I
It was in the train that I learnt of his death. Although a very greedy
eater of literature, I can only enjoy reading when I have little time
for reading. Give me three hours of absolute leisure, with nothing to
do but read, and I instantly become almost incapable of the act. So it
is always on railway journeys, and so it was that evening. I was in the
middle of Wordsworth's Excursion; I positively gloated over it,
wondering why I should have allowed a mere rumour that it was dull to
prevent me from consuming it earlier in my life. But do you suppose I
could continue with Wordsworth in the train? I could not. I stared out
of the windows; I calculated the speed of the train by my watch; I
thought of my future and my past; I drew forth my hopes, examined them,
polished them, and put them back again; I forgave myself for my sins;
and I dreamed of the exciting conquest of a beautiful and brilliant
woman that I should one day achieve. In short, I did everything that
men habitually do under such circumstances. The Gazette was lying
folded on the seat beside me: one of the two London evening papers that
a man of taste may peruse without humiliating himself. How appetizing a
morsel, this sheet new and smooth from the press, this sheet written by
an ironic, understanding, small band of men for just a few thousand
persons like me, ruthlessly scornful of the big circulations and the
idols of the people! If the Gazette and its sole rival ceased to
appear, I do believe that my existence and many similar existences
would wear a different colour. Could one dine alone in Jermyn Street or
Panton Street without this fine piquant evening commentary on the gross
newspapers of the morning? (Now you perceive what sort of a man I am,
and you guess, rightly, that my age is between thirty and forty.) But
the train had stopped at Rugby and started again, and more than half of
my journey was accomplished, ere at length I picked up the Gazette, and
opened it with the false calm of a drunkard who has sworn that he will
not wet his lips before a certain hour. For, well knowing from
experience that I should suffer acute ennui in the train, I had, when
buying the Gazette at Euston, taken oath that I would not even glance
at it till after Rugby; it is always the final hour of these railway
journeys that is the nethermost hell.
The second thing that I saw in the Gazette (the first was of course the
'Entremets' column of wit, humour, and parody, very uneven in its
excellence) was the death of Simon Fuge. There was nearly a column
about it, signed with initials, and the subheading of the article ran,
'Sudden death of a great painter'. That was characteristic of the
Gazette. That Simon Fuge was indeed a great painter is now admitted by
most dilettantes, though denied by a few. But to the great public he
was not one of the few great names. To the great public he was just a
medium name. Ten to one that in speaking of him to a plain person you
would feel compelled to add: 'The painter, you know,' and the plain
person would respond: 'Oh yes,' falsely pretending that he was
perfectly familiar with the name. Simon Fuge had many friends on the
press, and it was solely owing to the loyalty of these friends in the
matter of obituary notices that the great public heard more of Simon
Fuge in the week after his death than it had heard of him during the
thirty-five years of his life. It may be asked: Why, if he had so many
and such loyal friends on the press, these friends did not take
measures to establish his reputation before he died? The answer is that
editors will not allow journalists to praise a living artist much in
excess of the esteem in which the public holds him; they are timid. But
when a misunderstood artist is dead the editors will put no limit on
laudation. I am not on the press, but it happens that I know the world.
Of all the obituary notices of Simon Fuge, the Gazette's was the first.
Somehow the Gazette had obtained exclusive news of the little event,
and some one high up on the Gazette's staff had a very exalted notion
indeed of Fuge, and must have known him personally. Fuge received his
deserts as a painter in that column of print. He was compared to
Sorolla y Bastida for vitality; the morbidezza of his flesh-tints was
stated to be unrivalled even by--I forget the name, painting is not my
speciality. The writer blandly inquired why examples of Fuge's work
were to be seen in the Luxembourg, at Vienna, at Florence, at Dresden;
and not, for instance, at the Tate Gallery, or in the Chantrey
collection. The writer also inquired, with equal blandness, why a
painter who had been on the hanging committee of the Societe Nationale
des Beaux Arts at Paris should not have been found worthy to be even an
A.R.A. in London. In brief, old England 'caught it', as occurred
somewhere or other most nights in the columns of the Gazette. Fuge also
received his deserts as a man. And the Gazette did not conceal that he
had not been a man after the heart of the British public. He had been
too romantically and intensely alive for that. The writer gave a little
penportrait of him. It was very good, recalling his tricks of manner,
his unforgettable eyes, and his amazing skill in talking about himself
and really interesting everybody in himself. There was a special
reference to one of Fuge's most dramatic recitals--a narration of a
night spent in a boat on Ham Lake with two beautiful girls, sisters,
natives of the Five Towns, where Fuge was born. Said the obituarist:
'Those two wonderful creatures who played so large a part in Simon
Fuge's life.'
This death was a shock to me. It took away my ennui for the rest of the
journey. I too had known Simon Fuge. That is to say, I had met him
once, at a soiree, and on that single occasion, as luck had it, he had
favoured the company with the very narration to which the Gazette
contributor referred. I remembered well the burning brilliance of his
blue-black eyes, his touching assurance that all of us were necessarily
interested in his adventures, and the extremely graphic and convincing
way in which he reconstituted for us the nocturnal scene on Ham
Lake--the two sisters, the boat, the rustle of trees, the lights on
shore, and his own difficulty in managing the oars, one of which he
lost for half-an-hour and found again. It was by such details as that
about the oar that, with a tint of humour, he added realism to the
romantic quality of his tales. He seemed to have no reticences
concerning himself. Decidedly he allowed things to be understood...!
Yes, his was a romantic figure, the figure of one to whom every day,
and every hour of the day, was coloured by the violence of his passion
for existence. His pictures had often an unearthly beauty, but for him
they were nothing but faithful renderings of what he saw.
My mind dwelt on those two beautiful sisters. Those two beautiful
sisters appealed to me more than anything else in the Gazette's
obituary. Surely--Simon Fuge had obviously been a man whose emotional
susceptibility and virile impulsiveness must have opened the door for
him to multifarious amours--but surely he had not made himself
indispensable to both sisters simultaneously. Surely even he had not so
far forgotten that Ham Lake was in the middle of a country called
England, and not the ornamental water in the Bois de Boulogne! And
yet.... The delicious possibility of ineffable indiscretions on the
part of Simon Fuge monopolized my mind till the train stopped at Knype,
and I descended. Nevertheless, I think I am a serious and fairly
insular Englishman. It is truly astonishing how a serious person can be
obsessed by trifles that, to speak mildly, do not merit sustained
attention.
I wondered where Ham Lake was. I knew merely that it lay somewhere in
the environs of the Five Towns. What put fuel on the fire of my
interest in the private affairs of the dead painter was the slightly
curious coincidence that on the evening of the news of his death I
should be travelling to the Five Towns--and for the first time in my
life. Here I was at Knype, which, as I had gathered from Bradshaw, and
from my acquaintance Brindley, was the traffic centre of the Five Towns.