by Grant Allen
‘My dear fellow, how could I call myself alive, I should like to know, if I hadn’t admired those Moorish maidens with the wistful dark eyes and the Mohammedan voluptuousness, or those dim streets where veiled beauties mysteriously descend interminable steps of the native quarter, which testify to your existence in the Grosvenor annually? Not to know them would argue myself unknown with a vengeance. Everybody worth naming has seen and praised your glossy Nubians and your dreamy Arab girls.’
‘No; have they, though, really?’ Linnell echoed back with eager delight. ‘I didn’t know anyone (except the critics, confound them!) ever took the trouble to notice my things. There’s so much good work in the Grosvenor always, that one naturally expects the lesser men to be passed by unheeded.’
‘Besides,’ Mansel continued, without rising to the fly, ‘I’ve heard of you now and again from our neighbours, the Maitlands, who keep a villa or something of the sort over yonder at Algiers, and made your acquaintance there, you remember, last winter.’
Linnell’s too expressive face fell slightly. If the secret must out, he preferred to be tracked by his handicraft alone.
‘Why, yes,’ he answered in a disappointed tone; ‘of course I know the Maitlands well. It’s through them, to tell you the truth, that I’m here this summer. The old General knocked up against me in town last week, and asked me to run down and stop with them at High Ash. But I wouldn’t accept the invitation outright, of course: I hate visiting — cramps individuality: I always like to be my own master. Besides, they’ve got a girl in the house, you see, and I bar girls, especially that one. She’s a great deal too much up in the clouds for me, and she makes me fidgety. I prefer women who keep their feet planted on the solid ground. I was born on the earth, and I like to stop there. However, the old man’s account of the place pleased me, and I’ve come down to stop at the Red Lion, accordingly, and do some sketching — or at least what I take, myself, for sketching — among the cliffs and cottages. From what you say, then, I infer you abide here.’
‘You infer like a treatise on deductive logic. We do abide here. We’ve got a bit of a pied-à-terre in a humble way on the hilltop yonder. A poor thing, but mine own. You must come and lunch with us this very morning.’
‘Thanks. It’s awfully good of you to think of bidding me. But you’re married, I see. Inference again: you said we. Perhaps Mrs. Mansel won’t be equally glad to see a perfect stranger at a moment’s notice. Ladies object to the uninvited guest, not unreasonably. I’m not an old Oxford friend of hers, too, you know, my dear fellow.’
Mansel laughed.
‘Oh, Ida won’t mind, I’m sure,’ he answered hastily, though with the internal qualms of the well-trained husband. ‘She’s quite accustomed to my Bohemian habits. I insist upon going out into the highways and byways and bringing home whomever I light upon. That’s a pretty sketch of yours. As smooth as usual. Your quality’s so good! and so much depth and breadth in the shadows of the doorway!’
Linnell put his head on one side once more, with a dubious air.
‘Do you really think so?’ he said, evidently reassured. ‘Well, that’s a comfort. I’m so glad you like it. I was afraid, myself, the grays and yellows in the thatch were all wrong. They’ve bothered me terribly. Would you put a touch or so more of olive green for local colour in the dark corner by the deep-red creeper there? I’m not quite sure I’ve brought out the complementary shades under the eaves distinct enough.’
‘Not another stroke!’ Mansel answered decisively, eyeing it hard with his arms crossed. ‘Not a dash! not a tinge! not a jot! not a thought even! You’d spoil the whole picture if you altered a single bit of the colouring there, I assure you. That’s the fault of your detail, I’ve always said, if you won’t be offended at an old friend’s criticism. You spoil your best work by over-elaboration. I can see at a glance in all your most careful pieces — oh yes, I’ve studied them in Bond Street, you may be sure’ — for Linnell had waved his hand deprecatingly— ‘that you do a good thing, and you do it to a turn, and then you’re afraid to leave well alone; so you touch it up, and you touch it up, and you touch it up again, till all the breadth and force is taken clean out of it, and only the detail and the after-thoughts are left on your canvas.’
Linnell shook his head with a despondent air.
‘It’s too true,’ he said slowly. ‘I know it only too well myself already.’
