"Oh, a lot," replied Margaret, refusing to commit herself with adjectives. "Can I see?"
He sat back to give her room to look. She had in her time spent sincere days at one of the art schools which help Kensington to its character and was prepared to appreciate expertly. It was a sketch in oils, done mostly with the thumb and palette-knife, a croûte of the most obvious – paint piled in ridges as though the artist would have built his subject in relief upon the canvas, perspective improvised by the light of nature, crudities, brutalities of color, obtruded in the effort for breadth. They were all there. She stared into this mist of blemishes in an effort to see what the painter saw and could not set down, and had to give it up.
In the art school it had been the custom to tell one's fellows the curt, unwelcome truth.
"You can't paint," said Margaret.
"Oh, I know that," answered Ford. "You weren't looking for that, were you?"
"For what, then?" asked Margaret.
He hitched himself up to the canvas again, and began to smudge with his thumb at a mess of yellow ocre.
"There 's something in it that I can see," he said. "I 've been watching this – this desert for more than a year, you know, and I try to get in what I see in it. You can't see anything?"
"No," said Margaret. "But I did try." She watched his unskilful handling of the ocre. "I could show you a thing or two," she suggested.
She had all a woman's love for technique, and might have been satisfied with more skill and less purpose. But Ford shook his head.
"No, thank you," he said. "It's not worth while. I 'm only painting for myself. I know what I mean by these messes I make; if I could paint more, I mightn't be so pleased with it."
"As you like, of course," said Margaret, a little disappointed.
He worked in silence for about a minute.
"You didn't like the looks of Dr. Jakes?" he suggested suddenly. "I saw you wondering at him in there."
"Well," Margaret hesitated. "He seemed rather out of it," she answered. "Is there anything – wrong – with him?"
Ford was making an irreparable mess of his picture and did not look up.
"Wrong?" he repeated. "Well, depends what you call wrong. He drinks."
"Drinks!" Margaret did not like the matter-of-fact way in which he said it. "Do you mean – "
"He 's a drunkard – he goes to bed drunk. His nerves were like banjo strings this afternoon; he couldn't keep his hands still. You noticed it? That was last night's drinking; he didn't get to bed till daylight. I heard him struggling up the stairs, with Mrs. Jakes whispering to him not to make a noise and helping him. That was just before you came."
"Poor thing!"
"Yes – poor thing!" Ford looked up at the girl sharply. "You 've got it, Miss Harding. It 's Mrs. Jakes that suffers. Jakes has got his liquor, and that makes up to him for a lot. You and I, we 've got – whatever we have got, little or much. Old Samson 's got his memories and his pose; he gets along all right with them. But she 's got nothing at all – only the feeling that she 's managed to screen him and prop him and fooled people into thinking she 's the wife of a decent man. That 's all."
"But," said Margaret, "is he safe?"
"Safe? Oh, I forgot that he was to see you in his study. He won't reel about and fall down, if that 's what you mean. That part of it is all done in private; Mrs. Jakes gets the benefit of that. And as to his patients, he really does know a little about lungs when he 's sober, and there 's always the air. Oh, he 's safe enough."
"It's dreadful," said Margaret. She was at a loss; the men she knew did not get drunk. When they went to the bad, they chose different roads; this one seemed ankle-deep with defilement. She recalled Mrs. Jakes when she had come forth from the silent house to meet her in the chill dawn, and a vision flashed upon her of the vigil that must have been hers through the slow night, listening to the chink of bottle on glass and waiting, waiting in misery and fear to do that final office of helping the drunken man to his bed. Her primness, her wan gentility, her little affectations of fashion, seemed monstrously heroic in the light of that vision – she had carried them with her to the pit of her humiliation and brought them forth again unsullied, the spotless armor of a woman of no account.
"You understand now?" asked Ford, watching her.
"Yes," answered Margaret, slowly. "But it frightens me. I wish I hadn't got to see him in his study. What will he do?"
"Hush!" said Ford. "Here comes Mrs. Jakes. Don't let her hear you. He won't do anything."
He fell to his work again, and Margaret turned to receive the doctor's wife.
"The doctor will see you now, Miss Harding," said Mrs. Jakes. "Will you come with me?"
She eyed the pair of them with a suspicion she could not altogether hide, and Ford was careful to hold an impassive face.
"I am quite ready," returned Margaret, nerving herself for what had assumed the proportions of an ordeal, and went with her obediently.
Jakes' study was a small, rather dark room opening off the hall, in which the apparatus of his profession was set forth to make as much show as possible. His desk, his carpet, his leather chairs and bookcases did their best to counterfeit a due studiousness in his behalf, and a high shelf of blue and green bottles, with a microscope among them, counteracted their effect by suggesting to the irreverent that here science was "skied" while practice was hung on the line. This first interview was a convention in the case of every new patient. Dr. Jakes always saw them alone as a matter of professional honor. Mrs. Jakes would make a preliminary inspection of him to assure herself and him that he was fit for it; old Mr. Samson, passing by the half-open door once, had seen her bending over him, smelling his breath critically; and then she would trust him to his patient's good will and to the arbitrary Providence which ruled her world.
"Miss Harding, Eustace," she announced at the door of the study and motioned the girl to enter.
The little doctor rose with bustling haste, and looked at her with melancholy eyes. There was a smell of eau de Cologne in the room, which seemed natural at the time to its rather comfortable shabbiness.
"Sit down, sit down, Miss Harding," he said, and made a business of thrusting forward one of the leather chairs to the side of his desk. Seated, she faced him across a corner of it. In the interval that had elapsed since she had seen him at tea, he seemed to have recovered himself somewhat. Some of the strain was gone from him, and he was grave with a less effect of effort and discomfort.
He put his open hand upon a paper that lay before him.
"It was Dr. Mackintosh who ordered you south?" he asked. "A clever man, Miss Harding. I have his letter here about your case. Now, I want you to answer a question or two before we listen to that lung of yours."
"Certainly," said Margaret.
She was conscious of some surprise that he should move so directly to the matter in hand. It relieved her of vague fears with which Ford's warning had filled her, and as he went on to question her searchingly, her nervousness departed. The little man who fell so far short of her ideal of a doctor knew his business; even a patient like herself, with all a patient's prejudice and ignorance, could tell by the line his questions took that he had her case by heart. He was clearly on familiar ground, a fact which had power to reassure her, and she told herself that, after all, his resigned, plump face was not entirely repulsive.
"A queer little man," she said to herself. "Queer enough to be a genius, perhaps."
"And, now, please, we 'll just hear how things really are. No, I don't think you need undo anything. Yes, like that."
As he explored her chest and side with the stethoscope, his head was just under her face, the back of it rumpled like the head of some huge and clumsy baby. It was fluffy and innocent and comical, and Margaret smiled above him. Every one has his best aspect, or photographers would crowd the workhouses and the manufacturers of pink lampshades would starve. Dr. Jakes should have made more