Matt’s redemption from comic journalism was partly due to the prosperity of the proprietor of the comic-picture factory, who started a serious-art department, where Matt found less uncongenial work in painting figures into the landscapes of his less competent fellow-workmen. This gradually opened up to his astonished eyes a new section of the trade. He saw one of these landscapes near King’s Cross, resplendent in a gorgeous gold frame, and marked “Original oil-painting—two guineas only,” and another, in a poor neighborhood marked “Water-color, hand-painted—a bargain!” and he perceived that he had been flying too high in his early attempts to approach dealers of the type of Drücker. Henceforward he haunted furniture dealers, picture-frame makers, and artists’ colormen, and thus he occasionally obtained half a sovereign to despatch to his tailor. His drawings in the Christian Home attracted the attention of the editor of the Working Man, and Matt was commissioned to accompany a journalist through the East End to expose the evils of sweating. The Working Man was owned by a syndicate, and Matt had to settle terms with the manager, a truculent gentleman with a double chin and a double watch-chain, who agreed to give him five shillings a sketch. Matt did several sketches for each article, and the pathetic series caused a great stir and much correspondence; but at the end of the month—when poor Matt, who had already nearly starved himself for his tailor’s sake, was expecting a goodly check to send to Abner Preep—he received only a quarter of what he had bargained for. He went to the editor, who referred him to the manager, who insisted the terms were five shillings for the illustration of a single article. “You must remember, too, what a lift we are giving you, with our big circulation,” concluded the manager, his double watch-chain heaving pompously on his abdomen. “It is not every young man who gets such a chance of showing what he can do.”
“You’re a set of damned scoundrels!” cried Matt, with an access of ancient rage, and had wellnigh torn up the check and thrown it in the manager’s face, when his later chastened self plucked at his coat-tails and bade him begone with it. Who so helpless as the black-and-white artist, his work poorly paid, and reproduced again and again without his control; his very originals taken from him and sometimes sold at a profit?
It was not a happy time for Matt, this period of spiritless work by day and spiritless study by night, his soul chafing alike against the degradations of life and the routine of school. For what an actuality had he exchanged his dreams! Yet he had no option; the tailor must be paid, his family must be helped, and to these two ends, moreover, he himself must exist. But the friction of ideals and realities left him irritable and high-strung; and even when, towards the autumn, he won his way into the Ladies’ Weekly, at a guinea an illustration, he lost his work by not concealing his contempt for the art editor, a pragmatic person, absolutely dead to art, but excessively fastidious about the drawings, which he refused whenever there was time for alterations.
“This is feeble, but we’re pressed for time,” was his encouraging apology to the artist for accepting his work, “and I’ll put it into the hands of a competent engraver.” His first self-revelation to Matt was his complaint about some rough shadows on the borders of a sketch: “I wish you would bear in mind, Mr. Strang, that we have to pay as much per inch for the reproduction of those blotches as for the most finished work.” But it was not till the “old lady” (as the other artists called the art editor of the Ladies’ Weekly behind his back) had insisted on his dressing his figures better that Matt lost control of his tongue and retorted, “I draw pictures, not fashion-plates.” In after-remorse, he would have been glad to get fashion-plates to do. He replaced the lost work by returning to photo-tinting, though he now obtained more important work on enlarged photographs, which he colored in oil at three and six apiece, managing to do two or three a day while the light held, without interfering with his black and white, which could be done at night; by which means he scraped together enough to pay off the tailor in full, and to send his promised contribution home, together with seven fourpenny halfpenny “Notable Novels” to reconcile Billy to his narrow existence. And then, with these burdens thrown off, his idealism resurged again, for beneath the placid everyday exterior of this homely young man, who trudged up foul staircases, portfolio under arm, or danced attendance on smug h-less photographers smoking twopenny cigars, a volcanic fire burned, and the thought of his precious youth wasted and abraded in this inartistic art-drudgery, under the yoke of vulgar souls, was a dull haunting torment. His qualms of self-distrust vanished under the pressure of obstacles, and the measure of his aversion from joyless commercial art became to him the measure of his genius. One gray windy forenoon of late autumn he had stopped to take a mental sketch of a strangely attired woman, who was listening to a Salvation Army exhortation, a woman who was a dab of color upon the dreary day. Below an enormous white hat with a recumbent ostrich feather and a broad brim with an upward slant, tied under the chin with black bands, shone through a black veil a glorious oval-shaped dark face with flashing eyes, full red lips, large shapely ears, and raven hair curling low over the forehead. She wore a black, half-masculine jacket, with big mother-of-pearl buttons and a yellow bow that was awry, and by a shapely hand cased in a white glove with three black stripes she held the skirts of a slaty gown clear of the mud.
While Matt was whimsically wondering what the editor of the Christian Home would say to a sketch of her in his staid organ, he instinctively noted the other romantic touches about the scene, ineffably grimy though the roadway was to the inartistic eye, flanked on one side by a coal office, with a blear-eyed old man at the window, and on the other by a canal running lengthwise. There were fresh country faces among the girl-soldiers, and among the men was an ex-heathen in a turban, a flaring Paisley shawl, flowing robes, and sandals, bearing aloft a red flag with a blue border and a central yellow star, around which ran the words “Blood and Fire.” And while his eye selected the picturesque points, the whole scene passed half insensibly into his sub-consciousness as into a camera, to be developed in after-years—the grotesque snag-toothed hags in the crowd, the collarless men with the air of being connected with the canal, one of them with a Mephistophelian red tuft on his chin; the ice-cream stall at the corner, where a postman, a baby of three, and an urchin with his collar paradoxically up against the cold were licking green glasses. And then a buxom work-girl with a tambourine began to hold forth, pouring out breathless sentences all running into one another, clutching her inspiration tight lest it should escape her, and repeating herself endlessly rather than pause for a moment.
“Only the blood of Christ can save only the blood of Christ has saved only the blood of Christ will save.”
And her fellow-soldiers, quivering with unction, punctuated her shapeless periods with soul-wrung ejaculations.
“Ah, yes.”
“Bless her.”
“Glory to God.”