The Doctor gestured magnificently himself and knocked over a construction made of perspex by Gabo. He was not perturbed by the accident but stooped and set the construction upright once more. He turned his delighted face towards Emily.
“Of course, my dear Emily,” he continued, “a man of the violent genius of our friend needs someone to act as his mentor and controller. The whole problem of the artist and his guide or friend is implicit in the case. Now, for instance, if I had brusquely refused to permit Carr to place that meat in the ladies’ lavatory I might have done incalculable harm to his creative ego. As it is, by praising the freedom of his imagination, I have managed to avoid the disaster, for I think it might have been nothing less—imagine the face of dear, dear Lady Swivelton—while at the same time I have left Carr feeling more certain than ever of the essential rightness of his ideas. You see, my dear Emily, how important some understanding of the major psychological discoveries of our day becomes. But for my intensive, and I may say exhaustive, study of the works of Freud and Jung, I might permanently have injured Ben Carr as a creator. As things are he will go on from strength to greater strength, producing walls that vie with one another in their startling modernity and audacity. Who knows but that, some day, he may build a house to vie in fantasy with the Dream Palace at Hauterives erected by the postman Cheval between the years eighteen seventy-nine and nineteen-twelve. Who knows what height he may not scale. Ah, me.”
The Doctor fell silent. Emily did not speak. She knew that Dr. Cornelius Bellamy was contemplating the wonders that Ben Carr was destined to perform. As a matter of fact she was wrong. The Doctor was thinking that he must instruct his cook to omit onion from his omelettes. Onion, he told himself irritably, always repeated on him in the most annoying and sometimes embarrassing way.
Douglas felt that he was building a bulwark of books between himself and the world. It seemed to him that Francis Varley had failed to give more than one reproduction to each picture. Vast bundles of bound volumes of Cahiers d’Art rose before him on his desk. Abstraction-Creation and Axis lay beside his feet. The catalogues of the Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of Living Art in New York lay up against his elbows. He made a few entries dutifully. He was beginning to feel most damnably thirsty. He supposed, vaguely, it was something to do with paper. The sight of a great deal of paper always made him want a drink.
Julian Ambleside had finally finished with his research into the matter of Chirico and Douglas had replaced the books and periodicals in their proper places.
In a few minutes, Douglas knew, he would need to go and have a drink. The quart bottle of Tolly was as empty as it could be. He knew that once he let his mind start wandering it was a sign that he needed a drink. He started to scribble an elegy on the subject of the learned Doctor:
When Dr. Bellamy went to hell
The devil asked him his advice on art,
He spoke so gentlemanly and so well
They allowed him to open a picture mart.
He was interrupted in the composition of this by the appearance of Francis Varley who pushed his well-groomed graying head shortsightedly round the door.
“Ah, there you are, my dear Douglas,” he spoke with the air of a Stanley who had suddenly, and most unexpectedly, come upon the Martin Johnson’s photographing big game, “How are you this morning, my dear fellow?”
He asked as if he really cared how Douglas’s health was treating him, and Douglas answered, “Oh, I’m all right, but I’m hellish dry. How about going out for a drink? The Ely will be open by now.”
“That, my dear Douglas,” said Francis, “is a most excellent idea. How are you getting on with my proofs?”
He sauntered slowly across the room and Douglas, who was aware of the oddness of his own clothes only occasionally, was impressed by the languid grace of the expensive tailor’s cutting. He really would need to buy himself a new suit one of these days instead of going around dressed in the oddments discarded by his friends. He wondered absently whether, if he gave his position and the Museum as his address, Mr. Snodgrass would allow him credit. He doubted it, but it might be worth trying. The most unexpected people sometimes allowed him to have credit. He really felt very sorry for them every time he failed to pay his bill. He wished he was like Ben Carr who apparently had no conscience about the feelings or requirements of those to whom he owed money.
