Chapter XII: Book II: Chapter I

IN LONDON

On a dull February day a respectably clad steerage passenger disembarked at Southampton with little luggage and great hopes. He was only twenty, but he looked several years older. There were deep traces of thought and suffering in the face, bronzed though it was; and despite the vigorous set of the mouth and the jaw, the dark eyes were soft and dreamy. He was clean-shaven except for a dark-brown mustache, which combined with the little tangle of locks on his forehead to suggest the artistic temperament, and to repel the insinuation of rough open-air labor radiating from his sturdy frame and bearing.

Matt Strang’s foot had touched England at last. Two long, monotonous years of steadfast endurance, self-sacrifice, and sordid economies--two years of portrait and sign painting, interrupted by spells of wagon-striping at two and a half dollars a day, had again given him the mastery of three hundred dollars, despite his despatch of five dollars a week to Abner Preep, and of a final subsidy of one hundred dollars to bridge over the time till he should have a footing in England. Gradually the cloud of despondency had rolled off, the spring-time of life and aspiration would not be denied, and though the pity and terror of his mother’s tragedy had tamed his high spirit and snapped the springs of buoyancy, the passion for painting returned with an intensity that dulled him to every appeal of the blood in his veins; and with it a haunting fear that he could never live to see London or his artist uncle, that he would die in the flower of his youth, all his possibilities latent. So impatient was he to give this fear the lie that he suffered a vexatious loss through his hurry to realize the bills and the goods in which his art had too often found payment. When the steamer floundered into a field of ice off Newfoundland, his semi-superstitious feeling wellnigh amounted to a quiet conviction that he would be shipwrecked in sight of port, the three hundred dollars serving but to sink him deeper.

Without stopping in Southampton to tempt Providence, he went straight on to London, every vein in him pulsing with feverish anticipations of mysterious splendors. The engine panted in answering exultation, and the rattle of the carriages was a rhythmic song of triumph. At last he was approaching the city of his dreams--the mighty capital of culture and civilization, where Art was loved and taught and honored. For some days now his whole being had been set in this key.

He sat at the window, gazing eagerly at the sunless landscapes that raced past him. Gradually he became aware of the approach of the monstrous city. Fields were interrupted by houses; later, houses were interrupted by fields; then the rural touches grew fewer and fewer, and at last he sped under a leaden sky amid appalling, endless, everlasting perspectives of chimney-pots and sooty tiles, and dingy houses and dead walls and vomiting columns and gasworks and blank-faced factories reeking with oppressive odors--on and on and on, as amid the infinities of a mean Inferno, whirring past geometrical rows of murky backyards with dust-bins and clothes-lines, and fleeting glimpses of grimy women and shock-headed children and slouching men, thundering over bridges that spanned gray streets relieved by motley traffic and advertisement hoardings, and flashing past gaunt mansions of poverty--bald structures with peeling fronts and bleared windows. There was a sombre impressiveness in the manifold frowziness, the squalid monotony; it was the sublime of the sordid. Fresh as Matt was from the immensities of sea and sky, the shabbiness of the spectacle caught at his throat; he thought chokingly of the unnumbered, unnoticed existences dragging dismally along within those bleak, congested barracks.

What had all this to do with Art? The glow of his blood died away, to be rekindled only by the seething streets into which he emerged from the clangorous maze of Waterloo Station; the throb of tumultuous life that beat as a drum and stirred the blood as a trumpet. Yet he had not come up to conquer London, but to sit at its feet. His bitter experience of life had destroyed every vestige of cocksureness, almost of confidence, leaving him shy and sometimes appalled at his own daring, as he realized the possibilities of self-delusion. He knew that fame and money were the guerdons of Art, but these were only indirectly in his mind. If they sometimes flashed to his heart in intoxicating instants of secret hope, he was too full of the consciousness of his disadvantages and imperfections to think much of anything beyond getting the necessary training. Far down the vista of thought and years lay this rosy rim of splendor, a faint haze dimly discerned, but the joy of learning and practising his art was the essence of his yearning. And yet there were moments, like this of feeling London under his foot for the first time, when a consciousness of power welled up in his soul--a sense of overflowing energy and immovable purpose that lifted him high above the crowd of shadows.

