Part 8

'Would you like to know,' he began, almost at once, 'how I came to paint in what we will call, if you please, my final manner? One day, at the theatre, I saw Sada Yacco. She taught me art.'

'What do you mean?' I said.

'Look here,' he went on, 'they say everything has been done in art. But no, there is at least one thing that remains for us. Have you ever seen Sada Yacco? When I saw her for the first time I said to myself, "I have found out the secret of Japanese art." I had never been able to understand how it was that the Japanese, who can imitate natural things, a bird, a flower, the rain, so perfectly, have chosen to give us, instead of a woman's face, that blind oval, in which the eyes, nose, and mouth seem to have been made to fit a pattern. When I saw Sada Yacco I realised that the Japanese painters had followed nature as closely in their woman's faces as in their birds and flowers, but that they had studied them from the women of the Green Houses, the women who make up, and that Japanese women, made up for the stage or for the factitious life of the Green Houses, look exactly like these elegant, unnatural images of the painters. What a new kind of reality that opened up to me, as if a window had suddenly opened in a wall! Here, I said to myself, is something that the painters of Europe have never done; it remains for me to do it. I will study nature under the paint by which woman, after all, makes herself more woman; the ensign of her trade, her flag as the enemy. I will get at the nature of this artificial thing, at the skin underneath it, and the soul under the skin. Watteau and the Court painters have given us the dainty, exterior charm of the masquerade, woman when she plays at being woman, among "lyres and flutes." Degas, of course, has done something of what I want to do, but only a part, and with other elements in his pure design, the drawing of Ingres, setting itself new tasks, exercising its technique upon shapeless bodies in tubs, and the strained muscles of the dancer's leg as she does "side-practice." What I am going to do is to take all the ugliness, gross artifice, crafty mechanism, of sex disguising itself for its own ends: that new nature which vice and custom make out of the honest curves and colours of natural things.

'Well, I have tried to do that; in all my best work, my work of the last two or three years, I have done it. I am sure that what I have done is a new thing, and I think it is the one new thing left to us Western painters.'

'I am beginning to understand you,' I said, 'and I have not always found it easy. When I admire you, it has so often seemed to me irrational. I am gradually finding out your logic. Do you remember those talks we used to have at Bognor, one in particular, when you told me about your way of seeing?'

'Yes, yes,' he said, 'I remember, but there was one thing I am almost sure I did not tell you, and it is curious. I don't understand it myself. Do you know what it is to be haunted by colours? There is something like a temptation of the devil, to me, in the colour green. I know it is the commonest colour in nature, it is a good, honest colour, it is the grass, the trees, the leaves, very often the sea. But no, it isn't like that that it comes to me. To me it is an aniline dye, poisoning nature. I adore and hate it. I can never get away from it. If I paint a group outside a café at Montmartre by gas-light or electric light, I paint a green shadow on the faces, and I suppose the green shadow isn't there; yet I paint it. Some tinge of green finds its way invariably into my flesh-colour; I see something green in rouged cheeks, in peroxide-of-hydrogen hair; green lays hold of this poor, unhappy flesh that I paint, as if anticipating the colour-scheme of the grave. I know it, and yet I can't help doing it; I can't explain to you how it is that I at once see and don't see a thing; but so it is.

'And it grew upon me too like an obsession. I always wanted to keep my eyes perfectly clear, so that I could make my own arrangements of things for myself, deliberately; but this, in some unpleasant way, seemed horribly like "nature taking the pen out of one's hand and writing," as somebody once said about a poet. I would rather do all the writing myself; the more so, as I have to translate as I go.'

He broke off suddenly, as if a wave of exhaustion had come over him. His eyes, which had been very bright, had gone dull again, and he let his head droop till the chin rested on his breast.

'I have tired you,' I said, 'you must not talk any more. Try to go to sleep now, and I will come back another day.'

'To-morrow?' he said, looking at me sleepily.

