Antic Hay (14 page)

Mrs Viveash looked at him. No, he wasn't young; at the moment, indeed, he seemed to have become much older than he really was. An old man was standing there, peaked and sharp and worn. He had failed, he was unhappy. But the world would have been unjuster, less discriminating if it had given him success.

‘Some people believe in you,' she said; there was nothing else for her to say.

Lypiatt looked up at her. ‘You?' he asked.

Mrs Viveash nodded, deliberately. It was a lie. But was it possible to tell the truth? ‘And then there is the future,' she reassured him, and her faint death-bed voice seemed to prophesy with a perfect certainty. ‘You're not forty yet; you've got twenty, thirty years of work in front of you. And there were others, after all, who had to wait – a long time – sometimes till after they were dead. Great men; Blake, for instance . . .' She felt positively ashamed; it was like a little talk by Doctor Frank Crane. But she felt still more ashamed when she saw that Casimir had begun to cry, and that the tears were rolling, one after another, slowly down his face.

He put down his palette, he stepped on to the dais, he came and knelt at Mrs Viveash's feet. He took one of her hands between his own and he bent over it, pressing it to his forehead, as though it were a charm against unhappy thoughts, sometimes kissing it; soon it was wet with tears. He wept almost in silence.

‘It's all right,' Mrs Viveash kept repeating, ‘it's all right,' and she laid her free hand on his bowed head, she patted it comfortingly as one might pat the head of a large dog that comes and thrusts its muzzle between one's knees. She felt, even as she made it, how meaningless and unintimate the gesture was. If she had liked him, she would have run her fingers through his hair; but somehow his hair rather disgusted her. ‘It's all right, all right.' But, of course, it wasn't all right; and she was comforting him under false pretences and he was kneeling at the feet of somebody who simply wasn't there – so utterly detached, so far away she was from all this scene and all his misery.

‘You're the only person,' he said at last, ‘who cares or understands.'

Mrs Viveash could almost have laughed.

He began once more to kiss her hand.

‘Beautiful and enchanting Myra – you were always that. But now you're good and dear as well, now I know you're kind.'

‘Poor Casimir!' she said. Why was it that people always got involved in one's life? If only one could manage things on the principle of the railways! Parallel tracks – that was the thing. For a few miles you'd be running at the same speed. There'd be delightful conversation out of the windows; you'd exchange the omelette in your restaurant car for the vol-au-vent in theirs. And when you'd said all there was to say, you'd put on a little more steam, wave your hand, blow a kiss and away you'd go, forging ahead along the smooth, polished rails. But instead of that, there were these dreadful accidents; the points were wrongly set, the trains came crashing together; or people jumped on you as you were passing through the stations and made a nuisance of themselves and wouldn't allow themselves to be turned off. Poor Casimir! But he irritated her, he was a horrible bore. She ought to have stopped seeing him.

‘You can't wholly dislike me, then?'

‘But of course not, my poor Casimir!'

‘If you knew how horribly I loved you!' He looked up at her despairingly.

‘But what's the good?' said Mrs Viveash.

‘Have you ever known what it's like to love some one so much that you feel you could die of it? So that it hurts all the time. As though there were a wound. Have you ever known that?'

Mrs Viveash smiled her agonizing smile, nodded slowly and said, ‘Perhaps. And one doesn't die, you know. One doesn't die.'

Lypiatt was leaning back, staring fixedly up at her. The tears were dry on his face, his cheeks were flushed. ‘Do you know what it is,' he asked, ‘to love so much that you begin to long for the anodyne of physical pain to quench the pain in the soul? You don't know that.' And suddenly, with his clenched fist, he began to bang the wooden dais on which he was kneeling, blow after blow, with all his strength.

Mrs Viveash leant forward and tried to arrest his hand. ‘You're mad, Casimir,' she said. ‘You're mad. Don't do that.' She spoke with anger.

Lypiatt laughed till his face was all broken up with the grimace, and proffered for her inspection his bleeding knuckles. The skin hung in little white tags and tatters, and from below the blood was slowly oozing up to the surface. ‘Look,' he said, and laughed again. Then suddenly, with an extraordinary agility, he jumped to his feet, bounded from the dais and began once more to stride up and down the fairway between his easel and the door.

