So he sketched Ismay in the nude, as she lay on the sofa in his sitting-room on the top floor of Canterbury House, where the light was so good and the coal fire kept the room so warm, and on many subsequent occasions he sketched her in the nude, and though his excellent experience in Mr. Devinney’s embalming parlour enabled him to do it very well, the thought of all those work-worn corpses never entered his head.

One day, when he had finished a good effort, he threw down his pad and pencil and knelt beside her on the sofa, kissing her hands and trying to keep back the tears that rushed to his eyes.

“What is it?”

“You are so beautiful, and I love you so much.”

“Oh Christ,” said Ismay. “I thought it might come to this.”

“To what?”

“To talk about love, you prize ass.”

“But I do love you. Have you no feeling for me at all?”

Ismay leaned toward him, and his face was buried between her breasts. “Yes,” she said. “I love you, Frank—but I’m not in love with you, if you understand.”

This is a nice distinction, dear to some female hearts, which people like Francis can never encompass. But he was happy, for had she not said she loved him? Being in love might follow.

So, when he had agreed to her condition that he must not talk about love, it was decided by Ismay that the afternoons of posing in the nude might continue from time to time. She liked it. It gave her a sense of living fully and richly, and Francis’s adoring eyes warmed her in places where the glow of his generous coal fire could not reach—places that Charlie did not seem to know existed.

Who taught you to draw? In one of the guest-rooms at Exeter, where he was staying for a few days in the Spring Term, Saraceni was looking over the sketches and finished pictures that Francis had brought him.

“Harry Furniss, I suppose.”

“Extraordinary! Just possible, but—he died—let me see—surely more than ten years ago!”

“But only from a book. How to Draw in Pen and Ink–it was my Bible when I was a boy.”

“Well, you have his vigour, but not his coarse style—his jokey, jolly-good-fellow superficial style.”

“Of course, I’ve done a great deal of copying since those days, as you can see. I copy Old Master drawings, at the Ashmolean every week. I try to capture their manner as well as their matter. As you said you did when you restored pictures.”

“Yes, and you didn’t learn anatomy from Harry Furniss, or from copying.”

“I picked it up in an embalming parlour, as a matter of fact.”

“Mother of God! There is a good deal more in you than meets the eye, Mr. Cornish.”

“I hope so. What meets the eye doesn’t make much impression, I’m afraid.”

“There speaks a man in love. Unhappily in love. In love with this model for these nude studies that you have been trying to palm off on me as some of your Old Master copies.”

Saraceni laid his hand on a group of drawings of Ismay that had cost Francis great pains. He had coated an expensive handmade paper with Chinese white mixed with enough brown bole to give it an ivory tint, and on the sheets thus prepared he had worked up some of his sketches of the nude Ismay, drawing with a silver-point that had cost him a substantial sum, touching up the drawing at last with red chalk.

“I didn’t mean to deceive you.”

“Oh, you didn’t deceive me, Mr. Cornish, though you might deceive a good many people.”

“I mean I wasn’t trying to deceive anybody. Only to work in the genuine Renaissance style.”

“And you have done so. You have imitated the manner admirably. But you haven’t been so careful about the matter. This girl, now: she is a girl of today. Everything about her figure declares it. Slim, tall for a woman, long legs—this is not a woman of the Renaissance. Her feet alone give the show away; neither the big feet of the peasant model nor the deformed feet of a woman of fortune. The Old Masters, you know, when they weren’t copying from the antique, were drawing women of a kind we do not see today. This girl, now—look at her breasts. She will probably never suckle a child, or not for long. But the women of the Renaissance did so, and their painters fancied the great motherly udders; as soon as those women had given up their virginity they seemed to be always giving suck, and by thirty-five they had flat, exhausted bladders hanging to their waists. Their private parts were torn with child-bearing, and I suppose a lot of them had piles for the same reason. Age came early in those days. The flesh that showed such rosy opulence at eighteen had lost its glow, and fat hung on bones far too small to support it well. This girl of yours will be a beauty all her life. This is the beauty you have captured with a tenderness that suggests a lover.

“I am not pretending to be clairvoyant. Looking deep into pictures is my profession. It is simple enough to see that this model is a woman of today, and the attitude of the artist to his sitter is always apparent in the picture. Every picture is several things: what the artist sees, but also what he thinks about what he sees, and because of that, in a certain sense it is a portrait of himself. All those elements are here.

“None of this is to say that this is not good work. But why go to such pains to work in the Renaissance style?”

“It seems to me to be capable of saying so much that can’t be said—or I should say that can’t be said by me—in a contemporary manner.”

“Yes, yes, and to compliment the sitter—I hope she is grateful—and to show that you see her as beyond time and place. You draw pretty well. Drawing is not so lovingly fostered now as it used to be. A modern artist may be a fine draughtsman without depending much on his skill. You love drawing simply for itself.”

“Yes. It sounds extreme, but it’s an obsession with me.”

“More than colour?”

“I don’t know, I haven’t really done much about colour.”

“I could introduce you to that, you know. But I wonder how good a draughtsman you really are. Would you submit to a test?”

“I’d be flattered that you thought it worth your trouble.”

“Taking trouble is much of my profession, also. You have your pad? Draw a straight line from the top of the page to the bottom, will you? And I mean a straight line, done freehand.”

Francis obeyed.

“Now: draw the same line from the bottom to the top, so exactly that the two lines are one.”

This was not so easily done. At one point Francis’s line varied a fraction from the first one.

“Ah, that was not simple, was it? Now draw a line across the page to bisect that line—or I should say those two indistinguishable lines. Yes. Now draw a line through the centre point where those two lines bisect; draw it so that I cannot see a hint of a triangle at the middle point. Yes, that is not bad.”

The next part of the test was the drawing of circles, freehand, clockwise and anti-clockwise, concentric and in various ways eccentric. Francis managed all of this with credit, but without perfection.

“You should work on this sort of thing,” said Saracem. “You have ability, but you have not refined it to the full extent of your capabilities. This is the foundation of drawing, you must understand. Now, will you try a final test? This is rather more than command of the pencil; it is to test your understanding of mass and space. I shall sit here in this chair, as I have been doing, and you shall draw me as well as you can in five minutes. But you shall draw me as I would look if you were sitting behind me. Ready?”

Francis was wholly unprepared for this, and felt that he made a mess of it. But when Saraceni looked at the result, he laughed.

“If you think you might be interested in my profession, Mr. Cornish—and I assure you it is full of interest—write to me, or come and see me. Here is my card; my permanent address, as you see, is in Rome, though I am not often there; but it would reach me. Come and see me anyhow. I have some things that would interest you.”