“If you give compliments solely in order to give pleasure, you will get what you want,” he had said when she was trying to butter up Mr. Hayley. “If you give them solely to get what you want, you will merely displease. You have not the art to dissimulate, dear Emma.”
“And it must be said, you do not seem to need it,” said Hayley, about whom everything was pleasant but his verse. “If you wish me to inscribe the Triumphs of Temper, why of course I shall.”
“I do not like the girl to appear pert,” said Greville. “She is at times.”
“You must come to the country more often. So is my climbing rose,” said Hayley. “She is Serena to the life.”
“Reading it is one of her few diversions.”
“She seems to wish to improve herself, at any rate,” said Hayley, Serena being the heroine of the above-mentioned work.
Indeed she did.
“Being ignorant of Taste, her only thought, upon seeing the sculpture around her, is to ask the subject of the scene, and so, to feed her curiosity, I have thought it best to instruct her in the elements of Classic Greek Myth,” wrote Greville to his uncle.
As for the celestial tittle-tattle of Greek myth, Emma had seldom heard such disgusting carryings on in her life, but into the memory box it went, and down went the lid, while Hope droned around the room with all the random diligence of a mosquito.
“The gnats in this part of Delaware are as large as sparrows. I have armed myself against them by wearing trousers,” wrote the Earl of Carlisle. In it went. Had she not been so pretty, Emma would have qualified as a bluestocking tomorrow. She had the erudition of a magpie; that is, she did not care what it was, what it meant or where it came from, but if it sparkled, into that jackdaw’s nest of a memory of hers it went. The worst was French.
“On pent comparer la société à une salle de spectacle: on n’y était aux loges que parce qu’on payait d’avantage,” mouthed Emma.
“And what is this ubiquitous caterwauling, pray?”
“It is French.”
“Child,” said Mrs. Cadogan, who lived in terror of foreign travel, for parsnips were not procurable abroad, “why?”
“It is a polite accomplishment and contains no ‘h’s,’” said Emma, holding out the book. “You see. There is an haitch. But you pay it no mind. That’s the beauty of it.”
“She is teachable. She shall vie with Mrs. Delaney,” said Greville.
“Ah, Charles,” said the Bishop of Derry, “you are a willful man. You would curdle cream. Have you not yet learned that artless prattle is superior to the artful kind?”
“Not twenty-four hours a day.”
“Ah well, perhaps not,” agreed the Bishop, and taking her hand, led Emma out into the garden, to name the flowers and plants and any animals therein at that time residing.
“Must I really read Dr. Johnson?” asked Emma.
“No, my child,” said the Bishop, who had been contemplating a zinnia, a most rare flower, and did not want his pleasure spoiled. “If an elephant could have written verse, he would have written much in the style of Johnson. It is not easy; it does not convince; but it is full of ponderous felicities. There is even here and there the gleam of a tusk. But though it is quotable, it cannot be read.”
“Not even the Dictionary?”
“The Dictionary is different. Here and there the Dictionary is amusing. As good as a novel, but with the words in their proper order, so I am told.”
“You are making fun of me.”
“No, I am only making fun with you. If Charles must convert you into that horrid grownup thing, a gentlewoman, he is going about it the wrong way. Even he should know a gentlewoman never reads, except, of course, the ‘Court Gazette.’”
“There is little other diversion here, except to sing and play the spinet and sew.”
The Bishop of Derry was shocked. “How sad,” he said, “to be so serious so young.”
“I am not sad. I find it paradise.”
“A strange Methodistic paradise, all gray. Now had you read the Alcoran, you would know that true paradise consists of nothing but your pretty self and milk and honey. My dear, you are diversion.” And the Bishop went back to contemplation of his copper zinnia, a plant from the New World, but in England, a novelty.
*
It was Mr. Hayley who provided the diversion, not the Bishop of Derry, and most certainly not Greville. Mr. Hayley had gone to see his friend Romney, the painter, who though he had been living in London for some years, had only recently arrived, and was at the moment fashionable. “Romney’s pictures are hard, dry and tasteless, and such as you would not like in the least. And I am enough secure that he will never make a first-rate painter,” wrote Northcote to his brother. That showed you how well established Romney had become. In these matters, a word from Northcote was enough.
