Widdershins Part 36

Secretively he had kept one package until the last. He now removed its wrappings and set it against a chair.

_"There!"_ he cried. "I'll thank ye, Harrison, for your opinion of _that!"_

It was the portrait Andriaovsky had refused to sell me--a portrait of himself.

The portrait was the climax of the display. The Lancastrian still talked; but I, profoundly moved, mechanically gathered up the drawings from the floor and returned them to their proper packages and folios. I was dining at home, alone, that evening, and for form's sake I asked this faithful dog of Andriaovsky's to share my meal; but he excused himself--he was dining with Hallard and Connolly. When the drawings were all put away, all save that portrait, he gave an inquisitive glance round my library.

It was the same glance as Maschka had given when she had feared to intrude on my time; but Schofield did these things with a much more heavy hand. He departed, but not before telling me that even my mansion contained such treasures as it had never held before.

That evening, after glancing at Schofield's "scenario," I carefully folded it up again for return to him, lest when the book should appear he should miss the pleasure of saying that I had had his guidance but had disregarded it; then I sat down at my writing-table and took out the loose notes I had made. I made other jottings, each on a blank sheet for subsequent amplification; and the sheets overspread the large leather-topped table and thrust one another up the standard of the incandescent with the pearly silk shade. The firelight shone low and richly in the dusky s.p.a.ces of the large apartment; and the thick carpet and the double doors made the place so quiet that I could hear my watch ticking in my pocket.

I worked for an hour; and then, for the purpose of making yet other notes, I rose, crossed the room, and took down the three or four ill.u.s.trated books to which, in the earlier part of his career, Andriaovsky had put his name. I carried them to the table, and twinkled as I opened the first of them. It was a book of poems, and in making the designs for them Andriaovsky had certainly _not_ found for himself.

Almost any one of the "Art Shades," as he had called them, could have done the thing equally well, and I twinkled again. I did not propose to have much mercy on _that_. Already Schofield's words had given birth to a suspicion in my mind--that Andriaovsky, in permitting these fellows, Hallard, Connolly, and the rest, to suppose that he "thought highly" of them and their work, had been giving play to that malicious humour of his; and they naturally did not see the joke. That joke, too, was between himself, dead, and me, preparing to write his "Life." As if he had been there to hear me, I chuckled, and spoke in a low voice.

"You were pulling their legs, Michael, you know. A little rough on them you were. But there's a book here of yours that I'm going to tell the truth about. You and I won't pretend to one another. It's a rotten book, and both you and I know it...."

I don't know what it was that caused me suddenly to see just then something that I had been looking at long enough without seeing--that portrait of himself that I had set leaning against the back of a chair at the end of my writing-table. It stood there, just within the soft penumbra of shadow cast by the silk-shaded light. The canvas had been enlarged, the seam of it clumsily sewn by Andriaovsky's own hand; but in that half-light the rough ridge of paint did not show, and I confess that the position and effect of the thing startled me for a moment. Had I cared to play a trick with my fancy I could have imagined the head wagging from side to side, with such rage and fire was it painted. He had had the temerity to dash a reflection across one of the gla.s.ses of his spectacles, concealing the eye behind it. The next moment I had given a short laugh.

"So you're there, are you?... Well, I know you agree very heartily about that book of poems. Heigho! If I remember rightly, you made more money out of that book than out of the others put together. But I'm going to tell the truth about it. _I_ know better, you know...."

Chancing, before I turned in that night, to reopen one of his folios, I came across a drawing, there by accident, I don't doubt, that confirmed me in my suspicion that Andriaovsky had had his quiet joke with Schofield, Hallard, Connolly and Co. It was a sketch of Schofield's, imitative, deplorable, a dreadful show-up of incapacity. Well enough "drawn," in a sense, it was ... and I remembered how Andriaovsky had ever urged that "drawing," of itself, did not exist. I winked at the portrait.

I saw his point. He himself had no peer, and, rather than invite comparison with stars of the second magnitude, he chose his intimates from among the peddlers of the wares that had the least possible connection with his Art. He, too, had understood that the Compromise must be entirely accepted or totally refused; and while, in the divergence of our paths, he had done the one thing and I the other, we had each done it thoroughly, with vigour, and with persistence, and each could esteem the other, if not as a co-worker, at least as an honourable and out-and-out opposite.

