FOLLOWING
DARKNESS
BY
FORREST REID
AUTHOR OF “THE BRACKNELS,” ETC.
“Lost, lost, for ever lost,
In the wide pathless desert of dim sleep,
That beautiful shape!”
SHELLEY.
LONDON
EDWARD ARNOLD
1912
[_All Rights Reserved_]
TO E. M. F.
FOLLOWING DARKNESS
It is not without some hesitation that I offer to the public the
following fragment of an autobiography, even though in doing so I am
but obeying the obvious intention of its author. When the papers of
Mr. Peter Waring came into my possession I had indeed no idea of its
existence, and I have now no means of telling when it was written.
The fact that he left it unfinished proves nothing. He may have begun
it and abandoned it years ago: he may have been working at it shortly
before his death. That he intended to carry it to completion, there is,
I think, abundant evidence in a mass of detached notes and impressions
bearing on a later period of his life. These, rightly or wrongly, I
have not printed, partly because the earlier portion has in itself a
certain unity and completeness, which would be marred were I to add
anything to it, and partly because they never received his personal
revision. Moreover, many of them are in the highest degree fantastic
and exotic, so that it is at times difficult to take them literally,
especially if the simplicity and directness of the earlier pages be
borne in mind.
Those who are familiar with Mr. Waring’s writings published during his
lifetime――writings in which the personal element is so slight――will
hardly be prepared for anything so intimate as this journal. His
critical methods were entirely scientific. Of their value I am not the
proper person to speak, having neither the necessary knowledge, nor,
to tell the whole truth, the necessary sympathy. Our paths, if they
seemed to run parallel for a moment, diverged very early in life, and
I could never take much interest in the work to which he devoted his
real, though, I venture to think, somewhat narrow gifts. He was still a
young man――barely thirty-six――when he died, but he had already become
eminent in his own particular line, that of the newer art criticism,
invented, I believe, by the Italian, Morelli. It was scarcely a career
to bring him much under the public eye, but his “Study of the Drawings
of the Early Italian Masters” gained him, I understand, the recognition
of a small number of persons, of various nationalities, occupied in
making similar researches. He was busy with the proofs of the second
and larger edition of this work when, on the 10th of September, 1911,
he died under tragic circumstances. The mystery of his death, about
which there was some noise in the papers at the time, will, I think,
never now be cleared up, though, to my own mind, it is perfectly clear
that he was murdered.
* * * * *
In relation to the autobiography, a word or two of comment and
explanation is possibly due to the reader. To begin with, I have
altered all the proper names save two――my own, and that of Mrs.
Carroll, of Derryaghy, Newcastle, County Down, his oldest friend, which
I have allowed to remain. I feel this, myself, to be unsatisfactory,
but I cannot see how at present it is to be avoided. Again, though I
have added nothing, I have left out a few pages――only a few――and none,
I believe, of importance, so far as the understanding of the whole is
concerned. For this I have no excuse to offer, except that it seemed to
me that he himself should have omitted them.
In the main the portrait he has given of himself coincides with my
own impression of him in early life. I can remember very well when
I first came to know him at school. I was more struck by his gifts
then, perhaps, than I was later, though even at that time he seemed to
me to be intensely one-sided. He was very intelligent, but from the
beginning his whole manner of looking upon life was, in my opinion,
unfortunate. It may sound harsh to say so, but as the years passed I
do not think he improved. Latterly, he appeared to me to have little
but his fine taste. It was as if everything had become subservient to
an æsthetic sense, which was extraordinarily, morbidly acute. Yet even
while I write this I have a suspicion that I am not doing him justice.
If he had been nothing but what I say he was, I should not be able to
look back with tenderness upon the friendship of those early days,
whereas the recollection of that friendship will always remain one
of the pleasantest memories of my life. I regret that it should have
been broken, but that was almost inevitable. It came about slowly and
naturally, though no doubt the actual break was hastened by a mutual
friend of ours, who informed me that Waring had described me as borné
and tedious. That is the kind of thing which rankles. You may say to
yourself it is of no consequence, but to have an uneasy feeling that
your friend finds your company dull quickly becomes unendurable. A man
would rather be thought almost anything than a bore; hence it was that
for a long time I entirely ceased to see him. I regret it now, for he
may never have made the fatal remark, and even if he did, judging from
his journal, it need not have been inconsistent with affection.
