THE VERDICT
I HAD always thought Jack Gisburn rather a cheap genius--though a
good fellow enough--so it was no great surprise to me to hear that,
in the height of his glory, he had dropped his painting, married a
rich widow, and established himself in a villa on the Riviera.
(Though I rather thought it would have been Rome or Florence.)
"The height of his glory"--that was what the women called it. I can
hear Mrs. Gideon Thwing--his last Chicago sitter--deploring his
unaccountable abdication. "Of course it's going to send the value of
my picture 'way up; but I don't think of that, Mr. Rickham--the loss
to Arrt is all I think of." The word, on Mrs. Thwing's lips,
multiplied its _rs_ as though they were reflected in an endless
vista of mirrors. And it was not only the Mrs. Thwings who mourned.
Had not the exquisite Hermia Croft, at the last Grafton Gallery
show, stopped me before Gisburn's "Moon-dancers" to say, with tears
in her eyes: "We shall not look upon its like again"?
Well!--even through the prism of Hermia's tears I felt able to face
the fact with equanimity. Poor Jack Gisburn! The women had made
him--it was fitting that they should mourn him. Among his own sex
fewer regrets were heard, and in his own trade hardly a murmur.
Professional jealousy? Perhaps. If it were, the honour of the craft
was vindicated by little Claude Nutley, who, in all good faith,
brought out in the Burlington a very handsome "obituary" on
Jack--one of those showy articles stocked with random technicalities
that I have heard (I won't say by whom) compared to Gisburn's
painting. And so--his resolve being apparently irrevocable--the
discussion gradually died out, and, as Mrs. Thwing had predicted,
the price of "Gisburns" went up.
It was not till three years later that, in the course of a few
weeks' idling on the Riviera, it suddenly occurred to me to wonder
why Gisburn had given up his painting. On reflection, it really was
a tempting problem. To accuse his wife would have been too easy--his
fair sitters had been denied the solace of saying that Mrs. Gisburn
had "dragged him down." For Mrs. Gisburn--as such--had not existed
till nearly a year after Jack's resolve had been taken. It might be
that he had married her--since he liked his ease--because he didn't
want to go on painting; but it would have been hard to prove that he
had given up his painting because he had married her.
Of course, if she had not dragged him down, she had equally, as Miss
Croft contended, failed to "lift him up"--she had not led him back
to the easel. To put the brush into his hand again--what a vocation
for a wife! But Mrs. Gisburn appeared to have disdained it--and I
felt it might be interesting to find out why.
The desultory life of the Riviera lends itself to such purely
academic speculations; and having, on my way to Monte Carlo, caught
a glimpse of Jack's balustraded terraces between the pines, I had
myself borne thither the next day.
I found the couple at tea beneath their palm-trees; and Mrs.
Gisburn's welcome was so genial that, in the ensuing weeks, I
claimed it frequently. It was not that my hostess was "interesting":
on that point I could have given Miss Croft the fullest reassurance.
It was just because she was _not_ interesting--if I may be pardoned
the bull--that I found her so. For Jack, all his life, had been
surrounded by interesting women: they had fostered his art, it had
been reared in the hot-house of their adulation. And it was
therefore instructive to note what effect the "deadening atmosphere
of mediocrity" (I quote Miss Croft) was having on him.
I have mentioned that Mrs. Gisburn was rich; and it was immediately
perceptible that her husband was extracting from this circumstance a
delicate but substantial satisfaction. It is, as a rule, the people
who scorn money who get most out of it; and Jack's elegant disdain
of his wife's big balance enabled him, with an appearance of perfect
good-breeding, to transmute it into objects of art and luxury. To
the latter, I must add, he remained relatively indifferent; but he
was buying Renaissance bronzes and eighteenth-century pictures with
a discrimination that bespoke the amplest resources.
"Money's only excuse is to put beauty into circulation," was one of
the axioms he laid down across the Sevres and silver of an
exquisitely appointed luncheon-table, when, on a later day, I had
again run over from Monte Carlo; and Mrs. Gisburn, beaming on him,
added for my enlightenment: "Jack is so morbidly sensitive to every
form of beauty."
Poor Jack! It had always been his fate to have women say such things
of him: the fact should be set down in extenuation. What struck me
now was that, for the first time, he resented the tone. I had seen
him, so often, basking under similar tributes--was it the conjugal
note that robbed them of their savour? No--for, oddly enough, it
became apparent that he was fond of Mrs. Gisburn--fond enough not to
see her absurdity. It was his own absurdity he seemed to be wincing
under--his own attitude as an object for garlands and incense.
