Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) (9 page)

Half-way to the studio, Dick was smitten with a terrible thought. The figure of a solitary woman in the fog suggested it.

‘She’s all alone in London, with a red-haired impressionist girl, who probably has the digestion of an ostrich. Most red-haired people have.

Maisie’s a bilious little body. They’ll eat like lone women, — meals at all hours, and tea with all meals. I remember how the students in Paris used to pig along. She may fall ill at any minute, and I shan’t be able to help.

Whew! this is ten times worse than owning a wife.’

Torpenhow entered the studio at dusk, and looked at Dick with eyes full of the austere love that springs up between men who have tugged at the same oar together and are yoked by custom and use and the intimacies of toil. This is a good love, and, since it allows, and even encourages, strife, recrimination, and brutal sincerity, does not die, but grows, and is proof against any absence and evil conduct.

Dick was silent after he handed Torpenhow the filled pipe of council. He thought of Maisie and her possible needs. It was a new thing to think of anybody but Torpenhow, who could think for himself. Here at last was an outlet for that cash balance. He could adorn Maisie barbarically with jewelry, — a thick gold necklace round that little neck, bracelets upon the rounded arms, and rings of price upon her hands, — the cool, temperate, ringless hands that he had taken between his own. It was an absurd thought, for Maisie would not even allow him to put one ring on one finger, and she would laugh at golden trappings. It would be better to sit with her quietly in the dusk, his arm around her neck and her face on his shoulder, as befitted husband and wife. Torpenhow’s boots creaked that night, and his strong voice jarred. Dick’s brows contracted and he murmured an evil word because he had taken all his success as a right and part payment for past discomfort, and now he was checked in his stride by a woman who admitted all the success and did not instantly care for him.

‘I say, old man,’ said Torpenhow, who had made one or two vain attempts at conversation, ‘I haven’t put your back up by anything I’ve said lately, have I?’

‘You! No. How could you?’

‘Liver out of order?’

‘The truly healthy man doesn’t know he has a liver. I’m only a bit worried about things in general. I suppose it’s my soul.’

‘The truly healthy man doesn’t know he has a soul. What business have you with luxuries of that kind?’

‘It came of itself. Who’s the man that says that we’re all islands shouting lies to each other across seas of misunderstanding?’

‘He’s right, whoever he is, — except about the misunderstanding. I don’t think we could misunderstand each other.’

The blue smoke curled back from the ceiling in clouds. Then Torpenhow, insinuatingly — ’Dick, is it a woman?’

‘Be hanged if it’s anything remotely resembling a woman; and if you begin to talk like that, I’ll hire a red-brick studio with white paint trimmings, and begonias and petunias and blue Hungarias to play among three-and-sixpenny pot-palms, and I’ll mount all my pics in aniline-dye plush plasters, and I’ll invite every woman who maunders over what her guide-books tell her is Art, and you shall receive ‘em, Torp, — in a snuff-brown velvet coat with yellow trousers and an orange tie. You’ll like that?’

‘Too thin, Dick. A better man than you once denied with cursing and swearing. You’ve overdone it, just as he did. It’s no business of mine, of course, but it’s comforting to think that somewhere under the stars there’s saving up for you a tremendous thrashing. Whether it’ll come from heaven or earth, I don’t know, but it’s bound to come and break you up a little. You want hammering.’

Dick shivered. ‘All right,’ said he. ‘When this island is disintegrated, it will call for you.’

‘I shall come round the corner and help to disintegrate it some more.

We’re talking nonsense. Come along to a theatre.’

CHAPTER VI

‘And you may lead a thousand men,

Nor ever draw the rein,

But ere ye lead the Faery Queen

‘Twill burst your heart in twain.’

He has slipped his foot from the stirrup-bar,

The bridle from his hand,

And he is bound by hand and foot

To the Queen o’ Faery-land.

Sir Hoggie and the Fairies.

SOME weeks later, on a very foggy Sunday, Dick was returning across the Park to his studio. ‘This,’ he said, ‘is evidently the thrashing that Torp meant. It hurts more than I expected; but the Queen can do no wrong; and she certainly has some notion of drawing.’

