by George Moore
Etta turned over and over, thinking how pleasant it was to go straight from one’s bedroom to one’s bath; and returning from her bath in a white wrapper, she stood before the glass saying: What a fright I am looking! I ought to be looking better after my long sleep. We are in for a hot day, she added, and began to consider what she should wear. One doesn’t know what to wear in such weather as this, she continued, as she settled the ribbons in her white dress and looked once more into the glass to see if the soft, fluffy hair which the least breath disturbed was disarranged. She smoothed it with her short, white hand. There was a wistful expression in her brown eyes, a little, pathetic, won’t-you-care-for-me expression which she cultivated, knowing its charm in her somewhat short, rather broad face, ending in a pointed chin. The nose was slightly tip-tilted; her teeth were white, but too large; she was short, somewhat stocky, yet she seemed almost stately as she passed with measured and demure steps along the passages and down the high staircase, stopping in the breakfast-room in front of a ham and a tongue with a gesture, though nobody was there to admire it. Eggs, bacon, kidneys, she said, lifting the covers of the dishes, and she crossed to another table, to be tempted by a melon. Only a water melon, but a good one, she said; and her thoughts went to the great Canteloupe melons of France, rough-skinned and wide-furrowed, just as if Nature had foreseen the silver knives slicing them into portions, red inside, filled with seeds. De quoi manger et boire, she muttered, airing her French gaily, for her thoughts were still in France. Now if Harold were to hear me criticising his melons, how angry he’d be!
The coffee, however, in Sutton was plentiful and good, and having refreshed herself according to her appetite, she strolled to the windows and walked through them on to a flagged pathway, over which her father and mother had built a veranda on their return from one of their Italian journeys, forgetful that a veranda, as its name implies, is not English, and that a sloping roof, a portico, connected with a sturdily-built low house in grey stone, is an incongruous adjunct. The house would have been better without it, Etta reflected, though on a day like this, almost oriental, a veranda is something more than a piece of unnatural picturesqueness. We have been having the same weather here for some time, miss, said the butler, to whom Mrs. Marr used to address most of her conversation during dinner, and all the fields about are opening in great cracks. It’s just the same in France, Collar, Etta replied, and looking at a stretch of country shelving down towards a shallow valley, spreading gently into woods and fields, all dry as tinder, that a match would set fire to, she thought of the melancholy of summer-time, when the season is at pause and the sap no longer rises and the leaves are withering. They will be gone earlier this year than last, she said to herself, and her reverie ending, she began to think if she would walk across the parched fields to the point of view, her thoughts turning to the prospect which she knew so well, for long ago, when they were children, they went thither for picnics, and heard a tale of their grandfather, John Marr, the founder of the family, whose wont it was to sit there dreaming of the purchase he would make of acres if his whisky continued to sell well. He owned but a few hundred acres, and coveted the thousands that reached up to the horizon, confiding to his son, Richard, that when he had bought Chown’s farm on the horizon, he would be able to bring his friends to see the view, and to say — (For none will know that the piece lying in between does not belong to us): Our lands extend as far as the eye can see, to the horizon.
II
The rooms within the great stone walls of the Manor House at Sutton were large but somewhat low, the house being a low, three-storeyed house; and everywhere there were pictures, in the passages, in the drawing-rooms, in the dining-rooms, two generations having set themselves to form collections, and very disparate were the tastes of John and Richard Marr. John Marr, never having been to Italy, bought out of the Royal Academy, and in his share of the collection were pictures by Wilkie, Egg, Webster, and many brown glens by Linnell, his money not having come to him soon enough for the purchase of Turners.
