Chapter X: The Master

He half groped his way down the stairs. In this mist of tears all things were obscured, even the image of Eleanor Wyndwood.

No, one thing was clear--the figure of the sweet Puritan woman with her simple righteousness.

He emerged into the Rue de Rivoli with its pretentious architecture, its glittering shop windows, its bustle of life; across the road the gardens of the Tuileries stretched away in the sunshine; but the gentle figure stood between him and Paris. He tried to shake her off, to think of the transcendent raptures that awaited him on the morrow; he tried to see Eleanor’s face steadily, but it was all wavering lines like a reflection in storm-shaken water. He bethought himself of selecting the secluded restaurant and hiring the private room for the dinner, but the figure of Ruth resurged, blotting Eleanor’s out. He took out her photograph and kissed it again. “She’s a little angel,” he cried, aloud. And then, from that chaos of ancient memories, freshly stirred up, came like an echo Mad Peggy’s cry, “She’s a little angel....” A girl passing him laughed in his face, and he put away the portrait, flushing and chilled to the marrow.

He told himself he must soak himself in Paris and forget her. He walked towards the Grand Boulevards, trying vainly to absorb and assimilate the gayety of the streets. He returned to his hotel and dressed, and dined with dainty dishes and sparkling wines, such as Herbert himself would have recommended. But the quivering roots of his being had been laid bare; his soul vibrated with intangible memories, and the image of Ruth still possessed his imagination--the candid eyes, the pure skin. As ever his soul was touched through the concrete.

After dinner he wandered about the gay city, adding the red of his cigar-tip to the feverish dusk athrob with a myriad stars above and a myriad lights below; the soft spring air was charged with the pleasurable hum of ceaseless pedestrians; the theatres and music-halls and dancing places blazoned themselves upon the night; the great restaurants flared within and without, their pavement tables thronged with light-hearted men and pretty women, gossiping, laughing, clinking glasses. Women, everywhere women. They looked out even from the illustrated papers of the illumined kiosks. The shining city seemed to waft an incense of pleasure up to the stars; to breathe out an aroma of sinless voluptuousness that rose like a thank-offering for life. His heart expanded to all this happiness; he felt himself being caught up by the great joyous wave, and Eleanor Wyndwood’s face came back, radiant and seductive. But Ruth Hailey was still at his side, and ever and anon he saw her as in her later guise--stern, sorrowful, negativing; she stood out against the whole city.

He seated himself before one of the innumerable little marble _guéridons_. He was at the cross-roads of the great arteries dominated by the fulgent façade of the Opera House, where he could watch the perpetual currents of gladsome life. He observed the countless couples with emotion, striving to concentrate himself on the thought of his imminent happiness, when the love that sustained the world and made it sustainable should be his at last; when he should become as other men, living the natural life of the race and the sexes in sympathetic fusion. But the figure of Ruth Hailey stood firm amid the swirling crowds, and her pure eyes shamed his thought, and filled his breast with an aching tenderness for the poor human atoms he had deserted--for Rosina, for Billy, for “Aunt Clara”--for whom there was no happiness and no natural life. He fought against this obsession of Ruth’s spirit, he struggled to fix his vision on the glitter and the gayety, but he had to see her standing like a rock or a tower, four-square against smiling, treacherous seas.

But if he went back to Rosina in honorable acknowledged union, then farewell to Society! To take her about with him was out of the question; she would be more unhappy than he in those high glacial latitudes of humanity. Well, what was Society to him? He could shake it off as easily as the Micmac of his childhood shook off the clothes of Christendom. To be shut out from Society were no privation for him. He had the advantage of his fellow-artists, who sacrificed at its shrine and were sacrificed to it. He could couch on fir boughs, he had lived on bread and water. This constant concern with wines and cookery, with couches and carriages; this gorging and gormandizing and self-pampering--did it add dignity to life? Was it worth the hecatomb of hearts and souls offered up for it--this low luxury of the higher classes? Was not simplicity the note of greatness--in life as in Art? And howsoever simple the complex comfort of their lives might seem to those born to it, was it for artists to imitate this lowest side of the upper classes, especially if it frittered away their Art? Was it for Bohemia to ape Philistia, and for Art--the last of the rebels against the platitudinization of life--to bow the knee and swear allegiance to the vulgar ideals of fashion? They had drawn him even from boyhood, these showy ideals; from the days when he had peered wistfully into the cricket-ground at Halifax. But he was done with boyhood now.

Ah, but if he went back to Rosina--and the new thought struck a chill as of graveyard damps--it was all over with his Art. That, just beginning to revive under the inspiration of Eleanor Wyndwood, would be a sheer impossibility under the daily oppression of Rosina with her kitchen horizon. His imagination would be clogged with the vapors of cabbage. And of the old bad work he had had enough. He would retire from Art as from Society, and the Exhibitions should know him no more. He would go out of the business; that was all it was, he told himself with a bitter smile. His fame was a bauble, a bagatelle. For all it mattered to him it might have been his dead uncle, Matthew Strang, whose name was on the lips of strangers. There was still work in the world for an honest man to do; he remembered again that his hands could wield more than the brush; besides, he had a little capital now, Rosina had still her income. Perhaps they would go back to Nova Scotia and buy a farm. They would sow and reap, far from the glare of cities, and the sweet, simple sun and rain would bless the work of their hands. His life would be joyless, but perchance his soul would be at peace.

Yes, but to give up Art! Art, which was the meaning of his life! Rosina’s life stood for nothing. It was out of all proportion to give up his for hers. Had he not suffered enough? Had he not already expiated his marriage, the hapless union he had entered into when distracted by illness and disgrace and hunger, when perhaps his whole future had hinged--such were the tragi-whimsical turns of life--on his reluctance to change his last two dollars?

