Louis Zangwill

“ And then followed Wyndham's awakening; taking him with the force of cataclysm, and dashing him out of his drowsy mood of contentment. Evidently the poor child was not living in this world. If her feet touched earth, her head at any rate was in a heaven of its own. She poured herself out with a lyric fervour that was like the song of a lark for rapture. All the years of her life she had saved herself for this, not frittered her emotions away in flirtations or frivolous love-affairs—as the soberer Wyndham now reflected. Her ideals were as unsullied as in her childhood. ”

“ In the world outside there beat a life that was strenuous, entrancing, dramatic—the struggle of the realm of affairs, the pomp and colour of courts and society, the important events of politics, the field of view that opened in the novels, or lay spread behind the footlights of the theatres. Wyndham belonged to all this brilliant universe, had walked with firm tread amid it all, breathing its airs with an assurance born of right and nature. No poverty could destroy his inalienable privileges, could render him less by a hair's breadth ”

“ He knew now that he was face to face with the actuality that lay before him in all its horror. An engagement of convenience! He would have given the world to recall it. His eyes saw clear again—the enthusiasm that swirled and whirled around him had thus far sustained him: vibrations of romance had arisen within him, had resounded with a certain music. But these letters of Alice, this crescendo series, each soaring beyond the other, had illumined the horrible poverty of his own emotion. The freshness of her note was a revelation and yet an agony to him. ”

“ We must make things contribute to our happiness while we may. All these crowds of people have no idea that they are there for our entertainment; they do not know, poor things, that we have willed they should be masquerading to please us. They have the delusion they are going about their own affairs, and they see only an ordinary omnibus, full on the roof—that is, if they cared to look at us. To them what more commonplace than a journey on an omnibus from Hyde Park Corner to Aldgate Pump? Yet, to us, what a whimsical universe it is! ”

“ And the mother was as fluttered as her daughter at this sudden appeal. "Alice looks lovely," she broke out. "You know so well how to make the best of people. I've never seen her so beautiful."
"It's the beautiful accessories that produce the effect," stammered Alice.
"They certainly produce some effect," conceded Wyndham. "That is why they are there. But it's you I'm painting, Miss Robinson. You are the picture, and the picture will be you—and not the surroundings."
He had arranged his palette, and fell to with the brush in earnest, bidding her speak the moment she felt fatigued. ”

“ Still staggering under the magnificent impression of his brilliancy as an artist, Mrs. Robinson summoned her courage, and suggested that, if he hadn't any other engagement that evening, he might as well dine with them as dine alone. The argument struck him as forcible, and he accepted with an unhesitating simplicity that won her heart still further. He was thanking her for her kindness, but she raised her hands in horrified deprecation to check him.
"Kindness," she cried. "Not at all, Mr. Wyndham. We know we are not worthy of the honour you do us." ”

“ The brilliance and green avenues of Paris beckoned him; his blood beat pleasurably. And then of course there was his portrait of Lady Betty in the Salon. What better shrine for a pilgrimage!
He would linger a little in Paris, then proceed further South. He was not of the great crowd that refuses to venture in those regions during the summer. He knew well how to adapt himself to the conditions, and the lands of the South would be soon in their full glory. His imagination dwelt on the prospect, and sunshine broke in on his mood. ”

“ Robinson's tastes were the tastes of the great public—nay, of even the better classes that went to the galleries. Like him, they dwelt entirely on the illustrative aspect of painting, and were altogether swayed by the humanity of a picture, by its dramatic or anecdotal interest. No wonder some of his fellow-craftsmen had been driven to the opposite extreme, and tried to rule out humanity altogether. But the human side of art need not be necessarily on a low plane, or descend to mere anecdote. In his hands art should be the vehicle of real intellect and emotion. ”

“ Wyndham hesitated. "There is smoking below. You may not like it."
"There are other women going down," she insisted. "I can't resist the temptation."
It was an average type of City lunching place, but Lady Betty had never before tried the sort of thing, so Wyndham fell in with her whim. Down the stairs they went into a spacious cellar, lighted with jets of gas, though the sun was still shining outside. Wreaths and clouds of smoke floated in the atmosphere, and a clatter of dominoes and crockery dominated the buzz of voices that rose from the chaos of people at the marble tables. ”

“ Your honour, dearest, is precious to me. The thought of your perfect loyalty to Alice will help me. I only ask you to remember the high standard I have set for you. Strive for the best; let your watchword be 'No compromise!' You will let me go now, darling. Say you understand my motives, and forgive me if they were mistaken. Perhaps, instead of mending things, I have only added mischief to mischief. I throw myself on your generosity and magnanimity. Promise me you will be the truest husband to her, that you will do everything in your power to promote her happiness. ”

