Ah, what hopes harbored, what dreams hovered in that bleak little room! The vague, troubled rumor of the great city rolled up in inspiring mystery; the light played with instructive fascination upon the sooty tiles; high over the congested chaos of house-tops he saw the evening mists rifted with sunset, and on starry nights he touched the infinite through his rickety casement.
CHAPTER II
GRAINGER’S
Only, where to learn? There was the rub. He had looked to his uncle to put him in the way of instantly acquiring art, and here had he wasted a week without acquiring even information. But in the British Museum he lighted upon young men and women drawing from the antique, and entering into conversation with the shabbiest of the men, who was working at the head of a Roman emperor in chalk, pecking at it with a pointed pellet of bread, he learned that the Roman emperor’s head was intended, in alliance with the torso of a Greek river-god, to force the doors of the Royal Academy Schools, the privileges of which gratuitous establishment the aspirant duly recounted. But the examination would not take place for some time, and Matt, though he felt it hard to have to pay fees elsewhere in the meantime, was secretly pleased at being able to shelve temporarily the thought of partaking in this examination, for the Roman emperor’s head was appallingly stippled, and the student said he had been at work on it for four months, and evidently meditated touching and retouching it till the very eve of the examination. Matt did not think he could ever muster sufficient interest in Roman emperors to live with the head of one for more than a week. His heart sank at the thought of what he might have to go through to please professors and examiners, but he would have willingly tried his hand at copying a bust had not the student informed him he must apply for permission and give a reference to a reputable householder. With the exception of his unclaimed uncle, Matt knew no one, reputable or disreputable, householder or vagrant. But he obtained from the shabby delineator of the Roman emperor the address of a cheap, good art-school, though he found, to his dismay, that even at the cheapest he could only afford to take the night class, from seven to ten, three times a week. He saw he would have to study form apart from natural color, and apply during the days the preachings of the three nights. Impatient, and holding his paint-box tight against his palpitating heart, he set out that very night to join the class, but losing himself in a labyrinth of squares exactly alike, did not find the school till half-past seven. Passing through an open door marked “Grainger’s Academy of Art” in ugly and faded lettering, he found himself in a long, gloomy passage that led away from the rest of the house; and, following the indication of a dirty finger painted on the wall, he stole cautiously along the deserted corridor, which grew momentarily drearier as it receded from the naked jet of gas in the doorway, till it reached its duskiest at the point where it was bordered by a pair of cloak-rooms. Matt peered eagerly into their shadowy depths, which seemed to contain coals and a bicycle and litter, as well as clothing, and to exhale a flavor of ancient stuffiness; but he could detect no movement among the congested overcoats. At last, at the end of the passage, he stumbled against a boy in buttons kneeling with his eye to the key-hole of a door. Apologetically he asked the boy if this was Grainger’s, and the boy, jumping up quickly, told him to walk in, and retreated in haste.
Matt opened the door. A wave of insufferably hot air, reeking of tobacco, smote his face and his nostrils; a glare of light dazzled his eyes. He was vaguely aware of a great square room crowded with young men in uncouth straw hats sitting or standing at work in their shirt-sleeves before easels; but the whole scene was a blur compared with the central point that stood out in disconcerting clearness. Immediately facing him, on a platform at the other end of the room, a nude woman was standing. He started back shocked, and was meditating flight, when a student near him growled to him to shut the door. He obeyed, and had an instant of awful loneliness and embarrassment amid this crowd of gifted strangers, in the rear of which he stood, paint-box under arm, wondering why nobody challenged his entry, and where Grainger was. Turning to look for him, he upset a rickety easel and a disengaged stool, both of which seemed to topple over at the slightest touch. But his awkwardness saved the situation; the owner of the easel was good-natured and, perceiving he was a new-comer, bade him seat himself on the stool and fix up an easel next to him, the number painted on the oilcloth of the floor being unappropriated. As Matt had no canvas, he even went outside to buy him one for two-and-ninepence from the boy in buttons. Matt handed him the money with a feeling of eternal gratitude.
While his amiable fellow was thus busied in his behalf, the new student’s keen eye absorbed the scene in detail. A great square dusty room, rimmed as to the roof by skylights, and lighted to-night from above by a great circular gas-flare; round two of the walls, patched here and there by the crumbling away of the plaster, ran a rack on which innumerable canvases and drawing-boards were stacked, and underneath the rack a streak of wood permeated the plaster to hold the pins by which crude sketches were fastened up, evidently for criticism; here and there hung notices of the meetings of Grainger’s Sketching Club, mixed up with photographs and advertisements of studios, and of a drawing competition instituted by the proprietors of a soap, and the mural ornamentation was completed by clever nude studies, rapid tours de force of the visiting artists, as Matt discovered later; everywhere about the floor were canvases, boards, and an unstable assortment of three-legged easels, donkeys, quaintly carved chairs, and stools, high and low, upon which last students of all figures and complexions, some of them smoking, sat perched, crowned with the uncouth straw hats to keep the glare out of their eyes, and reduced to the shirt-sleeves by the heat from so many lights and breaths; the pendent gas-jets being supplemented by the paraffine lamp that lighted a shadowy corner where a skull grinned on a shelf, and by the big fire that was needed to keep the model from shivering on the throne, where she stood statuesque against the white background of a dirty sheet, her head resting against her arm.
And from everything breathed an immemorial dust—from the fire in the centre of the right-hand wall an impalpable ash seemed to drift; dust covered the mantel-piece and coated the bottles of linseed-oil and fixative and the boxes of charcoal that stood upon it, dust draped in gray the dilapidated squash-nosed lay-figure that leaned drunkenly against the right side of the throne. In the corners of the room the dust had an air of legal possession, as if the statute of limitations had secured it against the broom. There were dusty mysteries doubled up on shelves, a visible leopard’s skin suggesting infinite romantic possibilities for the others, and within a dusty barrel in a corner near him Matt saw dusty bits of velvet and of strange, splendid stuffs which he divined were for costume models, and the floor seemed a land of lost drawing-pins and forgotten fragments of charcoal. And then his heart gave a great leap, for his eye, returning timidly to the throne where it had scarcely dared as yet to rest, encountered a man’s head bending over a writing-desk in the compartment of the floor to the left of it. Surely it could be no other than Grainger himself, that thin, austere man with the big bald forehead and the air of Wellington, and Matt thrilled with proportionate reverence, and turned his eye away, as if dazzled, to repose it on the inchoate paintings of the students who were squinting scientifically at the model, and measuring the number of heads with sticks of charcoal or their brush-handles. Some had her large, some small; some turned her head this way, some that; some were painting her, some drawing her—each from his point of sight.
As soon as his own canvas arrived, altogether forgetting his startled modesty in the delightful interest of the work, he fell to touching in the head with rapid strokes of a flowing brush. The woman vanished in the woman’s form: what a privilege to enjoy and reproduce those beautiful curves, those subtle fleshtones, those half-tints of cream and rose, seen under gaslight!
“What are you about?” said his mentor, presently.
“Painting her portrait,” he replied, pausing, with painful foreboding.
“But where’s the charcoal outline?”