After long sauntering in the Antipodes, I was naturally anxious to hear of him—of his inner life particularly—for his fame as a worldling had skirted the globe. The north wind had trumpeted of it; the south had whispered poetically, if insidiously; the east had contradicted the poetry and accentuated the venom, and western zephyrs had harmonised the whole with a dulcet cadence of admiration and pity. In his profession, however, public opinion was unanimous in proclaiming him pre-eminent. The signature of Wallace Wray—"Woll" we called him—at the corner of a canvas lured the artist mind to praise and thanksgiving; it did more, it loosed some sluggish thousands from speculative coffers—coffers that, prompt enough to gape at safe investment, could stand in the face of the divine afflatus, hermetically sealed. He had reached the peak on Parnassus where criticism drops crippled and diagnosis wrings its hands; his dexterity of brush had become a species of sleight-of-hand, backgrounded by the mysterious tissue of philosophy, science, and emotion, which, commonly called genius, defies ken or comparison.

He had been a singular youth, the solitary output of one of Nature's quaintest moulds, and from what I learnt, the singularity had become pronounced rather than mellowed by the glaze of time. Yet, as I remembered him—it was five years since we had met—he was an excellent fellow, a mass of incongruity, courageous, sensitive—morbidly so—modest, with a humility deduced from keen self-knowledge, a generous companion and a witty, dispensing the fine flavour of his humour through a countenance as nearly classical as individuality of expression would permit.

This countenance now showed its presentment on the Academy walls. It was this portrait, done by his own hand, which roused my admiration and awoke a greed for more of him. Around me, the wagging of gossip tongues fanned the air, and scraps, hints, fragments of scandal were wafted to my ears as I stood amazed to salute his art in the superb masterpiece of portraiture.

From the confused babble I was straining to sift a grain of truth. It seemed that Wallace Wray had been outraging the feelings of his admirers, had dealt them a slap in the face as cleanly, or rather as dirtily, as a realistic brush could deal it. In the nick of time, Spry, a brother of the craft and the very sieve I needed, jostled at my elbow.

"Splendid likeness—the best he has ever done, eh? He calls it 'The Body of Me.' Ha! ha! The Corporation of H—— commissioned, it, and luckily he got it finished before he took leave of his senses."

"Senses!" I echoed, stupidly. "What is wrong? What has he been saying, doing?"

"More antics! Haven't you seen 'The Soul of Me,' there, in the next room?"

And Spry, scarcely waiting for dissent, led off, inviting me, by backward twists of the head, to follow his pioneering.

The crowd was too great for conversation, but it was easy to know from the congested state of the room in a particular spot where Wray's work must be hung. When patience was nearly exhausted we reached it. Comments and criticisms were freely bandied aloud.

"Decidedly morbid," spake a sightseer in disgust.

"Hideous! I wouldn't own such a picture for worlds," confided one woman to another.

"It is astounding," an art critic remarked to his companion, whose face I knew. "What power, what genius, yet——"

"Genius is a loganstone," said the other, shaking his head. "It rocks and rocks, but a stalk of asphodel may shift it from its centre."

"For 'asphodel' translate 'woman,'" the critic replied, "and you solve the riddle."

At this moment a gap opened; it was sufficiently wide to reveal the subject without the frame of the picture.

On a slab of wood in semi-darkness lay a drowned woman. The rays from a lamp, held aloft by a bargee or coal-heaver, flickered down on the green-grey features that had already lost the expression which accompanies the first beatitude of death. Some outcast, as the worn finery proved; young in years, we knew by the modelling of her throat; aged in worldliness, by the hard set of her features, the sparse strands of faded hair that might once have glittered. The folds of the frayed gown hung lank, heavy with dark drops of liquid mud which oozed and fell slowly to the ground, already a morass of wharf drippings that reflected pallidly the meagre gleams of the uplifted lamp. The magnificent anatomy of a beautiful arm, a shapely bosom—bared, it seemed, in an effort to reanimate—showed that this was no plebeian waif driven by stress of poverty over the water's edge. On the elbow was grim evidence of Wray's realistic mood—a bruise, wide and purple, and higher up, the dull indenture of a water-rat's tooth.

