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. Chalk-pits 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 non ha, ne tua beltate,
O fortuna, o durezza, o gran disdegno,
Del mio mal colpa, o mio destino, o sorte.
Se dentro del tuo cor morte e pietate
Porti in un tempo, e ch’l mio basso ingegno
Non sappia 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 his 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.
Every one’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 judgment 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.
“Mr. 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. Our 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 this 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.