The Lesson of the Master

“You’ve a house in the country?” Paul asked enviously.

“Ah not like this!  But we have a sort of place we go to—an hour from Euston.  That’s one of the reasons.”

“One of the reasons?”

“Why my books are so bad.”

“You must tell me all the others!” Paul longingly laughed.

His friend made no direct rejoinder to this, but spoke again abruptly.  “Why have I never seen you before?”

The tone of the question was singularly flattering to our hero, who felt it to imply the great man’s now perceiving he had for years missed something.  “Partly, I suppose, because there has been no particular reason why you should see me.  I haven’t lived in the world—in your world.  I’ve spent many years out of England, in different places abroad.”

“Well, please don’t do it any more.  You must do England—there’s such a lot of it.”

“Do you mean I must write about it?” and Paul struck the note of the listening candour of a child.

“Of course you must.  And tremendously well, do you mind?  That takes off a little of my esteem for this thing of yours—that it goes on abroad.  Hang ‘abroad!’  Stay at home and do things here—do subjects we can measure.”

“I’ll do whatever you tell me,” Overt said, deeply attentive.  “But pardon me if I say I don’t understand how you’ve been reading my book,” he added.  “I’ve had you before me all the afternoon, first in that long walk, then at tea on the lawn, till we went to dress for dinner, and all the evening at dinner and in this place.”

St. George turned his face about with a smile.  “I gave it but a quarter of an hour.”

“A quarter of an hour’s immense, but I don’t understand where you put it in.  In the drawing-room after dinner you weren’t reading—you were talking to Miss Fancourt.”

“It comes to the same thing, because we talked about ‘Ginistrella.’  She described it to me—she lent me her copy.”

“Lent it to you?”

“She travels with it.”

“It’s incredible,” Paul blushed.

“It’s glorious for you, but it also turned out very well for me.  When the ladies went off to bed she kindly offered to send the book down to me.  Her maid brought it to me in the hall and I went to my room with it.  I hadn’t thought of coming here, I do that so little.  But I don’t sleep early, I always have to read an hour or two.  I sat down to your novel on the spot, without undressing, without taking off anything but my coat.  I think that’s a sign my curiosity had been strongly roused about it.  I read a quarter of an hour, as I tell you, and even in a quarter of an hour I was greatly struck.”

“Ah the beginning isn’t very good—it’s the whole thing!” said Overt, who had listened to this recital with extreme interest.  “And you laid down the book and came after me?” he asked.

“That’s the way it moved me.  I said to myself ‘I see it’s off his own bat, and he’s there, by the way, and the day’s over and I haven’t said twenty words to him.’  It occurred to me that you’d probably be in the smoking-room and that it wouldn’t be too late to repair my omission.  I wanted to do something civil to you, so I put on my coat and came down.  I shall read your book again when I go up.”

Our friend faced round in his place—he was touched as he had scarce ever been by the picture of such a demonstration in his favour.  “You’re really the kindest of men.  Cela s’est passé comme ça?—and I’ve been sitting here with you all this time and never apprehended it and never thanked you!”

“Thank Miss Fancourt—it was she who wound me up.  She has made me feel as if I had read your novel.”

“She’s an angel from heaven!” Paul declared.

“She is indeed.  I’ve never seen any one like her.  Her interest in literature’s touching—something quite peculiar to herself; she takes it all so seriously.  She feels the arts and she wants to feel them more.  To those who practise them it’s almost humiliating—her curiosity, her sympathy, her good faith.  How can anything be as fine as she supposes it?”

“She’s a rare organisation,” the younger man sighed.

“The richest I’ve ever seen—an artistic intelligence really of the first order.  And lodged in such a form!” St. George exclaimed.

“One would like to represent such a girl as that,” Paul continued.

“Ah there it is—there’s nothing like life!” said his companion.  “When you’re finished, squeezed dry and used up and you think the sack’s empty, you’re still appealed to, you still get touches and thrills, the idea springs up—out of the lap of the actual—and shows you there’s always something to be done.  But I shan’t do it—she’s not for me!”

“How do you mean, not for you?”

“Oh it’s all over—she’s for you, if you like.”

“Ah much less!” said Paul.  “She’s not for a dingy little man of letters; she’s for the world, the bright rich world of bribes and rewards.  And the world will take hold of her—it will carry her away.”

