CHAPTER XIX

 

AFTER leaving Mr Mercaptan, Lypiatt had gone straight home.  The bright day seemed to deride him.  With its shining red omnibuses, its parasols, its muslin girls, its young-leaved trees, its bands at the street corners, it was too much of a garden party to be tolerable.  He wanted to be alone.  He took a cab back to the studio.  He couldn’t afford it, of course; but what did that matter, what did that matter now?

       The cab drove slowly and as though with reluctance down the dirty mews.  He paid it off, opened his little door between the wide stable doors, climbed the steep ladder of his stairs and was at home.  He sat down and tried to think.

       ‘Death, death, death, death,’ he kept repeating to himself, moving his lips as though he were praying.  If he said the word often enough, if he accustomed himself completely to the idea, death would come almost by itself; he would know it already, while he was still alive, he would pass almost without noticing out of life into death.  Into death, he thought, into death.  Death like a well.  The stone falls, falls, second after second; and at last there is a sound, a far-off, horrible sound of death and then nothing more.  The well at Carisbrooke, with a donkey to wind the wheel that pulls up the bucket of water, of icy water … He thought for a long time of the well of death.

       Outside in the mews a barrel-organ struck up the tune of ‘Where do flies go in the winter-time?’  Lypiatt lifted his head to listen.  He smiled to himself.  Where do flies go?’  The question asked itself with a dramatic, a tragical appositeness.  At the end of everything – the last ludicrous touch.  He saw it all from outside.  He pictured himself sitting there alone, broken.  He looked at his hand lying limp on the table in front of him.  It needed only the stigma of the nail to make it the hand of a dead Christ.

       There, he was making literature of it again.  Even now.  He buried his face in his hands.  His mind was full of twisted darkness, of an unspeakable, painful confusion.  It was too difficult, too difficult.

       The inkpot, he found when he wanted to begin writing, contained nothing but a parched black sediment.  He had been meaning for days past to get some more ink; and he had always forgotten.  He would have to write in pencil.

       ‘Do you remember,’ he wrote, ‘do you remember, Myra, that time we went down into the country – you remember – under the Hog’s Back at that little inn they were trying to make pretentious?  “Hotel Bull” – do you remember?  How we laughed over the Hotel Bull!  And how we liked the country outside its doors!  All the world in a few square miles.  Chalkpits and blue butterflies on the Hog’s Back.  And at the foot of the hill, suddenly, the sand; the hard, yellow sand with those queer caves, dug when and by what remote villains at the edge of the Pilgrims’ Way? the fine grey sand on which the heather of Puttenham Common grows.  And the flagstaff and the inscription marking the place where Queen Victoria stood to look at the view.  And the enormous sloping meadows round Compton and the thick, dark woods.  And the lakes, the heaths, the Scotch firs at Cutt Mill.  The forests of Shackleford.  There was everything.  Do you remember how we enjoyed it all!  I did, in any case.  I was happy during those three days.  And I loved you, Myra.  And I thought you might, you might perhaps, some day, love me.  You didn’t.  And my love has only brought me unhappiness.  Perhaps it has been my fault.  Perhaps I ought to have known how to make you give me happiness.  You remember that wonderful sonnet of Michelangelo’s, where he says that the loved woman is like a block of marble from which the artist knows how to cut the perfect statue of his dreams.  If the statue turns out a bad one, if it’s death instead of love that the lover gets – why, the fault lies in the artist and in the lover, not in the marble, not in the beloved.

 

                                                                  Amor dunque no ha, nè tua beltate,

                                                                  O fortuna, o durezza, o gran disdegno,

                                                                  Del mio mal colpa, o mio destino, o sorte,

 

                                                                  Se dentro del tuo cor morte è pietate

                                                                  Porti in un tempo, e ch’l mio basso ingegno

                                                                  Non sepia ardendo trarne altro che morte.

