The Real Thing and Other Tales

He had too much tact to try and make himself agreeable when he couldn’t be useful; so he simply sat and waited, when I was too absorbed in my work to talk.  But I liked to make him talk—it made my work, when it didn’t interrupt it, less sordid, less special.  To listen to him was to combine the excitement of going out with the economy of staying at home.  There was only one hindrance: that I seemed not to know any of the people he and his wife had known.  I think he wondered extremely, during the term of our intercourse, whom the deuce I did know.  He hadn’t a stray sixpence of an idea to fumble for; so we didn’t spin it very fine—we confined ourselves to questions of leather and even of liquor (saddlers and breeches-makers and how to get good claret cheap), and matters like “good trains” and the habits of small game.  His lore on these last subjects was astonishing, he managed to interweave the station-master with the ornithologist.  When he couldn’t talk about greater things he could talk cheerfully about smaller, and since I couldn’t accompany him into reminiscences of the fashionable world he could lower the conversation without a visible effort to my level.

So earnest a desire to please was touching in a man who could so easily have knocked one down.  He looked after the fire and had an opinion on the draught of the stove, without my asking him, and I could see that he thought many of my arrangements not half clever enough.  I remember telling him that if I were only rich I would offer him a salary to come and teach me how to live.  Sometimes he gave a random sigh, of which the essence was: “Give me even such a bare old barrack as this, and I’d do something with it!”  When I wanted to use him he came alone; which was an illustration of the superior courage of women.  His wife could bear her solitary second floor, and she was in general more discreet; showing by various small reserves that she was alive to the propriety of keeping our relations markedly professional—not letting them slide into sociability.  She wished it to remain clear that she and the Major were employed, not cultivated, and if she approved of me as a superior, who could be kept in his place, she never thought me quite good enough for an equal.

She sat with great intensity, giving the whole of her mind to it, and was capable of remaining for an hour almost as motionless as if she were before a photographer’s lens.  I could see she had been photographed often, but somehow the very habit that made her good for that purpose unfitted her for mine.  At first I was extremely pleased with her lady-like air, and it was a satisfaction, on coming to follow her lines, to see how good they were and how far they could lead the pencil.  But after a few times I began to find her too insurmountably stiff; do what I would with it my drawing looked like a photograph or a copy of a photograph.  Her figure had no variety of expression—she herself had no sense of variety.  You may say that this was my business, was only a question of placing her.  I placed her in every conceivable position, but she managed to obliterate their differences.  She was always a lady certainly, and into the bargain was always the same lady.  She was the real thing, but always the same thing.  There were moments when I was oppressed by the serenity of her confidence that she was the real thing.  All her dealings with me and all her husband’s were an implication that this was lucky for me.  Meanwhile I found myself trying to invent types that approached her own, instead of making her own transform itself—in the clever way that was not impossible, for instance, to poor Miss Churm.  Arrange as I would and take the precautions I would, she always, in my pictures, came out too tall—landing me in the dilemma of having represented a fascinating woman as seven feet high, which, out of respect perhaps to my own very much scantier inches, was far from my idea of such a personage.

The case was worse with the Major—nothing I could do would keep him down, so that he became useful only for the representation of brawny giants.  I adored variety and range, I cherished human accidents, the illustrative note; I wanted to characterise closely, and the thing in the world I most hated was the danger of being ridden by a type.  I had quarrelled with some of my friends about it—I had parted company with them for maintaining that one had to be, and that if the type was beautiful (witness Raphael and Leonardo), the servitude was only a gain.  I was neither Leonardo nor Raphael; I might only be a presumptuous young modern searcher, but I held that everything was to be sacrificed sooner than character.  When they averred that the haunting type in question could easily be character, I retorted, perhaps superficially: “Whose?”  It couldn’t be everybody’s—it might end in being nobody’s.

