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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I thought—” Matt stammered.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Indeed?” Madame flushed now.

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

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

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

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

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

The saturnine figure in the velvet coat descended again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But Matthew Strang tapped his forehead significantly.

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

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

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

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

“The dear boy,” breathed Madame.

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER II
GRAINGER’S

Only, where to learn? There was the rub. He had looked to his uncle to put him in the way of instantly acquiring art, and here had he wasted a week without acquiring even information. But in the British Museum he lighted upon young men and women drawing from the antique, and entering into conversation with the shabbiest of the men, who was working at the head of a Roman emperor in chalk, pecking at it with a pointed pellet of bread, he learned that the Roman emperor’s head was intended, in alliance with the torso of a Greek river-god, to force the doors of the Royal Academy Schools, the privileges of which gratuitous establishment the aspirant duly recounted. But the examination would not take place for some time, and Matt, though he felt it hard to have to pay fees elsewhere in the meantime, was secretly pleased at being able to shelve temporarily the thought of partaking in this examination, for the Roman emperor’s head was appallingly stippled, and the student said he had been at work on it for four months, and evidently meditated touching and retouching it till the very eve of the examination. Matt did not think he could ever muster sufficient interest in Roman emperors to live with the head of one for more than a week. His heart sank at the thought of what he might have to go through to please professors and examiners, but he would have willingly tried his hand at copying a bust had not the student informed him he must apply for permission and give a reference to a reputable householder. With the exception of his unclaimed uncle, Matt knew no one, reputable or disreputable, householder or vagrant. But he obtained from the shabby delineator of the Roman emperor the address of a cheap, good art-school, though he found, to his dismay, that even at the cheapest he could only afford to take the night class, from seven to ten, three times a week. He saw he would have to study form apart from natural color, and apply during the days the preachings of the three nights. Impatient, and holding his paint-box tight against his palpitating heart, he set out that very night to join the class, but losing himself in a labyrinth of squares exactly alike, did not find the school till half-past seven. Passing through an open door marked “Grainger’s Academy of Art” in ugly and faded lettering, he found himself in a long, gloomy passage that led away from the rest of the house; and, following the indication of a dirty finger painted on the wall, he stole cautiously along the deserted corridor, which grew momentarily drearier as it receded from the naked jet of gas in the doorway, till it reached its duskiest at the point where it was bordered by a pair of cloak-rooms. Matt peered eagerly into their shadowy depths, which seemed to contain coals and a bicycle and litter, as well as clothing, and to exhale a flavor of ancient stuffiness; but he could detect no movement among the congested overcoats. At last, at the end of the passage, he stumbled against a boy in buttons kneeling with his eye to the key-hole of a door. Apologetically he asked the boy if this was Grainger’s, and the boy, jumping up quickly, told him to walk in, and retreated in haste.

Matt opened the door. A wave of insufferably hot air, reeking of tobacco, smote his face and his nostrils; a glare of light dazzled his eyes. He was vaguely aware of a great square room crowded with young men in uncouth straw hats sitting or standing at work in their shirt-sleeves before easels; but the whole scene was a blur compared with the central point that stood out in disconcerting clearness. Immediately facing him, on a platform at the other end of the room, a nude woman was standing. He started back shocked, and was meditating flight, when a student near him growled to him to shut the door. He obeyed, and had an instant of awful loneliness and embarrassment amid this crowd of gifted strangers, in the rear of which he stood, paint-box under arm, wondering why nobody challenged his entry, and where Grainger was. Turning to look for him, he upset a rickety easel and a disengaged stool, both of which seemed to topple over at the slightest touch. But his awkwardness saved the situation; the owner of the easel was good-natured and, perceiving he was a new-comer, bade him seat himself on the stool and fix up an easel next to him, the number painted on the oilcloth of the floor being unappropriated. As Matt had no canvas, he even went outside to buy him one for two-and-ninepence from the boy in buttons. Matt handed him the money with a feeling of eternal gratitude.

While his amiable fellow was thus busied in his behalf, the new student’s keen eye absorbed the scene in detail. A great square dusty room, rimmed as to the roof by skylights, and lighted to-night from above by a great circular gas-flare; round two of the walls, patched here and there by the crumbling away of the plaster, ran a rack on which innumerable canvases and drawing-boards were stacked, and underneath the rack a streak of wood permeated the plaster to hold the pins by which crude sketches were fastened up, evidently for criticism; here and there hung notices of the meetings of Grainger’s Sketching Club, mixed up with photographs and advertisements of studios, and of a drawing competition instituted by the proprietors of a soap, and the mural ornamentation was completed by clever nude studies, rapid tours de force of the visiting artists, as Matt discovered later; everywhere about the floor were canvases, boards, and an unstable assortment of three-legged easels, donkeys, quaintly carved chairs, and stools, high and low, upon which last students of all figures and complexions, some of them smoking, sat perched, crowned with the uncouth straw hats to keep the glare out of their eyes, and reduced to the shirt-sleeves by the heat from so many lights and breaths; the pendent gas-jets being supplemented by the paraffine lamp that lighted a shadowy corner where a skull grinned on a shelf, and by the big fire that was needed to keep the model from shivering on the throne, where she stood statuesque against the white background of a dirty sheet, her head resting against her arm.

And from everything breathed an immemorial dust—from the fire in the centre of the right-hand wall an impalpable ash seemed to drift; dust covered the mantel-piece and coated the bottles of linseed-oil and fixative and the boxes of charcoal that stood upon it, dust draped in gray the dilapidated squash-nosed lay-figure that leaned drunkenly against the right side of the throne. In the corners of the room the dust had an air of legal possession, as if the statute of limitations had secured it against the broom. There were dusty mysteries doubled up on shelves, a visible leopard’s skin suggesting infinite romantic possibilities for the others, and within a dusty barrel in a corner near him Matt saw dusty bits of velvet and of strange, splendid stuffs which he divined were for costume models, and the floor seemed a land of lost drawing-pins and forgotten fragments of charcoal. And then his heart gave a great leap, for his eye, returning timidly to the throne where it had scarcely dared as yet to rest, encountered a man’s head bending over a writing-desk in the compartment of the floor to the left of it. Surely it could be no other than Grainger himself, that thin, austere man with the big bald forehead and the air of Wellington, and Matt thrilled with proportionate reverence, and turned his eye away, as if dazzled, to repose it on the inchoate paintings of the students who were squinting scientifically at the model, and measuring the number of heads with sticks of charcoal or their brush-handles. Some had her large, some small; some turned her head this way, some that; some were painting her, some drawing her—each from his point of sight.

As soon as his own canvas arrived, altogether forgetting his startled modesty in the delightful interest of the work, he fell to touching in the head with rapid strokes of a flowing brush. The woman vanished in the woman’s form: what a privilege to enjoy and reproduce those beautiful curves, those subtle fleshtones, those half-tints of cream and rose, seen under gaslight!

“What are you about?” said his mentor, presently.

“Painting her portrait,” he replied, pausing, with painful foreboding.

“But where’s the charcoal outline?”

“The charcoal outline!”

“Yes. You can’t paint her without sketching her first in charcoal.”

“Can’t I?” asked Matt, with a sudden remorseful recollection of his first sitter, the Acadian legislator whose portrait had paved his way to sign-painting. He hastened to efface his ignorance with a palette-knife, and to obliterate it with a rag moistened with turpentine; but he was frightened and nervous and denuded of confidence in himself, and when he attempted to outline the figure the charcoal boggled at the greasy surface of the canvas; and while he was wrestling with his medium he became conscious that the great Grainger was behind him, and a nervousness that he had not felt when he pointed his gun at the bear in his forest home paralyzed his hand. Grainger stood for some moments watching his fumbling strokes, then he said:

“You want to join the Life class?”

Matt, flushing furiously, stammered an affirmative.

“Don’t you think you’d better begin with the Antique?” asked Grainger.

Matt murmured that he didn’t care about the Antique anyhow, and Grainger shook his austere head.

“Ah! there’s no getting on without slogging away; it’s no good shirking the ground-work. The living figure is all subtle lines. You can’t expect to be equal to them without years of practice at the Antique and Still-life.”

Matt plucked up courage to guess that he would have another try at the figure, and Grainger, having pocketed a quarter’s fees, moved off, leaving Matt amazed at his own temerity.

“Do you think he’ll be annoyed if I stay on here?” he asked his mentor, as he resumed his work with the determination to prove himself not unworthy of the privilege.

“If you want to chuck your money away, it’s your lookout,” said his mentor, candidly. “You don’t hurt him.”

“Then he won’t say anything?”

“It doesn’t matter what he says. He’s not up to much.”

“No?” queried Matt, astonished. “Isn’t he a great painter?”

The student laughed silently. “A great painter keep a school!” he said. “No; it’s only the failures that do that!”

“Then how can one learn?” asked Matt, in dismay.

“Oh, well, we have a visitor once a week—he’s rather a good man. Tarmigan! He’s not an R.A., but he can knock off a head in twenty minutes.”

“But the R.A.’s—what are they for?” inquired Matt, only partially reassured.

“For show,” said the young man, smartly. “You are a green un, to think that you’re going to get Academicians for thirty bob a month. You’ve got to go to the Academy Schools if you want them. And then the chaps say they’re not much use. Most of them are out of date, and you get a different man every month who contradicts all the others. A fellow I know says the best of the visitors is Marmor, but he’s awfully noisy and facetious, and claps you on the back, and tells you a story, and forgets to criticise. And then there’s Peters—he sighs and says ‘Very tender,’ and you think you’ve improved, till you hear him say ‘Very tender’ to the next man too. The chief advantage of going to a school is that you get a model which you couldn’t afford to hire for yourself, and you learn from the other fellows. And then, of course, there’s composition—Tarmigan’s jolly good for that.”

By this time Matt had sketched his outline, and he was about to resume the brush when the clock struck eight. The model stretched herself and retired behind the dirty sheet, which now operated as a screen, and there was a rising, a putting down of palettes (each with its brushes stuck idly in its thumb-hole), an outburst of exclamations, a striking of matches, a mechanical rolling of cigarettes, a sudden lowering of the lights, and a general air of breaking up.

“School over already?” he asked, in a disappointed tone.

“No, they’re only turning the gas down for coolness while the model has a rest. You see, she can’t stand two hours straight off the reel.”

“No, I guess not,” said Matt, and then repented of having said “guess,” for he was trying to prune away his humble expressions and to remember the idioms of the educated people with whom his new life was bringing him into contact. “It must be awful hard,” he added.

“Yes; especially in a school where a lot of chaps are working at once, and she can’t rest a limb because somebody might just be painting it. One woman told me she’d rather scrub floors so as to feel her limbs moving about. But posing pays better. This is a new model—first time she’s been here. Pity women with such fine figures haven’t got prettier faces. Have a cigarette?”

“No, thanks,” said Matt.

“Don’t smoke?”

“I did smoke once, but I gave it up.” Matt did not like to confess it was because he could not afford the luxury.

“You can’t be an artist without tobacco,” said his mentor, laughingly. “Ah, here’s the model. I’ll just go and get her address.”

He went up to the model, who had re-emerged and seated herself at ease upon the throne, where a group of students, with pipes or cigarettes in their mouths, was in conversation with her.

Matt followed his mentor, interested in this new specimen of humanity, and thinking that he would prefer to paint her as she was sitting then, nude in that dim, mysterious light, surrounded by smoke-wreathed figures in tropic headgear, her face alive, her feet crossed gracefully, playing a part in a real scene, yet withal unreal to the point of grotesqueness.

“Oh, I’ve sat a lot for him,” she was saying when Matt came up. “I stand every morning for the portrait of Letty Gray, the skirt-dancer; it’s for the Academy. She can’t come much, and she’s awfully unpunctual. Of course I’m only for the figure.”

“Weren’t you in the Grosvenor Gallery last summer?” asked a bald middle-aged man.

“Yes; I was Setter’s ‘Moonbeam,’” began the model, proudly.

“I thought I recognized you,” said the middle-aged man, with an air of ancient friendship.

“And I was also on the line in the big room,” she added—“Colin Campbell’s ‘Return of the Herring-Boats.’ And I got into the Royal Institute as well—Saxon’s ‘Woman Wailing for Her Demon Lover.’”

“Ah, here you are, then!” said a red-haired young man, producing an illustrated catalogue.

“Yes,” said she, turning over a few pages. “And there’s my husband—Sardanapalus, 223. They often have him at the Academy Schools,” she wound up, with conscious pride.

“Ah, perhaps we shall get him here one week,” said the middle-aged man.

While his mentor was taking down her address, Matt looked round the room. The austere Grainger, with a cigarette in his mouth, was reading a yellowish paper embellished with comic cuts. Most of the students were moving about, looking at one another’s easels, the work on which, with few exceptions, Matt was surprised to find mediocre; a few sat stolidly humped on their stools, feet on rail and pipe in mouth; one group was examining photographs which its central figure had taken, and which he loudly declared knocked the painting of the Fishtown School to fits. From all sides the buzz of voices came through the stifling, smoky, darkened atmosphere.

“Have you seen Piverton’s new picture?”

“Rather! Another S,” contemptuously replied a very young man, seated, smoking a very long pipe before a very indifferent canvas.

“What do you mean, Bubbles?” asked a by-stander.

“What, haven’t you noticed,” he answered, with ineffable disdain, swinging his arm in illustration, “that the lines of his compositions are all curly—they always make S?”

“I thought they always made £ s. d.,” interjected a curly-headed wag. And all except the very young man laughed.

“Bubbles is gone on Whistler,” observed a freckle-faced student, compassionately.

“I admire him,” admitted the very young man, candidly, “but I don’t say he’s the end of art.”

“No; that’s reserved for Bubbles,” laughed the freckle-faced student.

“What is the end of art, Bubbles?” said another man.

“T, of course,” put in the curly-headed wag. “Five o’clock and fashionable.”

“I say, Grainger says Miss Hennery used to work in his day class,” said a handsome young Irishman, strolling up with a bag of cakes, from which the model had just helped herself in the pervasive spirit of camaraderie.

“Well, I don’t see anything to boast of in that,” pronounced Bubbles, puffing at his long hookah. “She’s only a feeble female imitation of Tarmigan. Her color’s muddy, and her brother comes into all her men’s heads.”

“I suppose she can’t afford models,” said the Irishman, charitably. “Have a banbury.”

Bubbles accepted, and the by-standers helped to empty the bag. Matt moved back towards his easel, passing a little dark man with a mane, who was explaining to a derisive audience that the reason he went to music-halls was to study character, and brushing by a weedy giant, who was boasting that he hardly ever went to bed, so tied was he to his anatomy. During his progress a meagre, wrinkled old man, with pepper-and-salt hair and a stoop, approached him, and said, in a husky whisper:

“Excuse me introducin’ myself, but I do admire your feet so!”

Matt flushed, startled.

“My name’s Gregson—William Gregson—and I’ve made a speciality of feet. The ’uman form divine is beautiful everywhere, sir, but the foot—ah! there you have the combination of graces, all the beautiful curves in a small compass; the arch of the foot, the ankle, instep, the beautiful proportions of it all when you do get a really beautiful foot such as yours. I come here, sir, every night to study the beautiful—for in daily life the foot is ’idden, distorted by boots and shoes that ignore the subtleties and delicacies of nature—and the foot is the first thing I look at; but how rarely does a model, man or woman, ex’ibit a truly beautiful foot! Oh, how I wish I could paint your foot, or take a cast of it—a study from the nude, of course! But no—you will not allow me, I know. May I at least be allowed to measure it, to take the proportions, to add to my knowledge of the laws of the beautiful foot?”

Matt faltered that he didn’t know he had anything extraordinary in the way of feet.

“My dear sir!” protested William Gregson, showing the whites of his eyes.

Just then the light was turned up, and William Gregson retreated abruptly to his easel. The model’s court scattered, and she herself resumed her inglorious occupation of the throne, placing her feet within a chalked-out line, and her arm against a mark in the sheet.

Matt, returning to his canvas, worked enthusiastically to finish the figure by closing-time, and laid down his brush with some minutes to spare, thereby drawing upon himself the attention of his mentor, who exclaimed:

“By Jove! What made you rush along like that?”

“There was no time,” said Matt.

“Time! Why, there’s four more evenings. Every model sits a fortnight—six nights, you know.”

“Well, she’s done, anyhow,” said Matt, in rueful amusement.

“Yes, she is done anyhow.” And his mentor laughed. “Why, that ’ll never do. You can’t show work like that.”

“Why not? It’s like her.”

“Yes, but there’s no finish in it. It’s only a sketch. You’re supposed to make a careful study of it. Tarmigan insists on the exact character of the model. He always says even Velasquez’s early things were tight and careful.”

But Matt felt he could not take the thing any further—at any rate, not that night; the fury of inspiration was over. He sat abstractedly watching the quivering of the model’s tired limbs and her shadows on the screen, a dusky silhouette with lighter penumbras, till the hour was up.

On Matt’s homeward journey he was overtaken by old Gregson, who discovered that their routes coincided, and renewed his admiration of Matt’s foot and his request to gauge its beauties, till at last, unwilling to disoblige a brother artist, but feeling rather ridiculous, the young man slipped off his boot in the shelter of a doorway, under the light of a street-lamp, and the wrinkled old man, producing a tape-measure, ecstatically recorded, on a crumpled envelope, the varied perfections of its form.

At the next lesson Matt set to work and painted away all the force of his study in the effort to reach the standard prevailing at Grainger’s. But he worked dispirited and joyless, like a war-horse between the shafts of an omnibus, or a savage in a stiff shirt and a frock-coat; suppressing himself with the same sense of drear duty as when he had sawn logs or drilled potatoes. During the “rest,” while Matt was listening in amazement to some secret information concerning royal personages, who seemed to have confided all their intrigues to Bubbles, William Gregson drew him mysteriously into the anteroom.

“Do you know, I couldn’t sleep the other night?” said the meagre, wrinkled old man with the pathetic stoop.

“Were you ill?” said Matt, sympathetically.

“No. Your foot kept me awake.”

