XLVI
Philip did not find living in Paris as cheap as he had been led to believe and by February had spent most of the money with which he started. He was too proud to appeal to his guardian, nor did he wish Aunt Louisa to know that his circumstances were straitened, since he was certain she would make an effort to send him something from her own pocket, and he knew how little she could afford to. In three months he would attain his majority and come into possession of his small fortune. He tided over the interval by selling the few trinkets which he had inherited from his father.
At about this time Lawson suggested that they should take a small studio which was vacant in one of the streets that led out of the Boulevard Raspail. It was very cheap. It had a room attached, which they could use as a bed-room; and since Philip was at the school every morning Lawson could have the undisturbed use of the studio then; Lawson, after wandering from school to school, had come to the conclusion that he could work best alone, and proposed to get a model in three or four days a week. At first Philip hesitated on account of the expense, but they reckoned it out; and it seemed (they were so anxious to have a studio of their own that they calculated pragmatically) that the cost would not be much greater than that of living in a hotel. Though the rent and the cleaning by the concierge would come to a little more, they would save on the petit dejeuner, which they could make themselves. A year or two earlier Philip would have refused to share a room with anyone, since he was so sensitive about his deformed foot, but his morbid way of looking at it was growing less marked: in Paris it did not seem to matter so much, and, though he never by any chance forgot it himself, he ceased to feel that other people were constantly noticing it.
They moved in, bought a couple of beds, a washing-stand, a few chairs, and felt for the first time the thrill of possession. They were so excited that the first night they went to bed in what they could call a home they lay awake talking till three in the morning; and next day found lighting the fire and making their own coffee, which they had in pyjamas, such a jolly business that Philip did not get to Amitrano’s till nearly eleven. He was in excellent spirits. He nodded to Fanny Price.
“How are you getting on?” he asked cheerily.
“What does that matter to you?” she asked in reply.
Philip could not help laughing.
“Don’t jump down my throat. I was only trying to make myself polite.”
“I don’t want your politeness.”
“D’you think it’s worth while quarrelling with me too?” asked Philip mildly. “There are so few people you’re on speaking terms with, as it is.”
“That’s my business, isn’t it?”
“Quite.”
He began to work, vaguely wondering why Fanny Price made herself so disagreeable. He had come to the conclusion that he thoroughly disliked her. Everyone did. People were only civil to her at all from fear of the malice of her tongue; for to their faces and behind their backs she said abominable things. But Philip was feeling so happy that he did not want even Miss Price to bear ill-feeling towards him. He used the artifice which had often before succeeded in banishing her ill-humour.
“I say, I wish you’d come and look at my drawing. I’ve got in an awful mess.”
“Thank you very much, but I’ve got something better to do with my time.”
Philip stared at her in surprise, for the one thing she could be counted upon to do with alacrity was to give advice. She went on quickly in a low voice, savage with fury.
“Now that Lawson’s gone you think you’ll put up with me. Thank you very much. Go and find somebody else to help you. I don’t want anybody else’s leavings.”
Lawson had the pedagogic instinct; whenever he found anything out he was eager to impart it; and because he taught with delight he talked with profit. Philip, without thinking anything about it, had got into the habit of sitting by his side; it never occurred to him that Fanny Price was consumed with jealousy, and watched his acceptance of someone else’s tuition with ever-increasing anger.
“You were very glad to put up with me when you knew nobody here,” she said bitterly, “and as soon as you made friends with other people you threw me aside, like an old glove” she repeated the stale metaphor with satisfaction “like an old glove. All right, I don’t care, but I’m not going to be made a fool of another time.”
There was a suspicion of truth in what she said, and it made Philip angry enough to answer what first came into his head.
“Hang it all, I only asked your advice because I saw it pleased you.”
She gave a gasp and threw him a sudden look of anguish. Then two tears rolled down her cheeks. She looked frowsy and grotesque. Philip, not knowing what on earth this new attitude implied, went back to his work. He was uneasy and conscience-stricken; but he would not go to her and say he was sorry if he had caused her pain, because he was afraid she would take the opportunity to snub him. For two or three weeks she did not speak to him, and, after Philip had got over the discomfort of being cut by her, he was somewhat relieved to be free from so difficult a friendship. He had been a little disconcerted by the air of proprietorship she assumed over him. She was an extraordinary woman. She came every day to the studio at eight o’clock, and was ready to start working when the model was in position; she worked steadily, talking to no one, struggling hour after hour with difficulties she could not overcome, and remained till the clock struck twelve. Her work was hopeless. There was not in it the smallest approach even to the mediocre achievement at which most of the young persons were able after some months to arrive. She wore every day the same ugly brown dress, with the mud of the last wet day still caked on the hem and with the raggedness, which Philip had noticed the first time he saw her, still unmended.
But one day she came up to him, and with a scarlet face asked whether she might speak to him afterwards.
“Of course, as much as you like,” smiled Philip. “I’ll wait behind at twelve.”
He went to her when the day’s work was over.
“Will you walk a little bit with me?” she said, looking away from him with embarrassment.
