Tongues of Conscience Part 4

"I can see her."

"I wish to heaven I could not," the painter said, with a sudden outburst of fire.

He was silent a moment and then continued: "I had no difficulty in persuading her to let me paint the boy. I don't think she rightly understood what I meant, except that for some foolish reason I was prepared to give her money, apparently in return for nothing, that I meant to have little Jack decently dressed--"

"Jack--was that his name?"

"Yes, and that he was to spend certain hours--s.n.a.t.c.hed from Trafalgar Square--in my house in Kensington."

"I see."

"The boy turned up in the jersey and cap and boots I had bought him. And then his education began. On first entering my studio he was numb with surprise, a moving and speechless stare--more overcome than by rainbows."

"Poor little chap!"

"I let him stray about examining everything. He did so completely oblivious of my presence, and of the fact that all the things in the place were mine. By his demeanour one might have supposed him engaged in an examination of works of G.o.d never before brought to his notice. While I smoked and pretended to read, he crept about like a little animal, penetrating into corners where statues stood, smelling--so it seemed--the angles of painted walls, touching the petals of flowers, smoothing rugs the wrong--but soon the right--way. I can hear his new boots creaking still. He was a very muscular little chap, but small.

When he was able to speak I questioned him. He had never seen the sea.

He had never been out of London for a day or slept away from Drury Lane for a night. The flask was empty; now to pour the wine into it. I told him to sit down by the open hearth. He obeyed, staring hard at me before he sat, hard at the chair when he was sitting. I interested him much less than old brocade and lighted wax candles, which inspired him with a solemnity that widened his eyes and narrowed his features. He looked on a new, and never-before-imagined, life. And he was grave to excess, though, later, I found plenty of the London child's impish nature in him."

"That impish quality hides in nearly all street-bred children," said Uniacke. "I have seen larkiness dawn in them for an instant at some recollection, even when they were dying."

"I daresay. I can believe it. But Jack was solemn at first, his brow thunderous with thought, as he examined his chair and the rug under his new boots. Then in the firelight I began my task. I wrought to bring about in this Trafalgar Square soul a sea change. For a time I did not attempt to paint. I merely let the boy come to me day by day, get accustomed to the studio, and listen to my talk--which was often of the sea. I very soon found that my intention had led me to the right mind for my purpose; for the starved gaze that had been fixed on the rainbow could turn itself, with equal wonder, similar rapture, on other things.

And the mind also could be brought to see what was not visible to the eye. My studio--you must see it some day--is full of recollections of sea days and nights. Jack explored them. I eliminated from the studio important objects of art which might lead him to think of towns, of villages inland, of wonderful foreign interiors. I fixed all his nature upon this marvellous element which had never murmured round his life before. I played to him music in which the sea could be heard. I described to him the onward gallop of the white horses, racing over impenetrable depths. I painted for him in words the varying colours of waves in different seas, the black purple of tropical waters, the bottle-green turmoil of a Cornish sea on a choppy day, the brown channel waves near sh.o.r.e, the jewelled smoothness of the Mediterranean in early morning sunshine, its silver in moonrise, melting into white and black.

I told him of the crowd of voices that cry in the sea, expressing all the emotions which are uttered on land by the voices of men; of the childish voices that may be heard on August evenings in fiords, of the solemn sobbing that fills an autumn night on the Northumbrian coast, of the pa.s.sionate roaring in mid Atlantic, of the peculiar and frigid whisper of waters struggling to break from the tightening embrace of ice in extreme northern lat.i.tudes, of the level moan of the lagoons. I explained to him how this element is so much alive that it is never for a moment absolutely still, even when it seems so to the eyes, as it sleeps within the charmed embrace of a coral reef, extended, like an arm, by some Pacific island far away. I drew for him the thoughts of the sea, its intentions, its desires, its regrets, its griefs, its savage and its quiet joys. I narrated the lives in it, of fishes, of monsters; its wonders of half human lives, too, the mermaids who lie on the rocks at night to see the twinkling lights on land, the mermen who swim round them, wondering what those lights may mean. I made him walk with me on the land under the sea, where go the divers through the wrecks, and ascend the rocky mountains and penetrate the weedy valleys, and glide across the slippery, oozy plains. In fine, Uniacke, I drowned little Jack--I drowned him in the sea, I drowned him in the sea."