"Well," said Spry, watching my mute amazement, "he has left no part of his gruesome task undone; he has gloated in it—look!—even to the snipping of the linen."

A definite jag on the front of the shift—the place which is usually inscribed with the name of the owner—was carefully insisted on. It was the highest light in the picture, and seemed to emphasise a piteous degradation and still more piteous consciousness thereof.

"Wray turned moralist?" a bystander sneered.

"We may find sermons in stones, but we don't want 'em on canvas," bounced another, a "port-wine-flavoured" personage, who ogled for applause with the confidence of the self-crowned wag.

I eyed him with swelling spleen, and shot a dart at Spry which was intended to ricochet.

"Wasn't it Flaubert who said that, in the hands of an artist, a disembowelled ox would make as fine a subject as any other?"

"I don't know," returned Spry, "but, anyway, about this work there are ugly tales afloat. It is too true—unpleasantly, unnecessarily true."

It indeed appeared to be inhumanly horrible—a vulture swoop of the brush—and, much as I appreciated Wray as a friend and worshipped him as a disciple, I was forced to recognise a want of reserve, some lack of sentiment in the handling—say, rather, over-handling—of so repellant a subject. His aim seemed to lie in choking sentiment—suffocating it in loathliness and disgust. There was a violence of passion that suggested the manner of Prudhon—suggested it, but, giant-like, overshadowed it with the brawny vigour of modern actuality.

I turned from the picture to the crowd, blinked dazedly to find myself again facing daylight and colour, and stretched myself awake as far as environing shoulders would allow. Looking away from this squalid scene, I became suddenly aware of an unusual amount of paint and gilding on the walls—an art tawdriness that had not before obtruded itself. My taste for the reproduction of veined marble and glossy parquet, for pretty pussies and portraits of gentlefolk was exhausted. I made for the turnstiles, and nodded to Spry to get quit of him.

"I'm off," I said, curtly, "to look up Wray and offer my congratulations."

Green Park, bedecked in spring raiment, seemed to me at that moment a welcome oasis of verdure in the midst of the swirl of Piccadilly; it offered no impediment to the bubbling flood of conjecture that Wray's strange chef d'oeuvre had let loose.

So far as I knew him—and our friendship, though spasmodic by reason of my wanderings, had existed since our teens—he was the last man to sneak voluntarily into the shadowy niches of life; his nature clung to radiance and his sentiment revolted at the opacity of pessimism. Why, then, this sudden hectic of the sensational? Why, indeed, unless the genius, the loganstone, as suggested by the fellow in the exhibition, had rocked till it tilted?

In the midst of my mental tussle, while twisting the pros and cons in favour of lunacy, and walking with bent head and irresponsible stride, I fell foul of an obstacle. It was Lawrence Vane, the poet, who, being well known to me, chose this mode of salute.

"Your moutons are causing you trouble," he laughed. "Debts?—love affairs?"

"I have neither," I replied, without a vestige of humour.

He was a breezy fellow, good tempered and sound, but at the moment he was out of place. Despite my abruptness he wheeled round and kept pace with me.

"You were totting up your virtues then?" he pursued.

"I can do that on my fingers. It was Wray's vagaries that puzzled me. I am on my way to him."

His cheery mood vanished.

"Don't go near him," he burst out. "He is a beast; I loathe him."

"He is my friend." (This with an accent on the last word.)

"I expected that. They were my friends once, but I never go there now."

"They?" I inquired. I had forgotten the report of Wray's marriage, five years before. It had taken place in Rome on the eve of my departure from England.

"He and his wife. You met her? No? She was the sweetest girl that ever stept."

"Was?" I exclaimed. "Is she dead?"

"Dead to us, to society, to happiness. She left her husband within the year."

"Poor fellow!"

It was well to have met Lawrence before going to Wray's studio—awkward situations might have ensued. I delved for more of the domestic history.