Francis leaned languidly against the desk and looked down at the sheets of proofs, besprinkled with additions and corrections in the smallest, neatest hand Douglas could manage. He reached out a pale and well manicured hand and picked the papers up. He ruffled through them.
“My dear Douglas,” he sounded gratified. “You are surprising. I did not know that you knew as much as this.”
“I don’t,” Douglas was honest, “I just sat down and wondered where I would find certain paintings illustrated. You see I’m like the idiot boy who found the horse—he just wondered where he would have gone if he had been a horse. Well, I applied the same system to the pictures.”
Francis laughed. “All right, my charming idiot boy,” he said, “I must say that you have made a very good job of your horse-hunting. I’ll send these straight off to the printers. Emily, my dear, is quite devastated to discover that it will take a week or two to make the loose-leaf covers for the catalogue and that, willy-nilly, she’ll have to have a small number of catalogues printed off in the ordinary way and bound up in paper wrappers. She takes it hard, as her money has enabled her to get everything else finished in time. The non-appearance of the covers is her only set-back. I have pointed out to her that she only thought of the idea yesterday, so she can hardly blame the binders for the failure, but she seems convinced that money should be able to hurry them up. Money, my dear Douglas, should according to her be able to alter the physical properties of glue.”
Douglas looked at the wad of proofs in Francis’s hand. He knew how incomplete they were, but he felt that he had had enough to do with them for the time being. He hesitated.
“As a matter of fact, Francis,” he said honestly, “I haven’t nearly done with the proofs. I’ve only put in the more obvious reproductions. I wonder if you could get the printer to use these for the make-shift catalogue and get him to give me a copy of it interleaved? Then, you see, I could fill in the gaps and they could print the revised version to fit the loose-leaf covers. Do you think that a good idea?”
“My dear,” Francis was enthusiastic, “I think that is an excellent idea, but we’ll have to try it out on the dog. In other words, we’ll have to ask dear Emily whether she agrees.”
Douglas started putting the books and magazines back on their shelves. He had realised as soon as he had taken the job that he would need to make a practice of this, as otherwise the books would soon become a conglomerate mass upon his desk.
He followed Francis into the lift, wondering gloomily whether he would get his drink or whether Emily would think of something that just had to be done before he went out. Being pessimistic by nature, Douglas was already preparing himself for her refusal to let him go.
The door of Emily’s office was ajar. Through it they could hear the mellow and experienced accents of Dr. Cornelius Bellamy laying down the law.
“But, dear Mrs. Rampion,” he was saying, “you fail to appreciate the plastic qualities of his work.”
Francis did not hesitate to discover whose work was calling up the learned Doctor’s plastic batteries. He pushed open the door. Emily was seated in an early Bauhaus wooden chair which belied its angularity by being very comfortable. She was listening to the words dripping from the Doctor’s thin lips with the intensity and pleasure of a music lover hearing a Bach Prelude.
“Hullo, Emily dear,” Francis was gay, “I’ve just got hold of the proofs from Douglas here. He has a bright suggestion to make. He thinks it would be a good idea if we let these be printed with the corrections he has made so far, and let him go on making corrections for the proper, loose-leaf catalogue. I think that
is very sound. He would not need to hurry so much with these and they would be very complete. He really has done a lot of work on them already.”
Dr. Bellamy held out an imperious hand and took the proofs from Francis. He looked at them carefully and then he looked at Douglas.
“My dear boy,” he said, disguising his annoyance, “as you say, these proofs are by no means complete. For instance I reproduced this Klee in my book on Man and Art To-day, and you have made no reference to it. In fact,” he ruffled the pages quickly, “I do not see that you make any reference to any of my books at all, and, it may interest you to know, I have reproduced and discussed many of the paintings which have now, thanks to the generosity of our benefactor,” he bowed stiffly to Emily, “found their permanent home in this Museum. I will myself enter them upon the proofs.”