“Certainly.”
They walked for two or three minutes in silence.
“D’you remember what you said to me the other day?” she asked then on a sudden.
“Oh, I say, don’t let’s quarrel,” said Philip. “It really isn’t worth while.”
She gave a quick, painful inspiration.
“I don’t want to quarrel with you. You’re the only friend I had in Paris. I thought you rather liked me. I felt there was something between us. I was drawn towards you you know what I mean, your club-foot.”
Philip reddened and instinctively tried to walk without a limp. He did not like anyone to mention the deformity. He knew what Fanny Price meant. She was ugly and uncouth, and because he was deformed there was between them a certain sympathy. He was very angry with her, but he forced himself not to speak.
“You said you only asked my advice to please me. Don’t you think my work’s any good?”
“I’ve only seen your drawing at Amitrano’s. It’s awfully hard to judge from that.”
“I was wondering if you’d come and look at my other work. I’ve never asked anyone else to look at it. I should like to show it to you.”
“It’s awfully kind of you. I’d like to see it very much.”
“I live quite near here,” she said apologetically. “It’ll only take you ten minutes.”
“Oh, that’s all right,” he said.
They were walking along the boulevard, and she turned down a side street, then led him into another, poorer still, with cheap shops on the ground floor, and at last stopped. They climbed flight after flight of stairs. She unlocked a door, and they went into a tiny attic with a sloping roof and a small window. This was closed and the room had a musty smell. Though it was very cold there was no fire and no sign that there had been one. The bed was unmade. A chair, a chest of drawers which served also as a wash-stand, and a cheap easel, were all the furniture. The place would have been squalid enough in any case, but the litter, the untidiness, made the impression revolting. On the chimney-piece, scattered over with paints and brushes, were a cup, a dirty plate, and a tea-pot.
“If you’ll stand over there I’ll put them on the chair so that you can see them better.”
She showed him twenty small canvases, about eighteen by twelve. She placed them on the chair, one after the other, watching his face; he nodded as he looked at each one.
“You do like them, don’t you?” she said anxiously, after a bit.
“I just want to look at them all first,” he answered. “I’ll talk afterwards.”
He was collecting himself. He was panic-stricken. He did not know what to say. It was not only that they were ill-drawn, or that the colour was put on amateurishly by someone who had no eye for it; but there was no attempt at getting the values, and the perspective was grotesque. It looked like the work of a child of five, but a child would have had some naivete and might at least have made an attempt to put down what he saw; but here was the work of a vulgar mind chock full of recollections of vulgar pictures. Philip remembered that she had talked enthusiastically about Monet and the Impressionists, but here were only the worst traditions of the Royal Academy.
“There,” she said at last, “that’s the lot.”
Philip was no more truthful than anybody else, but he had a great difficulty in telling a thundering, deliberate lie, and he blushed furiously when he answered:
“I think they’re most awfully good.”
A faint colour came into her unhealthy cheeks, and she smiled a little.
“You needn’t say so if you don’t think so, you know. I want the truth.”
“But I do think so.”
“Haven’t you got any criticism to offer? There must be some you don’t like as well as others.”
Philip looked round helplessly. He saw a landscape, the typical picturesque ‘bit’ of the amateur, an old bridge, a creeper-clad cottage, and a leafy bank.
“Of course I don’t pretend to know anything about it,” he said. “But I wasn’t quite sure about the values of that.”
She flushed darkly and taking up the picture quickly turned its back to him.
“I don’t know why you should have chosen that one to sneer at. It’s the best thing I’ve ever done. I’m sure my values are all right. That’s a thing you can’t teach anyone, you either understand values or you don’t.”
“I think they’re all most awfully good,” repeated Philip.
She looked at them with an air of self-satisfaction.
“I don’t think they’re anything to be ashamed of.”
Philip looked at his watch.
“I say, it’s getting late. Won’t you let me give you a little lunch?”
“I’ve got my lunch waiting for me here.”
Philip saw no sign of it, but supposed perhaps the concierge would bring it up when he was gone. He was in a hurry to get away. The mustiness of the room made his head ache.
XLVII
In March there was all the excitement of sending in to the Salon. Clutton, characteristically, had nothing ready, and he was very scornful of the two heads that Lawson sent; they were obviously the work of a student, straight-forward portraits of models, but they had a certain force; Clutton, aiming at perfection, had no patience with efforts which betrayed hesitancy, and with a shrug of the shoulders told Lawson it was an impertinence to exhibit stuff which should never have been allowed out of his studio; he was not less contemptuous when the two heads were accepted. Flanagan tried his luck too, but his picture was refused. Mrs. Otter sent a blameless Portrait de ma Mere, accomplished and second-rate; and was hung in a very good place.
