Читать книгу Coloured Spectacles - Frederick Niven - Страница 5

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Out of these distant years I have a memory of a visit to a house somewhere near the top of Bath Street—in Blythswood Square, I think—where a sturdy and rather paternal young man was our host. He was the eldest of three brilliant brothers, both of whose parents, I believe, were then gone. He was Muirhead Bone, and James Bone was also there, dark and eager. The door opened and a lad came in, wearing brass-buttoned blue, and the eldest brother, as this youngest joined us, said, "This is the sailor-laddie," by way of introduction. That was the only time I saw Muirhead Bone and David Bone but James I used to see, years afterwards, when I was in Fleet Street, silk-hatted, with furled umbrella, strolling slowly (the best journalists seldom hurry) under the arch that leads to the Temple where he lived. He was by that time London editor of The Manchester Guardian.

One day I saw him there and, a little further along the street, as if for contrast, David Hodge in unpressed suit, large and easy, a cigarette hanging from a corner of his mouth, strolling into the ancient cottage (long since pulled down) in which the Glasgow Evening News had its London office. In that office and, later, across the street in a modern block, I used occasionally to drop in on Hodge for the refreshment of his tolerance and geniality and to hear the rich Scots burr of his voice as, looking up from his littered table, he gave me welcome, the cigarette waggling at a mouth-corner.

But I run too far on. We are still in Glasgow and I am still a boy there. Harrington Mann was good to that boy and the boy adored him. I hear again the clash of brass rings as he draws a curtain in one of his Glasgow studios, coming out on to the landing to find me there. He is sorry that he is just going off, he says.

"Going off?" say I. "To Italy?" I ask.

I had somehow the idea that going off meant departure to Italy. He smiles down at me, says he wishes he was going to Italy, is only going off for the day, and tells me to come and see him another day.

I cannot place that studio though I recall the clash of the curtain-rings. It was on the north side of a street, up some stairs and along a corridor; that's all I remember of its situation. I recall the whereabouts of another of his studios: it was in St. Vincent Place—on the south side, and had an ante-room in which he sat one day tossing a scrap of pencil from one hand to the other and drawing now with the left, now with the right in an attempt to show me how to do it. When I said that I thought it was time for me to go he took a skull from the mantelpiece, wrapped it in brown paper, and told me I could have a loan of that to draw. I see him again in his people's home after he came back from what I presume must have been a second visit to Italy, sitting on a cushion on the floor accompanying himself, on a guitar, in songs the models sang at Anticoli-Corrado and in "As Villikins was a-volikin in his garden von day . . ."

I remember him coming once to our house in search of a spinning-wheel. He wanted a big one, such as is used in Hebridean crofts. Ours was an elegant drawing-room one (it had belonged once to the Boswells of Auchinleck—the family of Dr. Johnson's biographer) but it would serve him, he said, and carried it off. It had served me in earlier years when, standing behind it, I had spun the wheel to port and starboard, navigating imaginary ships across the carpet-ocean. When he brought it back there were whorls of fleecy wool around the distaff. I remember him also by Loch Lomond side, striding along a hedge-lined road—head thrown back, eyelids slightly lowered as if focussing the scene—easel and canvas hanging from a shoulder, on his way to a beechwood to paint; and the painting I can see still, the sun among the beeches and a small figure of a girl in it, an inch or two high, in distance, and recall how I recognised that portrait, marvelling how a few adroit flicks of paint, so small, could let me call her by name at a glance.

All the members of that family could see. My own eyes, by merely being with him, or with his people, seemed to be aided; and still to-day for me (across fifty years) the morning dew-drops remain glistening on an iron railing round the garden of their country home by Loch Lomond as I saw them then on a week-end visit. That guide to "doon the watter" with the pen-drawings of Muirhead Bone I cannot find but still I have a few pages of a Scottish Art Review of that time with reproductions of wash-drawings by Harrington Mann done in a village of the Apennines to which he had gone on winning the first Slade School Travelling Scholarship.

One of his brothers, Ludovic, well known to-day as an archæologist and anthropologist, used often, in summer-time, to leave the town house of an evening—after seeing to the garden there, gardening one of his hobbies—and "stepping westward" through the cool night, street lamps behind, stars overhead, arrive in the dewy Highland morning at the house by Loch Lomond in good time for bath and an early breakfast. I saw him setting out one evening for the tramp in an easy, rhythmic stride. Perhaps in these tramps under the stars, till the dawn put them out, there was the beginning of another interest that led to his astronomical researches and discoveries. I never think of any member of that gifted and generous family without a sense of gratitude. Benefits they conferred more often than they knew.

Among the treasures of those days that have survived many packings and removals, along with the pages of that Scottish Art Review, I found, on my last unpacking, a copy of the Black and White Handbook to the Royal Academy and the New Gallery Pictures of 1893. Easy to realise why it was preserved. Following a brief history of the Royal Academy by C. Lewis Hind it contains an article entitled "The Outsiders, Some Eminent Artists of the Day NOT Members of the Royal Academy," by R. Jope-Slade, and many short biographies of these—a goodly number of whom, by the way, later became Academicians.