Matt cast a furtive look at it, as if to read marks of guilt thereon.

“Yes; you must know I’m a shoemaker by trade, and love art, but I can’t devote myself to it like you young fellows. I work ’ard all day ’ammerin’ and stitchin’; it’s only in the evenings that I can spare an hour for paintin’.”

Matt’s eyes moistened sympathetically. “I’m so sorry,” he murmured.

“I knew you would be. I knew you had a beautiful nature. It always goes with beautiful feet. Ah, you smile! I’m an enthusiast, I admit, and you will smile more when you ’ear I sat up half the last two nights to create an artistic boot with your beautiful lines. You had given me the inspiration. I had to create there and then. I was tired of my day’s work, I was poor, and my time was valuable; but before all I am an artist. Sir, I have brought the boots with me”—here he produced a brown-paper parcel from under his arm—”and I shall be proud if you will accept them as a ’umble tribute from a lover of the beautiful.”

“No, no; I couldn’t think of taking them,” said Matt, blushing furiously.

“Oh, but you will vex me, sir, if you do not. It pains me enough already to think of you wearin’ the cumbrous, inartistic pair I see.”

“I won’t take them unless I pay you for them.”

“No, no. What is a guinea between artists?” And he pressed the parcel into Matt’s hand.

Matt shook his head. He was appalled at the price, but he felt it wouldn’t be fair to take the poor old man’s work for nothing. A vague suspicion that he was being tricked flitted beneath his troubled mind, but his worldly experiences had not yet robbed him of his guilelessness, and there was such a fire of abnegation in the homely face that Matt felt ashamed of his doubt, and drew out the money with a feeling that he was, at any rate, helping a worthy artistic soul.

“Here is the price of them,” he said.

The artist took the money and looked at it.

“A guinea would give me nearly another month’s lessons,” he said, wistfully.

“Put it in your pocket, then,” insisted Matt, his last doubt dissolving in fellow-feeling.

But the cobbler shook his head. “No, no, sir, you mustn’t rob me of my impulse. I cannot charge you full price. Take back the shilling. Concede something to my feelings.”

“There—if that ’ll satisfy you,” said Matt, reaccepting it.

“You won’t tell the chaps,” besought the shoemaker, pathetically. “They wouldn’t understand us. They would laugh at our innocent enthusiasm.”

As Matt shared this distrust of the sympathy of the studio, he was not backward with assurances of secrecy, while he was laboriously bulking his overcoat-pocket with the parcel.

At the end of the four lessons, when Matt’s painting seemed to him to be getting almost as smooth as a wax figure, and as dead, Tarmigan came—a stern, ill-dressed man, prematurely gray—at whose approach Matt’s heart was in his mouth. The famous artist moved leisurely but inevitably towards him, shedding criticism by grunts and phrases and gestures; expressing the ineffable by an upward snap of the fingers, accompanied by a Russian-sounding sibilation; inquiring sarcastically whether one student was drawing the model or the lay-figure, and sneeringly recommending another to move his drawing “if the model moved.” Every now and again he sat down at an easel to get the man’s point of view, and, taking up his brush, suggested tone and color, or, if it was a draughtsman’s easel, borrowed his charcoal, and showed him how to put the head on the shoulders or fit on an extremity. When at length Matt felt the great man’s breath on his neck a cold shiver ran down his spine, the brush clove to his paralyzed hand.

“Ah, a new man!” said the visitor. “Not bad.”

All the blood in Matt’s body seemed to be rushing to his face. His hand began to tremble.

The visitor did not pass on immediately. He said: “Where do you come from? There’s a want of sharpness in the shadows.”

“From America,” breathed Matt.

“I mean from what school?”

“I haven’t been to school since I was a boy.”

“Not been to an art school?” queried the visitor, in surprise. “Nonsense! Impossible! The face is very well, but the rest is not taken far enough. A little too clever! Search! search! Even Velasquez’s early things were—But you must have had a deal of practice.”

“I have painted quite a little,” admitted Matt, “but not rightly, though I did study artistic anatomy out of a book. I’ve painted hundreds of portraits and signs and ceilings.”

The artist was examining the work more minutely. “Don’t you call that practice?” he said, a little triumphant smile flitting across his wintry face. “Hundreds of portraits—why, that means hundreds of models! Why, however did you get all those commissions? It’s more than I can boast of. Try and keep that lower in tone, and don’t use that color at all,” he added, his fingers tattooing kindly on Matt’s shoulder. The class had pricked up its ears, for the artist spoke by habit in a loud tone, so that all might benefit by his criticism of the individual, and his remarks to the new-comer were quite out of the ordinary run.

“It was only in the country places in Nova Scotia,” said Matt, apologetically, “and people didn’t know anything about it. So long as I made a handsome likeness, it was all they cared for. And then, of course, they were never—never naked.”

“No?” said the celebrity, with a little laugh.

“No; they always wore their best clothes,” said Matt, smiling, too. “So this is the first time I’ve done one like this.”

“You haven’t done it yet,” said Tarmigan, moving on. “There’s that foot yet to be studied. Search! Finish!”

“If you please, sir,” said Matt, with an unconscious reversion to the idiom of McTavit’s school-room, “I have finished the foot.”

“Nonsense,” said Tarmigan. “You’ve got another toe to paint in.”

“I thought I had to copy the model exactly,” said Matt, meekly.

“Well, sir?” said Tarmigan, puzzled.

“Well, I only see four toes on that foot.”

The artist was startled; he cast a rapid glance at the model. “Good Lord! the man’s right,” he murmured, for the model was indeed minus a toe.

“I say, you men,” he said, “where are your eyes? You’ve given the model an extra toe. How often have I told you to look before you paint?”

All eyes were bent on the foot; the model reddened. Those whose work had not yet been examined hastened to amputate the toe; the others took on an air of injury.

“You might have told a chap,” whispered his mentor.

“I thought you knew,” said Matt. “I saw it as soon as I began to paint, but I didn’t take any notice of it in my first rough sketch. It was only when you told me I must copy the model exactly that I put it in, or, rather, left it out.”

For some time longer the fusillade of Tarmigan’s criticisms rang out intermittently: “Not bad.” “Humph! I wouldn’t make too much of those little things! Keep it broader!” “That’s very well!” “Psch!” “That’s better!” “Don’t get your shadows too hot!” “That’s a good bit!” “That leg’s too long from the knee down!” “Don’t lick it too much!” “Not bad!” “No, no; that won’t do at all!” “You’ll never get her feet into that canvas!” “Look at the model with your eyes nearly closed and compare the tones!” Then Tarmigan set a composition to be done at home in illustration of “Charity,” and stalked through the door amid a chorus of “Good-nights” in incongruous keys, and then there was a silence so tense that the creak of his departing boots could be heard dying away in the long passage; but it was not till the “rest” arrived, and the model, wrapping a cloak round her, had left the room, and Grainger had silently disappeared after his wont, that the storm burst.

Bubbles led off.

“Who ever saw a picture of a woman with four toes?” he cried, disgustedly.

“Yes. How could he expect us to examine her blooming toes?” said the freckle-faced student.

“Oh, I saw she had four toes right enough,” said Bubbles. “But a painter hasn’t got to paint accidents—he’s got to paint pictures.”

“It ’ll be an accident if you paint pictures,” put in the curly-headed wag.

“I saw the missing toe,” asserted the handsome young Irishman, “when I set her for the class. But I wasn’t going to spoil the study. One can easily imagine a toe. He’s got no sense of poetry.”

“I saw a scratch on her wrist,” volunteered the middle-aged man. “I wonder he didn’t want us to paint that.”

“I suppose he’ll put a background to it, and send it to the Academy,” cackled the red-headed young man.

“They’ve got blue noses in Nova Scotia, I believe. I wonder if he put them into his portraits?” the weedy giant remarked in a loud whisper to the little man with the mane.

Though the last two remarks were so impersonal, Matt knew well enough they were aimed at him, and he seemed to feel an undercurrent of resentment against himself beneath the animadversions on Tarmigan, whom he knew the studio revered. He sat uneasily on his stool, poring mechanically over his unhappy study from the nude, and morbidly misreading animosity into this good-humored badinage. Before his mother’s living death he might have replied violently with word or even fist, but life had broken him in. Seeing the new man spiritless, another student took up the parable:

“He’s going to leave it to the nation.”

“Then he’ll have to leave it on the door-step when nobody’s looking,” replied the weedy giant.

Then the stream of wit ran dry, and comparative silence fell upon the room.

Abruptly the voice of the curly-headed wag shot across the silence: “Four-toes, R.A.”

The cry was taken up in a great shout of laughter, even the uninterested joining in from sheer joy in a catchword. It seemed to Matt he had not a friend in the room. But he mistook. The grizzled old shoemaker sidled up to him.

“You’ve licked me, sir,” he said, in emotional accents. “You’ve shamed me; me, whose speciality is feet. I never noticed there was a toe missin’. No, sir; not even me. Your hand, sir. I bear you no malice.”

Gratefully Matt gripped the cobbler’s extended hand, and he took occasion to apologize for not enduing the artistic boots, explaining that he was reserving them for high days and holidays. He let the bantering cry die away unanswered, but at heart he was sick with the thought he was to repeat the experience of the St. John paint-shop, and he had a fierce impulse to shake the dust of the studio off his feet, even as he had thrown up his position in New Brunswick, and in his resentful bitterness he allowed his sense of the inferiority of the jeerers’ work to well up into clear consciousness. And thus he brought himself round to the remembrance of the great Tarmigan’s words, and to a softening sense of gratitude for the strange way in which he had been acquiring art in his own land, even while he was yearning and planning to get it across the seas. And so, though the nickname stuck to him—for, indeed, Grainger’s scarcely knew his real name—he remained at the studio, learning to take its humors more genially, and even to partake in them, and drawn to its habituÉs by the discovery that they, too, were fighting their way to art from the shop, the school, or the office, but never losing altogether the shyness and sensitiveness of a lonely alien and high-spirited soul.

From Tarmigan, whose executive faculty and technical knowledge were remarkable, and who, despite surface revolts behind his back, was worshipped by the whole school, Matt got many “pointers,” as he called them in his transatlantic idiom—traditions of the craft which he might never have hit out for himself; though, on the other hand, in the little studies he made at home and sometimes showed to Tarmigan, he produced effects instinctively, the technique of which he was puzzled to explain to the master-craftsman, who for the rest did not approve of the strange warm luminosities Matt professed to see on London tiles, or the misty coruscations that glorified his chimney-pots. Grainger himself never offered criticisms to his pupils except casually, and mainly by way of conversation, when he was bored with his own thoughts.

To the science of art which Tarmigan taught, and which was based upon inductions from great pictures, Matt in his turn did not always take kindly; the reduction of Æsthetics to rule chafed him; he was distressed by Tarmigan’s symmetrical formulÆ against symmetry, and though some of the canons of composition seemed to him self-evident when once pointed out, and others not unreasonable, he could not always relish the mechanical application of the general law to his particular case; but he suppressed his untutored instincts, much as in her day his mother had wrestled with Satan, and in faith, hope, and self-distrust submitted himself duteously to law and Tarmigan. He worked fluently for the most part, but every now and then came a sudden impotency not always due to lack of sympathy with the model; an inability to get the exact effect he wanted, which tortured him even more than Tarmigan’s strait-waistcoat of dogma.

Very soon Grainger’s grew half boastful, half jealous of its American prodigy, whom all later arrivals, catching up the nickname without the history of its origin, imagined to be likewise abnormal in the number of his toes. Some recalled Byron’s clubfoot, and wondered if Matt Strang’s pedal defect had any connection with the genius of “Four-toes, R.A.”

CHAPTER III
THE ELDER BRANCH

In the heated discussions at Grainger’s of the demerits of the painters of the day, no one ever mentioned the name of Strang except once; and then the Christian name was not Matthew. Matt did not like to bring up the name himself, as it was his own, but he soon understood that artists do not deal in other people’s pictures, and, recalling Madame Strang’s remark about her husband, he gradually came to the conviction that his namesake was the dethroned god of an earlier day, discouraged into sterility and commerce by the indifference of the younger generation. And as the deity loomed less terrible, and as Matt felt himself more at home in the art atmosphere of England, so the idea of making himself known to his uncle began to be shorn of its terrors, and even to be tinged with the generous thought of inspiring the neglected artist to fresh work—an inversion of attitude, the humor of which did not occur to him.

But when one afternoon he did betake himself again to the elegant emporium off Cavendish Square, and found himself face to face with the dapper young gentleman and his horseshoe cravat-pearl, the old awe of the refinement radiating from every quarter of the compass overwhelmed him, and his tongue refused to ask for Mr. Strang, compromising by a happy thought in the demand for Madame. Madame appeared forthwith, flashing upon him a sense of matronly sweetness and silk, and snatching him from the embarrassment of openings by exclaiming in her charming accent:

“Ah, you’ve come for your change.”

“What change?” asked Matt.

“You left sixpence on the desk. I noted it down.”

“It is very kind of you,” said Matt. “I had no idea you would remember me all this time.”

“I never forget clever people,” said Madame, with a bewitching smile.

“How do you know I’m clever?” Matt smiled back.

Madame waved away the question with her plump white hand in silent smiling reaffirmation. “I’ve always lived with clever people,” she said, simply. “Talent is the only thing I admire in this world.”

Matt said lamely that he was glad to hear it. The phrase was a poor expression of his pleasure in at last meeting a soul with his own ideals.

“Where was it you saw my husband’s pictures?” asked Madame, eagerly.

Matt flushed. “I didn’t see any,” he confessed. “My father told me about them.”

“Where did your father see them?”

“At home, when they were boys together.”

“What! They were school-fellows?”

“Brothers!” said Matt, and felt the instant relief of criminal confession.

Madame uttered a little cry of delighted astonishment, and took Matt’s hands in hers.

“My dear sir, my dear sir!” she cried, shaking them, “I knew you were clever. Come inside—come inside. Why didn’t you say who you were last time? You are the boy who wrote to Matthew from Nova Scotia years ago! What a pity he is out! He will be so charmed.”

And, still holding his hands, she led him up a little flight of stairs into a daintily furnished sitting-room, resplendent with pictures, and sat him down in a soft arm-chair, and hung admiringly over him, and plied him with inquiries as to his past and his projects and things Nova Scotian (without always waiting for an answer, or ever getting more than a brief generality), and rang for claret and cake, which were brought in by a pretty girl in a piquant white cap, but which Matt refused for fear of seeming to be in want of refreshment.

“I have a son who is also an artist—oh, so clever, the dear boy!” she told him. “You must know him—you will love each other. He is at work now in his studio; but he must not be interrupted till the light fails.”

Matt’s eyes kindled. “I shall like to know him,” he cried, fervently.

“Yes, dear Herbert! Oh, you’ve no idea how sweet and good and clever he is! He’s twenty-three, yet as obedient as a child. We’re so proud of him—his father and I. He quite consoles us for the failure of the English to appreciate Matthew’s work.”

“Oh, where can I see uncle’s work?” asked Matt, eagerly.

Madame shook her head sadly. “Oh, he parted with all his pictures ever so many years ago,” she said.

“But aren’t they exhibited anywhere?”

“We don’t know. They must be some day, if they are not destroyed, for they are so clever. But the fact is—though, of course, I wouldn’t tell it to a stranger—we had to—to—pawn them, and they were never redeemed, and poor Matthew never would paint again, he was so embittered. Oh, it was such a slow, sad struggle, those early days of our married life! For years no one would buy poor Matthew’s work, and when the money he had brought from Nova Scotia gave out we should have starved if I had not started a little dress-maker’s shop. They still call me Madame,” she interpolated, with a melancholy smile.

“But you are French, aren’t you?” said Matt, thrilling with the pathos of those far-away struggles.

“Yes, my parents were French, but I have spoken English almost from girlhood.”

“There is French blood in our family, too,” murmured Matt, with a sad recollection of his mother. He wondered what she was doing at the moment.

“Indeed! Perhaps that was what drew me to Matthew—that and his artistic genius. Poor Matthew!”

“But you are well off now?” said Matt, dubiously. He did not trouble to correct her mistake, to explain that the French blood was on the spindle side.

“Oh, we are rich. We have all we want. When my dress-maker’s business grew prosperous—in fact, quite a fashionable resort—Matthew, who could not bear to be out of touch with art, though he had sworn never to paint again, saw his way to dealing in pictures. Of course, he makes far more than any of his artist friends who succeeded, but that does not console me for the pictures the world has lost.”

“But why doesn’t he paint now that he has money?” inquired Matt.

“He says he’s too old,” said Madame, sighing. “And besides, he thinks he’d only be eclipsed by Herbert. Of course, Herbert is exceptionally gifted; he took the medal at the Royal Academy Schools, you know, for the best copy of an Old Master, and he has had advantages which were denied to his poor father. But still it often makes me cry to think of how he sinks himself in the dear boy, not caring a jot about his own reputation. Oh, there are few such fathers, I can tell you. I don’t know what I have done to deserve such a husband, I who have no cleverness or talent of any kind.”

And here, as at his cue, Matthew Strang entered, in a soft hat and a black cloak vastly more impressive than the staid shabbiness of Tarmigan, than whom his Vandyke beard alone gave him the greater artistic distinction. He leaned slightly upon a gnarled walking-stick.

Madame sprang up to meet him in the doorway. “Oh, Matthew!” she cried, ecstatically, “the young man who wanted to see you is your own nephew. And he is come to study art. And won’t it be delightful for Herbert to have a companion? I made him wait for you—I knew you wouldn’t be long.” And radiant beneath her cap, Madame stepped aside, as if to leave the stage free for the rapturous embrace between the uncle and his long-lost nephew. But Matthew Strang stood rigid with astonishment, only his eyes moving in startled examination of the young man, who had risen respectfully.

For an interval of seconds that seemed numerable in minutes he looked at Matt without speaking, leaning on his stick, his saturnine face growing momently darker.

“Davie’s son, I suppose,” he said, slowly, at last.

“Yes, sir,” said Matt.

