Honeybath's Haven Read Online Free PDF Page B

of the sort, and there was no reason to maintain that they were not on the same terms still.
    He mounted the final flight of stairs doubtfully, all the same. The burly men were clustered round Melissa’s grand piano on a lower landing, and their language cast the mild impropriety of Mrs Plover’s in the shade. It would be awkward, however, if one of them looked up and shouted at him. Fortunately this didn’t happen, and the key was in its familiar hiding-place. Honeybath unlocked the door of the studio and went in.
    It was a single very large room under the roof – into which there had been inset a large skylight. Off it there opened two small and low-hutched dens which appeared long ago to have served as rudimentary kitchen and yet more rudimentary bathroom. (Perhaps the late burglarious Mr Vickers, if he had indeed lived here, had let it out to some confrère less eminent in the profession.) These ancillary accommodations no doubt made it possible to envisage living in the place as well as painting in it. And this seemed indeed to be in theabsent Edwin Lightfoot’s mind. The sole marked change in the studio since Honeybath had seen it last was the introduction of a brand-new single bed. It hadn’t occurred to Lightfoot, planning some alteration in his manner of life, to introduce an unobtrusive object of similar utility called a ‘studio couch’ or something of the sort. Or, if it had, he had nevertheless decided upon this more bleakly assertive measure. Married life – the narrow bed declared – had packed up on him. And in this Bohemian fashion he was going to set up his abode when he returned from Italy.
    Honeybath approved of Italy; it was a distressed painter’s obvious resource. He didn’t approve of the proposal to pig in the studio. It would be all right for a young man. And there were, perhaps, older men for whom it would be all right too. But it just wasn’t Edwin. Honeybath was wholly clear about this. It was part of the atrophy (as it must brutally be called) of his friend’s genius that he had turned rather self-indulgent in the most commonplace ways. And Melissa, who had more than a streak of domestic competence when she was feeling like it, had always done him fairly well – or had done so until the recent phase of strained relations. Edwin’s ability to do for himself would have been minimal at the best of times, since he simply wasn’t a practical man. In the plan he appeared to have formed there was no future whatever.
    But the studio, when Honeybath walked round it, bore at least the superficial appearance of being in full working order. And the smell, too, was right; it was like that of a good sauce of the more complex sort, the diverse ingredients of which are still at play upon one another and have not yet faded into an inert continuum. There waseven token of a work in progress, since a fairly large canvas was disposed on the easel, covered with a light cloth. Honeybath respected its reclusion, since he was a punctilious man, but otherwise poked freely about. A good many completed paintings were in evidence, unframed, and stacked up one against another, face to the wall. It was a state of affairs reminding him of the earliest phase of his own career; these works were in a kind of queue, he supposed, awaiting exposure in discreet numbers in some dealer’s gallery – probably Ambrose Prout’s. Honeybath examined a few at random, and didn’t greatly care for what he found. They were landscapes of undoubted technical mastery, but repetitive and almost formulaic, as if the artist had long ago compounded for a limited number of schemata which were more and more peeping through the varied compositions based upon them. It was sad, but true, that there was very little fire to Edwin Lightfoot nowadays. What that failed painter and prolific writer William Hazlitt had been fond of calling gusto had evaporated from his