Swing Low, Swing Death

by R. T. Campbell

  Mr. Carr, unused as he was to the purlieus of Bond Street, was doing very well. He had found a pub in a mews, the Groom and Horses, and had got into conversation with the inhabitants. The conversation was instructive and edifying. It dealt practically entirely with the prospects to be enjoyed by certain horses during the course of the afternoon. Mr. Carr made mental notes of the names of some of them. Although he never risked a gamble at cards, and indeed would have looked shocked had anyone except himself produced a pack of them, he was not averse to risking a little money on the turf.

  As he argued it out to himself; since I am unlucky at cards or would be if I did not make certain that I did not lose (he shuddered as he remembered sundry occasions upon which he had had to play with simple unmarked cards), I should make a great deal of money on horses. As a matter of fact, he was in the habit of being fortunate in his bets, but Maggie’s skilful dice had robbed him of his lawful winnings.

  Mr. Carr looked up at the clock. “Whose turn is it?” he enquired. “I’ll have to be going after this one.”

  “It’s mine,” the speaker had been the source of most of Mr. Carr’s most favoured horses for the afternoon.

  “Tell you what,” said Mr. Carr, “I’ll toss you for it. Heads. Heads it is.” He slid the two-headed penny back into his waistcoat pocket having made his gesture of sportsmanship. “Well, down the hatch with it. It’s my turn next time.”

  When Douglas returned to the library after lunch, and as usual a little late, he found that he had been forestalled at his desk. Mr. Carr was sitting there. He was smoking a small but pungent cigar which still had its band of scarlet and gold. He was engrossed in the study of the Sporting Times. On the desk beside him there stood an open bottle of whisky and a couple of glasses, obviously borrowed from the Industrial Design section.

  He looked up when Douglas entered the room and blew a ring of malodorous smoke. He turned over a page of the Sporting Times.

  “Hullo, Douglas cock,” he said cheerfully, “have a drink? It’s worth having. It’s Crabbie’s. That’s me. I don’t like anything but the best. Take this cigar now,” he looked at it affectionately, “you mightn’t believe it, but it set me back one-and-six. It’s a fact.”

  There was no doubt that Douglas was astonished. Judging from the smell of the cigar he would have guessed that it had been given to Mr. Carr by a garbage factory as a sample of its wares.

  “Yes,” he said mechanically, “I’d love a drink.”

  Mr. Carr poured a generous measure into the glass. “Sorry,” he said, “I haven’t got any soda or any fancy stuff. You’ll just need to take it the way it came from the cow, or,” he added darkly, “the haggis. I don’t know which. I never was great on natural history. I know how to make babies, but that is all.”

  Douglas helped himself to the Marcel Breuer steel chair and sank into it, sipping thankfully at his drink.

  “The trouble with biology,” Mr. Carr continued, “is that it makes you think and puts you off your stroke. The great thing to remember, old cock, is never think. Look at my old mother. She must be a hundred-and-two if she’s a day. To what does she attribute her great age? To someone’s patent medicine? No! To fresh air and plenty of it? No, the old girl likes a fug as much as I do and that’s saying something. To leading a sober life? No, most assuredly no! Saying that she is a hundred-and-two at the moment and that she started to booze at the age of twelve, that will mean, let me think,” Mr. Carr screwed up his face under the strain of mathematical calculation, “that means she hasn’t gone sober to bed for ninety years, and it looks to me as though she was good for another ninety.” He said this rather regretfully. “To what then does she attribute her great age? I ask you. You can’t guess? Why it is simple, Douglas old cock; she has lived to this great age solely by virtue of the fact that she never thinks. She has never been known to express an opinion on anything. A statement of fact, such as that she’d like another drink—yes—but an opinion—no! Take it from me, Douglas, as a man who has seen a good deal of the world and learned nothing by it, that thinking is the start of all trouble. Once you start thinking there is no telling where you will end. It might be Dartmoor,” he said this cheerfully, but his voice fell with apprehension as he nodded, “or it might be Ten Downing Street.”

