Читать книгу Fenwick's Career - Mrs. Humphry Ward - Страница 20

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Fenwick had never spent a more arduous hour than that which he devoted to the business of dressing for Lord Findon's dinner-party. It was his first acquaintance with dress-clothes. He had, indeed, dined once or twice at the tables of the Westmoreland gentry in the course of his portrait-painting experiences. But there had been no 'party,' and it had been perfectly understood that for the Kendal bookseller's son a black Sunday coat was sufficient. Now, however, he was to meet the great world on its own terms; and though he tried hard to disguise his nervousness from his sponsor, Philip Cuningham, he did not succeed. Cuningham instructed him where to buy a second-hand dress-suit that very nearly fitted him, and he had duly provided himself with gloves and tie. When all was done he put his infinitesimal looking-glass on the floor of his attic, flanked it with two guttering candles, and walked up and down before it in a torment, observing his own demeanour and his coat's, saying 'How d'ye do?' and 'Good-bye' to an imaginary host, or bending affably to address some phantom lady across the table.

When at last he descended the stairs, he felt as though he were just escaped from a wrestling-match. He followed Cuningham into the omnibus with nerves all on edge. He hated the notion, too, of taking an omnibus to go and dine in St. James's Square. But Cuningham's Scotch thriftiness scouted the proposal of a hansom.

On the way Fenwick suddenly asked his companion whether there was a Lady Findon. Cuningham, startled by the ignorance of his protégé, drew out as quickly as he could la carte du pays.

Lady Findon, the second wife, fat, despotic, and rich, rather noisy, and something of a character, a political hostess, a good friend, and a still better hater; two sons, silent, good-looking and clever, one in the brewery that provided his mother with her money, the other in the Hussars; two daughters not long 'introduced'—one pretty—the other bookish and rather plain; so ran the catalogue.

'I believe there is another daughter by the first wife—married—something queer about the husband. But I've never seen her. She doesn't often appear—Hullo—here we are.'

They alighted at the Haymarket, and as they walked down the street Fenwick found himself in the midst of the evening whirl of the West End. The clubs were at their busiest; men passed them in dress-suits and overcoats like themselves, and the street was full of hansoms, whence the faces of well-dressed women, enveloped in soft silks and furs, looked out.

Fenwick felt himself treading a new earth. At such an hour he was generally wending his way to a Bloomsbury eating-house, where he dined for eighteenpence; he was a part of the striving, moneyless student-world.

But here, from this bustling Haymarket with its gay, hurrying figures, there breathed new forces, new passions which bewildered him. As he was looking at the faces in the carriages, the jewels and feathers and shining stuffs, he thought suddenly and sharply of Phoebe sitting alone at her supper in the tiny cottage room. His heart smote him a little. But, after all, was he not on her business as well as his own?

The door of Lord Findon's house opened before them. At sight of the liveried servants within, Fenwick's pride asserted itself. He walked in, head erect, as though the place belonged to him.

Lord Findon came pleasantly to greet them as they entered the drawing-room, and took them up to Lady Findon. Cuningham she already knew, and she gave a careless glance and a touch of the hand to his companion. It was her husband's will to ask these raw, artistic youths to dinner, and she had to put up with it; but really the difficulty of knowing whom to send them in with was enormous.

'I am glad to make your acquaintance,' she said, mechanically, to Fenwick, as he stood awkwardly beside her, while her eyes searched the door for a Cabinet Minister and his wife who were the latest guests.

'Thank you; I too am pleased to make yours,' said Fenwick, nervously pulling at his gloves, and furious with his own malaise.

Lady Findon's eyebrows lifted in amusement. She threw him another glance.

Good-looking!—but really Findon should wait till they were a little décrotté.

'I hear your picture is charming,' she said, distractedly; and then, suddenly perceiving the expected figures, she swept forward to receive them.

'Very sorry, my dear fellow, we have no lady for you; but you will be next my daughter, Madame de Pastourelles,' said Lord Findon, a few minutes later, in his ear, passing him with a nod and a smile. His gay, half-fatherly ways with these rising talents were well known. They made part of his fame with his contemporaries; a picturesque element in his dinner-parties which the world appreciated.

