CHAPTER III
“VAIN-LONGING”
As a matter of habit Mr. Matthew Strang went, some weeks later, to the Academy Soirée to add his handshake to the many suffered by the presidential image of patience at the top of the stairs, and to help appease the insatiable appetite of the crowd of Christians to whom lions are thrown. It was part of his success to move through fluttering drawing-rooms, and it imbittered him to feel that the average admirer conceives the artist as living in a world of beautiful dreams, sweet with the incense of perpetually swung censers, and knows nothing of the artist’s agonies, or the craftsman’s sweatings, that go to the making of beautiful things; sees always the completed design, and never the workman scraping the paint or wetting the back of the canvas or tossing sleeplessly under the weight of a ruined picture.
To-night, in the restless dissatisfaction that had grown upon him since the reappearance of Herbert had undammed a flood of ancient memories, this feeling possessed him more strongly than ever, inspiring a morbid resentment of the chattering crew divided between hero-worship and champagne-cup. There was almost a suspicion of a leonine snarl in the stereotyped answer, “You are very kind to say so,” which he gave to the grimacing persons who buttonholed him to bask in the radiance of his success or to effuse honest admiration. Everybody seemed to him ill-dressed, ill-mannered, and in ill-health. He thought he had never seen so many cadaverous complexions, snag teeth, powder-tipped noses, scraggy shoulders, glazed eyes (with pince-nez, monocle, or spectacles), ungainly figures (squat or slim), queer costumes, bald heads, or top-heavy hair-dressings; how horrible gentlefolk were, more uncouth even than the denizens of the slums! Those one could imagine to be a very different breed, cleaned and properly clothed, but these had had every chance. How poorly humanity compared with cows and horses; what a price man had paid for soul—and without always getting it. Surely, none but custom-blinded eyes could gaze unblinking, unsmiling, at the grotesque show of mankind, the quaint crania, the unsightly bodies; the crowd struck him as the inventions of a comic draughtsman in a malicious mood, the men in black and white, the ladies in color. And, indeed, though he was not thinking of himself, his stalwart, well-proportioned figure and his handsome head stood out notably from a serried batch of degenerate physiques.
“So you are determined to cut me, Mr. Strang?”
The painter started violently as the laughing syllables, sounding far more musical than the faint far-away strains of the band in the Sculpture Room, vibrated above the endless buzz of the crowd that hemmed him in.
He looked up. His moody fit vanished before the radiant apparition of a beautiful woman in a shimmering amber gown from which her shoulders rose dazzling. A jewelled butterfly fluttered at her breast. In the twinkling of an eye—and that eye hers—he recanted his contempt for the Creator’s draughtsmanship.
“I have bowed to you three times,” she said, and the twinkling of her eye—large and gray and lambent—was supplemented by the smile that hovered about the corners of her wide sweet mouth. “But you won’t take any notice of me.”
“I beg your pardon,” he said, in flushed embarrassment, “I must have been lost in thought.”
She shook her head bewitchingly.
“You don’t remember me. Celebrities never do remember people, though people always remember celebrities.”