Читать книгу The Coming of Amos - William J. Locke - Страница 3

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I HATE excursions and I abhor alarms. Once they were more or less to my taste; now, at forty-five, I’ve had enough of them. I ask little of Providence beyond the peaceful existence I have somewhat laboriously assured myself. If I paint half a dozen portraits a year, I can live in comfort. If I sell during the same period a few landscapes, impressions, sketches or what not, I can live in affluence. Even if I choose to be bone idle, I can sit in the sun all day and sleep in a warm bed all night and have enough food to keep me alive. I own this Villa at Cannes, perched on the top of a cliff, with nothing in front of my broad windows but the southern sea and sky and the long Esterel of ever-changing beauty. I am king in my castle. I seek no other position that fate or financiers or governments could offer me. Let me paint when I choose, bask like a lizard in my tiny rock garden full of cactus when I feel that idleness would be good for my soul, summon hither whom I please for mutual entertainment, descend, when the humour takes me, into the pleasant throng of humans, and all my very modest desires are entirely satisfied.

But do you think I can get this minimum that I crave? No. There is always something coming along to disturb my nicely balanced equilibrium. The Perfect Egoist would be able, in most cases, to withstand the shock; but that is an ideal of character which I shall never attain. Just as I shall go down to my grave as the Imperfect Painter, so shall I go down as the Imperfect Egoist. It is of my struggles towards Perfection, my rebuffs and my despairs that I propose to write. Also, in consequence, of the exasperating doings of a lot of people, notably those of my step-daughter Dorothea, my nephews, Claude Worthington and Amos Burden and the Princess Nadia Ramiroff. There is also a personage of the name of Ramon Garcia.

As you gather that my story is, technically at least, autobiographical, you must allow me to explain myself further, with as little tediousness as I can. Hitherto you only know that I am a painter, a step-father, an uncle and the associate of a Russian princess, striving hard towards an ideal of gentle egoism. The matter is complicated when I say that Captain Claude Worthington is the son of a Bishop, that the Russian princess is an enigma, and that I am a widower. All this needs explanation. You don’t even know my name.

It is:

David Fontenay, Associate of the Royal Academy.

I passed my boyhood in a close ecclesiastical atmosphere. My father, the parson son of a dean, had married an archdeacon’s daughter. My great-grandfathers were parsons. My father, an Honorary Canon of Bristol, was also Rector of a near-by country parish. The family, on both sides, were in easy circumstances. Our society was mainly sacerdotal. It thought in Church, it talked in Church, it lived in Church. It admitted only the laity who also thought in terms of Church. To my boyish mind Church was the one thing in the world that mattered. My sisters, much older than I, took interest in nothing else. Amiable young men belonging to the privileged laity aforesaid came with their arts and their fascinations and went away not so much spurned as unregarded. The home was Church-bound. But as cat will after kind, as the wise Touchstone remarked, so will a healthy parson’s daughter. My younger sister, Muriel, fell in love with my father’s brilliant, just ordained curate, who, having walked away with all the honours that Oxford could propose for competition, was obviously marked out for preferment. Thus my brother-in-law, the bishop, is explained.

Muriel was the intellectual. She loved the paraphernalia of sacerdotalism and was gathering material for a treatise on vestments when Thomas Worthington arrived. It was the putting of their heads together over this pretty pedantry that led to the putting of their hearts together in the common way of mortals. Need I say that a stalwart young bachelor parson was the best man? I remember that he cast eyes of amorous decorum on my elder sister Dorcas and that he went away sorrowing, for, as I afterwards learned, he had great possessions and was a fashionable vicar in Kensington.

Dorcas would not look at him. She was a girl of strong character, who took her religion seriously, and hated the polished shell that enveloped the yolk of piety. She was the only one of the family who dared to hold the Church in disrespect. My father, kind, bland man, indulged her in her theological waywardness; he had his reasons; she was immensely useful, in that she carried on, with singular efficiency, the poor side of the rectorial administration. My father only grew alarmed when he discovered that she was promulgating Calvinistic heresies among his parishioners. He became more alarmed when he learned that she was attending the revivalist meetings of a firebrand of an itinerant preacher by the name of Burden. When she came home one night and calmly asserted that she had found Jesus and was saved, my good father was profoundly shocked. He sent her to bed to think it over. She thought it over to such purpose that the next afternoon she ran away with the man Burden, leaving a letter to say that she would marry him within the shortest interval permitted by the law and then sail with him to the centre of Australia to convert the blacks. The whites, she remarked, were not worth converting.

In my father’s old-fashioned way of the aristocratical parson, he would never allow her name to be mentioned in his presence. The social misalliance perhaps he would have condoned; but in mis-allying herself ecclesiastically she had committed the unpardonable sin.

So much for Dorcas. She faded out of my boyish memory; all the more because she was dour and unsympathetic and so rubbed my sins into me that I began to love them for their own intimate sake. There was some thrill in being a vivid sinner; none whatever in colourless virtue.

