Читать книгу: «The Light That Failed», страница 6

‘By Jove, Maisie, you look like a little heathen idol tucked up there.’ The eyes showed that they did not appreciate the compliment. ‘I’m sorry,’ he continued. ‘The Southern Cross isn’t worth looking at unless someone helps you to see. That steamer’s out of hearing.’

‘Dick,’ she said quietly, ‘suppose I were to come to you now, – be quiet a minute, – just as I am, and caring for you just as much as I do.’

‘Not as a brother, though? You said you didn’t – in the Park.’

‘I never had a brother. Suppose I said, “Take me to those places, and in time, perhaps, I might really care for you,” what would you do?’

‘Send you straight back to where you came from, in a cab. No, I wouldn’t; I’d let you walk. But you couldn’t do it, dear. And I wouldn’t run the risk. You’re worth waiting for till you can come without reservation.’

‘Do you honestly believe that?’

‘I have a hazy sort of idea that I do. Has it never struck you in that light?’

‘Ye – es. I feel so wicked about it.’

‘Wickeder than usual?’

‘You don’t know all I think. It’s almost too awful to tell.’

‘Never mind. You promised to tell me the truth – at least.’

‘It’s so ungrateful of me, but – but, though I know you care for me, and I like to have you with me, I’d – I’d even sacrifice you, if that would bring me what I want.’

‘My poor little darling! I know that state of mind. It doesn’t lead to good work.’

‘You aren’t angry? Remember, I do despise myself.’

‘I’m not exactly flattered, – I had guessed as much before, – but I’m not angry. I’m sorry for you. Surely you ought to have left a littleness like that behind you, years ago.’

‘You’ve no right to patronise me! I only want what I have worked for so long. It came to you without any trouble, and – and I don’t think it’s fair.’

‘What can I do? I’d give ten years of my life to get you what you want.

But I can’t help you; even I can’t help.’

A murmur of dissent from Maisie. He went on – ‘And I know by what you have just said that you’re on the wrong road to success. It isn’t got at by sacrificing other people, – I’ve had that much knocked into me; you must sacrifice yourself, and live under orders, and never think for yourself, and never have real satisfaction in your work except just at the beginning, when you’re reaching out after a notion.’

‘How can you believe all that?’

‘There’s no question of belief or disbelief. That’s the law, and you take it or refuse it as you please. I try to obey, but I can’t, and then my work turns bad on my hands. Under any circumstances, remember, four-fifths of everybody’s work must be bad. But the remnant is worth the trouble for it’s own sake.’

‘Isn’t it nice to get credit even for bad work?’

‘It’s much too nice. But – May I tell you something? It isn’t a pretty tale, but you’re so like a man that I forget when I’m talking to you.’

‘Tell me.’

‘Once when I was out in the Soudan I went over some ground that we had been fighting on for three days. There were twelve hundred dead; and we hadn’t time to bury them.’

‘How ghastly!’

‘I had been at work on a big double-sheet sketch, and I was wondering what people would think of it at home. The sight of that field taught me a good deal. It looked just like a bed of horrible toadstools in all colours, and – I’d never seen men in bulk go back to their beginnings before. So I began to understand that men and women were only material to work with, and that what they said or did was of no consequence. See? Strictly speaking, you might just as well put your ear down to the palette to catch what your colours are saying.’

‘Dick, that’s disgraceful!’

‘Wait a minute. I said, strictly speaking. Unfortunately, everybody must be either a man or a woman.’

‘I’m glad you allow that much.’

‘In your case I don’t. You aren’t a woman. But ordinary people, Maisie, must behave and work as such. That’s what makes me so savage.’ He hurled a pebble towards the sea as he spoke. ‘I know that it is outside my business to care what people say; I can see that it spoils my output if I listen to ‘em; and yet, confound it all,’ – another pebble flew seaward, – ‘I can’t help purring when I’m rubbed the right way. Even when I can see on a man’s forehead that he is lying his way through a clump of pretty speeches, those lies make me happy and play the mischief with my hand.’

