CHAPTER XVI

 

The Rampions lived in Chelsea.  Their house consisted of one large studio with three or four little rooms tacked on to it.  A very nice little place, in its rather ramshackle way, Burlap reflected, as he rang the bell that Saturday afternoon.  And Rampion had bought it for nothing, literally for nothing, just before the War.  No post-War rents for him.  A sheer gift of a hundred and fifty a year.  Lucky devil, thought Burlap, forgetting for the moment that he himself was living rent-free at Beatrice's, and only remembering that he had just spent twenty-four and ninepence on a luncheon for himself and Molly d'Exergillod.

      Mary Rampion opened the door.  'Mark's expecting you in the studio,' she said when salutations had been exchanged.  Though why on earth, she was inwardly wondering, why on earth he goes on being friendly with this creature passes all comprehension.  She herself detested Burlap.  'He's a sort of vulture,' she had said to her husband after the journalist's previous visit.  'No, not a vulture, because vultures only eat carrion.  He's a parasite that feeds on living hosts, and always the choicest he can find.  He has a nose for the choicest; I'll grant him that.  A spiritual leech, that's what he is.  Why do you let him suck your blood?'

      'Why shouldn't he suck?' retorted Mark.  'He doesn't do me any harm, and he amuses me.'

      'I believe he tickles your vanity,' said Mary.  'It's flattering to have parasites.  It's a compliment to the quality of your blood.'

      'And besides,' Rampion went on, 'he has something in him.'

      'Of course he has something in him,' Mary answered.  'He has your blood in him, among other things.  And the blood of all the other people he feeds on.'

      'Now, don't exaggerate, don't be romantic.'  Rampion objected to all hyperboles that weren't his own.

      'Well, all I can say is that I don't like parasites.'  Mary spoke with finality.  'And next time he comes I shall try sprinkling a little Keating's powder on him, just to see what happens.  So there.'

      However, the next time had arrived, and here she was opening the door for him and telling him to find his own way to the studio, as if he were a welcome guest.  Even in atavistic Mary the force of polite habit was stronger than her desire to sprinkle Keating's.

      Burlap's thoughts, as he found his own way to the studio, were still of financial matters.  The memory of what he had paid for lunch continued to rankle.

      'Not only does Rampion pay no rent,' he was thinking; 'he has hardly any expenses.  Living as they do with only one servant, doing most of the housework themselves, having no car, they really must spend ridiculously little.  True, they have two children to educate.'  But Burlap managed by a kind of mental conjuring trick, at which he was extremely adept, to make the two children disappear out of his field of consciousness.  'And yet Rampion must make quite a lot.  He sells his pictures and drawings very decently.  And he has a regular market for anything he chooses to write.  What does he do with all his money?'  Burlap wondered rather resentfully, as he knocked at the studio door.  'Does he hoard it up?  Or what?'

      'Come in,' called Rampion's voice from the other side of the door.

      Burlap adjusted his face to a smile and opened.

      'Ah, it's you,' said Rampion.  'Can't shake hands at the moment, I'm afraid.'  He was cleaning his brushes.  'How are you?'

      Burlap shook his head and said that he needed a holiday but couldn't afford to take it.  He walked round the studio looking reverentially at the paintings.  St Francis would hardly have approved of most of them.  But what life, what energy, what imagination!  Life, after all, was the important thing.  'I believe in life.'  That was the first article of one's creed.

      'What's the title of this?' he asked, coming to a halt in front of the canvas on the easel.

      Wiping his hands as he came, Rampion crossed the room and stood beside him.  'That?' he said.  'Well, "Love", I suppose, is what you'd call it.'  He laughed; he had worked well that afternoon and was in the best of humours.  'But less refined and soulful people might prefer something less printable.'  Grinning, he suggested a few of the less printable alternatives.  Burlap's smile was rather sickly.  'I don't know if you can think of any others,' Rampion concluded maliciously.  When Burlap was in the neighbourhood it amused him, and at the same time he felt it positively a duty, to be shocking.

