“Creative genius!” Barnabas had said to him one day. “Man, you don’t understand the first principles of it. Your painting is pure slither. Do you think creation is slither? It’s travail, it’s agonizing. What does your work cost you? Nothing. An airy fancy, half an hour’s mental indigestion, and there’s a canvas covered with purples, greys, and greens. The colour’s all right, but what on earth is the thing worth? I’m not talking monetary jargon. You say that purple mass in the corner is a veiled woman, and she’s talking through opal mists to a silver star. Who on earth’s going to find that out unless you go round like a kind of animated catalogue to your own pictures. Get hold of form, man. Study it. Draw—draw—draw—till you can express ideas tangibly. Leave poetry alone for a bit till you’re honoured with the power of understanding it. You’re being mentally sensual and don’t know it. You talk of passion! Great Scot! You don’t understand the meaning of the word, nor the A B C of nature.”
And Alan had listened and taken the harangue meekly, though it had had, apparently, little effect.
Next to Alan was Paul Treherne, seated on a packing-case. He was a man well above the medium height, and with a lean-limbed look about him. He had grey eyes, sad—like his mouth, which was partly hidden by a small moustache. Fate had started him in an office, which he hated. Later she had taken him abroad, where he had lived in a tent and under the open sky, where he had experienced hardships few men of his class have known, and where he had three times been face to face with death. He had looked at sunsets across open plains, and seen mountains bathed in gold and purple, and the crimson fire of tropical evenings. He had seen the blue shadows of palm trees on yellow sand; he had seen the scarlet of pomegranate flowers, the gold of oranges against azure skies, till his whole being was saturated in colour. And lastly he had returned to England at the age of twenty-seven to find in the soft greys and lilacs of smoky London an even more wonderful charm. He had then an income of eight hundred a year, four of which he gave to his widowed mother, who lived in a little house in Hampshire. He was at last able to turn to art, which he had always loved passionately, and from his knowledge of character gained through much experience of men and women, and with his wonderful sense of colour, he took to portrait painting. He now, besides his invested income, earned, at the age of thirty-seven, about six hundred a year by his brush. He sang in an untrained mellow baritone in a way that brought tears to one’s eyes.
Between Paul and Barnabas was Michael Chester, a small man, one shoulder higher than the other, and with one leg shrunken and twisted. He had had a pencil in his hand since babyhood. In illustration and line work he excelled, though his choice of subjects was morbid. His paintings of the river and grey London streets were beautiful. There was something almost Whistler-ish about them. He had the heart of a true poet, and the tongue of a cynic, and he played the violin like a god. An ultra-morbidity regarding his own appearance had lost him to the world as a public violinist. Nothing would have induced him to mount a platform or enter a crowded drawing-room. The studios alone were given the benefit of his talent.
And finally, master of the ceremonies, seated on another packing-case was Barnabas—tall, brown-haired, green-eyed, and sunny hearted, outwardly indolent, and beloved of his fellow-men. He followed in the footsteps of Paul as a portrait painter, though he was apt to say it was “the devil of a way behind.”
The conversation during tea had somehow centred round a certain unconscious old lady, who was at that moment cleaning oil paints from a large mahogany palette, and looking with humorous disgust at a canvas on which were large and unsteady blobs of pink paint above a smear of green and gold. They were intended to represent pink roses in a Sèvres bowl, but had failed horribly in the intention.
The conversation had begun airily enough, five of the men taking part in it, Barnabas alone being silent. After about ten minutes it began to be slightly strained, and three of the men had more or less dropped out of it. Dan had, however, continued to express his views somewhat clearly and with a certain amount of gruffness. Jasper was being annoyingly Christian-like in his attitude.
“I intend to call on the lady, at all events,” he said at last, with exasperating decision. “After what you two fellows said yesterday I felt that I at least——”
“Not you only, my child,” interrupted Barnabas good-humouredly, speaking for the first time. “We’re all going. We begin on Sunday.”
“Won’t the lady be a trifle overwhelmed?” asked Paul.