After I had drawn Mrs. Monarch a dozen times I perceived more clearly than before that the value of such a model as Miss Churm resided precisely in the fact that she had no positive stamp, combined of course with the other fact that what she did have was a curious and inexplicable talent for imitation.  Her usual appearance was like a curtain which she could draw up at request for a capital performance.  This performance was simply suggestive; but it was a word to the wise—it was vivid and pretty.  Sometimes, even, I thought it, though she was plain herself, too insipidly pretty; I made it a reproach to her that the figures drawn from her were monotonously (bêtement, as we used to say) graceful.  Nothing made her more angry: it was so much her pride to feel that she could sit for characters that had nothing in common with each other.  She would accuse me at such moments of taking away her “reputytion.”

It suffered a certain shrinkage, this queer quantity, from the repeated visits of my new friends.  Miss Churm was greatly in demand, never in want of employment, so I had no scruple in putting her off occasionally, to try them more at my ease.  It was certainly amusing at first to do the real thing—it was amusing to do Major Monarch’s trousers.  They were the real thing, even if he did come out colossal.  It was amusing to do his wife’s back hair (it was so mathematically neat,) and the particular “smart” tension of her tight stays.  She lent herself especially to positions in which the face was somewhat averted or blurred; she abounded in lady-like back views and profils perdus.  When she stood erect she took naturally one of the attitudes in which court-painters represent queens and princesses; so that I found myself wondering whether, to draw out this accomplishment, I couldn’t get the editor of the Cheapside to publish a really royal romance, “A Tale of Buckingham Palace.”  Sometimes, however, the real thing and the make-believe came into contact; by which I mean that Miss Churm, keeping an appointment or coming to make one on days when I had much work in hand, encountered her invidious rivals.  The encounter was not on their part, for they noticed her no more than if she had been the housemaid; not from intentional loftiness, but simply because, as yet, professionally, they didn’t know how to fraternise, as I could guess that they would have liked—or at least that the Major would.  They couldn’t talk about the omnibus—they always walked; and they didn’t know what else to try—she wasn’t interested in good trains or cheap claret.  Besides, they must have felt—in the air—that she was amused at them, secretly derisive of their ever knowing how.  She was not a person to conceal her scepticism if she had had a chance to show it.  On the other hand Mrs. Monarch didn’t think her tidy; for why else did she take pains to say to me (it was going out of the way, for Mrs. Monarch), that she didn’t like dirty women?

One day when my young lady happened to be present with my other sitters (she even dropped in, when it was convenient, for a chat), I asked her to be so good as to lend a hand in getting tea—a service with which she was familiar and which was one of a class that, living as I did in a small way, with slender domestic resources, I often appealed to my models to render.  They liked to lay hands on my property, to break the sitting, and sometimes the china—I made them feel Bohemian.  The next time I saw Miss Churm after this incident she surprised me greatly by making a scene about it—she accused me of having wished to humiliate her.  She had not resented the outrage at the time, but had seemed obliging and amused, enjoying the comedy of asking Mrs. Monarch, who sat vague and silent, whether she would have cream and sugar, and putting an exaggerated simper into the question.  She had tried intonations—as if she too wished to pass for the real thing; till I was afraid my other visitors would take offence.

Oh, they were determined not to do this; and their touching patience was the measure of their great need.  They would sit by the hour, uncomplaining, till I was ready to use them; they would come back on the chance of being wanted and would walk away cheerfully if they were not.  I used to go to the door with them to see in what magnificent order they retreated.  I tried to find other employment for them—I introduced them to several artists.  But they didn’t “take,” for reasons I could appreciate, and I became conscious, rather anxiously, that after such disappointments they fell back upon me with a heavier weight.  They did me the honour to think that it was I who was most their form.  They were not picturesque enough for the painters, and in those days there were not so many serious workers in black and white.  Besides, they had an eye to the great job I had mentioned to them—they had secretly set their hearts on supplying the right essence for my pictorial vindication of our fine novelist.  They knew that for this undertaking I should want no costume-effects, none of the frippery of past ages—that it was a case in which everything would be contemporary and satirical and, presumably, genteel.  If I could work them into it their future would be assured, for the labour would of course be long and the occupation steady.

