XLIII…

XLIII

On Tuesdays and Fridays masters spent the morning at Amitrano’s, criticising the work done. In France the painter earns little unless he paints portraits and is patronised by rich Americans; and men of reputation are glad to increase their incomes by spending two or three hours once a week at one of the numerous studios where art is taught. Tuesday was the day upon which Michel Rollin came to Amitrano’s. He was an elderly man, with a white beard and a florid complexion, who had painted a number of decorations for the State, but these were an object of derision to the students he instructed: he was a disciple of Ingres, impervious to the progress of art and angrily impatient with that tas de farceurs whose names were Manet, Degas, Monet, and Sisley; but he was an excellent teacher, helpful, polite, and encouraging. Foinet, on the other hand, who visited the studio on Fridays, was a difficult man to get on with. He was a small, shrivelled person, with bad teeth and a bilious air, an untidy gray beard, and savage eyes; his voice was high and his tone sarcastic. He had had pictures bought by the Luxembourg, and at twenty-five looked forward to a great career; but his talent was due to youth rather than to personality, and for twenty years he had done nothing but repeat the landscape which had brought him his early success. When he was reproached with monotony, he answered:

“Corot only painted one thing. Why shouldn’t I?”

He was envious of everyone else’s success, and had a peculiar, personal loathing of the impressionists; for he looked upon his own failure as due to the mad fashion which had attracted the public, sale bete, to their works. The genial disdain of Michel Rollin, who called them impostors, was answered by him with vituperation, of which crapule and canaille were the least violent items; he amused himself with abuse of their private lives, and with sardonic humour, with blasphemous and obscene detail, attacked the legitimacy of their births and the purity of their conjugal relations: he used an Oriental imagery and an Oriental emphasis to accentuate his ribald scorn. Nor did he conceal his contempt for the students whose work he examined. By them he was hated and feared; the women by his brutal sarcasm he reduced often to tears, which again aroused his ridicule; and he remained at the studio, notwithstanding the protests of those who suffered too bitterly from his attacks, because there could be no doubt that he was one of the best masters in Paris. Sometimes the old model who kept the school ventured to remonstrate with him, but his expostulations quickly gave way before the violent insolence of the painter to abject apologies.

It was Foinet with whom Philip first came in contact. He was already in the studio when Philip arrived. He went round from easel to easel, with Mrs. Otter, the massiere, by his side to interpret his remarks for the benefit of those who could not understand French. Fanny Price, sitting next to Philip, was working feverishly. Her face was sallow with nervousness, and every now and then she stopped to wipe her hands on her blouse; for they were hot with anxiety. Suddenly she turned to Philip with an anxious look, which she tried to hide by a sullen frown.

“D’you think it’s good?” she asked, nodding at her drawing.

Philip got up and looked at it. He was astounded; he felt she must have no eye at all; the thing was hopelessly out of drawing.

“I wish I could draw half as well myself,” he answered.

“You can’t expect to, you’ve only just come. It’s a bit too much to expect that you should draw as well as I do. I’ve been here two years.”

Fanny Price puzzled Philip. Her conceit was stupendous. Philip had already discovered that everyone in the studio cordially disliked her; and it was no wonder, for she seemed to go out of her way to wound people.

“I complained to Mrs. Otter about Foinet,” she said now. “The last two weeks he hasn’t looked at my drawings. He spends about half an hour on Mrs. Otter because she’s the massiere. After all I pay as much as anybody else, and I suppose my money’s as good as theirs. I don’t see why I shouldn’t get as much attention as anybody else.”

She took up her charcoal again, but in a moment put it down with a groan.

“I can’t do any more now. I’m so frightfully nervous.”

She looked at Foinet, who was coming towards them with Mrs. Otter. Mrs. Otter, meek, mediocre, and self-satisfied, wore an air of importance. Foinet sat down at the easel of an untidy little Englishwoman called Ruth Chalice. She had the fine black eyes, languid but passionate, the thin face, ascetic but sensual, the skin like old ivory, which under the influence of Burne-Jones were cultivated at that time by young ladies in Chelsea. Foinet seemed in a pleasant mood; he did not say much to her, but with quick, determined strokes of her charcoal pointed out her errors. Miss Chalice beamed with pleasure when he rose. He came to Clutton, and by this time Philip was nervous too but Mrs. Otter had promised to make things easy for him. Foinet stood for a moment in front of Clutton’s work, biting his thumb silently, then absent-mindedly spat out upon the canvas the little piece of skin which he had bitten off.

“That’s a fine line,” he said at last, indicating with his thumb what pleased him. “You’re beginning to learn to draw.”

Clutton did not answer, but looked at the master with his usual air of sardonic indifference to the world’s opinion.

“I’m beginning to think you have at least a trace of talent.”

Mrs. Otter, who did not like Clutton, pursed her lips. She did not see anything out of the way in his work. Foinet sat down and went into technical details. Mrs. Otter grew rather tired of standing. Clutton did not say anything, but nodded now and then, and Foinet felt with satisfaction that he grasped what he said and the reasons of it; most of them listened to him, but it was clear they never understood. Then Foinet got up and came to Philip.

“He only arrived two days ago,” Mrs. Otter hurried to explain. “He’s a beginner. He’s never studied before.”

“Ca se voit,” the master said. “One sees that.”

He passed on, and Mrs. Otter murmured to him:

“This is the young lady I told you about.”

He looked at her as though she were some repulsive animal, and his voice grew more rasping.

“It appears that you do not think I pay enough attention to you. You have been complaining to the massiere. Well, show me this work to which you wish me to give attention.”

Fanny Price coloured. The blood under her unhealthy skin seemed to be of a strange purple. Without answering she pointed to the drawing on which she had been at work since the beginning of the week. Foinet sat down.

“Well, what do you wish me to say to you? Do you wish me to tell you it is good? It isn’t. Do you wish me to tell you it is well drawn? It isn’t. Do you wish me to say it has merit? It hasn’t. Do you wish me to show you what is wrong with it? It is all wrong. Do you wish me to tell you what to do with it? Tear it up. Are you satisfied now?”

Miss Price became very white. She was furious because he had said all this before Mrs. Otter. Though she had been in France so long and could understand French well enough, she could hardly speak two words.

“He’s got no right to treat me like that. My money’s as good as anyone else’s. I pay him to teach me. That’s not teaching me.”

“What does she say? What does she say?” asked Foinet.

Mrs. Otter hesitated to translate, and Miss Price repeated in execrable French.

“Je vous paye pour m’apprendre.”

His eyes flashed with rage, he raised his voice and shook his fist.

“Mais, nom de Dieu, I can’t teach you. I could more easily teach a camel.” He turned to Mrs. Otter. “Ask her, does she do this for amusement, or does she expect to earn money by it?”

“I’m going to earn my living as an artist,” Miss Price answered.

“Then it is my duty to tell you that you are wasting your time. It would not matter that you have no talent, talent does not run about the streets in these days, but you have not the beginning of an aptitude. How long have you been here? A child of five after two lessons would draw better than you do. I only say one thing to you, give up this hopeless attempt. You’re more likely to earn your living as a bonne a tout faire than as a painter. Look.”

He seized a piece of charcoal, and it broke as he applied it to the paper. He cursed, and with the stump drew great firm lines. He drew rapidly and spoke at the same time, spitting out the words with venom.

“Look, those arms are not the same length. That knee, it’s grotesque. I tell you a child of five. You see, she’s not standing on her legs. That foot!”

With each word the angry pencil made a mark, and in a moment the drawing upon which Fanny Price had spent so much time and eager trouble was unrecognisable, a confusion of lines and smudges. At last he flung down the charcoal and stood up.

“Take my advice, Mademoiselle, try dressmaking.” He looked at his watch. “It’s twelve. A la semaine prochaine, messieurs.”

Miss Price gathered up her things slowly. Philip waited behind after the others to say to her something consolatory. He could think of nothing but:

“I say, I’m awfully sorry. What a beast that man is!”

She turned on him savagely.

“Is that what you’re waiting about for? When I want your sympathy I’ll ask for it. Please get out of my way.”

She walked past him, out of the studio, and Philip, with a shrug of the shoulders, limped along to Gravier’s for luncheon.

“It served her right,” said Lawson, when Philip told him what had happened. “Ill-tempered slut.”

Lawson was very sensitive to criticism and, in order to avoid it, never went to the studio when Foinet was coming.

“I don’t want other people’s opinion of my work,” he said. “I know myself if it’s good or bad.”

“You mean you don’t want other people’s bad opinion of your work,” answered Clutton dryly.

In the afternoon Philip thought he would go to the Luxembourg to see the pictures, and walking through the garden he saw Fanny Price sitting in her accustomed seat. He was sore at the rudeness with which she had met his well-meant attempt to say something pleasant, and passed as though he had not caught sight of her. But she got up at once and came towards him.

“Are you trying to cut me?” she said.

“No, of course not. I thought perhaps you didn’t want to be spoken to.”

“Where are you going?”

“I wanted to have a look at the Manet, I’ve heard so much about it.”

“Would you like me to come with you? I know the Luxembourg rather well. I could show you one or two good things.”

He understood that, unable to bring herself to apologise directly, she made this offer as amends.

“It’s awfully kind of you. I should like it very much.”

“You needn’t say yes if you’d rather go alone,” she said suspiciously.

“I wouldn’t.”

They walked towards the gallery. Caillebotte’s collection had lately been placed on view, and the student for the first time had the opportunity to examine at his ease the works of the impressionists. Till then it had been possible to see them only at Durand-Ruel’s shop in the Rue Lafitte (and the dealer, unlike his fellows in England, who adopt towards the painter an attitude of superiority, was always pleased to show the shabbiest student whatever he wanted to see), or at his private house, to which it was not difficult to get a card of admission on Tuesdays, and where you might see pictures of world-wide reputation. Miss Price led Philip straight up to Manet’s Olympia. He looked at it in astonished silence.

“Do you like it?” asked Miss Price.

“I don’t know,” he answered helplessly.

“You can take it from me that it’s the best thing in the gallery except perhaps Whistler’s portrait of his mother.”

She gave him a certain time to contemplate the masterpiece and then took him to a picture representing a railway-station.

“Look, here’s a Monet,” she said. “It’s the Gare St. Lazare.”

“But the railway lines aren’t parallel,” said Philip.

“What does that matter?” she asked, with a haughty air.

Philip felt ashamed of himself. Fanny Price had picked up the glib chatter of the studios and had no difficulty in impressing Philip with the extent of her knowledge. She proceeded to explain the pictures to him, superciliously but not without insight, and showed him what the painters had attempted and what he must look for. She talked with much gesticulation of the thumb, and Philip, to whom all she said was new, listened with profound but bewildered interest. Till now he had worshipped Watts and Burne-Jones. The pretty colour of the first, the affected drawing of the second, had entirely satisfied his aesthetic sensibilities. Their vague idealism, the suspicion of a philosophical idea which underlay the titles they gave their pictures, accorded very well with the functions of art as from his diligent perusal of Ruskin he understood it; but here was something quite different: here was no moral appeal; and the contemplation of these works could help no one to lead a purer and a higher life. He was puzzled.

At last he said: “You know, I’m simply dead. I don’t think I can absorb anything more profitably. Let’s go and sit down on one of the benches.”

“It’s better not to take too much art at a time,” Miss Price answered.

When they got outside he thanked her warmly for the trouble she had taken.

“Oh, that’s all right,” she said, a little ungraciously. “I do it because I enjoy it. We’ll go to the Louvre tomorrow if you like, and then I’ll take you to Durand-Ruel’s.”

“You’re really awfully good to me.”

“You don’t think me such a beast as the most of them do.”

“I don’t,” he smiled.

“They think they’ll drive me away from the studio; but they won’t; I shall stay there just exactly as long as it suits me. All that this morning, it was Lucy Otter’s doing, I know it was. She always has hated me. She thought after that I’d take myself off. I daresay she’d like me to go. She’s afraid I know too much about her.”

Miss Price told him a long, involved story, which made out that Mrs. Otter, a humdrum and respectable little person, had scabrous intrigues. Then she talked of Ruth Chalice, the girl whom Foinet had praised that morning.

“She’s been with every one of the fellows at the studio. She’s nothing better than a street-walker. And she’s dirty. She hasn’t had a bath for a month. I know it for a fact.”

Philip listened uncomfortably. He had heard already that various rumours were in circulation about Miss Chalice; but it was ridiculous to suppose that Mrs. Otter, living with her mother, was anything but rigidly virtuous. The woman walking by his side with her malignant lying positively horrified him.

“I don’t care what they say. I shall go on just the same. I know I’ve got it in me. I feel I’m an artist. I’d sooner kill myself than give it up. Oh, I shan’t be the first they’ve all laughed at in the schools and then he’s turned out the only genius of the lot. Art’s the only thing I care for, I’m willing to give my whole life to it. It’s only a question of sticking to it and pegging away.”

She found discreditable motives for everyone who would not take her at her own estimate of herself. She detested Clutton. She told Philip that his friend had no talent really; it was just flashy and superficial; he couldn’t compose a figure to save his life. And Lawson:

“Little beast, with his red hair and his freckles. He’s so afraid of Foinet that he won’t let him see his work. After all, I don’t funk it, do I? I don’t care what Foinet says to me, I know I’m a real artist.”

They reached the street in which she lived, and with a sigh of relief Philip left her.

XLIV

But notwithstanding when Miss Price on the following Sunday offered to take him to the Louvre Philip accepted. She showed him Mona Lisa. He looked at it with a slight feeling of disappointment, but he had read till he knew by heart the jewelled words with which Walter Pater has added beauty to the most famous picture in the world; and these now he repeated to Miss Price.

“That’s all literature,” she said, a little contemptuously. “You must get away from that.”

She showed him the Rembrandts, and she said many appropriate things about them. She stood in front of the Disciples at Emmaus.

“When you feel the beauty of that,” she said, “you’ll know something about painting.”

She showed him the Odalisque and La Source of Ingres. Fanny Price was a peremptory guide, she would not let him look at the things he wished, and attempted to force his admiration for all she admired. She was desperately in earnest with her study of art, and when Philip, passing in the Long Gallery a window that looked out on the Tuileries, gay, sunny, and urbane, like a picture by Raffaelli, exclaimed:

“I say, how jolly! Do let’s stop here a minute.”

She said, indifferently: “Yes, it’s all right. But we’ve come here to look at pictures.”

The autumn air, blithe and vivacious, elated Philip; and when towards mid-day they stood in the great court-yard of the Louvre, he felt inclined to cry like Flanagan: To hell with art.

“I say, do let’s go to one of those restaurants in the Boul’ Mich’ and have a snack together, shall we?” he suggested.

Miss Price gave him a suspicious look.

“I’ve got my lunch waiting for me at home,” she answered.

“That doesn’t matter. You can eat it tomorrow. Do let me stand you a lunch.”

“I don’t know why you want to.”

“It would give me pleasure,” he replied, smiling.

They crossed the river, and at the corner of the Boulevard St. Michel there was a restaurant.

“Let’s go in there.”

“No, I won’t go there, it looks too expensive.”

She walked on firmly, and Philip was obliged to follow. A few steps brought them to a smaller restaurant, where a dozen people were already lunching on the pavement under an awning; on the window was announced in large white letters: Dejeuner 1.25, vin compris.

“We couldn’t have anything cheaper than this, and it looks quite all right.”

They sat down at a vacant table and waited for the omelette which was the first article on the bill of fare. Philip gazed with delight upon the passers-by. His heart went out to them. He was tired but very happy.

“I say, look at that man in the blouse. Isn’t he ripping!”

He glanced at Miss Price, and to his astonishment saw that she was looking down at her plate, regardless of the passing spectacle, and two heavy tears were rolling down her cheeks.

“What on earth’s the matter?” he exclaimed.

“If you say anything to me I shall get up and go at once,” she answered.

He was entirely puzzled, but fortunately at that moment the omelette came. He divided it in two and they began to eat. Philip did his best to talk of indifferent things, and it seemed as though Miss Price were making an effort on her side to be agreeable; but the luncheon was not altogether a success. Philip was squeamish, and the way in which Miss Price ate took his appetite away. She ate noisily, greedily, a little like a wild beast in a menagerie, and after she had finished each course rubbed the plate with pieces of bread till it was white and shining, as if she did not wish to lose a single drop of gravy. They had Camembert cheese, and it disgusted Philip to see that she ate rind and all of the portion that was given her. She could not have eaten more ravenously if she were starving.

Miss Price was unaccountable, and having parted from her on one day with friendliness he could never tell whether on the next she would not be sulky and uncivil; but he learned a good deal from her: though she could not draw well herself, she knew all that could be taught, and her constant suggestions helped his progress. Mrs. Otter was useful to him too, and sometimes Miss Chalice criticised his work; he learned from the glib loquacity of Lawson and from the example of Clutton. But Fanny Price hated him to take suggestions from anyone but herself, and when he asked her help after someone else had been talking to him she would refuse with brutal rudeness. The other fellows, Lawson, Clutton, Flanagan, chaffed him about her.

