I worked for an hour; and then, for the purpose of making yet other
notes, I rose, crossed the room, and took down the three or four
illustrated books to which, in the earlier part of his career,
Andriaovsky had put his name. I carried them to the table, and twinkled
as I opened the first of them. It was a book of poems, and in making the
designs for them Andriaovsky had certainly _not_ found for himself. Almost any one of the "Art Shades," as he had called them, could have
done the thing equally well, and I twinkled again. I did not propose to
have much mercy on _that_. Already Schofield's words had given birth to a
suspicion in my mind--that Andriaovsky, in permitting these fellows,
Hallard, Connolly, and the rest, to suppose that he "thought highly" of
them and their work, had been giving play to that malicious humour of
his; and they naturally did not see the joke. That joke, too, was between
himself, dead, and me, preparing to write his "Life." As if he had been
there to hear me, I chuckled, and spoke in a low voice. "You were pulling their legs, Michael, you know. A little rough on them
you were. But there's a book here of yours that I'm going to tell the
truth about. You and I won't pretend to one another. It's a rotten book,
and both you and I know it...."

I don't know what it was that caused me suddenly to see just then
something that I had been looking at long enough without seeing--that
portrait of himself that I had set leaning against the back of a chair at
the end of my writing-table. It stood there, just within the soft
penumbra of shadow cast by the silk-shaded light. The canvas had been
enlarged, the seam of it clumsily sewn by Andriaovsky's own hand; but in
that half-light the rough ridge of paint did not show, and I confess that
the position and effect of the thing startled me for a moment. Had I
cared to play a trick with my fancy I could have imagined the head
wagging from side to side, with such rage and fire was it painted. He had
had the temerity to dash a reflection across one of the glasses of his
spectacles, concealing the eye behind it. The next moment I had given a
short laugh. "So you're there, are you?... Well, I know you agree very heartily about
that book of poems. Heigho! If I remember rightly, you made more money
out of that book than out of the others put together. But I'm going
to tell the truth about it. _I_ know better, you know...."

Chancing, before I turned in that night, to reopen one of his folios, I
came across a drawing, there by accident, I don't doubt, that confirmed
me in my suspicion that Andriaovsky had had his quiet joke with
Schofield, Hallard, Connolly and Co. It was a sketch of Schofield's,
imitative, deplorable, a dreadful show-up of incapacity. Well enough
"drawn," in a sense, it was ... and I remembered how Andriaovsky had ever
urged that "drawing," of itself, did not exist. I winked at the portrait. I saw his point. He himself had no peer, and, rather than invite
comparison with stars of the second magnitude, he chose his intimates
from among the peddlers of the wares that had the least possible
connection with his Art. He, too, had understood that the Compromise
must be entirely accepted or totally refused; and while, in the
divergence of our paths, he had done the one thing and I the other, we
had each done it thoroughly, with vigour, and with persistence, and each
could esteem the other, if not as a co-worker, at least as an honourable
and out-and-out opposite. III

Within a fortnight I was so deep in my task that, in the realest sense,
the greater part of my life was in the past. The significance of those
extraordinary peregrinations of ours had been in the opportunity they had
afforded for a communion of brain and spirit of unusual rarity; and all
this determined to my work with the accumulated force of its long
penning-up. I have spoken of Andriaovsky's contempt for such as had the
conception of their work that it was something they "did" as distinct
from something they "were"; and unless I succeed in making it plain that,
not as a mere figure of speech and loose hyperbole, but starkly and
literally, Andriaovsky _was_ everything he did, my tale will be
pointless. There was not one of the basic facts of life--of Faith, Honour,
Truth-speaking, Falsehood, Betrayal, Sin--that he did not turn, not to
moral interpretations, as others do, but to the holy purposes of his
noble and passionate Art. For any man, Sin is only mortal when it is Sin
against that which he knows to be immortally true; and the things
Andriaovsky knew to be immortally true were the things that he had gone
down into the depths in order to bring forth and place upon his paper or
canvas. These things are not for the perusal of many. Unless you love the
things that he loved with a fervour comparable in kind, if not in degree,
with his own, you may not come near them. "Truth, 'the highest thing a
man may keep,'" he said, "cannot be brought down; a man only attains it
by proving his right to it"; and I think I need not further state his
views on the democratisation of Art. Of any result from the elaborate
processes of Art-education he held out no hope whatever. "It is in a man,
or it isn't," he ever declared; "if it is, he must bring it out for
himself; if it isn't, let him turn to something useful and have done with
it." I need not press the point that in these things he was almost a
solitary. He made of these general despotic principles the fiercest personal
applications. I have heard his passionate outbreak of "Thief! Liar! Fool!" over a drawing when it has seemed to him that a man has not
vouched with the safety of his immortal soul for the shapes and lines he
has committed to it. I have seen him get into such a rage with the eyes
of the artist upon him. I have heard the ice and vinegar of his words
when a good man, for money, has consented to modify and emasculate
his work; and there lingers in my memory his side of a telephone
conversation in which he told a publisher who had suggested that he
should do the same thing precisely what he thought of him. And on the
other hand, he once walked from Aldgate to Putney Hill, with a loose heel
on one of his boots, to see a man of whom he had seen but a single
drawing. See him he did, too, in spite of the man's footman, his liveried
parlourmaid, and the daunting effect of the electric brougham at the
door. "He's a good man," he said to me afterwards, ruefully looking at the
place where his boot-heel had been. "You've got to take your good where
you find it. I don't care whether he's a rich amateur or skin-and-grief
in a garret as long as he's got the stuff in him. Nobody else could have
fetched me up from the East End this afternoon.... So long; see you in a
week or so--"

This was the only time I ever knew him break that sacred time in which he
celebrated each year the Passover and the Feast of Tabernacles.