Читать книгу The Triumph of Jill - F. E. Mills Young - Страница 5

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The following morning Jill received another visit. It was a case of history repeating itself so to speak. She was seated in much the same attitude as on the former occasion, only this time she waited and allowed the visitor to stumble up the stairs as best he could and knock before she rose to open the door. It was the same quick blundering step, and, when she confronted him, the same slightly scowling face that met her glance; apparently Mr St. John did not find the stairs less intricate on further acquaintance. He held his hat in his hand and Jill noticed that he looked rather diffident.

“You got my note?” she queried with a clearly perceptible inflection of surprise in her voice.

“Yes,” he answered, “that is why I am here. I must apologise, though, for calling on your class day. As a matter of fact I came yesterday afternoon but found I had just missed you; you were out.”

“Yes,” she replied, “I was out, but I never heard that you had been. It was courageous of you to attempt those stairs a second time. Will you come in?”

He entered, and then looked round in surprise. The room was just the same as on the former occasion unoccupied save by themselves and with no visible preparation for anyone else. Jill detected the look and resented it.

“You are wondering where my pupils are,” she said quickly, “I am expecting—no,” with a proud upraising of her small chin, “I am not expecting—How could I expect anyone to mount those stairs?—I am hoping that some may turn up eventually.”

“And yet,” he said in a distinctly offended tone, “you refuse the first who presents himself. But perhaps you mistrusted my claim to respectability?”

Jill blushed uncomfortably. She had forgotten for the moment that she had refused him as a pupil on the ground of having no vacancy.

“It—it isn’t that,” she tried to explain. “I can quite believe that you are very respectable but—Oh! can’t you understand?—I wanted to teach children?”

Apparently he did not consider that sufficient reason to preclude her from teaching him also; he did not seem to think that there might be other reasons which had led up to this—to him—very trivial one.

“I don’t know any more than a child would,” he replied, “and I should pay three times the fee—double for being an adult, treble for being a male adult which some ladies seem to consider an additional inconvenience.”

“Excuse me,” put in Jill severely, “if I undertook to teach you my charge would be the same for you as for any other pupil, but I am afraid I must decline.”

“Very well,” he answered huffily, “the decision of course rests with you, but I won’t attempt to disguise the fact that I am very disappointed.”

He walked towards the door, but stopped, and came back a little way.

“If it is anything to do with—that is I mean to say—I will pay in advance,” he blurted out.

The girl bit her lip.

“It has nothing to do with that,” she cried sharply. “Oh, dear me, how very dense you are! Don’t you see that it wouldn’t do for me to teach you?”

He stared at her.

“Good heavens!” he exclaimed, “you don’t mean to say that you’re afraid of Mrs Grundy? She would never get up those stairs I can assure you, and if she did why we’d stick her on the model throne and paint her.”

Jill laughed in spite of herself. It sounded very ridiculous put into plain English, and yet after all he had pretty well hit upon the truth.

“It isn’t only Mrs Grundy,” she replied, “but I—I don’t feel equal to undertaking you. I think it would be better if you went to someone—older.”

“When I read your advertisement,” he said stiffly, “I imagined that you would be older. But I don’t see that it much matters. I want to study art. You wish to teach it and have no other pupils. Why not try me for a quarter and see how it works?”

It was a great temptation, Jill still hesitated. Absurd as she felt it to be she was unmistakably nervous at the thought of teaching this big young man, while he, noting her indecision, stood waiting anxiously for her to speak, too engrossed with his project to consider her at all; she merely represented a means to an end, the object through which he might accomplish the only real ambition of his life.

“I don’t know,” she said slowly after a long pause, “I think perhaps I might try as you suggest, for the quarter but—I wish you had been a girl.”

“Thank you,” he answered. “I am sorry that I cannot agree with you. Shall I stay this morning?”

Jill looked rather alarmed at this proposal, but, she reasoned within herself, if he were coming at all he might as well begin at once, so, after another long pause, and a dubious look round the none too tidy studio, she gave an ungracious assent, whereupon he immediately commenced divesting himself of his overcoat, an action he regretted when it was too late, and, but for fear of hurting her feelings, he would have slipped into it again for the fire was nearly out and the room struck chill; he wondered how she sat there painting with her small hands almost blue with cold.

“The servant,” explained Jill airily with the astuteness of a very observant nature, “will be here with the coals shortly; she usually brings them up at about eleven.”

He looked rather disconcerted.

“Oh, I’m not cold in the least,” he exclaimed untruthfully, “it is quite warm to-day.”

“Yes,” replied the girl shortly, “the thermometer is below Zero, I should say. Will you sit here please?”

She placed him as near the fire as possible and provided him with drawing-materials, then going over to a shelf began to rummage among endless books and papers for a suitable copy simple enough for him to start on.