III

Within a fortnight I was so deep in my task that, in the realest sense, the greater part of my life was in the past. The significance of those extraordinary peregrinations of ours had been in the opportunity they had afforded for a communion of brain and spirit of unusual rarity; and all this determined to my work with the acc.u.mulated force of its long penning-up. I have spoken of Andriaovsky's contempt for such as had the conception of their work that it was something they "did" as distinct from something they "were"; and unless I succeed in making it plain that, not as a mere figure of speech and loose hyperbole, but starkly and literally, Andriaovsky _was_ everything he did, my tale will be pointless.

There was not one of the basic facts of life--of Faith, Honour, Truth-speaking, Falsehood, Betrayal, Sin--that he did not turn, not to moral interpretations, as others do, but to the holy purposes of his n.o.ble and pa.s.sionate Art. For any man, Sin is only mortal when it is Sin against that which he knows to be immortally true; and the things Andriaovsky knew to be immortally true were the things that he had gone down into the depths in order to bring forth and place upon his paper or canvas. These things are not for the perusal of many. Unless you love the things that he loved with a fervour comparable in kind, if not in degree, with his own, you may not come near them. "Truth, 'the highest thing a man may keep,'" he said, "cannot be brought down; a man only attains it by proving his right to it"; and I think I need not further state his views on the democratisation of Art. Of any result from the elaborate processes of Art-education he held out no hope whatever. "It is in a man, or it isn't," he ever declared; "if it is, he must bring it out for himself; if it isn't, let him turn to something useful and have done with it." I need not press the point that in these things he was almost a solitary.

He made of these general despotic principles the fiercest personal applications. I have heard his pa.s.sionate outbreak of "Thief! Liar!

Fool!" over a drawing when it has seemed to him that a man has not vouched with the safety of his immortal soul for the shapes and lines he has committed to it. I have seen him get into such a rage with the eyes of the artist upon him. I have heard the ice and vinegar of his words when a good man, for money, has consented to modify and emasculate his work; and there lingers in my memory his side of a telephone conversation in which he told a publisher who had suggested that he should do the same thing precisely what he thought of him. And on the other hand, he once walked from Aldgate to Putney Hill, with a loose heel on one of his boots, to see a man of whom he had seen but a single drawing. See him he did, too, in spite of the man's footman, his liveried parlourmaid, and the daunting effect of the electric brougham at the door.

"He's a good man," he said to me afterwards, ruefully looking at the place where his boot-heel had been. "You've got to take your good where you find it. I don't care whether he's a rich amateur or skin-and-grief in a garret as long as he's got the stuff in him. n.o.body else could have fetched me up from the East End this afternoon.... So long; see you in a week or so--"

This was the only time I ever knew him break that sacred time in which he celebrated each year the Pa.s.sover and the Feast of Tabernacles. I doubt whether this observance of the ritual of his Faith was of more essential importance to him than that other philosophical religion towards which he sometimes leaned. I have said what his real religion was.

But to the "Life."

With these things, and others, as a beginning, I began to add page to page, phase to phase; and, in a time the shortness of which astonished myself, I had pretty well covered the whole of the first ten years of our friendship. Maschka called rather less, and Schofield rather more frequently, than I could have wished; and my surmise that he, at least, was in love with her, quickly became a certainty. This was to be seen when they called together.

It was when they came together that something else also became apparent.

This was their slightly derisive att.i.tude towards the means by which I had attained my success. It was not the less noticeable that it took the form of compliments on the outward and visible results. Singly I could manage them; together they were inclined to get a little out of hand.

I would have taxed them fairly and squarely with this, singly or together, but for one thing--the beautiful ease with which the "Life" was proceeding. Never had I felt so completely _en rapport_ with my subject.

So beautifully was the thing running that I had had the idle fancy of some actual urge from Andriaovsky himself; and each night, before sitting down to work, I set his portrait at my desk's end, as if it had been some kind of an observance. The most beautiful result of all was, that I felt what I had not felt for five years--that I too was not "doing" my work, but actually living and being it. At times I took up the sheets I had written as ignorant of their contents as if they had proceeded from another pen--so freshly they came to me. And once, I vow, I found, in my own handwriting, a Polish name, that I might (it is true) have subconsciously heard at some time or other, but that stirred no chord in my memory even when I saw it written. Maschka checked and confirmed it afterwards; and I did not tell her by what odd circ.u.mstance it had issued from my pen.

