This Little World

Front matter

NOVELS BY D. CHRISTIE MURRAY Crown 8va, cloth extra, 3s. 6d. each ; post8vo., illustrated boards, 2S. each. A LIFE'S ATONEMENT. JOSEPH'S COAT. COALS OF FIRE. VAL STRANGE. HEARTS. THE WAY OF THE WORLD. A MODEL FATHER. OLD BLAZER'S HERO. CYNIC FORTUNE. BY THE GATE OF THE SEA. A BIT OF HUMAN NATURE. FIRST PERSON SINGULAR. BOB MARTIN'S LITTLE GIRL. TIME'S REVENGES. A WASTED CRIME. IN DIREST PERIL. MOUNT DESPAIR. A CAPFUL O' NAILS. Crown 8vo., cloth, 3s. 6d. THIS LITTLE WORLD. Crown 8vo., cloth, 6s. TALES AND POEMS. Crown 8vo., cloth, 3s. 6d. [Shortly. THE MAKING OF A NOVELIST: An Experiment in Autobiography. With Portrait. Crown 8vo., buckram, 3s. 6d. MY CONTEMPORARIES IN FICTION. Crown 8vo. , buckram, 3s. 6d. NOVELS BY CHRISTIE MURRAY & HENRY HERMAN Crown 8vo., cloth extra, 3s. 6d. each ; post 8vo. , illustrated boards, 2s. each.

ONE TRAVELLER RETURNS. THE BISHOPS' BIBLE. PAUL JONES'S ALIAS. London: CHATTO & WINDUS, in St. Mariin's Lane, W.C BY DAVID CHRISTIE MURRAY AUTHOR OF 'josefh's coat,' 'bob martin's little girl,' 'a capul o' nails,' etc. LONDON CHATTO & WINDUS

Chapter I

Warnock Chase lay under the white, illimitable heaven, shimmering in the noonday heat of mid July. The sky was filled with a palpitating radiance, and everywhere the landscape dazzled the sight. The yellow gorse blazed like flame itself, the bracken twinkled with innumerable flecks of light. Viewed from any point of vantage, the landscape rolled away and away into the living blue of the distance in a series of ridges, the boldly-accented lines of which were emphasized here and there by clustering masses of gray and purple rock. In places bare earth of a strong yellowish red made an extraordinary contrast with the vivid green of its turfy border. The whole scene presented a riot of colour, and had it been translated to canvas, would barely have seemed half credible. The Chase looked as unpeopled as the desert of Sahara, though behind any one of the ridges an army might easily have Iain concealed.

An unceasing, monotonous drone of insects filled the air, and was at least partially responsible for the sense of loneliness which, in combination with the intense sunshine, dwelt oppressively on the spirit. A bit of grayish-white on a hillside might have passed from a distance for an outcrop of rock, but, seen nearer at hand, it turned out to be a tent of small size and eccentric shape. Considerable skill must have gone to the making of this miniature house of canvas, for the materials of which it was constructed were unpromising in the extreme. The cloth was patched and ragged, the cords which held it to the ground were old and frayed, the roof-tree and its supports were mere hedge-stakes, bound together in some places by withes, and in others by old odds and ends of string. Within the tent were two or three stout ammu nition blankets, spread upon the grassy floor, and beyond the blankets was heaped a petty chaos of artist's working materials.

Not far from the tent, stretched at full length, a young man lay face downward in the bracken. He was roughly dressed in a tweed coat which had seen much service, and he wore corduroy trousers, and big, hobnailed boots. A rusty wideawake protected the back of his neck from the direct rays of the sun. He lay quite still in the blazing noonday amid the monotonous hum of insects, and might have been a dead man for any outward sign he showed. Still as he lay, he had never been more alive than at this hour. His soul was feeling its way to the fulfilment of a splendid desire. His hands, shaped cup-like over each eye, excluded the sunlight, and he lay staring earth ward in this artificial darkness, and seeing all manner of wonderful and beautiful things with an amazing distinct ness of vision. He saw Warnock Chase as it lay about him then, with its clamour and clangour of colour.