‘By God,' he kept repeating, ‘by God, by God. I feel it in me. I can face the whole lot of you; the whole damned lot. Yes, and I shall get the better of you yet. An Artist' – he called up that traditional ghost and it comforted him; he wrapped himself with a protective gesture within the ample folds of its bright mantle – ‘an Artist doesn't fail under unhappiness. He gets new strength from it. The torture makes him sweat new masterpieces . . .'

He began to talk about his books, his poems and pictures; all the great things in his head, the things he had already done. He talked about his exhibition – ah, by God, that would astonish them, that would bowl them over, this time. The blood mounted to his face; there was a flush over the high projecting cheekbones. He could feel the warm blood behind his eyes. He laughed aloud; he was a laughing lion. He stretched out his arms; he was enormous, his arms reached out like the branches of a cedar. The Artist walked across the world and the mangy dogs ran yelping and snapping behind him. The great wind blew and blew, driving him on; it lifted him and he began to fly.

Mrs Viveash listened. It didn't look as though he would get much further with the portrait.

IT WAS PRESS
Day. The critics had begun to arrive; Mr Albemarle circulated among them with a ducal amiability. The young assistant hovered vaguely about, straining to hear what the great men had to say and trying to pretend that he wasn't eavesdropping. Lypiatt's pictures hung on the walls, and Lypiatt's catalogue, thick with its preface and its explanatory notes, was in all hands.

‘Very strong,' Mr Albemarle kept repeating, ‘very strong indeed!' It was his password for the day.

Little Mr Clew, who represented the
Daily Post,
was inclined to be enthusiastic. ‘How well he writes!' he said to Mr Albemarle, looking up from the catalogue. ‘And how well he paints! What
impasto
!'

Impasto, impasto
– the young assistant sidled off unobtrusively to the desk and made a note of it. He would look the word up in Grubb's
Dictionary of Art and Artists
later on. He made his way back, circuitously, and as though by accident, into Mr Clew's neighbourhood.

Mr Clew was one of those rare people who have a real passion for art. He loved painting, all painting, indiscriminately. In a picture-gallery he was like a Turk in a harem; he adored them all. He loved Memling as much as Raphael, he loved Grünewald and Michelangelo, Holman Hunt and Manet, Romney and Tintoretto; how happy he could be with all of them! Sometimes, it is true, he hated; but that was only when familiarity had not yet bred love. At the first Post-Impressionist Exhibition, for example, in 1911, he had taken a very firm stand. ‘This is an obscene farce,' he had written then. Now, however, there was no more passionate admirer of Matisse's genius. As a connoisseur and
kunstforscher,
Mr Clew was much esteemed. People would bring him dirty old pictures to look at, and he would exclaim at once: Why, it's an El Greco, a Piazzetta, or some other suitable name. Asked how he knew, he would shrug his shoulders and say: But it's signed all over. His certainty and his enthusiasm were infectious. Since the coming of El Greco into fashion, he had discovered dozens of early works by that great artist. For Lord Petersfield's collection alone he had found four early El Grecos, all by pupils of Bassano. Lord Petersfield's confidence in Mr Clew was unbounded; not even that affair of the Primitives had shaken it. It was a sad affair: Lord Petersfield's Duccio had shown signs of cracking; the estate carpenter was sent for to take a look at the panel; he had looked. ‘A worse-seasoned piece of Illinois hickory,' he said, ‘I've never seen.' After that he looked at the Simone Martini; for that, on the contrary, he was full of praise. Smooth-grained, well-seasoned – it wouldn't crack, no, not in a hundred years. ‘A nicer slice of board never came out of America.' He had a hyperbolical way of speaking. Lord Petersfield was extremely angry; he dismissed the estate carpenter on the spot. After that he told Mr Clew that he wanted a Giorgione, and Mr Clew went out and found him one which was signed all over.