The day did come, however, when I found I must have it out with Schofield about this superciliousness I have mentioned. The _Falchion_ had just begun to print the third series of my _Martin Renard_; and this had been made the occasion of another of Schofield's ponderous compliments. I acknowledged it with none too much graciousness; and then he said:

"I've na doubt, Harrison, that by this time the famous sleuth-hound of crime has become quite a creature of flesh and blood to ye."

It was the tone as much as the words that riled me; and I replied that his doubts or the lack of them were a privacy with which I did not wish to meddle. From being merely a bore the fellow was rapidly becoming insolent.

"But I opine he'll get wearisome now and then, and in that case poor Michael's 'Life' will come as a grand relaxation," he next observed.

If I meant to have it out, here was my opportunity.

"I should have thought you'd have traced a closer connection than that between the two things," I remarked.

He shot a quick glance at me from beneath his s.h.a.ggy russet brows.

"How so? I see varry little connection," he said suspiciously.

"There's this connection--that while you speak with some freedom of what I do, you are quite willing to take advantage of it when it serves your turn."

"'Advantage,' Harrison?" he said slowly.

"Of the advertis.e.m.e.nt _Martin Renard_ gives you. I must point out that you condone a thing when you accept the benefit of it. Either you shouldn't have come to me at all, or you should deny yourself the gratification of these slurs."

"Slurrrrs?" he repeated loweringly.

"Both of you--you and Miss Andriaovsky, or Maschka as I call her, _tout court_. Don't suppose I don't know as well as you do the exact worth of my 'sleuth-hound,' as you call him. You didn't come to me solely because I knew Andriaovsky well; you came because I've got the ear of the public also; and I tell you plainly that, however much you dislike it, Michael's fame as far as I'm of any use to him, depends on the popularity of _Martin Renard."_

He shook his big head. "This is what I feared," he said.

"More," I continued, "you can depend upon it that Michael, wherever he is, knows all about that."

"Ay, ay," he said sagely, "I mis...o...b.. your own artistic soul's only to be saved by the writing of poor Michael's 'Life,' Harrison."

"Leave that to me and Michael; we'll settle that. In the meantime, if you don't like it, write and publish the 'Life' yourself."

He bent his brows on me.

"It's precisely what I wanted to do from the varry first," he said. "If you'd cared to accept my symposium in the spirit in which it was offered, I cannot see that the 'Life' would have suffered. But now, when you're next in need of my services, ye'll mebbe send for me."

He took up his hat. I a.s.sured him, and let him take it in what sense he liked, that I would do so; and he left me.

Not for one single moment did I intend that they should bounce me like that. With or without their sanction and countenance, I intended to write and publish that "Life." Schofield--in my own house too--had had the advantage that a poor and ill-dressed man has over one who is not poor and ill-dressed; but my duty first of all was neither to him nor to Maschka, but to my friend.

The worst of it was, however, that I had begun dimly to suspect that the Lancastrian had hit at least one nail on the head. "Your artistic soul's only to be saved by writing poor Michael's 'Life,'" he had informed me... and it was truer than I found it pleasant to believe.

Perhaps, after all, my first duty was not to Andriaovsky, but to myself.

I could have kicked myself that the fool had been perspicacious enough to see it, but that did not alter the fact. I saw that in the sense in which Andriaovsky understood Sin, I had sinned....

My only defence lay in the magnitude of my sin. I had sinned thoroughly, out-and-out, and with a will. It had been the only respectable way--Andriaovsky's own way when he had cut the company of an Academician to hobn.o.b with a vagabond. I had at least inst.i.tuted no comparison, lowered no ideal, was innocent of the accursed att.i.tude of facing-both-ways that degrades all lovely and moving things. I was, by a paradox, too black a sinner not to hope for redemption....

I fell into a long musing on these things....

Had any of the admirers of _Martin Renard_ entered the library of his author that night he would have seen an interesting thing. He would have seen the creator of that idol of clerks and messenger-lads and fourth-form boys frankly putting the case before a portrait propped up on a chair. He would have heard that popular author haranguing, pleading, curiously on his defence, turning the thing this way and that.