He saw it clad in the gray mists of morning. He saw it under the slanting rains and bitter winds of winter. He saw it fresh from a transient shower in springtime, tearfully smiling, and half spanned by a broken rainbow. He saw it gloriously sombre in the after-glow of an autumn sunset. All these visions presented themselves to him, not as they come to commonplace people who strive to make pictures in their minds, but with a beautiful com pleteness, as if he gazed upon the very presentments themselves. They were even better than that, for the magic of his own spirit was over them all, and the scenes he looked on (though the bodily eye had watched them for years, and he had worshipped their beauty in its every form), were permeated now by the light of his own soul — were gloriously a part and parcel of himself.

It was a time of creation. He lay stone-still for an hour or more, and then rolled slowly over, and adjusted the rusty wideawake anew to shade his eyes, which, after prolonged shelter from the light, were for a moment painfully sensitive. He sat up in the fern, gripping his knees, and rocking himself to and fro, as if he kept time to some musical measure in his mind. ' I know where I am now,' he said aloud. ' I'll do it if I die for it ! I'll do it !' he repeated, in a tone of concen trated determination. ' I'll do it ! You'll see if I don't.' His speech, like his boots and his clothes, was coarse and rustic, but his face belied both his accent and his aspect. Fire and delicacy and dogged determination are not the most cognate of qualities in human nature, and do not easily or often express themselves at the same moment in one countenance ; but this rustic young man owned and showed them all.

His eyes were large and of a gray so dark that at times they looked quite black. His forehead was almost gloomy in its massy squareness ; it overhung the eyes somewhat, and left them cavernous ; there was a deep cleft between the brows. The lips were perhaps too sensitive and delicate, and the nostrils shared such fault in that direction as they had ; but the jaw and chin were as full of power as the forehead. The faintest brown down had begun to show on lip and cheek and i — chin, and helped to sustain a lurking impression of youth which might otherwise have been banished altogether by the weight and power of the man's dominant ex pression. He rose slowly to his feet, and waded thigh-deep in bracken towards the tent. It was so low that he had to go upon all fours to enter it ; but there was a sort of rude hood in front of it, under which he could sit without cramping himself.

From the far end of the tent he threw towards the entrance a rough-hewn three-legged stool, obviously of amateur make, and with more care conveyed towards the opening a flat wooden box filled with tubes of oil colours, an easel, a small canvas, and a sheaf of brushes. The easel was a little three-legged affair, as evidently home-made as the stool, and the pegs on which he supported his canvas were mere untrimmed twigs of the thickness of an ordinary penholder. He sat down in the shadow of the hood, and busied himself in the setting of his palette, talking to himself from time to time mean while. ' I've got ye,' he said, in a kind of dogged triumph — ' I've got ye this time ; and afore the day's out I'll have ye on the cloth.' He began to paint, and worked with a perfect self absorption for an hour, with occasional ejaculations of half-sullen approval : ' You'll do.

I'll fetch thee yet,' and so on. He had worked so far with a kind of slow-burning intentness, neither hurrying nor pausing; but now he began to doubt and fidget, and by-and-by, laying his brushes and palette on the ground beside him, he shifted his stool as far back as his narrow limits would allow, and glared at the work of his own hands with a gloomy dis satisfaction. Half a dozen times a sigh of impatience broke from him, and once he stretched out his hand towards the canvas with a gesture so wild and passionate that it seemed as if he meant to destroy it utterly. He restrained that impulse, however, and fell once more to a grudging survey of the work. ' It's no more like it,' he muttered, ' than choke's like cheese.' He sat silent after this, with his teeth clenched, his ponderous brows corrugated, and his eyes gleaming, as if he contemplated some forlorn hope, and were resolving to throw away his life upon it. ' I'll do it yet !' he said savagely. ' It's in me — I know it's in me — and come out it shall.' A moment later a rustle in the bracken awoke him from his dreams, and turning round, he saw, striding towards him and within a score of yards, a stalwart, well-set-up personage of five or six and twenty, followed by a boy who carried a field-easel and a camp-stool.

