To Matt the hard work and the peril were alike welcome; the very mists were poetry after the yellow charnel-house vapors of London, which now lay behind him like a nightmare, and with it his dream of Art. His soul had swung round violently. In the strain of hauling up the nets in the misty moonlight, in the silence of sea and sky and night, he found repose from his morbid craving to reproduce this mighty Nature, which stretched away all around him in large, sane serenity, as indifferent to the puny images of Art as the waste of waters to the little dory rocking on its bosom. And the rugged simplicity of his briny, horny-handed mates was equally restful after the garish brilliance of the young artists about town; after all, his heart was with homely folk, went out to sea-folk; he was his father’s son and the brother of all those who go down to the sea in ships and do business in the great waters. How like a child’s cackle Cornpepper’s epigrams sounded across the silence of the lonely deep! Under the hushed stars, touching the infinite spaces with awful beauty, all these feverish figures of the smoking-room showed like fretful midges.
When the cruise was over, and the spoil had been unloaded and sold on the fishy wharf, or steeped in brine and packed in the vats, Matt was able to send ten dollars to England, besides keeping up his usual allowance to Cobequid Village and maintaining himself—a triple task which weighed heavily upon his brain, and gave him frequent moments of corroding, nervous apprehension. For his health was only partially re-established, and his correspondence with Cobequid Village was not reassuring. His brothers and sisters were growing up without finding much to do; Billy moped a great deal, and though he thanked his brother for the engraving of the “Angelus,” which Matt sent him, he intimated that he would have been better pleased had Matt spent his money on books of travel and adventure for him. And Abner wrote, with pathetic facetiousness, that he was “tolerable pleased” that his brother-in-law had not come home, as they would have been “mighty squeezed” to put him up, for, what with the increase of Abner’s own progeny and the growth of the Strangs, even the best room with the cane chairs had long since been turned into a bedroom, though it could still be restored to its pristine magnificence on state occasions.
From the neighboring fishing-ground Matt gravitated back to Halifax. His thoughts, divorced from Art, centred on money. His artistic fibre was coarser now than in those days of almost religious enthusiasm for Art. He had an idea of opening a drawing-school and becoming the local “Grainger,” but the initial funds were to seek. He got a few drawing-lessons, but the stupidity of his pupils was maddening, and his communion with their parents fretted him after the larger mind of London. He feared he would have to take to the road again in search of sitters, and the prospect of weary tramps in quest of patronizing store-keepers and farmers was not alluring, even though that fine squeamish horror at the idea of Art to order had been knocked out of him. He was saved from the tramping by becoming assistant in a photographic caravan, which toured the country, leaving in each village a trail of attitudinizing inhabitants mounted and framed; in the course of which campaign, by a pleasanter stroke of fortune, he painted the portraits of a minister of fisheries and of the cook he had married, and so gained enough money to quit the caravan and start a carriage-painting shop in the village where the happy couple had their country home. As the poorest inhabitants were carriage-folk—for horses and oats and hay were cheap, and carriage taxes unknown—Matt Strang, with a commercial instinct sharpened and an artistic interest blunted by miseries, calculated to do well. His sign-board, executed by his own hand, ran:
| CARRIAGES PAINTED, |
| ALSO SLEIGHS. |
| House Decorating, Portraits, and |
| Drawing-lessons. |
The shop was a success. Ere the summer waned many of the villagers had their idle sleighs brilliantly illumined, and when winter came their faded carriages were handed over to Matt to be berouged or otherwise beautified. Each man had his equipage decorated after his own taste or whim, though he always began by leaving it entirely to the artist. One would order lemon-yellow underworks, with vermilion stripes and an olive-green body, for another the ideal of beauty lay in lake and russet-and-green, while the fancy of a third would turn lightly to Prussian blue and gold stripes; and Matt, devoid now of artistic interest and thus of artistic irritability, faithfully obeyed the behests of his employers, and filled the leafy streets with a riotous motley of perambulating color. The little village was pranked and rejuvenated. It wore a sempiternally festive air. The sign-boards were spick-and-span, the house fronts fresh and bright, the vehicles gayly a-glitter, the glass windows of the stores black with self-laudatory lettering by day, while at night the buff store-blinds repeated the brag; and over all the village was a sense of “wet paint.” Thus did the artist throw a glamour over life, and touch the sleeping souls of his fellows to livelier issues, though his own interest in Art was numb. But prices were small, and paid mainly in kind, and when once the place was transmogrified there was nothing further to be done, the latter items of his sign-board evoking no response. So Matt shifted his ensign to Starsborough, a ship-building village on the coast, where he found new scope for his versatile craftsmanship, as witness two new items added to his painted prospectus:—
Figure-heads Carved.
Ship Decorating.
