CHAPTER XXXIX: ALONE. THE YEAR EIGHTEEN NINETY-SIX.

Whistler stayed a short time at Hampstead with his sisters-in-law, and then went to Mr. Heinemann at Whitehall Court, where he remained, on and off, for two or three years, spending only the periods of Mr. Heinemann's absence at Garlant's Hotel or in Paris. He was with us day after day. Little notes came from the studio to ask if we would be in and alone in the evening, and, if so, he would dine with us. At first he would not join us if we expected anyone. He liked to sit and talk, he said, but he could not meet other people. He saw few outside the studio, except Mr. Heinemann, Mr. Kennedy, and ourselves. We went to the studio, and often he and J. sketched together in the streets.

For these sketching expeditions Whistler prepared beforehand the colours he wanted to use, and if the day turned out too grey or too radiant for his scheme nothing was done. The chosen colours were mixed, and little tubes, filled with them, were carried in his small paint-box, which held also the tiny palette with the pure colours arranged on it, his brushes, and two or three small panels. Many studies were made. The most important was of St. John's, Westminster. He loved the quiet corner, now destroyed, and he went there many times. He worked away, his top hat jammed down on his nose, sitting on a three-legged stool, his paint-box on his knee, the panel in it, beginning at once in colour on the panel, usually finishing the sketch in one afternoon, though he took two over the church. The painting was simply done, commencing with the point of interest, the masses put in bigly, the details worked into them. Just as in the studio, five minutes after he had begun he became so absorbed in his work that he forgot everything else until it grew too dark to see. When ladies would come and recognise him, he stopped, got up, and spoke to them, always charmingly.

He made little journeys during the summer, one to Rochester and Canterbury, with Mrs. Whibley and Miss Birnie Philip. But, disgusted with the inns and the food, he came back after a day or so. Another was with Mr. Kennedy, who writes us:

"It was agreed that Whistler and myself should go to France. Neither of us had any idea _where_ we were going except to Havre. We arrived in the early morning, and after he got shaved and had coffee, we took the boat to Honfleur, which, as you know, has a tidal service. 'Do you know where we are going?' I said to him. 'No, I don't,' said he. 'Well,' said I, 'there is a white-whiskered, respectable-looking old gentleman; perhaps he knows the lay of the ground. Tip him a stave.'

"So Whistler asked him about the hotels in Honfleur. There were two--the Cheval Blanc on the quay, and the Ferme de St. Siméon on the outskirts. The Cheval was so dirty that I got the only cab, and, piling the luggage on it ourselves, drove off to the farm. Fortunately, there were two vacant rooms, and we stayed there a week. The cooking was excellent, and, of course, _Madame_ knew who _Monsieur Vistlaire_ was. Whistler used to kick up a row every night with me about the 'ridiculous British' to divert his mind, I imagine, and sometimes my retorts were so sharp that I said to myself, 'All is over between us now.' But he used to bob up serenely in the morning, as if nothing had happened, and after _déjeuner_ he would take his small box of colours and paint in the large church. I used to stroll about the town and look in occasionally to see that he came to no harm. It was here that he said he was going over to Rome some day, and when I said, 'Don't forget to let me know, so that I may be on hand to see you wandering up the aisle in sackcloth and ashes, with a candle in each hand, or scrubbing the floor!' he said, in a tone of horrified astonishment, 'Good God! O'K.,[11] is it possible? Why, I thought they would make me a hell of a swell of an abbot, or something like that.'

"It was amusing to see him manoeuvre to get near the big kitchen fire, overcoat on. He was a true American in his liking for heat, and the way he would sidle into the kitchen, which opened on out-of-doors, all the time mildly flattering _Madame_, was very characteristic. We went to Trouville one day on the diligence, and had a capital _déjeuner_ at the Café de Paris, before which Whistler said, 'We must do this _en Prince_, O'K.!' 'All right, your Highness, I'm with you!' Afterwards, on the beach, he went to sleep on a chair, leaning back against a bath-house, his straw hat tipped on his nose. It was funny, but sleep after luncheon was a necessity to him. Coming back to London, in the harbour of Southampton, after listening to the usual unwearying talk against the British, I said, 'Oh, be reasonable!' 'Why should I?' said he."

