by A. J. Cronin
On the following morning he felt weak and faint, yet still he forced himself to resume work. But when afternoon came a shaft of reason struck through the mists that now befogged his brain. He realised less that he must eat to live than simply that he would never finish the Circe unless he could find some means of sustenance. Seated on the edge of the bed, he considered for a while, then, rising, he went to the corner where his Netiers pictures stood and selected three that were especially bright and colourful. They were good, they satisfied him, gave him confidence. In Paris, the most artistic city in the world, there must be a market for such beautiful things. He wrapped them in brown paper and, with the package under his arm, set out across the Seine, along the Champs Elysées towards the Faubourg St Honoré. It was an act of courage. Yet the time for half measures had passed. He was resolved to offer his work to the best art dealer in France.
At the comer of the Avenue Marigny, a thoroughfare mainly given over to smart apartment buildings and sumptuous establishments of the haute couture, he paused outside a rich though restrained façade of Palladian pillars and cut white stone. Then, gathering himself resolutely, he passed through the gilt Venetian doorway and entered a marble-floored vestibule, panelled in rosewood and hung with red velvet, where he found himself confronted by a young man in a cutaway coat, seated at a Louis XVI lacquer and ormolu desk. Through the portières behind, a large salon was visible, equally splendid, embellished with great sheaves of lilies in alabaster vases and hung with paintings, beautifully lighted, before which a number of fashionable people moved and mingled, consulting their catalogues, conversing in subdued voices.
‘You have a card for the vernissage, Monsieur?’
Stephen returned his gaze to the sleek young man, who, beneath his professional smile, was viewing him with extreme wariness.
‘No. I was not aware that you had an exhibition. I called to see Monsieur Tessier.’
‘And your business, Monsieur?’
‘A personal matter.’
The smile, of ineffable politeness, did not waver.
‘I am afraid that Monsieur Tessier is not in the house. However, if you will take a chair I shall inquire.’
As Stephen seated himself the young man rose gracefully and glided off. But almost at once a side door opened and three persons came into the entresol – a woman, very chic, in black, with a dashing little plumed hat, and a cascade of bracelets on her gloved wrists, carrying a miniature beribboned poodle, fantastically clipped; her escort, an elderly man, bored and distinguished, impeccably dressed in brown from shoes to hat; and Tessier whom Stephen recognised at once, a suave figure, dark, shaven, with a protruding lower lip and a hooded bistre eye. The dealer was talking, reasonably, with reserved animation and restrained movements of his hands.
‘I assure you, it is a perfect gem. The finest which has come my way in several years.’
‘It is lovely,’ said the lady.
‘But the price!’ her companion interpolated, somewhat moodily.
‘I have already told you, sir. At one hundred thousand, this is unquestionably an occasion. But if you do not wish me to reserve it for you, you have only to let me know. Virtually, I am committed to another client.’
There was a pause, a touch on the escort’s sleeve, a murmur of intimate conversation, then:
‘You may consider the picture sold.’
An inclination of the head, not obsequious but gravely approving such good taste, was Tessier’s sole response. He did, however, conduct them to the door and, when he turned, in a meditative manner, his head bowed, hands clasped behind his back, Stephen stood up.
‘Monsieur Tessier, I apologise for this intrusion. Will you give me just five minutes of your time?’
The dealer looked up sharply, disturbed in his train of thought, which was almost certainly a calculation, and his hooded eye, with immediate comprehension as of something encountered with distaste on previous occasions, took in the shabby figure before him, from the sodden, mud-splashed shoes to the ill-wrapped bundle beneath the arm.
‘No,’ he murmured. ‘Not now. You see that I am fully occupied.’
‘But, Monsieur,’ Stephen persisted, shakily yet with determination. ‘I ask you to view my work. Is that too much for an artist to request of you?’
