Crome Yellow (19 page)

‘Well, what
does
it mean?' asked Mr Scogan, a little impatiently.

‘Carminative,' said Denis, lingering lovingly over the syllables, ‘carminative. I imagined vaguely that it had something to do with
carmen-carminis,
still more vaguely with
caro-carnis,
and its derivatives, like carnival and carnation. Carminative – there was the idea of singing and the idea of flesh, rose-coloured and warm, with a suggestion of the jollities of mi-Carême and the masked holidays of Venice. Carminative – the warmth, the glow, the interior ripeness were all in the word. Instead of which . . .'

‘Do come to the point, my dear Denis,' protested Mr Scogan. ‘Do come to the point.'

‘Well, I wrote a poem the other day,' said Denis; ‘I wrote a poem about the effects of love.'

‘Others have done the same before you,' said Mr Scogan. ‘There is no need to be ashamed.'

‘I was putting forward the notion,' Denis went on, ‘that the effects of love were often similar to the effects of wine, that Eros would intoxicate as well as Bacchus. Love, for example, is essentially carminative. It gives one the sense of warmth, the glow.

was what I wrote. Not only was the line elegantly sonorous; it was also, I flattered myself, very aptly and compendiously expressive. Everything was in the word carminative – a detailed, exact foreground, an immense, indefinite hinterland of suggestion.

I was not ill-pleased. And then suddenly it occurred to me that I had never actually looked up the word in a dictionary. Carminative had grown up with me from the days of the cinnamon bottle. It had always been taken for granted. Carminative: for me the word was as rich in content as some tremendous, elaborate work of art; it was a complete landscape with figures.

It was the first time I had ever committed the word to writing, and all at once I felt I would like lexicographical authority for it. A small English-German dictionary was all I had at hand. I turned up C, ca, car, carm. There it was: “Carminative:
windtreibend.
”
Windtreibend!
' he repeated. Mr Scogan laughed. Denis shook his head. ‘Ah,' he said, ‘for me it was no laughing matter. For me it marked the end of a chapter, the death of something young and precious. There were the years – years of childhood and innocence – when I had believed that carminative meant – well, carminative. And now, before me lies the rest of my life – a day, perhaps, ten years, half a century, when I shall know that carminative means
windtriebend
.

It is a realization that makes one rather melancholy.'

‘Carminative,' said Mr Scogan thoughtfully.

‘Carminative,' Denis repeated, and they were silent for a time. ‘Words,' said Denis at last, ‘words – I wonder if you can realize how much I love them. You are too much preoccupied with mere things and ideas and people to understand the full beauty of words. Your mind is not a literary mind. The spectacle of Mr Gladstone finding thirty-four rhymes to the name “Margot” seems to you rather pathetic than anything else. Mallarmés envelopes with their versified addresses leave you cold, unless they leave you pitiful; you can't see that

is a little miracle.'

‘You're right,' said Mr Scogan. ‘I can't.'

‘You don't feel it to be magical?'

‘No.'

‘That's the test for the literary mind,' said Denis; ‘the feeling of magic, the sense that words have power. The
technical, verbal part of literature is simply a development of magic. Words are man's first and most grandiose invention. With language, he created a whole new universe; what wonder if he loved words and attributed power to them! With fitted, harmonious words the magicians summoned rabbits out of empty hats and spirits from the elements. Their descendants, the literary men, still go on with the process, morticing their verbal formulas together and, before the power of the finished spell, trembling with delight and awe. Rabbits out of empty hats? No, their spells are more subtly powerful, for they evoke emotions out of empty minds. Formulated by their art, the most insipid statements become enormously significant. For example, I proffer the constatation, “Black ladders lack bladders.” A self-evident truth, one on which it would not have been worth while to insist, had I chosen to formulate it in such words as “Black fire-escapes have no bladders,” or, “Les échelles noires manquent de vessie.” But since I put it as I do, “Black ladders lack bladders,” it becomes, for all its self-evidence, significant, unforgettable, moving. The creation by word-power of something out of nothing – what is that but magic? And, I may add, what is that but literature? Half the world's greatest poetry is simply “Les échelles noires manquent de vessie,” translated into magic significance as, “Black ladders lack bladders.” And you can't appreciate words. I'm sorry for you.'

