CHAPTER FOUR
For weeks Craine’s news came only in a sort of journal from Jill. The instalments neither began nor finished like a letter. They were like pages copied from a diary – the sort of diary, candid within controlled bounds, that a reticent person might keep for his own eye alone. They were such that he could have taken them to Weidle – to whom he had grown curiously close – but scarcely sent on to the boys at their schools. Jill, however, was writing separately to them. So Craine kept the record to himself. And every few days he sent a similar but shorter report to Saltino, devoted almost entirely to news of the children at Pinn. It was all provisional. It couldn’t be otherwise for a time.
Saltino-Vallombrosa 8 October
I hardly knew what I was doing when I sent off my cable. I hope it wasn’t as wild as the Marchesa’s famous one about little Nino.
It is, they say, a great triumph. What bewildered me – and I am still bewildered – was the suddenness. I had expected, if anything, a sort of slow dawn, a groping, a seeing things darkly, men as trees walking, permission to take a short low-lit glimpse each day. There was even some bit of pseudo-science, of muddled reading of psychology in my head. The infant laboriously constructs his world, distinguishes self and not-self, disentangles in a kind of creative act the chair from the table, the earth from the heavens . . . John took a stick and walked out of the clinic within a couple of hours of the bandages coming off. He walked away down the road in sunshine, not much looking to right or left. I saw, on the table in his room, the dark glasses with which they had provided him. I was terrified and picked them up and thought to run after him. Professor Pirelli – he had come back from Rome – laid a hand on my arm as if I were an impulsive child. He was smiling, and I could see that it was his moment. But he hasn’t, they explain to me, made any sort of medical history; he has simply done some recently discovered thing supremely well. The triumph is in that.
John stayed away for hours. When he came back, he said he’d been to the old monastery, the place that is now a forestry school.
He comes across to the villa tomorrow.
12 October
He is very quiet. He walks in the Pratomagno, or sits on the terrace looking at the view. I have to tell myself that it is true, that John Arnander who painted the La Verna is sitting in a high place in Italy – looking at the view. This morning I joined him. He talked a little, almost idly, and pointed here and there with his steady finger. He was amused when there were colours I couldn’t see.
He is quite often amused. His mood is sunny. His only impatience is with Sister Barfoot, and there seems no reason why she should not leave us quite soon. I have a notion he knows whose idea it was that there might be advantage in having an English nurse on the spot, and that his impatience with the poor girl proceeds from this. It occurred to me today that the boys might, in the exceptional circumstances, get exeats and be flown out just for a few days. But John says that they had better stick to their books – particularly Tim, who, he says, is clever. He said, ironically but not unkindly, that Charles will one day be in danger of pursuing unremunerative enterprises, and that he should be kept away from infection a little longer. I supposed him to mean that Charles might become a painter. He said at once that Charles wouldn’t be a painter. I remembered his old manner of being surprised at one’s unawareness of self-evident things.
14 October
I am still bewildered – and don’t know whether it is simply because John so strikingly is not. Or certainly not by the world at large around him. He is taking it very quietly – that world. Not, as one might almost expect, wildly carrying on with it. A second marriage, a second honeymoon, with the pleasures the keener for being known about in advance.
Sometimes now I seem hardly to exist for him. It’s an abrupt change, that – but like old times, after all. And in a way it’s a nervous relief – to become the frame again, not the picture. During all these months I have felt his concentration on me to be intense. It extended to my physical presence; I felt he knew precisely how I sat or stood, or moved, all the time. It was a strain. Now, really, he is seeing less of me than when he was blind. Or that’s how I often feel. And yet he doesn’t ever steadily ignore me, as he used to have spells of doing. Almost, he studies me. And that’s new. He may be looking for something no longer there. Those years, after all, have passed.
I haven’t got this right. I puzzle him. When I said that nothing bewildered him, I was missing that out. Sometimes he looks at me surreptitiously – which was never a habit of his – and at once something flickers in him. I can imagine some natural, some very natural reactions in a man of his temperament in our situation. But why should something flicker in him? I get from it some unnatural image – as of a child, perhaps, who seeks to turn out the light and find security in the dark.
15 October
The last page could be read, misread, as piping a plaintive note. But there’s no injured feeling behind it – only a puzzle and, perhaps, some disturbing intuition. I’m seasoned to coming, for long periods, a poor second to a pile of cabbages on a table, or an old gnarled stump. That was all in the day’s work. And such working days they were! When I look at John today, I have to remind myself that he was no more physically robust then than now. Meagre, unexercised, he was yet capable, day after day, of achieving those tremendous labours. Joseph Conrad somewhere has a passage about the toil of writing one of his books – Nostromo, perhaps – and he likens the labour to the everlasting sombre stress of the westward winter passage round Cape Horn. I remember just such days with John. Is the capacity for them in him still? I strain my ears and think I hear, through the thin wall of flesh, the deep, deep throb of the machine.
