When Philip returned to Amitrano's he found that Fanny Price was no longer
working there. She had given up the key of her locker. He asked Mrs. Otter
whether she knew what had become of her; and Mrs. Otter, with a shrug of
the shoulders, answered that she had probably gone back to England. Philip
was relieved. He was profoundly bored by her ill-temper. Moreover she
insisted on advising him about his work, looked upon it as a slight when
he did not follow her precepts, and would not understand that he felt
himself no longer the duffer he had been at first. Soon he forgot all
about her. He was working in oils now and he was full of enthusiasm. He
hoped to have something done of sufficient importance to send to the
following year's Salon. Lawson was painting a portrait of Miss Chalice.
She was very paintable, and all the young men who had fallen victims to
her charm had made portraits of her. A natural indolence, joined with a
passion for picturesque attitude, made her an excellent sitter; and she
had enough technical knowledge to offer useful criticisms. Since her
passion for art was chiefly a passion to live the life of artists, she was
quite content to neglect her own work. She liked the warmth of the studio,
and the opportunity to smoke innumerable cigarettes; and she spoke in a
low, pleasant voice of the love of art and the art of love. She made no
clear distinction between the two.
Lawson was painting with infinite labour, working till he could hardly
stand for days and then scraping out all he had done. He would have
exhausted the patience of anyone but Ruth Chalice. At last he got into a
hopeless muddle.
"The only thing is to take a new canvas and start fresh," he said. "I know
exactly what I want now, and it won't take me long."
Philip was present at the time, and Miss Chalice said to him:
"Why don't you paint me too? You'll be able to learn a lot by watching Mr.
Lawson."
It was one of Miss Chalice's delicacies that she always addressed her
lovers by their surnames.
"I should like it awfully if Lawson wouldn't mind."
"I don't care a damn," said Lawson.
It was the first time that Philip set about a portrait, and he began with
trepidation but also with pride. He sat by Lawson and painted as he saw
him paint. He profited by the example and by the advice which both Lawson
and Miss Chalice freely gave him. At last Lawson finished and invited
Clutton in to criticise. Clutton had only just come back to Paris. From
Provence he had drifted down to Spain, eager to see Velasquez at Madrid,
and thence he had gone to Toledo. He stayed there three months, and he was
returned with a name new to the young men: he had wonderful things to say
of a painter called El Greco, who it appeared could only be studied in
Toledo.
"Oh yes, I know about him," said Lawson, "he's the old master whose
distinction it is that he painted as badly as the moderns."
Clutton, more taciturn than ever, did not answer, but he looked at Lawson
with a sardonic air.
"Are you going to show us the stuff you've brought back from Spain?" asked
Philip.
"I didn't paint in Spain, I was too busy."
"What did you do then?"
"I thought things out. I believe I'm through with the Impressionists; I've
got an idea they'll seem very thin and superficial in a few years. I want
to make a clean sweep of everything I've learnt and start fresh. When I
came back I destroyed everything I'd painted. I've got nothing in my
studio now but an easel, my paints, and some clean canvases."
"What are you going to do?"
"I don't know yet. I've only got an inkling of what I want."
He spoke slowly, in a curious manner, as though he were straining to hear
something which was only just audible. There seemed to be a mysterious
force in him which he himself did not understand, but which was struggling
obscurely to find an outlet. His strength impressed you. Lawson dreaded
the criticism he asked for and had discounted the blame he thought he
might get by affecting a contempt for any opinion of Clutton's; but Philip
knew there was nothing which would give him more pleasure than Clutton's
praise. Clutton looked at the portrait for some time in silence, then
glanced at Philip's picture, which was standing on an easel.
"What's that?" he asked.
"Oh, I had a shot at a portrait too."
"The sedulous ape," he murmured.
He turned away again to Lawson's canvas. Philip reddened but did not
speak.
"Well, what d'you think of it?" asked Lawson at length.
"The modelling's jolly good," said Clutton. "And I think it's very well
drawn."
"D'you think the values are all right?"
"Quite."
Lawson smiled with delight. He shook himself in his clothes like a wet
dog.
"I say, I'm jolly glad you like it."
"I don't. I don't think it's of the smallest importance."
Lawson's face fell, and he stared at Clutton with astonishment: he had no
notion what he meant, Clutton had no gift of expression in words, and he
spoke as though it were an effort. What he had to say was confused,
halting, and verbose; but Philip knew the words which served as the text
of his rambling discourse. Clutton, who never read, had heard them first
from Cronshaw; and though they had made small impression, they had
remained in his memory; and lately, emerging on a sudden, had acquired the
character of a revelation: a good painter had two chief objects to paint,
namely, man and the intention of his soul. The Impressionists had been
occupied with other problems, they had painted man admirably, but they had
troubled themselves as little as the English portrait painters of the
eighteenth century with the intention of his soul.
