He finished his beer at a draught. He thought himself magnificently kind and tolerant. And so did we.
That was a long time ago, thirty years ago, to be exact. The Bellamys took their little girl out of our school that spring, and I saw no more of them. But I always felt a slight personal interest at the sight of his name in a list of exhibitors, and in picture-galleries always went to look at whichever bright, high-keyed, dashing portrait he was exhibiting that year. Some years ago it began to seem to me that they did not look just the same; and yet when I looked straight at them, I saw that they were, quite miraculously, the same, the old Bellamy flowing brush-work, the masterly rendering of fabrics, the ringing color, the firm drawing, all lighted by that bold flood of sunlight with which he had shocked and enchanted the early American public groping its way out from Munich.
Presently, finding that the impression that they were different persisted, I set myself to analyze it, and found that their altered look came from the altered character of the paintings beside and above them ... and then, as the years went on, below them! For the time came when the annual Bellamy portrait was not in the center of the last gallery, to catch your eye as you entered, but was hung high in one of the side-rooms. It looked very queer and matter-of-fact with its solid surfaces honestly rendered in all their opacity, compared to the odd, subtle, sideways-glancing, arrestingly imaginative canvases about it. They took the eye far below the surfaces they depicted. They suggested far more than they said. For days afterwards, they haunted you like an unfinished cadence in a poem in a foreign language. The Bellamy canvas was in no unknown language, but in the speech used for the daily order to the grocer; nor was it in the least unfinished. It came finally to seem to me as literal and bald a statement of fact as a time-table.
One day this year, as I hung over an Arthur Davies, a strange, beautiful, white-fleshed, eerie, blonde woman, placed at the side of a luminous canvas, with, so it seemed to me, more pure imaginative beauty than anything since Botticelli, I heard voices behind me. A tall, splendid-looking old man, with a great white beard, fine dark eyes, and the carriage of a king was talking to a younger man, an unimpressive, slight, fair fellow, evidently very ill at ease.
“See here, Brehming, speak out, tell me what it’s all about. I honestly don’t know what you’re driving at, you kids. What’s the matter with good drawing? What do you want in a painting?” He waved a well-kept hand up towards a canvas above us, “Isn’t there light in that? And space? And interesting composition? And true values? I ought to know a good painting when I see one. What are you boys talking about when you slash at my things so? I’m not sore. Don’t think I’m sore. You’ve a right to your own opinion. Only, for the Lord’s sake, what is your opinion?”
He had said he was not sore, but there was a raw note of hurt in his voice, and his eyes rested anxiously on the young man beside him.
The other looked every way except at him and said in a vague, hurried, kindly voice, “Why, Mr. Bellamy, your work is all right, of course. It’s fine. Sure, it’s fine. We all admire it like anything....”
Yes, I did hear that! I heard it just exactly as I’m setting it down.