  He shuddered as he thought of the awful fate that might befall those who used their brains. He took up the bottle of whisky and politely emptied about another gill into Douglas’s glass before replenishing his own. Douglas felt rather as though he had been beaten about the head with thin steel rods. He was not quite sure what he had done to deserve this visitation. He surely had not had all that much to drink at lunch.

  The telephone rang briskly. Douglas started to hoist himself out of the chair, but Mr. Carr stayed him with an imperious gesture. “It’ll be for me,” he announced, taking off the microphone, “Hullo, this is the Museum of Modern Art, Iron Street, and this is Mr. Carr.” He sounded as though he was slightly astonished. “What, you say they both won? How very pleasing of them.”

  He rang off and looked at Douglas sternly. “Never back a horse,” he said, “unless you are a hundred per cent. certain it will win. I have just backed two that I felt that way about. I had a double on them. I am now the owner of three hundred and seventy-six pounds, eleven shillings and some pennies. Here,” he dug in his pocket, “is the half-crown you lent me this morning.”

  He looked gloomily at the change he took out. “You might as well have the half-crown you gave me yesterday as well,” he said, “if you don’t Maggie will. God alone knows what she does with all the money she wins off me with her crooked dice. I’ll either have to get a new wife or some new dice. I can’t afford both. The trouble with her is that she is very mean. Take, take, take, that’s her motto. Why, I discovered that she had shewn the children a big money-box and I became suspicious. I was quite right. She had shewn them the gas-meter, and there the little bastards were, shovelling in pennies as quickly as they could steal them.”

  He looked moodily at his glass and then at the bottle of whisky. It had certainly suffered. He tilted it against the light and shook his head sadly.

  “Nothing’s the same as it was when I was a boy,” he remarked. “Even whisky hasn’t got the staying power it used to have. Why I remember the times when one bottle of whisky would last me a whole day. You mayn’t believe it, but it’s a fact. Now I just look at a bottle and, hey presto, it’s gone. When I was at Eton,” he looked at Douglas to see how he took this and was satisfied that, as Douglas’s expression did not change, he had accepted the statement, “I believe a bottle used to last me two days. That, of course, is a long time ago, and I may be exaggerating. I cannot say that I remember those days clearly.”

  He looked at the bottle again and decided to be generous. He poured half into Douglas’s glass and the rest into his own. He then placed the glasses side by side.

  “Not bad,” his expression was happy, “not a hair’s breadth between ’em. I thought the old eye was still holding out. Well,” he poured the drink back, “I must be going now. Dear Emily,” he said this in a voice that very closely mimicked Dr. Bellamy, “has a bit of decorating for me to do.”

  He got up and put the Sporting Times in his pocket. He deposited the empty whisky bottle in the perspex wastepaper basket where it looked extremely odd. He left the room and then he looked back round the door.

  “Have you ever thought of trying your hand as an interior decorator?” he enquired. “It’s easy and it’s well paid. You just stick things all over the wall, arranging them as it takes your fancy. Along comes the Doc and before you know where you are you find you’ve created a blinking masterpiece. Not bloody likely!”

  He shut the door softly and Douglas heard the muted whine of the lift. Douglas got up and took the two glasses. He took them into the little lavatory off the library and washed and polished them. Then he took them downstairs to the Industrial Gallery. He placed them on a table beside the door. The gallery shone with chro
mium and glass. Working in it, Douglas thought, would be rather like working in Fortnum and Mason’s. He admitted to himself that he liked his living to be a little less obviously hygienic.

  He was about to climb again to his own department when he met the Flints. They seemed to be suppressing some hidden excitement. Douglas had sufficient drink in him to allow him to forget all he had ever known of tact.

  “What’s up?” he asked, “you both look as though you’d taken Seidlitz powders and they were fizzing inside you.”

  “It really is most extraordinary, most extraordinary,” Jeremy replied while Douglas bottled his curiosity, “you know that large painting by the Italian chappie? Chirico? Yes? Well, while most of the people were out at lunch, someone has come in and cut it to pieces with a razor. It’s hanging in shreds over the floor. There is absolutely nothing that can be done for it. Dr. Bellamy says that it is ruined beyond repair.”

