Part 9 (1/2)

'I tell you now,' Dora replied, absently, 'when I am able to offer you the fact with ill.u.s.trations.' She laughed and dropped a still illuminated face in the palm of her hand. 'He has wonderfully revived me,' she declared. 'I could throw, honestly, the whole of Simla overboard for this.'

'Don't,' I urged, feeling, suddenly, an integral part of Simla.

'Oh, no--what end would be served? But I don't care who knows,' she went on with a rush, 'that in all life this is what I like best, and people like Mr. Armour are the people I value most. Heavens, how few of them there are! And wherever they go how the air clears up round them! It makes me quite ill to think of the life we lead here--the poverty of it, the preposterous dullness of it....'

'For goodness' sake,' I said, obscurely irritated, 'don't quote the bishop. The life holds whatever we put into it.'

'For other people it does, and for us it holds what other people put into it,' she retorted. 'I don't know whether you think it's adequately filled with gold lace and truffles.'

'Why should I defend it?' I asked, not knowing indeed why. 'But it has perhaps a dignity, you know. Ah, you are too fresh from your baptism,'

I continued, as she shook her head and went to the piano. The quality, whatever it was, that the last fortnight had generated in her, leaped from her fingers; she played with triumph, elation, intention. The notes seemed an outlet for the sense of beauty and for power to make it. I had never heard her play like that before.

It occurred to me to ask when she had done, how far, after a fortnight, she could throw light on Armour's aims and history, where he had come from, and the great query with which we first received him, what he could be doing in Simla. I gathered that she had learned practically nothing, and had hardly concerned herself to learn anything. What difference did it make? she asked me. Why should we inquire? Why tack a theory of origin to a phenomenon of joy? Let us say the wind brought him, and build him a temple. She was very whimsical up to the furthest stretch of what could possibly be considered tea-time. When I went away I saw her go again and sit down at the piano. In the veranda I remembered something, stopped, and went back. I had to go back. 'You did not tell me,' I said, 'when he was coming again.'

'Oh, tomorrow--tomorrow, of course,' Dora paused to reply.

I resented, as I made my way to the Club, the weight of official duties that made it so impossible for me to keep at all closely in touch with this young man.

Chapter 2.V.

The art of the photographer usually arouses in me all that is splenetic, and I had not submitted myself to him for years before Dora made such a preposterous point of it--years in which, as I sadly explained to her, I might have submitted to the ordeal with much more 'pleasing' results.

She had often insisted before, but I could never see that she made out a particularly good case for the operation until one afternoon when she showed me the bold counterfeit presentment of an a.s.sistant Adjutant-General or some such person, much flattered as to features but singularly faithful in its reproduction of the straps and b.u.t.tons attached. To my post also there belongs a uniform and a c.o.c.ked hat sufficiently dramatic, but persons who serve the State primarily with the intelligence are supposed to have a mind above b.u.t.tons; and when I decided that my photograph should compete with the a.s.sistant Adjutant-General's, I gave him every sartorial advantage. I gathered that the offer, cabinet size, of this gentleman had been a spontaneous one; that certainly could not be said of mine. Most unwillingly I turned one morning into Kauffer's; and I can not now imagine why I did it, for emulation of the a.s.sistant Adjutant-General was really not motive enough, unless it was with an instinct prepared to stumble upon matter germane in an absurd degree to this little history.

I had the honour to be subjected to the searching a.n.a.lysis of Mr.

Kauffer himself. It was he who placed the chair and arranged the screw, he who fixed the angle of my chin and gently disposed my fingers on my knee. He gave me, I remember, a recent portrait of the Viceroy to fix my eye upon, doubtless with the purpose of inspiring my countenance with the devotion which would sit suitably upon one of His Excellency's slaves, and when it was all over he conducted me into another apartment in order that I might see the very latest viceregal group--a domestic one, including the Staff. The walls of the room contained what is usually there, the enlarged photograph, the coloured photograph, the amateur theatrical group, the group of His Excellency's Executive Council, the native dignitary with a diamond-tipped aigrette in the front of his turban. The copy in oils of some old Italian landscape, very black and yellow, also held its invariable place, and above it, very near the ceiling, a line of canvases which, had I not been led past them to inspect our ruler and his family, who sat transfixed on an easel in a resplendent frame, would probably have escaped my attention. I did proper homage to the easel, and then turned to those pictures. It was plain enough who had painted them. Armour's broad brush stood out all over them. They were mostly Indian sporting subjects, the incident a trifle elliptical, the drawing unequal, but the verve and feeling unmistakeable, and colour to send a quiver of glorious acquiescence through you like a pang. What astonished me was the number of them; there must have been at least a dozen, all the same size and shape, all hanging in a line of dazzling repet.i.tion. Here then was the explanation of Armour's seeming curious lack of output, and plain denial of the supposition that he spent the whole of his time in doing the little wooden 'pochade' things whose sweetness and delicacy had so feasted our eyes elsewhere. It was part, no doubt, of his absolutely uncommercial nature--we had experienced together pa.s.sages of the keenest embarra.s.sment over my purchase of some of his studies--that he had not mentioned these more serious things exposed at Kauffer's; one had the feeling of coming unexpectedly on treasure left upon the wayside and forgotten.

'Hullo!' I said, at a standstill, 'I see you've got some of Mr. Armour's work there.'

Mr. Kauffer, with his hands behind him, made the sound which has its counterpart in a shrug. 'Ya.s.s,' he said, 'I haf some of Mr. Armour's work there. This one, that one, all those remaining pictures--they are all the work of Mr. Armour.'

'I didn't know that any of his things were to be seen outside his studio,' I observed.

'So? They are to be seen here. There is no objection.'

'Why should there be any objection?' I demanded, slightly nettled.

'People must see them before they buy them.'

'Buy them!' Kauffer's tone was distinctly exasperated. 'Who will buy these pictures? n.o.body. They are all, every one of them to REfuse.'

'If you know Mr. Armour well enough,' I said, 'you should advise him to exhibit some of his local studies and sketches here. They might sell better.'

My words seemed unfortunately chosen. Mr. Kauffer turned an honest angry red.

'Do I not know Mr. Armour well enough--und better!' he exclaimed. 'What this man wa.s.s doing when I in Paris find him oudt? Shtarving, mein Gott! I see his work. I see he paint a very goot horse, very goot animal subject. I bring him oudt on contract, five hundred rupees the monnth to paint for me, for my firm. Sir, it is now nine monnth. I am yoost four tousand five hundred rupees out of my pocket by this gentleman!'

To enable me to cope with this astonis.h.i.+ng tale I asked Mr. Kauffer for a chair, which he obligingly gave me, and begged that he also would be seated. The files at my office were my business, and this was not, but no matter of Imperial concern seemed at the moment half so urgently to require probing. 'Surely,' I said, 'that is an unusual piece of enterprise for a photographic firm to employ an artist to paint on a salary. I don't know even a regular dealer who does it.'

Mr. Kauffer at once and frankly explained. It was unusual and entirely out of the regular line of business. It was, in fact, one of the exceptional forms of enterprise inspired in this country by the native prince. We who had to treat with the native prince solely on lofty political lines were hardly likely to remember how largely he bulked in the humbler relations of trade; but there was more than one Calcutta establishment, Mr. Kauffer declared, that would be obliged to put up its shutters without this inconstant and difficult, but liberal customer.