I believe this made me frightened of the hereditary career that my father had mapped out for me. I was condemned to goodness all my life. My dismay grew blacker and blacker as my public school revelations of the great world grew more and more alluring. I didn’t want to walk about in a black coat and preach sermons and go on reading, for ever and ever, Church services which I already knew by heart. I wanted to wear gorgeous waistcoats and coloured socks. I craved the generous lustiness of physical existence. And I wanted to paint. Who ever heard of a parson painting? The old monks, of course. They had little else to do. But a modern parson’s time was too fully occupied. And paint I must. Most of my pocket-money I spent on materials. I painted during every leisure hour I could steal from compulsory study and compulsory games. I painted everything paintable, woods, leaves, cows, boys, ships, bunches of carrots. I painted my own reflection in a mirror. I remember trying to interest my father in my daubs. His approval was urbanity itself. Such accomplishment tended to the amiable recreation of a cultivated mind. His sister had painted agreeably—it was in the family. I glanced round the library walls adorned with my late Aunt Eliza’s water-colours and shrank as if from the menace of a Family Curse.

In my arrogance I said: “But I’m talking about real painting, father.”

I can see him now looking at me above the gold eye-glasses which he had put on to inspect a small and sticky canvas, and waving a hand to the walls.

“And I, my son, am talking of genuine talent. Not—er——”

With his white, soft fingers he flicked my picture an inch or two away from him. It was no good.

A year or two later, when I left school, I had the battle royal. Poor old chap, I must have caused his narrow but exquisite soul infinite pain. The recalcitrance of man, equally with the peace of God, passed all his understanding. Here was I, inbred in the Church, consecrated from my birth to its service, practically (in his own mind) ordained in my cradle and now stolidly refusing to have anything to do with Holy Orders. Didn’t I believe in God? Of course I did. In Christ? Certainly. In the Church? Yes. In the sacredness of the Priest’s profession?

“For those who can hold it sacred,” said I. “But I’m afraid I can’t.”

“Why?”

In my callow priggishness I replied:

“I’m much more interested in the sacredness of another profession—Art.”

He gave me up and summoned my brother-in-law, Tom, from the important Midland living to which he had already been preferred, to reason with the renegade. Tom, a little, brisk man, with the face of a humorous dog, turned me inside out in a quarter of an hour. Then he dragged me into the library.

“Well?” said my father.

“He’d make the very worst kind of possible beast of a parson,” said he.

My father made a gesture of despair.

“It’s terrible,” he groaned.

“It isn’t,” cried Tom cheerily. “He’ll be a much decenter Christian outside than in. Heaven isn’t a close corporation for the clergy. In fact I believe there’s quite a little clique of them in the other place.”

My father opened his eyes wide.

“Yes,” said Tom. “And David will join it if he takes orders. Personally, I would rather see a painter saved than a parson damned.”

I’m sure my father thought that the brilliant young Vicar of Middleborough was talking blasphemy. But he asked meekly:

“What would you advise?”

“I’d send him to Paris at once to learn his trade.”

My father gasped. The old ecclesiastical world seemed to be clattering down around his ears.

“Paris?”

“Where else? The young devil has got the gift. I’ve seen his pictures. I’m not a fool—I’m a bit of a connoisseur—and I keep up to date. I assure you, sir,” he added after a pause, “I know what I’m talking about.”

He did. The present Bishop of Bradbury is the most all-round man I have ever come across. He is one of those weird beings who react to every form of human activity. A creature with all kinds of brain-cells working simultaneously. A marvellous, encyclopædic fellow. Why he chose to become a bishop is a matter between himself and his God. Anyhow, at this particular interview he grinned like a dog, and routed my father with the Divinity of Common Sense.

That is why, to this day, I love Tom, the bishop. I think I know him better than my sister Muriel, who always loves to feel herself on the heights. Tom doesn’t care a hang whether he is on the heights or in the depths. He is equal to both. But I think he is at his best on the mid-slopes of a generous humanity.

So my father, almost in an obfuscated dream, sent me to Paris, where I learned my trade.

He has been gathered to his clergyman fathers long since, dear old man, and walks serenely in Elysian Fields with the sweet sound of church bells for ever in his ears. My mother, a fragile sphinx, as she always was, still lives in the dainty retirement of the Somersetshire hills.

One more member of my family may here be explained. Dorothea. She belongs to my brief and wondrous married life which has nothing to do with this story. My wife, when we married, was a widow with one little girl. After five years she died. The little girl is now a young woman of twenty-three. She runs, in partnership with another independent young person, a funny little shop in South Molton Street, where they sell cushions and embroidered bags and such little vanities at disgracefully exorbitant prices. We are the very best of friends and companions, when she can tear herself from her criminal commerce and come to visit me at the Villa Esterel.