“It will try—but it’s just a case in which there may be a fight.  It would be worth fighting, for a man who had it in him, with youth and talent on his side.”

These words rang not a little in Paul Overt’s consciousness—they held him briefly silent.  “It’s a wonder she has remained as she is; giving herself away so—with so much to give away.”

“Remaining, you mean, so ingenuous—so natural?  Oh she doesn’t care a straw—she gives away because she overflows.  She has her own feelings, her own standards; she doesn’t keep remembering that she must be proud.  And then she hasn’t been here long enough to be spoiled; she has picked up a fashion or two, but only the amusing ones.  She’s a provincial—a provincial of genius,” St. George went on; “her very blunders are charming, her mistakes are interesting.  She has come back from Asia with all sorts of excited curiosities and unappeased appetities.  She’s first-rate herself and she expends herself on the second-rate.  She’s life herself and she takes a rare interest in imitations.  She mixes all things up, but there are none in regard to which she hasn’t perceptions.  She sees things in a perspective—as if from the top of the Himalayas—and she enlarges everything she touches.  Above all she exaggerates—to herself, I mean.  She exaggerates you and me!”

There was nothing in that description to allay the agitation caused in our younger friend by such a sketch of a fine subject.  It seemed to him to show the art of St. George’s admired hand, and he lost himself in gazing at the vision—this hovered there before him—of a woman’s figure which should be part of the glory of a novel.  But at the end of a moment the thing had turned into smoke, and out of the smoke—the last puff of a big cigar—proceeded the voice of General Fancourt, who had left the others and come and planted himself before the gentlemen on the sofa.  “I suppose that when you fellows get talking you sit up half the night.”

“Half the night?—jamais de la vie!  I follow a hygiene”—and St. George rose to his feet.

“I see—you’re hothouse plants,” laughed the General.  “That’s the way you produce your flowers.”

“I produce mine between ten and one every morning—I bloom with a regularity!” St. George went on.

“And with a splendour!” added the polite General, while Paul noted how little the author of “Shadowmere” minded, as he phrased it to himself, when addressed as a celebrated story-teller.  The young man had an idea he should never get used to that; it would always make him uncomfortable—from the suspicion that people would think they had to—and he would want to prevent it.  Evidently his great colleague had toughened and hardened—had made himself a surface.  The group of men had finished their cigars and taken up their bedroom candlesticks; but before they all passed out Lord Watermouth invited the pair of guests who had been so absorbed together to “have” something.  It happened that they both declined; upon which General Fancourt said: “Is that the hygiene?  You don’t water the flowers?”

“Oh I should drown them!” St. George replied; but, leaving the room still at his young friend’s side, he added whimsically, for the latter’s benefit, in a lower tone: “My wife doesn’t let me.”

“Well I’m glad I’m not one of you fellows!” the General richly concluded.

The nearness of Summersoft to London had this consequence, chilling to a person who had had a vision of sociability in a railway-carriage, that most of the company, after breakfast, drove back to town, entering their own vehicles, which had come out to fetch them, while their servants returned by train with their luggage.  Three or four young men, among whom was Paul Overt, also availed themselves of the common convenience; but they stood in the portico of the house and saw the others roll away.  Miss Fancourt got into a victoria with her father after she had shaken hands with our hero and said, smiling in the frankest way in the world, “I must see you more.  Mrs. St. George is so nice: she has promised to ask us both to dinner together.”  This lady and her husband took their places in a perfectly-appointed brougham—she required a closed carriage—and as our young man waved his hat to them in response to their nods and flourishes he reflected that, taken together, they were an honourable image of success, of the material rewards and the social credit of literature.  Such things were not the full measure, but he nevertheless felt a little proud for literature.

