Fenwick's Career Part 27

'Not in this weather. I'm off next week. In the summer it's pleasant enough. Well, it's deuced lucky I caught sight of you at that show yesterday! How are you? I believe it's nearly two years since we met last.'

'I'm all right,' said Fenwick, accepting a shaky seat and a cigarette.

Watson lighted a fresh one for himself, and then with arms akimbo surveyed his visitor.

'I've seen you look better. What's the matter? Have you been working through the summer in London?'

'I'm all right,' Fenwick repeated; then, with a little grimace--'or I should be, if I could pay my way, and paint the things I want to paint.'

He looked up.

'Well, why don't you?'

'Because--somehow--one has to live.'

Watson climbed on to his high stool, still observing his visitor.

For a good many years now, Fenwick had been always well and carefully dressed--an evident Londoner, accustomed to drawing-rooms and frequenting expensive tailors. But to-day there was something in his tired, dishevelled look, and comparatively shabby coat, which reminded Watson of years long gone by--of a studio in Bernard Street, and a broad-browed, handsome fellow, with queer manners and a North-Country accent. As to good looks, Fenwick's face and head were now far finer than they had been in first youth; Watson's critical eye took note of it. The hair, touched lightly with grey, had receded slightly on the temples, and the more ample brow, heavily lined, gave a n.o.bler shelter than of old to the still astonishing vivacity of the eyes.

The carriage of the head, too, was prouder and more a.s.sured. Fenwick, indeed, as far as years went, was, as Watson knew, in the very prime of life. Nevertheless, there was in his aspect, as he sat there, a prophetic note of discouragement, of ebbing vitality which startled his friend.

'I say,' said Watson, abruptly, 'you've been over-doing it. Have you made it up with the Academy?'

Fenwick laughed.

'Goodness, no!'

'Where have you been exhibiting this year?'

'At the gallery I always take. And I sent some things to the Grosvenor.'

Watson shook his head.

'It's an awful pity. You'd got in--you should have stayed in--and made yourself a power.'

Fenwick's att.i.tude stiffened.

'I have never regretted it for a single hour--except that the scene itself was ridiculous.'

Watson knew very well to what he referred. Some two years before, it had been the nine days wonder of artistic London. Fenwick, then a newly elected a.s.sociate of the Academy, and at what seemed to be the height of his first success as an artist, had sent in a picture to the Spring Exhibition which appeared to the Hanging Committee of the moment a perfunctory thing. They gave it a bad place, and an Academician told Fenwick what had happened. He rushed to Burlington House, tore down his picture from the wall, stormed at the astonished members of the Hanging Committee, carried off his property, and vowed that he would resign his a.s.sociateship. He was indeed called upon to do so; and he signalised his withdrawal by a furious letter to the _Times_ in which the rancours, grievances, and contempts of ten chequered and ambitious years found full and rhetorical expression.

The letter naturally made a breach between the writer and England's official art. Watson, who was abroad when the whole thing happened, had heard of it with mingled feelings. 'It will either make him--or finish him!' was his own judgement, founded on a fairly exhaustive knowledge of John Fenwick; and he had waited anxiously for results.

So far no details had reached him since. Fenwick seemed to be still exhibiting, still writing to the papers, and, as far as he knew, still selling. But the aspect of the man before him was not an aspect of prosperity.

Watson, however, having started a subject which he well knew to be interminable, would instantly have liked to escape from it. He was himself nervous, critical, and easily bored. He did not know what he should do with Fenwick's outpourings when he had listened to them.

But Fenwick had come over--charged--and Watson had touched the spring.

He sat there, smoking and declaiming, his eyes blazing, one hand playing with Watson's favourite dog, an Aberdeen terrier who was softly smelling and pushing against him. All that litany of mockery and bitterness, which the Comic Spirit kindles afresh on the lips of each rising generation, only to quench it again on the lips of those who 'arrive,' flowed from him copiously. He was the age indeed for 'arrival,' when, as so often happens, the man of middle life, appeased by success, dismisses the revolts of his youth. But this was still the language--and the fierce language--of revolt! The decadence of English art and artists, the miserable commercialism of the Academy, the absence of any first-rate teaching, of any commanding traditions, of any 'school' worth the name--the vulgarity of the public, from royalty downward, the sn.o.bbery of the rich world in its dealings with art: all these jeremiads which he recited were much the same--_mutatis mutandis_--as those with which, half a century before, poor Benjamin Haydon had filled the 'autobiography' which is one of the capital 'doc.u.ments' of the artistic life. This very resemblance, indeed, occurred to Watson.

'Upon my word,' he said, with a queer smile, 'you remind me of Haydon.'

Fenwick started; with an impatient movement he pushed away the dog, who whimpered.

'Oh, come--I hope it's not as bad as that,' he said, roughly.

Watson sharply regretted his remark. Through the minds of both there pa.s.sed the same image of Haydon lying dead by his own hand beneath the vast pictures that no one would buy.

