Spiritual Adventures Part 4

Sometimes, when he felt a little better, the sick man would come downstairs, and at times he would walk about in the garden, stooping under his great-coat and leaning upon his stick. One very bright day in early February he seemed better than he had been since his illness had come upon him, and as he stood at the window looking at the white road s.h.i.+ning under the pale sun, he said suddenly: 'I feel quite well to-day, I shall go for a little walk.' His eyes were bright, there was a slight flush on his cheek, and he seemed to move a little more easily than usual. 'Lucy,' he said, 'I think I should like some claret with my supper to-night, like old times. You must go into the town and get me some: I suppose there is none in the house.' Lucy took the money gladly, for she thought: 'He is beginning to be better.' 'Get it from Allen's,'

he called after her, as she went to put on her hat and jacket; 'it won't take so very much longer to go there and back, and it will be better there.' When she came downstairs her aunt was helping him to put on his coat. 'Don't wait for me,' he said, smiling, and tapping her cheek with his thin, chilly fingers; 'I shall have to walk slowly.' She went out, and turning, as she came to the bend in the road, saw him come out of the gate, leaning on his stick, and begin to walk slowly along in the middle of the road. He did not look up, and she hurried on.

It was the last time she ever saw him. The house, when she returned to it, after her journey into town, had an air of ominous quiet, and she saw with surprise that her father's hat and coat were lying in a heap across the chair in the hall, instead of hanging neatly upon the hat-pegs. As she closed the door behind her, she heard the bedroom door opened, and her aunt came quickly downstairs with a strange look on her face. She began to tremble, she knew not why, and mechanically she put the bottle of wine on the floor by the side of the chair; and her aunt, though she would always have everything put in its proper place, did not seem to notice it; but took her into the sitting-room, and said: 'There has been an accident; no, you must not go upstairs'; and she said to herself, seeming to hear her own words at the back of her brain, where there was a dull ache that was like the coming-to of one who has been stunned: 'He is dead, he is dead.' She felt that her aunt was shaking her, and wondered why she shook her, and why everything looked so dim, and her aunt's face seemed to be fading away from her, and she caught at her; and then she heard her aunt say (she could hear her now), 'I thought you were going to faint: I'll have no fainting, if you please; I must go up to him again.' So he was not dead, after all; and she listened, with a relief which was almost joy, while her aunt told her rapidly what had happened: how the mail-cart had turned a corner at full speed just as he was walking along the road, more tired than he had thought, and he had not the strength to pull himself out of the way in time, and had been knocked down, and the wheel had just missed him, but he had been terribly shaken, and one of the horse's hoofs had struck him on the face. They hoped it was nothing serious; he seemed to feel little pain; but he had said: 'Don't let Lucy come in; she musn't see me like this.'

Lucy had been so used to obey her father, his commands had always been so capricious, that she obeyed now without a murmur. She understood him; the fastidiousness which was part of his affection, and which made him refuse to be seen, by those he loved, under a disfigurement which time would probably heal, was one of the things for which she loved him, for it was part of her pride in him.

The doctor had come and gone; he had been very serious, she had seen his grave face, and had overheard one or two of his words to her aunt; she had heard him say: 'Of course, it is a question of time.' Night came on, and she sat in the unlighted room alone, and looking into the fire, in which the last dreams of her childhood seemed to flicker in little wavering tongues of flame, which throbbed, and went out, one after another, in smoke or ashes. She cried a little, quietly, and did not wipe away the tears; but sat on, looking into the fire, and thinking.

She was crying when her aunt came downstairs, and told her that she must go to bed; he was resting quietly, and they hoped he would be better in the morning.

She slept heavily, without dreams; and the hour seemed to her late when she awoke in the morning. It was Linda, not her aunt, who came into the room, and took her in her arms, and cried over her, and did not need to tell her that she had no father. He had died suddenly in his sleep, and just before he turned over on his side for the last rest, he had said to her (she thought drowsily): 'I am very tired; if anything happens, cover my face.' When Lucy crept into the room, on tip-toe, his face was covered. It was a white, shrouded thing that lay there, not her father.