Fenwick found his way rather sulkily to the dining-room. It annoyed him that Cuningham had a lady and he had none. His companion on the road downstairs was the private secretary, who tried good-naturedly to point out the family portraits on the staircase wall. But Fenwick scarcely replied. He stalked on, his great black eyes glancing restlessly from side to side; and the private secretary thought him a boor.

As he was standing bewildered inside the dining-room a servant caught hold of him and piloted him to his seat. A lady in white, who was already seated in the next chair, looked up and smiled.

'My father told me we were to be neighbours. I must introduce myself.'

She held out a small hand, which, in his sudden pleasure, Fenwick grasped more cordially than was necessary. She withdrew it smiling, and he sat down, feeling himself an impulsive ass, intimidated by the lights, the flowers, the multitude of his knives and forks, and most of all, perhaps, by this striking and brilliant creature beside him.

Madame de Pastourelles was of middle height, slenderly built, with pale-brown hair, and a delicately white face, of a very perfect oval. She had large, quiet eyes, darker than her hair; features small, yet of a noble outline—strength in refinement. The proud cutting of the nose and mouth gave delight; it was a pride so unconscious, so masked in sweetness, that it challenged without wounding. The short upper lip was sensitive and gay; the eyes ranged in a smiling freedom; the neck and arms were beautiful. Her dress, according to the Whistlerian phrase just coming into vogue, might have been called an 'arrangement in white.' The basis of it seemed to be white velvet; and breast and hair were powdered with diamonds delicately set in old flower-like shapes.

'You are in the same house with Mr. Cuningham?' she asked, when a dean had said grace and the soup was served. Her voice was soft and courteous; the irritation in Fenwick felt the soothing of it.

'I am on the floor above.'

'He paints charming things.'

Fenwick hesitated.

'You think so?' he said, bluntly, turning to look at her.

She coloured slightly and laughed.

'Do you mean to put me in the Palace of Truth?'

'Of course I would if I could,' said Fenwick, also laughing. 'But I suppose ladies never say quite what they mean.'

'Oh yes, they do. Well, then, I am not much enamoured of Mr.

Cuningham's pictures. I like him, and my father likes his painting.'

'Lord Findon admires that kind of thing?'

'Besides a good many other kinds. Oh! my father has a dreadfully catholic taste. He tells me you haven't been abroad yet?'

Fenwick acknowledged it.

'Ah, well; of course you'll go. All artists do—except'—she dropped her voice—'the gentleman opposite.'

Fenwick looked, and beheld a personage scarcely, indeed, to be seen at all for his very bushy hair, whiskers, and moustache, from which emerged merely the tip of a nose and a pair of round eyes in spectacles. As, however, the hair was of an orange colour and the eyes of a piercing and pinlike sharpness, the eclipse of feature was not a loss of effect. And as the flamboyant head was a tolerably familiar object in the shop-windows of the photographers and in the illustrated papers, Fenwick recognised almost immediately one of the most popular artists of the day—Mr. Herbert Sherratt.

Fenwick flushed hotly.

'Lord Findon doesn't admire his work?' he said, almost with fierceness, turning to his companion.

'He hates his pictures and collects his drawings.'

'Drawings!' Fenwick shrugged his shoulders. 'Anybody can make a clever drawing. It's putting on the paint that counts. Why doesn't he go abroad?'

'Oh, well, he does go to Holland. But he thinks Italian painting all stuff, and that so many Madonnas and saints encourage superstition. But what's the use of talking? They have to station a policeman beside his picture in the Academy to keep off the crowd. Hush-sh! He is looking this way.'

She turned her head, and Fenwick feared she was lost to him. He managed to get in another question. 'Are there any other painters here?'

She pointed out the president of the Academy, a sculptor, and an art-critic, at whose name Fenwick curled his lip, full of the natural animosity of the painter to the writer.

'And, of course, you know my neighbour?'

