It indeed appeared to be inhumanly horrible—a vulture swoop of the brush—and, much as I appreciated Wray as a friend and worshipped him as a disciple, I was forced to recognise a want of reserve, some lack of sentiment in the handling—say, rather, over-handling—of so repellant a subject. His aim seemed to lie in choking sentiment—suffocating it in loathliness and disgust. There was a violence of passion that suggested the manner of Prudhon—suggested it, but, giant-like, overshadowed it with the brawny vigour of modern actuality.
I turned from the picture to the crowd, blinked dazedly to find myself again facing daylight and colour, and stretched myself awake as far as environing shoulders would allow. Looking away from this squalid scene, I became suddenly aware of an unusual amount of paint and gilding on the walls—an art tawdriness that had not before obtruded itself. My taste for the reproduction of veined marble and glossy parquet, for pretty pussies and portraits of gentlefolk was exhausted. I made for the turnstiles, and nodded to Spry to get quit of him.
"I'm off," I said, curtly, "to look up Wray and offer my congratulations."
Green Park, bedecked in spring raiment, seemed to me at that moment a welcome oasis of verdure in the midst of the swirl of Piccadilly; it offered no impediment to the bubbling flood of conjecture that Wray's strange chef d'œuvre had let loose.
So far as I knew him—and our friendship, though spasmodic by reason of my wanderings, had existed since our teens—he was the last man to sneak voluntarily into the shadowy niches of life; his nature clung to radiance and his sentiment revolted at the opacity of pessimism. Why, then, this sudden hectic of the sensational? Why, indeed, unless the genius, the loganstone, as suggested by the fellow in the exhibition, had rocked till it tilted?
In the midst of my mental tussle, while twisting the pros and cons in favour of lunacy, and walking with bent head and irresponsible stride, I fell foul of an obstacle. It was Lawrence Vane, the poet, who, being well known to me, chose this mode of salute.
"Your moutons are causing you trouble," he laughed. "Debts?—love affairs?"
"I have neither," I replied, without a vestige of humour.
He was a breezy fellow, good tempered and sound, but at the moment he was out of place. Despite my abruptness he wheeled round and kept pace with me.