave such
an impression of the clear and the noble combined with the easy and the
natural that in spite of her eminent modern situation she suggested no
sort of sister-hood with the “fast” girl. Modern she was indeed, and
made Paul Overt, who loved old colour, the golden glaze of time, think
with some alarm of the muddled palette of the future. He couldn’t get
used to her interest in the arts he cared for; it seemed too good to be
real—it was so unlikely an adventure to tumble into such a well of
sympathy. One might stray into the desert easily—that was on the cards
and that was the law of life; but it was too rare an accident to stumble
on a crystal well. Yet if her aspirations seemed at one moment too
extravagant to be real they struck him at the next as too intelligent to
be false. They were both high and lame, and, whims for whims, he
preferred them to any he had met in a like relation. It was probable
enough she would leave them behind—exchange them for politics or
“smartness” or mere prolific maternity, as was the custom of scribbling
daubing educated flattered girls in an age of luxury and a society of
leisure. He noted that the water-colours on the walls of the room she
sat in had mainly the quality of being naïves, and reflected that naïveté
in art is like a zero in a number: its importance depends on the figure
it is united with. Meanwhile, however, he had fallen in love with her.
Before he went away, at any rate, he said to her: “I thought St. George
was coming to see you to-day, but he doesn’t turn up.”
For a moment he supposed she was going to cry “Comment donc? Did you
come here only to meet him?” But the next he became aware of how little
such a speech would have fallen in with any note of flirtation he had as
yet perceived in her. She only replied: “Ah yes, but I don’t think he’ll
come. He recommended me not to expect him.” Then she gaily but all
gently added: “He said it wasn’t fair to you. But I think I could manage
two.”
“So could I,” Paul Overt returned, stretching the point a little to meet
her. In reality his appreciation of the occasion was so completely an
appreciation of the woman before him that another figure in the scene,
even so esteemed a one as St. George, might for the hour have appealed to
him vainly. He left the house wondering what the great man had meant by
its not being fair to him; and, still more than that, whether he had
actually stayed away from the force of that idea. As he took his course
through the Sunday solitude of Manchester Square, swinging his stick and
with a good deal of emotion fermenting in his soul, it appeared to him he
was living in a world strangely magnanimous. Miss Fancourt had told him
it was possible she should be away, and that her father should be, on the
following Sunday, but that she had the hope of a visit from him in the
other event. She promised to let him know should their absence fail, and
then he might act accordingly. After he had passed into one of the
streets that open from the Square he stopped, without definite
intentions, looking sceptically for a cab. In a moment he saw a hansom
roll through the place from the other side and come a part of the way
toward him. He was on the point of hailing the driver when he noticed a
“fare” within; then he waited, seeing the man prepare to deposit his
passenger by pulling up at one of the houses. The house was apparently
the one he himself had just quitted; at least he drew that inference as
he recognised Henry St. George in the person who stepped out of the
hansom. Paul turned off as quickly as if he had been caught in the act
of spying. He gave up his cab—he preferred to walk; he would go nowhere
else. He was glad St. George hadn’t renounced his visit altogether—that
would have been too absurd. Yes, the world was magnanimous, and even he
himself felt so as, on looking at his watch, he noted but six o’clock, so
that he could mentally congratulate his successor on having an hour still
to sit in Miss Fancourt’s drawing-room. He himself might use that hour
for another visit, but by the time he reached the Marble Arch the idea of
such a course had become incongruous to him. He passed beneath that
architectural effort and walked into the Park till he got upon the
spreading grass. Here he continued to walk; he took his way across the
elastic turf and came out by the Serpentine. He watched with a friendly
eye the diversions of the London people, he bent a glance almost
encouraging on the young ladies paddling their sweethearts about the lake
and the guardsmen tickling tenderly with their bearskins the artificial
flowers in the Sunday hats of their partners. He prolonged his
meditative walk; he went into Kensington Gardens, he sat upon the penny
chairs, he looked at the little sail-boats launched upon the round pond
and was glad he had no engagement to dine. He repaired for this purpose,
very late, to his club, where he found himself unable to order a repast
and told the waiter to bring whatever there was. He didn’t even observe
what he was served with, and he spent the evening in the library of the
establishment, pretending to read an article in an American magazine. He
failed to discover what it was about; it appeared in a dim way to be
about Marian Fancourt.