"My dear, since I've chucked painting people don't say that stuff
about me--they say it about Victor Grindle," was his only protest,
as he rose from the table and strolled out onto the sunlit terrace.
I glanced after him, struck by his last word. Victor Grindle was, in
fact, becoming the man of the moment--as Jack himself, one might put
it, had been the man of the hour. The younger artist was said to
have formed himself at my friend's feet, and I wondered if a tinge
of jealousy underlay the latter's mysterious abdication. But no--for
it was not till after that event that the _rose Dubarry_
drawing-rooms had begun to display their "Grindles."
I turned to Mrs. Gisburn, who had lingered to give a lump of sugar
to her spaniel in the dining-room.
"Why _has_ he chucked painting?" I asked abruptly.
She raised her eyebrows with a hint of good-humoured surprise.
"Oh, he doesn't _have_ to now, you know; and I want him to enjoy
himself," she said quite simply.
I looked about the spacious white-panelled room, with its
_famille-verte_ vases repeating the tones of the pale damask
curtains, and its eighteenth-century pastels in delicate faded
frames.
"Has he chucked his pictures too? I haven't seen a single one in the
house."
A slight shade of constraint crossed Mrs. Gisburn's open
countenance. "It's his ridiculous modesty, you know. He says they're
not fit to have about; he's sent them all away except one--my
portrait--and that I have to keep upstairs."
His ridiculous modesty--Jack's modesty about his pictures? My
curiosity was growing like the bean-stalk. I said persuasively to my
hostess: "I must really see your portrait, you know."
She glanced out almost timorously at the terrace where her husband,
lounging in a hooded chair, had lit a cigar and drawn the Russian
deerhound's head between his knees.
"Well, come while he's not looking," she said, with a laugh that
tried to hide her nervousness; and I followed her between the marble
Emperors of the hall, and up the wide stairs with terra-cotta nymphs
poised among flowers at each landing.
In the dimmest corner of her boudoir, amid a profusion of delicate
and distinguished objects, hung one of the familiar oval canvases,
in the inevitable garlanded frame. The mere outline of the frame
called up all Gisburn's past!
Mrs. Gisburn drew back the window-curtains, moved aside a
_jardiniere_ full of pink azaleas, pushed an arm-chair away, and
said: "If you stand here you can just manage to see it. I had it
over the mantel-piece, but he wouldn't let it stay."
Yes--I could just manage to see it--the first portrait of Jack's I
had ever had to strain my eyes over! Usually they had the place of
honour--say the central panel in a pale yellow or _rose Dubarry_
drawing-room, or a monumental easel placed so that it took the light
through curtains of old Venetian point. The more modest place became
the picture better; yet, as my eyes grew accustomed to the
half-light, all the characteristic qualities came out--all the
hesitations disguised as audacities, the tricks of prestidigitation
by which, with such consummate skill, he managed to divert attention
from the real business of the picture to some pretty irrelevance of
detail. Mrs. Gisburn, presenting a neutral surface to work
on--forming, as it were, so inevitably the background of her own
picture--had lent herself in an unusual degree to the display of
this false virtuosity. The picture was one of Jack's "strongest," as
his admirers would have put it--it represented, on his part, a
swelling of muscles, a congesting of veins, a balancing, straddling
and straining, that reminded one of the circus-clown's ironic
efforts to lift a feather. It met, in short, at every point the
demand of lovely woman to be painted "strongly" because she was
tired of being painted "sweetly"--and yet not to lose an atom of the
sweetness.
"It's the last he painted, you know," Mrs. Gisburn said with
pardonable pride. "The last but one," she corrected herself--"but
the other doesn't count, because he destroyed it."
"Destroyed it?" I was about to follow up this clue when I heard a
footstep and saw Jack himself on the threshold.
As he stood there, his hands in the pockets of his velveteen coat,
the thin brown waves of hair pushed back from his white forehead,
his lean sunburnt cheeks furrowed by a smile that lifted the tips of
a self-confident moustache, I felt to what a degree he had the same
quality as his pictures--the quality of looking cleverer than he
was.
His wife glanced at him deprecatingly, but his eyes travelled past
her to the portrait.
"Mr. Rickham wanted to see it," she began, as if excusing herself.
He shrugged his shoulders, still smiling.
"Oh, Rickham found me out long ago," he said lightly; then, passing
his arm through mine: "Come and see the rest of the house."
He showed it to me with a kind of naive suburban pride: the
bath-rooms, the speaking-tubes, the dress-closets, the
trouser-presses--all the complex simplifications of the
millionaire's domestic economy. And whenever my wonder paid the
expected tribute he said, throwing out his chest a little: "Yes, I
really don't see how people manage to live without that."
