All Hallows' Eve (5 page)

Richard said at last, “It's a wonderful effect—especially the color of the face. I don't know how you got that dark deadness. But what——” He stopped.

“Richard,” Jonathan said accusingly, “you were going to ask what it
meant.
”

“I don't think I was,” Richard answered. “I may have been going to ask what
he
meant. I feel as if there was something in him I hadn't grasped. He's—” and again he paused.

“Go on!” Jonathan said. “The ladies won't be here just yet, and you may now have got a general idea of why I'd like you to be here when they do come. Anyhow, go on; say anything that occurs to you.”

Richard obediently renewed his study and his reverie. They had done this together on a number of occasions before a new painting. Richard did not mind sounding foolish before his friend and Jonathan did not mind being denigrated by his friend; in fact, he always swore that one soliloquy of this kind was worth a great deal of judicious criticism. Painting was the only art, he maintained, about which it could be done; one couldn't hear a poem or a symphony as one could look at a painting; in time one could never get the whole at once, but one could in space—or all but; there was bound perhaps to be a very small time lag even there. Except for that, all the aural arts aspired to escape from recollection into the immediate condition of the visual.

Richard said, “The skin looks almost as if it were painted; I mean—as if you were painting a painted effect. Very dark and very dull. Yet it's a sort of massive dullness—much like your mass
and
light; only the opposite. But what I don't get is the expression. At first he seems to be just a preacher driving his point home—convicting them of sin or something. Only, though that mass makes him effective enough—even his hand seems to be pressing down on them, though it is back downwards; it might almost be pulling the sky down on them by a kind of magic—a sort of Samson and the pillars of cloud—yet the more I look at what I can see of the face, the more I think that it doesn't mean anything. It seems to be as near plain bewilderment as anything I ever saw.”

“Ho!” said Jonathan, getting off the table to which he had retired. “Ho! You're a genius, Richard. I thought that too. But I've looked at it so often that I can't make out now who's bewildered—him or me.”

Richard looked a question.

“I began painting the damned fellow, as one does,” Jonathan went on, pacing up and down the room and frowning at the floor. “Of course, he wasn't sitting for me, so I had to do the best I could from one meeting at St. Bartholomew's, a couple of orations, seven photographs in
Picture Post
, a dozen daily papers and other oddments. Lady Wallingford says he won't sit because of his reserve, which may of course be true. But at a pinch I can manage to get something out of such a general hodge-podge fairly well, tiresome as the whole business always is, and this time I took particular notice. I wasn't trying to paint his soul or anything; I just wanted to get him done well enough to please Betty's mother. And when I'd done it I stared at it and I thought, ‘Either I don't know
what
he is or he doesn't know
where
he is.' But a fellow who's put it over all America and bits of England is likely to know where he is, I suppose, so I must just have got him completely wrong. It's odd, all the same. I generally manage to make something more or less definite. This man looks as if he were being frightfully definite and completely indefinite at the same moment—an absolute master and a lost loony at once.”

“Perhaps he is,” said Richard doubtfully.

Jonathan came to a stop by the easel and sighed drearily. “No,” he said, “no. I'm afraid not. In fact, I'm afraid it's a complete give-away for me. The main point is—do you think Lady Wallingford will notice it? And what will she say if she does?”

“I shouldn't think she would,” said Richard. “After all, I only just did myself and I'm far more used to your style than she is.”

“She may not be used to me, but she's extremely used to him,” Jonathan said gloomily. “She's one of the real inner circle. Betty and I will have a much more difficult time if there's any trouble. Otherwise, I shouldn't mind in the least. What
do
you people know about him, Richard?”

“We know,” said Richard, “that his name is Simon Leclerc—sometimes called Father Simon and sometimes Simon the Clerk. We gather he's a Jew by descent, though born in France, and brought up in America. We know that he has a great power of oratory—at least, over there; he hasn't tried it much here so far—and that it's said he's performed a number of very remarkable cures, which I don't suppose we've checked. We know that quite intelligent people are attached to him—and that's about all we do know; at least, it's all I know. But, as I told you, I've not been particularly interested. You say you've heard him preach; what does he preach?”

