“I?”
“Either you, because you carry about with you an uncomfortable Palace of Truth sort of atmosphere, or else the desire to rub it into my mother.”
“Rub what in?” Jimmie was puzzled.
Norma laughed somewhat bitterly. She saw that he was incapable of understanding the vulgar pettiness of the scheme of motives that had prompted the utterances of her mother and herself. She could not explain.
“I think you are born out of your century,” she said.
It was lucky for Jimmie that he was unaware of the passionate tribute the light words implied. She gave him no time to answer, but carried him straight to the pictures.
“I had no idea you did such beautiful work,” she said, looking around her.
Jimmie followed her glance, and the melancholy of the artist laid its touch for a moment upon him. He sighed.
“They might have been beautiful if I had done what I started out to do. It is the eternal tragedy of the clipped wings.”
She was oddly responsive to a vibration in his voice, and gave out, like a passive violin, the harmonic of the struck note.
“Better to have wings that are clipped than to have no wings at all.”
She had never uttered such a sentiment, never thought such a thought in her life before. Her words sounded unreal in her own ears, and yet she had a profound sense of their sincerity.
“There is no apteryx among human souls,” said Jimmie, released from the melancholy fingers. They argued the point in a lighter vein, discussed individual pictures. Charmed by her sympathy, he spoke freely of his work, his motives, his past dreams. Had Norma not begun to know him, she might have wondered at the lack of bitterness in his talk. To this man of many struggles and many crushing disappointments the world was still young and sweet, and his faith in the ultimate righteousness of things undimmed. The simple courage of his attitude towards life moved her admiration. She felt somewhat humbled in the presence of a spirit stronger, clearer than any into which chance had hitherto afforded her a glimpse. And as he talked in his bright, half-earnest, half-humourous way, it crossed her mind that there was a fair world of thought and emotion in which she and her like had not set their feet; not the world entirely of poetic and artistic imaginings, but one where inner things mattered more than outer circumstance, where it would not be ridiculous or affected to think of the existence of a soul and its needs and their true fulfilment.
Hitherto meeting him as an alien in her world, she had regarded him with a touch of patronising pity. From this she was now free. She saw him for the first time in harmony with his environment, as the artist sensitive and responsive, integral with the beautiful creations that hung around the walls, and still homely and simple, bearing the rubs of time as bravely and frankly as the old drawing-room suite that furnished the unpretentious studio. Now it was she who felt herself somewhat disconcertingly out of her element. The sensation, however, had a curious charm.
There was one picture that had attracted her from the first. She stood in front of it moved by its pity and tenderness.
“Tell me about this one,” she said without looking at him. She divined that it was very near his heart.
In the foreground amid laughing woodland crouched a faun with little furry ears and stumps of horns, and he was staring in piteous terror at a vision; and the vision was that of a shivering, outcast woman on a wet pavement in a sordid street.
“It is the joyous, elemental creature's first conception of pain,” said Jimmie, after a few moments' silence. “You see, life has been to him only the sunshine, and the earth drenched with colour and music—as the earth ought to be—and now he sees a world that is coming grey with rain and misty with tears, and he has the horror of it in his eyes. I am not given to such moralising in paint,” he added with a smile. “This is a very early picture.” He looked at it for some time with eyes growing wistful. “Yes,” he sighed, “I did it many years ago.”
“It has a history then?”
“Yes,” he admitted; and he remembered how the outcast figure in the rain had symbolised that little funeral procession in Paris and how terribly grey the world had been.
Norma's chastened mood had not awed the spirit of mockery within her, but had rendered it less bitter, and had softened her voice. She waved her hand towards the crouching faun.
“And that is you?” she asked.
Jimmie caught a kind raillery in her glance, and laughed. Yes, she had his secret; was the only person who had ever guessed him beneath the travesty of horns and goat's feet.
“I like you for laughing,” she said.
“Why?”
“Other painters have shown me their pictures.”
“Which signifies—?”
“That this is one of the most beautiful pictures I have ever seen,” she replied.
“But why are you glad that I laughed?” asked Jimmie, in happy puzzledom.
“I have told you, Mr. Padgate, all that I am going to tell you.”
“I accept the inscrutable,” said he.
“Do you believe in the old pagan joy of life?” she asked after a pause. “I mean, was there, is there such a thing? One has heard of it; in fact it is a catch phrase that any portentous poseur has on the tip of his tongue. When one comes to examine it, however, it generally means champagne and oysters and an unpresentable lady, and it ends with liver and—and all sorts of things, don't you know. But you are not a poseur—I think you are the honestest man I have ever met—and yet you paint this creature as if you utterly believe in what he typifies.”