“I wish to go in for the figure from life,” he modestly observed.

Jill fairly gasped at his audacity; she had understood him to say that he was a novice.

“How much,” she asked, pausing in her search and regarding him critically the while she put the question, “or how little drawing did I understand you to say you had done up to the present?”

“I haven’t done any,” he answered meekly.

Jill went on with her search again.

“We will commence with flat copies,” she crushingly remarked, “after that we will attempt the cast, and then—but there is ample time in which to think about such lofty aspirations.”

Mr St. John was not the mildest tempered of mortals but he sat mute under the rebuff and took the copy which she handed him without comment. It was an easy outline of a woman’s head, absurdly easy the new pupil considered it, and yet, to use his own vulgar phraseology after he had been working laboriously for ten minutes and had succeeded in rubbing a hole in the paper where the prominent feature should have been, it stumped him. Miss Erskine rose and stood over him with a disagreeable, I-told-you-so expression on her face.

“I can hardly accuse you of idleness,” she said, “you have been most energetic as the paper evinces. I think we had better start again on a fresh piece.”

She fetched another sheet of drawing paper and, taking the seat he had vacated, pinned it on the board, while he stood behind her, his brows drawn together in the old scowl, and a gleam of angry resentment in his eyes.

“The paper,” Jill continued in measured cutting tones, “was not wasted; it has served its purpose; for you have learnt your first lesson in art. It is a useful lesson, too, as it applies to other things that are worth mastering. The will to accomplish a thing is not the accomplishment, remember; it is necessary to the accomplishment, of course, but one must work hard, fight against difficulty, and defeat defeat. Now that you have acknowledged the difficulty we will see what we can do to overcome it.”

The young man stared at her with, it must be confessed, a certain amount of vexed amusement in his gaze. He wondered what sort of an old woman she would be, and finally decided that she would develop into an acidulated spinster.

“If you will kindly give me your attention,” she began with the new dignity which was so unbecoming to her, and so very unpleasant to her pupil, “I will—”

But here an interruption occurred in the welcome sound of someone mounting the stairs, followed by much shuffling and the flop of something heavy outside the door.

“Coals!” purred Jill with evident relief, and then he noticed that she was shivering slightly.

“Come in,” she cried.

The shuffling re-continued but instead of the appearance of the coals the sound merely heralded a retreat, whoever it was had commenced the descent, of that there could be no shadow of a doubt. Jill sprang up and went to the door, and St. John heard her remonstrating at some length with a person named Isobel, an obdurate person seemingly, and one who used the expression aint a good deal, and found some difficulty with her aspirates. After a long and subdued warfare of words the shuffling feet recommenced their descent, and then the door flew open and Miss Erskine appeared dragging in the scuttle. St. John strode swiftly to her assistance but Jill waved him peremptorily back.

“Thank you,” she said, “I can manage; it is not at all heavy.”

“No,” he answered, giving her a straight look as he grasped the handle, “not more than quarter of a ton I should say. Allow me if you please.”

Jill released her hold and watched him with limp resignation; that deft usage of her own weapons had been too much for her. It was ungenerous of him, she considered, and to do him justice he was rather of the same opinion.

“There!” he exclaimed, as he threw on fresh coals, and, going down on his knees, raked out the dead ashes from the lower bars, “it will soon burn up now. Had the cold upset Isobel’s equilibrium too?”

It was an unlucky slip, but fortunately for his own peace of mind, Mr St. John did not notice the offensive and unnecessary little word at the end of his query, nor, having his back towards her, could he see Jill’s quick flush of annoyance.

“I don’t understand you,” she answered curtly.

“I beg your pardon,” he remarked, nettled by her tone. “I hope you don’t think me impertinent; but I thought there had been a little difficulty about bringing in the coals.”

“So there was,” she replied, and smiled involuntarily at the recollection. Then she glanced at her art student as he knelt upon the hearth, and from him to the models showing up white and still against the dingy curtain which formed their background; Mars Borghese, the Apollo Belvidere, the Venus de Medici, and a smaller figure of the Venus de Milo; a good collection, a collection which both she and her father had loved and been proud of, and which had taken many years to gather together.

“You were the cause,” she continued, bringing her gaze back again to the kneeling figure in front of the grate; “Isobel’s modesty would not permit her to enter the studio with a strange man present; ignorance is always self-conscious, you know.”

He gave her a quick look.

“I am sorry,” he said, “to have been the innocent cause of so much perturbation. Hadn’t you better arrange with the Abigail to bring the coals a little earlier?”

Jill shook her head, but she was still smiling.

