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Marion, the Story of an Artist's Model

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<h2>XLV</h2> I HAD been posing for several Sundays for the “Club” in Paresis Row. At first, all four of the men came regularly. Then Enfield dropped out, then Christain, who was out of work, and finally one Sunday when I arrived I found only Bonnat there. He insisted that I should remain, as, he said, he was very much in need of a model. He had been working away, without speaking once to me for some time. It was funny to watch his face while he worked, making curious facial expressions and attitudes corresponding to certain expressions and emotions. When he was through, I went over and looked at the painting, and I thought it was very wonderful. I said shyly: “If you like, I’ll take it to some of the dealers I sell Mr. Menna’s paintings to, and Mr. Bonnat”— I wanted him to know that I, too, could paint, but I had never the courage to tell him before all the other men—“I sometimes sell some of my own, too.{273}” He turned around slowly and looked at me. “So you paint, too, do you?” I nodded. After a moment, he said: “We won’t bother about those dealers you speak of, but I’d like to see your work.” “I get ten dollars for a painting sometimes,” I said, thinking that would be an added inducement to him to let me help him sell his paintings. He smiled when I said that and after a moment he said: “Ten dollars are a mighty comfortable thing, and so are two pairs of darned socks, as Oliver Twist would have said; but there’s something besides the selling question in all these efforts of ours—don’t you know that?” “You mean self-expression?” I asked timidly. I had heard studio talk before. “Yes—self-expression, and a good many other things besides.” He paused, studying me musingly. “I wonder if you will understand,” he said almost to himself, and then he added, with a beaming look: “Yes, I am sure you will. It’s this way: If our art is our life, then perhaps we had best follow Goethe’s advice and live resolutely in the good, the whole and the true. To do that we must know values—values on the canvas and values in life.{274}” Reggie’s scale of values flashed to my mind. “To be well informed,” he went on, “generally helps us to recognize values.” “The value of one’s paintings?” I asked slyly. “I have an inclination to regard you as a little mouse,” he said, “but if you bite like that, I shall call you a flea instead. Yes, that value, and the value of money, too, by—hearsay.” As he talked I had a sense of excitement, a certain uplifting thrill, as it were. It seemed to me he was opening the doors into a world that I had previously merely sensed. I knew dimly of its existence. The girls at Lil’s had said: “Well, what do you want then?” I did not know myself. I think it was simply a blind, intuitive reaching after the light of understanding. I felt these things, but I could not express my needs. I was of the inarticulate, but not the unfeeling. Bonnat must have realized this quality in me, else he would not have revealed himself so freely to me. He talked with an odd mixture of seriousness and lightness. It was almost as if he slowly chose his words, to make himself clear, just as if he were speaking to a child—a child he was not entirely sure of, but whom he wanted to reach. “I do know what you mean,” I cried. “Do you know Kipling’s ‘L’Envoi?’—because that expresses it exactly.” “Let’s hear it.{275}” And I recited warmly, for I loved it: <div class="poetry"> <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> “When earth’s last picture is painted And the tubes are twisted and dry, When the oldest colors are faded, And the youngest critic has died, We shall rest, and, faith, we shall need it— Lie down for an æon or two, Till the Master of all good workmen Shall set us to work anew. And those who are good shall be happy; They shall sit in a Golden Chair; They shall splash at a ten-league canvas With brushes of Comet’s hair; They shall find real saints to draw from— Magdalene, Peter and Paul; They shall work for an age at a sitting, And never be tired at all; And only the Master shall praise us, And only the Master shall blame; And no one shall work for money, And no one shall work for Fame: But each for the joy of the working; And each in his separate star Shall draw the thing as he sees it For the God of Things as They are!” </div> </div></div> “Bully!” cried Bonnat. “Your dramatic training was not lost. Only one thing—” “What?” He put his two hands on my shoulders, and gave me a friendly little shake and hug: “You—lithp!” (lisp) he said.{276} Before I could protest at that deadly insult he took my hands and squeezed them hard, and he said: “I believe we speak the same language after all. We think it, anyway, don’t we?{277}” <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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