‘And when he doesn’t say pretty things?’

‘Then, belovedest,’ – Dick grinned, – ‘I forget that I am the steward of these gifts, and I want to make that man love and appreciate my work with a thick stick. It’s too humiliating altogether; but I suppose even if one were an angel and painted humans altogether from outside, one would lose in touch what one gained in grip.’

Maisie laughed at the idea of Dick as an angel.

‘But you seem to think,’ she said, ‘that everything nice spoils your hand.’

‘I don’t think. It’s the law, – just the same as it was at Mrs. Jennett’s.

Everything that is nice does spoil your hand. I’m glad you see so clearly.’

‘I don’t like the view.’

‘Nor I. But – have got orders: what can do? Are you strong enough to face it alone?’

‘I suppose I must.’

‘Let me help, darling. We can hold each other very tight and try to walk straight. We shall blunder horribly, but it will be better than stumbling apart. Maisie, can’t you see reason?’

‘I don’t think we should get on together. We should be two of a trade, so we should never agree.’

‘How I should like to meet the man who made that proverb! He lived in a cave and ate raw bear, I fancy. I’d make him chew his own arrow-heads.

Well?’

‘I should be only half married to you. I should worry and fuss about my work, as I do now. Four days out of the seven I’m not fit to speak to.’

‘You talk as if no one else in the world had ever used a brush. D’you suppose that I don’t know the feeling of worry and bother and can’t-get-at-ness? You’re lucky if you only have it four days out of the seven. What difference would that make?’

‘A great deal – if you had it too.’

‘Yes, but I could respect it. Another man might not. He might laugh at you. But there’s no use talking about it. If you can think in that way you can’t care for me – yet.’

The tide had nearly covered the mud-banks and twenty little ripples broke on the beach before Maisie chose to speak.

‘Dick,’ she said slowly, ‘I believe very much that you are better than I am.’

‘This doesn’t seem to bear on the argument – but in what way?’

‘I don’t quite know, but in what you said about work and things; and then you’re so patient. Yes, you’re better than I am.’

Dick considered rapidly the murkiness of an average man’s life. There was nothing in the review to fill him with a sense of virtue. He lifted the hem of the cloak to his lips.

‘Why,’ said Maisie, making as though she had not noticed, ‘can you see things that I can’t? I don’t believe what you believe; but you’re right, I believe.’

‘If I’ve seen anything, God knows I couldn’t have seen it but for you, and I know that I couldn’t have said it except to you. You seemed to make everything clear for a minute; but I don’t practice what I preach. You would help me… There are only us two in the world for all purposes, and – and you like to have me with you?’

‘Of course I do. I wonder if you can realise how utterly lonely I am!’

‘Darling, I think I can.’

‘Two years ago, when I first took the little house, I used to walk up and down the back-garden trying to cry. I never can cry. Can you?’

‘It’s some time since I tried. What was the trouble? Overwork?’

‘I don’t know; but I used to dream that I had broken down, and had no money, and was starving in London. I thought about it all day, and it frightened me – oh, how it frightened me!’

‘I know that fear. It’s the most terrible of all. It wakes me up in the night sometimes. You oughtn’t to know anything about it.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Never mind. Is your three hundred a year safe?’

‘It’s in Consols.’

‘Very well. If any one comes to you and recommends a better investment, – even if I should come to you, – don’t you listen. Never shift the money for a minute, and never lend a penny of it, – even to the red-haired girl.’

‘Don’t scold me so! I’m not likely to be foolish.’

‘The earth is full of men who’d sell their souls for three hundred a year; and women come and talk, and borrow a five-pound note here and a ten-pound note there; and a woman has no conscience in a money debt.

Stick to your money, Maisie, for there’s nothing more ghastly in the world than poverty in London. It’s scared me. By Jove, it put the fear into me! And one oughtn’t to be afraid of anything.’

