Jonathan turned. He said, “You like it?”
The other answered, “No one has painted me so well for a hundred years. Everything’s there.”
Jonathan went back. He did not quite see how to carry on the conversation; the allusion to “a hundred years” baffled him. At last he said doubtfully, “And Lady Wallingford?”
The Clerk slowly looked round at him as if he were recalled. He said and his face twitched slightly, “Lady Wallingford? What has she to do with it?”
“She was rather annoyed with it,” said Jonathan. “In fact, she talked, as no doubt she told you, about insects and imbeciles.”
The Clerk, still looking at him, said, “They aren’t insects; they are something less. But insects is the nearest you can get. And as for imbecile, haven’t you read Sapientia adepti stultitia mundi? That is why your work is so wonderful.”
“Oh!” said Jonathan.
“That,” the Clerk went on, turning his head again, “is what I am to these creatures, and Lady Wallingford (as you call her) is one of them. She thinks herself someone, but presently she’ll find out. It’s quite good for them to be hypnotized; they’re much happier. But you—you are different; you are a genius. You must paint me often. Now you have shown me as I am to them and to myself, you must paint me often as I am in myself.”
The chill sense of death was receding from Jonathan’s heart. He began to feel that life was still possible, even life with Betty. He also wondered what his own painting of the face was like. He had first thought it was an ordinary portrait; then he had been uneasy about the bewilderment that seemed to show in it. Richard had agreed. Lady Wallingford had spoken of imbecility. Now Simon seemed to see something else beyond that, something that was hidden in that and yet contradicted it. He might perhaps tell Lady Wallingford; he might make everything clear for him and Betty. In a second of silence Jonathan had married Betty, set up a house, painted Father Simon a stupendous portrait of himself without the beetles, painted several other shattering successes at the Peace Conferences and after, made a lot of money, become a father and an immortal at once, and was back again in the studio with the immediate necessity of explaining to Simon how all this was to be brought about. Better not go into further details of the painting; better get on with the main job.
He began, “Then you’ll speak to——” but the other was already speaking. He was saying, “You must come with me, Mr. Drayton. I must have one or two people with me who are something more than these other creatures. The Doctrine is good for them; one gets nowhere by fighting it. All your books have it—the Koran, the New Testament, the Law. Hitler fought it; where is Hitler? There is nothing better, for those who need it. But you are an exception. You belong to yourself—and to me. Great art is apostolic. You must not lessen yourself. You are to be a master. I can do something to help you, but then you must have courage to paint the right things.”
Jonathan listened to this with a certain warmth. He was a little shaken by great art being apostolic, but there was no doubt a sense in which it was true, though Sir Joshua’s “common observation and plain understanding” pleased him better. He did think he was a remarkable painter and he did not care how often he was told so. But he did not lose sight of his main point. As soon as Simon paused, he said, “Then you’ll speak to Lady Wallingford?”
Simon’s voice had seemed to be closer and clearer. It receded again and grew huskier as he said, “What do you so want with Lady Wallingford?”
“I want to marry her daughter,” Jonathan said.
The Clerk dropped his eyes to the ground. He said, after a moment, “I am not sure that you’re wise. But it shall be as you like. I will talk to her—yes, in a few days, if you still wish. You shall have the girl if you want her. Show me something else.”
“I haven’t much here,” Jonathan said. “The war paintings——”
“Oh the war!” the Clerk said. “The war, like Hitler, was a foolery. I am the one who is to come, not Hitler! Not the war; something else.”
