In December Whistler gave up the struggle to brave the London winter, and decided to sail for Gibraltar, on the way to Tangier and Algiers, with Mr. Birnie Philip, his brother-in-law, to take care of him. Sir Thomas Sutherland, Chairman of the P. & O. Company, arranged for every comfort on the voyage. But, as usual, there were complications at the last moment—as usual, the fearful trouble of getting off from his studio. Everybody was pressed into his service and kept busy, all the waiters in the hotel were in attendance. The day before he was to start he discovered that his etching plates needed to be regrounded and he sent them to J., who agreed to do what he could at such short notice, but warned him that there was not time to ground the plates properly and that very likely they would be spoiled. Whistler sent for them in the evening and, instead of leaving them out to dry until the morning, wrapped them up and packed them among the linen in his trunk. It was extraordinary that a man so careful about his work should always have wanted somebody else to ground his plates or prepare his canvases, or do something as important, that he should have done for himself, and that oftener than not he should have wanted it, as on this occasion, at the last moment. However, with the help of his friends and the waiters and his family, he was got ready in time, and on December 14 he started for the South.
CHAPTER XLVI: IN SEARCH OF HEALTH.
THE YEARS NINETEEN HUNDRED AND ONE AND NINETEEN HUNDRED AND TWO.
As soon as Whistler got away from London he was unhappy. At Tangier the wind was icy, at Algiers it rained, and everywhere when it was clear the sky was "hard" and the sea was "black." Snow was falling at Marseilles, and he was kept in his room for a couple of weeks, so ill he had to send for a doctor, and he was only comforted when he found the doctor delightful. Corsica was recommended and, as "Napoleon's Island," attracted Whistler. When he was well enough Mr. Birnie Philip left him, and he sailed alone for Ajaccio. Here he stayed at the Hôtel Schweizerhof. The weather at first was abominable, so cold and the wind so treacherous that he could not work out of doors, and he felt his loneliness acutely. Fortunately he made a friend of the Curator of the Museum, and Mr. Heinemann joined him for a time. They loitered about together in the quaint little town, went to see the house where Napoleon was born—"a great experience"—spent many rainy hours in the café where Mr. Heinemann taught him to play dominoes, a resource not only then but the rest of his life. They played for the price of their coffee, and Whistler cheated with a brilliancy that made him easily a winner, but that horrified a German who sometimes took a hand, though the naïveté of Whistler's "system" could not have deceived a child.
He was by no means idle, and he brought back a series of exquisite pen and pencil drawings begun at Tangier. A few water-colours were made, and when the weather gave him a chance he worked on his copper-plates. He bit one or two that J. had grounded in London, and the ground came off. He did not know how, or did not have the courage to prevent it. We can only wonder again that a man who made such wonderful plates did not know what to do, or did not dare do it, in difficulties of this sort, preferring to rely upon somebody else. He had drawn on some of the other plates before he began to bite any of them, and he may have done more than have as yet been seen. In Mr. Howard Mansfield's and the Grolier catalogues only one plate in Corsica is recorded, in both called The Bohemians. But as J. grounded ten or a dozen for Whistler, and as he spoke to us of more than once bitten, it is probable that the plates exist. "All my dainty work lost," he wrote to us from Corsica, and it looked as if the shadow had fallen upon our friendship. But he understood, and the shadow passed as quickly as it came. There were other schemes. One day, after his return, he told Mr. Clifford Addams that he had seen a great black-bearded shepherd, on a horse, carrying a long pole, coming down a hill-side, of whom he wanted to make a large equestrian portrait. But he never started it. He felt he was not able.
The closing of the school in Paris occupied and worried him, and he was arranging for a show of pastels and prints at the Luxembourg. One pleasure, of which he wrote to us, came from "new honours" in Dresden, where he was awarded a gold medal and elected "unanimously to the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts." He was more tired than he admitted in his letters, dwelling little on his fatigue, and insisting that the doctor in Marseilles found nothing was the matter with him. But he was never strong after the autumn of 1900, and earlier than this the doctor in London warned his friends that he was failing.
He was more hopeful because at Ajaccio he said he had discovered what was the matter with him:
"At first, though I got through little, I never went out without a sketch-book or an etching-plate. I was always meaning to work, always thinking I must. Then the Curator offered me the use of his studio. The first day I was there he watched me, but said nothing until the afternoon. Then—'But, Mr. Whistler, I have looked at you, I have been watching. You are all nerves, you do nothing. You try to, but you cannot settle down to it. What you need is rest—to do nothing—not to try to do anything.' And all of a sudden, you know, it struck me that I had never rested, that I never had done nothing, that it was the one thing I needed. And I put myself down to doing nothing—amazing, you know. No more sketch-books, no more plates. I just sat in the sun and slept. I was cured. You know, Joseph must sit in the sun and sleep. Write and tell him so."
He was sufficiently recovered to take his old joy in the "Islanders," into the midst of whom he fell on the P. & O. steamer coming back from Marseilles:
"Nobody but English on board, and, after months of not seeing them, really they were amazing: there they all were at dinner, you know—the women in low gowns, the men in dinner jackets. They might look a trifle green, they might suddenly run when the ship rolled—but what matter? There they were—men in dinner jackets, stewards behind their chairs in dinner jackets—and so all's right with the country! And, do you know, it made the whole business clear to me down there in South Africa. At home every Englishman does his duty—appears in his dinner jacket at the dinner hour—and so, what difference what the Boers are doing? All is well with England! You know, you might just as well dress to ride in an omnibus!"