Читать книгу Joshua's Vision - William J. Locke - Страница 6

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This was by no means the end of Joshua’s artistic career. It was only the beginning.

“And a very good beginning too,” said Robina, when she heard of the cat’s destruction.

She listened to him sympathetically. Interests outside the Turf and the Boxing Ring were essential to the making of Joshua. Besides, if a human being had received so evident a call from the Spirit of Art, it would be sacrilege to allow his ears to be deafened. Deciding that severe elementary training in the modeller’s craft would be excellent for Joshua’s soul, she entrusted the task to one of her own most conscientious pupils, Euphemia Boyd, who had passed through her studio after a bright career at the Slade School.

“She’ll never do anything particularly brilliant on her own account, poor dear,” said Robina, “because she never knows when to throw over the rules. She thinks God made them. Perhaps she’s right,” she added after a pause. “Anyhow, it’s the rules you want, and the rules you’ll get.”

At first Joshua made a faint objection.

“As I’m having lessons in my house, don’t you think perhaps a man ...”

Robina interrupted him with a laugh.

“There’s no danger of your falling in love with Euphemia. At least, I hope not. If you think I’m going to fill your house with Houris, you’re mistaken. I’m not such an accommodating woman-friend as all that.”

“I wasn’t quite looking at it in that light,” Joshua replied unhumorously. “It’s the servants—and Sutton, you know—and——”

“And whether she’ll fall in love with you. Oh dear! Will you forgive me for saying something? You’re in London now and not in Trenthampton. Here we have a different set of values.”

Joshua scratched his head. “Look here, everywhere I turn I hear that word, and I don’t know what it means. Does it mean that the value of anything—say modesty—is worth twenty shillings a pound in Trenthampton, and only twopence in London?”

Her unexpected contacts with the provincial in Joshua always delighted and at the same time irritated her. Now she was hung up for a definition.

“ ‘Values’,” she said oracularly, “is a term in painting meaning the relations between light and shade. And so it’s applied to all other arts. It has the same general meaning when applied to life generally. It isn’t a question of the absolute worth of any particular idea.... Oh, Lord!”—she passed clay-stained fingers over her brow—she was putting the last touches to his bust. “How can I explain? In Trenthampton you have the same kind of virtues and vices and safeguards we have in London; but the relative, the proportionate values are all different. Modesty! what would your grandmother have said if she saw every woman showing her legs above her knees and her back to her waist and smoking cigarettes?

“I see,” said Joshua. “Thank you. That word ‘values’ has worried me more than I can say.”

In a day or two he once more set his Egeria down as a woman of practical usefulness and clear intelligence. The comings and goings of Euphemia Boyd, her long sojourns, seemed to cause no moral ripple on the serene waters of his household. Even Sutton took her for granted. He had met her coming down the stairs and afterwards said to his father:

“How’s little Art for Art’s sake getting on? Personally, I prefer ’em plumper—and I like ’em to powder their noses.”

And he had never given the lady another thought.

She was very earnest and thin and untidy and wore, against all modern canons, steel-rimmed spectacles. She flitted up the stairs to the north-east room like a wraith, conducted herself there like an iron-hearted, impersonal task-mistress, and like a wraith flitted down the stairs again out of the house. In the room converted into a studio she did all sorts of things. She banished remaining bedroom furniture and such amateur appurtenances. She hung the walls with plaster-casts. In front of the window she ordained a table at which Joshua must go back to the far-off days when he had won a prize and re-learn to draw from the round. She fitted up a shelf of elementary text-books. She made him begin, like a child in a primary school, at the very beginning of things. When she had passed his first relievo of an ivy leaf, he contemplated it with the pride of an artist who recognizes the perfect accomplishment. Euphemia Boyd also sent him, marked text-book in hand, round the British and South Kensington Museums. Now and again, at his ingenuous invitation, she accompanied him and delivered scrappy lectures on æsthetics; the subjects of these visits she had pre-ordained and set him the schoolboy task of getting up their history beforehand. He never questioned her authority. Once before the Elgin Marbles, he said to her suddenly:

“You’re like an angel leading me along heavenly paths.”

She flushed deep red and cast him a frightened glance; but he was looking not at her, but at the newly-revealed magic of the frieze.