He rose and walked about restlessly through the glistening streets. Everywhere restaurants, open-air tables, men, women. He wandered to Montmartre. More restaurants, more couples, cafés, cabarets, queer entertainments: _Le Chat Noir, Le Rat Mort_, the red sails of the famous Mill turning tirelessly, lights, gayety, women, always women, of all shades of prettiness and piquancy, with rosy cheeks and lips not always painted, and eyes that could shine without bismuth. He walked back through the Grand Boulevards--they were one flush of life.

But the reasoning was inexorable. He had sacrificed Rosina to his Art; Art had slipped through his fingers, but Rosina remained none the less sacrificed. Now his Art must be sacrificed to Rosina--the atonement was logical. That was not a surrender, he told himself angrily, to Ruth Hailey’s view of life--a view whose narrowness he and everybody around him had outgrown. He refused to recognize, in the face of this radiant Paris, that each human soul came into the world to sacrifice its happiness to other human souls. That seemed to him a preposterous paradox rather than a solution; a world of reciprocal whipping-boys was an absurdity, and, at any rate, if such were the scheme of creation, it did not work at all with the gross run of mankind, to say nothing of animals. The only reason for going back to Rosina must be honestly to fulfil his side of the bargain. She had done her part, he must do his. That his return to her meant the ruin of his life and his life-work was not her concern; these larger issues were too wide for her comprehension; she loved her husband and she desired him. That was enough. He owed himself to her, and to shirk his obligation was as dishonorable as to disown a debt. He had paid off the Stasborough store-keeper, although absolved by bankruptcy; he must be equally honorable with Rosina, though his life had been bankrupted. Practically his Art had always been sacrificed to her; it was her pettiness that had driven him to produce in haste for the market, so as to escape indebtedness to her; well, let the sacrifice be consummated.

He had come to the Place de la Concorde--it seemed a fairy-land of romantic lights, a dance of fire-flies; it wooed him towards the calm and solitude of the river. He leaned on the parapet and saw the sombre, fire-shot water stretching away in marvellously solemn beauty, hushed and lonely, its many-twinkling perspective of green and red and yellow gleams palpitating in the air dim with a yearning poetry. He felt the presence of Ruth Hailey at his side; she looked like the photograph now; he held her little hand and gazed into her candid eyes. Good God! This girl had loved him all those long years, and would be hopelessly faithful even unto death.

But if he went back to Rosina, what of Eleanor Wyndwood? Would he spoil her life, too? and more culpably than he had spoiled Ruth Hailey’s? He sighed wearily; it was impossible to do wrong and have the result simple. Life was so intercomplicated. But he had been honest with Eleanor, thank heaven; she knew the truth about his life; he would be honest with her to the end. He would tell her the truth now. The same noble, uncalculating simplicity that had accorded him friendship, that had been ready to give him love, would bear her triumphantly through the new trial. He remembered her brave words: “If I did not suffer I should think I had not grown.” Perhaps there would be consolation for both in the thought that she remained unsullied before the world.

He crossed the river, and his mood changed. He got towards the Latin Quarter, and wandered into the “Boule Miche” amid the students’ restaurants, where young humanity sat in its couples again, amorous and gay; every place was full within and without, and there was the gurgle of liquids with the sounds of singing and laughter; he was back again amid the blithe, insouciant, easy-going life of the eternal undergraduate, with the local variation of bocks; rakish young men danced through the restaurants arm in arm in tipsy merriment; poets with lack-lustre visages and tumbled hair imbibed vermouth, clinking glasses with their mistresses; the smoky air vibrated with irresponsible gayety; it was full of invitations to careless happiness, joyous levity, forgetfulness of an austere view of life. Puritanism seemed a form of dementia, asceticism a sunless folly. The atmosphere gained upon him. He tossed off a bock, then walked recklessly past Mrs. Wyndwood’s studio. The whole court-yard was in darkness, but he thought of to-morrow night, and it glowed as with bonfires of joy. He resolved to sup famously. He jumped into a victoria and drove to a fashionable restaurant. It was near midnight; the theatres had emptied, but the streets were only the fuller. He passed through rooms full of dazzling women in gorgeous evening costumes, sipping champagne; women, always women: the city blossomed with them like roses. He ordered some oysters and chablis, and forgot to eat; opposite him a self-conscious celebrity of the footlights, blazing with diamonds, held her court, surrounded by a bevy of dandies; behind him a black-eyed _demi-mondaine_ in red playfully rapped her cavalier’s knuckles; at the next table the exuberant liveliness of a supper party diverted him; he drank, drank, listening greedily to the gay repartees. Life should be joy, joy, joy, he thought. That was what modern life lacked, gray with problems, wrinkled with thought. These people lived--lived in splendid insolence under the midnight sun. There was a touch of bigness that appealed to him in their arrogant vitality. Society was an organized insipidity, afraid of life.

The figure of Ruth Hailey rose rebuking; he paid the bill and went out.

But his heart cried, ached for happiness. Ah, no! He could not give up so young; go into a living grave. He roved the Boulevards again. The beautiful city solicited him, rouged and perfumed, clad in shining garments, with star-gemmed hair. But the virginal figure of Ruth Hailey, with sweet shy eyes, stood against the city. Paris seemed garish beside her.

He was fluctuating again. It seemed as if the simple girl would draw him away from all the joys of life. Was there no means of ridding himself of her haunting presence? A grotesque mask looked out of a cab. Ah! the fancy ball! He had forgotten. That would lay the ghost of his disordered imagination. He felt in his pocket and found the ticket; he hastened to the scene of revelry. A clatter of cabs and a blaze of lights--he had arrived.