"She was the prey of mischief-makers—there were so many who envied her. People whispered cruelly of her mysterious elfish beauty, and women coveted her golden hair; for nothing women resent so much as Nature's own coronation of sovereignty. She was only eighteen, and believed in him—worse luck for her. Afterwards she became jealous and tried the spur. It makes some beasts go and some stand stock still. He gibbed. Rash people—men—quoted Byron, told her that constancy was woman's greatest vice; others—women—bragged of the equality of man and woman, hinted at levelling down when you can't level up."

"He had cared for her?"

"It was a love match. But you can't plant figs in the midst of thistles. He was easygoing, hated a smart, so there was no uprooting, and the fig tree perished!"

There were tears in Lawrence's eyes, but he began whistling a music hall air in affectation of nonchalance.

"Well," I said, extending a hand as we neared Buckingham Gate, "it is miserably sad, but thanks for instructing me. I shall be saved unlucky allusions."

"You mean to see him?" he asked, dejectedly.

"Certainly."

With a wry sneer of dissatisfaction he bade me good-bye, and I continued my way to the studio.

Lawrence Vane's view struck me as narrow and one-sided. He ignored the fact that Wray was one of the most courted men in London, that in England and America his genius drew to him followers, patrons, friends of all ranks, and that, as a natural consequence, there were warm corners in women's hearts for this spoilt child of fortune. With the world beckoning, the fair sex flinging petals from the rose gardens of love and admiration, he had needed more than human dexterity to pick his way through the scented labyrinths that were continually twining around his feet.

I found him in, and he greeted me with his rare smile. In an instant I observed that he was no longer the same Wray, whose presentiment he himself had painted for the Corporation of H——, no longer the harum-scarum painter I had known five years ago; it seemed as though he had thrown all the buoyancy of colour and tissue—the veritable body of him—on the canvas, and had left merely a shadow of the original to walk the earth.

The studio, a temporary one, was on the ground floor. It looked out on the bustle and swarm of the Buckingham Palace Road, where the roar of traffic was accompanied by wafts of martial music from the adjacent parade ground. It made a bizarre accompaniment to our reunion.

I strained his hand, shook it more than once as an assurance. I wished to convey to him that I was not ignorant, nor curious—in fact, that I believed in him. My allegiance was unshaken by Lawrence Vane's history. I gave him the faith of friendship, which is a closer grained quality than the faith of love.

We stood among his pictures and gossiped of art, praising H's brush-work, wondering at R's anatomy, arguing L's historical accuracy, and talking of everything warily—on the brink, as it were, of a plunge, like timid girls at a river, dipping now a finger, a foot, an arm, in the chilly depths, and wavering. When at last we were seated he took a header.

"You've seen my portrait?"

"At the Academy? Just come from it."

"You think I've flattered myself?" he said, with his head on one side, his eyes asking more than the question.

"It would not have done you justice three years ago," I evaded.

"Good! I wished the husk to be a thing of beauty. You think it a work that will live?"

"Assuredly, or the Corporation of H—— would not have unbuttoned to it. It keeps its heart well within the limits of its waistcoat."

"And the other—the kernel?"

I looked at him and arched an interrogative eyebrow.

"The other picture? 'The Soul of Me?'"

"Of course I've seen it. It's magnificent work, Woll, but I don't like it."

"Crude realism, eh?" he said, leaning sideways and bending a palette knife backwards and forwards on the back of his chair.

"More," I said—"exaggeration."

He paled. I thought it was in offence at my critical presumption.

"There was none," he averred. "You shall see the original sketch," and he paced to an easel that stood, covered with a cloth, in a distant corner. He unveiled it.

"Ugh!" My cry was inevitable. I resisted the impulse to shroud my eyes, but my teeth clenched on words.

It was the same picture with a terrible difference. Vivid, almost glaring, in the black gloom and silence, the woman's form represented a combination of all the debasement and degradation of the world. Evil spirits seemed to mock and writhe and gibber in the sludge of the foreground; the iridescent atmosphere hung with noisome miasmic dews, even the face of the bargee glowed like a fiend in the glare of his lamp, held viciously aloft to reveal in its completeness the whole squalid history of spiritual failure.

