Page:The Yellow Book - 04.djvu/120

1O4 with a fine vermilion point in their corners, the result, as I insisted, of his dipping locks of hair.

With a choice of reasons for his coming, I was yet surprised when he came, late one evening, and having whistled the opening bars of Chopin's "Dirge of Poland" below my seventh-floor window, decoyed me to the roadway, and described his first visit to the studio of Dufour in the Rue de Vaugirard.

Out of mere curiosity we had wandered to the number, one afternoon after the reception of the letter; and I well remembered the living stench of the impasse, the dead trails of an enterprising Virginia creeper, the broken mass of plaster casts which sufficiently located a young sculptor near at hand, and the cracked Moorish lamp which lay upon its side in the half-choked drain. All we had seen of the studio's furnishings was the silk-threaded back of a magnificent curtain which blocked an upper square of lights; but I knew that inside all must be on a much greater scale of artistic beauty than the queer, draughty barns of art-student friends, where I often juggled with a cup of tea—tea produced from a corner shrouded modestly in the green canvas covering of a French waggon and the dusty, bellying folds of a brown fishing-net. I was now to hear from Wladislaw what the interior was really like; how the great Dufour appeared when seen from the front instead of the rear, so to say, and upon what terms the negotiations were begun.

A certain indecisiveness in Wladislaw's painting was reflected in his conversation: he never could describe anything. Perhaps this is to do him an injustice; I would rather say that he had no idea of giving a detailed description. By whiles you might get a flash equivalent to one of his illuminative brush-strokes, which was very certain to be an unsurpassable appreciation of the fact or the circumstances; but bid him begin at the beginning and go