December Love Part 45

The question sounded to Miss Van Tuyn almost suspicious.

"He admires your appearance," she answered. "He thinks you a very striking type."

"Ah! A type! But what of?"

"He didn't tell me," she answered.

Arabian was silent for a moment; then he said:

"Does Mr. d.i.c.k Garstin get high prices for his portraits? Are they worth a great deal?"

"Yes," she said, with a sudden light touch of disdain, which she could not forego. "The smallest sketch of a head painted by him will fetch a lot of money."

"Ah--indeed!"

"Let him paint you! There he is--coming back."

As Garstin reappeared Arabian turned to him with a smile that looked cordial and yet that seemed somehow wanting in real geniality.

"I have seen them all."

"Have you? Well, let's have a drink."

He went over to the Spanish cabinet and brought out of it a flagon of old English gla.s.s ware, soda-water, and three tall tulip-shaped gla.s.ses with long stems.

"Come on. Let's sit down," he said, setting them down on a table. "I'll get the cigars. Squat here, Beryl. Here's a chair for you, Arabian. Help yourselves."

He moved off and returned with a box of his deadly cigars. Arabian took one without hesitation, and accepted a stiff whisky and soda. While he had been downstairs Garstin had apparently recovered his good humour, or had deliberately made up his mind to take a certain line with his guest from the Cafe Royal. He said nothing about his pictures, made no further allusion to his wish to paint Arabian's portrait, but flung himself down, lit a cigar, and began to drink and smoke and talk, very much as if he were in the bar of an inn with a lot of good fellows. When he chose Garstin could be human and genial, at times even rowdy. He was genial enough now, but Miss Van Tuyn, who was very sharp about almost everything connected with people, thought of a patient's first visit to a famous specialist, and of the quarter of an hour so often apparently wasted by the great physician as he talks about topics unconnected with symptoms to his anxious visitor. She was certain that Garstin was determined to paint Arabian whether the latter was willing to be painted or not, and she was equally certain that already Garstin had begun to work on his sitter, not with brushes but with the mind. For his own benefit, and incidentally for hers, Garstin was carelessly, but cleverly, trying to find out things about Arabian, not things about his life, but things about his education, and his mind and his temperament.

He did not ask him vulgar questions. He just talked, and watched, and occasionally listened in the midst of the cigar smoke, and often with the whisky at his lips.

She had refused to take any whisky, but smoked cigarette after cigarette quickly, nervously almost. She was enjoying herself immensely, but she felt unusually excited, mentally restless, almost mentally agitated. Her usual coolness of mind had been changed into a sort of glow by Garstin and the living bronze. She always liked being alone with men, hearing men talk among themselves or talking with them free from the presence of women. But to-day she was exceptionally stimulated for she was exceptionally curious. There was something in Arabian which vaguely troubled her, and which also enticed her almost against her will. And now she was following along a track, pioneered by a clever and cunning leader.

Garstin talked about London, which Arabian apparently knew fairly well, though he said he had never lived long in London; then about Paris, which Arabian also knew and spoke of like a man who visited it now and then for purposes of pleasure. Then Garstin spoke of the art he followed, of the old Italian painters and of the Galleries of Italy.

Arabian became very quiet. His att.i.tude and bearing were those of one almost respectfully listening to an expert holding forth on a subject he had made his own. Now and then he said something non-committal. There was no evidence that he had any knowledge of Italian pictures, that he could distinguish between a Giovanni Bellini and a Raphael, tell a Luini from a t.i.tian.

Miss Van Tuyn wondered again whether he had ever heard of Leonardo.

Garstin mentioned some Paris painters of the past, but of more recent times than those of the grand old Italians, spoke of Courbet, of Manet, of Renoir, Guilaumin, Sisley, the Barbizon school, Cezanne and his followers. Finally he came to the greatest of the French Impressionist painters, to p.i.s.saro, for whom, as Miss Van Tuyn knew, he had an admiration which amounted almost to a cult.

"He's a glorious fellow, isn't he?" he said in his loud ba.s.s voice to Arabian. "You know his 'Pont Neuf,' of course?"

He did not wait for an answer, but drove on with immense energy, puffing away at his cigar and turning his small, keen eyes swiftly from Arabian to Miss Van Tuyn and back again. The talk, which was now a monologue, fed by frequent draughts of the excellent whisky, included a dissertation on p.i.s.saro's oil paintings, his water-colours, his etchings and lithographs, his pupils, Cezanne, Van Gogh and Gauguin, his friendships, his troubles, and finally a paean on his desperate love of work, which was evidently shared by the speaker.

"Work--it's _the_ thing in life!" roared Garstin. "It's the great consolation for all the d.a.m.nableness of the human existence. Work first and the love of women second!"

"Thank you very much for your chivalry, d.i.c.k," said Miss Van Tuyn, sending one of her most charming blue glances to the living bronze, who returned it, almost eagerly, she thought.

"And the love of women betrays," continued Garstin. "But work never lets you down."

He flung out his right arm and quoted sonorously from p.i.s.saro: "I paint portraits because doing it helps me to live!" he almost shouted.

"Another cigar!" He turned to Arabian.

"Thank you. They are beauties and not too strong."

"You've got a d.a.m.ned strong const.i.tution if you can say that. You have been like me; you have fortified it by work."

"I fear not," he said with a smile. "I have been a flaneur, an idler.

It has been my great misfortune to have enough money for what I want without working."

"Like poor me!" said Miss Van Tuyn, feeling suddenly relieved.

"I pity you both!" said Garstin.

And he branched away to literature, to music, to sculpture. Lowering his big voice suddenly he spoke of the bronzes of the Naples Museum, half shutting his eyes till they were two narrow slits, and looking intently at Arabian.

"You have the throat of one of those bronzes," he said bluntly, "and should never wear that cursed abomination, a starched linen collar."

"What is one to do in London?" murmured Arabian, suddenly stretching his brown throat and lifting his strong chin.

"Show it something worth looking at," said Garstin.

And he returned to the subject of women, and spoke on it so freely and fully that Miss Van Tuyn presently pulled him up. Rather to her surprise he showed unusual meekness under her interruption.

"All right, my girl! I've done! I've done! But I always forget you're not a young man."

"_Ma foi!_" said Arabian, almost under his breath.

Garstin looked across at him

"She's a Tartar. She'd keep the devil himself in order."

"He deserves restraint far less than you do," said Miss Van Tuyn.

"She won't leave me alone," continued Garstin, flinging one leg over the arm of his easy chair. "She even attacks me about my painting, says I only paint the rats of the sewers."

"I never said that," said Miss Van Tuyn. "I said you were a painter of the underworld, and so you are."

"But Mr. d.i.c.k Garstin also paints judges, mademoiselle," said Arabian.

"Oh, lord! Drop the Mister! I'm d.i.c.k Garstin _tout court_ or I'm nothing. Now, Arabian, you know the reason, part of the reason, why I want to stick you on canvas."

"You mean because--"

He seemed to hesitate, and touched his little Guardsman's moustache.

"Because you're a jolly fine subject and nothing to do with the darlings that live in the sewers."

"Ah! Thank you!" said Arabian. "But you paint judges."