There starts up in my mind another way of taking it. X is a great painter, but comparatively unproductive – his canvasses being so scarce, indeed, that they fetch figures comparable with the cost of Old Masters. X falls sick; his lungs, say, are known to be gravely affected; he is reduced to a skeleton, carried off to a Swiss sanatorium, and so on. In consequence his work is sought after more than ever, the great collectors and collections enter the market, there is hectic competition, etc., over what exists. But A’s disease has an unexpected effect upon him. He paints furiously. (I believe that, were it consumption that was in question, this might be made plausible even to my medical readers – if I have any.) The dealers and collectors are in despair, for X has never worked better, and shows every sign of rivalling the productivity of Rubens before he is through. This, with some light-hearted resolution of the imbroglio, would make 15,000 words. For a novel, further involvement would, of course, be required – an artificial plot, with perhaps an element of deception or imposture about A’s belated foisonnant phase.
I am much pleased with the above little idea, and on the strength of it have walked as far as the chapel beyond the Castello di Poggio. Beneath that unassuming roof I took shelter for a while, the afternoon being warm and the behaviour of my heart not altogether satisfactory to me. It was delightfully cool and I lingered, grateful to the good lady whose restoration of the place is recorded on the walls. I should find it hard to imagine any spot more inviolate, less susceptible of other than the gentlest touches from the hand of time, than this small consecrated place with its unremarkable Madonna, set amid cypress and ilex in a fold of the Fiesolan hills. I wish it could be my burial place. It would surely grant a peaceful sleeping, undisturbed even by that most thorough-going species of tourist who finds his way to the old protestant cemetery on the Piazzale Donatello.
Another story about an old and famous painter comes to me. Into his last work there has crept a puzzling symbolism of stone and ice. This much disputed over by critics, disciples and such. He dies. State of his nether limbs, etc. If virtually no circulation, might there be for weeks, months, sensation of no sensation (Keats: the feel of not to feel it) other than that, perhaps, of deathly cold? Technical information needed. 5000 words. A little macabre thing. Suggested by feeling unaccountably chilly today – perhaps the result of having lingered injudiciously in the little chapel, with the consequence of a mild recurrence of my recent trouble. A cable from C.S. that he is coming out. I can trust him to be forbearing when he finds me flourishing and at my desk.
The above are Mark Lambert’s last written words of other than purely private concern. Reproduction of the Memorandum Book has been continued thus far in order to show that something of the old fecundity remained to the last. It will not have escaped the reader that Lambert, although for some time intermittently anxious about his health, contrived to view the first definitive symptom of the end simply as a hint towards “a little macabre thing”. — C.S.
EIGHT
“We went too far.” Sir Charles Shaxby closed the Settignano Memorandum Book, and it was clear that he would be more at ease when it was returned to its shelf. “Intensely interesting as these last pages are, they constitute, even in the very limited currency here given them, an undoubted invasion of privacy. This is brought home to me by the odd situation in which I find myself.”
Anthea took this up. “You mean looking over it with Garth and me?”
“Yes.” Sir Charles turned to the young man; and at the same time discernibly took a moment to consider this use of his Christian name. “I hope my sister and I may be allowed to call you Garth too. Anything more formal would appear inappropriate to the son of a very old friend.”
“Yes, indeed.” Hermione Shaxby backed up her brother with becoming graciousness. “But the situation is odd; even a little sad. You are indeed the children of these two very old friends, and we meet over this record of some estrangement between them, and of a last meeting in which the consciousness of that would appear still to have been present. But I disagree with Charles about the Memorandum Book, and think it was right to print all except the terminal entries.”
“And they wouldn’t do at all?” Garth Dauncey presented this question to his host with some firmness.
