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The Real Thing
by
They made no response, but I was used to silent company and went on with my work, only a little disconcerted–even though exhilarated by the sense that thiswas at least the ideal thing–at not having got rid of them after all. Presently I heard Mrs. Monarch’s sweet voice beside or rather above me: “I wish her hair were a little better done.” I looked up and she was staring with a strange fixedness at Miss Churm, whose back was turned to her.”Do you mind my just touching it?” she went on–a question which made me spring up for an instant as with the instinctive fear that she might do the young lady a harm. But she quieted me with a glance I shall never forget–I confess I should like to have been able to paint that–and went for a moment to my model. She spoke to her softly, laying a hand on her shoulder and bending over her; and as the girl, understanding, gratefully assented, she disposed her rough curls, with a few quick passes, in such a way to make Miss Churm’s head twice as charming. It was one of the most heroic personal services I’ve ever seen rendered. Then Mrs. Monarch turned away with a low sign and, looking about her as if for something to do, stooped to the floor with a noble humility and picked up a dirty rag that had dropped out of my paint-box.
The Major meanwhile had also been looking for something to do, and, wandering to the other end of the studio, saw before him my breakfast-things neglected, unremoved.”I say, can’t I be useful
here?” he called out to me with an irrepressible quaver. I assented with a laugh that I fear was awkward, and for the next ten minutes, while I worked, I heard the light clatter of china and the tinkle of spoons and glass. Mrs. Monarch assisted her husband–they washed up my crockery, they put it away. They wandered off into my little scullery, and I afterwards found that they had cleaned my knives and that my slender stock of plate had an unprecedented surface. When it came over me, the latent eloquence of what they were doing, I confess that my drawing was blurred for a moment–the picture swam. They had accepted their failure, but they couldn’t accept their fate. They had bowed their heads in bewilderment to the perverse and cruel law in virtue of which the real thing could be so much less precious than the unreal; but they didn’t want to starve. If my servants were my models; then my models might be my servants. They would reverse the parts–the others would sit for the ladies and gentlemen and theywould do the work. They would still be in the studio–it was an intense dumb appeal to me not to turn them out.”Take us on,” they wanted to say–“we’ll do anything.”
My pencil dropped from my hand; my sitting was spoiled and I got rid of my sitters, who were also evidently rather mystified and awestruck. Then, alone with the Major and his wife I had a most uncomfortable moment. He put their prayer into a single sentence: “I say, you know–just let usdo for you, can’t you?” I couldn’t–it was dreadful to see them emptying my slops; but I pretended I could, to oblige them, for about a week. Then I gave them a sum of money to go away, and I never saw them again. I obtained the remaining books, but my friend Hawley repeats that Major and Mrs. Monarch did me a permanent harm, got me into false ways. If it be true I’m content to have paid the price–for the memory.