“Love,” said Jonathan, more gloomily than ever as he looked at his watch. “They'll be here in a minute. Love, so far as I can gather, but I was more looking at him than listening to him and it's almost impossible for me really to do both at once. I could sort of feel his effect going on all round. But it was mostly Love, with a hint of some secret behind, which Love no doubt could find out. He sometimes gives private interviews, I know, but I really felt it'd be too embarrassing to go to one. So I can only generalize from the bits I caught while I was staring. Love, and something else.”

There was a ring at the front door bell, Jonathan threw the cover again over the painting, and said, “Richard, if you go now, I'll never forgive you. And if you don't say the right thing, I'll never listen to a word of yours again.” He went hastily out.

He was back so soon that Richard had hardly time to do more than feel at a distance within him that full and recollected life which, whenever it did show itself, threatened to overthrow all other present experiences. It was his first experience of such a nature, of “another” life. Almost, as he too turned from the easel, he saw Lester's dead face, as he had seen it, floating, dim and ill-defined, before his eyes; and the two women who came into the room, though more spectacular, were more empty and shell-like than she.

They were not unlike, with thirty years between. They were both smallish. Lady Wallingford was gray and thin, and had something almost of arrogance in her manner. Betty was fair and thinner than, at her age, one would have thought she ought to be. She looked tired and rather wan. Her eyes, as she entered, were turned on Jonathan, and Richard thought he saw her hand drop from his. Jonathan presented him. Lady Wallingford took him, so to speak, for granted—so granted as to be unnecessary. Betty gave him a quick little glance of interest, which for the moment he did not quite understand; having forgotten that she was supposed to have known Lester. He bowed twice and stepped back a pace. Jonathan said, “You'll have some tea first, Lady Wallingford? It's not too warm today.”

Lady Wallingford said, “We'll look at the picture first. I'm anxious to see it.”

“I'm very cold, Mother,” Betty said—a little nervously, Richard thought. “Couldn't we have tea?”

Lady Wallingford entirely ignored this. She said, “Is that covered thing it? Let me see it.”

Jonathan, with the faintest shrug, obeyed. He went to the easel; he said, over his shoulder, “You'll understand that this is rather an impression than a portrait,” and he pulled aside the covering. There was a silence, concentrated on the painting. Richard, discreetly in the background, waited for its first quiver.

The first he observed was in Betty. She was just behind her mother and he saw her yield to a faint shudder. Jonathan saw it too; he almost made a movement towards her and checked it before Lady Wallingford's immobility. After what seemed like minutes, she said, “What is our Father coming out of, Mr. Drayton?”

Jonathan pinched his lip, glanced at Betty, and answered, “What you choose, Lady Wallingford.”

Lady Wallingford said, “You must have some idea. What is he standing on? rock?”

“Oh yes, rock,” said Jonathan readily; and then, as if reluctantly truthful, added, “At least, you might as well call it rock.”

The private view was not going very well. Betty sat down as if her power had failed. Lady Wallingford said, “
Is
he standing on it?”

Jonathan answered, “It doesn't much matter, perhaps.” He glanced rather anxiously at Richard. Richard took a step forward and said as engagingly as he could, “It's the whole impression that counts, don't you think?”

It was quite certainly the wrong remark. Lady Wallingford took no notice of it. She went on, still addressing herself to Jonathan, “And why are the people so much like insects?”

Betty made an inarticulate sound. Jonathan and Richard both stared at the painting. It had not occurred to either of them—not even apparently to Jonathan—that the whole mass of inclined backs could be seen almost as a ranked mass of beetles, their oval backs dully reflecting a distant light. Once the word had been spoken, the painting became suddenly sinister. Jonathan broke out but his voice was unconvincing, “They're not … they weren't meant … they don't look like beetles.”

“They look exactly like beetles,” Lady Wallingford said. “They are not human beings at all. And Father Simon's face is exactly the same shape.”