One day Mrs. Monarch came without her husband—she explained his absence by his having had to go to the City.  While she sat there in her usual anxious stiffness there came, at the door, a knock which I immediately recognised as the subdued appeal of a model out of work.  It was followed by the entrance of a young man whom I easily perceived to be a foreigner and who proved in fact an Italian acquainted with no English word but my name, which he uttered in a way that made it seem to include all others.  I had not then visited his country, nor was I proficient in his tongue; but as he was not so meanly constituted—what Italian is?—as to depend only on that member for expression he conveyed to me, in familiar but graceful mimicry, that he was in search of exactly the employment in which the lady before me was engaged.  I was not struck with him at first, and while I continued to draw I emitted rough sounds of discouragement and dismissal.  He stood his ground, however, not importunately, but with a dumb, dog-like fidelity in his eyes which amounted to innocent impudence—the manner of a devoted servant (he might have been in the house for years), unjustly suspected.  Suddenly I saw that this very attitude and expression made a picture, whereupon I told him to sit down and wait till I should be free.  There was another picture in the way he obeyed me, and I observed as I worked that there were others still in the way he looked wonderingly, with his head thrown back, about the high studio.  He might have been crossing himself in St. Peter’s.  Before I finished I said to myself: “The fellow’s a bankrupt orange-monger, but he’s a treasure.”

When Mrs. Monarch withdrew he passed across the room like a flash to open the door for her, standing there with the rapt, pure gaze of the young Dante spellbound by the young Beatrice.  As I never insisted, in such situations, on the blankness of the British domestic, I reflected that he had the making of a servant (and I needed one, but couldn’t pay him to be only that), as well as of a model; in short I made up my mind to adopt my bright adventurer if he would agree to officiate in the double capacity.  He jumped at my offer, and in the event my rashness (for I had known nothing about him), was not brought home to me.  He proved a sympathetic though a desultory ministrant, and had in a wonderful degree the sentiment de la pose.  It was uncultivated, instinctive; a part of the happy instinct which had guided him to my door and helped him to spell out my name on the card nailed to it.  He had had no other introduction to me than a guess, from the shape of my high north window, seen outside, that my place was a studio and that as a studio it would contain an artist.  He had wandered to England in search of fortune, like other itinerants, and had embarked, with a partner and a small green handcart, on the sale of penny ices.  The ices had melted away and the partner had dissolved in their train.  My young man wore tight yellow trousers with reddish stripes and his name was Oronte.  He was sallow but fair, and when I put him into some old clothes of my own he looked like an Englishman.  He was as good as Miss Churm, who could look, when required, like an Italian.

IV

I thought Mrs. Monarch’s face slightly convulsed when, on her coming back with her husband, she found Oronte installed.  It was strange to have to recognise in a scrap of a lazzarone a competitor to her magnificent Major.  It was she who scented danger first, for the Major was anecdotically unconscious.  But Oronte gave us tea, with a hundred eager confusions (he had never seen such a queer process), and I think she thought better of me for having at last an “establishment.”  They saw a couple of drawings that I had made of the establishment, and Mrs. Monarch hinted that it never would have struck her that he had sat for them.  “Now the drawings you make from us, they look exactly like us,” she reminded me, smiling in triumph; and I recognised that this was indeed just their defect.  When I drew the Monarchs I couldn’t, somehow, get away from them—get into the character I wanted to represent; and I had not the least desire my model should be discoverable in my picture.  Miss Churm never was, and Mrs. Monarch thought I hid her, very properly, because she was vulgar; whereas if she was lost it was only as the dead who go to heaven are lost—in the gain of an angel the more.

By this time I had got a certain start with “Rutland Ramsay,” the first novel in the great projected series; that is I had produced a dozen drawings, several with the help of the Major and his wife, and I had sent them in for approval.  My understanding with the publishers, as I have already hinted, had been that I was to be left to do my work, in this particular case, as I liked, with the whole book committed to me; but my connection with the rest of the series was only contingent.  There were moments when, frankly, it was a comfort to have the real thing under one’s hand; for there were characters in “Rutland Ramsay” that were very much like it.  There were people presumably as straight as the Major and women of as good a fashion as Mrs. Monarch.  There was a great deal of country-house life—treated, it is true, in a fine, fanciful, ironical, generalised way—and there was a considerable implication of knickerbockers and kilts.  There were certain things I had to settle at the outset; such things for instance as the exact appearance of the hero, the particular bloom of the heroine.  The author of course gave me a lead, but there was a margin for interpretation.  I took the Monarchs into my confidence, I told them frankly what I was about, I mentioned my embarrassments and alternatives.  “Oh, take him!” Mrs. Monarch murmured sweetly, looking at her husband; and “What could you want better than my wife?” the Major inquired, with the comfortable candour that now prevailed between us.