Escaping the touts and cabmen, he carried his valise across a great noiseful bridge to the nearest inexpensive-looking hotel, intending to secure a base of operations from which to reconnoitre London before looking up his uncle. But though he was at once booked for a room, the genteel air of the place, with its well-dressed customers and white-tied waiters, terrified him with the prevision of a portentous bill. He would have backed out at once had he dared, but, he thought, now that he was in for it, he would give it a week’s trial. He took only his breakfasts there, however, though the unnatural hour at which he took them made him an object of suspicion. He seemed always on the point of catching an early train. His other meals were taken at those modest restaurants where twopence is not a tip, but the price of a dish, and the menu is cut up into slips and pasted across the shop-window.

His first visit on the day of his arrival was to the National Gallery, not only to fulfil a cherished dream, but to see his uncle’s pictures, to talk of which might smooth the meeting. But he could nowhere come across the works of Matthew Strang, and a catalogue he could not afford; and he soon forgot the unseen pictures in the emotions excited by the seen, which plunged him into alternate heats of delight and chills of despair.

Despair alone possessed him at first in his passage through the Florentine and Sienese rooms. The symbolic figures of Catholicism had scant appeal for a soul which in its emergence from Puritan swaddlings had not opened out to mediævalism, and the strange draughtsmanship blinded him to everything else. If Margaritone or even Botticelli was Art, then his ideas must be even cruder than he had feared. He was relieved to find, as he continued his progress, that it must be the Madonnas that were crude, for he was apparently following the evolution of Art. But the sense of his own superior technique was brief--despair came back by another route. Before the later masters he was reduced to a worshipper, thrilled to tears. And, somewhat to his own astonishment, it was not only the poetic and imaginative that compelled this religious ecstasy; his soul was astrain for high vision, yet it was seized at once by Moroni’s “Portrait of a Tailor,” and by the exquisite modelling--though he did not know the word for it--of the head in his “Portrait of an Ecclesiastic.” To the young Nova Scotian, who had so chafed at having to paint uncouth farmers, it was an illumination to see how in the hands of a Teniers, or, above all, a Rembrandt, the commonplace could be transfigured by force of technique and sympathy. And yet he surrendered more willingly to the romantic, held by the later “Philip the Fourth” of Velasquez, as much for its truculent kingly theme as for the triumphantly subtle coloring, which got the effects of modelling almost without the aid of shadows. And the fever of inspiration and mastery, the sense of flowing paint which pervaded and animated the portrait of the Admiral, was the more entrancing because of the romantic figure of the Spanish sailor; while beside Rembrandt’s “Jewish Merchant,” with its haunting suggestion of suffering and the East, even the fine Vandyke, its neighbor, seemed to lose in poetry.

The brilliant and seizing qualities had his first vote; luminosity of color, richness of handling, grip of composition--all that leaped to the eye. Being alone, he had the courage of his first impressions; and having always been alone, he had the broadness that is clipped by school. The beautiful sense of form and landscape in Titian’s “Christ Appearing to Mary Magdalen” captivated him, though for subject he preferred the “Bacchus and Ariadne.” He was equally for Murillo’s “St. John and the Lamb,” and for Andrea del Sarto’s portrait of himself; for Palma’s Christ-like “Portrait of a Painter.” He wondered wistfully whence Bassano’s “Good Samaritan” took the glow of its color, or Greuze’s “Head of a Girl” its pathetic grace, and he was as struck by the fine personal, if sometimes unsure, touch of Gainsborough as by the vigorous handling and extraordinary painting force of Sir Joshua Reynolds, whose children alone he found unreservedly delicious.

Amid many sound if superficial judgments were many crude admirations and condemnations, destined to undergo almost annual revision. At the present stage of his growth, for example, the charming Correggio was his ideal of an artist--to wit, a skilful painter, suffusing poetical themes with poetical feeling.