And he spent some time this morning poking round the big wooden hut that has been built on top of the old stables. It was put up during the war, when the villa housed wounded Italian officers. At lunch he referred to it as the studio. I could hardly look up from my plate. He spoke as if nobody could ever have thought of it as anything else. He wondered whether the single partition could be knocked down, so as to make one big room. It seemed a forward-looking plan, and I tried to test the strength of it, mentioning the winter climate up here, and the fact of its being essentially a summer resort. He took in what I said, but went on at once to talk of putting in a skylight and a fireplace. He could have, he said, a tremendous log fire. But he didn’t actually speak of painting there, and he has made no move to secure any of the materials of a painter’s workshop. I return to the question: how much am I in anxiety about all this?
Sometimes I feel I don’t care twopence for his painting, old or new – that I’m anaesthetic to the art in general, like Marchesa Forni; and that in point of what John is to me, it’s neither here nor there. But his work was nearly all his happiness and torment, and if he is to have any sort of future it must be that all over again, and any sort of snag would surely be his final tragedy. He went – well, as at Castelarbia he did go, I suppose essentially because he hadn’t eyes to paint with; and if now something else failed him, mightn’t he go like that again?
I don’t think I’m talking about a real anxiety, so far as his will goes. He will try. That pulse is really there to hear. But does this pause before he makes the beginning of an effort indicate ease and confidence, or does it speak of some distrust or fear? I don’t know. My reason tells me that what one would at first expect is just what I have evidence of now: a long passive communion with what has been restored to him. But Weidle spoke of terrific toil ahead, of a vast labour of rehabilitation in the whole field of technique. The stiffest of all the passages round the Horn. Perhaps John is brooding over that.
17 October
He has had the skylight put in and the fireplace built – all in two days. The workmanship of both is, in consequence, skimped and wretched. But John is pleased. Or rather, I said to myself: “Look at his childish pleasure.” And then I realised that it is nothing of the sort, but the tremor of a deep excitement which he won’t m
uch longer control. I feel de trop – but it’s a familiar old feeling, as I’ve said. May his bride be fruitful.
The Marchesa came up from Florence today. There is a car at the disposal of the innumerable shelved Forni ladies down there, and her share works out at about a day every three weeks. It was good of her to come up, particularly as she begins to get mountain sickness at about this height, it seems. I was prepared not to be surprised if John lived up to old form – not bothering his head, I mean, about somebody he felt he was through with. It isn’t among my illusions that he had bobbed up with a larger armoury of the minor personal virtues than he went to earth with. But I was quite wrong. There is affection between them. The Marchesa inspected the studio but passed no comment on it. She has been in distress at the thought that she and her husband didn’t make proper efforts about John’s sight. I did my best to assure her that their own doctor had been right at the time, and that surgery has overtaken such cases only recently.
20 October
Poor Miss Barfoot is to leave us at the end of this week. She has of course no function now, and John continues to make fun of the idea that an English nurse was desirable during convalescence. He isn’t, he says, a disreputable old man with gout and a fondness for a pretty face. I believe she will be glad to go. It’s very dull up here, and she isn’t made for that.
Marchesa Forni seemed to set John’s mind running on Italians – the sort I used to take him among long ago. He said he’s like to pay a visit, see a great house again. I wasn’t sure what to do. We still, I think, want a little to defer the plunge into publicity. Certainly he does. Then I thought of the Perinos. They are utterly discreet; no conceivable surprise would make either of them turn a hair; and their villa would be a show place if they had the slightest disposition to show it to other than a few respectable old persons like themselves. So I rang up – the old lady didn’t sound surprised even by that – and we drove over yesterday afternoon. Conte Luigi is certainly very much a man of one idea – having given all his days to fostering some impracticable innovation in viniculture which he once explained to me but which I didn’t understand. But he must certainly have been quite aware that John had died – and so, equally, must the Contessa. So it was all dreamlike and comical, and exactly as I’d predicted. I’d played in their gardens as a child – but that wasn’t a familiarity that would license resurrection as a suitable tea-table topic. The old lady runs all sorts of activities – clinics and kindergartens and so on – on the spot; and she told me about these. Her husband showed John a great many jam-jars containing, I suppose, blights, pests and other diseases of the vine. It was all entirely pleasant. And then we took a little stroll through some of the rooms. People like that think it courteous to turn on a sort of modified showmanship; it isn’t supposed one wants to do a tour, but one might care to renew acquaintance just with this or that. The old gentleman, although his mind was really still on the jam-jars, thought it mightn’t be burdening us too much to take us just one room farther and glance at the Mantegna.
It is of course their grand thing – the great Agony in the Garden of which there is a smaller version in London. John looked at it for a long time – first at the whole composition, and then at the canvas here and there. It was when he was looking at the two white herons fishing in the stream that he responded in some way that eludes and haunts me. Some very small thing, at once familiar and strange, happened; something I didn’t like. Then he was impassive. But he must have caught me looking at him. For he said quickly: “God has not died for the white heron. God has not appeared to the birds.” I remember how he used to read occasionally in modern poetry, although always declaring that it was incomprehensible to him. As we drove back to Saltino I mentioned the painting again. I asked him if the herons were very well painted. He laughed – perfectly naturally – and made no reply. But half an hour later, and when we were just going to get out of the car, he said casually: “Of course it takes Mantegna to make, entirely parenthetically, a statement like that.” And at dinner he said, very gently: “Do you remember the Maremma, Jill?” It was almost the first time he’d used my name. He was quite silent for the rest of the evening.