      It was a smallish painting, in oils.  Low down in the left-hand corner of the canvas, set in a kind of recess between a foreground of dark rocks and tree trunks and a background of precipitous crags, and arched over by a mass of foliage, two figures, a man and a woman, lay embraced.  Two naked bodies, the woman's white, the man's a red brown.  These two bodies were the source of the whole illumination of the picture.  The rocks and tree trunks in the foreground were silhouetted against the light that issued from them.  The precipice behind them was golden with the same light.  It touched the lower surface of the leaves above, throwing shadows up into a thickening darkness of greenery.  It streamed out of the recess in which they lay, diagonally into and across the picture, illuminating and, one felt, creating by its radiance an astounding flora of gigantic roses and zinnias and tulips, with horses and leopards and little antelopes coming and going between the huge flowers, and beyond, a green landscape deepening, plane after plane, into blue, with a glimpse of the sea between the hills and over it the shapes of huge, heroic clouds in the blue sky.

      'It's fine,' said Burlap slowly, wagging his head over the picture.

      'But I can see you hate it.'  Mark Rampion grinned with a kind of triumph.

      'But why do you say that?' the other protested with a martyred and gentle sadness.

      'Because it happens to be true.  The things not gentle-Jesusish enough for you.  Love, physical love, as the source of light and life and beauty - Oh, no, no, no!  That's much too coarse and carnal; it's quite deplorably straightforward.'

      'But do you take me for Mrs Grundy?'

      'Not Mrs Grundy, no.'  Rampion's high spirits bubbled over in mockery.  'Say St Francis.  By the way, how's your Life of him progressing?  I hope you've got a good juicy description of his licking the lepers.'  Burlap made a gesture of protest.  Rampion grinned. 'As a matter of fact even St Francis is a little too grown up for you.  Children don't lick lepers.  Only sexually perverted adolescents do that.  St Hugh of Lincoln, that's who you are, Burlap.  He was a child, you know, a pure sweet chee-yild.  Such a dear snuggly-wuggly, lovey-dovey little chap.  So wide-eyed and reverent towards the women, as though they were all madonnas.  Coming to be petted and have his pains kissed away and be told about poor Jesus - even to have a swig of milk if there happened to be any going.'

      'Really!' Burlap protested.

      'Yes, really,' Rampion mimicked.  He liked baiting the fellow, making him look like a forgiving Christian martyr.  Serve him right for coming in that beloved-disciple attitude and being so disgustingly reverential and admiring.

      Toddling wide-eyed little St Hugh.  Toddling up to the women so reverently, as though they were all madonnas.  But putting his dear little hand under their skirts all the same.  Coming to pray, but straying to share madonnina's bed.'  Rampion knew a good deal about Burlap's amorous affairs and had guessed more.  'Dear little St Hugh!  How prettily he toddles to the bedroom, and what a darling babyish way he has of snuggling down between the sheet!  This sort of thing is much too gross and unspiritual for our little Hughie.'  He threw back his head and laughed.

      'Go on, go on,' said Burlap.  'Don't mind me.'  And at the sight of his martyred, spiritual smile, Rampion laughed yet louder.

      'Oh dear, of dear!' he gasped.  'Next time you come, I'll have a copy of Ary Scheffer's "St Monica and St Augustine" for you.  That ought to make you really happy.  Would you like to see some of my drawings?' he asked in another tone.  Burlap nodded.  'They're grotesques mostly.  Caricatures.  Rather ribald, I warn you.  But if you will come to look at my work, you must expect what you get.'

      He opened a portfolio that was lying on the table.

      'Why do you imagine I don't like your work?' asked Burlap.  'After all, you're a believer in life and so am I.  We have our differences; but on most matters our point of view's the same.'

      Rampion looked at him.  'Oh, I'm sure it is, I know it is,' he said, and grinned.

      'Well, if you know it's the same,' said Burlap, whose averted eyes had not seen the grin on the other's face, 'why do you imagine I'll disapprove of your drawings?'

      'Why indeed?' the other mocked.

      'Seeing that the point of view's the same ...'