Hayward, whom Philip had not seen since he left Heidelberg, arrived in Paris to spend a few days in time to come to the party which Lawson and Philip were giving in their studio to celebrate the hanging of Lawson’s pictures. Philip had been eager to see Hayward again, but when at last they met, he experienced some disappointment. Hayward had altered a little in appearance: his fine hair was thinner, and with the rapid wilting of the very fair, he was becoming wizened and colourless; his blue eyes were paler than they had been, and there was a muzziness about his features. On the other hand, in mind he did not seem to have changed at all, and the culture which had impressed Philip at eighteen aroused somewhat the contempt of Philip at twenty-one. He had altered a good deal himself, and regarding with scorn all his old opinions of art, life, and letters, had no patience with anyone who still held them. He was scarcely conscious of the fact that he wanted to show off before Hayward, but when he took him round the galleries he poured out to him all the revolutionary opinions which himself had so recently adopted. He took him to Manet’s Olympia and said dramatically:
“I would give all the old masters except Velasquez, Rembrandt, and Vermeer for that one picture.”
“Who was Vermeer?” asked Hayward.
“Oh, my dear fellow, don’t you know Vermeer? You’re not civilised. You mustn’t live a moment longer without making his acquaintance. He’s the one old master who painted like a modern.”
He dragged Hayward out of the Luxembourg and hurried him off to the Louvre.
“But aren’t there any more pictures here?” asked Hayward, with the tourist’s passion for thoroughness.
“Nothing of the least consequence. You can come and look at them by yourself with your Baedeker.”
When they arrived at the Louvre Philip led his friend down the Long Gallery.
“I should like to see The Gioconda,” said Hayward.
“Oh, my dear fellow, it’s only literature,” answered Philip.
At last, in a small room, Philip stopped before The Lacemaker of Vermeer van Delft.
“There, that’s the best picture in the Louvre. It’s exactly like a Manet.”
With an expressive, eloquent thumb Philip expatiated on the charming work. He used the jargon of the studios with overpowering effect.
“I don’t know that I see anything so wonderful as all that in it,” said Hayward.
“Of course it’s a painter’s picture,” said Philip. “I can quite believe the layman would see nothing much in it.”
“The what?” said Hayward.
“The layman.”
Like most people who cultivate an interest in the arts, Hayward was extremely anxious to be right. He was dogmatic with those who did not venture to assert themselves, but with the self-assertive he was very modest. He was impressed by Philip’s assurance, and accepted meekly Philip’s implied suggestion that the painter’s arrogant claim to be the sole possible judge of painting has anything but its impertinence to recommend it.
A day or two later Philip and Lawson gave their party. Cronshaw, making an exception in their favour, agreed to eat their food; and Miss Chalice offered to come and cook for them. She took no interest in her own sex and declined the suggestion that other girls should be asked for her sake. Clutton, Flanagan, Potter, and two others made up the party. Furniture was scarce, so the model stand was used as a table, and the guests were to sit on portmanteaux if they liked, and if they didn’t on the floor. The feast consisted of a pot-au-feu, which Miss Chalice had made, of a leg of mutton roasted round the corner and brought round hot and savoury (Miss Chalice had cooked the potatoes, and the studio was redolent of the carrots she had fried; fried carrots were her specialty); and this was to be followed by poires flambees, pears with burning brandy, which Cronshaw had volunteered to make. The meal was to finish with an enormous fromage de Brie, which stood near the window and added fragrant odours to all the others which filled the studio. Cronshaw sat in the place of honour on a Gladstone bag, with his legs curled under him like a Turkish bashaw, beaming good-naturedly on the young people who surrounded him. From force of habit, though the small studio with the stove lit was very hot, he kept on his great-coat, with the collar turned up, and his bowler hat: he looked with satisfaction on the four large fiaschi of Chianti which stood in front of him in a row, two on each side of a bottle of whiskey; he said it reminded him of a slim fair Circassian guarded by four corpulent eunuchs. Hayward in order to put the rest of them at their ease had clothed himself in a tweed suit and a Trinity Hall tie. He looked grotesquely British. The others were elaborately polite to him, and during the soup they talked of the weather and the political situation. There was a pause while they waited for the leg of mutton, and Miss Chalice lit a cigarette.
“Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair,” she said suddenly.
With an elegant gesture she untied a ribbon so that her tresses fell over her shoulders. She shook her head.
“I always feel more comfortable with my hair down.”
With her large brown eyes, thin, ascetic face, her pale skin, and broad forehead, she might have stepped out of a picture by Burne-Jones. She had long, beautiful hands, with fingers deeply stained by nicotine. She wore sweeping draperies, mauve and green. There was about her the romantic air of High Street, Kensington. She was wantonly aesthetic; but she was an excellent creature, kind and good natured; and her affectations were but skin-deep. There was a knock at the door, and they all gave a shout of exultation. Miss Chalice rose and opened. She took the leg of mutton and held it high above her, as though it were the head of John the Baptist on a platter; and, the cigarette still in her mouth, advanced with solemn, hieratic steps.
“Hail, daughter of Herodias,” cried Cronshaw.
