'It was good of you to come,' he said, stretching out a long, thin hand to me; 'Clara has to go out, and we can have a talk. How do you like the last thing I've done?'
I lifted the drawing which was lying on the bed. It was a portrait of the woman before the glass, just as she looked now, one of the most powerful of his drawings, crueller even than usual in its insistence on the brutality of facts: the crude contrasts of bone and fat, the vulgar jaw, the brassy eyes, the reckless, conscious attitude. Every line seemed to have been drawn with hatred. I looked at Mrs. Waydelin. She had finished dressing, and she came up to the bedside to say good-bye to Peter. 'Horrid thing,' she said, nodding her head at the drawing; 'not a bit like me, is it? I assure you none of them like it at the hall. They say it doesn't do me justice. I'm sure I hope not.' I bowed and murmured something. 'Good-bye, Peter,' she said, smiling down at him in a kindly, hurried way, 'I'll come back as soon as I can,' and with a nod to me she was out of the room.
Peter drew himself slowly up in the bed, pointed to a shawl, which I wrapped round his shoulders, and then, looking at me a little defiantly, said: 'My theory, do you remember? of living the life of my models! She is a very nice woman and an excellent model, and they appreciate her very much at "Collins's"; but it appears that I have no gift for domesticity.'
I scarcely knew what to say. While I hesitated he went on: 'Don't suppose I have any illusions, or, indeed, ever had. I married that woman because I couldn't help doing it, but I knew what I was doing all the time. Have you ever been in Belgium? There is stuff they give you there to drink called Advokat, which you begin by hating, but after a time you can't get on without it. She is like Advokat.'
'You are ill, Waydelin,' I said, 'and you speak bitterly. I don't like to hear you speak like that about your wife.'
Waydelin stared at me curiously. 'So you are going to defend her against my brutality,' he said. 'I will give you every opportunity. Did you know I was married?'
'I have been married three years,' he said, 'and I never told even you. I know you did not take me at my word when I talked about how one had to live in order to paint as I painted, but I did not tell you half. I have been living, if you like to call it so, systematically, not as a stranger in a foreign country which he stares at over his Baedeker, but as like a native as I could, and with no return ticket in my pocket. Why shouldn't one be as thorough in one's life as in one's drawing? Is it possible for one to be otherwise, if one is really in earnest in either? And the odd thing is, as you will say, I didn't live in that way because I wanted to do it for my art, but something deeper than my art, a profound, low instinct, drew me to these people, to this life, without my own will having anything to do with it. My work has been much more sincere than any one suspected. It used to amuse me when the papers classed me with the Decadents of a moment, and said that I was probably living in a suburban villa, with a creeper on the front wall. I have never cared for anything but London, or in London for anything but here, or the Hampstead Road, or about the Docks. I never really chose the music-halls or the public-houses; they chose me. I made the music-halls my clubs; I lived in them, for the mere delight of the thing; I liked the glitter, false, barbarous, intoxicating, the violent animality of the whole spectacle, with its imbecile words, faces, gestures, the very heat and odour, like some concentrated odour of the human crowd, the irritant music, the audience! I went there, as I went to public-houses, as I walked about the streets at night, as I kept company with vagabonds, because there was a craving in me that I could not quiet. I fitted in theories with my facts; and that is how I came to paint my pictures.'