The Ferme de St. Siméon has been called the Cradle of Impressionism. It was here that Boudin lived and most of the Impressionists came, and round about they found their subjects.

Later on Whistler spent a few days at Calais in the Meurice, Sterne's Hotel, where he was miserable. Then he tried to find J. at Whitby, where they missed each other, and where he said the glitter of the windows made the town look like the Crystal Palace.

Whistler recovered slowly, and journeys helped him less than work in the studio, where, by degrees, he returned to the schemes so sadly interrupted. We remember his coming to us with Mr. Kennedy one Sunday afternoon, bringing up our three flights of stairs _The Master Smith_ to show it to us once again before it went to America. Mr. Kennedy had captured it, fearful of a touch being added. It was placed on one chair, Whistler, on another facing it, wretched at the thought of parting with it. It was always a wrench to let a picture go.

After a while he did not mind meeting a few people. A man he liked to see was Timothy Cole. There was a great scheme that he should make a series of drawings on wood and Cole engrave them. Cole brought the blocks prepared for him to draw on. But that is the last we or Cole heard about it, though we saw the blocks frequently at Fitzroy Street. Mr. Cole says:

"I did not speak to him more than once after I had given him the wood blocks. I did not think it prudent to press him about the matter, fearing he might get disgusted and give it up.... The blocks were the size of the _Century_ page."

Cole gave Whistler some of his prints, and they pleased Whistler very much, though he rarely cared to own the pictures and prints of other artists. Once when an etcher gave him a not very wonderful proof, he tore it up, saying, "I do not collect etchings, I make them! I do not collect the works of my contemporaries!" With the exception of his portrait by Boxall we never saw a scrap of anyone else's work about his studio or his house, save the forgery someone sent him which he kept and hung for a while. Another side to Mr. Cole was his endless practical jokes. He used to do extraordinary things, to Whistler's amusement. On one point only they were not in sympathy: Mr. Cole's theories of diet. One evening at dinner Cole told us that he and his family were living chiefly on rhubarb tops, they have such a "foody" taste, his son thought. "Dear me, poor fellow," said Whistler, "it sounds as if once, long long ago, he had really eaten, and still has a dim memory of what food is!" "And spinach," Cole added, "it's fine. We eat it raw, it's wonderful the things it does for you!" "But what does it do for you?" Whistler asked, and Cole began a dissertation on the juices of the stomach. "Well, you know," Whistler told him, "when you begin to talk about the stomach and its juices, it's time to stop dining." After that, Cole managed to dismiss his theories and dine like other people when with us.

Professor John Van Dyke was in London that fall, and Whistler was willing to come to meet him. A long darn in a tablecloth afterwards bore witness to the animation of one of those dinners--Whistler's knife brought down sharply on the table to emphasise his argument. The subject was _Las Meniñas_, which he had never seen, which everyone else had seen. Velasquez painted the picture just as you see it, he maintained; no one agreed. Perspectives and plans were drawn on the unfortunate cloth, chairs were pushed back, the situation grew critical. Whistler was forced to yield slowly, when, of a sudden, his eyes fell on Van Dyke's feet in long, pointed shoes, then the American fashion, their points carried to a degree of fineness no English bootmaker could rival. "My God, Van Dyke, where did you get your shoes?" Whistler asked. We could not go on fighting after that; defeat was avoided. Though Whistler had never been to Madrid, it seemed as if he had seen the pictures, so familiar was he with them, and though he was at times not right about them, his interest was endless. We remember "Bob" Stevenson telling him, to his great delight, how, one summer day with J. in the Long Gallery of the Prado where _Las Meniñas_ then hung, an old peasant dressed in faded blue-green came and sat down on the green bench in front, and straightway he became part of the picture, so true was its atmosphere. There are legends of Whistler's descent into a _Casa des Huespedes_ in Madrid with Sargent and J., but J. never was there and Sargent denies it. It is another legend. Whistler could get more from a glance at a photograph than most painters from six months' copying.

