Clorinda Walks in Heaven

by A. E. Coppard

"I mean the execution, the presentation and so on."

Julia did not reply. He stared at her picture of him, a delicately modelled face with a suggestion of nobility, an air that was kind as it was grave. The gravity and nobility which so pleased him were perhaps the effect of a high brow from which the long brown hair flowed thinly back to curve in a tidy cluster at his neck. Kindness beamed in the eyes and played around the thin mouth, sharp nose and positive chin. What could have inspired her to make this idealisation of himself, for it was idealisation in spite of its fidelity and likeness? He knew he had little enough nobility of character—too little to show so finely—and as for that calm gravity of aspect, why gravity simply was not in him. But there it was on paper, deliberate and authentic, inscribed with his name—David Masterman 1912.

"When, how did you come to do it?"

"I just wanted it, you were a nice piece, I watched you a good deal, and there you are!" She said it jauntily, but there was a pink flush in her cheeks.

"It's delicious," he mused, "I envy you. I can't touch a decent head—not even yours. But why have you idealised me so?" He twitted her lightly about the gravity and nobility.

"But you are like that, you are. That's how I see you at this moment."

She did not give him the drawing as he hoped she would. He did not care to ask her for it—there was delicious flattery in the thought that she treasured it so much.

Masterman was a rather solitary man of about thirty. He lived alone in a bungalow away out of the town and painted numbers of landscapes, rather lifeless imitations, as he knew, of other men's masterpieces. They were frequently sold.

Sometimes on summer afternoons he would go into woods or fields with a few of his pupils to sketch or paint farmhouses, trees, clouds, stacks, and other rural furniture. He was always hoping to sit alone with Julia Tern; but there were other loyal pupils who never missed these occasions, among them the two Forrest girls, Ianthe, the younger, and Katherine, daughters of a thriving contractor. Julia remained inscrutable, she gave him no opportunities at all: he could never divine her feelings or gather any response to his own, but there could be no doubt of the feelings of the Forrest girls—they quite certainly liked him, liked him enormously, and indeed could have had no other reason for continuing in his classes, both being as devoid of artistic grace as an inkstand. They brought fruit or chocolate to the classes and shared them with him. Their attentions, their mutual attentions, were manifested in many ways, small but significant and kind. On such occasions Julia's eyes seemed to rest upon him with an ironical gaze. It was absurd. He liked them well enough, and sometimes from his shy wooing of the adorable but enigmatic Julia he would turn for solace to Ianthe. Yet strangely enough it was Kate, the least alluring to him of the three girls, who took him to her melancholy heart.

Ianthe was a little bud of womanhood, dark-haired but light-headed, dressed in cream-coloured clothes. She was small and right and tight, without angularities or rhythms, just one dumpy solid roundness. But she had an extraordinary vulgarity of speech, if not of mind, that exacerbated him, and in the dim corridors of his imagination she did not linger; she scurried as it were into doorways or upon twisting staircases or stood briefly where a loop of light fell upon her hair, her dusky face, her creamy clothes and her delightful rotundities. She had eyes of indiscretion and a mind like a hive of bees, it had such a tiny opening and was so full of a cloying content.