“H’m! I might have seen it. So you have come to England, after all?”

“Yes, sir. But not till I had the money for my studies.”

Matthew Strang’s face lightened a little. “Sit down! Sit down! No need to stand,” he said, with uneasy graciousness, placing his disengaged hand on Matt’s shoulder. “And how are all your folks?”

“Oh, they’re pretty spry, thank you,” said Matt, resuming his chair.

“Let me see—your mother married again, didn’t she?”

Matt nodded.

“She’s still alive, I suppose?”

“Ye-es,” faltered Matt.

“And how’s the Province?”

“It’s about the same,” said Matt, vaguely.

“Ha!” said Mr. Strang, with an all-comprehending air.

He allowed Madame to divest him lovingly of his cloak. Then he said: “You’re settled in London, then?”

“I shall stay here some time.”

“Humph! You’re not like your father. He could never stay in one place. Well, well, I’m sure I wish you success, but you know it’s not an easy line you’ve gone into.”

“So you wrote to me, sir.”

“Ha! Well, I wrote the truth.”

“I was much obliged to you, sir, for your advice,” said Matt, sincerely.

But the elder man, suspecting sarcasm, replied half defiantly: “There’s not one man in a thousand that makes his bread-and-butter by it. Why, I’ve just bought a picture from an A.R.A. for fifty pounds; it’s worth treble. You would have done better at your farm—or was it a saw-mill?”

“It isn’t the money I was thinking of, sir; it’s the joy of painting.”

“Hum! I talked like that once.” Matthew Strang sat down rather peevishly and crossed his legs.

“And you talk like that now, too,” said Madame, with gentle reproach. “Not for yourself,” she corrected, hastily, as his eyebrows took their interrogative altitude. “But you know you don’t care if Herbert doesn’t make money for years, so long as he makes a reputation eventually.”

“Herbert is in a different position. He doesn’t need to earn anything.”

“Nor does your nephew,” said Madame. “He has ample resources, he tells me.”

Matt blushed at Madame’s unconscious magnification of his curt statement on the point, but he did not think it worth while contradicting her. Matthew uncrossed his legs restlessly. “I suppose your mother married a well-to-do man?”

“Yes, pretty well-to-do,” Matt stammered.

“Why didn’t you say who you were at first?”

“I didn’t like to. I—I remembered you had advised me not to come to England.”

“Well, the mischief was done; you might just as well have spoken. I might have given you some advice.... You could have had the engraving at trade price.... If you are looking for etchings, or any little things for your rooms, I couldn’t dream of treating you like a stranger.”

“Thank you,” said Matt, with feeble fervency.

“Don’t mention it,” said his uncle, holding up his right palm deprecatingly. “By-the-way, what made you address your letter to the National Gallery?”

Matt colored. “I thought all the London painters lived there,” he said, with an uneasy smile.

Madame laughed heartily. “Why, Matthew only got it through an official inquiring among the people copying pictures there. One of them happened to be a customer of ours, and suggested trying us.”

“Yes, it was all boyish foolishness,” said Matt.

“And where are you living, now that you have come?” said his uncle.

“Not far from here—in Holborn.” He added, hastily, for fear his uncle might be meditating a visit: “I can bring you some of my work if you like.”

“Oh yes, do! Won’t that be charming!” interjected Madame, clapping her hands.

Matthew checked her with a stern glance. “I don’t think I should be able to do anything with an unknown man,” he said, shaking his head.

“No, I don’t mean that,” said Matt, getting hot. “I thought you might like to see that I wasn’t quite a duffer. I don’t expect to sell my work yet, but they think I’m rather promising at the school.”

“What school? Who thinks?”

“Tarmigan.”

“Tarmigan!” echoed Matthew Strang. “Why, I could have picked up one of his water-colors for a fiver last week. Tarmigan has been going down steadily for the last four years. He took the gold medal at the Academy, and at first promised well. Ten years ago I even meditated a corner in him, but luckily I had the sense to sell out in time, before it was quite certain he would never even be an Associate. No wonder he’s reduced to visiting.”

“Oh, but he does that for nothing, they say,” protested Matt, hotly. “He’s a jolly fine chap!”

“Ha! No wonder he doesn’t get on. Who ever heard of a really good man wasting his time in that way?”

“Then don’t you think I’m doing any good studying under him?” asked Matt, in affright.

“Oh, he’s all right for teaching; I haven’t a word against him. He’s one of the few men in England who are supposed to know their trade. But he’s too stilted and classical; there’s no sentiment in him; he don’t touch the heart of the buying public. It’s all science and draughtsmanship, and he won’t do anything to meet the market half way.”

“It’s spunky of him to stick to his convictions, anyhow,” said Matt, in low tones, provoked by his uncle’s disparagement into a recrudescent enthusiasm for Tarmigan, who had recently been weighing upon him like a nightmare.

“Bah! and how does he know his convictions are right? The public’s the best judge of art.”

“Oh!” said Matt, deprecatingly. “Should you really think that’s so?”

“Of course I think so. Would the public have me? No. And the public was right.” He looked at Matt half fiercely, as if defying him to deny it. Madame was smiling and shaking her head. “The public’s always right,” he went on, emphatically. “It’s the critics that throw the market into perpetual confusion. Such a babel of voices, all laying down what is right and what is wrong, what is art and what is not art, that it’s enough to drive a dealer crazy. For my part, I steer by the Academy; that’s my polestar, and I’m rarely out, for that’s what the public take their reckoning by. And it’s an R.A. that my boy is going to be, please God, for theories may come and theories may go, but the Academy goes on forever.”

“Dear Herbert!” murmured Madame.

“I suppose he’s awfully advanced,” said Matt, wistfully.

“Years ago he took the medal for the best copy of an Old Master at the Royal Academy Schools, where he is now just finishing his course,” explained his uncle. “And you know you can’t even begin the course without being clever.”

“No, I know,” said Matt, with a sinking of heart, for he had by this time studied the prospectus of the national art-schools and been dismayed, not so much by the anatomical information and technical expertness demanded at the entrance competition as by the slow-dragging septennial course, the drudgery of still-life and perspective and the antique, and all the tedious grind of convention. “I thought of trying to get in myself, but I’m afraid I shall have to give up the idea.”

“Oh, Herbert only drops in there now and then,” said Matthew, loftily. “He works mostly at home with his own models.”

Matt had a pang of envy.

“And then he has always had the benefit of your experience,” he said.

“Oh, I can’t pretend to have done more than encourage him.”

“Now, Matthew,” said Madame, shaking her finger fondly, “you know it was at your knee that he made his first studies.”

Matthew smiled faintly, not displeased. “I’m like Tarmigan: I can teach better than I can paint,” he said, and poured himself out a glass of wine, fascinating Matt’s eye by the play of light in the diamond on his forefinger. “If I listened to my wife, I should give up business and set up an easel again, as in my young and foolish days. Thank God,” he said, pausing to gulp down the claret, “I had sense to stop in time! What could be expected of a young man who’d lived on a farm in a God-forsaken country? Ah, your father was right! He never would allow any merit to my ships or cows.”

Red sands flitted before Matt’s vision, with lambent pools, and overhead a diaphanous rosy vapor, beyond which brooded the vast cloudless circle of the sky. Ah, God! why was the sky so blue and depthless in those days? As from dim, far-away caverns, the acrid voice of the picture-dealer reached his ears in complacent exposition: “It’s all training, and if you don’t get trained young, you might as well attempt to fly.”

Becoming conscious of a silence, Matt answered, “That’s so.”

“It’s the same with music,” went on his uncle, tapping impressively on his wineglass with his glittering forefinger. “You can’t expect a grown-up man to sit down and practise scales like a little girl in a pinafore; and even if he would, his fingers have lost their suppleness, his joints are set. I saw this clearly, and was determined my boy shouldn’t suffer as I’d done. Why, Herbert had a brush put into his hand before he could write!”

Matt’s heart sank lower.

“I should like to see his work,” he said, anxiously.

“Ha!” said Matthew, a complacent smile hovering about his lips.

“Oh yes, let him see Herbert’s work,” pleaded Madame.

“I don’t think we ought to disturb him,” said Matthew, yieldingly. “Won’t you take another glass of wine?”

“No, thank you, sir,” said Matt, who was quite faint, for his dinner had been of the slightest; and feeling the request a signal to take his leave, he rose.

“Oh yes, do let him see them,” said Madame, hurriedly. “It’s only for once.”

“Oh, well, as you’re a sort of relation,” said the father, imposingly. “But I make it a point not to interrupt him. These hours are precious; there’s not too much light at the best of times.” And, as if following Matt’s impulse, he rose and turned doorward.

“There’s no need for you to trouble, Josephine,” he said, waving her back.

As they mounted the soft-carpeted staircase, on which undraped marble statues looked down from their niches, he explained, gravely, “There’s a male model up there, you see.”

Matt nodded, awed to silence by the splendor of the staircase, up which he toiled side by side with the Vandyke beard and the velvet coat.

“Herbert, of course, uses the side door,” vouchsafed his companion, graciously, to relieve the monotony of the long ascent. “I couldn’t have his models coming through the shop.”

Matt murmured something negative, but his reply was lost in a dull thud from above. The elder man cleared the remaining stairs in alarm, and threw open the door.

“Give us a hand up, you beggar,” a piping girlish voice was saying.

On the rich carpet of the vast, elegant studio, whose glories dazzled Matt’s vision, a slim young man was sprawling on his back. Over him stood a stalwart figure, clad only in boxing-gloves.

The saturnine picture-dealer rushed forward and helped his boy up.

“It’s all right, dad,” said Herbert, in unembarrassed amusement as he was scrambling to his feet. “I just wanted to give the model’s arms a little movement during the rest. The position’s so difficult for him, I haven’t been able to get the thing right all day. Look! there’s nothing at all on the canvas; I’ve had to paint it out.”

The model had somewhat shamefacedly taken off his gloves and struck an attitude upon the throne.

“Ha!” said Matthew Strang, in vague accents. “You ought to be getting on faster with those gold-medal studies, now that you have put aside your picture for this year’s Academy. You will need all your time, you know. I’ve brought you a visitor.”

Herbert turned his face towards the door—the handsome, glowing face of a boy, beardless and clean-shaven, with candid blue eyes and tumbled flaxen hair, and the flash of white teeth accustomed to display themselves in laughter. There was his father’s interrogative mark about the arched eyebrows as he caught sight of Matt, hanging back timidly on the threshold.

The young Nova-Scotian’s heart was leaden, his soul wrapped in a gloom which had been gathering blackness ever since he had set foot in his uncle’s shop, and which the sight of the commodious studio, with its rich properties and luxurious appliances, its crimson lounges and silk drapings and fleecy rugs and gleaming marbles and bronzes, had darkened into despair. The penurious past surged back to him through a suffusion of unshed tears—tears that were salt with the sense of injustice and of sorrows unforgettable, all the creeping, irremediable years contributing their quintessence to the bitterness of this supreme moment: the chances he had missed, the lessons he had not received, the obstacles that had rather sprung up to beat him back, whose infant fingers no loving hand had ever guided, whose boyish yearnings no word of encouragement had ever sweetened, whose youth had been all distasteful labors and mean tragedies and burdens too great to bear, and whose very triumph would find none to sympathize with it, if it came, as it never could come to one so untrained, so alien from the world of art and elegant studios and all the soft things of life; driven to the scum of the streets for models at a few pence an hour, and reduced to studying attitudes from his own contortions before a bleared strip of mirror in a dingy back room; unregarded, uncared-for, unknown, an atom in that vast magic-gleaming London which had so cruelly disillusioned him, and in which even the one heart in which his own blood ran was cold and far away; his poor pre-eminence at Grainger’s, his primacy among a set of duffers, no augury of success in that fierce struggle in which Tarmigan himself had gone to the wall. Was it worth while to vex himself endlessly, swirled to and fro like a bubble on an ocean? Were it not sweeter to break, and to be resolved into the vastness and the silence?

His right hand wandered towards his hip-pocket, where his pistol lay. How good to be done with life! Then he became aware, through a semi-transparent mist, that the gracious blond boy was holding out his hand with a frank smile, and instinct drew out his own right hand in amicable response, and so the temptation was over. The poor children dependent upon him came up to memory, and he wondered at his spasm of selfish despair.

His uncle must have said words to which he had been deaf, for Herbert seemed to know who he was and why he had come.

“Welcome, fair coz,” he said, gripping Matt’s hand heartily. “I feel as if I were in Shakespeare. A moment ago I scarcely remembered I had a relation in the world. Confound it! why weren’t you a girl cousin while you were about it?”

“Herbert, don’t be rude,” said his father.

Herbert elevated his blond eyebrows. “I wish you would cultivate a sense of humor, dad,” he observed, wearily. Matt, who was responding to his grip, fascinated instantly by the boyish, sunny charm, loosed his clasp in sheer astonishment at the transition.

Matthew Strang disregarded his son’s observation, but gruffly told the model, whose attitudinizing immobility was irritating, that he need not pose for a moment or two, whereupon Herbert bade him begone altogether. “I’ve been off color all day,” he observed, explanatorily, as he counted out the model’s silver, “but the excitement of discovering I am not alone in the world is the finishing touch.”

Matthew threw a rather reproachful look at Matt, whose eyes drooped guiltily. He raised them immediately, however, in accordance with his uncle’s instructions, to admire a study of a draped figure which was hung on a wall. The coloring struck him agreeably, though he found a certain feebleness in the drawing which was equally agreeable to his jealous mood. This not displeasing impression was borne out by the other pictures and sketches for which his uncle besought his admiration: always this facile poetic coloring and this indifferent draughtsmanship, this suggestion of difficulties shirked rather than of difficulties overcome; at last seen to be due to the conventional composition, most of the works, whether in chalk or water-color or oil, being pretty landscapes or single-figure studies in simple attitudes, or, when complicated by other figures, embracing episodes which seemed to have been transferred direct from other pictures, some of which, indeed, Matt had seen either in the originals or in engravings. To his astonishment, Herbert, who had been yawning widely, drew his attention to one such little bit.

“Don’t you recognize that?” he said. “Dad did at once. It’s a quotation from Millais.”

Matt looked puzzled at the phrase.

“‘Cribbing,’ the unwise it call,” expounded Herbert, “and so did dad, till I explained to him it was only quoting. When a great writer hits off a phrase it passes into the language, and when a great painter hits off a new effect of technique, or gets a happy grouping, I contend it belongs to the craft, as much as the primitive tricks of scumbling or glazing. We praise the mellow Virgilisms in Tennyson, but we are down upon the painter who repeats another’s lines. The Old Masters borrowed unblushingly, but we are such sticklers for originality, which, after all, only means plagiarizing nature. Didn’t Raphael crib his composition from Orcagna, and Michael Angelo copy Masaccio, and Tintoretto turn Michael Angelo’s Samson into Jupiter? Why, in the Academy at Venice I saw—”

“Have you been to Venice?” cried Matt, eagerly.

“Herbert has been to all the galleries of Europe,” said his father, impressively. “We travel abroad every year. It’s part of the education of a painter. How are you to know Bellini and Tintoretto if you don’t go to Venice? Velasquez and Titian cannot be fully studied by any one who has not been in Madrid; and the man who is ignorant of the treasures of the Louvre or of the Uffizi at Florence, where”—he interpolated with simulated facetiousness, laying his hand on Herbert’s shoulder—“I hope to see my boy’s portrait painted by his own hand one day—”

“Look at this queer stone scarab,” interrupted Herbert, annoyed. “I picked it up in Egypt; comes from inside a mummy-case.”

Egypt! The word fell like music on Matt’s ears. The rose-light of romance illumined the uncouth beetle. Herbert hastened to exhibit his other curios: coins, medals, cameos, scarves, yataghans, pottery, ivories, with a cursive autobiographical commentary, passing rapidly to another object whenever his father threatened to take up the thread of autobiography.

And as Matt handled these picturesque trophies of travel, that wafted into the studio the aroma of foreign bazaars, the wave of hopelessness resurged, swamping even the fresh hopefulness engendered by the discovery that his cousin’s craftsmanship was not so far beyond his hand, after all; all those marvellous, far-off old-world places that had disengaged themselves from his lonely readings, fair mirages thrown upon a phantasmal sky, not vaguely, but with the sensuous definiteness of a painter’s vision, jostling one another like the images in a shaken kaleidoscope in an atmosphere of romantic poetry: Venice, dreaming on its waters in an enchanted moonlight; Paris, all life and light; Spain, with cathedrals and gypsies and cavaliers tinkling guitars; Sicily, with gray olive-trees and sombre cypresses and terraced gardens and black-eyed peasant women with red snoods; the Rhine, haunted by nixies and robber-chiefs, meandering ’twixt crumbling castles perched on wooded crags; Egypt, with its glow and color, all lotus-blossoms and bulrushes and crocodiles and jasper idols, and bernoused Arabs galloping on silken chargers in a land of sand and sphinxes and violet shadows; the Indies, east of the sun and west of the moon, full of palm-trees and nautch-girls and bayaderes—a shifting panorama of strange exotic cities, steeped in romance and history and sunshine and semi-barbarian splendors, where the long desolation of his native winter never came, nor the clammy vapors of Britain; cities of splendid dream, where anything might happen and nothing could seem unreal; where Adventure waited masked at every street corner, and Love waved a white hand from every lattice. And in a flood of sadness, that had yet something delicious in it, he pitied himself for having been cut off from all these delectable experiences, which the happier Herbert had so facilely enjoyed.

“I know you are bored, father,” said Herbert, pausing amid his exposition. “You want to get back to business, and Matt and I want to yarn.”

Matt’s bitterness was soothed. It thrilled him to be called Matt by this rich, refined, travelled young gentleman.

“Well, good-bye, my young friend,” said his uncle, holding out his hand for the first time. “I dare say I shall see you again. Ha! Drop in any time you’re passing. I think your mother will be wanting you presently, Herbert.”

He moved to the door, then paused, and, turning his head uneasily, said: “And if you ever want any advice, you know, don’t hesitate to ask me.” And with a faint friendly nod of his Vandyke beard he went out, closing the door carefully behind him.