Thus did the god of Beauty unfold himself within the man’s soul like the awful rose of dawn of the poet’s metaphor. And thus did the dream of lovely forms, which his fingers tingled to mould, begin to find some sort of material expression. A new wonder, and yet a meaning, began to inform his life. In great humility he attended evening classes at an Art school, sitting among eager youths and maidens who paid scant attention to their elderly neighbour. He took the New Wonder seriously, as, in days gone by, he had taken the making of boots. Lessons in elementary anatomy fascinated him. It delighted him to learn that the two contours of an ankle, for instance, one hard and one soft, were matters of anatomical fact. He bought books and made drawings.

He kept Robina, his Egeria, conversant with his progress. She admitted him into a little brotherhood of artists, male and female, who supped with her occasionally on Sunday evenings. To Joshua they were so many Gamaliels at whose feet he sat. They, in their turn, invited him to their studios.

“But, for God’s sake,” Robina counselled, “don’t go and buy their pictures and things, out of the kindness of your heart, unless you’re really hit by them—hit by them as you were by the back of my poor little model.”

“I’ve never seen the back of your model—worse luck!” said Joshua. He had an elementary sense of humour.

“And you’re not going to,” said Robina, “until you’ve passed through a Life School.”

The main point of her argument, however, remained fixed in his mind. He visited studios and stayed there awe-stricken; but he resisted the daintiest blandishments of hopeful vendors of works of modern art.

The eventual transformation of the house in Eaton Terrace, picture-hung by the Impeccable Expert of the Eminent Firm, had a vehement beginning.

He rushed one day into the studio of Robina forewarned by telephone. He had seen a picture in a Bond Street art-dealer’s window. It was an old mill, water in the foreground; bits of red roofs peeping through brown trees; lovely trees, oaks. Mild sort of afternoon sunshine. An autumn effect. He made the bald statement.

“Well?” she asked, amused.

“I’d like to buy it.”

She drew a little breath. Joshua was, indeed, progressing. It was the first time he had indicated a desire to buy anything beyond the paraphernalia indicated by Euphemia Boyd.

“Who’s it by?”

Joshua couldn’t remember. They wanted a terrible lot of money for it. And it was only about that size—he indicated something about eighteen inches by eight. But a gem. They were real oaks. And a flat country. He had once been to Norwich on business—it reminded him of Norfolk.

“You can’t be talking about an Old Crome?” said Robina.

“Yes. That’s the name they told me,” cried Joshua, hitting his head with his knuckles. “How the devil did you guess?”

“Never mind. I’ll look at it for you. I suppose that’s what you’ve come for?”

During the course of that afternoon several things happened. There was a minor massacre of innocent water-colours in the drawing-room. The exquisite Old Crome was hung in the right light—Joshua being a handy man with workmen’s tools, and therefore needing no base assistance. Robina, impatient of hats, had thrown hers off on entrance, and stood in bare-headed, earnest supervision. The late May sunshine flooded the room, and glorified the dark face and the keen strong features and the glow in her intent and widely-set brown eyes as they looked at the little painting in its old gold frame. But Joshua looked at her, and, floundering about in a welter of new sensations, blurted out a suddenly revealed truth:

“I’m hanged if you’re not much more beautiful than the picture.”

She turned on him swiftly, the woman of the world, ready to cope on the spot with ill-breeding. But her heart melted at once. His blue eyes fixed on her held nothing but an artist’s ascetic adoration. It was a tribute of which any woman might be proud. Her quick sense made her realize her pose.

“Rubbish,” she laughed. “You’ve been taken in by a trick of sunshine, like many other people. A haystack can look beautiful in sunshine. Take a course of Claude Monet and find it out.”

She moved away into the shadows of the room.

“You’re still the same,” said Joshua. “The sunshine told me.”

Robina rang a bell by the chimney-piece.

“Let’s have tea or something.”

The unconscious grace of her little domestic act defeated her own object. It stimulated rather than repressed the awakening of the New Joshua.

“Do you mind?” she asked.

“Good Lord, no! I ought to have thought of it before.”