To each man is appointed his particular dread, – the terror that, if he does not fight against it, must cow him even to the loss of his manhood. Dick’s experience of the sordid misery of want had entered into the deeps of him, and, lest he might find virtue too easy, that memory stood behind him, tempting to shame, when dealers came to buy his wares. As the Nilghai quaked against his will at the still green water of a lake or a mill-dam, as Torpenhow flinched before any white arm that could cut or stab and loathed himself for flinching, Dick feared the poverty he had once tasted half in jest. His burden was heavier than the burdens of his companions.

Maisie watched the face working in the moonlight.

‘You’ve plenty of pennies now,’ she said soothingly.

‘I shall never have enough,’ he began, with vicious emphasis. Then, laughing, ‘I shall always be three-pence short in my accounts.’

‘Why threepence?’

‘I carried a man’s bag once from Liverpool Street Station to Blackfriar’s Bridge. It was a sixpenny job, – you needn’t laugh; indeed it was, – and I wanted the money desperately. He only gave me threepence; and he hadn’t even the decency to pay in silver. Whatever money I make, I shall never get that odd threepence out of the world.’

This was not language befitting the man who had preached of the sanctity of work. It jarred on Maisie, who preferred her payment in applause, which, since all men desire it, must be of her right. She hunted for her little purse and gravely took out a threepenny bit.

‘There it is,’ she said. ‘I’ll pay you, Dickie; and don’t worry any more; it isn’t worth while. Are you paid?’

‘I am,’ said the very human apostle of fair craft, taking the coin. ‘I’m paid a thousand times, and we’ll close that account. It shall live on my watch-chain; and you’re an angel, Maisie.’

‘I’m very cramped, and I’m feeling a little cold. Good gracious! the cloak is all white, and so is your moustache! I never knew it was so chilly.’

A light frost lay white on the shoulder of Dick’s ulster. He, too, had forgotten the state of the weather. They laughed together, and with that laugh ended all serious discourse.

They ran inland across the waste to warm themselves, then turned to look at the glory of the full tide under the moonlight and the intense black shadows of the furze bushes. It was an additional joy to Dick that Maisie could see colour even as he saw it, – could see the blue in the white of the mist, the violet that is in gray palings, and all things else as they are, – not of one hue, but a thousand. And the moonlight came into Maisie’s soul, so that she, usually reserved, chattered of herself and of the things she took interest in, – of Kami, wisest of teachers, and of the girls in the studio, – of the Poles, who will kill themselves with overwork if they are not checked; of the French, who talk at great length of much more than they will ever accomplish; of the slovenly English, who toil hopelessly and cannot understand that inclination does not imply power; of the Americans, whose rasping voices in the hush of a hot afternoon strain tense-drawn nerves to breaking-point, and whose suppers lead to indigestion; of tempestuous Russians, neither to hold nor to bind, who tell the girls ghost-stories till the girls shriek; of stolid Germans, who come to learn one thing, and, having mastered that much, stolidly go away and copy pictures for evermore. Dick listened enraptured because it was Maisie who spoke. He knew the old life.

‘It hasn’t changed much,’ he said. ‘Do they still steal colours at lunch-time?’

‘Not steal. Attract is the word. Of course they do. I’m good – I only attract ultramarine; but there are students who’d attract flake-white.’

‘I’ve done it myself. You can’t help it when the palettes are hung up.

Every colour is common property once it runs down, – even though you do start it with a drop of oil. It teaches people not to waste their tubes.’

‘I should like to attract some of your colours, Dick. Perhaps I might catch your success with them.’

‘I mustn’t say a bad word, but I should like to. What in the world, which you’ve just missed a lovely chance of seeing, does success or want of success, or a three-storied success, matter compared with – No, I won’t open that question again. It’s time to go back to town.’

‘I’m sorry, Dick, but – ’

‘You’re much more interested in that than you are in me.’

‘I don’t know, I don’t think I am.’

‘What will you give me if I tell you a sure short-cut to everything you want, – the trouble and the fuss and the tangle and all the rest? Will you promise to obey me?’

‘Of course.’

