# Tussock Land/Chapter 22

XXII
For the approaching annual exhibition of the Society of Artists in Sydney King had put forth a special effort. He felt that the big canvases upon which he had been so jealously working for the past ten months were to be the test of his ability. For years he had been feeling his way to the artistic expression that here he seemed to have reached. This was his summing-up, his justification. By these big canvases he would be judged; from the verdict of this, his first complete work, he would not appeal.
During all these months of work upon these pictures, King had gradually felt himself emerging from the insecure; he saw the difficulties of technique silently and quietly drop away from him. The brush offered no longer any obstacle to his expression of himself. He had won through the learner’s stage, and was now ready to prove his belief in himself by great and ambitious work. He had done with studies and poses; he would paint a picture.
And now that the time was approaching for the exhibition King grew more and more anxious, more and more uncertain of his work. It seemed to him that he was even a little uncertain of himself; once or twice he caught himself contemplating the chance of comparative failure, the possibility of a grave mistake. But a glance at his slowly-maturing work reassured him. There stood his vindication. The critics of to-morrow would recognise his sincerity. ​He would recover from this temporary despondency, the natural result of too prolonged work in the studio and in the office. Undoubtedly he was feeling a little run down; the double life was beginning to tell; the heat had been terrible; he had not been able to get away to the mountains for the summer; he had not been sleeping well during the last few weeks.
But he was not dismayed: his pictures stood before him to comfort him. His work would tell.
One Sunday night, after a long day’s work in his studio, these drifting doubts suddenly took more palpable shape. He had been all day working almost feverishly at his largest composition. He had exhausted himself in a strenuous effort to finally “pull it together,” and when the light failed he had left his studio in disgust, unsatisfied, doubtful, distrustful of himself. He walked rapidly through the city, making instinctively for the open air and the cool breeze that would be found by the harbour’s edge. He turned slowly into the Domain, and finding the Botanical Gardens shut he continued beneath the avenues of figs till he reached that point known as Macquarie’s Chair. There the quiet lap of the waters seemed to soothe his quick pulse. He cast himself down on the hard dry grass beneath the shadow of a heavy-foliaged fig, and saw the water beneath him like a sheet of dull, dark glass. Across the harbour the lights of North Shore towered high like some ancient castle perched on a rocky eyrie. And, as he idly let his glance stray, a ferry-boat, like a smouldering torch, swam in a gleaming brilliance of silver across the bay. The night was breathless and warm.
King was tired out. A terrible despondency fell upon him. Often before he had felt this ebb of hope, ​this long slackness of his enthusiasm. But those fits of despair had been as brief as they had been keen, and he had learnt to recognise that no poignancy of despair could endure indefinitely. A great grief burns itself swiftly out; despair, like joy, can, from its own keenness, be but short-lived. And he was sufficiently a materialist to have learnt that no attack of “the blues” is proof against a good night’s sleep, even a good dinner.
But even a reflection so valuable as that avails little at the moment. It comforts little to consider that to-morrow the aspect of the world must necessarily be brighter. There is the long night to get through. And this evening it seemed to King as if the tide of enthusiasm, the tide of hope and of youth, was flowing for ever out and out, as if this slack-water of his heart would never change, this dreary ebb of despair never show signs of the long-prayed-for flow.
Above him was the heavy blackness of the fig-tree; before him the jewel-chain of lights across the water where the city preened herself for the embraces of the night, the swift trains of light as the ferry-boats swept to and fro, a snorting tug that fussed noisily from Wooloomooloo wharfs with a slim-sparred schooner in his teeth; across the warm-scented night the faint bugle call from one of the squadron of warships off Garden Island; and high over him the incurious, passionless stars watching him without a tremor. And the man proved himself at the same moment infinitely smaller and infinitely greater than the night, than the silence, than the stars. For he had that weakness in him that was not in all that host of stars. He doubted. And from his doubt he and his weakling race might rise to the mastery even of that untroubled, unhesitant, passionless galaxy of suns.