The new comer himself bore an artist's umbrella, weather-stained and bulky, and carried under his arm a large-sized sketch block in a cover of American cloth. The occupant of the tent stared at him with no expression of goodwill, not that he was angry at a promise of interruption, but that he was for the moment absorbed in his anger and humiliation at his own failure. The man with the big umbrella and the sketch-block was a good deal of a dandy. He wore knickerbockers of brown velvet, a jacket and hat of the same material, and his shirt was of twilled silk. He had no waistcoat, and his necktie was of a pale orange, which contrasted excellently with his foreign - looking olive greenish complexion. He smoothed a sweeping mous tache and an imperial ; and what with these, an eaglish nose, and sparkling black eyes, he looked uncommonly handsome.

When he first caught sight of the figure seated in the shelter of the tent's hood, he smiled as if amused ; but before the other had turned he had brought his features back to an aspect of propriety. ' I hope I'm not intruding on your ground, sir,' he sang out in a cheery, good-natured voice. ' I came up this way yesterday, and you were not here.' ' I was out yonder,' the young man returned, waving his right hand vaguely. ' I come over here this mornin'.' ' Only this morning?' said the newcomer, dropping his sketch-block on the fern and advancing. ' May I look ?' ' You can look if you like,' the other answered. He was bitterly shy, and, as very often happens with resolute people in such a case, his manner was unintentionally offensive. ' There's nothin' much to look at,' he added. ' Let me see,' said the stranger, with a voice and manner of good-humoured patronage.

He was himself, young as he was, already a painter of some eminence, and it came natural to him to patronize any rustic young brother of the brush. He meant kindly, and had not the faintest idea that his manner could be construed unpleasantly. He dropped on one knee, and looked over the workman's shoulder. 'Dear me!' he said, in a suddenly changed tone. ' Upon my word, that's very respectable. This is your own work ?' ' Whose else d'ye think it is ?' the young man of the tent demanded disdainfully. ' You have studied ?' said the newcomer. ' How long have you been painting ?' ' All my life,' the young man answered grimly. The stranger cast a sidelong glance at him, and then looked back at the picture on the home-made little easel. 'That's a rare good little bit of colour in the middle distance,' he said after awhile — ' a rare good bit of colour.' ' 'Tain't up to much,' the younger man answered, speaking rather more gruffly than before. ' I shan't disturb you ?' the newcomer asked. ' Oh,' was the answer, given in a prolonged drawl, ' I don't belong to the Chase.' The stranger was ignorant of the local turn of phrase, in which a man is said to belong to a walking-stick, a dog, a house, or anything of which he may happen to be the owner. 'You're not a native here?' he asked, half puzzled. ' Who says I ain't ?' the young man responded. ' The place is free.

You've got as much right here as I have.' ' I see,' said the stranger, half laughing. ' I didn't understand at first. You mean that the Chase doesn't belong to you ?' ' I said so,' the other answered, stooping to gather up his palette and his brushes. His manner definitely closed the interview for the time being. The noonday heat and blaze had passed away, and in the north the sky was glorious with a fleece of white, whose folds cast dove-coloured shadows. A wind so high that not a breath of it touched the surface of the earth swept these clouds along in a slow, calm progress, and under their changing shadows the distant landscape broke to laughter or sank to slumber with a soft alternation. The stranger, with a voiceless wave of the hand, summoned the boy with the easel and the camp-stool, chose his place, set up his paraphernalia, drew from his pockets a number of ingenious little appliances the rustic artist had never seen before, and fell to work with a rapid and practised dexterity.

The young man of the tent set to work like wise, but the inward fire of encouragement and hope with which he had glowed an hour before had fallen to dead ashes, and his labour was a bitterness. None the less, he stuck to it, and in another hour was rewarded by a return of his enthusiasms. He forgot the intruder as completely as he had forgotten himself, and the dandy worker in water-colour brimmed and almost bubbled over with mirth to hear him muttering ardently to himself, with his local drawl intensified by his absorption in his labour. 'There's a bit more yaller in that gray,' he heard him say once. ' Yis, theer's a bit more yaller in it.' Then a moment later, in a tone of triumph, half breathless with eagerness: 'That's it, to a toucher!' This and similar outbursts from the solitary enthusiast kept the other workman not disagreeably aware of his presence.

