The Real Thing and Other Tales

“We might have brought some, my dear,” her husband remarked.

“I’m not sure we have any left.  We’ve given quantities away,” she explained to me.

“With our autographs and that sort of thing,” said the Major.

“Are they to be got in the shops?” I inquired, as a harmless pleasantry.

“Oh, yes; hers—they used to be.”

“Not now,” said Mrs. Monarch, with her eyes on the floor.

II

I could fancy the “sort of thing” they put on the presentation-copies of their photographs, and I was sure they wrote a beautiful hand.  It was odd how quickly I was sure of everything that concerned them.  If they were now so poor as to have to earn shillings and pence, they never had had much of a margin.  Their good looks had been their capital, and they had good-humouredly made the most of the career that this resource marked out for them.  It was in their faces, the blankness, the deep intellectual repose of the twenty years of country-house visiting which had given them pleasant intonations.  I could see the sunny drawing-rooms, sprinkled with periodicals she didn’t read, in which Mrs. Monarch had continuously sat; I could see the wet shrubberies in which she had walked, equipped to admiration for either exercise.  I could see the rich covers the Major had helped to shoot and the wonderful garments in which, late at night, he repaired to the smoking-room to talk about them.  I could imagine their leggings and waterproofs, their knowing tweeds and rugs, their rolls of sticks and cases of tackle and neat umbrellas; and I could evoke the exact appearance of their servants and the compact variety of their luggage on the platforms of country stations.

They gave small tips, but they were liked; they didn’t do anything themselves, but they were welcome.  They looked so well everywhere; they gratified the general relish for stature, complexion and “form.”  They knew it without fatuity or vulgarity, and they respected themselves in consequence.  They were not superficial; they were thorough and kept themselves up—it had been their line.  People with such a taste for activity had to have some line.  I could feel how, even in a dull house, they could have been counted upon for cheerfulness.  At present something had happened—it didn’t matter what, their little income had grown less, it had grown least—and they had to do something for pocket-money.  Their friends liked them, but didn’t like to support them.  There was something about them that represented credit—their clothes, their manners, their type; but if credit is a large empty pocket in which an occasional chink reverberates, the chink at least must be audible.  What they wanted of me was to help to make it so.  Fortunately they had no children—I soon divined that.  They would also perhaps wish our relations to be kept secret: this was why it was “for the figure”—the reproduction of the face would betray them.

I liked them—they were so simple; and I had no objection to them if they would suit.  But, somehow, with all their perfections I didn’t easily believe in them.  After all they were amateurs, and the ruling passion of my life was the detestation of the amateur.  Combined with this was another perversity—an innate preference for the represented subject over the real one: the defect of the real one was so apt to be a lack of representation.  I liked things that appeared; then one was sure.  Whether they were or not was a subordinate and almost always a profitless question.  There were other considerations, the first of which was that I already had two or three people in use, notably a young person with big feet, in alpaca, from Kilburn, who for a couple of years had come to me regularly for my illustrations and with whom I was still—perhaps ignobly—satisfied.  I frankly explained to my visitors how the case stood; but they had taken more precautions than I supposed.  They had reasoned out their opportunity, for Claude Rivet had told them of the projected édition de luxe of one of the writers of our day—the rarest of the novelists—who, long neglected by the multitudinous vulgar and dearly prized by the attentive (need I mention Philip Vincent?) had had the happy fortune of seeing, late in life, the dawn and then the full light of a higher criticism—an estimate in which, on the part of the public, there was something really of expiation.  The edition in question, planned by a publisher of taste, was practically an act of high reparation; the wood-cuts with which it was to be enriched were the homage of English art to one of the most independent representatives of English letters.  Major and Mrs. Monarch confessed to me that they had hoped I might be able to work them into my share of the enterprise.  They knew I was to do the first of the books, “Rutland Ramsay,” but I had to make clear to them that my participation in the rest of the affair—this first book was to be a test—was to depend on the satisfaction I should give.  If this should be limited my employers would drop me without a scruple.  It was therefore a crisis for me, and naturally I was making special preparations, looking about for new people, if they should be necessary, and securing the best types.  I admitted however that I should like to settle down to two or three good models who would do for everything.

“Should we have often to—a—put on special clothes?” Mrs. Monarch timidly demanded.

“Dear, yes—that’s half the business.”

“And should we be expected to supply our own costumes?”

“Oh, no; I’ve got a lot of things.  A painter’s models put on—or put off—anything he likes.”

“And do you mean—a—the same?”

“The same?”

Mrs. Monarch looked at her husband again.

“Oh, she was just wondering,” he explained, “if the costumes are in general use.”  I had to confess that they were, and I mentioned further that some of them (I had a lot of genuine, greasy last-century things), had served their time, a hundred years ago, on living, world-stained men and women.  “We’ll put on anything that fits,” said the Major.

“Oh, I arrange that—they fit in the pictures.”

“I’m afraid I should do better for the modern books.  I would come as you like,” said Mrs. Monarch.

“She has got a lot of clothes at home: they might do for contemporary life,” her husband continued.

“Oh, I can fancy scenes in which you’d be quite natural.”  And indeed I could see the slipshod rearrangements of stale properties—the stories I tried to produce pictures for without the exasperation of reading them—whose sandy tracts the good lady might help to people.  But I had to return to the fact that for this sort of work—the daily mechanical grind—I was already equipped; the people I was working with were fully adequate.

“We only thought we might be more like some characters,” said Mrs. Monarch mildly, getting up.