The painter spoke the last words in a voice of profound, even of morbid, melancholy, as if he were indeed confessing a secret crime, driven by some wayward and irresistible impulse. Uniacke looked at him in growing surprise.

"And why not?" Uniacke asked.

But the painter did not reply. He continued:

"I made him see the rainbows of the sea and he looked no more at the rainbows of the sky. For at length I had his imagination fast in my net as a salmon that fishermen entice within the stakes. His town mind seemed to fade under my fostering, and, Uniacke, 'nothing of him that did fade but did suffer a sea change into something rich and strange.'"

The painter got up from his chair and walked over to the blowing wind that crept in at the window fastenings. The red curtains flew out towards him. He pushed them back with his hands.

"Into something rich and strange," he repeated, as if to himself. "And strange."

"Ah, but that was said, surely, of one who was actually drowned in the sea," said the clergyman. "It might be suitably placed on many of the memorial slabs in the church yonder," he continued, waving his hand towards the cas.e.m.e.nt that looked on the churchyard. "But your sea-urchin--"

"Oh, I speak only of the fading of the town nature into the sea nature,"

rejoined the painter quickly, "only of that. The soil of the childish mind was enriched; his eyes shone as if touched with a glow from the sun, swaying in the blue sea. The Trafalgar Square gamin disappeared, and at last my sea-urchin stood before me. As the little Raleigh may have looked he looked at me, and I saw in the face then rather the wonder of the sea itself than the crude dancing desire of the little adventurer who would sail it. And it was the wonder of the sea embodied in a child that I desired to paint, not the wakening of a human spirit of gay seamanship and love of peril. That's for a Christmas number--but that came at last."

He stopped abruptly and faced the clergyman.

"Why does the second best succeed so often and so closely the best, I wonder," he said. "It is very often so in the art life of a man, even of a great man. And it is so sometimes--perhaps you know this better than I--in the soul life of a nature. Must we always sink again after we have soared? Must we do that? Is it an immutable law?"

"Perhaps for a time. Surely, surely, not forever," said Uniacke.

His guest's conversation and personality began to stir him more and more powerfully. It seemed so new and vital an experience to be helped to think, to have suggestion poured into him now, after his many lonely island evenings.

"Ah, well, who can say?" said the painter. "I had the best for a time--long enough for my immediate purpose; for now I painted, and I felt that I was enabled by little Jack to do fine work. It seems he told his drinking mother in Drury Lane, in his lingo, of the wonders of the sea. This I learnt later. And, in his occasional, and now somewhat fleeting visits to Trafalgar Square, he explained to the emaciated little girls, in the shadow of Nelson, the fact that there was to be found, and seen, somewhere, water of a very different kind from that splashing and churning in the dingy basins guarded by the lions.

Meanwhile I painted little Jack, all the time keeping alive in his nature the sea change, which was, in the end, to bring into my pocket 1,000 in hard cash."

Sir Graham said this with an indescribable cold irony and bitterness.

"I can hear that money jingling in the wind, upon my soul, Uniacke," he added, frowning heavily.

The young clergyman was touched by a pa.s.sing thought of the painter's notorious ill-health.

"Before the picture was finished--quite completed--the impish child began to waken in the wonder-child, and I had to comply with the demands of this new-born youngster. Our conversation--little Jack's and mine--drifted from the sea itself to the men and ships that travel it, to the deeds of men that are done upon it; raidings of Moorish pirates, expeditions to the Spanish Main in old days, to the whaling grounds in new, and so forth. When we got to this sort of thing my work was nearly done and could not be spoiled. So I let myself go, and talked several boys' books in those afternoons. I was satisfied, d.a.m.nably satisfied--your pardon, Uniacke--with my work, and I was heedless of all else. That is the cursed, selfish instinct of the artist; that is the inadvertence of which we spoke formerly. You remember?"

