All Hallows' Eve (4 page)

Chapter Two

THE BEETLES

It was a month or so since Lester Furnival had been buried. The plane crash had been explained and regretted by the authorities. Apologies and condolences had been sent to Mrs. Furnival's husband and Miss Mercer's mother. A correspondence on the possibility and propriety of compensation had taken place in the Press, and a question or two had been asked in the House. It was explained that nothing could be done, but that a whole set of new instructions had been issued to everyone connected with flying, from Air Marshals to factory hands.

The publicity of this discussion was almost a greater shock to Richard Furnival than his wife's death; or, at least, the one confused the other. He was just enough to see that, for the sake of the poor, the Crown ought always at such times to be challenged to extend as a grace what it refused as a claim. He was even conscious that Lester, if the circumstances had been reversed, might properly have had no difficulty in taking what he would have rejected; not that she was less fastidious or less passionate than he, but it would have seemed to her natural and proper to spoil those whom he was content to ignore.

The Foreign Office, in which through the war he had been serving, pressed on him prolonged leave. He had been half inclined to refuse, for he guessed that, after the first shock, it was not now that his distress would begin. The most lasting quality of loss is its unexpectedness. No doubt he would know his own loss in the expected places and times—in streets and stations, in restaurants and theaters, in their own home. He expected that. What he also expected, and yet knew he could not by its nature expect, was his seizure by his own loss in places uniquely his—in his office while he read Norwegian minutes, in the Tube while he read the morning paper, at a bar while he drank with a friend. These habits had existed before he had known Lester, but they could not escape her. She had, remotely but certainly, and without her own knowledge, overruled all. Her entrance into all was absolute, and lacking her the entrance of the pain.

He went away; he returned. He went away to spare his office companions the slight embarrassment of the sight of him. He returned because he could not bear to be away. He had not yet taken up his work; in a few days he would. Meanwhile he determined unexpectedly one afternoon to call on Jonathan Drayton.

He had known him for a number of years, long before Jonathan became a well-known painter. He was also a very good painter, though there were critics who disapproved of him; they said his color was too shrill. But he had been appointed one of the official war-artists, and two of his paintings—
Submarine Submerging
and
Night Fighters over Paris—were
among the remarkable artistic achievements of the war. He also had been for some time on leave, in preparation (it was understood) for the grand meetings after the peace, when he would be expected to produce historic records of historic occasions. He had been once or twice, a little before the accident, at the Furnivals' flat, but he had then gone to Scotland and written to Richard from there. A later postcard had announced his return.

Richard had come across the card accidentally on this particular afternoon and had suddenly made up his mind to go round. Jonathan had been living, or rather had left his things while he was away, on the top floor of a building in the City, not far from St. Paul's, one room of which was sufficiently well-lit to be used as a studio. It was to the studio that he took Richard after a warm welcome. He was shorter and stockier than his friend, and he had a general habit of leaving Richard the most comfortable chair and himself sitting on the table. He settled himself there, and went on. “I've got several things to tell you; at least, I've got one to tell you and two to show you. If I tell you first … the fact is I'm practically engaged.”

“Splendid!” said Richard. Such things were unlikely to distress him, as Jonathan guessed; one could not altogether say what might, but not that. He was quite simply pleased. He said, “Do I know her? and what do you mean by ‘practically'?”

“I don't know if you know her,” Jonathan said. “She's Betty Wallingford, the daughter of the Air Marshal. She and her mother are coming here presently.”

“I remember hearing her name,” Richard said. “She was a friend of Lester's—or rather not a friend, but they knew each other some time ago. But I rather gathered she was ill or something and her mother didn't let her go out much.”

“That's true enough,” Jonathan answered. “It was the Air Marshal who asked me to dine one night after I'd painted him. He's a nice creature, though not interesting to paint. Lady Wallingford keeps Betty rather close, and why I say ‘practically' is because, when things came to a head with Betty the other day, she didn't seem very keen. She didn't exactly refuse, but she didn't encourage. They're both coming here presently. Don't go, whatever you do. I've a particular reason for asking you to stay.”