Well--it was just the end one might have foreseen for him. Only he
was, through it all and in spite of it all--as he had been through,
and in spite of, his pictures--so handsome, so charming, so
disarming, that one longed to cry out: "Be dissatisfied with your
leisure!" as once one had longed to say: "Be dissatisfied with your
work!"
But, with the cry on my lips, my diagnosis suffered an unexpected
check.
"This is my own lair," he said, leading me into a dark plain room at
the end of the florid vista. It was square and brown and leathery:
no "effects"; no bric-a-brac, none of the air of posing for
reproduction in a picture weekly--above all, no least sign of ever
having been used as a studio.
The fact brought home to me the absolute finality of Jack's break
with his old life.
"Don't you ever dabble with paint any more?" I asked, still looking
about for a trace of such activity.
"Never," he said briefly.
"Or water-colour--or etching?"
His confident eyes grew dim, and his cheeks paled a little under
their handsome sunburn.
"Never think of it, my dear fellow--any more than if I'd never
touched a brush."
And his tone told me in a flash that he never thought of anything
else.
I moved away, instinctively embarrassed by my unexpected discovery;
and as I turned, my eye fell on a small picture above the
mantel-piece--the only object breaking the plain oak panelling of
the room.
"Oh, by Jove!" I said.
It was a sketch of a donkey--an old tired donkey, standing in the
rain under a wall.
"By Jove--a Stroud!" I cried.
He was silent; but I felt him close behind me, breathing a little
quickly.
"What a wonder! Made with a dozen lines--but on everlasting
foundations. You lucky chap, where did you get it?"
He answered slowly: "Mrs. Stroud gave it to me."
"Ah--I didn't know you even knew the Strouds. He was such an
inflexible hermit."
"I didn't--till after. . . . She sent for me to paint him when he
was dead."
"When he was dead? You?"
I must have let a little too much amazement escape through my
surprise, for he answered with a deprecating laugh: "Yes--she's an
awful simpleton, you know, Mrs. Stroud. Her only idea was to have
him done by a fashionable painter--ah, poor Stroud! She thought it
the surest way of proclaiming his greatness--of forcing it on a
purblind public. And at the moment I was _the_ fashionable painter."
"Ah, poor Stroud--as you say. Was _that_ his history?"
"That was his history. She believed in him, gloried in him--or
thought she did. But she couldn't bear not to have all the
drawing-rooms with her. She couldn't bear the fact that, on
varnishing days, one could always get near enough to see his
pictures. Poor woman! She's just a fragment groping for other
fragments. Stroud is the only whole I ever knew."
"You ever knew? But you just said--"
Gisburn had a curious smile in his eyes.
"Oh, I knew him, and he knew me--only it happened after he was
dead."
I dropped my voice instinctively. "When she sent for you?"
"Yes--quite insensible to the irony. She wanted him vindicated--and
by me!"
He laughed again, and threw back his head to look up at the sketch
of the donkey. "There were days when I couldn't look at that
thing--couldn't face it. But I forced myself to put it here; and now
it's cured me--cured me. That's the reason why I don't dabble any
more, my dear Rickham; or rather Stroud himself is the reason."
For the first time my idle curiosity about my companion turned into
a serious desire to understand him better.
"I wish you'd tell me how it happened," I said.
He stood looking up at the sketch, and twirling between his fingers
a cigarette he had forgotten to light. Suddenly he turned toward me.
"I'd rather like to tell you--because I've always suspected you of
loathing my work."
I made a deprecating gesture, which he negatived with a
good-humoured shrug.
"Oh, I didn't care a straw when I believed in myself--and now it's
an added tie between us!"
He laughed slightly, without bitterness, and pushed one of the deep
arm-chairs forward. "There: make yourself comfortable--and here are
the cigars you like."
He placed them at my elbow and continued to wander up and down the
room, stopping now and then beneath the picture.
"How it happened? I can tell you in five minutes--and it didn't take
much longer to happen. . . . I can remember now how surprised and
pleased I was when I got Mrs. Stroud's note. Of course, deep down, I
had always _felt_ there was no one like him--only I had gone with
the stream, echoed the usual platitudes about him, till I half got
to think he was a failure, one of the kind that are left behind. By
Jove, and he _was_ left behind--because he had come to stay! The
rest of us had to let ourselves be swept along or go under, but he
was high above the current--on everlasting foundations, as you say.