“You be careful, my lad,” they said, “she’s in love with you.”

“Oh, what nonsense,” he laughed.

The thought that Miss Price could be in love with anyone was preposterous. It made him shudder when he thought of her uncomeliness, the bedraggled hair and the dirty hands, the brown dress she always wore, stained and ragged at the hem: he supposed she was hard up, they were all hard up, but she might at least be clean; and it was surely possible with a needle and thread to make her skirt tidy.

Philip began to sort his impressions of the people he was thrown in contact with. He was not so ingenuous as in those days which now seemed so long ago at Heidelberg, and, beginning to take a more deliberate interest in humanity, he was inclined to examine and to criticise. He found it difficult to know Clutton any better after seeing him every day for three months than on the first day of their acquaintance. The general impression at the studio was that he was able; it was supposed that he would do great things, and he shared the general opinion; but what exactly he was going to do neither he nor anybody else quite knew. He had worked at several studios before Amitrano’s, at Julian’s, the Beaux Arts, and MacPherson’s, and was remaining longer at Amitrano’s than anywhere because he found himself more left alone. He was not fond of showing his work, and unlike most of the young men who were studying art neither sought nor gave advice. It was said that in the little studio in the Rue Campagne Premiere, which served him for work-room and bed-room, he had wonderful pictures which would make his reputation if only he could be induced to exhibit them. He could not afford a model but painted still life, and Lawson constantly talked of a plate of apples which he declared was a masterpiece. He was fastidious, and, aiming at something he did not quite fully grasp, was constantly dissatisfied with his work as a whole: perhaps a part would please him, the forearm or the leg and foot of a figure, a glass or a cup in a still-life; and he would cut this out and keep it, destroying the rest of the canvas; so that when people invited themselves to see his work he could truthfully answer that he had not a single picture to show. In Brittany he had come across a painter whom nobody else had heard of, a queer fellow who had been a stockbroker and taken up painting at middle-age, and he was greatly influenced by his work. He was turning his back on the impressionists and working out for himself painfully an individual way not only of painting but of seeing. Philip felt in him something strangely original.

At Gravier’s where they ate, and in the evening at the Versailles or at the Closerie des Lilas Clutton was inclined to taciturnity. He sat quietly, with a sardonic expression on his gaunt face, and spoke only when the opportunity occurred to throw in a witticism. He liked a butt and was most cheerful when someone was there on whom he could exercise his sarcasm. He seldom talked of anything but painting, and then only with the one or two persons whom he thought worth while. Philip wondered whether there was in him really anything: his reticence, the haggard look of him, the pungent humour, seemed to suggest personality, but might be no more than an effective mask which covered nothing.

With Lawson on the other hand Philip soon grew intimate. He had a variety of interests which made him an agreeable companion. He read more than most of the students and though his income was small, loved to buy books. He lent them willingly; and Philip became acquainted with Flaubert and Balzac, with Verlaine, Heredia, and Villiers de l’Isle Adam. They went to plays together and sometimes to the gallery of the Opera Comique. There was the Odeon quite near them, and Philip soon shared his friend’s passion for the tragedians of Louis XIV and the sonorous Alexandrine. In the Rue Taitbout were the Concerts Rouge, where for seventy-five centimes they could hear excellent music and get into the bargain something which it was quite possible to drink: the seats were uncomfortable, the place was crowded, the air thick with caporal horrible to breathe, but in their young enthusiasm they were indifferent. Sometimes they went to the Bal Bullier. On these occasions Flanagan accompanied them. His excitability and his roisterous enthusiasm made them laugh. He was an excellent dancer, and before they had been ten minutes in the room he was prancing round with some little shop-girl whose acquaintance he had just made.

The desire of all of them was to have a mistress. It was part of the paraphernalia of the art-student in Paris. It gave consideration in the eyes of one’s fellows. It was something to boast about. But the difficulty was that they had scarcely enough money to keep themselves, and though they argued that French-women were so clever it cost no more to keep two then one, they found it difficult to meet young women who were willing to take that view of the circumstances. They had to content themselves for the most part with envying and abusing the ladies who received protection from painters of more settled respectability than their own. It was extraordinary how difficult these things were in Paris. Lawson would become acquainted with some young thing and make an appointment; for twenty-four hours he would be all in a flutter and describe the charmer at length to everyone he met; but she never by any chance turned up at the time fixed. He would come to Gravier’s very late, ill-tempered, and exclaim:

“Confound it, another rabbit! I don’t know why it is they don’t like me. I suppose it’s because I don’t speak French well, or my red hair. It’s too sickening to have spent over a year in Paris without getting hold of anyone.”

“You don’t go the right way to work,” said Flanagan.

He had a long and enviable list of triumphs to narrate, and though they took leave not to believe all he said, evidence forced them to acknowledge that he did not altogether lie. But he sought no permanent arrangement. He only had two years in Paris: he had persuaded his people to let him come and study art instead of going to college; but at the end of that period he was to return to Seattle and go into his father’s business. He had made up his mind to get as much fun as possible into the time, and demanded variety rather than duration in his love affairs.

“I don’t know how you get hold of them,” said Lawson furiously.

“There’s no difficulty about that, sonny,” answered Flanagan. “You just go right in. The difficulty is to get rid of them. That’s where you want tact.”

Philip was too much occupied with his work, the books he was reading, the plays he saw, the conversation he listened to, to trouble himself with the desire for female society. He thought there would be plenty of time for that when he could speak French more glibly.

It was more than a year now since he had seen Miss Wilkinson, and during his first weeks in Paris he had been too busy to answer a letter she had written to him just before he left Blackstable. When another came, knowing it would be full of reproaches and not being just then in the mood for them, he put it aside, intending to open it later; but he forgot and did not run across it till a month afterwards, when he was turning out a drawer to find some socks that had no holes in them. He looked at the unopened letter with dismay. He was afraid that Miss Wilkinson had suffered a good deal, and it made him feel a brute; but she had probably got over the suffering by now, at all events the worst of it. It suggested itself to him that women were often very emphatic in their expressions. These did not mean so much as when men used them. He had quite made up his mind that nothing would induce him ever to see her again. He had not written for so long that it seemed hardly worth while to write now. He made up his mind not to read the letter.

“I daresay she won’t write again,” he said to himself. “She can’t help seeing the thing’s over. After all, she was old enough to be my mother; she ought to have known better.”

For an hour or two he felt a little uncomfortable. His attitude was obviously the right one, but he could not help a feeling of dissatisfaction with the whole business. Miss Wilkinson, however, did not write again; nor did she, as he absurdly feared, suddenly appear in Paris to make him ridiculous before his friends. In a little while he clean forgot her.

Meanwhile he definitely forsook his old gods. The amazement with which at first he had looked upon the works of the impressionists, changed to admiration; and presently he found himself talking as emphatically as the rest on the merits of Manet, Monet, and Degas. He bought a photograph of a drawing by Ingres of the Odalisque and a photograph of the Olympia. They were pinned side by side over his washing-stand so that he could contemplate their beauty while he shaved. He knew now quite positively that there had been no painting of landscape before Monet; and he felt a real thrill when he stood in front of Rembrandt’s Disciples at Emmaus or Velasquez’ Lady with the Flea-bitten Nose. That was not her real name, but by that she was distinguished at Gravier’s to emphasise the picture’s beauty notwithstanding the somewhat revolting peculiarity of the sitter’s appearance. With Ruskin, Burne-Jones, and Watts, he had put aside his bowler hat and the neat blue tie with white spots which he had worn on coming to Paris; and now disported himself in a soft, broad-brimmed hat, a flowing black cravat, and a cape of romantic cut. He walked along the Boulevard du Montparnasse as though he had known it all his life, and by virtuous perseverance he had learnt to drink absinthe without distaste. He was letting his hair grow, and it was only because Nature is unkind and has no regard for the immortal longings of youth that he did not attempt a beard.

XLV

Philip soon realised that the spirit which informed his friends was Cronshaw’s. It was from him that Lawson got his paradoxes; and even Clutton, who strained after individuality, expressed himself in the terms he had insensibly acquired from the older man. It was his ideas that they bandied about at table, and on his authority they formed their judgments. They made up for the respect with which unconsciously they treated him by laughing at his foibles and lamenting his vices.

“Of course, poor old Cronshaw will never do any good,” they said. “He’s quite hopeless.”

They prided themselves on being alone in appreciating his genius; and though, with the contempt of youth for the follies of middle-age, they patronised him among themselves, they did not fail to look upon it as a feather in their caps if he had chosen a time when only one was there to be particularly wonderful. Cronshaw never came to Gravier’s. For the last four years he had lived in squalid conditions with a woman whom only Lawson had once seen, in a tiny apartment on the sixth floor of one of the most dilapidated houses on the Quai des Grands Augustins: Lawson described with gusto the filth, the untidiness, the litter.

“And the stink nearly blew your head off.”

“Not at dinner, Lawson,” expostulated one of the others.

But he would not deny himself the pleasure of giving picturesque details of the odours which met his nostril. With a fierce delight in his own realism he described the woman who had opened the door for him. She was dark, small, and fat, quite young, with black hair that seemed always on the point of coming down. She wore a slatternly blouse and no corsets. With her red cheeks, large sensual mouth, and shining, lewd eyes, she reminded you of the Bohemienne in the Louvre by Franz Hals. She had a flaunting vulgarity which amused and yet horrified. A scrubby, unwashed baby was playing on the floor. It was known that the slut deceived Cronshaw with the most worthless ragamuffins of the Quarter, and it was a mystery to the ingenuous youths who absorbed his wisdom over a cafe table that Cronshaw with his keen intellect and his passion for beauty could ally himself to such a creature. But he seemed to revel in the coarseness of her language and would often report some phrase which reeked of the gutter. He referred to her ironically as la fille de mon concierge. Cronshaw was very poor. He earned a bare subsistence by writing on the exhibitions of pictures for one or two English papers, and he did a certain amount of translating. He had been on the staff of an English paper in Paris, but had been dismissed for drunkenness; he still however did odd jobs for it, describing sales at the Hotel Drouot or the revues at music-halls. The life of Paris had got into his bones, and he would not change it, notwithstanding its squalor, drudgery, and hardship, for any other in the world. He remained there all through the year, even in summer when everyone he knew was away, and felt himself only at ease within a mile of the Boulevard St. Michel. But the curious thing was that he had never learnt to speak French passably, and he kept in his shabby clothes bought at La Belle Jardiniere an ineradicably English appearance.

He was a man who would have made a success of life a century and a half ago when conversation was a passport to good company and inebriety no bar.

“I ought to have lived in the eighteen hundreds,” he said himself. “What I want is a patron. I should have published my poems by subscription and dedicated them to a nobleman. I long to compose rhymed couplets upon the poodle of a countess. My soul yearns for the love of chamber-maids and the conversation of bishops.”

He quoted the romantic Rolla,

“Je suis venu trop tard dans un monde trop vieux.”

He liked new faces, and he took a fancy to Philip, who seemed to achieve the difficult feat of talking just enough to suggest conversation and not too much to prevent monologue. Philip was captivated. He did not realise that little that Cronshaw said was new. His personality in conversation had a curious power. He had a beautiful and a sonorous voice, and a manner of putting things which was irresistible to youth. All he said seemed to excite thought, and often on the way home Lawson and Philip would walk to and from one another’s hotels, discussing some point which a chance word of Cronshaw had suggested. It was disconcerting to Philip, who had a youthful eagerness for results, that Cronshaw’s poetry hardly came up to expectation. It had never been published in a volume, but most of it had appeared in periodicals; and after a good deal of persuasion Cronshaw brought down a bundle of pages torn out of The Yellow Book, The Saturday Review, and other journals, on each of which was a poem. Philip was taken aback to find that most of them reminded him either of Henley or of Swinburne. It needed the splendour of Cronshaw’s delivery to make them personal. He expressed his disappointment to Lawson, who carelessly repeated his words; and next time Philip went to the Closerie des Lilas the poet turned to him with his sleek smile:

“I hear you don’t think much of my verses.”

Philip was embarrassed.

“I don’t know about that,” he answered. “I enjoyed reading them very much.”

“Do not attempt to spare my feelings,” returned Cronshaw, with a wave of his fat hand. “I do not attach any exaggerated importance to my poetical works. Life is there to be lived rather than to be written about. My aim is to search out the manifold experience that it offers, wringing from each moment what of emotion it presents. I look upon my writing as a graceful accomplishment which does not absorb but rather adds pleasure to existence. And as for posterity—damn posterity.”

Philip smiled, for it leaped to one’s eyes that the artist in life had produced no more than a wretched daub. Cronshaw looked at him meditatively and filled his glass. He sent the waiter for a packet of cigarettes.

“You are amused because I talk in this fashion and you know that I am poor and live in an attic with a vulgar trollop who deceives me with hair-dressers and garcons de cafe; I translate wretched books for the British public, and write articles upon contemptible pictures which deserve not even to be abused. But pray tell me what is the meaning of life?”

“I say, that’s rather a difficult question. Won’t you give the answer yourself?”

“No, because it’s worthless unless you yourself discover it. But what do you suppose you are in the world for?”

Philip had never asked himself, and he thought for a moment before replying.

“Oh, I don’t know: I suppose to do one’s duty, and make the best possible use of one’s faculties, and avoid hurting other people.”

“In short, to do unto others as you would they should do unto you?”

“I suppose so.”

“Christianity.”

“No, it isn’t,” said Philip indignantly. “It has nothing to do with Christianity. It’s just abstract morality.”

“But there’s no such thing as abstract morality.”

“In that case, supposing under the influence of liquor you left your purse behind when you leave here and I picked it up, why do you imagine that I should return it to you? It’s not the fear of the police.”

“It’s the dread of hell if you sin and the hope of Heaven if you are virtuous.”

“But I believe in neither.”

“That may be. Neither did Kant when he devised the Categorical Imperative. You have thrown aside a creed, but you have preserved the ethic which was based upon it. To all intents you are a Christian still, and if there is a God in Heaven you will undoubtedly receive your reward. The Almighty can hardly be such a fool as the churches make out. If you keep His laws I don’t think He can care a packet of pins whether you believe in Him or not.”

“But if I left my purse behind you would certainly return it to me,” said Philip.

“Not from motives of abstract morality, but only from fear of the police.”

“It’s a thousand to one that the police would never find out.”

“My ancestors have lived in a civilised state so long that the fear of the police has eaten into my bones. The daughter of my concierge would not hesitate for a moment. You answer that she belongs to the criminal classes; not at all, she is merely devoid of vulgar prejudice.”

“But then that does away with honour and virtue and goodness and decency and everything,” said Philip.

“Have you ever committed a sin?”

“I don’t know, I suppose so,” answered Philip.

“You speak with the lips of a dissenting minister. I have never committed a sin.”

Cronshaw in his shabby great-coat, with the collar turned up, and his hat well down on his head, with his red fat face and his little gleaming eyes, looked extraordinarily comic; but Philip was too much in earnest to laugh.

“Have you never done anything you regret?”

“How can I regret when what I did was inevitable?” asked Cronshaw in return.

“But that’s fatalism.”

“The illusion which man has that his will is free is so deeply rooted that I am ready to accept it. I act as though I were a free agent. But when an action is performed it is clear that all the forces of the universe from all eternity conspired to cause it, and nothing I could do could have prevented it. It was inevitable. If it was good I can claim no merit; if it was bad I can accept no censure.”

“My brain reels,” said Philip.

“Have some whiskey,” returned Cronshaw, passing over the bottle. “There’s nothing like it for clearing the head. You must expect to be thick-witted if you insist upon drinking beer.”

Philip shook his head, and Cronshaw proceeded:

“You’re not a bad fellow, but you won’t drink. Sobriety disturbs conversation. But when I speak of good and bad…” Philip saw he was taking up the thread of his discourse, “I speak conventionally. I attach no meaning to those words. I refuse to make a hierarchy of human actions and ascribe worthiness to some and ill-repute to others. The terms vice and virtue have no signification for me. I do not confer praise or blame: I accept. I am the measure of all things. I am the centre of the world.”

“But there are one or two other people in the world,” objected Philip.

“I speak only for myself. I know them only as they limit my activities. Round each of them too the world turns, and each one for himself is the centre of the universe. My right over them extends only as far as my power. What I can do is the only limit of what I may do. Because we are gregarious we live in society, and society holds together by means of force, force of arms (that is the policeman) and force of public opinion (that is Mrs. Grundy). You have society on one hand and the individual on the other: each is an organism striving for self-preservation. It is might against might. I stand alone, bound to accept society and not unwilling, since in return for the taxes I pay it protects me, a weakling, against the tyranny of another stronger than I am; but I submit to its laws because I must; I do not acknowledge their justice: I do not know justice, I only know power. And when I have paid for the policeman who protects me and, if I live in a country where conscription is in force, served in the army which guards my house and land from the invader, I am quits with society: for the rest I counter its might with my wiliness. It makes laws for its self-preservation, and if I break them it imprisons or kills me: it has the might to do so and therefore the right. If I break the laws I will accept the vengeance of the state, but I will not regard it as punishment nor shall I feel myself convicted of wrong-doing. Society tempts me to its service by honours and riches and the good opinion of my fellows; but I am indifferent to their good opinion, I despise honours and I can do very well without riches.”