“ Poor Wyndham! She told herself she had the most perfect understanding of his mind. She held him in honour as a noble gentleman, and knew surely that he would fret his heart away rather than wound her by word or deed. She would have put her hand in the fire for the certainty that he would never withdraw from the compact; that he would go through with the marriage, and die rather than relax the effort to simulate perfect happiness in their after life. ”

“ Wilfully she shut her eyes to all that she understood only too well, and surrendered herself to the spell and wonder of the vista that opened before her. It was the best thing that life had brought her, she told herself, and in an impulse of pagan desire she was impelled to wring from it the last drop of passionate happiness it could afford her. Her love for him reached out into new depths; the dull, despairing, impossible love of before became a fever, a frenzy, a great yearning passion that must pour itself out or kill her. ”

“ Alice Robinson, the granddaughter of a carpenter, seriously beloved by an aristocrat with all the graces and culture, an artist, moreover, for whom beauty was always the primal appeal! She—Alice Robinson—had been under this wondrous delusion! Was there anything more ridiculous since men and women were? Her laughter could not be repressed, but it rang out through the studio weirdly, with a strange note of hardness and bitterness, and somehow it echoed and re-echoed through all the house, coming back to her mockingly from the empty rooms beneath her. ”

“ There was no one to attend on him; no one to care for him. Even a charwoman was a rarity at last, and Wyndham could be seen shopping almost furtively in the adjoining streets, and bearing back his own provisions to the studio. Miss Robinson divined, under their wrappings, the tin of sardines, the potted tongue, the loaf of bread. She knew that he never took a meal out now, and that, if he left the studio in the daytime, it was only to escape from the misery of solitude and hopelessness. ”

“ Yet when he had told her of his meeting with Lady Lakeden again, and of the new portrait he had engaged upon, no shade of jealousy had arisen in her. Her sense of the calamity that had befallen Lady Lakeden was so infinitely distressing that she could have fallen upon her knees and prayed. To lose a dear husband after only a few months of wedded happiness!—what more crushing grief could a woman's destiny hold? She shut her eyes and shuddered, as she tried to realise the depths of its meaning. It seemed to her that no wife with the least spark of womanhood could recover from such a blow ”

“ Wyndham was unconvinced. "If you take away the poetry out of life, the rest of it is too hideous to bother about. If a man marries to make himself comfortable, he's no better than a contented pig wallowing in muck. Rather than surrender the ideal, I'd give up marriage altogether, stand by my guns, and die fighting."
"We artists are a damned sentimental lot," shouted Sadler. He lifted a juicy morsel to his mouth. "This chateau's jolly good, isn't it?"
"Excellent," admitted Wyndham.
"Now you see I wasn't exaggerating when I said it's as good here as at Lavenue's." Sadler swallowed his mouthful. ”

“ For the second time he and Lady Betty had come together, only voluntarily to part that they might not disturb the happiness of this other life! How they had tortured themselves; how Lady Betty had sought deliberate martyrdom, staying near him only long enough to school him to perfect loyalty to Alice! "Whilst I was fretting my heart away," his lips murmured, "lest I should wound her with a chance word, she was vibrating again towards her own kind, and was planning her retreat. Surely the gods are pulling the strings and making us poor puppets dance for their amusement!" ”

“ Then, whilst the old man rested, Wyndham trimmed his lamp; and presently the glooms vanished before a cosy illumination. Mr. Robinson at once began to scrutinise the studio on all sides with amusingly deep interest. The old Normandy presses, the model's throne, the giant easel, the well-worn Persian carpet, the hosts of canvasses of all sizes standing with their faces to the wall, the disorder and informality everywhere—all seemed to strike for him a note of youth and gaiety, to animate him with a sense of a new romantic universe. ”

“ Wyndham was glad of this refreshment; he had been in too uncertain a mood to do more than gulp down his coffee at breakfast, and the raw air had roused a craving for some sort of sustenance—a desire for stimulation rather than a keen hunger. He swallowed a glass of the wine, then began to nibble a sandwich slowly; but his mind was still in his work. He half-knew that the great folding door at the bottom of the room had opened, that somebody had entered. ”

“ You're only a boy! But I'm forty, and I tell you I'd give up the interest of the drama for a safe income, and think it a damned good bargain. I get along, I sell my stuff, but I tell you I sweat and groan."
"I admit I should like my old income back again," said Wyndham; "not for itself, but for the sake of the splendid freedom to work."
"That's just my point," shouted Sadler. "What the hell do I care about money for itself? And I tell you what, my boy, the right thing for an artist is to marry a woman with money." He struck the table hard with his big fist, making the whole restaurant rattle. ”

