CHAPTER XVIII
THE MASTERPIECE
The third day after the Mambare sailed found me southbound for Sydney, with Paris as my ultimate objective. The thought that a striking—possibly a great—picture might be painted about the face I had already done came to me the first time I threw back the veiling rug and encountered poor Allen's terror-haunted eyes staring back into my own. In deciding to finish the work in Paris I missed whatever chance I might have had of doing something really worth while. That I did finally complete a picture that was striking, arresting—something to set the tongues of the art world wagging for many a day—was due to the effort I had already made—The Face.
With small chance of being able to do anything for Hartley Allen—at that time believed to be permanently insane,—there was no reason for my remaining longer in Townsville. As nothing that the good Chief of Police had learned—or ever did learn, so far as I know—was calculated to connect me with his failure to run Ranga to earth, he, naturally made no objection to my leaving. The whole affair was a complete mystery to him. The disappearance of Rona was rated only as a minor mystery. The amusing part of it was that it never occurred to the dear man to connect the two. The last thing that I fixed my glass upon as my southbound boat steamed out of the harbour was a confused mass of wreckage, blurring darkly against the mangroves a few miles north of the town. It was all that the late storm had left of the grounded labour schooner, Cora Andrews.
Missing the P. & O. boat by twenty-four hours at Melbourne—too late to overtake it by train to Adelaide,—I found the next sailing was a Messageries Maritime steamer. Rather than wait a week for the next Orient liner, I booked for the French boat. This was all against my better judgment, especially in the light of the fact that I had work ahead. The one most effective influence I had known in keeping my use of absinthe at a point where it was not entirely beyond my control was the scathing if unspoken contempt of men of my own race for another of that race addicted to the insidious Latin habit. The nearest thing to a clean break-away I had ever made up to this time came after a stony-faced Cockney steward on a transatlantic Cunarder, who had put my whisky-drunken cabin-mate to bed one night as a matter of course, slammed the door with a snort when he surprised me pouring absinthe into cracked ice the following afternoon. In France, in French colonies, on French steamers—wherever the tri-colour flapped, in short—that restraining contempt was non-existent. There one found palliation, indulgence, even encouragement. That was the reason I had always become so abject a slave of the "Green Lady" during my sojourns in Paris, in Algiers, in Saigon, in Noumea. With no one to remind me of my shame, I forgot it, sinking ever lower and lower the while. This time, it had been my plan so to occupy myself with work on my picture in Paris that I should be able to keep my absinthe appetite just about where I had managed to hold it during the last six months in Kai and Australia. It is quite possible I might have kept to this program had I caught the P. & O. from Melbourne, or had the sense to wait for another British boat. As it was, five weeks of dolce far niente were too much for me. By the time we reached Suez, I was seeing so green that the desert banks of the Canal looked like verdant lawns to me, and at Marseilles they took me straight from the ship to the hospital, pretty well all in mentally and physically. As my case presented some interesting complications of malaria and tropical anaemia, the doctors took a good deal of interest in it. Under the circumstances, I was dead lucky to get out of their hands at the end of a month.
Thoroughly disgusted with the world in general and myself in particular on the day I was discharged from the hospital, it was a toss-up for a few hours as to whether I should jump out for the Islands by the first boat, or push on to Paris. That I finally plumped for the latter was due more to the fact that there was no east-bound sailing for a couple of days, than to any faith that remained in my ability to get on with the picture. Considering all this, it seems to me that the effort I finally did pull myself together for was fairly creditable in its results.
It was The Face itself—after I had unpacked and set up the canvas in a studio that a former friend kindly placed at my disposal—that was responsible for finally jolting me into action. Even at the end of ten weeks, Hartley Allen's tortured features seemed as real to me as on the night I had finished transferring them from my burning brain to the canvas. It struck me then—as it seemed to strike the public later—as the nearest thing to flesh and blood ever flicked off the tip of an artist's brush; and I felt that I had only to daub in some kind of an ensemble around it to have a work that would at least give Parisian art circles something to talk about for a while.
It seemed to me that the most effective thing to do would be to make Allen, lashed to the schooner's wheel, the central and dominating figure on the canvas, and to have the other figures the creatures of his imagination—the phantoms conjured up by his reeling brain. These would include Bell, Rona, Ranga and a background of plague-stricken niggers. It was not to be—as we had planned the "Black-birder"—an attempt to portray some incident of the voyage. The "phantoms" were to be done in greys and blues, filmy and indistinct, to differentiate them from the solider flesh of the maniac tied to the wheel. It was not an uneffective conception, had I been up to carrying it out—which I wasn't.
By a remarkable coincidence, as I have already mentioned, The Face was in exactly the right place to fit into the ensemble I had planned. This was a good omen and I derived no little encouragement from it. Fearful of the effect that terror-stricken gaze might have upon my models, I stuck an opaque square of paper over the distorted features, with the intention of leaving it there until the rest of the picture was finished. This was a wise precaution, as the sequel proved.