“But if everyone thought like you things would go to pieces at once.”

“I have nothing to do with others, I am only concerned with myself. I take advantage of the fact that the majority of mankind are led by certain rewards to do things which directly or indirectly tend to my convenience.”

“It seems to me an awfully selfish way of looking at things,” said Philip.

“But are you under the impression that men ever do anything except for selfish reasons?”

“Yes.”

“It is impossible that they should. You will find as you grow older that the first thing needful to make the world a tolerable place to live in is to recognise the inevitable selfishness of humanity. You demand unselfishness from others, which is a preposterous claim that they should sacrifice their desires to yours. Why should they? When you are reconciled to the fact that each is for himself in the world you will ask less from your fellows. They will not disappoint you, and you will look upon them more charitably. Men seek but one thing in life—their pleasure.”

“No, no, no!” cried Philip.

Cronshaw chuckled.

“You rear like a frightened colt, because I use a word to which your Christianity ascribes a deprecatory meaning. You have a hierarchy of values; pleasure is at the bottom of the ladder, and you speak with a little thrill of self-satisfaction, of duty, charity, and truthfulness. You think pleasure is only of the senses; the wretched slaves who manufactured your morality despised a satisfaction which they had small means of enjoying. You would not be so frightened if I had spoken of happiness instead of pleasure: it sounds less shocking, and your mind wanders from the sty of Epicurus to his garden. But I will speak of pleasure, for I see that men aim at that, and I do not know that they aim at happiness. It is pleasure that lurks in the practice of every one of your virtues. Man performs actions because they are good for him, and when they are good for other people as well they are thought virtuous: if he finds pleasure in giving alms he is charitable; if he finds pleasure in helping others he is benevolent; if he finds pleasure in working for society he is public-spirited; but it is for your private pleasure that you give twopence to a beggar as much as it is for my private pleasure that I drink another whiskey and soda. I, less of a humbug than you, neither applaud myself for my pleasure nor demand your admiration.”

“But have you never known people do things they didn’t want to instead of things they did?”

“No. You put your question foolishly. What you mean is that people accept an immediate pain rather than an immediate pleasure. The objection is as foolish as your manner of putting it. It is clear that men accept an immediate pain rather than an immediate pleasure, but only because they expect a greater pleasure in the future. Often the pleasure is illusory, but their error in calculation is no refutation of the rule. You are puzzled because you cannot get over the idea that pleasures are only of the senses; but, child, a man who dies for his country dies because he likes it as surely as a man eats pickled cabbage because he likes it. It is a law of creation. If it were possible for men to prefer pain to pleasure the human race would have long since become extinct.”

“But if all that is true,” cried Philip, “what is the use of anything? If you take away duty and goodness and beauty why are we brought into the world?”

“Here comes the gorgeous East to suggest an answer,” smiled Cronshaw.

He pointed to two persons who at that moment opened the door of the cafe, and, with a blast of cold air, entered. They were Levantines, itinerant vendors of cheap rugs, and each bore on his arm a bundle. It was Sunday evening, and the cafe was very full. They passed among the tables, and in that atmosphere heavy and discoloured with tobacco smoke, rank with humanity, they seemed to bring an air of mystery. They were clad in European, shabby clothes, their thin great-coats were threadbare, but each wore a tarbouch. Their faces were gray with cold. One was of middle age, with a black beard, but the other was a youth of eighteen, with a face deeply scarred by smallpox and with one eye only. They passed by Cronshaw and Philip.

“Allah is great, and Mahomet is his prophet,” said Cronshaw impressively.

The elder advanced with a cringing smile, like a mongrel used to blows. With a sidelong glance at the door and a quick surreptitious movement he showed a pornographic picture.

“Are you Masr-ed-Deen, the merchant of Alexandria, or is it from far Bagdad that you bring your goods, O, my uncle; and yonder one-eyed youth, do I see in him one of the three kings of whom Scheherazade told stories to her lord?”

The pedlar’s smile grew more ingratiating, though he understood no word of what Cronshaw said, and like a conjurer he produced a sandalwood box.

“Nay, show us the priceless web of Eastern looms,” quoth Cronshaw. “For I would point a moral and adorn a tale.”

The Levantine unfolded a table-cloth, red and yellow, vulgar, hideous, and grotesque.

“Thirty-five francs,” he said.

“O, my uncle, this cloth knew not the weavers of Samarkand, and those colours were never made in the vats of Bokhara.”

“Twenty-five francs,” smiled the pedlar obsequiously.

“Ultima Thule was the place of its manufacture, even Birmingham the place of my birth.”

“Fifteen francs,” cringed the bearded man.

“Get thee gone, fellow,” said Cronshaw. “May wild asses defile the grave of thy maternal grandmother.”

Imperturbably, but smiling no more, the Levantine passed with his wares to another table. Cronshaw turned to Philip.

“Have you ever been to the Cluny, the museum? There you will see Persian carpets of the most exquisite hue and of a pattern the beautiful intricacy of which delights and amazes the eye. In them you will see the mystery and the sensual beauty of the East, the roses of Hafiz and the wine-cup of Omar; but presently you will see more. You were asking just now what was the meaning of life. Go and look at those Persian carpets, and one of these days the answer will come to you.”

“You are cryptic,” said Philip.

“I am drunk,” answered Cronshaw.

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.

XLIX

The story which Philip made out in one way and another was terrible. One of the grievances of the women-students was that Fanny Price would never share their gay meals in restaurants, and the reason was obvious: she had been oppressed by dire poverty. He remembered the luncheon they had eaten together when first he came to Paris and the ghoulish appetite which had disgusted him: he realised now that she ate in that manner because she was ravenous. The concierge told him what her food had consisted of. A bottle of milk was left for her every day and she brought in her own loaf of bread; she ate half the loaf and drank half the milk at mid-day when she came back from the school, and consumed the rest in the evening. It was the same day after day. Philip thought with anguish of what she must have endured. She had never given anyone to understand that she was poorer than the rest, but it was clear that her money had been coming to an end, and at last she could not afford to come any more to the studio. The little room was almost bare of furniture, and there were no other clothes than the shabby brown dress she had always worn. Philip searched among her things for the address of some friend with whom he could communicate. He found a piece of paper on which his own name was written a score of times. It gave him a peculiar shock. He supposed it was true that she had loved him; he thought of the emaciated body, in the brown dress, hanging from the nail in the ceiling; and he shuddered. But if she had cared for him why did she not let him help her? He would so gladly have done all he could. He felt remorseful because he had refused to see that she looked upon him with any particular feeling, and now these words in her letter were infinitely pathetic: I can’t bear the thought that anyone else should touch me. She had died of starvation.

Philip found at length a letter signed: your loving brother, Albert. It was two or three weeks old, dated from some road in Surbiton, and refused a loan of five pounds. The writer had his wife and family to think of, he didn’t feel justified in lending money, and his advice was that Fanny should come back to London and try to get a situation. Philip telegraphed to Albert Price, and in a little while an answer came:

“Deeply distressed. Very awkward to leave my business. Is presence essential. Price.”

Philip wired a succinct affirmative, and next morning a stranger presented himself at the studio.

“My name’s Price,” he said, when Philip opened the door.

He was a commonish man in black with a band round his bowler hat; he had something of Fanny’s clumsy look; he wore a stubbly moustache, and had a cockney accent. Philip asked him to come in. He cast sidelong glances round the studio while Philip gave him details of the accident and told him what he had done.

“I needn’t see her, need I?” asked Albert Price. “My nerves aren’t very strong, and it takes very little to upset me.”

He began to talk freely. He was a rubber-merchant, and he had a wife and three children. Fanny was a governess, and he couldn’t make out why she hadn’t stuck to that instead of coming to Paris.

“Me and Mrs. Price told her Paris was no place for a girl. And there’s no money in art—never ’as been.”

It was plain enough that he had not been on friendly terms with his sister, and he resented her suicide as a last injury that she had done him. He did not like the idea that she had been forced to it by poverty; that seemed to reflect on the family. The idea struck him that possibly there was a more respectable reason for her act.

“I suppose she ’adn’t any trouble with a man, ’ad she? You know what I mean, Paris and all that. She might ’ave done it so as not to disgrace herself.”

Philip felt himself reddening and cursed his weakness. Price’s keen little eyes seemed to suspect him of an intrigue.

“I believe your sister to have been perfectly virtuous,” he answered acidly. “She killed herself because she was starving.”

“Well, it’s very ’ard on her family, Mr. Carey. She only ’ad to write to me. I wouldn’t have let my sister want.”

Philip had found the brother’s address only by reading the letter in which he refused a loan; but he shrugged his shoulders: there was no use in recrimination. He hated the little man and wanted to have done with him as soon as possible. Albert Price also wished to get through the necessary business quickly so that he could get back to London. They went to the tiny room in which poor Fanny had lived. Albert Price looked at the pictures and the furniture.

“I don’t pretend to know much about art,” he said. “I suppose these pictures would fetch something, would they?”

“Nothing,” said Philip.

“The furniture’s not worth ten shillings.”

Albert Price knew no French and Philip had to do everything. It seemed that it was an interminable process to get the poor body safely hidden away under ground: papers had to be obtained in one place and signed in another; officials had to be seen. For three days Philip was occupied from morning till night. At last he and Albert Price followed the hearse to the cemetery at Montparnasse.

“I want to do the thing decent,” said Albert Price, “but there’s no use wasting money.”

The short ceremony was infinitely dreadful in the cold gray morning. Half a dozen people who had worked with Fanny Price at the studio came to the funeral, Mrs. Otter because she was massiere and thought it her duty, Ruth Chalice because she had a kind heart, Lawson, Clutton, and Flanagan. They had all disliked her during her life. Philip, looking across the cemetery crowded on all sides with monuments, some poor and simple, others vulgar, pretentious, and ugly, shuddered. It was horribly sordid. When they came out Albert Price asked Philip to lunch with him. Philip loathed him now and he was tired; he had not been sleeping well, for he dreamed constantly of Fanny Price in the torn brown dress, hanging from the nail in the ceiling; but he could not think of an excuse.

“You take me somewhere where we can get a regular slap-up lunch. All this is the very worst thing for my nerves.”

“Lavenue’s is about the best place round here,” answered Philip.

Albert Price settled himself on a velvet seat with a sigh of relief. He ordered a substantial luncheon and a bottle of wine.

“Well, I’m glad that’s over,” he said.

He threw out a few artful questions, and Philip discovered that he was eager to hear about the painter’s life in Paris. He represented it to himself as deplorable, but he was anxious for details of the orgies which his fancy suggested to him. With sly winks and discreet sniggering he conveyed that he knew very well that there was a great deal more than Philip confessed. He was a man of the world, and he knew a thing or two. He asked Philip whether he had ever been to any of those places in Montmartre which are celebrated from Temple Bar to the Royal Exchange. He would like to say he had been to the Moulin Rouge. The luncheon was very good and the wine excellent. Albert Price expanded as the processes of digestion went satisfactorily forwards.

“Let’s ’ave a little brandy,” he said when the coffee was brought, “and blow the expense.”

He rubbed his hands.

“You know, I’ve got ’alf a mind to stay over tonight and go back tomorrow. What d’you say to spending the evening together?”

“If you mean you want me to take you round Montmartre tonight, I’ll see you damned,” said Philip.

“I suppose it wouldn’t be quite the thing.”

The answer was made so seriously that Philip was tickled.

“Besides it would be rotten for your nerves,” he said gravely.

Albert Price concluded that he had better go back to London by the four o’clock train, and presently he took leave of Philip.

“Well, good-bye, old man,” he said. “I tell you what, I’ll try and come over to Paris again one of these days and I’ll look you up. And then we won’t ’alf go on the razzle.”

Philip was too restless to work that afternoon, so he jumped on a bus and crossed the river to see whether there were any pictures on view at Durand-Ruel’s. After that he strolled along the boulevard. It was cold and wind-swept. People hurried by wrapped up in their coats, shrunk together in an effort to keep out of the cold, and their faces were pinched and careworn. It was icy underground in the cemetery at Montparnasse among all those white tombstones. Philip felt lonely in the world and strangely homesick. He wanted company. At that hour Cronshaw would be working, and Clutton never welcomed visitors; Lawson was painting another portrait of Ruth Chalice and would not care to be disturbed. He made up his mind to go and see Flanagan. He found him painting, but delighted to throw up his work and talk. The studio was comfortable, for the American had more money than most of them, and warm; Flanagan set about making tea. Philip looked at the two heads that he was sending to the Salon.

“It’s awful cheek my sending anything,” said Flanagan, “but I don’t care, I’m going to send. D’you think they’re rotten?”

“Not so rotten as I should have expected,” said Philip.

They showed in fact an astounding cleverness. The difficulties had been avoided with skill, and there was a dash about the way in which the paint was put on which was surprising and even attractive. Flanagan, without knowledge or technique, painted with the loose brush of a man who has spent a lifetime in the practice of the art.

“If one were forbidden to look at any picture for more than thirty seconds you’d be a great master, Flanagan,” smiled Philip.

These young people were not in the habit of spoiling one another with excessive flattery.

“We haven’t got time in America to spend more than thirty seconds in looking at any picture,” laughed the other.

Flanagan, though he was the most scatter-brained person in the world, had a tenderness of heart which was unexpected and charming. Whenever anyone was ill he installed himself as sick-nurse. His gaiety was better than any medicine. Like many of his countrymen he had not the English dread of sentimentality which keeps so tight a hold on emotion; and, finding nothing absurd in the show of feeling, could offer an exuberant sympathy which was often grateful to his friends in distress. He saw that Philip was depressed by what he had gone through and with unaffected kindliness set himself boisterously to cheer him up. He exaggerated the Americanisms which he knew always made the Englishmen laugh and poured out a breathless stream of conversation, whimsical, high-spirited, and jolly. In due course they went out to dinner and afterwards to the Gaite Montparnasse, which was Flanagan’s favourite place of amusement. By the end of the evening he was in his most extravagant humour. He had drunk a good deal, but any inebriety from which he suffered was due much more to his own vivacity than to alcohol. He proposed that they should go to the Bal Bullier, and Philip, feeling too tired to go to bed, willingly enough consented. They sat down at a table on the platform at the side, raised a little from the level of the floor so that they could watch the dancing, and drank a bock. Presently Flanagan saw a friend and with a wild shout leaped over the barrier on to the space where they were dancing. Philip watched the people. Bullier was not the resort of fashion. It was Thursday night and the place was crowded. There were a number of students of the various faculties, but most of the men were clerks or assistants in shops; they wore their everyday clothes, ready-made tweeds or queer tail-coats, and their hats, for they had brought them in with them, and when they danced there was no place to put them but their heads. Some of the women looked like servant-girls, and some were painted hussies, but for the most part they were shop-girls. They were poorly-dressed in cheap imitation of the fashions on the other side of the river. The hussies were got up to resemble the music-hall artiste or the dancer who enjoyed notoriety at the moment; their eyes were heavy with black and their cheeks impudently scarlet. The hall was lit by great white lights, low down, which emphasised the shadows on the faces; all the lines seemed to harden under it, and the colours were most crude. It was a sordid scene. Philip leaned over the rail, staring down, and he ceased to hear the music. They danced furiously. They danced round the room, slowly, talking very little, with all their attention given to the dance. The room was hot, and their faces shone with sweat. It seemed to Philip that they had thrown off the guard which people wear on their expression, the homage to convention, and he saw them now as they really were. In that moment of abandon they were strangely animal: some were foxy and some were wolf-like; and others had the long, foolish face of sheep. Their skins were sallow from the unhealthy life they led and the poor food they ate. Their features were blunted by mean interests, and their little eyes were shifty and cunning. There was nothing of nobility in their bearing, and you felt that for all of them life was a long succession of petty concerns and sordid thoughts. The air was heavy with the musty smell of humanity. But they danced furiously as though impelled by some strange power within them, and it seemed to Philip that they were driven forward by a rage for enjoyment. They were seeking desperately to escape from a world of horror. The desire for pleasure which Cronshaw said was the only motive of human action urged them blindly on, and the very vehemence of the desire seemed to rob it of all pleasure. They were hurried on by a great wind, helplessly, they knew not why and they knew not whither. Fate seemed to tower above them, and they danced as though everlasting darkness were beneath their feet. Their silence was vaguely alarming. It was as if life terrified them and robbed them of power of speech so that the shriek which was in their hearts died at their throats. Their eyes were haggard and grim; and notwithstanding the beastly lust that disfigured them, and the meanness of their faces, and the cruelty, notwithstanding the stupidness which was worst of all, the anguish of those fixed eyes made all that crowd terrible and pathetic. Philip loathed them, and yet his heart ached with the infinite pity which filled him.