"But when you try to get that you become literary," said Lawson,
interrupting. "Let me paint the man like Manet, and the intention of his
soul can go to the devil."
"That would be all very well if you could beat Manet at his own game, but
you can't get anywhere near him. You can't feed yourself on the day before
yesterday, it's ground which has been swept dry. You must go back. It's
when I saw the Grecos that I felt one could get something more out of
portraits than we knew before."
"It's just going back to Ruskin," cried Lawson.
"No--you see, he went for morality: I don't care a damn for morality:
teaching doesn't come in, ethics and all that, but passion and emotion.
The greatest portrait painters have painted both, man and the intention of
his soul; Rembrandt and El Greco; it's only the second-raters who've only
painted man. A lily of the valley would be lovely even if it didn't smell,
but it's more lovely because it has perfume. That picture"--he pointed to
Lawson's portrait--"well, the drawing's all right and so's the modelling
all right, but just conventional; it ought to be drawn and modelled so
that you know the girl's a lousy slut. Correctness is all very well: El
Greco made his people eight feet high because he wanted to express
something he couldn't get any other way."
"Damn El Greco," said Lawson, "what's the good of jawing about a man when
we haven't a chance of seeing any of his work?"
Clutton shrugged his shoulders, smoked a cigarette in silence, and went
away. Philip and Lawson looked at one another.
"There's something in what he says," said Philip.
Lawson stared ill-temperedly at his picture.
"How the devil is one to get the intention of the soul except by painting
exactly what one sees?"
About this time Philip made a new friend. On Monday morning models
assembled at the school in order that one might be chosen for the week,
and one day a young man was taken who was plainly not a model by
profession. Philip's attention was attracted by the manner in which he
held himself: when he got on to the stand he stood firmly on both feet,
square, with clenched hands, and with his head defiantly thrown forward;
the attitude emphasised his fine figure; there was no fat on him, and his
muscles stood out as though they were of iron. His head, close-cropped,
was well-shaped, and he wore a short beard; he had large, dark eyes and
heavy eyebrows. He held the pose hour after hour without appearance of
fatigue. There was in his mien a mixture of shame and of determination.
His air of passionate energy excited Philip's romantic imagination, and
when, the sitting ended, he saw him in his clothes, it seemed to him that
he wore them as though he were a king in rags. He was uncommunicative, but
in a day or two Mrs. Otter told Philip that the model was a Spaniard and
that he had never sat before.
"I suppose he was starving," said Philip.
"Have you noticed his clothes? They're quite neat and decent, aren't
they?"
It chanced that Potter, one of the Americans who worked at Amitrano's, was
going to Italy for a couple of months, and offered his studio to Philip.
Philip was pleased. He was growing a little impatient of Lawson's
peremptory advice and wanted to be by himself. At the end of the week he
went up to the model and on the pretence that his drawing was not finished
asked whether he would come and sit to him one day.
"I'm not a model," the Spaniard answered. "I have other things to do next
week."
"Come and have luncheon with me now, and we'll talk about it," said
Philip, and as the other hesitated, he added with a smile: "It won't hurt
you to lunch with me."
With a shrug of the shoulders the model consented, and they went off to a
cremerie. The Spaniard spoke broken French, fluent but difficult to
follow, and Philip managed to get on well enough with him. He found out
that he was a writer. He had come to Paris to write novels and kept
himself meanwhile by all the expedients possible to a penniless man; he
gave lessons, he did any translations he could get hold of, chiefly
business documents, and at last had been driven to make money by his fine
figure. Sitting was well paid, and what he had earned during the last week
was enough to keep him for two more; he told Philip, amazed, that he could
live easily on two francs a day; but it filled him with shame that he was
obliged to show his body for money, and he looked upon sitting as a
degradation which only hunger could excuse. Philip explained that he did
not want him to sit for the figure, but only for the head; he wished to do
a portrait of him which he might send to the next Salon.
"But why should you want to paint me?" asked the Spaniard.
Philip answered that the head interested him, he thought he could do a
good portrait.
"I can't afford the time. I grudge every minute that I have to rob from my
writing."
"But it would only be in the afternoon. I work at the school in the
morning. After all, it's better to sit to me than to do translations of
legal documents."
There were legends in the Latin quarter of a time when students of
different countries lived together intimately, but this was long since
passed, and now the various nations were almost as much separated as in an
Oriental city. At Julian's and at the Beaux Arts a French student was
looked upon with disfavour by his fellow-countrymen when he consorted with
foreigners, and it was difficult for an Englishman to know more than quite
superficially any native inhabitants of the city in which he dwelt.
