Whistler could not stay long from London, and the early summer of 1899 saw him back at Garlant's and visiting Mr. Heinemann at Weybridge. He was in town for the sequel to the Eden affair. He heard that, on July 15, there was to be a sale of Sir William Eden's pictures at Christie's. He went to it and came to us afterwards.
"Really, it has been beautiful. I know you will enjoy it. It occurred to me in the morning—the Baronet's sale to-day—h'm—the Butterfly should see how things are going! And I went home, and I changed my morning dress, my dandy straw hat, and then, very correct and elegant, I sauntered down King Street into Christie's. At the top of the stairway someone spoke to me. 'Well, you know, my dear friend,' I said, 'I do not know who you are, but you shall have the honour of taking me in.' And on his arm I walked into the big room. The auctioneer was crying, 'Going! Going! Thirty shillings! Going!' 'Ha ha!' I laughed—not loudly, not boisterously, it was very delicately, very neatly done. But the room was electrified. Some of the henchmen were there; they grow rigid, afraid to move afraid to glance my way out of the corners of their eyes. 'Twenty shillings! Going!' the auctioneer would cry. 'Ha ha!' I would laugh, and things went for nothing and the henchman trembled. Louis Fagan came across the room to speak to me—Fagan, representing the British Museum, as it were, was quite the most distinguished man there. And now, having seen how things were, I took Fagan's arm. 'You,' I said, 'may have the honour of taking me out.'"
He dined with us the next evening and found Mr. Harry Wilson, whose brother-in-law, Mr. Sydney Morse, was the friend upon whose arm Whistler had entered the auction-room. Mr. Wilson was full of the story, and confirmed the "electric shock" when Whistler appeared.
He ran over to Holland once during the summer. Part of the time he was at Pourville, near Dieppe, where he had taken a house for Miss Birnie Philip and her mother. The sea was on the right side at Dieppe, of which he never tired; at Madame Lefèvre's restaurant he could get as good a breakfast as in Paris; and many small marines, oils, and water-colours were done before bad weather drove him away.
Though it is not always easy to identify the place or the time to which his small marines belong, for they cover a number of years, probably more were made at Dieppe than anywhere else. When he did not care to work from the shore there were boatmen who would take him out beyond the breakers, where he could get the effect he wished at the height above the water that suited him. He used to be seen calmly painting away in a dancing row-boat, the boatman holding it as steadily as he could. There is as much of the bigness of the ocean in these little paintings, which show usually only the grey or blue or green, but ever recurring, swell of the wave, or a quiet sea with two or three sails on the horizon, as in any big marines that ever were painted. He explained his method to his apprentice, Mrs. Addams. When the wave broke and the surf made a beautiful line of white, he painted this at once, then all that completed the beauty of the breaking wave, then the boat passing, and then, having got the movement and the beauty that goes almost as soon as it comes, he put in the shore or the horizon.
In Paris, during the winter of 1899-1900, he took two small rooms at the Hôtel Chatham, where the last three years he had often stayed, afraid to risk the dampness of the Rue du Bac. But they were inner rooms with no light and scarcely any ventilation, though most swell and more expensive, unless, perhaps, the lady who used to come to massage him was included. He had fewer friends in Paris than in London, and he was often lonely. He would go to see Drouet and say, "Tu sais, je suis ennuyé." And Drouet, to amuse him, would get up little dinners, at which all who were left of the old group of students met again. One was given in honour of Becquet, whom Whistler had etched almost half a century before. A wreath of laurels was prepared. During dinner Drouet said he had met many great men, but, pour la morale, none greater than Becquet, who was moved to tears, and the laurel wreath was offered to him by Whistler, and Becquet fairly broke down; he "would hang it on the walls of his studio, always to have it before him," he said.
Once Drouet took Whistler to the fair at Neuilly, made him ride in a merry-go-round. Whistler lost his hat, dropped his eye-glass. "What would London journalists say if they could see me now?" he asked. They generally dined at Beaujé's, in the Passage des Panoramas, to which Drouet and other artists, literary men, and barristers went. Whistler renewed his intimacy with Oulevey, whom he had barely seen since the early Paris days. Madame Oulevey's memories are, above all, of Whistler's dining with them in the Passage des Favorites at the other end of the Rue Vaugirard, when he wore his pumps and, a storm coming up and not a cab to be found in their quarter, and they had to keep him for hours. His pumps left an impression on Drouet, too, who was sure it was because Whistler wore them by day and could not walk in them that he was so often seen driving through the streets in a cab. And he seemed so tired then, Drouet said, half the time lying back, fast asleep. Fantin, the most intimate of his early associates, he met but once and then by chance.
In February news came of the death of his brother, Doctor Whistler. Alexander Harrison writes us:
"I chanced to call upon him half an hour after he had received the news and, with a quivering voice and tears in his eyes, he told me that he considered me a friend and told me his sad loss and asked me to dine with him."
The two brothers had been devoted since boyhood, and Whistler felt the Doctor's death acutely. It made him the more ready to rejoin his friends in London, and two months later found him staying with Mr. Heinemann, who had moved from Whitehall Court to Norfolk Street.