collection, pickled in glass bottles, of the throats of famous opera singers.
And the instruments of renowned virtuosi-- he goes in for them too; he
will try to bribe Paganini to part with his little Guarnerio, but he has small
hope of success. Paganini won't sell his fiddle; but perhaps he might
sacrifice one of his guitars. Others are bound on crusades--one to die
miserably among the savage Greeks, another, in his white top hat, to lead
Italians against their oppressors. Others have no business at all; they are
just giving their oddity a continental airing. At home they cultivate
themselves at leisure and with greater elaboration. Beckford builds
towers, Portland digs holes in the ground, Cavendish, the millionaire, lives
in a stable, eats nothing but mutton, and amuses himself--oh, solely for his
private delectation--by anticipating the electrical discoveries of half a
century. Glorious eccentrics! Every age is enlivened by their presence.
Some day, my dear Denis," said Mr Scogan, turning a beady bright regard
in his direction--"some day you must become their biographer--'The Lives
of Queer Men.' What a subject! I should like to undertake it myself."
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Mr. Scogan paused, looked up once more at the towering house, then
murmured the word "Eccentricity," two or three times.
"Eccentricity...It's the justification of all aristocracies. It justifies
leisured classes and inherited wealth and privilege and endowments and
all the other injustices of that sort. If you're to do anything reasonable in
this world, you must have a class of people who are secure, safe from
public opinion, safe from poverty, leisured, not compelled to waste their
time in the imbecile routines that go by the name of Honest Work. You
must have a class of which the members can think and, within the obvious
limits, do what they please. You must have a class in which people who
have eccentricities can indulge them and in which eccentricity in general
will be tolerated and understood. That's the important thing about an
aristocracy. Not only is it eccentric itself--often grandiosely so; it also
tolerates and even encourages eccentricity in others. The eccentricities
of the artist and the new-fangled thinker don't inspire it with that fear,
loathing, and disgust which the burgesses instinctively feel towards them.
It is a sort of Red Indian Reservation planted in the midst of a vast horde
of Poor Whites--colonials at that. Within its boundaries wild men disport
themselves--often, it must be admitted, a little grossly, a little too
flamboyantly; and when kindred spirits are born outside the pale it offers
them some sort of refuge from the hatred which the Poor Whites, en bons
bourgeois, lavish on anything that is wild or out of the ordinary. After
the social revolution there will be no Reservations; the Redskins will be
drowned in the great sea of Poor Whites. What then? Will they suffer
you to go on writing villanelles, my good Denis? Will you, unhappy
Henry, be allowed to live in this house of the splendid privies, to continue
your quiet delving in the mines of futile knowledge? Will Anne..."
"And you," said Anne, interrupting him, "will you be allowed to go on
talking?"
"You may rest assured," Mr. Scogan replied, "that I shall not. I shall
have some Honest Work to do."
56
CHAPTER XII.
Blight, Mildew, and Smut..." Mary was puzzled and distressed.
Perhaps her ears had played her false. Perhaps what he had really said
was, "Squire, Binyon, and Shanks," or "Childe, Blunden, and Earp," or
even "Abercrombie, Drinkwater, and Rabindranath Tagore." Perhaps.
But then her ears never did play her false. "Blight, Mildew, and Smut."
The impression was distinct and ineffaceable. "Blight, Mildew..." she
was forced to the conclusion, reluctantly, that Denis had indeed
pronounced those improbable words. He had deliberately repelled her
attempts to open a serious discussion. That was horrible. A man who
would not talk seriously to a woman just because she was a woman--oh,
impossible! Egeria or nothing. Perhaps Gombauld would be more
satisfactory. True, his meridional heredity was a little disquieting; but at
least he was a serious worker, and it was with his work that she would
associate herself. And Denis? After all, what WAS Denis? A dilettante,
an amateur...
Gombauld had annexed for his painting-room a little disused granary
that stood by itself in a green close beyond the farm- yard. It was a
square brick building with a peaked roof and little windows set high up in
each of its walls. A ladder of four rungs led up to the door; for the
granary was perched above the ground, and out of reach of the rats, on
four massive toadstools of grey stone. Within, there lingered a faint
smell of dust and cobwebs; and the narrow shaft of sunlight that came
slanting in at every hour of the day through one of the little windows was
always alive with silvery motes. Here Gombauld worked, with a kind of
concentrated ferocity, during six or seven hours of each day. He was
pursuing something new, something terrific, if only he could catch it.
During the last eight years, nearly half of which had been spent in the
process of winning the war, he had worked his way industriously through
cubism. Now he had come out on the other side. He had begun by
painting a formalised nature; then, little by little, he had risen from nature
into the world of pure form, till in the end he was painting nothing but his
own thoughts, externalised in the abstract geometrical forms of the mind's
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devising. He found the process arduous and exhilarating. And then,
quite suddenly, he grew dissatisfied; he felt himself cramped and confined
within intolerably narrow limitations. He was humiliated to find how
few and crude and uninteresting were the forms he could invent; the
inventions of nature were without number, inconceivably subtle and
elaborate. He had done with cubism. He was out on the other side.
But the cubist discipline preserved him from falling into excesses of
nature worship. He took from nature its rich, subtle, elaborate forms, but
his aim was always to work them into a whole that should have the
thrilling simplicity and formality of an idea; to combine prodigious
realism with prodigious simplification. Memories of Caravaggio's
portentous achievements haunted him. Forms of a breathing, living
reality emerged from darkness, built themselves up into compositions as
luminously simple and single as a mathematical idea. He thought of the
"Call of Matthew," of "Peter Crucified," of the "Lute players," of
"Magdalen." He had the secret, that astonishing ruffian, he had the secret!
And now Gombauld was after it, in hot pursuit. Yes, it would be
something terrific, if only he could catch it.
