myself to death about all these things—”
her tragic gesture swept the disordered room—“just
as I thought I was going home to enjoy myself, and
look nice, and see people again, and have a little
pleasure after all our worries—” She
dropped back on the sofa with another burst of tears.
“For all the good this rubbish will do me now!
I loathe the very sight of it!” she sobbed with
her face in her hands.
It was one of the distinctions of Mr. Claud Walsingham
Popple that his studio was never too much encumbered
with the attributes of his art to permit the installing,
in one of its cushioned corners, of an elaborately
furnished tea-table flanked by the most varied seductions
in sandwiches and pastry.
Mr. Popple, like all great men, had at first had his
ups and downs; but his reputation had been permanently
established by the verdict of a wealthy patron who,
returning from an excursion into other fields of portraiture,
had given it as the final fruit of his experience that
Popple was the only man who could “do pearls.”
To sitters for whom this was of the first consequence
it was another of the artist’s merits that he
always subordinated art to elegance, in life as well
as in his portraits. The “messy”
element of production was no more visible in his expensively
screened and tapestried studio than its results were
perceptible in his painting; and it was often said,
in praise of his work, that he was the only artist
who kept his studio tidy enough for a lady to sit
to him in a new dress.
Mr. Popple, in fact, held that the personality of
the artist should at all times be dissembled behind
that of the man. It was his opinion that the
essence of good-breeding lay in tossing off a picture
as easily as you lit a cigarette. Ralph Marvell
had once said of him that when he began a portrait
he always turned back his cuffs and said: “Ladies
and gentlemen, you can see there’s absolutely
nothing here,” and Mrs. Fairford supplemented
the description by defining his painting as “chafing-dish”
art. On a certain late afternoon of December,
some four years after Mr. Popple’s first meeting
with Miss Undine Spragg of Apex, even the symbolic
chafing-dish was nowhere visible in his studio; the
only evidence of its recent activity being the full-length
portrait of Mrs. Ralph Marvell, who, from her lofty
easel and her heavily garlanded frame, faced the doorway
with the air of having been invited to “receive”
for Mr. Popple.
The artist himself, becomingly clad in mouse-coloured
velveteen, had just turned away from the picture to
hover above the tea-cups; but his place had been taken
by the considerably broader bulk of Mr. Peter Van
Degen, who, tightly moulded into a coat of the latest
cut, stood before the portrait in the attitude of
a first arrival.
“Yes, it’s good—it’s
damn good, Popp; you’ve hit the hair off ripplingly;
but the pearls ain’t big enough,” he pronounced.