"Well, I went off to the house in my most egregious mood--rather
moved, Lord forgive me, at the pathos of poor Stroud's career of
failure being crowned by the glory of my painting him! Of course I
meant to do the picture for nothing--I told Mrs. Stroud so when she
began to stammer something about her poverty. I remember getting off
a prodigious phrase about the honour being _mine_--oh, I was
princely, my dear Rickham! I was posing to myself like one of my own
sitters.
"Then I was taken up and left alone with him. I had sent all my
traps in advance, and I had only to set up the easel and get to
work. He had been dead only twenty-four hours, and he died suddenly,
of heart disease, so that there had been no preliminary work of
destruction--his face was clear and untouched. I had met him once or
twice, years before, and thought him insignificant and dingy. Now I
saw that he was superb.
"I was glad at first, with a merely aesthetic satisfaction: glad to
have my hand on such a 'subject.' Then his strange life-likeness
began to affect me queerly--as I blocked the head in I felt as if he
were watching me do it. The sensation was followed by the thought:
if he _were_ watching me, what would he say to my way of working? My
strokes began to go a little wild--I felt nervous and uncertain.
"Once, when I looked up, I seemed to see a smile behind his close
grayish beard--as if he had the secret, and were amusing himself by
holding it back from me. That exasperated me still more. The secret?
Why, I had a secret worth twenty of his! I dashed at the canvas
furiously, and tried some of my bravura tricks. But they failed me,
they crumbled. I saw that he wasn't watching the showy bits--I
couldn't distract his attention; he just kept his eyes on the hard
passages between. Those were the ones I had always shirked, or
covered up with some lying paint. And how he saw through my lies!
"I looked up again, and caught sight of that sketch of the donkey
hanging on the wall near his bed. His wife told me afterward it was
the last thing he had done--just a note taken with a shaking hand,
when he was down in Devonshire recovering from a previous heart
attack. Just a note! But it tells his whole history. There are years
of patient scornful persistence in every line. A man who had swum
with the current could never have learned that mighty up-stream
stroke. . . .
"I turned back to my work, and went on groping and muddling; then I
looked at the donkey again. I saw that, when Stroud laid in the
first stroke, he knew just what the end would be. He had possessed
his subject, absorbed it, recreated it. When had I done that with
any of my things? They hadn't been born of me--I had just adopted
them. . . .
"Hang it, Rickham, with that face watching me I couldn't do another
stroke. The plain truth was, I didn't know where to put it--_I had
never known_. Only, with my sitters and my public, a showy splash of
colour covered up the fact--I just threw paint into their faces. . .
. Well, paint was the one medium those dead eyes could see
through--see straight to the tottering foundations underneath. Don't
you know how, in talking a foreign language, even fluently, one says
half the time not what one wants to but what one can? Well--that was
the way I painted; and as he lay there and watched me, the thing
they called my 'technique' collapsed like a house of cards. He
didn't sneer, you understand, poor Stroud--he just lay there quietly
watching, and on his lips, through the gray beard, I seemed to hear
the question: 'Are you sure you know where you're coming out?'
"If I could have painted that face, with that question on it, I
should have done a great thing. The next greatest thing was to see
that I couldn't--and that grace was given me. But, oh, at that
minute, Rickham, was there anything on earth I wouldn't have given
to have Stroud alive before me, and to hear him say: 'It's not too
late--I'll show you how'?
"It _was_ too late--it would have been, even if he'd been alive. I
packed up my traps, and went down and told Mrs. Stroud. Of course I
didn't tell her _that_--it would have been Greek to her. I simply
said I couldn't paint him, that I was too moved. She rather liked
the idea--she's so romantic! It was that that made her give me the
donkey. But she was terribly upset at not getting the portrait--she
did so want him 'done' by some one showy! At first I was afraid she
wouldn't let me off--and at my wits' end I suggested Grindle. Yes,
it was I who started Grindle: I told Mrs. Stroud he was the 'coming'
man, and she told somebody else, and so it got to be true. . . . And
he painted Stroud without wincing; and she hung the picture among
her husband's things. . . ."
He flung himself down in the arm-chair near mine, laid back his
head, and clasping his arms beneath it, looked up at the picture
above the chimney-piece.
"I like to fancy that Stroud himself would have given it to me, if
he'd been able to say what he thought that day."
And, in answer to a question I put half-mechanically--"Begin again?"
he flashed out. "When the one thing that brings me anywhere near him
is that I knew enough to leave off?"
He stood up and laid his hand on my shoulder with a laugh. "Only the
irony of it is that I _am_ still painting--since Grindle's doing it
for me! The Strouds stand alone, and happen once--but there's no
exterminating our kind of art."