      'It's obvious that the people looking at the view from the same point must be identical.'  Rampion grinned again.  'Q.E.D.'  He turned away again to take out one of the drawings.  'This is what I call "Fossils of the Past and Fossils of the Future".'  He handed Burlap the drawing.  It was in ink touched with coloured washes, extraordinarily brilliant and lively. Curving in a magnificently sweeping S, a grotesque procession of monsters marched diagonally down and across the paper.  Dinosaurs, pterodactyls, titanotheriums, diplodocuses, ichthyosauruses walked, swam or flew at the tail of the procession; the van was composed of human monsters, huge-headed creatures, without limbs or bodies, creeping slug-like on vaguely slimy extensions of chin and neck.  The faces were mostly those of eminent contemporaries.  Among the crowd Burlap recognized J.J. Thomson and Lord Edward Tantamount, Bernard Shaw, attended by eunuchs and spinsters, and Sir Oliver Lodge, attended by a sheeted and turnip-headed ghost and a walking cathode tube, Sir Alfred Mond and the head of John D. Rockefeller carried on a charger by a Baptist clergyman, Dr Frank Crane and Mrs Eddy wearing haloes, and many others.

      'The lizards died of having too much body and too little head,' said Rampion in explanation.  'So at least the scientists are never tired of telling us.  Physical size is a handicap after a certain point.  But what about mental size?  These fools seem to forget that they're just as top-heavy and clumsy and disproportionate as any diplodocus.  Sacrificing physical life and affective life to mental life.  What do they imagine's going to happen?'

      Burlap nodded his agreement.  'That's what I've always asked.  Man can't live without a heart.'

      'Not to mention bowels and skin and bones and flesh,' said Rampion.  'They're just marching towards extinction.  And a damned good thing too.  Only the trouble is that they're marching the rest of the world along with them.  Blast their eyes!  I must say, I resent being condemned to extinction because these imbeciles of scientists and moralists and spiritualists and technicians and literary and political uplifters and all the rest of them haven't the sense to see that man must live as a man, not as a monster of conscious braininess and soulfulness.  Grr! I'd like to kill the lot of them.'  He put the drawing back into the portfolio and extracted another.  'Here are two Outlines of History, the one on the left according to H.G. Wells, the one on the right according to me ...'

      Burlap looked, smiled, laughed outright.  'Excellent!' he said.  The drawing on the left was composed on the lines of a simple crescendo.  A very small monkey was succeeded by a very slightly larger pithecanthropus, which was succeeded in its turn by a slightly larger Neanderthal man.  Paleolithic man, neolithic man, bronze-age Egyptian and Babylonian man, iron-age Greek and Roman man - the figures slowly increased in size.  By the time Galileo and Newton had appeared on the scene, humanity had grown to quite respectable dimensions.  The crescendo continued uninterrupted through Watt and Stephenson, Faraday and Darwin, Bessemer and Edison, Rockefeller and Wanamaker, to come to a contemporary consummation in the figures of Mr H.G. Wells himself and Sir Alfred Mond.  Nor was the future neglected.  Through the radiant mist of prophecy the forms of Wells and Mond, growing larger and larger at every repetition, wound away in a triumphant spiral clean off the paper, towards Utopian infinity.  The drawing on the right had a less optimistic composition of peaks and declines.  The small monkey very soon blossomed into a good-sized bronze-age man, who gave place to a very large Greek and a scarcely smaller Etruscan.  The Romans grew smaller again.  The monks of the Thebaid were hardly distinguishable from the primeval little monkeys.  There followed a number of good-sized Florentines, English, French. They were succeeded by revolting monsters labelled Calvin and Knox, Baxter and Wesley.  The stature of the representative men declined.  The Victorians had begun to be dwarfish and misshapen.  Their twentieth-century successors were abortions.  Through the mists of the future one could see a diminishing company of little gargoyles and foetuses with heads too large for their squelchy bodies, the tails of apes and the faces of our most eminent contemporaries, all biting and scratching and disembowelling one another with that methodical and systematic energy which belongs only to the very highly civilized.

