The fortnight’s end found him spiritually seared and physically scalded. The depressing society of the British working-man, the ever-present contrast of the blank building with the free forest in which he had made sugar in his boyhood (how happy his boyhood seemed now!), and the overflowing contents of the seething boilers, demonstrated to him daily that he had made a mistake. He might have stayed on nevertheless, but the dread that an accidental scald on the hand might permanently injure his power with the brush made the trial fortnight his last. He scanned the advertisement columns again, with no suspicion of what now awaited him.
He had been misled by the comparative facility with which he had found work hitherto; he was now destined to re-experience—far more poignantly than in New Brunswick—the long-drawn agony of unemployment, the sickness of hope deferred; to bruise himself against the ruthless indifference of an overstaffed nation; to see and hear the blind, deaf forces of the social machine grind out happiness for all but him. At first he did not mind getting no replies, except for the waste of stamps, for he took feverish advantage of the hours of daylight thus left free for Art. But as day followed day, and week followed week, the perturbation of his soul and the weakness of his body, enfeebled by hunger and cold, made painting difficult; and he had not even the capital to expend on canvas. Broken in health and pride, he applied again for his old work, prepared even to tint cartes-de-visite. But his place had been filled up. The stream of human life had flowed on as if he had never been. The work he had got was the only work in London open to a man in his position, and this work he had thrown away. One of the papers he had so imprudently quarrelled with was willing to take him on again, but at half the price. Subdued as he was, a pride he afterwards felt to have been insane spurred him to refuse. He fancied he could get such terms from a score of other papers, but he was mistaken. In truth, black and white was no more his métier than humor. The rush into black and white, of which he had first heard at Cornpepper’s, had filled the ranks with abler men or of older standing, with a better appreciation of the market, and of how to draw for reproduction by the new processes just coming up. And he had yet to learn, also, that the world went very well without him; that it had no need for him either as artist or artisan, craftsman or clerk; that every hole had its peg, round or square; and that he was of no more account in the surging life of London than the fallen leaves blown about the bleak squares.
He earned a few odd shillings now and then for his old pictures by persuading some small skinflint dealer to cheat him; and that was all. Once he was cruelly tantalized—a five-pound commission to copy a National Gallery picture being dangled before him, only to be withdrawn. He parted with all but the barest necessities—with the fashionable morning suit, with his pistol, with the Gregson boots; his only luxury was the engraving of the “Angelus,” which he had retained because nobody offered more than eighteenpence for it. The bulk of the money thus raised was remitted to Abner Preep, as promised; the rest went to pay Mrs. Lipchild. Himself he so stinted that often when he went to Grainger’s (which he had fortunately prepaid) he took care to arrive first, not only because of the warmth, but because the girl students, whose class preceded his, left stale crusts lying about, whose crumb had been used up on their charcoal drawings. To such straits may a man sink in a few weeks, though he sinks slowly, for each week is a year to him. But outwardly he preserved dignity, brushing his one suit scrupulously, and glad that, owing to his interlude of fashionable tailoring, it was still in good condition; for the vision of the lost mortals was ever before his eyes, and he foresaw that without a decent appearance he would not be able to grasp an opportunity even when it came, but would be driven down to the deeps to join the damned souls outside that Fleet Street public-house, within which the happier staff of the Christian Home ushered in the Sabbath with beer.
