Armour turned round and saw me--that I was a stranger.
He got up at once. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I thought it was Rosario.
‘It isn’t,’ I replied, ‘my name is Philips. May I ask whether you were expecting Mr. Rosario? I can come again, you know.’
‘Oh, it doesn’t matter. Sit down. He may drop in or he may not--I rather thought he would today. It’s a pull up, isn’t it, from the Mall? Have a whisky and soda.’
I stood on the threshold spellbound. It was just the smell that bound me, the good old smell of oil paints and turpentine and mediums and varnish and new canvas that you never by any chance put your nose into in any part of Asia. It carried me back twenty years to old haunts, old friends, old joys, ideals, theories. Ah, to be young and have a temperament! For I had one then--that instant in Armour’s veranda proved it to me forever.
‘No thanks,’ I said. ‘If you don’t mind I’ll just have the smell.’
The young fellow knew at once that I liked the smell. ‘Well, have a chair, anyhow,’ he said, and took one himself and sat down opposite me, letting his lean brown hands fall between his knees.
‘Do you mind,’ I said, ‘if for a minute I sit still and look round?’
‘I haven’t brought much,’ he said, ‘I left pretty near everything in Paris.’
‘You have brought a world.’ Then after a moment, ‘Did you do that?’ I asked, nodding towards a canvas tacked against the wall. It was the head of a half-veiled Arab woman turned away.
The picture was in the turning away, and the shadow the head-covering made over the cheek and lips.
‘Lord, no! That’s Dagnan Bouveret. I used to take my things to him, and one day he gave me that. You have an eye,’ he added, but without patronage. ‘It’s the best thing I’ve got.’
‘Once upon a time,’ I said, ‘I was allowed to have an eye.’ The wine, untasted all those years, went to my head. ‘That’s a vigorous bit above,’ I continued.
‘Oh, well! It isn’t really up to much, you know. It’s Rosario’s. He photographs mostly, but he has a notion of colour.’
‘Really?’ said I, thinking with regard to my eye that the sun of that atrocious country had put it out. ‘I expect I’ve lost it,’ I said aloud.
‘Your eye? Oh, you’ll easily get a fresh one. Do you go home for the exhibitions?’
‘I did once,’ I confessed. ‘My first leave. A kind of paralysis overtakes one here. Last time I went for the grouse.’