Subject counted for him: a sympathetic theme seemed to him of the essence of Art.

But the craftsman in him was not to be suppressed. When he was absorbed in Raphael’s “Pope Julius II.,” his practical self suggested that the reds needed varnishing to bring up the head from the background; and though the fine feeling of Joseph Ribera’s “Dead Christ” awoke long-dormant chords of religious emotion, what moved him most was the modelling of the foot caressed by the Magdalen’s hair. His emotion subsided in the study of the painter’s mannerisms, his heavy blacks and shadows. His delight in the luminous quality of Bordone’s “Portrait of a Lady” was modified by an uneasy conviction that the left hand was unnatural. Even in Moroni’s portraits the hands seemed slightly too small. Though he was astonished at the triviality of subject in Gerard Dow’s “Fish and Poultry Shop,” he must fain admire the exquisite quality of the still-life passages and the loving patience of the infinite touches; in Van Mieris’ treatment of the same subject he found a resentful pleasure in the discovery that, despite the marvellous accuracy of the dish of fish and the vegetables, the woman’s head was too little, her left arm too heavy and too big for the right, her flesh more like fish, and her very cat purring in contented ignorance of its wrong proportions.

In the landscape galleries he was puzzled by the old classic landscape; the occasional fineness of line, the masterly distribution of masses, did not counterbalance his sense of unreality before these brown trees and sombre backgrounds. Where were the sunlight and atmosphere of Nature as he had known her, the sky over all, subtly interfused with all the living hues, the fresh, open-air feeling which he had tried to put into his own humble sketches of Nova-Scotian forest, and by virtue of which he found more of the great mother in Peter de Hoogh’s pictures of the courts of Dutch houses than in all the templed woodlands of the pre-Gainsborough period? But Constable revealed to him the soul of loveliness of rural England, setting in his heart a pensive yearning for those restful woods and waters; Crome touched his imagination with the sweep of his lonely heaths; and Turner dazzled him with irisations of splendid dream, and subdued him with the mystery and poetry of sea and sky.

And the total effect of this first look round was inspiration. Over all the whirling confusion of the appeal of so many schools and ages, over all his bewilderment before early Italian pictures that seemed to him badly drawn and modern English that seemed banal, over all his dispiriting diffidence before the masterpieces, was an exultant sense of brotherhood, as of a soul come home at last. There were pictures to which he returned again and again with a feeling of reverential kinship, a secret audacious voice whispering that he understood those who had painted them--that he too was of their blood and race, though come from very far, and lonely and unknown; that he too had thrilled with the beauty and mystery of things; that he too had seen visions and heard voices. Quitting the gallery with regret tempered by the prospect of many magic hours in the society of its treasures, he found out the whereabouts of the Limners’ Club, and took his way towards Bond Street, every sense thrilling with vivid perceptions, receiving pleasant impressions from the shop-windows, exhilarated by the pretty women that brushed by him with a perfume of fashion, and keenly enjoying the roar of the town.

On the threshold of the club he inquired for Mr. Matthew Strang. The door-keeper eyed him surlily, and said there was no such member. The world grew suddenly dark and bleak again. He stammered in piteous apology that Mr. Strang had given him that address; and the janitor, a whit softened by his evident distress, admitted that Mr. Strang was sometimes about the club, and volunteered to send the boy to see--an offer which Matt gratefully accepted with a sense of taking alms. But Mr. Strang was not on the premises, and Matt was further driven to inquire where he _could_ be found. The door-keeper, tired of him, replied to the effect that he was not Mr. Strang’s keeper, and that it was not unusual to look for gentlemen in their own homes; whereupon Matt turned miserably away, too disheartened to ask where his uncle’s own home was situate, and feeling that there was nothing for it but to keep watch over the club door till the great painter should appear. He lingered about at a safe distance (for to be seen by the door-keeper were terrible), scanning with eager glances the faces of the few men who passed through the swinging glass doors, his imagination glorifying them, and seeing rather halos than silk hats on their heads. But at last the futility of his sentinelship dawned upon him; he could not be sure of recognizing his uncle; he could not accost the celestials and question them; he must come again and again till he found his uncle at the club. The thought of facing the door-keeper made him flinch, but he knew the road to Art was thorny and precipitous.

