Part 85 (1/2)
”I shall never dream of turning you away; I shall cherish you till the latest possible hour. I'm only trying to keep myself in tune with the logic of things. The proof of how I cling is that precisely I want you to sit to me.”
”To sit to you?” With which Nick could fancy his visitor a little blank.
”Certainly, for after all it isn't much to ask. Here we are and the hour's peculiarly propitious--long light days with no one coming near me, so that I've plenty of time. I had a hope I should have some orders: my younger sister, whom you know and who's a great optimist, plied me with that vision. In fact we invented together a charming little sordid theory that there might be rather a 'run' on me from the chatter (such as it was) produced by my taking up this line. My sister struck out the idea that a good many of the pretty ladies would think me interesting and would want to be done. Perhaps they do, but they've controlled themselves, for I can't say the run has commenced. They haven't even come to look, but I daresay they don't yet quite take it in. Of course it's a bad time--with every one out of town; though you know they might send for me to come and do them at home. Perhaps they will when they settle down. A portrait-tour of a dozen country-houses for the autumn and winter--what do you say to that for the ardent life? I know I excruciate you,” Nick added, ”but don't you see how it's in my interest to try how much you'll still stand?”
Gabriel puffed his cigarette with a serenity so perfect that it might have been a.s.sumed to falsify these words. ”Mrs. Dallow will send for you--_vous allez voir ca_,” he said in a moment, brus.h.i.+ng aside all vagueness.
”She'll send for me?”
”To paint her portrait; she'll recapture you on that basis. She'll get you down to one of the country-houses, and it will all go off as charmingly--with sketching in the morning, on days you can't hunt, and anything you like in the afternoon, and fifteen courses in the evening; there'll be bishops and amba.s.sadors staying--as if you were a 'well-known,' awfully clever amateur. Take care, take care, for, fickle as you may think me, I can read the future: don't imagine you've come to the end of me yet. Mrs. Dallow and your sister, of both of whom I speak with the greatest respect, are capable of hatching together the most conscientious, delightful plan for you. Your differences with the beautiful lady will be patched up and you'll each come round a little and meet the other halfway. The beautiful lady will swallow your profession if you'll swallow hers. She'll put up with the palette if you'll put up with the country-house. It will be a very unusual one in which you won't find a good north room where you can paint. You'll go about with her and do all her friends, all the bishops and amba.s.sadors, and you'll eat your cake and have it, and every one, beginning with your wife, will forget there's anything queer about you, and everything will be for the best in the best of worlds; so that, together--you and she--you'll become a great social inst.i.tution and every one will think she has a delightful husband; to say nothing of course of your having a delightful wife. Ah my dear fellow, you turn pale, and with reason!”
Nash went lucidly on: ”that's to pay you for having tried to make me let you have it. You have it then there! I may be a bore”--the emphasis of this, though a mere shade, testified to the first personal resentment Nick had ever heard his visitor express--”I may be a bore, but once in a while I strike a light, I make things out. Then I venture to repeat, 'Take care, take care.' If, as I say, I respect _ces dames_ infinitely it's because they will be acting according to the highest wisdom of their s.e.x. That's the sort of thing women do for a man--the sort of thing they invent when they're exceptionally good and clever. When they're not they don't do so well; but it's not for want of trying.
There's only one thing in the world better than their incomparable charm: it's their abysmal conscience. Deep calleth unto deep--the one's indeed a part of the other. And when they club together, when they earnestly consider, as in the case we're supposing,” Nash continued, ”then the whole thing takes a lift; for it's no longer the virtue of the individual, it's that of the wondrous s.e.x.”
”You're so remarkable that, more than ever, I must paint you,” Nick returned, ”though I'm so agitated by your prophetic words that my hand trembles and I shall doubtless scarcely be able to hold my brush. Look how I rattle my easel trying to put it into position. I see it all there just as you show it. Yes, it will be a droll day, and more modern than anything yet, when the conscience of women makes out good reasons for men's not being in love with them. You talk of their goodness and cleverness, and it's certainly much to the point. I don't know what else they themselves might do with those graces, but I don't see what man can do with them but be fond of them where he finds them.”
”Oh you'll do it--you'll do it!” cried Nash, brightly jubilant.
”What is it I shall do?”
”Exactly what I just said; if not next year then the year after, or the year after that. You'll go halfway to meet her and she'll drag you about and pa.s.s you off. You'll paint the bishops and become a social inst.i.tution. That is, you'll do it if you don't take great care.”
”I shall, no doubt, and that's why I cling to you. You must still look after me,” Nick went on. ”Don't melt away into a mere improbable reminiscence, a delightful, symbolic fable--don't if you can possibly help it. The trouble is, you see, that you can't really keep hold very tight, because at bottom it will amuse you much more to see me in another pickle than to find me simply jogging down the vista of the years on the straight course. Let me at any rate have some sort of sketch of you as a kind of feather from the angel's wing or a photograph of the ghost--to prove to me in the future that you were once a solid sociable fact, that I didn't invent you, didn't launch you as a deadly hoax. Of course I shall be able to say to myself that you can't have been a fable--otherwise you'd have a moral; but that won't be enough, because I'm not sure you won't have had one. Some day you'll peep in here languidly and find me in such an att.i.tude of piety--presenting my bent back to you as I niggle over some interminable botch--that I shall give cruelly on your nerves and you'll just draw away, closing the door softly. You'll be gentle and considerate about it and spare me, you won't even make me look round. You'll steal off on tiptoe, never, never to return.”