“You forget,” she said, “that I’m only the attics; it is a favour that I get them brought at all. I fear it will end in your always having to carry them in if you won’t let me; that and the stairs will soon put to flight your desire for studying art.”

He got up, and bending, began to dust the ash off his clothes with angry vehemence. Did she wish to annoy him, or was it merely that she was cursed with a particularly disagreeable manner? Jill feigned not to note his displeasure, but, returning to the table, resumed her seat and went on with the lesson as though there had been no interruption, explaining and illustrating her remarks with the care and precision that she remembered her father to have used when first instructing her. Mr St. John listened with grave attention; he was at any rate unaffectedly interested in the matter in hand, and had, if not the talent, an unmistakable love for art. When she relinquished the seat he took it and made a second, and this time less futile attempt. It is true that his drawing bore so little resemblance to the copy that it could not possibly be taken for the same head, nevertheless it was a wonderful creation in the artist’s eyes, and possessed a power and boldness of conception which the original lacked, he considered. He put his idea into words, and again Miss Erskine marvelled at his audacity.

“Not bad, is it?” he queried in a tone the self-complacency of which he did not even attempt to disguise. “I strengthened it a bit—thought it would be an improvement, don’t you know.”

“Yes,” agreed Jill, regarding his work with dubious appreciation, “character in a face is greatly to be desired.”

He nodded approvingly.

“I’m glad you think that,” he remarked with increasing satisfaction; “but of course you would.”

“Of course. And, after all, a few inches on to one’s nose hardly signifies, does it? not to mention a jaw that no woman ever possessed outside a show. Your drawing puts me in mind of somebody or other’s criticism on Pope’s translation of Homer—‘a very pretty story, Mr Pope, but it is not Homer.’ Yours is a very wonderful creation, Mr St. John, but it in no wise resembles the copy.”

St. John glared.

“I thought you said you admired character?” he exclaimed.

“So I do; and there is a great deal of character in the original, I consider; but if you wish for a candid opinion, I think your head is simply a masculine monstrosity. But, come, you need not look so angry; we do not win our spurs at the first charge, you know. Must I praise your failures as well as your successes, eh?”

“You don’t think me quite such a conceited fool, I hope,” he said somewhat deprecatingly, though he still looked a little dissatisfied and aggrieved. “I only meant that it wasn’t altogether bad for a first attempt.”

But it was not Jill’s intention to flatter.

“It isn’t altogether good for a first attempt,” she said.

“You are not very encouraging,” he remarked a trifle reproachfully. “Had you been my pupil and I had said so much—”

“I should have thought you very disagreeable,” she interrupted, laughing.

He laughed also; for despite her contrariety her mirth was most infectious, and put him more at ease with her. It was the first glimpse of her natural self that she had vouchsafed him, and he liked it infinitely better than the half-aggressive dignity she assumed in her capacity of teacher.

“Do you think,” he ventured again after a pause, and with a decided increase of diffidence, “that I am likely to be any good at it?”

Jill took up a pencil and penknife with the intent to sharpen the former but laid them down again suddenly and looked him squarely in the face.

“If you mean have you any talent for art?” she said coolly, “I am afraid I cannot give you much encouragement. You have a liking for it, and, I should say, possess a certain amount of perseverance; therefore in time you ought to turn out some fairly decent work, but you have not talent.”

He looked displeased, and fell to contemplating his work anew from the distinctly irritating standpoint of its not being quite such a success as he had deemed it.

“You are very candid,” he remarked, not altogether gratefully; “I suppose I should feel obliged to you. But, to be frank in my turn, you would do well not to be quite so candid with your pupils; you will never get on if you are.”

She laughed, and shrugged her shoulders with a careless, half-bitter gesture.

“Your advice is rather superfluous,” she answered; “I am not likely to get any pupils.”

“Why not?” he queried. “You have one.”

“Very true,” she replied, “I had not forgotten that; it is too gigantic a fact to be overlooked. Nevertheless, as I believe I remarked before, the coals and the stairs are likely to prove too great odds; facts—even gigantic ones—have a way of vanishing before great personal discomfort.”

He reached down his overcoat and thrust his arms into the sleeves without passing any comment on her last remark; there was such an extreme possibility, not in the stairs, or the coals, but in herself proving too much for him that he refrained from contradicting her. Jill watched him busily without appearing to do so until he was ready to go, and stood, hat in hand, apparently undecided whether to shake hands or no.

“Good morning,” she said, and bowed in so distant a manner, that, regretting his former indecision, he bowed back, and turning round went out with an equally brief salutation.

When he had gone Jill sat down in his seat and fell to studying his work.

“‘Shall I be any good at it?’” she mimicked, and then she laughed aloud. “‘Do you think that I am likely to be any good at it?’ No, I do not, Mr St. John, I don’t indeed.”