‘Well, then,’ his friend answered with the prompt brusqueness of sound common-sense, ‘be warned by experience, and avoid it in future. Don’t go and do what you know’s an error. Have the courage of your convictions, and leave off in time. The minute I looked at this bit on the easel, I said to myself: “By George! I didn’t know Linnell had it in him.” The ease and verve of the thing was just what I liked about it. And then, at the very moment when I’m standing admiring it, you propose to go and spoil the entire effect by faking it up to get the local colour strictly according to Cocker. Local colour and all the rules be hanged! The picture’s the thing; and the picture’s a vast deal better without them. Besides, I want you to get this particular sketch good. You know, of course, whose cottage you’re painting?’
‘No; I don’t,’ Linnell answered, surveying it carelessly. ‘John Noakes’s or Simon Stokes’s, I should say, most probably.’
‘Wrong!’ Mansel cried, lowering his voice a trifle to a mysterious undertone, for dim figures were flitting half unseen behind the high box hedge opposite. ‘That poetical-looking cottage’ — his tone sinking to a whisper— ‘you’ll hardly believe it, but it’s Haviland Dumaresq’s.’
At that famous name, Linnell drew himself up in sudden surprise. If Mansel had counted upon producing an impression, he hadn’t gone far wrong in his calculation. Linnell whistled a long low whistle.
‘No; you’re trying to take me in,’ he exclaimed at last, after a short pause. ‘We always called you “The Wag” at Christ Church, I remember. You can’t surely mean Haviland Dumaresq the philosopher?’
Mansel smiled a smile of conscious superiority.
‘You remind me of what Lewis Carroll said one evening at High Table,’ he answered quickly, ‘when we were all discussing the authorship of the Homeric poems. Everybody else had given his pet opinion on that endless problem, and while they all gabbled about it, Carroll sat and looked on grimly. At last somebody appealed to him for confirmation of his own special dogma. “Well,” said Carroll, looking up in his dry way, “I’ve got a theory of my own about the ‘Iliad’ and ‘Odyssey.’ It is, that they weren’t really written by Homer, but by another person of the same name.” In Haviland Dumaresq’s case, however, there’s no room for any such doubt. No two people in the world could possibly be called by accident by such a singular combination of names as that. Don’t shake your head. I’m quite in earnest. This is the original and only genuine Dumaresquian Theory. When you ask for the real Encyclopædic Philosophy, see that you get it. And here’s the shop all the true stuff comes from.’
Linnell glanced up at his old college friend in breathless astonishment. For a moment it was clear he could hardly believe his own ears.
‘Are you really serious?’ he asked at last, gasping. ‘I’ve always believed in Dumaresq most profoundly; and I can’t suppose he inhabits a hovel. ‘The Encyclopædic Philosophy’ has almost put a girdle round the world in my own portmanteau. I never went anywhere that I didn’t take it. And do you mean to tell me the man who wrote it — the philosopher who transcends space and time — the profoundest thinker of our age and nation — the greatest mathematician and deepest metaphysician in all Europe — really lives in a labourer’s cottage?’
‘Why not? Mansel answered with a screwed-up face. ‘It’s a very picturesque one.’
‘Picturesque! Je vous l’accorde. But convenient, commodious, suitable, no. And painters as we are, we must still admit a man can’t live on pure picturesqueness. Dirt and discomfort, I’ve always maintained, are necessary elements of the picturesque. But dirt and discomfo
rt are personally distasteful in their actual form. It is only when painted that they become agreeable. What on earth can make a man like Haviland Dumaresq bury himself here, in such a mere cramped outhouse?’
‘Poverty,’ the local artist replied laconically.
‘Poverty!’ his friend echoed, all incredulous, a frank indignation flashing from his eye. ‘You don’t mean to tell me the man who first formulated that marvellous Law of Sidereal Reciprocity is still so poor that he has to inhabit a ploughman’s hut in a remote village? For the honour of our kind, I refuse to believe it. I won’t believe it; I can’t believe it. It’s a disgrace to the age. I knew Dumaresq was comparatively little read or known, of course — that’s the natural penalty of extreme greatness — but I always pictured the philosopher to myself as a wealthy man, living in easy circumstances in a London square, writing his books in a luxurious library, and serenely waiting for future generations to discover the true proportions of his stature. Bacon left his fame by will, you remember, to the care of foreign nations and the after-age. Foreign nations have found out Dumaresq already: the after-age will find him out in time, as surely as it found out Descartes and Newton.’
