‘Tell me, please. Are you going to be able to paint again?’
‘It depends what you mean by painting, I think.’ Windingwood was undisturbed by this abrupt challenge. ‘For instance, a man can paint inside his own head, just as a musician can compose that way.’
‘I can’t think—’
‘Don’t you ever do it yourself?’
‘Me?’ Firth was disconcerted – perhaps only because Windingwood had never interrupted him before, but perhaps also on account of certain fantasies which had been coming to him of late. ‘Why should I do such a thing?’
‘You have this fondness for pictures.’ Windingwood spoke with a lightness which didn’t disguise a sense of being on delicate ground. And underlying this was a situation Firth found very hard to define. It might be called a perverse topsy-turviness in Windingwood’s attitude to him. Firth couldn’t glance at his own right hand without knowing that he owed Windingwood the strangest of debts. Yet Windingwood seemed to regard himself almost as the debtor. At least it was as if he felt he owed Firth something he had no power to give. ‘And you draw sometimes, don’t you?’ Windingwood was carefully preserving what was virtually a playful tone. ‘Once or twice, I’ve noticed you.’
This was true. Frequenting Windingwood’s studio, as he had come to do, on almost familiar terms, Firth had occasionally found himself picking up a pencil or a crayon and sketching with it on any scrap of paper to hand. But it confused him that this had been remarked, so that all he could now produce was an awkward mutter. Windingwood sheered off the subject at once.
‘But to go back to your question,’ he said. ‘With me it’s the question, I need hardly say. And it’s early days to answer it, perhaps. But I’m discovering I must have been the most confoundedly right-handed person.’
‘Have you thought, by any chance, of a change of medium?’
‘Yes.’ Windingwood had glanced up swiftly, and with a beautiful candour. He seemed to be able to take anything Firth said as making all for support and sympathy. ‘It can sometimes be done, can’t it? Think of Degas, taking to clay and wax in his old age! But that, of course, was because of failing sight. I doubt whether it could be my answer. Don’t you think the most superb sculptors would have been those Indian gods with half a dozen hands apiece? They would be superb lovers too, of course. It’s much the same thing.’ Whimsically, he held up his left hand. ‘So what can one hand do? Certainly not trim its own finger-nails! I suppose it might learn to cut out nursery silhouettes.’
‘You mustn’t think in terms of bagatelles,’ Firth said. The awkwardness of this brought him to his feet. ‘I must be getting along.’
‘Must you? Then drop in again soon.’ Windingwood spoke with his largest effect of simplicity. ‘It gives me the greatest happiness to see you, my dear Firth.’
Firth now fell increasingly into the habit of thinking about Windingwood. He also ‘got him up’ (as it might have been called) as a painter. There were a number of canvases in the Tate as well as in other public galleries, and most of the better dealers had several either on show or tucked away. There was also a handsome catalogue of Windingwood’s first retrospective exhibition from which a good deal was to be learnt about the development of his genius. And genius came to seem to Firth at least approximately the right word. Windingwood had a high reputation and yet remained underestimated. He was a great painter.
This discovery or persuasion ought to have given Firth pleasure, since it was an assurance that Windingwood, before the terrible blow dealt to him, had achieved what must give him a secure niche in the history of his art. This seemed very wonderful to Firth, who retained in manhood something of the adolescent’s immature persuasion that it is better to be among the thousands who linger for a time in human memory than among the billions who do not. (Fame, as Milton rather largely failed to say, is the first infirmity of clever young men.)
But Firth thought of Donatello and Rembrandt and Beethoven and Shakespeare: thought, that is, of all the major artists to whom a third manner, an apotheosis at once spiritual and sensual, had come. Of this, at least, Windingwood had been cheated. And increasingly Firth went about under the terrible burden of a conviction that this cheating had been done by him. He knew perfectly well that this belief came very near to madness; that the cheating was non-existent, since mere fatality (which had crashed Windingwood’s air-liner) can play neither fair nor foul. But this knowledge only added to what might be called, with some mildness, his nervous distress. When he looked at the finger and thumb on his right hand – above all, when he felt, in a strangely physical way, what that finger and thumb were itching to do – his intellectually meaningless sense of guilt overwhelmed him.