The terror of the dead seized hold upon her, and she shrieked, and Linda caught her up in her arms, and carried her back to her room, and soothed her, as if she had been a little, wailing child.

At the funeral she saw, for the first time, her father's relations, the rich relations who had cast him off; and she hated them for being there, for speaking to her kindly, for offering to look after her. She was rude to them, and she wished to be rude. 'My father would never touch your money,' she said, 'and I am sure he wouldn't like me to, and I don't want it. I don't want to have anything to do with you.' She clung to the severe aunt who had been good to her father; and she tried to smile on her other uncle and aunt, and on her cousin, who was not many years older than she was: he had seemed to her so kind, and so ready to be her friend. 'I will go with my aunt,' she said. The rich relatives acquiesced, not unwillingly. They did not linger in the desolate house, where this unreasonable child, as they thought her, stood away from them on the other side of the room. She seemed to herself to be doing the right thing, and what her father would have wished; and she saw them go out with relief, not giving a thought to the future, only knowing that she had buried her childhood, on that day of the funeral, in the grave with her father.

THE DEATH OF PETER WAYDELIN.

Peter Waydelin, the painter of those mysterious, brutal pictures, who died last year at the age of twenty-four, spent a week with me at Bognor, trying to get better, a little while before it was quite certainly too late; and we had long talks of a very intimate kind as we lay and lounged about the sand from Selsey to Blake's Felpham, along that exquisite coast. To him, if he were to be believed, all that meant very little; he hated nature, he was always a.s.suring you; but at Bognor nature deals with its material so much in the manner of art that he can hardly have been sincere in not feeling the colour-sense of those arrangements of sand, water, and sky which were perpetually changing before him. One of our conversations that I remembered best, because he seemed to put more of himself into it than usual, took place one afternoon in June as we lay on the sand about half-way towards Selsey, beyond the last of those troublesome groins, and I remember that as I listened to him, and heard him defining so sincerely his own ideas of art, I was conscious all the time of a magnificent silent refutation of some of those ideas, as nature, quietly expressing herself before us, transformed the whole earth gradually into a new and luminous world of air. He did not seem to see the sunset; now and then he would pick up a pebble and throw it vehemently, almost angrily, into the water. We were talking of art. He began to explain to me what art meant to him, and what it was he wanted to do with his own art. I remember almost the very words he used, sometimes so serious, sometimes so petulant and boyish. I was interested in his ideas, and the man too interested me; so young and so experienced, so mature already and so enthusiastic under his cynicism. He puzzled me: it was as if there were a clue wanting; I could not get further with him than a certain point, frank, self-explanatory even, as he seemed to be. Of himself he never spoke, only of his ideas.

I knew vaguely that he had been in Paris, and I supposed that he had been living there for some time. I had met him in London, in the street, quite casually, and he had looked so ill that I had asked him there and then to come with me to Bognor, where I was going. He agreed willingly, and was at the station with his bag the next day. I never ask people about their private affairs, and his talk was entirely about pictures, his own chiefly, and about ideas. As he talked I tried to piece together the man and his words. What was it in this man, who was so much a gentleman, that drew him instinctively, whenever he took up a brush or a pencil, towards gross things, things that he painted as if he hated them, but painted always? Was it a theory or an enslavement? and had he, in order to interpret with so cruel a fidelity so much that was fact.i.tious and dishonourable in life, sunk to the level of what he painted? I could not tell. He was not obviously the man of his pictures, nor was he obviously the reverse. I felt in those pictures, and I felt equally, but differently, in the man, a fundamental sincerity; after that came I know not how much of pose, perhaps merely the defiant pose of youth. He was a problem to me, which I wanted to think out; and I listened very attentively to everything that he said on that afternoon when he was so much more communicative than usual.