The first glimpse within was exhilarating, provoking, dazzling, overwhelming; he had a confused sense of a hall of a thousand lights and mirrors, reeking with scent and heat, reverberant with music and shrieks and laughter, white with the whirling gleam of semi-nude women, and motley with the rainbow hues and multiplied reflections of male masqueraders; a mad, joyous orgy, the diabolical medley of a glittering, tinselled pantomime and an opium-eater’s nightmare. Ah, here was oblivion of Ruth Hailey at last, and he eagerly took up a position on a raised platform that ran along the side of the gigantic ball-room, trying to catch the contagion of the scene, and ready to rush into the heart of the devil-may-care jollity. The gleeful, palpitating pageant--a twisted, tangled kaleidoscopic rally of riotous color and flesh tones--tore past him, dancing, leaping, shrieking, wantoning, clowning, kissing, uncouth as the gargoyles of Notre Dame and brilliant as the midnight Boulevard: Japanese figures and demons, gladiators in cuirasses and bathing drawers, Gallic warriors in skins, brawny barbarians in blankets, Amazons with brass breasts, a savage in a girdle of fig-leaves, a real Samoan girl with coal-black hair in the convoy of her Russian lover in a tall white hat, a boy as a German girl, and an elderly woman as a gendarme with orange blossoms in her hair; one man with a helmet crowned by a black cat, and another with a mock broken head, reddened bandages, and a hideous stream of blood on his shirt-front. And women--always women; a few masked, but most bare-faced, shining with flowers and flesh; models of all sorts and conditions, some with artistic dresses designed by their favorite students, some with tarnished gaudery; blondes, brunettes of every nationality--French, English, Greek, Italian, Creoles, Negresses, diversely dowered; frail anæmic women, fervid gypsy-like women, saucily splendid women, soft sleepy women with languorous black eyes, sweet lily-like women, big blowzy women, tall febrile women, little demoniac women, all content to take life as a flash of leaping flame flickering out to an early darkness. And as they danced and laughed and romped and shouted, the fun rose to hysterical frenzy; four masked men bore the queen of the models, sinuous in complete fleshings, niched in an outspread gigantic fan; before it a Druid and a Bacchante danced backward; behind it seethed a vast picturesque procession of women mounted on their cavaliers’ shoulders, smoking cigarettes and waving lighted red and green lanterns; at its sides girls pirouetted frantically, foot in mouth; the brazen orchestra clanged--the procession defiled, frolicking, round and round the hall, roaring a students’ marching chorus; a wave of hysteria ran through the assembly, mighty, magnetic, compulsive; and Matthew Strang waved his arms and shouted and sang with the best. Joy, joy, joy, this was your true artistic interpretation of life. Away with this modern morbidity! He was one in soul with all the great artists, all the Masters who had had their royal way in life. O royal Eleanor! O rare Eleanor! fit mate for a mighty artist! Then supper came, and he fought for some in the balconies, amid the roar of voices, and the rattle of knives, and the shouts for the maddened waiters, and the indescribable exhalations of food and wine and smoke and hot air and scented flesh. The half-deserted dancing floor was littered with champagne capsules, bits of lanterns, ends of cigarettes, fragments of dresses, spangles, morsels of fur. After supper the frolic grew more intoxicating, the gayety more reckless; sweet demure-looking girls gave themselves to high-kicking and lascivious movement; they obliged with the _danse du ventre_; in a corner a woman turned somersaults from sheer light-heeledness, a bashi-bazouk trundled a hoop through the centre of the room, a band of fifty dancers with joined hands ran amuck among the yelling crowd. Matthew Strang’s senses ached with the riot of color and the rollick of figures and the efflorescence of femininity, and the tohu-bohu of this witches’ sabbath. And then a strange ancient thought struck him afresh--the same grotesque thought that after his father’s death had weighed upon his childhood: very soon all these scintillating, whirling figures would lie still and cold, frozen in death. They suddenly became nothing but marionettes in a clock-work mechanism destined to run down. And then the girlish form that had hovered mistily in his neighborhood throughout all the tumultuous hours grew clear again, and against this pandemoniac background the inexorable figure of Ruth Hailey rose, simple and virginal, with sweet shy eyes.

When he came back to consciousness of the revellers, they had formed a human amphitheatre, an inner circle lying on the ground, and the next squatting, and the next kneeling, and the next half standing, and the last but one erect, and the last of all surmounted by shouldered girls, and in the centre of this human amphitheatre a beautiful young nude model with ruddy brown hair struck graceful attitudes. The cold blue light of dawn fell through a semicircular window overhead and mingled weirdly with the yellowish electric light, lending a strange, wan, unearthly hue to all these painted, perspiring faces.

The atmosphere seemed unbearably mephitic. He sallied shamefacedly into the street. It was Sunday morning, stainless and fresh and blue. The sunrise brooded over the sleeping gray-etched city in sacred splendor. The sun was like a gigantic bowl of pure gold with a refracted cover separated from it by a rift of cloud. Around it the sky was dappled with lines and splashes and a ring or two of pale sulphur, ending to the south in a narrow gulf of green. And all this loveliness of color was spread on two amorphous islands of amber-gray in an ocean of pale-blue sky, across which a few fleecy clouds sailed swan-like.

He had a perception of the divine, speaking through the silence of beauty. And the world was asleep or at riot.

Ah! this should have been the message of his Art. Each morn the sunrise spoke its flaming word unheard; it was the artist’s function to stir the world to the perception of the sublimity and poetry that lay all around unheeded; to uplift its eyes to the loveliness of realities, realities solid as rocks, yet beautiful as dreams; visionary and tangible; the great verities of sun and sea and forest, of righteousness and high thinking; beautiful and elemental.

Too late! Too late! Art was over now. Not to his hand had the mission been given; once he had thought to feel the sacred fire in his bosom; but he knew now that the mission was not for him. He had failed.