Our grandfather seems to have liked Westhall and Stoddart, Etta said. If one likes one, it’s only natural to like the other. And don’t you like either? Harold asked. In a way, but English painting seems more or less amateurish. England never seems able to learn to draw. What, interjected Harold, not Wilkie? The Dutchman did all that he did, and better. But he seems to have been able to grasp the construction of a head better than the others, better than Hilton. Our grandfather’s eyebrows, Etta added, after a pause, are very well done, and it is difficult to draw an eyebrow. Harold asked how this was, and a moment after they had forgotten the portrait they were looking at and were talking of the man himself, the founder of the family, whose instinct for business filled Harold with an admiration that he never was able wholly to conceal, even when talking to strangers, and Etta with a slight contempt, which she was never able wholly to conceal when Harold began to tell of his grandfather’s admirable foresight when he lent a friend some money to pay a debt of honour, the security being a large number of shares in a distillery. She had heard the story many times in fragments, and foreseeing that she would have to hear it all again, she permitted herself to impugn her grandfather’s conduct, asking Harold if it were true that, on being elected Chairman for his business instincts, he had allowed the trade of the distillery to die away till the shareholders were glad to get rid of their shares. The story ran that the shareholders had held on too long, and that their grandfather was afraid the reforms he had in mind would never enable him to recapture the trade he had let go.
I cannot understand how it is, Etta, that you take pleasure in trying to pick holes in those upon whose industry and foresight you are living. I admire my grandfather as much as you do, Harold, only I admire him for different reasons. I was anxious this morning to go to the point of view. If grandfather had not died when he did, he would have bought those five thousand acres, and would have been made a Baronet, perhaps a Lord. Brewers and distillers have never been raised to the Peerage, Etta. Oh yes, they have, Etta answered. Not in the ‘forties, said Harold; don’t forget that grandfather died in ‘forty-five. We must give him credit for his good intentions, which father might have realised, and which you might realise, Harold, if you cared. But do you care so much, Etta? I thought that you only cared for painting.
Their talk passed from their grandfather to their father, whom Sir Francis Grant had painted amid Italian mountain scenery, and Mrs. Marr in the midst of old masters, lost in admiration of a Guido Reni. On the walls were many copies, Andrea del Sarto being a favourite with both Mr and Mrs. Marr. One of Mrs. Marr’s obiter dicta was well known in Sutton and much admired; she had said: If you have not money to buy Raphaels and Michel Angelos, the next best thing is to buy copies. Mother seems to have liked Salvator Rose, Etta continued, but I think it was his name that exalted his landscapes in her eyes. You remember, Harold, mother always used to roll it out: Salvator Rosa. She never missed putting a great deal of R into Rosa, did she, and even went to the trouble of playing some of his music, for he composed songs, which she sang, do you remember, at the concerts? Harold remembered his mother’s follies and also her failings, but he was sensitive on the subject and did not wish them alluded to. Malice was, however, instinctive in Etta, and accepting his dark face for a reproof, she said: I have as much right to admire father and mother as you have, Harold. We don’t admire them for the same things, that is all. Our father and mother had a house in Berkeley Square and received all London, and were received by all London. I have heard you say yourself that at the dinner father gave after winning the Lincolnshire Handicap there was only one untitled person in the room — Aunt Mary.
The races that preceded and that followed the Lincolnshire Handicap nearly cost us our business. Father and mother could not understand that the source of our fortune was not inexhaustible, and went on spending. At the end of her life mother couldn’t see anything without wanting to buy it, and father never went to the office. I think they were
both ashamed of it, as I think you are, Etta. A business that we are ashamed of hits back very quickly — If father and mother had lived, Etta interjected —— — Let us not think of that, Harold replied, and Etta asked him if the business, since he took it in hand, was reviving. The question untied Harold’s tongue and he talked for a long time, wearying Etta with details, for what interested her was how much they would have to spend and how soon it would be before Harold could afford to give her a house in Park Lane. But I thought, Etta, that your idea was to live in the Quartier Latin with students. You have no ambition, Harold, Etta answered, to which he replied that every man has ambitions, projects, call them what you will, and that his thought was to realise his grandfather’s idea — the purchase of a great landed estate. And answering a look of perplexity which had come into her brother’s face, she said: When I am in Paris I think of nothing but painting, for painting is being done all round me. But if I had a house in Berkeley Square I should think of other things besides painting. One likes to know and to be known, and if one has not a title one has to do something, to write a book or paint a picture. But what I don’t understand are people with titles bothering themselves about books or pictures. Why aren’t they satisfied with their titles?