'All art, of course,' he said, 'is a way of seeing, and I have my way. I did not get to it at once. Like everybody else, I began by seeing too much. Gradually I gave up seeing things in shades, in subdivisions; I saw them in ma.s.ses, each single. It takes more choice than you think, and more technical skill, to set one plain colour against another, unshaded, like a great, raw morsel, or a solid lump of the earth. The art of the painter, you observe, consists in seeing in a new, summarising way, getting rid of everything but the essentials; in seeing by patterns. You know how a child draws a house? Well, that is how the average man thinks he sees it, even at a distance. You have to train your eye not to see. Whistler sees nothing but the fine shades, which unite into a picture in an almost bodiless way, as Verlaine writes songs almost literally "without words." You can see, if you like, in just the opposite way: leaving in only the hard outlines, leaving out everything that lies between. To me that is the best way of summarising, the most abbreviated way. You get rid of all that molle, sticky way of work which squashes pictures into cakes and puddings, and of that stringy way of work which draws them out into tapes and ribbons. It is a way of seeing square, and painting like hits from the shoulder.

'I wonder,' he went on, after a moment, 'how many people think that I paint ugly pictures, as they call them, because I am unable to paint pretty ones? Perhaps even you have never seen any of my quite early work: Madonnas for Christmas cards and hallelujah angels for stained-gla.s.s windows. They were the prettiest things imaginable, immensely popular, and they brought me in several pounds. I take them out and show them to people who complain that I have no sense of beauty, and they always ask me pityingly why I have not gone on turning out these confectionaries.'

'I contend that I have never done anything which is without beauty, because I have never done anything which is without life, and life is the source and sap of beauty. I tell you that there is not one of those grimacing masks, those horribly pale or horribly red faces, plastered white or red, leering professionally across a gulf of footlights, or a cafe-table, that does not live, live to the roots of the eyes, somewhere in the soul, I think! And if beauty is not the visible spirit of all that infamous flesh, when I have sabred it like that along my canvas, with all my hatred and all my admiration of its foolish energy, I at least am unable to conjecture where beauty has gone to live in the world.'

He looked at me almost indignantly, as if he took me for one of his critics. I said nothing, and he went on:

'I have done nothing, believe me, without being sure that I was doing a beautiful thing. People don't see it, it seems. How should they, when we do our best to train them up within the prison walls of a Raphael aesthetics, when we send them to the Apollo Belvedere, instead of to the marbles of aegina? Our academies shut out nine parts of beauty and imprison us with the poor tenth, which we have never even the s.p.a.ce to frequent casually and grow familiar with. How much of the world itself do you think exists as a thing of beauty for the average man? Why, he has to know if the most exquisite leaf in the world, the thing I came upon just now in the lane, belongs to a flower or a weed before he can tell whether he ought to commend it for existing. I hate nature, because fools prostrate themselves before sunsets; as if there is not much better drawing in that leaf than in all the Turners of the sky. You see, one has to quote Turner to apologise for a sunset!'

He laughed, really without malice, waving his hand towards the sky with a youthful impertinence. For a little while he was silent, and then, in a different tone, he said:

'I wonder if it is possible to paint what one doesn't like, to take one's models as models, and only know them for the hours during which they sit to you in this att.i.tude or that. I don't believe that it is.

Much of our bad painting comes from respectable people thinking that they can soil their hands with paint and not let the dye sink into their innermost selves. Do you know that you are the only man of my own world that I ever see, or have seen for years now? People call me eccentric; I am only logical. You can't paint the things I paint, and live in a Hampstead villa. You must come and see me some day: will you take the address? 3 Somervell Street, Islington. It's not much like a studio.

However, there's "Collins's" at hand, and I live there a good deal, you know. I lived in the Hampstead Road for some time on account of the "Bedford." But "Collins's" suits me and my models better.'