‘In the first place, you must never forget a meal because you happen to be at work. You forgot your lunch twice last week,’ said Dick, at a venture, for he knew with whom he was dealing.’

‘No, no, – only once, really.’

‘That’s bad enough. And you mustn’t take a cup of tea and a biscuit in place of a regular dinner, because dinner happens to be a trouble.’

‘You’re making fun of me!’

‘I never was more in earnest in my life. Oh, my love, my love, hasn’t it dawned on you yet what you are to me? Here’s the whole earth in a conspiracy to give you a chill, or run over you, or drench you to the skin, or cheat you out of your money, or let you die of overwork and underfeeding, and I haven’t the mere right to look after you. Why, I don’t even know if you have sense enough to put on warm things when the weather’s cold.’

‘Dick, you’re the most awful boy to talk to – really! How do you suppose I managed when you were away?’

‘I wasn’t here, and I didn’t know. But now I’m back I’d give everything I have for the right of telling you to come in out of the rain.’

‘Your success too?’

This time it cost Dick a severe struggle to refrain from bad words.

‘As Mrs. Jennett used to say, you’re a trial, Maisie! You’ve been cooped up in the schools too long, and you think every one is looking at you.

There aren’t twelve hundred people in the world who understand pictures. The others pretend and don’t care. Remember, I’ve seen twelve hundred men dead in toadstool-beds. It’s only the voice of the tiniest little fraction of people that makes success. The real world doesn’t care a tinker’s – doesn’t care a bit. For aught you or I know, every man in the world may be arguing with a Maisie of his own.’

‘Poor Maisie!’

‘Poor Dick, I think. Do you believe while he’s fighting for what’s dearer than his life he wants to look at a picture? And even if he did, and if all the world did, and a thousand million people rose up and shouted hymns to my honour and glory, would that make up to me for the knowledge that you were out shopping in the Edgware Road on a rainy day without an umbrella? Now we’ll go to the station.’

‘But you said on the beach – ’ persisted Maisie, with a certain fear.

Dick groaned aloud: ‘Yes, I know what I said. My work is everything I have, or am, or hope to be, to me, and I believe I’ve learnt the law that governs it; but I’ve some lingering sense of fun left, – though you’ve nearly knocked it out of me. I can just see that it isn’t everything to all the world. Do what I say, and not what I do.’

Maisie was careful not to reopen debatable matters, and they returned to London joyously. The terminus stopped Dick in the midst of an eloquent harangue on the beauties of exercise. He would buy Maisie a horse, – such a horse as never yet bowed head to bit, – would stable it, with a companion, some twenty miles from London, and Maisie, solely for her health’s sake should ride with him twice or thrice a week.

‘That’s absurd,’ said she. ‘It wouldn’t be proper.’

‘Now, who in all London to-night would have sufficient interest or audacity to call us two to account for anything we chose to do?’

Maisie looked at the lamps, the fog, and the hideous turmoil. Dick was right; but horseflesh did not make for Art as she understood it.

‘You’re very nice sometimes, but you’re very foolish more times. I’m not going to let you give me horses, or take you out of your way to-night. I’ll go home by myself. Only I want you to promise me something. You won’t think any more about that extra threepence, will you? Remember, you’ve been paid; and I won’t allow you to be spiteful and do bad work for a little thing like that. You can be so big that you mustn’t be tiny.’

This was turning the tables with a vengeance. There remained only to put Maisie into her hansom.

‘Good-bye,’ she said simply. ‘You’ll come on Sunday. It has been a beautiful day, Dick. Why can’t it be like this always?’

‘Because love’s like line-work: you must go forward or backward; you can’t stand still. By the way, go on with your line-work. Good-night, and, for my – for my sake, take care of yourself.’

He turned to walk home, meditating. The day had brought him nothing that he hoped for, but – surely this was worth many days – it had brought him nearer to Maisie. The end was only a question of time now, and the prize well worth the waiting. By instinct, once more, he turned to the river.