Fenwick looked hastily, and saw a very handsome youth bending forward to answer a question which Lord Findon had addressed to him from across the table; a face in the 'grand style'—almost the face of a Greek—pure in outline, bronzed by foreign suns, and lit by eyes expressing so strong a force of personality that, but for the sweetness with which it was tempered, the spectator might have been rather repelled than won. When the young man answered Lord Findon, the voice was, like the face, charged—perhaps over-charged—with meaning and sensibility.

'I took Madame de Pastourelles to see it to-day,' the youth was saying. 'She thought it as glorious as I did.'

'Oh! you are a pair of enthusiasts,' said Lord Findon. 'I keep my head.'

The 'it' turned out to be a Titian portrait from the collection of an old Roman family, lately brought to London and under offer to the National Gallery, of which Lord Findon was a trustee.

Madame de Pastourelles looked towards her father, confirming what the unknown youth had said. Her eyes had kindled. She began to talk rapidly in defence of her opinion. Between her, Lord Findon, and her neighbour there arose a conversation which made Fenwick's ears tingle. How many things and persons and places it touched upon that were wholly unknown to him! Pictures in foreign museums—Vienna, Berlin, St. Petersburg—the names of French or German experts—quotations from Italian books or newspapers—the three dealt lightly and familiarly with a world in which Fenwick had scarcely a single landmark. How clever she was! how charming! What knowledge without a touch of pedantry! And how the handsome youth kept up with her—nay, rather, led her, with a mastery, a resource, to which she always yielded in case of any serious difference of opinion! It seemed that they had been abroad together—had seen many sights in each other's company—had many common friends.

Fenwick felt himself strangely sore and jealous as he listened. Who was this man? Some young aristocrat, no doubt, born silver spoon in mouth—one of your idle, insolent rich, with nothing to do but make a hobby of art, and patronise artists. He loathed the breed.

Her voice startled him back from these unspoken tirades, and once more he found her eyes fixed upon him. It provoked him to feel that their scrutiny made him self-conscious—anxious to please. They were so gentle, so gay!—and yet behind the first expression there sat what seemed to him the real personality, shrewd, critical, and remote.

'You must see this picture,' she said, kindly. 'It's glorious!'

'Where is it?'

'In a house near here. But father could get you in.'

He hesitated, then laughed, ungraciously.

'I don't seem to have finished yet with the National Gallery.

Who—please—is the gentleman on your right?'

She smiled.

'Oh! don't you know him? You must let me introduce him. It is Mr.

Arthur Welby. Doesn't he talk well?'

She introduced them. Welby received the introduction with a readiness—a touch of eagerness indeed—which seemed to show a mind favourably prepared for it.

'Lord Findon tells me you're sending in a most awfully jolly thing to the Academy!' he said, bending across Madame de Pastourelles, his musical voice full of cordiality. Fenwick made a muttered reply. It might have been thought he disliked being talked to about his own work. Welby accordingly changed the subject at once; he returned to the picture he had been pressing on Lord Findon.

'Haven't you seen it? You really should.' But this elicited even less response. Fenwick glared at him—apparently tongue-tied. Then Madame de Pastourelles and her neighbour talked to each other, endeavouring to draw in the stranger. In vain. They fell back, naturally, into the talk of intimates, implying a thousand common memories and experiences; and Fenwick found himself left alone.

His mind burned with annoyance and self-disgust. Why did he let these people intimidate him? Why was he so ridiculously self-conscious?—so incapable of holding his own? He knew all about Arthur Welby; his name and fame were in all the studios. The author of the picture of the year—in the opinion, at least, of the cultivated minority for whom rails and policemen were not the final arbiters of merit; glorified in the speeches at the Academy banquet; and already overwhelmed with more commissions than he could take—Welby should have been one of the best hated of men. On the contrary, his mere temperament had drawn the teeth of that wild beast, Success. Well-born, rich, a social favourite, trained in Paris and Italy, an archaeologist and student as well as a painter, he commanded the world as he pleased. Society asked him to dinners, and he gave himself no professional airs and went when he could. But among his fellows he lived a happy comrade's life, spending his gifts and his knowledge without reserve, always ready to help a man in a tight place, to praise a friend's picture, to take up a friend's quarrel. He took his talent and his good-fortune so simply that the world must needs insist upon them, instead of contesting them.