‘So you are an artist?’ Tessier’s lip drew back. ‘I congratulate you. Do you know that every week I am besieged, waylaid, and importuned by self-styled geniuses who imagine I will swoon with ecstasy when I behold their execrable efforts? But never did I know one with the effrontery to approach me here, at the very peak of my autumn exhibition.’
‘I am sorry if I disturb you. But the matter is somewhat urgent.’
‘Urgent to me… or to you?’
‘To both of us.’ Stephen swallowed convulsively. In his agitation he spoke wildly. ‘You have just sold a Millet for a considerable sum. Forgive me, I could not help overhearing. Give me the opportunity and I will show you work as fine as anything that came from Barbizon.’
Tessier glanced at Stephen, noted his distraught appearance, the dilation of his eye.
‘Please,’ he said in a fatigued manner, relinquishing the argument. ‘Another time, I beg of you.’
He stepped aside, entered the salon, and a minute later was lost to view. Stephen, who had begun, with nervous haste, to undo the package, stood for a moment very pale, then, with a strange expression, he moved toward the door. As he came into the street, the string, half untied, slipped from his grasp, and the three canvases dropped to the wet pavement and slid into the gutter.
He picked them up carefully, with a tenderness almost ludicrous. The mere act of stooping made his head swim. But stubbornly, with an almost fanatic intensity, he told himself that he would not be defeated. There were other dealers in Paris, less arrogant, surely more approachable than this insufferable Tessier. Slowly he started across the street, through the traffic, towards the Rue de la Boétiè.
Two hours later, wet through and still encumbered with the three paintings, he was back at the Place St Severin, so exhausted he could barely climb to his room. Indeed, half-way up the stairs he sat down to recover his breath. As he did so the door on the half landing above swung open and there appeared, dressed for the street in sabots, collarless shirt, and a threadbare black overcoat, a man of about thirty, thin and dark, with a sallow complexion and sunken, Semitic eyes. On his way down, almost stumbling over Stephen, he drew back, studied him with a peculiar, bitter smile.
‘No luck?’ he exclaimed.
‘No.’
‘Whom did you try?’
‘Most of them… from Tessier down.’
‘Salamon?’
‘I can’t remember.’
‘He is not bad. But none of them are buying now.’
‘I had one offer. Two hundred francs to fake a Breughel.’
‘And you accepted?’
‘No.’
‘Ah! Life has its little vexations.’ Then, after a pause: ‘What’s your name?’
‘Desmonde.’
‘I am Amédée Modigliani. Come in and have a drink.’
He led the way back to the landing and threw open the door of his room. This was an apartment identical almost with Stephen’s, but perhaps more squalid. In one corner, beside the unmade bed, stood an untidy stack of empty bottles, and in the centre an easel bearing a painting, almost finished, of a reclining nude.
‘You like it?’ Pouring two Pernods from a bottle he had taken from the cupboard, Modigliani inclined his head towards the canvas.
‘Yes,’ Stephen said, after a moment. There was in the painting a personal style, marked by its efforts in arabesque line, something monumental and pure.
‘Good.’ Modigliani handed him the drink. ‘But it will bring the police commissioner after me. Already he has proclaimed that my nudes are scandalous.’
The absinthe, fortifying Stephen, clearing his brain, evoked a note of recollection.
‘Didn’t you exhibit at the Ind
épendants? Le Joueur de violin cello?’
The other made a gesture of admission.
‘It was not my best work. But it sold. Now they will buy nothing. Indeed, were it not for my talent as a plongeur at the Hôtel Monarque, I should have obliged my critics and ceased to exist.’
‘A plongeur?’ Stephen did not understand.
‘Yes. Would you care to try the job? I am going there now. It is a fascinating employment.’ A faint, saturnine smile flickered across his impassive, olive features. ‘And they are always agreeable to taking on a new man.’
Stephen was silent. Then, with sudden decision, he stood up. ‘I’ll try anything,’ he said.
