“With a little dancing with human partners thrown in?” I suggested.
“Yes, of course.”
At this moment the bell rang, indicating that the pupil had arrived, and for the next hour my would-be Rosa Bonheur was showing steps.
How few things we should do if we had time to examine carefully every action and its possible consequences before we committed ourselves to it! I for one, probably—but one never knows—instead of encouraging Rose in her drawing and painting should have discouraged her; for it led straight to London, and when your children, your own or your foster-children, get to London, they are lost. New lives begin, with new parents—for London is father and mother too. Careers have to be, I suppose, and leading strings must be cut—but O! the severance of heart-strings that that operation involves as well!
Anyway, I had taken an immense interest in Rose’s sketches, and often sat with her while she made them, and marvelled—being a hopeless duffer at such work—as the swift deft touches transferred the landscape to the paper: sky and earth and water. She may not have been remarkable, but to my eyes she was as clever as anyone sketching nature need be. Her portraits were good too: at any rate, lifelike enough to provoke cries of delight from the villagers as they recognized their neighbours. She was a straightforward performer: she cubed nothing and abhorred a vortex; but artists are curiously impressionable people, visitors to this planet rather than dwellers upon it, and at any moment she might become as wild as the wildest. And I am not surprised: the power to splash colour about must naturally lead to experimentalism.
In those days, however, Rose was in the old and sober tradition, and the desire to paint filled her soul.
At last the go-fever broke out. She had been to London—that promoter of restlessness—to stay with a girl artist friend and show her work to some experts and see the exhibitions, and she came back glowing with excitement and plans. She returned with her hair intact too, to my great joy. I had nursed a terror that she might bob it.
“How much money have I got?” was one of the first things she said to me after dinner.
During the meal I had heard the story of her adventures. How she had stayed with her friend Vera Gray in her studio at Chelsea. It was on the Embankment, looking out on the river.
“And O!” she exclaimed, “the river is exactly what Whistler made it. I mean—exactly how he painted it.”