“Awful bore, the governor,” said Herbert, stretching his arms. “He never knows when he’s de trop.”

Matt did not know what de trop was, except when he saw it printed, but the disrespectful tone jarred upon him.

“You owe him a good deal, it seems to me,” he replied, simply.

“Hullo, hullo, my young Methodist parson!” and Herbert threw back his head in a ringing laugh which made his white teeth gleam gayly. “Why, do you think we owe anything to our parents? They didn’t marry to oblige us. I am only a tool for his ambitions.”

“What do you mean?” murmured Matt.

“Oh, well, I oughtn’t to talk about it, perhaps, but you’re my first cousin—the first cousin I’ve ever had”—Matt smiled, fascinated afresh—”and, after all, it’s an open secret that he wants the name of Strang to live in the annals of painting—if it couldn’t be Matthew Strang, it must be Herbert Strang, and so he belongs to the minor artists’ clubs. Of course, he can’t get into the Limners’, though he contrives to be there on business pretty often, and consoles himself by using their note-paper; but at the Gillray and the Reynolds’ they dare not blackball him, because the committee always owe him money, or want to sell him pictures; but I dare say they laugh at him behind his back when he jaws to them about art in general, and my talents in particular. It’s confoundedly annoying. Oh, I’ve been forgetting to smoke. What can be the matter with me?” And he pulled out a lizard-skin case, from which Matt, not liking to refuse, drew forth a cigarette.

“But what good does he do by belonging to those clubs?” he asked.

“Oh, he likes it, for one thing,” replied Herbert, striking a match and holding it to Matt’s cigarette. “My belief is, he only went into the picture business to rub shoulders with artists, though where the charm comes in I have never been able to find out, for a duller, a more illiterate set of fellows I never wish to meet. Shop is all they can talk. And then, of course, it’s good for business. But in the background lurks, I feel sure, the idea of advancing my interests, of accumulating back-stairs influence, of pulling the ropes that shall at last lift me into the proud position of R.A. Nay, who knows?” he said, puffing out his first wreath of smoke—“President of the Royal Academy!” And he laughed melodiously.

“Well, but—” began Matt, inhaling the delicious scent of the tobacco.

“Well, but,” echoed Herbert. “That’s just it. My tastes are not considered in the matter at all. Art! Art! Art! Nothing but Art rammed down my throat till I’m sick of the sight of a canvas. I was a connoisseur in my cradle, and sucked a maul-stick instead of a monkey-on-a-stick, and I live in the midst of Art and out of the profits of it. It’s pictures, pictures everywhere, and not a—Oh, have a brandy-and-soda, won’t you? Don’t stand about as if you were going.” Matt obediently dropped upon a lounge that yielded deliciously to his pressure. The fragrant smoke curled about his face, while his cousin made pleasant play with popping corks and gurgling liquids.

“But don’t you really like painting?” he asked, in astonishment.

“I like some things in it well enough,” replied Herbert, “but it’s such beastly drudgery. All this wretched copying of models is no better than photography. And a camera would do the tiding in a thousandth part of the time. I always work from photographs when I can.”

“But is that artistic?” said Matt, slightly shocked.

“It’s the only thing worthy of the artist’s dignity. The bulk of art is journeyman’s work. Besides, lots of ’em do it nowadays—with magic-lanterns to boot! Because one man by a fluke happens to be a better drawing-machine than another, is he to be counted the greater artist?” Matt felt small before this answer to his secret criticism. “Did you ever see the camera-obscura at the Crystal Palace? That does landscapes in a jiffy that we should go messing over for months. And then think of the looking-glass! They talk of Rembrandt and Franz Hals. I’ll back a bedroom mirror to put more life into its portraits than either of ’em. Why, if some process were invented—a sort of magic mirror to fix the image, living and colored, in the glass—here’s luck!”—he clinked his glass against Matt’s—”the governor would have to shut up shop.”

“Yes, but the mirror hasn’t got any imagination,” urged Matt, setting down his glass refreshed, the glow of brandy in his throat lending added intellectual charm to the discussion.

“Oh, I don’t know! There are distorting mirrors,” rejoined Herbert, laughing. “But you are quite right. Art is selection; nature À travers d’un tempÉrament. Art is autobiography. But painting, which somehow monopolizes the name of Art, is really the lowest form of Art. Nature is full of scenes quite as good as Art. Doesn’t Ruskin say an artist has got to copy Nature? But is there anything in Nature so closely akin to a poem, or to Ruskin’s own prose, or to a symphony of Beethoven, as a moonlit sea or a beautiful woman is to a picture? What is the skylark’s song compared to Shelley’s, or the music of the sea to Mozart’s? The real creation is in the other arts, which are called literature and music. They are an addition to Nature—something extra. Painting and acting—these are mere reduplications of Nature. Perhaps I was unfair to painting. That, at least, fixes the beauty of Nature, but acting is merely an evanescent imitation of the temporary.”

The younger man sat half bewildered beneath this torrent of words and quotations; the respect Herbert had lost in his eyes by his draughtsmanship (a trifling matter under Herbert’s disdainful analysis) returning, multiplied to reverence, and with a fresh undercurrent of humility and envy. How much there was to know in the world, how many languages and books and arts! How could he mix with Herbert and his set without being found out?

“That’s why I prefer literature and music,” said Herbert. “But then I’m not my own master, like you—you lucky beggar. If I had my way, pictures would be nothing but color-schemes, sheer imagination, with no relation to truth of Nature. What do I care how her shadows fall, if they don’t fall gracefully? And then why must my lines imitate Nature’s? That’s where the Japanese are so great. Don’t smoke that fag-end! Have another!” And he threw his cigarette-case across to his magnetized listener. It was the first time in his hard, busy existence Matt had ever heard any one talk like a book, discussing abstract relations of Art and Life.

“I wish I knew as much as you,” he said, naÏvely.

“I wish I was as free as you,” retorted Herbert, laughingly; “though I certainly wouldn’t employ my liberty as you do. What in Heaven’s name made you want to study Art? I did laugh when the governor told the mater of your letter. I was just in the roughest grind, and felt like writing you on the sly to warn you.”

“I don’t think I should have taken your advice,” said Matt, with an embarrassed laugh.

“But what made you come to London, anyhow? Why didn’t you go to Paris?”

“To Paris!”

“Yes; there’s no teaching to be got in London.”

“No?” Matt turned pale.

“No. At least, that’s what everybody says in England. Paris alone has the tradition. Once it was Holland, once Florence, and now it’s Paris. Why, in Paris any fellows who club together can get the biggest men to visit them free, gratis, for nothing. Here the big pots prefer the society of the swells.”

“Then why are you not in Paris?” asked Matt, rallying.

“Ah! That’s where my governor is such an idiot. He pretends to think there’s more chance for a man who’s been through the Academy Schools; he gets known to the R.A.’s, and all that. But his real reason is that he’s afraid to trust me in Paris by myself.”

“No?” said Matt, in sympathetic incredulity.

“Yes; that’s why he had this room knocked into a studio for me—it always reminds me of a nursery, at the top of the house-and even selects my female models, knows their parents, and that sort of thing. It’s all sheer selfishness, I tell you, and I’m just sick of all this perpetual fussing and worrying over me, as if I were a prize pig or a race-horse. A man of twenty-three not allowed to have a studio or chambers of his own! You don’t realize how lucky you are, my boy. If I could afford it I’d chuck up the governor to-morrow. But I’m dependent on him for every farthing. And all he allows me for pocket-money is—well, you’d never guess—”

Matt did not make the attempt; he judged Herbert might think meanly of even a pound a week, but he did not dare to hazard a guess.

“Three hundred a year! And out of that I’ve got to get my clothes and pay my models, confound ’em!”

Matt stared in startled, reverential envy.

“Yes, you may well stare. Why, you know yourself if you buy a woman a bracelet it runs away with a month’s allowance. But, talking of clothes, you’ll have to get better than those things, if you ever want me to be seen with you.”

“These are quite new,” murmured Matt, in alarm.

“And original,” added Herbert. “I’ll have to introduce you to my tailor.”

“Is—is he dear?” Matt stammered.

“If you pay him,” said Herbert, dryly.

“Oh, I always pay,” protested Matt.

“You’re lucky. I have to economize.”

Matt thought suddenly of William Gregson with a throb of gratitude. At least his wardrobe boasted of unimpeachable boots. Then he suddenly espied a small battalion of foot-gear ranged against a wall—black boots, brown boots, patent shoes, brown shoes, boots with laces, boots with beautiful buttons—and he relapsed into his primitive humility. Uneasy lest Herbert should insist on equipping him similarly, he was glad to remember that Herbert’s mother was expecting her boy, and with a murmur to that effect rose to go.

“Nonsense!” said Herbert, “I’m not due till dinner-time; but if you must be going, I think I’ll just stroll a little. You go towards Oxford Street, don’t you?”

“Ye-es,” faltered Matt, who was a little frightened at the idea that his dainty cousin might accompany him to his lodging.

“All right. I’ll just go to the club to see if there are any letters. There’s another of your privileges, confound you! I can’t have any letters come to my own place.”

“Why not?”

“Why not? Do you think I’d have the governor nosing my correspondence? He’d be always asking questions. It’s a jolly little club—I’ll put you up for it if you like. Take another cigarette; take half a dozen; put ’em in your pocket.”

As they were going down-stairs, Matt said he would like to say good-bye to Madame, so they passed into the sitting-room.

“Au revoir, my dear nephew, au revoir!” said Madame, shaking both his hands. “I said you and Herbert would love each other. You will find your sixpence awaiting you on the desk.”

CHAPTER IV
THE PICTURE-MAKERS

“Funny I’ve never been to see your place. I must look you up one day.” Thus Herbert at uncertain intervals, but he never carried out his threat. His life was too full, and he had been accustomed from childhood to have the mountain come to Mohammed. And so, gradually, Matt, who had at first lived half apprehensive of an exposure, half wishful that Herbert should become rudely aware of his real position, surrendered himself to the magnetism of his cousin’s manner, and weakly tried to live up to that young gentleman’s misconception of him whenever they were together; even submitting to a morning suit and an evening dress from Herbert’s tailor for an undefined sum at an unmentioned date. For if the disadvantages of Herbert’s society were many, if he had to starve for days to return Herbert’s club hospitality at a restaurant, still he was satisfied the game was worth the candle. From Herbert he felt himself acquiring polish and refinement and impeccable English and social lore; Herbert was an intellectual stimulus, with thoughts to give away and the newest poets to lend; Herbert was bright and gay, charming away the vapors of youthful despondency. But, above all, Herbert sometimes allowed him to work in his studio, amid the sensuous beauty of draping and decoration and statuary that lapped his artistic nature like a soft summer sea—a privilege inestimable, but, in view of the mere model, worth at least all the extra money this friendship cost him. It befell thus:

On Matt’s second visit Herbert said, good-naturedly:

“I’ve just laid my palette. You sit down. Let’s see what you can do.”

“May I?” cried Matt, eagerly. There was a costume-model on the throne—a dark-eyed beauty in Oriental drapery.

Herbert relinquished the brush and threw himself upon his back on the couch, puffing lazily at his cigarette.

“By Jove!” he said, after ten minutes, “you’ve put that in all right. But what a juicy style you’ve got! Where did you get that from?”

“I can’t do it any other way,” said Matt, apologetically.

“The governor told me you’re under Tarmigan. He never taught you that?”

“No; but that’s the way I’ve always worked. I did a lot of portraits in Nova Scotia.”

“The devil you did! No wonder you’ve made money, confound you! I thought you were a blooming ignoramus just come over to learn your pictorial pothooks and hangers.”

“I thought so, too,” said Matt, flushing with pleasure and modesty.

“None of your sarcasm, you beggar. You can finish the head if you like.”

“Thank you,” said Matt, flutteringly. He felt as if Herbert were heaping coals of fire upon his own head, repaying his first secret depreciation by over-generous praise. He painted away bravely, soon losing himself in the happy travail of execution.

“I must come down to your place and see your work,” said Herbert, looking up from the volume of Swinburne in which he had immersed himself.

“Oh, there isn’t much!” said Matt, hastily. “I’ll bring you some little things next time. Only I don’t want your father to see them—they’re not for sale.”

“You’re quite right,” said Herbert. “Don’t show ’em to him. Hush!”

“What’s the matter?” asked Matt, turning his head.

“Talk of the—Old Gentleman,” said Herbert.

The brush dropped from the painter’s palsied fingers. He felt like one caught red-handed. He had already come in, somewhat surreptitiously, through the side door, in obedience to Herbert’s recommendation, and to be found using Herbert’s appliances and model would be the acme of guiltiness.

The alarm was false, but thenceforward “The Old Gentleman” indicated Matthew Strang the elder. For they had frequent occasion to fear his advent, since Matt came often, tempted from his gloomy back room to the beautiful light studio, where he was allowed not only to do bits of Herbert’s work while Herbert read or gossiped with the model, but occasionally to set up another easel and use the same model. But they were only detected together twice by the Vandyke beard and the velvet coat, and on one occasion Herbert had had time to resume the brush, and on another to pose Matt as a model.

“The Old Gentleman’s rather grumpy about you,” he admitted, with his customary candor. “I’ve had to tell the servant not to mention your coming so often. The mater’s mashed on you, and I suppose he’s a bit jealous. She wanted to ask you to our dinner-party last night—we had two Associates, and a Scotch Academician, and an American millionaire who buys any rot, and an art critic who praises it—but he said one didn’t give dinner-parties for one’s relations, but for strangers.”

As Matt had already dined once en famille, with Madame’s guileless homage at his side to put him at ease, he did not feel himself hardly used.

His position with “The Old Gentleman” was not improved by his demeanor on an occasion when, meeting him in the doorway, Herbert’s father, instead of raising remonstrant eyebrows, astonished him by asking if he would like to see the masterpieces he had in stock. Matt did not know that this generous offer was due to the death of a member of the Institute whose watercolors had been accumulating on Matthew Strang’s hands, and who now, even before his funeral, was showing signs of a posthumous “boom;” he replied eagerly that nothing could be a greater favor. The picture-dealer waved his jewelled hand with pompous geniality, and, mounting one flight of stairs, with the hand on Matt’s shoulder, ushered him into the holy of holies, a chamber religious with purple curtains and hushed with soft carpets, where the more precious pictures reposed behind baize veils that for possible purchasers were lifted with a reverent silence bespeaking a hundred extra guineas. Long habit of ritual awe made Matthew Strang’s hands pious even before his nephew.

But his nephew’s expected ecstasies were tempered by unexpected criticism. In an eminent Academician’s portrait of a lady, Matt pointed out that the eyes were wrong, that pupils should be round, not squashy, and that the hot shadows made by the Indian reds under the nose were inspired by Romney. He questioned the veracity of a landscape by a costly name, demurring to the light on the under sides of the leaves as impossible under the conditions depicted; and in a historical composition by an old English master he found a lack of subtlety in the legs, and a stringy feeling throughout.

All this wanton depreciation of goods by one who was not even an interested bargainer galled the picture-dealer, conscious of overflowing good-nature, and prepared for a natural return in breathless adoration. So when Matt suggested that in a celebrated picture of a sea-beach the sea had no fluidity and was falling on the fishermen’s heads, he lost his temper and cried, sarcastically: “I think you had better open a school for R.A.’s, young man!”

Matt flushed, feeling he had been impertinent; then his sense of justice repudiated the rebuke. It was of no use pretending a thing was right when it wasn’t, he protested. He didn’t profess to get things right himself, and he only wished he could do anything half as good as the worst of these pictures. But he did know when he was wrong, even if it wouldn’t come right for all his sweating and fuming.

“A young man oughtn’t to talk till he can paint,” interrupted his uncle, severely.

“But you know what Dr. Johnson says, sir,” Matt remonstrated. “If you can’t make a plum-pudding, it’s no sign you can’t judge one.”

“Plum-puddings and pictures are very different things,” said Matthew Strang, stiffly, as though insulted by an implicit association with a pastry-cook.

“My, that’s ripping!” cried Matt, abandoning the argument at the sudden sight of a fine mellow piece of portrait-painting. “How the Old Masters got the grays! Oh, why don’t people wear wigs nowadays?”

This outburst of enthusiasm made the private exhibition close more auspiciously than had seemed probable, but Matt was never again invited to inspect the sacred treasures. His relations with his relatives came to be limited to morning visits to Herbert, whose stairs he ascended half secretly, to watch the progress of his cousin’s studies for an ambitious picture of “Daniel before Nebuchadnezzar,” the models for which he also used himself. He left his own studies behind at Herbert’s request—though reluctantly, for he was not at all satisfied with them—as a species of payment for the privilege. When, through his interest in this coming masterpiece of Herbert’s, and under the fascination of this delightful and flattering friendship, he forgot his pride and fell into the habit of regular morning work in Herbert’s company, lunch somehow came up regularly for three, though Madame was not supposed to be aware of his presence. Those were joyous lunches, full of laughter and levity, made picturesque by the romantic dress or undress of the third party, and extra palatable for Matt—when his first reluctance wore off—by the fact that they saved dinners.

“Daniel before Nebuchadnezzar” was intended for next year’s Academy, Herbert told him, and he gathered from his cousin’s casual observations that it had also to be submitted beforehand to the professors at the schools, for there were strange cramping conditions as to the size of the canvas and the principal figure. But he was less interested in its destination than in its draughtsmanship. He saw the tableau in his mind’s eye the moment Herbert told him he was engaged upon it, for the scene had often figured itself to his fancy in those far-off days when his mother read the Bible to her helpless children by random prickings. Nebuchadnezzar’s dream was one of the lucky chapters, to which Matt listened without distraction as the narrative unrolled itself pictorially before his inner vision. He rapidly sketched his conception, then found he disliked it, and ultimately remembered he had unconsciously reproduced the grouping of figures in the illustration in his mother’s Bible, one of those he had colored in his childish naughtiness. Herbert protested this was no drawback, but Matt went away brooding over a more artistic arrangement, and dreamed that he was mangled by lions in a den. But in the morning he brought a new grouping for Herbert’s consideration. This Herbert picked to pieces as being against the canons.