  Douglas pushed past the Flints and went into the gallery. Emily, Dr. Cornelius Bellamy, Julian Ambleside and Francis Varley were gathered in a small circle in front of the destroyed picture. As usual, the Doctor was holding the floor.

  “While nothing, my dearest Emily,” he said, “can ever replace a work of art that has been destroyed wantonly, yet we must confess that this affair has its compensations. The fact that some stranger was urged to enter the Museum and destroy a work of art shews how disturbing such works must be to the neurotic personality. No doubt the destroyer of this work had in some way identified himself with it. We might almost call it a Dorian Gray complex. By destroying the painting no doubt he hoped to free himself from its clutches. It must have required considerable desperation to take the first cut at the canvas, for doubtless the possessor of a complex like that would be convinced that, in destroying the picture, he was running considerable risk of destroying himself. Once, however, he had discovered that he had taken the first stroke with impunity, he would doubtless go on cutting until the spasm passed.”

  “Then,” said Emily, hollowly, “you don’t think that I should inform the police about the outrage?”

  “Think, my dear Emily,” the Doctor said, “what prospect have the police of catching a man who was probably, to all intents and purposes, as ordinary a person as you’ll meet in the streets? And, if by one chance in eight million, they should catch him, what could be done with him. It would not be fitting to send the man to jail for a psychopathic disease, and yet any alienist would tell you that having destroyed the object of his obsession he was now as sane as I am, so that he could not be confined in any asylum, even if you wished to have the fact of such a confinement on your conscience, my dear Emily.”

  “It was fortunate,” Francis Varley said, “that it was this one and not any of the others that suffered.”

  Julian Ambleside looked at him sharply. He seemed about to say something, but he closed his large mouth with a snap, like a frog that had just eaten a gnat.

  “Oh I know, Francis, that you weren’t satisfied with the painting,” Emily was impatient, “you had some theory that it was one of those that Chirico painted ten years later and signed as if they had been done when he was young. You mayn’t have been satisfied with the picture, but I was. I thought it was one of the finest Chiricos in the collection. One of the finest I have ever seen. And now, look at it, ruined. It is a beastly shame.”

  Douglas thought that she was about to burst into tears, but she recovered herself as Dr. Cornelius Bellamy bore up on her flank like one of Nelson’s ships.

  “I may say, my dear Emily,” he was ponderous, “that I agree with everything you say about the painting. It was undoubtedly a major work and we will not see its like again. While I have heard that absurd story of Chirico’s painting copies of his earlier works and dating them wrongly, I do not for a minute believe that one of these copies, if indeed they existed beyond the imaginations of the surrealists who were, as even Francis must admit, grossly prejudiced on the subject of Chirico, I do not for one minute believe that I would be deceived by such a copy. It would be bound to be a travesty, a mere shadow of the real thing. Anyone with the slightest aesthetic feeling would be certain to distinguish it at once. I remember having a discussion with you, Ambleside,” he turned to Julian who had been watching him closely, “on this very subject, after you had asked my opinion upon the four large paintings by Chirico which you own. You will remember that I was able to put your mind completely at rest. I do not believe that, if such copies existed, a point upon which I must admit I am doubtful, that they ever left the artist’s studio. You may take it from me, my dear Emily, that that painting which has just been destroyed was indeed a masterpiece, and that we are fortunate in possessing such excellent photographs of it, not to mention the colour-plate in my Man Art in a Machine Age, to transmit even a shadow of its glories to posterity.”

  “The trouble with the Doctor, my dear boy,” Francis whispered to Douglas, “is that he’s always flirting with posterity, and he doesn’t know what kind of a girl she is. He should remember Christopher Smart’s warning about the Muses in The Hilliad, where he says, ‘The Muses are all whores, and they frequently give an intellectual gonorrhoea!’”

  Julian Ambleside moved sideways towards the tattered shreds of canvas. He fingered them gently, rubbing the painted surface with a smooth finger. He tried placing fragments alongside one another, but shook his head sadly.

