At the Gate of Samaria

by William John Locke

“No; somehow I like it,” he would reply, laughing. “I believe I am developing into respectability.”

Combining their resources they were able to entertain in a modest way those of their friends who perfectly understood their relations—the Farquharsons, the Trehernes, Wither. On these occasions Mrs. Gurkins's husband, a lean, self-effacive man, would wait at table in the severest of black and lend immense dignity to the meal. Wither was a constant visitor. The “monastery” was broken up; Fairfax had taken a practice in a large country town, Green had taken a wife. Wither complained bitterly, railing at them both for their disgusting selfishness. Clytie learned to love the bright-eyed, gnomelike little being, his cynical, paradoxical talk, his large-heartedness which he was ever anxious to conceal from the world. Often when life seemed to weigh a little heavy, the future to loom somewhat sad, and Kent and Clytie had been sitting alone, a spell of wistful silence over them, Wither would come in unexpectedly, and, with his subtle feminine perception piercing to the heart of their mood, would exert himself to extra brilliancy and dissipate their cloud in laughter. A man by no means requires delicate tact to win a woman's love, but no man who displays it towards a woman can fail of winning a little of the overflow of her heart. Clytie was grateful to Wither. Once, when bidding him good-night,—Kent had gone into the passage,—she added impulsively, “and thank you.”

He looked at her in his odd way, with a smile playing around his lips.

“What for? For being miserable and lonely and making use of you to cure myself?”

But they understood one another, and he was touched by Clytie's little tribute. And Clytie had spoken out of her heart.

For, in spite of the helpfulness and comfort of their life together, there were gaps in its plenitude which, as she had said to Winifred, ached a little at times. Kent was tenderness, manly sympathy itself: he would have cut his tongue out rather than formulate a longing that could not be satisfied. But moments came when the irony of life seemed somewhat bitterly mocking, and caused a veil of sadness to be drawn between them. And like people who love deeply each was sensitive to the variations in the other's mood. Then Clytie would yearn for the impossible: to fix forever the light she loved to see in his eyes, to cling to his arm and be acknowledged his wife before all the world. Thus through the midst of their happy, earnest life ran a vein of sorrow.

But the years that had passed, with their manifold emotions, experiences, and disillusions, with their awakenings of passion, with their plentiful gift of tears, with their later gift of an almost holy communion of souls, had completed the woman and the artist. One hunger remained to her—one that had had no place in her girlish cravings—a woman's hunger that is as a thing sacred, and wondrously softens her nature. An infinite compassion took within her the place of scorn. Her eyes had learned the trick of tenderness which illuminated her bright, fearless face. Her judgments became less harsh, gained in breadth what they lost in brilliance. She “saw life steadily and saw it whole.” Many of its mysteries had been revealed to her, and she had learned the road to the heart of others. The great lesson that Kent in the years before had suggested to her she grasped in its entirety, and it revolutionised her artistic career. No longer was her art a stepping-stone, a magic-lantern sheet on which to project life in order to realise its meaning. It was no longer the objective form of a vague craving, but the idealised record of an experience. When she painted the wistful, old-world look in a waif's eyes it was no longer with the impatient, fretful hope that its significance would be taught her from her own canvas; her awakened sight gazed with the sorrow of knowledge into the young soul, and she used her art to bear witness to the world of what was there. In a dim way she was conscious of this change of attitude—seeking within herself for the reason of the deeper, intenser, calmer feeling with which she approached her work. There came, too, a sense of responsibility, the necessity of perfecting whatever she painted in its presentation of truth. As her genius expanded the inner interpretation of the formula, “Art for art's sake,” dawned upon her in the realisation of the “sorrowful great gift” whereby the artist has the privilege of piercing through the media of sense and intellect and touching the naked soul of man.

She went, as of old, into the streets for her models, choosing the side of life least understanded of Philistia, sublimating that which was spiritual, eternal in abject and outcast, beggar and courtesan. Strange were the walks of Kent and herself about the great city, by day and by night, and strange the spars and fragments of humanity they picked up in these rambles, who found their way afterwards to Clytie's studio. They went together to East End music halls, bank holiday gatherings, thieves' kitchens, night clubs in the West End, where ladies are admitted free on a member's introduction, Kent paying his subscription almost at the door. It was towards women that Clytie's sympathy flowed the strongest. Her first contact with one of ces autres in the hotel at Dinan had set a chord vibrating within her that now rang out full and true. She could paint these women, young, withered, children on the lurid threshold, old women with charred and blackened past. It is the moralist's part to condemn, evolve the moral; the artist on the higher plane disintegrates the spiritual from the animal and presents it in the form of Truth. From the comedy of misery, the tragedy of sex, the never ending drama of vice and crime, the one draws groans, the other tears. Each has his place in the cosmos. Thus Clytie, artist and woman, walked through the abomination of desolation and opened the eyes of the world to the glimmering spiritual rays that shot across it.

Once more she took out the studies she had made for the “Faustina” picture. This time she could look on them without a shudder, only sadly. The picture would never be painted. She was no longer in feverish, passionate search after mysteries that had baffled her. The picture now had no artistic reason for existence. It would be a cruel, despairing work, a tragedy of cynicism. Knowledge of the world had given her knowledge of self; she knew now how blent were the foreshadowings of passion in her own soul with those that she had hungered to express on the young face of Faustina. In those days she could have found a model in her own mirror, and then the personal note dominating the picture would have saved it from heartlessness. For the complete woman to paint it would be the presentation of the damnation of a young soul. But the contemplation of her earlier work suggested vividly the converse of the subject—a Faustina swept away by the whirl of passion with the after-light of innocence in her soul's depths. The conception grew within her, took form, awoke the full artist in the ripe woman. With a throbbing sense of mastery, a quivering thrill of inspiration, new to her as the first love kiss on a young girl's lips, she betook herself to her task.

It was the 5th of August, two years after Clytie had resumed her artistic life with Kent. The afternoon was hot and oppressive. Clytie was tired and lay back on the couch by the window, for she had worked unceasingly all through the summer and the strain was beginning to tell on her.