Half-Past Bedtime

by Sir H. H. Bashford

But she loved it too, better than all the other pictures, because nobody else seemed to understand it; and when her aunt had married Captain Jeremy, and they had left Bellington Square, and most of the other pictures had been sold, her aunt had allowed her to take this one with her and hang it in her bedroom in the old farmhouse. So she was rather excited when Marian introduced her to the blind painter; and when he came to tea with them in the middle of April she took him upstairs and told him all about it, because, of course, he could no longer see it.

But he couldn't remember it, or even where he had painted it, though there was a date on it which showed that it was six years old, because that was a year, he said, in which he was travelling all over the world and making little sketches almost every day. But he didn't laugh at her as her nurse had done, because pictures, he said, were queer things; and nothing was more likely than that there should be something in this one that only Gwendolen could feel.

"You see, a picture," he said, "if you look at it properly, is just like a conversation painted on canvas; and you can see what the artist said to his subject as well as what his subject said to him. Of course, in most pictures, just as in most conversations, all that happened is something like this: 'Good morning,' said the artist, 'fine weather we're having,' and whatever he was painting just nodded its head. That's because he was really thinking about something else—his indigestion or the money that he hoped to make; and nobody ever tells their inmost thoughts to people who talk to them like that. But if he has tried to be a real artist, loving and understanding, and not thinking about himself at all, the hills and the trees, or whatever he was painting, have begun to tell him all about themselves. They've swopped secrets with him just like old friends; and there they are for you to see. Sometimes they have even told him things that he didn't understand himself. But he has painted them so faithfully that other people have; and that's the most wonderful thing that can happen to an artist—better than finding a hundred pounds."

He lit a cigarette.

"And I shouldn't be surprised," he said, "if that little window wasn't giving me a message. Only it was a message that I never understood; and perhaps Gwendolen does."

But Gwendolen shook her head.

"Not very well," she said. "I only know that it makes me feel sad."

And then Gwendolen's aunt came to tell them that tea was ready, and in a couple of minutes they had forgotten all about the picture; and a quarter of an hour later they forgot it still more, for in came Captain Jeremy and Lancelot, the bosun's mate. They were both in high spirits, because they had had an order to put to sea again for Porto Blanco, to fetch a cargo of fruit from the Gulf of Oranges, on the shores of which Porto Blanco was the principal town.

"A matter of three months," said Captain Jeremy, "out and home." He gave Marian a kiss and pulled Gwendolen's pigtail. "You'd better come with us. What do you say, Lancelot? Or do you think they'd bring us bad luck?"

But Lancelot only grinned and made a husky noise—not because he was naturally shy, but because he was always afraid of having tea in the drawing-room, in case he should spill something on the carpet. He would much have preferred, in fact, to have tea in the kitchen with Mrs Robertson, the housekeeper, because he was very fond of Mrs Robertson, and wanted to marry her, and had told her so several times. But Mrs Robertson couldn't make up her mind. Her first husband had been rather a nuisance; and though he had been dead for nine and a half years, she was still a little doubtful about taking a second one. But Marian and Gwendolen couldn't help jumping up and down, and the blind painter said that they ought to go, and Captain Jeremy promised to go round to Peter Street and see what Marian's mother had to say about it.