The Spanish Virgin

by V. S. Pritchett

  “Yes, at the back, the old cottage.”

  “Oh, at the back? Well, it might …”

  “Oh no. It wouldn’t. It’s not a studio.”

  “But it might do. Has it a skylight?”

  “Ah, no. I wouldn’t offer it you. It has got a skylight, but …”

  “I don’t know. I don’t want much. It sounds as though it might.”

  “Ah, no. I don’t see how you could do anything with it.”

  “Well, may I see it anyway?”

  “It isn’t worth your while …”

  That was how Bantock was installed in the cottage. How it was transformed into a studio. Old Puigi gave it him on a yearly lease, and even went so far as to have a window looking seaward put into the wall. He took a great interest in the place. He carpentered. He fitted it up. He repaired the path. Had flagstones put down. And he screwed on the brass plate himself. It bore just the name, William Bantock, Studio. “In case people should think it was the hotel and bother you,” old Puigi explained!

  The summer came. William Bantock worked hard at his big canvases through the heat. Through the great licking heat. The lambent sirocco unburdened its weight of fire. The country shimmered. The mountains blenched like ore in a furnace. The blue sky was the flame-quivering wall of a kiln. The limp promontories melted into the virtreous sea. Women drove donkeys laden with lemons down the dried tendons of path through the groves. You could smell the lemons. The water was slow and still and voiceless in the irrigation gullies. The dry, bare pebbled wadis glared bone-white. The banging church-bells seemed to crack the baked air as though it were a plate in an oven. The orchards broke with fruitage. Mule-carts took all day groaning to climb the dusty cliff from the sea. The earth grew no more. It lay inert. It matured. It stopped and waited, satiated; it cracked. The sun and his golden flame ate away the rocky limestone hills and lit the dim facets of the clefts with the silvery void light of drought.

  William Bantock laboured. Often he had tried to get that first vision of his. How to get it on to canvas. Sometimes he feared he had lost the vision. No, there it was again. And he snapped his eyelids as if to prevent it from obliterating into nothing. Screwing up his brow like a leaf; as if by the exquisite constricting of his vision and the tightening of his senses he could squeeze the fading vision into existence again.

  “This is just the travail. I am getting nearer and nearer every day,” he would say to himself.

  But he knew, under all this, he was getting farther and farther away. It was like being adrift in a boat and believing the tide was taking you shorewards when you half realized all the time the current was gradually edging you out to sea, out and out.

  Old Puigi used to go to the studio now and then, puffing away; his teeth precise, even, smoky keys. He would walk around and see how the studio was. He would tap the walls. Yes, the plaster was sound. He would have to fit a new hinge to that skylight. It was always catching. Otherwise everything seemed all right. It seemed very good. Very good. Very satisfactory. Terrible, smell of paint! Not a bad smell though. Rather a sharp, enlivening, persuading smell. Smelt workmanlike. Smelt as if a job was being done. That was one thing he would say for painting: you did it with your hands. You could see your work when it was finished. You had something to show for your time.

  This fellow was working away. Mighty big canvases he had around too. All of Etna. Etna was good business. He was on the right track there. No doubt about that. People did love a volcano. “The trouble is,” thought old Puigi as he looked around, “the trouble is these things of his are so large. Far too large. Why, you’d want a pantechnicon to take them away in.”

  “Here, Mr. Bantock, why don’t you cut down—” old Puigi pulled himself up in time. “I mean you work on a very large scale, don’t you?”

  “It is a large subject.”

  “It is a grand subject.”

  “Grand, yes. That is it,” said Bantock, warmed by the sympathy in the adjective.

  “Grand and intense.”

  “Yes, that is it. That is the difficulty. To keep the intensity and to get the grandeur. Not to let the picture get loose, flabby, out of hand. Do you know?”

  “You are a brave man to try such a large canvas. It must be much harder to do a big picture than a little picture. Must use up a lot of paint too. I’m not an artist. I’m only an hotel keeper. But I remember in that big place in Naples where I was, where I was head waiter you know, the place was that big that you couldn’t put good service into it if you tried. A bell went at one end of the place and another at the other end. Someone was always unlucky. Thin, if you know what I mean. And what it cost to run it.”

