The Real Thing | Page 9

an encouragement
to the hesitating, a nut for pessimists to crack. Their address was
humble (I remember afterwards thinking it had been the only thing
about them that was really professional), and I could fancy the
lamentable lodgings in which the Major would have been left alone. He
could bear them with his wife--he couldn't bear them without her.
He had too much tact to try and make himself agreeable when he
couldn't be useful; so he simply sat and waited, when I was too
absorbed in my work to talk. But I liked to make him talk--it made my
work, when it didn't interrupt it, less sordid, less special. To listen to
him was to combine the excitement of going out with the economy of
staying at home. There was only one hindrance: that I seemed not to
know any of the people he and his wife had known. I think he
wondered extremely, during the term of our intercourse, whom the
deuce I DID know. He hadn't a stray sixpence of an idea to fumble for;
so we didn't spin it very fine--we confined ourselves to questions of
leather and even of liquor (saddlers and breeches-makers and how to
get good claret cheap), and matters like "good trains" and the habits of
small game. His lore on these last subjects was astonishing, he
managed to interweave the station-master with the ornithologist. When
he couldn't talk about greater things he could talk cheerfully about
smaller, and since I couldn't accompany him into reminiscences of the
fashionable world he could lower the conversation without a visible
effort to my level.
So earnest a desire to please was touching in a man who could so easily

have knocked one down. He looked after the fire and had an opinion on
the draught of the stove, without my asking him, and I could see that he
thought many of my arrangements not half clever enough. I remember
telling him that if I were only rich I would offer him a salary to come
and teach me how to live. Sometimes he gave a random sigh, of which
the essence was: "Give me even such a bare old barrack as THIS, and
I'd do something with it!" When I wanted to use him he came alone;
which was an illustration of the superior courage of women. His wife
could bear her solitary second floor, and she was in general more
discreet; showing by various small reserves that she was alive to the
propriety of keeping our relations markedly professional--not letting
them slide into sociability. She wished it to remain clear that she and
the Major were employed, not cultivated, and if she approved of me as
a superior, who could be kept in his place, she never thought me quite
good enough for an equal.
She sat with great intensity, giving the whole of her mind to it, and was
capable of remaining for an hour almost as motionless as if she were
before a photographer's lens. I could see she had been photographed
often, but somehow the very habit that made her good for that purpose
unfitted her for mine. At first I was extremely pleased with her
lady-like air, and it was a satisfaction, on coming to follow her lines, to
see how good they were and how far they could lead the pencil. But
after a few times I began to find her too insurmountably stiff; do what I
would with it my drawing looked like a photograph or a copy of a
photograph. Her figure had no variety of expression--she herself had no
sense of variety. You may say that this was my business, was only a
question of placing her. I placed her in every conceivable position, but
she managed to obliterate their differences. She was always a lady
certainly, and into the bargain was always the same lady. She was the
real thing, but always the same thing. There were moments when I was
oppressed by the serenity of her confidence that she WAS the real thing.
All her dealings with me and all her husband's were an implication that
this was lucky for ME. Meanwhile I found myself trying to invent
types that approached her own, instead of making her own transform
itself-- in the clever way that was not impossible, for instance, to poor
Miss Churm. Arrange as I would and take the precautions I would, she
always, in my pictures, came out too tall--landing me in the dilemma of

having represented a fascinating woman as seven feet high, which, out
of respect perhaps to my own very much scantier inches, was far from
my idea of such a personage.
The case was worse with the Major--nothing I could do would keep
HIM down, so that he