“ It was an irony of ironies that, after his great surrender, his pride should still flame up unconquered. Before the moral tragedy of love yoked to mockery, he might bow his head in resignation; but Miss Robinson's fortune loomed up as a ridiculous and contemptible complication in a situation already nigh impossible.
The metaphor of the vulture was often back in his mind now! The heap of carrion!—he had stooped for the sake of it, and it was now even more loathsome than his former morbid perception of it. His poverty seemed suddenly unbearable. ”

“ This great display of Wyndham's work astonished and dazzled them. Above all, the amazing pièce de résistance of the afternoon won their obeisance to the genius. They stared at the vast canvas in wonder, at once conquered by this crowd of tattered labour intermingled with the silk hats and frock-coats of Bond Street, the smart brougham rolling along with its aristocratic occupant and her poodle, the pillared structure in the background, the vista of roadway, the trees and the foliage. ”

“ In the natural resulting intimacy between artist and sitter, Miss Robinson expanded, opened out her mind; at first timidly and tentatively, ultimately with freedom and confidence. She confessed that her experience of life had been nothing at all, since she had always lived in quiet shelter. Her unsophisticated simplicity was certainly engaging; he could see that she was a sheet entirely unwritten upon, that her soul was as naïve and trusting as her outward being. She was refreshingly a child of nature—no bewildering complexity here—no shadow of affectation. ”

“ Undoubtedly there was a substratum of truth and good sense in the views so stoutly and passionately maintained by Sadler; only Sadler imagined it was possible to compromise, to step down from the ideal and yet find great happiness. He himself would give up the dream of happiness in the ideal sense: his would be frankly a case of convenience, though were it not for the many virtues of Miss Robinson, his mind would never have become reconciled to it. No! not even were she as rich as Croesus. He must do that amount of justice to himself. ”

“ What wonder if in the course of so harsh a journeying, as he lives and breathes in his own universe of striving, his precise moral relation to things external grows dim, intangible; and, if money one day give out, he clutches at any crust for sustenance.
Wyndham began his journeyings. His advantages were many and obvious; his disadvantages subtle and unseen. There was the danger that facile talent and social prestige might bring him an early delusive success; a failure, rightly seen, however tricked out with glamour. ”

“ He had done that which makes every man a hero for the moment, and dim figures with whom he had been out of touch for endless years started up again on the horizon, palpitatingly actual, athrob with goodwill. In the Bohemian world, too, confirmation of the former rumour was not slow to be noised abroad, and Sadler hastened to Hampstead and burst in upon him, the massive head enthusiastically aglow; declaring that he had never for a moment taken Wyndham's denial seriously, and roaring out his congratulations and envy with an exuberance of virile expletive. ”

“ The depths of Lady Betty's sympathy were indeed profound. She could enter into his life, appreciate motives barely realised by himself, and, with charming broad humanity, understand and forgive his actions even when he felt ashamed of them as unworthy and discreditable. No comedy of sentiment here—no playing of the saint on either side; but a noble simplicity, a serene good faith, a spontaneous self-revelation!
He recounted to her, as naturally as everything else, the whole history of his acquaintanceship with the Robinsons. ”

“ Meanwhile the boy's eyes were glued on the books.
"I can see you like books, little man," said Wyndham.
"Yes, sir," said the child, "better than anything else."
"His ambition is to become a scholar," put in his father proudly.
"He is to have the Browning as a memento," said Lady Betty. She handed it to the child. "Keep this volume carefully. When you are older, I am sure you will love and treasure it." Then she unfastened her big bunch of violets and pressed the flowers on his mother, who took them shyly but coloured with pleasure. ”

“ At a street-corner, under the light of a lamp that was still pale in the gathering dusk, a shivering flower-seller with a red shawl over her shoulders stood with a basket of deliciously fresh violets, and Wyndham stopped to get a big bunch of them put together for his companion. Lady Betty was immensely gratified; [Pg 242] she breathed in the odour of the violets with rapture, then fastened them in her bosom. She was herself again now, overflowing with good fellowship, and amused at every trifle. He caught her exhilaration. "We shall fill our evening with a whirl of gaiety!" he cried. ”

“ He had tried to steel himself to confess the miserable truth to Alice, to lay it before her with a fidelity as unswerving as Nature, merciless both to him and to her. But her letters continued to shake him, and he had not the strength to face the inevitable wreckage. To break was to punish her: to continue was only to punish himself. His course was obvious: he must play the game à outrance. Yet he sought temporarily to escape the actuality by immersing himself desperately in routine. ”