_ The Rutland Galleries were crowded, especially in the neighbourhood
of the tea-buffet, by a fashionable throng of art-patrons which had
gathered to inspect Mervyn Quentock's collection of Society
portraits. Quentock was a young artist whose abilities were just
receiving due recognition from the critics; that the recognition
was not overdue he owed largely to his perception of the fact that
if one hides one's talent under a bushel one must be careful to
point out to everyone the exact bushel under which it is hidden.
There are two manners of receiving recognition: one is to be
discovered so long after one's death that one's grandchildren have
to write to the papers to establish their relationship; the other
is to be discovered, like the infant Moses, at the very outset of
one's career. Mervyn Quentock had chosen the latter and happier
manner. In an age when many aspiring young men strive to advertise
their wares by imparting to them a freakish imbecility, Quentock
turned out work that was characterised by a pleasing delicate
restraint, but he contrived to herald his output with a certain
fanfare of personal eccentricity, thereby compelling an attention
which might otherwise have strayed past his studio. In appearance
he was the ordinary cleanly young Englishman, except, perhaps, that
his eyes rather suggested a library edition of the Arabian Nights;
his clothes matched his appearance and showed no taint of the
sartorial disorder by which the bourgeois of the garden-city and
the Latin Quarter anxiously seeks to proclaim his kinship with art
and thought. His eccentricity took the form of flying in the face
of some of the prevailing social currents of the day, but as a
reactionary, never as a reformer. He produced a gasp of admiring
astonishment in fashionable circles by refusing to paint actresses-
-except, of course, those who had left the legitimate drama to
appear between the boards of Debrett. He absolutely declined to
execute portraits of Americans unless they hailed from certain
favoured States. His "water-colour-line," as a New York paper
phrased it, earned for him a crop of angry criticisms and a shoal
of Transatlantic commissions, and criticism and commissions were
the things that Quentock most wanted.
"Of course he is perfectly right," said Lady Caroline Benaresq,
calmly rescuing a piled-up plate of caviare sandwiches from the
neighbourhood of a trio of young ladies who had established
themselves hopefully within easy reach of it. "Art," she
continued, addressing herself to the Rev. Poltimore Vardon, "has
always been geographically exclusive. London may be more important
from most points of view than Venice, but the art of portrait
painting, which would never concern itself with a Lord Mayor,
simply grovels at the feet of the Doges. As a Socialist I'm bound
to recognise the right of Ealing to compare itself with Avignon,
but one cannot expect the Muses to put the two on a level."
"Exclusiveness," said the Reverend Poltimore, "has been the
salvation of Art, just as the lack of it is proving the downfall of
religion. My colleagues of the cloth go about zealously
proclaiming the fact that Christianity, in some form or other, is
attracting shoals of converts among all sorts of races and tribes,
that one had scarcely ever heard of, except in reviews of books of
travel that one never read. That sort of thing was all very well
when the world was more sparsely populated, but nowadays, when it
simply teems with human beings, no one is particularly impressed by
the fact that a few million, more or less, of converts, of a low
stage of mental development, have accepted the teachings of some
particular religion. It not only chills one's enthusiasm, it
positively shakes one's convictions when one hears that the things
one has been brought up to believe as true are being very
favourably spoken of by Buriats and Samoyeds and Kanakas."
The Rev. Poltimore Vardon had once seen a resemblance in himself to
Voltaire, and had lived alongside the comparison ever since.
"No modern cult or fashion," he continued, "would be favourably
influenced by considerations based on statistics; fancy adopting a
certain style of hat or cut of coat, because it was being largely
worn in Lancashire and the Midlands; fancy favouring a certain
brand of champagne because it was being extensively patronised in
German summer resorts. No wonder that religion is falling into
disuse in this country under such ill-directed methods."
"You can't prevent the heathen being converted if they choose to
be," said Lady Caroline; "this is an age of toleration."
"You could always deny it," said the Rev. Poltimore, "like the
Belgians do with regrettable occurrences in the Congo. But I would
go further than that. I would stimulate the waning enthusiasm for
Christianity in this country by labelling it as the exclusive
possession of a privileged few. If one could induce the Duchess of
Pelm, for instance, to assert that the Kingdom of Heaven, as far as
the British Isles are concerned, is strictly limited to herself,
two of the under-gardeners at Pelmby, and, possibly, but not
certainly, the Dean of Dunster, there would be an instant reshaping
of the popular attitude towards religious convictions and
observances. Once let the idea get about that the Christian Church
is rather more exclusive than the Lawn at Ascot, and you would have
a quickening of religious life such as this generation has never
witnessed. But as long as the clergy and the religious
organisations advertise their creed on the lines of 'Everybody
ought to believe in us: millions do,' one can expect nothing but
indifference and waning faith."
"Time is just as exclusive in its way as Art," said Lady Caroline.
