Chapter II: “success”

The studio bell had tinkled so often that afternoon that Mr. Matthew Strang refused to budge from the comfortable arm-chair in which he sat smoking his cigarette and reading the _Nineteenth Century_ after the labors of the day. The model had sipped her tea, taken her silver, and was gone to resume her well-earned place among the clothed classes, and the hard-working artist was in no mood to open his door to the latest bell-ringer.

Probably it was only another model to inquire if he had any work, or to apprise him of a change of address or of wardrobe; or else it was a _soi-disant_ decayed artist, who had tramped all the way from Camberwell, ignorant that his old patron had moved from the studio a year ago; or mayhap it was a child. He had been much worried by children lately, since he had picked up a couple in the gutter and placed them on the “throne.” The dingy court where the fortunate twain resided had been agitated from attic to cellar; the entire juvenile population had pulled his bell in quest of easy riches; mothers had quarrelled with one another over the chances of their young ones; the whole court had been torn with intestine war.

Ting-a-ting--ting-a-ting--ting--ting--ting--

The person had rung again, more ferociously. Ah, it must be that interminable Mrs. Filbert back again. Well, let her ring on, the old jade. Rather an hour of tintinnabulation than ten minutes of her tongue. Had his man been in, he might himself have been “out,” but he could scarcely appear at the door and deny himself. Her shrill falsetto voice resurged in the ear of memory, offering nude photos from Paris at exorbitant prices, or lists of models full of inaccurate addresses, or rare costumes, most of which could be picked up at any old clo’ shop. He smiled, recalling one of these costumes--something like a fishing-net with holes about an inch across. “This is Greek, and shows the figure.” Certainly it showed the figure, he thought, smiling more broadly. And now he remembered--she had threatened to bring her younger sister. “And I have also a little sister. I don’t know if you paint pretty girls,” here his memory inserted a giggle. “She sits for modern dress or the head. Not for the figure. Of course she doesn’t mind a light costume, something diaphanous. Though I’m not quite sure she has any time left. She is always with Mr. Rapper, who does those pastels for the Goupil Art Gallery. He is so very sweet to her. She goes to the theatre and dines with him. I sit myself sometimes, though you mightn’t think so” (giggle). “So of course she can’t sit in the evening, in case you want her for black and white.” (“Just like a woman,” he reflected, cynically, “too careless to take the trouble to discover that I am far too eminent for black and white.”) “I know I’m dressed carelessly just now, I really must be more careful” (giggle). “I have an Empire gown to sit in, very sweet. I will bring it you to look at.”

Ting-a-ting-ting-a-ting-ting-ting-ting-ting-ting.

Yes, it was the sweet Empire gown she was bringing him if it was not her sweeter sister. His experienced eye foresaw the Empire gown--something cut by herself out of muslin, with an old yellow silk sash. He let the last vibration of the bell-wire die away; the creature would know now he was not in. The smoke curled in a blue-gray cloud about his head, as, looking up from the page of the magazine, he gazed dreamily at his half-finished picture, standing on the easel at the other extremity of the great luxurious room, where the westering sun of June sent down a flood of light that brightened the gleam of the gold frames of hanging pictures, touched up rough sketches and preliminary studies standing about, and lay in a splash of brilliancy among the sheets of music and the dainty volumes of poetry and _belles-lettres_ on the grand piano. Suddenly, as his gaze rested with a suspicion of wistfulness on this doubly artistic interior, in which the pictures were only pleasant spots of color in a larger harmony, a harmony of rugs and flowers and tapestry and picturesque properties and bric-à-brac, there shot up in his mind an image of an ancient episode. He saw himself, a shy, homely figure, standing in despairing bitterness on the threshold of an elegant studio--though not so elegant nor so commodious as this--the studio of the brilliant cousin whose life had intersected his own so many years ago. His face changed, a sad smile hovered about the corners of his mouth. Perhaps some unhappy young man was now outside his own less hospitable door, growing hopeless as the echoes alone answered him. He started up hastily, and hurrying into the passage drew back the handle of the door. A slim, fashionably attired gentleman, who was just walking off down the gravel pathway, turned, hearing the sound of the open door, his handsome, clean-shaven, bronzed face radiating joyous amusement.