"Who was she?" I whispered at last—it was a sight to shackle the tongue—and his answer hissed back like the sound of searing iron on sweating flesh:—

"It was my wife."

Heaven forgive me, I shrank from him. The man who could thus portray accurately, unmercifully, this tale of hideous defilement—the victim his wife, however sinning—must be himself either morally debased or partially insane.

He saw the gesture, and moved away to the foot of the model throne and waited.

I could think of nothing but the ghastly achievement, could stand only with bulged eyes staring at it, a dry, dusty flavour parching my tongue. At last I broke from the horrible fascination—a fascination that almost prompted me to snatch his knife and rip the canvas from end to end.

I flung down the cloth.

"Sit there," he almost commanded, and pointed to an arm-chair at some distance from him.

"You may shun me. It is what I wanted—deserved. To that end I confessed it, 'The Soul of Me.'"

Then on a sudden his meaning dawned.

"The body," he went on, "was painted before I learnt what colour the soul was. I will tell you."

"No, no!" I remonstrated, perceiving the tension of his set jaws. "It will pain you, and do no good."

"Pain?" he said. "There is no pain that eats into the heart like silence. The knowledge of guilt hidden corrodes like an acid. It must have been that which taught the Catholic Church the value of confession."

"Possibly," I said, moving from my distant chair to his side, and grasping his hand. "But remember I am not a priest; I am only, and always, a friend."

"I know, I know," he said, hurriedly, staring out across the room at the humming, busy road. "My confession is not to you. All that humanity can do the priests have done. You stare? Yes, I've turned myself inside out for them; but all their altar flowers cannot scent a foul soul, nor can their sanctuary lights illumine its crooked corners. I'm no historian, but I've heard of cases where private penance, remorse, and religious absolution have totally failed to wipe clean the hearts of intellectual men—they of the world, sinners, needing absolution of the world. Such men, who live in the open, and trumpet their triumphs there, need, too, to howl their confessions from the housetop, carve their contrition, like the wisdom of Asoka, on the immemorial rocks as an outcry to the generations."

He started up, and began to stride about the room. His face was full of passionate grief, and his wandering eyes passed beyond me as though watching a sunset.

I thought of the loganstone, and of the frail woman, the stalk of asphodel, who had unhinged it. The great painter, sensitive ever to colour and beauty and flattery and happiness, to pin-pricks and to sneers, had dropped in pieces before a real strain—sin for which he held himself responsible, remorse that found no outlet wide enough for his great transcendent heart.

Presently he stood still before his picture, threw back the curtain, and surveyed it with folded arms.

"She was pure," he muttered, half to himself; "sweet, sweet as new milk from warm udders in cowslip time, and I—I brought her to my cobwebbed life without so much as a preliminary sweep of the broom. She thought me like herself, and I dared not undeceive her; but others—curse them!—they taught her. She was pure as milk, I said—ay, for milk absorbs poison quicker than things less pure. She breathed the taint from the loathly atmosphere of my world—of the world that had been mine.... But I loved her ... would have won her back—cringed to her. She spurned me, spited me through herself, evaded me, till"—a shuddering horror stifled his voice—"till, by chance, I came on that."

I followed him to the easel, and placed an affectionate arm on his shoulder.

"Well, old man, you must clear out of this. Come along with me back to the Bush, and drop this nightmare."

"Drop it?" he flouted; "why, the world reeks of it!"

"Not now. You say that even the priests absolve you."

"Cheap contrition! cheap absolution! how one cuddles them at first—at first! But in time we feel our canker—it grows under the clean Church wrappings—in time we learn that where our sanctuary is, there, alone, can our penance be. Hence this picture. It accompanies the portrait, a gift to the nation. You can't think what a going down on the marrow bones it was—down on the stones for every rascal to gaze and prod at, an attitude for eternity."

"You'll come to Australia?" I repeated, adhering obstinately to my matter-of-fact bent.

"As you please. I feel clean enough for your company now, for I have committed suicide—not vulgarly, by murdering myself, but suicide spiritually. I have given up the ghost by working out the pitch through the point of my brush, and the carcass is yours to bury where or how you will."