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Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
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ALEC had heard his wife playing, and had thrown down his brushes and come to the chair beside the old-fashioned square piano. It was a wide, velvet-covered armchair, in which he had perforce to clasp his hands behind his head and lounge luxuriously if he meant to sit in it at all—a chair not easily to be sat in without perfect easiness, a chair with the embrace of Morpheus and the inspiration of the herb Papaver.
Isabel was playing very sweetly; she played by feeling as well as touch; something of Wagner’s it was, something as uncertain and variable, and as invariably attractive as life itself. To listen—in that armchair—was like hearing the Sirens; existence became "spiritualized," the word is—suddenly emancipated from all necessary cares and courses.
Alec had been tormenting his brain all day with the expression of a curiously obdurate face, feeling an idea growing frayed and colourless, like a captured butterfly, as he attempted to fix what beauty it had for the common eye; and the escape from technique was delicious. He slipped away from realities gladly, and wandered—no longer mortal man, but immortal soul again—in the realms of the imagination, dealing with realities boldly as became a deathless spirit. He had been working all day to develop his conception of a knightly vigil; and as Isabel played andante, the vision the music inspired him with was full of violet shadows in mysterious temples, solitary pink flames before ghostly altars, tenebrous gleamings, white robed figures faintly seen, prayer and awe—all very vague indeed, but all exceedingly beautiful. Presently, however, her white hands passed into swift allegro and his fancies grew insensibly more animated. Into his shadowy dim aisles processions came marching, torchlight banished the dimness and blazed paler into day, figures flowed in more and more, more and more the scene grew crowded, dignified priests and warriors grew more numerous, younger, more active, swarming and overflowing until temples, altars, processions, all order and stability vanished in a mazy dance of exultant figures, knights and dames, shepherds and shepherdesses, clowns, grotesques, Punchinellos, corphyrées, humanity, finally danced under by a whirl of ideal creations, imps, gnomes, fairies, satyrs, hamadryads, harpies, and oreads. Faster and faster they danced in intricate kaleidoscopic figures. Suddenly through them all, like the news of a death in a ball room, passed a shudder, a jar,—blackness rapt them away!—the music had stopped.
"Alec," said Isabel, "you are going to sleep; you distinctly snored."
"My dear girl! nothing could have been further from my thoughts. I was just shutting my eyes to enjoy the music, and thinking over a little problem in composition." He felt quite hurt.
Isabel turned back to the piano, and Alec, to avoid a repetition of this unjust misconception—she was always thinking him sleepy or unwell when reverie engaged him—opened his eyes as wide as possible and fixed them unblinkingly on her face.
"My dear, Alec, don’t look like that! Are you ill? Or is there anything wrong with my hair?"
Isabel had curly dark brown hair, that dark brown which gleams golden in a slanting light. It was a little out (so Isabel called it) that night, and there were ever so many little misty gold curves and wreaths fading away round her head—the amber-shaded lamp beside her gave her quite a halo of them.
"Only Sylphs, dear Belinda," said Alec, lazily, suppressing some annoyance. "Does my look disturb you?"
Isabel considered as she went on playing. "I don’t want you to stare like a hairdresser’s wig block," she said judicially; "but you may look at me if you like."
So Alec went on looking, with greatly subdued violence, however, at the glory-surrounded head and the shadowed face.
"It was a sweet face," Alec meditated, "soft lined, tender-looking; one of those pale faces with dark eyes that are not perhaps beautiful but infinitely capable of beautiful expressions, a face never wearisome while there is life, and yet—"
Alec loved his wife very greatly—more by far than he loved himself or any other loveable being, and yet—. There was this little "and yet—," this one fatal objection, very much present in Alec’s mind just then, suggested by the slight vulgarity of those few words of his wife to begin with, and fostered perhaps by the subdued discontent of the air that now prevailed in the music, Isabel, he thought, was a force in life antagonistic to art.