“It would go hard with me if I did n't,” said Jimmie. “I can't talk to you in philosophic terms and explain all my reasons, because I have read very little philosophy. When I do try, my head gets addled. I knew a chap once who used to devour Berkeley and Kant and all the rest, and used to write about them, and I used to sit at his feet in a kind of awed wonder at the tremendousness of his brain. A man called Smith. He was colossally clever,” he added after a reflective pause. “But I can only grope after the obvious. Don't you think the beauty of the world is obvious?”
“It all depends upon which world,” said Norma.
“Which world? Why, God's world. It is sweet to draw the breath of life. I love living; don't you?”
“I have never thought of it,” she answered. “I should n't like to die, it is true, but I don't know why. Most people seem to spend two-thirds of their existence in a state of boredom, and the rest in sleep.”
“That is because they reject my poor faun's inheritance.”
“I have been asking you what that is.”
“The joy and laughter of life. They put it from them.”
“How?”
“They draw the soul's curtains and light the gas, instead of letting God's sunshine stream in.”
Norma turned away from the picture with a laugh.
“That reminds me of the first time I met you. You told me to go and ventilate my soul. It gave me quite a shock, I assure you. But I have been trying to follow your precept ever since. Don't you think I am a little bit fresher?”
For the moment the girl still lingering in her five-and-twenty hard years flashed to the surface, adorably warming the cold, finely sculptured face, and bringing rare laughter into her eyes. Jimmie marvelled at the infinite sweetness of her, and fed his poor hungry soul thereon.
“You look like a midsummer morning,” he said unsteadily.
The tone caught her, sobered her; but the colour deepened on her cheek.
“I'll treasure that as a pretty compliment,” she said. There was a little space of silence—quite a perilous little space, with various unsaid things lurking in ambush. Norma broke it first.
“Now I have seen everything, have n't I? No. There are some on the floor against the wall.”
Jimmie explained their lack of value, showed her two or three. They were mostly the wasters from his picture factory, he said. She found in each a subject for admiration, and Jimmie glowed with pleasure at her praise. While he was replacing them she moved across the studio.
“And this one?” she asked, with her finger on the top of a strainer. He looked round and followed swiftly to her side. It was her own portrait with its face to the wall.
“I am not going to show you that,” he said hurriedly.
“Why not?”
“It's a crazy thing.”
“I should love to see it.”
“I tell you it's a crazy thing,” he repeated. “A mad artist's dream.”
Norma arched her eyebrows. “Aha! That is very like a confession!”
“Of what?”
“The ideal woman?”
“Perhaps,” he said.
“I thought everything was so positive in your scheme of life,” she remarked teasingly. “Don't you know?”
“Yes,” said Jimmie, “I know.”
Again the vibration that Jimmie, poorest of actors, could not keep from his voice, stirred her. She felt the indelicacy of having trodden upon sanctified ground. She turned away and sat down. They talked of other matters, somewhat self-consciously. Both welcomed the entrance of Connie Deering and Aline. The former filled the studio at once with laughing chatter. She hoped Norma had not turned Jimmie's hair white with the dreadful things she must have said.
“I don't turn a hair, as I'm a mere worldling, but Jimmie is an unsophisticated child of nature, and is n't accustomed to you, my dear Norma.”
She went on to explain that she was Jimmie's natural protectress, and that they who harmed him would have to reckon with her. Jimmie flew gaily to Norma's defence.
“And this child's garments?” he asked, indicating Aline, whose face was irradiated by a vision of splendid attire.
“Don't meddle with what does n't concern you,” replied Connie, while she and the girl exchanged the glances of conspirators.
A short while afterwards the two visitors drove away. For some time Norma responded somewhat absently to Mrs. Deering's light talk.
“I am so glad you have taken to Jimmie,” said the latter at last. “Is n't he a dear?”
“I remember your saying that before. But is n't it rather an odd word to use with reference to him?” said Norma.
“Odd—? But that's just what he is.”
Norma turned in some resentment on her friend.
“Oh, Connie, how dare we talk patronisingly of a man like that? He's worth a thousand of the empty-souled, bridge-playing people we live among.”
“But that's just why I call him a dear,” said Mrs. Deering, uncomprehendingly.
Norma shrugged her shoulders, fell into a silence which she broke by risking:
“Do you know whom he is in love with?”
“Good gracious, Norma,” cried the little lady, in alarm. “You don't say that Jimmie is in love? Oh, it would spoil him. He can't be!”
“There was one picture—of a woman—which he would not let me see,” said Norma.
“Well?”
Norma paused for some seconds before she replied:
“He called it 'a mad artist's dream.' I have been wondering whether it was not better than a sane politician's reality.”
“What is a sane politician's reality, dear?” Connie asked, mystified.
“I am,” said Norma.
Then, woman-like, she turned the conversation to the turpitudes of her dressmaker.