For a long time an idea had been stirring and spreading, yeastily, in his
mind. He had made a portfolio full of studies, he had drawn a cartoon;
and now the idea was taking shape on canvas. A man fallen from a horse.
The huge animal, a gaunt white cart-horse, filled the upper half of the
picture with its great body. Its head, lowered towards the ground, was in
shadow; the immense bony body was what arrested the eye, the body and
the legs, which came down on either side of the picture like the pillars of
an arch. On the ground, between the legs of the towering beast, lay the
foreshortened figure of a man, the head in the extreme foreground, the
arms flung wide to right and left. A white, relentless light poured down
from a point in the right foreground. The beast, the fallen man, were
sharply illuminated; round them, beyond and behind them, was the night.
They were alone in the darkness, a universe in themselves. The horse's
body filled the upper part of the picture; the legs, the great hoofs, frozen to
stillness in the midst of their trampling, limited it on either side. And
beneath lay the man, his foreshortened face at the focal point in the centre,
58
his arms outstretched towards the sides of the picture. Under the arch of
the horse's belly, between his legs, the eye looked through into an intense
darkness; below, the space was closed in by the figure of the prostrate man.
A central gulf of darkness surrounded by luminous forms...
The picture was more than half finished. Gombauld had been at
work all the morning on the figure of the man, and now he was taking a
rest--the time to smoke a cigarette. Tilting back his chair till it touched
the wall, he looked thoughtfully at his canvas. He was pleased, and at
the same time he was desolated. In itself, the thing was good; he knew it.
But that something he was after, that something that would be so terrific if
only he could catch it--had he caught it? Would he ever catch it?
Three little taps--rat, tat, tat! Surprised, Gombauld turned his eyes
towards the door. Nobody ever disturbed him while he was at work; it
was one of the unwritten laws. "Come in!" he called. The door, which
was ajar, swung open, revealing, from the waist upwards, the form of
Mary. She had only dared to mount half-way up the ladder. If he didn't
want her, retreat would be easier and more dignified than if she climbed to
the top.
"May I come in?" she asked.
"Certainly."
She skipped up the remaining two rungs and was over the threshold in
an instant. "A letter came for you by the second post," she said. "I
thought it might be important, so I brought it out to you." Her eyes, her
childish face were luminously candid as she handed him the letter. There
had never been a flimsier pretext.
Gombauld looked at the envelope and put it in his pocket unopened.
"Luckily," he said, "it isn't at all important. Thanks very much all the
same."
There was a silence; Mary felt a little uncomfortable. "May I have a
look at what you've been painting?" she had the courage to say at last.
Gombauld had only half smoked his cigarette; in any case he wouldn't
begin work again till he had finished. He would give her the five
minutes that separated him from the bitter end. "This is the best place to
see it from," he said.
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Mary looked at the picture for some time without saying anything.
Indeed, she didn't know what to say; she was taken aback, she was at a
loss. She had expected a cubist masterpiece, and here was a picture of a
man and a horse, not only recognisable as such, but even aggressively in
drawing. Trompe-l'oeil--there was no other word to describe the
delineation of that foreshortened figure under the trampling feet of the
horse. What was she to think, what was she to say? Her orientations
were gone. One could admire representationalism in the Old Masters.
Obviously. But in a modern...? At eighteen she might have done so.
But now, after five years of schooling among the best judges, her
instinctive reaction to a contemporary piece of representation was
contempt--an outburst of laughing disparagement. What could
Gombauld be up to? She had felt so safe in admiring his work before.
But now--she didn't know what to think. It was very difficult, very
difficult.
"There's rather a lot of chiaroscuro, isn't there?" she ventured at last,
and inwardly congratulated herself on having found a critical formula so
gentle and at the same time so penetrating.
"There is," Gombauld agreed.
Mary was pleased; he accepted her criticism; it was a serious
discussion. She put her head on one side and screwed up her eyes. "I
think it's awfully fine," she said. "But of course it's a little
too...too...trompe-l'oeil for my taste." She looked at Gombauld, who
made no response, but continued to smoke, gazing meditatively all the
time at his picture. Mary went on gaspingly. "When I was in Paris this
spring I saw a lot of Tschuplitski. I admire his work so tremendously.
Of course, it's frightfully abstract now--frightfully abstract and frightfully
intellectual. He just throws a few oblongs on to his canvas--quite flat,
you know, and painted in pure primary colours. But his design is
wonderful. He's getting more and more abstract every day. He'd given
up the third dimension when I was there and was just thinking of giving up
the second. Soon, he says, there'll be just the blank canvas. That's the
logical conclusion. Complete abstraction. Painting's finished; he's
finishing it. When he's reached pure abstraction he's going to take up
60
architecture. He says it's more intellectual than painting. Do you
agree?" she asked, with a final gasp.
Gombauld dropped his cigarette end and trod on it. "Tschuplitski's
finished painting," he said. "I've finished my cigarette. But I'm going
on painting." And, advancing towards her, he put his arm round her
shoulders and turned her round, away from the picture.
Mary looked up at him; her hair swung back, a soundless bell of gold.
Her eyes were serene; she smiled. So the moment had come. His arm
was round her. He moved slowly, almost imperceptibly, and she moved
with him. It was a peripatetic embracement. "Do you agree with him?"
she repeated. The moment might have come, but she would not cease to
be intellectual, serious.
"I don't know. I shall have to think about it." Gombauld loosened
his embrace, his hand dropped from her shoulder. "Be careful going
down the ladder," he added solicitously.
Mary looked round, startled. They were in front of the open door.
She remained standing there for a moment in bewilderment. The hand that
had rested on her shoulder made itself felt lower down her back; it
administered three or four kindly little smacks. Replying automatically
