IV
I thought Mrs. Monarchs face slightly convulsed when, on her coming back with her husband, she found Oronte installed. It was strange to have to recognise in a scrap of a lazzarone a competitor to her magnificent Major. It was she who scented danger first, for the Major was anecdotically unconscious. But Oronte gave us tea, with a hundred eager confusions (he had never seen such a queer process), and I think she thought better of me for having at last an establishment. They saw a couple of drawings that I had made of the establishment, and Mrs. Monarch hinted that it never would have struck her that he had sat for them. Now the drawings you make from us, they look exactly like us, she reminded me, smiling in triumph; and I recognised that this was indeed just their defect. When I drew the Monarchs I couldnt, somehow, get away from themget into the character I wanted to represent; and I had not the least desire my model should be discoverable in my picture. Miss Churm never was, and Mrs. Monarch thought I hid her, very properly, because she was vulgar; whereas if she was lost it was only as the dead who go to heaven are lostin the gain of an angel the more.
By this time I had got a certain start with Rutland Ramsay, the first novel in the great projected series; that is I had produced a dozen drawings, several with the help of the Major and his wife, and I had sent them in for approval. My understanding with the publishers, as I have already hinted, had been that I was to be left to do my work, in this particular case, as I liked, with the whole book committed to me; but my connection with the rest of the series was only contingent. There were moments when, frankly, it was a comfort to have the real thing under ones hand; for there were characters in Rutland Ramsay that were very much like it. There were people presumably as straight as the Major and women of as good a fashion as Mrs. Monarch. There was a great deal of country-house lifetreated, it is true, in a fine, fanciful, ironical, generalised wayand there was a considerable implication of knickerbockers and kilts. There were certain things I had to settle at the outset; such things for instance as the exact appearance of the hero, the particular bloom of the heroine. The author of course gave me a lead, but there was a margin for interpretation. I took the Monarchs into my confidence, I told them frankly what I was about, I mentioned my embarrassments and alternatives. Oh, take him! Mrs. Monarch murmured sweetly, looking at her husband; and What could you want better than my wife? the Major inquired, with the comfortable candour that now prevailed between us.
I was not obliged to answer these remarksI was only obliged to place my sitters. I was not easy in mind, and I postponed, a little timidly perhaps, the solution of the question. The book was a large canvas, the other figures were numerous, and I worked off at first some of the episodes in which the hero and the heroine were not concerned. When once I had set them up I should have to stick to themI couldnt make my young man seven feet high in one place and five feet nine in another. I inclined on the whole to the latter measurement, though the Major more than once reminded me that he looked about as young as anyone. It was indeed quite possible to arrange him, for the figure, so that it would have been difficult to detect his age. After the spontaneous Oronte had been with me a month, and after I had given him to understand several different times that his native exuberance would presently constitute an insurmountable barrier to our further intercourse, I waked to a sense of his heroic capacity. He was only five feet seven, but the remaining inches were latent. I tried him almost secretly at first, for I was really rather afraid of the judgment my other models would pass on such a choice. If they regarded Miss Churm as little better than a snare, what would they think of the representation by a person so little the real thing as an Italian street-vendor of a protagonist formed by a public school?
If I went a little in fear of them it was not because they bullied me, because they had got an oppressive foothold, but because in their really pathetic decorum and mysteriously permanent newness they counted on me so intensely. I was therefore very glad when Jack Hawley came home: he was always of such good counsel. He painted badly himself, but there was no one like him for putting his finger on the place. He had been absent from England for a year; he had been somewhereI dont remember whereto get a fresh eye. I was in a good deal of dread of any such organ, but we were old friends; he had been away for months and a sense of emptiness was creeping into my life. I hadnt dodged a missile for a year.
He came back with a fresh eye, but with the same old black velvet blouse, and the first evening he spent in my studio we smoked cigarettes till the small hours. He had done no work himself, he had only got the eye; so the field was clear for the production of my little things. He wanted to see what I had done for the Cheapside, but he was disappointed in the exhibition. That at least seemed the meaning of two or three comprehensive groans which, as he lounged on my big divan, on a folded leg, looking at my latest drawings, issued from his lips with the smoke of the cigarette.
Whats the matter with you? I asked.
Whats the matter with you?
Nothing save that Im mystified.
You are indeed. Youre quite off the hinge. Whats the meaning of this new fad? And he tossed me, with visible irreverence, a drawing in which I happened to have depicted both my majestic models. I asked if he didnt think it good, and he replied that it struck him as execrable, given the sort of thing I had always represented myself to him as wishing to arrive at; but I let that pass, I was so anxious to see exactly what he meant. The two figures in the picture looked colossal, but I supposed this was not what he meant, inasmuch as, for aught he knew to the contrary, I might have been trying for that. I maintained that I was working exactly in the same way as when he last had done me the honour to commend me. Well, theres a big hole somewhere, he answered; wait a bit and Ill discover it. I depended upon him to do so: where else was the fresh eye? But he produced at last nothing more luminous than I dont knowI dont like your types. This was lame, for a critic who had never consented to discuss with me anything but the question of execution, the direction of strokes and the mystery of values.
In the drawings youve been looking at I think my types are very handsome.
Oh, they wont do!
Ive had a couple of new models.
I see you have. They wont do.
Are you very sure of that?
Absolutelytheyre stupid.
You mean I amfor I ought to get round that.
You cantwith such people. Who are they?
I told him, as far as was necessary, and he declared, heartlessly: Ce sont des gens quil faut mettre à la porte.
Youve never seen them; theyre awfully good, I compassionately objected.
Not seen them? Why, all this recent work of yours drops to pieces with them. Its all I want to see of them.
No one else has said anything against itthe Cheapside people are pleased.