The Works of Rudyard Kipling Part 107

"It's too good of you,--much too good. Because you are consoling yourself with what will never happen, and I know that, and yet I want to keep you. Don't blame me later, please."

"I'm going into the matter with my eyes open. Moreover the Queen can do no wrong. It isn't your selfishness that impresses me. It's your audacity in proposing to make use of me."

"Pooh! You're only d.i.c.k,--and a print-shop."

"Very good: that's all I am. But, Maisie, you believe, don't you, that I love you? I don't want you to have any false notions about brothers and sisters."

Maisie looked up for a moment and dropped her eyes.

"It's absurd, but--I believe. I wish I could send you away before you get angry with me. But--but the girl that lives with me is red-haired, and an impressionist, and all our notions clash."

"So do ours, I think. Never mind. Three months from today we shall be laughing at this together."

Maisie shook her head mournfully. "I knew you wouldn't understand, and it will only hurt you more when you find out. Look at my face, d.i.c.k, and tell me what you see."

They stood up and faced each other for a moment. The fog was gathering, and it stifled the roar of the traffic of London beyond the railings.

d.i.c.k brought all his painfully acquired knowledge of faces to bear on the eyes, mouth, and chin underneath the black velvet toque.

"It's the same Maisie, and it's the same me," he said. "We've both nice little wills of our own, and one or other of us has to be broken. Now about the future. I must come and see your pictures some day,--I suppose when the red-haired girl is on the premises."

"Sundays are my best times. You must come on Sundays. There are such heaps of things I want to talk about and ask your advice about. Now I must get back to work."

"Try to find out before next Sunday what I am," said d.i.c.k. "Don't take my word for anything I've told you. Good-bye, darling, and bless you."

Maisie stole away like a little gray mouse. d.i.c.k watched her till she was out of sight, but he did not hear her say to herself, very soberly, "I'm a wretch,--a horrid, selfish wretch. But it's d.i.c.k, and d.i.c.k will understand."

No one has yet explained what actually happens when an irresistible force meets the immovable post, though many have thought deeply, even as d.i.c.k thought. He tried to a.s.sure himself that Maisie would be led in a few weeks by his mere presence and discourse to a better way of thinking. Then he remembered much too distinctly her face and all that was written on it.

"If I know anything of heads," he said, "there's everything in that face but love. I shall have to put that in myself; and that chin and mouth won't be won for nothing. But she's right. She knows what she wants, and she's going to get it. What insolence! Me! Of all the people in the wide world, to use me! But then she's Maisie. There's no getting over that fact; and it's good to see her again. This business must have been simmering at the back of my head for years.... She'll use me as I used Binat at Port Said. She's quite right. It will hurt a little.

I shall have to see her every Sunday,--like a young man courting a housemaid. She's sure to come around; and yet--that mouth isn't a yielding mouth. I shall be wanting to kiss her all the time, and I shall have to look at her pictures,--I don't even know what sort of work she does yet,--and I shall have to talk about Art,--Woman's Art! Therefore, particularly and perpetually, d.a.m.n all varieties of Art. It did me a good turn once, and now it's in my way. I'll go home and do some Art."

Half-way to the studio, d.i.c.k was smitten with a terrible thought. The figure of a solitary woman in the fog suggested it.

"She's all alone in London, with a red-haired impressionist girl, who probably has the digestion of an ostrich. Most red-haired people have.

Maisie's a bilious little body. They'll eat like lone women,--meals at all hours, and tea with all meals. I remember how the students in Paris used to pig along. She may fall ill at any minute, and I shan't be able to help. Whew! this is ten times worse than owning a wife."

Torpenhow entered the studio at dusk, and looked at d.i.c.k with eyes full of the austere love that springs up between men who have tugged at the same oar together and are yoked by custom and use and the intimacies of toil. This is a good love, and, since it allows, and even encourages, strife, recrimination, and brutal sincerity, does not die, but grows, and is proof against any absence and evil conduct.

d.i.c.k was silent after he handed Torpenhow the filled pipe of council. He thought of Maisie and her possible needs. It was a new thing to think of anybody but Torpenhow, who could think for himself. Here at last was an outlet for that cash balance. He could adorn Maisie barbarically with jewelry,--a thick gold necklace round that little neck, bracelets upon the rounded arms, and rings of price upon her hands,--the cool, temperate, ringless hands that he had taken between his own. It was an absurd thought, for Maisie would not even allow him to put one ring on one finger, and she would laugh at golden trappings. It would be better to sit with her quietly in the dusk, his arm around her neck and her face on his shoulder, as befitted husband and wife. Torpenhow's boots creaked that night, and his strong voice jarred. d.i.c.k's brows contracted and he murmured an evil word because he had taken all his success as a right and part payment for past discomfort, and now he was checked in his stride by a woman who admitted all the success and did not instantly care for him.

"I say, old man," said Torpenhow, who had made one or two vain attempts at conversation, "I haven't put your back up by anything I've said lately, have I?"

"You! No. How could you?"

"Liver out of order?"

"The truly healthy man doesn't know he has a liver. I'm only a bit worried about things in general. I suppose it's my soul."

"The truly healthy man doesn't know he has a soul. What business have you with luxuries of that kind?"

"It came of itself. Who's the man that says that we're all islands shouting lies to each other across seas of misunderstanding?"