“Well, there’s this thing of London,” Jonathan said. “Wait, I’ll turn it for you.” He went round to the other easel, to the canvas on which he had not looked since the early afternoon because of all that had since happened, but now he did and saw it as he had seen it with Richard. He knew the validity of his own work—yet he knew also that he might so easily be wrong, as innumerable unfortunate bad painters had been. There was no way of being certain. But at least he believed that painting could be valid, could hold an experience related to the actuality of the world, and in itself valuable to mind and heart. He hoped this painting might be that; more he could not say. He saw beyond it the figure of the Clerk looming, and the window behind him, and it seemed almost as if he were now looking at the other painting made actual and released from canvas. The figure was there; the blank window behind; he could not at this distance and in this light see through it; it was but an opening into bleakness. And he himself the only other being there. He looked at the Clerk’s face and it too hung blank as the window, empty of meaning. “I am being a fool,” he thought, and looked, as he stepped back after turning the easel again, at the light on the canvas. He said, with the least flash of arrogance in his voice, “There! What do you think of that?”
The Clerk looked and flinched. Jonathan saw a quiver go through him; he shut his eyes and opened them. He said, “No, no; it’s too bright. I can’t see it properly. Move it.”
Jonathan said coldly, “I’m sorry you don’t like it. Myself, I think it’s better than the other.”
The Clerk said, “That is because you do not quite understand the meaning of your own work. This is a dream; that other is a fact. It is simply I who have come. I shall give all these little people peace because they believe in me. But these fancies of light would distract them. There is only one art and that is to show them their master. You had better—well, I know how you painters love even your mistakes and I will not say you should destroy it. But hide it for a year and come with me, and then look at it again and you will see it as I do.”
Jonathan said cautiously, “Well, I’ll see what Betty says. Anyhow I shan’t have much time for views of the City during the next year or so.” The words, and the tone, of mastery did not seem altogether unsuitable to the towering form; he himself was on the defensive. The very hint that there was much more in the other picture than he had supposed, that he painted more greatly than he knew, subtly soothed him. He was the more ready to owe Betty to a man who saw so deeply. He added, “You won’t forget to speak to Lady Wallingford?”
“Presently,” the Clerk said. “But you must remember that you have a great work to do. When I am in union again, you shall paint me as I shall be. Soon.”
Jonathan murmured something. The conversation was getting beyond him. He wished his visitor would go away before he said the wrong thing. The Clerk, almost as if he too felt that all had been said, turned. He said, “I’ll come to you again, or else I’ll send for you.”
“I may be moved about,” Jonathan said. “We of the Services, you know——”
“Your service is with me,” the other answered. “I or—or Betty will let you know.” His eyes stared out through the blank window. “What you shall paint! Trust me. I will make you … never mind. But put the other thing away. The color is wrong.”
He gave Jonathan no opportunity for a reply. He went towards the door and Jonathan followed. At parting he raised his hand a little. He came out into the street and the moonlight and began to walk.
He went towards Highgate and he went easily though at great speed, and as he went the City seemed to dwindle around him. His mind was very earnestly set on himself. As he went the Jewish quality in his face seemed to deepen; the occasional policemen whom he passed thought they saw a Jew walking by night. Indeed that august race had reached in this being its second climax. Two thousand years of its history were drawing to a close; until this thing had happened it could not be free. Its priesthood—the priesthood of a nation
—had been since Abraham determined to one End. But when, after other terrible wars had shaken the Roman peace, and armies had moved over Europe, and Caesar (being all that Caesar could be) had been stabbed in his own central place, when then that End had been born, they were not aware of that End. It had been proposed that their lofty tradition should be made almost unbearably august; that they should be made the blood companions of their Maker, the own peculiar house and family of its Incarnacy—no more than the Gentiles in the free equality of souls, but much more in the single hierarchy of kindred flesh. But deception had taken them; they had, bidding a scaffold for the blasphemer, destroyed their predestined conclusion, and the race which had been set for the salvation of the world became a judgment and even a curse to the world and to themselves. Yet the oaths sworn in heaven remained. It had been a Jewish girl who, at the command of the Voice which sounded in her ears, in her heart, along her blood and through the central cells of her body, had uttered everywhere in herself the perfect Tetragrammaton. What the high priest vicariously spoke among the secluded mysteries of the Temple, she substantially pronounced to God. Redeemed from all division in herself, whole and identical in body and soul and spirit, she uttered the Word and the Word became flesh in her. Could It have been received by her own people, the grand Judean gate would have been opened for all peoples. It could not. They remained alien—to It and to all, and all to them and—too much!—to It. The Gentiles, summoned by that other Jew of Tarsus, could not bear their vicarious office. Bragging themselves to be the new Israel, they slandered and slew the old, and the old despised and hated the bragging new. Till at last there rose in Europe something which was neither, and set itself to destroy both.