He broke off with an ambiguous laugh, flung his last stone into the water, and jumped up, as if to end the conversation. Something in the way he spoke made me feel vaguely uneasy, but I was used to his exaggerations, his way of inventing as he went along. Was I, after all, any nearer to his secret, to himself as he really was?

Waydelin went back to London and I to Russia, which I shall always remember, after that terrible summer under the gold and green domes of Moscow, as the hottest country in which I have ever been. When I came back to London I thought of Waydelin, made plan after plan to visit him, when one evening in November I received a brief note in his handwriting, asking me if I would come and see him at once, as he was very ill, and wanted to see me on a matter of business. I started immediately after dinner and got to Islington a little after nine. The street was one of those drab, hopeless streets to which a Russian observer has lately attributed the 'spleen' from which all Englishmen are thought to suffer.

There was a row of houses on each side of the way, every house exactly like every other house, each with its three steps leading to the door, its bow window on one side, its strip of dingy earth in which there were a few dusty stalks between the lowest step and the railing, the paint for the most part peeling off the door, the bell-handle generally hanging out from its hole in the wall. I rang at No. 3. I had to wait for some time, and then the door was opened by an impudent-looking servant girl in a very untidy dress. I asked for Waydelin. 'Mrs.

Waydelin, did you say?' said the girl, leering at me; then, calling over my head to the driver of a four-wheeler which just then drew up at the door, 'Wait five minutes, will you?' she turned to me again: 'Mr.

Waydelin? I don't know if you can see him.' I told her impatiently that I had come by appointment, and she held the door open for me to come in.

She knocked at a room on the first floor. 'Come in,' said a shrill voice that I did not know, and I went in.

It was a bedroom; a woman, with her bodice off, was making-up in front of the gla.s.s, and in a corner, with the clothes drawn up to his chin, a man lay in bed. The cheeks were covered by a three days' beard; they were ridged into deep hollows; large eyes, very wide open, looked out under a ma.s.s of uncombed hair, and as the face turned round on the pillow and looked at me without any change of expression I recognised Peter Waydelin. The woman, seeing me in the gla.s.s, nodded at my reflection, and said, as she drew a black pencil through her eyelashes: 'You'll excuse me, won't you? I have to be at the hall in ten minutes.

Don't stand on ceremony; there's Peter. He'll be glad to see you, poor dear!' She spoke in a common and affected voice, and I thought her a deplorable person, with her carefully curled yellow hair, her rouged and powdered cheeks, her mouth glistening with lip salve, her big, empty blue eyes with their blackened under-lids, her fat arms and shoulders, the tawdry finery of her costume, half on and half off the body. I moved towards the bed, and Waydelin looked up at me with a queer, mournful smile.

'It was good of you to come,' he said, stretching out a long, thin hand to me; 'Clara has to go out, and we can have a talk. How do you like the last thing I've done?'

I lifted the drawing which was lying on the bed. It was a portrait of the woman before the gla.s.s, just as she looked now, one of the most powerful of his drawings, crueller even than usual in its insistence on the brutality of facts: the crude contrasts of bone and fat, the vulgar jaw, the bra.s.sy eyes, the reckless, conscious att.i.tude. Every line seemed to have been drawn with hatred. I looked at Mrs. Waydelin. She had finished dressing, and she came up to the bedside to say good-bye to Peter. 'Horrid thing,' she said, nodding her head at the drawing; 'not a bit like me, is it? I a.s.sure you none of them like it at the hall. They say it doesn't do me justice. I'm sure I hope not.' I bowed and murmured something. 'Good-bye, Peter,' she said, smiling down at him in a kindly, hurried way, 'I'll come back as soon as I can,' and with a nod to me she was out of the room.

Peter drew himself slowly up in the bed, pointed to a shawl, which I wrapped round his shoulders, and then, looking at me a little defiantly, said: 'My theory, do you remember? of living the life of my models! She is a very nice woman and an excellent model, and they appreciate her very much at "Collins's"; but it appears that I have no gift for domesticity.'