Quite late in the week she wrote to him that she was not to go into the
country—it had only just been settled. Her father, she added, would
never settle anything, but put it all on her. She felt her
responsibility—she had to—and since she was forced this was the way she
had decided. She mentioned no reasons, which gave our friend all the
clearer field for bold conjecture about them. In Manchester Square on
this second Sunday he esteemed his fortune less good, for she had three
or four other visitors. But there were three or four compensations;
perhaps the greatest of which was that, learning how her father had after
all, at the last hour, gone out of town alone, the bold conjecture I just
now spoke of found itself becoming a shade more bold. And then her
presence was her presence, and the personal red room was there and was
full of it, whatever phantoms passed and vanished, emitting
incomprehensible sounds. Lastly, he had the resource of staying till
every one had come and gone and of believing this grateful to her, though
she gave no particular sign. When they were alone together he came to
his point. “But St. George did come—last Sunday. I saw him as I looked
back.”
“Yes; but it was the last time.”
“The last time?”
“He said he would never come again.”
Paul Overt stared. “Does he mean he wishes to cease to see you?”
“I don’t know what he means,” the girl bravely smiled. “He won’t at any
rate see me here.”
“And pray why not?”
“I haven’t the least idea,” said Marian Fancourt, whose visitor found her
more perversely sublime than ever yet as she professed this clear
helplessness.
V
“OH I say, I want you to stop a little,” Henry St. George said to him at
eleven o’clock the night he dined with the head of the profession. The
company—none of it indeed _of_ the profession—had been numerous and was
taking its leave; our young man, after bidding good-night to his hostess,
had put out his hand in farewell to the master of the house. Besides
drawing from the latter the protest I have cited this movement provoked a
further priceless word about their chance now to have a talk, their going
into his room, his having still everything to say. Paul Overt was all
delight at this kindness; nevertheless he mentioned in weak jocose
qualification the bare fact that he had promised to go to another place
which was at a considerable distance.
“Well then you’ll break your promise, that’s all. You quite awful
humbug!” St. George added in a tone that confirmed our young man’s ease.
“Certainly I’ll break it—but it was a real promise.”
“Do you mean to Miss Fancourt? You’re following her?” his friend asked.
He answered by a question. “Oh is _she_ going?”
“Base impostor!” his ironic host went on. “I’ve treated you handsomely
on the article of that young lady: I won’t make another concession. Wait
three minutes—I’ll be with you.” He gave himself to his departing
guests, accompanied the long-trained ladies to the door. It was a hot
night, the windows were open, the sound of the quick carriages and of the
linkmen’s call came into the house. The affair had rather glittered; a
sense of festal things was in the heavy air: not only the influence of
that particular entertainment, but the suggestion of the wide hurry of
pleasure which in London on summer nights fills so many of the happier
quarters of the complicated town. Gradually Mrs. St. George’s
drawing-room emptied itself; Paul was left alone with his hostess, to
whom he explained the motive of his waiting. “Ah yes, some intellectual,
some _professional_, talk,” she leered; “at this season doesn’t one miss
it? Poor dear Henry, I’m so glad!” The young man looked out of the
window a moment, at the called hansoms that lurched up, at the smooth
broughams that rolled away. When he turned round Mrs. St. George had
disappeared; her husband’s voice rose to him from below—he was laughing
and talking, in the portico, with some lady who awaited her carriage.
Paul had solitary possession, for some minutes, of the warm deserted
rooms where the covered tinted lamplight was soft, the seats had been
pushed about and the odour of flowers lingered. They were large, they
were pretty, they contained objects of value; everything in the picture
told of a “good house.” At the end of five minutes a servant came in
with a request from the Master that he would join him downstairs; upon
which, descending, he followed his conductor through a long passage to an
apartment thrown out, in the rear of the habitation, for the special
requirements, as he guessed, of a busy man of letters.
St. George was in his shirt-sleeves in the middle of a large high room—a
room without windows, but with a wide skylight at the top, that of a
place of exhibition. It was furnished as a library, and the serried
bookshelves rose to the ceiling, a surface of incomparable tone produced
by dimly-gilt “backs” interrupted here and there by the suspension of old
prints and drawings. At the end furthest from the door of admission was
a tall desk, of great extent, at which the person using it could write
only in the erect posture of a clerk in a counting-house; and stretched
from the entrance to this structure was a wide plain band of crimson
cloth, as straight as a garden-path and almost as long, where, in his
mind’s eye, Paul at once beheld the Master pace to and fro during vexed
hours—hours, that is, of admirable composition. The servant gave him a
coat, an old jacket with a hang of experience, from a cupboard in the
wall, retiring afterwards with the garment he had taken off. Paul Overt
welcomed the coat; it was a coat for talk, it promised confidences—having
visibly received so many—and had tragic literary elbows. “Ah we’re
practical—we’re practical!” St. George said as he saw his visitor look
the place over. “Isn’t it a good big cage for going round and round? My
wife invented it and she locks me up here every morning.”