“They wouldn’t do at all.” Sir Charles took him up roundly. “Yet not, my dear boy, for any very sensational reason. Quite simply, they are concerned with matters in which only his physician, or a member of his family, could take any proper interest. There are jottings about symptoms – some of them detailed and distressing. There are further jottings about financial affairs, concerning which he clearly felt much anxiety. Mingled with these is the expression of an answering anxiety about Anthea’s brother Raymond, who was then twenty-two. This was natural and even inevitable since – as I need not conceal from you – the young man was scarcely developing on satisfactory lines. But the salient point is this: that in those final two or three weeks before poor Mark became unable even to put pencil to paper his notebook had ceased to bear any literary character, and become merely a very sick roan’s private and fragmentary diary. It is often difficult to decipher, being little more than a faint scrawl.”
“I clearly remember, Charles, how you worked over it with the minutest care.” Miss Shaxby struck in as if vindicating her brother’s stewardship. “Nothing of literary significance could have eluded you.”
Garth received this with proper respect. “I’m very sure, ma’am, that the reasonable conclusion is just that. And of course it was right to stop printing at the point where the artist in Lambert disappears entirely behind the sick man.”
“The process is already apparent while Mark is at Siena.” Sir Charles lightly tapped the volume in his hand. “In the entries made during that holiday, and progressively in those that follow, there is a tell-tale carelessness in small things – the minutiae, for example, of punctuation and grammar. The manuscript, in fact, needed a little editing.”
“Editing?” Garth’s question was so sharp as to be disconcerting. “The text printed here is by no means a literatim reproduction of what Lambert wrote?”
“It makes no claim to be.” Sir Charles spoke with both surprise and asperity. “We were preparing a memorial for Lambert’s intimate friends, and not a definitive edition for students.”
“Doing what Lambert himself might have done had he been preparing his manuscript for the press?”
“Precisely. I saw no advantage in reproducing small failures of mere notation in the private jottings of a sick man. Perhaps I did wrong. Please remember that I am only a very humble historian of art, with no claims to the enjoyment and exercise of a professional literary scholarship.”
“I am sure, sir, you did absolutely right.” Garth retreated in alarm before this heavy barrage of irony. “Bui you’ll forgive my saying that the point may be important, after all. Indeed, I hope to show that it is. Could you tell me what was Lambert’s habit when writing down Latin or French or Italian words – or short quotations? Did he underline them?”
“Yes.” Sir Charles paused in an effort of memory. “But – particularly in this last phase – not consistently. It was one of the conventions which we regularised.”
“And the same would be true of the titles of books – his own and others?”
“Certainly.”
“What about his capital letters, sir? Are they readily distinguishable from his minuscules?”
“His minuscules?” It took Sir Charles a second to run this learned word to earth. “No, indeed; they are readily confounded with the capitals – and particularly in those last scrawled notes. All this, no doubt, is the literary detection of which you spoke. I assure you that nobody will be more disappointed than myself if nothing comes of it. So pray press on.”
“Then here goes.” If Garth heard continued irony in his host’s tone, he gave no sign of it. “I’ve said that I’ve been rather haunted by something my father remarked to me on one of the rare occasions we’ve had
any talk at all. It was three years ago – the last time I was over on this side – and I had managed to arrange myself a couple of weeks in Florence.” The young man hesitated. “The difficulty is to get this across to you folks as it came to me. I’ve just never tried to tell it – not even to Anthea.”
“I see.” Sir Charles, although perhaps prompted by this turn of phrase to exchange glances with his sister, in fact kept his eyes courteously upon his guest. “Remember that both Hermione and I used to know your father very well. In any sketch that you are kind enough to give us we shall no doubt find the pleasure of simple recognition as well as of increased knowledge. There is the context, I mean, of our personal experience into which to fit your own reminiscence.”
“Fine.” Garth seemed unresentful of this ponderous caution. “Well, I can’t do it like your radio talk. But, just like your talk, it closes on what one might call an enigmatic note. And, what is more, it too brings in the Piazzale Michelangelo.”
“My dear Garth, our curiosity grows apace. Proceed.”
