JIMMIE PADGATE was the son of a retired commander in the Navy, of
irreproachable birth and breeding, of a breezy impulsive disposition,
and with a pretty talent as an amateur actor. Finding idleness the root
of all boredom, he took to the stage, and during the first week of his
first provincial tour fell in love with the leading lady, a fragile waif
of a woman of vague upbringing. That so delicate a creature should have
to face the miseries of a touring life--the comfortless lodgings,
the ill-cooked food, the damp death-traps of dressing-rooms, the long
circuitous Sunday train-journeys--roused him to furious indignation. He
married her right away, took her incontinently from things theatrical,
and found congenial occupation in adoring her. But the hapless lady
survived her marriage only long enough to see Jimmie safe into short
frocks, and then fell sick and died. The impulsive sailor educated the
boy in his own fashion for a dozen years or so, and then he, in his
turn, died, leaving his son a small inheritance to be administered by
his only brother, an easy-going bachelor in a Government office. This
inheritance sufficed to send Jimmie to Harrow, where he began his
life-long friendship with Morland King, and to the École des Beaux-Arts
in Paris, where he learned many useful things beside the method of
painting pictures. When he returned to London, his uncle handed him over
the hundred or two that remained, and, his duty being accomplished, fell
over a precipice in the Alps, and concerned himself no more about his
nephew. Then Jimmie set to work to earn his living.
When he snatched the child Aline from the embraces of her tipsy aunt and
carried her out into the street, wondering what in the world he should
do with her, he was just under thirty years of age. How he had earned a
livelihood till then and kept himself free from debt he scarcely knew.
When he obtained a fair price for a picture, he deposited a lump sum
with his landlord in respect of rent in advance, another sum with the
keeper of the little restaurant where he ate his meals, and frittered
the rest away among his necessitous friends. In the long intervals
between sales, he either went about penniless or provided himself with
pocket money by black and white or other odd work that comes in the
young artist's way. His residence at that time consisted in a studio and
a bedroom in Camden Town. His wants were few, his hopes were many. He
loved his art, he loved the world. His optimistic temperament brought
him smiles from all those with whom he came in contact--even from
dealers, when he wasted their time in expounding to them the
commercial value of an unmarketable picture. He was quite happy, quite
irresponsible. When soberer friends reproached him for his hand-to-mouth
way of living, he argued that if he scraped to-day he would probably
spread the butter thick tomorrow, thus securing the average, the golden
mean, which was the ideal of their respectability. As for success,
that elusive will-o'-the-wisp, the man who did not enjoy the humour of
failure never deserved to succeed.
But when he had rescued Aline from the limbo over the small apothecary's
shop, as thoughtlessly and as gallantly as his father before him had
rescued the delicate lady from the trials of theatrical vagabondage, he
found himself face to face with a perplexing problem. That first night
he had risen from an amorphous bed he had arranged for himself on the
studio floor, and entered his own bedroom on tiptoe, and looked with
pathetic helplessness on the tiny child asleep beneath his bedclothes.
If it had been a boy, he would have had no particular puzzle. A boy
could have been stowed in a corner of the studio, where he could have
learned manners and the fear of God and the way of smiling at adversity.
He would have profited enormously, as Jimmie felt assured, by his
education. But with a girl it was vastly different. An endless vista
of shadowy, dreamy, delicate possibilities perplexed him. He conceived
women as beings ethereal, with a range of exquisite emotions denied
to masculine coarseness. Even the Rue Bonaparte had not destroyed his
illusion, and he still attributed to the fair Maenads of the Bal des
Quatre-z' Arts the lingering fragrance of the original Psyche. Of course
Jimmie was a fool, as ten years afterwards Norma had decided; but this
view of himself not occurring to him, he had to manage according to his
lights. Here was this mysterious embryo goddess entirely dependent on
him. No corner of the studio and rough-and-tumble discipline for her.