There was a pause during which they both awaited the imminent arrival of Dotley. Robina was surprised to find herself oddly worried by Joshua’s words: “The sunshine told me.” Whence had he dug them out except from a brand-new consciousness of things? Months ago, when the gulls, flashing white against the indigo of the sea, aroused in him no more emotion than he would have felt at the sight of dead flies on an arsenical brown fly-paper, he had been no more capable of saying those words than of re-writing Lessing’s “Laocoon.” She was a woman of swift and allusive thought. Supposing she, a female Frankenstein, had called into being a semi-artistic monster!

The stocky, red-haired, almost common and completely uneducated man regarded her still with eyes of undisguised admiration. She wasn’t beautiful, not gifted with the beauty that burns topless towers of Ilium and plays the devil generally in the world. She knew it. She held men in a secret disesteem because they had ever been slow to recognize the best in feminine attractiveness which she sedulously made of herself. She had not even been able to keep her own husband. God knew why. She was not one of those asexual women, idiot bees who think that the making of honey, artistic, political, commercial, or what-not, is the main aim of existence, and hold in contempt the prolific queen-bee and the disgusting, yet necessary, drone. Far from it. Such a concept of herself would be a pollution of all the springs that vivified her being.... If she had chosen to descend from her assured pinnacle of modest fame and worldly possessions to the unworthy in the market-place of modern social life, she could have done so without anyone being a whit the wiser. But Robina was proud. If she exercised no physical fascination over the men who mattered, they could go to the devil. That was her attitude towards them; one of almost pugnacious don’t-care-a-damativeness. Joshua’s tribute was novel, a bit disconcerting....

Dotley came in. Joshua asked:

“Tea or cocktails?”

“Oh, cocktails. Bring in the tray with the things, Dotley, and I’ll make them.”

“Certainly, madam.”

“They sling them together any old way downstairs,” she said apologetically.

“I don’t know which I like seeing you do best,” said Joshua, with his hands in his pockets. “Messing about with silver teapots and things, or shaking up cocktails.”

“Pouring out tea is a very womanly occupation.”

“Yes, but when you shake a cocktail”—he waved a thumb as he had seen her and Euphemia Boyd and all his artistic friends do—“there’s a pose.”

She laughed, mimicking him. “Lots of line?”

“Just so,” he replied seriously. “But there’s something else to it all the same.”

Her voice sharpened a little. “What’s that?”

“Whatever you do here leaves a picture in my mind—and then it sort of goes out and I want it back again.”

“It’s a great pity,” she said, “that you’ve been left with an only son instead of a daughter.”

“Why?”

“She could have given you all the feminine poses plastiques you seem to want about the house.”

She hurriedly developed the theory of the grown-up daughter, until the tray was brought in. Then she made the cocktails somewhat self-consciously, facing him as she handled the silver shaker, so as to obliterate thumb-indicated lines. Glass in hand, he made a little awkward bow and sipped.

“I don’t think a daughter would quite do. Sutton’s quite a good boy and he looks fit and healthy, but you can’t call him handsome. As a girl he’d be dreadfully plain. I shouldn’t like a plain daughter with a heavy face and thick ankles always about me. No. I suppose I’ve been too much domesticated—or perhaps too little.”

Robina took a cigarette from a box and lit it.

“What is it, then, that you do want?”

She would have it out with him then and there, too direct a woman to find pleasure in philandering.

“Tell me,” she commanded. “Then we’ll know where we are.”

He went to the window, looked into the eye of the sunset and turned.

“I suppose I’ve made a discovery—you’ll laugh at it. But when you’re here it’s light, and when you aren’t it’s dark. I’d like you to stay here for ever.”

“As what?”

“I don’t know,” said he, standing on the edge of a swirl of elemental things. “Just as yourself. You’re the only woman who has ever mattered a damn to me ... in that sort of way ... the only woman who has gripped me, and got hold of me altogether and meant something I never dreamed a woman could mean to a man. I know I’m a fool, but you’re letting me talk, aren’t you? You had me the first quarter of an hour you were good enough to speak to me on the boat.... I didn’t know how you had me until a few minutes ago.”

“When the sunshine told you?”

“Yes. That was it. So I don’t know what I want—except you. And that’s the end of it. It would be impudence for a man like me to ask you to marry me——”

Robina stubbed her unconsidered cigarette on the silver tray.

“That would be absurd, my friend,” she said, quite gently, “seeing that I’m married already.”