Alec was an artist not only by choice of métier, but of spiritual compulsion. So he fancied, and just then was thinking that his supreme love was not to be found in that warmly illuminated room, but in the dim-lit studio beyond, that for one wedded to eternal Art, marriage was a sad mistake, even, indeed, a sort of bigamy. He had been reading, as the omniscient reader will observe, that child of fancy, Algernon Swinburne; and that and Isabel's pathetic transitions from phantasies to snores, and from sylph-surrounded heads to hairdressers' wig blocks, and the melancholy music—it was really melancholy now—all worked together. It was, in fact, one of those painful moments of domestic dissatisfaction not uncommon to recently-married young men who are moderately clever and immoderately ambitious—especially after days passed in badly arranged and unsuccessful work. The theory of the wife being an earthly clog is so soothing to self love. Ars longa, vita brevis, he thought, not a new or original idea, but one remembered from copybook learning; and here he, the artist, was actually making his vita brevior by becoming domesticated! Among other equally poignant reminders, Milton's words, "and that one talent which is death to hide," came into his mind. Death! the loss of immortality! Were the appointed moments of probation indeed gliding inevitably by? Perish the thought! At that moment he seemed to himself—the music and the easy chair inspiring another Merlin in the spell of another Vivien; he, the potential creator of spell-beautiful paintings, spending his moments, his hours, pleasing and being pleased by a wife who compared him to a hairdresser's wig block.
It was his duty to his supreme mistress, Art, not to permit this a moment longer. He would return to his proper sphere. His act was swifter than his resolution, although that supervened very suddenly on his wandering discontents.
He did not venture to look round at Isabel as he rose and walked straight into his studio, but as he closed the door he heard that the music ceased abruptly and that her dress rustled.
He lit the white-burning Solar lamp and turned it towards his picture.
Just then he heard the door behind him creak, and turning, saw it pushed open very softly, and Isabel, her face full of solicitude, appear looking in. Probably she fancied he was ill.
When, however, his sudden asperity of expression became evident, she disappeared, the door closing noiselessly.
It was an Italian model he had been troubled about. The fellow had fine white features, mobile lips, and liquid eyes; he was to be the knight keeping vigil. When Alec had first seen him he had been struck merely by the possibilities of looking impassioned which this young man possessed. He was fit to go into a picture quite unmodified, "Kneel. Look devout," he would have to say, paint him forthwith, and the thing would be done. But that day as he had worked at his knight’s features he had been surprised and annoyed to find a curious phenomenon appearing through his efforts. Try as he would, copy with never so much painful accuracy the adolescent countenance before him, a curious sinister expression would come somehow upon the canvas, a look of age, and instead of devotion, furtive ridicule. He could not understand it—had been glad to leave patching it to hear his wife’s playing. Now, this evening, disregarding subtleties of tint, he would have another try, wrestle with and overcome this difficulty.
"Some little inaccuracy does it," he said; "eyebrows probably too oblique,"—therewith turning the white light full upon his work and taking up palette and brushes.
The face on the canvas certainly seemed animated by a spirit of its own. Where the expression of diablerie came in he found impossible to discover. Experiment was necessary. The eyebrows—it could scarcely be the eyebrows? But he altered them. No, that was no better; in fact, if anything, a trifle more satanic. The corner of the mouth? Pah! more than ever a Mephistophilesian leer—and now, re-touched, it is ominously grim. The eye then? Catastrophe! he had filled his brush with vermilion instead of brown, and yet he had felt sure it was brown! The eye seemed now to have rolled in its socket, glowing on him an eye of fire. In a flash of passion he struck the brush full of bright red athwart the picture; and then a very curious thing, a very strange thing indeed, occurred—if it did occur.
The diabolified Italian before him shut both his eyes, pursed his mouth, and wiped the colour off his face with his hand!
Then the red eye opened again and the face smiled. "That was rather hasty of you," it said.
Curiously enough, Alec did not feel frightened or very much astonished. Perhaps he was too much exasperated. "Why do you keep moving about then," he said, "making faces and all that, sneering and squinting while I am painting you?"
"I don’t," said the picture.
"You do," said Alec.
"It’s yourself," said the picture.
"It’s not myself," said Alec.
"It is yourself," said the picture. "No! don’t go hitting me with paint again, because it’s true. You have been trying to fluke an expression on my face all day. Really you haven’t an idea what your picture ought to look like."
"I have," said Alec.