Her husband also rose; he stood looking at me with a dim wistfulness that was touching in so fine a man.  “Wouldn’t it be rather a pull sometimes to have—a—to have—?”  He hung fire; he wanted me to help him by phrasing what he meant.  But I couldn’t—I didn’t know.  So he brought it out, awkwardly: “The real thing; a gentleman, you know, or a lady.”  I was quite ready to give a general assent—I admitted that there was a great deal in that.  This encouraged Major Monarch to say, following up his appeal with an unacted gulp: “It’s awfully hard—we’ve tried everything.”  The gulp was communicative; it proved too much for his wife.  Before I knew it Mrs. Monarch had dropped again upon a divan and burst into tears.  Her husband sat down beside her, holding one of her hands; whereupon she quickly dried her eyes with the other, while I felt embarrassed as she looked up at me.  “There isn’t a confounded job I haven’t applied for—waited for—prayed for.  You can fancy we’d be pretty bad first.  Secretaryships and that sort of thing?  You might as well ask for a peerage.  I’d be anything—I’m strong; a messenger or a coalheaver.  I’d put on a gold-laced cap and open carriage-doors in front of the haberdasher’s; I’d hang about a station, to carry portmanteaus; I’d be a postman.  But they won’t look at you; there are thousands, as good as yourself, already on the ground.  Gentlemen, poor beggars, who have drunk their wine, who have kept their hunters!”

I was as reassuring as I knew how to be, and my visitors were presently on their feet again while, for the experiment, we agreed on an hour.  We were discussing it when the door opened and Miss Churm came in with a wet umbrella.  Miss Churm had to take the omnibus to Maida Vale and then walk half-a-mile.  She looked a trifle blowsy and slightly splashed.  I scarcely ever saw her come in without thinking afresh how odd it was that, being so little in herself, she should yet be so much in others.  She was a meagre little Miss Churm, but she was an ample heroine of romance.  She was only a freckled cockney, but she could represent everything, from a fine lady to a shepherdess; she had the faculty, as she might have had a fine voice or long hair.

She couldn’t spell, and she loved beer, but she had two or three “points,” and practice, and a knack, and mother-wit, and a kind of whimsical sensibility, and a love of the theatre, and seven sisters, and not an ounce of respect, especially for the h.  The first thing my visitors saw was that her umbrella was wet, and in their spotless perfection they visibly winced at it.  The rain had come on since their arrival.

“I’m all in a soak; there was a mess of people in the ’bus.  I wish you lived near a stytion,” said Miss Churm.  I requested her to get ready as quickly as possible, and she passed into the room in which she always changed her dress.  But before going out she asked me what she was to get into this time.

“It’s the Russian princess, don’t you know?” I answered; “the one with the ‘golden eyes,’ in black velvet, for the long thing in the Cheapside.”

“Golden eyes?  I say!” cried Miss Churm, while my companions watched her with intensity as she withdrew.  She always arranged herself, when she was late, before I could turn round; and I kept my visitors a little, on purpose, so that they might get an idea, from seeing her, what would be expected of themselves.  I mentioned that she was quite my notion of an excellent model—she was really very clever.

“Do you think she looks like a Russian princess?” Major Monarch asked, with lurking alarm.

“When I make her, yes.”

“Oh, if you have to make her—!” he reasoned, acutely.

“That’s the most you can ask.  There are so many that are not makeable.”

“Well now, here’s a lady”—and with a persuasive smile he passed his arm into his wife’s—“who’s already made!”

“Oh, I’m not a Russian princess,” Mrs. Monarch protested, a little coldly.  I could see that she had known some and didn’t like them.  There, immediately, was a complication of a kind that I never had to fear with Miss Churm.

This young lady came back in black velvet—the gown was rather rusty and very low on her lean shoulders—and with a Japanese fan in her red hands.  I reminded her that in the scene I was doing she had to look over someone’s head.  “I forget whose it is; but it doesn’t matter.  Just look over a head.”

“I’d rather look over a stove,” said Miss Churm; and she took her station near the fire.  She fell into position, settled herself into a tall attitude, gave a certain backward inclination to her head and a certain forward droop to her fan, and looked, at least to my prejudiced sense, distinguished and charming, foreign and dangerous.  We left her looking so, while I went down-stairs with Major and Mrs. Monarch.

“I think I could come about as near it as that,” said Mrs. Monarch.

“Oh, you think she’s shabby, but you must allow for the alchemy of art.”

However, they went off with an evident increase of comfort, founded on their demonstrable advantage in being the real thing.  I could fancy them shuddering over Miss Churm.  She was very droll about them when I went back, for I told her what they wanted.

“Well, if she can sit I’ll tyke to bookkeeping,” said my model.

“She’s very lady-like,” I replied, as an innocent form of aggravation.

“So much the worse for you.  That means she can’t turn round.”

“She’ll do for the fashionable novels.”

“Oh yes, she’ll do for them!” my model humorously declared.  “Ain’t they had enough without her?” I had often sociably denounced them to Miss Churm.

III

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 she was away from him his occupation was gone—she never had been away from him.  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 bear them with his wife—he couldn’t bear them without her.

He had too much tact to try and make himself agreeable when he couldn’t be useful; so he simply sat and waited, when I was too absorbed in my work to talk.  But I liked to make him talk—it made my work, when it didn’t interrupt it, less sordid, 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 I seemed not to know any of the people he and his wife 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 good 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 I could see that he thought many of my arrangements not half clever enough.  I remember telling him that if I were only rich I would offer him a salary to come and teach me how to live.  Sometimes he gave a random sigh, of which the essence was: “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 if she were 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 lady-like 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 few times 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, was only a question of placing her.  I placed her in every conceivable position, but 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 was oppressed by 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, in my pictures, came out 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.