  “Hotels and pictures are very different, Mr. Puigi,” said Bantock huffily. Really, I mean to compare a head waiter’s job to my middle distances!

  “Very different, indeed,” blandly agreed old Puigi. “And yet I think there is more in a picture, in a small picture. You get it concentrated. Something like that size, say,” kicking a suit-case that was lying on the floor. “You ought to have an exhibition next season. People like something they can take away.”

  “But—”

  “Ah yes, and if an artist doesn’t want custom he must have recognition.”

  “What minds those hotel people have,” muttered Bantock with scorn, when old Puigi had gone. But old Puigi stood on the step and knocked the ash out of his pipe. He watched the silver ash softly heap on the step. He had sown his little seed. A little clumsily perhaps, but since he had got the fellow into the studio he felt more sure of him. He could mould him. That is what a young man wanted—moulding. “There’s a mint of money in Etna for that fellow if he turns them out regular, suit-case size, for the tourist,” he said aloud almost. And tiptoed off, frightened that Bantock might have overheard the little soliloquy.

  So, the last act. It is a hot afternoon. It is late in the afternoon. Scene, the Greek Theatre. It always is the Greek Theatre. The tired silver of the Straits is soldered to the iron promontories. There is a steely, greenish light under that wide tray of water, a light not of the sea. Etna is dulling into neutral cloud, but a raised lance of blue sky is tapering from the sizzling crater to the zenith, broadening, broadening like a signal of life in the pewter monotone of the afternoon. A sign from the witch. And there is Bantock. Look at him. Squaring his easel, kicking a leg out, almost brutally. Now he is facing it. Etna. Always Etna and the theatre below. And now he is going to get it. He is excited, for two new words are rolling like a crescendo of drums in his head. Intensity! Recognition!

  The canvas is much smaller.

  That was the beginning. As old Puigi said “I made him.” “Make them suit-case size,” I said. “Of course, not as bluntly as that. It’s no good. Just sowed the little seed; it’s far the best way.”

  And, after a longish silence, “My, how he did rave about those Greeks.”

  Then one day out came the question that had been troubling old Puigi, making him doubt his judgment at moments, making him uncertain of himself for the first time in his life—the doubt that had suddenly appeared in his mind the day I asked him not to strike that match.

  He said, “I suppose they weren’t worth anything, were they, those big pictures, you know—in that—in that—er—room?”

  The White Rabbit

  The houses on the south side of Rambledon Common are large Edwardian villas, each with three or four ornate white verandahs. These houses stand in large gardens, fifty yards from the road, and look, because of their cleanness, finish and white paint, like the bridges of luxurious liners. They are the sort of house which goes back a long way, and is even larger than it seems, and only after you have lived in it a long time can you really afford to live in it. The beginning of the lease is the bad time; men “in the City” buy these houses just when their affairs are starting to prosper, but always a little before prosperity has blossomed into its full bland magnanimity. Until then, there is war for the men, quarrelling anxiety for the women, and a certain supercili
ousness among the servants; everyone knows it is war, a kind of domestic reconnoitring, petty and nervous; and every one watches day by day for his little wisp of victory.

  At Mr. Gough’s house on the Common the skirmishing became stealthy when the new governess arrived. Mr. Gough, an impassioned organizer, whose success in business was due, like all success, to delegating to others his ideas, as the machinery of his mind produced them, engaged the governess himself. He thought he was very clever to find such a clever woman. He half lowered one eyelid and dropped his mouth open as he always did when he had done something shrewd and was half afraid of it:

  “Thank God,” he said to his wife, “we have at last got an intelligent woman for the damned children.” His eye quivered nervously as though he had cigarette smoke in it.

  For one of these days, when there was more leisure, he was going to devote a lot of time solely to intelligence; also he was reserving some vague cycle of gilded years for the love of his children and for the enjoyment of their gratitude. When he retired perhaps: or even earlier, when he went up to the office at eleven. Until then, until this late baptism of accumulating paternal affection, they were in limbo, as good as damned, and he meant ‘damned’ when he said it.

