Free Collected Stories by Willa Cather Page B

were stealing back into the fold of national British art; the hand that had wound them up was still. MacMaster despaired of them and confined himself more and more exclusively to the studio, to such of Treffinger’s letters as were available—they were for the most part singularly negative and colourless—and to his interrogation of Treffinger’s man.
    He could not himself have traced the successive steps by which he was gradually admitted into James’s confidence. Certainly most of his adroit strategies to that end failed humiliatingly, and whatever it was that built up an understanding between them, must have been instinctive and intuitive on both sides. When at last James became anecdotal, personal, there was that in every word he let fall which put breath and blood into MacMaster’s book. James had so long been steeped in that penetrating personality that he fairly exuded it. Many of his phrases, mannerisms and opinions were impressions that he had taken on like wet plaster in his daily contact with Treffinger. Inwardly he was lined with cast off epithelia, as outwardly he was clad in the painter’s discarded coats. If the painter’s letters were formal and perfunctory, if his expressions to his friends had been extravagant, contradictory and often apparently insincere—still, MacMaster felt himself not entirely without authentic sources. It was James who possessed Treffinger’s legend; it was with James that he had laid aside his pose. Only in his studio, alone, and face to face with his work, as it seemed, had the man invariably been himself. James had known him in the one attitude in which he was entirely honest; their relation had fallen well within the painter’s only indubitable integrity. James’s report of Treffinger was distorted by no hallucination of artistic insight, coloured by no interpretation of his own. He merely held what he had heard and seen; his mind was a sort of camera obscura. His very limitations made him the more literal and minutely accurate.
    One morning when MacMaster was seated before the
Marriage of Phædra,
James entered on his usual round of dusting.
    “I’ve ’eard from Lydy Elling by the post, sir,” he remarked, “an’ she’s give h’orders to ’ave the ’ouse put in readiness. I doubt she’ll be ’ere by Thursday or Friday next.”
    “She spends most of her time abroad?” queried MacMaster; on the subject of Lady Treffinger James consistently maintained a very delicate reserve.
    “Well, you could ’ardly say she does that, sir. She finds the ’ouse a bit dull, I daresay, so durin’ the season she stops mostly with Lydy Mary Percy, at Grosvenor Square. Lydy Mary’s a h’only sister.” After a few moments he continued, speaking in jerks governed by the rigour of his dusting: “Honly this morning I come upon this scarf-pin,” exhibiting a very striking instance of that article, “an’ I recalled as ’ow Sir ’Ugh give it me when ’e was a-courting of Lydy Elling. Blowed if I ever see a man go in for a ’oman like ’im! ’e was that gone, sir. ’e never went in on anythink so ’ard before nor since, till ’e went in on the
Marriage
there—though ’e mostly went in on things pretty keen, ’ad the measles when ’e was thirty, strong as cholera, an’ come close to dyin’ of ’em. ’e wasn’t strong for Lydy Elling’s set; they was a bit too stiff for ’im. A free an’ easy gentleman, ’e was; ’e liked ’is dinner with a few friends an’ them jolly, but ’e wasn’t much on what you might call big affairs. But once ’e went in for Lydy Elling, ’e broke ’imself to new paces. He give away ’is rings an’ pins, an’ the tylor’s man an’ the ’abberdasher’s man was at ’is rooms continual. ’e got ’imself put up for a club in Piccadilly; ’e starved ’imself thin, an worrited ’imself white, an’ ironed ’imself out, an’ drawed ’imself tight as a bow string. It was a good job ’e come a winner, or I don’t