Another evening Claude was the subject--Claude compared to Turner. Whistler could never see the master Englishman adored in Turner; not because of Ruskin, for Mr. Walter Greaves told us that years before the Ruskin trial Whistler "reviled Turner." Mr. Cole in 1896 was engraving Turners in the National Gallery, and Whistler insisted on their inferiority to the Claudes, so amazingly demonstrated in Trafalgar Square, where Turner invited the comparison disastrous to him. The argument grew heated, and Whistler adjourned it until the next morning, when he arranged to meet Cole and J. in the Gallery. Whistler compared the work of the two artists hanging side by side, as Turner wished:

"Well, you know, you have only to look. Claude is the artist who knows there is no painting the sun itself, and so he chooses the moment after the sun has set, or has hid behind a cloud, and its light fills the sky, and that light he suggests as no other painter ever could. But Turner must paint nothing less than the sun, and he sticks on a blob of paint--let us be thankful that it isn't a red wafer, as in some of his other pictures--and there isn't any illusion whatever, and the Englishman lifts up his head in ecstatic conceit with the English painter, who alone has dared to do what no artist would ever be fool enough to attempt! And look at the architecture. Claude could draw a classical building as it is; Turner must invent, imagine architecture as no architect could design it, and no builder could put it up, and as it never would stand up--the old amateur!"

They went on to the Canalettos and Guardis Whistler could not weary of--to Canaletto's big red church and the tiny Rotunda at Vauxhall with the little figures, from which Hogarth learned so much. Whistler always acknowledged Guardi's influence, though it had not led him in Venice to paint pictures like Guardi or Canaletto either. And he never tired of pointing out that great artists like Guardi and Canaletto and Velasquez, who were born and worked in the South, did not try to paint sunlight, but kept their work grey and low in tone. That day at the National Gallery, before he could finish explaining the similarity between his work and Guardi's, the talk came to an end, for half the copyists in the room had left their easels. He stopped. He could not talk to an audience which he was not sure was sympathetic. Sure of sympathy, he would talk for ever in praise of the luminosity of Claude, the certainty of Canaletto, the wonderful tone of Guardi, the character and colour of Hogarth. Another Italian about whom he was enthusiastic was Michael Angelo Caravaggio, admiring his things in the Louvre. Whistler maintained that the exact knowledge, the science, of the Old Masters was the reason of their greatness. The modern painter has a few tricks, a few fads; these give out, and nothing is left. Knowledge is inexhaustible. Tintoretto did not find his way until he was forty. Titian was painting in as masterly a manner in his last year as in his youth. And speaking of the cleverness--a term he hated--of the modern man, he said:

"Think of the finish, the delicacy, the elegance, the repose of a little Terborgh, Vermeer, Metsu. These were masters who could paint interiors, chandeliers, and all the rest; and what a difference between them and the clever little interiors now!"

In the autumn Whistler established Miss Birnie Philip and her mother in the Rue du Bac and returned to Mr. Heinemann's flat at Whitehall Court, making it so much his home that before long he was laughingly alluding to "my guest Heinemann." It is not likely that the two would ever have parted had not Mr. Heinemann married and even then Whistler stayed with him as long as his health remained good, dependent on the friendship formed late in life with a man many years younger. When Mr. Heinemann was away he complained that London was duller and blacker than ever. Whistler shrank from condolence in his great grief or from a revival of the memories of those terrible weeks. His host was careful or we would invite Whistler to us if anybody was expected at Whitehall Court. After three or four years Mr. Heinemann's married life ended abruptly, and Whistler at once suggested that they should go back to the old way. Mr. Heinemann took another flat in Whitehall Court with this idea. But before the plan could be realised Whistler died.