“You duffer!” he exclaimed.

The famous painter turned pale. His cigarette fell from his mouth, so startled was he. That he should have just been thinking of Herbert Strang seemed almost supernatural. But the nervous feeling was submerged in a wave of happiness; to have Herbert again was an incredible bliss. How lucky he had opened the door!

“Herbert!” he cried, seizing his cousin’s delicately gloved hands with an affectionate impulsiveness worthy of Herbert’s mother.

Herbert surveyed him roguishly. “You’re a nice old pal to make me ring three times. What’s going on inside?”

“Nothing at all,” laughed the painter, in effusive happiness. “Only tea, and that’s cold. But come in.”

“You’re sure I’m not disturbing you,” said Herbert, mischievously.

“No, I’m all by myself.”

“It must be awfully convenient to have a back door,” murmured Herbert.

The painter shook his head. “You haven’t changed one bit,” he said, in laughing reproach, as they moved within.

“Oh, but you have,” said Herbert, pausing in the doorway to take him by the shoulders, and looking affectionately into his face. “Why, there’s quite a dash of gray in your hair. You must have been killing yourself with work.”

And, indeed, there were lines of premature age on the handsome face, too, though the rather tall, sturdy figure was still alert and unbent. The dark eyes had lost something of their old softness, the light of dream was rarer in them, but the little tangle of locks on his forehead still co-operated with the dark brown mustache and the smoothness of the firm chin to suggest the artist behind the practical man of the world.

“You forget I’m getting old,” he replied, only half jocosely.

“What nonsense! Why, I’m several years older than you.”

“No, are you?”

“Of course I am. Don’t you remember I was your senior, instructing you in the ways of this wicked world?”

“Well, you’re still looking a boy, anyhow,” said Mr. Strang.

“That’s what I want to look,” said Herbert, laughing. “It makes pretty women pet you and hold your hand. Why, in Italy I was the envy of all the cavaliers. _Per Dio_, this is a change!” he exclaimed, as he entered the fashionable studio. “Do you remember the time you came to me and wanted to borrow tenpence, or something? Ha, ha, ha! Not that I’m surprised, old boy, not a bit. I’ve heard your name come up quite half a dozen times in the few days I’ve been back in stony old London. No, thanks, I’ll sit on the couch. It’s cooler there. And I won’t have any cold tea in this frightfully hot weather. I’m still faithful to soda-and-whiskey, if you’ve got any.”

“Lots,” said Mr. Strang. “A cigar?”

“Not before dinner, thanks. I don’t mind a cigarette. But I’m not interrupting your work?”

“Don’t be ridiculous, old fellow. The idea of my turning you away!”

“Well, considering you nearly did it! But you’re a celebrity now. Your time’s valuable.”

“Oh, but I’ve struck work for to-day.”

“What, with all this light left? This is indeed a change from the tenpenny days.”

“Yes, I suppose one gets tired,” the painter sighed. “Do you like Turkish or Egyptians?”

“In cigarettes Turkish, in women Egyptians,” he answered, laconically. “But what a joke to find you tired of painting! You’re beginning to feel like I felt, eh? That it’s one demnition grind. And I’m tired of travelling, and wouldn’t mind doing a little painting now, ha, ha, ha! How funnily things do turn out, to be sure. Why, you’ve changed inside almost as much as outside,” he said, looking up languidly into his host’s face, as he selected a cigarette from the box. “I wonder if I should have recognized you if I had met you in the streets instead of tracking the lion to his own den. I shouldn’t have thought half a dozen years would have made such a difference.”

“Half a dozen years! It’s nearer ten since we met.”

“Nearer ten? Is it possible? Let me see. It must be quite seven years since the governor died, poor old chap. We haven’t met since then, have we?”

