The Judgment Books

Frank laughed a little bitter laugh.

"My drawing has been very successful," he said.

Margery was still looking at the face.

"It is horrible," she said. "Yet I don't see where it is wrong. It's very like you, somehow."

She looked from the picture to her husband, and saw that his face was puzzled and anxious.

"I see what it is," she said. "You've been worrying and growling over it till your face really began to look something like what you were drawing. Oh, Frank, you haven't had breakfast yet. Sit down and have it at once. It all comes of having no breakfast."

"Is that all, do you think?" asked he. "Is that the face of a man who is only guilty of not eating his breakfast? It looks to me guilty, somehow."

"Yes, that's why it's guilty. Your face is guilty, too. When you've eaten your breakfast and smoked that horrid little black pipe of yours, it won't look guilty any more."

Frank was looking at what he had done with the air of a disinterested spectator.

"It seems to me that that brute there has done something worse than not eat his breakfast," he said.

"Nonsense. I'm going to get you some fresh tea because this is cold, and there's that sweet little cold grouse dying, so to speak, to be eaten. You begin on it while I get the tea."

Frank felt exhausted and hungry, and he sat down and proceeded to cut the "sweet little grouse" of which Margery had spoken. He had a strange sense of having just awakened from a dream, or else having just fallen asleep and begun dreaming. He could not tell which seemed the most real – the hours he had just spent before the canvas, or the present moment with Margery in his thoughts. He only knew that the two were quite distinct and different.

Suddenly he dropped his knife and fork with a crash, and turned to the picture again. Yes, there was no doubt about it. There was a curious look in the lines of the face, especially in the mouth, which suggested guilt; and yet, as Margery had said, it was very like him.

Margery's fears and doubts had returned to her for a moment with renewed force as she looked at the face Frank had drawn, but she had spent an hour out-of-doors, and the fresh autumn air had been hellebore to fantastic thoughts, and, by a violent effort, she had torn her vague disquiet out of her mind, and her manner to Frank had been perfectly natural. She soon returned with a teapot of fresh tea, and chatted to him while he breakfasted.

"What part of your personality has gone this morning?" she asked. "It seems to me that you are just as sulky as you always are when you are painting. That's unfortunate, because this afternoon we play tennis at the Fortescues', and if you are sulky, why, there'll be a pair of you – you and Mr. F. Oh, but what a dreadful man, Frank! I don't love him one bit more than one Christian is bound to love another, and he's a Presbyterian at that!"

"Oh, I can't go to the Fortescues'," said Frank. "I want to get on with this. I've been working very hard, yet I haven't finished drawing it yet."

"Don't interrupt," said Margery. "Then we come home after tea, and the Rev. Mr. Greenock dines with us, and the Rev. Mrs. – particularly the Rev. Mrs."

"There are some people," said Frank, "who make me feel as I imagine rabbits must feel when they find a ferret has been put into their burrow – I want to run away."

"Yes, dear, I know exactly what you mean. She's got plenty of personality."

Margery's presence was wonderfully soothing to Frank. She carried an atmosphere of sanity about with her which could not fail to make itself felt. He leaned back in his chair and thought no more of the portrait.

"Oh, I forgot to tell you," she went on. "Mother wants us both to come over to the Lizard and stay with her a couple of nights. She leaves on Thursday, you know, and I've hardly seen her."

"I can't possibly go," said Frank. "I can't leave my painting when I've only just begun it."

"I wish you'd come," said Margery.

"Margery, how silly you are! I couldn't possibly. But – but there's no reason why you shouldn't go."

He suddenly sprang up.

"Margery, tell me not to go on with it," he said, "and if you'll do that I'll come. But I can't leave it."

"Frank, how silly you are. I shall do nothing of the kind. I wish you would leave it for a couple of days and come with me, but I know it's no use arguing with you. I shall go, I think, for one night, not for two; so if I start to-morrow morning I shall get back on Friday evening. I must see mother again before she leaves Cornwall."

Frank walked back to the easel.

"What's the matter with it?" he said, impatiently.

"You've only made yourself look very cross, dear," said Margery, placidly. "You often do look cross, you know, but I should not advise you to paint yourself as cross as you are. Oh, Frank, I've got a brilliant idea!"

"What's that?"

"Why, put all the crossness out of your personality into the picture, and then you'll never be cross any more. Oh, I'm so glad I thought of that!"

Frank had picked up the charcoal and put a few finishing lines to the face.