I promised. When I went back the next day he was weaker, but he insisted on sitting up and talking. He spoke of his wife, without affection and without bitterness; he spoke of death, with so little apprehension, or even curiosity, that I was startled. His art was still a much more realisable thing to him.

'Do you believe in God, religion, and all that?' he said. 'To tell you the honest truth, I have never been able to take a vital interest in those or any other abstract matters: I am so well content with this world, if it would only go on existing, and I don't in the least care how it came into being, or what is going to happen to it after I have moved on. I suppose one ought to feel some sort of reverence for something, for an unknown power, at least, which has certainly worked to good purpose. Well, I can't. I don't know what reverence is. If I were quite healthy, I should be a pagan, and choose, well! Dionysus Zagreus, a Bacchus who has been in hell, to worship after my fashion, in some religious kind of "orgie on the mountains." That is how somebody explains the origin of religion, or was it of religious hymns? I forget; but, you see, having had this rickety sort of body to drag about with me, I have never been able to follow any of my practical impulses of that sort, and I have had to be no more than an unemployed atheist, ready to gibe at the gods he doesn't understand.

'I am afraid even in art,' he went on, as if leaving unimportant things for the one thing important, 'I don't find it easy to look up to anybody, at least in a way that anybody can be imagined as liking. I have never gone very much to the National Gallery, not because I don't think Venetian and Florentine pictures quite splendid, painted when they were, but because I can get nothing out of them that is any good for me, now in this all but twentieth century. You won't expect me, of all people, to prate about progress, but, all the same, it's no use going to Botticelli for hints about modern painting. We have different things to look at, and see them differently. A man must be of his time, else why try to put his time on the canvas? There are people, of course, who don't, if you call them painters: Watts, Burne-Jones, Moreau, that sort of hermit-crab. But I am talking about painting life and making it live. If it comes to making pictures for churches and curiosity shops!'

He spoke eagerly, but in a voice which grew more and more tired, and with long pauses. I was going to try to get him to rest when the front door opened noisily and I heard Mrs. Waydelin's voice in the hall. I heard other voices, men's and women's, feet coming up the stairs. I looked apprehensively at Waydelin. He showed no surprise. I heard a door open on the landing; then, a moment after, it was shut, and Mrs. Waydelin came into the bedroom, flushed and perspiring through the paint, and ran up to the bed. 'I have brought a few friends in to supper,' she said. 'They won't disturb you, you know, and I couldn't very well get out of it.'

She would have entered into explanations, but Waydelin cut her short. 'I have not the least objection,' he said. 'I must only ask you to apologise to them for my absence. I am hardly entertaining at present.'

She stared at him, as if wondering what he meant; then she asked me if I would join her at supper, and I declined; then went to the dressing-table, took up a pot of vaseline and looked at her eyelashes in the glass; then put it down again, came back to the bed, told Peter Waydelin to cheer up, and bounced out of the room.

I could see that Waydelin was now very tired and in need of sleep. I got up to go. The partition between the two rooms must have been very thin, for I could hear a champagne-cork drawn, the shrill laughter of women, men talking loudly, and chairs being moved about the floor. 'I don't mind,' he said, seeing what I was thinking, 'so long as they don't sing. But they won't begin to sing for two hours yet, and I can get some sleep. Good-night. Perhaps I shall not see you again.'

'May I come again?' I said.

'I always like seeing you,' he said, smiling, and thereupon turned over on the pillow, just as he was, and fell asleep.

I looked at his face as he lay there, with the shawl about his shoulders and his hands outside the bedclothes. The jaw hung loose, the cheeks were pinched with exhaustion, sweat stood out about the eyes. The sudden collapse into sleep alarmed me. I could not leave him in such a state, and with no one at hand but those people supping in the next room. I sat down in a corner near the bed and waited.