"You have not," contradicted the picture; "you never have with your pictures. You always start with the vaguest presentiment of what you are going to do; it is to be something beautiful—you are sure of that—and devout, perhaps, or tragic; but beyond that it is all experiment and chance. My dear fellow! you don’t surely think you can paint a picture like that?"
Alec felt there was a lot of truth in all this. "What am I to do then?"
"Get an inspiration."
"But I thought this was an inspiration."
"Inspiration," sneered the sardonic figure; "a fancy that came from your seeing an organ-grinder looking up at a window! Vigil! ha, ha!"
Alec groaned. "Too true! I am married. The days of inspiration are past. Oh, to undo it! I would give anything in life for a return of inspiration, for a release from the humdrum life of small domesticities that is beginning. I—who would have given my soul to art!"
"As you wish," said the figure, and then everything was still.
"Eigh!" cried Alec, suddenly startled out of his cool acceptance of this phenomenon by a swift, uncomfortable realisation.
"Did you speak?" he said, after a pause.
"I say—Vezetti—or—whoever you are, did you say anything?"
In the stillness he could hear his own heart beating. The picture was motionless and voiceless, but the red eye glowed like a coal.
Very slowly he approached, and passed his hand over the paint. Paint, sure enough—unsophisticated paint. He must have been dreaming; he had read plenty of scientific matter about hallucinations and so forth, and so he was not too horribly frightened; still—. He felt the red eye, but that was perfectly cool.
"Do you want to say anything more?" asked Alec, deliberately jumbling together all the colours on his palette; "because, if not—"
Dab, dab, dab, he proceeded to paint out this disagreeably outspoken creation as quickly as he could. He had some difficulty in getting out the red eye; it seemed to glow through the coatings he laid over it. At last, however, with what seemed like a quietly ironical wink, it disappeared.
Smear, smudge, wriggle, every stroke of the obnoxious figure was presently hidden. With a feeling of relief Alec drew back from the canvas. "I am a superstitious fellow," he was thinking dubiously, as he surveyed the wreck, when suddenly some lines in his aimless smearing caught his eye. "By Jove!" he exclaimed, "there’s an idea there!" He framed his eyes with his hands.
He heard a light tapping at the door. It was his wife. Presently the door opened, but he did not turn towards her. "Alec," she said, "do you know the time?" She received no answer. "It is nearly midnight, Alec." Still no answer. "Are you going to paint all night, Alec?"
"Oh! yes! yes!" he answered, without turning, in a tone that made it almost a curse; and when with a faint twinge of compunction he looked round, she had gone away.
It was really a splendid idea; splendid idea is not enough; it was almost as if a divine revelation had come to Alec. The curves above suggested the intersecting arching of the roof; that smear below, the knight keeping vigil; and between, that white space, what he had been feeling for all along, a group, the watching spirits of Chivalry, Generosity, Purity, and Religion. Beautiful in form and colour, definite as bodily sight, the conception had come to him. In another minute he was frantically preparing colours. Morning should see the work under way.
He was working feverishly in the dead of night when his wife’s finger-nails tapped at his studio door again. As he stepped back to get a view of his work he saw her standing in her white nightdress in the doorway. "Alec," she said, "it is four o’clock. You will make yourself ill."
"Go away," Alec answered roughly, and as her footsteps slipped along the passage he went to the door and, slamming, locked it. He thought he heard her cry, but just then his eye caught the growing picture and he forgot everything else.
When the pale daylight came streaming into the room to show the yellow in his Solar lamp, Alec was still working in frantic haste. The great masses of the picture were blocked in; already it was beautiful.
What was that? A rapping at the door. "Come in." The door is locked however. With his eyes on his picture he opens it, and hears the voice of Lizzie, the little serving maid.
"Oh, if you please, sir, missus sent me to say as she’s ill, and will you come to see her."
"Ill?" said Alec, walking up to the picture and touching in some purple.
"She slipped upon the stairs, sir, last night, and her side and back are just dreffle painful this morning, sir."
"This moonlit window is supreme," said Alec, absently painting. "Ah—Lizzie!"
"Yessir."