“Have you?” Richard said. “What is it?”

Jonathan nodded at an easel on which was a canvas covered by a cloth. “That,” he said, and looked at his watch. “We've an hour before they come and I'd like you to see it first. No; it's not a painting of Betty, or of her mother. It's something quite different, but it may—I don't know, but it just may—be a little awkward with Lady Wallingford. However, there's something else for you to see first—d'you mind? If you hadn't come along, I was going to ring you up. I'm never quite happy about a thing till you've seen it.”

This, as Richard knew, was a little extreme. But it had a basis of truth; when Jonathan exaggerated, he exaggerated in the grand style. He never said the same thing to two people; something similar perhaps, but always distinguished, though occasionally hardly anyone but he could distinguish the distinction. Richard answered, “I've never known you take much notice of anything I said. But show it to me all the same, whatever it is.”

“Over here,” Jonathan said, and took his friend round to the other side of the room. A second easel was standing back to back with the first, also holding a canvas, but this uncovered. Richard set himself to look at it.

It was a part of London after a raid—he thought, of the City proper, for a shape on the right reminded him dimly of St. Paul's. At the back were a few houses, but the rest of the painting was a wide stretch of desolation. The time was late dawn; the sky was clear; the light came, it seemed at first, from the yet unrisen sun behind the single group of houses. The light was the most outstanding thing in the painting; presently, as Richard looked, it seemed to stand out from the painting, and almost to dominate the room itself. At least it so governed the painting that all other details and elements were contained within it. They floated in that imaginary light as the earth does in the sun's. The colors were so heightened that they were almost at odds. Richard saw again what the critics meant when they said that Jonathan Drayton's paintings “were shrill” or “shrieked,” but he saw also that what prevented this was a certain massiveness. The usual slight distinction between shape and hue seemed wholly to have vanished. Color was more intensely image than it can usually manage to be, even in that art. A beam of wood painted amber was more than that; it was light which had become amber in order to become wood. All that massiveness of color was led, by delicate gradations almost like the vibrations of light itself, towards the hidden sun; the eye encountered the gradations in their outward passage and moved inwards towards their source. It was then that the style of the painting came fully into its own. The spectator became convinced that the source of that light was not only in that hidden sun; as, localized, it certainly was. “Here lies the east; does not the day break here?” The day did, but the light did not. The eye, nearing that particular day, realized that it was leaving the whole fullness of the light behind. It was everywhere in the painting—concealed in houses and in their projected shadows, lying in ambush in the cathedral, opening in the rubble, vivid in the vividness of the sky. It would everywhere have burst through, had it not chosen rather to be shaped into forms, and to restrain and change its greatness in the colors of those lesser limits. It was universal, and lived.

Richard said at last, “I wish you could have shown the sun.”

“Yes?” said Jonathan. “Why?”

“Because then I might have known whether the light's in the sun or the sun's in the light. For the life of me, I can't be certain. It rather looks as though, if one could see the sun, it would be a kind of container … no, as if it would be made of the light as well as everything else.”

“And very agreeable criticism,” Jonathan said. “I admit you imply a whole lot of what I only hope are correct comments on the rest of it. You approve?”

“It's far and away the best thing you've done,” Richard answered. “It's almost the
only
thing you've done—now you've done it. It's like a modern Creation of the World, or at least a Creation of London. How did you come to do it?”

“Sir Joshua Reynolds,” said Jonathan, “once alluded to ‘common observation and a plain understanding' as the source of all art. I should like to think I agreed with Sir Joshua here.”

Richard still contemplated the painting. He said slowly, “You've always been good at light. I remember how you did the moon in that other thing—
Doves on a Roof
, and there was something of it in the
Planes
and the
Submarine
. Of course one rather expects light effects in the sea and the air, and perhaps one's more startled when the earth becomes like the sea or the air. But I don't think that counts much. The odd thing is that you don't at any time lose weight. No one can say your mass isn't massive.”