He got leave to set up in the ship-yard, speculated in a set of carving-tools, and supplied the prows of the ships with those picturesque wooden persons whose uselessness is of the essence of Art. He occupied a corner in the calker’s shop, reeking with tarry odors, and worked hemmed in by the oakum-pickers, who relieved the tedium of toil by smoking and singing lewd songs. One of his works, a Turkish lady eight feet high, to get which done in time cost him much sweat and sacrifice of other work, pleased the ship-builder so vastly that he gave Matt the contract—in preference to all the other candidates who sent in estimates—for painting his next ship within and without. The delighted young man saw his way to speedy competence, the long-torpid thought of Art began to stir drowsily, only it was Paris that now gleamed fitfully in the background of his day-dreams. He talked over the decorations with the ship-builder, and agreed to pay the men from week to week, and to supply the tools, paints, and gold-leaf till the job was completed, when his employer undertook to pay him the sum agreed upon in actual coin. As Matt was able to get the materials from a store on three months’ credit, and to pay his men with orders on the same all-embracing store on the same terms, and the job would be finished in less than three months, the arrangement promised to be very profitable. Alas! it proved the crash and break-down of all his new prosperity. In the middle of the work the ship-builder failed heavily, and Matt found himself on the point of bankruptcy too, for, though he sent in his claim against the estate, there seemed scant chance of his obtaining anything. Even the Turkish woman had not been paid for, Matt having consented to receive her price with the rest of the money, for the sake of getting silver in lieu of goods. His account with the store-keeper had run up to $250. He could not see how to meet his bills; the weeks without other work had exhausted his savings; there was even about a fourth of his debt still to be sent to Madame Strang. He got other little jobs, but the great shipwright’s failure had reduced Starsborough to stagnation. The time of payment drew nigh. After sleepless nights of anguish he went to the store-keeper and told him he could not pay. The man received him sympathetically, said he had been expecting the confession, and consented to give him a little time; so Matt broke up his establishment, and journeyed by train and packet to another village nearer Halifax, and set up his sign-board afresh. A job took him to the capital, and in the streets he ran across his Starsborough creditor, who was come up to order hardware, and who, apparently delighted to see him, invited him to breakfast with him at his hotel next morning. Always glad to save a meal, and rejoiced to find his creditor so genial and debonair, Matt tramped into town the first thing in the morning and repaired to the hotel. But there was no breakfast for him. A sheriff’s officer awaited him instead, and arrested him for debt. He had been the victim of a subterfuge, his creditor fearing from his migratory movements that he was about to run off to the States.
And so Matt was clapped into the prison to await his trial, and became one of the broken-down band that inhabited its spacious ward, promenaded the long whitewashed corridor on which the lavatory gave, and slept on the iron beds ranged against the wall. Every morning the bedclothes were stripped off and piled in the empty cells to give the ward a more habitable air. In this dreary bed and sitting room Matt spent days of mental agony, though physically he fared better than under his own parsimonious régime. But the sense of degradation outweighed all else. He felt he could never look his fellow-men in the face again. His character was gone; his ambitions had received their death-blow—nay, his very business career in his native land was at an end. The stigma would always soil his future. All the long travail and aspiration had ended at what a goal! He could not understand the careless merriment of his fellow-prisoners, who fleeted the time with cards, which they played for love. There was a negro among them who was the whetstone of their wit, and a Frenchman who varied his tearful narrative of the misfortune that had brought him low, with ventriloquial performances and anecdotes of self-made Yankee millionaires. In this gesticulating little man Matt recognized with surprise and shamefacedness his ancient fractious subordinate in the Halifax furniture shop, who had taken him to his bosom after due alcohol, but he was glad to find his unconscious fellow made no advances. At moments he forced himself to look for the comic Bohemian side of the situation, to imagine Cornpepper’s superiority to a debtors’ prison, the artist sublime amid the ruins of his credit, snorting disdain for the absurd institutions of the bourgeois; but neither this nor philosophy availed to shake his sense of shame. He summoned the infinite to his aid, saw himself again rocking on the little dory between sea and sky, and asked himself what anything mattered in this vast of space and time. But these excursions of the intellect left instinct unmoved; from childhood the word “jail” had been fraught with shuddering associations; they could not be argued away. Strang’s aloofness from his companions, even when an outside friend had sent in liquor or dainties to one of them, attracted the notice of the jailer, a kindly man in a cutaway coat, with only an official cap to mark his calling. He talked to the sullen, brooding prisoner, conceived a liking for him, and commissioned him to paint his portrait for ten dollars, supplying the materials himself and providing a temporary easel. The darkness that had threatened Matt’s reason, if not his life, fled before this kindness; the days before the trial flew by almost joyously, and the nights were rendered more tolerable by being passed alone on a plank bed in one of the criminal cells, whose stout doors, studded with iron nails and furnished with little gratings, rarely held anybody, so that the painter easily persuaded his patron to allow him to occupy it.
He had scarcely set up his easel when his companions clustered round, and the Frenchman burst into tears of emotion, and professed that he, too—he who spoke to you—was an artist. If only some one could see the creditor who had thrown him into prison, and explain to him that his victim was guiltless of all save genius. As Matt had heard all this before, he pursued his work unmoved, affording a new distraction to his mates, so that the negro’s life became endurable, and less love was lost at cards. But ere the second sitting was over the Frenchman, who had studied alternately the artist’s face and his canvas, uttered an exclamation of joyous recollection and fell upon his neck, crying that he had at last found again the comrade of his soul. When Matt had shaken him off, he drew a romantic picture of their early affection and collaboration for the edification of the salon, and henceforth took a proud fraternal interest in the progress of the portrait.
The picture turned out better than Matt had expected; to his own surprise he found himself painting more vigorously than ever; his hand, instead of having lost its cunning, seemed to have gained by the rest. The jailer was well content, and promised two and a half dollars over and above the price; but as Matt had expressed his intention of sending the money to his creditor, his new friend held over the surplus till he should need it for himself. When at the end of the third week the trial came on, and Matt “swore out,” solemnly asserting absolute impecuniosity, his creditor, mollified by the ten dollars, and further assuaged by the sale of Matt’s effects, from his tools to his sign-board, did not press the counter-proof of competency, and so the prisoner was set at liberty. Sundry other bankrupts “swore out” at the same time, one or two, who had boasted privily of their means, perjuring themselves back to freedom and prosperity.