‘I like this very much,' said Mr Clew, pointing to one of the thoughts with which Lypiatt had prefaced his catalogue. ‘“Genius,”' he adjusted his spectacles and began to read aloud, ‘“is life. Genius is a force of nature. In art, nothing else counts. The modern impotents, who are afraid of genius and who are envious of it, have invented in self-defence the notion of the Artist. The Artist with his sense of form, his style, his devotion to pure beauty, et cetera, et cetera. But Genius includes the Artist; every Genius has, among very many others, the qualities attributed by the impotents to the Artist. The Artist without genius is a carver of fountains through which no water flows.” Very true,' said Mr Clew, ‘very true indeed.' He marked the passage with his pencil.

Mr Albemarle produced the password. ‘Very strongly put,' he said.

‘I have always felt that myself,' said Mr Clew. ‘El Greco, for example . . .'

‘Good morning. What about El Greco?' said a voice, all in one breath. The thin, long, skin-covered skeleton of Mr Mallard hung over them like a guilty conscience. Mr Mallard wrote every week in the
Hebdomadal Digest.
He had an immense knowledge of art, and a sincere dislike of all that was beautiful. The only modern painter whom he really admired was Hodler. All others were treated by him with a merciless savagery; he tore them to pieces in his weekly articles with all the holy gusto of a Calvinist iconoclast smashing images of the Virgin.

‘What about El Greco?' he repeated. He had a peculiarly passionate loathing of El Greco.

Mr Clew smiled up at him propitiatingly; he was afraid of Mr Mallard. His enthusiasms were no match for Mr Mallard's erudite and logical disgusts. ‘I was merely quoting him as an example,' he said.

‘An example, I hope, of incompetent drawing, baroque composition, disgusting forms, garish colouring and hysterical subject-matter.' Mr Mallard showed his old ivory teeth in a menacing smile. ‘Those are the only things which El Greco's work exemplifies.'

Mr Clew gave a nervous little laugh. ‘What do you think of these?' he asked, pointing to Lypiatt's canvases.

‘They look to me very ordinarily bad,' answered Mr Mallard.

The young assistant listened appalled. In a business like this, how was it possible to make good?

‘All the same,' said Mr Clew courageously, ‘I like that bowl of roses in the window with the landscape behind. Number twenty-nine.' He looked in the catalogue. ‘And there's a really charming little verse about it:

Really charming!' Mr Clew made another mark with his pencil.

‘But commonplace, commonplace.' Mr Mallard shook his head. ‘And in any case a verse can't justify a bad picture. What an unsubtle harmony of colour! And how uninteresting the composition is! That receding diagonal – it's been worked to death.' He too made a mark in his catalogue – a cross and a little circle, arranged like the skull and cross-bones on a pirate's flag. Mr Mallard's catalogues were always covered with these little marks: they were his symbols of condemnation.

Mr Albemarle, meanwhile, had moved away to greet the new arrivals. To the critic of the
Daily Cinema
he had to explain that there were no portraits of celebrities. The reporter from the
Evening Planet
had to be told which were the best pictures.

‘Mr Lypiatt,' he dictated, ‘is a poet and philosopher as well as a painter. His catalogue is a – h'm – declaration of faith.'

The reporter took it down in shorthand. ‘And very nice too,' he said. ‘I'm most grateful to you, sir, most grateful.' And he hurried away, to get to the Cattle Show before the King should arrive. Mr Albemarle affably addressed himself to the critic of the
Morning Globe
.

‘I
al
ways regard this gallery,' said a loud and cheerful voice, full of bulls and canaries in chorus, ‘as positively a
mauvais lieu
. Such exhibitions!' And Mr Mercaptan shrugged his shoulders expressively. He halted to wait for his companion.

Mrs Viveash had lagged behind, reading the catalogue as she slowly walked along. ‘It's a complete book,' she said, ‘full of poems and essays and short stories even, so far as I can see.'

‘Oh, the usual cracker mottoes.' Mr Mercaptan laughed. ‘I know the sort of thing. “Look after the past and the future will look after itself.” “God squared minus Man squared equals Art-plus-life times Art-minus-life.” “The Higher the Art the fewer the morals” – only that's too nearly good sense to have been invented by Lypiatt. But I know the sort of thing. I could go on like that for ever.' Mr Mercaptan was delighted with himself.