He took his coat from the cloak-room and went out into the bitter coldness of the night.

L

Philip could not get the unhappy event out of his head. What troubled him most was the uselessness of Fanny’s effort. No one could have worked harder than she, nor with more sincerity; she believed in herself with all her heart; but it was plain that self-confidence meant very little, all his friends had it, Miguel Ajuria among the rest; and Philip was shocked by the contrast between the Spaniard’s heroic endeavour and the triviality of the thing he attempted. The unhappiness of Philip’s life at school had called up in him the power of self-analysis; and this vice, as subtle as drug-taking, had taken possession of him so that he had now a peculiar keenness in the dissection of his feelings. He could not help seeing that art affected him differently from others. A fine picture gave Lawson an immediate thrill. His appreciation was instinctive. Even Flanagan felt certain things which Philip was obliged to think out. His own appreciation was intellectual. He could not help thinking that if he had in him the artistic temperament (he hated the phrase, but could discover no other) he would feel beauty in the emotional, unreasoning way in which they did. He began to wonder whether he had anything more than a superficial cleverness of the hand which enabled him to copy objects with accuracy. That was nothing. He had learned to despise technical dexterity. The important thing was to feel in terms of paint. Lawson painted in a certain way because it was his nature to, and through the imitativeness of a student sensitive to every influence, there pierced individuality. Philip looked at his own portrait of Ruth Chalice, and now that three months had passed he realised that it was no more than a servile copy of Lawson. He felt himself barren. He painted with the brain, and he could not help knowing that the only painting worth anything was done with the heart.

He had very little money, barely sixteen hundred pounds, and it would be necessary for him to practise the severest economy. He could not count on earning anything for ten years. The history of painting was full of artists who had earned nothing at all. He must resign himself to penury; and it was worth while if he produced work which was immortal; but he had a terrible fear that he would never be more than second-rate. Was it worth while for that to give up one’s youth, and the gaiety of life, and the manifold chances of being? He knew the existence of foreign painters in Paris enough to see that the lives they led were narrowly provincial. He knew some who had dragged along for twenty years in the pursuit of a fame which always escaped them till they sunk into sordidness and alcoholism. Fanny’s suicide had aroused memories, and Philip heard ghastly stories of the way in which one person or another had escaped from despair. He remembered the scornful advice which the master had given poor Fanny: it would have been well for her if she had taken it and given up an attempt which was hopeless.

Philip finished his portrait of Miguel Ajuria and made up his mind to send it to the Salon. Flanagan was sending two pictures, and he thought he could paint as well as Flanagan. He had worked so hard on the portrait that he could not help feeling it must have merit. It was true that when he looked at it he felt that there was something wrong, though he could not tell what; but when he was away from it his spirits went up and he was not dissatisfied. He sent it to the Salon and it was refused. He did not mind much, since he had done all he could to persuade himself that there was little chance that it would be taken, till Flanagan a few days later rushed in to tell Lawson and Philip that one of his pictures was accepted. With a blank face Philip offered his congratulations, and Flanagan was so busy congratulating himself that he did not catch the note of irony which Philip could not prevent from coming into his voice. Lawson, quicker-witted, observed it and looked at Philip curiously. His own picture was all right, he knew that a day or two before, and he was vaguely resentful of Philip’s attitude. But he was surprised at the sudden question which Philip put him as soon as the American was gone.

“If you were in my place would you chuck the whole thing?”

“What do you mean?”

“I wonder if it’s worth while being a second-rate painter. You see, in other things, if you’re a doctor or if you’re in business, it doesn’t matter so much if you’re mediocre. You make a living and you get along. But what is the good of turning out second-rate pictures?”

Lawson was fond of Philip and, as soon as he thought he was seriously distressed by the refusal of his picture, he set himself to console him. It was notorious that the Salon had refused pictures which were afterwards famous; it was the first time Philip had sent, and he must expect a rebuff; Flanagan’s success was explicable, his picture was showy and superficial: it was just the sort of thing a languid jury would see merit in. Philip grew impatient; it was humiliating that Lawson should think him capable of being seriously disturbed by so trivial a calamity and would not realise that his dejection was due to a deep-seated distrust of his powers.

Of late Clutton had withdrawn himself somewhat from the group who took their meals at Gravier’s, and lived very much by himself. Flanagan said he was in love with a girl, but Clutton’s austere countenance did not suggest passion; and Philip thought it more probable that he separated himself from his friends so that he might grow clear with the new ideas which were in him. But that evening, when the others had left the restaurant to go to a play and Philip was sitting alone, Clutton came in and ordered dinner. They began to talk, and finding Clutton more loquacious and less sardonic than usual, Philip determined to take advantage of his good humour.

“I say I wish you’d come and look at my picture,” he said. “I’d like to know what you think of it.”

“No, I won’t do that.”

“Why not?” asked Philip, reddening.

The request was one which they all made of one another, and no one ever thought of refusing. Clutton shrugged his shoulders.

“People ask you for criticism, but they only want praise. Besides, what’s the good of criticism? What does it matter if your picture is good or bad?”

“It matters to me.”

“No. The only reason that one paints is that one can’t help it. It’s a function like any of the other functions of the body, only comparatively few people have got it. One paints for oneself: otherwise one would commit suicide. Just think of it, you spend God knows how long trying to get something on to canvas, putting the sweat of your soul into it, and what is the result? Ten to one it will be refused at the Salon; if it’s accepted, people glance at it for ten seconds as they pass; if you’re lucky some ignorant fool will buy it and put it on his walls and look at it as little as he looks at his dining-room table. Criticism has nothing to do with the artist. It judges objectively, but the objective doesn’t concern the artist.”

Clutton put his hands over his eyes so that he might concentrate his mind on what he wanted to say.

“The artist gets a peculiar sensation from something he sees, and is impelled to express it and, he doesn’t know why, he can only express his feeling by lines and colours. It’s like a musician; he’ll read a line or two, and a certain combination of notes presents itself to him: he doesn’t know why such and such words call forth in him such and such notes; they just do. And I’ll tell you another reason why criticism is meaningless: a great painter forces the world to see nature as he sees it; but in the next generation another painter sees the world in another way, and then the public judges him not by himself but by his predecessor. So the Barbizon people taught our fathers to look at trees in a certain manner, and when Monet came along and painted differently, people said: But trees aren’t like that. It never struck them that trees are exactly how a painter chooses to see them. We paint from within outwards—if we force our vision on the world it calls us great painters; if we don’t it ignores us; but we are the same. We don’t attach any meaning to greatness or to smallness. What happens to our work afterwards is unimportant; we have got all we could out of it while we were doing it.”

There was a pause while Clutton with voracious appetite devoured the food that was set before him. Philip, smoking a cheap cigar, observed him closely. The ruggedness of the head, which looked as though it were carved from a stone refractory to the sculptor’s chisel, the rough mane of dark hair, the great nose, and the massive bones of the jaw, suggested a man of strength; and yet Philip wondered whether perhaps the mask concealed a strange weakness. Clutton’s refusal to show his work might be sheer vanity: he could not bear the thought of anyone’s criticism, and he would not expose himself to the chance of a refusal from the Salon; he wanted to be received as a master and would not risk comparisons with other work which might force him to diminish his own opinion of himself. During the eighteen months Philip had known him Clutton had grown more harsh and bitter; though he would not come out into the open and compete with his fellows, he was indignant with the facile success of those who did. He had no patience with Lawson, and the pair were no longer on the intimate terms upon which they had been when Philip first knew them.

“Lawson’s all right,” he said contemptuously, “he’ll go back to England, become a fashionable portrait painter, earn ten thousand a year and be an A. R. A. before he’s forty. Portraits done by hand for the nobility and gentry!”

Philip, too, looked into the future, and he saw Clutton in twenty years, bitter, lonely, savage, and unknown; still in Paris, for the life there had got into his bones, ruling a small cenacle with a savage tongue, at war with himself and the world, producing little in his increasing passion for a perfection he could not reach; and perhaps sinking at last into drunkenness. Of late Philip had been captivated by an idea that since one had only one life it was important to make a success of it, but he did not count success by the acquiring of money or the achieving of fame; he did not quite know yet what he meant by it, perhaps variety of experience and the making the most of his abilities. It was plain anyway that the life which Clutton seemed destined to was failure. Its only justification would be the painting of imperishable masterpieces. He recollected Cronshaw’s whimsical metaphor of the Persian carpet; he had thought of it often; but Cronshaw with his faun-like humour had refused to make his meaning clear: he repeated that it had none unless one discovered it for oneself. It was this desire to make a success of life which was at the bottom of Philip’s uncertainty about continuing his artistic career. But Clutton began to talk again.

“D’you remember my telling you about that chap I met in Brittany? I saw him the other day here. He’s just off to Tahiti. He was broke to the world. He was a brasseur d’affaires, a stockbroker I suppose you call it in English; and he had a wife and family, and he was earning a large income. He chucked it all to become a painter. He just went off and settled down in Brittany and began to paint. He hadn’t got any money and did the next best thing to starving.”

“And what about his wife and family?” asked Philip.

“Oh, he dropped them. He left them to starve on their own account.”

“It sounds a pretty low-down thing to do.”

“Oh, my dear fellow, if you want to be a gentleman you must give up being an artist. They’ve got nothing to do with one another. You hear of men painting pot-boilers to keep an aged mother—well, it shows they’re excellent sons, but it’s no excuse for bad work. They’re only tradesmen. An artist would let his mother go to the workhouse. There’s a writer I know over here who told me that his wife died in childbirth. He was in love with her and he was mad with grief, but as he sat at the bedside watching her die he found himself making mental notes of how she looked and what she said and the things he was feeling. Gentlemanly, wasn’t it?”

“But is your friend a good painter?” asked Philip.

“No, not yet, he paints just like Pissarro. He hasn’t found himself, but he’s got a sense of colour and a sense of decoration. But that isn’t the question. It’s the feeling, and that he’s got. He’s behaved like a perfect cad to his wife and children, he’s always behaving like a perfect cad; the way he treats the people who’ve helped him—and sometimes he’s been saved from starvation merely by the kindness of his friends—is simply beastly. He just happens to be a great artist.”

Philip pondered over the man who was willing to sacrifice everything, comfort, home, money, love, honour, duty, for the sake of getting on to canvas with paint the emotion which the world gave him. It was magnificent, and yet his courage failed him.

Thinking of Cronshaw recalled to him the fact that he had not seen him for a week, and so, when Clutton left him, he wandered along to the cafe in which he was certain to find the writer. During the first few months of his stay in Paris Philip had accepted as gospel all that Cronshaw said, but Philip had a practical outlook and he grew impatient with the theories which resulted in no action. Cronshaw’s slim bundle of poetry did not seem a substantial result for a life which was sordid. Philip could not wrench out of his nature the instincts of the middle-class from which he came; and the penury, the hack work which Cronshaw did to keep body and soul together, the monotony of existence between the slovenly attic and the cafe table, jarred with his respectability. Cronshaw was astute enough to know that the young man disapproved of him, and he attacked his philistinism with an irony which was sometimes playful but often very keen.

“You’re a tradesman,” he told Philip, “you want to invest life in consols so that it shall bring you in a safe three per cent. I’m a spendthrift, I run through my capital. I shall spend my last penny with my last heartbeat.”

The metaphor irritated Philip, because it assumed for the speaker a romantic attitude and cast a slur upon the position which Philip instinctively felt had more to say for it than he could think of at the moment.

But this evening Philip, undecided, wanted to talk about himself. Fortunately it was late already and Cronshaw’s pile of saucers on the table, each indicating a drink, suggested that he was prepared to take an independent view of things in general.

“I wonder if you’d give me some advice,” said Philip suddenly.

“You won’t take it, will you?”

Philip shrugged his shoulders impatiently.

“I don’t believe I shall ever do much good as a painter. I don’t see any use in being second-rate. I’m thinking of chucking it.”

“Why shouldn’t you?”

Philip hesitated for an instant.

“I suppose I like the life.”

A change came over Cronshaw’s placid, round face. The corners of the mouth were suddenly depressed, the eyes sunk dully in their orbits; he seemed to become strangely bowed and old.

“This?” he cried, looking round the cafe in which they sat. His voice really trembled a little.

“If you can get out of it, do while there’s time.”

Philip stared at him with astonishment, but the sight of emotion always made him feel shy, and he dropped his eyes. He knew that he was looking upon the tragedy of failure. There was silence. Philip thought that Cronshaw was looking upon his own life; and perhaps he considered his youth with its bright hopes and the disappointments which wore out the radiancy; the wretched monotony of pleasure, and the black future. Philip’s eyes rested on the little pile of saucers, and he knew that Cronshaw’s were on them too.

LI

Two months passed.

It seemed to Philip, brooding over these matters, that in the true painters, writers, musicians, there was a power which drove them to such complete absorption in their work as to make it inevitable for them to subordinate life to art. Succumbing to an influence they never realised, they were merely dupes of the instinct that possessed them, and life slipped through their fingers unlived. But he had a feeling that life was to be lived rather than portrayed, and he wanted to search out the various experiences of it and wring from each moment all the emotion that it offered. He made up his mind at length to take a certain step and abide by the result, and, having made up his mind, he determined to take the step at once. Luckily enough the next morning was one of Foinet’s days, and he resolved to ask him point-blank whether it was worth his while to go on with the study of art. He had never forgotten the master’s brutal advice to Fanny Price. It had been sound. Philip could never get Fanny entirely out of his head. The studio seemed strange without her, and now and then the gesture of one of the women working there or the tone of a voice would give him a sudden start, reminding him of her: her presence was more noticable now she was dead than it had ever been during her life; and he often dreamed of her at night, waking with a cry of terror. It was horrible to think of all the suffering she must have endured.

Philip knew that on the days Foinet came to the studio he lunched at a little restaurant in the Rue d’Odessa, and he hurried his own meal so that he could go and wait outside till the painter came out. Philip walked up and down the crowded street and at last saw Monsieur Foinet walking, with bent head, towards him; Philip was very nervous, but he forced himself to go up to him.

“Pardon, monsieur, I should like to speak to you for one moment.”

Foinet gave him a rapid glance, recognised him, but did not smile a greeting.

“Speak,” he said.

“I’ve been working here nearly two years now under you. I wanted to ask you to tell me frankly if you think it worth while for me to continue.”

Philip’s voice was trembling a little. Foinet walked on without looking up. Philip, watching his face, saw no trace of expression upon it.

“I don’t understand.”

“I’m very poor. If I have no talent I would sooner do something else.”

“Don’t you know if you have talent?”

“All my friends know they have talent, but I am aware some of them are mistaken.”

Foinet’s bitter mouth outlined the shadow of a smile, and he asked:

“Do you live near here?”

Philip told him where his studio was. Foinet turned round.

“Let us go there? You shall show me your work.”

“Now?” cried Philip.

“Why not?”

Philip had nothing to say. He walked silently by the master’s side. He felt horribly sick. It had never struck him that Foinet would wish to see his things there and then; he meant, so that he might have time to prepare himself, to ask him if he would mind coming at some future date or whether he might bring them to Foinet’s studio. He was trembling with anxiety. In his heart he hoped that Foinet would look at his picture, and that rare smile would come into his face, and he would shake Philip’s hand and say: “Pas mal. Go on, my lad. You have talent, real talent.” Philip’s heart swelled at the thought. It was such a relief, such a joy! Now he could go on with courage; and what did hardship matter, privation, and disappointment, if he arrived at last? He had worked very hard, it would be too cruel if all that industry were futile. And then with a start he remembered that he had heard Fanny Price say just that. They arrived at the house, and Philip was seized with fear. If he had dared he would have asked Foinet to go away. He did not want to know the truth. They went in and the concierge handed him a letter as they passed. He glanced at the envelope and recognised his uncle’s handwriting. Foinet followed him up the stairs. Philip could think of nothing to say; Foinet was mute, and the silence got on his nerves. The professor sat down; and Philip without a word placed before him the picture which the Salon had rejected; Foinet nodded but did not speak; then Philip showed him the two portraits he had made of Ruth Chalice, two or three landscapes which he had painted at Moret, and a number of sketches.

“That’s all,” he said presently, with a nervous laugh.

Monsieur Foinet rolled himself a cigarette and lit it.

“You have very little private means?” he asked at last.

“Very little,” answered Philip, with a sudden feeling of cold at his heart. “Not enough to live on.”

