"Carton-pierre?" Paul was struck, and gaped.

"Lincrusta-Walton!"

"Ah don't say such things--you make me bleed!" the younger man protested.

"I see you in a beautiful fortunate home, living in comfort and honour."

"Do you call it honour?"--his host took him up with an intonation that often comes back to him. "That's what I want _you_ to go in for. I mean the real thing. This is brummagem."

"Brummagem?" Paul e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed while his eyes wandered, by a movement natural at the moment, over the luxurious room.

"Ah they make it so well to-day--it's wonderfully deceptive!"

Our friend thrilled with the interest and perhaps even more with the pity of it. Yet he wasn't afraid to seem to patronise when he could still so far envy. "Is it deceptive that I find you living with every appearance of domestic felicity--blest with a devoted, accomplished wife, with children whose acquaintance I haven't yet had the pleasure of making, but who _must_ be delightful young people, from what I know of their parents?"

St. George smiled as for the candour of his question. "It's all excellent, my dear fellow--heaven forbid I should deny it. I've made a great deal of money; my wife has known how to take care of it, to use it without wasting it, to put a good bit of it by, to make it fructify. I've got a loaf on the shelf; I've got everything in fact but the great thing."

"The great thing?" Paul kept echoing.

"The sense of having done the best--the sense which is the real life of the artist and the absence of which is his death, of having drawn from his intellectual instrument the finest music that nature had hidden in it, of having played it as it should be played. He either does that or he doesn't--and if he doesn't he isn't worth speaking of. Therefore, precisely, those who really know _don't_ speak of him. He may still hear a great chatter, but what he hears most is the incorruptible silence of Fame. I've squared her, you may say, for my little hour--but what's my little hour? Don't imagine for a moment," the Master pursued, "that I'm such a cad as to have brought you down here to abuse or to complain of my wife to you. She's a woman of distinguished qualities, to whom my obligations are immense; so that, if you please, we'll say nothing about her. My boys--my children are all boys--are straight and strong, thank G.o.d, and have no poverty of growth about them, no penury of needs. I receive periodically the most satisfactory attestation from Harrow, from Oxford, from Sandhurst--oh we've done the best for them!--of their eminence as living thriving consuming organisms."

"It must be delightful to feel that the son of one's loins is at Sandhurst," Paul remarked enthusiastically.

"It is--it's charming. Oh I'm a patriot!"

The young man then could but have the greater tribute of questions to pay. "Then what did you mean--the other night at Summersoft--by saying that children are a curse?"

"My dear youth, on what basis are we talking?" and St. George dropped upon the sofa at a short distance from him. Sitting a little sideways he leaned back against the opposite arm with his hands raised and interlocked behind his head. "On the supposition that a certain perfection's possible and even desirable--isn't it so? Well, all I say is that one's children interfere with perfection. One's wife interferes.

Marriage interferes."

"You think then the artist shouldn't marry?"

"He does so at his peril--he does so at his cost."

"Not even when his wife's in sympathy with his work?"

"She never is--she can't be! Women haven't a conception of such things."

"Surely they on occasion work themselves," Paul objected.

"Yes, very badly indeed. Oh of course, often, they think they understand, they think they sympathise. Then it is they're most dangerous. Their idea is that you shall do a great lot and get a great lot of money. Their great n.o.bleness and virtue, their exemplary conscientiousness as British females, is in keeping you up to that. My wife makes all my bargains with my publishers for me, and has done so for twenty years. She does it consummately well--that's why I'm really pretty well off. Aren't you the father of their innocent babes, and will you withhold from them their natural sustenance? You asked me the other night if they're not an immense incentive. Of course they are--there's no doubt of that!"

Paul turned it over: it took, from eyes he had never felt open so wide, so much looking at. "For myself I've an idea I need incentives."

"Ah well then, n'en parlons plus!" his companion handsomely smiled.

"_You_ are an incentive, I maintain," the young man went on. "You don't affect me in the way you'd apparently like to. Your great success is what I see--the pomp of Ennismore Gardens!"

"Success?"--St. George's eyes had a cold fine light. "Do you call it success to be spoken of as you'd speak of me if you were sitting here with another artist--a young man intelligent and sincere like yourself?