As I sat there listening to the exuberant voices, I wondered by what casual or quixotic impulse Waydelin had been led to marry the woman, and whether the woman was really heartless because she sat drinking champagne with her friends of the music-hall while her husband, a man of genius in his way, lay dying in the next room. I forced myself to acknowledge that she had probably no suspicion of how near she was to being a widow, that Waydelin would deceive her to the end in this matter, and the last thing in the world he would desire would be to see Mrs. Waydelin in tears at the foot of the bed.

As time went on the supper-party got merrier, but Waydelin did not stir, and I sat still in my corner. It was probably in about two hours, as he had foreseen, that a chord was struck on the piano, and a man began to sing a music-hall song in a rough, facile voice. At the sound Waydelin shivered through his whole body and woke up. In a very weak voice he asked me for water. I brought him a glass of water and held it to his lips. He drank a little and then pushed it away and began shivering again. 'Let me send for a doctor,' I said, but he seized my hand, and said violently that he would see no doctor. In the next room the piano rattled and all the voices joined in the chorus. I distinguished the voice of Mrs. Waydelin. He seemed to be listening to it, and I said, 'Let me call her in.' 'Poor Clara may as well amuse herself,' he said, with his odd smile. 'What is the use? I feel very much as if I am going to die. Will it bother you: being here, I mean?' His voice seemed to grow weaker as he spoke, and his eyes stared. I left him and went hastily into the other room. The singer stopped abruptly, and the girl at the piano turned round. I saw the remains of supper on the table, the empty glasses and bottles, the chairs tilted back, the cigars, tobacco-smoke, the flushed faces, rings, artificial curls; and then Mrs. Waydelin came to me out of the midst of them, looking almost frightened, and said, 'What's the matter?' 'Get rid of these people at once,' I said in a low voice, 'and send for a doctor.' Her face sobered instantly, she took one step to the bell, was about to ring it, then turned and said to one of the men, 'Go for a doctor, Jim,' and to the others, 'You'll go, all of you, quietly?' and then she came with me into the bedroom.

Waydelin lay shivering and quaking on the bed; he seemed very conscious and wholly preoccupied with himself. He never looked at the woman as she flung herself on the floor by the bedside and began to cry out to him and kiss his hand. The tears ran down over her cheeks, leaving ghastly furrows in the wet powder, which clotted and caked under them. The curl was beginning to come out of her too yellow hair, which straggled in wisps about her ears. She sobbed in gulps, and entreated him to look at her and forgive her. At that he looked, and as he looked life seemed to revive in his eyes. He motioned to me to lift him up. I lifted him against the pillows, and in a weak voice he asked me for drawing-paper and a pencil. 'Don't move,' he said to his wife, who knelt there struck into rigid astonishment, with terror and incomprehension in her eyes. The pose, its grotesque horror, were finer than the finest of his inventions. He made a few scrawls on the paper, trying to fix that last and best pose of his model. But he could no longer guide the pencil, and he let it drop out of his hand with a look of helplessness, almost of despair, and sank down in the bed and shut his eyes. He did not open them again. The doctor came, and tried all means to revive him, but without success. Something in him seemed consciously to refuse to come back to life. He lay for some time, dying slowly, with his eyes fast shut, and it was only when the doctor had felt his heart and found no movement that he knew he was dead.

AN AUTUMN CITY.

To Daniel Roserra life was a matter of careful cultivation. He respected nature, for what might be cunningly extracted from nature; provided only that one's aim was a quite personal thing, willingly subject to surroundings on its way to the working out of itself. He tended his soul as one might tend some rare plant; careful above most things of the earth it was to take root in. And so he thought much of the influence of places, of the image a place makes for itself in the consciousness, of all that it might do in the formation of a beautiful or uncomely disposition. Places had virtues of their own for him; he supposed that he had the quality of divining their secrets; at all events, if they were places to which he could possibly be sensitive. Much of his time was spent in travelling, in a leisurely way, about Europe; not for the sake of seeing anything in particular, for he had no interest in historical associations or in the remains of ugly things that happened to be old, or in visiting the bric-a-brac museums of the fine arts which make some of the more tolerable countries tedious. He chose a city, a village, or a seashore for its charm, its appeal to him personally; nothing else mattered.

