Crusader's Tomb

by A. J. Cronin

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Listen, then. There are perhaps ten thousand blasted impostors in this town who imagine they are artists because they study a little, sketch a little, and sit on their arses in the cafés all night gabbling about their stillborn masterpieces. You’re almost one of them. You’re bloody well wasting your time, Desmonde. Painting means work, work, and still more work. Hard, hellish work that pulls the guts out of you. Not drifting down the Seine, lying on your backside in a canoe with some half-baked poseur who spouts Verlaine and Baudelaire at you.’

  Stephen flushed indignantly.

  ‘You’re unjust, Glyn. Chester and Lambert are very decent fellows. Lambert certainly has great talent.’

  ‘Bosh! What has he done? Some japonaiseries, painted fans, fragments … oh, pretty enough, I grant you, but effeminate little things … affected … and all so small.’

  ‘Surely it’s a sign of vulgarity to produce large canvases.’

  In his resentment Stephen quoted a favourite remark of Lambert’s and Glyn was quick to scent its origin. He laughed harshly.

  ‘What about Rubens, and Correggio, and del Sarto, with their terrific conceptions, and old Michelangelo, covering the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel with his tremendous vision of Creation, working so hard that for days he didn’t even take his clothes off? Were they vulgar? No, Desmonde … Lambert is a gifted amateur, a minor artist, who’d never be heard of if he weren’t pushed from behind by his shrewish wife. I’ve nothing against the fellow, it’s you I’m thinking of, Desmonde. You have something that Lambert would give his soul to possess. I won’t want to see you chuck it away through your own damned foolishness. As for Harry Chester,’ Glyn concluded, ‘ are you so unutterably green that you haven’t tumbled to him yet?’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ Stephen answered sulkily.

  For a moment Glyn thought of enlightening him, but he contented himself with a scornful smile.

  ‘How much has he sponged off you?’

  Stephen’s flush deepened. Chester had on several occasions borrowed additional sums until he now owed him more than five hundred francs, but had he not given his word of honour that he would faithfully pay them back?

  ‘I tell you, Desmonde,’ Glyn went on more quietly, ‘you’ve got off to a false start, landed in bad company, and worst of all you’ve been slacking abominably. If you don’t take yourself up you’ll have dug your own grave. The lowest pit in hell is occupied by the artist who does not work!’

  A long, cold silence fell. Although Stephen had defended himself, as he contrasted his own useless day with the hours of concentrated effort given out by Glyn, a slow shame spread over him.

  ‘What am I to do?’ he said, at last.

  Glyn’s drawn brows relaxed.

  ‘First of all, get out of this damned Anglican home of rest.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Now.’

  Stephen’s look of consternation seemed to amuse Glyn immensely, but in a moment he was serious again.

  ‘I can’t ask you to dig with me. But I know a man who’ll be glad to have you.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Jerome Peyrat’s the name. Papa Peyrat. He’s an oldish chap, not well off, wants someone to share expenses. A queer fish but, by heaven, a real painter, different from your fake bohemians.’ Glyn’s grin was disconcerting, but it vanished quickly as he concluded. ‘You’re finished with Dupret, of course. You can use my studio. And I’ll introduce you to my colourman, Napoleon Campo. He gives credit … sometimes. Now let’s go.’

  Stephen’s nature was not adapted to sudden changes and abrupt decisions, yet there was an overwhelming force in Glyn’s arguments, an irresistible compulsion in his manner. He went, therefore, to the office and, to the surprise and mortification of the director, asked for and settled his bill. He then packed his bag and had it brought downstairs, atoning for the unexpectedness of his departure by an indiscriminate distribution of gratuities.

  Glyn, standing by in the passage, and plainly regarded by the Clifton staff as the demon of the piece, was chilly towards this tipping, and commented grimly:

  ‘I advise you to hang on to your cash, Desmonde. You may need it before you’re through. Come along.’

  ‘Wait, Glyn. They’ll have to get us a cab.’

  ‘Damn the cab. Are you too weak to walk?’

  Picking up the suitcase, which was no light weight, Richard swung it on to his shoulder and strode out of the hotel. Stephen followed, into the luminous dusk of the street.

