The Tower of Oblivion Part 51

So we sat there over our empty cups, with the wasps struggling in the jam and Coco harping on the wires of his cage, but still obstinately refusing to sing "Quand je bois." Jennie got up to give him a piece of sugar, and he c.o.c.ked his yellow upside-down eye at her and showed the ribbed black tongue inside his hook of a beak. Were I a painter I should paint the picture she made against the shrill yellow of the broom, with the sun full on her white summer frock, her gleaming hair, and the sun-loving bird with his head on one side watching her. "Mind his beak,"

Derry called; and she smiled over her shoulder, as if his mere voice were so much that she must turn her eyes whatever it said. Then she returned to the table, but not before she had plucked a sprig of genet and put it in her breast. It lay at the pit of her stately throat like a dropped blossom at the plinth of a column.

"But what about the pictures?" Madge suddenly said. "We came here to see pictures, didn't we?"

"Then that means a trail upstairs," said Derry, springing up. "Carefully through the kitchen, Mrs Aird; it's always as dark as the pit after you've been sitting out here. Perhaps I'd better go first."

He led the way through the kitchen, up the bare polished stairs, and into his room.

He cannot have had any great wish to show them; otherwise they would have been set out, or at least ready to hand. As it was he had to rummage for them in his single cupboard, selecting some, rejecting others. He showed a dozen or more of them, mostly canvas on the stretchers, but a few watercolours among them; and I fancy, if the truth must be told, that Madge was just a shade disappointed. I think she had hoped for jazz and lightning and something to go with her drawing-room cus.h.i.+ons. Nor did I myself quite know what to make of those pictures.

The first impression of them I had was a kind of--let me say datelessness; I can't think of a better word. All were landscapes, the largest of them not more than a couple of feet by eighteen inches; and at first he set them up one after another rather negligently. But as Madge began to question him his manner rather curiously changed. That preternatural skill that he had shown for two whole afternoons seemed to drop from him. He seemed to halt a little, to take risks, to advance warily into deeper water. If Mrs Aird really wished to know, then he was sincerely ready to explain. And he began to take me, for one, through the unsuspected intricacies of what at a first glance appeared to be a few casual brush-marks on the flat.

"I dare say I'm all wrong--I feel rather an a.s.s talking about it," he said diffidently, "but I'll try to tell you. I mean I came across a fellow one day just outside Pleudihen, and he was painting what he called a Romantic Landscape. I asked him what a Romantic Landscape was, and he was just a bit stuffy about it. 'This that I'm painting,' he said. 'But why can't you paint just a landscape?' I said. 'Because I'm doing a Romantic one and I can't do two things at once,' he said. 'What are you doing it for?' I asked him. 'The Salon,' he said. 'No, but I mean _why_ are you doing it?' I said. 'I suppose because I belong to the Romantic School,' says he.... Well, there you are, Mrs Aird. What I mean is that he was painting it because he belonged to a school that did paint that sort of thing. If he'd belonged to another school he'd have painted something different, I suppose. So of course that set me thinking a bit."

"I suppose so," said Madge, quite out of her depth.

"So I said to him, 'What do you want to belong to a school at all for?'

'Everybody does,' says he. 'I should have thought that was all the more reason why you shouldn't,' says I. 'Oh, if you're a blooming genius!' he said ... a bit rotten of him, I thought, but he was years older than I.

So I rather let myself go, I'm afraid. I picked up the nearest leaf.

'Look here,' I said to him, 'this thing's a leaf, just a leaf. It's a certain colour and a certain shape and certain other things; the point is it's itself and nothing else; and neither you nor I can alter it, sir' (I told you he was years older than I). 'The light hits it there, and only one possible thing can happen; it hits it there, where the direction alters, and only another thing can happen. In another minute the light will have changed, and a quite different set of things will have happened. Everything there is happens to that leaf in the course of a day, and if you know all about that leaf you know all about everything. And if you can paint it you can paint all the leaves in the world.' I hope I didn't seem too rude, but that's what I said to him."

I had moved to the window. He was talking with a mixture of diffidence and warmth, on a subject I had never heard him on before, and yet it seemed to me that I had heard something strangely like it all before.

"And what did he say?" Madge asked.

"Oh, he said something, but he was years older than I, so I just said good afternoon. I suppose he went back to school," said Derwent Rose.

Once more I was disturbed. Was this a new phase, or an old one all over again? If he was going to abolish schools and precedents and all the accepted apparatus by which the world's thought is carried on, it seemed to me to matter very little whether he dealt in words, as before, or in paint, as now. True, this parallelism might exist largely in my own imagination; he had said nothing that another man might not have said without arousing anxiety; but again he was trying to see something, though only a leaf, as if it had never been seen before, and I noted it carefully as I looked out over the sunny northward water.

"So that's more or less what I'm after," he was saying. "I know they're pretty bad, but I think they start right. That sky's as clumsy as it can be, but it _is_ horizontal. That tree's got a back you don't see as well as a front you do. So I simply don't go to look at other people's stuff.... Ah, this branch will explain what I mean."

It did when he pointed it out, but I should never have seen for myself.

As completely as a wors.h.i.+pping pagan he sought to subdue himself to one given thing in one given moment. As I say, I know nothing about painting. That may be a valid theory of painting landscape or it may not. But it was his, there was no ear-say or eye-say about it, and it is of him and not of his pictures that I am speaking.