Richard saw that there at least she was right. The oval shape of the face differed only in its features and its downward inclination from the innumerable backs, and in the fact that it reflected no light. It was this lack of reflection which gave it its peculiar deadness; the backs had that dim reflection but this face none. But now he saw it as so similar in shape that it seemed to him for half a second not a face at all, but another back; but this eyed and mouthed as if the living human form ended in a gruesomeness and had a huge beetle for its head, only a beetle that looked out backward through its coat and had a wide speaking mouth there also; a speaking beetle, an orating beetle, but also a dead and watching beetle. He forgot the aesthetic remark he had been about to make.

Jonathan was saying, “I think that's rather reading things into it.” It was not, for him, a particularly intelligent remark; but he was distracted by the thought of Betty and yet his voice was as cold as Lady Wallingford's own. He could manage his words but not his tone.

Lady Wallingford moved her head a little more forward. Richard saw the movement and suddenly, as she stood in front of him, she too took on the shape of an overgrown insect. Outside the painting her back repeated the shapes in the painting. Richard suddenly found himself believing in the painting. This then was what the hearers of Father Simon looked like. He glanced at the face again, but he supposed he had lost that special angle of sight; it was now more like a face, though of that dead artificiality he had remarked before. Lady Wallingford leaned towards the picture as if she were feeling for it with invisible tentacles. But she was feeling with a hideous and almost dangerous accuracy. She now said, and her voice was more than cold; it was indignant, “Why have you painted our Father as an imbecile?”

Here, however, Jonathan was driven to protest more strongly. He turned his back on the painting and he said with some passion, “No, really, Lady Wallingford, I have not. I can see what you mean by complaining of the shapes, though honestly I never thought of anything of the sort, and I'll do something.… I mean, I'll paint something different somehow. But I never had the slightest intention of painting Father Simon in any displeasing way.…”

Lady Wallingford said, “You intended.… Look at it!” Jonathan stopped speaking; he looked at the woman; then he looked beyond her at Betty. She looked back despairingly. Richard observed the exchange of their eyes, and the full crisis became clear to him. He felt, as they did, Betty swept away on Lady Wallingford's receding anger; he saw her throw out a hand towards Jonathan and he saw Jonathan immediately respond. He saw him move away from the painting and go across to Betty, take her hands and lift her from her chair so that she stood against him. His arm round her, he turned again towards the painting. And again Richard's eyes went with his.

It was as he had last seen it. Or was it? Was the face not quite so down-turned? was it more lifted and already contemplating the room? Had he misjudged the angle? of course, he must have misjudged the angle. But to say it was “contemplating” was too much; it was not contemplating but only staring. What he had called bewilderment was now plain lack of meaning. Jonathan's phrase—“an absolute master and a lost loony at the same time”—recurred to him. The extended hand was no longer a motion of exposition or of convincing energy, holding the congregation attentive, but rather drawing the congregation after it, a summons and a physical enchantment. It drew them towards the figure, and behind the figure itself perhaps to more; for the shadow of the figure on the cliff behind was not now a shadow, but the darkness of a cleft which ran back very deeply, almost infinitely deep, a corridor between two walls of rock. Into that corridor the figure, hovering on its shadowy platform, was about to recede; and below it all those inclined backs were on the point of similar movement. A crowd of winged beetles, their wings yet folded but at the very instant of loosing, was about to rise into the air and disappear into that crevice and away down the prolonged corridor. And the staring emaciated face that looked out at them and over them was the face of an imbecile. Richard said impatiently to himself, “This is all that old woman talking,” because, though one did get different angles on paintings, one did not usually so soon see on the same canvas what was practically a different painting. Blatant and blank in the gray twilight, where only a reflection of the sun shone from the beetles' coats, the face hung receding; blank and blatant, the thousand insects rose towards it; and beyond them the narrow corridor hinted some extreme distance towards which the whole congregation and their master were on the point of unchecked flight. And yet the face was not a true face at all; it was not a mockery, but the hither side of something which was hidden and looking away, a face as much stranger than the face they saw as that—face or back—from the other insect backs below it.