‘And she understood at once,’ he said, looking at the water. ‘She found out my pet besetting sin on the spot, and paid it off. My God, how she understood! And she said I was better than she was! Better than she was!’ He laughed at the absurdity of the notion. ‘I wonder if girls guess at one-half a man’s life. They can’t, or – they wouldn’t marry us.’ He took her gift out of his pocket, and considered it in the light of a miracle and a pledge of the comprehension that, one day, would lead to perfect happiness. Meantime, Maisie was alone in London, with none to save her from danger. And the packed wilderness was very full of danger.

Dick made his prayer to Fate disjointedly after the manner of the heathen as he threw the piece of silver into the river. If any evil were to befal, let him bear the burden and let Maisie go unscathed, since the threepenny piece was dearest to him of all his possessions. It was a small coin in itself, but Maisie had given it, and the Thames held it, and surely the Fates would be bribed for this once.

The drowning of the coin seemed to cut him free from thought of Maisie for the moment. He took himself off the bridge and went whistling to his chambers with a strong yearning for some man-talk and tobacco after his first experience of an entire day spent in the society of a woman. There was a stronger desire at his heart when there rose before him an unsolicited vision of the Barralong dipping deep and sailing free for the Southern Cross.

CHAPTER VIII

 
     And these two, as I have told you,
     Were the friends of Hiawatha,
     Chibiabos, the musician,
     And the very strong man, Kwasind.
 

– Hiawatha.

TORPENHOW was paging the last sheets of some manuscript, while the Nilghai, who had come for chess and remained to talk tactics, was reading through the first part, commenting scornfully the while.

‘It’s picturesque enough and it’s sketchy,’ said he; ‘but as a serious consideration of affairs in Eastern Europe, it’s not worth much.’

‘It’s off my hands at any rate… Thirty-seven, thirty-eight, thirty-nine slips altogether, aren’t there? That should make between eleven and twelve pages of valuable misinformation. Heigho!’ Torpenhow shuffled the writing together and hummed —

 
     Young lambs to sell, young lambs to sell,
     If I’d as much money as I could tell,
     I never would cry, Young lambs to sell!
 

Dick entered, self-conscious and a little defiant, but in the best of tempers with all the world.

‘Back at last?’ said Torpenhow.

‘More or less. What have you been doing?’

‘Work. Dickie, you behave as though the Bank of England were behind you. Here’s Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday gone and you haven’t done a line. It’s scandalous.’

‘The notions come and go, my children – they come and go like our ‘baccy,’ he answered, filling his pipe. ‘Moreover,’ he stooped to thrust a spill into the grate, ‘Apollo does not always stretch his – Oh, confound your clumsy jests, Nilghai!’

‘This is not the place to preach the theory of direct inspiration,’ said the Nilghai, returning Torpenhow’s large and workmanlike bellows to their nail on the wall. ‘We believe in cobblers’ wax. La! – where you sit down.’

‘If you weren’t so big and fat,’ said Dick, looking round for a weapon, ‘I’d – ’

‘No skylarking in my rooms. You two smashed half my furniture last time you threw the cushions about. You might have the decency to say How d’you do? to Binkie. Look at him.’

Binkie had jumped down from the sofa and was fawning round Dick’s knee, and scratching at his boots.

‘Dear man!’ said Dick, snatching him up, and kissing him on the black patch above his right eye. ‘Did ums was, Binks? Did that ugly Nilghai turn you off the sofa? Bite him, Mr. Binkie.’ He pitched him on the Nilghai’s stomach, as the big man lay at ease, and Binkie pretended to destroy the Nilghai inch by inch, till a sofa cushion extinguished him, and panting he stuck out his tongue at the company.

‘The Binkie-boy went for a walk this morning before you were up, Torp.

I saw him making love to the butcher at the corner when the shutters were being taken down – just as if he hadn’t enough to eat in his own proper house,’ said Dick.

‘Binks, is that a true bill?’ said Torpenhow, severely. The little dog retreated under the sofa cushion, and showed by the fat white back of him that he really had no further interest in the discussion.