Among these brief biographies is one on Harrington Mann (the photograph reproduced above it like enough to what he was in those days as I recall him), and one on Lavery, and one on W. E. Lockhart whom once when young—before my School of Art days—I met. He was painting the portrait of an old friend of my folks in a house from knolls in the grounds of which the glass top of the Cloch lighthouse could be seen twinkling in the sun and yachts flickering back and forth and steamers thrashing along in the broadening estuary of Clyde. I remember a boy of about my own age who led me away for a while to play, remember sunny gardens, enclosures of warmth and flowers surrounded by red brick walls. We did something to annoy a hirsute old man in shirt-sleeves, obviously a gardener. I remember him bellowing at us in indignation. Vaguely I recall that our sin had to do with climbing a wall to get into a section of gardens the gate of which was locked.

I recall a panting return to the house and then that small boy disappears, and in a cool interior a lady is asking the bearded painter if the visitors may see the portrait though it is not finished. I go tagging along behind a rustle of skirts into a room where it stood on an easel, framed, only some last touches to be done upon it. The subject's wife, I think, must have doted upon her husband. She drew the attention of the elders in front of me, between whose bustles and hips I peered, to this and that characteristic of her husband that had been discerningly observed and accurately limned by the artist. He and his wife stood back, and as they did so they looked one to the other and exchanged a smile which still I can see, and then looked sharply round on discovering that some one was behind them—only me, only a youngster.

Then there is a dining-room and our host and Lockhart are on their feet and I am standing with them, the ladies having just gone. They sit down again, and I sit down, and these two bearded men, after some chat about this and that over my head, turn to me. Our host asks me if I have begun Latin and I say Yes, and the painter asks if I can decline Columba. I marvel at the appropriateness, for I have a pigeon-house—a "doo-cot"—at home and am then what Scots boys used to call, and no doubt still call, "doo-daft." I decline Columba, the two men listening soberly. Our host of the portrait remarks that the manner in which I do it is slightly different from the usage when he was a boy, and asks of the painter, "Is that not so?" Lockhart nods and smiles. I know what they mean—only too well I know; for I did my declension, for ease, not as I would have done it in school. I did it as if I saw a page in columns and read down instead of across. I began by chanting, "Nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, vocative, ablative," and then, with the ground thus rapidly cleared, started. By the time I came to the third column I was winded, or flustered, or diffident. I had it all clear enough in my mind, all the way down to "by, with, or from a pigeon," but I let translation go. "Plural," I had announced, and plunged on.

The painter continued to smile on me after his nod of agreement that that was not how it was done when he was at school. And there they are still, in that dining-room, for me. It was a fine evening. The sunset's brightness was among the trees outside. Not till some years later, when I got that copy of Royal Academy Pictures, did I know that the painter for whom I had declined Columba had (to quote from Jope-Slade's thumbnail biography) "tarried long in Spain, making Fortuny's acquaintance"—Mariano Fortuny who, as you shall hear, had once brought sunshine for me into a foggy Glasgow night.

Another famous painter of these days was, I believe, in Spain when, shortly after our return from South America, I was taken in tow to his mother's house, and one of the first books to come my way—Robinson Crusoe—was given to me by her, the mother of Kerr Lawson. The house was in Shields Road (I do not suppose it stands now), set back a little way beyond a lawn, a few trees round it with spring flourish on them. All that was wrong with the house, I remember hearing, was that on foggy days and nights the screaming of engine-whistles, and the explosion of detonators on the railway tracks near-by, were wearisome. But there was sunshine that day in the book-lined room in which we sat, and sunlight was in the coloured plates of the Robinson Crusoe I was given to carry home.

It had an additional interest for me because from Valparaiso, where I was born, now and then parties sailed out to visit Juan Fernandez, the island of the original Robinson Crusoe—Alexander Selkirk, or Selcraig—although Defoe had set his island somewhere off the mouth of the Orinoco. I have that copy of Robinson Crusoe still. Even in adventurous times later, when many of my books became a movable feast and passed to the second-hand booksellers in London, I could not part with it.

Tough days! Tough days reveal to us our friends. When I went broke and had to sell books and prints, one was memorably disclosed to me. I had a Whistler etching. It went with the rest. When I was on my feet again Holbrook Jackson arrived one day with a flat parcel under his arm. "A little present for you," he said. It was my cherished and sacrificed Whistler. He had bought it from the dealer to whom I had sold it and kept it till there would be evidence of my financial affairs having improved. I have it still also.

Harrington Mann's mother gave me Treasure Island. Robinson Crusoe and Treasure Island were none too bad for a start, I think.

The years slipped past. The doo-cot was taken down.