“Don’t forget it’s for the Academy,” he said. “We mustn’t make mistakes in grammar. Some of the old buffers are worse than Tarmigan.”

“Damn Tarmigan!” cried Matt, but he had to admit ruefully that his scheme was full of solecisms. He had by this time as full an acquaintance with the rules as his senior, but with Herbert they had become instinctive. It was with a renewed sense of inferiority to his cousin, paradoxically combined with an inward raging against the Lindley Murrays of art, that Matt abandoned point after point under Herbert’s searching criticism. Herbert’s gift of pulling other people’s ideas to pieces amounted to genius. But he abandoned his original sketch also, dismissed his projected models, and devoted himself to arguing out the composition afresh.

Under the banter of the art-critic smoking cynically on the sofa, Matt was put upon his mettle to group all the figures and dispose the lines so as to escape the pitfalls lurking on every side, and likewise satisfy the conditions of the pedantic professors.

“We must get as much subject as possible into it,” explained Herbert. “They give you such a small space—only fifty by forty—that you must crowd all you know into it.”

Gradually the composition took shape, with infinite discussion, daily renewed. Matt was for pillars with curious effects of architecture. Herbert objected that pillars would make the perspective too difficult, and only consented on the laughing stipulation that Matt should work out the angles. And Herbert was very averse from Matt’s suggestions of strange original attitudes for the figures.

“That ’ll make some awfully stiff foreshortening,” he grumbled.

“What does it matter? You’ll have models,” Matt would reply.

“It’s all very well. You haven’t got to do the work,” Herbert would retort.

And when the grouping was settled, the color and the drapery brought fresh argumentation, the young men working as at a chess problem till the puzzle of arriving at the original without deserting the Academic was solved. And as, in the solution of a chess problem by a pair of heads, the suggestion of the winning moves has been so obscured by the indefinite suggestion of abortive moves by both, that neither remembers to which the final discovery of the right track was due, so Matt would have been surprised to be told that the ideas that had been retained were all his, and the ideas that had been rejected were all Herbert’s. The thought of apportioning their shares in the final scheme never crossed his mind, even though it was his hand that always held the experimentative pencil. Indeed, the technical interest of the task had absorbed every other thought, and the details of the tentative were lost in the triumph of the achieved, and obscured as by a cigarette cloud of happy mornings.

And then Herbert told his father he must have new models fresh to studios.

“I don’t want ’em from Haverstock Hill or Lillie Road,” he said—”women who’ve been hung in every gallery. I don’t want your Italians from Hatton Garden, or professionals that any of the other fellows might get hold of and extract my ideas from. Besides, new faces will give me a better chance.”

And Matthew Strang the Elder recognized there was some reason in his son’s request; but he pointed out it was not so easy to go outside the stock families, especially for figure models, and that old hands often helped the painter. But Herbert easily overrode his objections. It was only the conventional attitudinizings and foreshortenings which they understood, the quotations of art, which he was now about to abandon in deference to paternal prejudice; and so Matthew Strang, morbidly solicitous, obediently brought picturesque Orientals for Daniel and the King and the satraps and the counsellors, and blushing brunettes for the beauties of the Court; and Herbert set to work to reproduce in large on the canvas Matt’s rough charcoal scheme of the whole, and his own or Matt’s studies of the parts; and when Herbert blundered, Matt suggested with pastel a change of tone or color or outline, sometimes even taking up the brush when Herbert was lazy—as Herbert often was. Matt was never surprised to find the work no more advanced than when he had gone away the morning before, for Herbert’s mind was on many and more important things. The Academy students were rehearsing a burlesque which he had written for their dramatic society, and he sometimes slipped out to the rehearsals, lamenting to Matt that, through his father’s insistence on steady work, he could not even play in his own piece. The only recreation allowed him was a ride in the Park on a hired hack, and even that, he grumbled, was to enable him to salute cantering R.A.’s. Sometimes he went to tea with the girl students at restaurants. Sometimes he went to balls, and was too tired on the day after to do anything but describe them. They were always painters’ dances; “The Old Gentleman blocks others,” he said. On one occasion the host was an R.A., whose son was a fellow-student at the schools, and then “The Old Gentleman chortled.”

Then there was the students’ ball, to which he convoyed Matt, who was quite dazzled by the elegance and refinement of the ladies, and almost afraid to speak to his partners, and torn afresh with envy of the beautiful life from which he had been, and must long be, shut out; not losing his discomfort till, after the supper (at which he tasted champagne for the first time), Herbert’s special circle danced the Lancers with a zest and entrain that horrified some of the matrons, and brought back to Matt the dear old nights when he took the barn floor with little Ruth Hailey, under the placid gaze of the cows and amid the odors of the stable and the hay-mow.

For other memorable experiences, too, Matt was indebted to his easy-going cousin. There was Herbert’s club, the Bohemian, a cosey little place favored by actors and journalists, caricatures of whose sensuous faces lined the walls in company with oil-paintings and sketches more sensuous still. Matt felt measureless reverence for the men he brushed against here. He had seen some of them before in the illustrated papers which he read in shop-windows or penny news-rooms or Herbert’s studio, and he trembled lest they should detect, from his embarrassment amid the varied knives and forks and glasses, that he was only a boor with less education than the waiters. He wondered what the clever, cultured people—scraps of whose conversation floated across to him amid the popping of soda-water corks—would think if they knew he had planted potatoes, chopped logs, made sugar in the woods, and climbed masts and steeples. In the new snobbishness with which their society had infected him he could not see that these things were education, not humiliation, and he was glad that even Herbert knew little of his history, and asked less. Of other people’s histories, on the other hand, Matt heard a great deal. “Bubbles” had robbed him of his belief in royal virtue; in the smoking-room of the Bohemians society fell to pieces like a house of cards, in building which, as Herbert once said, the knaves alone had been used. It was a racing, dicing, drinking, swindling, fornicating fraternity, worm-eaten with hypocrisy. Sincerity or simplicity was “all my eye;” there was always money or a woman or position in the background.

“They talk a lot of scandal,” Matt once complained.

“My dear Matt,” remonstrated Herbert, “it’s not scandal; it’s gossip. Brixton gossips about who marries whom, Bohemia about who lives with whom. Scandal implies censure.”

Despite the scandal (or the gossip), Matt was full of curiosity to see this strange new life of clubs and restaurants and theatres (to which Herbert sometimes got paper admissions), this feverish realm of intellect and gayety, where nobody seemed to want for anything; but it sometimes came over him with an odd flash of surprise and bitterness, as he caught the gleam of white scented shoulders, or saw heavy-jowled satyrs swilling champagne, that all this settled luxury had been going on while he was tramping the snowy roads of what might have been another planet.

The feeling wore off as the London season advanced, and the tide of luxurious life rolled along the great sunny thoroughfares, or flecked the midnight streets with darting points of fire. His Puritan conscience, curiously persisting beneath all the scepticism engendered by his mother’s tragedy, had at first acquiesced but uneasily in the unscriptural view of life that seemed to prevail around him. But fainter and fainter grew its prickings, the sensuous in him ripened in this liberal atmosphere, and that Greek conception of a beautiful world which, budding for him in solitude, had been almost nipped by the same cruel tragedy, flowered now in the heats of an ardent city.

“The Old Gentleman” was in such good-humor at the surprising progress of Herbert’s “Daniel before Nebuchadnezzar” that Madame’s gentle remonstrance that he ought to do something for Matt touched a responsive chord, and before the Academy sending-in day Matt had the privilege of being escorted by his uncle, in company with Herbert, to a conversazione at the Reynolds Club, of which the dealer was a member. Herbert was soon lost in the crush of second-rate painters and engravers and obscurely famous visitors who gathered before the members’ would-be Academy pictures that lined the walls, or the second-rate entertainers who struck attitudes on the daÏs; but Matt was too nervous amid this congestion of celebrities to detach himself from his uncle, who did the honors grandly, pointing out the lions of the club with a proprietorial air. Matt could not but feel that his uncle (who was of the swallow-tailed minority) was himself one of the lions of the club, and in very truth he was its most distinguished-looking member. “The refreshments are not gratis,” he told Matt, “but of course you can have anything you like at my expense. Will you have a cup of coffee, or are you one of those degenerate young men who can’t live without whiskey-and-water?” But Matt had no appetite for anything; he was too fluttered by this close contact with the giants of the brush. He listened eagerly to morsels of their dialogue, strained his vision to see them through the smoky, lamplit air; critical as he might have been, and was, before their work, the men themselves were shrouded in a vague splendor of achievement. They had all been hung.

There seemed a good deal of talk about a virulent article of comprehensive condemnation in the art columns of the Saturday Spectator; everybody seemed to have read it and nobody to have written it. For the rest, compliments crossed like smiling couples in the quadrille.

“What a stunning landscape that is of yours, Rapper!” said Wilfred Smith, a journalist so ignorant of painting that he was suspected of art criticism. “Quite like a Corot.”

“Oh, it’s nothing; just knocked off for a color-blind old Johnny who admires me,” replied Rapper, deprecatingly. He was a moon-faced man with a double eyeglass on a gold cord. “It’s rotten, really; I’m awfully ashamed of it.” And he elbowed his way towards it.

“So he ought to be, and so ought you to be ashamed, Wilfred,” said Morrison, the poet of pessimism and music-halls. “It’s just like those splashes of silvery gray they sell for Corots on the Boulevards.”

“That’s what I meant,” said Wilfred. “Didn’t you see I was guying him? Hullo, Clinch, I’ve been admiring that water-color of yours. What an exquisite face the girl has!”

“It isn’t a water-color, you —— fool; it’s a pastel,” said Clinch, gruffly.

“That’s what I meant—not an oil-color,” replied Wilfred, unabashed.

Matt stared with interest at the picture, which was just beside him. The face was indeed exquisite with the peculiar delicacy of pastel. He looked at the painter’s own face, coarse and splotched, the teeth fouled by endless tobacco. It was as though Pan should paint Psyche.

“I see the Saturday Spectator doesn’t understand your ‘Carolina,’ Clinch,” said the poet, smiling.

Clinch damned the Saturday Spectator in a string of unlovely oaths, which were drowned by the music of a violin and a piano. He did not care a twopenny damn what people scribbled about him; his pictures were there, just the same.

“But what does ‘Carolina’ mean, old man?” said the poet, appealingly.

Clinch replied that literary fellows were invariably sanguinary fools who fancied that painting meant things and could be explained in words. He had just been reading about the significance of Leonardo’s backgrounds in some rotten book on the Renaissance. In reality those bits of landscape must have been put in and painted out a dozen times before Leonardo had struck the color-harmony he tried after. Morrison retorted, that if the art-critic could paint he would become a partisan, tied to his own talent. As it was, he could approach other men’s pictures without prejudice.

“But also without knowledge,” Clinch replied, goaded. He pointed out brutally that to learn painting meant to learn a new set of symbols. “If you wanted to paint that lamp,” he said, “you’d probably put down a—— line to get that edge, and so lose all the—— softness. A real line wouldn’t look a—— bit like the real thing. Same with color; real red wouldn’t give red. Painting is all subterfuge, optical illusion. Color and form are only an affair of relations.”

He went on to explain, with punctilious profanities, that to study the relation of that lamp to the piano-lid was enough for a picture; treated perfectly, there would be a poetry and mystery about it. Beauty, too, was only an affair of relations, and in “Carolina” he had been trying to get a beautiful relation between two ugly things, and an early Georgian feeling into a nineteenth-century interior, with a scientific accuracy of tones known only to modern French art.

Matt listened eagerly, wincing a little at the livelier oaths, but conscious of piquant perspectives, of novel artistic vision, which, if not quite intelligible, was in refreshing contrast with Tarmigan’s old-fashioned orthodoxy.

“But you had the same woman in your picture of the ‘Salvation Lass,’” persisted the poet.

Clinch explained that if writing chaps knew what it was to hunt for a satisfactory model, they’d thank their stars they didn’t know a palette from a planchette. A “swell woman” that really expressed your idea you couldn’t get to sit for you, and if you could get her you couldn’t swear at her. Besides, it was his ambition to create a new type of feminine beauty, and impose her on his period—une femme de Clinch! Wilfred Smith took mental notes, prepared henceforward to expound Clinch to an ignorant world.

“It’s about time he got a new model, anyway,” he said, when the repulsive-looking artist had moved off.

“Or painted her,” added Morrison, dryly.

Matt had a flash of resentment. The picture was to him a dainty dream of cool color and graceful form. Despite his association with Herbert, he did not yet understand the temperament that strides to Wit over Truth’s body.

“Isn’t it funny a man like that should draw such refined women?” he could not help remarking to his cicerone.

Matthew Strang assumed an oracular expression. “Art’s just a knack,” he said. “You’ve got to be born with it. I wasn’t, more’s the pity; but Herbert makes up for it, thank Heaven! Art’s got nothing to do with character. I’ve paid many a man to do me so many easel-pictures a year, and do you suppose I ever got them? The rogues get drunk or die or something, but they never come up to time.”

Matt was puzzled. If Art demanded anything, it seemed to him it was steadfastness and sobriety. The truth about it seemed to lie in those lines he had read in a volume of Matthew Arnold, borrowed from Herbert:

A sudden fear that he was not a genius himself was like a vivisector’s knife through his heart, laying bare with painful incision its secret hope.

“Do you think Clinch gets his effects without bothering?” he asked, with anxiety.

“O heavens! no,” said Matthew Strang, authoritatively. “I once watched him at work. He was squatted on a tiny stool, looking up at his picture, and painting upward. He had a cigarette in his mouth, which he was always relighting. Every now and then he would sigh heavily, or swear at himself or his model, and sometimes he would go and lie on the hearth-rug and stare solemnly at the canvas; then jump up, give one touch, swear if it went wrong, paint it out, and then go and stand in the corner with his face to the wall, probably in meditation, but looking exactly like a naughty little boy at school.”

Matt smiled, half at the picture of Clinch in the corner, half from relief at finding that even men who swore and drank far more than he did suffered quite as acutely in the parturition of the Beautiful. He fell back on the theory of an essential inner delicacy behind the occasionally coarse envelope of artistic genius, just as grossness could lurk beneath a gentlemanly refinement.

They ultimately found Herbert in the billiard-room, with a cue in one hand and a “soda-and-whiskey” in the other. “I don’t want to look at the pictures,” he protested. “If they’re decent I’ll see them in the Academy, and if they’re rot it’s waste of time seeing them at all. As for the entertainment, you can get a better at any music-hall—at least, so I’ve been told.” Nevertheless, he himself took Matt to another conversazione the same week, the far more homely gathering of the St. George’s Sketching Club, where the refreshments were gratis and evening dress was taboo, and really famous people scrambled for the bread-and-cheese and beer, of which there was not enough, and members disported themselves in their models’ costumes for the edification of a company which had turned its back on their pictures. For the Academy itself Matt paid his shilling, into such extravagant habits had he slipped since the days of his arrival in London, when a National Gallery catalogue was beyond his far fatter purse. But he came away much less inspired than from that momentous visit, his imagination untouched, save once or twice, as by Erle-Smith’s personalized projections of mediÆval romance, in which the absence of real atmosphere seemed only natural. There were so many smooth portraits of uninteresting people that he was reminded drearily of his Nova-Scotian drudgery, when his heaven-scaling spirit had to stoop to portray and please some tedious farmer who was sometimes not even picturesque. It did not occur to him how unfair was the latent comparison with the National Gallery; he forgot that Art is short and the Academy long, that one can no more expect a batch of great pictures every year than a batch of great novels or of great symphonies.

Tarmigan had a picture of “The Rape of the Sabines.” It was hung on the line, and Grainger’s was very proud of it. In the discussion on the Academy (which supplied the class with the materials for a fortnight’s carping) it was the only picture that escaped even “Bubbles’s” depreciation, though he declared he would never himself paint like that, which the curly-headed wag eagerly admitted. One of the students had secured a place in the “skies,” and his success made Matt regret he himself had not dared to send in.

Grainger’s own contribution had been rejected, which made his pupils think more highly of themselves.

Matt was more interested in the Azure Art Gallery, a little exhibition (mainly of landscapes with violet shadows) held by some young men about whom Herbert was enthusiastic; for they did not attempt, said he, to vie either with the camera or the conte. “If painting be an art at all,” he contended, “it can only be so by virtue of ignoring Nature. As Goethe said, ‘We call art Art because it is not Nature.’ The musician works up notes, the poet syllables into a music unlike anything in Nature, and so must the painter work up Nature’s colors and forms under the sole guidance of his artistic instinct. And whatever can be better expressed in words has no place in painting. These young men’s pictures tell no stories, and no truths either. They are merely concerned with color and line.”

Matt afterwards found that, with the exception of a couple of Scotchmen, these young men by no means accepted Herbert’s account of their aims; indeed, they rather regarded it as satirical, for to give truer impressions of Nature was precisely their boast and glory. Although Matt could not always credit them with success in this, still he found a note of life and fantasy in their work. He was especially struck by Cornpepper’s “Chimney on Fire in Fitzroy Street”—a flight of sparks falling and curving in a golden rain, in vivid contrast with the dark, starlit sky above and the black mass of spectators below, faintly illumined by street-lamps, and broken at the extreme end by the brassy gleam of the fire-engine tearing up the street. There were inaccuracies of detail, but Matt was immensely impressed by the originality of the subject and the touch of weirdness, and it was with joy that he accepted Herbert’s offer to take him to the Azure Art Club, where Cornpepper and his clique mostly forgathered. Since Herbert had misinterpreted them to his cousin, Matt had read a good deal about them in the papers, and they had held forth brilliantly to interviewers on the veracity of their rendering of Nature, Cornpepper going so far as to claim that you could not look at his landscapes without feeling—from the color of stone and sea, from the tints of the sky and the disposition of the clouds—what o’clock it was. Whereupon the interviewer had consulted a study of poppies on a cliff, and reported that it was half-past eleven, Cornpepper crying “Correct!” All of which did not fail to provoke counterblasts from the Academic camp and from the irresponsible concocters of facetious paragraphs.