  It was a considerable distance to Peyrat’s lodging, but Glyn, who took a savage satisfaction in exacting the utmost from himself, traversed it at a rapid pace, without once faltering or setting down the valise. Finally in a dark little side street on the Left Bank, in the triangle formed by the meeting of the Rue d’Assas and the Boulevard du Montparnasse, Glyn turned into a crooked entrance next to a pastrycook’s shop which, though feebly illuminated by an overhead lamp, was scrubbed clean, and began ascending the stone stairs three at a time. On the second floor he paused, knocked on the door, then, without waiting for an answer, turned the handle and led Stephen in.

  It was a three-room apartment, and in the living-room, furnished with bourgeois neatness, there sat by an oilcloth-covered table a slight, round-shouldered man of about fifty, with a flat, furrowed face and an untrimmed beard, who wore, despite the warmth of a stove in full blast, a dilapidated black overcoat turned up at the collar and a hard black hat and who, while a thrush with half its feathers gone piped an accompaniment in a cage by the window, was practising softly on the ocarina. At the sight of Glyn his eyes, which were clear and youthful and filled with ingenuous audacity, lighted up. He put down the instrument, and rising, embraced Richard with affectionate formality upon both cheeks.

  ‘Peyrat,’ said Glyn briefly, when he had disengaged himself, ‘I’ve brought you your new lodger. He’s a friend of mine. Stephen Desmonde.’

  Jerome Peyrat’s gaze travelled from Glyn towards Stephen and rested upon him thoughtfully – a scrutiny both innocent and amiable.

  ‘If he is your friend, mon vieux, then he will be mine. Forgive me for receiving you like this, Monsieur Desmonde. Richard knows how subject I am to draughts.’

  ‘I hope we are not disturbing you,’ Stephen said awkwardly.

  ‘Far from it. In the evenings I am in the habit of contemplating my own soul. Sometimes I find it splendid, sometimes hideous. Tonight’ – he smiled gravely – ‘I welcome any distraction.’

  ‘Desmonde is a painter, Peyrat. He’s going to work with me – and you.’

  ‘Good.’ Peyrat expressed not the slightest surprise. ‘ I make you welcome to my apartment.… At least temporarily it is mine since it belongs to Monsieur Bisque, the pastrycook. No matter. Here we renounce the beauty of women and the brilliance of contemporary fame in order to produce masterpieces that will be acclaimed a thousand years after we are dead.’

  ‘What a hope!’ exclaimed Glyn with ironic indulgence.

  ‘It is that hope which alone keeps us alive.’

  ‘What about the blessed Thérèse?’

  ‘Ah, yes. Truly, one is sustained by the example of that noble soul.’ He turned to Stephen. ‘ Have you visited Spain?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then some day we may make a pilgrimage together. To Avila de los Caballeros … lying behind its granite ramparts, baked yellow by the sun in summer, frozen by the Castilian winter, standing like a great crown amidst its wilderness of rock against the hard blue of the Gredos Mountains.’

  ‘You have been there?’ Stephen asked politely.

  ‘Many times. But only in spirit.’

  Glyn burst out laughing.

  ‘I warn you, Desmonde. This madman, who never goes to church and says disagreeable things about the Pope, has an absurd veneration for Sainte Thérèse.’

  Peyrat shook his head in reproof.

  ‘My friend, do not take in vain the name of that sweet and obst
inate woman from Old Castile, who restored the original discalced order, abandoned in the easy, gossiping life of the Carmelites. She fought her campaign with wit, charm, humility, prayer, argument, the patience of a saint and the temper of a sea captain. She was a poet too …’

  ‘I’m off,’ Glyn said with a grin, going to the door. ‘I’ll leave you to get acquainted. Be at my studio at seven tomorrow, Desmonde. Good night.’

  He went out. Peyrat, after a moment’s silence, came forward and held out his hand to Stephen.

  He said simply, ‘I hope you will be at home here.’