"I believe I shall pull it off one day; in fact I know I shall.... And now that's quite enough about me. That's my view, Mrs Aird, and this is where I live. My old landlady's a perfect dear, and Madeleine and Hortense are all right. But sometimes that brute Coco simply won't sing----"

I saw Jennie drinking in every detail of his room. There was not to be one inch of it that she could not reproduce when she went to bed that night and turned her face in the direction of St Briac. Her eyes took in his moulded ceiling-beams, the gla.s.s k.n.o.b of his door, his neat bed, the herring-boned parquet of the floor. It was a little bare, perhaps, but then he spent all his days out of doors, painting those wonderful paintings, and, of course, this was not his real home. She hated that older painter--a hundred at least--who had been rude to him about the Romantic Landscapes; instantly and pa.s.sionately she had taken sides with her hero. She loved the fat old Frenchwoman who looked after him and was nearly seventy; she did not so much love the two Breton women who looked after him and were not nearly seventy. Coco was a naughty bird not to sing "Quand je bois" when he was told, and if his window did not face towards Dinard, at any rate he had the tram opposite, and could watch it every time it started, and know that it was going almost past the gates of Ker Annic. She stood with puckered brows before his canvases.

She loved trees. They would always be different to her now that he had shown her about them. She had no doubt whatever about his theory of landscape; how could it be wrong if it was his? Her fingers touched the blossom of broom at her throat that had grown on his tree.

Then she came over to the window to make sure that Dinard really did not lie that way. Most stupidly it did not. Actually it lay miles away past the gla.s.s door-k.n.o.b, and the Garde Guerin to the right was invisible from Dinard. But she pressed my arm lightly. "September, Uncle George?"

the pleading pressure silently said. "You'll ask us both down in September, the moment we get back from here?"

I looked at my watch.

Then I heard Madge's voice across the room, and my heart almost stopped at the swift peril.

"Then your mother was Cicely Treherne, and she married an Arnaud?"

But he weathered it. He did it with his rascally eyes. He smiled down on her.

"Well ... I shouldn't be allowed to swear it in a court of law, because it was before I was born, you see."

The smile conquered. She laughed. I cut quickly in, my watch half out of my pocket. Gunpowder was safer than family history with Madge Aird about.

"Time?" I said.

"Ought we to be going?"

"The tram has a way of filling up."

"Then don't let's miss it," said Madge, drawing on her gloves. "Thank you for a most delightful afternoon, Mr Arnaud (all my friends are 'Mr'

for at least a week, you know). I think the pictures are fascinating; they make our books look very dull. Good-bye."

"Oh, I'm coming to see you off," he said.

Something in his last words, I really can't tell you what, made me take a swift resolve. If he was going to see us off, I was going to see him off also. I had a superst.i.tious idea that it might be necessary. He had bamboozled Alec about his delicate chest, had only just evaded that question of Madge's that simply meant, if you like to do a little sum about it, that his mother had borne him at two different dates with a quarter of a century between them. Blandly as he might cover it up, I now expected nothing but tricks from him--tricks coolly and resolutely planned and carried out without a moment's compunction or hesitation.

Very well. He was going to be watched if I had eyes in my head.

And so was Miss Jennie. With a guile so innocent and transparent that I had nothing for it but the tenderest and most smiling love, she too was quite capable of duplicity. More than once her tell-tale hand had fluttered about the flower at the pit of her throat. As I have said, I don't pretend to deep knowledge of the hearts of these superb and recently-awakened young creatures, but I do know when things are in the wind.

Nothing happened as we pa.s.sed down the stairs and out into the street. I could have taken my oath of that. And, devoted as always, he walked with Madge across to the terminus, leaving Jennie to me. But I felt it coming....

It came as he took the tickets at the guichet; and it was not of his doing, but of hers. I had silver in my hand, ready to repay him, and there was no reason why she also should have pressed so close to him.

Again there was the little flurry about the flower at her throat; her bent nape was towards me; the thing was movingly clumsily done.

But it was done for all that. A note pa.s.sed from her hand to his, and the fingers that pa.s.sed it were held for a moment.

Don't tell me that that note had not been in readiness probably since the evening before. Don't tell me that it had not lain under her pillow for a whole night before being transferred to that tenderer post-bag that was sealed with the yellow flower. Don't tell me that it had not been even more sweetly sealed. For I saw her face when she turned again. I saw its struggle of soft emotion and the will to be calm. With a quick little impulse that I did not understand she flew to her mother's arm.

"There are three seats there if we're quick," she said in a broken little voice....

Only to see one another--only to speak to one another--and to pa.s.s a secret note at the first opportunity----

IV

"You know that we can't quarrel, Derry," I said.

"In that case----" he said quietly, but did not finish.

"We can't quarrel for the reason there's always been--that we aren't in the same ring and can't possibly get there."

"I wish----" he began, but once more suddenly stopped.

From the obscurity of the next table where the four young Frenchmen sat another soft unaccompanied song broke out.

"Listen," whispered Derry.

"En mon coeur, tendre reliquaire, J'avais garde ton souvenir; Par lui le long de mon calvaire En esperant, j'ai pu souffrir!"