They went out together and began to walk in the direction of the Etoile. The Grand Monarque, one of the famous Parisian hotels, was an immense palatial building in the style of the Third Empire, occupying an entire square just off the Grands Boulevards. Imposing and dignified, if a trifle old-fashioned, its marble steps, red-carpeted, the vast public rooms hung with glittering chandeliers, a bevy of liveried attendants hovering behind the polished brass doors as though alert to receive the ambassadors, foreign dignitaries, and native princes who were amongst its visitors, it conveyed a sense of opulent magnificence. Modigliani, however, when they reached the central portico, did not attempt an entrance, but led the way round the comer and through a dark alley to the back premises, where, flanked by a row of battered garbage cans, a steep flight of littered steps admitted them to the basement.
It was less a basement than a huge underground cellar, the ceiling damp and dripping, crossed by a maze of iron pipes, the walls scaling, patchy with mildew, the broken stone floor ankle-deep in slops, the whole feebly illuminated by a few naked electric lights, filled with steam, noise, and a confused babel of many voices. Here, at the long stand of wooden tubs, a row of men, assembled, it seemed, from the slums of Paris, were feverishly washing dishes which a relay of scullions kept rushing in, in arm loads, from the adjoining kitchens. Now, thought Stephen, as he adjusted his sight to this nightmare vision, I know what is meant by a plongeur.
Meanwhile Amédée had approached the contremaître, who, with an indifferent glance towards Stephen, handed out a metal disc stamped with a number, and chalked a time opposite that number on the slate that hung above his cubicle beside a notice which warned that anyone caught removing broken meats would be summarily prosecuted.
And now, imitating his companion, Stephen stripped off his jacket and, taking his place in the line, began to wash the dinnerplates piled above the sink. It was not easy work, stooping over the low tub, and it went on without a break. The smell of the scummy water never changed, foul with grease and remnants of food, was nauseating. Periodically this pulpy debris clogged the drain and had to be removed by thrusting the hand into the outlet pipe. It was strange, during this process, to hear faint wafts of polite music coming from the orchestra in the palm court overhead.
Towards eleven o’clock the pace slackened, and before midnight there was a definite lull which indicated that the ladies and gentlemen above had been fed. Amédée, who, all along, had not uttered a single word, put on his coat, lit a cigarette, and with a motion of his head drew Stephen towards the door where the foreman, after a glance at the time-slate, paid each of them two francs fifty.
Outside, still in silence, he slouched off through the darkened streets and five minutes later led the way into an all-night bistro. Here, while Amédée drank several Pernods, Stephen consumed a large bowl of pot-au-feu, thick with good vegetables and shredded pieces of mutton. It was his first satisfying meal in several days and he felt the better for it.
‘Don’t you want anything?’ he asked.
‘This is meat and drink to me.’ Amédée gazed with a hard indifference at the greenish, opalescent fluid in the glass which he held in his nicotine-stained fingers. ‘ It has been my diet for quite some time.’
Seated there in the deserted café, the lights half dimmed, the billiard table in the rear shrouded for the night, the solitary waiter half asleep, with his serviette over his head, behind the bar, Amédée revealed something of himself in brief, laconic phrases.
Born in Italy, he came of a family of Jewish bankers, had studied, despite interruptions due to illness, in Florence and at the Academy of Venice. For the past seven years, inspired by the primitives and Negro art, he had worked in Paris, sometimes with his friend Picasso, and occasionally with Gris. He had sold practically nothing.
‘So now,’ he concluded, with his gloomy yet reckless smile, ‘ you see me, enfeebled by poverty, excess of alcohol, and the use of pernicious drugs. Alone, except for a young girl who has the misfortune to be devoted to me. Devoid of all reputation.’ He tossed off the last of his drink and got up. ‘But rejoicing in the fact that all my life I have never debased my art.’
He said good night, without further communication, on the staircase of their lodging.