  Chapter Nine

  Now there began for Stephen, under the influence of Glyn and Peyrat, a new existence, filled with unremitting work, flatly opposed to his recent interpretation of the artistic life. Jerome Peyrat, known all over the Plaisance district as ‘Papa Peyrat’, was of humble origin, his parents, now dead, no more than simple country people – though he spoke of them with pride – working a few hectares near Nantes. For thirty years, as a government clerk, model petit fonctionnaire, his days had been passed in paper cuffs and an alpaca jacket, making entries in dusty ledgers at the Palais de Justice. Only once had he been out of France, when, as third clerk to a judicial commission, he had gone to India. Here, he had spent all his leisure a naïve and fascinated spectator of the animals ranging behind bars, beneath the tall palms and carob trees of the Calcutta Zoo. Some months after his return, the personnel of the ministry was reduced and Peyrat was retired with a pension so minute it barely kept him in bread. Then, unexpectedly, never having manifested in the faintest degree any interest in art, he began, prolifically, to paint. Not only to paint, but to regard himself, calmly, as a painter of genius. He had never had a lesson in his life. He painted the portraits of his friends, he painted streets, ugly buildings, wedding groups, factories in the banlieue, bunches of flowers grasped by disembodied hands, he painted jungle compositions – a naked female form, prodigal of breast and thigh, bestriding a snarling tiger amidst a tangled undergrowth of palms, creepers, fern fronds, orchids of chromatic hues, a forest of the imagination, lush and stupendous, peopled by snakes, and climbing apes interlocked as though in mortal combat, during the execution of which he trembled, sweated and, lest he faint, was forced, despite his dread of catching cold, to open the window for fresh air.

  The neighbourhood shrugged and smiled at these pictures, which were displayed for sale at the price of fifteen francs, in the window of his friend, Madame Huffnaegel, a respectable widow who kept the millinery shop a few doors down the street and for whom he cherished a temperate regard. Except for Napoleon Campo, the colourman, who had taken canvases in payment for materials obtained by Peyrat – and whose attic admittedly was stored with junk from struggling artists – no one bought the pictures which became, to the neighbours in the Rue Castel, a standard subject of hilarious, if affectionate, mirth. Yet, complacently, Peyrat went on painting, often sorely in need, yet eking out his meagre pension by various devices. In addition to the ocarina, which he played for his own pleasure, and the French horn, he had a limited knowledge of the violin, and clarinet. He therefore drew out a number of handbills which, in his best clothes, he distributed from door to door throughout the district.

  Notice

  JEROME PEYRAT

  Painter and Musician

  COURSES FOR CHILDREN IN MUSIC, HARMONICA, AND SOLFEGGIO

  Saturday afternoons from 2–5 o’clock. Rapid progress guaranteed. Parents may be present at the classes. Monthly fee for each student 5 francs. The number accepted will be limited.

  Also, in the summer, he turned his skill upon the French horn to good effect by playing every Thursday afternoon in the orchestra which charmed the nursemaids and their charges in the Tuileries Gardens. And when necessity pressed too hard upon him there was always the friend of his boyhood, Alphonse Bisque, now the Plaisance pastrycook, stout, middle-aged and completely bald, who, out of sentimental recollection of their distant schooldays in Nantes rather than because of the pictures which, from time to time, Jerome pressed upon him in payment, could be relied upon, in a crisis, to provide a meat pâté or a mutton pie.

  In his habits and the general manner of his life, Peyrat – Stephen soon discovered – was as ingenuous, as strikingly original as his pictures. For all his simplicity, he had an active and inquiring mind which, stuffed with the fruits of his researches in abstruse volumes bought second hand on the quais, frequently erupted in naïvely erudite discourses upon history, medieval theology, or subjects so irreconcilable as Cosmas of Alexandria, who in the year 548 denounced the doctrine of the rotundity of the earth, and Sainte Thérèse of Avila, whom he, an atheist, had calmly appropriated as his patroness.

  Despite these eccentricities, he proved himself, in his favourite phrase, un brave homme et un bon camarade. Early though Stephen rose, Peyrat was up before him to take in the milk and new-baked bread which Alphonse’s small boy delivered every morning to the door. Their simple breakfast over, he would put on an apron and wash the dishes; then, having given water and seed to the thrush, which he had found in the street lamed by a cat and proposed to release when its wing had mended, he girded himself for the day’s work, shouldered his easel and paint-box and, with a great rusty umbrella to protect him from the elements, set off on foot to some remote corner of the suburbs, to Ivry, Charenton or Passy, where, undisturbed either by the ribald comments of passing spectators, or the practical jokes of the children who tormented him, he lost himself in the wonder and mystery of projecting upon canvas some celestial vision of a railway siding, a tramcar, or a chimney-stack.