And when that had been thwarted, this also which was to happen had at last happened. Jew and Christian alike had waited for the man who now walked through the empty London streets. He had been born in Paris, in one of those hiding-places of necromancy which all the energy of the Fourteenth Louis had not quite stamped out. He was a child of the nobility, but he was hardly yet a boy when the Revolution had broken out. His family had moved safely through it, protected by wealth and cunning and in extremes by another kind of cunning learned in very ancient schools. His father had been to the world a scholar as well as a nobleman, one of the early philologists, but to a different circle and to his son his philology had been quite other. He knew sounds and the roots of sounds, almost the beginnings of sounds; the vibrations that overthrew and the vibrations that built up. The son followed his father.
He remembered now, as he walked, how he had come to know himself. It was not often he permitted himself the indulgence of memory, but that painted face which Jonathan had supposed to be blank of meaning yet in which he had read all he wished to read, seeing it full of power and portent—that artificiality had opened up recollection within him. He remembered how he had seen the crowds in Paris, their poverty, their need, their rage, and (so small as he was) understood how men need both comfort and control. And he had seen Napoleon rise and fall, but before that mastery was done his childish dreams of being king or emperor had been better instructed. He had learned three things from that small college of which his father was president—that there was another power to use, that there were ways of directing it, that many men would pay much to learn them. Could they be sold! but they could not be. They were private to those who had the right by nature, as all art is, but these especially to the high priestly race. Only a Jew could utter the Jewish, which was the final, word of power.
There were not in the circles where he grew up any of the mere obscenities of magic—no spectacular outrages of the Black Mass or profane sensualities of the Sabbath. There were certain bloody disciplines to test the postulant—it was all. The mass of men were at once despised and pitied by the chaste sorcerers. He learned to shelter, to feed, to console them, but at the same time that he was separate from them. He had watched a man starve, but he was not cruel; it was in his training. He was not lustful; only once in all his life had he lain with a woman, and that for a rational purpose. He had not been kept from talk with holy Rabbis and charitable priests; if he had chosen their way no one would have interfered with him unless he had become inconvenient to the great work. He did not so choose; he preferred his own.
He was not, in fact, much different from any man, but the possibilities slowly opened to him were more rare. There shaped itself gradually in his mind a fame beyond any poet’s and a domination beyond any king’s. But it was fame and domination that he desired, as they did. That his magical art extended where theirs could never reach was his luck. The understanding of his reach had come when he first assisted at a necromantic operation. As the dead body stood and spoke he felt the lordship of that other half of the world. Once, as he had learned the tale, the attempt at domination had been made and failed. The sorcerer who had attempted it had also been a Jew, a descendant of the house of David, who clothed in angelic brilliance had compelled a woman of the same house to utter the Name, and something more than mortal had been born. But in the end the operation had failed. Of the end of the sorcerer himself there were no records; Joseph ben David had vanished. The living thing that had been born of his feminine counterpart had perished miserably. It had been two thousand years before anyone had dared to risk the attempt again.
He came up towards Highgate, and as he came he let his memories fade. He put away the recollection of the painting; the time for his spiritual enthronement was not quite come. But he felt the City lessen—not only London, but all bodies and souls of men. He lifted his head; his face was lean and hungry under the moon. He felt himself walking alone among tiny houses among which men and women ran about under his protection and by his will. There waited him, in the house to which he was going, the means of another operation than his coming empery in this world; of which his child was the instrument. For a moment he thought of Jonathan and Jonathan’s love. He smiled—or rather a sudden convulsion passed across his face, a kind of muscular spasm rather than a smile. It was not meant to be unkind; he did not dislike Jonathan, and he wished his genius to thrive and paint the grand master even more intensely. But Betty was for another purpose. Nor was he even aware that what had once been a smile was now a mere constriction. One cannot smile at no one, and there was no one at whom he could smile. He was alone. He went on, ignorantly grimacing.