Uniacke nodded.

"My picture was before me and a child's budding soul, and I thought of nothing at all but my picture. That's sin, if you like. Little Jack, in his jersey and squeaky boots, with his pale face and great eyes, was my prey on canvas and my 1,000. I hugged myself and told him wild stories of bold men on the sea. Uniacke, do you believe in a personal devil?"

"I do," replied the young clergyman, simply.

"Well, if there is one, depend upon it he sometimes requires an introduction before he can make a soul's acquaintance. I effected the introduction between him and my wonder-child when I sat in the twilight and told Jack those tales of the sea. The devil came to the boy in my studio, and I opened the door and bowed him in. And once he knew the boy, he stayed with him, Uniacke, and whispered in his ear--'Desert your duty. Life calls you. The sea calls you. Go to it. Desert your duty!'

Even a dirty little London boy can have a duty and be aware of it, I suppose. Eh?"

"Yes. I think that. But--"

"Wait a moment. I've nearly finished my tale, though I'm living the sequel to it at this moment. One day I completed my picture; the last touch was given. I stood back, I looked at my canvas. I felt I had done well; my sea urchin was actually what I had imagined. I had succeeded in that curious effort--to accomplish which many of us give our lives--in the effort to project perfectly my thought, to give the exactly right form to my imagination. I exulted. Yes, I had one grand overwhelming moment of exultation. Then I turned from my completed picture. 'Jack,'

I cried out, 'little Jack, I've made you famous. D'you know what that means?'

"I took the little chap by the shoulders and placed him before the picture. 'See yourself,' I added. The boy stared at the sea urchin, at those painted eyes full of the sea wonder, at those parted lips, that mouth whispering to the sea. His nose twisted slightly.

"'That ain't me,' he said. 'That ain't me.'

"I looked down at him, and knew that he spoke the truth; for already the wonder-child was fading, even had faded. And a little adventurer, a true boy, stood before me, a boy to pull ropes, lend a hand at an oar, whistle in the rigging, gaze with keen dancing eyes through a cold dawn to catch the first sight of a distant land. I looked, understood, didn't care; although the poetry of wonder had faded into the prose of mere desire.

"'It isn't you, Jack?' I answered. 'Well, perhaps not. But it is what you were, what you may be again some day.'

"He shook his head.

"'No, it ain't me. Go on tellin' about them pirits.'

"And, full of gladness, a glory I had never known before, I went on till it was dark. I said good-by to little Jack on the doorstep. When he had gone, I stood for a moment listening to the sound of his footsteps dying away down the road. I did not know that I should never hear them again.

For, although I did not want Jack any more as a model, I was resolved not to lose sight of him. To him I owed much. I would pay my debt by making the child's future very different from his past. I had vague thoughts of educating him carefully for some reasonable life. I believe, Uniacke, yes, on my soul, I believe that I had bland visions of the sea-urchin being happy and prosperous on a high stool in an office, at home with ledgers, a contented little clerk, whose horizon was bounded by an A B C shop, and whose summer pastime was fly-killing. My big work finished, a sort of eager idiocy seized me. I was as a man drugged. My faculties must have been besotted, I was in a dream. Three days afterwards I woke from it and learnt that there may be grandeur, yes, grandeur, dramatic in its force, tragic in its height and depth, in a tipsy old woman of Drury Lane."

"Jack's mother?"

The painter nodded. All the time he had been talking the wind had steadily increased, and the uproar of the embracing sea had been growing louder. The windows rattled like musketry, the red curtains shook as if in fear. Now there came a knock at the door.

"Come in," said the clergyman.

The maid appeared.

"Do you want anything more to-night, sir?"