Our young man breathed—by way of tribute—with a certain oppression. “You
don’t miss a window—a place to look out?”
“I did at first awfully; but her calculation was just. It saves time, it
has saved me many months in these ten years. Here I stand, under the eye
of day—in London of course, very often, it’s rather a bleared old
eye—walled in to my trade. I can’t get away—so the room’s a fine lesson
in concentration. I’ve learnt the lesson, I think; look at that big
bundle of proof and acknowledge it.” He pointed to a fat roll of papers,
on one of the tables, which had not been undone.
“Are you bringing out another—?” Paul asked in a tone the fond
deficiencies of which he didn’t recognise till his companion burst out
laughing, and indeed scarce even then.
“You humbug, you humbug!”—St. George appeared to enjoy caressing him, as
it were, with that opprobrium. “Don’t I know what you think of them?” he
asked, standing there with his hands in his pockets and with a new kind
of smile. It was as if he were going to let his young votary see him all
now.
“Upon my word in that case you know more than I do!” the latter ventured
to respond, revealing a part of the torment of being able neither clearly
to esteem nor distinctly to renounce him.
“My dear fellow,” said the more and more interesting Master, “don’t
imagine I talk about my books specifically; they’re not a decent
subject—il ne manquerait plus que ça! I’m not so bad as you may
apprehend! About myself, yes, a little, if you like; though it wasn’t
for that I brought you down here. I want to ask you something—very much
indeed; I value this chance. Therefore sit down. We’re practical, but
there _is_ a sofa, you see—for she does humour my poor bones so far.
Like all really great administrators and disciplinarians she knows when
wisely to relax.” Paul sank into the corner of a deep leathern couch,
but his friend remained standing and explanatory. “If you don’t mind, in
this room, this is my habit. From the door to the desk and from the desk
to the door. That shakes up my imagination gently; and don’t you see
what a good thing it is that there’s no window for her to fly out of?
The eternal standing as I write (I stop at that bureau and put it down,
when anything comes, and so we go on) was rather wearisome at first, but
we adopted it with an eye to the long run; you’re in better order—if your
legs don’t break down!—and you can keep it up for more years. Oh we’re
practical—we’re practical!” St. George repeated, going to the table and
taking up all mechanically the bundle of proofs. But, pulling off the
wrapper, he had a change of attention that appealed afresh to our hero.
He lost himself a moment, examining the sheets of his new book, while the
younger man’s eyes wandered over the room again.
“Lord, what good things I should do if I had such a charming place as
this to do them in!” Paul reflected. The outer world, the world of
accident and ugliness, was so successfully excluded, and within the rich
protecting square, beneath the patronising sky, the dream-figures, the
summoned company, could hold their particular revel. It was a fond
prevision of Overt’s rather than an observation on actual data, for which
occasions had been too few, that the Master thus more closely viewed
would have the quality, the charming gift, of flashing out, all
surprisingly, in personal intercourse and at moments of suspended or
perhaps even of diminished expectation. A happy relation with him would
be a thing proceeding by jumps, not by traceable stages.
“Do you read them—really?” he asked, laying down the proofs on Paul’s
enquiring of him how soon the work would be published. And when the
young man answered “Oh yes, always,” he was moved to mirth again by
something he caught in his manner of saying that. “You go to see your
grandmother on her birthday—and very proper it is, especially as she
won’t last for ever. She has lost every faculty and every sense; she
neither sees, nor hears, nor speaks; but all customary pieties and kindly
habits are respectable. Only you’re strong if you _do_ read ’em! _I_
couldn’t, my dear fellow. You are strong, I know; and that’s just a part
of what I wanted to say to you. You’re very strong indeed. I’ve been
going into your other things—they’ve interested me immensely. Some one
ought to have told me about them before—some one I could believe. But
whom can one believe? You’re wonderfully on the right road—it’s awfully
decent work. Now do you mean to keep it up?—that’s what I want to ask
you.”