 

Yes, it was my basso ingegno: my low genius which did not know how to draw love from you, nor beauty from the materials of which art is made.  Ah, now you’ll smile to yourself and say: Poor Casimir, he has come to admit that at last?  Yes, yes, I have come to admit everything.  That I couldn’t paint, I couldn’t write, I couldn’t make music.  That I was a charlatan and a quack.  That I was a ridiculous actor of heroic parts who deserved to be laughed at – and was laughed at.  But then every man is ludicrous if you look at him from outside, without taking into account what’s going on in his heart and mind.  You could turn Hamlet into an epigrammatic farce with an inimitable scene when he takes is adored mother in adultery.  You could make the wittiest Guy de Maupassant short story out of the life of Christ, by contrasting the mad rabbi’s pretensions with his abject fate.  It’s a question of the point of view.  Everyone’s a walking farce and a walking tragedy at the same time.  The man who slips on a banana-skin and fractures his skull describes against the sky, as he falls, the most richly comical arabesque.  And you, Myra – what do you suppose the unsympathetic gossips say of you?  What sort of a farce of the Boulevards is your life in their eyes?  For me, Myra, you seem to move all the time through some nameless and incomprehensible tragedy.  For them you are what?  Merely any sort of a wanton, with amusing adventures.  And what am I?  A charlatan, a quack, a pretentious, boasting, rhodomontading imbecile, incapable of painting anything but vermouth posters. (Why did that hurt so terribly? I don’t know. There was no reason why you shouldn’t think so if you wanted to.) I was all that – and grotesquely laughable.  And very likely your laughter was justified, your judgement was true.  I don’t know.  I can’t tell.  Perhaps I am a charlatan.  Perhaps I’m insincere; boasting to others, deceiving myself.  I don’t know, I tell you.  Everything is confusion in my mind now.  The whole fabric seems to have tumbled to pieces; it lies in a horrible chaos.  I can make no order within myself.  Have I lied to myself? have I acted and postured the Great Man to persuade myself that I am one? have I something in me, or nothing? have I ever achieved anything of worth, anything that rhymed with my conceptions, my dreams (for those were fine; of that, I am certain)?  I look into the chaos that is my soul and, I tell you, I don’t know, I don’t know.  But what I do know is that I’ve spent nearly twenty years now playing the charlatan at whom you all laugh.  That I’ve suffered, in mind and in body too – almost from hunger, sometimes – in order to play it.  That I’ve struggled, that I’ve exultantly climbed to the attack, that I’ve been thrown down – ah, many times! – that I’ve picked myself up and started again.  Well, I suppose all that’s ludicrous, if you like to think of it that way.  It is ludicrous that a man should put himself to prolonged inconvenience for the sake of something which doesn’t really exist at all.  It’s exquisitely comic, I can see.  I can see it in the abstract, so to speak.  But in this particular case, you must remember I’m not a dispassionate observer.  And if I am overcome now, it is not with laughter.  It is with an indescribable unhappiness, with the bitterness of death itself.  Death, death, death.  I repeat the word to myself, again and again.  I think of death, I try to imagine it, I hang over it, looking down, where the stones fall and fall and there is one horrible noise, and then silence again; looking down into the well of death.  It is so deep that there is no glittering eye of water to be seen at the bottom.  I have no candle to send down.  It is horrible, but I do not want to go on living.  Living would be worse than …’

       Lypiatt was reaching out for another sheet of paper when he was startled to hear the sound of feet on the stairs.  He turned towards the door.  His heart beat with violence.  He was filled with a strange sense of apprehension.  In terror he awaited the approach of some unknown and terrible being.  The feet of the angel of death were on the stairs.  Up, up, up.  Lypiatt felt himself trembling as the sound came nearer.  He knew for certain that in a few seconds he was going to die.  The hangmen had already pinioned him; the soldiers of the firing squad had already raised their rifles.  One, two, … he thought of Mrs Viveash standing, bare-headed, the wind blowing in her hair, at the foot of the flagstaff from the site of which Queen Victoria had admired the distant view of Selborne; he thought of her dolorously smiling; he remembered that once she had taken his head between her two hands and kissed him: ‘Because you’re such a golden ass,’ she had said, laughing.  Three … There was a little tap at the door.  Lypiatt pressed his hand over his heart.  The door opened.