“No,” said the painter.

“No, of course; I’ve been careering about the world ever since. You know he died in Egypt?”

“No, I didn’t know that,” said Mr. Strang. “I only heard of his death from the dealer who took over the connection.”

“Yes, he had to go there pretty sharp for his lungs, and I was compelled to leave Paris in my second year to go with him and the mater. But he died happy. That blessed gold medal of mine made him sure the name of Strang would be immortal in the history of Art. I always said there was a certain pathos about the poor old gentleman. But perhaps his assurance wasn’t so wrong after all, because _you_ are going to make the name glorious, aren’t you, you lucky beggar! And his own name, too; which ought to make him happy, even in heaven.”

The great man smiled sadly, but he only said, “And your mother--how is she? I’ve often wished to see her again.”

“Oh, she’s living now at Lyons with some distant relatives of hers. Of course, she soon tired of gadding about with me. She sent me a cutting about you once from a French paper. So you see how your fame has spread! I’ve often been meaning to write to you, but you know how it is, always moving about, and I always intended to look you up when I came to London. I was here two years ago on a flying visit, but some paper said you were in Rome. Yes, and I saw a colored reproduction of a picture of yours, ‘Motherhood,’ decorating a miner’s cabin in the Rockies--the Christmas supplement of the _Illustrated London News_, if I remember aright. It was a mother nursing a little girl, while the kid herself nursed a doll.”

The painter turned away and struck a match.

“And then there were a couple of years before your father died,” he said. “The last time we met was at the Students’ Club in Seven Dials on Gold Medal Night.”

“Yes, by Jove, you’re right,” said Herbert, thoughtfully. “If I didn’t wish to avoid a platitude I should say that time flies. It’s been a jolly good time, though, for me, with nothing to do except spend the poor old governor’s savings, and a jolly big hole I’ve knocked in them, too. And _you_ haven’t come out of it so badly, eh? That’s a stunning thing of yours in the Academy. Aren’t you glad I made you promise to send a picture to it in those tenpenny times? I’ve just come from there. Got your address from the catalogue. I congratulate you heartily. It’s not the sort of thing I expected from you; but it’s well put in, and I suppose it pays. It is astonishing,” he went on, after pausing to sip from his glass, “how paltry English art looks to me after all these years and seeing everything everywhere. The picture of the year is exactly like the lid of a bon-bon box. There aren’t half a dozen things in to-day’s show that I’d care to look at again. _You’re_ in the running, don’t look so glum, ha, ha, ha! Frankly, old man, your ‘Triumph of Bacchus’ is jolly good work. You know I never cared much for subject, but the modelling is A 1, and that sunlight effect is ripping! And what a crowd there was before it! Phew! I nearly got suffocated trying to see it, and I had to retire to the Architectural Room to cool. I don’t like Cornpepper’s picture one bit, though he _is_ an A.R.A.”

“You mean _because_ he is,” said Matthew Strang, with melancholy facetiousness.

“No, nothing of the kind; that rather prejudices me in his favor. You mustn’t forget I prophesied it. You don’t mean to say you admire his ‘Ariadne in Naxos’? ‘Poached lady on greens,’ I marked it in my catalogue. Do laugh! You look as dull and faded as an Old Master. I think I shall have to restore you. Here, have some whiskey yourself. You’re damned unsociable.”

“I rarely drink,” the host said, feebly.

“You used to drink my whiskey,” Herbert reminded him, and as he poured himself out a little in deference to his brilliant cousin, he thought how queerly things had inverted themselves.

“The Triumph of Bacchus,” said Herbert, laughing. “Now I’ve put in the good spirit, I’ll exorcise the bad, as David did to Saul.” And crossing over to the piano he played a lively air.

“I picked up that from a Spanish gypsy,” he said. “Not George Eliot’s. But I’m sinking to puns. It’s the English climate. You’ve got no wit here, and there isn’t even a word for _esprit_. Let’s examine your pictures. Ha! Hum! I see you’ve got quite a number on your hands. I suppose they must be the good ones. Ah! What do you call that thing--the lady in blue and the harp?”