When Roserra was forty he fell in love, quite suddenly, though he had armed himself, as he imagined, against such disturbances of the æsthetic life, and was invulnerable. He had always said that a woman was like a liqueur: a delightful luxury, to be taken with discretion. He feared the influence of a companion in his delicate satisfactions: he realised that a woman might not even be a sympathetic companion. He had, it is true, often wished to try the experiment, a risky one, of introducing a woman to one of his friends among cities; it was a temptation, but he remembered how rarely such introductions work well among people. Would the cities be any more fortunate?

When, however, he fell in love, all hesitation was taken out of his hands by the mere force of things. Livia Dawlish was remarkably handsome, some people thought her beautiful; she was tall and dark, and had a sulky, enigmatical look that teased and attracted him. Some who knew her very well said that it meant nothing, and was merely an accident of colour and form, like the green eye of the cat or the golden eye of the buffalo. Roserra tried to study her, but he could get no point of view. He felt something that he had never felt before, and this something was like a magnetic current flowing subtly from her to him; perhaps, like the magnetic rocks in the 'Arabian Nights,' ready to draw out all the nails and bolts of his ship, and drown him among the wrecked splinters of his life.

He was rich, not too old, of a good Cornish family; he could be the most charming companion in the world; he knew so many things and so many places and was never tedious about them: Livia thought him on the whole the most suitable husband whom she was likely to meet. She was happy when he asked her to marry him, and she married him without a misgiving. She was not reflective.

After the marriage they went straight to Paris, and Roserra was surprised and delighted to find how childishly happy Livia could be among new surroundings. She had always wanted to see Paris, because of its gaiety, its bright wickedness, its names of pleasure and fashion. Everything delighted her; she seemed even to admire a little indiscriminatingly. She thought the Sainte-Chapelle the most beautiful thing in Paris.

They went back to London with more luggage than they had brought with them, and for six months Livia was quite happy. She wore her Paris hats and gowns, she was admired, she went to the theatre; she seemed to get on with Roserra even better than she had expected.

During all this time Roserra seemed to have found out very little about his wife. It gave him more pleasure to do what she wanted than it had ever given him to carry out his own wishes. So far, they had never had a dispute; he seemed to have put his own individuality aside as if it no longer meant anything to him. But he had not yet discovered her individuality from among her crowds of little likes and dislikes, which meant nothing. Nothing had come out yet from behind those enigmatical eyes; but he was waiting; they would open, and there would be treasure there.

Gradually, while he was waiting, his old self began to come back to him. He must do as he had always wanted to do: introduce the most intimate of his cities to a woman. Autumn was beginning; he thought of Arles, which was an autumn city, and the city which meant more to him than almost any other. He must share Arles with Livia.

Livia had heard of the Arlesiennes, she remembered Paris, and, though she was a little reluctant to leave the new London into which she had come since her marriage, she consented without apparent unwillingness.

They went by sea to Marseilles, and Livia wished they were not going any further. Roserra smiled a little satisfied smile; she was so pleased with even slight, superficial things, she could get pleasure out of the empty sunlight and obvious sea of Marseilles. When the deeper appeal of Arles came to her, that new world in which one went clean through the exteriorities of modern life, how she would respond to it!

They reached Arles in the afternoon, and drove to the little old-fashioned house which Roserra had taken in the square which goes uphill from the Amphitheatre, with the church of Notre Dame la Major in the corner. Livia looked about her vividly as the cab rattled round twenty sharp angles, in the midst of narrow streets, on that perilous journey. Here were the Arlesiennes, standing at doorways, walking along the pavements, looking out of windows. She scarcely liked to admit to herself that she had seen prettier faces elsewhere. The costume, certainly, was as fine as its reputation; she would get one, she thought, to wear, for amusement, in London. And the women were a noble race; they walked nobly, they had beautiful black hair, sometimes stately and impressive features. But she had expected so much more than that; she had expected a race of goddesses, and she found no more than a townful of fine-looking peasants.

