Page 396 - of-human-bondage-

hiti. He was broke to the world. He was a brasseur d’affaires,
a stockbroker I suppose you call it in English; and he had
a wife and family, and he was earning a large income. He
chucked it all to become a painter. He just went off and set-
tled down in Brittany and began to paint. He hadn’t got any
money and did the next best thing to starving.’
‘And what about his wife and family?’ asked Philip.
‘Oh, he dropped them. He left them to starve on their
own account.’
‘It sounds a pretty low-down thing to do.’
‘Oh, my dear fellow, if you want to be a gentleman you
must give up being an artist. They’ve got nothing to do with
one another. You hear of men painting pot-boilers to keep
an aged mother—well, it shows they’re excellent sons, but
it’s no excuse for bad work. They’re only tradesmen. An
artist would let his mother go to the workhouse. There’s a
writer I know over here who told me that his wife died in
childbirth. He was in love with her and he was mad with
grief, but as he sat at the bedside watching her die he found
himself making mental notes of how she looked and what
she said and the things he was feeling. Gentlemanly, wasn’t
it?’
‘But is your friend a good painter?’ asked Philip.
‘No, not yet, he paints just like Pissarro. He hasn’t found
himself, but he’s got a sense of colour and a sense of decora-
tion. But that isn’t the question. it’s the feeling, and that he’s
got. He’s behaved like a perfect cad to his wife and children,
he’s always behaving like a perfect cad; the way he treats the
people who’ve helped him—and sometimes he’s been saved