I am glad to hear you speak like that, Etta, for I thought you were going to spend your life in Paris. Not my life; but I am going back, although I don’t feel sure that painting is as deep in me as I thought for. A look of doubt, amounting to sorrow, came into her face, and to cheer her Harold reminded her that a certain staleness comes often after a long year’s work. Yes, she answered, a year of eight hours a day is a long year. Yet you tell me that you think painting is not so deep in you as you believed it to be. Is it the weariness that comes after a year’s work, or did you hear anybody say so — Cissy, Elsie, or the Professor? I shouldn’t pay any attention to what Cissy and Elsie said; that would be jealousy. The Professor, I assure you, thought a great deal of my drawing. Lefebre went round the studio correcting one Tuesday morning, and before leaving he said: Miss Marr’s drawing is the best in the studio, and I do not except even Doucet’s. And Doucet was his private pupil, who worked in his studio. Of course I don’t think that at the end of the week my drawing was as good as Doucet’s; I cannot carry out a thing to the rounded end as well as he. But they mustn’t expect too much from me. I am only four-and-twenty, and at that age one isn’t an Ingres, not altogether, not even a Lefebre or a Bouguereau.
Her face lit up and pleasant laughter flowed from her lips, for she was aware of her own vanity; it amused her, and she knew how to make good her retreat from it with laughter. Harold, who had been brought up to admire his sister, was caught by her delicious comedy and begged that she would send upstairs for her portfolios; and she, nothing loath, asked him to ring for her maid. And her drawings and sketches were overlooked till Harold had exhausted his vocabulary and admitted pathetically: To think you should have done all these drawings, Etta, and that I should not be able to understand them, or very little. I am afraid that I understand only whisky. And now about the whisky. A nightcap would guarantee you a long night’s rest, I am sure, for you’re looking very tired, and I have no hesitation in saying that it would be well if you remained in bed for a few days. A rest cure is what you need.
III
As soon as she was able to leave her room, she was ordered to the sea-side, and after a fortnight at Brighton she went to stay with some friends in London, returning to the Manor House for Christmas to entertain a large party of Harold’s friends, business men, several of whom looked upon themselves as patrons of the art of painting because they collected bad pictures, which they bought right off the easel, a favourite phrase when telling each other of their purchases. Sometimes it dropped into their conversations with Etta, provoking an ironical answer, a quick stab, reaching to the very heart of their vanity: and then she would sit listening to them without even a look of weariness upon her face.
As soon as the holidays were over and she had bidden the last of Harold’s friends good-bye, her thoughts turned to the room in which she used to paint before she went to Paris, and to a subject which she had had to abandon for lack of skill to carry it out. Having no song of their own, bullfinches can learn tunes more easily than other birds — two tunes, but not more; if they are taught a third, they forget the first, and if they are taught a fourth, they forget the second, their musical memory being limited to two, and these are imparted to them by means of a bird organ. She had never seen one of these bird organs, but imagined it to be set in motion by the turning of a handle, a sort of miniature hurdy-gurdy, the purpose of which would be difficult to make plain in a painting. Not difficult, but impossible, she said to herself, and her thoughts turned to a flute, and afterwards to a flageolet. And having come to a definite conception of her picture, she engaged a model, and had nearly finished before it struck her that girls do not play a pastoral instrument of a sort once associated with shepherds and of late with gate-keepers. A boy is more patient, she said; a girl would not sit hour after hour playing the same tune. And from that moment she lost interest in the chubby, blue-eyed, flaxenhaired girl, who held the flageolet in her lips, sucking the mouthpiece as she might a sugar stick, but with less interest. I ought to have had a boy, but it is too late to change now; and she continued in the hope that nobody would notice the discrepancy.
