Poor Pissarro, with his light analyses and colour vibrations! I was bound to feel very small; but I could not help sniggering over the impudent candour of this hussy. She turned, and dropped the butt of her cigarette into a brass pot, and went silently scrutinising the “things” along the walls. Presently she stopped before a little framed piece, an interior with figures, very rich and sombre in tone, but made cloudier than its due by the dirty state of the glass.
“O, I like that!” she said—“I do like that. I think you must be an artist after all. Why do you not always paint in that way?”
“Every producer, you know, has his own best for enemy. What do you find in this to like so much?”
“It is a picture—a little bit of truth and beauty brought into the limits of the eye’s understanding. It seems to satisfy everything—one’s love of colour, one’s sense of form, and—yes, just the little place in one’s emotions the two appeal to. It doesn’t matter a bit about the subject. It is the scheme of colour which is the subject, and the figures are only patterns in it.” She turned on me. “O, you are stupid, to go and paint those other things when you can do like this!”
“Well, I can’t,” I said. “As a matter of fact it is by a friend of mine. It is very good, as you say; but the critics would have none of it.”
“The critics!” she snapped her rosy fingers disdainfully. “They are just the flies on that glass, that have made it all dirty and obscure. But the picture is behind all the time to speak for itself; and some day posterity will clean away the dirt with a wet sponge, and the truth will come out. I should like to know the man who painted it.”
“Sorry,” I said shortly. “He’s dead.”
Something in my tone seemed to strike her. Her eyes were on me, and suddenly a strange light, like wistfulness or pity, came into them.
“I am sorry if I hurt you,” she said. “I did not know—how could I? And I am sure, after seeing that dear little mother, you could paint pictures like this if you would.”
“Would you like me to?” I said. I don’t know what made me say it. This young callow criticism, refreshing as it might be, was hardly worth the most transitory waiving of my principles. Yet oddly there came into my mind the face, hectic and eager, of the boy Ronsin, whose work, and gift to me, the picture had been—and I was jealous. Yes, absurd as it may sound, because she had said she would like to know him, I was jealous. For my art, or what else? Ah, that I cannot tell. Yet at least I could not deny that, whatever the youthfulness of this criticism, it had seen clearly here: the picture was, of its kind, remarkably good.