Later that evening, Edwin sat at a small deal table in the embrasure of
the dormer window of the empty attic next to his bedroom. During the
interval between tea and the rendezvous with Big James he had formally
planted his flag in that room. He had swept it out with a long-brush,
while Clara stood at the door giggling at the spectacle and telling him
that he had no right thus to annex territory in the absence of the
overlord. He had mounted a pair of steps, and put a lot of lumber
through a trap at the head of the stairs into the loft. And he had got
a table, a lamp, and a chair. That was all that he needed for the
moment. He had gone out to meet Big James with his head quite half-full
of this vague attic-project, but the night sights of Bursley, and
especially the music at the Dragon, and still more especially the
dancing at the Dragon, had almost expelled the attic-project from his
head. When he returned unobtrusively into the house and learnt from a
disturbed Mrs Nixon, who was sewing in the kitchen, that he was
understood to be in his new attic, and that his sisters had gone to bed,
the enchantment of the attic had instantly resumed much of its power
over him, and he had hurried upstairs fortified with a slice of bread
and half a cold sausage. He had eaten the food absently in gulps while
staring at the cover of "Cazenove's Architectural Views of European
Capitals," abstracted from the shop without payment. Then he had pinned
part of a sheet of cartridge-paper on an old drawing-board which he
possessed, and had sat down. For his purpose the paper ought to have
been soaked and stretched on the board with paste, but that would have
meant a delay of seven or eight hours, and he was not willing to wait.
Though he could not concentrate his mind to begin, his mind could not be
reconciled to waiting. So he had decided to draw his picture in pencil
outline, and then stretch the paper early on Sunday morning; it would
dry during chapel. His new box of paints, a cracked T-square, and some
india-rubber also lay on the table.
He had chosen "View of the Cathedral of Notre-Dame Paris, from the Pont
des Arts." It pleased him by the coloration of the old houses in front
of Notre-Dame, and the reflections in the water of the Seine, and the
elusive blueness of the twin towers amid the pale grey clouds of a
Parisian sky. A romantic scene! He wanted to copy it exactly, to
recreate it from beginning to end, to feel the thrill of producing each
wonderful effect himself. Yet he sat inactive. He sat and vaguely
gazed at the slope of Trafalgar Road with its double row of yellow
jewels, beautifully ascending in fire to the ridge of the horizon and
there losing itself in the deep and solemn purple of the summer night;
and he thought how ugly and commonplace all that was, and how different
from all that were the noble capitals of Europe. Scarcely a sound came
through the open window; song doubtless still gushed forth at the
Dragon, and revellers would not for hours awake the street on their way
to the exacerbating atmosphere of home.
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