It was three o’clock, but he had forgotten to lunch. Now that his emotions had been chilled, he remembered he was hungry. He looked around in vain for a mean eating-house, then reluctantly slipped into a public-house and ordered a glass of ale and something brown and dumpy which he saw under a glass cover. The wench who served him smiled so amiably that he was emboldened to ask if by chance she knew where Matthew Strang lived. Her smile died away, and nothing succeeded it.

“Matthew Strang, the painter,” said Matt, with a ghastly suspicion that the girl did not even know the name. London to him meant largely Matthew Strang; it was to Matthew Strang that he had taken his ticket and booked his passage, it was to get to Matthew Strang that he had starved and pinched himself, and it depressed him to discover the limitations of fame--to find that Matthew Strang was not hung in the air like Mohammed’s coffin, ’twixt earth and heaven, for all to see.

“There’s the Directory,” said the girl, lugging it down when she perceived that the good-looking young man with the curious drawling accent was not quizzing her. “You’ll find painters in the Trade Directory.”

The barmaid’s satire was unconscious. Understanding the bulky red volume but dimly, Matt hunted up “Strang” in the general section. He was surprised to see there was more than one person of that name. But fortunately there was only one Matthew Strang, and he lived in a side street off Cavendish Square. Warmly thanking the girl, Matt gulped down his ale and hurried out to inquire the way, munching the relics of the cake as he hastened towards the long-elusive goal. Very soon, scanning the numbers, his eye flashed and his heart leaped up. There it was--the magic name--actually ’twixt earth and heaven, painted above a shop-window. Surprised, he came to a stand-still.

The window was one which would have arrested him in any case, for it was illumined with paintings and engravings, and through the doorway Matt saw enchanting stacks of pictures mounting from floor to ceiling, and the side wall was a gallery of oils and water-colors, and an aroma of art and refinement and riches seemed over everything, from the gold of the frames of the oil-colors to the chaste creamy margins of the engravings. He entered the shop with beating heart. His eyes lit first on a sweet-faced matron in a cap standing at the far end of the shop, reverentially surveying a faded “Holy Family,” and while he was wondering whether she was the artist’s wife, a dapper young gentleman, installed behind a broad desk near the door, startled him by asking his business.

He coughed uneasily, overcome by sudden diffidence. The series of barriers between him and his uncle gave the great painter an appalling aloofness.

“I want to see Mr. Matthew Strang,” he stammered.

The dapper young gentleman looked inquiringly towards the sweet-faced matron. “Can this gentleman see Mr. Strang, Madame?” he said. Matt noticed that he wore a pearl horseshoe in his cravat.

“Certainly, sir. Be seated,” said the lady, with grave courtesy and a pleasant touch of foreign accent, such as Matt had heard in the French families of Acadia. She disappeared for a moment, and returned in the wake of a saturnine-looking elderly gentleman, with interrogative eyebrows, a pointed beard, and a velvet jacket, the first sight of whom gave Matt the heart-sickness of yet another disappointment. But though his keen eye soon snipped off the pointed beard and wiped off the sallowness of civilization, revealing the David Strang interblent with the Matthew, his heart-sickness remained. The gap between him and this fine gentleman and great artist seemed too great to be bridged over thus suddenly. He became acutely conscious of his homely clothes, of his coarse, unlettered speech, of the low, menial occupations he had followed; he saw himself furling the sail and carrying the hod and sawing the wood; he felt himself far below the dapper young shopman with the pearl horse-shoe, and his throat grew parched and his eyes misty.

“Good-afternoon, sir,” said his uncle, rubbing his hands with chilling geniality. “What can I have the pleasure of doing for you?”

In that instant Matt perceived all the perversity of which he had been guilty, he remembered he had flown in the face of his uncle’s kind advice, and had not even apprised him of his departure from America.