He had just finished a Sunday visit to Maisie, — always under the green eyes of the red-haired impressionist girl, whom he learned to hate at sight, — and was tingling with a keen sense of shame. Sunday after Sunday, putting on his best clothes, he had walked over to the untidy house north of the Park, first to see Maisie’s pictures, and then to criticise and advise upon them as he realised that they were productions on which advice would not be wasted. Sunday after Sunday, and his love grew with each visit, he had been compelled to cram his heart back from between his lips when it prompted him to kiss Maisie several times and very much indeed. Sunday after Sunday, the head above the heart had warned him that Maisie was not yet attainable, and that it would be better to talk as connectedly as possible upon the mysteries of the craft that was all in all to her. Therefore it was his fate to endure weekly torture in the studio built out over the clammy back garden of a frail stuffy little villa where nothing was ever in its right place and nobody every called, — to endure and to watch Maisie moving to and fro with the teacups. He abhorred tea, but, since it gave him a little longer time in her presence, he drank it devoutly, and the red-haired girl sat in an untidy heap and eyed him without speaking. She was always watching him.

Once, and only once, when she had left the studio, Maisie showed him an album that held a few poor cuttings from provincial papers, — the briefest of hurried notes on some of her pictures sent to outlying exhibitions. Dick stooped and kissed the paint-smudged thumb on the open page. ‘Oh, my love, my love,’ he muttered, ‘do you value these things? Chuck ‘em into the waste-paper basket!’

‘Not till I get something better,’ said Maisie, shutting the book.

Then Dick, moved by no respect for his public and a very deep regard for the maiden, did deliberately propose, in order to secure more of these coveted cuttings, that he should paint a picture which Maisie should sign.

‘That’s childish,’ said Maisie, ‘and I didn’t think it of you. It must be my work. Mine, — mine, — mine!’

‘Go and design decorative medallions for rich brewers’ houses. You are thoroughly good at that.’ Dick was sick and savage.

‘Better things than medallions, Dick,’ was the answer, in tones that recalled a gray-eyed atom’s fearless speech to Mrs. Jennett. Dick would have abased himself utterly, but that other girl trailed in.

Next Sunday he laid at Maisie’s feet small gifts of pencils that could almost draw of themselves and colours in whose permanence he believed, and he was ostentatiously attentive to the work in hand. It demanded, among other things, an exposition of the faith that was in him.

Torpenhow’s hair would have stood on end had he heard the fluency with which Dick preached his own gospel of Art.

A month before, Dick would have been equally astonished; but it was Maisie’s will and pleasure, and he dragged his words together to make plain to her comprehension all that had been hidden to himself of the whys and wherefores of work. There is not the least difficulty in doing a thing if you only know how to do it; the trouble is to explain your method.

‘I could put this right if I had a brush in my hand,’ said Dick, despairingly, over the modelling of a chin that Maisie complained would not ‘look flesh,’ — it was the same chin that she had scraped out with the palette knife, — ’but I find it almost impossible to teach you. There’s a queer grin, Dutch touch about your painting that I like; but I’ve a notion that you’re weak in drawing. You foreshorten as though you never used the model, and you’ve caught Kami’s pasty way of dealing with flesh in shadow. Then, again, though you don’t know it yourself, you shirk hard work. Suppose you spend some of your time on line lone. Line doesn’t allow of shirking. Oils do, and three square inches of flashy, tricky stuff in the corner of a pic sometimes carry a bad thing off, — as I know. That’s immoral. Do line-work for a little while, and then I can tell more about your powers, as old Kami used to say.’

Maisie protested; she did not care for the pure line.

‘I know,’ said Dick. ‘You want to do your fancy heads with a bunch of flowers at the base of the neck to hide bad modelling.’ The red-haired girl laughed a little. ‘You want to do landscapes with cattle knee-deep in grass to hide bad drawing. You want to do a great deal more than you can do. You have sense of colour, but you want form. Colour’s a gift, — put it aside and think no more about it, — but form you can be drilled into.

Now, all your fancy heads — and some of them are very good — will keep you exactly where you are. With line you must go forward or backward, and it will show up all your weaknesses.’

‘But other people —  — ’ began Maisie.

‘You mustn’t mind what other people do. If their souls were your soul, it would be different. You stand and fall by your own work, remember, and it’s waste of time to think of any one else in this battle.’

