Gossamer Part 13

"Oh," said Tim, "that's exactly what she said. Blasphemy! Do you really think so too? I wouldn't go on with my experiments if I thought that.

But I don't believe you can be right. I--I went round to see Father Bourke. That was after Mrs. Ascher said it was blasphemy and I really wanted to know. Father Bourke is one of the priests at St. Gabriel's. I consulted him."

"Well," I said, "what did he tell you?"

"He said it was all right and that I needn't bother about what Protestants said was blasphemy. They don't know. At least Father Bourke seemed to think they couldn't know."

"You go by what Father Bourke says and you'll be safe."

I should particularly like to hear Father Bourke and Mrs. Ascher arguing out the subject of blasphemy together. They might go on for years and years before either of them began to understand what the other meant by the word. But it would be little less than a crime to involve the simple soul of Tim Gorman in the maze of two separate kinds of casuistry.

"In any case," I said, "I don't take Mrs. Ascher's view of the matter. I don't agree with her."

"I don't see," said Tim, "how cinematographs can be blasphemies so long as there aren't any pictures of religious things. I'm sure it must be all right and I can go on with what I want to do. If I can succeed in making the figures stand out from one another, as if they were really there----"

"You'll add a new terror to life," I said. "But that needn't stop you doing it if you can."

"I think I can," he said eagerly. "You see it's the next thing to be done. The cinematograph is perfect up to that point It must make a new start if it's to go any further. I should like to be the man who makes the next step possible. What's wanted now is--is----"

"The illusion of distance."

"That's it. That's what I mean. It's a matter of optics. Just making a few adjustments, and I think I see the way to manage it."

"If you do," I said, "you'll make an immense fortune. The world will pay anything, absolutely anything to the man who provides it with a new torture. It's an odd twist in human nature--though I don't know why I should say that. Oddness is really the normal thing in human nature."

"But I want a thousand dollars," said Tim, "or five hundred dollars at the very least. I must try experiments."

"If you ask your brother----" I said.

"Michael isn't nice to me about it," said Tim. "He isn't nice at all.

When I asked him for a thousand dollars he said he'd get it for me on condition that I allowed him to manage my cash register in his own way.

But I won't do that. I know what he wants to do."

"His idea," he said, "is to let your invention lapse."

"I know. The machine will never be made. But I want it to be made. I want to see it working everywhere all over the world. You see I'm always travelling about with the circus, sometimes in America, sometimes in England. We go to a lot of different towns. We go to all the big towns there are. I want to be able to go into shops everywhere, in every town in the world and see my machine there. Don't you understand?"

"Perfectly," I said. "Mrs. Ascher explained the whole position to me thoroughly. It's the artist's soul in you."

A look of puzzled annoyance came over the boy's face. His forehead wrinkled and his fine eyes took an expression of painful doubt as they met mine.

"Mrs. Ascher says things like that," he said, "and I don't know what she means. I am not an artist. I never learned to draw, even; at least not pictures. I can do geometrical drawing, of course, and make plans of machines; but that's not being an artist. I can't paint. Why does she say I am an artist?"

"That," I said, "is one of her little mannerisms. You will have to put up with it."

Tim uses the word artist in a simple old-fas.h.i.+oned way, very much as Father Bourke uses "blasphemy." There is a good deal to be said for their practice. People like Mrs. Ascher ought to invent new terms when they want to express uncommon thoughts. They have no right to borrow words like "artist" and "blasphemy" from common speech in order to set them parading about the world with novel meanings attached to them. It is not fair to people like Tim Gorman and his Father Bourke. It is not fair to the words themselves. I should not like to be treated in that way if I were a word. I cannot imagine anything more annoying to a respectable, steady-going word than to be called upon suddenly to undertake work to which it is not accustomed. The domestic housemaid is perfectly right in resisting any effort to make her do new kinds of work. Her formula, "It's not my place," used when she is asked to make a slice of toast, is unanswerable. Why should words be worse treated than housemaids? It is the business of "artist" to stand for the man who paints pictures in oils. "Blasphemy" describes aggravated breaches of the third commandment. What right had Mrs. Ascher or any one else to press them into new services? There ought to be a strong trade union among words.

"And now," said Tim, "she says I'm not an artist after all because I want to make movies more real. And she's angry with me. She turned me out of her studio because I wouldn't promise not to. Of course, I wouldn't promise such a thing. I think I see how it can be done. The great difficulty is to secure an exact adjustment of the mirrors. There are other difficulties. There's the awkwardness of transparent figures crossing in front of each other. Also----"

"My dear boy," I said, "don't explain the thing to me. I am totally incapable of understanding anything connected with mechanics, optics or hydrostatics."

