Bernard Capes

“ The priest, looming large in the mist in a great frieze overcoat, and with a round clerical hat of dark felt put back from his head like an extinguished halo, greeted the artist with an ineffable enlargement of the smile that was habitual to his round impassive face. His eyes were half-buried in jocund wrinkles, his nose was small, his little juicy mouth seemed to eject phrases, like cherry-stones, with a delicate relish. He put out a plump gloved hand, and touched Derrick on the arm.
"Pardon me," he said; "an artist? The artist?" ”

“ Half an hour later the two stood together in Derrick's studio. The man of science dwelt a long time before the portrait, profoundly abstracted and absorbed. Presently he turned round, a light in his eyes.
"It is curious," he said; "a most striking similarity. This is the work of a colour-blind person, but possessed of a vision beyond the common understanding. No technical knowledge is needed to recognise the fact. It impresses at once, as something quite unusual, yet obviously the actual presentment of a thing penetrated and seen by him, invisible, or at best greatly obscured to us. ”

“ He had no vision for his surroundings; he knew only that he was following her up a dusky stairway, that thick pulse still hammering in his heart and brain, and that suddenly they were in a little white bedroom—her own. There were soft curtains there and flowers and fragrance. The sweet atmosphere stole into his senses and intoxicated them; his blood raced in his veins and half blinded his sight. He saw her dimly—she was down on her knees by an opened drawer—and the madness in him was moving to leap and claim her thus, when she rose to her feet. ”

“ Legend and fact have too often declined to distinguish the possession of an artist's soul by his subject from material passion. Pygmalion, no doubt, felt at first no more than an abstract interest in the figure he foresaw embedded in the ivory. It was when he began to shape substance out of the shadow that he began to realise that his model was his own transcendent desire. So Laurence unconsciously entertained the image that was to come to possess his soul with the passion of its loveliness. ”

“ If a man sought to emerge from the thraldom of ink and paper, he could not do it by more cautious and gradual means. He was feeling his way.
Presently he paused on the edge of the cliff and looked about him. His 'tools' were slung in a case over his shoulder; his hands, a good stick gripped in one of them, were bare; he was not the man to concede a point to the rigours of frost and fog. There was little to cherish in all the view but a sense of stark isolation. Melancholy is the reigning spirit of all that haunted, crumbling coast. ”

“ But Dolly could not smile. Her plumes were ruffled. She was often doubtful in her small heart of her capacity for understanding, and assimilating her own nature to this strange mysterious spirit whom her young beauty had captivated. And irony, however playful, is always alarming to little minds. She got into her things, and departed with the briefest of adieux.
"Poor little elf," said Derrick to himself, when she was gone. "There will be a note from her to-night, all ill-spelt penitence and supplication." ”

“ Her softness, her prettiness, her irreproachable ordinariness in fact, had appealed like balm to his exacerbated emotions, and he had straightway fluttered and flattered her by an impulsive proposal. Offended pride had its part, no doubt, in the impossible contract; but the hunger newly created in his being was principally responsible for it. Passion is a prolific weed when once sown in virgin soil, and, though it may never flower, assumes thenceforth and for ever the biologic cast. The hopeless necessity of the feminine had intruded itself into Laurence's philosophy. ”

“ In the houses there are noises at night, not to be accounted to rats or gusty chinmeys; in twilit rooms presences are felt, and the touch of soft cold fingers; in the deep troughs of the waves outside gleam shadows of ruins and sudden deriding eyes. The dead scream in stormy weather on the buried ramparts of the old towns for miles away. They lie where they fell when the sea caught and overwhelmed them, lapping up a principality in a night.
From the first Derrick had been fascinated by the place. ”

“ AFTER THE RAIN "My de-ar," said Father Appleyard, "all religion is safe in the hands of a good man. We may trust our souls to the honest heretic, so long as he be no heretic from love."
"I am none at least," said Derrick. "Driven from its substance, I sought its shadow, and even rested in it for a time. I will confess, Father."
"Absolvo te," said the priest. "Thou hast atoned and art forgiven. She is at peace, my son." ”

“ THE FROZEN POND "THROUGHOUT my early artistic development," once wrote Laurence Derrick to a very intimate friend, "I suffered from a peculiar difficulty—an inability to see things as all others appeared to see them. I had always to force myself into line, as it were, with alien perceptions in order to be understood; to distinguish between the positive and the adventitious in recognised forms; to define for myself the limits of the actual as patent to the common view. ”

“ Talent coruscated in their ranks, and was not allowed to hide itself under a bushel. A competition of some sort was organised for each supper, and an inflexible condition of attendance lay in contributing to it. Any refusal entailed appalling penalties; but the general cleverness was such that refusals were unknown. Inability was the only peril; one having full license to say what one liked and drink what one liked, the brain could not always command the hand. But impudence generally prevailed somehow.
Derrick was greeted with cheers on his appearance, in homage to his distinction. ”

“ Love and Genius in combination must surely be producing something to justify such a vision, and she indulged it to its full. She was going to be made famous as she had never been yet—as a lady as well as a beauty, the chosen of an inspired gentleman- artist.
Derrick knew nothing about the girl's relations; never troubled himself with a thought of them; just dreamed and drifted. But, in deference to imaginary respectabilities, he always insisted upon Dolly's being accompanied during the sittings by an adoring professional friend, Miss Vickers. ”

“ Why, surely this: that, if so convicted of such an affliction, he, an artist to the depths of his being, would know himself for the first time defrauded of his full birthright of beauty; would for ever be straining his soul to attain the light which to all others was a simple condition of their existence. Ignorance is only blissful so long as it is unconscious of its own limitations; but here would be a limitation which, did it exist, must be accepted as final. He had understood so much from the lecturer. ”