  “I’m afraid,” he remarked in his piping voice, “that absolutely nothing can be done with it. The vandal has not been content with the comparatively clean cut of the razor-blade, but has actually torn and twisted at the canvas with brutal strength so that the paint has cracked and flaked and vanished from large stretches. I doubt if the best picture restorer in England, even with the photographs and the coloured plate in Bellamy’s book, could do anything with it. But if you like,” he turned to Emily, “I’ll see what can be done?”

  “I think,” the Doctor spoke heavily, “that Emily would prefer to have no picture to one which had been botched about by a picture restorer. No picture restorer, however skilful, could restore the original spirit of the work. It would be worse than a good photograph. All the essential falsities of the restorer’s handiwork would become more and more important as time passed and succeeding generations would be deceived. We owe a duty to posterity which we cannot avoid. I say discard the damaged masterpiece. Do you agree with me, my dear Emily?”

  Francis Varley nudged Douglas. “What did I say about posterity?” he said with a grin. “My dear boy, he just can’t avoid his little pomposities about the future. He is convinced that his works will last as long as Vasari.”

  Emily was thinking. She flicked one polished finger-nail against another. She looked at the tattered mess of canvas sadly, and then she turned. Her mind was made up.

  “Cornelius,” she said, “I am in complete agreement with you. After all this is a Museum of living art and not of copies or poor botched things. From now on this painting has ceased to exist. Francis,” she looked at him, “will you be a dear and ring the printers and get them to exclude it from the catalogue? If it is too late to cut it out of the proofs they must print a black block over the page where it is reproduced and described.”

  “How right you are, my dear Emily,” the Doctor was flattered by her complete agreement with him. “Let the dead bury their dead and let us, all of us, look to the future.”

  Douglas, who was suffering slightly from the amount of whisky he had taken during lunch and after, suddenly said, plainly and clearly, “Tally ho. The future has gone to covert!”

  Everyone looked at him severely. He held his breath slightly as if afraid that it was explosive and might catch fire. “Sorry,” he said, “it was just something that occurred to me.”

  Dr. Cornelius Bellamy looked at him more severely than the others. Douglas felt that he would not retain his job as librarian for long if the Doctor had any say in the matter and he was afraid that the Doctor had.

  Fortunately there was a diversion.
Mr. Ben Carr came in through the door. He was smoking a slightly larger but no less vile cigar. He looked very pleased with himself. He had just heard that the third horse of his treble had won. Until he saw Maggie he was a rich man.

  Sticking from his pocket was the neck of a bottle of Johnny Walker’s Black Label. Judging from the slightly glazed look in his eyes and the maritime lilt of his steps he had been sampling the fluid this contained.

  “Hullo, hullo, hullo,” he said and gave one more in case no one had heard him, “Hullo. What’s going on here?” He caught sight of the ripped tatters of the Chirico, “Someone been cutting up rough, eh?” He laughed at his own wit. “Now I come to think of it I could do with some of that. It will look fine on my new wall. Can I have it?”

  “Certainly, my dear Carr,” the Doctor spoke for Emily, “take it away. Do what you like with it.”

  Mr. Carr advanced unsteadily to the picture. He took hold of the canvas tentatively and gave a tug. Nothing happened. He laid his bottle carefully on the ground and spat on his hands. He took a firmer grip and still nothing happened. He jerked suddenly and the frame fell over on top of him. He sat down and looked indignantly at those around him, a babe in the wood covered with leaves of jute. No one laughed and he realised that no one had been near enough to play a practical joke on him. He rose with a sudden access of dignity, gathering his bottle, and departed, holding the frame round him like a gargantuan lifebelt.

  “Dear man,” Dr. Cornelius Bellamy was mildly amused, “the true genius to whom nothing comes amiss. It would have been all the same to him had it been a Leonardo. My dear Emily, you should be grateful to him. From your loss there will arise another masterpiece. Nothing perishes. There is a biological continuity in all things.”

  Quietly, so that no one except Francis could hear him, Douglas began to sing “On Ilkla Moor.” Francis looked at him reprovingly. The door of the gallery was opened again and Mr. Carr popped his head in.

  “Did I hear you speaking about biology, Doc?” he asked, and there was a wild gleam in his eye.