‘A mental carminative,' said Mr Scogan reflectively. ‘That's what you need.'

PERCHED ON ITS
four stone mushrooms, the little granary stood two or three feet above the grass of the green close. Beneath it there was a perpetual shade and a damp growth of long, luxuriant grasses. Here, in the shadow, in the green dampness, a family of white ducks had sought shelter from the afternoon sun. Some stood, preening themselves, some reposed with their long bellies pressed to the ground, as though the cool grass were water. Little social noises burst fitfully forth, and from time to time some pointed tail would execute a brilliant Lisztian tremolo. Suddenly their jovial repose was shattered. A prodigious thump shook the wooden flooring above their heads; the whole granary trembled, little fragments of dirt and crumbled wood rained down among them. With a loud, continuous quacking the ducks rushed out from beneath this nameless menace, and did not stay their flight till they were safely in the farmyard.

‘Don't lose your temper,' Anne was saying. ‘Listen! You've frightened the ducks. Poor dears! no wonder.' She was sitting sideways in a low, wooden chair. Her right elbow rested on the back of the chair and she supported her cheek on her hand. Her long, slender body drooped into curves of a lazy grace. She was smiling, and she looked at Gombauld through half-closed eyes.

‘Damn you!' Gombauld repeated, and stamped his foot again. He glared at her round the half-finished portrait on the easel.

‘Poor ducks!' Anne repeated. The sound of their quacking was faint in the distance; it was inaudible.

‘Can't you see you make me lose my time?' he asked. ‘I can't work with you dangling about distractingly like this.'

‘You'd lose less time if you stopped talking and stamping your feet and did a little painting for a change. After all, what am I dangling about for, except to be painted?'

Gombauld made a noise like a growl. ‘You're awful,' he said, with conviction. ‘Why do you ask me to come and stay
here? Why do you tell me you'd like me to paint your portrait?'

‘For the simple reasons that I like you – at least, when you're in a good temper – and that I think you're a good painter.'

‘For the simple reason' – Gombauld mimicked her voice – ‘that you want me to make love to you and, when I do, to have the amusement of running away.'

Anne threw back her head and laughed. ‘So you think it amuses me to have to evade your advances! So like a man! If only you knew how gross and awful and boring men are when they try to make love and you don't want them to make love! If you could only see yourselves through our eyes!'

Gombauld picked up his palette and brushes and attacked his canvas with the ardour of irritation. ‘I suppose you'll be saying next that you didn't start the game, that it was I who made the first advances, and that you were the innocent victim who sat still and never did anything that could invite or allure me on.'

‘So like a man again!' said Anne. ‘It's always the same old story about the woman tempting the man. The woman lures, fascinates, invites; and man – noble man, innocent man – falls a victim. My poor Gombauld! Surely you're not going to sing that old song again. It's so unintelligent, and I always thought you were a man of sense.'

‘Thanks,' said Gombauld.

‘Be a little objective,' Anne went on. ‘Can't you see that you're simply externalizing your own emotions? That's what you men are always doing; it's so barbarously naïve. You feel one of your loose desires for some woman, and because you desire her strongly you immediately accuse her of luring you on, of deliberately provoking and inviting the desire. You have the mentality of savages. You might just as well say that a plate of strawberries and cream deliberately lures you on to feel greedy. In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred women are as passive and innocent as the strawberries and cream.'

‘Well, all I can say is that this must be the hundredth case,' said Gombauld, without looking up.

Anne shrugged her shoulders and gave vent to a sigh. ‘I'm at a loss to know whether you're more silly or more rude.'