The great streets stretched under the blue dawn bathed in sacred freshness. The stir of night was passing into the stir of morning. The sleepy yawn of returning revellers was met by the sleepy yawn of early-risen artisans. Two horrible hags of rag-pickers, first astir of Parisians, were resting their baskets on a bench; he heard them rapturously recalling the excellence of the soup they had made from the bones, picked clean by dogs, that they had gathered from the citizens’ ash-pans.

Ah, not all the world was gay. He had been surveying only the sparkling bubbles and froth of Paris. Below flowed the sober, orderly, industrious civic life, with its bottom dregs of misery. All the great cities were full of dolorous figures, every by-way and alley swarmed with sickly faces, pale fruits of a congested civilization. He had always kept his eye on those happier than he; now he was reminded of how much more than the man in the street he had drawn in the lottery of the fates. He remembered the saying of a street scavenger he had come across in his days of destitution. “I’m neither hungry nor dry, so what have I to grumble about, mate?” What, indeed, had he, Matthew Strang, to grumble about? There did not seem to be enough happiness to go round. Who was he, to be selected for a special helping? Who was he more than his mate the scavenger, more than any other of the human souls he had met in his diversified career, more than his fellow-lodgers in the slums of Holborn or Halifax, or his fellow-passengers on board _The Enterprise_, or the blind woman who caned chairs in the basement of the house of the Rotherhithe bird-stuffer? Why should he be happy?

It was like a new thought, luminous and arrestive. And then it flashed upon him that all this glitter of gayety that had dazzled his covetous eyes, even if it were not half an illusion, was infinitely subdivided; each person could only have a minute share in the overwhelming total, and even this quantum of joy must be alloyed with the inevitable miseries of the human lot. This was the fallacy that in London, too, had added the sting of envy to his unhappiness; he had lumped together all the pleasure and splendor and happiness of the capital, forgetting that though it could all be lacked by one man, it could not be possessed by one. And to look at life from the outside was childish--it was like reading paragraphs about people in the newspapers. How happy he himself loomed in biographical summaries! Poor Rosina! Poor Aunt Clara! Poor Billy! What happiness for these?

They were foolish, fretful creatures, all of them; in the jargon of the drawing-rooms, bourgeois, vulgar, impossible, too low even for the stigma of “suburban”; but their lives were as important to them as his life to him. Each soul was the centre of its own world. If he could understand them, and they could not understand him, the gain was to him. He was strong, therefore he must supplement their weakness; not because of any ethics or theology, simply because he was stronger. For sheer pity he must give up his life to theirs; sacrifice his Art to their happiness. He must adapt himself to their points of view, since they could not adapt themselves to his; if for Rosina the world turned on the price of beef, he must teach himself to be interested in the price of beef. He had found it easy enough on the day when they had gone a-marketing together at Halifax. He saw her as then, buoyant, youthful, gay, even pretty; was it not he who had made her shrewish, sorrowful, unlovely? How nobly reticent she had been about his neglect of her! Coble had died thinking her ideally happy, boastfully proud of his son-in-law. And after all, there was an excellent side to her economical instincts; she did not long for diamonds and dinner-parties like the wives of other artists; nay, wiser, perhaps, than he, she had known how to content herself with her own station. Even Tarmigan must have approved of her as an artist’s wife. Yes, he must go back to her and his children, not out of any deference to the marriage-tie, but as individual to individuals.

He arrived at his hotel. To his astonishment it was in full illumination; he heard the strains of dance-music from within. He peeped into the magnificent dining-room; it was become a ball-room, and sober couples were waltzing. Women, always women; irreproachable this time; elegant in shimmering silks. The world of fashion was dancing there--dancing on behalf of a charity.

He wavered again; this was the world he was leaving forever, the world of soft things, the world of thought and pleasant speech, the world of art and books and music, the caressing world that praised pictures, and the makers thereof: the world of Eleanor Wyndwood. But the fight was over; in every sense, he told himself, the fight was over. He must go to Eleanor and tell her that happiness was not for either; she would be strong and fine, she would strengthen him in his obedience to the higher voice. But oh--and her face swam up vivid again--would not the very sight of her weaken him, shatter his resolve? And perhaps, too, the sight of him would weaken even her. No, they must never meet again; that was the simplest, the least painful for both.

He gave instructions that he was to leave by the first morning train; he mounted to his room and packed up; then he wrote to Eleanor.

DEAREST ELEANOR,--Forgive me that I must cause you pain. I can only
hope it will prove to have saved you greater pain in the future.
But, my dear, I must not pretend it is from any unselfish desire to
save you from sacrificing yourself to my happiness, as you in your
generous nobility have been ready to do, that I have resolved never
to see you again. I am leaving Paris at once. When I tell you the
reason I know that it will ease your pain, and that your noble
nature will approve and forgive. I am going back to my wife. I have
thought it over and see that I have no option. I have been
forgetting that in return for her helping me to Art, I vowed to
love, cherish, and protect her. If I cannot love her--if I can only
love you, if the thought of you will always be like music to me,
though I must never see you again in the flesh--I must at least do
my best to make her happy. This is not only a farewell to you, it
is a farewell to Art. Without you to inspire it, my Art is dead. I
retire from the long contest broken-hearted.

Yours so truly,

MATTHEW STRANG.

P.S.--I dared not trust myself to come and tell you this. It would
have been a useless trial for both of us. You will be happier
without me and all the suffering my selfish passion must have
brought upon you. Forget me. God bless you.

He descended to the court-yard and dropped the letter into the box. Then he sat outside on his balcony and watched the great gleaming Boulevards as they woke to the new day.