"In what way?" said the Reverend Poltimore.
"Your pleasantries about religion would have sounded quite clever
and advanced in the early 'nineties. To-day they have a dreadfully
warmed-up flavour. That is the great delusion of you would-be
advanced satirists; you imagine you can sit down comfortably for a
couple of decades saying daring and startling things about the age
you live in, which, whatever other defects it may have, is
certainly not standing still. The whole of the Sherard Blaw school
of discursive drama suggests, to my mind, Early Victorian furniture
in a travelling circus. However, you will always have relays of
people from the suburbs to listen to the Mocking Bird of yesterday,
and sincerely imagine it is the harbinger of something new and
revolutionising."
"WOULD you mind passing that plate of sandwiches," asked one of the
trio of young ladies, emboldened by famine.
"With pleasure," said Lady Caroline, deftly passing her a nearly
empty plate of bread-and-butter.
"I meant the place of caviare sandwiches. So sorry to trouble
you," persisted the young lady
Her sorrow was misapplied; Lady Caroline had turned her attention
to a newcomer.
"A very interesting exhibition," Ada Spelvexit was saying;
"faultless technique, as far as I am a judge of technique, and
quite a master-touch in the way of poses. But have you noticed how
very animal his art is? He seems to shut out the soul from his
portraits. I nearly cried when I saw dear Winifred depicted simply
as a good-looking healthy blonde."
"I wish you had," said Lady Caroline; "the spectacle of a strong,
brave woman weeping at a private view in the Rutland Galleries
would have been so sensational. It would certainly have been
reproduced in the next Drury Lane drama. And I'm so unlucky; I
never see these sensational events. I was ill with appendicitis,
you know, when Lulu Braminguard dramatically forgave her husband,
after seventeen years of estrangement, during a State luncheon
party at Windsor. The old queen was furious about it. She said it
was so disrespectful to the cook to be thinking of such a thing at
such a time."
Lady Caroline's recollections of things that hadn't happened at the
Court of Queen Victoria were notoriously vivid; it was the very
widespread fear that she might one day write a book of
reminiscences that made her so universally respected.
"As for his full-length picture of Lady Brickfield," continued Ada,
ignoring Lady Caroline's commentary as far as possible, "all the
expression seems to have been deliberately concentrated in the
feet; beautiful feet, no doubt, but still, hardly the most
distinctive part of a human being."
"To paint the right people at the wrong end may be an eccentricity,
but it is scarcely an indiscretion," pronounced Lady Caroline.
One of the portraits which attracted more than a passing flutter of
attention was a costume study of Francesca Bassington. Francesca
had secured some highly desirable patronage for the young artist,
and in return he had enriched her pantheon of personal possessions
with a clever piece of work into which he had thrown an unusual
amount of imaginative detail. He had painted her in a costume of
the great Louis's brightest period, seated in front of a tapestry
that was so prominent in the composition that it could scarcely be
said to form part of the background. Flowers and fruit, in exotic
profusion, were its dominant note; quinces, pomegranates, passion-
flowers, giant convolvulus, great mauve-pink roses, and grapes that
were already being pressed by gleeful cupids in a riotous Arcadian
vintage, stood out on its woven texture. The same note was struck
in the beflowered satin of the lady's kirtle, and in the
pomegranate pattern of the brocade that draped the couch on which
she was seated. The artist had called his picture "Recolte." And
after one had taken in all the details of fruit and flower and
foliage that earned the composition its name, one noted the
landscape that showed through a broad casement in the left-hand
corner. It was a landscape clutched in the grip of winter, naked,
bleak, black-frozen; a winter in which things died and knew no
rewakening. If the picture typified harvest, it was a harvest of
artificial growth.
"It leaves a great deal to the imagination, doesn't it?" said Ada
Spelvexit, who had edged away from the range of Lady Caroline's
tongue.
"At any rate one can tell who it's meant for," said Serena
Golackly.
"Oh, yes, it's a good likeness of dear Francesca," admitted Ada;
"of course, it flatters her."
"That, too, is a fault on the right side in portrait painting,"
said Serena; "after all, if posterity is going to stare at one for
centuries it's only kind and reasonable to be looking just a little
better than one's best."
"What a curiously unequal style the artist has," continued Ada,
almost as if she felt a personal grievance against him; "I was just
noticing what a lack of soul there was in most of his portraits.
Dear Winifred, you know, who speaks so beautifully and feelingly at
my gatherings for old women, he's made her look just an ordinary
dairy-maidish blonde; and Francesca, who is quite the most soulless
woman I've ever met, well, he's given her quite--"
"Hush," said Serena, "the Bassington boy is just behind you."