After painting for a little time in silence Gombauld began to speak again. ‘And then there's Denis,' he said, renewing the conversation as though it had only just been broken off. ‘You're playing the same game with him. Why can't you leave that wretched young man in peace?'

Anne flushed with a sudden and uncontrollable anger. ‘It's perfectly untrue about Denis,' she said indignantly. ‘I never dreamt of playing what you beautifully call the same game with him.' Recovering her calm, she added in her ordinary cooing voice and with her exacerbating smile, ‘You've become very protective towards poor Denis all of a sudden.'

‘I have,' Gombauld replied, with a gravity that was somehow a little too solemn. ‘I don't like to see a young man . . .'

‘. . . being whirled along the road to ruin,' said Anne, continuing his sentence for him. ‘I admire your sentiments and, believe me, I share them.'

She was curiously irritated at what Gombauld had said about Denis. It happened to be so completely untrue. Gombauld might have some slight ground for his reproaches. But Denis – no, she had never flirted with Denis. Poor boy! He was very sweet. She became somewhat pensive.

Gombauld painted on with fury. The restlessness of an unsatisfied desire, which, before, had distracted his mind, making work impossible, seemed now to have converted itself into a kind of feverish energy. When it was finished, he told himself, the portrait would be diabolic. He was painting her in the pose she had naturally adopted at the first sitting. Seated sideways, her elbow on the back of the chair, her head and shoulders turned at an angle from the rest of her body, towards the front, she had fallen into an attitude of indolent abandonment. He had emphasized the lazy curves of her body; the lines sagged as they crossed the canvas, the grace of the painted figure seemed to be melting into a kind of soft decay. The hand that lay along the knee was as limp as a glove. He was at work on the face now; it had begun to emerge on the canvas, doll-like in its regularity and listlessness. It was Anne's face – but her face as it would be, utterly unillumined by the inward lights of thought and
emotion. It was the lazy, expressionless mask which was sometimes her face. The portrait was terribly like; and at the same time it was the most malicious of lies. Yes, it would be diabolic when it was finished, Gombauld decided; he wondered what she would think of it.

FOR THE SAKE
of peace and quiet Denis had retired earlier on this same afternoon to his bedroom. He wanted to work, but the hour was a drowsy one, and lunch, so recently eaten, weighed heavily on body and mind. The meridian demon was upon him; he was possessed by that bored and hopeless post-prandial melancholy which the coenobites of old knew and feared under the name of ‘accidie.' He felt, like Ernest Dowson, ‘a little weary.' He was in the mood to write something rather exquisite and gentle and quietist in tone; something a little droopy and at the same time – how should he put it? – a little infinite. He though of Anne, of love hopeless and unattainable. Perhaps that was the ideal kind of love, the hopeless kind – the quiet, theoretical kind of love. In this sad mood of repletion he could well believe it. He began to write. One elegant quatrain had flowed from beneath his pen:

when his attention was attracted by a sound from outside. He looked down from his window; there they were, Anne and Gombauld, talking, laughing together. They crossed the courtyard in front, and passed out of sight through the gate in the right-hand wall. That was the way to the green close and the granary; she was going to sit for him again. His pleasantly depressing melancholy was dissipated by a puff of violent emotion; angrily he threw his quatrain into the waste-paper basket and ran downstairs. ‘The stealth of moonbeams,' indeed!

In the hall he saw Mr Scogan; the man seemed to be lying in wait. Denis tried to escape, but in vain. Mr Scogan's eye glittered like the eye of the Ancient Mariner.

‘Not so fast,' he said, stretching out a small saurian hand
with pointed nails – ‘not so fast. I was just going down to the flower garden to take the sun. We'll go together.'

Denis abandoned himself; Mr Scogan put on his hat and they went out arm in arm. On the shaven turf of the terrace Henry Wimbush and Mary were playing a solemn game of bowls. They descended by the yew-tree walk. It was here, thought Denis, here that Anne had fallen, here that he had kissed her, here – and he blushed with retrospective shame at the memory – here that he had tried to carry her and failed. Life was awful!