Five Nights | Page 7

which I had drawn a woman's head. As I looked at it, I knew
suddenly my power, and the Voice that is above all others said within
me: "I have made you an artist. None can undo or dispute MY work."

From that moment I cared for neither praise nor blame. The opinion of
men affected me not at all. My gift was mine, and I knew it. I held it
straight from the Divine hands. I had the Divine promise with me for as
long as I should live on this earth.
And I was filled with a boundless delight in life and my own powers.
When I showed my original pictures all painted under inspiration to my
father, he carefully put on his pince-nez and studied them very closely.
After that he said he must reserve his judgment. When they went to the
Academy and were promptly refused, he drew a long face and said I
had better have gone into the Indian Civil Service as he wished.
Subsequently, when I had sold them all, and not one for less than a
thousand guineas, he began to enter upon a placid state of contentment
with me which induced him to say to other captious relations--"Let the
boy alone, he will be an artist some day." At which I used to laugh
inwardly and go away to my studio to listen to the Divine voice
dictating fresh pictures to me. For five years in Italy I had studied
closely and worked unremittingly, keeping myself for my art alone and
existing only in it. My teachers had called me industrious. Another
phrase which always must make an artist laugh when applied to his art.
To those who know the wild pleasure, the almost mad joy of exercising
a really natural gift, it sounds as funny as to talk of a drunkard
industriously getting drunk.
However, this by the way. The world is the world, and artists are artists;
the artist may understand the world, but the world can never understand
the artist.
I was happy, life passed like a golden dream till I was twenty-two, and
my father was satisfied that I was an "industrious" student.
From twenty-two till now, when I was twenty-eight, life had opened
out into fuller colour still. My art remained the life of the soul, of all
that was best in me, but the brain and the senses had come forward,
demanding their share of recognition, too, and out of the many
coloured strands of which we can weave our web of life, I had chosen

that which gleams the next brightest to art, the strand of passion, and
woven much with that.
I had travelled, passing from country to country, city to city, finding
love and inspiration everywhere, for the world is full of both for those
who desire and look for them, and now I had come on this coasting trip
along the shores of Alaska in the same spirit, looking for pictures in the
golden atmosphere, for joy in the golden days and nights.
My sketch-book was full of ideas and jottings, and I looked forward
much to the landing at Sitka where I hoped to find new and good
material. The hopeless ugliness of the Alaskan natives had so far
appalled me. An artist chiefly of the face and figure, as I was, could not
hope to find a model amongst them. As our steamer had come up the
coast I had looked in vain for even a decent-sized woman or child
amongst them. They seem a race without a single beauty, possessing
neither stature, nor colour, nor length of hair, nor even plump
shapeliness. Undersized, leather-skinned, small-eyed, thin, and wizened,
they never seem to be young. They seem to start middle-aged and go on
growing older.
No, I had really had no luck at present on my Alaskan tour, but I was
naturally sanguine and hoped still something from Sitka.
Most capitals give you something if you visit them, and Sitka was the
capital of Alaska.
As I lay in my berth that night, made wakeful by the bright light, I was
thinking over past incidents in my life and all the Minnies and Marys
that had been connected with them. They seemed all to have been Mary
or Minnie with Marias in Italy and France. I fell asleep at last, hoping
whatever Fate had in store for me at Sitka, it wouldn't be a Mary or a
Minnie, but some new name embodying a new idea.

CHAPTER II

THE TEA-SHOP
When we landed at Sitka I went ashore with a fellow passenger. He
was a clever man, and had made trips up there already for the sake of
taking photographs of the people and the scenery; he knew Sitka well
and