Dick paused, and the longing that had been so resolutely put away came back into his eyes. He looked at Maisie, and the look asked as plainly as words, Was it not time to leave all this barren wilderness of canvas and counsel and join hands with Life and Love?

Maisie assented to the new programme of schooling so adorably that Dick could hardly restrain himself from picking her up then and there and carrying her off to the nearest registrar’s office. It was the implicit obedience to the spoken word and the blank indifference to the unspoken desire that baffled and buffeted his soul. He held authority in that house, — authority limited, indeed, to one-half of one afternoon in seven, but very real while it lasted. Maisie had learned to appeal to him on many subjects, from the proper packing of pictures to the condition of a smoky chimney. The red-haired girl never consulted him about anything.

On the other hand, she accepted his appearances without protest, and watched him always. He discovered that the meals of the establishment were irregular and fragmentary. They depended chiefly on tea, pickles, and biscuit, as he had suspected from the beginning. The girls were supposed to market week and week about, but they lived, with the help of a charwoman, as casually as the young ravens. Maisie spent most of her income on models, and the other girl revelled in apparatus as refined as her work was rough. Armed with knowledge, dear-bought from the Docks, Dick warned Maisie that the end of semi-starvation meant the crippling of power to work, which was considerably worse than death.

Maisie took the warning, and gave more thought to what she ate and drank. When his trouble returned upon him, as it generally did in the long winter twilights, the remembrance of that little act of domestic authority and his coercion with a hearth-brush of the smoky drawing-room chimney stung Dick like a whip-lash.

He conceived that this memory would be the extreme of his sufferings, till one Sunday, the red-haired girl announced that she would make a study of Dick’s head, and that he would be good enough to sit still, and — quite as an afterthought — look at Maisie. He sat, because he could not well refuse, and for the space of half an hour he reflected on all the people in the past whom he had laid open for the purposes of his own craft. He remembered Binat most distinctly, — that Binat who had once been an artist and talked about degradation.

It was the merest monochrome roughing in of a head, but it presented the dumb waiting, the longing, and, above all, the hopeless enslavement of the man, in a spirit of bitter mockery.

‘I’ll buy it,’ said Dick, promptly, ‘at your own price.’

‘My price is too high, but I dare say you’ll be as grateful if —  — ’ The wet sketch, fluttered from the girl’s hand and fell into the ashes of the studio stove. When she picked it up it was hopelessly smudged.

‘Oh, it’s all spoiled!’ said Maisie. ‘And I never saw it. Was it like?’

‘Thank you,’ said Dick under his breath to the red-haired girl, and he removed himself swiftly.

‘How that man hates me!’ said the girl. ‘And how he loves you, Maisie!’

‘What nonsense? I knew Dick’s very fond of me, but he had his work to do, and I have mine.’

‘Yes, he is fond of you, and I think he knows there is something in impressionism, after all. Maisie, can’t you see?’

‘See? See what?’

‘Nothing; only, I know that if I could get any man to look at me as that man looks at you, I’d — I don’t know what I’d do. But he hates me. Oh, how he hates me!’

She was not altogether correct. Dick’s hatred was tempered with gratitude for a few moments, and then he forgot the girl entirely. Only the sense of shame remained, and he was nursing it across the Park in the fog. ‘There’ll be an explosion one of these days,’ he said wrathfully. ‘But it isn’t Maisie’s fault; she’s right, quite right, as far as she knows, and I can’t blame her. This business has been going on for three months nearly.

Three months! — and it cost me ten years’ knocking about to get at the notion, the merest raw notion, of my work. That’s true; but then I didn’t have pins, drawing-pins, and palette-knives, stuck into me every Sunday.

Oh, my little darling, if ever I break you, somebody will have a very bad time of it. No, she won’t. I’d be as big a fool about her as I am now. I’ll poison that red-haired girl on my wedding-day, — she’s unwholesome, — and now I’ll pass on these present bad times to Torp.’

Torpenhow had been moved to lecture Dick more than once lately on the sin of levity, and Dick and listened and replied not a word. In the weeks between the first few Sundays of his discipline he had flung himself savagely into his work, resolved that Maisie should at least know the full stretch of his powers. Then he had taught Maisie that she must not pay the least attention to any work outside her own, and Maisie had obeyed him all too well. She took his counsels, but was not interested in his pictures.