The mutton was eaten with gusto, and it did one good to see what a hearty appetite the pale-faced lady had. Clutton and Potter sat on each side of her, and everyone knew that neither had found her unduly coy. She grew tired of most people in six weeks, but she knew exactly how to treat afterwards the gentlemen who had laid their young hearts at her feet. She bore them no ill-will, though having loved them she had ceased to do so, and treated them with friendliness but without familiarity. Now and then she looked at Lawson with melancholy eyes. The poires flambees were a great success, partly because of the brandy, and partly because Miss Chalice insisted that they should be eaten with the cheese.
“I don’t know whether it’s perfectly delicious, or whether I’m just going to vomit,” she said, after she had thoroughly tried the mixture.
Coffee and cognac followed with sufficient speed to prevent any untoward consequence, and they settled down to smoke in comfort. Ruth Chalice, who could do nothing that was not deliberately artistic, arranged herself in a graceful attitude by Cronshaw and just rested her exquisite head on his shoulder. She looked into the dark abyss of time with brooding eyes, and now and then with a long meditative glance at Lawson she sighed deeply.
Then came the summer, and restlessness seized these young people. The blue skies lured them to the sea, and the pleasant breeze sighing through the leaves of the plane-trees on the boulevard drew them towards the country. Everyone made plans for leaving Paris; they discussed what was the most suitable size for the canvases they meant to take; they laid in stores of panels for sketching; they argued about the merits of various places in Brittany. Flanagan and Potter went to Concarneau; Mrs. Otter and her mother, with a natural instinct for the obvious, went to Pont-Aven; Philip and Lawson made up their minds to go to the forest of Fontainebleau, and Miss Chalice knew of a very good hotel at Moret where there was lots of stuff to paint; it was near Paris, and neither Philip nor Lawson was indifferent to the railway fare. Ruth Chalice would be there, and Lawson had an idea for a portrait of her in the open air. Just then the Salon was full of portraits of people in gardens, in sunlight, with blinking eyes and green reflections of sunlit leaves on their faces. They asked Clutton to go with them, but he preferred spending the summer by himself. He had just discovered Cezanne, and was eager to go to Provence; he wanted heavy skies from which the hot blue seemed to drip like beads of sweat, and broad white dusty roads, and pale roofs out of which the sun had burnt the colour, and olive trees gray with heat.
The day before they were to start, after the morning class, Philip, putting his things together, spoke to Fanny Price.
“I’m off tomorrow,” he said cheerfully.
“Off where?” she said quickly. “You’re not going away?” Her face fell.
“I’m going away for the summer. Aren’t you?”
“No, I’m staying in Paris. I thought you were going to stay too. I was looking forward….”
She stopped and shrugged her shoulders.
“But won’t it be frightfully hot here? It’s awfully bad for you.”
“Much you care if it’s bad for me. Where are you going?”
“Moret.”
“Chalice is going there. You’re not going with her?”
“Lawson and I are going. And she’s going there too. I don’t know that we’re actually going together.”
She gave a low guttural sound, and her large face grew dark and red.
“How filthy! I thought you were a decent fellow. You were about the only one here. She’s been with Clutton and Potter and Flanagan, even with old Foinet that’s why he takes so much trouble about her and now two of you, you and Lawson. It makes me sick.”
“Oh, what nonsense! She’s a very decent sort. One treats her just as if she were a man.”
“Oh, don’t speak to me, don’t speak to me.”
“But what can it matter to you?” asked Philip. “It’s really no business of yours where I spend my summer.”
“I was looking forward to it so much,” she gasped, speaking it seemed almost to herself. “I didn’t think you had the money to go away, and there wouldn’t have been anyone else here, and we could have worked together, and we’d have gone to see things.” Then her thoughts flung back to Ruth Chalice. “The filthy beast,” she cried. “She isn’t fit to speak to.”
Philip looked at her with a sinking heart. He was not a man to think girls were in love with him; he was too conscious of his deformity, and he felt awkward and clumsy with women; but he did not know what else this outburst could mean. Fanny Price, in the dirty brown dress, with her hair falling over her face, sloppy, untidy, stood before him; and tears of anger rolled down her cheeks. She was repellent. Philip glanced at the door, instinctively hoping that someone would come in and put an end to the scene.
“I’m awfully sorry,” he said.
“You’re just the same as all of them. You take all you can get, and you don’t even say thank you. I’ve taught you everything you know. No one else would take any trouble with you. Has Foinet ever bothered about you? And I can tell you this you can work here for a thousand years and you’ll never do any good. You haven’t got any talent. You haven’t got any originality. And it’s not only me they all say it. You’ll never be a painter as long as you live.”
“That is no business of yours either, is it?” said Philip, flushing.
“Oh, you think it’s only my temper. Ask Clutton, ask Lawson, ask Chalice. Never, never, never. You haven’t got it in you.”
Philip shrugged his shoulders and walked out. She shouted after him.
“Never, never, never.”
