Those who did not have the modesty to be struck by such doubts tended to comport themselves as the collector now did: to ask for adjustments and improvements, to tell the limner that his hand and eye were faulty. Would they have the vanity to complain to God in His turn? ‘More dignity, more dignity.’ An instruction additionally repugnant given Mr Tuttle’s behaviour in the kitchen two nights ago.
Wadsworth had been taking his supper, content with his day’s labour. He had just finished the piano. The instrument’s narrow leg, which ran parallel to Tuttle’s more massive limb, ended in a gilt claw, which Wadsworth had had some trouble in rendering. But now he was able to refresh himself, to stretch by the fire, to feed, and to observe the society of the help. There were more of these than expected. A collector of customs might earn fifteen dollars a week, enough to keep a hired girl. Yet Tuttle also kept a cook and a boy to work the garden. Since the collector did not appear to be a man lavish with his own money, Wadsworth deduced that it was Mrs Tuttle’s portion which permitted such luxury of attention.
Once they became accustomed to his deformity, the help treated him easily, as if his deafness rendered him their equal. It was an equality Wadsworth was happy to concede. The garden boy, an elf with eyes of burnt umber, had taken to amusing him with tricks. It was as if he imagined that the limner, being shorn of words, thereby lacked amusement. This was not the case, but he indulged this indulgence of him and smiled as the boy turned cartwheels, stole up behind the cook while she bent to the bake oven, or played a guessing game with acorns hidden in his fists.
The limner had finished his broth and was warming himself before the fire – an element Mr Tuttle was not generous with elsewhere in the house – when an idea came to him. He drew a charred stick from the edge of the ashes, touched the garden boy on the shoulder to make him stay as he was, then pulled a drawing book from his pocket. The cook and the hired girl tried to watch what he was doing, but he held them away with a hand, as if to say that this particular trick, one he was offering in thanks for the boy’s own tricks, would not work if observed. It was a rough sketch – it could only be so, given the crudeness of the implement – but it contained some part of a likeness. He tore the page from the book and handed it to the boy. The child looked up at him with astonishment and gratitude, placed the sketch on the table, took Wadsworth’s drawing hand and kissed it. I should always paint children, the limner thought, looking the boy in the eye. He was almost unaware of the laughing tumult that broke out when the other two examined the drawing, and then of the silence which fell when the collector of customs, drawn by the sudden noise, entered the kitchen.
The limner watched as Tuttle stood there, one foot advanced, as in his portrait, his mouth opening and closing in a manner that did not suggest dignity. He watched as the cook and the girl rearranged themselves in more decorous attitudes. He watched as the boy, alert to his master’s gaze, picked up the drawing and modestly, proudly, handed it over. He watched as Tuttle took the paper calmly, examined it, glanced at the boy, then at Wadsworth, nodded, deliberately tore the sketch in four, placed it in the fire, waited until it blazed, said something further when in quarter-profile to the limner, and made his exit. He watched as the boy wept.
The portrait was finished: both rosewood piano and collector of customs gleamed. The small white customs house filled the window at Mr Tuttle’s elbow – not that there was any real window there, nor, if there had been, any customs house visible through it. Yet everyone understood this modest transcendence of reality. And perhaps the collector, in his own mind, was only asking for a similar transcendence of reality when he demanded more dignity. He was still leaning over Wadsworth, gesturing at the representation of his face, chest, leg. It did not matter in the least that the limner could not hear what he was saying. He knew exactly what was meant, and also how little it signified. Indeed, it was an advantage not to hear, for the particularities would doubtless have raised him to an even greater anger than that which he presently felt.
He reached for his notebook. ‘Sir,’ he wrote, ‘we agreed upon five days for my labour. I must leave tomorrow morning by daybreak. We agreed that you would pay me tonight. Pay me, give me three candles, and by the morning I shall work such improvement as you require.’
It was rare for him to treat a client with so little deference. It would be bad for his reputation in the county; but he no longer cared. He offered the pen in the direction of Mr Tuttle, who did not deign to receive it. Instead, he left the room. While waiting, the limner examined his work. It was well done: the proportions pleasing, the colours harmonious, and the likeness within the bounds of honesty. The collector ought to be satisfied, posterity impressed, and his Maker – always assuming he was vouchsafed Heaven – not too rebuking.
Tuttle returned and handed over six dollars – half the fee – and two candles. Doubtless their cost would be deducted from the second half of the fee when it came to be paid. If it came to be paid. Wadsworth looked long at the portrait, which had come to assume for him equal reality with its fleshly subject, and then he made several decisions.
He took his supper as usual in the kitchen. His companions had been subdued the previous night. He did not think they blamed him for the incident with the garden boy; at most, they thought his presence had led to their own misjudgement, and so they were chastened. This, at any rate, was how Wadsworth saw matters, and he did not think their meaning would be clearer if he could hear speech or read lips; indeed, perhaps the opposite. If his notebook of men’s thoughts and observations was anything to judge by, the world’s knowledge of itself, when spoken and written down, did not amount to much.
This time, he selected a piece of charcoal more carefully, and with his pocket knife scraped its end to a semblance of sharpness. Then, as the boy sat opposite him, immobile more through apprehension than a sitter’s sense of duty, the limner drew him again. When he had finished, he tore out the sheet and, with the boy’s eyes upon him, mimed the act of concealing it beneath his shirt, and handed it across the table. The boy immediately did as he had seen, and smiled for the first time that evening. Next, sharpening his piece of charcoal before each task, Wadsworth drew the cook and the hired girl. Each took the sheet and concealed it without looking. Then he rose, shook their hands, embraced the garden boy, and returned to his night’s work.
More dignity, he repeated to himself as he lit the candles and took up his brush. Well then, a dignified man is one whose appearance implies a lifetime of thought; one whose brow expresses it. Yes, there was an improvement to be made there. He measured the distance between the eyebrow and the hairline, and at the midpoint, in line with the right eyeball, he developed the brow: an enlargement, a small mound, almost as if something was beginning to grow. Then he did the same above the left eye. Yes, that was better. But dignity was also to be inferred from the state of a man’s chin. Not that there was anything patently insufficient about Tuttle’s jawline. But perhaps the discernible beginnings of a beard might help – a few touches on each point of the chin. Nothing to cause immediate remark, let alone offence; merely an indication.