  “I am glad,” his wife said as the days went by, in the tone of one who having borne two children can let who will be intelligent, “that you are happy.”

  Mrs. Gough did not express her dislike of Miss Spencer, the new governess, more strongly than this.

  So, when a queen loses her crown for a while and moves in exile without insignia or outward sign, you still know she is a queen. She will say a word, or tap her finger, or pick a flower from the table, or hum a confident tune, or by a discreet smile turn something she has seen or heard into a tribute.

  But the war in Mr. Gough’s house became more open and passed like electricity into all its members. Miss Spencer, the new governess, was aware that she had created a situation.

  “It is so interesting,” she exclaimed to herself, and, in strictest confidence, to all her friends. “He is Big Business, you know, most frightfully Big Business, and in mind virtually one of Us. But she is simply years behind him. She doesn’t begin to understand. It is a most frightfully enormous responsibility.”

  And with each emphasis her voice stretched higher and higher. Miss Spencer had very dark hair and a complexion like unbleached linen, and thin mauve lips. Her forehead was very naked. She was neither tall nor short, stout nor thin, but she looked as though she would become stoutish in time because her eyes mused and brightened and blinked slowly with compressed reflections under the thick lenses of her pincenez. There was something drawling, exact and feline about her. The great thing, she said, was awareness, that beautiful word, and when she said this, it seemed that every pore of her skin must be stretching and opening until it was on the point of splitting; and the thin lines that part from the lips of a woman of thirty-five seemed to be indefinitely extended like the rays of a laboratory lamp or the whiskers of a cat. She was one of those unemotional people who speak with an intense emphasis as if endeavouring to pump blasts of emotion into something which is essentially two dimensional. “One ought to feel intensely,” she would say.

  The governing mood of her life was a sense of injustice or rather what she called a sense of justice, which had been roused by the fact that she had fallen in love three times with married men who had drawn back at the last moment and remained faithful to their wives. Strictest impartiality to others was therefore her principle. She knew that she and Mr. Gough saw eye to eye, or rather mind to mind. She knew in consequence that she and Mrs. Gough did not see mind to mind.

  “No woman ought to be allowed to bring up her own children,” he had said.

  “But I agree with you most frightfully,” Miss Spencer had replied, as though in pain, as though she were suffering for him. This was her chief fascination: she could really make you believe she was suffering for you.

  “It is very difficult, a most interesting situation,” she told her friends, as she analyzed it for them. “It really seems that I am morally bound to estrange the children from their mother.” Her sorrowful duty.

  She thought of Mr. Gough and sighed. Mr. Gough thought of her and sighed, but not such a long sigh, because he had not very much time. And Mrs. Gough smiled like a queen and shook her crown of yellow curls and waited for even the smallest revenges which she knew her subjects, the children, would bring her from time to time.

  Only at night, when the household was horizontal and unconscious, did the skirmishing cease. Once on their legs everyone stood to arms. After the maid, Mr. Gough was the first out of bed, beginning his exasperated awareness of the day: it was as if this energetic idealist suffered from an acute sensitiveness of the eyes caused by waking too early and exposing them to the dawn. And so, one morning, as Miss Spencer was awaking to the hope of enjoying a new awareness of that which she ought to experience—always ought, ought, ought in Miss Spencer’s life—Mr. Gough bluntly jumped out of bed as Jehovah might, to see what he would have to put right. For the dazzling energy of the sunlight filling him with its own energy could remind him only that if ecstasy were shining on his neighbours’ trees, lawns and windows, only wrong and calamity occurred among his possessions. Every draught of that exciting air redoubled his fervour. He put on his dressing-gown and marched out of his room to battle. Why couldn’t everybody feel like this in the morning? They were missing something. They were wasting their lives. He had bought an expensive house and here they were refusing to enjoy it. He walked into the bedroom of his small son Geoffrey. “I’ll break that lazy young cur of his vile habit of staying in bed,” he said enthusiastically.