Mr. Romney was a paranoiac of great charm, which is to say, in his own day, an original. His studio in Cavendish Square was vast. It was not England; it was not Italy; it was not anywhere. Freed for a moment from his vanities, his insanities and his own innate inabilities, he shut his eyes and life came flooding in, sepia wave after sepia wave of women who writhed and turned and were waves and not women, badly drawn, not drawn at all, merely fixed in the act of being either that bright turbulence the nearly blind see by daylight, or else the promise of something unknowable.
What I am I am, and that’s a pity, thought Mr. Romney. But what I draw for myself is quite another thing. For he had long ago given up hope that those half-understood and barely attended-to visions of his would ever find a model through whom he could express them.
He did not enjoy being a fashionable painter, for since all women of fashion desire to have the same face, he was forced to draw the same face always, which was not even the face of any particular woman, but only the face of fashion, and no relief in sight, but a change of style, which would merely be the same thing all over again with different eyebrows. Where is the woman with the courage to look like herself? Where, for that matter, the man? These do not exist. We are all afraid of something. Besides, he could not but hanker after the history or fancy piece, for since he had no talent for composition, that, of course, was what he longed to do.
In short, he was in the dumps. His talent was limited, in so far as he could draw accurately only what he saw. And who could get a woman to sit still long enough to show her character? She knows better. As soon as you begin to get close, she begins to fidget. As for sharing the canvas with anyone less undifferentiated than a child, that was out of the question, so there went composition. Even Reynolds had been constrained to draw the Waldegrave sisters separately.
Hayley wanted a portrait of Serena, engravable for a new edition of the Triumphs of Temper, and therefore an excellent advertisement for them both. The Triumphs of Temper is a poem of ideas. Where another poet would match words, therefore, Hayley matched wool. “He is a workbasket poet,” said Farrington, just as catty as Northcote and every inch the R.A. “His verses are upon every girl’s sofa.” And so they were, laid face down. A fresh edition appeared every year, at Confirmation time.
“But can she sit still?” asked Romney. “I am slow to compose.”
“I fear she sits still for quite long periods of time,” said Hayley. “She is a sweet thing, and has little else to do. Greville keeps her, you see.”
“Oh Greville,” said Romney, with a contemptuous snort. He, too, had had to deal with the purity and exactitude of Greville’s taste. “Very well, bring her along, and we’ll take a look at her.” It was Greville who had told him he was not quite ready yet. He decided to up his price, should a commission be forthcoming.
And so the second lesson began, with the first one as yet unlearned.
II
THOUGH AMORAL in important matters, Greville was strict in trifles, and insisted upon a duenna, so Mrs. Cadogan went along.
As the sittings progressed, and there were to be more than three hundred of them, she spent most of her tim
e reorganizing the kitchen. Romney came from their own part of the world. The three of them understood each other at once. No matter what their vices, they were all innocent in a most venal town, and if Mrs. Cadogan was perhaps less innocent than they were, why that only improved her cooking, which was a blessing, considering what Romney generally ate. Within the confines of the studio they were quite gay, like prisoners in Bedlam, who do not care where they are.
“And where is your wife, Mr. Romney?” asked Mrs. Cadogan, a woman’s first question to any seemingly single man.
“At home where she belongs, I trust.” Romney liked women well enough. It was only their company he could not abide. Their company fell short of the ideal. And answering a woman’s second question before it was put, with a glance at the stack of portraits in the corner, waiting for delivery, he added: “She is well provided for.”
“And your children?” Mrs. Cadogan persisted.
“With my wife. I would prefer that in their younger years they had some experience of the country, which is wholesome, so I am told.” Though it was all very well for Reynolds to do the Honourable This or That as the Infant Samuel, that was by no means the same as having the pudgy things pewling about underfoot. No doubt Reynolds loved children, but Reynolds was a bachelor, and so could well afford the sentiment. Sentiment is not the same as rocks in one’s best asphaltum, and three pounds’ worth of chrome yellow expended upon the funeral of a dead cat.
