It is a thing I am ashamed to think of, and it deserved its reward.
Lamb criticized and patronized every blessed thing he saw, advised Armour to beware of mannerisms and to be a little less liberal with his colour, and heard absolutely unmoved of the horses Armour had got into the Salon. ‘I understand,’ he said, with a benevolent wink, ‘that about four thousand pictures are hung every year at the Salon, and I don’t know how many thousand are rejected. Let Mr. Armour get a picture accepted by the Academy. Then he will have something to talk about.’
Neither did Sir William Lamb buy anything at all.
The experiment with Lady Pilkey was even more distressing. She gushed with fair appropriateness and great liberality, and finally fixed upon one scene to make her own. She winningly asked the price of it. She had never known anybody who did not understand prices. Poor Armour, the colour of a live coal, named one hundred rupees.
‘One hundred rupees! Oh, my dear boy, I can never afford that! You must, you must really give it to me for seventy-five. It will break my heart if I can’t have it for seventy-five.’
‘Give me the pleasure,’ said Armour, ‘of making you a present of it. You have been so kind about everything, and it’s so seldom one meets anybody who really cares. So let me send it to you.’ It was honest embarrassment; he did not mean to be impertinent.
Blum, of the Geological Department--Herr Blum in his own country--came up and honestly rejoiced, and at end of an interminable pipe did purchase a little Breton bit that I hated to see go--it was one of the things that gave the place its air; but Blum had a large family undergoing education at Heidelberg, and exclaimed, to Armour’s keenest anguish, that on this account he could not more do.
Altogether, during the months of August and September, persons resident in Simla drawing their income from Her Majesty, bought from the eccentric young artist from nowhere, living on Summer Hill, canvases and little wooden panels to the extent of two hundred and fifty rupees. Lady Pilkey had asked him to lunch--she might well! and he had appeared at three garden-parties and a picnic. It was not enough.
It was not enough, and yet it was, in a manner, too much. Pitiful as it was in substance, it had an extraordinary personal effect. Armour suddenly began to turn himself out well--his apparel was of smarter cut than mine, and his neckties in better taste. Little elegances appeared in the studio--he offered you Scotch in a Venetian decanter and Melachrinos from a chased silver box. The farouche element faded out of his speech; his ideas remained as fresh and as simple as ever, but he gave them a form, bless me! that might have been used at the Club. He worked as hard as ever, but more variously; he tried his hand at several new things. He said he was feeling about for something that would really make his reputation.