第13章

It was for the elucidation of a mystery in one of these works that I first tried Mrs.Monarch.Her husband came with her, to be useful if necessary--it was sufficiently clear that as a general thing he would prefer to come with her.At first I wondered if this were for "propriety's" sake--if he were going to be jealous and meddling.The idea was too tiresome, and if it had been confirmed it would speedily have brought our acquaintance to a close.But I soon saw there was nothing in it and that if he accompanied Mrs.Monarch it was--in addition to the chance of being wanted--simply because he had nothing else to do.When they were separate his occupation was gone, and they never HAD been separate.

I judged rightly that in their awkward situation their close union was their main comfort and that this union had no weak spot.It was a real marriage, an encouragement to the hesitating, a nut for pessimists to crack.Their address was humble--I remember afterwards thinking it had been the only thing about them that was really professional--and I could fancy the lamentable lodgings in which the Major would have been left alone.He could sit there more or less grimly with his wife--he couldn't sit there anyhow without her.

He had too much tact to try and make himself agreeable when he couldn't be useful; so when I was too absorbed in my work to talk he simply sat and waited.But I liked to hear him talk--it made my work, when not interrupting it, less mechanical, less special.To listen to him was to combine the excitement of going out with the economy of staying at home.There was only one hindrance--that Iseemed not to know any of the people this brilliant couple had known.I think he wondered extremely, during the term of our intercourse, whom the deuce I DID know.He hadn't a stray sixpence of an idea to fumble for, so we didn't spin it very fine; we confined ourselves to questions of leather and even of liquor-saddlers and breeches-makers and how to get excellent claret cheap--and matters like "good trains" and the habits of small game.His lore on these last subjects was astonishing--he managed to interweave the station-master with the ornithologist.When he couldn't talk about greater things he could talk cheerfully about smaller, and since I couldn't accompany him into reminiscences of the fashionable world he could lower the conversation without a visible effort to my level.

So earnest a desire to please was touching in a man who could so easily have knocked one down.He looked after the fire and had an opinion on the draught of the stove without my asking him, and Icould see that he thought many of my arrangements not half knowing.

I remember telling him that if I were only rich I'd offer him a salary to come and teach me how to live.Sometimes he gave a random sigh of which the essence might have been: "Give me even such a bare old-barrack as this, and I'd do something with it!"When I wanted to use him he came alone; which was an illustration of the superior courage of women.His wife could bear her solitary second floor, and she was in general more discreet; showing by various small reserves that she was alive to the propriety of keeping our relations markedly professional--not letting them slide into sociability.She wished it to remain clear that she and the Major were employed, not cultivated, and if she approved of me as a superior, who could be kept in his place, she never thought me quite good enough for an equal.

She sat with great intensity, giving the whole of her mind to it, and was capable of remaining for an hour almost as motionless as before a photographer's lens.I could see she had been photographed often, but somehow the very habit that made her good for that purpose unfitted her for mine.At first I was extremely pleased with her ladylike air, and it was a satisfaction, on coming to follow her lines, to see how good they were and how far they could lead the pencil.But after a little skirmishing I began to find her too insurmountably stiff; do what I would with it my drawing looked like a photograph or a copy of a photograph.Her figure had no variety of expression--she herself had no sense of variety.You may say that this was my business and was only a question of placing her.Yet I placed her in every conceivable position and she managed to obliterate their differences.She was always a lady certainly, and into the bargain was always the same lady.She was the real thing, but always the same thing.There were moments when I rather writhed under the serenity of her confidence that she WAS the real thing.All her dealings with me and all her husband's were an implication that this was lucky for ME.Meanwhile I found myself trying to invent types that approached her own, instead of making her own transform itself--in the clever way that was not impossible for instance to poor Miss Churm.Arrange as I would and take the precautions I would, she always came out, in my pictures, too tall--landing me in the dilemma of having represented a fascinating woman as seven feet high, which (out of respect perhaps to my own very much scantier inches) was far from my idea of such a personage.