“Sir, you need a woman’s care,” said Mrs. Cadogan, unimpressed.
“The char comes in every second Wednesday. I also need peace and quiet.”
Neither one of them had won. It was therefore necessary, as it is after inconclusive battles, to declare an entente cordiale. Mrs. Cadogan sailed off to the kitchen. He was, she confided afterward, a dear old gentleman.
He was nothing of the sort. He was merely a boy tortured by a vision he could not even see, who drew very badly, and who was forty-eight; in short, as lonely as a genius, even if he was not one.
“Ah,” he said, “the music of the spheres,” for he had heard a kettle boiling. Inside of two weeks the studio reeked of boiled cabbage, shepherd’s pie, jam tarts, Yorkshire pudding, brown Windsor soup, baked widgeon, jugged hare, blood pudding, venison patty, suet roly-poly, and all those other treats of the commonalty which in Edgware Row could be served only on the sly.
“She is a wonder,” Romney said to Hayley. “She can sit for hours immovable, and yet her face is never still. In the face she can be anything. In short, she is so vivacious that, tell me, what does Greville see in her?”
“He reads to her.”
Which he did. He hoped, by example, to rid her of her native Doric, or failing that, of those tones in it which made the Boston Stump sound like a dance. He instructed her as one would address oneself to the elocution of a parrot, but his voice was a drone, and do what she would, Emma could not drone. She was too happy. Mr. Romney had asked her to come back again.
“It is useless,” said Greville. “But her French is not too bad.”
It was better than his own, since the proper English always speak that tongue as though groping around in a hip tub for the soap they cannot find but on which they have no desire to slip when they get out to dry themselves with their native tongue.
Serena was disposed of, but Greville had commissioned a three-quarter portrait (that being the cheapest size). Romney proposed to paint her in a poke bonnet, with a toy spaniel in her lap.
“What are you looking for, dear child?”
“The spaniel,” said Emma, with a disappointed air.
“The spaniel is hypothetical,” he assured her gravely. She was the most entrancing personage, the ideal daughter, and he had produced mostly far from ideal, and solemn, if reverend, sons.
“You mean it isn’t here?”
“It isn’t here,” said Romney.
“It never is, is it?” said Emma, and gave him a quizzical look.
So the next Thursday there was a toy spaniel which yapped and barked and relieved itself against a full-length portrait of Lord North.
“The dear thing. How I wish I could take it home.”
“You may if you wish.”
“Oh no, I mayn’t. Greville has a rooted horror of the animate; he has never explained why. But it is part of his system, I expect.”
So the spaniel stayed in the studio, to its own vast relief, with a soft-boiled egg in the morning and kitchen scraps, until Emma forgot the pretty thing and he could give it away. Romney did not mind. It was a happy time for him, his only one.
It was a very happy time.
I am an old man, he thought, with a few cronies. The only part I play in their lives is the part I play when I am asking to visit them. I sit inside the dungeon of myself, a room as large as this studio and just as empty. I paint portraits the way a prisoner cards jute, and sometimes, if it is not always winter, there is a ray of pallid sunlight for a few minutes in the morning, before I cloud over again; though all the sun does is show the rings and shackles in the opposite wall, and the dust. I have waited in vain for the jailer’s pretty daughter to unbolt the door with a metallic clang, and open it. I was a young man once, but now my only visions are a purely physiological phenomenon occasioned by pressure when I blink in the dark, when the inchoate roils; the only light, the dead cells in the eye, for the inchoate is uncreatable, for I do not know where to begin.
But now the jailer’s pretty daughter comes regularly on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and would come every day if she or I were free, and so the dark is light enough. I do not mind carding my jute.
She had become an obsession. He saw her everywhere, most clearly perhaps, because surrounded by a nimbus, where she was not.