The last time I saw him was at Mrs. Carroll’s house, about a year
before his death. She had asked me down, I suppose by Waring’s request,
and I went, though I stayed only one night. I had not seen him for
years until this occasion, and I was struck, and even shocked, by his
altered appearance, and still more by his manner, which was that,
I imagined, of a man haunted by some secret thought that has come
between him and everything about him. This impression, though I do
not desire to lay stress upon it, may throw a light on certain of the
later notes I have not printed, and these, in turn, may afford some
clue as to the mystery surrounding his death, for it is evident that
he had come under the influence of strange and disreputable persons,
who professed to experiment in occult sciences――spiritualism, and
even magic. His hair had turned quite white at the temples. He seemed
restless and dissatisfied; and, whatever else he may have found in his
long wanderings, I could not believe he had found peace.
Late in the evening we sat together. He was so silent that I looked at
him to see if he had fallen asleep. The room we were sitting in――the
morning-room――gave on to a garden at the side of the house, into which
one could easily pass through tall French windows. The night was warm,
and one of these windows stood wide open, letting in the scent of
flowers, but with a curtain drawn across it to keep out moths and other
winged creatures attracted by lamplight. I did not speak, but waited
for him to talk or to keep silent as he chose. After a while I got up
to examine a few black-framed etchings that hung upon the walls. These,
with some pieces of china, formed the only decorations. I drew back
the curtain and looked out into the night. The moon was high above
the trees, and I could hear the low sound of waves breaking on the
shore. When I turned round he was watching me, and I was struck by his
expression, which was that of a man on the point of making some very
private communication. But perhaps my sudden movement disconcerted him,
for he said nothing, and in a little I could see the impulse had left
him. I began to talk, not of my own work, which I thought would have no
interest for him, but of his, which I was surprised to find he seemed
to regard as equally unimportant. I asked him what had first led him to
take it up.
“There was nothing else,” he answered.
Seeing that I waited for him to go on, he made an effort to shake off
his abstraction. “If I hadn’t found it I should have bored myself to
death. What is there for a boy of eighteen, with no taste for society,
and left to wander about Europe alone, to do? Fortunately, I had always
cared for pictures, and early Italian art appealed to me particularly.”
“Of course, you had your writing.”
“I never wrote a line except to take notes. I was nearly thirty before
it occurred to me to publish anything. Even then, it was only for a
few pedants more or less like myself that I wrote. My writings are of
no account. The only people I can imagine it pleasant to write for
are quite young people. They might lend your work a sort of charm by
reading their own youth and enthusiasm into it. But it is not easy to
arouse enthusiasm by describing how Bernardino de’ Conti paints ears,
or how Pontormo models hands. For one thing, nobody wants to know. All
that it leads to is that presently you find yourself approaching the
most innocent work of art with the mind of a detective, revelling in
clues and the æsthetically unimportant. Nine-tenths of your enjoyment
comes from the gratified sense of your own ingenuity. Of course it is
wrong. When I was a boy I fell in love with one of Giotto’s frescoes
in the Upper Church at Assisi, a thing half-peeled from the wall, and
representing Saint Francis preaching to the birds. But why I liked it
had nothing in the world to do either with Giotto or Saint Francis. I
simply saw a bit of decoration, a Japanese print in gray and blue....
That is the proper spirit. One day, however, a year or so later, I
was in the Louvre, in the Salle des Primitifs, and before me was a
beautiful little picture which hangs on the side wall, near the door.
Below it was printed an artist’s name, Gentile da Fabriano. I looked
at the picture again, and I said to myself, ‘Why Gentile, when it is
obviously by Jacopo Bellini?’ That was the beginning.”
“You don’t think, then, it matters very much?”