He took out a slender streamlined fountain pen. Douglas wondered why the designers of the pen had thought it necessary to streamline it. It was not as though anyone was in the habit of using fountain pens as darts, and he had to confess that the resistance of the air had never interfered with his speed of writing.
“I’m terribly sorry, Dr. Bellamy,” he said quickly, “I told Francis I had not finished with the proofs, but he thought they would do until I had time to prepare the final edition of them. I meant to go through your books this afternoon, filling in the gaps.”
“I accept your word for it,” the Doctor was stiff, “that you did not mean to slight me intentionally. My dear boy, I merely hope that this will be a lesson to you to be more careful in future.”
“Of course, Douglas meant no harm, Bellamy,” Francis was cheerful. “He’s been busier than the whole lot of us put together, and he was bound to slip up somewhere. We should be thankful that it wasn’t anywhere really serious.”
Dr. Bellamy looked up sharply, as if to see whether Francis was intentionally insulting him. Francis, however, had turned to Emily.
“I’m taking Douglas out for a drink, my dear,” he announced, “I feel that he has done a very good morning’s work and when I arrived I found him sitting in the library with his tongue dangling round about his boots. You don’t mind if I take him out for a few minutes, do you?”
Emily had been listening to this affair with her beloved Doctor. She smiled at Francis.
“You are a terror,” she said fondly, and Francis straightened his bow tie. Douglas noticed that the polka dots for the day were dark olive green. “Of course you can take Douglas out for a drink, if you would rather do that than have one here. Perhaps it’s just as well that the Doctor is filling in his own entries on the proofs. They are bound to be accurate now. Are you sure you wouldn’t like a drink here?”
“Yes, my dear,” replied Francis, “I’m sure that what Douglas needs is a change of atmosphere as much as the drink. Once that Bellamy has finished with the proofs I think they should go back to the printers. It will take them all their time to get enough copies of the interim catalogue ready.”
Emily nodded her head wisely. Douglas had been looking on very gloomily. For some minutes he felt his drink had been a feather in the balance against the weight of Dr. Cornelius Bellamy. Thank God, he thought, that I am not the elder Pitt—I would loathe one of Bellamy’s pies.
Chapter 4
Delights of the Poet
THE LOUNGE of the Ely was not crowded. Douglas and Francis found a table in a corner, bowed over by nodding palm-branches. Douglas sat eating salted peanuts mechanically until the drinks arrived. The sight of the mellow amber of the whisky brought some signs of animation back into his face.
“I’ve just remembered something, Francis,” he said. “Do you remember me ringing you up last night to ask if you had seen the folder with the Chirico photographs? Well, this morning when I got in—I was, I’m afraid, a minute or two late—I found Dr. Bellamy and Julian Ambleside already in the library. Julian had apparently told Bellamy that the photos were missing for the old beast went across to look for them himself. He found them squeezed into the Dali folder and then he had the nerve to tell me that I hadn’t found them myself because, subconsciously, I had wished not to find them. He had some line about Chirico’s melancholy being oppressive to one of my temperament. Now the fact is that I looked all through the D’s last night when I failed to find the folder myself—I too had thought that in the bustle I might have filed Chirico under de Chirico. But then the funny thing is that I gave the photos to Julian who was looking at Chiricos. After a few minutes he asked me if that was all there were. I said it was and he then told me that all the 1916 and 1917 photos were missing. I went and took a look and realised that he was right, for, although I had not yet got round to listing all the photographs in each folder, I had sorted them out myself and I remembered that there were photographs of the Grand metaphysical interior, the Toys of a Philosopher and the Troubadour among them. You see, in spite of the learned Doctor, I really do like Chirico rather a lot, and his pictures stick in my mind. Now if it had been the Mondrian folder I might easily have failed to know if any were missing, but as it was the Chiricos I am sure they are missing. You didn’t, by any chance Francis, borrow them and forget to put them back, did you?”