I scarcely knew what to say. While I hesitated he went on: 'Don't suppose I have any illusions, or, indeed, ever had. I married that woman because I couldn't help doing it, but I knew what I was doing all the time. Have you ever been in Belgium? There is stuff they give you there to drink called Advokat, which you begin by hating, but after a time you can't get on without it. She is like Advokat.'

'You are ill, Waydelin,' I said, 'and you speak bitterly. I don't like to hear you speak like that about your wife.'

Waydelin stared at me curiously. 'So you are going to defend her against my brutality,' he said. 'I will give you every opportunity. Did you know I was married?'

I shook my head.

'I have been married three years,' he said, 'and I never told even you.

I know you did not take me at my word when I talked about how one had to live in order to paint as I painted, but I did not tell you half. I have been living, if you like to call it so, systematically, not as a stranger in a foreign country which he stares at over his Baedeker, but as like a native as I could, and with no return ticket in my pocket. Why shouldn't one be as thorough in one's life as in one's drawing? Is it possible for one to be otherwise, if one is really in earnest in either?

And the odd thing is, as you will say, I didn't live in that way because I wanted to do it for my art, but something deeper than my art, a profound, low instinct, drew me to these people, to this life, without my own will having anything to do with it. My work has been much more sincere than any one suspected. It used to amuse me when the papers cla.s.sed me with the Decadents of a moment, and said that I was probably living in a suburban villa, with a creeper on the front wall. I have never cared for anything but London, or in London for anything but here, or the Hampstead Road, or about the Docks. I never really chose the music-halls or the public-houses; they chose me. I made the music-halls my clubs; I lived in them, for the mere delight of the thing; I liked the glitter, false, barbarous, intoxicating, the violent animality of the whole spectacle, with its imbecile words, faces, gestures, the very heat and odour, like some concentrated odour of the human crowd, the irritant music, the audience! I went there, as I went to public-houses, as I walked about the streets at night, as I kept company with vagabonds, because there was a craving in me that I could not quiet. I fitted in theories with my facts; and that is how I came to paint my pictures.'

As he spoke, with bitter ardour, I looked at him as if I were seeing him for the first time. The room, the woman, that angry drawing on the bed, and the dishevelled man dying there, just at the moment when he had learnt everything that such experiences could teach him, fell of a sudden into a revealing relation with each other. I did not know whether to feel that the man had been heroic or a fool; there had been, it was clear to me, some obscure martyrdom going on, not the less for art's sake because it came out of the mere necessity of things. A great pity came over me, and all I could say was, 'But, my dear friend, you have been very unhappy!'

'I never wanted to be happy,' said Waydelin; 'I wanted to live my own life and do my own work; and if I die to-morrow (as likely enough I may), I shall have done both things. My work satisfies me, and, because of that, so does my life.'

'Are you very ill?' I asked.

'Dead, relatively speaking,' he said in his jaunty way, which death itself could not check in him; 'I'm only waiting on some celestial order of precedence in these matters, which, I confess, I don't understand. So it was good of you to come; I would like to arrange with you about what is to be done with my work, presently, when they will have to accept me.

I always said that I had only to die in order to be appreciated.'

I had a long talk with him, and I promised to carry out his wishes. All the money that his pictures brought in was to go to his wife, but, as he said, she would not know what to do with them if they were left in her own hands, not even how to turn them into money. He was quite certain that they would sell; he knew exactly the value of what he had done, and he knew how and when work finds its own level.

I sat beside the bed, talking, for more than two hours. He could no longer do much work, he said, and he hated being alone when he was not working. But it amused him to talk, for a change. 'Clara talks when she is here,' he said, with one of his queer smiles. I promised to come back and see him again. 'Come soon,' he said, 'if you want to be sure of finding me.'

