The final adventure of the journey was in London. Whistler never told us, but everybody else says that when he got out of the train at Euston, or Waterloo, someone besides his friends was waiting: whether the captain of the ship, or relations of the Marquis de Marmalade, or an old enemy makes little difference. Somebody got a thrashing, and this was the end to the most unaccountable episode in Whistler's life.
CHAPTER XII: CHELSEA DAYS CONTINUED.
THE YEARS EIGHTEEN SIXTY-SIX TO EIGHTEEN SEVENTY-TWO.
It was late in 1866 when Whistler returned from Valparaiso. Soon after he moved into No. 2,[4] at the east end of Lindsey Row, now
No. 96 Cheyne Walk. It was a three-storey house with an attic, part of the old palace remodelled, and, like No. 7, it looked on the river. Here he lived longer than anywhere else; here he painted the Nocturnes and the great portraits; here he gave his Sunday breakfasts. He had a house-warming on February 5 (1867), when the two Rossettis dined with him, and Mr. W. M. Rossetti wrote in his diary:
"There are some fine old fixtures, such as doors, fireplaces, and Whistler has got up the rooms with many delightful Japanesisms. Saw for the first time his pagoda cabinet. He has two or three sea-pieces new to me: one, on which he particularly lays stress, larger than the others, a very grey unbroken sea [probably Sea and Rain], also a clever vivacious portrait of himself begun."
No doubt this is the portrait in round hat, with paint-brushes in his hand.
Mr. Greaves says that the dining-room at No. 2 was blue, with a darker blue dado and doors, and purple Japanese fans tacked on the walls and ceiling; other friends remember "a fluttering of purple fans." One evening Miss Chapman was dining, and Whistler, wanting her to see the view up the river from the other end of the bridge, told her he would show her something "as lovely as a fan!" The studio, again the second-storey back room, was grey, with black dado and doors; from the Mother and the Carlyle one knows that Japanese hangings and his prints were on the walls; and in it was the big screen he painted for Leyland but kept for himself, with Battersea Bridge across the top, Chelsea Church beyond, and a great gold moon in the deep blue sky. The stairs were covered with Dutch metal. He slept in a huge Chinese bed. Beautiful silver was on his table. He ate off blue and white. "Suppose one of these plates was smashed?" Miss Chapman asked Whistler once. "Why, then, you know," he said, "we might as well all take hands and go throw ourselves into the Thames!"
The beauty of the decoration, as at No. 7, was its simplicity. Rossetti's house was a museum, an antiquity shop, in comparison. The simplicity seemed the more bewildering because it was the growth, not of weeks, but of years. The drawing-room was not painted until the day of Whistler's first dinner-party. In the morning he sent for the brothers Greaves to help him. "It will never be dry in time!" they feared. "What matter?" said Whistler, "it will be beautiful!" "We three worked like mad," is Mr. Walter Greaves' account, and by evening the walls were flushed with flesh-colour, pale yellow, and white spread over doors and woodwork, and we have heard gowns and coats too were touched with flesh-colour and yellow before the evening was at an end. One Sunday morning Whistler, after he had taken his mother to Chelsea Church, as he always did, again sent for his pupils and painted a great ship with spreading sails in each of the two panels at the end of the hall; the ships are said to be still on the wall covered up. His mother was not so pleased when, on her return, she saw the blue and white harmony, for she would have had him put away his brushes on Sunday as once she put away his toys. But she had many other trials and revelations: coming into the studio one day, she found the parlour-maid posing for "the all-over!" The ships were in place long before the dado of hall and stairway was covered with gold and sprinkled with rose and white chrysanthemum petals. Miss Alexander (Mrs. Spring-Rice) saw Whistler at work upon it when she came to sit, and he had lived six years at No. 2. Whistler's houses were never completely decorated and furnished; they had a look as if he had just moved in or was just moving out. But what was decorated was beautiful.