“There is nothing so degrading as the constant anxiety about one’s means of livelihood. I have nothing but contempt for the people who despise money. They are hypocrites or fools. Money is like a sixth sense without which you cannot make a complete use of the other five. Without an adequate income half the possibilities of life are shut off. The only thing to be careful about is that you do not pay more than a shilling for the shilling you earn. You will hear people say that poverty is the best spur to the artist. They have never felt the iron of it in their flesh. They do not know how mean it makes you. It exposes you to endless humiliation, it cuts your wings, it eats into your soul like a cancer. It is not wealth one asks for, but just enough to preserve one’s dignity, to work unhampered, to be generous, frank, and independent. I pity with all my heart the artist, whether he writes or paints, who is entirely dependent for subsistence upon his art.”

Philip quietly put away the various things which he had shown.

“I’m afraid that sounds as if you didn’t think I had much chance.”

Monsieur Foinet slightly shrugged his shoulders.

“You have a certain manual dexterity. With hard work and perseverance there is no reason why you should not become a careful, not incompetent painter. You would find hundreds who painted worse than you, hundreds who painted as well. I see no talent in anything you have shown me. I see industry and intelligence. You will never be anything but mediocre.”

Philip obliged himself to answer quite steadily.

“I’m very grateful to you for having taken so much trouble. I can’t thank you enough.”

Monsieur Foinet got up and made as if to go, but he changed his mind and, stopping, put his hand on Philip’s shoulder.

“But if you were to ask me my advice, I should say: take your courage in both hands and try your luck at something else. It sounds very hard, but let me tell you this: I would give all I have in the world if someone had given me that advice when I was your age and I had taken it.”

Philip looked up at him with surprise. The master forced his lips into a smile, but his eyes remained grave and sad.

“It is cruel to discover one’s mediocrity only when it is too late. It does not improve the temper.”

He gave a little laugh as he said the last words and quickly walked out of the room.

Philip mechanically took up the letter from his uncle. The sight of his handwriting made him anxious, for it was his aunt who always wrote to him. She had been ill for the last three months, and he had offered to go over to England and see her; but she, fearing it would interfere with his work, had refused. She did not want him to put himself to inconvenience; she said she would wait till August and then she hoped he would come and stay at the vicarage for two or three weeks. If by any chance she grew worse she would let him know, since she did not wish to die without seeing him again. If his uncle wrote to him it must be because she was too ill to hold a pen. Philip opened the letter. It ran as follows:

My dear Philip,

I regret to inform you that your dear Aunt departed this life early this morning. She died very suddenly, but quite peacefully. The change for the worse was so rapid that we had no time to send for you. She was fully prepared for the end and entered into rest with the complete assurance of a blessed resurrection and with resignation to the divine will of our blessed Lord Jesus Christ. Your Aunt would have liked you to be present at the funeral so I trust you will come as soon as you can. There is naturally a great deal of work thrown upon my shoulders and I am very much upset. I trust that you will be able to do everything for me. Your affectionate uncle, William Carey.

LII

Next day Philip arrived at Blackstable. Since the death of his mother he had never lost anyone closely connected with him; his aunt’s death shocked him and filled him also with a curious fear; he felt for the first time his own mortality. He could not realise what life would be for his uncle without the constant companionship of the woman who had loved and tended him for forty years. He expected to find him broken down with hopeless grief. He dreaded the first meeting; he knew that he could say nothing which would be of use. He rehearsed to himself a number of apposite speeches.

He entered the vicarage by the side-door and went into the dining-room. Uncle William was reading the paper.

“Your train was late,” he said, looking up.

Philip was prepared to give way to his emotion, but the matter-of-fact reception startled him. His uncle, subdued but calm, handed him the paper.

“There’s a very nice little paragraph about her in The Blackstable Times,” he said.

Philip read it mechanically.

“Would you like to come up and see her?”

Philip nodded and together they walked upstairs. Aunt Louisa was lying in the middle of the large bed, with flowers all round her.

“Would you like to say a short prayer?” said the Vicar.

He sank on his knees, and because it was expected of him Philip followed his example. He looked at the little shrivelled face. He was only conscious of one emotion: what a wasted life! In a minute Mr. Carey gave a cough, and stood up. He pointed to a wreath at the foot of the bed.

“That’s from the Squire,” he said. He spoke in a low voice as though he were in church, but one felt that, as a clergyman, he found himself quite at home. “I expect tea is ready.”

They went down again to the dining-room. The drawn blinds gave a lugubrious aspect. The Vicar sat at the end of the table at which his wife had always sat and poured out the tea with ceremony. Philip could not help feeling that neither of them should have been able to eat anything, but when he saw that his uncle’s appetite was unimpaired he fell to with his usual heartiness. They did not speak for a while. Philip set himself to eat an excellent cake with the air of grief which he felt was decent.

“Things have changed a great deal since I was a curate,” said the Vicar presently. “In my young days the mourners used always to be given a pair of black gloves and a piece of black silk for their hats. Poor Louisa used to make the silk into dresses. She always said that twelve funerals gave her a new dress.”

Then he told Philip who had sent wreaths; there were twenty-four of them already; when Mrs. Rawlingson, wife of the Vicar at Ferne, had died she had had thirty-two; but probably a good many more would come the next day; the funeral would start at eleven o’clock from the vicarage, and they should beat Mrs. Rawlingson easily. Louisa never liked Mrs. Rawlingson.

“I shall take the funeral myself. I promised Louisa I would never let anyone else bury her.”

Philip looked at his uncle with disapproval when he took a second piece of cake. Under the circumstances he could not help thinking it greedy.

“Mary Ann certainly makes capital cakes. I’m afraid no one else will make such good ones.”

“She’s not going?” cried Philip, with astonishment.

Mary Ann had been at the vicarage ever since he could remember. She never forgot his birthday, but made a point always of sending him a trifle, absurd but touching. He had a real affection for her.

“Yes,” answered Mr. Carey. “I didn’t think it would do to have a single woman in the house.”

“But, good heavens, she must be over forty.”

“Yes, I think she is. But she’s been rather troublesome lately, she’s been inclined to take too much on herself, and I thought this was a very good opportunity to give her notice.”

“It’s certainly one which isn’t likely to recur,” said Philip.

He took out a cigarette, but his uncle prevented him from lighting it.

“Not till after the funeral, Philip,” he said gently.

“All right,” said Philip.

“It wouldn’t be quite respectful to smoke in the house so long as your poor Aunt Louisa is upstairs.”

Josiah Graves, churchwarden and manager of the bank, came back to dinner at the vicarage after the funeral. The blinds had been drawn up, and Philip, against his will, felt a curious sensation of relief. The body in the house had made him uncomfortable: in life the poor woman had been all that was kind and gentle; and yet, when she lay upstairs in her bed-room, cold and stark, it seemed as though she cast upon the survivors a baleful influence. The thought horrified Philip.

He found himself alone for a minute or two in the dining-room with the churchwarden.

“I hope you’ll be able to stay with your uncle a while,” he said. “I don’t think he ought to be left alone just yet.”

“I haven’t made any plans,” answered Philip. “If he wants me I shall be very pleased to stay.”

By way of cheering the bereaved husband the churchwarden during dinner talked of a recent fire at Blackstable which had partly destroyed the Wesleyan chapel.

“I hear they weren’t insured,” he said, with a little smile.

“That won’t make any difference,” said the Vicar. “They’ll get as much money as they want to rebuild. Chapel people are always ready to give money.”

“I see that Holden sent a wreath.”

Holden was the dissenting minister, and, though for Christ’s sake who died for both of them, Mr. Carey nodded to him in the street, he did not speak to him.

“I think it was very pushing,” he remarked. “There were forty-one wreaths. Yours was beautiful. Philip and I admired it very much.”

“Don’t mention it,” said the banker.

He had noticed with satisfaction that it was larger than anyone’s else. It had looked very well. They began to discuss the people who attended the funeral. Shops had been closed for it, and the churchwarden took out of his pocket the notice which had been printed: “Owing to the funeral of Mrs. Carey this establishment will not be opened till one o’clock.”

“It was my idea,” he said.

“I think it was very nice of them to close,” said the Vicar. “Poor Louisa would have appreciated that.”

Philip ate his dinner. Mary Ann had treated the day as Sunday, and they had roast chicken and a gooseberry tart.

“I suppose you haven’t thought about a tombstone yet?” said the churchwarden.

“Yes, I have. I thought of a plain stone cross. Louisa was always against ostentation.”

“I don’t think one can do much better than a cross. If you’re thinking of a text, what do you say to: With Christ, which is far better?”

The Vicar pursed his lips. It was just like Bismarck to try and settle everything himself. He did not like that text; it seemed to cast an aspersion on himself.

“I don’t think I should put that. I much prefer: The Lord has given and the Lord has taken away.”

“Oh, do you? That always seems to me a little indifferent.”

The Vicar answered with some acidity, and Mr. Graves replied in a tone which the widower thought too authoritative for the occasion. Things were going rather far if he could not choose his own text for his own wife’s tombstone. There was a pause, and then the conversation drifted to parish matters. Philip went into the garden to smoke his pipe. He sat on a bench, and suddenly began to laugh hysterically.

A few days later his uncle expressed the hope that he would spend the next few weeks at Blackstable.

“Yes, that will suit me very well,” said Philip.

“I suppose it’ll do if you go back to Paris in September.”

Philip did not reply. He had thought much of what Foinet said to him, but he was still so undecided that he did not wish to speak of the future. There would be something fine in giving up art because he was convinced that he could not excel; but unfortunately it would seem so only to himself: to others it would be an admission of defeat, and he did not want to confess that he was beaten. He was an obstinate fellow, and the suspicion that his talent did not lie in one direction made him inclined to force circumstances and aim notwithstanding precisely in that direction. He could not bear that his friends should laugh at him. This might have prevented him from ever taking the definite step of abandoning the study of painting, but the different environment made him on a sudden see things differently. Like many another he discovered that crossing the Channel makes things which had seemed important singularly futile. The life which had been so charming that he could not bear to leave it now seemed inept; he was seized with a distaste for the cafes, the restaurants with their ill-cooked food, the shabby way in which they all lived. He did not care any more what his friends thought about him: Cronshaw with his rhetoric, Mrs. Otter with her respectability, Ruth Chalice with her affectations, Lawson and Clutton with their quarrels; he felt a revulsion from them all. He wrote to Lawson and asked him to send over all his belongings. A week later they arrived. When he unpacked his canvases he found himself able to examine his work without emotion. He noticed the fact with interest. His uncle was anxious to see his pictures. Though he had so greatly disapproved of Philip’s desire to go to Paris, he accepted the situation now with equanimity. He was interested in the life of students and constantly put Philip questions about it. He was in fact a little proud of him because he was a painter, and when people were present made attempts to draw him out. He looked eagerly at the studies of models which Philip showed him. Philip set before him his portrait of Miguel Ajuria.

“Why did you paint him?” asked Mr. Carey.

“Oh, I wanted a model, and his head interested me.”

“As you haven’t got anything to do here I wonder you don’t paint me.”

“It would bore you to sit.”

“I think I should like it.”

“We must see about it.”

Philip was amused at his uncle’s vanity. It was clear that he was dying to have his portrait painted. To get something for nothing was a chance not to be missed. For two or three days he threw out little hints. He reproached Philip for laziness, asked him when he was going to start work, and finally began telling everyone he met that Philip was going to paint him. At last there came a rainy day, and after breakfast Mr. Carey said to Philip:

“Now, what d’you say to starting on my portrait this morning?” Philip put down the book he was reading and leaned back in his chair.

“I’ve given up painting,” he said.

“Why?” asked his uncle in astonishment.

“I don’t think there’s much object in being a second-rate painter, and I came to the conclusion that I should never be anything else.”

“You surprise me. Before you went to Paris you were quite certain that you were a genius.”

“I was mistaken,” said Philip.

“I should have thought now you’d taken up a profession you’d have the pride to stick to it. It seems to me that what you lack is perseverance.”

Philip was a little annoyed that his uncle did not even see how truly heroic his determination was.

“‘A rolling stone gathers no moss,’” proceeded the clergyman. Philip hated that proverb above all, and it seemed to him perfectly meaningless. His uncle had repeated it often during the arguments which had preceded his departure from business. Apparently it recalled that occasion to his guardian.

“You’re no longer a boy, you know; you must begin to think of settling down. First you insist on becoming a chartered accountant, and then you get tired of that and you want to become a painter. And now if you please you change your mind again. It points to…”

He hesitated for a moment to consider what defects of character exactly it indicated, and Philip finished the sentence.

“Irresolution, incompetence, want of foresight, and lack of determination.”

The Vicar looked up at his nephew quickly to see whether he was laughing at him. Philip’s face was serious, but there was a twinkle in his eyes which irritated him. Philip should really be getting more serious. He felt it right to give him a rap over the knuckles.

“Your money matters have nothing to do with me now. You’re your own master; but I think you should remember that your money won’t last for ever, and the unlucky deformity you have doesn’t exactly make it easier for you to earn your living.”

Philip knew by now that whenever anyone was angry with him his first thought was to say something about his club-foot. His estimate of the human race was determined by the fact that scarcely anyone failed to resist the temptation. But he had trained himself not to show any sign that the reminder wounded him. He had even acquired control over the blushing which in his boyhood had been one of his torments.

“As you justly remark,” he answered, “my money matters have nothing to do with you and I am my own master.”

“At all events you will do me the justice to acknowledge that I was justified in my opposition when you made up your mind to become an art-student.”

“I don’t know so much about that. I daresay one profits more by the mistakes one makes off one’s own bat than by doing the right thing on somebody’s else advice. I’ve had my fling, and I don’t mind settling down now.”

“What at?”

Philip was not prepared for the question, since in fact he had not made up his mind. He had thought of a dozen callings.

“The most suitable thing you could do is to enter your father’s profession and become a doctor.”

“Oddly enough that is precisely what I intend.”

He had thought of doctoring among other things, chiefly because it was an occupation which seemed to give a good deal of personal freedom, and his experience of life in an office had made him determine never to have anything more to do with one; his answer to the Vicar slipped out almost unawares, because it was in the nature of a repartee. It amused him to make up his mind in that accidental way, and he resolved then and there to enter his father’s old hospital in the autumn.

“Then your two years in Paris may be regarded as so much wasted time?”

“I don’t know about that. I had a very jolly two years, and I learned one or two useful things.”

“What?”

Philip reflected for an instant, and his answer was not devoid of a gentle desire to annoy.

“I learned to look at hands, which I’d never looked at before. And instead of just looking at houses and trees I learned to look at houses and trees against the sky. And I learned also that shadows are not black but coloured.”

“I suppose you think you’re very clever. I think your flippancy is quite inane.”

LIII

Taking the paper with him Mr. Carey retired to his study. Philip changed his chair for that in which his uncle had been sitting (it was the only comfortable one in the room), and looked out of the window at the pouring rain. Even in that sad weather there was something restful about the green fields that stretched to the horizon. There was an intimate charm in the landscape which he did not remember ever to have noticed before. Two years in France had opened his eyes to the beauty of his own countryside.

He thought with a smile of his uncle’s remark. It was lucky that the turn of his mind tended to flippancy. He had begun to realise what a great loss he had sustained in the death of his father and mother. That was one of the differences in his life which prevented him from seeing things in the same way as other people. The love of parents for their children is the only emotion which is quite disinterested. Among strangers he had grown up as best he could, but he had seldom been used with patience or forbearance. He prided himself on his self-control. It had been whipped into him by the mockery of his fellows. Then they called him cynical and callous. He had acquired calmness of demeanour and under most circumstances an unruffled exterior, so that now he could not show his feelings. People told him he was unemotional; but he knew that he was at the mercy of his emotions: an accidental kindness touched him so much that sometimes he did not venture to speak in order not to betray the unsteadiness of his voice. He remembered the bitterness of his life at school, the humiliation which he had endured, the banter which had made him morbidly afraid of making himself ridiculous; and he remembered the loneliness he had felt since, faced with the world, the disillusion and the disappointment caused by the difference between what it promised to his active imagination and what it gave. But notwithstanding he was able to look at himself from the outside and smile with amusement.

“By Jove, if I weren’t flippant, I should hang myself,” he thought cheerfully.

His mind went back to the answer he had given his uncle when he asked him what he had learnt in Paris. He had learnt a good deal more than he told him. A conversation with Cronshaw had stuck in his memory, and one phrase he had used, a commonplace one enough, had set his brain working.

“My dear fellow,” Cronshaw said, “there’s no such thing as abstract morality.”