“I should hope they couldn't,” said Jonathan. “I've no notion of losing one thing because I've put in another. Now to paint the massiveness of light——”

“What do you call this?” Richard asked.

“A compromise, I fear,” Jonathan answered. “A necessary momentary compromise, I allow. Richard, you really are a blasted nuisance. I do wish you wouldn't always be telling me what I ought to do next before I've been let enjoy what I've done. This, I now see, is compromising with light by turning it into things. Remains to leave out the things and get into the light.”

Richard smiled. “What about the immediate future?” he asked. “Do you propose to turn Churchill into a series of vibrations in pure light?”

Jonathan hummed a little. “At that——” he began and stopped. “No, I'm babbling. Come and see the other thing, which is different.”

He led the way back round the easels. He said, “Have you ever heard of Father Simon?”

“Have I not?” said Richard. “Is he or is he not in all the papers, almost as much as the Peace? The Foreign Office has been taking a mild concern in all these new prophets, including this one. Then there's the Russian one and the Chinese. You get them at times like these. But they all seem, from our point of view, quite innocuous. I've not been very interested myself.”

“Nor was I,” said Jonathan, “till I met Lady Wallingford. Since then I have read of him, listened to him, met him and now painted him. Lady Wallingford came across him in America when she was there soon after the last war and I gather fell for him then. During this war he became one of their great religious leaders and when he came over she was one of—or rather she was—his reception committee. She's devoted to him; Betty—not so much, but she goes with her mother.” He paused frowning, as if he were about to make a further remark about Betty and her mother, but he changed his mind and went on. “Lady Wallingford thought it would be a privilege for me to paint the Prophet.”

Richard said, “Is that what they call him?”

His hand on the covering of the canvas, Jonathan hesitated. “No,” he said, “I don't want to be unfair. No. What she actually calls him is the Father. I asked her if he was a priest, but she took no notice. He's got a quite enormous following in America, though here, in spite of the papers, he's kept himself rather quiet. It's been suggested that he's the only man to evangelize Germany. It's also been suggested that he and his opposite numbers in Russia and China shall make a threefold World Leadership. But so far he's not done or said anything about it. He may be just waiting. Well, I did the best I could. Here's the result.”

He threw the covering back and Richard was confronted with the painting. It was, at first glance, that of a man preaching. The congregation, of which there seemed a vast number, had their backs to the spectator. They were all a little inclined forward, as if (Richard supposed) in the act of listening, so that they were a mass of slightly curved backs. They were not in a church; they were not in a room; it was difficult to see where they were, and Richard did not particularly mind. It was in an open space somewhere; what he could see of the ground was not unlike the devastation in the other picture, though more rock-like, more in the nature of a wilderness than a City. Beyond them, in a kind of rock pulpit against a great cliff, was the preacher. He seemed to be a tallish dark man of late middle age, in a habit of some sort. His face, clean-shaven, heavy, emaciated, was bent a little downward towards his audience. One hand was stretched out towards them, also a little downward, but the hand was open and turned palm upward. Behind him his shadow was thrown on the rock; above, the sky was full of heavy and rushing cloud.

Richard began to speak and checked himself. He looked more closely at the preaching figure, especially at the face. Though the canvas was large the face inevitably was small, but it was done with care, and as Richard studied it, the little painted oval began to loom out of the picture till its downward-leaning weight seemed to dominate and press on the audience below, and to make all—clouds and crowds and rock-pulpit—grayer and less determined around it. If it was a pulpit; Richard was not clear whether the figure was casting a shadow on the rock or emerging from a cleft in the rock. But the face—it was almost as if the figure had lowered his face to avoid some expression being caught by the painter, and had failed, for Jonathan had caught it too soon. But what exactly had Jonathan caught? and why had Jonathan chosen to create precisely that effect of attempted escape and capture?