The Glory of Clementina Wing. William John Locke

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СКАЧАТЬ jesting,” said Quixtus, touched by his earnestness. “I know that not only are you a devotee—and very rightly so—of Clementina—but that she is a very great painter.”

      “All the same,” said Tommy, with a twinkle in his eyes, “I’m afraid that you’re in for an awful time.”

      “I’m afraid so, too,” said Quixtus, whimsically, “but I’ll get through it somehow.”

      He did get through it; but it was only “somehow.” This quiet, courtly, dreamy gentleman irritated Clementina as he had irritated her years ago. He was a learned man; that went without saying; but he was a fool all the same, and Clementina had not trained herself to suffer fools gladly. The portrait became her despair. The man had no character. There was nothing beneath the surface of those china-blue eyes. She was afraid, she said, of getting on the canvas the portrait of a congenital idiot. His attitude towards life—the dilettante attitude which she as a worker despised—made her impatient. By profession he was a solicitor, head of the old-fashioned firm of Quixtus and Son; but, on his open avowal, he neglected the business, leaving it all in the hands of his partner.

      “He’ll do you, sure as a gun,” said Clementina.

      Quixtus smiled. “My father trusted him implicitly, and so do I.”

      “A man or a woman’s a fool to trust anybody,” said Clementina.

      “I’ve trusted everybody around me all my life, and no one has done me any harm, and therefore I’m a happy man.”

      “Rubbish,” said Clementina. “Any fraud gets the better of you. What about your German friend Tommy was telling me of?”

      This was a sore point. A most innocent, spectacled, bearded, but obviously poverty-stricken German had called on him a few weeks before with a collection of flint instruments for sale, which he alleged to have come from the valley of the Weser, near Hameln. They were of shapes and peculiarities which he had not met with before, and, after a cursory and admiring examination, he had given the starving Teuton twice as much as he had asked for the collection, and sent him on his way rejoicing. With a brother palæontologist summoned in haste he had proceeded to a minute scrutiny of his treasures. They were impudent forgeries.

      “I told Tommy in confidence. He ought not to have repeated the story,” he said, with dignity.

      “Which shows,” said Clementina, pausing so as to make her point and an important brush-stroke—“which shows that you can’t even trust Tommy.”

      On another occasion he referred to Vandermeer’s famous interview.

      “You know a friend of mine, Vandermeer,” said he.

      Clementina shook her head.

      “Never heard the name.”

      He explained. Vandermeer was a journalist. He had interviewed her and lunched with her at a restaurant.

      Clementina could not remember. At last her knitted brow cleared.

      “Good lord, do you mean a half-starved, foxy-faced man with his toes through his boots?”

      “The portrait is unflattering,” said he, “but I’m afraid there’s a kind of resemblance.”

      “He looked so hungry and was so hungry—he told me—that I took him to the ham-and-beef shop round the corner and stuffed his head with copy while he stuffed himself with ham and beef. To say that he lunched with me at a restaurant is infernal impudence.”

      “Poor fellow,” said Quixtus. “He has to live rather fatly in imagination so as to make up for the meagreness of his living in reality. It’s only human nature.”

      “Bah,” said Clementina, “I believe you’d find human nature in the devil.”

      Quixtus smiled one of his sweet smiles.

      “I find it in you, Clementina,” he said.

      Thus it may be perceived that the sittings were not marked by the usual amenities of the studio. The natures of the two were antagonistic. He shrank from her downrightness; she disdained his ineffectuality. Each bore with the other for the sake of past associations; but each drew a breath of relief when freed from the presence of the other. Although he was a man of wide culture beyond the bounds of his own particular subject, and could talk well in a half-humorous, half-pedantic manner, her influence often kept him as dumb as a mummy. This irritated Clementina still further. She wanted him to talk, to show some animation, so that she could seize upon something to put upon the dismaying canvas. She talked nonsense, in order to stimulate him.

      “To live in the past as you do without any regard for the present is as worthless as to go to bed in a darkened room and stay there for the rest of your life. It’s the existence of a mole, not of a man.”

      He indicated, with a wave of the hand, a Siennese predella on the wall. “You go to the past.”

      “For its lessons,” said Clementina. “Because the Old Masters can teach me things. How on earth do you think I should be able to paint you if it hadn’t been for Velasquez? To say nothing of the æsthetic side. But you only go to the past to satisfy an idle curiosity.”

      “Perhaps I do, perhaps I do,” he assented, mildly. “A knowledge of the process by which a prehistoric lady fashioned her petticoat out of skins by means of a flint needle and reindeer sinews would be of no value to Worth or Paquin. But it soothes me personally to contemplate the intimacies of the toilette of the prehistoric lady.”

      “I call that abnormal,” said Clementina, “and you ought to be ashamed of yourself.”

      And that was the end of that conversation.

      Meanwhile, in spite of her half-comic despair, the portrait progressed. She had seized, at any rate, the man’s air of intellectuality, of aloofness from the practical affairs of life. Unconsciously she had invested the face with a spirituality which had eluded her conscious analysis. The artist had worked with the inner vision, as the artist always does when he produces a great work. For the great work of an artist is not that before which he stands, and, sighing, says; “This is fair, but how far away from my dreams!” That is the popular fallacy. The great work is that which, when he regards it on completion, causes him to say in humble admiration and modest stupefaction: “How on earth did the dull clod that is I manage to do it?” For he does not know how he accomplished it. When a man is conscious of every step he takes in the execution of a work of art, he is obeying the letter and not the spirit; he is a juggler with formulas; and formulas, being mere analytical results, have no place in that glorious synthesis which is creation—either of a world or a flower or a poem. Clementina, to her astonishment, regarded the portrait of Ephraim Quixtus, and, like the First Creator regarding His work, saw that it was good.

      “I should never have believed it,” she said.

      “What?” asked Quixtus.

      “That I should have got all this out of you,” said Clementina.

CHAPTER III

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