When Philip ceased to believe in Christianity he felt that a great weight was taken from his shoulders; casting off the responsibility which weighed down every action, when every action was infinitely important for the welfare of his immortal soul, he experienced a vivid sense of liberty. But he knew now that this was an illusion. When he put away the religion in which he had been brought up, he had kept unimpaired the morality which was part and parcel of it. He made up his mind therefore to think things out for himself. He determined to be swayed by no prejudices. He swept away the virtues and the vices, the established laws of good and evil, with the idea of finding out the rules of life for himself. He did not know whether rules were necessary at all. That was one of the things he wanted to discover. Clearly much that seemed valid seemed so only because he had been taught it from his earliest youth. He had read a number of books, but they did not help him much, for they were based on the morality of Christianity; and even the writers who emphasised the fact that they did not believe in it were never satisfied till they had framed a system of ethics in accordance with that of the Sermon on the Mount. It seemed hardly worth while to read a long volume in order to learn that you ought to behave exactly like everybody else. Philip wanted to find out how he ought to behave, and he thought he could prevent himself from being influenced by the opinions that surrounded him. But meanwhile he had to go on living, and, until he formed a theory of conduct, he made himself a provisional rule.

“Follow your inclinations with due regard to the policeman round the corner.”

He thought the best thing he had gained in Paris was a complete liberty of spirit, and he felt himself at last absolutely free. In a desultory way he had read a good deal of philosophy, and he looked forward with delight to the leisure of the next few months. He began to read at haphazard. He entered upon each system with a little thrill of excitement, expecting to find in each some guide by which he could rule his conduct; he felt himself like a traveller in unknown countries and as he pushed forward the enterprise fascinated him; he read emotionally, as other men read pure literature, and his heart leaped as he discovered in noble words what himself had obscurely felt. His mind was concrete and moved with difficulty in regions of the abstract; but, even when he could not follow the reasoning, it gave him a curious pleasure to follow the tortuosities of thoughts that threaded their nimble way on the edge of the incomprehensible. Sometimes great philosophers seemed to have nothing to say to him, but at others he recognised a mind with which he felt himself at home. He was like the explorer in Central Africa who comes suddenly upon wide uplands, with great trees in them and stretches of meadow, so that he might fancy himself in an English park. He delighted in the robust common sense of Thomas Hobbes; Spinoza filled him with awe, he had never before come in contact with a mind so noble, so unapproachable and austere; it reminded him of that statue by Rodin, L’Age d’Airain, which he passionately admired; and then there was Hume: the scepticism of that charming philosopher touched a kindred note in Philip; and, revelling in the lucid style which seemed able to put complicated thought into simple words, musical and measured, he read as he might have read a novel, a smile of pleasure on his lips. But in none could he find exactly what he wanted. He had read somewhere that every man was born a Platonist, an Aristotelian, a Stoic, or an Epicurean; and the history of George Henry Lewes (besides telling you that philosophy was all moonshine) was there to show that the thought of each philosopher was inseparably connected with the man he was. When you knew that you could guess to a great extent the philosophy he wrote. It looked as though you did not act in a certain way because you thought in a certain way, but rather that you thought in a certain way because you were made in a certain way. Truth had nothing to do with it. There was no such thing as truth. Each man was his own philosopher, and the elaborate systems which the great men of the past had composed were only valid for the writers.

The thing then was to discover what one was and one’s system of philosophy would devise itself. It seemed to Philip that there were three things to find out: man’s relation to the world he lives in, man’s relation with the men among whom he lives, and finally man’s relation to himself. He made an elaborate plan of study.

The advantage of living abroad is that, coming in contact with the manners and customs of the people among whom you live, you observe them from the outside and see that they have not the necessity which those who practise them believe. You cannot fail to discover that the beliefs which to you are self-evident to the foreigner are absurd. The year in Germany, the long stay in Paris, had prepared Philip to receive the sceptical teaching which came to him now with such a feeling of relief. He saw that nothing was good and nothing was evil; things were merely adapted to an end. He read The Origin of Species. It seemed to offer an explanation of much that troubled him. He was like an explorer now who has reasoned that certain natural features must present themselves, and, beating up a broad river, finds here the tributary that he expected, there the fertile, populated plains, and further on the mountains. When some great discovery is made the world is surprised afterwards that it was not accepted at once, and even on those who acknowledge its truth the effect is unimportant. The first readers of The Origin of Species accepted it with their reason; but their emotions, which are the ground of conduct, were untouched. Philip was born a generation after this great book was published, and much that horrified its contemporaries had passed into the feeling of the time, so that he was able to accept it with a joyful heart. He was intensely moved by the grandeur of the struggle for life, and the ethical rule which it suggested seemed to fit in with his predispositions. He said to himself that might was right. Society stood on one side, an organism with its own laws of growth and self-preservation, while the individual stood on the other. The actions which were to the advantage of society it termed virtuous and those which were not it called vicious. Good and evil meant nothing more than that. Sin was a prejudice from which the free man should rid himself. Society had three arms in its contest with the individual, laws, public opinion, and conscience: the first two could be met by guile, guile is the only weapon of the weak against the strong: common opinion put the matter well when it stated that sin consisted in being found out; but conscience was the traitor within the gates; it fought in each heart the battle of society, and caused the individual to throw himself, a wanton sacrifice, to the prosperity of his enemy. For it was clear that the two were irreconcilable, the state and the individual conscious of himself. THAT uses the individual for its own ends, trampling upon him if he thwarts it, rewarding him with medals, pensions, honours, when he serves it faithfully; THIS, strong only in his independence, threads his way through the state, for convenience’ sake, paying in money or service for certain benefits, but with no sense of obligation; and, indifferent to the rewards, asks only to be left alone. He is the independent traveller, who uses Cook’s tickets because they save trouble, but looks with good-humoured contempt on the personally conducted parties. The free man can do no wrong. He does everything he likes—if he can. His power is the only measure of his morality. He recognises the laws of the state and he can break them without sense of sin, but if he is punished he accepts the punishment without rancour. Society has the power.

But if for the individual there was no right and no wrong, then it seemed to Philip that conscience lost its power. It was with a cry of triumph that he seized the knave and flung him from his breast. But he was no nearer to the meaning of life than he had been before. Why the world was there and what men had come into existence for at all was as inexplicable as ever. Surely there must be some reason. He thought of Cronshaw’s parable of the Persian carpet. He offered it as a solution of the riddle, and mysteriously he stated that it was no answer at all unless you found it out for yourself.

“I wonder what the devil he meant,” Philip smiled.

And so, on the last day of September, eager to put into practice all these new theories of life, Philip, with sixteen hundred pounds and his club-foot, set out for the second time to London to make his third start in life.

LIV

The examination Philip had passed before he was articled to a chartered accountant was sufficient qualification for him to enter a medical school. He chose St. Luke’s because his father had been a student there, and before the end of the summer session had gone up to London for a day in order to see the secretary. He got a list of rooms from him, and took lodgings in a dingy house which had the advantage of being within two minutes’ walk of the hospital.

“You’ll have to arrange about a part to dissect,” the secretary told him. “You’d better start on a leg; they generally do; they seem to think it easier.”

Philip found that his first lecture was in anatomy, at eleven, and about half past ten he limped across the road, and a little nervously made his way to the Medical School. Just inside the door a number of notices were pinned up, lists of lectures, football fixtures, and the like; and these he looked at idly, trying to seem at his ease. Young men and boys dribbled in and looked for letters in the rack, chatted with one another, and passed downstairs to the basement, in which was the student’s reading-room. Philip saw several fellows with a desultory, timid look dawdling around, and surmised that, like himself, they were there for the first time. When he had exhausted the notices he saw a glass door which led into what was apparently a museum, and having still twenty minutes to spare he walked in. It was a collection of pathological specimens. Presently a boy of about eighteen came up to him.

“I say, are you first year?” he said.

“Yes,” answered Philip.

“Where’s the lecture room, d’you know? It’s getting on for eleven.”

“We’d better try to find it.”

They walked out of the museum into a long, dark corridor, with the walls painted in two shades of red, and other youths walking along suggested the way to them. They came to a door marked Anatomy Theatre. Philip found that there were a good many people already there. The seats were arranged in tiers, and just as Philip entered an attendant came in, put a glass of water on the table in the well of the lecture-room and then brought in a pelvis and two thigh-bones, right and left. More men entered and took their seats and by eleven the theatre was fairly full. There were about sixty students. For the most part they were a good deal younger than Philip, smooth-faced boys of eighteen, but there were a few who were older than he: he noticed one tall man, with a fierce red moustache, who might have been thirty; another little fellow with black hair, only a year or two younger; and there was one man with spectacles and a beard which was quite gray.

The lecturer came in, Mr. Cameron, a handsome man with white hair and clean-cut features. He called out the long list of names. Then he made a little speech. He spoke in a pleasant voice, with well-chosen words, and he seemed to take a discreet pleasure in their careful arrangement. He suggested one or two books which they might buy and advised the purchase of a skeleton. He spoke of anatomy with enthusiasm: it was essential to the study of surgery; a knowledge of it added to the appreciation of art. Philip pricked up his ears. He heard later that Mr. Cameron lectured also to the students at the Royal Academy. He had lived many years in Japan, with a post at the University of Tokyo, and he flattered himself on his appreciation of the beautiful.

“You will have to learn many tedious things,” he finished, with an indulgent smile, “which you will forget the moment you have passed your final examination, but in anatomy it is better to have learned and lost than never to have learned at all.”

He took up the pelvis which was lying on the table and began to describe it. He spoke well and clearly.

At the end of the lecture the boy who had spoken to Philip in the pathological museum and sat next to him in the theatre suggested that they should go to the dissecting-room. Philip and he walked along the corridor again, and an attendant told them where it was. As soon as they entered Philip understood what the acrid smell was which he had noticed in the passage. He lit a pipe. The attendant gave a short laugh.

“You’ll soon get used to the smell. I don’t notice it myself.”

He asked Philip’s name and looked at a list on the board.

“You’ve got a leg—number four.”

Philip saw that another name was bracketed with his own.

“What’s the meaning of that?” he asked.

“We’re very short of bodies just now. We’ve had to put two on each part.”

The dissecting-room was a large apartment painted like the corridors, the upper part a rich salmon and the dado a dark terra-cotta. At regular intervals down the long sides of the room, at right angles with the wall, were iron slabs, grooved like meat-dishes; and on each lay a body. Most of them were men. They were very dark from the preservative in which they had been kept, and the skin had almost the look of leather. They were extremely emaciated. The attendant took Philip up to one of the slabs. A youth was standing by it.

“Is your name Carey?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Oh, then we’ve got this leg together. It’s lucky it’s a man, isn’t it?”

“Why?” asked Philip.

“They generally always like a male better,” said the attendant. “A female’s liable to have a lot of fat about her.”

Philip looked at the body. The arms and legs were so thin that there was no shape in them, and the ribs stood out so that the skin over them was tense. A man of about forty-five with a thin, gray beard, and on his skull scanty, colourless hair: the eyes were closed and the lower jaw sunken. Philip could not feel that this had ever been a man, and yet in the row of them there was something terrible and ghastly.

“I thought I’d start at two,” said the young man who was dissecting with Philip.

“All right, I’ll be here then.”

He had bought the day before the case of instruments which was needful, and now he was given a locker. He looked at the boy who had accompanied him into the dissecting-room and saw that he was white.

“Make you feel rotten?” Philip asked him.

“I’ve never seen anyone dead before.”

They walked along the corridor till they came to the entrance of the school. Philip remembered Fanny Price. She was the first dead person he had ever seen, and he remembered how strangely it had affected him. There was an immeasurable distance between the quick and the dead: they did not seem to belong to the same species; and it was strange to think that but a little while before they had spoken and moved and eaten and laughed. There was something horrible about the dead, and you could imagine that they might cast an evil influence on the living.

“What d’you say to having something to eat?” said his new friend to Philip.

They went down into the basement, where there was a dark room fitted up as a restaurant, and here the students were able to get the same sort of fare as they might have at an aerated bread shop. While they ate (Philip had a scone and butter and a cup of chocolate), he discovered that his companion was called Dunsford. He was a fresh-complexioned lad, with pleasant blue eyes and curly, dark hair, large-limbed, slow of speech and movement. He had just come from Clifton.

“Are you taking the Conjoint?” he asked Philip.

“Yes, I want to get qualified as soon as I can.”

“I’m taking it too, but I shall take the F. R. C. S. afterwards. I’m going in for surgery.”

Most of the students took the curriculum of the Conjoint Board of the College of Surgeons and the College of Physicians; but the more ambitious or the more industrious added to this the longer studies which led to a degree from the University of London. When Philip went to St. Luke’s changes had recently been made in the regulations, and the course took five years instead of four as it had done for those who registered before the autumn of 1892. Dunsford was well up in his plans and told Philip the usual course of events. The “first conjoint” examination consisted of biology, anatomy, and chemistry; but it could be taken in sections, and most fellows took their biology three months after entering the school. This science had been recently added to the list of subjects upon which the student was obliged to inform himself, but the amount of knowledge required was very small.

When Philip went back to the dissecting-room, he was a few minutes late, since he had forgotten to buy the loose sleeves which they wore to protect their shirts, and he found a number of men already working. His partner had started on the minute and was busy dissecting out cutaneous nerves. Two others were engaged on the second leg, and more were occupied with the arms.

“You don’t mind my having started?”

“That’s all right, fire away,” said Philip.

He took the book, open at a diagram of the dissected part, and looked at what they had to find.

“You’re rather a dab at this,” said Philip.

“Oh, I’ve done a good deal of dissecting before, animals, you know, for the Pre Sci.”

There was a certain amount of conversation over the dissecting-table, partly about the work, partly about the prospects of the football season, the demonstrators, and the lectures. Philip felt himself a great deal older than the others. They were raw schoolboys. But age is a matter of knowledge rather than of years; and Newson, the active young man who was dissecting with him, was very much at home with his subject. He was perhaps not sorry to show off, and he explained very fully to Philip what he was about. Philip, notwithstanding his hidden stores of wisdom, listened meekly. Then Philip took up the scalpel and the tweezers and began working while the other looked on.

“Ripping to have him so thin,” said Newson, wiping his hands. “The blighter can’t have had anything to eat for a month.”

“I wonder what he died of,” murmured Philip.

“Oh, I don’t know, any old thing, starvation chiefly, I suppose…. I say, look out, don’t cut that artery.”

“It’s all very fine to say, don’t cut that artery,” remarked one of the men working on the opposite leg. “Silly old fool’s got an artery in the wrong place.”

“Arteries always are in the wrong place,” said Newson. “The normal’s the one thing you practically never get. That’s why it’s called the normal.”

“Don’t say things like that,” said Philip, “or I shall cut myself.”

“If you cut yourself,” answered Newson, full of information, “wash it at once with antiseptic. It’s the one thing you’ve got to be careful about. There was a chap here last year who gave himself only a prick, and he didn’t bother about it, and he got septicaemia.”

“Did he get all right?”

“Oh, no, he died in a week. I went and had a look at him in the P. M. room.”

Philip’s back ached by the time it was proper to have tea, and his luncheon had been so light that he was quite ready for it. His hands smelt of that peculiar odour which he had first noticed that morning in the corridor. He thought his muffin tasted of it too.

“Oh, you’ll get used to that,” said Newson. “When you don’t have the good old dissecting-room stink about, you feel quite lonely.”

“I’m not going to let it spoil my appetite,” said Philip, as he followed up the muffin with a piece of cake.

LV

Philip’s ideas of the life of medical students, like those of the public at large, were founded on the pictures which Charles Dickens drew in the middle of the nineteenth century. He soon discovered that Bob Sawyer, if he ever existed, was no longer at all like the medical student of the present.

It is a mixed lot which enters upon the medical profession, and naturally there are some who are lazy and reckless. They think it is an easy life, idle away a couple of years; and then, because their funds come to an end or because angry parents refuse any longer to support them, drift away from the hospital. Others find the examinations too hard for them; one failure after another robs them of their nerve; and, panic-stricken, they forget as soon as they come into the forbidding buildings of the Conjoint Board the knowledge which before they had so pat. They remain year after year, objects of good-humoured scorn to younger men: some of them crawl through the examination of the Apothecaries Hall; others become non-qualified assistants, a precarious position in which they are at the mercy of their employer; their lot is poverty, drunkenness, and Heaven only knows their end. But for the most part medical students are industrious young men of the middle-class with a sufficient allowance to live in the respectable fashion they have been used to; many are the sons of doctors who have already something of the professional manner; their career is mapped out: as soon as they are qualified they propose to apply for a hospital appointment, after holding which (and perhaps a trip to the Far East as a ship’s doctor), they will join their father and spend the rest of their days in a country practice. One or two are marked out as exceptionally brilliant: they will take the various prizes and scholarships which are open each year to the deserving, get one appointment after another at the hospital, go on the staff, take a consulting-room in Harley Street, and, specialising in one subject or another, become prosperous, eminent, and titled.

The medical profession is the only one which a man may enter at any age with some chance of making a living. Among the men of Philip’s year were three or four who were past their first youth: one had been in the Navy, from which according to report he had been dismissed for drunkenness; he was a man of thirty, with a red face, a brusque manner, and a loud voice. Another was a married man with two children, who had lost money through a defaulting solicitor; he had a bowed look as if the world were too much for him; he went about his work silently, and it was plain that he found it difficult at his age to commit facts to memory. His mind worked slowly. His effort at application was painful to see.