At intervals, however, he became absorbed in his own labour, and at length he was startled by the rustic voice drawling right over his shoulder : 'That's cliver!' The tone was modified, and, in spite of approval, suggested reservation. The artist's ear was quick, and he turned with a smile less candid than he had worn when appraising the workmanship of this odd companion. ' Oh !' he said, with a cool superiority of manner, and answering the tone instead of the words, ' what's wrong with it ?' The young man of the tent nursed his chin in a grimy hand, and inspected the picture with half-closed eyes under bent brows. He looked so bitter and uncompromising that the artist fairly laughed. It was a new experience to him to find his work examined with so masterly an air by such a critic. ' What's the matter with it ?' he asked, repeating his inquiry. ' H-m !' said the critic. ' I dunno.

It's done too easy.' ' Oh, done too easy, is it ?' the artist asked with a banter not altogether natural or unconcerned. ' And what makes you think it's done too easily ?' ' Dunno,' said the other. ' Looks like it.' He waved an unwashed right hand in front of the drawing with a stretched forefinger, as it were designing it. ' It's cliver,' he repeated, 'but it's done too easy.' ' My dear fellow,' cried the perplexed artist, 'this is not a finished picture. It's a sketch — a mere impression. I shall carry this and a dozen more home with me, and shall work from them.' ' You'll niver get the Chase i' that way,' the young man returned, with a sulky solidity of manner. ' No ?' said the artist. ' And may I ask how one should work to get it ?' ' Yo've got to live on it,' the young man answered. Without knowing it, he resented the other's clothes, and his manner, and his facility in work.

His own enthusiasms made him shy, and enthusiasm and shyness in combination made him seem insolent. ' That's all right as far as it goes,' he said, once more indicating the landscape. ' It's cliver in a way, an' it's pretty in a way, but theer's nothin' in it.' ' Doesn't it strike you, my young friend,' the artist answered, turning in his seat to address him — ' doesn't it strike you, my young friend, that you're rather a hardy critic ?' ' Eh ?' queried the rustic, with an almost loutish air. ' Now, let me tell you,' said the artist, with an un disguised air of patronage and mastership, ' if you go on working, and if you are able to get lessons in a proper school, you will most likely be able to paint one of these days ; but one of the first lessons you will require to learn will be to be respectful.' The young man of the tent stood abashed, and blushed so fierily that his elder, who was a thoroughly good fellow in his way, took compassion on him, thinking that perhaps he had rebuked him too severely. ' Let me have a look at your own work,' he said, with a return to geniality, ' and let's see if Where did you pick it up ?' 'Eh?' ' Where did you study ?

Who gave you lessons ?' ' I niver had a lesson,' the young man answered. ' I wish I had. There's lots o' things as anybody could tell me. I've wasted months in findin' out some on 'em.' ' You never had a lesson ?' the artist asked, turning with an air of surprise. ' How did you come to begin ?' ' I found a gentleman a-paintin' on the Chase, 'ears an' 'ears back. He used to let me watch him an' carry his things for him. He used to come regular for five or six 'ears, and I began to try for myself.' ' Do you sell your work at all ?' the artist asked. 'Sometimes,' the young man answered — 'when I ain't too much ashamed on it.' 'What should you want for this, now?' the stranger demanded, waving his pipe towards the picture on the easel. 'Oh!' said the youth, 'that's worth ten bob, if it's worth anything.' ' Will you sell it to me ?

I'll give you ten shillings for it, if you like to part with it.' ' You can have it,' said the young man of the tent. ' It ain't up to much.' The artist drew out a purse, searched for and found a half-sovereign, and handed it to his poorer brother. The young man spat on the coin and pouched it in silence, but a lurking smile was visible in his eyes, and his grim jaw relaxed a little. ' Yrou live here ?' his new-found companion asked, stooping down to inspect the interior of the tent. ' I live here as long as the weather'll let me. It's too cold i' the winter-time.' ' And you paint all the while ?' The artist was growing interested in this remarkable young savage. ' I paint as much as I can,' the young man answered. ' I can't be at it always. Some o' the paints is a sight too dear for me.' ' Don't think I mean to be impertinent,' replied the artist. ' I'm not asking you questions out of mere idle curiosity.

