Part 25 (1/2)
Their pinnacles are twin, I venture to believe--of just an equal height and width and thickness, like their bodies in this life; but unlike their frail bodies in one respect: no taller pinnacles are to be seen, methinks, in all the garden of the deathless dead painters of our time, and none more built to last!
But it is not with the art of Little Billee, nor with his fame as a painter, that we are chiefly concerned in this unpretending little tale, except in so far as they have some bearing on his character and his fate.
”I should like to know the detailed history of the Englishman's first love, and how he lost his innocence!”
”Ask him!”
”Ask him yourself!”
Thus Papelard and Bouchardy, on the morning of Little Billee's first appearance at Carrel's studio, in the Rue des Potirons St. Michel.
And that is the question the present scribe is doing his little best to answer.
A good-looking, famous, well-bred, and well-dressed youth finds that London Society opens its doors very readily; he hasn't long to knock; and it would be difficult to find a youth more fortunately situated, handsomer, more famous, better dressed or better bred, more seemingly happy and successful, with more attractive qualities and more condonable faults, than Little Billee, as Taffy and the Laird found him when they came to London after their four or five years in foreign parts--their Wanderjahr.
He had a fine studio and a handsome suite of rooms in Fitzroy Square.
Beautiful specimens of his unfinished work, endless studies, hung on his studio walls. Everything else was as nice as it could be--the furniture, the bibelots, and bric-a-brac, the artistic foreign and Eastern knick-knacks and draperies and hangings and curtains and rugs--the semi-grand piano by Collard & Collard.
That immortal canvas, the ”Moon-Dial” (just begun, and already commissioned by Moses Lyon, the famous picture-dealer), lay on his easel.
No man worked harder and with teeth more clinched than Little Billee when he was at work--none rested or played more discreetly when it was time to rest or play.
[Ill.u.s.tration: PLATONIC LOVE]
The gla.s.s on his mantel-piece was full of cards of invitation, reminders, pretty mauve and pink and lilac-scented notes; nor were coronets wanting on many of these hospitable little missives. He had quite overcome his fancied aversion for bloated dukes and lords and the rest (we all do sooner or later, if things go well with us); especially for their wives and sisters and daughters and female cousins; even their mothers and aunts. In point of fact, and in spite of his tender years, he was in some danger (for his art) of developing into that type adored by sympathetic women who haven't got much to do: the friend, the tame cat, the platonic lover (with many loves)--the squire of dames, the trusty one, of whom husbands and brothers have no fear!--the delicate, harmless dilettante of Eros--the dainty shepherd who dwells ”dans le pays du tendre!”--and stops there!
The woman flatters and the man confides--and there is no danger whatever, I'm told--and I am glad!
One man loves his fiddle (or, alas! his neighbor's sometimes) for all the melodies he can wake from it--it is but a selfish love!
Another, who is no fiddler, may love a fiddle too; for its symmetry, its neatness, its color--its delicate grainings, the lovely lines and curves of its back and front--for its own sake, so to speak. He may have a whole galleryful of fiddles to love in this innocent way--a harem!--and yet not know a single note of music, or even care to hear one. He will dust them and stroke them, and take them down and try to put them in tune--pizzicato!--and put them back again, and call them ever such sweet little pet names: viol, viola, viola d'amore, viol di gamba, violino mio! and breathe his little troubles into them, and they will give back inaudible little murmurs in sympathetic response, like a damp aeolian harp; but he will never draw a bow across the strings, nor wake a single chord--or discord!
And who shall say he is not wise in his generation? It is but an old-fas.h.i.+oned philistine notion that fiddles were only made to be played on--the fiddles themselves are beginning to resent it; and rightly, I wot!
In this harmless fas.h.i.+on Little Billee was friends with more than one fine lady _de par le monde_.
Indeed, he had been reproached by his more bohemian brothers of the brush for being something of a tuft-hunter--most unjustly. But nothing gives such keen offence to our unsuccessful brother, bohemian or bourgeois, as our sudden intimacy with the so-called great, the little lords and ladies of this little world! Not even our fame and success, and all the joy and pride they bring us, are so hard to condone--so imbittering, so humiliating, to the jealous fraternal heart.
Alas! poor humanity--that the mere countenance of our betters (if they _are_ our betters!) should be thought so priceless a boon, so consummate an achievement, so crowning a glory, as all that!
”A dirty bit of orange-peel, The stump of a cigar-- Once trod on by a princely heel, How beautiful they are!”
Little Billee was no tuft-hunter--he was the tuft-hunted, or had been.
No one of his kind was ever more persistently, resolutely, hospitably harried than this young ”hare with many friends” by people of rank and fas.h.i.+on.
And at first he thought them most charming; as they so often are, these graceful, gracious, gay, good-natured stoics and barbarians, whose manners are as easy and simple as their morals--but how much better!--and who, at least, have this charm, that they can wallow in untold gold (when they happen to possess it) without ever seeming to stink of the same: yes, they bear wealth gracefully--and the want of it more gracefully still! and these are pretty accomplishments that have yet to be learned by our new aristocracy of the shop and counting-house, Jew or gentile, which is everywhere elbowing its irresistible way to the top and front of everything, both here and abroad.