Of Human Bondage (44 page)

  When Philip returned to Amitrano's he found that
Fanny Price was no longer working there. She had given up the key
of her locker. He asked Mrs. Otter whether she knew what had become
of her; and Mrs. Otter, with a shrug of the shoulders, answered
that she had probably gone back to England. Philip was relieved. He
was profoundly bored by her ill-temper. Moreover she insisted on
advising him about his work, looked upon it as a slight when he did
not follow her precepts, and would not understand that he felt
himself no longer the duffer he had been at first. Soon he forgot
all about her. He was working in oils now and he was full of
enthusiasm. He hoped to have something done of sufficient
importance to send to the following year's Salon. Lawson was
painting a portrait of Miss Chalice. She was very paintable, and
all the young men who had fallen victims to her charm had made
portraits of her. A natural indolence, joined with a passion for
picturesque attitude, made her an excellent sitter; and she had
enough technical knowledge to offer useful criticisms. Since her
passion for art was chiefly a passion to live the life of artists,
she was quite content to neglect her own work. She liked the warmth
of the studio, and the opportunity to smoke innumerable cigarettes;
and she spoke in a low, pleasant voice of the love of art and the
art of love. She made no clear distinction between the two.

  Lawson was painting with infinite labour, working
till he could hardly stand for days and then scraping out all he
had done. He would have exhausted the patience of anyone but Ruth
Chalice. At last he got into a hopeless muddle.

  "The only thing is to take a new canvas and start
fresh," he said. "I know exactly what I want now, and it won't take
me long."

  Philip was present at the time, and Miss Chalice
said to him:

  "Why don't you paint me too? You'll be able to learn
a lot by watching Mr. Lawson."

  It was one of Miss Chalice's delicacies that she
always addressed her lovers by their surnames.

  "I should like it awfully if Lawson wouldn't
mind."

  "I don't care a damn," said Lawson.

  It was the first time that Philip set about a
portrait, and he began with trepidation but also with pride. He sat
by Lawson and painted as he saw him paint. He profited by the
example and by the advice which both Lawson and Miss Chalice freely
gave him. At last Lawson finished and invited Clutton in to
criticise. Clutton had only just come back to Paris. From Provence
he had drifted down to Spain, eager to see Velasquez at Madrid, and
thence he had gone to Toledo. He stayed there three months, and he
was returned with a name new to the young men: he had wonderful
things to say of a painter called El Greco, who it appeared could
only be studied in Toledo.

  "Oh yes, I know about him," said Lawson, "he's the
old master whose distinction it is that he painted as badly as the
moderns."

  Clutton, more taciturn than ever, did not answer,
but he looked at Lawson with a sardonic air.

  "Are you going to show us the stuff you've brought
back from Spain?" asked Philip.

  "I didn't paint in Spain, I was too busy."

  "What did you do then?"

  "I thought things out. I believe I'm through with
the Impressionists; I've got an idea they'll seem very thin and
superficial in a few years. I want to make a clean sweep of
everything I've learnt and start fresh. When I came back I
destroyed everything I'd painted. I've got nothing in my studio now
but an easel, my paints, and some clean canvases."

  "What are you going to do?"

  "I don't know yet. I've only got an inkling of what
I want."

  He spoke slowly, in a curious manner, as though he
were straining to hear something which was only just audible. There
seemed to be a mysterious force in him which he himself did not
understand, but which was struggling obscurely to find an outlet.
His strength impressed you. Lawson dreaded the criticism he asked
for and had discounted the blame he thought he might get by
affecting a contempt for any opinion of Clutton's; but Philip knew
there was nothing which would give him more pleasure than Clutton's
praise. Clutton looked at the portrait for some time in silence,
then glanced at Philip's picture, which was standing on an
easel.

  "What's that?" he asked.

  "Oh, I had a shot at a portrait too."

  "The sedulous ape," he murmured.

  He turned away again to Lawson's canvas. Philip
reddened but did not speak.

  "Well, what d'you think of it?" asked Lawson at
length.

  "The modelling's jolly good," said Clutton. "And I
think it's very well drawn."

  "D'you think the values are all right?"

  "Quite."

  Lawson smiled with delight. He shook himself in his
clothes like a wet dog.

  "I say, I'm jolly glad you like it."

  "I don't. I don't think it's of the smallest
importance."

  Lawson's face fell, and he stared at Clutton with
astonishment: he had no notion what he meant, Clutton had no gift
of expression in words, and he spoke as though it were an effort.
What he had to say was confused, halting, and verbose; but Philip
knew the words which served as the text of his rambling discourse.
Clutton, who never read, had heard them first from Cronshaw; and
though they had made small impression, they had remained in his
memory; and lately, emerging on a sudden, had acquired the
character of a revelation: a good painter had two chief objects to
paint, namely, man and the intention of his soul. The
Impressionists had been occupied with other problems, they had
painted man admirably, but they had troubled themselves as little
as the English portrait painters of the eighteenth century with the
intention of his soul.

  "But when you try to get that you become literary,"
said Lawson, interrupting. "Let me paint the man like Manet, and
the intention of his soul can go to the devil."

  "That would be all very well if you could beat Manet
at his own game, but you can't get anywhere near him. You can't
feed yourself on the day before yesterday, it's ground which has
been swept dry. You must go back. It's when I saw the Grecos that I
felt one could get something more out of portraits than we knew
before."

  "It's just going back to Ruskin," cried Lawson.