‘You speak enthusiastically,’ Mansel answered with a careless wave of his hand towards the rose-bound casements of the poetical cottage. ‘I’m glad of that, for I’m always pleased when anybody comes here who has so much as heard poor old Dumaresq’s name. The old man has led a life of continued neglect: that’s the long and the short of it. All his hopes have been blighted and disappointed. His great work, though it’s had here and there in all parts of the world a few glowing and fervid disciples like yourself, has fallen flat, for the most part, so far as public appreciation’s concerned; and everything he expected to do he’s failed in effecting. He seems to me always like a massive broken Egyptian pillar, rising among the ruins of Karnak or Luxor, as I see them rise in some of your own pictures.’ Linnell’s eye flashed with pleasure. ‘And it’s a great point for him to meet nowadays with anybody who sympathizes at all with his aims and his methods. He’s had so little recognition in life, in fact, that, old as he is, a word of encouragement, a single compliment, an allusion to his work in ordinary conversation, seems to thrill him through and through with surprised enjoyment. I’ve seen him as pleased as a child at praise. He acknowledges it with a singular stately courtesy, as a right deferred, and holds his head higher in visible pride for the rest of that evening.’
‘How pathetic!’ Linnell cried. ‘Yet I can easily believe it. What I can’t believe is that Haviland Dumaresq should still be living in absolute poverty. I hope, when you say that, you don’t mean me to take your words in the literal acceptation that he wants for money?’
‘But I do, though, my dear fellow. I do — every word of it. The man’s as poor as the proverbial church mouse. He never made a farthing out of the ‘Encyclopædic Philosophy’: it was dead loss from beginning to end: and he lives to this day from hand to mouth by doing the merest scientific hackwork for London publishers — Universal Instructors, you know, and that sort of clap-trap.’
With a sudden start, Linnell folded up his easel very resolutely. ‘Come away,’ he said in a firm voice. ‘I can’t stand this sort of thing, for my part, any longer. Haviland Dumaresq in want of money! Haviland Dumaresq lacking the bare means of support! Haviland Dumaresq buried in a pigsty! The thing’s disgraceful. It’s not to be endured! Why doesn’t some rich person somewhere take the matter up and establish and endow him?’
‘Some wealthy countryman of yours across the Atlantic, for example?’ Mansel echoed good-humouredly. ‘Well, yes, Americans are always fond of that earthly-providence business. I wonder, indeed, they’ve never thought of it.’
Linnell’s face clouded visibly to the naked eye. ‘What!’ he cried, with unmistakable annoyance in his testy tone. ‘That old mistake alive and green still! How often shall I have to correct the blunder! Didn’t I tell you at Christ Church, over and over again, that I wasn’t an American, and never had been — that I’d never a drop of Yankee blood in my veins — that my connection with Boston was a purely accidental one? My father merely settled there for — ur — for business purposes. We are not, and we never were, American citizens. I hate to be called what I’m not, and never will be. But that’s neither here nor there at present. The question for the moment is simply this: Why doesn’t somebody establish and endow Haviland Dumaresq?’
Mansel’s face brimmed over with suppressed amusement.
‘Establish and endow him!’ he cried with a short laugh. ‘My dear fellow, I’d like to see the man, American or otherwise, brave enough to suggest it to him for half a second. He’d better have a fast-trotting horse and a convenient gig waiting round the corner before he tries; for Haviland Dumaresq would forthwith arise and slay him with his hands, as King Arthur proposed to do to the good Sir Bedivere, unless he evacuated the premises with all reasonable haste before the old man could get up and at him. He’s the proudest soul that ever stepped this earth, is Haviland Dumaresq. He’d rather starve than owe aught to any man. I can fancy how he’d take the proposal to subsidize him. The bare mention of the thing would kill him with humiliation.’
By this time Linnell had finished folding up his easel and picture, and addressed himself vigorously on the road homeward.
