Fenwicks Career | Page 8

the school library he found Shakespeare
and Chaucer, 'Morte d'Arthur' and 'Don Quixote,' fresh and endless
material for his drawing, which never stopped. Drawing
everywhere--on his books and slates, on doors and gate-posts, or on the
whitewashed wall of the old Tudor school-room, where a hunt, drawn
with a burned stick, and gloriously dominating the whole room, had
provoked the indulgence, even the praise, of the headmaster.
And the old drawing-master!--a German--half blind, though he would
never confess it--who dabbled in oil-painting, and let the boy watch his
methods. How he would twirl his dirty brush round and dab down a
lump of Prussian blue, imagining it to be sepia, hastily correcting it a
moment afterwards with a lump of lake, and then say chuckling to
himself: 'By Gode, dat is fine!--dat is very nearly a good purple.
Fenwick, my boy, mark me--you vill not find a good purple no-vere!
Some-vere--in de depths of Japanese art--dere is a good purple. Dat I
believe. But not in Europe. Ve Europeans are all tam fools. But I vill
not svear!--no!--you onderstand, Fenwick; you haf never heard me
svear?' And then a round oath, smothered in a hasty fit of coughing.
And once he had cut off part of the skirt of his Sunday coat, taking it in
his blindness for an old one, to clean his palette with; and it was
thought, by the boys, that it was the unseemly result of this rash act, as
disclosed at church the following Sunday morning, which had led to the
poor old man's dismissal.
But from him John had learnt a good deal about
oil-painting--something too of anatomy--though more of this last from
that old book--Albinus, was it?--that he had found in his father's stock.
He could see himself lying on the floor--poring over the old plates,
morning, noon, and night--then using a little lad, his father's apprentice,
to examine him in what he had learnt--the two going about
arm-in-arm--Backhouse asking the questions according to a paper
drawn up by John--'How many heads to the deltoid?'--and so on--over
and over again--and with what an eagerness, what an ardour!--till the
brain was bursting and the hand quivering with new knowledge--and

the power to use it. Then Leonardo's 'Art of Painting' and Reynolds's
Discourses'--both discovered in the shop, and studied incessantly, till
the boy of eighteen felt himself the peer of any Academician, and
walked proudly down the Kendal streets, thinking of the half-finished
paintings in his garret at home, and of the dreams, the conceptions, the
ambitions of which that garret had already been the scene.
After that--some evil days! Quarrels with his father, refusals to be
bound to the trade, to accept the shop as his whole future and
inheritance--painful scenes with the old man, and with the customers
who complained of the son's rudeness and inattention--attempts of
relations to mediate between the two, and all the time his own burning
belief in himself and passion to be free. And at last a time of truce, of
conditions made and accepted--the opening of the new Art
School--evenings of delightful study there--and, suddenly, out of the
mists, Phoebe's brown eyes, and Phoebe's soft encouragement!
Yes, it was Phoebe, Phoebe herself who had determined his career; let
her consider that, when he asked for sacrifices! But for the balm she
had poured upon his sore ambitions--but for those long walks and talks,
in which she had been to him first the mere recipient of his dreams and
egotisms, and then--since she had the loveliest eyes, and a young wild
charm--a creature to be hotly wooed and desired, he might never have
found courage enough to seize upon his fate.
For her sake indeed he had dared it all. She had consoled and inspired
him; but she had made the breach with his father final. When they met
she was only a struggling teacher in Miss Mason's school, the daughter
of a small farmer in the Vale of Keswick. Old Fenwick looked much
higher for his son. So there was renewed battle at home, till at last a
couple of portrait commissions from a big house near Kendal clinched
the matter. A hurried marriage had been followed by the usual parental
thunders. And now they had five years to look back upon, years of love
and struggle and discontent. By turning his hand to many things,
Fenwick had just managed to keep the wolf from the door. He had
worked hard, but without much success; and what had been an ordinary
good opinion of himself had stiffened into a bitter self-assertion. He

knew very well that he was regarded as a conceited, quarrelsome fellow,
and rather gloried in it. The world, he considered, had so far treated
him ill; he would at any rate keep his individuality.
Phoebe, too,