Love's Usuries Part 11

"Splendid likeness--the best he has ever done, eh? He calls it 'The Body of Me.' Ha! ha! The Corporation of H---- commissioned, it, and luckily he got it finished before he took leave of his senses."

"Senses!" I echoed, stupidly. "What is wrong? What has he been saying, doing?"

"More antics! Haven't you seen 'The Soul of Me,' there, in the next room?"

And Spry, scarcely waiting for dissent, led off, inviting me, by backward twists of the head, to follow his pioneering.

The crowd was too great for conversation, but it was easy to know from the congested state of the room in a particular spot where Wray's work must be hung. When patience was nearly exhausted we reached it. Comments and criticisms were freely bandied aloud.

"Decidedly morbid," spake a sightseer in disgust.

"Hideous! I wouldn't own such a picture for worlds," confided one woman to another.

"It is astounding," an art critic remarked to his companion, whose face I knew. "What power, what genius, yet----"

"Genius is a loganstone," said the other, shaking his head. "It rocks and rocks, but a stalk of asphodel may s.h.i.+ft it from its centre."

"For 'asphodel' translate 'woman,'" the critic replied, "and you solve the riddle."

At this moment a gap opened; it was sufficiently wide to reveal the subject without the frame of the picture.

On a slab of wood in semi-darkness lay a drowned woman. The rays from a lamp, held aloft by a bargee or coal-heaver, flickered down on the green-grey features that had already lost the expression which accompanies the first beat.i.tude of death. Some outcast, as the worn finery proved; young in years, we knew by the modelling of her throat; aged in worldliness, by the hard set of her features, the spa.r.s.e strands of faded hair that might once have glittered. The folds of the frayed gown hung lank, heavy with dark drops of liquid mud which oozed and fell slowly to the ground, already a mora.s.s of wharf drippings that reflected pallidly the meagre gleams of the uplifted lamp. The magnificent anatomy of a beautiful arm, a shapely bosom--bared, it seemed, in an effort to reanimate--showed that this was no plebeian waif driven by stress of poverty over the water's edge. On the elbow was grim evidence of Wray's realistic mood--a bruise, wide and purple, and higher up, the dull indenture of a water-rat's tooth.

"Well," said Spry, watching my mute amazement, "he has left no part of his gruesome task undone; he has gloated in it--look!--even to the snipping of the linen."

A definite jag on the front of the s.h.i.+ft--the place which is usually inscribed with the name of the owner--was carefully insisted on. It was the highest light in the picture, and seemed to emphasise a piteous degradation and still more piteous consciousness thereof.

"Wray turned moralist?" a bystander sneered.

"We may find sermons in stones, but we don't want 'em on canvas,"

bounced another, a "port-wine-flavoured" personage, who ogled for applause with the confidence of the self-crowned wag.

I eyed him with swelling spleen, and shot a dart at Spry which was intended to ricochet.

"Wasn't it Flaubert who said that, in the hands of an artist, a disembowelled ox would make as fine a subject as any other?"

"I don't know," returned Spry, "but, anyway, about this work there are ugly tales afloat. It is too true--unpleasantly, unnecessarily true."

It indeed appeared to be inhumanly horrible--a vulture swoop of the brush--and, much as I appreciated Wray as a friend and wors.h.i.+pped him as a disciple, I was forced to recognise a want of reserve, some lack of sentiment in the handling--say, rather, over-handling--of so repellant a subject. His aim seemed to lie in choking sentiment--suffocating it in loathliness and disgust. There was a violence of pa.s.sion that suggested the manner of Prudhon--suggested it, but, giant-like, overshadowed it with the brawny vigour of modern actuality.

I turned from the picture to the crowd, blinked dazedly to find myself again facing daylight and colour, and stretched myself awake as far as environing shoulders would allow. Looking away from this squalid scene, I became suddenly aware of an unusual amount of paint and gilding on the walls--an art tawdriness that had not before obtruded itself. My taste for the reproduction of veined marble and glossy parquet, for pretty p.u.s.s.ies and portraits of gentlefolk was exhausted. I made for the turnstiles, and nodded to Spry to get quit of him.

"I'm off," I said, curtly, "to look up Wray and offer my congratulations."

Green Park, bedecked in spring raiment, seemed to me at that moment a welcome oasis of verdure in the midst of the swirl of Piccadilly; it offered no impediment to the bubbling flood of conjecture that Wray's strange _chef d'oeuvre_ had let loose.

So far as I knew him--and our friends.h.i.+p, though spasmodic by reason of my wanderings, had existed since our teens--he was the last man to sneak voluntarily into the shadowy niches of life; his nature clung to radiance and his sentiment revolted at the opacity of pessimism. Why, then, this sudden hectic of the sensational? Why, indeed, unless the genius, the loganstone, as suggested by the fellow in the exhibition, had rocked till it tilted?

In the midst of my mental tussle, while twisting the pros and cons in favour of lunacy, and walking with bent head and irresponsible stride, I fell foul of an obstacle. It was Lawrence Vane, the poet, who, being well known to me, chose this mode of salute.

"Your _moutons_ are causing you trouble," he laughed. "Debts?--love affairs?"

"I have neither," I replied, without a vestige of humour.

He was a breezy fellow, good tempered and sound, but at the moment he was out of place. Despite my abruptness he wheeled round and kept pace with me.

"You were totting up your virtues then?" he pursued.

"I can do that on my fingers. It was Wray's vagaries that puzzled me. I am on my way to him."

His cheery mood vanished.

"Don't go near him," he burst out. "He is a beast; I loathe him."

"He is my friend." (This with an accent on the last word.)

"I expected that. They were my friends once, but I never go there now."

"They?" I inquired. I had forgotten the report of Wray's marriage, five years before. It had taken place in Rome on the eve of my departure from England.

"He and his wife. You met her? No? She was the sweetest girl that ever stept."

"Was?" I exclaimed. "Is she dead?"

"Dead to us, to society, to happiness. She left her husband within the year."

"Poor fellow!"

It was well to have met Lawrence before going to Wray's studio--awkward situations might have ensued. I delved for more of the domestic history.

"She was the prey of mischief-makers--there were so many who envied her.

People whispered cruelly of her mysterious elfish beauty, and women coveted her golden hair; for nothing women resent so much as Nature's own coronation of sovereignty. She was only eighteen, and believed in him--worse luck for her. Afterwards she became jealous and tried the spur. It makes some beasts go and some stand stock still. He gibbed.

Rash people--men--quoted Byron, told her that constancy was woman's greatest vice; others--women--bragged of the equality of man and woman, hinted at levelling down when you can't level up."

"He had cared for her?"

"It was a love match. But you can't plant figs in the midst of thistles.

He was easygoing, hated a smart, so there was no uprooting, and the fig tree perished!"

There were tears in Lawrence's eyes, but he began whistling a music hall air in affectation of nonchalance.

"Well," I said, extending a hand as we neared Buckingham Gate, "it is miserably sad, but thanks for instructing me. I shall be saved unlucky allusions."

"You mean to see him?" he asked, dejectedly.

"Certainly."