  But as he entered the room what should he see on the pillow but a rabbit, a live one, Geoffrey’s pet white rabbit. He had caught his children again in the vile habit of taking those filthy animals to bed. The room stank.

  “God in heaven!” shouted Mr. Gough, “I thought I had broken you of that.” And such a tirade. Loathsome boy, dishonest boy, unthoughtful boy, ungrateful boy, unchristian boy, what did he mean by it?

  “Nothing,” said Geoffrey, sitting up in bed, his gray eyes watching his father’s for the next move. His father moved towards the bed and Geoffrey rolled out on the far side just in time. His father’s forehead was now flushed with temper. With his bare neck and dressing-gown he looked like an angry monk. He had not yet shaved, and his growth was an harsh indigo hedge of bristle that grew down to his suddenly pale silky throat. He was covered with small curly black hairs; Geoffrey had seen him once in the bathroom, and he was afraid.

  “Come out of that, you cur,” shouted Mr. Gough, and finding the rabbit nearest to hand picked it up by its ears. Its legs skipped round and round like the wheels of a clock-work engine when it is lifted from the floor. The creature tore at Mr. Gough’s dressing-gown, until he ran downstairs and tossed the beast into the garden.

  His temper was well roused, but coming upstairs again to renew the engagement he met Miss Spencer. She was dressed already.

  “Oh—oh, good morning, Miss Spencer,” he said, hurriedly assuming politeness, tightening the cord of his dressing-gown. He was in awe of her.

  “Geoffrey—er—I have just found—Geoffrey has taken that d— that rabbit to bed with him again. I have just been showing him. I have just been explaining to him Perhaps you would speak to him. Children don’t always take things from their parents.… Nothing,” he added, with an almost pretty melancholy, and very conscious that his pyjama legs were caught in the heels of his shoes, “nothing except money.”

  He slippered into the bathroom whence the steam was clouding. He undressed. Excellent woman. He stepped into the bath and the water scalded two pink rings round his ankles. She was so efficient, so punctual, so erudite. He sat down cautiously, she—she—she—made him feel—he must—be—an exceptionally discerning man. In—tell-i-i-igence! Ah! Folds of water! He lay down in the bath. Time melted into eternity, eternity into steam. Ge
offrey, rabbit and all his trouble disappeared. Warmth and peace, at last.

  For half an hour he snorted, steamed and slopped water about. But a miserable coolness dawned in the water. He dripped out irritably. He went to his room and dressed slowly. Gradually his appearance became shapely in spite of incipient corpulence. He looked in the two mirrors which gave the most satisfying reflection of his profile, avoiding the thickness of the neck and accentuating the meditativeness of the brow. He felt the firm silkiness of the cheeks with secret delight. Who would have thought this trim, energetic man of iron in the carefully pressed, brushed suit, was like a gorilla covered in little black hairs!

  But damn! The time! My God, look at the time, barely enough for breakfast, barely enough for the train, and all that confounded little devil Geoffrey’s fault. He ran down to breakfast. He cursed his wife, his children and everything. He accused them of trying to starve him, of trying to wear him down with a hundred malicious trivialities, of trying to exterminate him with their interference and bad temper.… If only his wife had had a head on her like Miss Spencer’s. His grievance came bellowing out.

  “I have had cause to speak to Geoffrey again. He must be broken of his vile habits, the hound!” he said, crunching toast.

  “Yes, darling, but Geoffrey isn’t—”

  “Yes, yes, of course I thought as much. There you go again. You defend him naturally. You’re his mother!”

  He appealed despairingly to Miss Spencer.

  Miss Spencer’s glasses shone like two black moons of wisdom. She was suffering for him, yearning to suffer more.

  “Where is Geoffrey? Where is he? What does he mean by not being down for breakfast with me? Is he ashamed of his father, eh? By Heaven—”

  “I told him to go upstairs and fetch me something,” lied his wife, and added slyly, “It is my fault, not Miss Spencer’s.”

  Miss Spencer appealed to him with a glare.

  “Who said it was Miss Spencer’s fault?” he demanded at this prompting.