      'I'd like to have one or two of these for the World,' said Burlap, when they had looked through the contents of the portfolio.  'We don't generally reproduce drawings.  We're frankly missionaries, not an art for art concern.  But these things of yours are parables as well as pictures.  I must say,' he added, 'I envy you your power of saying things so immediately and economically.  It would take me hundreds and thousands of words to say the same things less vividly in an essay.'

      Rampion nodded.  'That's why I've almost given up writing for the moment.  Writing's not much good for saying what I find I want to say now.  And what a comfort to escape from words!  Words, words, words, they shut one off from the universe.  Three-quarters of the time one's never in contact with things, only with the beastly words that stand for them.  And often not even with those - only with some poet's damned metaphorical rigmarole about a thing.  "Nor what soft incense hangs upon the bough," for example.  Or "every fall soothing the raven wing of darkness till it smiled."  Or even "then will I visit with a roving kiss the vale of lilies and the bower of bliss."'  He looked at Burlap with a grin.  'Even the bower of bliss is turned into a metaphorical abstraction.  Vale of lilies, indeed!  Oh, these words!  I'm thankful to have escaped from them.  It's like getting out of a prison - oh, a very elegant fantastic sort of prison, full of frescoes and tapestries and what not.  But one prefers the genuine country outside.  Painting, I find, puts you in real touch with it.  I can say what I want to say.'

      'Well, all I can do,' said Burlap, 'is to provide an audience to listen to what you've got to say.'

      'Poor devils!' laughed Rampion.

      'But I think they ought to listen.  One has a responsibility.  That's why I'd like to publish some of your drawings in the World.  I feel it's really a duty.'

      'Oh, if it's a question of the categorical imperative,' Rampion laughed again, 'why then of course you must.  Take what you like.  The more shocking the drawings you publish, the better I shall be pleased.'

      Burlap shook his head.  'We must begin mildly,' he said.  He didn't believe in Life to the point of taking any risks with the circulation.

      'Mildly, mildly,' the other mockingly repeated. 'You're all the same, all you newspaper men.  No jolts.  Safety first.  Painless literature.  No prejudices extracted or ideas hammered in except under an anaesthetic.  Readers kept permanently in a state of twilight sleep.  You're hopeless, all of you.'

      'Hopeless,' repeated Burlap penitently, 'I know.  But, alas, one simply must compromise a little with the world, the flesh and the devil.'

      'I don't mind your doing that,' Rampion answered.  'What I resent is the disgusting way you compromise with heaven, respectability and Jehovah.  Still, I suppose in the circumstances you can't help it.  Take what you want.'

      Burlap made his selection.  'I'll take these,' he said at last, holding up three of the least polemical and scandalous of the drawings.  'Is that all right?'

      Rampion glanced at them. 'If you'd waited another week,' he grumbled, 'I'd have had that copy of Ary Scheffer ready for you.'

      'I'm afraid,' said Burlap with that wistfully spiritual expression which always came over his face when he began to speak about money, 'I'm afraid I shan't be able to pay much for them.'

      'Ah, well.  I'm used to it,' Rampion shrugged his shoulders.  Burlap was glad to look at it like that.  And after all, he reflected, it was true.  Rampion wasn't used to being paid much.  And with his way of living he did not need much.  No car, no servants ...

      'One wishes one could,' he said aloud, drifting away into impersonality.  'But the paper ...'  He shook his head.  'Trying to persuade people to love the highest when they see it doesn't pay.  One might manage four guineas a drawing.'

      Rampion laughed.  'Not exactly princely.  But take them.  Take them for nothing if you like.'

      'No, no,' protested Burlap.  'I wouldn't do that.  The World doesn't live on charity.  It pays for what it uses - not much, alas, but something, it pays something.  I make a point of that,' he went on, wagging his head, 'even if I have to pay out of my own pocket.  It's a question of principle.  Absolutely of principle,' he insisted, contemplating with a thrill of justifiable satisfaction the upright and self-sacrificing Denis Burlap who paid contributors out of his own pocket and in whose existence he was beginning, as he talked, almost genuinely to believe.  He talked on, and with every word the outlines of this beautifully poor but honest Burlap became clearer before his inward eyes; and at the same time the World crept closer and closer to the brink of insolvency, while the bill for lunch grew momently larger and larger, and his income correspondingly decreased.  Rampion eyed him curiously.  What the devil is he lashing himself up into a fury about this time? he wondered.  A possible explanation suddenly occurred to him.  When Burlap next paused for breath, he nodded sympathetically.