Moret was in those days an old-fashioned town of one street at the edge of the forest of Fontainebleau, and the Ecu d’Or was a hotel which still had about it the decrepit air of the Ancien Regime. It faced the winding river, the Loing; and Miss Chalice had a room with a little terrace overlooking it, with a charming view of the old bridge and its fortified gateway. They sat here in the evenings after dinner, drinking coffee, smoking, and discussing art. There ran into the river, a little way off, a narrow canal bordered by poplars, and along the banks of this after their day’s work they often wandered. They spent all day painting. Like most of their generation they were obsessed by the fear of the picturesque, and they turned their backs on the obvious beauty of the town to seek subjects which were devoid of a prettiness they despised. Sisley and Monet had painted the canal with its poplars, and they felt a desire to try their hands at what was so typical of France; but they were frightened of its formal beauty, and set themselves deliberately to avoid it. Miss Chalice, who had a clever dexterity which impressed Lawson notwithstanding his contempt for feminine art, started a picture in which she tried to circumvent the commonplace by leaving out the tops of the trees; and Lawson had the brilliant idea of putting in his foreground a large blue advertisement of chocolat Menier in order to emphasise his abhorrence of the chocolate box.
Philip began now to paint in oils. He experienced a thrill of delight when first he used that grateful medium. He went out with Lawson in the morning with his little box and sat by him painting a panel; it gave him so much satisfaction that he did not realise he was doing no more than copy; he was so much under his friend’s influence that he saw only with his eyes. Lawson painted very low in tone, and they both saw the emerald of the grass like dark velvet, while the brilliance of the sky turned in their hands to a brooding ultramarine. Through July they had one fine day after another; it was very hot; and the heat, searing Philip’s heart, filled him with languor; he could not work; his mind was eager with a thousand thoughts. Often he spent the mornings by the side of the canal in the shade of the poplars, reading a few lines and then dreaming for half an hour. Sometimes he hired a rickety bicycle and rode along the dusty road that led to the forest, and then lay down in a clearing. His head was full of romantic fancies. The ladies of Watteau, gay and insouciant, seemed to wander with their cavaliers among the great trees, whispering to one another careless, charming things, and yet somehow oppressed by a nameless fear.
They were alone in the hotel but for a fat Frenchwoman of middle age, a Rabelaisian figure with a broad, obscene laugh. She spent the day by the river patiently fishing for fish she never caught, and Philip sometimes went down and talked to her. He found out that she had belonged to a profession whose most notorious member for our generation was Mrs. Warren, and having made a competence she now lived the quiet life of the bourgeoise. She told Philip lewd stories.
“You must go to Seville,” she said she spoke a little broken English. “The most beautiful women in the world.”
She leered and nodded her head. Her triple chin, her large belly, shook with inward laughter.
It grew so hot that it was almost impossible to sleep at night. The heat seemed to linger under the trees as though it were a material thing. They did not wish to leave the starlit night, and the three of them would sit on the terrace of Ruth Chalice’s room, silent, hour after hour, too tired to talk any more, but in voluptuous enjoyment of the stillness. They listened to the murmur of the river. The church clock struck one and two and sometimes three before they could drag themselves to bed. Suddenly Philip became aware that Ruth Chalice and Lawson were lovers. He divined it in the way the girl looked at the young painter, and in his air of possession; and as Philip sat with them he felt a kind of effluence surrounding them, as though the air were heavy with something strange. The revelation was a shock. He had looked upon Miss Chalice as a very good fellow and he liked to talk to her, but it had never seemed to him possible to enter into a closer relationship. One Sunday they had all gone with a tea-basket into the forest, and when they came to a glade which was suitably sylvan, Miss Chalice, because it was idyllic, insisted on taking off her shoes and stockings. It would have been very charming only her feet were rather large and she had on both a large corn on the third toe. Philip felt it made her proceeding a little ridiculous. But now he looked upon her quite differently; there was something softly feminine in her large eyes and her olive skin; he felt himself a fool not to have seen that she was attractive. He thought he detected in her a touch of contempt for him, because he had not had the sense to see that she was there, in his way, and in Lawson a suspicion of superiority. He was envious of Lawson, and he was jealous, not of the individual concerned, but of his love. He wished that he was standing in his shoes and feeling with his heart. He was troubled, and the fear seized him that love would pass him by. He wanted a passion to seize him, he wanted to be swept off his feet and borne powerless in a mighty rush he cared not whither. Miss Chalice and Lawson seemed to him now somehow different, and the constant companionship with them made him restless. He was dissatisfied with himself. Life was not giving him what he wanted, and he had an uneasy feeling that he was losing his time.
The stout Frenchwoman soon guessed what the relations were between the couple, and talked of the matter to Philip with the utmost frankness.
“And you,” she said, with the tolerant smile of one who had fattened on the lust of her fellows, “have you got a petite amie?”
“No,” said Philip, blushing.
“And why not? C’est de votre age.”