*
Emma, too, seemed happier, more like her portrait, fresh painted, which had joined Paulus Potter and Thais in the library, with another ordered to balance it—Emma as Spinstress, half cottage ornée, half Graeae. But except for basking in the improved temperature, Greville scarcely noticed. Like Romney, he had been overwhelmed by a ray of hope. His uncle’s wife was dead.
“Good news, what, Charles?” said Towneley, in his best poke-a-stick-at-a-hedgehog way.
Greville curled into himself.
“I mean, since you are the favored nephew, no doubt you will inherit his wife’s estates, given he does not marry again and produce young.” Sir William was not only a doting uncle, he was also a childless man.
Greville did not consider this remark well-bred. It smacked of the frank.
“He is coming to England.”
“In that case you will be making a trip to Wales, I expect,” said Towneley. “Lady Hamilton’s estates are in Wales, are they not?”
Greville curled tighter than ever. Towneley was amused. When he was a boy, a gamekeeper had once given him a hedgehog which he had fed sweet milk from a tube, and in time it, too, had uncurled and eventually died. Towneley, who like most eunuchs, was afflicted with immortality, poured the sherry—a plump, complacent Jupiter, with money of his own.
“He is bringing, I believe, a vase.”
Greville was alarmed. “That is not a matter to be spoken of.”
“Like what song the Sirens sang, and what name Hercules took among women? Alcmene, I expect; he was a mother’s boy and stuck with the heel of memory, like a crust of old bread. But I would like to see the vase.”
He saw the vase. He always saw everything, for his principles were sound; when you cannot wheedle, threaten and—if possible—do both, for the best doors are not only closed, but have two locks.
So one day Emma saw from her window a tall, lean gentleman who looked very like Greville, but a Greville made out of some more durable material—say bronze—accompanied by Greville and a packing case, descend from a carriage in front of her door. Since she had been told not to come downstairs until summoned, all she knew about him for the time being was that the two men went into the library and closed the door.
She was late for Mr. Romne
y, and had no desire to linger; if that was Sir William, she already had heard enough about him to be terrified. He was, said Greville, a very grand personage: a Knight of the Bath, a Minister Plenipotentiary, a man of impeccable taste, a member of the Royal Society, an Intimate of Royalty, an expert alike upon Correggio and Vesuvius. He played the flute and ate young women raw, and what on earth was she to say to him, and should she curtsy?
*
“Oh, George, George, I do get so tired of nothing but ladies and gentlemen!” she said. If it was not a cri de coeur, it was most certainly a cri de cour. If one does not know French properly, one can form these puns.
“The expression is perfect; don’t budge,” said Romney, and sketched rapidly. He had discovered that the knowledge that she could hold a pose made it easier for him to work fast.
“And what am I to be this time, George?”
Romney looked at his canvas. “Cassandra,” he decided, “for no one would listen to her then, and I have not the time to listen to you now.”
It was a circular portrait, to fit Hayley’s wainscoting, and one of the best things he had ever done. And what was more, here he was right now, in front of the easel, doing it spontaneously, without the need to plan it in advance. It was a Cassandra, however, eager, dubious, young; without one prophecy as yet fulfilled; hurt by childhood perhaps, but not as yet, thank goodness, by life.
“Emma, may the Gods keep you as you are,” he said, brushing busily.
She seemed puzzled. She did not understand. It was just that added nuance needed to show Cassandra when young, for the young are always puzzled. He set it down.
Jumping from the dais, she came to watch.
“Why, George, that’s how I used to look. Now how did you ever guess that?”
He felt a pang, for it was true. She was growing up. She would never again look the way she used to look. He must hurry to catch it.
“And how do you think you look now?” he asked. “Look around and show me.” He waved a marl stick at the studio.
In thirty different attitudes, not counting sketches, which were littered everywhere, there she was, as a Bacchante, as Miranda, as Nature, as St. Cecilia, as Euphrosyne, as Cassandra again, as Sensibility, as Alope, as Circe, as Allegro, as every dream he’d ever had, and all the same imaginary woman, with a chaste body, and everything an attitude.
Sir William Page 6