“It was September, and I found my father, after some summer peregrinations about which he was entirely vague, lodged just beneath the roof in a large villa on Bellosguardo. There was, of course, a view, and conceivably he had chosen his situation on account of that. But if he had simply been looking for something melancholy – which may have been the actual state of the case, I guess – he couldn’t have done better in or around Florence at that time. Most of the houses perched on that once prosperous hill had been used as billets by several successive armies, and some looked to have been fought through with small arms and hand grenades. Certainly it was a long time since anybody had got round the majority of them with a can of paint – or had taken a hoe, for that matter, to the garden paths or a scrubbing brush to the garden statuary. Some of them were being turned into offices for industrial concerns and improbable boards and obscure committees, for all the world as you’ve become so fond of doing in England. The dismalness of the district was increased by the fact that it was only those disgraced and degraded houses that were being aggressively smartened up. The others, with hopelessly impoverished owners still lurking in them, were in a bad way. You could stand at the top of a great cypress avenue and see them tumbling rapidly downhill in every sense.”
“Very sad – very sad, indeed.” Sir Charles shook his head. “But I gather you judged all this to be congruous with your father’s mood?”
“That’s what came to me in an obscurely intimated way. Actually, he was so withdrawn in upon himself that a mood was something more positive than one could positively attribute to him. He lived in a single small untidy room—”
“Untidy?” Sir Charles was sharply surprised.
“Very untidy – a litter of books and portfolios and plates and knives and forks. But the untidiness stopped short of his person. That preserved a finish and an elegance – although a pervasively faded elegance – that I found more of a barrier, somehow, than anything else. He was my father – but here was something that belonged to no world of mine.”
‘To be sure – it is often those little things that most divide the generations.” Sir Charles seemed sufficiently aware of his own elegance – which was of an order to be described less as faded than as delicately bleached – to deliver himself of this generality with a shade of self-consciousness. “Your father, you say, had just this one room?”
“No, sir. He had a large studio as well, which appeared to occupy most of that top floor. But he kept it locked, and the key in his pocket. I’d say that key was about the only material object in the wide world of which he preserved any very-sharp awareness. It belonged in his pocket – at least when there was company about – and was going to remain there. I never saw the inside of that studio.”
Hermione Shaxby sighed – and as she did so leant forward to extinguish the little silver lamp on the tea-table before her. It was a gesture of almost symbolic effect. “I can well believe it. Even from the first, Garth, your father was quite desperately shy about his work.”
“Or about his lack of work.” And Garth Dauncey nodded uncompromisingly. “I’ve often heard that.”
“And he was, and remained, equally shy about you?” Anthea asked. “The awkwardness was in that, rather than in his being just uninterested?”
“Again, it’s hard to say. His manner to me could have been called formal – if it wasn’t so fined away, so rubbed and abraded, as not to be very distinguishable as a manner at all. When on that trip I visited him for the first time, he made about as much sign as if I’d strolled across the street for a casual neighbourly word. It’s true that he once or twice took me about, got me into places that casual visitors have only a slim chance of making, and showed me restaurants where the food and wine weren’t expensive – but were out of this world, all the same, compared with what I’d been finding for myself.”
Sir Charles nodded. “Cuisine is something on which your father always possessed knowledge. I have several times benefited from it myself – without, I recall, ceasing to regard it as a somewhat unexpected trait.”
“Sure. But he never made much conversation – and I could count the questions he has ever asked me on the fingers of one hand. He struck me as being pretty poor, by the way; and it was embarrassing that, when one of those rare excursions ended, I always turned out not to have spent a nickel of my own. Sometimes I felt it – and in spite of little things like that – as all having the appearance of my being a complete bore and sheer encumbrance; and Anthea knows that it’s something about which I can feel a bit crassly resentful. Yet I couldn’t be sure, and I had a kind of instinct that it mightn’t be altogether a kindness in me just to make off to someplace else.”
“You were very right.” Unexpectedly, Sir Charles advanced and laid a hand on the young man’s shoulder. “Your father, I suspect, is one in whom the waters run very deep. Your attempts at a normal filial relation, although so undemonstratively received, may in fact be a keen pleasure to him.”
