His first stroke carried him out of space and time, into a region where all that had become numbed2 and atrophied3 in him could expand and breathe. Lines, images, colours were again the sole facts: he plunged4 into their whirling circles like a stranded5 sea-creature into the sea. Once more every face was not a vague hieroglyph6, a curtain drawn7 before an invisible aggregate8 of wants and woes9, but a work of art, a flower in a pattern, to be dealt with on its own merits, like a bronze or a jewel. During the first day or two his hand halted; but the sense of insufficiency was a goad10, and he fought with his subject till he felt a strange ease in every renovated11 muscle, and his model became like a musical instrument on which he played with careless mastery.
He had transferred his easel to Mrs. Talkett’s apartment. It was an odd patchwork12 place, full of bold beginnings and doubtful pauses, rash surrenders to the newest fashions and abrupt13 insurrections against them, where Louis Philippe mahogany had entrenched14 itself against the aggression15 of art nouveau hangings, and the frail16 grace of eighteenth-century armchairs shed derision on lumpy modern furniture painted like hobby-horses at a fair. It amused Campton to do Mrs. Talkett against such a background: her thin personality needed to be filled out by the visible results of its many quests and cravings. There were people one could sit down before a blank wall, and all their world was there, in the curves of their faces and the way their hands lay in their laps; others, like Mrs. Talkett, seemed to be made out of the reflection of what surrounded them, as if they had been born of a tricky18 grouping of looking-glasses, and would vanish if it were changed.
At first Campton was steeped in the mere19 sensual joy of his art; but after a few days the play of the mirrors began to interest him. Mrs. Talkett had abandoned her hospital work, and was trying, as she said, to “recreate herself.” In this she was aided by a number of people who struck Campton as rather too young not to have found some other job, or too old to care any longer for that particular one. But all this did not trouble his newly recovered serenity20. He seemed to himself, somehow, like a drowned body—but drowned 229in a toy aquarium—still staring about with living eyes, but aware of the other people only as shapes swimming by with a flash of exotic fins21. They were enclosed together, all of them, in an unreal luminous22 sphere, mercifully screened against the reality from which a common impulse of horror had driven them; and since he was among them it was not his business to wonder at the others. So, through the cloud of his art, he looked out on them impartially23.
The high priestess of the group was Mme. de Dolmetsch, with Harvey Mayhew as her acolyte24. Mr. Mayhew was still in pursuit of Atrocities25: he was in fact almost the only member of the group who did not rather ostentatiously disavow the obligation to “carry on.” But he had discovered that to discharge this sacred task he must vary it by frequent intervals26 of relaxation27. He explained to Campton that he had found it to be “his duty to rest”; and he was indefatigable28 in the performance of duty. He had therefore, with an expenditure29 of eloquence30 which Campton thought surprisingly slight, persuaded Boylston to become his understudy, and devote several hours a day to the whirling activities of the shrimp-pink Bureau of Atrocities at the Nouveau Luxe. Campton, at first, could not understand how the astute31 Boylston had allowed himself to be drawn into the eddy32; but it turned out that Boylston’s astuteness33 had drawn him in. “You see, there’s an awful lot of money 230to be got out of it, one way and another, and I know a use for every penny—that is, Miss Anthony and I do,” the young man modestly explained; adding, in response to the painter’s puzzled stare, that Mr. Mayhew’s harrowing appeals were beginning to bring from America immense sums for the Victims, and that Mr. Mayhew, while immensely gratified by the effect of his eloquence, and the prestige it was bringing him in French social and governmental circles, had not the cloudiest notion how the funds should be used, and had begged Boylston to advise him. It was owing to this that the ex-Delegate to the Hague was able, with a light conscience, to seek the repose34 of Mrs. Talkett’s company and, with a smile of the widest initiation35, to listen to the subversive36 conversation of her familiars.
“Subversive” was the motto of the group. Every one was engaged in attacking some theory of art or life or letters which nobody in particular defended. Even Mr. Talkett—a kindly37 young man with eye-glasses and glossy38 hair, who roamed about straightening the furniture, like a gentlemanly detective watching the presents at a wedding—owned to Campton that he was subversive; and on the painter’s pressing for a definition, added: “Why, I don’t believe in anything she doesn’t believe in,” while his eye-glasses shyly followed his wife’s course among the teacups.
Mme. de Dolmetsch, though obviously anxious to retain her hold on Mr. Mayhew, did not restrict herself 231to such mild fare, but exercised her matchless eyes on a troop of followers39: the shock-haired pianist who accompanied her recitations, a straight-backed young American diplomatist whose collars seemed a part of his career, a lustrous41 South American millionaire, and a short squat42 Sicilian who designed the costumes for the pianist’s unproduced ballets.
All these people appeared to believe intensely in each other’s reality and importance; but it gradually came over Campton that all of them, excepting their host and hostess, knew that they were merely masquerading.
To Campton, used to the hard-working world of art, this playing at Bohemia seemed a nursery-game; but the scene acquired an unexpected solidity from the appearance in it, one day, of the banker Jorgenstein, who strolled in as naturally as if he had been dropping into Campton’s studio to enquire43 into the progress of his own portrait.
“I must come and look you up, Campton—get you to finish me,” he said jovially44, tapping his fat boot with a malacca stick as he looked over the painter’s head at the canvas on which Mrs. Talkett’s restless image seemed to flutter like a butterfly impaled45.
“You’ll owe it to me if he does you,” the sitter declared, smiling back at the leer which Campton divined behind his shoulder; and he felt a sudden pity for her innocence46.
232“My wife made Campton come back to his real work—doing his bit, you know,” said Mr. Talkett, straightening a curtain and disappearing again, like a diving animal; and Mrs. Talkett turned her plaintive47 eyes on Campton. “That kind of idiocy48 is all I’ve ever had,” they seemed to say; and he nearly cried back to her: “But, you poor child, it’s the only honest thing anywhere near you!”
Absorbed in his picture, he hardly stopped to wonder at Jorgenstein’s reappearance, at his air of bloated satisfaction or his easy
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