He was too early at the station, and the train tarried. The porters leisurely wheeled in the luggage. Sleepy passengers straggled up, armed with gayly illustrated papers broad with Gallic buffoonery.

Oh, the agony of that last quarter of an hour, when Paris beckoned him with its finger of morning sunlight, when Art cried to him from a thousand happy ateliers, calling him to come back and be happy in the great work he felt he had been about to do at last; when Love shone like a purple haze veiling the world in poetic dream, and sang to him like an angel’s voice, and witched him back with the eyes and the hair and the lips of Eleanor Wyndwood!

But the train was going at last, and he must take his seat in his first-class compartment. It was his second defeat, his second farewell to Art, bitterer, crueller by a thousand-fold than the first, when he had sailed home again penniless, broken in soul and body. Then, at least, home was a tender recollection. Now--! And he had been so near the goal of happiness, the cup had been at his very lips. Never to be happy--never, never! The sudden shriek of the engine sounded sardonic. The train moved on, bearing Matthew Strang from all the sweetness and savor of life. In the great ocean of existence wherein men struggle for happiness he had gone down--like his father.

But, like his father, he had gone down wrapped in his flag.

* * * * *

The stage of the world is not adapted for heroic attitudes, unless the curtain be dropped on the instant.

To pass, after a tedious day-long journey, from the vivid boulevards to the gray dreariness of a poor London suburb on a Sunday evening was already a chill to the artistic mind; to find that the wife into whose arms he had come to fall in dramatic contrition was not only out, but gone to church with Aunt Clara and little Clara, was to be further reminded of the essentially inartistic character of life in general, and of its especial narrowness in church-going districts.

But he stooped down to kiss little Davie, who, by reason of the servant’s “Sunday out,” had opened the door and explained these things to him. He saw that the child had a little wooden mannikin in his hand, and was sucking it.

“Don’t suck that, Davie,” he said.

“There ain’t no paint to spoil,” Davie urged, gravely. “It’s all gone.”

Matthew carried both the little men down-stairs on his shoulder. In the kitchen he found Billy moping by the fire--profiting by the absence of the servant to enjoy the only fire Rosina’s economy permitted at this season of the year--but sunk so deep in a black reverie that he did not raise his head at the unwonted footsteps.

A wave of protective love, almost paternal, flooded Matthew’s soul; he laid his hand on poor Billy’s head as in benediction. Nevermore would they be parted, nevermore.

“Billy,” he said, softly.

The young man started violently, and looked up.

“I’ve come back, Billy,” he said, tenderly.

“So I see,” replied Billy, ungraciously.

He was stung to the quick, but he controlled his pain; he saw this was part of his atonement.

“I’ve come to make it up with Rosina. I’m not going away again,” he went on gently, his hand on Billy’s shoulder.

“And what’s the use of that?” Billy snapped. “Even if she makes it up with you, she’ll break out again in a few days. I know her.”

He set down the child with a sigh, and drew a chair to his brother’s side. Davie climbed trustfully on his knee. The kettle was singing, and a plump gray cat purred in the fender.

“Besides,” Billy went on, “you’ve always said you couldn’t live here--it was necessary to live at your studio.”

“I know; but I am giving up the studio.”

Billy turned whiter than usual.

“What’s happened?” he cried in alarm.

“Nothing in particular.”

“Then I suppose you are going to turn me out of my workroom?”

“No, no, Billy. I am giving up painting altogether.”

Billy’s eyes dilated in horror, as on the night when his mother had dragged him out of bed to trudge the frozen fields.

“Are you mad?” he gasped.

Something of his awe sent a shiver through his brother.

“Perhaps I am,” said Matthew.

He fell silent.

Billy regarded him furtively. The minutes dragged on. Matthew looked at his watch--getting on for seven. Eleanor Wyndwood would have been dressing for him--he saw her matchless loveliness. Another few minutes, and his kisses would have been on her lips--those lips that had lain on his in what was already an enchanted, hazy dream rather than a waking memory.

“Perhaps I _am_ mad,” he muttered again, as he sat waiting for Rosina instead. And then he caught sight of the little figure Davie was sucking, and began to laugh boisterously.

Billy was terrified.

“You can have the studio back if you like,” he said, soothingly; the cripple’s tones became protective in their turn. “I can write anywhere--and, after all, what’s the use of my writing?--nobody will take what I write.”

“I can write kisses,” interposed Davie, looking up proudly.

“What does he mean, Billy?” said Matthew.

“Oh, he used to put crosses at the end of the letter when Rosina wrote to poor old Coble--kisses to his grandfather, you know.”

“He’s a angel now,” said Davie, gravely.

“What’s that you’re sucking?” Billy responded, sternly. “You know you mustn’t.”

He took it away, and Davie set up a howl till pacified by a penny.

“It’s an image of a preacher, Matt,” Billy explained. “I forget his name. He died last year--Rosina used to go and hear him. She said he gave her great comfort. These images are sold in thousands. What a ludicrous thing popular religion is!”

Matthew laughed, but there was a tear for Rosina in the laughter.

“By-the-way,” he said, suddenly, “did old Coble leave her any money?”

“Yes--but a few thousand dollars was all there was when his estate was wound up. He couldn’t have expected to crack up, for he made no provision whatever for Aunt Clara.”

“Then Rosina is keeping her?”

“Yes, I suppose so.”

“How does she reconcile that with her economy?” he thought, with an added throb of tenderness. The kettle sang on; the cat purred; he had a flash of hope--he might grow to love her yet. But he thought of Eleanor Wyndwood, and the hope died. They would have been on their way now to their restaurant--sitting close together, driving through the flashing streets. Oh, was he not mad to be here?

“What are you doing all alone?” he thought. “My love, my first love and my last, you who believed in me, who were ready to sacrifice yourself to me?”

