“Where do you suppose?” said the good lady drily. “She is very obedient to her instructions, that. She is high up by now. That is a good school of hers to end in such promotion. But I daresay your sister knows you better than I do.”
From which I perceived very clearly that my difficult time was beginning.
CHAPTER II
I compile these notes, these memoirs of a past episode, from what motive? I do not know. From vain unhappiness, perhaps: perhaps from an ineradicable instinct to deliver myself, in some concrete form, of a haunting vision. I do not seek the world’s opinion on them; I should care nothing for it, whichever way pronounced. If anything, they are in the nature of an appeal to the one spirit that could appreciate them, a grave self-analysis, a considered defence, offered to the clear judgment of the disembodied. If there is any moral weakness in them, let me abide by that judgment. I plead nothing in extenuation but sentiment, which in heaven, I think, is still allowed more place than in this modern world of ours, where it has come to be regarded as a contemptible thing, to be rigorously eschewed in art, in education, and, save in its most hypocritically clap-trap form, in the gamble called politics. Yet by sentiment, I think, we humanise, and without it retrograde. When there is no more, we shall have returned to the primal anarchy.
Looks are a powerful influence in the shaping of one’s destiny. The really good-looking man, having the confidence of his parts, finds himself easily equipped for the conquests for which souls less naturally endowed must suffer a severe handicap. He is a laggard if he allows himself to be overtaken; and so I have often found it. My excuse lies—my salvation, perhaps—in my inborn faculty for creating things of beauty far beyond the material reach of the senses. To carve divinity out of stone is ever a higher joy to me than to beget its fleshly image. Wherefore I can assert truly that personal coxcombry is as remote from my nature as the pride of the craftsman is near and holy. That may be believed or not: it may concern others to dispute what it does not concern me to defend.
I put this to myself, and to one other, if not as a justification, as a plea. I have sinned, if I have sinned, not from vanity at all. A thousand times I would rather have suffered that longest handicap than have basely used a favour due to no merit, but merely to inheritance. I did not so use it. It was the traffic of souls, not of bodies, that made the real joy and misery. It would have been the same in the end, though I had possessed the features of a Caliban. And with that I will leave it.
It seems appropriate here to interpolate a note, descriptive of the writer in his late thirties, from the pen of Monsieur C., professor of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris and himself a distinguished sculptor—who knew intimately, and was an ardent admirer of, the erratic genius self-portrayed in these pages. Monsieur C. writes:—
“Le Danois is very amusing, very clever, very suffisant. He will be here one moment and nowhere the next; and so with his work, his opinions, his enthusiasms. No one must doubt him, even when to-morrow he advocates the cause or the theory which to-day he denounces. And no one, I am sure, will think of doing so—for the moment: his personal magnetism, his unvexed effrontery see to it. His clothes—a hardy Englishman’s compromise with the French habit—are generally patched and mended: his manners show no bad places at all. He commonly wears what they call a Norfolk suit, but without lapels; knickerbockers, a white handkerchief round his neck in lieu of collar, and white canvas boots with string soles. And in these he will appear unembarrassed in drawing-rooms—to make ladies in love with vagabondism. I think I have never known in another the true gentleman and the true Bohemian so naturally blended. There is not a shadow of pose about him: his belief in himself is too simply unaffected for it. In person he is tall, somewhat lean, and muscular, with the thews of a mountaineer and the eyes of a jay. His hair, thick and brushed forward like a thatch, is coloured a warm brown, and his strong brows, moustache, and short beard au poinçon, are of the same satisfying tone. His face is very agreeably formed, with a look of power and self-confidence in it; and yet he is a disappointed man, one whose expectations have run well ahead of his achievements. He is interested in too many things, that is the fact. In his youth he was bred for the Bar, but soon abandoned its attractions for those of the free life and the pursuit of beauty. An artist, with an irresistible penchant for metaphysics, music, and mechanical science, and an insatiable curiosity about everything, he has never quite succeeded in realising himself or convincing others. Yet some magnificent fragments exist to his credit—a noble head or so, a torso worthy of Praxiteles. I suspect he is too impatient of practice to make perfect. It is a danger, after all, to be too deft with one’s fingers. Things picked up quickly quickly lose their interest; and there are so many fine things in the world to be picked up. Will our friend ever learn to concentrate? I fear. And, by the by, where is he just now? Nobody knows, of course. B. C.”
With a smile for Madame Crussol [continues the narrator], I went up the stairs leisurely. I found my “cousin” standing outside my door, and she turned to look at me as I arrived. I saw question but no embarrassment in her eyes. She held wrapped about her, more for concealment than warmth, I supposed, one of those heavy military capotes of stone blue which have become fashionable with ladies of late; and a black velvet hat, of Tudor shape and with a small white feather, surmounted her head coquettishly.
“You have been a long time coming, Monsieur,” she said; and her voice was soft to sleepiness.
“Ah, true!” I answered. “I have cause for deliberation.”