Philip made himself at home in his tiny rooms. He arranged his books and hung on the walls such pictures and sketches as he possessed. Above him, on the drawing-room floor, lived a fifth-year man called Griffiths; but Philip saw little of him, partly because he was occupied chiefly in the wards and partly because he had been to Oxford. Such of the students as had been to a university kept a good deal together: they used a variety of means natural to the young in order to impress upon the less fortunate a proper sense of their inferiority; the rest of the students found their Olympian serenity rather hard to bear. Griffiths was a tall fellow, with a quantity of curly red hair and blue eyes, a white skin and a very red mouth; he was one of those fortunate people whom everybody liked, for he had high spirits and a constant gaiety. He strummed a little on the piano and sang comic songs with gusto; and evening after evening, while Philip was reading in his solitary room, he heard the shouts and the uproarious laughter of Griffiths’ friends above him. He thought of those delightful evenings in Paris when they would sit in the studio, Lawson and he, Flanagan and Clutton, and talk of art and morals, the love-affairs of the present, and the fame of the future. He felt sick at heart. He found that it was easy to make a heroic gesture, but hard to abide by its results. The worst of it was that the work seemed to him very tedious. He had got out of the habit of being asked questions by demonstrators. His attention wandered at lectures. Anatomy was a dreary science, a mere matter of learning by heart an enormous number of facts; dissection bored him; he did not see the use of dissecting out laboriously nerves and arteries when with much less trouble you could see in the diagrams of a book or in the specimens of the pathological museum exactly where they were.

He made friends by chance, but not intimate friends, for he seemed to have nothing in particular to say to his companions. When he tried to interest himself in their concerns, he felt that they found him patronising. He was not of those who can talk of what moves them without caring whether it bores or not the people they talk to. One man, hearing that he had studied art in Paris, and fancying himself on his taste, tried to discuss art with him; but Philip was impatient of views which did not agree with his own; and, finding quickly that the other’s ideas were conventional, grew monosyllabic. Philip desired popularity but could bring himself to make no advances to others. A fear of rebuff prevented him from affability, and he concealed his shyness, which was still intense, under a frigid taciturnity. He was going through the same experience as he had done at school, but here the freedom of the medical students’ life made it possible for him to live a good deal by himself.

It was through no effort of his that he became friendly with Dunsford, the fresh-complexioned, heavy lad whose acquaintance he had made at the beginning of the session. Dunsford attached himself to Philip merely because he was the first person he had known at St. Luke’s. He had no friends in London, and on Saturday nights he and Philip got into the habit of going together to the pit of a music-hall or the gallery of a theatre. He was stupid, but he was good-humoured and never took offence; he always said the obvious thing, but when Philip laughed at him merely smiled. He had a very sweet smile. Though Philip made him his butt, he liked him; he was amused by his candour and delighted with his agreeable nature: Dunsford had the charm which himself was acutely conscious of not possessing.

They often went to have tea at a shop in Parliament Street, because Dunsford admired one of the young women who waited. Philip did not find anything attractive in her. She was tall and thin, with narrow hips and the chest of a boy.

“No one would look at her in Paris,” said Philip scornfully.

“She’s got a ripping face,” said Dunsford.

“What DOES the face matter?”

She had the small regular features, the blue eyes, and the broad low brow, which the Victorian painters, Lord Leighton, Alma Tadema, and a hundred others, induced the world they lived in to accept as a type of Greek beauty. She seemed to have a great deal of hair: it was arranged with peculiar elaboration and done over the forehead in what she called an Alexandra fringe. She was very anaemic. Her thin lips were pale, and her skin was delicate, of a faint green colour, without a touch of red even in the cheeks. She had very good teeth. She took great pains to prevent her work from spoiling her hands, and they were small, thin, and white. She went about her duties with a bored look.

Dunsford, very shy with women, had never succeeded in getting into conversation with her; and he urged Philip to help him.

“All I want is a lead,” he said, “and then I can manage for myself.”

Philip, to please him, made one or two remarks, but she answered with monosyllables. She had taken their measure. They were boys, and she surmised they were students. She had no use for them. Dunsford noticed that a man with sandy hair and a bristly moustache, who looked like a German, was favoured with her attention whenever he came into the shop; and then it was only by calling her two or three times that they could induce her to take their order. She used the clients whom she did not know with frigid insolence, and when she was talking to a friend was perfectly indifferent to the calls of the hurried. She had the art of treating women who desired refreshment with just that degree of impertinence which irritated them without affording them an opportunity of complaining to the management. One day Dunsford told him her name was Mildred. He had heard one of the other girls in the shop address her.

“What an odious name,” said Philip.

“Why?” asked Dunsford.

“I like it.”

“It’s so pretentious.”

It chanced that on this day the German was not there, and, when she brought the tea, Philip, smiling, remarked:

“Your friend’s not here today.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” she said coldly.

“I was referring to the nobleman with the sandy moustache. Has he left you for another?”

“Some people would do better to mind their own business,” she retorted.

She left them, and, since for a minute or two there was no one to attend to, sat down and looked at the evening paper which a customer had left behind him.

“You are a fool to put her back up,” said Dunsford.

“I’m really quite indifferent to the attitude of her vertebrae,” replied Philip.

But he was piqued. It irritated him that when he tried to be agreeable with a woman she should take offence. When he asked for the bill, he hazarded a remark which he meant to lead further.

“Are we no longer on speaking terms?” he smiled.

“I’m here to take orders and to wait on customers. I’ve got nothing to say to them, and I don’t want them to say anything to me.”

She put down the slip of paper on which she had marked the sum they had to pay, and walked back to the table at which she had been sitting. Philip flushed with anger.

“That’s one in the eye for you, Carey,” said Dunsford, when they got outside.

“Ill-mannered slut,” said Philip. “I shan’t go there again.”

His influence with Dunsford was strong enough to get him to take their tea elsewhere, and Dunsford soon found another young woman to flirt with. But the snub which the waitress had inflicted on him rankled. If she had treated him with civility he would have been perfectly indifferent to her; but it was obvious that she disliked him rather than otherwise, and his pride was wounded. He could not suppress a desire to be even with her. He was impatient with himself because he had so petty a feeling, but three or four days’ firmness, during which he would not go to the shop, did not help him to surmount it; and he came to the conclusion that it would be least trouble to see her. Having done so he would certainly cease to think of her. Pretexting an appointment one afternoon, for he was not a little ashamed of his weakness, he left Dunsford and went straight to the shop which he had vowed never again to enter. He saw the waitress the moment he came in and sat down at one of her tables. He expected her to make some reference to the fact that he had not been there for a week, but when she came up for his order she said nothing. He had heard her say to other customers:

“You’re quite a stranger.”

She gave no sign that she had ever seen him before. In order to see whether she had really forgotten him, when she brought his tea, he asked:

“Have you seen my friend tonight?”

“No, he’s not been in here for some days.”

He wanted to use this as the beginning of a conversation, but he was strangely nervous and could think of nothing to say. She gave him no opportunity, but at once went away. He had no chance of saying anything till he asked for his bill.

“Filthy weather, isn’t it?” he said.

It was mortifying that he had been forced to prepare such a phrase as that. He could not make out why she filled him with such embarrassment.

“It don’t make much difference to me what the weather is, having to be in here all day.”

There was an insolence in her tone that peculiarly irritated him. A sarcasm rose to his lips, but he forced himself to be silent.

“I wish to God she’d say something really cheeky,” he raged to himself, “so that I could report her and get her sacked. It would serve her damned well right.”

LVI

He could not get her out of his mind. He laughed angrily at his own foolishness: it was absurd to care what an anaemic little waitress said to him; but he was strangely humiliated. Though no one knew of the humiliation but Dunsford, and he had certainly forgotten, Philip felt that he could have no peace till he had wiped it out. He thought over what he had better do. He made up his mind that he would go to the shop every day; it was obvious that he had made a disagreeable impression on her, but he thought he had the wits to eradicate it; he would take care not to say anything at which the most susceptible person could be offended. All this he did, but it had no effect. When he went in and said good-evening she answered with the same words, but when once he omitted to say it in order to see whether she would say it first, she said nothing at all. He murmured in his heart an expression which though frequently applicable to members of the female sex is not often used of them in polite society; but with an unmoved face he ordered his tea. He made up his mind not to speak a word, and left the shop without his usual good-night. He promised himself that he would not go any more, but the next day at tea-time he grew restless. He tried to think of other things, but he had no command over his thoughts. At last he said desperately:

“After all there’s no reason why I shouldn’t go if I want to.”

The struggle with himself had taken a long time, and it was getting on for seven when he entered the shop.

“I thought you weren’t coming,” the girl said to him, when he sat down.

His heart leaped in his bosom and he felt himself reddening. “I was detained. I couldn’t come before.”

“Cutting up people, I suppose?”

“Not so bad as that.”

“You are a stoodent, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

But that seemed to satisfy her curiosity. She went away and, since at that late hour there was nobody else at her tables, she immersed herself in a novelette. This was before the time of the sixpenny reprints. There was a regular supply of inexpensive fiction written to order by poor hacks for the consumption of the illiterate. Philip was elated; she had addressed him of her own accord; he saw the time approaching when his turn would come and he would tell her exactly what he thought of her. It would be a great comfort to express the immensity of his contempt. He looked at her. It was true that her profile was beautiful; it was extraordinary how English girls of that class had so often a perfection of outline which took your breath away, but it was as cold as marble; and the faint green of her delicate skin gave an impression of unhealthiness. All the waitresses were dressed alike, in plain black dresses, with a white apron, cuffs, and a small cap. On a half sheet of paper that he had in his pocket Philip made a sketch of her as she sat leaning over her book (she outlined the words with her lips as she read), and left it on the table when he went away. It was an inspiration, for next day, when he came in, she smiled at him.

“I didn’t know you could draw,” she said.

“I was an art-student in Paris for two years.”

“I showed that drawing you left be’ind you last night to the manageress and she WAS struck with it. Was it meant to be me?”

“It was,” said Philip.

When she went for his tea, one of the other girls came up to him.

“I saw that picture you done of Miss Rogers. It was the very image of her,” she said.

That was the first time he had heard her name, and when he wanted his bill he called her by it.

“I see you know my name,” she said, when she came.

“Your friend mentioned it when she said something to me about that drawing.”

“She wants you to do one of her. Don’t you do it. If you once begin you’ll have to go on, and they’ll all be wanting you to do them.” Then without a pause, with peculiar inconsequence, she said: “Where’s that young fellow that used to come with you? Has he gone away?”

“Fancy your remembering him,” said Philip.

“He was a nice-looking young fellow.”

Philip felt quite a peculiar sensation in his heart. He did not know what it was. Dunsford had jolly curling hair, a fresh complexion, and a beautiful smile. Philip thought of these advantages with envy.

“Oh, he’s in love,” said he, with a little laugh.

Philip repeated every word of the conversation to himself as he limped home. She was quite friendly with him now. When opportunity arose he would offer to make a more finished sketch of her, he was sure she would like that; her face was interesting, the profile was lovely, and there was something curiously fascinating about the chlorotic colour. He tried to think what it was like; at first he thought of pea soup; but, driving away that idea angrily, he thought of the petals of a yellow rosebud when you tore it to pieces before it had burst. He had no ill-feeling towards her now.

“She’s not a bad sort,” he murmured.

It was silly of him to take offence at what she had said; it was doubtless his own fault; she had not meant to make herself disagreeable: he ought to be accustomed by now to making at first sight a bad impression on people. He was flattered at the success of his drawing; she looked upon him with more interest now that she was aware of this small talent. He was restless next day. He thought of going to lunch at the tea-shop, but he was certain there would be many people there then, and Mildred would not be able to talk to him. He had managed before this to get out of having tea with Dunsford, and, punctually at half past four (he had looked at his watch a dozen times), he went into the shop.

Mildred had her back turned to him. She was sitting down, talking to the German whom Philip had seen there every day till a fortnight ago and since then had not seen at all. She was laughing at what he said. Philip thought she had a common laugh, and it made him shudder. He called her, but she took no notice; he called her again; then, growing angry, for he was impatient, he rapped the table loudly with his stick. She approached sulkily.

“How d’you do?” he said.

“You seem to be in a great hurry.”

She looked down at him with the insolent manner which he knew so well.

“I say, what’s the matter with you?” he asked.

“If you’ll kindly give your order I’ll get what you want. I can’t stand talking all night.”

“Tea and toasted bun, please,” Philip answered briefly.

He was furious with her. He had The Star with him and read it elaborately when she brought the tea.

“If you’ll give me my bill now I needn’t trouble you again,” he said icily.

She wrote out the slip, placed it on the table, and went back to the German. Soon she was talking to him with animation. He was a man of middle height, with the round head of his nation and a sallow face; his moustache was large and bristling; he had on a tail-coat and gray trousers, and he wore a massive gold watch-chain. Philip thought the other girls looked from him to the pair at the table and exchanged significant glances. He felt certain they were laughing at him, and his blood boiled. He detested Mildred now with all his heart. He knew that the best thing he could do was to cease coming to the tea-shop, but he could not bear to think that he had been worsted in the affair, and he devised a plan to show her that he despised her. Next day he sat down at another table and ordered his tea from another waitress. Mildred’s friend was there again and she was talking to him. She paid no attention to Philip, and so when he went out he chose a moment when she had to cross his path: as he passed he looked at her as though he had never seen her before. He repeated this for three or four days. He expected that presently she would take the opportunity to say something to him; he thought she would ask why he never came to one of her tables now, and he had prepared an answer charged with all the loathing he felt for her. He knew it was absurd to trouble, but he could not help himself. She had beaten him again. The German suddenly disappeared, but Philip still sat at other tables. She paid no attention to him. Suddenly he realised that what he did was a matter of complete indifference to her; he could go on in that way till doomsday, and it would have no effect.

“I’ve not finished yet,” he said to himself.

The day after he sat down in his old seat, and when she came up said good-evening as though he had not ignored her for a week. His face was placid, but he could not prevent the mad beating of his heart. At that time the musical comedy had lately leaped into public favour, and he was sure that Mildred would be delighted to go to one.

“I say,” he said suddenly, “I wonder if you’d dine with me one night and come to The Belle of New York. I’ll get a couple of stalls.”

He added the last sentence in order to tempt her. He knew that when the girls went to the play it was either in the pit, or, if some man took them, seldom to more expensive seats than the upper circle. Mildred’s pale face showed no change of expression.

“I don’t mind,” she said.

“When will you come?”

“I get off early on Thursdays.”

They made arrangements. Mildred lived with an aunt at Herne Hill. The play began at eight so they must dine at seven. She proposed that he should meet her in the second-class waiting-room at Victoria Station. She showed no pleasure, but accepted the invitation as though she conferred a favour. Philip was vaguely irritated.

LVII

Philip arrived at Victoria Station nearly half an hour before the time which Mildred had appointed, and sat down in the second-class waiting-room. He waited and she did not come. He began to grow anxious, and walked into the station watching the incoming suburban trains; the hour which she had fixed passed, and still there was no sign of her. Philip was impatient. He went into the other waiting-rooms and looked at the people sitting in them. Suddenly his heart gave a great thud.

“There you are. I thought you were never coming.”

“I like that after keeping me waiting all this time. I had half a mind to go back home again.”

“But you said you’d come to the second-class waiting-room.”

“I didn’t say any such thing. It isn’t exactly likely I’d sit in the second-class room when I could sit in the first is it?”

Though Philip was sure he had not made a mistake, he said nothing, and they got into a cab.

“Where are we dining?” she asked.

“I thought of the Adelphi Restaurant. Will that suit you?”

“I don’t mind where we dine.”

She spoke ungraciously. She was put out by being kept waiting and answered Philip’s attempt at conversation with monosyllables. She wore a long cloak of some rough, dark material and a crochet shawl over her head. They reached the restaurant and sat down at a table. She looked round with satisfaction. The red shades to the candles on the tables, the gold of the decorations, the looking-glasses, lent the room a sumptuous air.

“I’ve never been here before.”

She gave Philip a smile. She had taken off her cloak; and he saw that she wore a pale blue dress, cut square at the neck; and her hair was more elaborately arranged than ever. He had ordered champagne and when it came her eyes sparkled.

“You are going it,” she said.

“Because I’ve ordered fiz?” he asked carelessly, as though he never drank anything else.

“I WAS surprised when you asked me to do a theatre with you.” Conversation did not go very easily, for she did not seem to have much to say; and Philip was nervously conscious that he was not amusing her. She listened carelessly to his remarks, with her eyes on other diners, and made no pretence that she was interested in him. He made one or two little jokes, but she took them quite seriously. The only sign of vivacity he got was when he spoke of the other girls in the shop; she could not bear the manageress and told him all her misdeeds at length.

“I can’t stick her at any price and all the air she gives herself. Sometimes I’ve got more than half a mind to tell her something she doesn’t think I know anything about.”

