“I fancy I am going to fall in love with Miss Mason.”
CHAPTER VII
THE SIX ARTISTS OF THE COURTYARD
THAT same afternoon the five other male occupants of the studios dropped in to tea with Barnabas. They frequently did. They liked the cakes he bought at a shop in the Fulham Road, and, incidentally, they appreciated Barnabas himself. They had one and all announced their intention previously.
“Meaning me to buy cakes,” said Barnabas. And he had sent his man to the Fulham Road to make the purchases.
Barnabas poured out the tea, which was drunk out of cream-coloured cups with festoons of flowers on them. There were not enough chairs, but a couple of packing-cases had been pressed into service, and they sat round an oak table—gate-legged. Barnabas had picked it up for a mere song at a filthy little shop in a back street. He was very proud of the bargain.
The six men were curiously dissimilar in appearance and in character. One took in the outlines of that, as one took in their appearance at the first glance.
Next to Barnabas was Dan Oldfield, huge, red-haired, and untidy-looking. He was one of a large family, and had begun his artistic career at a suburban art school, where he had risen to the post of pupil teacher, and later to that of assistant master. At twenty-two he had been left three hundred a year by an uncle, and had come to London to study at the Slade Schools. He was now thirty, and had never lost the idea of minute finish inculcated in him at the art school. It found expression in his tiny pictures of almost miniature-like work, pictures which the palm of one of his huge hands would have covered.
Beside Dan was Jasper Merton, sallow, clean-shaven, discontented in expression, his previous history unknown to the six studios. He painted altar pieces at low rates for high churches in poor districts, which paintings were usually the gift of benevolent and religiously-minded spinster ladies. He looked—as Barnabas had once said—as if he were wearing a hair shirt for the good of his soul, and as if the shirt were an extra-prickly one.
Beyond him was Alan Farley, who, like David of old, was “fair and of a ruddy countenance.” Nature had intended him for a cheerful soul, but art of the ultra-mystic type had taken him prisoner. He painted shadowy figures with silver stars on their brows, non-petalled roses, and purple chalices; he read Swinburne and the poems of Fiona Macleod, and talked about creative genius.