She must sleep on down and be covered with silk; the airs of heaven must
not visit her cheek too roughly; the clatter of the brazen world must
not be allowed to deafen her to her own sweet inner harmonies. Jimmie
was sorely perplexed.
His charwoman next morning could throw no light on the riddle. She had
seven children of her own, four of them girls, and they had to get along
the best way they could. She was of opinion that if let alone and just
physicked when she had any complaint, Aline would grow up of her own
accord. Jimmie said that this possibility had not struck him, but
doubtless the lady was right. Could she tell him how many times a day
a little girl ought to be fed and what she was to eat? The charwoman's
draft upon her own family experiences enlightened Jimmie so far that
he put a sovereign into her hand to provide a dinner for her children.
After that he consulted her no more. It was an expensive process.
Meanwhile it was obvious that a studio and one bedroom would not be
sufficient accommodation, and Jimmie, greatly daring, took a house. He
also engaged a resident housekeeper for himself and a respectable cat
for Aline, and when he had settled down, after having spent every penny
he could scrape together on furniture, began to wonder how he could pay
the rent. A month or two before he would have as soon thought of buying
a palace in Park Lane as renting a house in St. John's Wood--a cheap,
shabby little house, it is true; but still a house, with drawing-room,
dining-room, bedrooms, and a studio built over the space where once the
garden tried to smile. He wandered through it with a wonderment quite as
childish as that of Aline, who had helped him to buy the furniture. But
how was he ever going to pay the rent?
After a time he ceased asking the question. The ravens that fed Elijah
provided him with the twenty quarterly pieces of gold. Picture-dealers
of every hue and grade supplied him with the wherewithal to live.
In those early days he penetrated most of the murky byways of his
art--alleys he would have passed by with pinched nose a year before,
when an empty pocket and an empty stomach concerned himself alone.
Now, when the money for the last picture had gone, and no more was
forthcoming by way of advance on royalties on plates, and the black and
white market was congested, he did amazing things. He copied old Masters
for a red-faced, beery print-seller in Frith Street, who found some
mysterious market for them. The price can be gauged by the fact that
years afterwards Jimmie recognised one of his own copies in an auction
room, and heard it knocked down as a genuine Velasquez for eleven
shillings and sixpence. He also painted oil landscapes for a dealer
who did an immense trade in this line, selling them to drapers and
fancy-warehousemen, who in their turn retailed them to an art-loving
public, framed in gold, at one and eleven pence three farthings; and the
artist's rate of payment was five shillings a dozen--panels supplied,
but not the paint. To see Jimmie attack these was the child Aline's
delight. In after years she wept in a foolish way over the memory. He
would do half a dozen at a time: first dash in the foregrounds, either
meadows or stretches of shore, then wash in bold, stormy skies, then a
bit of water, smooth or rugged according as it was meant to represent
pool or sea; then a few vigorous strokes would put in a ship and a
lighthouse on one panel, a tree and a cow on a second, a woman and a
cottage on a third. And all the time, as he worked at lightning speed,
he would laugh and joke with the child, who sat fascinated by the magic
with which each mysterious mass of daubs and smudges grew into a living
picture under his hand. When his invention was at a loss, he would
call upon her to suggest accessories; and if she cried out “windmill,”
suddenly there would spring from under the darting brush-point a mill
with flapping sails against the sky. Now and again in his hurry Jimmie
would make a mistake, and Aline would shriek with delight:
“Why, Jimmie, that's a cow!”
And sure enough, horned and uddered, and with casual tail, a cow was
wandering over the ocean, mildly speculating on the lighthouse. Then
Jimmie would roar with laughter, and he would tether the cow to a buoy
and put in a milkmaid in a boat coming to milk the cow, and at Aline's
breathless suggestion, a robber with a bow and arrow shooting the
unnatural animal from the lighthouse top. Thus he would waste an hour
elaborating the absurdity, finishing it off beautifully so that it
should be worthy of a place on Aline's bedroom wall.
