Devil's Tor (24 page)

Where was Hugh all this time? She had a feeling that if he were to enter at that moment, Ingrid's manner would change, and she would take a part in the ensuing general conversation. She had been so civil to Hugh at both breakfast and lunch, although she knew she rather disliked him; while to Peter, to whom she had just engaged herself, she could find no word to say.

Then came that quiet explanation for Helga, to which all these tentative thoughts and discardings must have been leading up. This distraction of her daughter's was unconcerned with Peter altogether; it could have its origin only in her last evening's adventure on Devil's Tor. … Yes, the terrible storm, and their narrow escape from disaster, with her hurt, the discovery of a passage to an ancient tomb, and her painful, exhausting limp home in wet clothes through the rain—it had begun a work upon her imagination and nerves, that Hugh's account of his exploration had intensified, and Uncle Magnus's weird anecdote had carried into the realm of the occult. She was only a child. The organisation of a delicate girl was so easily upset. And that was why she had been interested in all that Hugh had had to say, and was showing no interest whatever in Peter's aspirations. He had been unlucky enough to hit on a bad time, that was all.

But was it poor Hugh's fate, then, always to be this involuntary obstacle to the pleasures of others? Having been nearly forcibly thrust between those men and their prize, now he was similarly finding himself set up between a young girl and her lover. So not only was Peter exonerated, it was even a piece of happiness for Ingrid that it was to-day he had turned up, if only to relieve her of half her sudden new obsession, by bringing back the rest of her mind to nature. Yet it seemed so incredible that this peaceful afternoon room, in which the sunlight still lingered, should be a scene of invisible forces that had to do with such things as death, and tragedy, and the supernatural. … What did she mean? The immediate memory of her own thought startled her. Hugh wasn't here, with his morbid presentiments, and for everyone else the future was to be ordinary. For a moment, however, it had been just as if the whole atmosphere of the day were charged with the dread of approaching woes for them all!...

She rose to pour out another cup for her uncle; and as she handed it to him, saw from his signs that he was to deliver himself at last, which gave her a sense of dropping back upon a solid support. He was viewing Peter with one of his dubious smiles, that somehow always had the effect of expressing both friendly raillery and a whip held in reserve; but Peter, who knew him well, had already turned to him in whimsical expectancy. Ingrid never changed her position.

While Helga was sitting down again, old Colborne began to the guest quietly enough:

"In art, as in life generally, there are some who employ costly and elaborate apparatus for the catching of sprats, and others who elect to angle with a slender rod for whales. The first-named, however superior they may be in sense and easy talent, will still by reason of their menial lack of ambition get nowhere; since he who thinks commonly must remain common to the last of his days, whereas of the passion for exploits only can anything be made. The second-named, despite their certain folly in so absurdly miscalculating the displacement of their haul, are yet the ones whom a rational man will desire to serve, if serve either he must. Vices of character are irreparable, but the judgment may at last be made a useful instrument by the repeated hard knocks of experience—by the lessons of other people's experience, if the subject be wise to attend in time.

"You, I conceive, are angling for a whale. You wish to paint such pictures as have never yet been painted.

"I shall still pursue the figure a little. You have sighted your spouting monster, and you have put out to sea in chase, but, as I fancy, you have neglected to take with you in your boat the supply of harpoons and length of stout line necessary to the killing and capture of so vast a floating mountain of blubber. It is not the audacity of your ambition that I desire to reprove, it is the inadequacy of the equipment with which you are to set upon the adventure.

"To kill a whale in art, you must continue to use the methods that always have been used in the killing of whales. These are, hard work, distinction of vision, the perfect mastery of your materials by constant practice, austerity of mind, following upon austerity of life, and the never-ceasing examination—in the spirit of love, not criticism—of the best work of the best of your predecessors. I do not pretend that such a list of essential factors to success is exhaustive, but, so far as it goes, it is indispensable, and I advise you to copy down its items in your notebook as soon as you get home. Above all, you must paint, paint, paint, and go on painting; and not spend any part of your time in lying upon couches, allowing all your ideas to run together in a mush.

"If it is written in the book of fate that you are to be a master of paint, these things will help you to it. If it is not so written, no amount of sterile thinking can do anything for you. For the rest, since you have set your heart upon the paintings that shall symbolise the universe, I recommend to you the symbol, of all symbols, which is the most vivid, the most passionate, and the most universal—the presentation of the Madonna.

"We know that you have already made a beginning with this subject. You need never come to an end with it, for its treatment is inexhaustible. You may, if you so wish it, go on painting Madonnas all your life—descend to posterity as the painter of Madonnas—there will always be something new for you to say, in each successive version. The symbol is vivid, because the human sympathies of all of us are immediately aroused, before the question of artistic merit comes up at all, by the mere representation of a beautiful young woman, nursing her infant. It is passionate, because of the semi-divinity of this beautiful young mother, and the entire divinity of her infant. And it is universal, because more than a mother is represented, more even than motherhood is represented; the whole female nature and spirit of this our world are represented."

Helga regarded him in a quietly-musing surprise. Her uncle was showing himself in an altogether new aspect to-day.

At breakfast there had escaped from him his silent former devotion to another man's wife; and now he was going on to emphasise the significance of womanhood in general. All her existence seemed becoming unreal to her. Hugh talked of death, Uncle Magnus praised women, Peter and her daughter were engaged and not engaged; everything was as if moving towards that change... and she was understanding what had mystified her just now, how all the atmosphere seemed
charged
—it was because all the three persons with her in the room were behaving unusually, and behind it all was her last night's conversation with Hugh, which she had not forgotten and never could forget; and because at any time, even at this very moment, a footstep might be heard on the gravel of the drive outside and one of the maids might appear, announcing either or both of those two men from Tibet, whose coming was to be like a signal of the new swift crystallisation of Hugh's affairs. … Surely they were all 'fey', including herself! Never in her life, but once, had she felt so nervously, irrationally apprehensive. When Dick had had his second visitation, her anxious dread, without known cause other than that superstitious assent, had been just the same—or not quite the same; she had been able to apply that, but this was inapplicable to any definitely-impending event.