24 October
Autumnal. Autumnal and oppressive and silent. Pine needles and a mush of chestnut leaves thick underfoot. I should have insisted on our getting away. He has had his great log fire kindled as he promised himself, and he sits in front of it, with his hands on his knees. This afternoon Celia Barfoot took him up tea. She was very silent when she came back – and indeed she has been for some days. I don’t know whether she has some professional instinct that worries her. Probably it is just the effect of the place and the season. She has worked a lot in Italy – and I should imagine with depressing old people, as often as not. But in places with shops and cafés and cinemas.
25 October
Autumnal and ominous. I keep remembering something else in the Mantegna – another bird, the strange bird in the dying tree. Celia said something strange about riding a bicycle again after being long out of practice. Clearly something she had picked up from John. I have a terrible foreboding that he won’t, he can’t, face the slog – the long days at the frozen ropes, driving round the Horn. We’re at a nadir, a zero. The blood scarcely moves.
26 October
But it’s happened!
This morning – it was mild and sunny – he had gone out for a walk. He was whistling and swinging his stick. It was very queer. About noon I thought I’d better stoke his fire, since it would turn chilly again later on. I went up the little outside wooden staircase to the hut. I had nothing else consciously in mind. But I was excited. My blood was racing. And there it was, tossed carelessly on a table. He’d got paper and a fine pencil, a hard fine lead. It was crowded: the whole hut, the whole studio, and Celia holding a tray. I stared and stared. I told myself nobody could be in a worse condition for making anything approximating to a detached aesthetic judgment. But I was certain, all the same. It had precision. But that’s mild. Picasso round about 1920 was doing about as well.
It hadn’t been concealed. But it hadn’t been shown me. I came away.
29 October
He has done Celia Barfoot again. This time, you could count the lines on one hand. I asked him for it, and he didn’t seem at all put out. I send it.
Celia isn’t leaving.
CHAPTER FIVE
Fyodor Weidle dropped the drawing on his desk. “You’ll have to come out with it,” he said. “The newspapers, and so forth.”
“At once?” Craine asked.
“Certainly. It’s not a private event.” Weidle refrained from looking again at the drawing. He had the appearance of proposing no further acquaintance with it. “I don’t make it as a material point,” he said. “But I put it on record that I feel a fool.”
“You wouldn’t have believed it possible?”
“I wouldn’t have believed it possible. I almost want to suspect a trick – say, that he got it out of an old portfolio. But of course he didn’t.” He paused. “Miss Barfoot is a versatile young lady. At least she’s changed her profession most obligingly.”
“It’s certainly an unusual use to which to put a nursing sister.” Craine looked curiously at the drawing. It didn’t strike him as an object for the exercise of delicacy. “She was my idea. And he was said to dislike her.”
“He very well may. One can’t tell if she’s good-looking. He has scarcely given her a face.”
“It’s modish.”
“That’s true – or would have been true when Matisse was doing his illustrations to the Poésies de Mallarmé. There’s a feeling of time-lag about such extreme simplifications now. But make no mistake, Craine. That”—and Weidle pointed at the drawing again without regarding it—”is no sort of pastiche, no sort of art-school stuff. It’s the line of a master.”
“Then that’s fine.” Craine spoke simply. But there was a cloud on his brow as he added: “It would be amateurish, I suppose, to reckon it a shade om
inous on – well, the personal side?”
“My dear chap, Arnander felt like making a start that way, and he simply grabbed the first wench available. At least we can look at it in that fashion until we’ve had further information. And you haven’t, I take it, had that?”
“Not about this Barfoot girl. But I’ve had another letter. The place is certainly a studio now. Everything under the sun has come up from Alinari’s in Florence. And Arnander’s making studies for a big composition. He’s working with as much energy as he ever did – and what that means you very well know.”
“Yes – I know. And he’s not all that old. He may have a long working career before him.”
Craine smiled rather grimly. “And just how,” he asked, “does this news affect your own little affair?”
“It depends. I don’t know that I’ve really thought it out. Or, rather, I’ve envisaged a restored Arnander as doing only one of two things. He might take to his brushes again and be unable to do a thing with them – nothing, I mean, that any competent person could see as counting. In that case, and with what I have”—Weidle made a gesture that might have been in the direction of his strong-room—”I’d be quite all right. My other thought – really quite a wild one – is that he might come out with something utterly new. I mean, you know, a sort of efflorescence, one of those personal styles of old age which the very great sometimes manage.”
“Donatello.”
“Quite so. Or Rembrandt. Unmistakably another, a terminal, phase. That would be wonderful.”
Craine couldn’t help laughing. “But – ideally – it wouldn’t be too esoteric a development. Everybody would know that John Arnander was simply the greatest living artist and that Fyodor Weidle controlled what might be called the central period. It would be wonderful, as you say.”
A Use of Riches Page 16