“Do I mean to do others?” Paul asked, looking up from his sofa at his
erect inquisitor and feeling partly like a happy little boy when the
school-master is gay, and partly like some pilgrim of old who might have
consulted a world-famous oracle. St. George’s own performance had been
infirm, but as an adviser he would be infallible.
“Others—others? Ah the number won’t matter; one other would do, if it
were really a further step—a throb of the same effort. What I mean is
have you it in your heart to go in for some sort of decent perfection?”
“Ah decency, ah perfection—!” the young man sincerely sighed. “I talked
of them the other Sunday with Miss Fancourt.”
It produced on the Master’s part a laugh of odd acrimony. “Yes, they’ll
‘talk’ of them as much as you like! But they’ll do little to help one to
them. There’s no obligation of course; only you strike me as capable,”
he went on. “You must have thought it all over. I can’t believe you’re
without a plan. That’s the sensation you give me, and it’s so rare that
it really stirs one up—it makes you remarkable. If you haven’t a plan,
if you _don’t_ mean to keep it up, surely you’re within your rights; it’s
nobody’s business, no one can force you, and not more than two or three
people will notice you don’t go straight. The others—_all_ the rest,
every blest soul in England, will think you do—will think you are keeping
it up: upon my honour they will! I shall be one of the two or three who
know better. Now the question is whether you can do it for two or three.
Is that the stuff you’re made of?”
It locked his guest a minute as in closed throbbing arms. “I could do it
for one, if you were the one.”
“Don’t say that; I don’t deserve it; it scorches me,” he protested with
eyes suddenly grave and glowing. “The ‘one’ is of course one’s self,
one’s conscience, one’s idea, the singleness of one’s aim. I think of
that pure spirit as a man thinks of a woman he has in some detested hour
of his youth loved and forsaken. She haunts him with reproachful eyes,
she lives for ever before him. As an artist, you know, I’ve married for
money.” Paul stared and even blushed a little, confounded by this
avowal; whereupon his host, observing the expression of his face, dropped
a quick laugh and pursued: “You don’t follow my figure. I’m not speaking
of my dear wife, who had a small fortune—which, however, was not my
bribe. I fell in love with her, as many other people have done. I refer
to the mercenary muse whom I led to the altar of literature. Don’t, my
boy, put your nose into _that_ yoke. The awful jade will lead you a
life!”
Our hero watched him, wondering and deeply touched. “Haven’t you been
happy!”
“Happy? It’s a kind of hell.”
“There are things I should like to ask you,” Paul said after a pause.
“Ask me anything in all the world. I’d turn myself inside out to save
you.”
“To ‘save’ me?” he quavered.
“To make you stick to it—to make you see it through. As I said to you
the other night at Summersoft, let my example be vivid to you.”
“Why your books are not so bad as that,” said Paul, fairly laughing and
feeling that if ever a fellow had breathed the air of art—!
“So bad as what?”
“Your talent’s so great that it’s in everything you do, in what’s less
good as well as in what’s best. You’ve some forty volumes to show for
it—forty volumes of wonderful life, of rare observation, of magnificent
ability.”
“I’m very clever, of course I know that”—but it was a thing, in fine,
this author made nothing of. “Lord, what rot they’d all be if I hadn’t
been I’m a successful charlatan,” he went on—“I’ve been able to pass off
my system. But do you know what it is? It’s cartonpierre.”
“Carton-pierre?” Paul was struck, and gaped.
“Lincrusta-Walton!”
“Ah don’t say such things—you make me bleed!” the younger man protested.
“I see you in a beautiful fortunate home, living in comfort and honour.”
“Do you call it honour?”—his host took him up with an intonation that
often comes back to him. “That’s what I want _you_ to go in for. I mean
the real thing. This is brummagem.”
“Brummagem?” Paul ejaculated while his eyes wandered, by a movement
natural at the moment, over the luxurious room.
“Ah they make it so well to-day—it’s wonderfully deceptive!”
Our friend thrilled with the interest and perhaps even more with the pity
of it. Yet he wasn’t afraid to seem to patronise when he could still so
far envy. “Is it deceptive that I find you living with every appearance
of domestic felicity—blest with a devoted, accomplished wife, with
children whose acquaintance I haven’t yet had the pleasure of making, but
who _must_ be delightful young people, from what I know of their
parents?”
