5
Evening had stolen down the street, that was now folded in shadow. The pinpoints of light glimmering through numberless curtains only served to intensify the gloom beyond their tiny radiance. Miles, standing by the cold north window while Brand wrote out his methodical confession, page after page, in the room behind him, shivered with a nausea he could not repress. The crossing had been a bad one, and the vessel had tossed about for some hours outside the harbour before she could attain port; then he had caught a slow and very bad train to Paris. It was enough, he told himself grimly, to sicken the most robust. Yet he knew that this discomfort, this sense of loss and despair, had no physical root. He thought of many things and people while he stood there, smoking steadily, cigarette after cigarette, in an effort to dull the brain. He remembered all the traitors of history, from false Sextus to Judas Iscariot, and from Iscariot to men whom he had known as spies in the last war. And he felt that their mantle lay upon his shoulders, the strain of their disease had infected him for ever. Never again, he knew, would he hear a criminal sentenced to the supreme penalty without recalling this dreadful hour in a top room in a narrow Paris house, without re-experiencing these emotions of horror and misery that possessed him to-day.
Brand spoke at last. “You’d better see what I’ve written. Make certain it’s all ship-shape. And do I need a witness?” Disregarding Miles’s shaken head, he continued, “I’d like you to see how it all happened.” He passed the sheaf of thin pages to his companion. “Have I made it clear?” he questioned.
He had made it so clear that Miles, reading that long, detailed document, looked up in bewilderment, missing the heavy furniture, the books, the hangings and carpets that he anticipated finding all around him; missing, too, the figure of a young man moving swiftly round the room, distorting evidence and standing before that mirror to sign his own death-warrant.
“It’s clear enough,” he said heavily. Brand nodded. Untroubled of hope, he was now making his final preparations. Now it was time for Miles to go. If possible, he was not to be involved in the final act of the drama. When the newspapers announced:
echo of king’s poplar tragedy
mysterious death of english artist
he was to be sitting placidly with his wife in St. John’s Wood, and was to exhibit as much surprise and consternation as any other man interested in the affair.
“That’s all, I think,” said Brand’s voice. “No. I mustn’t make my final bow without signing my—confession.”
Miles looked confused. “You did—surely…” He thrust a finger under the envelope he held in his hand. Then he hesitated. They were at cross-purposes to the end. For Brand, without heeding him, had taken up his brush and was signing, with that elaborate monogram, his amazing achievement.
6
Miles came out blindly, the letter in his hand. He could not, all that night, blot out from his mind the thought that, by his deed, a man now vigorous and alert would in a few hours be thrust out of a scheme of life in which he gloried and that he might enrich and explain. Walking through the dim streets, he was visited by a powerful temptation to destroy the envelope and its contents, and let that grey-faced, shuddering creature in a Grebeshire gaol take his chance. It wasn’t as if his life was of any value. But common sense, rescuing him from sentiment and personal desire, advised him that it was too late for heroics of this nature. In life it is never possible to go backwards, and, whatever the future held, he must advance to meet and conquer it. And so, with a sense of finality, he posted the confession in one of the grey-blue boxes, nailed to the wall, that he saw as he passed, and walked—and walked—with no sense of direction, till the day was bright all about him.
And with the coming of light, the dawn of a new era, as each day was to the individual, came reflections to soothe and console him. He remembered the opening words of a novel he had once read, and that had impressed him strongly at the time: “It is a pity that we cannot die when our lives are finished.” A pity! When one remembered the army of artists and writers and poets who laboured in the pathetic self-delusion that industry can replace genius, who insisted on bombarding the public with work after work long after inspiration was dead, desperately clinging to their ancient reputation (and their royalties), what better could one hope for any of their number than that he might pass in the zenith of his powers and at the height of his achievement? Brand would never surpass that picture. In it he had given expression to all the force and vitality and power that he possessed; it was the high-water mark of his maturity, the only kind of immortality he would have valued.
And, comforted thus, Miles retraced his steps and went down to the station, where his train waited to take him back to Calais and thence to England, back to the sensations of the trial, the subsequent re-arrest of Eustace Moore, and his final sentence of seven years for fraud.
Epilogue
The critic in the —— TIMES of the 27th October, 1932, wrote:
…But the pièce de résistance of the Exhibition is undoubtedly the canvas entitled ‘The Murderer,’ by the late Mr. Hildebrand Gray, by whose tragic death in the spring of this year Art lost one of her most valuable disciples. This magnificent picture, both in courage of conception and vigour of execution, displays a nobility and promise that fall little short of actual genius. It is impossible to predict what Mr. Gray might not have achieved but for his untimely death.
Brand himself might have observed with his ready cynicism, “Since it’s impossible, why talk of it? And as for what a man might have done, why talk of that either? It’s what he does that matters. This,” he might have said, “is what I do. And as for the meaning of it—who knows?”
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