“About Gentile? Not in the least. I haven’t even persuaded them to make
the alteration in the catalogue.”
But I could see he was talking merely not to be silent, so I got up and
we lit our candles. At the top of the staircase I said good-night, for
our bedrooms were on opposite sides of the house, but he pushed open a
door. “There is a picture here,” he said.
I followed him into the big, dark room, black shadows that seemed
almost solid gliding away before us. He took my candle and held both
up so that their light flickered across a small canvas that hung
just above the level of our eyes. The painting represented the head
of a quite young girl, and I recognised it at once as a portrait of
Katherine Dale. I am no judge of pictures, so I will only say that this
picture gave me pleasure. Yet I should have hesitated to call the face
beautiful, and it certainly was not pretty. It reminded me rather of
an early Millais――that is to say, the subject reminded me of a Millais
type. There was the same breadth of forehead, the same rich colouring
and steadfast, serious eyes that were more like the eyes of a boy than
of a girl. I wondered why he had brought me in to look at it just now,
and thought it had perhaps been painted by a celebrated artist.
“Whose is it?” I asked, and was greatly surprised when he told me he
had done it himself, from memory. I had never seen any of his work
before, and I congratulated him on his success, which seemed to me
to be really a genuine one. I asked another question, but he did not
reply. He merely returned me my candle, which I held up for another
look. The small, wavering, uncertain flame lent a curious air of life
to the portrait, and I continued to regard it, for the frankness and
simplicity of the young face gave me great pleasure. When I glanced
round I discovered I was alone. My companion had disappeared without
my noticing it, and evidently he had gone out, not by the way we had
entered, but by another door at the farther end of the room. That
this was the case I had more positive proof next moment, for a sudden
draught extinguished my candle so swiftly and unexpectedly that I had
an odd feeling that somebody had stolen up behind me and blown it out.
OWEN GILL.
CHAPTER I
What is there in this house, in these surroundings, so utterly
different from those I was born amongst, that revives a swarm of
memories of my childhood and youth? My notes are piled up on the table
before me, they have been there for several days, and I have not
touched them, though I came here to work. A warm Italian sun floods
the stiff and formal garden stretching from my window, with its pale
paved walks, its fountain, and dark cypress-trees; but when I shut my
eyes, it is quite another garden that I see, and now, when I have at
last taken up my pen to write, it is not to fulfil the task I had set
myself, but to chatter idly of a boyhood passed under other skies,
grayer, softer, and colder. The odd fact is that ever since my arrival
here, in spite of my being upon “classic soil,” in a district rich
in historical suggestion, and full, too, of the colour and odour of
the south, I have been communing daily, hourly almost, with my own
youth. I should like to set down simply what that youth was, without
embroidery, without suppression, though, on the other hand, a mere bald
enumeration of the outward facts will be little to my purpose. The
facts in themselves are nothing. Unless I can recapture the spirit that
hovered behind them, my task will have been fruitless, and even though
in my effort to do so I shall probably accentuate it, alter it, clip
its wings and make it heavy, yet that must be my aim if I am to write
at all. I have little eloquence, and perhaps no power of evocation, but
the whole great, soft, time-toned picture is before me at this moment,
and I cannot resist the temptation to linger over it. If I linger over
it pen in hand, what matter?
* * * * *
In the foreground there must be the portrait of a boy, but painted in
the manner of Rembrandt rather than Bronzino. By this I mean there will
be less of firm, clear outline, than of light and shadow. The danger is
that in the end there may be too much shadow; but at least I shall not,
in the manner of a writer of fiction, have sacrificed my subject for
the sake of gaining an additional brightness and vivacity. The spirit
of youth is not merely bright and vivacious; above all, it is not
merely thoughtless and noisy. It is melancholy, dreamy, passionate; it
is admirable, and it is base; it is full of curiosity; it is healthy,
and it is morbid; it is animal, and it is spiritual; sensual, yet
filled with vague half-realised yearnings after an ideal――that is to
say, it is the spirit of life itself, which can never be adequately
indicated by the description of a fight or of a football match.