I was not obliged to answer these remarks—I was only obliged to place my sitters.  I was not easy in mind, and I postponed, a little timidly perhaps, the solution of the question.  The book was a large canvas, the other figures were numerous, and I worked off at first some of the episodes in which the hero and the heroine were not concerned.  When once I had set them up I should have to stick to them—I couldn’t make my young man seven feet high in one place and five feet nine in another.  I inclined on the whole to the latter measurement, though the Major more than once reminded me that he looked about as young as anyone.  It was indeed quite possible to arrange him, for the figure, so that it would have been difficult to detect his age.  After the spontaneous Oronte had been with me a month, and after I had given him to understand several different times that his native exuberance would presently constitute an insurmountable barrier to our further intercourse, I waked to a sense of his heroic capacity.  He was only five feet seven, but the remaining inches were latent.  I tried him almost secretly at first, for I was really rather afraid of the judgment my other models would pass on such a choice.  If they regarded Miss Churm as little better than a snare, what would they think of the representation by a person so little the real thing as an Italian street-vendor of a protagonist formed by a public school?

If I went a little in fear of them it was not because they bullied me, because they had got an oppressive foothold, but because in their really pathetic decorum and mysteriously permanent newness they counted on me so intensely.  I was therefore very glad when Jack Hawley came home: he was always of such good counsel.  He painted badly himself, but there was no one like him for putting his finger on the place.  He had been absent from England for a year; he had been somewhere—I don’t remember where—to get a fresh eye.  I was in a good deal of dread of any such organ, but we were old friends; he had been away for months and a sense of emptiness was creeping into my life.  I hadn’t dodged a missile for a year.

He came back with a fresh eye, but with the same old black velvet blouse, and the first evening he spent in my studio we smoked cigarettes till the small hours.  He had done no work himself, he had only got the eye; so the field was clear for the production of my little things.  He wanted to see what I had done for the Cheapside, but he was disappointed in the exhibition.  That at least seemed the meaning of two or three comprehensive groans which, as he lounged on my big divan, on a folded leg, looking at my latest drawings, issued from his lips with the smoke of the cigarette.

“What’s the matter with you?” I asked.

“What’s the matter with you?”

“Nothing save that I’m mystified.”

“You are indeed.  You’re quite off the hinge.  What’s the meaning of this new fad?” And he tossed me, with visible irreverence, a drawing in which I happened to have depicted both my majestic models.  I asked if he didn’t think it good, and he replied that it struck him as execrable, given the sort of thing I had always represented myself to him as wishing to arrive at; but I let that pass, I was so anxious to see exactly what he meant.  The two figures in the picture looked colossal, but I supposed this was not what he meant, inasmuch as, for aught he knew to the contrary, I might have been trying for that.  I maintained that I was working exactly in the same way as when he last had done me the honour to commend me.  “Well, there’s a big hole somewhere,” he answered; “wait a bit and I’ll discover it.”  I depended upon him to do so: where else was the fresh eye?  But he produced at last nothing more luminous than “I don’t know—I don’t like your types.”  This was lame, for a critic who had never consented to discuss with me anything but the question of execution, the direction of strokes and the mystery of values.

“In the drawings you’ve been looking at I think my types are very handsome.”

“Oh, they won’t do!”

“I’ve had a couple of new models.”

“I see you have.  They won’t do.”

“Are you very sure of that?”

“Absolutely—they’re stupid.”

“You mean I am—for I ought to get round that.”

“You can’t—with such people.  Who are they?”

I told him, as far as was necessary, and he declared, heartlessly: “Ce sont des gens qu’il faut mettre à la porte.”

“You’ve never seen them; they’re awfully good,” I compassionately objected.

“Not seen them?  Why, all this recent work of yours drops to pieces with them.  It’s all I want to see of them.”