Comus stood looking at the portrait of his mother with the feeling
of one who comes suddenly across a once-familiar half-forgotten
acquaintance in unfamiliar surroundings. The likeness was
undoubtedly a good one, but the artist had caught an expression in
Francesca's eyes which few people had ever seen there. It was the
expression of a woman who had forgotten for one short moment to be
absorbed in the small cares and excitements of her life, the money
worries and little social plannings, and had found time to send a
look of half-wistful friendliness to some sympathetic companion.
Comus could recall that look, fitful and fleeting, in his mother's
eyes when she had been a few years younger, before her world had
grown to be such a committee-room of ways and means. Almost as a
re-discovery he remembered that she had once figured in his boyish
mind as a "rather good sort," more ready to see the laughable side
of a piece of mischief than to labour forth a reproof. That the
bygone feeling of good fellowship had been stamped out was, he
knew, probably in great part his own doing, and it was possible
that the old friendliness was still there under the surface of
things, ready to show itself again if he willed it, and friends
were becoming scarcer with him than enemies in these days. Looking
at the picture with its wistful hint of a long ago comradeship,
Comus made up his mind that he very much wanted things to be back
on their earlier footing, and to see again on his mother's face the
look that the artist had caught and perpetuated in its momentary
flitting. If the projected Elaine-marriage came off, and in spite
of recent maladroit behaviour on his part he still counted it an
assured thing, much of the immediate cause for estrangement between
himself and his mother would be removed, or at any rate, easily
removable. With the influence of Elaine's money behind him he
promised himself that he would find some occupation that would
remove from himself the reproach of being a waster and idler.
There were lots of careers, he told himself, that were open to a
man with solid financial backing and good connections. There might
yet be jolly times ahead, in which his mother would have her share
of the good things that were going, and carking thin-lipped Henry
Greech and other of Comus's detractors could take their sour looks
and words out of sight and hearing. Thus, staring at the picture
as though he were studying its every detail, and seeing really only
that wistful friendly smile, Comus made his plans and dispositions
for a battle that was already fought and lost.
The crowd grew thicker in the galleries, cheerfully enduring an
amount of overcrowding that would have been fiercely resented in a
railway carriage. Near the entrance Mervyn Quentock was talking to
a Serene Highness, a lady who led a life of obtrusive usefulness,
largely imposed on her by a good-natured inability to say "No."
"That woman creates a positive draught with the number of bazaars
she opens," a frivolously-spoken ex-Cabinet Minister had once
remarked. At the present moment she was being whimsically
apologetic.
"When I think of the legions of well-meaning young men and women to
whom I've given away prizes for proficiency in art-school
curriculum, I feel that I ought not to show my face inside a
picture gallery. I always imagine that my punishment in another
world will be perpetually sharpening pencils and cleaning palettes
for unending relays of misguided young people whom I deliberately
encouraged in their artistic delusions."
"Do you suppose we shall all get appropriate punishments in another
world for our sins in this?" asked Quentock.
"Not so much for our sins as for our indiscretions; they are the
things which do the most harm and cause the greatest trouble. I
feel certain that Christopher Columbus will undergo the endless
torment of being discovered by parties of American tourists. You
see I am quite old fashioned in my ideas about the terrors and
inconveniences of the next world. And now I must be running away;
I've got to open a Free Library somewhere. You know the sort of
thing that happens--one unveils a bust of Carlyle and makes a
speech about Ruskin, and then people come in their thousands and
read 'Rabid Ralph, or Should he have Bitten Her?' Don't forget,
please, I'm going to have the medallion with the fat cupid sitting
on a sundial. And just one thing more--perhaps I ought not to ask
you, but you have such nice kind eyes, you embolden one to make
daring requests, would you send me the recipe for those lovely
chestnut-and-chicken-liver sandwiches? I know the ingredients of
course, but it's the proportions that make such a difference--just
how much liver to how much chestnut, and what amount of red pepper
and other things. Thank you so much. I really am going now."
Staring round with a vague half-smile at everybody within nodding
distance, Her Serene Highness made one of her characteristic exits,
which Lady Caroline declared always reminded her of a scrambled egg
slipping off a piece of toast. At the entrance she stopped for a
moment to exchange a word or two with a young man who had just
arrived. From a corner where he was momentarily hemmed in by a
group of tea-consuming dowagers, Comus recognised the newcomer as
Courtenay Youghal, and began slowly to labour his way towards him.
Youghal was not at the moment the person whose society he most
craved for in the world, but there was at least the possibility
that he might provide an opportunity for a game of bridge, which
was the dominant desire of the moment. The young politician was
already surrounded by a group of friends and acquaintances, and was
evidently being made the recipient of a salvo of congratulation--
presumably on his recent performances in the Foreign Office debate,
Comus concluded. But Youghal himself seemed to be announcing the
event with which the congratulations were connected. Had some
dramatic catastrophe overtaken the Government, Comus wondered. And
then, as he pressed nearer, a chance word, the coupling of two
names, told him the news. _