“‘Ideal Womanhood,’” answered the painter, adding, hastily: “It’s just been returned from Australia. I lent it to an international exhibition. They beguiled me with the prospect it would be bought by the Government.”

“Ideal moonshine, I should call it,” laughed Herbert. “There never was such moonlight on sea or land. And does the ideal woman play the harp on snowy mountain-tops at midnight without a chaperon?”

“It’s supposed to be symbolic, you know, of her inspiring man to nobler heights,” explained the artist, with an embarrassed air.

He wondered vaguely what had become of that beautiful woman--what was her name?--whose casual words at a garden-party had driven him back for a time into what he thought was the true path of his Art.

“Dear me. There’s quite a mystic feeling about it. Isn’t that the right phrase? Do you know, I’m seriously thinking of becoming an art critic. Yes, really! As I told you, I’ve had my fill of travelling, and now I’m going to try and settle down here, and I rather like getting a reputation for something or other. It makes real woman more interested in one. The only thing I’m afraid of is, I know too much about the subject, and have actually handled the brush. I’m going to paint, too, but I’ve neglected to keep my hand in, so I’ve not much hopes of that. Unless I came out as a stylist, who sees the world as he fails to paint it. You’ve got several new men like that, I hear. There’s money in myopia and diseases of the eye generally. And _per Dio_! how photography has come along since I was one of the pioneers of its use in art!”

Matthew Strang shrugged his shoulders.

“What does it matter?” he said, wearily. “The whole thing’s a farce.”

“Here, I say, must I play another gypsy dance? I came here expecting to find you a harmony in gold, and lo! you’re a discord in the blues. What’s the matter with you? You’re jealous of Cornpepper. How is it they haven’t made you an A.R.A. yet? Don’t you go out enough?”

The painter’s lips essayed a melancholy smile.

“I go out all I want to.”

“There are enough cards stuck over your mantel.”

“Yes, I have to go out a good deal in the season. It doesn’t pay to offend patrons.”

“Or Ideal Womanhood. I reckon you’ll be making a fine marriage one of these days when you’re an A.R.A., as you must be. Lady Bettina Modish, or something of that sort, eh?”

“Won’t you have another cigarette?” said the painter, jerkily.

“Thanks. Oh, by-the-way, ha, ha, ha! What’s become of that woman, you rogue?”

“What woman?”

“Real womanhood. The woman you were living with in Paris. Ha, ha, ha! You didn’t think I knew that. But I met Cornpepper there on my return from Egypt, and he told me he’d seen you going about with her. How we laughed over our Methodist parson, who wanted art to be moral! What’s the matter?”

The painter’s face had grown white and agitated.

“I’m sorry if I’ve said anything to annoy you,” Herbert protested. “Perhaps I oughtn’t to have given Cornpepper away. But the affair is so ancient. I didn’t know you’d mind a reference to it now.”

“The woman I was living with in Paris,” said Matthew Strang, hoarsely, “was my wife.”

“Non--sense,” said Herbert, in low, long-drawn incredulity. But his cousin’s face was only too convincing.

“She’s not alive now?” he asked.

The painter nodded his head hopelessly.

Herbert sprang to his feet.

“Good God!” he said. “You don’t mean to say you were such an ass as to marry! No wonder you’re in the blues.”

Matthew Strang was silent. There was a painful pause.

“But you’ve kept it pretty dark,” Herbert said, at last. “Everybody seems to look upon you as a bachelor.”

“I know,” replied the painter. “I’ve always lived a lonely life, and I don’t speak about my affairs.”

“I’m sorry I touched upon them, then.”

“No. I can talk with _you_.”

“Thanks, old man.” And Herbert took his friend’s hand and pressed it sympathetically. “You’re not living with her, anyhow, and that’s something.”

