Buried Alive: a Tale of These Days Part 17

"I'm sure it's beautiful," she said kindly, but without the slightest conviction. "What is it? Is that Putney Bridge?"

"Yes," he said.

"I thought it was. I thought it must be. Well, I never knew you could paint. It's beautiful--for an amateur." She said this firmly and yet endearingly, and met his eyes with her eyes. It was her tactful method of politely causing him to see that she had not accepted last night's yarn very seriously. His eyes fell, not hers.

"No, no, no!" he expostulated with quick vivacity, as she stepped towards the canvas. "Don't come any nearer. You're at just the right distance."

"Oh! If you don't _want_ me to see it close," she humoured him. "What a pity you haven't put an omnibus on the bridge!"

"There is one," said he. "_That's_ one." He pointed.

"Oh yes! Yes, I see. But, you know, I think it looks rather more like a Carter Paterson van than an omnibus. If you could paint some letters on it--'Union Jack' or 'Vanguard,' then people would be sure. But it's beautiful. I suppose you learnt to to paint from your--" She checked herself. "What's that red streak behind?"

"That's the railway bridge," he muttered.

"Oh, of course it is! How silly of me! Now if you were to put a train on that. The worst of trains in pictures is that they never seem to be going along. I've noticed that on the sides of furniture vans, haven't you? But if you put a signal, against it, then people would understand that the train had stopped. I'm not sure whether there _is_ a signal on the bridge, though."

He made no remark.

"And I see that's the Elk public-house there on the right. You've just managed to get it in. I can recognize that quite easily. Any one would."

He still made no remark.

"What are you going to do with it?" she asked gently.

"Going to sell it, my dear," he replied grimly. "It may surprise you to know that that canvas is worth at the very least 800. There would be a devil of a row and rumpus in Bond Street and elsewhere if they knew I was painting here instead of rotting in Westminster Abbey. I don't propose to sign it--I seldom did sign my pictures--and we shall see what we shall see.... I've got fifteen hundred for little things not so good as that. I'll let it go for what it'll fetch. We shall soon be wanting money."

The tears rose to Alice's eyes. She saw that he was more infinitely more mad than she imagined--with his 800 and his 1,500 for daubs of pictures that conveyed no meaning whatever to the eye! Why, you could purchase real, professional pictures, of lakes, and mountains, exquisitely finished, at the frame-makers in High Street for three pounds apiece! And here he was rambling in hundreds and thousands! She saw that that extraordinary notion about being able to paint was a natural consequence of the pathetic delusion to which he had given utterance yesterday. And she wondered what would follow next. Who could have guessed that the seeds of lunacy were in such a man? Yes, harmless lunacy, but lunacy nevertheless! She distinctly remembered the little shock with which she had learned that he was staying at the Grand Babylon on his own account, as a wealthy visitor. She thought it bizarre, but she certainly had not taken it for a sign of lunacy. And yet it had been a sign of madness. And the worst of harmless lunacy was that it might develop at any moment into harmful lunacy.

There was one thing to do, and only one: keep him quiet, shield him from all troubles and alarms. It was disturbance of spirit which induced these mental derangements. His master's death had upset him. And now he had been upset by her disgraceful brewery company.

She made a step towards him, and then hesitated. She had to form a plan of campaign all in a moment! She had to keep her wits and to use them!

How could she give him confidence about his absurd picture? She noticed that nave look that sometimes came into his eyes, a boyish expression that gave the He to his greying beard and his generous proportions.

He laughed, until, as she came closer, he saw the tears on her eyelids.

Then he ceased laughing. She fingered the edge of his coat, cajolingly.

"It's a beautiful picture!" she repeated again and again. "And if you like I will see if I can sell it for you. But, Henry----"

"Well?"

"Please, please don't bother about money. We shall have _heaps_. There's no occasion for you to bother, and I won't _have_ you bothering."

"What are you crying for?" he asked in a murmur.

"It's only--only because I think it's so nice of you trying to earn money like that," she lied. "I'm not really crying."

And she ran away, downstairs, really crying. It was excessively comic, but he had better not follow her, lest he might cry too....

_A Patron of the Arts_

A lull followed this crisis in the affairs of No. 29 Werter Road. Priam went on painting, and there was now no need for secrecy about it. But his painting was not made a subject of conversation. Both of them hesitated to touch it, she from tact, and he because her views on the art seemed to him to be lacking in subtlety. In every marriage there is a topic--there are usually several--which the husband will never broach to the wife, out of respect for his respect for her. Priam scarcely guessed that Alice imagined him to be on the way to lunacy. He thought she merely thought him queer, as artists _are_ queer to non-artists. And he was accustomed to that; Henry Leek had always thought him queer. As for Alice's incredulous att.i.tude towards the revelation of his ident.i.ty, he did not mentally accuse her of treating him as either a liar or a madman. On reflection he persuaded himself that she regarded the story as a bad joke, as one of his impulsive, capricious essays in the absurd.

Thus the march of evolution was apparently arrested in Werter Road during three whole days. And then a singular event happened, and progress was resumed. Priam had been out since early morning on the riverside, sketching, and had reached Barnes, from which town he returned over Barnes Common, and so by the Upper Richmond Road to High Street. He was on the south side of Upper Richmond Road, whereas his tobacconist's shop was on the north side, near the corner. An unfamiliar peculiarity of the shop caused him to cross the street, for he was not in want of tobacco. It was the look of the window that drew him. He stopped on the refuge in the centre of the street. There was no necessity to go further. His picture of Putney Bridge was in the middle of the window. He stared at it fixedly. He believed his eyes, for his eyes were the finest part of him and never deceived him; but perhaps if he had been a person with ordinary eyes he would scarce have been able to believe them. The canvas was indubitably there present in the window.