  Stephen set out at the same hour, hurrying every morning towards the Rue de Bièvre to utilise the clear north light which, after dawn, streamed through the leaded skylights of Glyn’s studio. Richard, who never spared himself, was merciless in his attitude, a surly, and often savage, taskmaster.

  ‘Show me what you can do,’ he said grimly. ‘In six months, if you don’t satisfy me, I’ll return you to the Lord.’

  Glyn’s model, Anna Montel, was a woman of thirty, tall and vigorous, with black hair and a gaunt, gypsy look. She was a Cinzany Romany, her forbears must originally have been Hungarian, though Glyn had met her in a remote part of North Wales. Her skin was rough, and as she went always bareheaded, in a dark skirt and green blouse, without gloves or coat, her hands and cheeks were chapped by the sharp autumn breezes which swept up the street from the river. But the planes of this windswept face, with its firm eye-sockets and high cheek-bones, were flat and strong. Moving about the studio in her list slippers, reading Glyn’s wishes by a glance, she was the most silent person Stephen had ever known. She would pose at all hours, and for long periods at a stretch, then without a word would slip out of the studio to the Halles and, returning with an armful of provisions, go over to the tiny stove and make a goulash, or brew coffee in that speckled blue enamel pot with the broken spout which figured, later, in one of Glyn’s best-known paintings: Le Café Matinal.

  Although he never attempted to instruct, Glyn was incessant in his demand for originality, insisting that Stephen discard his preconceived notions, encouraging him to look at objects, not as they were seen and represented by tradition, but with his own eyes.

  ‘Do as Peyrat does!’ Glyn would exclaim. ‘Make every painting absolutely your own.’

  ‘You think highly of Peyrat?’

  ‘I think he’s great.’ Glyn spoke with complete conviction. ‘He has the direct original vision of the primitive artist. They may laugh at him for a damned old fool as much as they please. But in twenty years they’ll fall over themselves scrambling for his stuff.’

  It was hard work – and cold. The studio was frigid, and as the weeks advanced became more frigid still, for Glyn held a Spartan theory that no one could do his best in an atmosphere of comfort. Gone for ever was Stephen’s earlier idea that painting was a soft, seductive art. Never in his life had he known such a rigorous regime. And Glyn was insatiable in his demand for greater, a
nd still greater, effort.

  One day, when Stephen’s head was reeling and he felt he could go on no longer, Richard, with a deep breath, threw down his palette.

  ‘Exercise,’ he declared. ‘The top of my head’s coming off. Can you use a bicycle?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I suppose you did the curate’s crawl around Oxford. Four miles an hour.’

  ‘I believe I can do slightly better than that.’

  ‘Good.’ Glyn’s lips drew open. ‘ We’ll see what you’re made of.’

  They left the studio and crossed the street to the bicycle shop of the quarter kept by Pierre Berthelot, an old racing cyclist who, though now incapacitated by a Pernod-damaged heart, had in his day finished third in the Tour de France. It was a small, broken-down establishment with a row of vélos strung up to the ceiling in front and a dark repair shop in the rear. They went in. The place seemed deserted.

  ‘Pierre!’ Glyn shouted, rapping on the counter.

  A girl of about nineteen appeared from the back. She was rather short, wore a black sweater and black pleated skirt, her bare feet in low black slippers.

  ‘It’s you,’ said Glyn.

  ‘Who did you expect? The Queen of Sheba?’

  ‘Why aren’t you with the circus?’

  ‘Laid up for the winter.’ She spoke briefly, ungraciously, hands on her hips, legs planted apart.

  ‘Where’s your papa?’

  ‘Sleeping it off.’

  ‘Huh! Stephen, this is Emmy Berthelot.’ As she looked from one to the other in a bored manner he went on. ‘We want two machines for the afternoon. Good ones, now.’

  ‘They’re all good. Take the two at the end.’

  While Glyn lowered the pulley ropes, Stephen watched her as she caught each machine in turn and spun the wheels expertly. She had a pale, sulky face, a low, slightly bulging forehead, well-marked eyebrows, a wide, thin-lipped mouth. Her nose had a good line but had that slum-quarter tilt at the tip which gave her away. Except for her breasts, conspicuous under the tight jersey, she had the figure of a young, well-developed boy. Turning unexpectedly, she caught Stephen’s eyes on her. Under her cool appraising stare he felt himself reddening – there was an insolence in her manner that wounded him. Richard was wheeling the cycles to the door.