AT that moment we were interrupted by the appearance of Madame Coutras,
who had been paying visits. She came in, like a ship in full sail, an
imposing creature, tall and stout, with an ample bust and an obesity
girthed in alarmingly by straight-fronted corsets. She had a bold
hooked nose and three chins. She held herself upright. She had not
yielded for an instant to the enervating charm of the tropics, but
contrariwise was more active, more worldly, more decided than anyone in
a temperate clime would have thought it possible to be. She was
evidently a copious talker, and now poured forth a breathless stream of
anecdote and comment. She made the conversation we had just had seem
far away and unreal.
Presently Dr. Coutras turned to me.
“I still have in my _bureau_ the picture that Strickland gave me,” he
said. “Would you like to see it?”
“Willingly.”
We got up, and he led me on to the verandah which surrounded his house.
We paused to look at the gay flowers that rioted in his garden.
“For a long time I could not get out of my head the recollection of the
extraordinary decoration with which Strickland had covered the walls of
his house,” he said reflectively.
I had been thinking of it, too. It seemed to me that here Strickland
had finally put the whole expression of himself. Working silently,
knowing that it was his last chance, I fancied that here he must have
said all that he knew of life and all that he divined. And I fancied
that perhaps here he had at last found peace. The demon which possessed
him was exorcised at last, and with the completion of the work, for
which all his life had been a painful preparation, rest descended on
his remote and tortured soul. He was willing to die, for he had
fulfilled his purpose.
“What was the subject?” I asked.
“I scarcely know. It was strange and fantastic. It was a vision of the
beginnings of the world, the Garden of Eden, with Adam and Eve—_que
sais-je?_—it was a hymn to the beauty of the human form, male and
female, and the praise of Nature, sublime, indifferent, lovely, and
cruel. It gave you an awful sense of the infinity of space and of the
endlessness of time. Because he painted the trees I see about me every
day, the cocoa-nuts, the banyans, the flamboyants, the alligator-pears,
I have seen them ever since differently, as though there were in them a
spirit and a mystery which I am ever on the point of seizing and which
forever escapes me. The colours were the colours familiar to me, and
yet they were different. They had a significance which was all their
own. And those nude men and women. They were of the earth, and yet
apart from it. They seemed to possess something of the clay of which
they were created, and at the same time something divine. You saw man
in the nakedness of his primeval instincts, and you were afraid, for
you saw yourself.”
Dr. Coutras shrugged his shoulders and smiled.
“You will laugh at me. I am a materialist, and I am a gross, fat
man—Falstaff, eh?—the lyrical mode does not become me. I make myself
ridiculous. But I have never seen painting which made so deep an
impression upon me. _Tenez_, I had just the same feeling as when I went
to the Sistine Chapel in Rome. There too I was awed by the greatness of
the man who had painted that ceiling. It was genius, and it was
stupendous and overwhelming. I felt small and insignificant. But you
are prepared for the greatness of Michael Angelo. Nothing had prepared
me for the immense surprise of these pictures in a native hut, far away
from civilisation, in a fold of the mountain above Taravao. And Michael
Angelo is sane and healthy. Those great works of his have the calm of
the sublime; but here, notwithstanding beauty, was something troubling.
I do not know what it was. It made me uneasy. It gave me the impression
you get when you are sitting next door to a room that you know is
empty, but in which, you know not why, you have a dreadful
consciousness that notwithstanding there is someone. You scold
yourself; you know it is only your nerves—and yet, and yet... In a
little while it is impossible to resist the terror that seizes you, and
you are helpless in the clutch of an unseen horror. Yes; I confess I
was not altogether sorry when I heard that those strange masterpieces
had been destroyed.”
“Destroyed?” I cried.
“_Mais oui_; did you not know?”
“How should I know? It is true I had never heard of this work; but I
thought perhaps it had fallen into the hands of a private owner. Even
now there is no certain list of Strickland’s paintings.”