      'What you need is a capitalist,' he said.  'If I had a few hundreds or thousands to spare, I'd put them into the World.  But alas, and the sympathetic expression turned suddenly into a grin.

 

*     *     *     *

 

      That evening Burlap addressed himself to the question of Franciscan poverty.  'Bare-footed through the Umbrian hills she goes, the Lady Poverty.'  It was thus that he began his chapter.  His prose, in moments of exaltation, was apt to turn into blank verse ... 'Her feet are set on the white dusty roads that seem, to one who gazes from the walls of the little cities, taut-stretched white ribbons in the plains below ...'

      There followed references to the gnarled olive trees, the vineyards, the terraced fields, 'the great white oxen with their curving horns', the little asses patiently carrying their burdens up the stony paths, the blue mountains, the hill towns in the distance, each like a little New Jerusalem in a picture book, the classical waters of Clitumnus and the yet more classical waters of Trasimene.  'That was a land,' continued Burlap, 'and that a time when poverty was a practical, workable ideal.  The land supplied all the needs of those who lived on it; there was little functional specialization; every peasant was, to a great extent, his own manufacturer as well as his own butcher, baker, greengrocer and vintner.  It was a society in which money was still comparatively unimportant.  The majority lived in an almost moneyless condition.  They dealt directly in things - household stuff of their own making and the kindly fruits of the earth - and so had no need of the precious metals which buy things.  St Francis's ideal of poverty was practicable then, because it held up for admiration a way of life not so enormously unlike the actual way of his humbler contemporaries.  He was inviting the leisured and the functionally specialized members of society - those who were living mainly in terms of money - to live as their inferiors were living, in terms of things.  How different is the state of things today!'  Burlap relapsed once more into blank verse, moved this time by indignation, not by lyrical tenderness.  'We are all specialists, living in terms only of money, not of real things, inhabiting remote abstractions, not the actual world of growth and making.'  He rumbled on a little about 'the great machines that having been man's slaves are now his masters,' about standardization, about industrial and commercial life and its withering effect on the human soul (for which last he borrowed a few of Rampion's favourite phrases).  Money, he concluded, was the root of the whole evil; the fatal necessity under which man now labours of living in terms of money, not of real things.  'To modern eyes St Francis's ideal appears fantastic, utterly insane.  The Lady Poverty has been degraded by modern circumstances into the semblance of a sack-aproned, leaky-booted charwoman ... No one in his senses would dream of following her.  To idealize so repulsive a Dulcinea one would have to be madder than Don Quixote himself.  Within our modern society the Franciscan ideal is unworkable.  We have made poverty detestable.  But this does not mean that we can just neglect St Francis as a dreamer of mad dreams.  No, on the contrary, the insanity is ours, not his.  He is the doctor in the asylum.  To the lunatics the doctor seems the only madman.  When we recover our senses, we shall see that the doctor has been all the time the only healthy man.  As things are at present the Franciscan ideal is unworkable.  The moral of that is that things must be altered, radically.  Our aim must be to create a new society in which Lady Poverty shall be, not a draggled charwoman, but a lovely form of light and graciousness and beauty.  Oh Poverty, Poverty, beautiful Lady Poverty!...'

      Beatrice came in to say that supper was on the table.

      'Two eggs,' she commanded, rapping out her solicitude.  'Two, I insist. They were made especially for you.'

      'You treat me like the prodigal son,' said Burlap.  'Or the fatted calf while it was being fattened.'  He wagged his head, he smiled a Sodoma smile and helped himself to the second egg.

      'I want to ask your advice about some gramophone shares I've got,' said Beatrice.  'They've been rising so violently.'

      'Gramophones!' said Burlap.  'Ah ...' He advised.