       A small, bird-like man with a long, sharp nose and eyes as round and black and shining as buttons stepped into the room.

       ‘My Lydgate, I presume?’ he began.  Then looked at a card on which a name and address were evidently written.  ‘Lypiatt, I mean.  A thousand pardons.  Mr Lypiatt, I presume?’

       Lypiatt leaned back in his chair and shut his eyes.  His face was as white as paper.  He breathed hard and his temples were wet with sweat, as though he had been running.

       ‘I found the door down below open, so I came straight up.  I hope you’ll excuse …’ The stranger smiled apologetically.

       ‘Who are you?’ Lypiatt asked, reopening his eyes.  His heart was still beating hard; after the storm it calmed itself slowly.  He drew back from the brink of the fearful well; the time had not yet come to plunge.

       ‘My name,’ said the stranger, ‘is Boldero, Herbert Boldero.  Out mutual friend Mr Gumbril, Mr Theodore Gumbril, junior,’ he made it more precise, ‘suggested that I might come and see you about a little matter in which he and I are interested and in which perhaps you, too, might be interested.’

       Lypiatt nodded, without saying anything.

       Mr Boldero, meanwhile, was turning his bright, bird-like eyes about the studio.  Mrs Viveash’s portrait, all but finished now, was clamped to the easel.  He approached it, a connoisseur.

       ‘It reminds me very much,’ he said, ‘of Bacosso.  Very much indeed, if I may say so.  Also a little of …’ he hesitated, trying to think of the name of that other fellow Gumbril had talked about.  But being unable to remember the unimpressive syllables of Derain he played for safety and said – ‘of Orpen.’  Mr Boldero looked inquiringly at Lypiatt to see if that was right.

       Lypiatt still spoke no word and seemed, indeed, not to have heard what had been said.

       Mr Boldero saw that it wasn’t much good talking about modern art.  This chap, he thought, looked as though something were wrong with him.  He hoped he hadn’t got influenza.  There was a lot of the disease about.  ‘This little affair I was speaking of,’ he pursued, in another tone, ‘is a little business proposition that Mr Gumbril and I have gone into together.  A matter of pneumatic trousers,’ he waved his hand airily.

       Lypiatt suddenly burst out laughing, an embittered Titan.  Where do flies go?  Where do souls go?  The barrel-organ, and now pneumatic trousers!  Then, as suddenly, he was silent again.  More literature?  Another piece of acting?  ‘Go on,’ he said, ‘I’m sorry.’

       ‘Not at all, not at all,’ said Mr Boldero indulgently.  ‘I know the idea does seem a little humorous, if I may say so, at first.  But I assure you, there’s money in it, Mr Lydgate – Mr Lypiatt.  Money!’  Mr Boldero paused a moment dramatically.  ‘Well,’ he went on, ‘our idea was to launch the new product with a good swingeing publicity campaign.  Spend a few thousands in the papers and then get it good and strong into the Underground and on the hoardings, along with Owbridge’s and John Bull and the Golden Ballot.  Now, for that, Mr Lypiatt, we shall need, as you can well imagine, a few good striking pictures.  Mr Gumbril mentioned your name and suggested I should come and see you to find out if you would perhaps be agreeable to lending us your talent for this work.  And I may add, Mr Lypiatt,’ he spoke with real warmth, ‘that having seen this example of your work’ – he pointed to the portrait of Mrs Viveash – “I feel that you would be eminently capable of …’

       He did not finish the sentence; for at that moment Lypiatt leapt up from his chair and, making a shrill, inarticulate, animal noise, rushed on the financier, seized him with both hands by the throat, shook him, threw him to the floor, then picked him up again by the coat collar and pushed him towards the door, kicking him as he went.  A final kick sent Mr Boldero tobogganing down the steep stairs.  Lypiatt ran down after him; but Mr Boldero had picked himself up, had opened the front door, slipped out, slammed it behind him, and was running up the mews before Lypiatt could get to the bottom of the stairs.

       Lypiatt opened the door and looked out.  Mr Boldero was already far away, almost at the Piranesian arch.  He watched him till he was out of sight, then went upstairs again and threw himself face downwards on his bed.