“I want to buy some colors,” he faltered.

His uncle’s eyebrows mounted. “We do not sell colors, young man,” he said, frigidly.

“I thought--” Matt stammered.

Matthew Strang contemptuously turned on his heel and withdrew. His nephew lingered desperately in the shop, without the strength either to go or to stay.

The lady, who had half followed her husband, turned back hesitatingly, and with reassuring sweetness said: “You will get colors near at hand, in Oxford Street. We only sell pictures.”

Under her penetrating sympathy Matt found courage to say: “I’m sorry Mr. Strang got streaked.”

“Streaked?” echoed Madame, opening her eyes, as with a vision of broadcloth brushing against wet canvases.

“I mean angry,” said Matt, confusion streaking his own face with red.

“Yes, I remember now,” said madam, sweetly. “It’s an American word.”

“Yes; it was in America that I heard of Mr. Strang,” he replied, slowly, striving to accentuate his words, as though he were reading them from a school-book.

“Indeed?” Madame flushed now.

“Yes, I heard of his fame as a painter.”

“Ah.” Her eyes sparkled. Roses leaped into her blond cheeks. “I always told him his work was admirable,” she cried, in exultant excitement, “but he is so easily discouraged.”

Matt thrilled with a sense of the man’s greatness.

“So you see,” he said, with a quaver of emotion in his voice, “I was just wild to see him.”

“I am so glad,” cried Madame, with a charming smile. “I will go and tell my husband. He really must see you. Matthew,” she called out, tremulously, fluttering towards the passage.

The saturnine figure in the velvet coat descended again.

“You must talk to the young gentleman, dear. He has heard of your fame in America.”

Matthew Strang’s interrogative eyebrows reached their highest point, and Matt’s face got more streaked than ever. He felt he was in a false position.

“I heard of you from my father,” he said, hurriedly. “What is the price of this?” he asked in his confusion, half turning towards the shopman.

“This etching of Millet’s ‘Angelus’? Three guineas, sir.” He added, gauging his man, “We have a photogravure of the same subject--a little smaller--for half a guinea.”

“Your father!” repeated Mr. Strang, gruffly. “He was a brother artist, I presume.”

Matt would have given much to say he was not an artist, but a brother. But he replied instead: “No, not exactly. He was a captain.” He felt somehow as if the whole guilt of his father’s calling rested upon himself, and it was mean of him to cross the Atlantic to impose some of it on the dignified figure before him.

“Oh, I love soldiers,” murmured Madame Strang.

Matt felt things were now entangled beyond the possibility of even future extrication, so he desperately consented to purchase the photogravure, threw down a sovereign, and, snatching up the change and the picture-roll, hurried from the establishment.

“What a charming young man!” said Madame Strang.

But Matthew Strang tapped his forehead significantly.

“You always will run yourself down, dear,” murmured Madame.

“Josephine,” replied Matthew Strang, in low, solemn tones, “the fellow is either a fool or a rogue.”

“He’s left sixpence on the desk,” broke in the voice of the shopman.

“Ha! a fool! It is enough for me to live in my son. He has advantages which I was denied.”

“The dear boy,” breathed Madame.

The extravagant purchaser of the “Angelus” divided the rest of his week between the National Gallery, where he concluded his uncle had not yet been canonized, and the streets of London, which he explored fearlessly. In a few days of industrious investigation he saw more than many a Londoner sees in a lifetime. He had experience of the features and cook-shops of Peckham, Rotherhithe, Clapton, Westminster, Covent Garden, the East India Docks, the Tower, wandering wherever the shapeless city stretched its lubber limbs, and seeing things and places that made him glad of the protection of the pistol he carried in his hip-pocket. The very formlessness of the city fascinated even while it dazed him. He ceased to wonder that artists found inspiration in this atmosphere, in which the fog itself seemed but the visible symbol of the innumerable mysterious existences swarming in its obscure vastness. The unexpected was everywhere, green closes in the heart of commerce, quiet quadrangles in the byways of Fleet Street, quaint old churches by the river-side, bawling market-places behind stately mansions, great parks set in deserts of arid poverty, bustling docks hidden away in back streets, and elegant villas at the end of drab, dismal, long-trailing East-end thoroughfares, redolent of slush and cabbage-leaves and public-houses and fried fish. Miles were of light account to one who had lived in a land of great spaces, yet Matt was wearied by the lengthy sweep of the great arteries and the multiplicity of their ramifications, by this vastness that was but reiterated narrowness in its lack of the free open horizons to which his eye was used.

