“Not at all. You have a fine natural talent, still undisciplined. So long as you keep yourself free from matrimonial complications you may hope to achieve something. A single man can live on bread and water. I am heartily glad to hear you have nobody to keep but yourself.”
Matt smiled grimly under the imagined cover of the fog.
“Ah, I know what you’re smiling at,” said Tarmigan, more genially than he had yet spoken. “You’re wondering whether the preacher is a bachelor. Well, I am proud to say I’m still single, though I can’t boast of living on bread and water. You see, it isn’t only the expense; marriage spoils the silent incubation of ideas; the wife wants her husband, not his Art.”
“But suppose an artist falls in love—isn’t it hard on him?” asked Matt.
“No man can serve two masters. Every artist has got to ask himself, Does he want Happiness, or does he want Art? That choice will face you one day, Mr. Strang.”
“I hope not,” said Matt. “But I guess Art’s enough for me.” He spoke in a tone of quiet conviction, and his bosom swelled. Happiness, forsooth! How could there be Happiness apart from Art? Or how could Art be apart from Happiness?
Their talk fell to a lower level. Matt casually expressed an ardent wish to see sundry R.A.’s, especially the president. He had only come across the second-rate painters or the young men. He felt vaguely that he was at one with Butler and Greme and Herbert, and apparently Tarmigan also, in despising them, though he had only seen one of their exhibitions; they were in power and popular, and therefore time-serving mediocrities. Yet beneath all this prejudice was a keen curiosity about them, and a latent respect for these oldsters who had arrived. Tarmigan promised to get him a ticket for the prize distribution of the Academy Schools next month, when he would see most of them. The suggestion of suicide slunk into the rear; the spectacle of the Academicians was something to live for. Then the old man and the young relapsed into silent thoughts of their art, projecting visions of ideal beauty on the background of yellow, grimy vapor that shrouded the great dreary city.
But when Matt sat down to paint that night he found himself incapacitated, a mass of aches and bruises. He went home to anoint himself with his arnica; in the unconscious optimism of sickness the suggestion of suicide had vanished altogether.
CHAPTER VIII
“GOLD MEDAL NIGHT”
With a step that faltered from nervousness even more than from the weakness due to a diet of one meal per diem, Matt Strang passed across the clangorous court-yard of Burlington House, nigh turned back by the imposing bustle of broughams and cabs, whose shadows were thrown sharply on the stones under the keen, frosty starshine of the December night. In the warm-lighted hall he shrank back, even more timidly, blinking at the radiance of the company, the white shirt-fronts of the men, the dazzling shoulders of the women. Before a counter a block of black figures struggled to get rid of their hats and coats in exchange for numbers. Matt hid his hat, fortunately flexible, in the pocket of his overcoat, which, being the least shabby of his vestments by reason of its summer vacation, he did not dare to take off; otherwise he would not have dared to keep it on. There were spots of discoloration on the concealed garments, for they had suffered from the week’s job, which, together with the expectation of this gala-night, had kept him alive since he had met Tarmigan in the fog three weeks before. As a house-painter and distemperer Matt had still hovered on the verge of Art, and if Butler was right in his interpretation of the Academy of his day, and the highest art was indeed to conceal paint, then was the young Nova Scotian strictly Academic in retaining his overcoat on this most Academic of occasions. He marched with the courage of desperation up a broad crimson staircase, keenly conscious of the frayed edges of his trousers, and mistily aware of overarching palms and bordering flower-pots and fashionable companions, and surrendered the ticket Tarmigan had given him to a sumptuous official who seemed a part of the ornamental avenue to the Academic salons. Once safely past this point the haze cleared, and he saw, to his joy, less fashionable figures in frock-coats and ladies in hats and jackets, and though he wished they had been more numerous and more dowdy, he felt a morsel more at ease. There seemed to be pictures on view, and he eagerly joined the sparse groups of spectators that promenaded the rooms, in curious contrast with the crush of the populace the last time he had walked, at the price of a shilling, within these historic walls. The exhibition was curious: in one room dozens of semi-detached heads, some evidently from the same model; in another, cartoons of draped figures; in a third, sculptures. He saw from a placard that they had been done in competition for the prizes that were to be adjudged to-night. He heard scraps of foolish criticism from the people about him, but his commerce with art-editors had blunted his once sensitive nerves, and he was only amused. From the pictures his eyes strayed to the spectators, and he wondered which were celebrities. It occurred to him, with a pang of dismay, that in the absence of any cicerone he might go away no wiser than he had come, and he remembered with regret the personally conducted tour he had made through the Reynolds Club. Would his uncle be here to-night? he thought, with apprehensive shrinking. As he moved aimlessly about, thinking of the Old Gentleman, his heart leaped to see—not Matthew Strang, but “Daniel before Nebuchadnezzar,” and not the “Daniel before Nebuchadnezzar” he knew, but other Daniels and other Nebuchadnezzars—a veritable vision of Daniels and Nebuchadnezzars, a gallery of Daniels and Nebuchadnezzars, perspectives of Daniels and Nebuchadnezzars, stretching away on both sides of the room; young clean-shaven Daniels and old gray-bearded Daniels and middle-aged Daniels with mustaches, Daniels with uplifted arms and Daniels with downcast eyes, Daniels dressed and Daniels undressed, Daniels with flashing faces and Daniels with turned backs, and Nebuchadnezzars analogously assorted, and palaces of equal variety and backgrounds of similar dissimilarity, each tableau differing in properties and supernumeraries, but all appearing only the more alike because of their differences, so conventional were the variations.