“What is that?” asked Philip.

“Well, I happen to know that she’s not above going to Eastbourne with a man for the week-end now and again. One of the girls has a married sister who goes there with her husband, and she’s seen her. She was staying at the same boarding-house, and she ’ad a wedding-ring on, and I know for one she’s not married.”

Philip filled her glass, hoping that champagne would make her more affable; he was anxious that his little jaunt should be a success. He noticed that she held her knife as though it were a pen-holder, and when she drank protruded her little finger. He started several topics of conversation, but he could get little out of her, and he remembered with irritation that he had seen her talking nineteen to the dozen and laughing with the German. They finished dinner and went to the play. Philip was a very cultured young man, and he looked upon musical comedy with scorn. He thought the jokes vulgar and the melodies obvious; it seemed to him that they did these things much better in France; but Mildred enjoyed herself thoroughly; she laughed till her sides ached, looking at Philip now and then when something tickled her to exchange a glance of pleasure; and she applauded rapturously.

“This is the seventh time I’ve been,” she said, after the first act, “and I don’t mind if I come seven times more.”

She was much interested in the women who surrounded them in the stalls. She pointed out to Philip those who were painted and those who wore false hair.

“It is horrible, these West-end people,” she said. “I don’t know how they can do it.” She put her hand to her hair. “Mine’s all my own, every bit of it.”

She found no one to admire, and whenever she spoke of anyone it was to say something disagreeable. It made Philip uneasy. He supposed that next day she would tell the girls in the shop that he had taken her out and that he had bored her to death. He disliked her, and yet, he knew not why, he wanted to be with her. On the way home he asked:

“I hope you’ve enjoyed yourself?”

“Rather.”

“Will you come out with me again one evening?”

“I don’t mind.”

He could never get beyond such expressions as that. Her indifference maddened him.

“That sounds as if you didn’t much care if you came or not.”

“Oh, if you don’t take me out some other fellow will. I need never want for men who’ll take me to the theatre.”

Philip was silent. They came to the station, and he went to the booking-office.

“I’ve got my season,” she said.

“I thought I’d take you home as it’s rather late, if you don’t mind.”

“Oh, I don’t mind if it gives you any pleasure.”

He took a single first for her and a return for himself.

“Well, you’re not mean, I will say that for you,” she said, when he opened the carriage-door.

Philip did not know whether he was pleased or sorry when other people entered and it was impossible to speak. They got out at Herne Hill, and he accompanied her to the corner of the road in which she lived.

“I’ll say good-night to you here,” she said, holding out her hand. “You’d better not come up to the door. I know what people are, and I don’t want to have anybody talking.”

She said good-night and walked quickly away. He could see the white shawl in the darkness. He thought she might turn round, but she did not. Philip saw which house she went into, and in a moment he walked along to look at it. It was a trim, common little house of yellow brick, exactly like all the other little houses in the street. He stood outside for a few minutes, and presently the window on the top floor was darkened. Philip strolled slowly back to the station. The evening had been unsatisfactory. He felt irritated, restless, and miserable.

When he lay in bed he seemed still to see her sitting in the corner of the railway carriage, with the white crochet shawl over her head. He did not know how he was to get through the hours that must pass before his eyes rested on her again. He thought drowsily of her thin face, with its delicate features, and the greenish pallor of her skin. He was not happy with her, but he was unhappy away from her. He wanted to sit by her side and look at her, he wanted to touch her, he wanted… the thought came to him and he did not finish it, suddenly he grew wide awake… he wanted to kiss the thin, pale mouth with its narrow lips. The truth came to him at last. He was in love with her. It was incredible.

He had often thought of falling in love, and there was one scene which he had pictured to himself over and over again. He saw himself coming into a ball-room; his eyes fell on a little group of men and women talking; and one of the women turned round. Her eyes fell upon him, and he knew that the gasp in his throat was in her throat too. He stood quite still. She was tall and dark and beautiful with eyes like the night; she was dressed in white, and in her black hair shone diamonds; they stared at one another, forgetting that people surrounded them. He went straight up to her, and she moved a little towards him. Both felt that the formality of introduction was out of place. He spoke to her.

“I’ve been looking for you all my life,” he said.

“You’ve come at last,” she murmured.

“Will you dance with me?”

She surrendered herself to his outstretched hands and they danced. (Philip always pretended that he was not lame.) She danced divinely.

“I’ve never danced with anyone who danced like you,” she said.

She tore up her programme, and they danced together the whole evening.

“I’m so thankful that I waited for you,” he said to her. “I knew that in the end I must meet you.”

People in the ball-room stared. They did not care. They did not wish to hide their passion. At last they went into the garden. He flung a light cloak over her shoulders and put her in a waiting cab. They caught the midnight train to Paris; and they sped through the silent, star-lit night into the unknown.

He thought of this old fancy of his, and it seemed impossible that he should be in love with Mildred Rogers. Her name was grotesque. He did not think her pretty; he hated the thinness of her, only that evening he had noticed how the bones of her chest stood out in evening-dress; he went over her features one by one; he did not like her mouth, and the unhealthiness of her colour vaguely repelled him. She was common. Her phrases, so bald and few, constantly repeated, showed the emptiness of her mind; he recalled her vulgar little laugh at the jokes of the musical comedy; and he remembered the little finger carefully extended when she held her glass to her mouth; her manners like her conversation, were odiously genteel. He remembered her insolence; sometimes he had felt inclined to box her ears; and suddenly, he knew not why, perhaps it was the thought of hitting her or the recollection of her tiny, beautiful ears, he was seized by an uprush of emotion. He yearned for her. He thought of taking her in his arms, the thin, fragile body, and kissing her pale mouth: he wanted to pass his fingers down the slightly greenish cheeks. He wanted her.

He had thought of love as a rapture which seized one so that all the world seemed spring-like, he had looked forward to an ecstatic happiness; but this was not happiness; it was a hunger of the soul, it was a painful yearning, it was a bitter anguish, he had never known before. He tried to think when it had first come to him. He did not know. He only remembered that each time he had gone into the shop, after the first two or three times, it had been with a little feeling in the heart that was pain; and he remembered that when she spoke to him he felt curiously breathless. When she left him it was wretchedness, and when she came to him again it was despair.

He stretched himself in his bed as a dog stretches himself. He wondered how he was going to endure that ceaseless aching of his soul.

LVIII

Philip woke early next morning, and his first thought was of Mildred. It struck him that he might meet her at Victoria Station and walk with her to the shop. He shaved quickly, scrambled into his clothes, and took a bus to the station. He was there by twenty to eight and watched the incoming trains. Crowds poured out of them, clerks and shop-people at that early hour, and thronged up the platform: they hurried along, sometimes in pairs, here and there a group of girls, but more often alone. They were white, most of them, ugly in the early morning, and they had an abstracted look; the younger ones walked lightly, as though the cement of the platform were pleasant to tread, but the others went as though impelled by a machine: their faces were set in an anxious frown.

At last Philip saw Mildred, and he went up to her eagerly.

“Good-morning,” he said. “I thought I’d come and see how you were after last night.”

She wore an old brown ulster and a sailor hat. It was very clear that she was not pleased to see him.

“Oh, I’m all right. I haven’t got much time to waste.”

“D’you mind if I walk down Victoria Street with you?”

“I’m none too early. I shall have to walk fast,” she answered, looking down at Philip’s club-foot.

He turned scarlet.

“I beg your pardon. I won’t detain you.”

“You can please yourself.”

She went on, and he with a sinking heart made his way home to breakfast. He hated her. He knew he was a fool to bother about her; she was not the sort of woman who would ever care two straws for him, and she must look upon his deformity with distaste. He made up his mind that he would not go in to tea that afternoon, but, hating himself, he went. She nodded to him as he came in and smiled.

“I expect I was rather short with you this morning,” she said. “You see, I didn’t expect you, and it came like a surprise.”

“Oh, it doesn’t matter at all.”

He felt that a great weight had suddenly been lifted from him. He was infinitely grateful for one word of kindness.

“Why don’t you sit down?” he asked. “Nobody’s wanting you just now.”

“I don’t mind if I do.”

He looked at her, but could think of nothing to say; he racked his brains anxiously, seeking for a remark which should keep her by him; he wanted to tell her how much she meant to him; but he did not know how to make love now that he loved in earnest.

“Where’s your friend with the fair moustache? I haven’t seen him lately.”

“Oh, he’s gone back to Birmingham. He’s in business there. He only comes up to London every now and again.”

“Is he in love with you?”

“You’d better ask him,” she said, with a laugh. “I don’t know what it’s got to do with you if he is.”

A bitter answer leaped to his tongue, but he was learning self-restraint.

“I wonder why you say things like that,” was all he permitted himself to say.

She looked at him with those indifferent eyes of hers.

“It looks as if you didn’t set much store on me,” he added.

“Why should I?”

“No reason at all.”

He reached over for his paper.

“You are quick-tempered,” she said, when she saw the gesture. “You do take offence easily.”

He smiled and looked at her appealingly.

“Will you do something for me?” he asked.

“That depends what it is.”

“Let me walk back to the station with you tonight.”

“I don’t mind.”

He went out after tea and went back to his rooms, but at eight o’clock, when the shop closed, he was waiting outside.

“You are a caution,” she said, when she came out. “I don’t understand you.”

“I shouldn’t have thought it was very difficult,” he answered bitterly.

“Did any of the girls see you waiting for me?”

“I don’t know and I don’t care.”

“They all laugh at you, you know. They say you’re spoony on me.”

“Much you care,” he muttered.

“Now then, quarrelsome.”

At the station he took a ticket and said he was going to accompany her home.

“You don’t seem to have much to do with your time,” she said.

“I suppose I can waste it in my own way.”

They seemed to be always on the verge of a quarrel. The fact was that he hated himself for loving her. She seemed to be constantly humiliating him, and for each snub that he endured he owed her a grudge. But she was in a friendly mood that evening, and talkative: she told him that her parents were dead; she gave him to understand that she did not have to earn her living, but worked for amusement.

“My aunt doesn’t like my going to business. I can have the best of everything at home. I don’t want you to think I work because I need to.” Philip knew that she was not speaking the truth. The gentility of her class made her use this pretence to avoid the stigma attached to earning her living.

“My family’s very well-connected,” she said.

Philip smiled faintly, and she noticed it.

“What are you laughing at?” she said quickly. “Don’t you believe I’m telling you the truth?”

“Of course I do,” he answered.

She looked at him suspiciously, but in a moment could not resist the temptation to impress him with the splendour of her early days.

“My father always kept a dog-cart, and we had three servants. We had a cook and a housemaid and an odd man. We used to grow beautiful roses. People used to stop at the gate and ask who the house belonged to, the roses were so beautiful. Of course it isn’t very nice for me having to mix with them girls in the shop, it’s not the class of person I’ve been used to, and sometimes I really think I’ll give up business on that account. It’s not the work I mind, don’t think that; but it’s the class of people I have to mix with.”

They were sitting opposite one another in the train, and Philip, listening sympathetically to what she said, was quite happy. He was amused at her naivete and slightly touched. There was a very faint colour in her cheeks. He was thinking that it would be delightful to kiss the tip of her chin.

“The moment you come into the shop I saw you was a gentleman in every sense of the word. Was your father a professional man?”

“He was a doctor.”

“You can always tell a professional man. There’s something about them, I don’t know what it is, but I know at once.”

They walked along from the station together.

“I say, I want you to come and see another play with me,” he said.

“I don’t mind,” she said.

“You might go so far as to say you’d like to.”

“Why?”

“It doesn’t matter. Let’s fix a day. Would Saturday night suit you?”

“Yes, that’ll do.”

They made further arrangements, and then found themselves at the corner of the road in which she lived. She gave him her hand, and he held it.

“I say, I do so awfully want to call you Mildred.”

“You may if you like, I don’t care.”

“And you’ll call me Philip, won’t you?”

“I will if I can think of it. It seems more natural to call you Mr. Carey.”

He drew her slightly towards him, but she leaned back.

“What are you doing?”

“Won’t you kiss me good-night?” he whispered.

“Impudence!” she said.

She snatched away her hand and hurried towards her house.

Philip bought tickets for Saturday night. It was not one of the days on which she got off early and therefore she would have no time to go home and change; but she meant to bring a frock up with her in the morning and hurry into her clothes at the shop. If the manageress was in a good temper she would let her go at seven. Philip had agreed to wait outside from a quarter past seven onwards. He looked forward to the occasion with painful eagerness, for in the cab on the way from the theatre to the station he thought she would let him kiss her. The vehicle gave every facility for a man to put his arm round a girl’s waist (an advantage which the hansom had over the taxi of the present day), and the delight of that was worth the cost of the evening’s entertainment.

But on Saturday afternoon when he went in to have tea, in order to confirm the arrangements, he met the man with the fair moustache coming out of the shop. He knew by now that he was called Miller. He was a naturalized German, who had anglicised his name, and he had lived many years in England. Philip had heard him speak, and, though his English was fluent and natural, it had not quite the intonation of the native. Philip knew that he was flirting with Mildred, and he was horribly jealous of him; but he took comfort in the coldness of her temperament, which otherwise distressed him; and, thinking her incapable of passion, he looked upon his rival as no better off than himself. But his heart sank now, for his first thought was that Miller’s sudden appearance might interfere with the jaunt which he had so looked forward to. He entered, sick with apprehension. The waitress came up to him, took his order for tea, and presently brought it.

“I’m awfully sorry,” she said, with an expression on her face of real distress. “I shan’t be able to come tonight after all.”

“Why?” said Philip.

“Don’t look so stern about it,” she laughed. “It’s not my fault. My aunt was taken ill last night, and it’s the girl’s night out so I must go and sit with her. She can’t be left alone, can she?”

“It doesn’t matter. I’ll see you home instead.”

“But you’ve got the tickets. It would be a pity to waste them.”

He took them out of his pocket and deliberately tore them up.

“What are you doing that for?”

“You don’t suppose I want to go and see a rotten musical comedy by myself, do you? I only took seats there for your sake.”

“You can’t see me home if that’s what you mean?”

“You’ve made other arrangements.”

“I don’t know what you mean by that. You’re just as selfish as all the rest of them. You only think of yourself. It’s not my fault if my aunt’s queer.”

She quickly wrote out his bill and left him. Philip knew very little about women, or he would have been aware that one should accept their most transparent lies. He made up his mind that he would watch the shop and see for certain whether Mildred went out with the German. He had an unhappy passion for certainty. At seven he stationed himself on the opposite pavement. He looked about for Miller, but did not see him. In ten minutes she came out, she had on the cloak and shawl which she had worn when he took her to the Shaftesbury Theatre. It was obvious that she was not going home. She saw him before he had time to move away, started a little, and then came straight up to him.

“What are you doing here?” she said.

“Taking the air,” he answered.

“You’re spying on me, you dirty little cad. I thought you was a gentleman.”

“Did you think a gentleman would be likely to take any interest in you?” he murmured.

There was a devil within him which forced him to make matters worse. He wanted to hurt her as much as she was hurting him.

“I suppose I can change my mind if I like. I’m not obliged to come out with you. I tell you I’m going home, and I won’t be followed or spied upon.”

“Have you seen Miller today?”

“That’s no business of yours. In point of fact I haven’t, so you’re wrong again.”

“I saw him this afternoon. He’d just come out of the shop when I went in.”

“Well, what if he did? I can go out with him if I want to, can’t I? I don’t know what you’ve got to say to it.”

“He’s keeping you waiting, isn’t he?”

“Well, I’d rather wait for him than have you wait for me. Put that in your pipe and smoke it. And now p’raps you’ll go off home and mind your own business in future.”

His mood changed suddenly from anger to despair, and his voice trembled when he spoke.

“I say, don’t be beastly with me, Mildred. You know I’m awfully fond of you. I think I love you with all my heart. Won’t you change your mind? I was looking forward to this evening so awfully. You see, he hasn’t come, and he can’t care twopence about you really. Won’t you dine with me? I’ll get some more tickets, and we’ll go anywhere you like.”

“I tell you I won’t. It’s no good you talking. I’ve made up my mind, and when I make up my mind I keep to it.”

He looked at her for a moment. His heart was torn with anguish. People were hurrying past them on the pavement, and cabs and omnibuses rolled by noisily. He saw that Mildred’s eyes were wandering. She was afraid of missing Miller in the crowd.

“I can’t go on like this,” groaned Philip. “It’s too degrading. If I go now I go for good. Unless you’ll come with me tonight you’ll never see me again.”

“You seem to think that’ll be an awful thing for me. All I say is, good riddance to bad rubbish.”

“Then good-bye.”

He nodded and limped away slowly, for he hoped with all his heart that she would call him back. At the next lamp-post he stopped and looked over his shoulder. He thought she might beckon to him—he was willing to forget everything, he was ready for any humiliation—but she had turned away, and apparently had ceased to trouble about him. He realised that she was glad to be quit of him.