“Oh, but I _am_ living with her--at least, I go home sometimes. It’s not quite my fault--it’s grown up gradually. She lives in Camden Town.”

“Alone?”

“Oh no! There’s Billy--that’s my young brother--to keep her company. And then there’s the children.”

“What! kids as well?”

“Only two.”

Herbert looked glum. “I suppose she’s an impossible person,” he said.

“Do you mean to live with?”

“No, to be seen with.”

“We’ve never been out together in London,” replied the painter, simply. “We drifted apart before I was asked out. Oh, but it’s no use going into it--it’s all too sordid.”

“Poor chap!” said Herbert. “Well, you may rely on my respecting your confidence. I suppose it _is_ a secret?”

“It seems to be. I make none of it, except negatively. You will find Mrs. Strang in the directory as a householder in Camden Town; she took the house, as it happened. She has a little money of her own.”

Herbert smiled sadly. “That’s what I always say. The safest secret in the world is the open secret. If you had hidden her away in Patagonia, or tried to put her into a lunatic asylum, it would have been the talk of the town. As you simply let her live quietly in the heart of London, nobody’s provoked into inquisitiveness, and if anybody knows--as no doubt an odd person does here and there--he doesn’t tell anybody else because he doesn’t know it’s a secret. I shouldn’t be surprised to hear the marriage was duly advertised in the first column of the _Times_.”

Mr. Matthew Strang’s smile faintly reflected his cousin’s. “No, we were married in Nova Scotia,” he replied. “But what are you doing to-night?”

“How improbable life is,” mused Herbert. “Only yesterday I heard that Jackson, the Cabinet Minister, has been secretly married these last twenty years. What am I doing to-night? Oh, nothing particular. I thought of dropping into a music-hall. I can’t stand the English theatre. It’s so unintellectual.”

“Well, why not dine with me at the Limners’?”

“Sure you haven’t got any other engagement?” And Herbert peered curiously at the large chalked-over engagement slate hung on the wall.

“Oh, I said I would dine _en famille_ at Lady Conisbrooke’s, but I can easily send a wire. As it isn’t a formal dinner-party, and as I’m rather a privileged person with her, I dare say she’ll forgive me.”

“It’s awfully naughty of you,” said Herbert. “But then, there, you’re a genius! And it _would_ be jolly to dine together as in the days of auld lang syne. I’ve got an awful lot to yarn about, and so have you. I’ll rush to my rooms and dress.”

“Oh, why bother to dress? Though _I_ must, if you don’t mind. I’ve got to go on to one or two places. If you don’t mind waiting a few minutes while I wash my brushes and put on my war-paint, we can go at once. Unless you’re too fashionable to dine prematurely.”

“No, but I think I’d rather dress. It’s cooler in this frightful weather. Shall I come back or meet you at the club?”

“As you like.”

“Well, you go on to the club, and I’ll be there just as quick as I can. Oh, by-the-way, write out that wire, and I’ll send it for you.”

“Thanks; perhaps you had better, though I expect my man back in a few minutes. He’s seeing about the delivery of a picture to the London agents of the Liverpool Autumn Exhibition.”

When Herbert was gone Matthew Strang did not at once mount to his dressing-room. The advent of this visitor from the past had stirred up all its muddy depths, and the knowledge that he had a little time to spare kept him brooding over it all, recalling the episodes of their _camaraderie_; and blended with them, as faded scents with old letters, he caught faint, elusive whiffs of that freshness of feeling and aspiration which had impregnated them in those dear, divine days of youth, when even his darkest hours were tinged with a rose-light of dawn. Never again would he feel that glow, that fervor, those strange stirrings of romance, that delicious sadness sweeter than all mirth, when a perfect blue day could bring tears to the eyes, and the melancholy patter of rain at twilight was like a dying fall of music, and something strange and far away subtly interfused itself with the loveliness of nature, with flowers and sunsets and summer nights, a haunting grace, intangible, inexpressible, hinting somehow of divine archetypes of beauty in some celestial universe.