As for his pictures, they were based on the Italian tradition—rich, accurate, learned, full of literary allusion and reminiscence. In Fenwick's eyes, young as was their author, they were of the past rather than of the future. He contemptuously thought of them as belonging to a dead genre. But the man who painted them could draw.

Meanwhile he seemed to have lost Madame de Pastourelles, and must needs fall back on the private secretary beside him. This gentleman, who had already entered him on the tablets of the mind as a mannerless outsider, was not particularly communicative. But at least Fenwick learned the names of the other guests. The well-known Ambassador beside Lady Findon, with a shrewd, thin, sulky face, and very black eyes under whitish hair—eyes turned much more frequently on the pretty actress to his right than upon his hostess; a financier opposite, much concerned with great colonial projects; the Cabinet Minister—of no account, it seemed, either in the House or the Cabinet—and his wife, abnormally thin, and far too discreet for the importance of her husband's position; a little farther, the wife of the red-haired Academician, a pale, frightened creature who looked like her husband's apology, and was in truth his slave;—all these he learned gradually to discriminate.

So this was the great world. He was stormily pleased to be in it, and at the same time scornful of it. It seemed to contain not a few ancient shams and hollow pretenders—

Ah! once more the soft, ingratiating voice beside him. Madame de Pastourelles was expressing a flattering wish to see his picture, of which her father had talked so much.

'And he says you have found such a beautiful model—or, rather, better than beautiful—characteristic.'

Fenwick stared at her. It was on the tip of his tongue to say 'She is my wife.' But he did not say it. He imagined her look of surprise—'Ah, my father had no idea!'—imagined it with a morbid intensity, and saw no way of confronting or getting round it; not at the dinner-table, anyway—with all these eyes and ears about him—above all, with Lord Findon opposite. Why, they might think he had been ashamed of Phoebe!—that there was some reason for hiding her away. It was ridiculous—most annoying and absurd; but now that the thing had happened, he must really choose his own moment for unravelling the coil.

So he stammered something unintelligible about a 'Westmoreland type,' and then hastily led the talk to some other schemes he had in mind. With the sense of having escaped a danger he found his tongue for the first time, and the power of expressing himself.

Madame de Pastourelles listened attentively—drew him out, indeed—made him show himself to the best advantage. And presently, at a moment of pause, she said, with a smile and a shrug, 'How happy you are to have an art! Now I—'

She let her hand fall with a little plaintive movement.

'I am sure you paint,' said Fenwick, eagerly.

'No.'

'Then you are musical?'

'Not at all. I embroider—'

'All women should,' said Fenwick, trying for a free and careless air.

'I read—'

'You do not need to say it.'

She opened her eyes at this readiness of reply; but still pursued:

'And I have a Chinese pug.'

'And no children?' The words rose to Fenwick's lips, but remained unspoken. Perhaps she divined them, for she began hastily to describe her dog—its tricks and fidelities. Fenwick could meet her here; for a mongrel fox-terrier—taken, a starving waif, out of the streets—had been his companion since almost the first month of his solitude. Each stimulated the other, and they fell into those legends of dog-life in which every dog-lover believes, however sceptical he may be in other directions. Till presently she said, with a sigh and a stiffening of her delicate features:

'But mine shows some symptoms of paralysis. He was run over last summer. I'm afraid it will be long and painful.'

Fenwick replied that she should send for the vet. and have the dog painlessly killed.

'No. I shall nurse him.'

'Why should you look on at suffering?'

'Why not—if sometimes he enjoys life?'

'I am thinking of the mistress.'

'Oh, for us,' she said, quickly, 'for me—it is good to be with suffering.'

As she spoke, she drew herself slightly more erect. Neither tone nor manner showed softness, made any appeal. The words seemed to have dropped from her, and the strange pride and dignity she at once threw around them made a veiling cloud through which only a man entirely without the finer perceptions would have tried to penetrate. Fenwick, for all his surface gaucherie, did not attempt it. But he attacked her generalisation. With some vehemence he developed against it a Neo-pagan doctrine of joy—love of the earth and its natural pleasures—courage to take and dare—avoidance of suffering—and war on asceticism. He poured out a number of undigested thoughts, which showed a great deal of reading, and at least betrayed a personality, whatever value they might have as a philosophy.