It was all very small—the feeble British refraction of the great Gallic battle then waging, of the campaign of plein air and modern subject against bituminous landscapes and classic conventions, the expurgated English edition of the eternal battle of youth and age, spiritless as the bouts of boxers in a Quaker land, sans prize-rings or hero-worshippers; the shadowy warfare of art in a Puritan country vibrating only to politics and religion, indifferent to style, gauging literature merely by its message and art by its idea.

But Matt was not a true-born Briton, and his own aversion from an unreal Nature doctored and tricked up, in which an artificial chiaroscuro took the place of observation and atmosphere, led him into instant sympathy with this painting of “real moments,” with this presentation of “Nature caught in the fact,” as Cornpepper brilliantly defined the Impressionism he had smuggled over from Paris. Even if Nature was not so violet as she was painted, Matt felt the mistake was on the right side. And who but Cornpepper had revealed and interpreted the mystery and poetry of the night? True, he was rather staggered to remember, it was impossible to paint the night with your eye on the object. The night side of Nature might be caught in the fact; it could not be arrested in the fact.

Herbert was not a member of the Azure Art Club; they had to call on a man in Kensington to get him to take them there. He proved to be no other than the moon-faced Rapper, whom Herbert had invited to invite them to dinner.

“He’s an awful duffer,” he said, enviously, “but he has a flat of his own and an income of his own, and he’s had the run of Copenhagen, Paris, and Antwerp. They say Copenhagen is worse than Paris.”

Rapper made them stay to admire his rooms. “Don’t look at my pictures,” he said; “that’s only a portrait I’m doing of Riggs, the bucket-shop keeper. I’m an awful duffer; why I should get so many commissions at a hundred and fifty guineas when there’s lots of geniuses starving, I never can make out. I suppose it’s because I don’t want the money—I shall only blue it at Monte Carlo. I’ve only just come back from the country—a J.P., an awful screw. He made me do him and his wife for two-fifty. Still, they’re only half-lengths. Do try some of this Burgundy; it’s genuine. I import it direct from a small grower. I get a huge barrel for five pounds, and pay three pounds duty, and get hundreds of bottles out of it. People don’t know how to get wine in England. Oh, do please look at that Limoges enamel over the mantel-piece, Mr. Strang; it’s far better worth looking at than that daub of a library.”

“I always prefer to look at pictures,” said Matt, apologetically.

“It is rather a strong bit of color,” admitted Rapper.

“Yes. Do you think the light is accounted for?” asked Matt. “That red glow—”

“Don’t you see the library lamp?” rejoined Rapper.

“Yes, but the shade’s off; and even then, isn’t it more like firelight?”

“Not a bit of it!” replied Rapper, hotly. “Do you suppose I didn’t study the effects with a lighted lamp? That’s a good bit of action in the old scholar’s arm, reaching for the book.”

Matt examined it carefully.

“The forearm is a little out of drawing, isn’t it—a little too long?” he asked, timidly.

“My dear fellow, the model had an unusually long forearm. You don’t suppose everybody is alike. Of course it isn’t near finished yet. But really I was trying for color more than for line; and, after all, it’s the careless draughtsmanship of a man who can draw. It attracted quite a lot of notice at the Azure Art Gallery last year, but I put a big price on it, so that it shouldn’t sell, and I’d have time to work it up. That’s a little bust of myself; it’s only plaster of Paris bronzed over. I model ever so much better than I paint, but nobody will give me a commission. Isn’t it funny? Do have some more of the Burgundy. I’m not much of an artist, but I flatter myself I do know a good wine.”

Before they left he presented them with photographs of his library picture, apparently forgetting that he hadn’t near finished it.

“I say, I can’t go about with you if you go on like this,” whispered Herbert to Matt, as Rapper lingered to extinguish his gas and lock his door. “Fancy telling a chap his faults. You mustn’t go by me and my Nebuchadnezzar. I rather like to be pitched into. It keeps a fellow from getting conceited.”

“I didn’t know,” Matt murmured, with a new admiration for Herbert, who had already become a hero to him, moving so brilliantly amid all these shining circles. The three young men got into a hansom and smoked Rapper’s cigars. At the little club, which was only ten minutes off, they dined in a long, narrow, drab-painted room, with a billiard-table near the door. Several men, whose work Matt had studied with interest, were dining in their vicinity. Matt strained his ears to catch their conversation, but it seemed to be all about the billiard-table, an apparently recent acquisition. At last, to his joy, he was introduced to some of the most famous—to Butler, tall, dark, muscular, and frock-coated, most erratic of etchers, most slap-dash of painters; to the foul-mouthed, dainty-fingered Clinch; to Gurney, slim, youthful, and old-faced, habited in tweeds, the latest recruit, an earnest disciple of every master in turn, old or new, always in superlatives of eulogy or abuse, and untaught by his own gyrations to respect a past adoration or to tone down a present; to Greme, more barefacedly boyish than even Herbert, a blonde youth credited by his admirers with a charming new blond vision of Nature, though the Philistines contended that all he did was to get water-color effects with oils; to Simpson, who ground his own colors, and had mysterious glazes and varnishes, and was consumed by an unshared anxiety as to the permanence of his pictures; and—oh, awful joy!—to the great Cornpepper, the most brilliant and the youngest of them all, a squat, juvenile figure, with a supercilious eye-glass in the right eye, a beak-like nose, and a habit of rasping the middle of his seat with his hands, like an owl on a perch. Matt was dying to talk to them—and especially to Cornpepper—of their art; as to men who had already done something in the world through which they moved, burdened with aspirations and haloed with dreams. But the talk would not veer round to painting, and the evening was entirely devoted to a general game of shell-out with halfpenny points. Matt was drawn into taking a cue, and lost one and threepence halfpenny in the first game, his inexperience being aggravated by Herbert’s whispered caution not to cut the cloth. However, his skilled eye and hand, practised with gun and brush, soon told, and he won his money back in the second, much to his relief, for his funds were running away at an appalling rate. The strenuous leaders of the newest art movement relaxed over the green table, highly hilarious as the white ball ran among the red balls like a sheep-dog, to drive them into the pockets, and stamping and contorting themselves in mock applause after a failure to score.

“That’s a fluke!” Herbert would say when the failure was his, and the jest became a catchword provocative of perpetual cachinnation.

There were so many hands in the game that Matt had plenty of time for occasional remarks between his turns, but nobody would speak of art except a venerable graybeard named Brinkside, who talked to him enthusiastically of the Azure Art campaign. He told him of the heroism of its leaders: of how Cornpepper had lived on dates and water while doing black-and-white illustrations for the Christian Home, salvation subjects at starvation prices; of how the even sturdier Butler had slept in a stable-loft, refusing to compromise with his genius or to modify the great dabs of paint that the world mistook for daubs. In answer to Matt’s inquiries, the old man explained to him how Cornpepper painted his night scenes, by putting down at fever heat in the morning some beautiful effect noted and absorbed the night before. In the evening Cornpepper would return to the spot, Brinkside said; but if, despite all his waiting, he could not see the same effect, he would wilfully forget the second impression, and return again and again till the first conditions were repeated. Matt, relieved to find that Cornpepper’s method was similar to his own, and that genius had no esoteric prerogatives of method, pointed out that in Nature’s infinite permutations an effect never recurred exactly as before, and that, therefore, he, for his part, contented himself with storing up in his mind the main values and color-planes, relying on deduction for the minutiÆ. But, of course, it all depended on holding the total effect, the original sensation, vividly in the memory. On leaving he thanked Brinkside with touching humility for the instructive interest of his conversation.

“Funny to find an old man in a new movement,” he observed, suddenly, to Herbert, in their homeward hansom.

“Why not? Old men often creep in. It’s their last chance. But if it’s Brinkside you’re thinking of, he’s not an artist at all. He’s an artists’ colorman, who supplied ’em with their materials on tick before they caught on. Brinkside’s like a dress-maker I used to know at Brighton, who financed lovely woman till she married wealthy flats. He foresaw they would get on, and, by Jove, they are blazing away like a house on fire, or, perhaps I ought to say, like a chimney on fire.”

“Then the opposition to the Academy is flourishing!” cried Matt, joyfully. His vague, youthful sympathy with all that was fresh and young was strengthened and made concrete by the revelations of struggle and starvation in the lives of those that had preceded him, martyred for the faith that was in them.

“Yes, it is flourishing,” said Herbert; “so much so that in ten years’ time most of ’em will be Academicians or Associates. If I were the governor I’d buy ’em up now; but he’s got no insight.”

“Oh,” said Matt, disappointed. “Do you mean the Academy will win, after all?”

“Six of one and half a dozen of t’other. They’ll be half accepted and half toned down. Already Greme and Butler are married—and that’s the beginning of the end. Lucky beggars! supplied with enthusiasm in their youth, and comfort in their old age. I wish I was young myself.”

“What nonsense!”

“I never was young,” said Herbert, shaking his head. “I always saw through everything. Heigho! Give us a light from your cigar. I’ve sighed mine out.”

“I suppose they’re very grateful to Brinkside,” said Matt, when the fire of Herbert’s cigar was rekindled.

“They play billiards with him, but I don’t suppose they’ve squared up yet.”

“But they’re making money now,” urged Matt, horrified. Years of bitter slavery to domestic liabilities had unfitted him to understand this laxity of financial fibre.

“And then? Why be rash? One can’t foresee the future.”

Before the magnificence of this rebuke Matt shrank abashed; he had a sneaking twinge of shame and concern for his own homely honesty, as for something inauspiciously inartistic.

“Talking of money,” went on Herbert, “I’m devilish hard up myself for a day or two—bills to meet at once, and my allowance don’t come due for a few days. You couldn’t advance me a trifle, I suppose?”

“Of course I could,” said Matt, eagerly.

“Do you think you could let me have a pony?”

“A pony?” repeated Matt, mystified.

“Twenty-five pounds. Don’t do it if it will at all inconvenience you.”

Matt was glad that it was too dark for Herbert to read his face. The sum was by far the greater portion of his worldly possessions. But he did not hesitate. Herbert would refund it in a day or two.

“I will bring it to the studio to-morrow,” he said.

“That’s a good chap,” said Herbert. “By-the-way, we’ve got to go to Cornpepper’s studio next Sunday week.”

“Really?” cried Matt, in delighted excitement.

“Yes; he told me he didn’t like to ask you direct, because you looked so serious and strait-laced.”

“Oh!” protested Matt, with a vague sense of insult.

“Well, you do, there’s no denying it. Remember how you preached to me about the governor the first time you saw me. Perhaps you’ll go lecturing Cornpepper because he economizes by domesticating his model when he has a big picture on the easel. Personally, I like Cornpepper; he is the only fellow who has the courage of his want of principles in this whitewashed sepulchre of a country. But be careful that you don’t talk to him as you did to Rapper, for he lives up to his name. He is awfully peppery when you tread on his corns, though he has no objection to stamping on yours. Not that I believe there’s any real malice in him, but they say his master at the Beaux-Arts was a very quarrelsome fellow, and my opinion is that he models himself on him, and thinks that to quarrel with everybody is to be a great artist.”

“Oh, but don’t you think he will be a great artist?” said Matt.

“He is a great artist, but he won’t be,” said Herbert. “He’ll be an R.A. By Jove! we nearly ran over that Guardsman. Mary Ann has been standing him too many drinks. Do you know the price of a Guardsman, Matt?”

“The price?”

“Yes; a nurse-maid who wishes to be seen walking out with a swagger soldier has to give him half a crown and his beer.”

Herbert never lost an opportunity of showing off to Matt his knowledge of the inner working of the great social machine. Madame, passing her white hand lovingly over her boy’s hair, had no idea of the serpentine wisdom garnered in the brain beneath.

At the Marble Arch, Matt, carefully bearing the photograph of Rapper’s “Library,” got out of the hansom to exchange to a ’bus which passed near his street. He offered to pay his share of the hansom, but Herbert waved the silver aside with princely magnificence.

CHAPTER V
A SYMPOSIUM

Matt’s desire to hear the brotherhood of the brush on Art was gratified ad nauseam at Cornpepper’s, for a batch of artists of all ages, together with a couple of journalists, assembled in the big, bare, picture-littered studio to smoke their own pipes and to say “when” to the neat-handed model who dispensed the host’s whiskey. Some declared they wanted it neat, to take off the effects of a grewsome tale with which Rapper had started the evening. It was about the time when he had studied art in Berlin and attended Ringschneider’s anatomy class. (“I’m not much of an artist, but I do know anatomy,” he interpolated.) One day when the corpse upon which the professor was about to demonstrate was uncovered, the students recognized, to their horror, a favorite fellow-pupil, who had been away for a few days. He had been taken ill in his garret, conveyed to the hospital, and, being alone in the world, had been sold to the lecture-room. The startled class immediately subscribed for another corpse, and buried the unfortunate boy with due honors. Greme tried to counteract this tale by another one about a model, an old fellow named William Tell, who, after vainly applying at the Slade and Lambeth schools for work, had been taken up by the St. George’s Sketching Club for the sake of his picturesque corded breeches. When, at the end of the two hours’ spell, the men were criticising one another’s work, one said to another, “There doesn’t seem any leg under those breeches.” Overhearing which, William Tell fell to indignantly unbuttoning his gaiters.

The arrival of a twinkling-eyed caricaturist, joyously greeted by all as “Jimmy,” dispelled the last flavors of the mortuary. “Aren’t you in China?” everybody asked. Jimmy explained he had thrown up the commission, but was off to the West Indies next month, though he expected to find himself in Paris instead. He was a genius, with an infinite capacity for taking pains and making friends, and, being forced to rise in the small hours to get through his work before the countless callers arrived to distract him, was popularly supposed to be an idle scapegrace, who produced sketches as rapidly and copiously as the conjurer produces oranges from his coat-sleeve. Matt’s breath was almost taken away in a rush of reverence and rapture at the unexpected privilege of seeing him; for, despite his own craving for the Sublime and the Beautiful, Jimmy Raven’s sketches of low London life had for him a magnetic appeal whose strength surprised himself. Sometimes he fancied it was the humor and the fun that held him, as being the qualities in which he himself was most deficient; sometimes it flashed upon him obscurely—as in a light thrown through a fog—that Jimmy Raven was teaching him to see the spectacle of life more deeply and truthfully through the medium of his humorous vision; at such instants he almost thought one of Jimmy’s loafers worth a whole Academy of poetic myths, but he suppressed the suspicion as absurd and perturbing to his own ideals and vision, telling himself it was only the truth and subtlety of the draughtsmanship that he admired. He listened to him now as eagerly and deferentially as to Cornpepper, his eyes fixed mainly on these two famous faces, as if to seize the secret of their gifts in some contour of nose or chin; but he had ample curiosity and respect to spend even on the other men, though below all his real modesty and diffidence was a curious bed-rock of self-conscious strength, as of a talent that might hope one day to be recognized even of these.

But there was little art-talk to be got out of Jimmy. Having likewise said “when,” he launched into an account of an East End girl he had sketched that morning in the Park, and quoted her idea of a coster gentleman. “My brother’s a toff,” he had overheard her boasting. “He wears three rows of buttons down his trousers, and sixteen wentilation ’oles in ’is ’at.” “And who do you think I saw in the Park?” he went on. “Egyptian Bill.”

“No?” cried various voices. “What was he preaching?”

“Buddhism,” said Jimmy. “He’s sitting to Winkelman, that old chap who became a Buddhist when he was painting those Eastern things the critics made such a fuss about.”

There was a laugh at the expense of the Mohammedan model, who always suited his religion to his employer’s.

“When I did him,” said Jimmy, “I pretended to be a Jew, and it was great fun after he became a Jew to tell him I was a Christian.... I don’t know which was the biggest lie,” he added, with his droll twinkle.

“Did you hear about the Hindoo who went to see Winkelman’s things at Dowdeswell’s?” said Butler. “He spat out. You see, he knew the real thing.” He smiled with grim satisfaction, for the things were licked and stippled into a meretricious poetry, and his own bold blobs of Oriental color had been laughed at.

“Don’t you wish they supplied spittoons at the Academy?” asked Jimmy.

It was the red rag. For the next ten minutes the absurdities of the Academy and the transcendent merits of the Salon (which most of them had run over to Paris to see) occupied the tapis, and then a spectacled Scotchman, who answered to the name of Mack, dilated upon the decadence of the grisette and the degeneracy of the students’ orgies.

“Ah, but still Paris stands for the joy of life,” said Cornpepper. “They are not ashamed of living.”

“They ought to be,” said Matt, and the company laughed, as at a good joke.

“Our young friend thinks the artist should be moral,” said Herbert, paternally.

“He’ll say art should be moral next,” said Mack.

“It isn’t immoral, is it?” said Matt, feebly. As usual, he was half fascinated, half shocked by the freedom of the artistic standpoint, for which his intellect was ready, but not his deeper organization. He wondered again why he was so uncomfortably constructed, and he envied these others for whom their art seemed to flow in happy irrelation to conduct and character, or at least to the moral ideals of the bourgeois. He marvelled at them, too, not understanding how talents more subconscious than his own could lie in closed compartments, as it were, of the artists’ minds, apparently unaffected by the experiences of their temporary owners.

“Art’s neither moral nor immoral,” pronounced the little host, magisterially, as he grasped his perch more tightly, “any more than it’s lunar or calendar. The artist thinks and feels in line and color. He sees Nature green or gray, according to his temperament. There are as many views from Richmond Hill as there are artists. If two views are alike, one is a plagiarism. Nature will never be exhausted, for every man sees her differently.”

“And so long as he doesn’t see her double—” put in Jimmy.

“Quite so,” said Cornpepper. “So long as he isn’t too drunk to keep his brush steady, we ask no more of him. In fact, it’s always best to be in love with your sitter—that’s what gives chic.”