No; even his spasmodic strivings to escape from the rut of false Art were becoming fewer and farther between. Perhaps he was not a genius, after all, he had begun to think. Why should he vex himself? That sentiment of Constable at which he had winced when he first came across it, “People may say what they like of my art, what I know is that it is _my_ art,” was losing its power to sting. The stirrings of his astral self were subsiding. He felt himself hardening steadily into a mere unit of the Club world of tired and successful men, who, having blunted their emotions by heavy feeding of all their appetites, could no longer feel the primal things, taking even their vices with the joyless sobriety of virtue. And though he himself was temperate enough and had not been unfaithful to Rosina, but only to the spirit of the marriage contract, yet this same drought of feeling, this furred tongue of the emotional being, was becoming unpleasantly familiar.

As he sat now moodily reviewing the situation he burst into a spasmodic, bitter laugh. It had struck him for the first time that his life had come to be not unlike his father’s--a life apart from his wife’s, with a rare stay under the domestic roof, the wife the more amiable for his absences. A sudden intuition seemed a flash-light on his father’s past. He felt drawn to the dead sailor with a new sympathy. He rose in agitation, extending his arms towards a visionary form.

“Father, father!” he cried aloud. “Did you suffer like me?”

“Did you call, sir?” And Claydon, his man-servant, who had come in quietly through the back door, descended from the bedroom, where he had been laying out his master’s things.

“Yes,” said his master. “Is my shaving-water ready? I’m going out a little earlier than usual.”

“Yes, sir.” And the painter, recalled to reality, hastened to perform his toilet. But his mind still ran in the grooves of the past, remote from all the new interests and distractions of a brilliant career.

When he sprang from the hansom and walked through the door of the Limners’ Club, he remembered that this was the very club he had come to on his first day in London--nay, that the gray-headed, deferential door-keeper was the very man whose majesty had chilled him. He wondered now whether the old fellow ever connected the popular painter with the homely, diffident youth who had inquired for Mr. Matthew Strang.

“Gentleman waiting for you, sir.”

Curious! Now it was Herbert that was waiting for Mr. Matthew Strang.

But the thought of the whirligig of time gave him no pleasure. In his early struggles in London, when no one would buy his work, he had gloated in anticipation over the humility of the dealers when he should have made his position; now he had long since forgotten and forgiven their contempt; how could they know he was worth taking up? There was nothing but the palest shadow of satisfaction in the thought that they would scour London in search of those despised pictures if they only knew. He wondered sometimes if those early things of his would ever come up into the light, whether the daughter of his ancient landlady still treasured her mother’s wedding-present, and what had become of “The Paradise of the Birds.”

A bluff graybeard in the hall shook his hand heartily. It was Erle-Smith. Matthew Strang knew now that Erle-Smith, whom he had imagined to pass his days encamped before the beatific vision, was a jolly good fellow with sheaves of amusing anecdotes. But he remembered the first time Erle-Smith had spoken to him--at a City banquet in the beginnings of his fame.

“We oldsters will have to be looking to our laurels,” he had said, placing his hand on the young man’s shoulder. After the banquet Erle-Smith had given him a lift in his open carriage, and as they rolled through the busy, flashing London night a voice in Matt’s breast kept crying out, “This is Erle-Smith! Look! This is the great Erle-Smith I am driving with. Why don’t you look, you stupid multitudes? Do you not know this is Erle-Smith--Erle-Smith himself?” Oh, why did not some of the people who knew Matthew Strang come along and see him driving with Erle-Smith? Perhaps they did--there must surely be one acquaintance, at least, among all those crowds, and he would tell the others. He had scarcely been able to reply rationally to Erle-Smith’s conversation, so intoxicated was he by the great man’s proximity. And now he himself was a popular celebrity--shown with the finger--on the eve of Academic honors; had he not, of all the younger men among the guests, been called upon (with disconcerting unexpectedness) to respond to a toast at the Academy Greenwich Dinner only last month? Was he not already on the Council of minor artistic societies? Yes; doubtless he himself was already the cause of like foolish flutterings in the breasts of youthful hero-worshippers--he whose heart could no longer flutter, not even when the youthful hero-worshipper was a woman and beautiful.