“ The commonplace remains always its own best protector; it becomes so unspeakably vulgar in intrigue. Dolly, indeed, was wholly safe in her gentleman lover's keeping. To cultivate her nymph-like prettiness like a flower was his easy interest. He hardly thought of her but in the abstract, as one thinks in midwinter or the dog-days of the time of daffodils and primroses. He wore her gratefully in his buttonhole, and her small cool fragrance never reached his inner senses. ”

“ He looked an educated quidnunc of a fellow, and was in fact the bailiff or steward to some neighbouring estate. He had a sharp face, with restless lips and eyes, and a muffler about his throat; and his lean form was buttoned into a thick tight-waisted overcoat.
"O!" said Derrick. "Good evening. I wonder if I might hear it?"
"No objection in the world," said the stranger. His speech was dry and staccato; he put his hand over the counter, and, unbuttoning the bar door, walked in. "Ah!" he said; "it's like slipping into bed out of the cold. ”

“ Thus, to my abnormal vision, every human being was possessed of an aura, a luminous emanation, varying in its density, and eloquent somehow of the nature it enshrined; and every beast was likewise adorned, though in a lesser and duller degree. Moreover, I seemed ever conscious of a spiritual environment, now perilous, now sympathetic, but generally emotional, whose invisibility found me entirely without the scepticism common to those who believe in no evidence but such as their senses afford them. ”

“ Do you dare to rob me of my soul, of my art that is my soul, and refuse me all restitution? You dare because, with the ineffable meanness of your sex, you know that you can trust to my honour as a gentleman not to enforce a return. ”

“ It stood large in the grey mist, a silent shrouded phantom. A feeling of the unreality of all things stole into Derrick's being; he seemed to mount on air. Then came vacancy and shadow.
They were in the house, and alone. No sound or sign of other human being reached them from anywhere.
"We are alone," she whispered. "Not many are needed to take care of this little corner in which I live; and those few are absent. ”

“ Owing to that aforesaid compromise with terms, he has learnt to adapt his understanding to the accepted classification of tones and colours, while secretly in his heart, perhaps, marvelling over the minute, hardly discernible differentiation; but he does not know that anyone else sees other than himself. Yet what, according to our vision, must the world mean to him, what a melancholy wan affair—of soft cool half-tones at its best, perhaps, but bloodless, and always smeared and stained with brown, like the streaks of decomposed sunset in a Japanese print. ”

“ An ancient story now, so put away, so staled under the dust of a whole decade, that anyone seeking to disinter and restore it to its once significance must needs start at a great disadvantage. Perhaps it was a natural predilection for old things, for their mellowness and their mystery, for the tone which past deeds no less than past materials acquire from long keeping, which was in some sort responsible for Laurence Derrick's feeling ”

“ A man, holding a great hound in a leash, was standing close behind him—so close, that for the instant Derrick's heart leapt as in the shock of a betrayal. Then he laughed, lowered his block, and slewed round upon his seat. ”

“ Norman was in the way to be one of the most brilliant black and white young artists of his generation. He had come to the front latterly with a bound, after, it was said, years of struggling obscurity. There was always something rather fantastic and cruel in his work, despite its humour. He had that odd uncanny twist in his brain which, as in the case of Hood, could find fun in a street-accident and nothing unsavoury in the juxtaposition of skulls and roses.
The figure which Derrick regarded appeared to be that of a sort of Jacobean halberdier; it certainly suggested nothing modern ”

“ As what?"
"It reminded me of nothing so much," said the friend, in a burst of desperate candour, "as a decomposed mermaid."
Derrick laughed outright.
"Well," he said, "I'm not going to send it to the show. Will that do?"
"It's something," said Miss Vickers, obviously relieved. "But is it really, Mr. Derrick, as you see Dolly?"
"Yes, really."
"That makes things difficult—I'm afraid. It can't be very pleasant, now can it, to picture oneself as looking like that in one's own lover's eyes." ”

“ He was born to loneliness and self-sufficiency—a virile, potent spirit, nevertheless, and no truckler to Destiny. Already at this early age he was famous, and without a shadow of arrogance. Socially a shy man, in all that pertained to his art he was the embodiment of independence and individuality. ”

“ Broadly speaking Derrick had failed to identify, according to the accepted understanding, any of the hues into which the quality of red entered directly or indirectly. The blues, yellows and greens had been rightly named by him, but classified according to an order strangely differing from the orthodox. Other tests had produced a like result.
He took his sentence standing, and like a man.
"This defect, this lacuna," he said quietly, "bears no relation, you tell me, to the ordinary qualities of human vision?"
"None whatever. It occurs among the longest and the shortest sighted people." ”

“ THE LECTURE "The difficulty," the lecturer was saying, "in identifying cases of colour-blindness consists primarily in the difficulty of convincing its victims that they are mistaken in anything but the accepted classification of terms. They are disposed to imagine that an incomprehensible fuss is made about certain distinctions of tone, which distinctions are to them so nearly imperceptible as to deserve no more than the faintest shadow of a title to the name. ”

“ Given, then, his contemporary thesis in the shape of some chaotic enormity, it becomes the business of the artist to extract from it a figure of grace, his more or less success in doing which, through earning him the applause and the sincerest flattery of fashion, induces in him an attachment to his own creations, so that what he began by deriding he ends by admiring. ”

“ It is a salt, remote, wind-blown little place, one of the many, remnants of a once-swarming life, that dot at long intervals that stretch of eroded coast. Loneliness, quietude, grey antiquity are its settled features ”