Brief though it had been, this strange encounter was a providential one for Stephen. Now, by enduring every night five hours of sweated labour in the steaming cellars of the Grand Monarque, he was able to survive and, what seemed to him of greater moment, continue to work with all his powers upon the Circe.
At last, some three weeks later, one cold, dry afternoon, it was finished. There she stood, in that familiar attitude of careless insolence, indifferent yet alluring, with her pale face and enigmatic eyes, this modern daughter of Hellos, her background not the palace of Aiaie but a Parisian slum street wherein were grouped those vanquished lovers, changed and degraded to the form of beasts, and who, tamed and broken, looked up at her in servile longing as though still thirsting for her caresses.
Exhausted by his final effort, Stephen could not appraise the value of this work, which had taken its fantastic shape under a compulsion he had been powerless to resist. He knew only that he could do no more to it and, in a spasm of nervous haste, he wrapped it in the same creased brown paper that had served him before, and carried it all the way to the Institut des Arts Graphiques in the Place Redon. Here an aged official took his name, laboriously entered all particulars in a book, then, discovering that the canvas was unframed, became reluctant to accept it.
‘You see, Monsieur, there is a specification as to montage.’
‘’I was not aware of it.’
‘But it is apparent. Look, Monsieur, every other entry is correctly mounted.’
Stephen, glimpsing a long gallery stacked with scores of paintings, experienced a sudden apathy. One way or the other, he did not care.
‘I cannot afford a frame. Take it as it is or not at all.’
There was a pause, then the porter threw up his hands.
‘It is most irregular, Monsieur. But leave it if you wish.’
Back in his attic he sat down, supporting his head with his hands, suffused by a post-creative lethargy. And now … what was he to do? Impossible to continue at the Monarque – his soul revolted at the thought – yet he was on the verge of destitution. His rent was due on Monday. Except for the clothes he wore, his painting equipment, and fifteen sous, he had nothing of material value. Everything else had been pawned. He got up and looked in the cupboard. It contained half a stale roll, hard as a rock, and a rind of cheese. Downstairs, Amédée had been absent for the last three days, submerged in one of those debauches to which he periodically succumbed, and from which he would emerge, dizzily, in some remote region of the city. Through the matchboard wall the couple next door had begun to quarrel, shouting at each other. Children at play, squabbling on the dirty pavement outside, added to the din. Despite the open window the room was stagnant with the tired air of the city, and from the cracked wainscoting he could see beginning the usual evening procession of cockroaches.
All this was difficult enough to withstand, yet it was nothing compared to the insupportable sense of loneliness and deprivation that racked his breast. No longer dulled by the anodyne of work, his longing for Emmy returned, stronger than ever. Unlike Odysseus, he had no ma
gic herb to protect him from her spell. He blamed himself for not having asked her to view the painting. And next day she would be gone, moving south with the Peroz troupe – he would not see her for at least six months, if indeed he ever saw her again. Remembering the infatuation which Madame Cruchot had entertained for him, he shuddered at the trick fate had played on him – now it was he who had taken over that preposterous role.
He had nothing to occupy him, not even a book to read; he felt too unutterably languid to venture out into the streets. When darkness fell, he lay down on the bed, but could not sleep. The next day was Thursday, and it came with a clear, sweet dawn. He got up and dressed. The thought of the circus vehicles leaving that afternoon for the open country and the sunny Côte d’Azur tormented him anew. Suddenly, out of the blue, an idea came to him. For a moment he stood quite still in the middle of the floor. Could he do it? At least he could try. Snatching his hat, he hurried from the room and set off shakily in the direction of the Boulevard Jules Ferry.
Chapter Seven
On a stretch of common land just outside the ramparts of the town of Angers, under an afternoon sky brilliant for late October, the Cirque Peroz, ringed by bright red canvas, had raised its canvas city. Already the sideshows were in action, a thin music came from the children’s roundabouts, the aboyeurs had begun their exhortations upon the few spectators already on the ground.
