CHAPTER V
A SYMPOSIUM
Matt’s desire to hear the brotherhood of the brush on Art was gratified ad nauseam at Cornpepper’s, for a batch of artists of all ages, together with a couple of journalists, assembled in the big, bare, picture-littered studio to smoke their own pipes and to say “when” to the neat-handed model who dispensed the host’s whiskey. Some declared they wanted it neat, to take off the effects of a grewsome tale with which Rapper had started the evening. It was about the time when he had studied art in Berlin and attended Ringschneider’s anatomy class. (“I’m not much of an artist, but I do know anatomy,” he interpolated.) One day when the corpse upon which the professor was about to demonstrate was uncovered, the students recognized, to their horror, a favorite fellow-pupil, who had been away for a few days. He had been taken ill in his garret, conveyed to the hospital, and, being alone in the world, had been sold to the lecture-room. The startled class immediately subscribed for another corpse, and buried the unfortunate boy with due honors. Greme tried to counteract this tale by another one about a model, an old fellow named William Tell, who, after vainly applying at the Slade and Lambeth schools for work, had been taken up by the St. George’s Sketching Club for the sake of his picturesque corded breeches. When, at the end of the two hours’ spell, the men were criticising one another’s work, one said to another, “There doesn’t seem any leg under those breeches.” Overhearing which, William Tell fell to indignantly unbuttoning his gaiters.
The arrival of a twinkling-eyed caricaturist, joyously greeted by all as “Jimmy,” dispelled the last flavors of the mortuary. “Aren’t you in China?” everybody asked. Jimmy explained he had thrown up the commission, but was off to the West Indies next month, though he expected to find himself in Paris instead. He was a genius, with an infinite capacity for taking pains and making friends, and, being forced to rise in the small hours to get through his work before the countless callers arrived to distract him, was popularly supposed to be an idle scapegrace, who produced sketches as rapidly and copiously as the conjurer produces oranges from his coat-sleeve. Matt’s breath was almost taken away in a rush of reverence and rapture at the unexpected privilege of seeing him; for, despite his own craving for the Sublime and the Beautiful, Jimmy Raven’s sketches of low London life had for him a magnetic appeal whose strength surprised himself. Sometimes he fancied it was the humor and the fun that held him, as being the qualities in which he himself was most deficient; sometimes it flashed upon him obscurely—as in a light thrown through a fog—that Jimmy Raven was teaching him to see the spectacle of life more deeply and truthfully through the medium of his humorous vision; at such instants he almost thought one of Jimmy’s loafers worth a whole Academy of poetic myths, but he suppressed the suspicion as absurd and perturbing to his own ideals and vision, telling himself it was only the truth and subtlety of the draughtsmanship that he admired. He listened to him now as eagerly and deferentially as to Cornpepper, his eyes fixed mainly on these two famous faces, as if to seize the secret of their gifts in some contour of nose or chin; but he had ample curiosity and respect to spend even on the other men, though below all his real modesty and diffidence was a curious bed-rock of self-conscious strength, as of a talent that might hope one day to be recognized even of these.
But there was little art-talk to be got out of Jimmy. Having likewise said “when,” he launched into an account of an East End girl he had sketched that morning in the Park, and quoted her idea of a coster gentleman. “My brother’s a toff,” he had overheard her boasting. “He wears three rows of buttons down his trousers, and sixteen wentilation ’oles in ’is ’at.” “And who do you think I saw in the Park?” he went on. “Egyptian Bill.”
“No?” cried various voices. “What was he preaching?”
“Buddhism,” said Jimmy. “He’s sitting to Winkelman, that old chap who became a Buddhist when he was painting those Eastern things the critics made such a fuss about.”
There was a laugh at the expense of the Mohammedan model, who always suited his religion to his employer’s.
“When I did him,” said Jimmy, “I pretended to be a Jew, and it was great fun after he became a Jew to tell him I was a Christian.... I don’t know which was the biggest lie,” he added, with his droll twinkle.
“Did you hear about the Hindoo who went to see Winkelman’s things at Dowdeswell’s?” said Butler. “He spat out. You see, he knew the real thing.” He smiled with grim satisfaction, for the things were licked and stippled into a meretricious poetry, and his own bold blobs of Oriental color had been laughed at.
“Don’t you wish they supplied spittoons at the Academy?” asked Jimmy.