He dined with Herbert at a little table. His burst of communicativeness had exhausted itself, and he was glad to let the returned traveller do the bulk of the talking as well as of the dining. He himself ate little, though the cuisine was excellent, and the cellar took high rank. Over dinner Herbert bubbled over in endless reminiscences of the rare dishes and vintages he had consumed, the operas and symphonies he had heard, the women who had loved him--a veritable rhapsody of wine, woman, and song. In an access of unmalicious bitterness, like that which had overcome him on the threshold of Herbert’s studio, Matthew Strang felt that Herbert was the real Master--the Master of life.

In the smoking-room other men gathered round. There was Grose, whose colossal canvases were exhibited at a shilling a head with explanatory pamphlets by high ecclesiastical authorities, and there was Thornbury, who succeeded him in the same gallery with colossal nudes that needed no explanation from ecclesiastical authorities.

Matthew introduced Herbert to Trapp, the realistic novelist, and Herbert introduced Matthew to Sir Frederick Boyd, the composer, who related with gusto a story of how he had exposed a cheat at Monte Carlo. A Scotch landscape-painter asked Matthew to recommend him a model. Two Associates joined the group. One was a vigorous painter who painted everything _à premier coup_, the other was Cornpepper, externally unchanged, save for a round beard.

He had long since cut himself adrift from the Azure Art Club, though he still counted his disciples, whose experimental fumblings in development of his methods he boasted of observing in sapient passivity. “Try it on the dog,” he used to chuckle to his familiars. “I’ve done searching--let my imitators search, and risk the bogs and the blind-alleys. If they do strike a path, I’m on the spot instantly to lead them along it. That’s the only way one can learn from one’s followers.” He used to tell with glee how one of them had ruined a picture by putting it out in the rain to mellow it. “Some of those modern

stylists who are trying to discount Old Mastership will survive their pictures,” was Cornpepper’s commentary on a phase of the newer art. “They will leave masterpieces of invisibility.”

A good many changes had taken place in the Art world since Matthew Strang had first had the felicity of drinking whiskey in Cornpepper’s studio. The flowing tide was now with the decorative artists, of whom the “Mack” of that evening had proved a pioneer; the Fishtown school of photographic realism had lived long enough to be orthodox; the Azure Art Club itself was half absorbed by the Academy, and a new formula of revolt was momently expected on the horizon; some said it was to be Primitive, others mysteriously whispered “spots”; to-night Herbert, with mock seriousness, announced that he himself was about to lead a movement, the originality of which consisted in seeing Nature through stained glass. What weird magic a landscape gained when observed through a green or pink window! But he found the men not so willing to talk of principles as in the days of Cornpepper’s Bohemian parties, when Carrie with the whiskey bottle stood for the sober club attendant with his tray of liqueur brandies. The conversation was rigidly concrete, except for a moment when Cornpepper nearly came to hot words with the photographic painter who insisted that Nature was always beautiful. The little man, glaring through his monocle and rasping the plush arm-chair with his nails, insisted that this was sheer cant, one had only to look in the glass to see how ugly Nature could sometimes be! Selection was the only excuse for Art. Random transcripts from Nature were as foolish as the excesses of the Neo-Japanese school, into which the Azure Art Gallery had degenerated. But this lapse of Cornpepper’s into his early manner was brief. Recovering himself, he told a malicious anecdote about an artist who was taking to etching because his eyesight was failing, and he explained the domesticity of British Art by the objection of artists’ wives to all models except babies. Everybody knew, he said, why Carruthers had been driven to landscape and Christmas supplements. “Depend upon it,” dogmatized the little man with his most owlish air of wisdom, “the man who marries his model is lost. She will never tolerate a model on the premises again.”