Do you call it success to make you blush--as you would blush!--if some foreign critic (some fellow, of course I mean, who should know what he was talking about and should have shown you he did, as foreign critics like to show it) were to say to you: 'He's the one, in this country, whom they consider the most perfect, isn't he?' Is it success to be the occasion of a young Englishman's having to stammer as you would have to stammer at such a moment for old England? No, no; success is to have made people wriggle to another tune. Do try it!"

Paul continued all gravely to glow. "Try what?"

"Try to do some really good work."

"Oh I want to, heaven knows!"

"Well, you can't do it without sacrifices--don't believe that for a moment," the Master said. "I've made none. I've had everything. In other words I've missed everything."

"You've had the full rich masculine human general life, with all the responsibilities and duties and burdens and sorrows and joys--all the domestic and social initiations and complications. They must be immensely suggestive, immensely amusing," Paul anxiously submitted.

"Amusing?"

"For a strong man--yes."

"They've given me subjects without number, if that's what you mean; but they've taken away at the same time the power to use them. I've touched a thousand things, but which one of them have I turned into gold? The artist has to do only with that--he knows nothing of any baser metal.

I've led the life of the world, with my wife and my progeny; the clumsy conventional expensive materialised vulgarised brutalised life of London.

We've got everything handsome, even a carriage--we're perfect Philistines and prosperous hospitable eminent people. But, my dear fellow, don't try to stultify yourself and pretend you don't know what we _haven't_ got.

It's bigger than all the rest. Between artists--come!" the Master wound up. "You know as well as you sit there that you'd put a pistol-ball into your brain if you had written my books!"

It struck his listener that the tremendous talk promised by him at Summersoft had indeed come off, and with a prompt.i.tude, a fulness, with which the latter's young imagination had scarcely reckoned. His impression fairly shook him and he throbbed with the excitement of such deep soundings and such strange confidences. He throbbed indeed with the conflict of his feelings--bewilderment and recognition and alarm, enjoyment and protest and a.s.sent, all commingled with tenderness (and a kind of shame in the partic.i.p.ation) for the sores and bruises exhibited by so fine a creature, and with a sense of the tragic secret nursed under his trappings. The idea of _his_, Paul Overt's, becoming the occasion of such an act of humility made him flush and pant, at the same time that his consciousness was in certain directions too much alive not to swallow--and not intensely to taste--every offered spoonful of the revelation. It had been his odd fortune to blow upon the deep waters, to make them surge and break in waves of strange eloquence. But how couldn't he give out a pa.s.sionate contradiction of his host's last extravagance, how couldn't he enumerate to him the parts of his work he loved, the splendid things he had found in it, beyond the compa.s.s of any other writer of the day? St. George listened a while, courteously; then he said, laying his hand on his visitor's: "That's all very well; and if your idea's to do nothing better there's no reason you shouldn't have as many good things as I--as many human and material appendages, as many sons or daughters, a wife with as many gowns, a house with as many servants, a stable with as many horses, a heart with as many aches." The Master got up when he had spoken thus--he stood a moment--near the sofa looking down on his agitated pupil. "Are you possessed of any property?"

it occurred to him to ask.

"None to speak of."

"Oh well then there's no reason why you shouldn't make a goodish income--if you set about it the right way. Study _me_ for that--study me well. You may really have horses."

Paul sat there some minutes without speaking. He looked straight before him--he turned over many things. His friend had wandered away, taking up a parcel of letters from the table where the roll of proofs had lain.

"What was the book Mrs. St. George made you burn--the one she didn't like?" our young man brought out.

"The book she made me burn--how did you know that?" The Master looked up from his letters quite without the facial convulsion the pupil had feared.

"I heard her speak of it at Summersoft."

"Ah yes--she's proud of it. I don't know--it was rather good."

"What was it about?"

"Let me see." And he seemed to make an effort to remember. "Oh yes--it was about myself." Paul gave an irrepressible groan for the disappearance of such a production, and the elder man went on: "Oh but _you_ should write it--_you_ should do me." And he pulled up--from the restless motion that had come upon him; his fine smile a generous glare.

"There's a subject, my boy: no end of stuff in it!"

Again Paul was silent, but it was all tormenting. "Are there no women who really understand--who can take part in a sacrifice?"

"How can they take part? They themselves are the sacrifice. They're the idol and the altar and the flame."

"Isn't there even _one_ who sees further?" Paul continued.

For a moment St. George made no answer; after which, having torn up his letters, he came back to the point all ironic. "Of course I know the one you mean. But not even Miss Fancourt."