But have you any other means ?' He paused there, as if he would rather have left the question insinuated than spoken. ' No,' the youth answered. He surprised the painter a little by showing no embarrassment at the question. ' It was a stiffish game at fust, an' so I tell ye. But I can make as much as I want now, easy. Black choke's cheap enough, and so's paper. When I ain't got the paints, I go in for drawin'.' ' Black choke ?' queried the artist. ' Oh ah ! yes, I understand.' He translated it inwardly : ' Black chalk ;' and pretended to have found an obstruction in his pipe, to hide the smile he could not suppress. ' Have you any of your drawings here ? I should like to have a look at some of them.' The rustic crawled on all fours into the tent, and emerged with a bulky package done up roughly in a piece of old sacking, and tied with a frayed, much knotted cord. ' Here's some on 'em,' he said ; and a moment later exposed a considerable pile of sheets of grocer's paper, coarse in texture, and of a grayish tinge.

The artist took a dozen of the sheets and glanced over them. 'And you never took a lesson?' he said, breaking a silence which had endured for perhaps five minutes. The young man shook his head, and answered, ' Niver.' ' You'll be able to give one or two in time if you go on,' said the elder, rising from the stool. ' Do you mind signing this for me ?' he asked, indicating the picture. ' I should like to have your name to it.' The self-taught painter sat down on the stool his com panion had vacated, took up his palette and a brush, and laboriously painted in the name, ' John Cutler.' ' Let me have the date,' said the artist. ' The year only.' The young man complied, and set down the figures, '1882.' ' I know your name now, Mr. Cutler,' said the purchaser, drawing a card-case from his pocket, and daintily extracting a card. ' It is only fair that you should know mine.' John Cutler accepted the proffered card, and read it with apparent difficulty, ' Bassett Piercey, Steele's Road, Haverstock Hill, N.W.' ' If ever you think of sending any of your work to London,' said Mr. Piercey, ' I might be of service to you.'

Chapter II

The village of Wood Side overlooked the Chase, and its whitewashed houses, its clustering red-tiled roofs, and the gray squat tower of its old church made a prominent point in the landscape from a hundred differing places. John Cutler had painted it from almost every one of them, and found a beautiful, far-reaching sense of home and humanity infused into his work thereby. On gray days, when a sidelong sweep of rain came down beyond the village, and the long reaches of bracken were plunged in gloom, the faint curls of blue smoke which rose from the closely neighboured chimneys spoke to the lonely young artist's mind of a thousand homely intimacies ; and he did some how believe, though as yet in a purblind and uninstructed fashion, that one of these days it might be possible for him to translate for others, through the medium of paint and canvas, the affection and delight with which his thoughts inspired his own heart.

He did not know it, and even if he had known it, he was without means to express the fact in words, but from the earliest and clumsiest of his beginnings until now he had never attempted to paint a landscape without discerning in it an expression of some emotion of the soul. Nature beckoned the lowborn and untaught young genius, and called to him with a voice too seductive to be resisted : ' I have a secret to tell you. Deep meaning lies within my breast. Search, and you shall find it. Search with out ceasing. Some day of discovery, ever and always to be remarkable, awaits you.' The song of the Earth-Spirit in Faust would have enlightened him at once : ' Thus at the roaring loom of Time I ply, And weave for God the garment thou seest Him by.' For the self-taught lad Nature robed and hid something infinitely more splendid and divine than herself, and he strove to pierce the veil with a persistent and unfailing passion.

To be self-taught in any art is to be ill-instructed in many things concerning it ; but it means often (and indeed always, when the pupil-master is thoroughly in earnest), that certain truths appertaining to it will be moreprofoundly rooted than they ever could be if any stranger's hand had planted them. Viewed from the west at sunset, when the distant houses of the little place were steeped in blues and purplish browns, sombre against the reflected light of the eastern sky, with every window-pane that caught the light a flaming topaz in the gloom, it spoke the very heart of peace and quiet. One canvas depicting the scene under such conditions bore on its back in John's rude hand writing the word ' Repoze.' Another, painted at a distance of three miles from the first, showed the village gay in red and white, with the slender smoke-wreaths of a windless morning rising from its chimneys against a sky of jewelled Orient splendour.