"I've drawn it in carefully and freely, as if it was a black-and-white sketch," he said. "There, that's what I saw all morning, except just when you were breakfasting here."

"Oh, Frank, you do look a brute!" said Margery. "I'm not going to stop in the room with that, nor are you, because you are coming for a little walk till lunch-time. You have to see Hooper about mending that gate down to the rocks, and tell him, when he marks out the tennis-court, he must do it according to measurement, and not as his own exuberant fancy prompts. It's about a hundred feet long. Come away out."

Frank turned from the easel.

"Yes, I'll come," he said. "I can't get on with that just now; I don't know why; but unless I paint it as I see it I can't paint it at all, and I see it like that."

"Well, nobody can say you've flattered yourself," said Margery, consolingly.

They strolled out through the sweet-smelling woods, full of scents after the night's rain, and already beginning to turn gold and russet. A light mist still hung over the edges of the estuary, and five miles away, at Falmouth Harbor, the tall masts of the ships seemed to prick the skein of vapor like needles. The tide was up, and covered more than half of the little iron steps below the gate which had to be repaired, and long, brown-fingered sea-weed swung to and fro in the gentle swell of the water, like the hands of some blind man groping upward for light. Color, air, and sound alike seemed subdued and mellow, and with Margery by him Frank's phantoms seemed to catch something of the prevailing tranquillity, and retired into the dim, aqueous mists, instead of hovering insistently round him, black-winged, scarlet-robed.

"I think I'll come to the Fortescues', after all, this afternoon," said Frank, as they turned homeward.

"Why, of course you will."

"There's no 'of course' about it, dear," said Frank; "but I feel as if I couldn't paint to-day."

"How dreadfully lazy you are!" said Margery, inconsistently. "You'd never do anything if it wasn't for me. But you must promise to work very hard and sensibly to-morrow and next day, and when I come back I shall expect to see it more than half finished."

"Sensibly!" said Frank, impatiently; "there is no such thing. All good work is done in a sort of madness or somnambulism – I don't know which. Everything worth doing is done by men possessed of demons."

"The demon of crossness seems to have haunted you this morning," said Margery. "But you needn't make yourself crosser than is consistent with truth."

"But supposing I can't paint it in any other way than what you saw this morning?" asked Frank. "What am I to do, then?"

"There! Now you are asking my advice," said Margery, triumphantly, "although you always insist that I know nothing about art. Why, of course, you must paint it as you see it. You are forever saying that yourself."

"Well, you won't like it," said Frank.

"If you'll promise to eat your breakfast at nine and your lunch at two, and not work more than seven hours a day and go out not less than three, I will chance it. Mr. Armitage was so right when he said that good digestion was half the artistic sense."

"And the other half is bad dreams," said Frank.

"No; if you have good digestion, you don't have bad dreams."

Frank walked on in silence.

"If I only knew what was the matter with it," he said, at length, "I could correct it. But I don't, and I think it must be right. It's very odd."

"It's not a bit odd; it's only because you didn't eat your breakfast. And now you've got to eat your lunch."

Frank smoked a cigarette in his studio afterwards while Margery was getting ready. Soon he heard her calling, and got up to go. He stood for a moment in front of the portrait before leaving the room, and a momentary spasm of uncontrollable fear seized him.

"My God!" he said, "she goes away to-morrow; and I – I shall be left alone with this!"

CHAPTER V

Frank got through his tennis-party without discredit. Margery's presence seemed to have exorcised – for the time being, at any rate – the demon which he said possessed him, and there was no apparent similarity between his nature and Mr. Fortescue's. Ease of manner and a certain picturesqueness were natural to him, and Margery found herself forgetting the slightly disturbing events of the last twenty-four hours.

Mr. and Mrs. Greenock, who dined with them that evening, were gifted with oppressive personalities. Frank once said that he always felt as if Raphael's clouds had descended on him when he talked to this gentleman. Raphael's clouds, he maintained, were very likely big with blessing, but were somewhat solid in texture, and resembled benedictory feather-beds rather than benedictory clouds. The environment of benediction was possibly good for one in the long-run, but he himself considered it rather suffocating at the time. Mrs. Greenock, on the other hand, was an example of what Americans perhaps mean by a "very bright woman." She was oppressively bright. She had bright blue eyes, which suggested buttons covered with shiny American cloth, and a nose like a ship's prow, which seemed to cut the air when she moved. She asked artists questions about their art and musicians about their music, and if she had met a crossing-sweeper she would certainly have asked him questions about his crossing. This, she was persuaded, was the best way of improving an already superior intellect, as hers admittedly was. There is a great deal to be said for her view – there always was a great deal to be said for her views, and she usually said most of it herself. She always made a point of saying that she could remember anything you happened to tell her, in order to give Tom, or Harry, or Jane a really professional opinion in case they should happen to ask her questions on the subject in hand. She may, in fact, be described as a lioness-woman, who bore away all possible scraps to feed her whelps. Her methods of obtaining the scraps, however, as Frank had suggested, reminded one of a ferret at work. She had the same bright, cruel way of peering restlessly about.

