The Author of Beltraffio | Page 5

We would take a walk over the Surrey commons, and I could
tell him all about the other great man, the one in America. He indicated
to me the best train, and it may be imagined whether on the Saturday
afternoon I was punctual at Waterloo. He carried his benevolence to the
point of coming to meet me at the little station at which I was to alight,
and my heart beat very fast as I saw his handsome face, surmounted
with a soft wide-awake and which I knew by a photograph long since
enshrined on my mantel-shelf, scanning the carriage-windows as the
train rolled up. He recognised me as infallibly as I had recognised
himself; he appeared to know by instinct how a young American of
critical pretensions, rash youth, would look when much divided
between eagerness and modesty. He took me by the hand and smiled at
me and said: "You must be--a--YOU, I think!" and asked if I should
mind going on foot to his house, which would take but a few minutes. I
remember feeling it a piece of extraordinary affability that he should
give directions about the conveyance of my bag; I remember feeling
altogether very happy and rosy, in fact quite transported, when he laid
his hand on my shoulder as we came out of the station.
I surveyed him, askance, as we walked together; I had already, I had
indeed instantly, seen him as all delightful. His face is so well known
that I needn't describe it; he looked to me at once an English gentleman
and a man of genius, and I thought that a happy combination. There
was a brush of the Bohemian in his fineness; you would easily have
guessed his belonging to the artist guild. He was addicted to velvet
jackets, to cigarettes, to loose shirt-collars, to looking a little
dishevelled. His features, which were firm but not perfectly regular, are
fairly enough represented in his portraits; but no portrait I have seen
gives any idea of his expression. There were innumerable things in it,

and they chased each other in and out of his face. I have seen people
who were grave and gay in quick alternation; but Mark Ambient was
grave and gay at one and the same moment. There were other strange
oppositions and contradictions in his slightly faded and fatigued
countenance. He affected me somehow as at once fresh and stale, at
once anxious and indifferent. He had evidently had an active past,
which inspired one with curiosity; yet what was that compared to his
obvious future? He was just enough above middle height to be spoken
of as tall, and rather lean and long in the flank. He had the friendliest
frankest manner possible, and yet I could see it cost him something. It
cost him small spasms of the self-consciousness that is an Englishman's
last and dearest treasure--the thing he pays his way through life by
sacrificing small pieces of even as the gallant but moneyless adventurer
in "Quentin Durward" broke off links of his brave gold chain. He had
been thirty-eight years old at the time "Beltraffio" was published. He
asked me about his friend in America, about the length of my stay in
England, about the last news in London and the people I had seen there;
and I remember looking for the signs of genius in the very form of his
questions and thinking I found it. I liked his voice as if I were somehow
myself having the use of it.
There was genius in his house too I thought when we got there; there
was imagination in the carpets and curtains, in the pictures and books,
in the garden behind it, where certain old brown walls were muffled in
creepers that appeared to me to have been copied from a masterpiece of
one of the pre-Raphaelites. That was the way many things struck me at
that time, in England--as reproductions of something that existed
primarily in art or literature. It was not the picture, the poem, the fictive
page, that seemed to me a copy; these things were the originals, and the
life of happy and distinguished people was fashioned in their image.
Mark Ambient called his house a cottage, and I saw afterwards he was
right for if it hadn't been a cottage it must have been a villa, and a villa,
in England at least, was not a place in which one could fancy him at
home. But it was, to my vision, a cottage glorified and translated; it was
a palace of art, on a slightly reduced scale--and might besides have
been the dearest haunt of the old English genius loci. It nestled under a
cluster of magnificent beeches, it had little creaking lattices that opened

out