She heard Peter's interruption of her uncle's momentarily-ceased monologue.

"I'll say this for your method, sir—that it is calculated to produce excellent
craftsmen.
The question that arises in my mind is—since we are to speak of the Virgin Mary... would Mary, by the simple process of working hard at her pots and pans, have produced the Redeemer? Every creative artist is, or should be, a sort of Virgin. He is to be informed by the Holy Ghost, keep himself unspotted by men, and conceive miraculously. … The rest of your counsel, though, is very good. I always have approved the, Mother of God as affording in her person a symbol of the highest stamp."

"I am obliged to you for the explanation of much that I see around me," returned old Colborne sarcastically. "So many schools and coteries of painting to-day obviously have no parentage in the known world, that I have hitherto been non-plussed. Henceforth I shall understand that they have been directly fathered by the Holy Spirit!"

Peter viewed the red tip of the cigarette between his fingers.

"Did I stop you, sir? I am sorry, if so."

"I was to go on to speak of the singular advantage this subject of the Mother enjoys over the whole of the rest of Christian art. Angels, saints, martyrs, the Father, the adult Saviour—all have been painted; and not one has had much more than the force in representation to recall the associated myth. Only the Virgin-Mother, whether alone or with her Babe, has force to move us directly. Yet, far from being possessed of a higher spiritual rank than the majority of those others, in her lifetime she was principally characterised by her entire lack of spiritual will and effort. She is almost the most inconspicuous leading figure in the Gospel. The saints and apostles were consumed by the intense flame of their passion for the Almighty and His Son, the original disciples were forward in their earnestness and loyal love and following; only Mary remains an unknown person for us—as it were, a blank shape in a picture otherwise coloured and finished. Had she been another living flame, we should have heard of it. Or had she possessed the spirituality of a naïve and simple temper, we should have heard of that. In truth, she had not the enthusiasm of those others, and so far was their inferior. Her personal qualities may have been higher. Only a lioness bears a lion-cub. The story does not tell us, for the story is concerned merely with the affairs of the Son.

"Nevertheless—I say it again—in representation the Virgin-Mother has force, as those others have not, to work directly upon our souls; and this because the human instinct is more powerful far than the human reason. While the latter (for the white-skinned race) has finally settled down to its two male Gods, the one for its metaphysic, the other for its practical living—I mean, Jehovah and Christ; while this has happened for the reason, the profounder intuitive craving of the heart has never ceased to be aware that the whole of this, the only universe we know, sustained as it necessarily is by its infinite number of single acts of generation, is in essence
female.

"Accordingly, the source of this universe is logically to be sought in a female Archetype—not in an eternal Father, but in an eternal Mother. For, subversive of all our modern ideas though such a notion may be, the male function, the half of sex, the fount of all adventure and bed of all intellectual grandeur on the sphere, may still be nothing less nor more than parasitic and secondary—parasitic, because for its life it depends upon the female function; without women, it is evident, there could be no men; and secondary, because it has appeared later in the biological history of the world, and to that extent is superfluous and minor. I do not say that the female function has not been modified as well by the accidental sprouting of such an excrescence from its original unity. Manifestly it has been so. It used to be believed that the Pacific Ocean was the mighty hole left by the flying-off from the earth's surface at a tangent of the moon. Such a gap may have been left in the original femaleness before sex, by the flying off of males. I cannot begin to discuss that here. It is a stupid condition of our life on earth that we are placed by chance at birth in one or other of the two sexes, and thereafter must behave without candour to those who have been placed in the opposite. A state that demands of us a constant circumspection, and concealment, and picking and choosing of our words, cannot be a natural state.

"Nevertheless sex may appear a natural state in brutes, that do not resort to these disguises. That happens because human beings, of all creation, alone have succeeded in recovering a measure of the sacredness of the primal state, before sex.

"They have not done so through their bodily instincts, or brutes would have done the same. Neither have they done so through their reason, or we should not, in this most reasonable of all human centuries, be still glorifying and deifying the male in Nature, at the expense both of that primal female and its derived sexual feminine. But human beings have recovered so much as they have recovered of the primal state, through another and more ancient faculty, that perhaps is neither instinct nor reason, but lies infinitely beneath and behind and above both. Since brutes have it not, it has had to be recovered. I have also, a minute ago, named it as a human instinct, although it is so much profounder than all our other instincts. That was to distinguish it from reason, with which it has still less to do. Because it is real, and not feigned, it is always with us, and we cannot escape from it; but because it is other than reason, it does not speak the same language as reason; we feel it, but never know it, and may seldom know that we feel it. It is the
night
of our bustling
day
of the intellect. How then have we been so happy as to have recovered it? The brutes have not done so. The needs of civilisation have imposed on us a certain self-control in matters of sex. Our sex instincts have so far been limited and curtailed. This process has enabled us to clear away so much of the lumber of our later nature, as to reveal for us once more the large underlying fact that before
sex,
there was
motherhood.

"You may, unless your nature be utterly corrupt, discover it for yourself in any walk across these moors of ours. The clouds, the hills, the solitude and loveliness of all, must inevitably suggest to you that Nature is female, not male. Nature, accordingly, has always been given that sex. The reason for it is obvious, and not to be disputed. Yet this female Nature will not go on to suggest to you—unless, I repeat, you are entirely corrupt—the effeminacies and frivolities of women. It is too grand, too pure, and too serious. The scene before you, therefore, will be female, without also being sexed.