But the thought of the whirligig of time gave him no pleasure. In his early struggles in London, when no one would buy his work, he had gloated in anticipation over the humility of the dealers when he should have made his position; now he had long since forgotten and forgiven their contempt; how could they know he was worth taking up? There was nothing but the palest shadow of satisfaction in the thought that they would scour London in search of those despised pictures if they only knew. He wondered sometimes if those early things of his would ever come up into the light, whether the daughter of his ancient landlady still treasured her mother’s wedding-present, and what had become of “The Paradise of the Birds.”
A bluff graybeard in the hall shook his hand heartily. It was Erle-Smith. Matthew Strang knew now that Erle-Smith, whom he had imagined to pass his days encamped before the beatific vision, was a jolly good fellow with sheaves of amusing anecdotes. But he remembered the first time Erle-Smith had spoken to him—at a City banquet in the beginnings of his fame.
“We oldsters will have to be looking to our laurels,” he had said, placing his hand on the young man’s shoulder. After the banquet Erle-Smith had given him a lift in his open carriage, and as they rolled through the busy, flashing London night a voice in Matt’s breast kept crying out, “This is Erle-Smith! Look! This is the great Erle-Smith I am driving with. Why don’t you look, you stupid multitudes? Do you not know this is Erle-Smith—Erle-Smith himself?” Oh, why did not some of the people who knew Matthew Strang come along and see him driving with Erle-Smith? Perhaps they did—there must surely be one acquaintance, at least, among all those crowds, and he would tell the others. He had scarcely been able to reply rationally to Erle-Smith’s conversation, so intoxicated was he by the great man’s proximity. And now he himself was a popular celebrity—shown with the finger—on the eve of Academic honors; had he not, of all the younger men among the guests, been called upon (with disconcerting unexpectedness) to respond to a toast at the Academy Greenwich Dinner only last month? Was he not already on the Council of minor artistic societies? Yes; doubtless he himself was already the cause of like foolish flutterings in the breasts of youthful hero-worshippers—he whose heart could no longer flutter, not even when the youthful hero-worshipper was a woman and beautiful.
He dined with Herbert at a little table. His burst of communicativeness had exhausted itself, and he was glad to let the returned traveller do the bulk of the talking as well as of the dining. He himself ate little, though the cuisine was excellent, and the cellar took high rank. Over dinner Herbert bubbled over in endless reminiscences of the rare dishes and vintages he had consumed, the operas and symphonies he had heard, the women who had loved him—a veritable rhapsody of wine, woman, and song. In an access of unmalicious bitterness, like that which had overcome him on the threshold of Herbert’s studio, Matthew Strang felt that Herbert was the real Master—the Master of life.
In the smoking-room other men gathered round. There was Grose, whose colossal canvases were exhibited at a shilling a head with explanatory pamphlets by high ecclesiastical authorities, and there was Thornbury, who succeeded him in the same gallery with colossal nudes that needed no explanation from ecclesiastical authorities.
Matthew introduced Herbert to Trapp, the realistic novelist, and Herbert introduced Matthew to Sir Frederick Boyd, the composer, who related with gusto a story of how he had exposed a cheat at Monte Carlo. A Scotch landscape-painter asked Matthew to recommend him a model. Two Associates joined the group. One was a vigorous painter who painted everything à premier coup, the other was Cornpepper, externally unchanged, save for a round beard.
He had long since cut himself adrift from the Azure Art Club, though he still counted his disciples, whose experimental fumblings in development of his methods he boasted of observing in sapient passivity. “Try it on the dog,” he used to chuckle to his familiars. “I’ve done searching—let my imitators search, and risk the bogs and the blind-alleys. If they do strike a path, I’m on the spot instantly to lead them along it. That’s the only way one can learn from one’s followers.” He used to tell with glee how one of them had ruined a picture by putting it out in the rain to mellow it. “Some of those modern