In the autumn of 1896 Mr. Henry Savage Landor, back from Japan and Korea, also stayed with Mr. Heinemann; "a rare fellow, full of real affection," Whistler said of him. They sat up for hours together night after night. Whistler slept badly, and Mr. Landor can do with less sleep than most people. There was a skull in the drawing-room that Mr. Landor tells us Whistler sketched over and over again, while they talked till morning. When they drew the curtains it was day; then Whistler dressed, breakfasted, and went to the studio. He brought us stories of Mr. Landor; the way in which he would start for the ends of the earth as if to stroll in Piccadilly, "leaving the costume of travel to the Briton crossing the Channel"; or, in light shoes, "outwalk the stoutest-shod gillie over Scotch moors." Then Whistler brought us Mr. Landor, with whom our friendship dates from the morning when, at Whistler's request, he sat Japanese fashion on the floor in front of our fire, a rug wrapped round him for kimono, and devoured imaginary rice with pencils for chopsticks. When Mr. Landor had his horrible experiences in Thibet and the story of his tortures was telegraphed to Europe, Whistler was the first to send him a cable rejoicing at his escape. Whistler also took a fancy while in Whitehall Court to Mr. Heinemann's brother Edmund who was, Whistler said, "something in the City," who saw to one or two investments for him, and whom he christened the "Napoleon of Finance" and described as "sitting in a tangled web of telegraphs and telephones." He never had invested money before, and it was with pride that he deposited at the bank his scrip and collected his dividends. To end a discussion about the City Mr. Edmund Heinemann once said to him, "You ain't on the Stock Exchange!" "Well," said Whistler, "you just thank your stars, Eddy, I ain't, because if I was there wouldn't be much room for you! What!"

Evening after evening he would linger in the studio until he could see no longer; keeping dinner waiting at Whitehall Court, so that no time could ever be fixed. Arriving, he would mix cocktails, an art in which he excelled and must have learned in the days when he stayed away from the Coast Survey. If it did not suit him to dine at Whitehall Court he would write or wire to say he could dine with us if we liked; or that he had amazing things to tell us; should he come? or that he was sure we were both wanting to see him; or Heinemann's servant, Payne, would announce his coming; or he would drive straight from the studio, reaching us sometimes before the notes he had sent, or with the wires unsent in his pocket; almost the only time we have known him willingly not to dress for dinner. On rare occasions he came in after we had dined, demanded the _fortune du pot_ of our small establishment, and was content no matter how meagre that fortune might prove, though if it included "a piece of American cake," or anything sweet, he was better pleased. He grumbled only over our Sunday supper, which was cold in English fashion, out of deference to Bowen, our old English servant. Then he would bring Constant, his valet, model, and cook, to make an onion soup or an omelette. Constant was succeeded by a little Belgian called Marie, who was supposed to look after the studio, and who, when he stayed at Garlant's and we dined with him there, would be summoned to dress the salad and make the coffee. It was not long after this that, by the doctor's advice, he gave up coffee and stopped smoking too. Few men ever ate less than Whistler, but few were more fastidious about what they did eat. He made the best of our English cooking while it lasted, but he was glad when Bowen was replaced by Louise and then Augustine, who were French and who could make the soups, salads, and dishes he liked, and who did not hesitate to scold him when he was late and ruined the dinner.

These meetings must have been pleasant to Whistler as to us; there were weeks when he came every evening. On his arrival he might be silent, but after his nap he would begin talking, and his talk was as good on the last evening with us as on the first. We shall always regret that we made no notes of what he said, though the charm of his talk would have eluded a shorthand reporter. Much can never be forgotten. In "surroundings of antagonism" he wrapped this talk as well as himself in "a species of misunderstanding" and deliberately mystified, bewildered, and aggravated the company. But when disguise was not necessary, and he talked at his ease, he impressed everyone with his sanity of judgment, breadth of interest, and keenness of intellect. His reading was extensive, though we never ceased to wonder when he found time for it, save during sleepless nights. His talk abounded in quotations, especially from the Bible, that "splendid mine of invective," he described it. His diversity of knowledge was as unexpected as his extensive reading, and we felt that he knew things intuitively, just as by some uncanny faculty he heard everything said about him. When he chose he held the floor and was then at his best. "I am not arguing with you, I am telling you," he would say, and he would lose his temper, which was violent as ever, but he was friendlier than before when it was over. He liked to hear the last gossip, and reproached us if we had none for him. More than once he told E. her discretion amounted positively to indiscretion; he was sure she had a cupboard full of skeletons, and some day, when she was pulling the strings of one carefully to put it back in place, the whole lot would come rattling down about her ears. And so, the shadow of sorrow in the background, the evenings went by that winter in the little dining-room which had been Etty's studio where the huge Edinburgh pictures were painted.

