The ground-glass roof, the white walls scored over with Clytie's fantasies, and the bright red curtain at the back behind the stove gave a singular setting to the picture.
Clytie's eyes brightened. She threw a cloth over the picture she was engaged on.
“How good of you to come—and the hand?”
“A trifle. It will be quite well in a few days; I thought you would not mind my coming to tell you how your doctoring had succeeded. I am keeping it in a sling—so; otherwise I should be always trying to use it. You are none the worse, Miss Davenant?”
“I? Why should I?”
“Oh, nerves, shock, headache—and all that. My mother, I know, would have been upset for a week.”
Clytie laughed; a gay little laugh. She pierced through the words to the simplicity that lay behind them.
“I have never cultivated nerves, Mr. Kent. They sadly interfere with practical life. How do you think Miss Marchpane and I would get on with this sort of thing”—and she nodded towards Jack—“if we had nerves? Winifred, this is Mr. Kent, who put out my fire last night. Miss Marchpane and I share the studio together, you know.”
“You work on very different lines,” said Kent after a while, leaning back in his chair so as to catch a glimpse of Winifred's tiny canvas. “What a strange thing temperament is! I suppose neither of you does landscape.”
“Oh, yes, Winifred. Dainty little bits of meadow and stream. I can't; I always want to put legs and arms to my trees, and make the branches twist and writhe about, like Gustave Doré in the 'Wandering Jew.'”
“You scarcely look like a painter of the weird,” said Kent.
“You think I have not enough strength of imagination?”
“You have too much strength of mind,” returned Kent judiciously. “You hanker too much after the real. I can only judge,” he hastily added by way of explanation, “by what I can see of your work around me.”
“You will get into difficulties,” said Clytie, laughing. “One moment you accuse me of nerves, and the next of strong-mindedness. Which is right, Winnie?”
“I should be telling too much or too little if I were to say,” replied Winifred. “Mr. Kent will have to judge for himself. We had better show him something to go by.”
They turned to an exhibition of Clytie's paintings; small stacks of canvases were ranged on the floor, along the walls; here and there one hanging or standing on a table or on an easel. Clytie stood by in her nonchalant, professional way, giving a word or two of necessary explanation as Winifred placed them one by one upon an easel for Kent's inspection. Painters, sculptors, musicians and actors have a moral advantage over poets and novelists, in that they are not ashamed of their work. An artist shows you his picture frankly and hopes you will like it; if a poet reads you a sonnet, he has an all-devouring dread lest you may deem him a prig. And the strange part of it is that you do; whereas you think the painter rather a good fellow. A little problem in sociological aesthetics.
As Kent looked at the pictures he lost his sense of Clytie's Agatha-like behaviour of the previous evening. He forgot even to pity her. He expressed genuine admiration for her work, interspersing his remarks with outspoken criticism which Clytie recognised as deeper than that of the mere virtuoso. It was qualified, too, by the supreme attribute of simple common sense. He judged the pictures on their merits; he judged Clytie as a woman of genius, strong mind, out of the ordinary run of women. The inner promptings and cravings that had thus found artistic expression it was beyond his philosophy to suspect. Nor did Clytie think of enlightening him.
“I like your realism,” he said. “It is straightforward. There's always a great danger of this sort of thing degenerating into morbidness. But if you can keep it true, it's healthy; it means sober, honest work, and not an intermittent fever. I see you work off your superfluous energy on the walls.”
“Oh, I forgot them,” cried Clytie somewhat shamefacedly. “You must not look at them, please. They are not part of the show. Miss Marchpane gets tired of flowers and peach-bloom, and sometimes——”
“Clytie!” cried Winifred reproachfully.
Clytie laughed; and Kent with her. The light jest brought them nearer together.
“No; I do that when I feel wicked,” said Clytie. “I paint a nice, correct little picture for the nice, correct people who are going to buy it, and then I grow angry with them and feel I should like to shock them, take the stiffening out of them, reduce them to elemental bits of humanity. Look at this group of street urchins. I am doing that on order for my dealer. Here is Jack—look at him now staring into the stove with the unreasoning content of a young dog. Doesn't he seem nice and conventional in the picture? You can hear the young lady of the house saying to the curate, 'Aren't these little street children too delightful?' Now if they were shown the real Jack, it would give them to think, as the French say—and they hate doing that. This is my idea of the real Jack.”
She whisked the cloth off the easel and showed Kent the charcoal ébauche of her own particular study of the urchin.
She had worked rapidly that day, with the feverishness that Kent deprecated. Whether she would convert the sketch into a finished picture she did not know. She had desired to fix the haunting impression of Jack's possible history.
Kent was somewhat startled by the suddenness of the presentation. There was the boy, refined, delicate in feature, great-eyed, curly-haired, but repulsive with cruelty and animalism; in a degraded attitude, head bent forward, knees bent, lips parted in a sneer.
“He does not look like that now,” said Kent, comparing the original with the copy.
“Wait,” said Clytie. Then imperiously to the urchin: “Jack, what are you thinking of?”
He turned, looked up at her shiftingly.
“Dunno.”
“Weren't you thinking of the nice little story of the cat you told me this morning?”
No answer.
“It's about a stray cat that came into his mother's house half dead, you know, and this boy was so kind to it—like a dear little girl——”
“Yer lie!” cried the boy, starting to his feet. “Oi told yer Oi killed 'er. I lammed her bloomin' 'ed open with a chopper. I 'ates cats!”
“Voilà!” said Clytie. “That's the real Jack. That's the Jack I'd like to startle Peckham Rye with.”
And then turning to the boy:
“That will do for to-day, Jack. Here's your shilling; give it to your mother.”
“Shan't,” said Jack.
“Oh, but you must,” said Winifred; “look how hard your poor mother has to work to keep you, Jack.”
“She's bloomin' well got ter,” said Jack. “I aint going to give 'er no money. She never gives me none.”
“But your mother will beat you,” said Clytie.
“Wot do I care?”
“And your father, you sweet boy?” asked Kent.
“Aint got none.”
“Never had one?” continued Kent.
“No; mother aint that sort. Blamed glad.”
“Here, you'd better run away,” said Clytie hurriedly. “Keep your shilling and make yourself as ill as you like with it. Come the day after to-morrow—Friday.