ooking 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