His fellow-Associate told a story of a stock-broker who had got himself invited to the Greenwich dinner last year, and had asked Erle-Smith to give him the sketch of passing barges which the great man had pencilled on his sketch-book after dinner. “Erle-Smith good-naturedly gave it to him. This year he was there again, and said with proud respect to Erle-Smith, ‘I’ve still got that sketch.’ And produced it _crumpled up_ from his waistcoat pocket!”

“Yes, but did you hear Vanbrugh’s _mot_?” asked Trapp. “He said, ‘Naturally; being a financier he doubled it.’”

“Why, I said that!” cried Cornpepper, angrily.

“No doubt,” said Herbert. “It’s a well-known chestnut.”

“Then I pulled it out of the fire,” screamed Cornpepper.

Somebody exhibited another sketch, grotesquely indecorous, by a popular painter of religious masterpieces, and the latest epigram on the divorce case of the hour was repeated and enjoyed. But Matthew Strang’s laughter held no merriment.

“Shall you be at the Academy _soirée_?” he asked Trapp, to turn the conversation.

“No, I don’t care for crowds,” replied the realistic novelist.

The conversation rambled on. The composer drifted away, and a full-fledged Academician took his place--an elderly, dandified figure with a languid drawl, an aristocratic manner caught from his sitters, and a shoulder-shrugging contempt for Continental Art; in despite of which Matthew Strang protested mildly against the bad hanging at Burlington House of a portrait by an eminent Frenchman. Cornpepper talked of a sale at Christie’s at which most of the pictures had fetched lower prices than was given for them by their last owners.

“It’s all a spec’,” said Herbert; “there’s no such thing as a fixed value in a work of art. Everything depends on the artist’s pose. The more the buyer gives for a picture the more he likes it. It’s a game of brag. Set up a fine establishment--the dealer will pay. My old governor was a good deal taken in by pretentious humbugs with pals in the press.” As the Academician’s own establishment was notoriously finer than his pictures--a fact of which the wandering Herbert was ignorant--Matthew Strang hastened to speak of Tarmigan, who had been recalled to memory by the catalogue of the aforesaid sale. “I’m afraid he’s gone under, poor fellow,” he said. “I’ve tried to come across him, but he was always a mysterious person.”

But Cornpepper continued to talk of the sale, of the fluctuations of prices; of the impoverished condition of the market, so menacing to young artists who had set up fashionable establishments on the strength of their first sales; of the potentialities of America, that yet undiscovered continent, till all the tide of secret bitterness welled up in a flood from the depths of Matthew Strang’s soul. Money! Money! Money! He had never really escaped from it. What a mirage Art was! Even success only brought the same preoccupations with prices, it was all the old sordidness over again on a higher plane. The ring of the gold was the eternal undertone, bringing discord into every harmony. With a public ignorant of what Art meant, conceiving it as something rigid like science, not as the expression of the temperament, technique, and vision of individual genius; with a public craving for pictorial platitudes; Art could not be, and was not, produced, save by a martyr here and there. Everywhere the counting of pieces and the shuffling of bank-notes! The complacent Academician irritated him; he was tired of reading of his marble halls, the vassals and serfs at his side, his garden parties, his Belgravian palace erected on the ruins of a forgotten bankruptcy. The fumes of expensive wines and cigars gave him a momentary vertigo.

“For God’s sake, stop talking shop!” he burst out suddenly.

The astonished Cornpepper let his eye-glass fall.

“Have you gone crazy, Strang?” he asked, witheringly. “What do you join an artists’ club for, if you don’t want to talk shop? Strikes me you’d better get yourself put up for the Commercial Travellers’ Union.”

“That’s what we are,” retorted Matthew Strang.

The Scotch landscape-painter pacified them by proposing a game of “shell-out,” and Herbert eagerly seconding the proposal it was carried _nem. con._, and the group mounted to the billiard-room, where Matthew Strang won half a crown before he went off to his nocturnal parties, leaving his cousin still renewing with zest his olden experience of the lighter side of British Art.