‘What are you going for?’ Mansel asked, with an innocent face.
‘Going for?’ Linnell repeated, with profound energy. ‘Why, something must be done, I suppose, at once, about Dumaresq. This state of things is simply intolerable. A man with a world-wide reputation for the deepest thought among all who can think — that is to say, among all except absolute dolts and idiots — there, there, I haven’t even patience to talk about it. Something must be done, I tell you, this very day, to set things square for him.’
‘Exactly,’ Mansel went on, gazing up at the sky in a vacant, far-away fashion. ‘You’re rich, we all know, Linnell, like the mines of Golconda. You drop as a universal provider from the clouds — —’
He broke off suddenly, for Linnell had halted, and looked back at him half angrily, with a sudden quick suspicious glance.
‘I rich!’ the handsome young artist cried, with an impatient snap of his long middle finger. ‘Again one of those silly old exploded Christ Church fallacies. Who ever told you I was rich, I’d like to know? You never had it from my lips, at any rate, Mansel. I wish unauthorized people wouldn’t make one against one’s will into a peg to hang startling myths and romances upon. A painter by trade, whose pictures only sell by accident, can never be rich — unless he has private means of his own, of course; works a gold mine or a Pennsylvanian oil-well. I own neither. Still, for all that, I feel it a burning shame to the times we live in that Haviland Dumaresq — the deepest thinker of our age and race — should end his days in a ploughman’s cottage.’
CHAPTER II.
LINNELL’S MYSTERIES.
They turned aside into the deep-cut lane that led by tortuous twists toward the main road, and walked along for a second or two in solemn silence. Mansel was the first to break their reverie.
‘Why, Linnell,’ he cried, with a start of astonishment, pointing down to his friend’s feet with an awkward gesture, ‘you’re all right again that way now, then, are you? You — you don’t find your leg trouble you any longer?’
Till that moment, the new-comer to Petherton had been strolling along easily and naturally enough; but almost as the words passed Mansel’s lips, the older resident noticed that Linnell was now limping a little with his left foot — an imperceptible limp to a casual observer, though far more marked within the last few seconds than it had been a minute or two before attention was called to it. Linnell glanced down and smiled uneasily.
‘Oh, I hobble along rather better than I used to do,’ he answered casually, with an evasive laugh. ‘They sent me to Egypt for that, you know. Dry as blazes in Egypt. The old affection was rheumatic in origin, it seems. Damp intensified it. I was told a warm climate m
ight do me good. Sir Anthony Wraxall — astute old beggar — advised me never to let myself feel cold in my limbs for a single moment; and I’ve done my best ever since to follow out his directions to the letter. I’ve spent every winter for the last five years on the Nile or in Algeria. I’ve camped out for weeks together in the middle of the desert; I’ve dressed half my time like an Arab chief to give my limbs free play: I’ve ridden all day long on my horse or my camel: I’ve never walked when I could possibly get a mount of any sort: and in the end, I’m beginning to hobble about, I’m glad to say, in a way that remotely resembles walking. I suppose the treatment’s getting me round at last a bit.’
‘Resembles walking,’ Mansel exclaimed, with surprise. ‘Why, my dear fellow, you can walk every bit as well as all the rest of us. To tell you the truth, you stood so firm, and turned about and walked off so naturally, that I’d almost forgotten, at the first blush, all about your old difficulty.’
‘That was because I was excited and indignant about poor old Dumaresq,’ Linnell answered hastily, with obvious embarrassment. ‘I always walk better when I’m emotionally roused. It takes my mind off. I forget I’ve legs. When I play lawn-tennis, I never think for the time being about my lameness. It’s when my attention’s called to the existence of my feet that I feel it worst. Self-consciousness, I suppose. But don’t let’s discuss me. The empirical ego’s always tedious. There are so many other much more interesting subjects than an individual man to talk about in the universe!’
‘I’m not so sure of that,’ Mansel replied reflectively. ‘Man, says Emerson, is perennially interesting to man; and I always like to hear about you, Linnell. I expect another winter or two’ll set you up completely. Why, my dear fellow, where are you going off to? You’re coming to lunch with us, aren’t you? That’s our little box, you see — up there on the hilltop.’