​He questioned the value of his work, of his life. A terrible sickness of soul came drearily upon him. Was he ever to do aught in the world? Were all his immature strivings to end in bitter failure? Suppose, after all his splendid confidences, he were destined to achieve nothing? And if he bore in himself the inevitable inability to do anything? What if he that had always set himself apart from the rest of his kind were merely one of the undistinguished ruck, an ignoble soldier in the ranks of the incapable? What if he were unable to escape from the dead level of common humanity, whose destiny in this life is to do their trivial daily tasks, live and die, and the world know not of them, care not for them?
What was there, then, left for him to do? He could see nothing ahead. His art was all that he had; if that were proved a useless thing, he felt that existence was but a futile and trivial cheat.
He knew then that it was not fame that he wanted; it was the knowledge of his ability that he craved. Fame he felt to be the pleasant halo about the head of success. No; fame was an empty thing; he did not need that. But it was his own opinion of himself that he felt he so strenuously craved. That was the important thing. He wanted a justification for his existence. He wanted the great and steady joy of an assurance that his was not a wasted talent. His self-respect cried out for the certainty that he was of use.
And now a faint hope rose in him; the long ebb had begun imperceptibly to slacken. There was Gertrude. He was of value to her; she believed in him. And if he had it in his personality to inspire that trust in him from one soul, there was no need to despair. He would carry on the warfare with a serene confidence in himself. Even if he had failed ​in his chosen profession, he had not failed in life. As a man, at least, a man able to inspire love in a woman’s heart, he had merited his place in existence. A growing confidence thrilled him with a faint delight.
Over the edge of the night sprang the moon, full, glowing, monstrous, amber. The dim velvet of the warm darkness grew hard and cold. The city’s spires cut sharply into the pale blue steely sky. The harbour’s waters took vivid shape, like a great, newly-opened, wonderful blossom of flame.
And a keen light seemed to flood King’s brain, showing with a pitiless severity the thought that lurked shrinking and restless there. Did Gertrude believe in him, love him? He had not won her; she fled from his direct questioning. She was not sure. And all the warmth faded from his heart. It and the night were dominated only by the swift brilliance of the moon.
With a groan King rose and turned from the water’s edge and went swiftly back to the city. Within his brain one thought was growing to the grandeur of an obsession. He must not hesitate; he would put it to the test this night. He reached his studio, and mounting the long flights of stairs let himself into the silent room.
The moonlight, pitiless and blinding, flooded the studio. Upon the easel stood his big canvas, shrouded by a cloth. With a desperate fear at his heart he uncovered the painting. The moonlight was to be his judge; he would abide by the impassive, incurious, mute decision of that light. He would let the long dead and long cold satellite of the world, that far solitary stranger in space, with his aloof and dispassionate gaze, decide the value of his work.
​He stood back. The unfamiliar light fell with a pitiless candour upon his great painting. And King saw it as he had never seen it before. It took on another aspect—an aspect terrible and strange. Like the dissecting knife of a great surgeon too intent upon the precision of his work to be troubled about the agony of his patient, the moonlight laid bare his work in all its pitiless reality. Unsoftened, untouched by a human imagination, it lay there dead. King felt that he was not looking at it through his own eyes. Some unimpassioned critic that had no soul—some mere callous, undeviating judgment—stood before it and criticised with an inhuman perspicacity the trembling, fumbling effort of a human and immature soul.
King put his hands before his eyes and sank upon a chair. His great painting was a failure.
He had seen with an aloof vividness all its ineffectiveness, all its banality, all its weaknesses. He could not paint. There was no artistic instinct in him. He was forever barred from the paradise of his dreams. He was one of the ruck, of the triflers, the inefficients.
His hand blindly groped in the paint-box at his side, and with a desperate swiftness closed on a palette knife. He took it up and came close to the easel. Turning his head aside he raised his hand against the picture. But his eyes could not resist the last glance at what he yet felt was part of himself. He was going to wound himself in a vital part. He was going to kill something which seemed woven into his soul. He looked again—for the last time. He might want to remember.
And in that swift, keen-searching survey his eye caught a piece of rather clever brushwork which in his previous examinations of the picture he had ​rather passed over. He remembered suddenly the day when he had at last mastered the problem of that light upon the model’s shoulder; he recalled in its spontaneous vividness the great thrill of exultation he had felt when he recognised that here he had won a victory that summed up many a day of desperate striving. Here he had reached another goal on the long and dreary road.
He paused. His hand fell to his side. The knife clinked to his feet.