St. George smiled as for the candour of his question. “It’s all
excellent, my dear fellow—heaven forbid I should deny it. I’ve made a
great deal of money; my wife has known how to take care of it, to use it
without wasting it, to put a good bit of it by, to make it fructify.
I’ve got a loaf on the shelf; I’ve got everything in fact but the great
thing.”
“The great thing?” Paul kept echoing.
“The sense of having done the best—the sense which is the real life of
the artist and the absence of which is his death, of having drawn from
his intellectual instrument the finest music that nature had hidden in
it, of having played it as it should be played. He either does that or
he doesn’t—and if he doesn’t he isn’t worth speaking of. Therefore,
precisely, those who really know _don’t_ speak of him. He may still hear
a great chatter, but what he hears most is the incorruptible silence of
Fame. I’ve squared her, you may say, for my little hour—but what’s my
little hour? Don’t imagine for a moment,” the Master pursued, “that I’m
such a cad as to have brought you down here to abuse or to complain of my
wife to you. She’s a woman of distinguished qualities, to whom my
obligations are immense; so that, if you please, we’ll say nothing about
her. My boys—my children are all boys—are straight and strong, thank
God, and have no poverty of growth about them, no penury of needs. I
receive periodically the most satisfactory attestation from Harrow, from
Oxford, from Sandhurst—oh we’ve done the best for them!—of their eminence
as living thriving consuming organisms.”
“It must be delightful to feel that the son of one’s loins is at
Sandhurst,” Paul remarked enthusiastically.
“It is—it’s charming. Oh I’m a patriot!”
The young man then could but have the greater tribute of questions to
pay. “Then what did you mean—the other night at Summersoft—by saying
that children are a curse?”
“My dear youth, on what basis are we talking?” and St. George dropped
upon the sofa at a short distance from him. Sitting a little sideways he
leaned back against the opposite arm with his hands raised and
interlocked behind his head. “On the supposition that a certain
perfection’s possible and even desirable—isn’t it so? Well, all I say is
that one’s children interfere with perfection. One’s wife interferes.
Marriage interferes.”
“You think then the artist shouldn’t marry?”
“He does so at his peril—he does so at his cost.”
“Not even when his wife’s in sympathy with his work?”
“She never is—she can’t be! Women haven’t a conception of such things.”
“Surely they on occasion work themselves,” Paul objected.
“Yes, very badly indeed. Oh of course, often, they think they
understand, they think they sympathise. Then it is they’re most
dangerous. Their idea is that you shall do a great lot and get a great
lot of money. Their great nobleness and virtue, their exemplary
conscientiousness as British females, is in keeping you up to that. My
wife makes all my bargains with my publishers for me, and has done so for
twenty years. She does it consummately well—that’s why I’m really pretty
well off. Aren’t you the father of their innocent babes, and will you
withhold from them their natural sustenance? You asked me the other
night if they’re not an immense incentive. Of course they are—there’s no
doubt of that!”
Paul turned it over: it took, from eyes he had never felt open so wide,
so much looking at. “For myself I’ve an idea I need incentives.”
“Ah well then, n’en parlons plus!” his companion handsomely smiled.
“_You_ are an incentive, I maintain,” the young man went on. “You don’t
affect me in the way you’d apparently like to. Your great success is
what I see—the pomp of Ennismore Gardens!”
“Success?”—St. George’s eyes had a cold fine light. “Do you call it
success to be spoken of as you’d speak of me if you were sitting here
with another artist—a young man intelligent and sincere like yourself?
Do you call it success to make you blush—as you would blush!—if some
foreign critic (some fellow, of course I mean, who should know what he
was talking about and should have shown you he did, as foreign critics
like to show it) were to say to you: ‘He’s the one, in this country, whom
they consider the most perfect, isn’t he?’ Is it success to be the
occasion of a young Englishman’s having to stammer as you would have to
stammer at such a moment for old England? No, no; success is to have
made people wriggle to another tune. Do try it!”
Paul continued all gravely to glow. “Try what?”
“Try to do some really good work.”
“Oh I want to, heaven knows!”
“Well, you can’t do it without sacrifices—don’t believe that for a
moment,” the Master said. “I’ve made none. I’ve had everything. In
other words I’ve missed everything.”
“You’ve had the full rich masculine human general life, with all the
responsibilities and duties and burdens and sorrows and joys—all the
domestic and social initiations and complications. They must be
immensely suggestive, immensely amusing,” Paul anxiously submitted.
