"For 'asphodel' translate 'woman,'" the critic replied, "and you solve the riddle."
At this moment a gap opened; it was sufficiently wide to reveal the subject without the frame of the picture.
On a slab of wood in semi-darkness lay a drowned woman. The rays from a lamp, held aloft by a bargee or coal-heaver, flickered down on the green-grey features that had already lost the expression which accompanies the first beatitude of death. Some outcast, as the worn finery proved; young in years, we knew by the modelling of her throat; aged in worldliness, by the hard set of her features, the sparse strands of faded hair that might once have glittered. The folds of the frayed gown hung lank, heavy with dark drops of liquid mud which oozed and fell slowly to the ground, already a morass of wharf drippings that reflected pallidly the meagre gleams of the uplifted lamp. The magnificent anatomy of a beautiful arm, a shapely bosom—bared, it seemed, in an effort to reanimate—showed that this was no plebeian waif driven by stress of poverty over the water's edge. On the elbow was grim evidence of Wray's realistic mood—a bruise, wide and purple, and higher up, the dull indenture of a water-rat's tooth.
"Well," said Spry, watching my mute amazement, "he has left no part of his gruesome task undone; he has gloated in it—look!—even to the snipping of the linen."
A definite jag on the front of the shift—the place which is usually inscribed with the name of the owner—was carefully insisted on. It was the highest light in the picture, and seemed to emphasise a piteous degradation and still more piteous consciousness thereof.
"Wray turned moralist?" a bystander sneered.
"We may find sermons in stones, but we don't want 'em on canvas," bounced another, a "port-wine-flavoured" personage, who ogled for applause with the confidence of the self-crowned wag.
I eyed him with swelling spleen, and shot a dart at Spry which was intended to ricochet.
"Wasn't it Flaubert who said that, in the hands of an artist, a disembowelled ox would make as fine a subject as any other?"
"I don't know," returned Spry, "but, anyway, about this work there are ugly tales afloat. It is too true—unpleasantly, unnecessarily true."