“Did you go to see Ruth Hailey?” asked Billy, suddenly.

Eleanor’s face vanished. He put his hand to his breast-pocket, and drew out the portrait with the sweet, shy eyes.

“Yes,” he said, tremulously, “and she gave me this.”

Billy took the photograph and kissed it.

“God bless you!” he said.

Davie pricked up his ears.

“You’re not in love with her?” Matthew asked, lightly, with a sudden apprehension.

“I?--I know better than to be in love with any woman,” said Billy, sadly, as he returned the portrait. “Only in my stories can I love and be loved.”

“It was she who sent us that mysterious money,” said Matthew, and told him the story. Billy listened in surprise and emotion.

“God bless you, Ruth!” he said again.

“What is that God?” interrupted Davie.

The brothers looked at each other, embarrassed.

“Ask mummy; she’ll tell you,” said Matthew, at last.

“Mummy did tell me, but I can’t ’derstand.” He sat there wondering. “When does God sleep?”

The sudden blare and boom of a Salvationist procession saved reply. The blatant clangor passed, died. They waited for Rosina.

Presently they heard the returning church party descending into the area, so as not to soil the white upper-steps. He had kissed her before she was aware of his presence, as she stepped across the kitchen threshold, red-edged prayer-book in hand. After that her sullenness was only half-hearted. He said he had come to supper. By the time they had sat down to it a reconciliation had been patched up. Warned by Billy’s reception of his determination, he did not even break it to her yet. Thus tamely passed off the great renunciation scene--the crisis of his life--like everything else in his life, unlike what he had imagined beforehand. Rosina did not even understand what this home-coming meant to him. He pleaded that Davie, who did not want to go to sleep, should be allowed to stay up to supper, but this request was not granted.

“Mummy, when does God go to sleep?” the persistent Davie remembered to ask as she was leading him from the room.

“God never sleeps,” replied Rosina, sternly, and haled him to bed.

Matthew pondered the immense saying, so glibly spoken, as he waited for her to return. “Aunt Clara,” pouch-eyed and wan, her head nodding queerly with excitement at the great man’s presence, was laying the supper in the warm kitchen, where the servant would not resume possession till ten; little Clara was at her task of Bible reading. Billy drowsed on his chair, exhausted. The fire glowed red; the cat was still stretched in the warmth. Something in the scene thrilled him with a sense of restful kinship with it, half sweet, half sad; a sense of being more really at home than in delicate drawing-rooms; the old homely kitchen far away on the borders of the forest sent out subtle links, binding his childhood to the manhood that had come at last.

* * * * *

This half-and-half-ness was typical of the new life which began that night, and which on the morrow was sealed and consecrated by the characteristically self-deceptive message from Eleanor: “You are right. We have chosen the highest.” It was a life full of petty pricks and every-day worries. But if it was not so grandiosely heroic as he had intended, neither was the consequence to his Art as he had foreseen.

He has not given up Art. Neither Rosina nor Billy would permit that folly, and Eleanor’s brief letter had a postscript of inspiring protest. He had meant to sacrifice Art and Happiness, but only the latter sacrifice was accepted. For unhappiness drove him back to his studio--where the “Angelus” hung now like an inspiration. From the glooms and trials of the daily routine in this prosaic home, with its faithful but narrow-souled mistress, who knew not what was passing in her husband’s mind, nor at what cost he had made her happy, and who would not even agree to live in some beautiful country spot which would have softened life for him--from this depressing household, with its unsprightly children, its cheerless pensioner, its querulous cripple resenting the very hand that fed him, he escaped to the little whitewashed studio to find in his Art oblivion of the burden of life.

And now, at last, his true life--work was begun. Removed from the sapping cynicism of the Club conscience, from the drought of drawing-room disbelief, from the miasma of fashionable conversation, from the confusing cackle of critics; saved from the intrigue with Mrs. Wyndwood, that would have distracted his soul and imposed an extra need for money-making; withdrawn from the feverish rush of fashion and the enervating consumption of superfluous food and drink; exempted from keeping up a luxurious position purchased by scamped, soulless pictures; able to work without the whims of sitters or patrons, without regard to prices--for Rosina’s income, augmented by her very considerable hoardings and by his balance, supplemented by the proceeds of the sale of his studio effects and

ancient pictures, the whole doubled by Rosina’s economic administration, was amply sufficient for every rational need--Matthew Strang began at last, without underthought of anything but Art, in this homely environment to which his soul was native, to express his own inmost individuality, to produce faithfully and finely the work it was in him to do.

Solitary, silent, sorrowful, strong; not chattering about his ideas and his aims, indifferent to fame or the voice of posterity, striving for self-approbation and rarely obtaining it, touching and retouching, breaking the rules of the schools in obedience to his own genius, he toiled on in his humble studio, seeking the highest, with no man and no woman to inspire, encourage, or praise. He had been saved from Love and Happiness, and sent back into sympathy with all that works and suffers. And thus the note that had trembled faintly and then died out in his work was struck strong and sure at last--the note of soul. To his accurate science and his genius for the decorative, which are two of the factors of great Art, was now added the spiritual poetry which is the last and rarest. For he was master of his soul at last.

He had absorbed life sufficiently--he had toiled and hungered; he had feasted and made merry; he had sorrowed and endured; he had sinned and suffered; he had known the lust of life and the pride of the eye; he had known Love--the love of the soul and the love of the senses; he had known the heartache of baffled ambition and the dust and ashes of achievement. What he had wanted he had not got; by the time he had got it he had not wanted it; whatever he had set out to do he had not done, and whatever he had done he had not foreseen. And out of all this travail of the soul was born his Art--strong, austere, simple.