At times it sought relief in idiotic ways. It seemed to him (most absurdly) that Sir Horace Rumford and his unknown colleagues had done something very wrong. He planned at times to murder these blameless servants of humanity, and at other times he had the strangest dealings with them in his dreams. In one of these he was standing, palette in hand, before a vast canvas, rather in the manner of Velazquez in Las Meninas. And suddenly at the back, in silhouette within a brilliantly lit doorway, Sir Horace appeared. His right hand was invitingly posed (this was Velazquez again) upon a curtain. Firth, seizing his palette-knife, turned upon him in some sort of Struwwelpeter frenzy. But at this, and as if through a wilderness of mirrors, the scene dissolved in a whirling kaleidoscope of dwarfs and dogs and nuns and elaborately dressed little girls. Only Firth himself was left, and he was naked, and there were two great transverse, blood-red gashes over his heart. ‘The king,’ he heard himself say aloud. ‘The red cross of Santiago.’ And he woke up.
But this murderous disposition towards an eminent surgeon was only (as a psychiatrist could have explained to him) a displacement. Without at all knowing it, Michael Firth had come to hate Cyprian Windingwood. And this shows that the role of benefactor can be extremely hazardous, even when one has been insinuated into it during the profound unconsciousness induced by an anaesthetic.
6
Not knowing about himself, however, except through the obscure intimations of dreams, Firth continued to call on Windingwood from time to time. He did so one afternoon when the painter (or ci-devant painter, as it was beginning to look to be) was out. He sat down in the studio to wait, and presently became aware of some almost imperceptible change in it. He looked around, and the change eluded him. He happened to sniff, and that placed it. Windingwood had been versatile and resourceful in his use of media, and the complexity of the studio smell had borne witness to this. Pigments, turpentine, acids, sundry experimental thinners, the queer smell of sodden blotting-paper employed in peinture à l’essence, even honey: all these had been involved. But now they had faded beneath a single predominant smell. And this, disconcertingly, was quite like one of the minor elements in the smell at Firth’s office. It was simply a smell of gum.
But there was, after all, something else to attract attention. At the farther end of the studio, directly under one of the skylights, lay a broad shallow area which could be curtained off. On his previous visits the curtain had always been drawn back, revealing nothing but half a dozen canvases stacked face to the wall. But now the curtain was drawn to. Firth had noticed something like this in studios before. Sometimes, when a large work was in progress, or had recently been completed, the painter would screen it off in this way – partly against the casual observation of visitors, and partly, perhaps, that he himself should be able to achieve a fresh coup d’oeil after a useful interval. It seemed impossible that Windingwood had by any means achieved a work on a large scale – or for that matter even an easel picture such as could be casually covered with a cloth. Firth was curious. But, although Windingwood’s servant had disappeared after admitting him, he forbore to peep.
He doodled instead. He now found it necessary to admit that the habit was becoming compulsive with him. It interfered with his work. It disconcerted and offended clients. It irritated Camilla. But he went on dood
ling, all the same. Or rather he went on with his attempts at drawing, for that was what it honestly was. He had even, as far as he could judge, become quite good at it. The lines increasingly went precisely where he wanted them to go. All this would have been no more than the belated acquisition of an agreeable accomplishment but for the fact that it was so plainly compulsive. And magical as well. For there was no doubt that, having been given what of Windingwood’s he had been given, he was under a curious constraint to employ that gift in Windingwood’s way. And he was – he came to it again – jealous of Windingwood. He was jealous of Windingwood – who ought, in a sense, to be jealous of him, but who maddeningly appeared to be nothing of the sort.