"Fetch me some coffee and bread and butter;" and quite forgetful of his wife’s illness—news, indeed, that he imperfectly heard—he goes on with his great idea of expressing the profound stillness round the watching knight by metameric vertical praying figures in the windows and on the monuments. It was a real, an undeniable inspiration which had come to him at last. Previously he thought his idea had been as spiritless almost as that extraordinary painting of the same subject saved up for an ill-starred posterity in the Chantrey Room, South Kensington. Now, in richness of accessories and colour it was worthy of Titian; in harmony of line, of Leighton or Raphael. This idea was the morning star of his fame. Work, work, work, a fortnight, perhaps, or three weeks, and then—the dawn of immortality!
The hours seemed to fly by as the masterpiece grew slowly into beauty. As it grew, all possibilities of fatigue seemed to pass away from him—he felt neither hunger nor thirst. As it grew, it entranced him more and more; fainter and fainter outward impressions came to him. Some indistinct memories of various people interrupting him, saying stupid irrelevant things about his wife being ill and what not, of the lamp being lit again, and presently going out amid a stream of red sparks up the chimney, of his having to rave the house down to get it refilled, various people trying insanely to quiet him, of the clock having stopped, and of sleeping by snatches in his clothes at the foot of the easel.
But all these impressions were faint and intermingled, more like the swift imperfections of a dream than real occurrences. The one consequent idea, the one grand organic growth, was the Great Picture. Ever more beautiful, nearer and nearer to perfection it grew.
It was sublime, this flawless creating under his inspired fingers. Days slipped by unheeded; thrice the Solar lamp had flickered out. Alec’s life would have been altogether supreme had it not been for the faint but persistent intimations of evil to his wife, and for the reminiscences of the figure with the red eye that came to disturb his snatches of slumber. These things imported a vague uneasiness into the ecstatic dream of pure art he was living.
"Your wife is dangerously ill; her fall has injured her internally. She may be dying."
"Eigh! What! Is it you?"
It was his wife’s mother, and behind her the doctor. They were looking at him with a peculiar dread in their eyes. But he did not mind that. Everyone had been odd these last few days.
"She is dying," the Doctor said, solemnly.
"Dying is she? Who did you say?" He went up to the picture again, touching it fondly.
"Your wife."
"My wife—Doctor! what’s the day of the month?"
"The Vigil. Don’t go away, Doctor, without seeing my picture. What did you say the date?"
"Eigh! Then there’s—yes, just time for the Academy!"
Presently he was standing on the landing bawling, "Lizzie!"
"In the name of heaven, man, be quiet! Do you want to commit murder?"
"Murder! Nonsense! I want a cab. The Vigil is finished!"
The precious picture! He must carry the canvas down in his own arms. How hushed the house was. The two servants stood in the background in the hall with a look of profound awe on their faces. The triumph of accomplishment is already beginning. Evidently they know now that he is a genius. All the world will know that soon.
As he enters the cab the Doctor appears at the door with a white face, comes down the steps and clutches his arm, saying something.
"You idiot! Leave go my arm, will you?"
Then the cab is rumbling on its way to Burlington House.
Alec, with the picture on his knees, regards it lovingly.
It is very beautiful, but the light is dim. Presently it seems as if—yes, the light is shimmering through; the oiled canvas is growing transparent. It is really very strange; indeed, it is disagreeable. The work he has painted over shows; all the elemental smears and smudges are there. Then beneath that, the thing that those smears and smudges were to hide, that begins to grow perceptible. First, a red glimmer, then a faint outline. The sinister face, the ardent eye, become every moment more emphatic, seeming to have burnt out all the beauty he has worked for. Yes! it is the diabolical figure with the red eye grinning exultantly; then, with a laugh, speaking:
"You see I am still here."
"Who—what?" gasps Alec, and then, with lower jaw dropping, is silent.
"You are consecrated to art now. My friend, did you catch what the Doctor said to you?"
Smash!
All is indistinct for a little while after this; there is even a slight confusion about his identity. He sees himself lying with a crushed hand among the wreck of the cab, which has collided with a timber wagon. He can feel the pain and tingling of the wound, notices the great picture smashed hopelessly beside him. a gaping hole knocked through it, simulating curiously the shape of that weird red-eyed figure, and then the thought comes into his mind, where is he?