The larks had sung whilst John had worked at this painting; and though he rebuked himself for what he thought a stupidity, he could not for his life's sake stifle the longing to get the lark's music on to his canvas. He would have painted the very scent of the heather, and the half-sweet, half-acrid odour of a mound of smouldering weeds hard by. Nothing satisfied him. He guessed partly at the amateur incompleteness of his own work, and in spite of that he felt that even if he conquered every technicality of his art, it would still be impossible to speak all his own meaning. To make short work of the matter, the boy had genius, and was tormented by the intense necessity of finding the unspoken and unspeakable word which has been sought by genius in all ages, and has never yet been uttered. On the back of this second painting he had roughly scrawled, ' Up with the lark in the morning,' and to himself at least the work expressed an almost tremulous delight in the freshness and harmony of the breaking day.

Robbed of the advantages of distance, Wood Side was less picturesque and striking, a mere old-fashioned village, not interesting either in the way of architecture or arrange ment, and noticeable mainly for an air of peaceful order and content. There were not many of the very poor within its little borders, and most of its houses belonged to the comfortable lower middle class of people. The street curved and straggled at its own will, and its houses had a look of having been dropped at random. Some were built flush on the footway, and others retired a score of yards from it or more, and were fenced in by gardens and green-painted railings, with clattering gates leading to garden paths invariably paved with brick. Onion-beds and beds of cabbages were divided from each other by patches of ten-week stocks, and amongst the blossoms stood currant or gooseberry bushes.

Broad-beans, and scarlet-runners, and green-peas were trained here and there on a dense little phalanx of risels, and use and ornament everywhere went hand in hand. In the very middle of the street, so near the church as to lie in mid afternoon in the shadow of its tower, was a well-to-do-looking tenement of two stories, boasting just such a garden. This well-to-do house had a green painted trellis-work porch, sufficiently flimsy and shabby in itself, but overrun with a surprising wealth of climbing roses. Beside the porch, in a wooden armchair, sat a portly man of middle age, with a small round green table before him. On the table stood a jug of home-brewed beer, with a white head of froth bulging from it, and a battered leaden tobacco-box, flanked by a loose half-handful of wooden matches.

The man in the armchair sat with his feet apart to make room for a bulldog, whose expression so strangely resembled his own that they might have been twin brethren. Neither the man nor the dog was actually pugnacious for the moment, but each looked ready for a fight at an instant's warning. The human creature had an overhanging forehead and an underhanging jaw, and boasted at least half a dozen bridges to his nose. In the loosely-clenched fists that lay at rest upon his knees, in his broad shoulders, his deep chest, his scarred and battered countenance, he was marked ' pugilist ' all over. When he rose from his chair and walked into the house in search of his forgotten churchwarden, a certain alert looseness in the droop of his shoulder and in the carriage of his arms, a something of a spring and a slouch in combination in his gait, marked him still further.

He was beyond late middle age — nearing the sixties — and as far away from his time as if the tide had left him high and dry a hundred years back. He had found his pipe, had resumed his seat, and was idly loading up for a smoke, when the gate clicked, and a young gentleman, attired in cricketing flannels and a straw hat, came sauntering down the brick-paved pathway, carrying a cricket-bat in a green baize cover over one shoulder. 'Well, Mr. Richard,' said the man in the armchair, ' how be you ?' ' I needn't ask how you are, you old gladiator,' the young man answered, swaggering genially at him, with his feet apart and the cricket-bat clasped in either hand across his shoulders. ' You're looking as fit as a fiddle.' ' I'm pretty well, thank you, Mr. Richard,' said the other. ' I'm gettin' to be a bit pursy an' long-winded like, as a man might say; but, bless your heart an' soul, what can be looked for in a man at my time o' life, when he's been out o' trainin' for twelve 'ear ?' ' You could tackle a cart-load of the young ones yet, George,' said Mr. Richard, surveying him admiringly. ' The young uns !' returned the man in the armchair with scornful emphasis. ' The young uns !