“You have been married—I know that.”

“But my husband’s still alive.”

He fell back and the crease on his brow deepened.

“I thought you were a widow.”

“Good Lord, no. Who told you that? I didn’t. You must have taken it for granted. My husband’s quite a good fellow in his funny way. He lives somewhere in Africa. I haven’t seen him for years. We correspond occasionally, of course....”

“But what a brute!” cried Joshua in amazement.

“A question of definition,” she said calmly, taking another cigarette which he lighted for her, mechanically. “Many people’s idea of a brute is a man who flaunts mistresses all over the place and gets drunk and beats his wife. Humphrey’s not that kind at all. I told you he was a good sort. Most people love him.”

“I don’t understand,” said the practical though confused Joshua.

“Whose fault it was?

“If it comes to that, yes,” said he.

“I’ll tell you. It’s best you should know. Our friendship—really—I’m an honest woman—is a thing I value. It’s a new touch I feel in my life. I shouldn’t like you to misunderstand me. Well ... I fell in love with Humphrey because he was the most beautiful being God ever made. He had the most charming manners and ways in the world. But he had the brain of a rabbit and the instincts of a sweet-natured tiger. All he wanted in life was to go about and kill things. He left me before the war, to go out to East Africa to kill things. One would have thought he had had enough of killing during the war. But he rather looked on the war as a childish interruption to the slaughtering that ought to be done by a grown man. Now, I’ve never taken the faintest interest in exterminating lions and rhinoceroses, and he hasn’t the vaguest interest in anything I do—so there you are. He likes creeping about jungles. I like living in London. We decided amiably years ago that we were bored stiff with each other and would live apart.”

“I shouldn’t say that was a happy way of living,” Joshua remarked.

“Tell me a better, in the circumstances.”

“I don’t know much about it, but people seem to be able to get divorces pretty easily these days.”

She arched her eyebrows pathetically.

“I thought you the one friend I had who wouldn’t make that suggestion. Everybody’s been rubbing it in for years.”

“It’s quite sensible,” said Joshua. “He ought to have thought of it for himself.”

“For one thing,” said Robina, “he’s a devout Catholic, and so far from giving me technical grounds for divorcing him, he wouldn’t divorce me if I openly started practice in the oldest profession in the world. Besides, if he gets half-eaten by a hippopotamus, he might want to come back and be looked after.”

“Would you do it?”

“Why not?” she laughed. “I love looking after people.”

“I thought that was my only chance,” said Joshua ruefully.

“What?”

“That, being a sort of helpless stray dog, you might have been induced to come and look after me.”

“And now it’s all off?”

“As far as that’s concerned, I suppose it is.”

“Doesn’t it strike you,” she said, with irresistible mockery in her brown eyes, “that you’ve a long, long way to go before you become the perfect lover?”

He replied, with his Midland bluntness: “I’m an honest chap, and don’t go making love to other men’s wives.”

“What are we going to do about it?”

She was very sorry for him, seeing that, in his unsubtle way, he was in earnest. The revelation of her married estate had revolutionized his conception of her, and revolution always involves pain. She regretted her gibe at the unperfected lover, and felt anxious lest he should cast down his crude image of her and stamp it into shapelessness as he had done to the clay image of the cat. So she smiled on him with all that was kindly and pitiful in her nature.

“I suppose I’ve got to do whatever you say,” replied Joshua.

“Well, we’ll do a bit of forgetting, and carry on just as usual. Is that a bargain?”

“No question about it.”

“Then there’s two bargains in one day.” She went to the Old Crome. “It’s delicious, and you’ve got it cheap.”

She picked up her hat from the sofa and clamped it on her head before a mirror. Joshua bent his brows.

“All the same,” said he, “a man must be a mere fool not to see that you’re beautiful.”

“If you go on talking like that, I’ll begin to agree with Carlyle. Come to dinner and meet the old Baldos to-morrow night. He’ll be the next but one Lord Mayor. Lord Mayors of London are useful people for artists to know.... I’ll do a bust of him in robes and chain and you’ll do Lady Baldo, robed or otherwise. Good-bye, dear friend. Don’t worry.”