  "No – you see, he went for morality: I don't care a
damn for morality: teaching doesn't come in, ethics and all that,
but passion and emotion. The greatest portrait painters have
painted both, man and the intention of his soul; Rembrandt and El
Greco; it's only the second-raters who've only painted man. A lily
of the valley would be lovely even if it didn't smell, but it's
more lovely because it has perfume. That picture" – he pointed to
Lawson's portrait – "well, the drawing's all right and so's the
modelling all right, but just conventional; it ought to be drawn
and modelled so that you know the girl's a lousy slut. Correctness
is all very well: El Greco made his people eight feet high because
he wanted to express something he couldn't get any other way."

  "Damn El Greco," said Lawson, "what's the good of
jawing about a man when we haven't a chance of seeing any of his
work?"

  Clutton shrugged his shoulders, smoked a cigarette
in silence, and went away. Philip and Lawson looked at one
another.

  "There's something in what he says," said
Philip.

  Lawson stared ill-temperedly at his picture.

  "How the devil is one to get the intention of the
soul except by painting exactly what one sees?"

  About this time Philip made a new friend. On Monday
morning models assembled at the school in order that one might be
chosen for the week, and one day a young man was taken who was
plainly not a model by profession. Philip's attention was attracted
by the manner in which he held himself: when he got on to the stand
he stood firmly on both feet, square, with clenched hands, and with
his head defiantly thrown forward; the attitude emphasised his fine
figure; there was no fat on him, and his muscles stood out as
though they were of iron. His head, close-cropped, was well-shaped,
and he wore a short beard; he had large, dark eyes and heavy
eyebrows. He held the pose hour after hour without appearance of
fatigue. There was in his mien a mixture of shame and of
determination. His air of passionate energy excited Philip's
romantic imagination, and when, the sitting ended, he saw him in
his clothes, it seemed to him that he wore them as though he were a
king in rags. He was uncommunicative, but in a day or two Mrs.
Otter told Philip that the model was a Spaniard and that he had
never sat before.

  "I suppose he was starving," said Philip.

  "Have you noticed his clothes? They're quite neat
and decent, aren't they?"

  It chanced that Potter, one of the Americans who
worked at Amitrano's, was going to Italy for a couple of months,
and offered his studio to Philip. Philip was pleased. He was
growing a little impatient of Lawson's peremptory advice and wanted
to be by himself. At the end of the week he went up to the model
and on the pretence that his drawing was not finished asked whether
he would come and sit to him one day.

  "I'm not a model," the Spaniard answered. "I have
other things to do next week."

  "Come and have luncheon with me now, and we'll talk
about it," said Philip, and as the other hesitated, he added with a
smile: "It won't hurt you to lunch with me."

  With a shrug of the shoulders the model consented,
and they went off to a cremerie. The Spaniard spoke broken French,
fluent but difficult to follow, and Philip managed to get on well
enough with him. He found out that he was a writer. He had come to
Paris to write novels and kept himself meanwhile by all the
expedients possible to a penniless man; he gave lessons, he did any
translations he could get hold of, chiefly business documents, and
at last had been driven to make money by his fine figure. Sitting
was well paid, and what he had earned during the last week was
enough to keep him for two more; he told Philip, amazed, that he
could live easily on two francs a day; but it filled him with shame
that he was obliged to show his body for money, and he looked upon
sitting as a degradation which only hunger could excuse. Philip
explained that he did not want him to sit for the figure, but only
for the head; he wished to do a portrait of him which he might send
to the next Salon.

  "But why should you want to paint me?" asked the
Spaniard.

  Philip answered that the head interested him, he
thought he could do a good portrait.

  "I can't afford the time. I grudge every minute that
I have to rob from my writing."

  "But it would only be in the afternoon. I work at
the school in the morning. After all, it's better to sit to me than
to do translations of legal documents."

  There were legends in the Latin quarter of a time
when students of different countries lived together intimately, but
this was long since passed, and now the various nations were almost
as much separated as in an Oriental city. At Julian's and at the
Beaux Arts a French student was looked upon with disfavour by his
fellow-countrymen when he consorted with foreigners, and it was
difficult for an Englishman to know more than quite superficially
any native inhabitants of the city in which he dwelt. Indeed, many
of the students after living in Paris for five years knew no more
French than served them in shops and lived as English a life as
though they were working in South Kensington.

  Philip, with his passion for the romantic, welcomed
the opportunity to get in touch with a Spaniard; he used all his
persuasiveness to overcome the man's reluctance.

  "I'll tell you what I'll do," said the Spaniard at
last. "I'll sit to you, but not for money, for my own
pleasure."

  Philip expostulated, but the other was firm, and at
length they arranged that he should come on the following Monday at
one o'clock. He gave Philip a card on which was printed his name:
Miguel Ajuria.

  Miguel sat regularly, and though he refused to
accept payment he borrowed fifty francs from Philip every now and
then: it was a little more expensive than if Philip had paid for
the sittings in the usual way; but gave the Spaniard a satisfactory
feeling that he was not earning his living in a degrading manner.
His nationality made Philip regard him as a representative of
romance, and he asked him about Seville and Granada, Velasquez and
Calderon. But Miguel bad no patience with the grandeur of his
country. For him, as for so many of his compatriots, France was the
only country for a man of intelligence and Paris the centre of the
world.

  "Spain is dead," he cried. "It has no writers, it
has no art, it has nothing."

  Little by little, with the exuberant rhetoric of his
race, he revealed his ambitions. He was writing a novel which he
hoped would make his name. He was under the influence of Zola, and
he had set his scene in Paris. He told Philip the story at length.
To Philip it seemed crude and stupid; the naive obscenity – c'est
la vie, mon cher, c'est la vie, he cried – the naive obscenity
served only to emphasise the conventionality of the anecdote. He
had written for two years, amid incredible hardships, denying
himself all the pleasures of life which had attracted him to Paris,
fighting with starvation for art's sake, determined that nothing
should hinder his great achievement. The effort was heroic.