Part 19 (1/2)

'Hasn't got any.'

'The undomestic life of the Nilghai, then. Of course. Ma.s.s-meeting of his wives in Trafalgar Square. That's it. They came from the ends of the earth to attend Nilghai's wedding to an English bride. This shall be an epic. It's a sweet material to work with.'

'It's a scandalous waste of time,' said Torpenhow.

'Don't worry; it keeps one's hand in--specially when you begin without the pencil.' He set to work rapidly. 'That's Nelson's Column. Presently the Nilghai will appear s.h.i.+nning up it.'

'Give him some clothes this time.'

'Certainly--a veil and an orange-wreath, because he's been married.'

'Gad, that's clever enough!' said Torpenhow over his shoulder, as d.i.c.k brought out of the paper with three twirls of the brush a very fat back and labouring shoulder pressed against stone.

'Just imagine,' d.i.c.k continued, 'if we could publish a few of these dear little things every time the Nilghai subsidises a man who can write, to give the public an honest opinion of my pictures.'

'Well, you'll admit I always tell you when I have done anything of that kind. I know I can't hammer you as you ought to be hammered, so I give the job to another. Young Maclagan, for instance----'

'No-o--one half-minute, old man; stick your hand out against the dark of the wall-paper--you only burble and call me names. That left shoulder's out of drawing. I must literally throw a veil over that. Where's my pen-knife? Well, what about Maclagan?'

'I only gave him his riding-orders to--to lambast you on general principles for not producing work that will last.'

'Whereupon that young fool,'--d.i.c.k threw back his head and shut one eye as he s.h.i.+fted the page under his hand,--'being left alone with an ink-pot and what he conceived were his own notions, went and spilt them both over me in the papers. You might have engaged a grown man for the business, Nilghai. How do you think the bridal veil looks now, Torp?'

'How the deuce do three dabs and two scratches make the stuff stand away from the body as it does?' said Torpenhow, to whom d.i.c.k's methods were always new.

'It just depends on where you put 'em. If Maclagan had know that much about his business he might have done better.'

'Why don't you put the d.a.m.ned dabs into something that will stay, then?'

insisted the Nilghai, who had really taken considerable trouble in hiring for d.i.c.k's benefit the pen of a young gentleman who devoted most of his waking hours to an anxious consideration of the aims and ends of Art, which, he wrote, was one and indivisible.

'Wait a minute till I see how I am going to manage my procession of wives. You seem to have married extensively, and I must rough 'em in with the pencil--Medes, Parthians, Edomites.... Now, setting aside the weakness and the wickedness and--and the fat-headedness of deliberately trying to do work that will live, as they call it, I'm content with the knowledge that I've done my best up to date, and I shan't do anything like it again for some hours at least--probably years. Most probably never.'

'What! any stuff you have in stock your best work?' said Torpenhow.

'Anything you've sold?' said the Nilghai.

'Oh no. It isn't here and it isn't sold. Better than that, it can't be sold, and I don't think any one knows where it is. I'm sure I don't....

And yet more and more wives, on the north side of the square. Observe the virtuous horror of the lions!'

'You may as well explain,' said Torpenhow, and d.i.c.k lifted his head from the paper.

'The sea reminded me of it,' he said slowly. 'I wish it hadn't. It weighs some few thousand tons--unless you cut it out with a cold chisel.'

'Don't be an idiot. You can't pose with us here,' said the Nilghai.

'There's no pose in the matter at all. It's a fact. I was loafing from Lima to Auckland in a big, old, condemned pa.s.senger-s.h.i.+p turned into a cargo-boat and owned by a second-hand Italian firm. She was a crazy basket. We were cut down to fifteen ton of coal a day, and we thought ourselves lucky when we kicked seven knots an hour out of her. Then we used to stop and let the bearings cool down, and wonder whether the crack in the shaft was spreading.'

'Were you a steward or a stoker in those days?'

'I was flush for the time being, so I was a pa.s.senger, or else I should have been a steward, I think,' said d.i.c.k, with perfect gravity, returning to the procession of angry wives. 'I was the only other pa.s.senger from Lima, and the s.h.i.+p was half empty, and full of rats and c.o.c.kroaches and scorpions.'