But Joshua did worry. Hatred clouded his candid soul. He hated the hippopotamus-hunting dog-in-the-manger who stood guard over what to him was an undesired and unnecessary Robina; what to others, having the eyes of men and not of dogs, was the perfect woman, infinitely desirable and essential. In her careless way, she had left her gloves behind on the sofa. They were very large gloves, for her hands were big and long-fingered. But they were a woman’s gloves with just a bit of woman’s dainty fragrance. He looked at them for a moment and then stuffed them into his pocket. He would keep that much of her, at any rate, away from the hippopotamus-hunting dog.

With a lonely evening before him, he dined at his club. He had a club, by now, a new proprietary club, The Cock-Pit, somewhere in the neighbourhood of Leicester Square, agape for members, to which Fenton Hill, Lady Evangeline’s husband, had secured his election. There were two others of older standing, and of sedater repute, with his name on a page of their respective candidate books. But the wheels of sedate clubs move slowly, and Joshua must wait. In the meanwhile he must content himself with The Cock-Pit. It was comfortable, in spite of hearty noisiness in the bar. The dominating note of the coffee-room was Burgundy, of which the proprietors had bought a famous private cellar, and they specialized in red meats and red game (when in season) and had engaged a chef who had learned the secret of “Poularde à la Bourguignonne” in the kitchen of the Hôtel de la Poste at Beaune. The rooms were adorned with a fine collection of old sporting and especially cock-fighting prints. There were regular members, too, who curiously resembled the spectators around the cock-pit in the pictures.

“At any rate, my dear fellow,” Fenton Hill had said apologetically, “the beastly place has character.”

He was half-way through dinner, which he was eating with indifferent appetite, an evening paper propped up in front of him, when Fenton Hill came into the coffee-room and, with a wave of greeting and a “May I?”, sat down at Joshua’s table. He liked Fenton Hill, a bluff, prematurely bald-headed, fox-hunting county gentleman. He, too, had been an artilleryman in the war, and knew all that was to be known about horses. Those were links of common interest. Fenton also professed a fervent admiration of Robina Dale. A chance reference during their dinner talk caused the shy Joshua, his head full of Robina, to burst forth into unexpected eulogy. A great woman and an exquisite artist, he declared. All the strength and beauty of Rodin.... Had Hill seen the beautiful Hylas, the fellow who fell overboard and was dragged down by sea-nymphs? No? She was just putting the finishing touches to the marble now—just this lovely face and an elbow above the waves....

Hill looked at him with a puzzled smile.

“I never knew you cared about that sort of thing. Do you like miniatures? I’ve got rather a good collection.”

“I like anything,” said Joshua. “I can’t say I know anything about miniatures; but I’d like to.”

“Come round and see mine this evening, if you’ve nothing better to do. My wife’s away.”

“Delighted,” said Joshua, “if I’m not intruding.”

Fenton Hill smiled at the provincialism. “No, I’m at a loose end. I thought I’d get a game of bridge here, but the place is empty. You’ll be doing an act of Christian charity. We’ll have coffee and some of the club’s old brandy, and then get along.”

Joshua felt much happier than when he had entered the club, a lonely man; and he liked Fenton Hill more than ever. He yielded to a temptation to tell him about the Old Crome, feeling sure he would understand. The fox-hunting collector of miniatures understood at once. Joshua, encouraged, told him of the afternoon’s Bond Street adventure with Robina Dale. And this brought back the talk to Robina.

Now it is one of the curious quirks or twists in the network of human inter-relationships that not having heard of a man for twenty years, you see his name mentioned in a newspaper, and then in a day or two there come personal twitches along all kinds of lines recalling to you his existence.

Until that afternoon Joshua had never heard of Humphrey Dale. He was to hear more of him before he left The Cock-Pit.

“Why she doesn’t get rid of that husband of hers,” said Fenton Hill, “none of us can understand.”

“He’s away shooting big game,” said Joshua.

“Big game be damned. That’s only to save her face. If he saw a rabbit, he’d find it striped pink and green. He’s the rottenest little drunken swine alive, and he hasn’t got a bean ... and she works herself to death to keep him on a mismanaged estate in Kenya Colony where he leads the filthiest life you can think of.”

Joshua’s face puckered up. “Why does she do it?”

Fenton Hill drained his glass of old brandy and set it down.

“If you want to know why women do things—ask me another.”