Setting
out from one or other of the score of garrets and cheap lodgings we had
in our time inhabited, we had wandered together, day after day, night
after night, far down East, where, as we had threaded our way among the
barrels of soused herrings and the stalls and barrows of unleavened
bread, he had taught me scraps of Hebrew and Polish and Yiddish; up into
the bright West, where he could never walk a quarter of a mile without
meeting one of his extraordinary acquaintances--furred music-hall
managers, hawkers of bootlaces, commercial magnates of his own Faith,
touts, crossing-sweepers, painted women; into Soho, where he had names
for the very horses on the cab-ranks and the dogs who slumbered under the
counters of the sellers of French literature; out to the naphtha-lights
and cries of the Saturday night street markets of Islington and the North
End Road; into City churches on wintry afternoons, into the studios of
famous artists full of handsomely dressed women, into the studios of
artists not famous, at the ends of dark and break-neck corridors; to tea
at the suburban homes of barmaids and chorus girls, to dinner in the
stables of a cavalry-barracks, to supper in cabmen's shelters. He was
possessed in some mysterious way of the passwords to doors in hoardings
behind which excavations were in progress; he knew by name the butchers
of the Deptford yards, the men in the blood-caked clothes, so inured to
blood that they may not with safety to their lives swear at one another;
he took me into an opium-cellar within a stone's-throw of Oxford Street,
and into a roof-chamber to call upon certain friends of his ... well,
they _said_ they were fire extinguishers, so I'd better not say they
were bombs. Up, down; here, there; good report, but more frequently
evil ... we had known this side of our London as well as two men may. And
our other adventures and peregrinations, not of the body, but of the
spirit ... but these must be spoken of in their proper place. I had arranged with Maschka that Schofield should bring me the whole of
the work Andriaovsky had left behind him; and he arrived late one
afternoon in a fourwheeler, with four great packages done up in brown
paper. I found him to be a big, shaggy-browed, red-haired, raw-boned
Lancashire man of five-and-thirty, given to confidential demonstrations
at the length of a button-shank, quite unconscious of the gulf between
his words and his right to employ them, and bent on asserting an equality
that I did not dispute by a rather aggressive use of my surname. Andriaovsky had appointed him his executor, and he had ever the air of
suspecting that the appointment was going to be challenged. "A'm glad to be associated with ye in this melancholy duty, Harrison," he
said. "Now we won't waste words. Miss Andriaovsky has told me precisely
how matters stand. I had, as ye know, the honour to be poor Michael's
close friend for a period of five years, and my knowledge of him is
entirely at your disposal." I answered that I should be seriously handicapped without it. "Just so. It is Miss Andriaovsky's desire that we should pull together. Now, in the firrst place, what is your idea about the forrm the book
should take?" "In the first place, if you don't mind," I replied, "perhaps we'd better
run over together the things you've brought. The daylight will be gone
soon." "Just as ye like, Harrison," he said, "just as ye like. It's all the same
to me...."

I cleared a space about my writing-table at the window, and we turned to
the artistic remains of Michael Andriaovsky. I was astonished, first, at the enormous quantity of the stuff, and next
at its utter and complete revelation of the man. In a flash I realised
how superb that portion at least of the book was going to be. And
Schofield explained that the work he had brought represented but a
fraction of the whole that was at our disposal. "Ye'll know with what foolish generosity poor Michael always gave his
things away," he said. "Hallard has a grand set; so has Connolly; and
from time to time he behaved varry handsomely to myself. Artists of varry
considerable talents both Hallard and Connolly are; Michael thought
varry highly of their abilities. They express the deepest interest in the
shape your worrk will take; and that reminds me. I myself have drafted a
rough scenario of the forrm it appeared to me the 'Life' might with
advantage be cast in. A purely private opinion, ye'll understand,
Harrison, which ye'll be entirely at liberty to disregard...."

"Well, let's finish with the work first," I said. With boards, loose sheets, scraps of paper, notes, studies, canvases
stretched and stripped from their stretchers, we paved half the library
floor, Schofield keeping up all the time a running fire of "Grand,
grand! A masterpiece! A gem, that, Harrison!" They were all that he said,
and presently I ceased to hear his voice. The splendour of the work
issued undimmed even from the severe test of Schofield's praise; and I
thought again with pride how I, I, was the only man living who could
adequately write that "Life.".... "Aren't they grand? Aren't they great?" Schofield chanted monotonously. "They are," I replied, coming to a consciousness of his presence again. "But what's that?" Secretively he had kept one package until the last. He now removed its
wrappings and set it against a chair. _"There! "_ he cried. "I'll thank ye, Harrison, for your opinion of
_that! "_

It was the portrait Andriaovsky had refused to sell me--a portrait of
himself. The portrait was the climax of the display. The Lancastrian still talked;
but I, profoundly moved, mechanically gathered up the drawings from the
floor and returned them to their proper packages and folios. I was dining
at home, alone, that evening, and for form's sake I asked this faithful
dog of Andriaovsky's to share my meal; but he excused himself--he was
dining with Hallard and Connolly. When the drawings were all put away,
all save that portrait, he gave an inquisitive glance round my library. It was the same glance as Maschka had given when she had feared to
intrude on my time; but Schofield did these things with a much more heavy
hand. He departed, but not before telling me that even my mansion
contained such treasures as it had never held before. That evening, after glancing at Schofield's "scenario," I carefully
folded it up again for return to him, lest when the book should appear
he should miss the pleasure of saying that I had had his guidance but
had disregarded it; then I sat down at my writing-table and took out
the loose notes I had made. I made other jottings, each on a blank sheet
for subsequent amplification; and the sheets overspread the large
leather-topped table and thrust one another up the standard of the
incandescent with the pearly silk shade. The firelight shone low and
richly in the dusky spaces of the large apartment; and the thick carpet
and the double doors made the place so quiet that I could hear my watch
ticking in my pocket.