It had been put in a cheap frame such as is used for chromographic advertis.e.m.e.nts of ships, soups, and tobacco. He was almost sure that he had seen that same frame, within the shop, round a pictorial announcement of Taddy's Snuff. The tobacconist had probably removed the eighteenth-century aristocrat with his fingers to his nose, from the frame, and replaced him with Putney Bridge. In any event the frame was about half-an-inch too long for the canvas, but the gap was scarcely observable. On the frame was a large notice, 'For sale.' And around it were the cigars of two hemispheres, from Syak Whiffs at a penny each to precious Murias; and cigarettes of every allurement; and the mult.i.tudinous fragments of all advertised tobaccos; and meerschaums and briars, and patent pipes and diagrams of their secret machinery; and cigarette-and cigar-holders laid on plush; and pocket receptacles in aluminium and other precious metals.

Shining there, the picture had a most incongruous appearance. He blushed as he stood on the refuge. It seemed to him that the mere incongruity of the spectacle must inevitably attract crowds, gradually blocking the street, and that when some individual not absolutely a fool in art, had perceived the quality of the picture--well, then the trouble of public curiosity and of journalistic inquisitiveness would begin. He wondered that he could ever have dreamed of concealing his ident.i.ty on a canvas.

The thing simply shouted 'Priam Farll,' every inch of it. In any exhibition of pictures in London, Paris, Rome, Milan, Munich, New York or Boston, it would have been the cynosure, the target of ecstatic admirations. It was just such another work as his celebrated 'Pont d'Austerlitz,' which hung in the Luxembourg. And neither a frame of 'chemical gold,' nor the extremely variegated coloration of the other merchandise on sale could kill it.

However, there were no signs of a crowd. People pa.s.sed to and fro, just as though there had not been a masterpiece within ten thousand miles of them. Once a servant girl, a loaf of bread in her red arms, stopped to glance at the window, but in an instant she was gone, running.

Priam's first instinctive movement had been to plunge into the shop, and demand from his tobacconist an explanation of the phenomenon. But of course he checked himself. Of course he knew that the presence of his picture in the window could only be due to the enterprise of Alice.

He went slowly home.

The sound of his latchkey in the keyhole brought her into the hall ere he had opened the door.

"Oh, Henry," she said--she was quite excited--"I must tell you. I was pa.s.sing Mr. Aylmer's this morning just as he was dressing his window, and the thought struck me that he might put your picture in. So I ran in and asked him. He said he would if he could have it at once. So I came and got it. He found a frame, and wrote out a ticket, and asked after you. No one could have been kinder. You must go and have a look at it. I shouldn't be at all surprised if it gets sold like that."

Priam answered nothing for a moment. He could not.

"What did Aylmer say about it?" he asked.

"Oh!" said his wife quickly, "you can't expect Mr. Aylmer to understand these things. It's not in his line. But he was glad to oblige us. I saw he arranged it nicely."

"Well," said Priam discreetly, "that's all right. Suppose we have lunch?"

Curious--her relations with Mr. Aylmer! It was she who had recommended him to go to Mr. Aylmer's when, on the first morning of his residence in Putney, he had demanded, "Any decent tobacconists in this happy region?"

He suspected that, had it not been for Aylmer's beridden and incurable wife, Alice's name might have been Aylmer. He suspected Aylmer of a hopeless pa.s.sion for Alice. He was glad that Alice had not been thrown away on Aylmer. He could not imagine himself now without Alice. In spite of her ideas on the graphic arts, Alice was his air, his atmosphere, his oxygen; and also his umbrella to shield him from the hail of untoward circ.u.mstances. Curious--the process of love! It was the power of love that had put that picture in the tobacconist's window.

Whatever power had put it there, no power seemed strong enough to get it out again. It lay exposed in the window for weeks and never drew a crowd, nor caused a sensation of any kind! Not a word in the newspapers!

London, the acknowledged art-centre of the world, calmly went its ways.

The sole immediate result was that Priam changed his tobacconist, and the direction of his promenades.

At last another singular event happened.

Alice beamingly put five sovereigns into Priam's hand one evening.

"It's been sold for five guineas," she said, joyous. "Mr. Aylmer didn't want to keep anything for himself, but I insisted on his having the odd shillings. I think it's splendid, simply splendid! Of course I always _did_ think it was a beautiful picture," she added.

The fact was that this astounding sale for so large a sum as five pounds, of a picture done in the attic by her Henry, had enlarged her ideas of Henry's skill. She could no longer regard his painting as the caprice of a gentle lunatic. There was something _in_ it. And now she wanted to persuade herself that she had known from the first there was something in it.

The picture had been bought by the eccentric and notorious landlord of the Elk Hotel, down by the river, on a Sunday afternoon when he was--not drunk, but more optimistic than the state of English society warrants.

He liked the picture because his public-house was so unmistakably plain in it. He ordered a ma.s.sive gold frame for it, and hung it in his saloon-bar. His career as a patron of the arts was unfortunately cut short by an order signed by his doctors for his incarceration in a lunatic asylum. All Putney had been saying for years that he would end in the asylum, and all Putney was right.