I can make as good an attempt as most men at replying intelligently to Mrs. Ascher even when she talks of "values," atmospheres, feeling and sympathy, though her use of these familiar words conveys only the vaguest ideas to my mind. I can, after a period of intense mental effort, understand what Ascher means by exchanges, premiums, discounts and bills, though he uses these words in unfamiliar ways. But I am defeated utterly by the man who talks about escapements, compensating balances and clutches. I suspected that Tim Gorman would pelt me with even more recondite scientific terms if I let things go on.

"You may take my word for it," I said, "that you'll get a thousand dollars and more, in the end; but you may have to wait for it. In the meanwhile keep on thinking out your plan for doubling the horrors of our places of popular entertainment."

That was all I could do for Tim Gorman. I do not think that he deserved more than cold comfort and disagreeable advice. I might have given him, or lent him, a little money, if he had been at work on a really useful invention, something which would benefit humanity. There are lots of such things waiting to be invented. There ought to be some way of stabbing a man who insists on ringing you up on the telephone at unreasonable hours and saying tiresome things. We cannot claim to be civilised until we have some weapon for legitimate self defence attached to every telephone, something which could be operated easily and swiftly by pressing a b.u.t.ton at the side of the receiver. It is not necessary that the man at the other end of the wire should be struck dead, but he ought to suffer severe physical pain. If Tim Gorman would turn his inventive genius in that direction, I should not hesitate to advance money to him, even to the half of my possessions.

I called on Mrs. Ascher again before I left New York. I wanted to hear her version of the misunderstanding with Tim. I went, of course, to the studio, not to the hotel. Mrs. Ascher is at her best in the studio.

Besides I was much more likely to find her there than anywhere else.

She was hard at work when I entered on a figure, at least two feet high, of a man of very fine muscular development. I glanced at it and then asked where Tim Gorman's head was.

"You know," I said, "that I admired that piece of work greatly."

Mrs. Ascher waved her hand towards a table in the darkest corner of the room.

"It's not finished," she said, "and never will be. I've lost all interest in it. If you like it take it away. I'll give it to you with pleasure."

I found poor Tim, not even swathed in wet bandages, among a litter of half finished fauns and nymphs and several attempts at a smooth-haired dog. Mrs. Ascher had done very little work at him since I saw him before. She had, in pursuance of her own idea, turned half the saucer on which the head stood into a mat of water-lily leaves. The other half--and I felt gratified when I saw this--was worked up into an unmistakable hammer and a number of disproportionately large nails.

Tim's face and head still expressed lofty idealism in the way which had fascinated me when I first saw the thing. But Mrs. Ascher had evidently neglected some necessary precaution in dealing with her material. The neck--and Tim's neck is an unusually long one--had collapsed. A jagged crack ran half round it close under the right ear. The left side of the neck was curiously crumpled. The head leaned rakishly towards the water-lily side of the saucer.

I remember hearing once of an irreverent choir boy. At a Christmas party, a sort of feast of an Abbot of Unreason held in the less sacred parts of the cathedral precincts, the brat decorated the statue of an Archbishop with a pink and blue paper cap taken from a cracker. The effect must have been much the same as that produced by the subsidence of Tim Gorman's neck.

"Do you really mean to give it to me?" I said. "I should like to have it very much. I should set it up on my writing table and call it 'Disillusion.' But do you think it will collapse any more?"

"Has it collapsed? I suppose it did not dry properly."

Mrs. Ascher did not even look at it.

"Oh," I said, "the present effect, the cynical contempt for the original n.o.ble spirituality, is the result of an accident? What tricks circ.u.mstances play on us! A slight irregularity in drying and a hero becomes a clown. The case of 'Imperial Caesar dead and turned to clay'

is not so bad as that of an idealist whose neck has cracked."

"I'm dreadfully disappointed in that boy," said Mrs. Ascher. "Will you forgive me if I do not talk of him? Even now I cannot bear to."

She sighed heavily, showing how much she felt the loss of Tim's soul.

Then she turned to me with one of those bright smiles, one of those charmingly bright smiles, which are the greatest achievements of serious women. Very religious women, women with artists' souls and the intenser suffragists have these bright smiles. They work them up, I suppose, so as to show that they can be as cheerful as any one else when they choose to try.

"Come and see what I'm doing now," she said.

I looked very carefully at the man's figure in front of her.

"This," she said, "is manhood, virility, energy, simple strength, directness, all that this poor neurotic world is yearning for, the primal force, uncomplex, untroubled, just the exultation of the delight of being."

"It reminds me faintly of some one," I said, "the head and face, I mean; but I can't quite fix the likeness."

She clapped her hands with delight.

"You see it," she said, "I am so glad. It's not meant to be a mere likeness. I need not tell you that. Still I'm glad you see that it resembles him. I am working to express his soul, the mere features, the limbs, are nothing. The being which burns within, that is what I am trying to express. But the fact that you see the external likeness makes me feel more sure that my interpretation of the physical features is the right one."

"Surely," I said, "it's not Gorman, the other Gorman, the elder Gorman, Michael!"