The studio door opened, and the painter came in. Firth was instantly aware that some change had taken place in him. His expression, when he became aware of his visitor, was his habitual expression (which tended to irk Firth) of friendly concern. But there seemed not much attention behind it. It was rather as if there had come to Windingwood a new purposeness in which Firth had no part. His step was springy and impatient. Disconcertingly about him, indeed, there was something virtually manic. For a second Firth was at sea about this, and then he traced the impression to a very strange place. Windingwood had followed the common convention whereby men who have lost an arm continue to have their suits made with two sleeves, and he wore the cuff of his empty sleeve in the right-hand pocket of his jacket. Now it was as if this purely inanimate object had taken on an air of its own. The sleeve was tucked in the pocket, to an effect of confident negligence which was almost jaunty. Firth realised that only an abnormal concentration of nervous energy in the man could play such a trick with his clothing.
‘My dear Firth, I’m delighted to see you. But you ought to have got yourself a drink.’ Windingwood strode rapidly over to a table on which a small collection of bottles and decanters was kept – a shade too rapidly, Firth ungraciously and even angrily thought, since the haste suggested a search for at least something Windingwood could do for the poor devil who had visited him.
‘What’s that?’ It was with difficulty that Firth recognised his own voice, and with surprise that he distinguished himself as in the act of pointing accusingly at the drawn curtain. ‘What have you got hidden there?’
‘Hidden?’ The painter seemed to consider the word. ‘You’re perfectly right. I’ve been determined you should be the first person to have a look.’ Windingwood, who had poured out a glass of sherry and handed it to Firth, now moved across the studio. ‘It’s our small private view,’ he said. ‘I have felt I owe you that much.’
‘Owe me—?’ The words died on Firth’s lips. Windingwood had drawn back the curtain.
It was not by Matisse. It was wholly different. Yet it was only Matisse in his last years who had produced, with just these materials, work of such vibrancy and on such a scale.
‘It’s a start,’ Firth heard Windingwood say. Literally, of course, the words were true. It was a start, or at least a fresh start. At the same time, at least to Firth’s ear, they had been spoken with a displeasing insincerity. For this thing was an achievement, and a very great one – nothing less.
‘I always took a pride, you know, on doing a particularly neat job on the nails of my right hand. At least with scissors, almost an ambidextrous man.’ Windingwood was now speaking with a whimsicality he certainly didn’t feel. And a second later, indeed, he spoke on a different note. ‘If your matière has to be coloured paper and gum,’ he said, ‘it means doing the devil of a lot of work inside your head.’
‘I suppose so.’ Firth had a moment of full aesthetic lucidity in which he perfectly understood this. ‘I congratulate you,’ he said huskily.
‘But it has been enormous fun. And I see several ways of going ahead. The Master of the Snip-Snap – that’s how I’ll go down in the histories.’ Windingwood had turned casually away from the triumphant collage, as if being careful not to make too much of it, and he had now strolled over to the corner of the studio in which Firth had been awaiting him. He paused, and gave a low laugh. ‘Doodling again, I see.’
The laugh ought to have alerted Firth – even warned him. Windingwood was in a mood he hadn’t met before. It was a mood of absorption in his own creation, in which he became careless about other things. But Firth failed to reflect on this.
‘It isn’t doodling,’ Firth said. And again his voice surprised him.
‘No – I know.’ Windingwood had glanced with amusement at Firth’s drawings. ‘My surgeon did a good job, I’m bound to say. But don’t you think yours was an interfering fool?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You didn’t positively need two forefingers and thumbs, did you? They’re not necessary for dictating letters, or even for eating a perfectly good dinner. And this particular finger and thumb – mine, that is—’
‘Windingwood, please—’
But Windingwood appeared quite unconscious of having breached a delicacy which he had hitherto perfectly preserved.
‘Your possession of them, if that’s what it’s to be called’—he went on—’has messed you up, really. Isn’t that right? Hasn’t it given a kind of ineffective prod to the artist manque in you?’
‘Yes.’ Firth now had a weird sense that he might be speaking the last rational words ever to come from him. ‘But it’s more than that. It’s a sheer physical thing. What’s there now’—and he made a violent gesture towards his right hand—’tries to use me. And I’m no good to it.’