But the Titanic city awoke strange responses in his soul; something in him vibrated to the impulse of the endless panorama. Often his fingers itched for the brush, as if to translate into color and line all this huge pageant of life; for the spell of youthful poesy was still on his eyes, and if he could not see London as he had seen his native fields and sky and ocean, all fresh and pure and beautiful, if in the crude day its sordid streets seemed labyrinths in an underworld, unlovely, intolerable, there were atmospheres and lights in which it still loomed upon his vision through the glamour of fantasy, and chiefly at night, when the mighty city brooded in sombre majesty, magnificently transfigured by the darkness, and the solemn river stretched in twinkling splendor between enchanted warehouses, or shadowed itself with the inverted architecture of historic piles, or lapped against the gray old Tower dreaming of ancient battle. But he could only take rough pencil or mental notes of the romance of it all, and it was almost always the fantastic that touched his imagination and found expression in the pictorial short-hand of his sketch-book--lurid splotches of sunset against tall, grimy chimneys; tawny barges gliding over black canal-waters shot with quivering trails of liquid gold from the morning sun; ragged Rembrandtesque figures asleep under glooming railway arches, over which trains flew with shining windows; street perspectives at twilight, with strange, livid skies; filmy evening rain blurring the lights of the town to a tender haze; late omnibuses tearing by glistering, moonlit pavements, and casting the shadows of the outside passengers on the sleeping houses; foggy forenoons, with the eye of day inflamed and swollen in the yellow heaven. With his purchase of the “Angelus,” on the other hand, he was not greatly taken, despite its sentiment. He had seen too much of peasants; he had himself stooped over the furrows when his heart was elsewhere; his soul turned from the mean drudgeries and miseries of the human lot, yearning for the flash of poetry, the glow of romance, the light of dream.

In spite of his boarding out, his bill for the week’s bed, breakfast, and attendance reached as far as £1 19_s._ 3_d._--a terrifying total that drove him headlong into the frowsiest coffee-house to be found in the slums round Holborn. Here he spent a wretched, interminable night, provoked by insects and mysterious noises into dressing again and keeping his hand on his pistol as he sat shivering on a chair. The staircases resounded with the incessant tramp of feet mounting and descending, and there were bursts of rowdy laughter and blows and tipsy jeers, and once his locked door was shaken, and Matt thought he had fallen into a thieves’ den, and trembled for his savings. In the morning he called for his account and left, not without having discovered the real character of the place into which he had strayed. After some trouble he chanced upon a clean furnished room in the same neighborhood for four shillings and sixpence a week, attendance included. It was a back room on the third floor, and it gave on a perspective of tiles and shabby plaster, and the evidences of jerry-building in the doors and windows discomforted the whilom joiner’s apprentice; but he calculated that for less than twenty of his pounds he would have a foothold in London for a year. He wellnigh cried to think of the weeks he had lost in that week of hotel luxury. On sixpence a day he could sustain life. On ninepence he could live in clover. Why, even making lavish allowance for the technical expenses of which his uncle had warned him, he would easily be able to stay on for a whole year. In a year--a year of ceaseless painting--what might he not achieve?

Ah, what hopes harbored, what dreams hovered in that bleak little room! The vague, troubled rumor of the great city rolled up in inspiring mystery; the light played with instructive fascination upon the sooty tiles; high over the congested chaos of house-tops he saw the evening mists rifted with sunset, and on starry nights he touched the infinite through his rickety casement.