Then it is a hospital ward. The transition is abrupt; probably he has fainted. "His hand is to be amputated," one hard-featured nurse tells another in his hearing.
Hand and work gone together—the ignis fatuus of immortality has vanished. Bitterness and sorrow come upon him, and the need of refuge and comfort. With a great yearning, his thoughts rush back to his wife, her gentle touch, her tender eyes, her soothing voice. A frightful pang goes through him—the Doctor's words come to his mind—"In the name of decency come back—she is dead." The nympholept is disenchanted. What has he cast away for the phantasm of praise? Then the full comprehension of his acts appears in all its hideousness. Oh, the vileness, the folly, the mad ingratitude of it! What could have impelled him, what demon possessed him?
"You were inspired."
He turns his head. Beside the bed with folded arms and grimly smiling face, stands his creation, the red-eyed man.
He would scream, but he can find no voice; would spring away out of the bed, but motion is denied him.
"You wished to be inspired. Art and the domestic virtues jarred together. Your wife is dead; she had to die when you gave your soul to art."
"Gave my soul to art?"
"Yes. Ha, hah! It is a pity your hand is smashed."
And suddenly the red-eyed man had sat down on Alec’s body and was glaring with his one fiery orb into his face. "What did you make me for?" His breath was sulphurous, it made Alec’s nostrils and mouth burn; and the arm too grew terribly painful again, as though a thousand red-hot needles were probing it.
"Oh, my wife! I am dying."
"Don’t call your wife; you are mine," hissed the fiend close to his face.
"Listen!" he continued, with cruel deliberation. "When a painter paints a form without a soul to it, without, that is, a clear intention expressed by it; when he paints aimlessly and recklessly in the hope of some spirit coming into it by accident—sometimes a spirit comes. I came so to yours, and you know the bargain I struck with you."
It was horrible. The demon was as heavy as lead, and his breath burnt Alec’s nostrils. But the most bitter of all the terrible things he was suffering, more bitter even than his fear and agony for himself, was his remorse for his wife. Sacrificed for art—what was art compared with her loving, protean sweetness? His short married life with her, a thousand things that he had forgotten, came rushing back to his memory with the bitter hopelessness of the Peri’s glimpse of heaven.
"My wife," he cried, "my wife!"
The demon bent closely over him, hoarsely whispering, "Gone, gone." Then he stretched out something black over his eyes—a cloak, or was it a wing?
All was as black as futurity. A sense then of sinking swiftly down through a black, bottomless void. Could he be dying—or dead? It seemed as if he was being sucked down an infinite black funnel, an eternal maelstrom. Was there no hope? Suddenly through the awful silent space sounded his wife’s voice—
"Alec!"
He looked up. She stood a measureless distance above, clothed in radiant light, looking down with infinite compassion and forgiveness upon him. He stretched out his arms, and would have cried to her, but his voice would not come to him. Then into his mind came the thought of that great gulf which separates those who have despised love from joy and beauty for ever.
Down, down, down.
"Alec!"
"Alec, wake up!"
He was sitting in the old velvet-covered armchair beside the piano, and his wife was bending over him. He blinked like an owl. Then he realised that he had pins and needles in his left arm. "Have I been to sleep?" he asked.
"Yes, of course. When I saw you going to sleep again, I knew it was no good trying to prevent you, so I left off playing and went away. I should have thought, though, that Lizzie, dropping the tray downstairs, would have been sufficient to wake you."
"That," said Alec, rubbing his eyes as he rose from the old armchair’s embrace; "why, that must have been the cab accident!"
"You are very affectionate to-night," his wife said presently, as they went downstairs together.
"I am repenting, dearest, of a sin against you, of letting an idle dream come between us."
And thereupon he was "very affectionate" again.
Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
Go to Home Page
This work is out of copyright in countries with a copyright
period of 70 years or less, after the year of the author's death.
If it is under copyright in your country of residence,
do not download or redistribute this file.
Original content added by RGL (e.g., introductions, notes,
RGL covers) is proprietary and protected by copyright.