“Rot!” said a granite-faced, white-bearded septuagenarian who had been smoking in silent amusement. “Chic comes merely from painting with brushes too large for the work.”

“Avast there, Rocks!” said Jimmy. “We don’t want any of your revolutionary notions here. What would you say if we denounced jammy shadows at the Academy dinner?”

“Avast yourself!” cried Cornpepper, rather angrily. “This is Liberty Hall. I won’t be classed with the new school, or with any school.” Cornpepper’s success had already made him feel the dead-weight of an extravagant school with which one is confounded. “Because I exhibit with you chaps, people credit me with all your views. You might as well say I agree with the president because I’m on the line in the Academy.”

“Have you got a picture in the Academy, Teddy? I didn’t notice it,” said Wilfred Smith, the journalist, thereby expressing what was in Matt’s mind too.

“There you are!” laughed Rocks. “When you come among us you’re lost. It’s only by our rejecting you that we make you famous. When you exhibit by yourselves, you stand out.”

“I allow Rocks to talk,” said little Cornpepper, with a good-natured smile. “He was the first to detect my talent, and I am really sorry to be the last to detect his. I think his big nudes are shocking. He and Tarmigan are a pair. Where is the point of painting heathen mythology?”

“I only paint the nude because I can’t paint clothes,” said Rocks, smiling. “You are all so versatile nowadays.”

“Ah, Teddy’ll come round to the classic, too, one day,” said Butler, with a weary expression on his strong, stern face. “You should have seen his joy when he got the invitation for varnishing-day.”

“Nothing of the sort,” cried little Cornpepper, glaring through his eye-glass and humping himself into a more owl-like curve. “I didn’t even accept the invitation. I wasn’t going to help the R.A.’s to correct their draughtsmanship.” The glare relaxed under his pleasure at the laugh, and he added, more quietly: “Do let us drop shop, for Heaven’s sake. I’m not one of a school—I’m myself. And I don’t say salvation lies with any sect. Give me style; that’s all I ask for.”

“Will you have it neat?” murmured Jimmy.

“Style, not school,” pursued Cornpepper, pleased with the phrase. “Take literature! There’s style in Boccaccio, and style in Flaubert, and style in Wycherley. Even a moral work may pass if it has style—Pope’s satires, for instance. So, too, in painting. I don’t find style in Bouguereau or Fred Walker, in Rocks or Tarmigan, who are only fit for chromos, but I do find it in Mantegna, in Fortuny, in Degas, in—”

“Good-bye!” said Jimmy, getting up. “I have to meet my wife at ten.”

“Oh, there’s lots of time,” said Cornpepper. “Carrie, pass Jimmy the whiskey. Sit down, there’s a good chap.” And Jimmy sat down.

“Style’s going to be a square touch and a feathery outline,” said Greme, sarcastically.

“Style’s merely a decorative appearance,” said Mack. “A picture is primarily a wall-decoration; it has no right to exist for itself.”

“Hear, hear!” cried Herbert. Mack lived up to his principles, for he always saw Nature as a pretty pattern.

“Style’s an accident; look at the blottesque effects you get in water-color,” said Rocks.

“The last and greatest art—the art to blot,” quoted Levison, the second journalist, who also posed as a war-artist in times of peace.

“When I was in Antwerp, under Villat,” said Rapper—”a fierce little man he was—he used to come and correct our canvases with big blotches of burnt sienna and lamp-black on the last day of a model. Rocks would call that a blottesque effect. Now I flatter myself I can tell you what style is, though I don’t profess to get it myself. Style is—”

“The art of leaving in—or leaving out—accidents,” finished Rocks. “You see that so well in Fortuny’s work.”

“Jimmy gets his effects by leaving out all the dead lines of his first sketch,” said Wilfred Smith, the journalist; “don’t you, Jimmy?”

“So I’m told,” said Jimmy.

“Style is the art of leaving out,” said Herbert. “They don’t leave out the R.A.’s pictures in the Academy. Hence the absence of style in the show.”

“Tut, tut, tut! Shop again!” cried Cornpepper, despairingly. “The only chance of progress for art is in neglecting values—not from ignorance, like the Germans, but from intention; not viewing Nature through a bit of black glass, like Millet, or toning down the violets of her shadows, but painting real sunlight.”

“But you can’t really paint sunlight,” put in Matt, timidly. “Paint’s only mud.”

“Quite so,” said Cornpepper. “But Delacroix said, ‘Give me mud, and I’ll paint you the skin of Venus.’ It depends on what you put round your mud.”

“Or how you put it on,” added Gurney. “The only way is to get optics to help you, and mix your primaries on the canvas, not on the palette, with a Bright’s brush.”

“I reckon you’ll be breaking out in ‘spots’ next,” laughed Rocks. “That Vibriste nonsense has been the ruin of young Dircks. He used to be quite second-rate, but since he crossed the Channel he squeezes his tubes on to his canvas, and it’s all streaks like a clown’s face.”

“Paint is neither mud nor sunlight,” interposed Butler, authoritatively. “It’s paint. Glory in it. Don’t pretend it’s silk or wood. According to the Academy, the highest art is to conceal paint.”

“Shop again!” groaned Cornpepper. “We’re an awfully narrow set, we artists—always girding at each other’s methods, though we’re all trying for the same thing.” Then, recalled by Butler’s frowning face to a sense of his position as chef d’École, a position he was not yet prepared to abdicate, he added, in more conciliatory accents: “All I object to in the Academy is its existence. No body of men has the right to say to the public, L’art, c’est moi. I don’t for a moment claim our work’s better than theirs, only—”

“That theirs is worse than ours,” suggested Jimmy.

“It’s all very well, but their ideal is smooth things,” persisted Butler, vehemently. “Smooth things in paint, in life, and in after-dinner speeches. I should have taken the Gold Medal in my year, and been spared years of grinding misery, if I had scraped out the life with a fish-shell or a razor-blade.”

Matt’s eyes flashed sympathetic admiration at him.

“Bother the Academy!” said Herbert, hastily. “Pass me the jug.”

“Schools of Arts are barracks,” went on Butler, his resentment unexhausted. “They would fuse all talents in one mould, and put together what God has put asunder. You may teach craft; but Art—never!”

“The idea of setting a subject, too,” said Greme, who was very proud of his private color-vision. “They go on a false analogy. Art can’t be got at by a competitive examination. It isn’t like Latin or Greek, or the use of the globes; it’s the expression of individual temperament. And it’s always such a rotten, stilted subject they set for the Gold Medal. I wonder what it is this year?”

“Strang’s at the Academy,” said Rapper. “He’ll tell you.”

“Oh, confound the Academy!” said Herbert, crossly.

“Something Biblical, you bet your boots,” said Jimmy. “It makes the fellows read the Bible, anyhow. But I must really go and meet my wife.”

“I heard it was about Nebu—” Greme began.

“Here, shut up, Greme!” interrupted Herbert. “Isn’t it time to sing songs?”

He glanced anxiously at his cousin; but that enthusiastic young man was gazing at Butler with a hypnotized stare, lost in an inward vision of the youthful rebel painting in his stable-loft.

“It’s time to drop shop,” responded Cornpepper, sharply. “I’ve been trying to get the talk off art for the last half-hour. I want to discuss whiskey, woman, and song. What’s the difference who wins the Gold Medal, or even the Prix de Rome? That’s the last one ever hears of them.”

“Oh no,” said Rapper; “all the professors at the Beaux-Arts took the Prix de Rome.”

“Did the men with guts?” inquired Cornpepper, scathingly, as he glared through his monocle at his contradictor. “Did the biggest of all, Puvis de Chavannes? Now, you fellows define style, but it never occurs to you that it is simply the perfect handling of your medium, whatever it be. What makes the decorations of Puvis de Chavannes so great? Merely that the gray, cool color scheme just suits the stone of the Pantheon. The decorations of Laurens would be finer as easel pictures. They make the building look smaller. Those of Chavannes ennoble it, give the sense of space and atmosphere. The medium forced to yield its best—that is style. There is one glory of silver-point and another of chalk or pencil. Fritz’s pictures are damn bad because they are in the wrong medium. To preserve a chronicle of the time is the function of black and white. Only by—”

“I really must go,” said Jimmy, starting up again. “As a black-and-white man I preserve a chronicle of the time, and it tells me it’s a quarter-past ten, and I have got to meet my wife at the Monico at ten.”

“Oh, rot! There’s lots of time.” And a dozen hands pushed Jimmy into his seat, and Carrie brought him more whiskey.

“I never could see how you square that with your principles, Cornpepper,” argued Gurney, the gyrator, with a thoughtful wrinkle of his elderly face. “Every painter’s got to do his own time. Posterity won’t want Erle-Smith’s Greek gods with ginger-bread flesh, and sickly sea-nymphs with wooden limbs. A cod’s head, well painted, is better than a Madonna.” Erle-Smith had been his last idolized Master before he came to worship at the shrine of Cornpepper.

“But there’s imagination in Erle-Smith,” Matt protested, deferentially.

Gurney snorted out quintessence of contempt in an indecorous monosyllable. “‘Bus-drivers and ballet-girls—that’s the modern artist’s duty to posterity. And his duty to his contemporaries is to find the poetry and beauty around ’em and teach ’em to see it. That’s why your ‘Chimney on Fire in Fitzroy Street’ is the picture of the year.”

“Oh yes!” Matt burst forth, in the idiom of Granger’s, “it’s jolly stunning!”

Cornpepper made a moue of disgust. “Are we never going to get away from shop?” he asked, desperately. “What has my chimney to do with the chronicles of the time? You chaps have always misunderstood me. You all go by what O’Brien writes of me in the Saturday Spectator. I do wish he wouldn’t interpret me. I wish he’d leave me alone. It’s bad enough to have the papers writing about one’s sayings and doings, it’s bad enough to be afraid of your own friends when, like Levison and Wilfred Smith, they happen to be journalists; but to be interpreted in leading articles by O’Brien is the crowning blow. What right has he to meddle with art? Why the hell doesn’t he stick to his last? If I painted that chimney—”

“Instead of sweeping it,” murmured Jimmy. “Do let me go and meet my wife.”

“—it was because I saw an opportunity for style, and for giving an epic sense of London,” little Cornpepper went on, fixing Jimmy with his basilisk glare. “I don’t care a twopenny damn about posterity or my contemporaries. I paint as I do everything else—to please myself.”

“We know you don’t please anybody else,” retorted Jimmy. “I must be off.”

“Well, black and white is going to be the art of the future, anyhow,” said Butler. “Art is dead in England. Nobody disputes that.”

“Of course not,” said Cornpepper. “Painting’s a lost art. Not one of us can touch the old men—Watts, Millais, Whistler. No; we none of us can paint.”

“But English art’ll revive through black and white,” Butler maintained. “It’s the art of the people. I wish I had discovered that in the days when I refused to do it.”

“Black and white is not the art of the future, but the future of Art,” said Herbert. “Nothing else pays.”

“It’s surer than anything else,” admitted Gurney. “And a paper gives you a far wider appeal than a gallery. It’s the only way of elevating the people.” His eye lit up. He was meditating a new departure.

Matt pricked up his ears; Herbert had not yet repaid him the twenty-five pounds, borrowed for a day or two, and in any case he felt he must soon be earning money. In the stagnation of the picture market, of which he heard on every side, and on which the talk fell now, it was at once comforting and distressing to hear of another source of income. Black and white had scarcely entered into his thoughts before; he looked upon it as a degraded commercial form of art—a thing manufactured for the moment in obedience to editorial instructions. Perhaps if times had changed, if editors allowed the artist to express himself through their pages, one might think of it; otherwise it was too horrible. Art to order! The spirit whose essence was freedom chained to a cash-box! It were as well—and honester—to be a cobbler like William Gregson. He shuddered violently, remembering his sufferings as a portrait-painter in Nova Scotia, and very resolved to starve sooner than repeat those degrading efforts to please customers.

“I don’t talk about it,” said Cornpepper, after ten minutes of general tragic anecdotage, from which he gathered there was quite a rush into black and white—a subject concerning which both the journalists seemed fully posted. “I just go on working; I don’t care whether I sell or not. The dealers I hate and despise; they have no measure of Art but what it’ll fetch. I will have nothing to do with them. The world will come to me sooner or later. You never hear me grumbling about the market.”

“The more I hear of the troubles of you chaps,” said Rapper, “the more surprised I am that I, with nothing like your talents, should be the one to get the commissions, as if I had any need of the shiners. I’m going to Birmingham again next week to do a municipal duffer in his robes. Even when I studied art in Brussels—”

“The real reason we’re coming to black and white,” broke in the spectacled Scotchman, “is that we’re all born color-blind. The dulness of our surroundings, the long centuries of homes without decorations, with unbeautiful furniture and crockery, have told, and now—”

There was a roar of laughter. “Stow that, Mack!” cried Rapper.

“You can’t keep Mack off shop,” cried Cornpepper. “I’m sick of this talk about principles. Art, life, nature, realism, the decorative! The decorative indeed! For what is Art? It isn’t studio-pictures, it’s—”

“It’s half-past ten,” groaned Jimmy, trying to shake off the detaining hands of his friends. “Where’s Sandstone? Why hasn’t he turned up? He goes my way.”

“I don’t know,” said Cornpepper. “He’s been quarrelling with the man who published his lithographs. What a quarrelsome beggar he is! I believe he’s quarrelled with Clinch now. By-the-way, where is Clinch? He said he was coming.”

Everybody supposed simultaneously that Clinch was drunk, and their light-hearted acceptance of the idea jarred upon Matt, who again became conscious of a curious aloofness from the company, from which he seemed as cut off on the moral side as from the despised bourgeoisie on the artistic side. What a strange isolation! The thought made him feel lonely, and then—by reaction—strong.

Even Rocks laughed. “I prefer Philip drunk to Philip sober,” he said. “It’s the only time he uses drawing-room English.”

“How can I sup with my wife at the Monico?” persisted Jimmy, plaintively. “The beastly place closes at eleven on Sundays.”

“Oh, the English Sunday!” said Herbert. “How can you have art and the English Sunday together? You talk of the art of the people, Curtis. The real national art of England is oratorio, and Elijah may not appear on the stage except in evening dress.”

“Don’t talk to me of the middle classes,” groaned Cornpepper. “They will never be saved till Boccaccio is read aloud in every parlor on Sunday afternoons.”

“Don’t be an ass, Teddy,” said Butler. “You’ll be moral some day.”

“I can get my stockings darned without marrying,” retorted Cornpepper, with an irritating laugh, and Butler reddened angrily. He had married a slipshod, artistic creature who neglected his shirt-buttons, and the thrust rankled.

“My wife’s waiting at the Monico,” complained Jimmy, in a droll sing-song.

“Oh, bother! Carrie’s just making the coffee,” replied the host.

“I won’t have coffee,” said Jimmy; “I never mix drinks.”

The coffee came round, and with it sandwiches, and broke up the talk into duets and trios. Cornpepper planned a house-boat party for the summer to pick up nautical models and paint the river. Matt’s envious consciousness that he was too poor and too obscure to share in these delightful artistic experiences gave him a new and more disagreeable sense of aloofness. Then the proceedings became musical and remained so till the next morning, their refusal to depart before the advent of which the guests melodiously declared.

As the party was breaking up, Cornpepper cried: “Oh, I was nearly forgetting.”

“What?” said Jimmy. “To offer a prayer?”

“No, to take up a collection,” retorted Cornpepper, his eye-glass gleaming with joy of the mot. “Lily’s broken her leg.”

“Our Lily?” asked Greme. “But she doesn’t sit now—she’s on the stage.”

“I know; she’s dislocated her ankle, and can’t dance.”

“She never could dance,” observed Herbert. “How ever did she get an engagement?”

“Browney put her into his types of English beauty,” replied Cornpepper. “But she’s a good girl all the same, and she hasn’t got any money. I’ll lead off with five bob.”

In a few minutes two guineas were collected, Matt giving half a crown, which he could ill spare. As the men left, Cornpepper stood at the door exchanging a confidential word with each. “By Jove, you didn’t say a word during the whole discussion, Mossop,” he said, as he shook hands with a brown-bearded, middle-aged Scotchman, whose cranium bulged curiously at the side.

Mossop took his pipe out of his mouth and looked meditatively at the stem. “If art could be talked, it wouldn’t want to be painted,” he said, gravely. “Good-night.”

“Good-night, old chap. Ah, good-night, Wilfred!” said Cornpepper to the journalist. “Understand, this evening is private. I don’t object to your quoting what I or anybody else said—my opinions are common property—but, damn it, if you mention who were here in any of your papers you’ll never cross my door-step again. You don’t mind my frankness? Good-night, old man.”

“Good-night, Cornpepper,” said Herbert. “I’ll let the governor know about those things of yours,” he added, in a low tone.

“That’s a good fellow. He won’t regret taking me up. Mind you mention I’m not unreasonable—I’m open to an offer. I’m awfully glad to have made your acquaintance. Good-night, old chap. Ah, good-night, Levison!” he said, shaking hands with the other journalist. “Now, please do understand that what passes at my gatherings is strictly confidential. If you can earn half a dollar by mentioning who were here—Rocks is rather a lion just now—I’m not the man to stand in your light. But I won’t have what one says in private reported, and that’s straight. Good-night, old fellow.”

Two o’clock boomed from a neighboring steeple. “Good-night, Teddy,” said Jimmy, the last man to go. He added, lugubriously: “I’ve still got to meet my wife.” Then, as he caught sight of himself in the hall-rack mirror, the gleam in his eye grew droller. “I’m going home in my own hat and coat,” he grumbled. “I’m sober.”

It was delicious to breathe the balmy night air after the smoky, alcoholic atmosphere of the studio. Rocks walked a little way with Herbert and Matt under the silent stars before they came upon a hansom.

“Are you also an artist?” he asked Matt.

“I hope to be,” said Matt, gravely, “but it’s awfully confusing to know what’s right. They all talk so cleverly, and they all seem to be right.” He was still worried about formulÆ, not having discovered that there are only men.