In the five or six years since he died to the world he has finished as many big pictures, and has made studies for others, besides a host of minor things. He has not exhibited any of the larger pictures in the Academy; three have been presented quietly to provincial and suburban galleries where the People comes. Only one with some of the smaller things has been sold for money, and this but to appease Rosina; it was one more sacrifice of his individuality to hers. It is true there are expenses for models and materials, and he has now two more children, but it jars upon him to ask money for work that expresses and conceals the tragic secrets of his inmost being. Nor does he care to have his pictures shut away amid the other furniture of luxurious mansions. Still, he has learned enough to know that life cannot be lived ideally. And, moreover, the event has taught him again the contrariety of life; for his eccentricity, leaking out slowly, has enhanced the fame to which he is indifferent, and, aided by a legend of mysterious saturnine seclusion, has raised his market value to such a point that he need only sell an occasional picture. One dealer in particular is anxious to give him his own price for a picture. Matthew Strang will probably part with one to him some day, but he does not know that the dealer is acting for Lady Thornton, the wealthy and celebrated society leader and convert, though he knows and is glad that Eleanor Wyndwood found both happiness and spiritual peace when, a few months after her friend Olive Regan’s marriage to Herbert Strang, that ever-charming and impressionable lady was led to the altar by the handsome and brilliant Sir Gilbert Thornton, and went over with him to Roman Catholicism. With the same earnestness with which she had passed from her native orthodoxy to the Socialism of Gerard Brode, and thence to the spirituality of Dolkovitch, she had slid by a natural transition from the sensuous art atmosphere of Matthew Strang’s world into the sensuous spirituality of Catholicism as soon as his influence had been replaced by the ascendency of another male mind. He was not asked to the wedding, and the invitation to Olive’s, reaching him in the days when the first darkness of isolation was upon him, he had left unanswered.

And just as he has given his Art freely to the world, so, under the inspiration of Tarmigan’s memory, he gives his services freely at Grainger’s and other humble art-schools as encourager of every talent that aspires under discouragement; teaching it to be itself and nothing else, for the artist gives to the world and is not asked for, creating the taste he satisfies, and Art is not Truth nor Beauty, but a revelation of beautiful truth through the individual vision. It is the artist’s reaction to the stimulus of his universe, whether his universe be our common world seen for itself or through antecedent art, or a private world of inward vision: for while the philosophers are quarrelling about abstract truth, the artist answers Pilate’s question through his own personality. The beauty which Matthew Strang’s art reveals, though he experiments in many styles, with unequal results, is mainly tragic. For others the gay, the flippant, the bright--let those from whose temperament these things flow interpret the joyousness and buoyancy and airy grace of existence. For others the empty experimentation in line and color. It is all Art--in the house of Art are many mansions. He has come to the last of the three stages of so many artists, who pass from the fever to do everything, through a period of intolerance for all they cannot do, into a genial acceptance of the good in all schools. But, unassuming as he has always been, he is yet sometimes shaken by righteous indignation when he sees tawdry art--art that is the response to the stimulus of no universe but the artificial studio-universe of models and posings and stage-properties--enthroned and fêted at the banquet of life; and sometimes an unguarded word flashes out before his pupils, but he always repents of his railings, feeling it is his to work, not to judge; to do the one simple thing that his hand findeth to do.

One of his pictures is of a woman looking out to sea with hopeless eyes; there is a mocking glory of sunset in the sky. This is called “The Pain of the World.” The title was due to Olive’s exclamation that night in Devonshire. The figure is his mother’s, come back to him in his own solitude--the image of her standing thus in the asylum at Halifax could not be effaced from his soul; it had to find expression in his Art.

As he worked at it, with the brutal aloofness of the artist, studying lights and shadows, values and effects, gradations and tones, he wondered whether the artist were a cold-blooded monster, or a divinely appointed alchemist sent to transmute the dross of the world’s pain to the gold of Art for the world’s pleasure; a magician to cover up the rawness of life, as kindly Nature covers up the naked earth with grass, or throws the purple light of dream over all that is dead--over the centuries that are past or our youth that is gone; a Redeemer, whose beautiful perception of pathos and tragedy robs the grave of its victory, and plucks Death of its sting, so that no man suffereth or travaileth without contributing to the raw stuff of life of which Art is woven by the souls dowered with the pangs and privileges of Over-Consciousness. Each man, it sometimes seemed to him, dimly, had to pay so much in sorrow and pain; and in return for that he drew from the common human fund the comprehension of life and the consolation of Art, new sympathies and new delights, music and books and pictures, that only lived through the rich variety of human destinies; mystic atmospheres and minor scales, meaningless to souls that had not suffered or inherited the capacity to suffer. Some--generally the stupid--paid little in pain and sorrow; and some--as in his own case--much. But so long as the account showed a balance to the general good, it was not for the soul that was sacrificed to complain. It was, perhaps, even a privilege to subserve the common good. Life was so arranged that virtue could not be sure of personal reward, and this uncertainty was just what made virtue possible. Under no other scheme of things could the soul enjoy the privilege of virtue. To have suffered, as he himself had done, by the institution of marriage, both as child and husband; to have been a victim to the general laws which safeguard human society; to have been cut in two by the flaming swords of the cherubim, which turn every way to keep the way of the Tree of Life--all this did not, he thought, give him the right to blaspheme existence. And the artist at least extracted a soul of good from all things evil.

Some such reflections--not clear, but all confused and blurred, for he was no syllogism-building philosopher, but an artist whose profoundest thought sprang always from the concrete image before him--came to him again when he was working at his famous picture “The Persecutors,” inspired by an episode in Billy’s life, though Billy does not know. It is simply children tormenting an old man. The old man is one of the world’s wrecks; the children know not what they do. But the pathos of the picture is overwhelming; it purifies by pity and terror. This is the profit to the world of Billy’s life.