The months and years passed, and Jimmie found himself, if not on the
highroad to fortune, at least relieved of the necessity of frequenting
the murky byways aforesaid. He even acquired a little reputation as a
portrait painter, much to his conscientious, but comical despair. “I
am taking people's money under false pretences,” he would say. “I am an
imaginative painter. I can't do portraits. Your real portrait painter
can jerk the very soul out of a man and splash it on to his face. I
can't. Why do they come to me to be photographed, when Brown, Jones,
or Robinson would give them a portrait? Why can't they buy my
subject-pictures which are good? In taking their money I am a mercenary,
unscrupulous villain!” Indeed, if Aline had not been there to keep him
within the bounds of sanity, his Quixotism might have led him to send
his clients to Brown or Jones, where they could get better value for
their money. But Aline was there, rising gradually from the little child
into girlhood, and growing in grace day by day. After all, the charwoman
seemed to be right. The tender plant, left to itself, thrived, shot up
apparently of its own accord, much to Jimmie's mystification. It never
occurred to him that he was the all in all of her training--her
mother, father, nurse, teacher, counsellor, example. Everything she was
susceptible of being taught by a human being, he taught her--from the
common rudiments when she was a little child to the deeper things of
literature and history when she was a ripening maiden. Her life was
bound up with his. Her mind took the prevailing colour of his mind as
inevitably as the grasshopper takes the green of grass or the locust the
grey-brown of the sand. But Jimmie in his simple way regarded the girl's
sweet development as a miracle of spontaneous growth.
Yet Aline on her part instinctively appreciated the child in Jimmie, and
from very early years assumed a quaint attitude of protection in common
every-day matters. From the age of twelve she knew the exact state of
his financial affairs, and gravely deliberated with him over items of
special expenditure; and when she was fourteen she profited by a change
in housekeepers to take upon herself the charge of the household. Her
unlimited knowledge of domestic science was another thing that astounded
Jimmie, who to the end of his days would have cheerfully given two
shillings a pound for potatoes. And thus, while adoring Jimmie and
conscious that she owed him the quickening of the soul within her, she
became undisputed mistress of her small material domain, and regarded
him as a kind of godlike baby.
At last there came a memorable day. According to a custom five or six
years old, Jimmie and Aline were to spend New Year's Eve with some
friends, the Frewen-Smiths.
He was a rising architect who had lately won two or three important
competitions and had gradually been extending his scale of living. The
New Year's Eve party was to be a much more elaborate affair than usual.
Aline had received a beautifully printed card of invitation, with
“Dancing” in the corner. She looked through her slender wardrobe. Not
a frock could she find equal to such a festival. And as she gazed
wistfully at the simple child's finery laid out upon her bed, a desire
that had dawned vaguely some time before and had week by week broadened
into craving, burst into the full blaze of a necessity. She sat down on
her bed and puckered her young brows, considering the matter in all
its aspects. Then, with her sex's guilelessness, she went down to the
studio, where Jimmie was painting, and put her arms round his neck. Did
he think she could get a new frock for Mrs. Frewen-Smith's party?
“My dear child,” said Jimmie in astonishment, “what an idiotic
question!”
“But I want really a nice one,” said Aline, coaxingly.
“Then get one, dear,” said Jimmie, swinging round on his stool, so as to
look at her.
“But I'd like you to give me this one as a present. I don't want it
to be like the others that I help myself to and you know nothing
about--although they all are presents, if it comes to that--I want you
to give me this one specially.”
Jimmie laid down palette and mahl-stick and brush, and from a
letter-case in his pocket drew out three five-pound notes.
“Will this buy one?”
The girl's eyes filled with tears. “Oh, you are silly, Jimmie,” she
cried. “A quarter of it will do.”
She took one of the notes, kissed him, and ran out of the studio,
leaving Jimmie wondering why the female sex were so prone to weeping.
The next day he saw a strange woman established at the dining-room
table. He learned that it was a dressmaker. For the next week an air of
mystery hung over the place. The girl, in her neat short frock and with
her soft brown hair tied with a ribbon, went about her household duties
as usual; but there was a subdued light in her eyes that Jimmie noticed,
but could not understand. Occasionally he enquired about the new frock.