He shrugged his shoulders. He had a volume of Verlaine in his hands, and he wandered off. He tried to read, but his passion was too strong. He thought of the stray amours to which he had been introduced by Flanagan, the sly visits to houses in a cul-de-sac, with the drawing-room in Utrecht velvet, and the mercenary graces of painted women. He shuddered. He threw himself on the grass, stretching his limbs like a young animal freshly awaked from sleep; and the rippling water, the poplars gently tremulous in the faint breeze, the blue sky, were almost more than he could bear. He was in love with love. In his fancy he felt the kiss of warm lips on his, and around his neck the touch of soft hands. He imagined himself in the arms of Ruth Chalice, he thought of her dark eyes and the wonderful texture of her skin; he was mad to have let such a wonderful adventure slip through his fingers. And if Lawson had done it why should not he? But this was only when he did not see her, when he lay awake at night or dreamed idly by the side of the canal; when he saw her he felt suddenly quite different; he had no desire to take her in his arms, and he could not imagine himself kissing her. It was very curious. Away from her he thought her beautiful, remembering only her magnificent eyes and the creamy pallor of her face; but when he was with her he saw only that she was flat-chested and that her teeth were slightly decayed; he could not forget the corns on her toes. He could not understand himself. Would he always love only in absence and be prevented from enjoying anything when he had the chance by that deformity of vision which seemed to exaggerate the revolting?
He was not sorry when a change in the weather, announcing the definite end of the long summer, drove them all back to Paris.
XLVIII
When Philip returned to Amitrano’s he found that Fanny Price was no longer working there. She had given up the key of her locker. He asked Mrs. Otter whether she knew what had become of her; and Mrs. Otter, with a shrug of the shoulders, answered that she had probably gone back to England. Philip was relieved. He was profoundly bored by her ill-temper. Moreover she insisted on advising him about his work, looked upon it as a slight when he did not follow her precepts, and would not understand that he felt himself no longer the duffer he had been at first. Soon he forgot all about her. He was working in oils now and he was full of enthusiasm. He hoped to have something done of sufficient importance to send to the following year’s Salon. Lawson was painting a portrait of Miss Chalice. She was very paintable, and all the young men who had fallen victims to her charm had made portraits of her. A natural indolence, joined with a passion for picturesque attitude, made her an excellent sitter; and she had enough technical knowledge to offer useful criticisms. Since her passion for art was chiefly a passion to live the life of artists, she was quite content to neglect her own work. She liked the warmth of the studio, and the opportunity to smoke innumerable cigarettes; and she spoke in a low, pleasant voice of the love of art and the art of love. She made no clear distinction between the two.
Lawson was painting with infinite labour, working till he could hardly stand for days and then scraping out all he had done. He would have exhausted the patience of anyone but Ruth Chalice. At last he got into a hopeless muddle.
“The only thing is to take a new canvas and start fresh,” he said. “I know exactly what I want now, and it won’t take me long.”
Philip was present at the time, and Miss Chalice said to him:
“Why don’t you paint me too? You’ll be able to learn a lot by watching Mr. Lawson.”
It was one of Miss Chalice’s delicacies that she always addressed her lovers by their surnames.
“I should like it awfully if Lawson wouldn’t mind.”
“I don’t care a damn,” said Lawson.
It was the first time that Philip set about a portrait, and he began with trepidation but also with pride. He sat by Lawson and painted as he saw him paint. He profited by the example and by the advice which both Lawson and Miss Chalice freely gave him. At last Lawson finished and invited Clutton in to criticise. Clutton had only just come back to Paris. From Provence he had drifted down to Spain, eager to see Velasquez at Madrid, and thence he had gone to Toledo. He stayed there three months, and he was returned with a name new to the young men: he had wonderful things to say of a painter called El Greco, who it appeared could only be studied in Toledo.
“Oh yes, I know about him,” said Lawson, “he’s the old master whose distinction it is that he painted as badly as the moderns.”
Clutton, more taciturn than ever, did not answer, but he looked at Lawson with a sardonic air.
“Are you going to show us the stuff you’ve brought back from Spain?” asked Philip.
“I didn’t paint in Spain, I was too busy.”
“What did you do then?”
“I thought things out. I believe I’m through with the Impressionists; I’ve got an idea they’ll seem very thin and superficial in a few years. I want to make a clean sweep of everything I’ve learnt and start fresh. When I came back I destroyed everything I’d painted. I’ve got nothing in my studio now but an easel, my paints, and some clean canvases.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know yet. I’ve only got an inkling of what I want.”
He spoke slowly, in a curious manner, as though he were straining to hear something which was only just audible. There seemed to be a mysterious force in him which he himself did not understand, but which was struggling obscurely to find an outlet. His strength impressed you. Lawson dreaded the criticism he asked for and had discounted the blame he thought he might get by affecting a contempt for any opinion of Clutton’s; but Philip knew there was nothing which would give him more pleasure than Clutton’s praise. Clutton looked at the portrait for some time in silence, then glanced at Philip’s picture, which was standing on an easel.
“What’s that?” he asked.
“Oh, I had a shot at a portrait too.”
“The sedulous ape,” he murmured.
He turned away again to Lawson’s canvas. Philip reddened but did not speak.
“Well, what d’you think of it?” asked Lawson at length.
“The modelling’s jolly good,” said Clutton. “And I think it’s very well drawn.”