Indeed, many of the students after living in Paris for five years knew no
more French than served them in shops and lived as English a life as
though they were working in South Kensington.
Philip, with his passion for the romantic, welcomed the opportunity to get
in touch with a Spaniard; he used all his persuasiveness to overcome the
man's reluctance.
"I'll tell you what I'll do," said the Spaniard at last. "I'll sit to you,
but not for money, for my own pleasure."
Philip expostulated, but the other was firm, and at length they arranged
that he should come on the following Monday at one o'clock. He gave Philip
a card on which was printed his name: Miguel Ajuria.
Miguel sat regularly, and though he refused to accept payment he borrowed
fifty francs from Philip every now and then: it was a little more
expensive than if Philip had paid for the sittings in the usual way; but
gave the Spaniard a satisfactory feeling that he was not earning his
living in a degrading manner. His nationality made Philip regard him as a
representative of romance, and he asked him about Seville and Granada,
Velasquez and Calderon. But Miguel bad no patience with the grandeur of
his country. For him, as for so many of his compatriots, France was the
only country for a man of intelligence and Paris the centre of the world.
"Spain is dead," he cried. "It has no writers, it has no art, it has
nothing."
Little by little, with the exuberant rhetoric of his race, he revealed his
ambitions. He was writing a novel which he hoped would make his name. He
was under the influence of Zola, and he had set his scene in Paris. He
told Philip the story at length. To Philip it seemed crude and stupid; the
naive obscenity--c'est la vie, mon cher, c'est la vie, he cried--the
naive obscenity served only to emphasise the conventionality of the
anecdote. He had written for two years, amid incredible hardships, denying
himself all the pleasures of life which had attracted him to Paris,
fighting with starvation for art's sake, determined that nothing should
hinder his great achievement. The effort was heroic.
"But why don't you write about Spain?" cried Philip. "It would be so much
more interesting. You know the life."
"But Paris is the only place worth writing about. Paris is life."
One day he brought part of the manuscript, and in his bad French,
translating excitedly as he went along so that Philip could scarcely
understand, he read passages. It was lamentable. Philip, puzzled, looked
at the picture he was painting: the mind behind that broad brow was
trivial; and the flashing, passionate eyes saw nothing in life but the
obvious. Philip was not satisfied with his portrait, and at the end of a
sitting he nearly always scraped out what he had done. It was all very
well to aim at the intention of the soul: who could tell what that was
when people seemed a mass of contradictions? He liked Miguel, and it
distressed him to realise that his magnificent struggle was futile: he had
everything to make a good writer but talent. Philip looked at his own
work. How could you tell whether there was anything in it or whether you
were wasting your time? It was clear that the will to achieve could not
help you and confidence in yourself meant nothing. Philip thought of Fanny
Price; she had a vehement belief in her talent; her strength of will was
extraordinary.
"If I thought I wasn't going to be really good, I'd rather give up
painting," said Philip. "I don't see any use in being a second-rate
painter."
Then one morning when he was going out, the concierge called out to him
that there was a letter. Nobody wrote to him but his Aunt Louisa and
sometimes Hayward, and this was a handwriting he did not know. The letter
was as follows:
Please come at once when you get this. I couldn't put up with it any more.
Please come yourself. I can't bear the thought that anyone else should
touch me. I want you to have everything.
F. Price
I have not had anything to eat for three days.
Philip felt on a sudden sick with fear. He hurried to the house in which
she lived. He was astonished that she was in Paris at all. He had not seen
her for months and imagined she had long since returned to England. When
he arrived he asked the concierge whether she was in.
"Yes, I've not seen her go out for two days."
Philip ran upstairs and knocked at the door. There was no reply. He called
her name. The door was locked, and on bending down he found the key was in
the lock.
"Oh, my God, I hope she hasn't done something awful," he cried aloud.
He ran down and told the porter that she was certainly in the room. He had
had a letter from her and feared a terrible accident. He suggested
breaking open the door. The porter, who had been sullen and disinclined to
listen, became alarmed; he could not take the responsibility of breaking
into the room; they must go for the commissaire de police. They walked
together to the bureau, and then they fetched a locksmith. Philip found
that Miss Price had not paid the last quarter's rent: on New Year's Day
she had not given the concierge the present which old-established custom
led him to regard as a right. The four of them went upstairs, and they
knocked again at the door. There was no reply. The locksmith set to work,
and at last they entered the room. Philip gave a cry and instinctively
covered his eyes with his hands. The wretched woman was hanging with a
rope round her neck, which she had tied to a hook in the ceiling fixed by
some previous tenant to hold up the curtains of the bed. She had moved her
own little bed out of the way and had stood on a chair, which had been
kicked away. it was lying on its side on the floor. They cut her down. The
body was quite cold.
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