‘Strikes me that another disreputable dog went for a walk, too,’ said the Nilghai. ‘What made you get up so early? Torp said you might be buying a horse.’

‘He knows it would need three of us for a serious business like that. No, I felt lonesome and unhappy, so I went out to look at the sea, and watch the pretty ships go by.’

‘Where did you go?’

‘Somewhere on the Channel. Progly or Snigly, or some watering-place was its name; I’ve forgotten; but it was only two hours’ run from London and the ships went by.’

‘Did you see anything you knew?’

‘Only the Barralong outwards to Australia, and an Odessa grain-boat loaded down by the head. It was a thick day, but the sea smelt good.’

‘Wherefore put on one’s best trousers to see the Barralong?’ said Torpenhow, pointing.

‘Because I’ve nothing except these things and my painting duds. Besides, I wanted to do honour to the sea.’

‘Did She make you feel restless?’ asked the Nilghai, keenly.

‘Crazy. Don’t speak of it. I’m sorry I went.’

Torpenhow and the Nilghai exchanged a look as Dick, stooping, busied himself among the former’s boots and trees.

‘These will do,’ he said at last; ‘I can’t say I think much of your taste in slippers, but the fit’s the thing.’ He slipped his feet into a pair of sock-like sambhur-skin foot coverings, found a long chair, and lay at length.

‘They’re my own pet pair,’ Torpenhow said. ‘I was just going to put them on myself.’

‘All your reprehensible selfishness. Just because you see me happy for a minute, you want to worry me and stir me up. Find another pair.’

‘Good for you that Dick can’t wear your clothes, Torp. You two live communistically,’ said the Nilghai.

‘Dick never has anything that I can wear. He’s only useful to sponge upon.’

‘Confound you, have you been rummaging round among my clothes, then?’ said Dick. ‘I put a sovereign in the tobacco-jar yesterday. How do you expect a man to keep his accounts properly if you – ’

Here the Nilghai began to laugh, and Torpenhow joined him.

‘Hid a sovereign yesterday! You’re no sort of financier. You lent me a fiver about a month back. Do you remember?’ Torpenhow said.

‘Yes, of course.’

‘Do you remember that I paid it you ten days later, and you put it at the bottom of the tobacco?’

‘By Jove, did I? I thought it was in one of my colour-boxes.’

‘You thought! About a week ago I went into your studio to get some ‘baccy and found it.’

‘What did you do with it?’

‘Took the Nilghai to a theatre and fed him.’

‘You couldn’t feed the Nilghai under twice the money – not though you gave him Army beef. Well, I suppose I should have found it out sooner or later. What is there to laugh at?’

‘You’re a most amazing cuckoo in many directions,’ said the Nilghai, still chuckling over the thought of the dinner. ‘Never mind. We had both been working very hard, and it was your unearned increment we spent, and as you’re only a loafer it didn’t matter.’

‘That’s pleasant – from the man who is bursting with my meat, too. I’ll get that dinner back one of these days. Suppose we go to a theatre now.’

‘Put our boots on, – and dress, – and wash?’ The Nilghai spoke very lazily.

‘I withdraw the motion.’

‘Suppose, just for a change – as a startling variety, you know – we, that is to say we, get our charcoal and our canvas and go on with our work.’

Torpenhow spoke pointedly, but Dick only wriggled his toes inside the soft leather moccasins.

‘What a one-ideaed clucker that is! If I had any unfinished figures on hand, I haven’t any model; if I had my model, I haven’t any spray, and I never leave charcoal unfixed overnight; and if I had my spray and twenty photographs of backgrounds, I couldn’t do anything to-night. I don’t feel that way.’

‘Binkie-dog, he’s a lazy hog, isn’t he?’ said the Nilghai.

‘Very good, I will do some work,’ said Dick, rising swiftly. ‘I’ll fetch the Nungapunga Book, and we’ll add another picture to the Nilghai Saga.’

‘Aren’t you worrying him a little too much?’ asked the Nilghai, when Dick had left the room.