Chapter Four
THE DREAM
In the house at Highgate Betty Wallingford was lying awake. She was wholly wretched. Her mother, after they had returned from that secret conversation in Holborn in which she had not been allowed to take part, had sent her to bed. She had wished to protest; she had wished to ring up Jonathan. But it would have been quite useless. She could not remember a time when it would not have been useless. If she had been Lady Wallingford’s real daughter, she might have had a better chance, or so sometimes she thought. But since, years ago, Lady Wallingford had spoken of her adoption, she had always felt at a disadvantage. No allusion was ever made to it now. She had tried, once or twice, to ask Lady Wallingford about her real parents, but her adopted mother had only said, “We will not talk of that, Betty,” and so of course they did not. As for Sir Bartholomew, she had been forbidden to mention it to him, and anyhow he was hardly ever at home and was only interested in air matters. So she only knew she was not what everyone thought she was.
Everyone in London, that is. There was in the north, in Yorkshire, a small house where she and Lady Wallingford sometimes went. They always went by themselves, and when they got there she was not even treated as a daughter. She was, purely and simply, the servant. It was supposed to be training for her, in case (as might happen, Lady Wallingford said) she ever had to earn her own living. She did the work; she showed in the Vicar or any other local visitor, and then she went back to her nice bright kitchen, where she had that morning’s Daily Sketch (which Lady Wallingford took in for her) and her radio on which she was only allowed to listen to the most popular music (because, Lady Wallingford sai
d, that was what girls of that class liked). She was called Bettina there. “Ridiculous names these girls have nowadays!” Lady Wallingford had once said to the Vicar as he was leaving; and the Vicar had said, “Not at all ridiculous! a very good name.” But he had not looked very attentive and Lady Wallingford never let her go out alone, so there was no help there. And anyhow there was no need for help; what was there to help?
It had been going on for a long time, even before she had left school. She had always been in terror lest any of the other girls should pass and see her from a car. Or even, quite impossibly, call. She had tried to think what she would say, and to practice saying it. There would be nothing unusual in her mother and herself being there, but to be treated as a housemaid … She knew they would never believe anything she could say, and still more certainly that she could never say it. She used to lie awake by night thinking of it and wondering if the next day would bring them, but it never did; and presently the two of them always went back to London and then she was Betty Wallingford again—only of course she was no more Betty Wallingford than she was a housemaid. She was nothing and no one. Her mistress-mother, her mother-mistress, told her what to do; she and the man who sometimes came to see her, this Father Simon.
Of all the girls at school, two only now remained in her mind; indeed, she knew them a little still. She would have liked to be friends with Lester Grantham, who was now Lester Furnival, but it had never come about. At school Lester had never wanted to be bothered with her, though she had been in a vague way half-scornfully kind, and when she and Lady Wallingford met they had never got on very well. Lester had once or twice called with Evelyn Mercer, who was the other girl, but Betty did not like Evelyn. She might have borne Lester knowing about her being Bettina, but she would have been anguished by Evelyn’s finding out, and Evelyn was the sort of person who did find things out. When Evelyn came to see her, she used to sit and talk to her; she had hunted her down at school sometimes just to talk to her. But it used to be horrible and she would cry, and even now Evelyn would ask so many questions and tell so many horrid stories that Betty felt she could not bear it. Of course, she had to, because Evelyn sat, eying her and talking. So that presently she became the very image of Betty’s fear, more even than Lady Wallingford; and one of her worse nightmares was of running away from Evelyn, who was racing after her, calling, “Bettina! Bettina!” And other acquaintances she had none.
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