“No one else has said anything against it—the Cheapside people are pleased.”

“Everyone else is an ass, and the Cheapside people the biggest asses of all.  Come, don’t pretend, at this time of day, to have pretty illusions about the public, especially about publishers and editors.  It’s not for such animals you work—it’s for those who know, coloro che sanno; so keep straight for me if you can’t keep straight for yourself.  There’s a certain sort of thing you tried for from the first—and a very good thing it is.  But this twaddle isn’t in it.”  When I talked with Hawley later about “Rutland Ramsay” and its possible successors he declared that I must get back into my boat again or I would go to the bottom.  His voice in short was the voice of warning.

I noted the warning, but I didn’t turn my friends out of doors.  They bored me a good deal; but the very fact that they bored me admonished me not to sacrifice them—if there was anything to be done with them—simply to irritation.  As I look back at this phase they seem to me to have pervaded my life not a little.  I have a vision of them as most of the time in my studio, seated, against the wall, on an old velvet bench to be out of the way, and looking like a pair of patient courtiers in a royal ante-chamber.  I am convinced that during the coldest weeks of the winter they held their ground because it saved them fire.  Their newness was losing its gloss, and it was impossible not to feel that they were objects of charity.  Whenever Miss Churm arrived they went away, and after I was fairly launched in “Rutland Ramsay” Miss Churm arrived pretty often.  They managed to express to me tacitly that they supposed I wanted her for the low life of the book, and I let them suppose it, since they had attempted to study the work—it was lying about the studio—without discovering that it dealt only with the highest circles.  They had dipped into the most brilliant of our novelists without deciphering many passages.  I still took an hour from them, now and again, in spite of Jack Hawley’s warning: it would be time enough to dismiss them, if dismissal should be necessary, when the rigour of the season was over.  Hawley had made their acquaintance—he had met them at my fireside—and thought them a ridiculous pair.  Learning that he was a painter they tried to approach him, to show him too that they were the real thing; but he looked at them, across the big room, as if they were miles away: they were a compendium of everything that he most objected to in the social system of his country.  Such people as that, all convention and patent-leather, with ejaculations that stopped conversation, had no business in a studio.  A studio was a place to learn to see, and how could you see through a pair of feather beds?

The main inconvenience I suffered at their hands was that, at first, I was shy of letting them discover how my artful little servant had begun to sit to me for “Rutland Ramsay.”  They knew that I had been odd enough (they were prepared by this time to allow oddity to artists,) to pick a foreign vagabond out of the streets, when I might have had a person with whiskers and credentials; but it was some time before they learned how high I rated his accomplishments.  They found him in an attitude more than once, but they never doubted I was doing him as an organ-grinder.  There were several things they never guessed, and one of them was that for a striking scene in the novel, in which a footman briefly figured, it occurred to me to make use of Major Monarch as the menial.  I kept putting this off, I didn’t like to ask him to don the livery—besides the difficulty of finding a livery to fit him.  At last, one day late in the winter, when I was at work on the despised Oronte (he caught one’s idea in an instant), and was in the glow of feeling that I was going very straight, they came in, the Major and his wife, with their society laugh about nothing (there was less and less to laugh at), like country-callers—they always reminded me of that—who have walked across the park after church and are presently persuaded to stay to luncheon.  Luncheon was over, but they could stay to tea—I knew they wanted it.  The fit was on me, however, and I couldn’t let my ardour cool and my work wait, with the fading daylight, while my model prepared it.  So I asked Mrs. Monarch if she would mind laying it out—a request which, for an instant, brought all the blood to her face.  Her eyes were on her husband’s for a second, and some mute telegraphy passed between them.  Their folly was over the next instant; his cheerful shrewdness put an end to it.  So far from pitying their wounded pride, I must add, I was moved to give it as complete a lesson as I could.  They bustled about together and got out the cups and saucers and made the kettle boil.  I know they felt as if they were waiting on my servant, and when the tea was prepared I said: “He’ll have a cup, please—he’s tired.”  Mrs. Monarch brought him one where he stood, and he took it from her as if he had been a gentleman at a party, squeezing a crush-hat with an elbow.