Gabriel consented to sit; he professed he should enjoy it and be glad to give up for it his immediate foreign commerce, so vague to Nick, so definite apparently to himself; and he came back three times for the purpose. Nick promised himself a deal of interest from this experiment, for with the first hour of it he began to feel that really as yet, given the conditions under which he now studied him, he had never at all thoroughly explored his friend. His impression had been that Nash had a head quite fine enough to be a challenge, and that as he sat there day by day all sorts of pleasant and paintable things would come out in his face. This impression was not gainsaid, but the whole tangle grew denser. It struck our young man that he had never _seen_ his subject before, and yet somehow this revelation was not produced by the sense of actually seeing it. What was revealed was the difficulty--what he saw was not the measurable mask but the ambiguous meaning. He had taken things for granted which literally were not there, and he found things there--except that he couldn't catch them--which he had not hitherto counted in or presumed to handle. This baffling effect, eminently in the line of the mystifying, so familiar to Nash, might have been the result of his whimsical volition, had it not appeared to our artist, after a few hours of the job, that his sitter was not the one who enjoyed it most. He was uncomfortable, at first vaguely and then definitely so--silent, restless, gloomy, dim, as if on the test the homage of a directer attention than he had ever had gave him less pleasure than he would have supposed. He had been willing to judge of this in good faith; but frankly he rather suffered. He wasn't cross, but was clearly unhappy, and Nick had never before felt him contract instead of expanding.
It was all accordingly as if a trap had been laid for him, and our young man asked himself if it were really fair. At the same time there was something richly rare in such a relation between the subject and the artist, and Nick was disposed to go on till he should have to stop for pity or for shame. He caught eventually a glimmer of the truth underlying the strangeness, guessed that what upset his friend was simply the reversal, in such a combination, of his usual terms of intercourse. He was so accustomed to living upon irony and the interpretation of things that it was new to him to be himself interpreted and--as a gentleman who sits for his portrait is always liable to be--interpreted all ironically. From being outside of the universe he was suddenly brought into it, and from the position of a free commentator and critic, an easy amateurish editor of the whole affair, reduced to that of humble ingredient and contributor. It occurred afterwards to Nick that he had perhaps brought on a catastrophe by having happened to throw off as they gossiped or languished, and not alone without a cruel intention, but with an impulse of genuine solicitude: ”But, my dear fellow, what will you do when you're old?”
”Old? What do you call old?” Nash had replied bravely enough, but with another perceptible tinge of irritation. ”Must I really remind you at this time of day that that term has no application to such a condition as mine? It only belongs to you wretched people who have the incurable superst.i.tion of 'doing'; it's the ign.o.ble collapse you prepare for yourselves when you cease to be able to do. For me there'll be no collapse, no transition, no clumsy readjustment of att.i.tude; for I shall only _be_, more and more, with all the acc.u.mulations of experience, the longer I live.”
”Oh I'm not particular about the term,” said Nick. ”If you don't call it old, the ultimate state, call it weary--call it final. The acc.u.mulations of experience are practically acc.u.mulations of fatigue.”
”I don't know anything about weariness. I live freshly--it doesn't fatigue me.”
”Then you need never die,” Nick declared.
”Certainly; I daresay I'm indestructible, immortal.”
Nick laughed out at this--it would be such fine news to some people. But it was uttered with perfect gravity, and it might very well have been in the spirit of that gravity that Nash failed to observe his agreement to sit again the next day. The next and the next and the next pa.s.sed, but he never came back.
True enough, punctuality was not important for a man who felt that he had the command of all time. Nevertheless his disappearance ”without a trace,” that of a personage in a fairy-tale or a melodrama, made a considerable impression on his friend as the months went on; so that, though he had never before had the least difficulty about entering into the play of Gabriel's humour, Nick now recalled with a certain fanciful awe the special accent with which he had ranked himself among imperishable things. He wondered a little if he hadn't at last, balancing always on the stretched tight-rope of his wit, fallen over on the wrong side. He had never before, of a truth, been so nearly witless, and would have to have gone mad in short to become so singularly simple.
Perhaps indeed he was acting only more than usual in his customary spirit--thoughtfully contributing, for Nick's enlivenment, a purple rim of mystery to an horizon now so dreadfully let down. The mystery at any rate remained; another shade of purple in fact was virtually added to it. Nick had the prospect, for the future, of waiting to see, all curiously, when Nash would turn up, if ever, and the further diversion--it almost consoled him for the annoyance of being left with a second unfinished thing on his hands--of imagining in the portrait he had begun an odd tendency to fade gradually from the canvas. He couldn't catch it in the act, but he could have ever a suspicion on glancing at it that the hand of time was rubbing it away little by little--for all the world as in some delicate Hawthorne tale--and making the surface indistinct and bare of all resemblance to the model. Of course the moral of the Hawthorne tale would be that his personage would come back in quaint confidence on the day his last projected shadow should have vanished.
L
One day toward the end of March of the following year, in other words more than six months after Mr. Nash's disappearance, Bridget Dormer came into her brother's studio and greeted him with the effusion that accompanies a return from an absence. She had been staying at Broadwood--she had been staying at Harsh. She had various things to tell him about these episodes, about his mother, about Grace, about her small subterraneous self, and about Percy's having come, just before, over to Broadwood for two days; the longest visit with which, almost since they could remember, the head of the family had honoured their common parent.
Nick noted indeed that this demonstration had apparently been taken as a great favour, and Biddy loyally testified to the fact that her elder brother was awfully jolly and that his presence had been a pretext for tremendous fun. Nick accordingly asked her what had pa.s.sed about his marriage--what their mother had said to him.
”Oh nothing,” she replied; and Percy had said nothing to Lady Agnes and not a word to herself. This partly explained, for his junior, the consequent beat.i.tude--none but cheerful topics had been produced; but he questioned the girl further--to a point which led her to say: ”Oh I daresay that before long she'll write to her.”