IV

Before a week had elapsed he met Miss Fancourt in Bond Street, at a private view of the works of a young artist in “black-and-white” who had been so good as to invite him to the stuffy scene.  The drawings were admirable, but the crowd in the one little room was so dense that he felt himself up to his neck in a sack of wool.  A fringe of people at the outer edge endeavoured by curving forward their backs and presenting, below them, a still more convex surface of resistance to the pressure of the mass, to preserve an interval between their noses and the glazed mounts of the pictures; while the central body, in the comparative gloom projected by a wide horizontal screen hung under the skylight and allowing only a margin for the day, remained upright dense and vague, lost in the contemplation of its own ingredients.  This contemplation sat especially in the sad eyes of certain female heads, surmounted with hats of strange convolution and plumage, which rose on long necks above the others.  One of the heads Paul perceived, was much the so most beautiful of the collection, and his next discovery was that it belonged to Miss Fancourt.  Its beauty was enhanced by the glad smile she sent him across surrounding obstructions, a smile that drew him to her as fast as he could make his way.  He had seen for himself at Summersoft that the last thing her nature contained was an affectation of indifference; yet even with this circumspection he took a fresh satisfaction in her not having pretended to await his arrival with composure.  She smiled as radiantly as if she wished to make him hurry, and as soon as he came within earshot she broke out in her voice of joy: “He’s here—he’s here—he’s coming back in a moment!”

“Ah your father?” Paul returned as she offered him her hand.

“Oh dear no, this isn’t in my poor father’s line.  I mean Mr. St. George.  He has just left me to speak to some one—he’s coming back.  It’s he who brought me—wasn’t it charming?”

“Ah that gives him a pull over me—I couldn’t have ‘brought’ you, could I?”

“If you had been so kind as to propose it—why not you as well as he?” the girl returned with a face that, expressing no cheap coquetry, simply affirmed a happy fact.

“Why he’s a père de famille.  They’ve privileges,” Paul explained.  And then quickly: “Will you go to see places with me?” he asked.

“Anything you like!” she smiled.  “I know what you mean, that girls have to have a lot of people—”  Then she broke off: “I don’t know; I’m free.  I’ve always been like that—I can go about with any one.  I’m so glad to meet you,” she added with a sweet distinctness that made those near her turn round.

“Let me at least repay that speech by taking you out of this squash,” her friend said.  “Surely people aren’t happy here!”

“No, they’re awfully mornes, aren’t they?  But I’m very happy indeed and I promised Mr. St. George to remain in this spot till he comes back.  He’s going to take me away.  They send him invitations for things of this sort—more than he wants.  It was so kind of him to think of me.”

“They also send me invitations of this kind—more than I want.  And if thinking of you will do it—!” Paul went on.

“Oh I delight in them—everything that’s life—everything that’s London!”

“They don’t have private views in Asia, I suppose,” he laughed.  “But what a pity that for this year, even in this gorged city, they’re pretty well over.”

“Well, next year will do, for I hope you believe we’re going to be friends always.  Here he comes!” Miss Fancourt continued before Paul had time to respond.

He made out St. George in the gaps of the crowd, and this perhaps led to his hurrying a little to say: “I hope that doesn’t mean I’m to wait till next year to see you.”

“No, no—aren’t we to meet at dinner on the twenty-fifth?” she panted with an eagerness as happy as his own.

“That’s almost next year.  Is there no means of seeing you before?”

She stared with all her brightness.  “Do you mean you’d come?”

“Like a shot, if you’ll be so good as to ask me!”

“On Sunday then—this next Sunday?”

“What have I done that you should doubt it?” the young man asked with delight.

Miss Fancourt turned instantly to St. George, who had now joined them, and announced triumphantly: “He’s coming on Sunday—this next Sunday!”

“Ah my day—my day too!” said the famous novelist, laughing, to their companion.

“Yes, but not yours only.  You shall meet in Manchester Square; you shall talk—you shall be wonderful!”

“We don’t meet often enough,” St. George allowed, shaking hands with his disciple.  “Too many things—ah too many things!  But we must make it up in the country in September.  You won’t forget you’ve promised me that?”

“Why he’s coming on the twenty-fifth—you’ll see him then,” said the girl.

“On the twenty-fifth?” St. George asked vaguely.

“We dine with you; I hope you haven’t forgotten.  He’s dining out that day,” she added gaily to Paul.

“Oh bless me, yes—that’s charming!  And you’re coming?  My wife didn’t tell me,” St. George said to him.  “Too many things—too many things!” he repeated.

“Too many people—too many people!” Paul exclaimed, giving ground before the penetration of an elbow.

“You oughtn’t to say that.  They all read you.”

“Me?  I should like to see them!  Only two or three at most,” the young man returned.

“Did you ever hear anything like that?  He knows, haughtily, how good he is!” St. George declared, laughing to Miss Fancourt.  “They read me, but that doesn’t make me like them any better.  Come away from them, come away!”  And he led the way out of the exhibition.