I don’t know but that the recent world convulsion, through the midst of which I went like so many millions of others and which now—so long ago does it seem—produces nightmares only in my subconscious mind, has not directly brought me to that serenity in which I hoped to achieve the Perfect Egoism. A bullet through my lung, exiling me from the fogs and the damp and the sunless slush of London, cut short as successful a career as ever was the lot of a young painter. A similar accident of peace would doubtless have made me curse my fate. But the late Abomination of Abominations had one great effect, in that it stripped a man of vanities and made him see himself soul-naked. Otherwise why should I have come out of it with the clear knowledge that I was not the miraculously endowed painter of women that I, in the first place, and the Royal Academy, in the second, thought I was? There certainly occurred an amazing transformation of values. For one thing, during those years, in tedious intervals of inaction, I returned to the open-air joy of my boyhood’s daubing; to setting down on canvas the actualities of ghastly beauty or, for spirit-soothing contrast, the loveliness of untouched wood and stream. The facile portraiture of dainty women seemed an idle thing. I became conscious of an insincerity in my art; and insincerity in art is the living death. I had the knack—and I have it still—of the photographic likeness. I had the colour-sense, the costume sense, that women love. I established a bravura, sweeping, rapid genre of my own, as effective as you please; but it was shallow, a trick as certain to come off as that of a conjurer; as easy as lying. It had not the stern and patient paint by which alone the Great Ones expressed their immortal meaning....

Out of evil cometh good. Ex tenebris lux. And this is the light that has come on me out of the darkness, shining on my nakedness which I seek to clothe in humility. And this is why I fear I shall never be the Perfect Egoist whose standard is always inside himself. My confounded standard will persist in being outside. Instead of damning Velasquez for an antiquated pedant, as your born Egoist would do, I would give my soul to be able to paint a square inch of his wonder.

Instead of entertaining myself with my reactions on other people, I am exasperatingly conscious of their reactions on me.

I should be so happy on my cliff in the sunshine if people would only leave me alone. I am quite a sociable man; but I want to be sociable in my own times and seasons. I’m no misanthrope. I love my fellow-creatures. But I like to love them in my own way. They expect me to love them in theirs: which is unreasonable. At every turn I find some block in my egoistic path.

Last year I grew a pointed Vandyke beard—auburn just streaked with the faint grey of the early forties. I thought I looked distinguished. Wavy hair which I let grow longer than usual; dark blue eyes; not bad, regular features—I was rather pleased with myself. Like this, said I, I can paint in the Vandyke manner. Then arrives Dorothea. I meet her at the station. She gasps. Holds herself aloof from my step-paternal kiss.

“For God’s sake, Daddums, take it off, and cut your hair. You look like a Chelsea Horror in the Café Royal.”

I murmured something about the slavery of shaving.

“If that’s all there is to it,” she said in the lamentable modern vernacular, “I’ll shave you myself. But off it comes.”

I shuddered and obeyed and resumed the military cut and the clipped moustache of my war service, which I suppose will be the hirsute scheme of my visage till the day of my death.

How can a man be the Perfect Egoist with such people around him?

I have said that I paint a few portraits a year. My reputation is so far sustained that I can count on commissions from our visitors in Cannes, and from the generality in September and the beginning of October when I rent a casual studio in London. But, whereas once I could rattle them off with gay insouciance, like the lightning fellow who tears off strip after strip of portraits at a Palace of Varieties, now it is a matter of considerable agony of soul. I can’t flatter the confounded women. They must look just as my awakened conscience dictates. And they must sit long and often so that I can work in the stern honest paint. Two or three blazing idiots of critics have deplored my change of style. The masterly touch of the two, three brush strokes and hey presto! the thing was done—had vanished. I had sunk into conventionality. Triple idiots! There’s only one convention of which I have been guilty and that is the eternal convention of every conceivable form of Art: Sincerity; and the toil and anguish that it means.

Oh! I suppose I’m a perfect damfool of an Egoist. But all the same, why can’t they leave me alone?

And yet, when one is left alone, and desires to pursue the most egoistic of motives, the poor human creature is unaware that he is not only looking for trouble, as the phrase goes, but craving it, insisting on it, not being happy until he gets it.

Thus, in my roundabout way, I am arriving at the beginning of my story.

There’s not a portrait painter alive who does not occasionally paint for love, without question of money. A face, a personality gets hold of you, haunts you. You must make the spiritual translation of it on canvas, or you will have missed a masterpiece. You have the desire, comparable with nothing save the blind sexual impulse of procreation, to create. You see your subject, man, woman, child—sex is indifferent, my reference merely analogical—and out of it you must make your vehement creation.

The little Princess Ramiroff—Nadia—has crossed my path, in the most conventional of social ways. She has pale golden hair, fascinating features with a touch of the Kalmuck type, and blue, green hazel, grey—no, mainly green—eyes in which vibrate from second to second all the sorrows and despairs and all the joys and mischiefs of the world.

“Will you sit to me, Princess?”

“What an honour!”

“What a privilege!”

And that is how Nadia comes into the story.