“The bird,” Matt murmured, dazedly. “Oh! Ah! I was waiting for one to die. I wanted to be sure it was—new.”
“With my little eye, I sore ’im die,” quoted the aged gentleman, mockingly. “ ‘Ere, give us the cash—you’re a juggins. But I suppose folks can’t be honest and clever too.”
He took the sixpence and went inside, and re-emerged with what he called a “new-laid” linnet, and returning to his parlor, skinned it, and smeared the skin with arsenical soap, which he manufactured on the spot out of common yellow soap beaten up into a batter with water, white arsenic, and some drops of toothache mixture he had in a vial. He stuffed the skin with the cotton-wool in which the vial was embedded, and ran a wire right through from mouth to tail, with half a hair-pin for each leg and each wing.
“I’m out of eyes,” he said, pausing. “But in them sockets you sticks glass eyes—they’re so much a dozen, according to size. See?”
Matt’s aptitude as a pupil regained him the aged gentleman’s esteem, and a day or so after the oddly assorted couple sailed down the Thames on a penny steamboat, and walked from Blackwall to Stepney, where Matt was introduced to the bird-stuffer’s son, a fat, greasy, hilarious man, who told his father that he was “a old innercent,” and facetiously argued out the probabilities of Matt’s honesty in Matt’s presence. Ultimately, Ground Junior took the young man on a week’s trial. The trial going in Matt’s favor, he was installed permanently in the establishment at eighteen shillings a week, fulfilling miscellaneous functions, the most troublesome of which was the superintendence of a snub-nosed errand-boy, who played excruciatingly on a penny whistle. This boy, whose name was Tommy, and who reminded Matt queerly of his ancient Indian chum by his dishonesty as well as by his name, would calmly return with bare pedestals where there had been birds and shades, and assert that he had smashed the glass, and that thieves in the crowd had torn off the birds. He did not flinch from smashing whole nests of glass shades, two dozen inside one another, a veritable Napoleon among errand-boys. Sometimes, when he had been out with the barrow delivering orders, he would wheel it home laden with mysterious coats and boots, which he vainly offered Matt on easy terms. At irregular intervals, too, he fell ill, a note from his mother arriving in his handwriting differently sloped, and then Matt was reduced to trundling the barrow himself, while the fat facetious man, summoned from the workroom over the shop, or from his other establishment in the New Cut, where his wiry vixen of a wife had her headquarters, replaced him behind the counter. Matt had also spells of mechanical occupation in the workshop. He not only stuffed the skins (which came from abroad), but arranged baskets of wax-fruit (which were bought ready-made) and paper flowers and cases of shells with moss and sea-weeds and pyramids of pebbles. And he made mock red coral out of balls of brown paper, dipped into a hot composition of beeswax and rosin, and stuck it on wooden stands with many-hued shells variegating it, and preserved insects creeping prettily over it; likewise he manufactured wax-flowers to replace breakages; hollow frauds, mere wax shells pounced with dry colors, or mixed originally with coloring matter, yellow ochre making apples, and lake lending transparency to cherries, or uniting with Prussian blue to furnish the florid richness of purple grapes.
But though—as ever—his taskwork hovered oddly about the purlieus of Art, or the vaults of its Temple, and though his eighteen shillings a week enabled him to send nine shillings a week home, in monthly instalments, to Abner Preep, still he was not happy. The difficulties with the errand-boy; the fat facetiousness of Ground Junior; the menial trundling of the barrow, with the dread of some day meeting “Bubbles,” or other fellows from Grainger’s, to say nothing of Cornpepper, Gurney, Rapper, or the Old Gentleman; the retail trade over the counter, the biweekly task of cleaning all the shades with a chamois leather—all this, combined with the sense of wasted months, galled and fretted him. He was working at his Academy picture now—in accordance with his promise to Herbert—but his hours being from eight to eight, Sunday was his only leisure time, and he was paradoxically grateful for the ancient Oriental ordinance which made the godless British bird-stuffer close his shop once a week and thus enable him to work. He was able to do some of the preliminary sketching-out in the early morning and at night; but there was no light for the real work, nor was there much light in his back bedroom, even at noon on Sundays.
He had not changed his address, though he had to walk three miles to and from his work; kept to his old lodging by habit and the trust that his landlady—an artist’s mother—would not hastily throw him upon the streets. The subject of his picture had grown upon him from his daily occupation; the simulated bird-life around him moved him at moments to thoughts of the joyous winged creatures butchered to make a parlor ornament. He could not agree with Ground Senior that they were happier stuffed. And then, too, the pathos of prisoned birds would overwhelm him, exiled from their natural woodland home, and set to peck endlessly at wires. His own lot and theirs became subtly interlinked, and his imagination, turning from the sordid prose of the actual world in which he found himself, brooded on visions of poetry and idyllic happiness, and so, instead of selecting from reality that which was beautiful in it, instead of following Cornpepper’s theories, or his own theories, or anybody’s theories, he found himself irresistibly and instinctively seized and possessed by a subject and a mode of treatment uncompromisingly imaginative—“The Paradise of the Birds,” a beautiful wood, suffused with a magic sunlight, in which freed birds of many species should flutter blithely around a divine female figure with a wondrous radiance of love and joy upon her welcoming face, and at her feet a beautiful boy playing upon an oaten pipe. There should be an undertone of tender pathos—the pathos of birds—but light and joy were to be the essence of this harmony of lovely forms and colors; all the painter’s semi-unconscious yearning for happiness, all his revolt against his narrow, squalid lot, his secret, resentful sense of the high place denied him at the banquet of life, reflecting themselves, inverted, in the mirror of his art. And though the sunlight and atmosphere should be real enough to satisfy the Cornpepper faction, yet over all he would put something of Erle-Smith’s glamour:—
“The gleam,
The light that never was on sea or land,
The consecration and the poet’s dream.”
For the paradise Matt drew on his recollections and old sketches of Acadia, supplemented by a few water-color studies made in Epping Forest, which was within difficult walking distance of the bird-shop, from which, of course, he got his birds; the divine female figure was based upon his first study from the nude at Grainger’s, which he still possessed, though he now gave the woman the normal allowance of toes; while by the aid of coppers he bribed the snub-nosed apprentice with his penny whistle to sit for the cherub with the oaten reed. And thus was Nature transfigured to Art. But as Eden to Epping, so was Matt’s mental conception of the picture to the real picture.
From dawn to sunset Matt painted tirelessly, and with many patient effacements and substitutions of passages, during his one working-day, convinced that the Academy was now his only avenue to recognition; and as sending-in day drew nearer, and the precious light was born earlier, he was able to snatch an hour or two every morning before setting out for Stepney. Towards the end the need of time drove him to the omnibus.