‘Perhaps, but I know what he can turn out if he likes. It makes me savage to hear him praised for past work when I know what he ought to do. You and I are arranged for – ’

‘By Kismet and our own powers, more’s the pity. I have dreamed of a good deal.’

‘So have I, but we know our limitations now. I’m dashed if I know what Dick’s may be when he gives himself to his work. That’s what makes me so keen about him.’

‘And when all’s said and done, you will be put aside – quite rightly – for a female girl.’

‘I wonder… Where do you think he has been to-day?’

‘To the sea. Didn’t you see the look in his eyes when he talked about her? He’s as restless as a swallow in autumn.’

‘Yes; but did he go alone?’

‘I don’t know, and I don’t care, but he has the beginnings of the go-fever upon him. He wants to up-stakes and move out. There’s no mistaking the signs. Whatever he may have said before, he has the call upon him now.’

‘It might be his salvation,’ Torpenhow said.

‘Perhaps – if you care to take the responsibility of being a saviour.’

Dick returned with the big clasped sketch-book that the Nilghai knew well and did not love too much. In it Dick had drawn all manner of moving incidents, experienced by himself or related to him by the others, of all the four corners of the earth. But the wider range of the Nilghai’s body and life attracted him most. When truth failed he fell back on fiction of the wildest, and represented incidents in the Nilghai’s career that were unseemly, – his marriages with many African princesses, his shameless betrayal, for Arab wives, of an army corps to the Mahdi, his tattooment by skilled operators in Burmah, his interview (and his fears) with the yellow headsman in the blood-stained execution-ground of Canton, and finally, the passings of his spirit into the bodies of whales, elephants, and toucans. Torpenhow from time to time had added rhymed descriptions, and the whole was a curious piece of art, because Dick decided, having regard to the name of the book which being interpreted means ‘naked,’ that it would be wrong to draw the Nilghai with any clothes on, under any circumstances. Consequently the last sketch, representing that much-enduring man calling on the War Office to press his claims to the Egyptian medal, was hardly delicate. He settled himself comfortably on Torpenhow’s table and turned over the pages.

‘What a fortune you would have been to Blake, Nilghai!’ he said. ‘There’s a succulent pinkness about some of these sketches that’s more than life-like. “The Nilghai surrounded while bathing by the Mahdieh” – that was founded on fact, eh?’

‘It was very nearly my last bath, you irreverent dauber. Has Binkie come into the Saga yet?’

‘No; the Binkie-boy hasn’t done anything except eat and kill cats. Let’s see. Here you are as a stained-glass saint in a church. Deuced decorative lines about your anatomy; you ought to be grateful for being handed down to posterity in this way. Fifty years hence you’ll exist in rare and curious facsimiles at ten guineas each. What shall I try this time? The domestic life of the Nilghai?’

‘Hasn’t got any.’

‘The undomestic life of the Nilghai, then. Of course. Mass-meeting of his wives in Trafalgar Square. That’s it. They came from the ends of the earth to attend Nilghai’s wedding to an English bride. This shall be an epic. It’s a sweet material to work with.’

‘It’s a scandalous waste of time,’ said Torpenhow.

‘Don’t worry; it keeps one’s hand in – specially when you begin without the pencil.’ He set to work rapidly. ‘That’s Nelson’s Column. Presently the Nilghai will appear shinning up it.’

‘Give him some clothes this time.’

‘Certainly – a veil and an orange-wreath, because he’s been married.’

‘Gad, that’s clever enough!’ said Torpenhow over his shoulder, as Dick brought out of the paper with three twirls of the brush a very fat back and labouring shoulder pressed against stone.

‘Just imagine,’ Dick continued, ‘if we could publish a few of these dear little things every time the Nilghai subsidises a man who can write, to give the public an honest opinion of my pictures.’

‘Well, you’ll admit I always tell you when I have done anything of that kind. I know I can’t hammer you as you ought to be hammered, so I give the job to another. Young Maclagan, for instance – ’