Antic Hay

too, with the twist of an ivory statuette carved out of the curving tip of a great tusk. Only somehow in Lypiatt’s portrait the curve seemed to lack grace, it was without point, it had no sense. “You’ve made me look,” said Mrs. Viveash at last, “as though I were being blown out of shape by the wind.” All this show of violence—what was the point of it? She didn’t like it, she didn’t like it at all. But Casimir was delighted with her comment. He slapped his thighs and once more laughed his restless, sharp-featured face to pieces. “Yes, by God,” he shouted, “by God, that’s right! Blown out of shape by the wind. That’s it: you’ve said it.” He began stamping up and down the room again, gesticulating. “The wind, the great wind that’s in me.” He struck his forehead. “The wind of life, the wild west wind. I feel it inside me, blowing, blowing. It carries me along with it; for though it’s inside me, it’s more than I am, it’s a force that comes from somewhere else, it’s Life itself, it’s God. It blows me along in the teeth of opposing fate, it makes me work on, fight on.” He was like a man who walks along a sinister road at night and sings to keep up his own spirits, to emphasize and magnify his own existence. “And when I paint, when I write or improvise my music, it bends the things I have in my mind, it pushes them in one direction, so that everything I do has the look of a tree that streams north-east with all its branches and all its trunk from the root upwards, as though it were trying to run from before the Atlantic gale.” Lypiatt stretched out his two hands and, with fingers splayed out to the widest and trembling in the excessive tension of the muscles, moved them slowly upwards and sideways, as though he were running his palms up the stem of a little wind-wizened tree on a hilltop above the ocean. Mrs. Viveash continued to look at the unfinished portrait. It was as noisy and easy and immediately effective as a Vermouth advertisement in the streets of Padua. Cinzano, Bonomelli, Campari—illustrious names. Giotto and Mantegna mouldered meanwhile in their respective chapels. “And look at this,” Lypiatt went on. He took down the canvas that was clamped to the easel and held it out for her inspection. It was one of Casimir’s abstract paintings: a procession of machine-like forms rushing up diagonally from right to left across the canvas, with as it were a spray of energy blowing back from the crest of the wave towards the top right-hand corner. “In this painting,” he said, “I symbolize the Artist’s conquering spirit—rushing on the universe, making it its own.” He began to declaim: “Look down, Conquistador, There on the valley’s broad green floor, There lies the lake, the jewelled cities gleam, Chalco and Tlacopan Awaiting the coming Man; Look down on Mexico, Conquistador, Land of your golden dream. Or the same idea in terms of music——” and Lypiatt dashed to the piano and evoked a distorted ghost of Scriabin. “You see?” he asked feverishly, when the ghost was laid again and the sad cheap jangling had faded again into silence. “You _feel_? The artist rushes on the world, conquers it, gives it beauty, imposes a moral significance.” He returned to the picture. “This will be fine when it’s finished,” he said. “Tremendous. You feel the wind blowing there, too.” And with a pointing finger he followed up the onrush of the forms. “The great southwester driving them on. ‘Like leaves from an enchanter fleeing.’ Only not chaotically, not in disorder. They’re blown, so to speak, in column of four—by a conscious wind.” He leaned the canvas against the table and was free again to march and brandish his conquering fists. “Life,” he said, “life—that’s the great, essential thing. You’ve got to get life into your art, otherwise it’s nothing. And life only comes out of life, out of passion and feeling; it can’t come out of theories. That’s the stupidity of all this chatter about art for art’s sake and the æsthetic emotions and purely formal values and all that. It’s only the formal relations that matter; one subject is just as good as another—that’s the theory. You’ve only got to look at the pictures of the people who put it into practice to see that it won’t do. Life comes out of life. You must paint with passion and the passion will stimulate your intellect to create the right formal relations. And to paint with passion, you must paint things that passionately interest you, moving things, human things. Nobody, except a mystical pantheist, like Van Gogh, can seriously be as much interested in napkins, apples and bottles as in his lover’s face, or the resurrection, or the destiny of man. Could Mantegna have devised his splendid compositions if he had painted arrangements of Chianti flasks and cheeses instead of Crucifixions, martyrs and triumphs of great men? Nobody but a fool could believe it. And could I have painted that portrait if I hadn’t loved you, if you weren’t killing me?” Ah, Bonomelli and illustrious Cinzano! “Passionately I paint passion. I draw life out of life. And I wish them joy of their bottles and their Canadian apples and their muddy table napkins with the beastly folds in them that look like loops of tripe.” Once more Lypiatt disintegrated himself with laughter; then was silent. Mrs. Viveash nodded, slowly and reflectively. “I think you’re right,” she said. Yes, he was surely right; there must be life, life was the important thing. That was precisely why his paintings were so bad—she saw now; there was no life in them. Plenty of noise there was, and gesticulation and a violent galvanized twitching; but no life, only