“When he grew blind he would sit hour after hour in those two rooms
that he had painted, looking at his works with sightless eyes, and
seeing, perhaps, more than he had ever seen in his life before. Ata
told me that he never complained of his fate, he never lost courage. To
the end his mind remained serene and undisturbed. But he made her
promise that when she had buried him—did I tell you that I dug his
grave with my own hands, for none of the natives would approach the
infected house, and we buried him, she and I, sewn up in three _pareos_
joined together, under the mango-tree—he made her promise that she
would set fire to the house and not leave it till it was burned to the
ground and not a stick remained.”
I did not speak for a while, for I was thinking. Then I said:
“He remained the same to the end, then.”
“Do you understand? I must tell you that I thought it my duty to
dissuade her.”
“Even after what you have just said?”
“Yes; for I knew that here was a work of genius, and I did not think we
had the right to deprive the world of it. But Ata would not listen to
me. She had promised. I would not stay to witness the barbarous deed,
and it was only afterwards that I heard what she had done. She poured
paraffin on the dry floors and on the pandanus-mats, and then she set
fire. In a little while nothing remained but smouldering embers, and a
great masterpiece existed no longer.
“I think Strickland knew it was a masterpiece. He had achieved what he
wanted. His life was complete. He had made a world and saw that it was
good. Then, in pride and contempt, he destroyed it.”
“But I must show you my picture,” said Dr. Coutras, moving on.
“What happened to Ata and the child?”
“They went to the Marquesas. She had relations there. I have heard that
the boy works on one of Cameron’s schooners. They say he is very like
his father in appearance.”
At the door that led from the verandah to the doctor’s consulting-room,
he paused and smiled.
“It is a fruit-piece. You would think it not a very suitable picture
for a doctor’s consulting-room, but my wife will not have it in the
drawing-room. She says it is frankly obscene.”
“A fruit-piece!” I exclaimed in surprise.
We entered the room, and my eyes fell at once on the picture. I looked
at it for a long time.
It was a pile of mangoes, bananas, oranges, and I know not what and at
first sight it was an innocent picture enough. It would have been
passed in an exhibition of the Post-Impressionists by a careless person
as an excellent but not very remarkable example of the school; but
perhaps afterwards it would come back to his recollection, and he would
wonder why. I do not think then he could ever entirely forget it.
The colours were so strange that words can hardly tell what a troubling
emotion they gave. They were sombre blues, opaque like a delicately
carved bowl in lapis lazuli, and yet with a quivering lustre that
suggested the palpitation of mysterious life; there were purples,
horrible like raw and putrid flesh, and yet with a glowing, sensual
passion that called up vague memories of the Roman Empire of
Heliogabalus; there were reds, shrill like the berries of holly—one
thought of Christmas in England, and the snow, the good cheer, and the
pleasure of children—and yet by some magic softened till they had the
swooning tenderness of a dove’s breast; there were deep yellows that
died with an unnatural passion into a green as fragrant as the spring
and as pure as the sparkling water of a mountain brook. Who can tell
what anguished fancy made these fruits? They belonged to a Polynesian
garden of the Hesperides. There was something strangely alive in them,
as though they were created in a stage of the earth’s dark history when
things were not irrevocably fixed to their forms. They were
extravagantly luxurious. They were heavy with tropical odours. They
seemed to possess a sombre passion of their own. It was enchanted
fruit, to taste which might open the gateway to God knows what secrets
of the soul and to mysterious palaces of the imagination. They were
sullen with unawaited dangers, and to eat them might turn a man to
beast or god. All that was healthy and natural, all that clung to happy
relationships and the simple joys of simple men, shrunk from them in
dismay; and yet a fearful attraction was in them, and, like the fruit
on the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil they were terrible with
the possibilities of the Unknown.
At last I turned away. I felt that Strickland had kept his secret to
the grave.
“_Voyons, René, mon ami_,” came the loud, cheerful voice of Madame
Coutras, “what are you doing all this time? Here are the _apéritifs_.
Ask _Monsieur_ if he will not drink a little glass of Quinquina
Dubonnet.”
“_Volontiers_, Madame,” I said, going out on to the verandah.
The spell was broken.