She listened with a charming kindness, laughing now and then, putting in a humorous comment or two, and never by another word betraying her own position. But he was more and more conscious of the double self in her—of the cultivated, social self she was bringing into play for his benefit, and of something behind—a spirit watchful and still—wrapt in a great melancholy—or perhaps a great rebellion? And by this sense of something concealed or strongly restrained, she began to affect his imagination, and so, presently, to absorb his attention. Something exquisite in her movements and looks, also in the quality of her voice and the turn of her phrases, drew from his own crude yet sensitive nature an excited response. He began to envisage what these highly trained women of the upper class, these raffinées of the world, may be for those who understand them—a stimulus, an enigma, an education.

It flashed on him that women of this type could teach him much that he wanted to know; and his ambition seized on the idea. But what chance that she would ever give another thought to the raw artist to whom her father had flung a passing invitation?

He made haste, indeed, to prove his need of her or some other Egeria; for she was no sooner departed with the other ladies than he came to mischief. Left alone with the gentlemen, his temperament asserted itself. He had no mind in any company to be merely a listener. Moreover, that slight, as he regarded it, of sending him down without a lady, still rankled; and last, but not least, he had drunk a good deal of champagne, to which he was quite unaccustomed. So that when Lord Findon fell into a discussion with the Ambassador of Irving's Hamlet and Othello, then among the leading topics of London—when the foreigner politely but emphatically disparaged the English actor and Lord Findon with zeal defended him—who should break into the august debate but this strong-browed, black-eyed fellow, from no one knew where, whose lack of some of the smaller conventions had already been noticed by a few of the company.

At first all looked well. A London dinner-party loves novelty, and is always ready to test the stranger within its gates. Fenwick slipped into the battle as a supporter of Lord Findon's argument, and his host with smiling urbanity welcomed him to the field. But in a few minutes the newcomer had ravaged the whole of it. The older men were silenced, and Fenwick was leaning across the table, gesticulating with one hand, and lifting his port-wine with the other, addressing now Lord Findon and now the Ambassador—who stared at him in amazement—with an assurance that the world only allows to its oldest favourites. Lord Findon in vain tried to stop him.

'Didn't know this was to be a dinner with speeches,' murmured the financier, after a few minutes, in his neighbour's ear. 'Think I'll get up and propose a vote of thanks to the chairman.'

'There ought, at least, to be a time-limit,' said the neighbour, with a shrug. 'Where on earth did Findon pick him up?'

'I say, what an awfully rum chap!' said the young son of the house—wondering—to Arthur Welby. 'What does he talk like that for?'

'He doesn't talk badly,' said Welby, whose mouth showed the laughter within.

Meanwhile Fenwick—loud-voiced, excited—had brought his raid to a climax by an actual attack upon the stately Frenchman opposite, whose slight sarcastic look pricked him intolerably. All other conversation at the table fell dumb.

Lord Findon coloured, and rose.

'You are a great deal more sure of my own opinion than I am myself,' he said, coldly. 'I am much obliged to you, but—shall we adjourn this conversation?'

As the men walked upstairs, Fenwick realised that he had blundered; he felt himself isolated and in disfavour. Arthur Welby had approached him, but Lord Findon had rather pointedly drawn an arm through Welby's and swept him away. No one else spoke to him, and even the private secretary, who had before befriended him, left him severely alone. None of the ladies in the drawing-room upstairs showed, as it seemed to him, any desire for his company, and he was reduced to looking at a stand of miniatures near the door, while his heart swelled fiercely. So this was what society meant?—a wretched pleasure purchased on degrading terms! A poor dependant like himself, he supposed, was to be seen and not heard—must speak when he was spoken to, play chorus, and whisper humbleness. As to meeting these big-wigs on equal terms, that clearly was not expected. An artist may be allowed to know something about art; on any other subject let him listen to his betters.