“Ha!” he said, leaning forward towards the picture. “You’re portrayed, sir. Your unsympathetic personality, your unhealthy spots, your dorsal redness, and your abdominal pallor, your sullen eye turned upwards to your captors and their crumbs, all these are rendered with lynx-eyed fidelity. Privacy is not for you. Like Marie Antoinette, you are always in the full view of your gaolers.”
He paused to take breath.
“This is England, a free country where we lock into tiny prisons for our amusement the swiftest of God’s creatures, birds, squirrels, rabbits, mice, fishes. You are silhouetted against a background of incongruous foreign shells strewn on a zinc floor: the nightmare of a mad conchologist. What tenderness, what beauty in the cowslips and primroses which encircle your prison and almost hide the iron grating—but not quite. The rapture of Spring is in them. They bloom, they bloom, every bud is opening. The contrast between their joyous immobility and your enforced immobility is complete. Nothing remains to you, to you once swift, once beautiful, once free, nothing remains to you in your corpulent despair except—the pleasures of the table.”
M. leaned back exhausted, trembling a little.
“It is certainly a work of the imagination,” I hazarded, “if you can read all that into it.”
“Giles, my good fellow, confine yourself to your own sphere, how to keep in life against my will and all laws of humanity my miserable worn out carcase. That is not a work of the imagination. It is the work of close and passionate observation, observation so close, and of such integrity that it fears nothing, evades nothing. It is tremendous.”
There was a moment’s silence. I was a little hurt. I knew I was ignorant about art, but after all I had brought the picture to M.’s notice.
“How old is she?”
“Nineteen.”
“I’ve never had a pupil, but if I could live a few months longer I would take her. I suppose she’s starving. I nearly starved at her age. I’ll give her a hundred for it, and I’ll see to its future. Send her round here to-morrow morning.” He scrawled and flung me a cheque for a hundred guineas.