“D’you think the values are all right?”
“Quite.”
Lawson smiled with delight. He shook himself in his clothes like a wet dog.
“I say, I’m jolly glad you like it.”
“I don’t. I don’t think it’s of the smallest importance.”
Lawson’s face fell, and he stared at Clutton with astonishment: he had no notion what he meant, Clutton had no gift of expression in words, and he spoke as though it were an effort. What he had to say was confused, halting, and verbose; but Philip knew the words which served as the text of his rambling discourse. Clutton, who never read, had heard them first from Cronshaw; and though they had made small impression, they had remained in his memory; and lately, emerging on a sudden, had acquired the character of a revelation: a good painter had two chief objects to paint, namely, man and the intention of his soul. The Impressionists had been occupied with other problems, they had painted man admirably, but they had troubled themselves as little as the English portrait painters of the eighteenth century with the intention of his soul.
“But when you try to get that you become literary,” said Lawson, interrupting. “Let me paint the man like Manet, and the intention of his soul can go to the devil.”
“That would be all very well if you could beat Manet at his own game, but you can’t get anywhere near him. You can’t feed yourself on the day before yesterday, it’s ground which has been swept dry. You must go back. It’s when I saw the Grecos that I felt one could get something more out of portraits than we knew before.”
“It’s just going back to Ruskin,” cried Lawson.
“No you see, he went for morality: I don’t care a damn for morality: teaching doesn’t come in, ethics and all that, but passion and emotion. The greatest portrait painters have painted both, man and the intention of his soul; Rembrandt and El Greco; it’s only the second-raters who’ve only painted man. A lily of the valley would be lovely even if it didn’t smell, but it’s more lovely because it has perfume. That picture” he pointed to Lawson’s portrait “well, the drawing’s all right and so’s the modelling all right, but just conventional; it ought to be drawn and modelled so that you know the girl’s a lousy slut. Correctness is all very well: El Greco made his people eight feet high because he wanted to express something he couldn’t get any other way.”
“Damn El Greco,” said Lawson, “what’s the good of jawing about a man when we haven’t a chance of seeing any of his work?”
Clutton shrugged his shoulders, smoked a cigarette in silence, and went away. Philip and Lawson looked at one another.
“There’s something in what he says,” said Philip.
Lawson stared ill-temperedly at his picture.
“How the devil is one to get the intention of the soul except by painting exactly what one sees?”
About this time Philip made a new friend. On Monday morning models assembled at the school in order that one might be chosen for the week, and one day a young man was taken who was plainly not a model by profession. Philip’s attention was attracted by the manner in which he held himself: when he got on to the stand he stood firmly on both feet, square, with clenched hands, and with his head defiantly thrown forward; the attitude emphasised his fine figure; there was no fat on him, and his muscles stood out as though they were of iron. His head, close-cropped, was well-shaped, and he wore a short beard; he had large, dark eyes and heavy eyebrows. He held the pose hour after hour without appearance of fatigue. There was in his mien a mixture of shame and of determination. His air of passionate energy excited Philip’s romantic imagination, and when, the sitting ended, he saw him in his clothes, it seemed to him that he wore them as though he were a king in rags. He was uncommunicative, but in a day or two Mrs. Otter told Philip that the model was a Spaniard and that he had never sat before.
“I suppose he was starving,” said Philip.
“Have you noticed his clothes? They’re quite neat and decent, aren’t they?”
It chanced that Potter, one of the Americans who worked at Amitrano’s, was going to Italy for a couple of months, and offered his studio to Philip. Philip was pleased. He was growing a little impatient of Lawson’s peremptory advice and wanted to be by himself. At the end of the week he went up to the model and on the pretence that his drawing was not finished asked whether he would come and sit to him one day.
“I’m not a model,” the Spaniard answered. “I have other things to do next week.”
“Come and have luncheon with me now, and we’ll talk about it,” said Philip, and as the other hesitated, he added with a smile: “It won’t hurt you to lunch with me.”
With a shrug of the shoulders the model consented, and they went off to a cremerie. The Spaniard spoke broken French, fluent but difficult to follow, and Philip managed to get on well enough with him. He found out that he was a writer. He had come to Paris to write novels and kept himself meanwhile by all the expedients possible to a penniless man; he gave lessons, he did any translations he could get hold of, chiefly business documents, and at last had been driven to make money by his fine figure. Sitting was well paid, and what he had earned during the last week was enough to keep him for two more; he told Philip, amazed, that he could live easily on two francs a day; but it filled him with shame that he was obliged to show his body for money, and he looked upon sitting as a degradation which only hunger could excuse. Philip explained that he did not want him to sit for the figure, but only for the head; he wished to do a portrait of him which he might send to the next Salon.
“But why should you want to paint me?” asked the Spaniard.
Philip answered that the head interested him, he thought he could do a good portrait.
“I can’t afford the time. I grudge every minute that I have to rob from my writing.”
“But it would only be in the afternoon. I work at the school in the morning. After all, it’s better to sit to me than to do translations of legal documents.”
