The Hermit and the Wild Woman, and Other Stories

there had been no preliminary work of destruction—his face was clear and untouched. I had met him once or twice, years before, and thought him insignificant and dingy. Now I saw that he was superb.

“I was glad at first, with a merely aesthetic satisfaction: glad to have my hand on such a ‘subject.’ Then his strange life-likeness began to affect me queerly—as I blocked the head in I felt as if he were watching me do it. The sensation was followed by the thought: if he were watching me, what would he say to my way of working? My strokes began to go a little wild—I felt nervous and uncertain.

“Once, when I looked up, I seemed to see a smile behind his close grayish beard—as if he had the secret, and were amusing himself by holding it back from me. That exasperated me still more. The secret? Why, I had a secret worth twenty of his! I dashed at the canvas furiously, and tried some of my bravura tricks. But they failed me, they crumbled. I saw that he wasn’t watching the showy bits—I couldn’t distract his attention; he just kept his eyes on the hard passages between. Those were the ones I had always shirked, or covered up with some lying paint. And how he saw through my lies!

“I looked up again, and caught sight of that sketch of the donkey hanging on the wall near his bed. His wife told me afterward it was the last thing he had done—just a note taken with a shaking hand, when he was down in Devonshire recovering from a previous heart attack. Just a note! But it tells his whole history. There are years of patient scornful persistence in every line. A man who had swum with the current could never have learned that mighty up-stream stroke….

“I turned back to my work, and went on groping and muddling; then I looked at the donkey again. I saw that, when Stroud laid in the first stroke, he knew just what the end would be. He had possessed his subject, absorbed it, recreated it. When had I done that with any of my things? They hadn’t been born of me—I had just adopted them….

“Hang it, Rickham, with that face watching me I couldn’t do another stroke. The plain truth was, I didn’t know where to put it—_I had never known_. Only, with my sitters and my public, a showy splash of colour covered up the fact—I just threw paint into their faces…. Well, paint was the one medium those dead eyes could see through—see straight to the tottering foundations underneath. Don’t you know how, in talking a foreign language, even fluently, one says half the time not what one wants to but what one can? Well—that was the way I painted; and as he lay there and watched me, the thing they called my ‘technique’ collapsed like a house of cards. He didn’t sneer, you understand, poor Stroud—he just lay there quietly watching, and on his lips, through the gray beard, I seemed to hear the question: ‘Are you sure you know where you’re coming out?’

“If I could have painted that face, with that question on it, I should have done a great thing. The next greatest thing was to see that I couldn’t—and that grace was given me. But, oh, at that minute, Rickham, was there anything on earth I wouldn’t have given to have Stroud alive before me, and to hear him say: ‘It’s not too late—I’ll show you how’?

“It was too late—it would have been, even if he’d been alive. I packed up my traps, and went down and told Mrs. Stroud. Of course I didn’t tell her that—it would have been Greek to her. I simply said I couldn’t paint him, that I was too moved. She rather liked the idea—she’s so romantic! It was that that made her give me the donkey. But she was terribly upset at not getting the portrait—she did so want him ‘done’ by some one showy! At first I was afraid she wouldn’t let me off—and at my wits’ end I suggested Grindle. Yes, it was I who started Grindle: I told Mrs. Stroud he was the ‘coming’ man, and she told somebody else, and so it got to be true…. And he painted Stroud without wincing; and she hung the picture among her husband’s things….”

He flung himself down in the armchair near mine, laid back his head, and clasping his arms beneath it, looked up at the picture above the chimney-piece.

“I like to fancy that Stroud himself would have given it to me, if he’d been able to say what he thought that day.”

And, in answer to a question I put half-mechanically—“Begin again?” he flashed out. “When the one thing that brings me anywhere near him is that I knew enough to leave off?”

He stood up and laid his hand on my shoulder with a laugh. “Only the irony of it is that I am still painting—since Grindle’s doing it for me! The Strouds stand alone, and happen once—but there’s no exterminating our kind of art.”

THE POT-BOILER

I

The studio faced north, looking out over a dismal reach of roofs and chimneys, and rusty fire-escapes hung with heterogeneous garments. A crust of dirty snow covered the level surfaces, and a December sky with more snow in it lowered over them.

The room was bare and gaunt, with blotched walls and a stained uneven floor. On a divan lay a pile of “properties”—limp draperies, an Algerian scarf, a moth-eaten fan of peacock feathers. The janitor had forgotten to fill the coal-scuttle over-night, and the cast-iron stove projected its cold flanks into the room like a black iceberg. Ned Stanwell, who had just added his hat and great-coat to the miscellaneous heap on the divan, turned from the empty stove with a shiver.

“By Jove, this is a little too much like the last act of Boheme,” he said, slipping into his coat again after a vain glance at the coal-scuttle. Much solitude, and a lively habit of mind, had bred in him the habit of audible soliloquy, and having flung a shout for the janitor down the seven flights dividing the studio from the basement, he turned back, picking up the thread of his monologue. “Exactly like Boheme, really—that crack in the wall is much more like a stage-crack than a real one—just the sort of crack Mungold would paint if he were doing a Humble Interior.”

Mungold, the fashionable portrait-painter of the hour, was the favourite object of the younger men’s irony.

“It only needs Kate Arran to be borne in dying,” Stanwell continued with a laugh. “Much more likely to be poor little Caspar, though,” he concluded.

His neighbour across the landing—the little sculptor, Caspar Arran, humorously called “Gasper” on account of his bronchial asthma—had lately been joined by a sister, Kate Arran, a strapping girl, fresh from the country, who had installed herself in the little room off her brother’s studio, keeping house for him with a chafing-dish and a coffee-machine, to the mirth and envy of the other young men in the building.

Poor little Gasper had been very bad all the autumn, and it was surmised that his sister’s presence, which he spoke of growlingly, as a troublesome necessity devolved on him by the inopportune death of an aunt, was really an indication of his failing ability to take care of himself. Kate Arran took his complaints with unfailing good-humour, darned his socks, brushed his clothes, fed him with steaming broths and foaming milk-punches, and listened with reverential assent to his interminable disquisitions on art. Every one in the house was sorry for little Gasper, and the other fellows liked him all the more because it was so impossible to like his sculpture; but his talk was a bore,