“Amusing?”
“For a strong man—yes.”
“They’ve given me subjects without number, if that’s what you mean; but
they’ve taken away at the same time the power to use them. I’ve touched
a thousand things, but which one of them have I turned into gold? The
artist has to do only with that—he knows nothing of any baser metal.
I’ve led the life of the world, with my wife and my progeny; the clumsy
conventional expensive materialised vulgarised brutalised life of London.
We’ve got everything handsome, even a carriage—we’re perfect Philistines
and prosperous hospitable eminent people. But, my dear fellow, don’t try
to stultify yourself and pretend you don’t know what we _haven’t_ got.
It’s bigger than all the rest. Between artists—come!” the Master wound
up. “You know as well as you sit there that you’d put a pistol-ball into
your brain if you had written my books!”
It struck his listener that the tremendous talk promised by him at
Summersoft had indeed come off, and with a promptitude, a fulness, with
which the latter’s young imagination had scarcely reckoned. His
impression fairly shook him and he throbbed with the excitement of such
deep soundings and such strange confidences. He throbbed indeed with the
conflict of his feelings—bewilderment and recognition and alarm,
enjoyment and protest and assent, all commingled with tenderness (and a
kind of shame in the participation) for the sores and bruises exhibited
by so fine a creature, and with a sense of the tragic secret nursed under
his trappings. The idea of _his_, Paul Overt’s, becoming the occasion of
such an act of humility made him flush and pant, at the same time that
his consciousness was in certain directions too much alive not to
swallow—and not intensely to taste—every offered spoonful of the
revelation. It had been his odd fortune to blow upon the deep waters, to
make them surge and break in waves of strange eloquence. But how
couldn’t he give out a passionate contradiction of his host’s last
extravagance, how couldn’t he enumerate to him the parts of his work he
loved, the splendid things he had found in it, beyond the compass of any
other writer of the day? St. George listened a while, courteously; then
he said, laying his hand on his visitor’s: “That’s all very well; and if
your idea’s to do nothing better there’s no reason you shouldn’t have as
many good things as I—as many human and material appendages, as many sons
or daughters, a wife with as many gowns, a house with as many servants, a
stable with as many horses, a heart with as many aches.” The Master got
up when he had spoken thus—he stood a moment—near the sofa looking down
on his agitated pupil. “Are you possessed of any property?” it occurred
to him to ask.
“None to speak of.”
“Oh well then there’s no reason why you shouldn’t make a goodish
income—if you set about it the right way. Study _me_ for that—study me
well. You may really have horses.”
Paul sat there some minutes without speaking. He looked straight before
him—he turned over many things. His friend had wandered away, taking up
a parcel of letters from the table where the roll of proofs had lain.
“What was the book Mrs. St. George made you burn—the one she didn’t
like?” our young man brought out.
“The book she made me burn—how did you know that?” The Master looked up
from his letters quite without the facial convulsion the pupil had
feared.
“I heard her speak of it at Summersoft.”
“Ah yes—she’s proud of it. I don’t know—it was rather good.”
“What was it about?”
“Let me see.” And he seemed to make an effort to remember. “Oh yes—it
was about myself.” Paul gave an irrepressible groan for the
disappearance of such a production, and the elder man went on: “Oh but
_you_ should write it—_you_ should do me.” And he pulled up—from the
restless motion that had come upon him; his fine smile a generous glare.
“There’s a subject, my boy: no end of stuff in it!”
Again Paul was silent, but it was all tormenting. “Are there no women
who really understand—who can take part in a sacrifice?”
“How can they take part? They themselves are the sacrifice. They’re the
idol and the altar and the flame.”
“Isn’t there even _one_ who sees further?” Paul continued.
For a moment St. George made no answer; after which, having torn up his
letters, he came back to the point all ironic. “Of course I know the one
you mean. But not even Miss Fancourt.”
“I thought you admired her so much.”
“It’s impossible to admire her more. Are you in love with her?” St.
George asked.
“Yes,” Paul Overt presently said.
“Well then give it up.”
Paul stared. “Give up my ‘love’?”
“Bless me, no. Your idea.” And then as our hero but still gazed: “The
one you talked with her about. The idea of a decent perfection.”
“She’d help it—she’d help it!” the young man cried.
“For about a year—the first year, yes. After that she’d be as a
millstone round its neck.”
Paul frankly wondered. “Why she has a passion for the real thing, for
good work—for everything you and I care for most.”