"He's right, whoever he is,--except about the misunderstanding. I don't think we could misunderstand each other."

The blue smoke curled back from the ceiling in clouds. Then Torpenhow, insinuatingly--"d.i.c.k, is it a woman?"

"Be hanged if it's anything remotely resembling a woman; and if you begin to talk like that, I'll hire a red-brick studio with white paint tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs, and begonias and petunias and blue Hungarias to play among three-and-sixpenny pot-palms, and I'll mount all my pics in aniline-dye plush plasters, and I'll invite every woman who maunders over what her guide-books tell her is Art, and you shall receive 'em, Torp,--in a snuff-brown velvet coat with yellow trousers and an orange tie. You'll like that?"

"Too thin, d.i.c.k. A better man than you once denied with cursing and swearing. You've overdone it, just as he did. It's no business of mine, of course, but it's comforting to think that somewhere under the stars there's saving up for you a tremendous thrashing. Whether it'll come from heaven or earth, I don't know, but it's bound to come and break you up a little. You want hammering."

d.i.c.k shivered. "All right," said he. "When this island is disintegrated, it will call for you."

"I shall come round the corner and help to disintegrate it some more.

We're talking nonsense. Come along to a theatre."

CHAPTER VI

"And you may lead a thousand men, Nor ever draw the rein, But ere ye lead the Faery Queen 'Twill burst your heart in twain."

He has slipped his foot from the stirrup-bar, The bridle from his hand, And he is bound by hand and foot To the Queen 'o Faery-land.

----Sir Hoggie and the Fairies.

Some weeks later, on a very foggy Sunday, d.i.c.k was returning across the Park to his studio. "This," he said, "is evidently the thrashing that Torp meant. It hurts more than I expected; but the Queen can do no wrong; and she certainly has some notion of drawing."

He had just finished a Sunday visit to Maisie,--always under the green eyes of the red-haired impressionist girl, whom he learned to hate at sight,--and was tingling with a keen sense of shame. Sunday after Sunday, putting on his best clothes, he had walked over to the untidy house north of the Park, first to see Maisie's pictures, and then to criticise and advise upon them as he realised that they were productions on which advice would not be wasted. Sunday after Sunday, and his love grew with each visit, he had been compelled to cram his heart back from between his lips when it prompted him to kiss Maisie several times and very much indeed. Sunday after Sunday, the head above the heart had warned him that Maisie was not yet attainable, and that it would be better to talk as connectedly as possible upon the mysteries of the craft that was all in all to her. Therefore it was his fate to endure weekly torture in the studio built out over the clammy back garden of a frail stuffy little villa where nothing was ever in its right place and n.o.body every called,--to endure and to watch Maisie moving to and fro with the teacups. He abhorred tea, but, since it gave him a little longer time in her presence, he drank it devoutly, and the red-haired girl sat in an untidy heap and eyed him without speaking. She was always watching him.

Once, and only once, when she had left the studio, Maisie showed him an alb.u.m that held a few poor cuttings from provincial papers,--the briefest of hurried notes on some of her pictures sent to outlying exhibitions. d.i.c.k stooped and kissed the paint-smudged thumb on the open page. "Oh, my love, my love," he muttered, "do you value these things?

Chuck 'em into the waste-paper basket!"

"Not till I get something better," said Maisie, shutting the book.

Then d.i.c.k, moved by no respect for his public and a very deep regard for the maiden, did deliberately propose, in order to secure more of these coveted cuttings, that he should paint a picture which Maisie should sign.

"That's childish," said Maisie, "and I didn't think it of you. It must be my work. Mine,--mine,--mine!"

"Go and design decorative medallions for rich brewers' houses. You are thoroughly good at that." d.i.c.k was sick and savage.

"Better things than medallions, d.i.c.k," was the answer, in tones that recalled a gray-eyed atom's fearless speech to Mrs. Jennett. d.i.c.k would have abased himself utterly, but that other girl trailed in.

Next Sunday he laid at Maisie's feet small gifts of pencils that could almost draw of themselves and colours in whose permanence he believed, and he was ostentatiously attentive to the work in hand. It demanded, among other things, an exposition of the faith that was in him.

Torpenhow's hair would have stood on end had he heard the fluency with which d.i.c.k preached his own gospel of Art.

A month before, d.i.c.k would have been equally astonished; but it was Maisie's will and pleasure, and he dragged his words together to make plain to her comprehension all that had been hidden to himself of the whys and wherefores of work. There is not the least difficulty in doing a thing if you only know how to do it; the trouble is to explain your method.

"I could put this right if I had a brush in my hand," said d.i.c.k, despairingly, over the modelling of a chin that Maisie complained would not "look flesh,"--it was the same chin that she had sc.r.a.ped out with the palette knife,--"but I find it almost impossible to teach you.

There's a queer grim Dutch touch about your painting that I like; but I've a notion that you're weak in drawing. You foreshorten as though you never used the model, and you've caught Kami's pasty way of dealing with flesh in shadow. Then, again, though you don't know it yourself, you shirk hard work. Suppose you spend some of your time on line lone. Line doesn't allow of shirking. Oils do, and three square inches of flashy, tricky stuff in the corner of a pic sometimes carry a bad thing off,--as I know. That's immoral. Do line-work for a little while, and then I can tell more about your powers, as old Kami used to say."