Mr. and Mrs. Greenock were loudly and insistently punctual, and when Frank came into the drawing-room that evening he found his guests already there. Mrs. Greenock was snapping up pieces of information from Margery, and Mr. Greenock's attitude gave the beholder to understand that the blessing of the Church hovered over this instructive intercourse.

Mrs. Greenock instantly annexed Frank, as being able to give her more professional, and therefore more nutritive, scraps of intellectual food than his wife. She had a rich barytone voice and an impressive delivery.

"I'm sure you'll think me dreadfully ignorant," she said; "but when dear Kate asked me when Leonardo died I was unable to tell her within ten years. Now, what was the date?"

"I really could not say for certain," said Frank; "I forget the exact year, if I ever knew it."

Mrs. Greenock heaved a sigh of relief.

"Thank you so much, Mr. Trevor," she said. "Then may I tell dear Kate that even you don't know for certain, and so it cannot have been an epoch-making year? When one knows so little and wants to know so much, it is always worth while remembering that there is something one need not know. Now, which would you say was the most epoch-making year in the history of Art?"

Frank felt helpless with the bright, cruel eyes of the ferret fastened on his face, and he shifted nervously from one foot to the other.

"It would be hard to say that any one year was epoch-making," he replied; "but I should say that the Italian Renaissance generally was the greatest epoch. May I take you in to dinner?"

Mrs. Greenock turned her eyes up to the ceiling as if in a sudden spasm of gratitude.

"Thank you so much for telling me that. Algernon dear, did you hear what Mr. Trevor said about the Italian Renaissance? He agrees with us."

Mrs. Greenock unfolded her napkin as if she were in expectation of finding the manna of professional opinion wrapped up in it, and was a little disappointed on discovering only a piece of ordinary bread.

"And what, Mr. Trevor, if I may ask you this – what is the subject of your next picture? Naturally I wish to know exactly all that is going on round me. That is the only way, is it not, of being able to trace the tendencies of Art? Historical, romantic, realistic – what?"

"I've just begun a portrait of myself," said Frank.

Mrs. Greenock laid down the spoonful of soup she was raising to her lips, as if the mental food she was receiving was more suited to supply her needs than potage à la bonne femme.

"Thank you so much," she ejaculated. "Algernon dear, Mr. Trevor is doing a portrait of himself. Remind me to tell Harry that as soon as we get home. Ah, what a revelation it will be! An artist's portrait of himself – the portrait of you by yourself. That is the only true way for artists to teach us, to show us theirselves – what they are, not only what they look like."

Frank crumbled his bread with subdued violence.

"You have hit the nail on the head," he replied. "That is exactly what I mean to do."

Mrs. Greenock was delighted. This was a sort of testimonial to the superiority of her intellect, written in the hand of a professional.

"Please tell me more," she said, rejecting an entrée.

"There is nothing to tell," he said; "you have got to the root of the matter. A portrait should be, as you say, the man himself, not what he looks like. We are often very different to what we look like, and a gallery of real portraits would be a very startling thing. So many portraits are merely colored photographs. My endeavor is that this shall be something more than that."

"Yes!" said Mrs. Greenock, eagerly.

"You shall see it if you wish," said Frank, "but it will not be finished for a couple of days yet. My wife goes away to-morrow for a night, and as I shall be alone I shall work very hard at it. It – "

Frank was speaking in his lowest audible tones, but he stopped suddenly. He was afraid for a moment that he would actually lose all control over himself. As he spoke all his strange dreams and fancies surged back over his mind, and he could hardly prevent himself from crying aloud. He looked up and caught Margery's eye, and she, seeing that something was wrong, referred a point which she or Mr. Greenock had been discussing to his wife. Meantime Frank pulled himself together, but registered a solemn vow that never till the crack of doom should Mrs. Greenock set foot in his house again. He and Margery had had a small tussle over the necessity of asking the vicar to dinner, but Margery had insisted that every one always asked the vicar to dine, and Frank, of weaker will than she, had acquiesced. Poor Mrs. Greenock had unconsciously launched herself on very thin ice, and Frank inwardly absolved himself from all responsibility if she tried the experiment again.