'Do not judge too quickly,' said Roserra to her; 'you must judge neither the place nor the people until you have lived yourself into their midst. The first time I came here I was disappointed. Gradually I began to see why it was that even the guide-books tell you to come to this quiet, out-of-the-way place, made up of hovels that were once palaces.'

'I will wait,' said Livia contentedly. The queer little house, with its homely furniture, the gentle, picturesque woman who met her at the door, amused her. It was certainly an adventure.

Next day, and the days following, they walked about the town, and Roserra felt that his own luxuriating sensations could hardly fail to be shared by Livia, though she said little and seemed at times absent-minded. They strolled among the ruins of the theatre begun under Augustus, and among the coulisses of the great amphitheatre; they sat on the granite steps; they went up the hundred steps of the western tower. From the cloisters of St. Trophime they went across to the museum opposite, where a kindly little dwarf showed them the altar to Leda, the statue of Mithras, and the sarcophagi with the Good Shepherd. He sold them some photographs of Arlesian women: one was very beautiful. 'That is my sister,' he said shyly.

When the soul of Autumn made for itself a body, it made Arles. An autumn city, hinting of every gentle, resigned, reflective way of fading out of life, of effacing oneself in a world to which one no longer attaches any value; always remembering itself, always looking into a mournfully veiled mirror which reflects something at least of what it was, Arles sits in the midst of its rocky plains, by the side of its river, among the tombs. Everything there seems to grow out of death, and to be returning thither. The town rises above its ruins, does not seem to be even yet detached from them. The remains of the theatre look down on the public garden; one comes suddenly on a Roman obelisk and the fragments of Roman walls; a Roman column has been built into the wall of one of the two hotels which stand in the Forum, now the Place du Forum; and the modern, the comparatively modern houses, have an air which is neither new nor old, but entirely sympathetic with what is old. They are faded, just a little dilapidated, not caring to distinguish themselves from the faint colours, the aged slumber, of the very ancient things about them.

Livia tried to realise what it was that charmed Roserra in all this. To her there was no comfort in it; it depressed her; in the air itself there was something of decay. There was a smell of dead leaves everywhere, the moisture of stone, the sodden dampness of earth, water forming into little pools on the ground, creeping out of the earth and into the earth again. There was dust on everything; the trees that close in almost the whole city as with a leafy wall were dust-grey even in sunlight. The Aliscamps seemed to her drearier than even a modern cemetery, and she wondered what it was that drew Roserra to them, with a kind of fascination. On the way there, along the Avenue Victor Hugo, there were some few signs of life; the cafés, the Zouaves going in and out of their big barrack, the carts coming in from the country; and in the evening the people walked there. But she hated the little melancholy public garden at the side, with its paths curving upwards to the ruined walls and arches of the Roman theatre, its low balustrades of crumbling stone, its faint fountains, greenish grey. It was a place, she thought, in which no one could ever be young or happy; and the road which went past it did but lead to the tombs. Roserra told her that Dante, when he was in hell, and saw the 'modo più amaro' in which the people there are made into alleys of living tombs, remembered Arles:

'Si com' ad Arli ove 'l Rodano stagna.'

She laughed uneasily, with a half shudder. The tombs are moved aside now from the Aliscamps, into the little secluded Allée des Tombeaux, where they line both sides of the way, empty stone trough after empty stone trough, with here and there a more pompous sarcophagus. There is a quiet path between them, which she did not even like to walk in, leading to the canal and the bowling-green; and in the evening the old men creep out and sit among the tombs.