‘I see.’ For a couple of seconds Windingwood was soberly silent. And then, fatally, he touched once more his note of whimsical concern. ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, eh?’ He put out his hand, and lightly tapped that art of himself which Firth now carried around with him. ‘My tail wanting to wag your dog, I suppose one might say.’
‘Well?’
‘But the dog, my dear chap’—Windingwood, now glancing again at Firth’s drawings, was frankly entertained—’is quite unwaggable.’
What now happened was very shocking, but might have remained no more than that. Firth struck Windingwood hard across the face. For a moment the two men stared at each other in astonishment. And then, most unfortunately, Firth’s mind and vision alike became curiously clouded. He was only aware of expending a great deal of physical energy. And he might have had no more than this awareness for rather too long, had not Windingwood’s servant come into the studio and run protestingly if ineffectively forward. The man’s cries just enabled Firth to see that he was strangling Windingwood. He relaxed his grip, and in a vivid moment glimpsed the two angry red marks on either side of the painter’s windpipe. Then Windingwood scrambled to his feet – he had been flat on his back – and managed to speak, panting.
‘Firth, my dear fellow,’ he articulated, ‘you’re ill – a sick man. Will you let me call a doctor?’
Firth too was panting. But at these words he uttered a choking sob as well, and ran blunderingly from the studio.
7
He seemed to have forgotten that London traffic was so bewildering, and for a time he looked about him in despair. He supposed that Windingwood’s servant was bound to call the police, so that at any moment he might become the object of a hue and cry. But presently he calmed himself sufficiently to get into a taxi and give the driver his address. Camilla – he thought absurdly – would be able to protect him. Then he remembered that Camilla was not at home. She had been away for some days. This meant, surely, that she was at Spindle. Still in great confusion of mind, he told the man to drive him to Victoria. He was in his train and rushing through the meaningless expanses of south London before it came to him that he had got this wrong. Camilla of course, was in Paris, visiting some woman with whom she had kept up an acquaintance since their Vevey schooldays. There would be nobody at Spindle.
But it didn’t much matter, he told himself later – as he stared unseeingly at the oast-houses that signalised the last stage of his journey. He had been the agent – and what he di
d see, with his inner eye, was those two terrible marks on Windingwood’s throat – of a near-fatality unique in human history. In her silly way, Camilla wasn’t a bad soul. But she certainly hadn’t the imagination to grasp the horror of that.
Firth was still in the grip of this inflated view of himself (as many would have considered it) when he reached the little station at which, miraculously, trains from London did still occasionally condescend to stop. It was an antique place, decorated with battered tin notices commending Gold Flake cigarettes and the needs of anaemic girls, and was in charge of an old man whom Firth had never seen otherwise employed than in filling and trimming an array of oil-lamps which nobody ever seemed disposed to use. The old man greeted Firth respectfully, since he was of a generation to which this came naturally, and then stared in perplexity at the retreating back of so plainly distraught a passenger. Firth had hardly been aware of him, nor was he aware of the few people who glanced at him curiously in the village street. The anxieties besetting him became particularly acute as he walked past the police station. What if there had been a telephone call to Burbage, the constable, and Burbage was waiting to pounce? Was what he had always supposed to be a small coal-shed in Burbage’s back-yard in fact a cell in which he could lock you up? No malefactor, so far as he knew, had ever been apprehended in the village, and he felt confusedly that this circumstance would render particularly shameful such a fate now befalling himself. He quickened his pace nervously. No Burbage appeared.
The short winding drive to Spindle was now in front of him, and he strove to recall the small practical matters commonly in his mind as he came back to the place. Had Hayball cut the grass and attended to the wood-pile? Had Hayball’s goats eaten Camilla’s roses? Had both Hayball and his wife gone off on a reckless expedition of pleasure to the local market town, so that he would have difficulty in collecting milk and eggs?
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