'Why you talk like this, I'm sure I don't know,' Watson said, with an impatient laugh. 'I'm always seeing your name in the papers. You have a great reputation, and I don't expect the Academy matters to your _clientele_.'

Fenwick shook his head. 'I haven't sold a picture for more than a year--except a beastly portrait--one of the worst things I ever did.'

'That's bad,' said Watson. 'Of course that's my state--perennially!

But you're not used to it.'

Fenwick said nothing, and the delicate sensibility of the other instantly divined that, friends as they were, the comparison with himself had not been at all welcome to his companion. And, indeed, at the time when Watson left England to begin the wandering life he had been leading for some three years, it would have been nothing less than grotesque. Fenwick was then triumphant, in what, it was supposed, would be his 'first period'--that 'young man's success,' brilliant, contested, noisy, from which, indeed, many roads lead, to many goals; but with him, at that time, the omens were of the best. His pictures were always among the events of the spring exhibitions; he had gathered round him a group of enthusiastic pupils who worked in the studio of the new house; and he had already received a good many honours at the hands of foreign juries. He was known to be on the threshold of the Academy, and to be making, besides, a good deal of money. 'Society' had first admitted him as the _protege_ of Lord Findon and the friend of Madame de Pastourelles, and was now ready to amuse itself with him, independently, as a genius and an 'eccentric.'

He had many enemies; but so have all 'fighters.' The critics spoke severely of certain radical defects in his work, due to insufficiency of early training; defects which time might correct--or stereotype.

But the critics 'must be talking'; and the public, under the spell of a new and daring talent, appeared to take no notice.

As these recollections pa.s.sed through Watson's mind, another expression showed itself in the hollow-cheeked, ma.s.sive face. It was the look of the visionary who sees in events the strange verification of obscure instincts and divinations in which he himself perhaps has only half-believed. He and Fenwick had been friends now--in some respects, close friends--for a good many years. Of late, they had met rarely, and neither of the men was a good correspondent. But the friendship, the strong sense of congruity and liking, persisted. It had sprung, originally--unexpectedly enough--from that loan made to Fenwick in his days of stress and poverty; and there were many who prophesied that it would come to an end with Fenwick's success.

Watson had no interest in and small tolerance for the prosperous. His connexion with Cuningham, in spite of occasional letters, had dropped long ago, ever since that clever Scotch painter had shown himself finally possessed of the usual Scotch power to capture London and a competence. But his liking for Fenwick had never wavered through all the blare of Fenwick's success.

Was it that the older man with his melancholy Celtic instinct had divined from the first that he and Fenwick were in truth of the same race--the race of the [Greek: dusammoroi]--the ill-fated--those for whom happiness is not written in the stars?

He sat staring at his companion, his eyes dreamily intent, taking note of the restless depression of the man before him, and of the disagreeable facts which emerged from his talk--declining reputation, money difficulties, and--last and most serious--a new doubt of himself and his powers, which Watson never remembered to have noticed in him before.

'But you must have made a great deal of money!' he said to him once, interrupting him.

Fenwick turned away uneasily.

'So I did. But there was the new house and studio. I have been trying to sell the house. But it's a white elephant.'

'Building's the deuce,' said Watson, gloomily. 'It ruins everybody from Louis Quatorze and Walter Scott downward. Have no barns--that's my principle--and then you can't pull 'em down and build greater! But, you know, it's all great nonsense, your talking like this! You're as clever as ever--cleverer. You've only got to _paint_--and it'll be all right. But, of course, if you will spend all your time in writing letters to the papers, and pamphlets, and that kind of thing--well!--'

He shrugged his shoulders.

Fenwick took the remark good-temperedly. 'I've finished three large pictures in eight months--if only somebody would buy 'em. And I'm in Paris now'--he hesitated a moment--'on a painting job. I've promised C----' (he named a well-known actor-manager in London) 'to help him with the production of a new play! I never did such a thing before--but--'

He looked up uncertainly, his colour rising.

'What?--scenery for _The Queen's Necklace?_ I've seen the puffs in the papers. Why not? Hope he pays well. Then you're going to Versailles, of course?'

Fenwick replied that he had taken some rooms at the Hotel des Reservoirs and must make some sketches in the palace; also in the park, and the Trianon garden. Then he rose abruptly.

'Well, and what have you been after?'

'The same old _machines_,' said Watson, tranquilly, pointing to a couple of large canvases. 'My subjects are no gayer than they used to be. Except that--ah, yes--I forgot--I had a return upon myself this spring--and set to work on some Bacchantes.' He stopped, and picked up a canvas which was standing with its face to the wall.

It represented a dance of Bacchantes. Fenwick looked at it in silence.

Watson replaced it with a patient sigh. 'Theophile Gautier said of some other fellow's Bacchantes that they had got drunk on "philosophical" wine. He might, I fear, have said it of mine. Anyway, I felt I was not made for Bacchantes--so I fell back on the usual thing.'

And he showed an 'Execution of a Witch'--filled with gruesome and poignant detail--excellent in some of its ideas and single figures, but as a whole crude, horrible, and weak.