Page:How I Attended a Nervous Patient.pdf/4

324 not to have assimilated a little of the jargon; and as I took a roll of tape-strapping from my bag and proceeded to truss up the ankle, I turned the conversation into what I imagined was a congenial topic. But he either resented my talking shop, or else the pain of his ankle made him irritable. Anyhow, he was clearly uncomfortable, especially when I ventured a joke on the extraordinary cleanliness of his brushes, which stood in a tall jar on the mantelpiece as rustless a sheaf as if they had just left the makers. As I rose and stretched myself after bending over the ankle, I took care to make no similar remark as to a spotless palette hanging opposite me; it seemed every whit as clean as the brushes, and bore none of that peculiar gloss which follows repeated washings of paint. But although determined to be careful what I said, I nevertheless had a good look round the room. It struck me as an odd thing that a stock of unused canvases should be all of one size. Was he, I thought, a manufacturer of potboilers by the square foot? I turned to half a dozen finished pictures standing round the walls, and noted that they were all landscapes; but, curiously enough, everyone of them was in a totally different style.

"Your own work?" I queried.

"Yes!" came the abrupt answer. Smithson, without being exactly a genius, was certainly a very versatile painter. For instance, I never saw so many different ways of treating skies from the same hand, and the odd thing was that a sea-piece which really might have passed for an unknown work of Stanfield's stood next to a positive atrocity, which the conductor of a cheap illustrated paper would have hesitated to foist upon the public at Christmas time; indeed, it was the very outrageousness of the latter which threw the peculiar merit of its neighbour into such prominence, and led me to the most astonishing discovery I made in this truly astonishing studio. It arose in this way. Some two or three weeks before I came down to Borleywood, after paying a visit to Adamson, the medical agent, and returning along the Strand with nothing particular to do, I ran against Havery, similarly situated. We presently stopped outside a picture dealer's, where Havery must needs illustrate his usual growl at the crassness of the public taste by the lamentable exhibition of "art" in the window. He was good enough to omit one picture from his censure, and taking it in detail point by point, expatiated on the merits of open-air work and the "Newlyn stroke," to which he carefully drew my attention. All this came back to me as I gazed, for there, staring me in the face, was the self-same canvas, "Newlyn stroke" and all! Havery had identified the signature—that of a quite unknown man, but destined, he said, for great things in the future if he survived so long—and I searched eagerly for it in the corner. As I might have expected, it had disappeared, but its former position was clearly shown where it had been daubed over with a splash of "art enamel," and, as I lived, the same clumsy trick had been played upon every one of the pictures I was near enough to inspect.

"You like that?"

I started at the question, managed to blurt out, "Oh, very much—very nice indeed!" and sat down without knowing exactly what to do or say next. I think I made some irrelevant remark in a desperate attempt to regain my composure, but all I remember with any clearness is that the conversation, which was really a monologue on the artist's part, somehow drifted round to foreign travel, and for the first time he seemed to be entirely at his ease. But this mood was a very passing one; he was talking of the South of France, Switzerland, and then Italy, when I interjected a remark about Sassoferrato. Instantly his manner changed; he was obviously perturbed, and the fluent speech became a stutter tinged at once with that unmistakable foreign accent. One would have almost thought he had never heard the name before. And Sassoferrato, too, whose pictures are to be found in nearly every church and gallery in Italy! The situation was really too absurd. As I rose to go I question which of us was the more embarrassed; but as for myself, I am certain that a more awkward exit was never made by a novice in the art of leaving a patient.

"Have I been long?" I asked Trevatt as we drove away.

"Not so very long, sir," was the diplomatic reply, deftly flicking the cob on the neck as the latter resumed his castanet exercise.

Two new patients, and each a greater mystery than the other, I reflected.

The next day, and daily for a week, I visited the schoolmaster, and either because of my treatment or in spite of it he rapidly mended, regaining the calm suavity