He was a tall young man, thirty or thereabouts, clean-shaven, bronzed, grey-eyed, and with a thin hooked nose. His mouth, below it, was slightly grim in repose. But, when he smiled, you forgot the grimness, and smiled involuntarily in response. Also, you found yourself watching for the smile to come into play a second time. It had a curious manner of leaping first to his eyes in a sudden and illuminating flash. Deserting them, it passed equally suddenly to his mouth, leaving the eyes sad. It was a disconcerting trick, a baffling magician’s trick, and left you wondering. In the matter of dress he was fastidious to a degree. At the moment his attire was the most immaculate suit of London clothes, grey trousers, frock coat, and all the rest of the paraphernalia. His silk hat, exceeding glossy, reposed on a worm-eaten oak chair near him. He had removed a pile of sketch books and a bunch of dilapidated lilies to make place for the hat. They lay now on the floor.
With Corin, by contrast, clothes were a matter of necessity as mere covering, and no more. His tweed trousers and Norfolk jacket had an out-all-night-in-the-wet-and-then-sat-upon air. In two words they looked loosely crumpled. Paint spots adorned the left sleeve, in the crook of the elbow where his palette was wont to rest. His soft collar, attached to his shirt, was unbuttoned, and merely held together by a smoke-grey tie. Briefly, in the matter of clothes, he was the prototype of the modern novelist’s art-student,—the type that emerges paint-stained, careless-clad, cheerfully Bohemian, from the chapters of such novels as deal with the art world in Chelsea.
But here it behoves me to walk warily lest I should hear a whisper of “glass houses,” for does not this very Corin himself dwell in that most fascinating region of London? Is not his studio within a bare five minutes of the dirty, muddy, grey, but wholly adorable Thames, where it drifts past Carlyle’s statue, smoke-grimed and weather-worn, and on past the old herbalist’s garden set back across the street?
In face, this same Corin was plump, smooth-skinned, rosy-cheeked, fair-haired, with short-sighted blue eyes that gazed at you kindly from behind gold-rimmed spectacles. His own appearance caused him moments of acute anguish.
“Look at me!” he would cry on occasions, having met his reflection in some unexpected mirror in a friend’s house or studio, “Look at me! The soul of an artist, and the appearance of a benign and grown-up baby! If I didn’t know my own nature and character, I vow I’d be taken in. I am taken in when I come upon myself in this disgusting and unexpected fashion. Who’s that odd, kindly, little pink-faced man? I ask myself. And then I realize it’s me, me, ME! And, even while I’m swearing at the sight of myself, I look no more than a cross baby yelling for its feeding bottle. Talk of purgatory! I get ten years of it every time I come opposite a looking-glass. The things ought to be abolished. They ought to be ground to powder, scattered like dust to the four winds of heaven. They merely pander to woman’s vanity. No man wants to look into one. If he looks like a man he doesn’t bother about it. If he looks like me—” At this juncture his anguish would become too acute for further speech.
There was a pause in the conversation, quite an appreciable pause, seeing that it lasted at least two and three-quarter minutes. Then:
“So the matter is definitely settled,” announced Corin with an air of finality, “and on Tuesday next you and I, a couple of boon companions, wend our way to the charming, the altogether adorable and old-world village of Malford, situated, so the guide-books tell us, precisely seven miles from Whortley station, as the crow flies. Why as the crow flies,” he continued ruminatively, “I have never been able to fathom. The information is of remarkably small use to the feathered species, and I have not yet been able to grasp what precise and particular use it is to mankind at large.”
John, whose attention had been wandering, roused himself.
“For sheer pertinacity,” he remarked suavely, “commend me to one, Corin Elmore, painter, poet, musician, theosophist, and fortune-teller; in short, dabbler in the arts and the occult sciences.”
“At all events you can hear Mass at Malford,” retorted Corin succinctly. It would appear that “dabbler in the occult sciences” had pricked.