“He’s going to take me to the Park,” Miss Fancourt observed to Overt with elation as they passed along the corridor that led to the street.

“Ah does he go there?” Paul asked, taking the fact for a somewhat unexpected illustration of St. George’s moeurs.

“It’s a beautiful day—there’ll be a great crowd.  We’re going to look at the people, to look at types,” the girl went on.  “We shall sit under the trees; we shall walk by the Row.”

“I go once a year—on business,” said St. George, who had overheard Paul’s question.

“Or with a country cousin, didn’t you tell me?  I’m the country cousin!” she continued over her shoulder to Paul as their friend drew her toward a hansom to which he had signalled.  The young man watched them get in; he returned, as he stood there, the friendly wave of the hand with which, ensconced in the vehicle beside her, St. George took leave of him.  He even lingered to see the vehicle start away and lose itself in the confusion of Bond Street.  He followed it with his eyes; it put to him embarrassing things.  “She’s not for me!” the great novelist had said emphatically at Summersoft; but his manner of conducting himself toward her appeared not quite in harmony with such a conviction.  How could he have behaved differently if she had been for him?  An indefinite envy rose in Paul Overt’s heart as he took his way on foot alone; a feeling addressed alike strangely enough, to each of the occupants of the hansom.  How much he should like to rattle about London with such a girl!  How much he should like to go and look at “types” with St. George!

The next Sunday at four o’clock he called in Manchester Square, where his secret wish was gratified by his finding Miss Fancourt alone.  She was in a large bright friendly occupied room, which was painted red all over, draped with the quaint cheap florid stuffs that are represented as coming from southern and eastern countries, where they are fabled to serve as the counterpanes of the peasantry, and bedecked with pottery of vivid hues, ranged on casual shelves, and with many water-colour drawings from the hand (as the visitor learned) of the young lady herself, commemorating with a brave breadth the sunsets, the mountains, the temples and palaces of India.  He sat an hour—more than an hour, two hours—and all the while no one came in.  His hostess was so good as to remark, with her liberal humanity, that it was delightful they weren’t interrupted; it was so rare in London, especially at that season, that people got a good talk.  But luckily now, of a fine Sunday, half the world went out of town, and that made it better for those who didn’t go, when these others were in sympathy.  It was the defect of London—one of two or three, the very short list of those she recognised in the teeming world-city she adored—that there were too few good chances for talk; you never had time to carry anything far.

“Too many things—too many things!” Paul said, quoting St. George’s exclamation of a few days before.

“Ah yes, for him there are too many—his life’s too complicated.”

“Have you seen it near?  That’s what I should like to do; it might explain some mysteries,” her visitor went on.  She asked him what mysteries he meant, and he said: “Oh peculiarities of his work, inequalities, superficialities.  For one who looks at it from the artistic point of view it contains a bottomless ambiguity.”

She became at this, on the spot, all intensity.  “Ah do describe that more—it’s so interesting.  There are no such suggestive questions.  I’m so fond of them.  He thinks he’s a failure—fancy!” she beautifully wailed.

“That depends on what his ideal may have been.  With his gifts it ought to have been high.  But till one knows what he really proposed to himself—?  Do you know by chance?” the young man broke off.

“Oh he doesn’t talk to me about himself.  I can’t make him.  It’s too provoking.”

Paul was on the point of asking what then he did talk about, but discretion checked it and he said instead: “Do you think he’s unhappy at home?”

She seemed to wonder.  “At home?”

“I mean in his relations with his wife.  He has a mystifying little way of alluding to her.”

“Not to me,” said Marian Fancourt with her clear eyes.  “That wouldn’t be right, would it?” she asked gravely.

“Not particularly; so I’m glad he doesn’t mention her to you.  To praise her might bore you, and he has no business to do anything else.  Yet he knows you better than me.”

“Ah but he respects you!” the girl cried as with envy.

Her visitor stared a moment, then broke into a laugh.  “Doesn’t he respect you?”

“Of course, but not in the same way.  He respects what you’ve done—he told me so, the other day.”

Paul drank it in, but retained his faculties.  “When you went to look at types?”

“Yes—we found so many: he has such an observation of them!  He talked a great deal about your book.  He says it’s really important.”

“Important!  Ah the grand creature!”—and the author of the work in question groaned for joy.

“He was wonderfully amusing, he was inexpressibly droll, while we walked about.  He sees everything; he has so many comparisons and images, and they’re always exactly right.  C’est d’un trouvé, as they say.”