After all, she said, if the painting be good — But the bitter thought that her model should have been a boy filtered into the painting, poisoning it, and at the end of a week there was no more room for hope. She had spoilt her picture, and having spoilt it she might as well scrape it out and begin again, this time from a boy. The flaxen-haired girl might have a brother! She had, but the brother reminded Etta of his sister, and she preferred to make a fresh start, meeting with a child in Sutton who was the very model she had had in her mind from the first. The child’s mother brought him next day to the Manor House, and whilst making a drawing preparatory to painting, her thoughts often turned to Ralph Hoskin, whom she had met in the National Gallery in the very beginning of her career, before she knew anything of her craft. Ralph could help her. But will he come to Sutton if I write to him?”
She fell to thinking whether they were enemies or friends, and to discover which she began to recall the story of their friendship, how he had stopped before her easel and complimented her on her work, one of Gainsborough’s landscapes. He was much admired among the copyists in the National Gallery, for he was not an ordinary copyist. He had a studio of his own, exhibited at the Royal Academy, and only came to the National occasionally, in exceptional circumstances, to make a copy for himself or for a patron whom he wished to oblige. Nobody’s copies were so free as his, for his object always was to catch the spirit of the original rather than the special handicraft of the artist. She remembered how flattered she was by his notice of her picture, and how she had asked him to criticise, saying: I am only a beginner, and you can be of such help. You have got the background wrong, he said; if you will let me have your palette I will mix you a tone. She handed him the palette and stood by, full of anxiety, while he took off a muddy-grey with the knife. There, it’s better now, he said, surveying the picture, his head on one side. And they had walked through the galleries talking of Turner and Claude, Ralph saying that he liked Claude, for he was nearer to Nature; there was less fake. Turner’s fake was good fake, but — he had to exclude the burnt-sienna foregrounds.
She didn’t think he liked her, not at first; he didn’t seem even to see her. He stood staring, thinking, and anxious to help him out she began to argue with him, saying that the Turner he admired was merely a strip of sea with some fishing boats.
I have seen it myself a hundred times, she said, at Brighton, at Westgate, just like that, only not quite so dark. Turner didn’t copy, he transposed, Ralph answered. I am afraid I don’t express myself very well, but what I mean is that the more realistic you are the better, as long as you transpose; but there must always be a transpositi
on of tone. Look at the Jew merchant; he rises up grand and mysterious as a pyramid. You can’t say where the picture begins or ends; the Jew rises out of the darkness like a vision. Look at his robe; a few folds, that is all, and yet he is completely dressed. And his hand, how large, how beautiful! Don’t you see, don’t you understand? Ralph spoke with a low, gentle voice; it was pleasant to think of his voice. She had never heard anybody talk so winningly before; and feeling that she must not allow him to pass out of her reach, she said that she hoped he would come to her easel on the next students’ day. For now that I have had your help, I don’t think I shall ever be able to do without it.
She had always liked Ralph, and now in the great difficulty of the modelling of the boy’s blowing cheeks, she began to consider how she might get him back again. But would he be satisfied with her friendship? Ah, that was it! And after telling the boy, her model, to continue blowing the flageolet till she told him to stop, she took note of the light and shade; and having assimilated him as she thought he should be portrayed on the canvas, she began to paint, thinking at intervals of a delightful morning that she and Ralph had spent in the Green Park. It was whilst watching the ducks balancing themselves like little boats on the waves that he had told her his mother once kept a paper shop in Brixton, and that he used to draw behind the counter on every scrap of paper, till one day a man connected with one of the great newspapers took some two or three of his drawings to show to the editor, who was much struck by them. If a boy can draw like that, he said, without being taught, what will he be able to do when he gets some instruction? Everybody, Ralph said, as they stood on the bridge looking into the water, believes in instruction, not that he can be instructed himself, but that he can instruct somebody else. It’s either in you or it isn’t. If a duck had any more than: Quack, quack, in his bill, he would speak it.