“I’d like to think so.” Garth paused as if to collect himself. “One can’t tell what the mere bond of blood will do. But at least I can’t kid myself that I at all touch his imagination. Why should I? And I can remember very well the first of those few questions he has ever fired at me. It was when I talked about Landor and he gathered that literary scholarship was going to be my profession. ‘Do you write?’ he asked – and of course there was no mistaking what he meant. I replied that I had no thought of commencing poet, novelist or anything of the sort. It would be inaccurate to say that his interest dropped, because there had been such small sign of it in the first place. But I felt that a possible channel of communication – perhaps one of the very few he acknowledged the existence of – had been explored and abandoned.”
Garth paused again, and the momentary silence was broken by Anthea. “How very much you are under the shadow of this elusive and unsatisfactory parent, Garth. You’d be prepared to hold forth on him for hours.”
The young man flushed. “Perhaps so. But I guess I’m just trying in my plodding way – not at all an artist’s way – to clear the ground for my story. And, make no mistake, it’s your father and not mine that constitutes the whole point of interest in it. And now I must come to the painting.”
“The painting?” Sir Charles was swiftly interested. “Despite the locked studio, then, you did see something of your father’s work?”
“No, sir. This painting I’m speaking of, although it starts the story off, hasn’t really much to do with the matter. It’s a painting in the Uffizi – an enchanting old thing by somebody whose name I’ve forgotten, showing hermits swarming as thick as monkeys in a fantastic landscape.”
‘To be sure.” And Sir Charles smiled indulgently. “There is no doubt about what you mean: the Anchorites of the Thebais, at one time attributed to Starnino.”
“The little men?” Anthea spoke as from sudden vivid memory. “The little fierce bearded men in sentry-boxes and dog-kennels and tiny boa
ts? With one beating off a fox that has killed a hen, and another riding on a leopard, and a third teaching a bear tricks, and a fourth involved with lions, and a fifth ringing a bell for breakfast?”
Garth laughed. “Yes – that’s it. And, as it happens, I know—”
“I could describe dozens of those little men. But that’s got nothing to do with the case. So go on with your story, Garth, for goodness’ sake.”
“Perhaps it has something to do with the case – as you’ll presently see.” Garth glanced cautiously at Anthea.”What happened was this: simply to make conversation, I’d been giving my father some account of my wanderings in the Uffizi – and I think he was, in fact, mildly amused by what was no doubt the naivety of my observations. But when I mentioned those fascinating anchorites and the pleasure I had taken in them, he went off – well, much as Anthea has just done. It was obvious that he could see the whole densely and whimsically populated landscape in his mind’s eye as he spoke; and he described it with much the same sort of humour as is, I fancy, inherent in the painting itself. Then from description he passed to embroidery: what the little men were reading in their books, and what they were cooking for supper. I was in the presence of a Wendell Dauncey I hadn’t before glimpsed; and when I had ceased merely gaping I said the obvious thing: that with such a commentary he would absolutely enchant any imaginative child. At once he fell silent, and for some moments looked at me quite queerly. When he spoke again, it was in a new tone. ‘I have enchanted a child,’ he said. ‘I recall it as a recognised and acknowledged success. And it’s natural that I should so recall it. For I haven’t, you know, had many such.’ At that I was myself prompted to say – and pretty stupidly, I suppose, since, as you know, I had been removed from the Florentine scene in mere infancy – ‘I’m afraid it wasn’t to me that you introduced it. If it had been, I can only hope that I wouldn’t have let you down.’ I had hardly spoken these words before I regretted them, for they were unmistakably reproachful – a bubbling up of what Anthea calls my sense of having been disinherited or expelled. And I could see that my father was agitated. ‘No,’ he said presently, ‘it wasn’t, I’m afraid, you. As a matter of fact, it was—’” Garth paused. “But you can guess?”
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