The little organ was muttering softly to itself as
they entered. It was very still otherwise.
The morning sun struck through the stained windows
and made pretty lights about the altar; besides themselves
there were some half dozen other worshippers.
The little organ ceased with a long droning sigh,
and the minister in his white robes turned about, facing
his auditors, and in the midst of a great silence opened
the communion service with the words: “Ye
who do truly and earnestly repent you of your sins
and are in love and charity with your neighbours—”
As Vandover rose with the rest the blood rushed to
his head and a feeling of nausea and exhaustion, the
dregs of his previous night’s debauch, came
over him again for a moment, so that he took hold of
the back of the pew in front of him to steady himself.
In the afternoons Vandover worked in his studio, which
was on Sacramento Street, but in the mornings he was
accustomed to study in the life-class at the School
of Design.
This was on California Street over the Market, an
immense room partitioned by enormous wooden screens
into alcoves, where the still-life classes worked,
painting carrots, grapes, and dusty brown stone-jugs.
All about were a multitude of casts, the fighting
gladiator, the discobulus, the Venus of Milo, and
hundreds of smaller pieces, masks, torsos, and the
heads of the Parthenon horses. Flattened paint-tubes
and broken bits of charcoal littered the floor and
cluttered the chairs and shelves. A strong odour
of turpentine and fixative was in the air, mingled
with the stronger odours of linseed oil and sour, stale
French bread.
Every afternoon a portrait class of some thirty-odd
assembled in one of the larger alcoves near the door.
Several of the well-known street characters of the
city had posed for this class, and at one time Father
Elphick, the white-haired, bare-headed vegetarian,
with his crooked stick and white clothes, had sat
to it for his head.
Vandover was probably the most promising member of
the school. His style was sketchy, conscientious,
and full of strength and decision. He worked
in large lines, broad surfaces and masses of light
or shade. His colour was good, running to purples,
reds, and admirable greens, full of bitumen and raw
sienna.
Though he had no idea of composition, he was clever
enough to acknowledge it. His finished pictures
were broad reaches of landscape, deserts, shores,
and moors in which he placed solitary figures of men
or animals in a way that was very effective—as,
for instance, a great strip of shore and in the foreground
the body of a drowned sailor; a lion drinking in the
midst of an immense Sahara; or, one that he called
“The Remnant of an Army,” a dying war horse
wandering on an empty plain, the saddle turned under
his belly, his mane and tail snarled with burrs.