“No, my dear Douglas,” Francis was positive, “as I told you last night I’d have asked you for anything I wanted from the library. I know what it is to try and keep order among my own books and drawings, when I am the only person to disturb them, so I can just imagine the chaos you would get into if everyone went into the library and started helping themselves without telling you.”
He took a sip of his whisky and then felt in his pockets for a tin of Balkan Sobranie. He offered one of the fat cigarettes to Douglas. Then, in an undertone, as if talking to himself, he said, “I wonder what he wanted with the photographs. It isn’t as if photographs were not repeatable.”
“You wonder,” said Douglas, “what, who wanted the photographs?”
“Oh, nobody, my dear fellow,” Francis replied. “I’m just wondering who could have wanted them.”
“You are wrong anyhow,” Douglas went on, “in thinking that the photos can be replaced. Most of them are photographs taken before nineteen-twenty in Paris and elsewhere, and it’s damned unlikely that the plates will have survived slumps and wars. Anyhow, if they have, and can still be printed from, you will need to know the name of the photographer and his serial number on the print to get a repeat. No, Francis, if they are lost I’m afraid they’ve gone for good. Even Emily with all her money will not be able to repeat them. Apart from that, some of the photographs were of pictures which have been destroyed, so even though some photos could be taken again, if you can trace the pictures, these can’t.”
He drained the last precious drops of pungent fluid out of his glass and beckoned to the waiter to repeat the dose.
“I say, Francis,” he spoke as the new drinks arrived, “I really did drop a whacking great brick by forgetting to include Bellamy’s books in that damned catalogue, didn’t I?”
Francis seemed relieved that the subject had moved on from the question of the missing photographs. He laughed. “I don’t think, my dear Douglas,” he said cheerfully, “that you could have insulted the learned Doctor more deeply if you had sat down and tried to think of some way of doing it. He is most extremely jealous of his position as the major apostle of modernism in this country. What was it he was once called—oh, yes—‘the old hack of modernism.’ He does not believe that anyone knows how to look at a picture who has not made a careful study of his books. He believes that his books are the absolute essentials to anything in the way of an understanding of, say, a Miró, a Klee, or a Picasso. Of course you realise, my dear, what the Doctor suffers from as an art-critic? No? Oh, well, he suffers from the fact that he does not really like art. He really loathes painting. He agrees with Plato that there is no place for art in the ideal republic. But, as he has lived so fatly as a handmaiden of the arts for so many years, he feels that, raddled though she may be, he owes his old mistress something. Hen
ce the long quotations from Plato in his books and the excursions into psycho-analysis. He is trying to find out something that will make him like art. His latest idea is that Art, with a capital A, is probably a curative agent. No matter if you break your leg or suffer from appendicitis—Dr. Bellamy will give you a pencil and some coloured chalks and you can work the illness out of your system by doodling till you are tired of it.”
Douglas thought of a scrap more of his elegy on the learned Doctor. He fished out a pencil and jotted it down on the back of a cardboard beer-mat:
To Bellamy it was a shock
To find that in the depths of hell
The kind of pictures that he’d stock.
Were bought by devils very well.
He slipped the beer-mat into his pocket. “I see,” he said, “Bellamy’s just playing some kind of variation on Homer Lane’s ideas, is he? You can cure the liar’s quinsy by drawing the truth—is that it?”
“That’s more or less it,” Francis replied. “He is trying to justify his distaste for art, by making it appear useful. Once he has made art into a public utility it will cease to worry him. He will be able to dismiss the subject from his mind.”
He thought that art should really be
A kind of universal pill,
Old Nick himself refused, saying, We
Take pride in always being ill.
It seemed to Douglas that before he had finished he would have made a kind of Vision of Judgment on the subject of Dr. Cornelius Bellamy. He was beginning to be slightly surfeited with the subject.
“I wonder what Mr. Ben Carr, the Doctor’s protegé, is up to now?” he said, and Francis ordered another round of drinks.
Swing Low, Swing Death Page 5