The Eden affair was still dragging on, and Whistler was disgusted to find English artists as afraid to support him as at the Ruskin trial. One day in Bond Street he met a Follower, just returned to town, arm-on-arm with "the Baronet." The Follower at once left a card at Fitzroy Street. Whistler wrote "Judas Iscariot" on it and sent it back to him. A few weeks later the New English Art Club hung Sir William Eden's work, and with it, he said, "their shame, upon their walls." He complimented them, much to their discomfort, on their appetite for "toad." To clear the air, which had become sultry in the art clubs and studios, we invited Professor Fred Brown and Dr. D. S. MacColl to meet him one evening at dinner, and discuss things. Professor Brown had another engagement. Dr. MacColl came, and Whistler, who did not mind how hard a man fought if he fought at all, continued on terms with him. But the New English Art Club he never forgave.

A show of J.'s lithographs of Granada and the Alhambra was arranged at the Fine Art Society's during December 1896, and for the catalogue Whistler wrote an introductory note, and another for a show of Phil May's drawings in the same gallery. He designed the cover for Mr. Charles Whibley's _Book of Scoundrels_, and also two covers for novels by Miss Elizabeth Robins, _Below the Salt_, for which he drew a silver ship, and _The Open Question_, for which he devised shields; all three books published by Mr. Heinemann. The design for the _Book of Scoundrels_ was a gallows, drawn in thin lines, with rope and noose attached. Henley, to whom it was shown, asked whether the gallows should not have been drawn with a support. Whistler's comment was: "Well, you know, that's the usual sort of gallows, but this one will do. It will hang all of us. Just like Henley's selfishness to want a strong one!" an allusion to Henley's size.

During the winter Whistler met Sir Seymour Haden for the last time at a dinner given by the Society of Illustrators (of which both were Vice-Presidents) to Mr. Alfred Parsons, on his election to the Royal Academy. It was Whistler's first appearance in public since his wife's death, and as we had persuaded him to go, never anticipating any such meeting, we were annoyed to think that we had exposed him to the unpleasantness of it, or Haden either, for we had had no part in their quarrels. However, as soon as Whistler saw Haden he woke up and began to enjoy himself. His laugh carried far. Haden heard it, and may have seen the three monocles on the dinner-table. He looked toward the laugh, dropped his spoon in his soup-plate, and left. Later Whistler was called upon to make a speech and could not get out of it. But it was an anti-climax. The event of the dinner was over.

At Christmas he went with Mr. and Mrs. T. Fisher Unwin and ourselves to Bournemouth, where our hotel was an old-fashioned inn, selected from the guide-book because it was the nearest to the sea. We breakfasted in our rooms, we met at lunch to order dinner, and the rest of the day Whistler insisted must be spent getting an appetite for it--wandering on the cliffs, he with his little paint-box. But the sea was on the wrong side, the wind blew the wrong way, he could do nothing. Some days we took long drives. One damp, cold, cheerless afternoon we stopped at a small inn in Poole. The landlady, watching Whistler sip his hot whisky and water, was convinced he was somebody, but was unable to place him. "And who do you suppose I am?" Whistler asked at last. "I can't exactly say, sir, but I should fancy you was from the 'Alls!" Aubrey Beardsley was then at Boscombe, a further stage in his brave fight with death, and we went to see him. But the sight of the suffering of others was too cruel a reminder to Whistler, and he shrank from going to Beardsley.

Dinner was the event of the day, and it would have proved a disaster had Whistler not seen humour in being expected to eat it, so little was it what he thought a dinner should be. On Christmas Day he was melancholy and stared at the turkey and bread sauce, the sodden potatoes and soaked greens: "To think of my beautiful room in the Rue du Bac, and the rest of them there, eating their Christmas dinner, having up my wonderful old Pouilly from my cellar."

But we had something else to talk about. In the _Saturday Review_ of that week, December 26, there was an article, signed Walter Sickert, that was of interest to us all.

[Footnote 11: Whistler never lost his fancy for inventing names for his friends, and O'K. was the one he found for Mr. Kennedy, rarely calling him by any other either in conversation or correspondence.]