Rocks emitted a short laugh. “Don’t you bother your head with theories, my boy,” he said, laying his hand kindly on Matt’s shoulder. “You just paint. Every man does what he can, and runs down what he can’t. After all, Art is very old; there are no great sensational reforms left, like West’s discarding the toga for the clothes of the period. The plein air school is this century’s contribution; after that there can only be permutations and combinations of the old. What is new in the Azure Art Gallery is not good, and what is good is not new.”

“C’est fini!” said Herbert. “That’s what people always say till genius comes along. My belief is, going by literature and music, that painting hasn’t said its last word.”

“It may come back to its first,” admitted Rocks, laughing. “Things go in cycles. At present the last word of Art is azure.”

“But there are azure shadows?” said Matt.

“Yes; sunshine on a yellow sand gives a suspicion of blue and violet where the yellow light is cut off. But you exaggerate it and call that a revolution.”

“Yes, but this intensified violet, made on your canvas out of light pigments, does produce the illusion of sunlight,” argued Matt. “And, to my mind, it doesn’t falsify nature or values one bit, because in bright sunlight the eye really sees the dazzle, not the values.”

“Perhaps you young men see the new ultra-shades at the end of the spectrum,” said Rocks, a little annoyed to find Matt restive under his patronizing geniality. “Apelles had only four colors, but his reputation has survived. It is the craze for novelty that makes these fads catch on.”

“On the contrary,” retorted Matt, hotly, “people are so accustomed to the false they have no eyes for the true. It’s the old fable of the man with the pig under his cloak. I read somewhere that in Sir Joshua’s day it was the convention to paint portraits with hats under their arm, and that Sir Joshua, having to paint a man with his hat on, automatically put a second hat under his arm. If he hadn’t found it out, I don’t believe the public would have. And weren’t the 1830 men laughed at in France, though now they’re thrown in the teeth of the Impressionists? It’s always the same tale—the revolutionary is always wrong till he’s right. Treason never prospers. What’s the reason? When ’tis successful, ’tis no longer treason.’ Truth and light—that’s the right formula of landscape-painting.”

Herbert laughed. “My stars, Matt!” he cried, gayly, “that’s the longest speech I’ve ever heard you make! Is Cornpepper’s whiskey so much better than mine?”

It was, perhaps, not so much the whiskey as the reaction after the long, respectful self-repression of the evening. But Rocks caught fire in his turn.

“Revolution!” he cried, scornfully. “Doing things literally by halves—there’s a revolution, there’s a revelation for you. The new art! If the modern young man can’t draw, color’s the thing; and if he’s got no sense of color, color is vulgar. And even if he doesn’t offend my sense of line by figures that couldn’t stand and limbs that don’t fit on he won’t finish his work. He leaves it half-cooked to show his chic; to take it further would be Academic. It’s mere notes for pictures, not pictures. And even at that half the ideas come from Paris, like our ladies’ gowns; if you ran over there as often as I do you could put your finger on most of these azure fellows’ inspirations. If they would only search like the French! If they would only really imitate their Monet! That’s a real worker for you—how he slaves at his hay-stacks! More science than art to my thinking; but how he searches! These chaps are such dwarfs. Think of Leonardo, think of Raphael, think of Millet—real men, with big brains and big souls. No; this Azure Art Club’s a set of bounders and bad draughtsmen. There’s too much mutual admiration; it prevents men getting on; they’ll find themselves stranded with a half-talent.”

“And hasn’t Butler got a big soul?” cried Matt, boiling over. “And hasn’t Cornpepper got a big brain?”

“Cornpepper?—oh, but this is shop again. He’s a good little chap at bottom, but he’s succeeding too young.” And in Rocks’s hearty guffaw the storm-clouds rolled away.

“You mustn’t fancy I agree with him altogether, Mr. Rocks,” said Matt, simmering down in his turn. “About the morality of Art, now, isn’t there—”

“Ah, there’s the Methodist parson again,” interrupted Herbert, laughing. “Hang it all, man, you’re not a virgin, are you?”

“No, of course not,” faltered Matt, mendaciously. He went on in haste: “There’s a cab!”

“No, I hate four-wheelers!” said Herbert. “Then why the devil do you always talk such rot? Hansom!”

“They don’t seem as united as the papers make out, anyway,” said Matt, in shame-faced evasion. He was ashamed of the lie, and ashamed of its not being true.

“No, there’s no esprit de corps among artists,” returned Rocks. “People always imagine there are schools. But in London there’s only the camaraderie of success and the camaraderie of unsuccess. Good-night.”

“Can’t we give you a lift?” said Herbert.

“No, thanks; I’m successful,” rejoined Rocks, and went off chuckling.

“I wish I was,” Herbert grumbled to Matt. “Fancy not being able to join that house-boat party, but to be stuck down in town by the Old Gentleman to paint Nebuchadnezzar. I wish I was you, Matt.”

Matt was on the point of consoling him by confessing he was on the brink of ruin, but that would have seemed like dunning a friend, to whom he owed so much, for the twenty-five pounds, so he postponed the inevitable explanation.

CHAPTER VI
THE OUTCAST

It was midsummer, and everybody who was anybody was pent in the sweltering city.

“The sort of weather to make one want to be a figure-model,” Herbert said, wearily, as he flicked finically at “Daniel before Nebuchadnezzar,” now well on its way to completion. “But it seems to suit the Old Gentleman. You might laugh, Matt. I’m too languid myself.”

Matt did not reply; he was leaning against the marble mantel-piece, pale and perspiring.

“What do you think is his latest move?” pursued Herbert. “Though that’s rather a bull, for the mischief is that he refuses to go on our annual autumn jaunt abroad, lest it should interfere with Daniel and Nebby. However, I am to have a horse of my own, and that’s some consolation. Talking of horses, how do you like Nebby’s left leg? You see I’ve repainted it as you marked it.” He got up, walked backward, and surveyed the picture approvingly, brush in hand. “By Jove, it’s coming on splendidly! I could imagine I was in the palace. There is something in following Nature, after all. The creative part lies in the invention and color.... What’s the matter with you this morning, Matt? You don’t say a word. Are you sunstruck? or moonstruck?”

“Both,” said Matt, with a ghastly smile.

“Why, what’s up?” Herbert scrutinized his cousin’s face for the first time.

Matt looked towards the model.

“You know his English is limited,” Herbert remarked, reassuringly. “Unless you are bent on talking Arabic.” But Matt still hesitated. At last, as in desperation, he extracted a letter from his breast-pocket and tendered it to Herbert, who took it wonderingly, cast a glance at it, and frowned.

“The scoundrel!” he said. “How dare he send it in so soon? I shall never recommend him to anybody again.”

“It isn’t soon,” corrected Matt; “it’s more than three months.”

“You’re not going to take any notice of him yet?”

“Oh, I must.”

“Oh, nonsense! Why, the shock would drive him silly. He only sends it in as a matter of form.”

“I don’t like not to pay.”

“All right,” said Herbert, sulkily; “only you’ll spoil the market for us poor devils who’re not Croesuses, that’s all. But don’t give him the fifteen guineas at once; give him five on account.”

Matt struggled with himself. “I can’t even do that,” he faltered at last, “unless you can manage to pay me something.”

“Oh, by Jove!” said Herbert, whistling lugubriously. “I’d forgotten you were among my creditors. But I’m stony-broke just now. So the old scoundrel will have to wait, after all. Ha! ha! ha! When do you expect to be flush again? I suppose you draw interest on bonds or something. All Americans do.”

“I—I don’t,” said Matt, his head drooping shame-stricken. Then, with the courage of despair, he burst out, “I’ve only got tenpence in the world; that’s a fact.”

Herbert gave a shrill whistle of surprise and dismay, and let himself drop upon his painting-stool. “Here, go and play a little, Haroun al Raschid,” he called over to the model; and Nebuchadnezzar, shedding his purpureal splendors, cantered joyously down-stairs.

“Now then,” he said, sternly. “What in the devil have you been up to, my Methodist parson? Gambling, horse-racing, women?”

Matt shook his head, a wan smile struggling with his shame-faced expression. He already felt happier—the false atmosphere in which he had moved was dissipated forever. “I’ve never had any money to lose,” he confessed. “I only saved up fifty or sixty pounds to study in London for a year, and now it’s all gone—unless you can manage to repay me the twenty-five pounds.”

“Well, of all the—” cried Herbert, and did not finish the mysterious phrase. He leaned his elbows on his knees, and supporting his face upon his palms, stared severely at his cousin. “So this is the man who thinks Art should be moral,” he said, half musingly, half indignantly. “To go and let us all think you were a capitalist! And to let me in for borrowing money of a man who was practically a pauper! Why, I must have taken almost your last penny!”

Matt, flushing afresh under his reproachful gaze, did not attempt to deny it.

“Well, if that’s your idea of cousinly behavior, or even decent behavior—” said Herbert, witheringly.

“I—I didn’t mean to deceive you,” Matt stammered, apologetically. “You all took it for granted I was well-to-do. All I said was I had money enough to go along with, and so I thought I had.”

“Yes, but when I asked you for the pony, you consented at once. I gave you an opportunity to explain, but instead of that you intensified the original false impression.”

Matt was silent.

“And now you’ve put me into the wretched position of owing money, which I can’t pay, to a poor relation from whom I never would have borrowed it, had he been frank and truthful.”

Now both were silent, meditating the painful situation.

“Then you’ve got no money at all?” said Herbert at last, in stern accents, in which a note of astonishment still lingered.

Matt shook his head. His throat felt parched. “Unless you can pay me,” he murmured.

Herbert’s face softened, his tones became sympathetic.

“Then what are you going to do?” he asked, anxiously.

Matt was touched by the transition from reproach to solicitude.

“Oh, I shall manage somehow,” he said, huskily. “I don’t want to worry you—you’ve always been very good to me.”

“Yes, that’s all very well, but suppose you starve?” said Herbert, sharply.

“Oh, I shall find something to do,” said Matt. “In fact, I’ve already done some illustrations for the Christian Home, though they haven’t paid yet. I wouldn’t have told you if it hadn’t been for this tailor’s bill.”

“Confound him!” cried Herbert, savagely. “I’ll never recommend him another customer as long as I live.” He started promenading the studio angrily, muttering maledictions against the snip as the source of all the mischief.

“What a pity the governor won’t touch a new man’s work!” he said, pausing.

“Oh, I’d rather not trouble him,” said Matt, shrinking from a supplementary explanation with the Vandyke beard.

Herbert resumed his promenade with knitted brow. “I wonder if DrÜcker would take them. If you did sea-pieces—”

“Oh, please don’t worry,” pleaded Matt, concerned at his cousin’s anxiety. “I dare say I shall fall on my feet.”

“Yes, but while falling? Tenpence isn’t enough to fall with. You don’t owe any money into the bargain, I hope.”

Matt turned red. “Three weeks’ rent,” he murmured.

“How much is that?”

Matt shrank weakly from shredding his last rag of dignity.

“Not much,” he said. “She hasn’t said anything yet; I always paid her so regularly. But I don’t see any reason to despair; it looks as if I can make my bread and cheese by black and white. They were all agreed that that was the most paying kind of Art. You remember that night at Cornpepper’s?”

“Yes, I remember,” said Herbert, curtly. “But I can’t let you go away with tenpence in your pocket. I wonder if I’ve got anything.” He drew a handful of silver and copper coins out of his trousers-pocket. “Eight and fourpence halfpenny,” he announced, dolefully. “And I shall want seven for Haroun al Raschid this evening. I told you I was stony-broke. I suppose it’s no use offering you one and fourpence halfpenny.”

“No; then you’d have nothing,” said Matt. “Don’t bother.”

“Oh, but I must bother. I wish I knew how to raise a little cash for you to keep you going till you get work.”

The grave anxiety of his tones troubled Matt sympathetically. He was pained to see Herbert so distressed. Suddenly his eyes fell on Herbert’s battalion of boots ranged against the wall—brown boots, black boots, patent boots, riding boots, shoes, slippers—and a wild, impish idea flew into his brain, breathing malicious suggestion, and even kindling a flash of resentment: “Why should not Herbert sell some of those serried boots if he was really in earnest?” But the impish idea was extruded in a moment. It savored of ungenerous cynicism, and, in so far as it meditated diminishing Herbert’s wardrobe, touched indecency; it was impossible to imagine Herbert with only a single pair of breeches or without sub-varieties of ornamental shoes. He moved in a large atmosphere of discriminate waistcoats and superfluous neckties.

“I’ll give you an introduction to DrÜcker, if you like,” said Herbert. “I dare say you have some little things by you.”

“I—I’ve already been to DrÜcker,” Matt admitted. “A fellow at Grainger’s told me about him. But he won’t look at my work.”

There was another embarrassing pause. Matt’s eyes wandered distractedly towards Herbert’s boots. The spotless battalion fascinated him; the buttons winked maliciously.

“How about portraits?” said Herbert, suddenly. “I thought you did portraits in Nova Scotia. Was that also—was that, er—true?”

Matt did not at once answer; it had suddenly occurred to him that there was probably another battalion of boots in Herbert’s dressing-room. When Herbert’s question at last penetrated to his consciousness, he replied with a start:

“Oh yes. Perhaps I may get sitters here, too. The only thing that really worries me is that bill.”

“Oh, well, if that’s all, you can make your mind easy. He can’t touch you; you’ve no money.” Herbert laughed gleefully. “It’ll serve him right, the scoundrel!”

“But he can put me in prison,” said Matt, blanching at the mere idea; “and that I could never survive.”

Herbert’s laugh became more boisterous.

“Oh, you innocent!” he gasped. “We’re not living in the dark ages. A man without a farthing is the king of creation. Nothing can touch him.”

“Oh, but they put people in prison for debt in Nova Scotia,” said Matt, surprised.

“Really?” ejaculated Herbert, surprised in his turn. “Well, I had no idea the country was so uncivilized as that. No, don’t funk. And even suppose you were put into quod for debt? What then? Why, debt is the breath of the artistic nostril. Read your Bankruptcy Court daily in your paper, and cheer up, d’ye hear? Why should you take other people’s worries on your shoulders?”

“Other people’s?” quoth Matt, puzzled.

“Yes; the worry is for the tailor who can’t get his money, not for you,” explained Herbert, with the gay smile that showed his white teeth.

“I must pay him,” Matt repeated, stolidly, and, lunch coming up, he took himself off in spite of every protest. Now that Herbert knew him in his true colors, his pride would not endure sitting as a pauper at the mid-day banquet, though he had eaten nothing all day except a halfpenny roll. He saw Haroun al Raschid in the street luxuriating in the sultry sunshine, and sent him up to luncheon, then dragged himself along the hot pavements to his back room, brightened now with unsaleable sketches, and threw himself upon the little iron bed, and abandoned himself to bitter reflection. Why, indeed, could he not take life as lightly as the artistic temperament demanded?

He had already tried other dealers than DrÜcker, with as little success. The Irishman at Grainger’s was wont to boast that he always sold his work by pawning it. Matt had essayed to imitate him, speculating the outlay for a gold frame; but either his face betrayed him to the pawnbrokers, or his picture, and it eventually went for less than the price of the frame. And—O vanity of resolutions and ideals!—his horror at doing Art to order had dwindled daily. In the actual imminence of starvation, in the impossibility of sending any further subsidies to his family, he had broached to other students his desire to get on this or that paper, but could gain no sympathetic information from them, except that they had already refused the positions he coveted. On the strength of some specimens sent by post he had been permitted to illustrate five short stories for the Christian Home, but only two had yet been published, and none had yet been paid for. And so the dregs of his savings had dripped away, slowly, slowly, like honey from an inverted pot, more and more slowly the less there remained, till only twenty drops (for he had come down to counting in halfpennies) divided him from starvation. The arrears of rent had been an agony more gnawing than that at his stomach, and now this tailor’s bill had come as the crowning catastrophe.

Yet none of his bitterness was for Herbert, despite the impish suggestions of the buttons; he did not even blame himself much. In a sense he had had value for his money, he had bought experience, if not quite of the kind for which he had saved up his dollars. But for those frightful fifteen guineas he might have weathered starvation-point, even though by the practice of a form of art he had not contemplated. To pawn or sell the unfortunate clothes would be but to cut himself off from gentility without surmounting the crisis. His hopeless reverie was interrupted by a tap at the door, and the landlady entered, bearing a letter. He jumped up from the bed in excitement—it must be his check for the drawings. But the letter bore an American stamp, and was in Billy’s writing, and he tore it open, fearful of new evils.

Dear Matt,—I write not because there is anything fresh, but because there isn’t. Life here is so dreary and monotonous I can no longer endure it. It isn’t my health, for that is better, and the fits are very rare now, thank God; but sometimes I think I shall go mad or cut my throat if something doesn’t happen. Don’t you think I could come over and stay with you? You’ve seen so much of the world, and always enjoyed yourself, and I have always been tied down to one wretched little village. The people are so dismally religious, and between you and me I am losing faith in everything, the more I think of it, and how bad the good people are. Deacon Hailey and Ruth have quarrelled, and she has gone away to the States. She came to see us before she left—she is just lovely—I like to picture her before me. I should not be much extra expense, dear Matt, because you could deduct something from the amount you are soon going to send us monthly. I have mentioned this to Abner, and he is willing. I am very little use here in the fields, and in London I might perhaps earn money by writing. I feel I have it in me to write tales; I have already written one called “The Whale Hunters,” and another called “In the Burning Desert.” I do so long to be famous. We should be a pair, dear Matt. Do you think you could get these tales printed in a paper? I should not want money at first. I did not like to send them to you without asking, as the postage would be heavy, and the winter has been so unusually protracted we are delayed with the crops. Do please send me some books if you can; I have read everything in the school library twice over. Novels and books of travel are what I like best. The last we heard from Halifax was that mother was less violent. Do write and say I may come, and if you can let me have the fare I will repay you out of my tales. Abner and Harriet send their love, and so do all the boys and girls (Amy is getting quite podgy), and with the same from me, I remain,

Your affectionate brother,

Billy.

P.S.—Don’t you think “William Strang” would look fine on the cover of a book?