When the two ladies left the room Mr. Greenock's feather-bed descents began in earnest. It was trying, but he was less likely to go in dangerous places than his predatory wife. He would not drink any more wine, and he would not smoke; but when Frank proposed that they should join the ladies, he said:

"It so seldom happens, in this secluded corner of the world, that I can converse with men who have lived their lives in a sphere so different to mine, that I confess I should much enjoy a little longer talk with you."

"Yes, I suppose you get few visitors here," said Frank.

"The visitors we get here," said Mr. Greenock, "are chiefly tourists who are not inclined for an interchange of thought and experience. Sometimes I see them in our little church-yard where so many men of note are buried, but they do not stop. Indeed, it would indicate a morbid tendency if they did."

"I have often noticed how many names one knows are on the graves in your church-yard," said Frank.

"It is a solemn thought," said Mr. Greenock, "that in our little church-yard lies all that is mortal of so many brilliant intellects and exceptional abilities. 'Green grows the grass on their graves,' as my wife beautifully expressed it the other day in a little lyric."

"Dear me, I did not know that Mrs. Greenock wrote poetry," said Frank.

"She is a sonneteer of considerable power," said the vicar.

Frank, who had always thought of Mrs. Greenock in the light of a Puritan rather than a sonneteer, gave a sudden choke of laughter. But Mr. Greenock was arranging his next sentence and did not hear it.

"Her verses are always distinguished by their thoughtfully chosen similes," he continued, "and their flow of harmonious language."

"You can hardly feel out of the world if you always have a poet by you."

"The career of a poet," said Mr. Greenock, "is always beset with snares and difficulties. On the one hand, there is the danger of a too easily gained popularity, and, on the other, the discouraging effect of the absence of an audience."

"I am sure I can guess to which danger Mrs. Greenock is most exposed," said Frank, rather wildly.

"You are pleased to say so," said the vicar, with an appreciative wave of his hand. "In point of fact, some verses of hers which have appeared from time to time in a local paper have attracted much not unmerited attention. She is preparing a small volume of verse-idyls for publication."

Mr. Greenock rose, as if further interchange of thought and experience could not but be bathos after this, and Frank and he joined the ladies.

Mrs. Greenock was seized with sensitiveness when she heard that Frank had learned about the forthcoming verse-idyls, but soon recovered sufficiently to make some very true though not very original remarks on the beauty of the moonlit sea, and pressed Frank to tell her whether any one had ever painted a moonlit scene. Frank cast a glance of concentrated hatred at the unoffending moon, and proceeded to answer.

"In this imperfect world," he said, "it would surely be too much to expect that we can convince any one else. It is sufficient if we can convince ourselves. What on earth does the opinion of the foolish crowd matter to an artist? Their praise is almost more distasteful than their censure. Have you ever seen a critic? I met one once at dinner, and – God forgive him, for I cannot – he admired my pictures. He admired them all, and he admired them for the wrong reasons. He admired just that which was intelligible to him. He added insult to injury by praising them in one of those penny-in-the-slot journals, as some one says. No man has a right to criticise a picture unless he knows more about Art than the man who painted it. Carry conviction to any one else? Wait till the day when your poems seem ugly to you, when all you write seems commonplace and trivial; you will not care about convincing other people then. You will say, 'It is enough if I can write a line which seems to me only not execrable.' Extremes meet, and contentment comes only to those who know nothing or who nearly know all."

Mrs. Greenock stared at him in amazement. This was not at all her idea of the cultured, refined artist, the man who would say pretty things in beautiful language, and ask to borrow the Penalva Gazette which contained her poem on "A Corner in a Country Church-yard." She drew on her gloves as if to shield herself from a blustering wind.

Frank, I am sorry to say, felt an evil pleasure in the shock he had given her. He had spoken without malice aforethought, but the malice certainly came in when he had finished speaking. What right had this verse-idyl woman to tell him what a portrait should be, to speak to him of that which he hardly dared think of himself, and drag his nightmare out on to the table-cloth?

His voice rose a tone as he went on.