“Yes, with his gifts, such things as he ought to have done!” Paul sighed.

“And don’t you think he has done them?”

Ah it was just the point.  “A part of them, and of course even that part’s immense.  But he might have been one of the greatest.  However, let us not make this an hour of qualifications.  Even as they stand,” our friend earnestly concluded, “his writings are a mine of gold.”

To this proposition she ardently responded, and for half an hour the pair talked over the Master’s principal productions.  She knew them well—she knew them even better than her visitor, who was struck with her critical intelligence and with something large and bold in the movement in her mind.  She said things that startled him and that evidently had come to her directly; they weren’t picked-up phrases—she placed them too well.  St. George had been right about her being first-rate, about her not being afraid to gush, not remembering that she must be proud.  Suddenly something came back to her, and she said: “I recollect that he did speak of Mrs. St. George to me once.  He said, apropos of something or other, that she didn’t care for perfection.”

“That’s a great crime in an artist’s wife,” Paul returned.

“Yes, poor thing!” and the girl sighed with a suggestion of many reflexions, some of them mitigating.  But she presently added: “Ah perfection, perfection—how one ought to go in for it!  I wish I could.”

“Every one can in his way,” her companion opined.

“In his way, yes—but not in hers.  Women are so hampered—so condemned!  Yet it’s a kind of dishonour if you don’t, when you want to do something, isn’t it?”  Miss Fancourt pursued, dropping one train in her quickness to take up another, an accident that was common with her.  So these two young persons sat discussing high themes in their eclectic drawing-room, in their London “season”—discussing, with extreme seriousness, the high theme of perfection.  It must be said in extenuation of this eccentricity that they were interested in the business.  Their tone had truth and their emotion beauty; they weren’t posturing for each other or for some one else.

The subject was so wide that they found themselves reducing it; the perfection to which for the moment they agreed to confine their speculations was that of the valid, the exemplary work of art.  Our young woman’s imagination, it appeared, had wandered far in that direction, and her guest had the rare delight of feeling in their conversation a full interchange.  This episode will have lived for years in his memory and even in his wonder; it had the quality that fortune distils in a single drop at a time—the quality that lubricates many ensuing frictions.  He still, whenever he likes, has a vision of the room, the bright red sociable talkative room with the curtains that, by a stroke of successful audacity, had the note of vivid blue.  He remembers where certain things stood, the particular book open on the table and the almost intense odour of the flowers placed, at the left, somewhere behind him.  These facts were the fringe, as it were, of a fine special agitation which had its birth in those two hours and of which perhaps the main sign was in its leading him inwardly and repeatedly to breathe “I had no idea there was any one like this—I had no idea there was any one like this!”  Her freedom amazed him and charmed him—it seemed so to simplify the practical question.  She was on the footing of an independent personage—a motherless girl who had passed out of her teens and had a position and responsibilities, who wasn’t held down to the limitations of a little miss.  She came and went with no dragged duenna, she received people alone, and, though she was totally without hardness, the question of protection or patronage had no relevancy in regard to her.  She gave such an impression of the clear and the noble combined with the easy and the natural that in spite of her eminent modern situation she suggested no sort of sister-hood with the “fast” girl.  Modern she was indeed, and made Paul Overt, who loved old colour, the golden glaze of time, think with some alarm of the muddled palette of the future.  He couldn’t get used to her interest in the arts he cared for; it seemed too good to be real—it was so unlikely an adventure to tumble into such a well of sympathy.  One might stray into the desert easily—that was on the cards and that was the law of life; but it was too rare an accident to stumble on a crystal well.  Yet if her aspirations seemed at one moment too extravagant to be real they struck him at the next as too intelligent to be false.  They were both high and lame, and, whims for whims, he preferred them to any he had met in a like relation.  It was probable enough she would leave them behind—exchange them for politics or “smartness” or mere prolific maternity, as was the custom of scribbling daubing educated flattered girls in an age of luxury and a society of leisure.  He noted that the water-colours on the walls of the room she sat in had mainly the quality of being naïves, and reflected that naïveté in art is like a zero in a number: its importance depends on the figure it is united with.  Meanwhile, however, he had fallen in love with her.  Before he went away, at any rate, he said to her: “I thought St. George was coming to see you to-day, but he doesn’t turn up.”