Then there was the students’ ball, to which he convoyed Matt, who was quite dazzled by the elegance and refinement of the ladies, and almost afraid to speak to his partners, and torn afresh with envy of the beautiful life from which he had been, and must long be, shut out; not losing his discomfort till, after the supper (at which he tasted champagne for the first time), Herbert’s special circle danced the Lancers with a zest and entrain that horrified some of the matrons, and brought back to Matt the dear old nights when he took the barn floor with little Ruth Hailey, under the placid gaze of the cows and amid the odors of the stable and the hay-mow.
For other memorable experiences, too, Matt was indebted to his easy-going cousin. There was Herbert’s club, the Bohemian, a cosey little place favored by actors and journalists, caricatures of whose sensuous faces lined the walls in company with oil-paintings and sketches more sensuous still. Matt felt measureless reverence for the men he brushed against here. He had seen some of them before in the illustrated papers which he read in shop-windows or penny news-rooms or Herbert’s studio, and he trembled lest they should detect, from his embarrassment amid the varied knives and forks and glasses, that he was only a boor with less education than the waiters. He wondered what the clever, cultured people—scraps of whose conversation floated across to him amid the popping of soda-water corks—would think if they knew he had planted potatoes, chopped logs, made sugar in the woods, and climbed masts and steeples. In the new snobbishness with which their society had infected him he could not see that these things were education, not humiliation, and he was glad that even Herbert knew little of his history, and asked less. Of other people’s histories, on the other hand, Matt heard a great deal. “Bubbles” had robbed him of his belief in royal virtue; in the smoking-room of the Bohemians society fell to pieces like a house of cards, in building which, as Herbert once said, the knaves alone had been used. It was a racing, dicing, drinking, swindling, fornicating fraternity, worm-eaten with hypocrisy. Sincerity or simplicity was “all my eye;” there was always money or a woman or position in the background.
“They talk a lot of scandal,” Matt once complained.
“My dear Matt,” remonstrated Herbert, “it’s not scandal; it’s gossip. Brixton gossips about who marries whom, Bohemia about who lives with whom. Scandal implies censure.”
Despite the scandal (or the gossip), Matt was full of curiosity to see this strange new life of clubs and restaurants and theatres (to which Herbert sometimes got paper admissions), this feverish realm of intellect and gayety, where nobody seemed to want for anything; but it sometimes came over him with an odd flash of surprise and bitterness, as he caught the gleam of white scented shoulders, or saw heavy-jowled satyrs swilling champagne, that all this settled luxury had been going on while he was tramping the snowy roads of what might have been another planet.
The feeling wore off as the London season advanced, and the tide of luxurious life rolled along the great sunny thoroughfares, or flecked the midnight streets with darting points of fire. His Puritan conscience, curiously persisting beneath all the scepticism engendered by his mother’s tragedy, had at first acquiesced but uneasily in the unscriptural view of life that seemed to prevail around him. But fainter and fainter grew its prickings, the sensuous in him ripened in this liberal atmosphere, and that Greek conception of a beautiful world which, budding for him in solitude, had been almost nipped by the same cruel tragedy, flowered now in the heats of an ardent city.
“The Old Gentleman” was in such good-humor at the surprising progress of Herbert’s “Daniel before Nebuchadnezzar” that Madame’s gentle remonstrance that he ought to do something for Matt touched a responsive chord, and before the Academy sending-in day Matt had the privilege of being escorted by his uncle, in company with Herbert, to a conversazione at the Reynolds Club, of which the dealer was a member. Herbert was soon lost in the crush of second-rate painters and engravers and obscurely famous visitors who gathered before the members’ would-be Academy pictures that lined the walls, or the second-rate entertainers who struck attitudes on the daïs; but Matt was too nervous amid this congestion of celebrities to detach himself from his uncle, who did the honors grandly, pointing out the lions of the club with a proprietorial air. Matt could not but feel that his uncle (who was of the swallow-tailed minority) was himself one of the lions of the club, and in very truth he was its most distinguished-looking member. “The refreshments are not gratis,” he told Matt, “but of course you can have anything you like at my expense. Will you have a cup of coffee, or are you one of those degenerate young men who can’t live without whiskey-and-water?” But Matt had no appetite for anything; he was too fluttered by this close contact with the giants of the brush. He listened eagerly to morsels of their dialogue, strained his vision to see them through the smoky, lamplit air; critical as he might have been, and was, before their work, the men themselves were shrouded in a vague splendor of achievement. They had all been hung.
There seemed a good deal of talk about a virulent article of comprehensive condemnation in the art columns of the Saturday Spectator; everybody seemed to have read it and nobody to have written it. For the rest, compliments crossed like smiling couples in the quadrille.
“What a stunning landscape that is of yours, Rapper!” said Wilfred Smith, a journalist so ignorant of painting that he was suspected of art criticism. “Quite like a Corot.”
“Oh, it’s nothing; just knocked off for a color-blind old Johnny who admires me,” replied Rapper, deprecatingly. He was a moon-faced man with a double eyeglass on a gold cord. “It’s rotten, really; I’m awfully ashamed of it.” And he elbowed his way towards it.