I went back two days afterwards, a little later in the evening so that I need not meet Mrs. Waydelin, and he seemed better. He had shaved, his hair was brushed and combed, and he was sitting up in bed, with the shawl thrown lightly about his shoulders.

'Would you like to know,' he began, almost at once, 'how I came to paint in what we will call, if you please, my final manner? One day, at the theatre, I saw Sada Yacco. She taught me art.'

'What do you mean?' I said.

'Look here,' he went on, 'they say everything has been done in art. But no, there is at least one thing that remains for us. Have you ever seen Sada Yacco? When I saw her for the first time I said to myself, "I have found out the secret of j.a.panese art." I had never been able to understand how it was that the j.a.panese, who can imitate natural things, a bird, a flower, the rain, so perfectly, have chosen to give us, instead of a woman's face, that blind oval, in which the eyes, nose, and mouth seem to have been made to fit a pattern. When I saw Sada Yacco I realised that the j.a.panese painters had followed nature as closely in their woman's faces as in their birds and flowers, but that they had studied them from the women of the Green Houses, the women who make up, and that j.a.panese women, made up for the stage or for the fact.i.tious life of the Green Houses, look exactly like these elegant, unnatural images of the painters. What a new kind of reality that opened up to me, as if a window had suddenly opened in a wall! Here, I said to myself, is something that the painters of Europe have never done; it remains for me to do it. I will study nature under the paint by which woman, after all, makes herself more woman; the ensign of her trade, her flag as the enemy. I will get at the nature of this artificial thing, at the skin underneath it, and the soul under the skin. Watteau and the Court painters have given us the dainty, exterior charm of the masquerade, woman when she plays at being woman, among "lyres and flutes." Degas, of course, has done something of what I want to do, but only a part, and with other elements in his pure design, the drawing of Ingres, setting itself new tasks, exercising its technique upon shapeless bodies in tubs, and the strained muscles of the dancer's leg as she does "side-practice." What I am going to do is to take all the ugliness, gross artifice, crafty mechanism, of s.e.x disguising itself for its own ends: that new nature which vice and custom make out of the honest curves and colours of natural things.

'Well, I have tried to do that; in all my best work, my work of the last two or three years, I have done it. I am sure that what I have done is a new thing, and I think it is the one new thing left to us Western painters.'

'I am beginning to understand you,' I said, 'and I have not always found it easy. When I admire you, it has so often seemed to me irrational. I am gradually finding out your logic. Do you remember those talks we used to have at Bognor, one in particular, when you told me about your way of seeing?'

'Yes, yes,' he said, 'I remember, but there was one thing I am almost sure I did not tell you, and it is curious. I don't understand it myself. Do you know what it is to be haunted by colours? There is something like a temptation of the devil, to me, in the colour green. I know it is the commonest colour in nature, it is a good, honest colour, it is the gra.s.s, the trees, the leaves, very often the sea. But no, it isn't like that that it comes to me. To me it is an aniline dye, poisoning nature. I adore and hate it. I can never get away from it. If I paint a group outside a cafe at Montmartre by gas-light or electric light, I paint a green shadow on the faces, and I suppose the green shadow isn't there; yet I paint it. Some tinge of green finds its way invariably into my flesh-colour; I see something green in rouged cheeks, in peroxide-of-hydrogen hair; green lays hold of this poor, unhappy flesh that I paint, as if antic.i.p.ating the colour-scheme of the grave. I know it, and yet I can't help doing it; I can't explain to you how it is that I at once see and don't see a thing; but so it is.

'And it grew upon me too like an obsession. I always wanted to keep my eyes perfectly clear, so that I could make my own arrangements of things for myself, deliberately; but this, in some unpleasant way, seemed horribly like "nature taking the pen out of one's hand and writing," as somebody once said about a poet. I would rather do all the writing myself; the more so, as I have to translate as I go.'

He broke off suddenly, as if a wave of exhaustion had come over him. His eyes, which had been very bright, had gone dull again, and he let his head droop till the chin rested on his breast.