“‘You and I’ is charming, my dear fellow!” his friend laughed. “She has
it indeed, but she’d have a still greater passion for her children—and
very proper too. She’d insist on everything’s being made comfortable,
advantageous, propitious for them. That isn’t the artist’s business.”
“The artist—the artist! Isn’t he a man all the same?”
St. George had a grand grimace. “I mostly think not. You know as well
as I what he has to do: the concentration, the finish, the independence
he must strive for from the moment he begins to wish his work really
decent. Ah my young friend, his relation to women, and especially to the
one he’s most intimately concerned with, is at the mercy of the damning
fact that whereas he can in the nature of things have but one standard,
they have about fifty. That’s what makes them so superior,” St. George
amusingly added. “Fancy an artist with a change of standards as you’d
have a change of shirts or of dinner-plates. To _do_ it—to do it and
make it divine—is the only thing he has to think about. ‘Is it done or
not?’ is his only question. Not ‘Is it done as well as a proper
solicitude for my dear little family will allow?’ He has nothing to do
with the relative—he has only to do with the absolute; and a dear little
family may represent a dozen relatives.”
“Then you don’t allow him the common passions and affections of men?”
Paul asked.
“Hasn’t he a passion, an affection, which includes all the rest?
Besides, let him have all the passions he likes—if he only keeps his
independence. He must be able to be poor.”
Paul slowly got up. “Why then did you advise me to make up to her?”
St. George laid his hand on his shoulder. “Because she’d make a splendid
wife! And I hadn’t read you then.”
The young man had a strained smile. “I wish you had left me alone!”
“I didn’t know that that wasn’t good enough for you,” his host returned.
“What a false position, what a condemnation of the artist, that he’s a
mere disfranchised monk and can produce his effect only by giving up
personal happiness. What an arraignment of art!” Paul went on with a
trembling voice.
“Ah you don’t imagine by chance that I’m defending art? ‘Arraignment’—I
should think so! Happy the societies in which it hasn’t made its
appearance, for from the moment it comes they have a consuming ache, they
have an incurable corruption, in their breast. Most assuredly is the
artist in a false position! But I thought we were taking him for
granted. Pardon me,” St. George continued: “‘Ginistrella’ made me!”
Paul stood looking at the floor—one o’clock struck, in the stillness,
from a neighbouring church-tower. “Do you think she’d ever look at me?”
he put to his friend at last.
“Miss Fancourt—as a suitor? Why shouldn’t I think it? That’s why I’ve
tried to favour you—I’ve had a little chance or two of bettering your
opportunity.”
“Forgive my asking you, but do you mean by keeping away yourself?” Paul
said with a blush.
“I’m an old idiot—my place isn’t there,” St. George stated gravely.
“I’m nothing yet, I’ve no fortune; and there must be so many others,” his
companion pursued.
The Master took this considerably in, but made little of it. “You’re a
gentleman and a man of genius. I think you might do something.”
“But if I must give that up—the genius?”
“Lots of people, you know, think I’ve kept mine,” St. George wonderfully
grinned.
“You’ve a genius for mystification!” Paul declared; but grasping his hand
gratefully in attenuation of this judgement.
“Poor dear boy, I do worry you! But try, try, all the same. I think
your chances are good and you’ll win a great prize.”
Paul held fast the other’s hand a minute; he looked into the strange deep
face. “No, I _am_ an artist—I can’t help it!”
“Ah show it then!” St. George pleadingly broke out. “Let me see before I
die the thing I most want, the thing I yearn for: a life in which the
passion—ours—is really intense. If you can be rare don’t fail of it!
Think what it is—how it counts—how it lives!”
They had moved to the door and he had closed both his hands over his
companion’s. Here they paused again and our hero breathed deep. “I want
to live!”
“In what sense?”
“In the greatest.”
“Well then stick to it—see it through.”
“With your sympathy—your help?”
“Count on that—you’ll be a great figure to me. Count on my highest
appreciation, my devotion. You’ll give me satisfaction—if that has any
weight with you.” After which, as Paul appeared still to waver, his host
added: “Do you remember what you said to me at Summersoft?”
“Something infatuated, no doubt!”
“‘I’ll do anything in the world you tell me.’ You said that.”
“And you hold me to it?”
“Ah what am I?” the Master expressively sighed.
“Lord, what things I shall have to do!” Paul almost moaned as be
departed.