There were legends in the Latin quarter of a time when students of different countries lived together intimately, but this was long since passed, and now the various nations were almost as much separated as in an Oriental city. At Julian’s and at the Beaux Arts a French student was looked upon with disfavour by his fellow-countrymen when he consorted with foreigners, and it was difficult for an Englishman to know more than quite superficially any native inhabitants of the city in which he dwelt. Indeed, many of the students after living in Paris for five years knew no more French than served them in shops and lived as English a life as though they were working in South Kensington.
Philip, with his passion for the romantic, welcomed the opportunity to get in touch with a Spaniard; he used all his persuasiveness to overcome the man’s reluctance.
“I’ll tell you what I’ll do,” said the Spaniard at last. “I’ll sit to you, but not for money, for my own pleasure.”
Philip expostulated, but the other was firm, and at length they arranged that he should come on the following Monday at one o’clock. He gave Philip a card on which was printed his name: Miguel Ajuria.
Miguel sat regularly, and though he refused to accept payment he borrowed fifty francs from Philip every now and then: it was a little more expensive than if Philip had paid for the sittings in the usual way; but gave the Spaniard a satisfactory feeling that he was not earning his living in a degrading manner. His nationality made Philip regard him as a representative of romance, and he asked him about Seville and Granada, Velasquez and Calderon. But Miguel had no patience with the grandeur of his country. For him, as for so many of his compatriots, France was the only country for a man of intelligence and Paris the centre of the world.
“Spain is dead,” he cried. “It has no writers, it has no art, it has nothing.”
Little by little, with the exuberant rhetoric of his race, he revealed his ambitions. He was writing a novel which he hoped would make his name. He was under the influence of Zola, and he had set his scene in Paris. He told Philip the story at length. To Philip it seemed crude and stupid; the naive obscenity c’est la vie, mon cher, c’est la vie, he cried the naive obscenity served only to emphasise the conventionality of the anecdote. He had written for two years, amid incredible hardships, denying himself all the pleasures of life which had attracted him to Paris, fighting with starvation for art’s sake, determined that nothing should hinder his great achievement. The effort was heroic.
“But why don’t you write about Spain?” cried Philip. “It would be so much more interesting. You know the life.”
“But Paris is the only place worth writing about. Paris is life.”
One day he brought part of the manuscript, and in his bad French, translating excitedly as he went along so that Philip could scarcely understand, he read passages. It was lamentable. Philip, puzzled, looked at the picture he was painting: the mind behind that broad brow was trivial; and the flashing, passionate eyes saw nothing in life but the obvious. Philip was not satisfied with his portrait, and at the end of a sitting he nearly always scraped out what he had done. It was all very well to aim at the intention of the soul: who could tell what that was when people seemed a mass of contradictions? He liked Miguel, and it distressed him to realise that his magnificent struggle was futile: he had everything to make a good writer but talent. Philip looked at his own work. How could you tell whether there was anything in it or whether you were wasting your time? It was clear that the will to achieve could not help you and confidence in yourself meant nothing. Philip thought of Fanny Price; she had a vehement belief in her talent; her strength of will was extraordinary.
“If I thought I wasn’t going to be really good, I’d rather give up painting,” said Philip. “I don’t see any use in being a second-rate painter.”
Then one morning when he was going out, the concierge called out to him that there was a letter. Nobody wrote to him but his Aunt Louisa and sometimes Hayward, and this was a handwriting he did not know. The letter was as follows:
Please come at once when you get this. I couldn’t put up with it any more. Please come yourself. I can’t bear the thought that anyone else should touch me. I want you to have everything.
F. Price
I have not had anything to eat for three days.
Philip felt on a sudden sick with fear. He hurried to the house in which she lived. He was astonished that she was in Paris at all. He had not seen her for months and imagined she had long since returned to England. When he arrived he asked the concierge whether she was in.
“Yes, I’ve not seen her go out for two days.”
Philip ran upstairs and knocked at the door. There was no reply. He called her name. The door was locked, and on bending down he found the key was in the lock.
“Oh, my God, I hope she hasn’t done something awful,” he cried aloud.
He ran down and told the porter that she was certainly in the room. He had had a letter from her and feared a terrible accident. He suggested breaking open the door. The porter, who had been sullen and disinclined to listen, became alarmed; he could not take the responsibility of breaking into the room; they must go for the commissaire de police. They walked together to the bureau, and then they fetched a locksmith. Philip found that Miss Price had not paid the last quarter’s rent: on New Year’s Day she had not given the concierge the present which old-established custom led him to regard as a right. The four of them went upstairs, and they knocked again at the door. There was no reply. The locksmith set to work, and at last they entered the room. Philip gave a cry and instinctively covered his eyes with his hands. The wretched woman was hanging with a rope round her neck, which she had tied to a hook in the ceiling fixed by some previous tenant to hold up the curtains of the bed. She had moved her own little bed out of the way and had stood on a chair, which had been kicked away. It was lying on its side on the floor. They cut her down. The body was quite cold.