And the more London refused him the more his consciousness of power grew. As he tramped the teeming streets in quest of a job or a customer, a thousand ideas for great pictures jostled in his sick brain, a thousand fine imaginings took form and shape in beautiful color-harmonies and majestic groupings. In the ecstatic frenzy of moments of hysterical revolt against the blind forces closing in upon him like a tomb to shut him out forever from the sunlight, he grew Titanic to his own thought, capable of masterpieces in any and every kind of art—great heroic frescos like Michael Angelo’s, great homely pictures like those of the Dutch, great classic canvases like Raphael’s, great portraits like Rembrandt’s, great landscapes like Turner’s, great modern street-pieces like Cornpepper’s, great mediæval romances like Erle-Smith’s, not to say great new pictures that should found the school of Strang, combining all the best points of all the schools, the ancient poetry with the modern realism. Nay, even literary impulses mingled with artistic in these spasms of nebulous emotion, his immature genius not having yet grasped the limitations of the paintable. Good God! what did he ask? Not the voluptuous round of the young men whose elegant silhouettes standing out against the black, silent night from the warm lighted windows of great houses athrob with joyous music filled him with a mad bitterness; not the soft rose-leaf languors of the beautiful white women who passed in shimmering silks and laces from gleaming spick-and-span carriages under canvas awnings over purple carpets amid spruce, obsequious footmen; not the selfish joys of these radiant shadows dancing their way to dusty oblivion, to be trodden under foot by the generations over which he would shine as a star, serene, immortal; but bread and water and a little money for models and properties, and a top-light straight in touch with heaven, and a few pounds to send home to his kith and kin; but to paint, to paint, to joy in conception and to glory in difficult execution, to express the poetry of the ideal through real flesh and real shadows and real foliage, and find a rapturous agony in the search for perfection; to paint, to paint, to exult fiercely in the passing of faces, with their pathos and their tragedy, to catch a smile on a child’s face and the grace of a girl’s movement and the passion in the eyes of a woman; to watch the sunrise consecrating tiles and chimneys, or the river, mirroring a thousand night-lights, glide on, glorifying its own uncleanness; to express the intense stimulus of the wonderful city, resonant with the tireless tread of millions of feet, vibrant with the swirl of perpetual currents of traffic, pulsating with the rough music of humanity-roaring markets, shrilling trains, panting steamships; to record in pigment not only the romance of his dreams or the glamour of the dead past, but the poetry of the quick—the rich, full life of the town, the restless day and the feverish night, with its mysterious perspectives of fitful gleams; to paint, to paint, anything, everything, for the joy of eternalizing the transient beauty that lurked everywhere—in the shimmer of a sunlit puddle, in the starry heaven, in the motions of barefoot children dancing to a barrel-organ, in the scarlet passing of soldiers, in the play of light on the fish in a huckster’s barrow, in the shadowy aisles of city churches throbbing with organ diapasons.
Oh, the joy of life! Oh, the joy of Art that expressed the joy of life!
Yes, but in the absence of a few bits of metal, neither joy nor Art nor even life could be his. He must die, be swept off from among the surging crowds of which he was an unnoticed unit, and no one would ever know what mighty things he had dreamed and suffered in his little span of years. Every supper eaten by radiant couples at richly lit restaurants would have nourished him for weeks, nor did it diminish the bitter socialistic sentiment this reflection caused him to remember that he himself had fared as wantonly once and again. At least, he had earned his money. What gave those young men with the vacant faces, those women with the improbable complexions, the right to all the good things at the table of life? Even Herbert was splashed by this wave of bitterness; Herbert, the brilliant, with his battalion of boots. Ah! poor little Billy was right. It was impossible to believe in anything—to see any justice in life.
And was it worth while going on? The thought presented itself again and again, especially in those November days when London was as dark as his own soul; and it made him half sorry, half glad that a grim Providence had sent his pistol to the pawnshop. He was walking to Grainger’s one evening in such a double darkness of without and within, when the memory came to him of a newspaper paragraph concerning people who had wandered into the river, and, hypnotized by the idea, he bent his steps towards the docks, with a vague intention of giving death a chance. What did it matter what became of his brothers and sisters? It were better that they died too. In any case he could not help them any more; he had just scraped together the usual remittance, but he could not see where the next was to come from. But his semi-somnambulistic motion did not bear him towards the water-side; in the gray obscurity he erred endlessly in strange ghostly squares, whose chill iron-railed enclosures loomed like cemeteries through the sepulchral air.
London smelled like a boiled sponge; the raw air reeked with sulphurous grime, as if the chimneys of hell had been swept. It was not an inviting world to remain in. A gigantic brown head of a horse suddenly shot past his. He jumped back, but a shadowy wheel caught him in the pit of the stomach and hurled him across the road, where he fell on his back, hearing inarticulate noises from the cabman, and just seeing the hansom swallowed up again by the yellow sea. He got up, feeling dazed and indignant, rather than hurt, and staggered along in purposeless pursuit of the vanished cab. He found himself in a business street, where the illumined shop-fronts thinned the fog. A familiar face, with a strange green light upon it from a chemist’s window, burst upon him as unexpectedly as the horse. It was Tarmigan’s. He studied it abstractedly for a moment in its greenish pallor, with its deep furrows, seeming to read clearly a weariness and heart-sickness akin to his own, and struck for the first time by the shabbiness and flaccidity of the figure. Then the face took a more joyous expression than he had ever seen in it, and he heard Tarmigan saying:
“Hullo, Strang! Are you lost, too?”
“Yes, sir—at least, I don’t quite know, sir,” he replied, like one awaking from a dream.