"You call one thing pretty, another ugly," he said. "Believe me, Art knows no such terms. A thing is true or it is false, and the cruelty of it is that if we have as much as a grain of falsehood in our whole sense of truth, the thing is worthless. Therefore, in this picture I am doing I have tried to be absolutely truthful; as you said at dinner, I have tried to paint what I am without extenuation or concealment. Would you like to see it? You would probably call it a hideous caricature, because in this terribly cruel human life no man knows what is good in him, but only what is bad. It is those who love us only who know if there is any good in us – "

His voice sank again, and as his eye rested on Margery the hardness softened from his face and it was transformed.

"Dear me, I have been talking a lot of shop, I am afraid," he said; "but I have the privilege or the misfortune – I hardly know which – to be terribly in earnest, and I have committed the unpardonable breach of manners to make you the unwilling recipient of my earnestness. Ah, Margery is going to sing to us."

Poor Mrs. Greenock felt as if she had asked for a little bread and been pelted with quartern loaves. She felt almost too sore and knocked about to eat it herself, much less to put pieces in her pocket for Tom and Harry and Jane. But the fact that Margery was singing made it natural for her to be silent, and she finished putting on her gloves, and, so to speak, tidied herself up again. In fact, before they left she had recovered enough to be able to thank Frank for the extremely interesting conversation they had had, and to remind him of his promise to show her the picture.

"I will send you a note when it is done," said he. "Margery is going away to-morrow for the inside of two days, and I expect it will be finished in three or four days at the most."

CHAPTER VI

Margery left early next morning, since, by the ingenious and tortuous route pursued by the Cornish lines, it was a day's journey from Penalva to the Lizard. Frank drove with her to the station, and promised to do as he was told, and not work more than seven hours a day and not less than four. He had quite recovered his equanimity, and spoke of the portrait without fear or despair. But when they got in sight of the station, and again when a puff of white steam and a thin, shrill whistle came to them as they stood on the platform, through the blue-white morning mist, a terror came and looked him in the face, and he clung to Margery like a frightened child.

"Margery, you will come back to-morrow, won't you?" he said. "Ah, need you go at all?"

Margery was disappointed. She had thought that Frank had got over his fantastic fears, he had been so like himself during the drive. But she was absolutely determined to go through with this. To yield once was to yield twice, and she would not yield. Frank must be cured of this sort of thing, and the only way to cure him was to make him do what he feared – to make him give himself absolute final evidence that personalities did not vanish away before portraits like ghosts at daybreak. But, as a matter of fact, Frank's fear was the fear he had not spoken to her of. The danger of losing her swallowed up the danger of losing himself.

"Oh, Frank, don't be a fool!" she said. "Here's the train. Have you had my bag labelled? Of course I shall be back to-morrow. Good-bye, old boy!"

And with another whistle and puff of steam the train was off.

Frank drove home again like a man possessed. Margery had gone, and there remained to him only one thing, and until he was with that time ran to waste. The horses, freshened by the cool, clean air, flew over the hard road, but Frank still urged them on. As soon as they drew up by the door Frank jumped down, leaving the reins on their backs, and went to his studio. There in the corner stood his worst self, and he set to work in earnest. To-day there was no waiting, no puzzling over an idea he could not realize. The evil face smiled as it looked at the yellow little programme, and the long-fingered hands smoothed out its creases with a lingering, loving touch. Desire and the fulfilment of desire were there, and into the soul had the leanness of it entered. And because, as he had said, no man knows the best of himself, but only the worst, there was but little trace in the face of the man who had loved Margery and whom Margery had loved; yet in the eyes was the trace of what had been lost, and if not regret, at least the longing to be able to regret. The better part was not wholly dead, though half smothered under the weight of evil. As he painted he began to realize that it would be so. Had Margery been there, he felt the better part would have been recorded too; but the devil is a highwayman who waits for men who are alone, and he is stronger than a solitary man, though he be St. Anthony himself. But Margery was away, and her absence was almost as the draught that transformed Jekyll into Hyde. So for those two days he worked alone, as he had never worked before, but as he has often worked since, utterly absorbed in his painting, and eating ravenously, but for a few moments only, when his food was brought to him. As the hours went on the conviction came over him that he was right both about the strange fear he had spoken of to Margery and about the other fear of which he had spoken to none. His conscious self seemed to be passing into the portrait, and one by one, like drops of bitter water, his past life flowed higher and higher round him. Far off he thought he could see Margery, but she gave no sign. She did not beckon to him to come, she was not alive to the danger of the rising waters. Soon it would be too late.