the theatrical show of it. There was a flaw in the conduit; somewhere between the man and his work life leaked out. He protested too much. But it was no good; there was no disguising the deadness. Her portrait was a dancing mummy. He bored her now. Did she even positively dislike him? Behind her unchanging pale eyes Mrs. Viveash wondered. But in any case, she reflected, one needn’t always like the people with whom one associates. There are music halls as well as confidential boudoirs; some people are admitted to the tea-party and the _tête-à-tête_, others, on a stage invisible, poor things! to themselves, do their little song-and-dance, roll out their characteristic patter, and having provided you with your entertainment are dismissed with their due share of applause. But then, what if they become boring? “Well,” said Lypiatt at last—he had stood there, motionless, for a long time, biting his nails, “I suppose we’d better begin our sitting.” He picked up the unfinished portrait and adjusted it on the easel. “I’ve wasted a lot of time,” he said, “and there isn’t, after all, so much of it to waste.” He spoke gloomily, and his whole person had become, all of a sudden, curiously shrunken and deflated. “There isn’t so much of it,” he repeated, and sighed. “I still think of myself as a young man, young and promising, don’t you know. Casimir Lypiatt—it’s a young, promising sort of name, isn’t it? But I’m not young, I’ve passed the age of promise. Every now and then I realize it, and it’s painful, it’s depressing.” Mrs. Viveash stepped up on to the model’s dais and took her seat. “Is that right?” she asked. Lypiatt looked first at her, then at his picture. Her beauty, his passion—were they only to meet on the canvas? Opps was her lover. Time was passing; he felt tired. “That’ll do,” he said and began painting. “How young are you?” he asked after a moment. “Twenty-five, I should imagine,” said Mrs. Viveash. “Twenty-five? Good Lord, it’s nearly fifteen years since I was twenty-five. Fifteen years, fighting all the time. God, how I hate people sometimes! Everybody. It’s not their malignity I mind; I can give them back as good as they give me. It’s their power of silence and indifference, it’s their capacity for making themselves deaf. Here am I with something to say to them, something important and essential. And I’ve been saying it for more than fifteen years, I’ve been shouting it. They pay no attention. I bring them my head and heart on a charger, and they don’t even notice that the things are there. I sometimes wonder how much longer I can manage to go on.” His voice had become very low, and it trembled. “One’s nearly forty, you know....” The voice faded huskily away into silence. Languidly and as though the business exhausted him, he began mixing colours on his palette. Mrs. Viveash looked at him. No, he wasn’t young; at the moment, indeed, he seemed to have become much older than he really was. An old man was standing there, peaked and sharp and worn. He had failed, he was unhappy. But the world would have been unjuster, less discriminating if it had given him success. “Some people believe in you,” she said; there was nothing else for her to say. Lypiatt looked up at her. “You?” he asked. Mrs. Viveash nodded, deliberately. It was a lie. But was it possible to tell the truth? “And then there is the future,” she reassured him, and her faint death-bed voice seemed to prophesy with a perfect certainty. “You’re not forty yet; you’ve got twenty, thirty years of work in front of you. And there were others, after all, who had to wait—a long time—sometimes till after they were dead. Great men; Blake, for instance....” She felt positively ashamed; it was like a little talk by Doctor Frank Crane. But she felt still more ashamed, when she saw that Casimir had begun to cry and that the tears were rolling, one after another, slowly down his face. He put down his palette, he stepped on to the dais, he came and knelt at Mrs. Viveash’s feet. He took one of her hands between his own and he bent over it, pressing it to his forehead, as though it were a charm against unhappy thoughts, sometimes kissing it; soon it was wet with tears. He wept almost in silence. “It’s all right,” Mrs. Viveash kept repeating, “it’s all right,” and she laid her free hand on his bowed head, she patted it comfortingly as one might pat the head of a large dog that comes and thrusts its muzzle between one’s knees. She felt, even as she made it, how meaningless and unintimate the gesture was. If she had liked him, she would have run her fingers through his hair; but somehow his hair rather disgusted her. “It’s all right, all right.” But, of course, it wasn’t all right; and she was comforting him under false pretences and he was kneeling at the feet of somebody who simply wasn’t there—so utterly detached, so far away she was from all this scene and all his misery. “You’re the only person,” he said at last, “who cares or understands.” Mrs. Viveash could almost have laughed. He began once more to kiss her hand. “Beautiful and enchanting Myra—you were always that. But now you’re good and dear as well, now I know you’re kind.” “Poor Casimir!” she said. Why was it that people always got involved in one’s life? If only one could manage things on the principle of the railways! Parallel tracks—that was the thing. For a few miles you’d be running at the same speed. There’d be delightful conversation out of the windows; you’d exchange the omelette in your restaurant car for the vol-au-vent in theirs. And when you’d said all there was to say, you’d put on a little more steam, wave your