Matthew Strang knows, with the same secret assurance that sent him out to fight, and strengthened him in the long struggle, that this picture will live, that the gods have answered his boyish prayer for immortality. But at moments when Billy is moping or in pain, or when the artist foresees the gabble of magazines and drawing-rooms about his work, the chatter of fashionable parrots, and the analysis of his “second manner” by glib, comfortable critics, he wonders whether the picture or the immortality is worth the price.

But, stronger than those driven by their Over-Consciousness to express in artistic shapes the futility of life, he does not dwell eternally on the tears of things; and his picture simply entitled “A Woman” is perhaps his masterpiece. For when he painted it that sunrise in Paris was still vivid to him, and the light in Ruth Hailey’s eyes, and that fire of love in Eleanor Wyndwood’s; these things were in the eternal order, too, as truly as the ugliness and the sordid realities. The simplest human life was packed with marvels of sensation and emotion, haloed with dreams and divine illusions. To have been a child, to have sung and danced, to have eaten and played, to have seen woods and waters, to have grown to youth and to manhood, to have dreamed and aspired, to have labored and hoped--all this happiness had been his while he was looking for happiness, just as Art had been his in Nova Scotia, while he had been struggling to get to it in England.

And so to-day he yearns to paint the poetry of the Real--not with the false romantic glamour which had witched his youth, though even his youth had had a hankering after the Real, just as his maturity retains a love for the mystic. That gilded unreality to which his Art would have gravitated, had he found happiness with the sentimental Eleanor in her atmosphere of fashion, will be replaced by the beauty that even when mystic is based on Truth. He needed no woman’s inspiration, nor the stimulus of cultured cliques. Alone he faces the realities of life and death without intervening veils of charming illusion, no longer craving to filter the honest sunlight through stained cathedral windows or to tarnish the simplicity of the grave with monumental angels. Aspiring now to paint London, he wanders through the gray streets, as in his days of hunger, but now the grotesque figures no longer seem outside the realm of serious Art, or mere picturesque arrangements of line and color. To his purged vision, that still lacks humor, they touch the mysteries and the infinities, passing and disappearing like ghosts on a planet of dream: solitude has brought him a sense of the universal life from which they flow, and he fancies the function of Art should be to show the whole in every part, the universal through the particular. And so he longs to paint the beauty that lies unseen of grosser eyes, the poetry of mean streets and every-day figures, to enrich and hallow life by revealing some sweep of a great principle that purifies and atones.

In “The Old Maid” he has painted the portrait of “Aunt Clara” with Davie on her knee, revealing the wistful, imprisoned, maternal instinct he detected one day in her sunken eyes as she fondled his little Davie. What makes this presentation of ugliness Art is not merely the breathing brush-work, but the beauty of his own pity which the artist has added to the Nature he copied. With the falsely aristocratic in Art or life he has lost sympathy: to him to be honest and faithful is to belong to the only aristocracy in the world--and the smallest. Sometimes he dreams of some great Common Art--for all men, like the sky and the air, which should somehow soften life for all. And dreaming thus he somewhat frets against the many limitations of his own Art--as once in his callow boyhood when he set out to write that dime novel--and against its lapsed influence in modern life, wishing rather he had been a great poet or a great musician. Only music and poetry, he feared while toiling at the “Old Maid,” could express and inspire modern life; the impulse that had raised the cathedral had been transformed into the impulse that built the grand hotel, fitted throughout with electrical conveniences; in the visible arts landscape and portraiture alone seemed to find response from the modern mind, the one by its revelation of the beauty of the world, the other by its increasing subtlety of psychological insight. Painting had begun with religion, religion had led to technique, then religion had drifted away from painting, and then technique had become a religion. But technique ought not to be thought of separately except by the student; to the artist the spiritual and the material came as one conception, as metre comes with the poet’s thought. The spirit must be brought back to painting--this modern accuracy of tones and forms was but the channel for it. But it could no longer be conveyed through the simple images of a popular creed to which all men vibrated: to-day there was no such common chord for the artist to touch. Even this picture of “The Old Maid” might be unintelligible without its title, and risked denunciation as literary. And the greatest picture could be seen by but few.

But repining is useless; there is only one thing he can do, and he must do it--a small thing in the span of the cosmos and the sweep of the ages, but to be done ere he goes down to the kindred dust. But before death comes he has doubtless other things to suffer--all these spiritual agonies have seared the body in which early privations and sickness had already left the seeds of premature infirmity. His children are growing up, too, bringing new fears and problems.

And yet his life is not all unhappy--work is his anodyne, and there is an inner peace in the daily pain, because it is the pain that his soul has chosen, in willing slavery to its own yoke.

But life is too long for ideals; the unending procession of the days depresses the finest enthusiasm. Sometimes when the domestic horizon is dark, or when his body is racked with pain, he rebels against the rôle thrust upon him in the world’s workshop, and against the fate that mocked at his free-will, and made of him a voluntary instrument for the happiness of Rosina and Herbert, turning his every action to undreamed-of issues; and then he longs for the life that he had found so hollow, the life of gay talk, and rustling dresses, and wine, and woman, and song. And in such moments as these--when the natural human instinct for happiness, yearning sunward, breaks through all the strata of laborious philosophy and experience--he remembers that men call him “The Master,” and then he seems to hear the sardonic laughter of Mad Peggy, as he asks himself what Master he has followed in his sacrifice, or what Master, working imperturbably, moulds human life at his ironic, inscrutable will.

* * * * *

Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber:

Miss O’Reilly’s hair chamelon-colored=> Miss O’Reilly’s hair chameleon-colored {pg}

painter always trod giugerly=> painter always trod gingerly {pg 400}