It was progressing famously, said Aline. It was going to be a most
beautiful frock. He would have seen nothing like it since he was born.
“Vanity, thy name is little girls,” he laughed, pinching her chin.
On the evening of the 31st of December Jimmie, in his well-worn evening
suit, came down to the dining-room, and for the first time in his life
waited for Aline. He sat down by the fire with a book. The cab that had
been ordered drew up outside. It was a remarkable thing for Aline to
be late. After a while the door opened, and a voice said, “I am ready.”
Jimmie rose, turned round, and for a moment stared stupidly at the sight
that met his eyes. It was Aline certainly, but a new Aline, quite a
different Aline from the little girl he had known hitherto. Her brown
hair was done up in a mysterious manner on the top of her head, and the
tip of a silver-mounted tortoise-shell comb (a present, she afterwards
confessed, from Constance Deering, who was in her secret) peeped
coquettishly from the coils. The fashionably-cut white evening dress
showed her neck and shoulders and pretty round arms, and displayed in a
manner that was a revelation the delicate curves of her young figure. A
little gold locket that Jimmie had given her rose and fell on her bosom.
She met his stare in laughing, blushing defiance, and whisked round so
as to present a side view of the costume. The astonishing thing had a
train.
“God bless my soul!” cried Jimmie. “It never entered my head!”
“What?”
“That you're a young woman, that you're grown up, that we'll have all
the young men in the place falling in love with you, that you'll be
getting married, and that I'm becoming a decrepit old fogey. Well, God
bless my soul!”
She came up and put her hands on his shoulders and kissed him.
“You think it becoming, don't you, Jimmie?”
“Becoming! Why, it's ravishing! It's irresistible! Do you mean to
say that you got all that, gloves and shoes and everything, out of a
five-pound note?”
She nodded.
“Good Lord!” said Jimmie in astonishment.
In this manner came realisation of the fact that the tiny child he had
undressed and put to sleep in his own bed ten years before had grown
into a woman. The shock brought back some of the old perplexities, and
created for a short while an odd shyness in his dealings with her. He
treated her deferentially, regarded apologetically the mean viands on
which he forced this fresh-winged goddess to dine, went out and wasted
his money on adornments befitting her rank, and behaved with such
pathetic foolishness that Aline, crying and laughing, threatened to
run away and earn her living as a nursery-maid if he did not amend
his conduct. Whereupon there was a very touching scene, and Jimmie's
undertaking to revert to his previous brutality put their relations
once more on a sound basis; but all the same there stole into Jimmie's
environment a subtle grace which the sensitive in him was quick to
perceive. Its fragrance revived the tender grace of a departed day,
before he had taken Aline--a day that had ended in a woeful flight to
Paris, where he had arrived just in time to follow through the streets
a poor little funeral procession to a poor little grave-side in the
cemetery of Bagneux. Her name was Sidonie Bourdain, and she was a good
girl and had loved Jimmie with all her heart.
The tender grace was that of March violets. The essence of a maid's
springtide diffused itself through the house, and springtide began
to bud again in the man's breast. It was a strange hyperphysical
transfusion of quickening sap. His jesting pictured himself as of a
sudden grown hoary, the potential father of a full-blown woman, two or
three years short of grandfatherdom. But these were words thrown off
from the very lightness of a mood, and vanishing like bubbles in the
air. Deep down worked the craving of the man still young for love
and romance and the sweet message in a woman's eyes. It was a gentle
madness--utterly unsuspected by its victim--but a madness such as
the god first inflicts upon him whom he desires to drive to love's
destruction. In the middle of it all, while Aline and himself were
finding a tentative footing on the newly established basis of their
relationship, the ironical deity took him by the hand and led him into
the cold and queenly presence of Norma Hardacre.
After that Jimmie fell back into his old ways with Aline, and the Great
Frock Episode was closed.