“She could have made time,” Mrs. Bulloch returned, “and ye’ll remember she said that Grace was too inquisitive—who minds folks being inquisitive unless they’ve something to hide?”
“Ye’re thinking—”
“I’m not thinking anything, Thomas,” said Mrs. Bulloch somewhat inaccurately, and she took up her half-knitted sock.
Chapter Ten
His willow picture finished, Darnay had started on an entirely different regime. Instead of working day after day at the same subject, he moved about, ranging the countryside, and brought back sketches and queer half-finished studies of clouds and bare trees and rolling hills. These he stuck up in his studio on a shelf he had made himself, and sometimes Sue, going in to call him to a meal, would find him standing in the middle of the room, staring at them, his hands in his pockets and an unlit pipe in his mouth.
When Sue got back from Beilford, after her visit to the Bullochs, she found Darnay sitting in the kitchen reading The Scotsman. “It’s warmer here,” he told her, somewhat apologetically, for he was aware that Miss Bun was a stickler for propriety and liked him to keep to his own part of the house.
“You should have kept up the fire in the lounge,” said Sue sternly. “I knew how it would be if I went out.”
Darnay smiled. It amused him to be called to order by his housekeeper. She was such a quaint little creature, so practical and serious, and yet with a sense of humor all her own.
“What have you got there?” he asked as she laid her parcels down on the table. “What’s this, eh?”
He pointed to a quarterly magazine that Sue had purchased in Beilford. It was titled Brothers of the Brush and the outside cover displayed a highly colored reproduction of a surrealist painting.
She blushed. She had bought the magazine with the idea of educating herself in art so that the next time Darnay asked her to give her opinion on a picture she would know exactly what to say. Glancing through it on the bus, she had seen at once that it was the very thing she wanted—when she had mastered this she would no longer be an uneducated savage in his eyes.
“Miss Bun!” he said, half laughing and half serious. “Miss Bun, I won’t have it. You were going to study this frightful monstrosity in secret—deny it if you dare—and in a few days I should have had you prattling to me about depth and grouping and impasto—and oh, how I should have hated it!”
“But I thought—”
“It does credit to the kindness of your heart that you were willing to take all this trouble, but believe me, I prefer my gentle savage, my Woman Friday.”
“I could learn,” she began breathlessly.
“You could learn,” he agreed quite gravely. “You could learn all the jargon of the art critic—there isn’t a doubt of that—but it would take you years of study to even begin to understand what you were talking about.”
She gazed at him wide-eyed. “Then it’s no good,” she said hopelessly. “I could never be any help.”
“But you are a help!” he cried. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you. You taught me more about my picture in two minutes than the best art critic in London could have taught me in half an hour.”
“I only said—” began Sue, unable to believe her ears.
“I don’t know what you said,” cried Darnay excitedly. “I neither know nor care. All I know is that you made me see what I was doing and turned me from the path before it was too late. Your vision is intuitive and unspoiled—do you understand?”
It was the first time he had ever asked her if she understood what he meant, and Sue realized the importance of this. Hitherto he had talked on, not caring whether she understood or not—he had talked to please himself, because he felt like talking and there was no one else there—but now he was actually talking to her, communing with her as a person, anxious for her to understand his point.
“I don’t think I do understand…altogether,” admitted Sue.
“You know nothing, but you can see clearly with your eyes. You’re not muddled up with a lot of other people’s ideas about pictures,” Darnay explained carefully. “That’s quite clear, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” said Sue meekly. “I won’t read it, then.”
The magazine was lying on the table between them. Sue pushed it toward him and Darnay picked it up and dropped it into the fire. It went to Sue’s heart to see the magazine consumed (she had paid a shilling for it), but she made no move to stop him, and the two of them watched it burn. At first the flames licked around the edges of the glazed paper, charring and blackening the leaves, and then as it grew hotter, the whole book burst into flames and subsided into a mass of black fragments.
Darnay looked at Sue speculatively. “Tomorrow I shall paint you,” he said and lay back in the chair with a sigh.
Sue had not forgotten that she was going to be painted, but she imagined, in her ignorance of painters and their whims, that Darnay would await her convenience. She had her work to do, and work was more important than painting. Sue was busy scrubbing the kitchen floor when Darnay appeared at the door and announced that he was ready.
“But I’m not,” said Sue, plunging her scrubbing brush into the pail and retreating another yard onto the dry part of the floor. “I’ve got the potatoes to peel when I’ve finished this, and the pudding to make—maybe I’ll be ready about noon.”
“Maybe you’ll come now—this very minute,” declared Darnay, laughing. “The kitchen floor won’t run away, and we’ll have bread and cheese for lunch.”
“What!” cried Sue. “But I can’t leave all the work and—”
“You can and will.”
She looked up at him and saw to her dismay that he was quite serious and determined. She would have to go, that was obvious, and perhaps if she gave in and went now she could escape later and get the dinner on. The kitchen floor would have to wait until the afternoon.
“I’ll go change my dress,” she said, rising reluctantly from her knees.
His eyes narrowed. “I’ll paint you like that,” he said. “No, don’t take that thing off your head. I like it.”
“It’s a duster!” Sue cried.
“I don’t care what it is.”
“You’re never going to paint my picture with an old duster on my head?”
“I’m going to paint you just like that,” he declared firmly.
Sue sat down on the chair that he had arranged for her. She was miserable and nervous. She had had her photograph taken at the Beilford Gallery and had hated it, but this was much worse.
“How will I sit?” she inquired.
“Sit naturally,” he replied, moving his easel slightly and gazing at her with a strange impersonal expression in his eyes.
Sue composed herself carefully and hardened every muscle into rigid stone.
“Good heavens!” Darnay cried. “Is that a natural position for you to sit in? Would it be natural for anybody to look like that? Are you supposed to represent Marie Antoinette driving to the scaffold or what?”
Sue lifted her chin and replied with asperity, quite forgetting about her pose. Darnay began to paint.
He had intended merely to make a few rough studies of Miss Bun’s head, but he found his new subject so intriguing that his intentions vanished into thin air. It was not until he had started to paint her that he discovered she was beautiful—not beautiful perhaps by the usual canons, but beautiful in her own way. In most people of Darnay’s world, there are several strains, blending sometimes into beauty and sometimes not, but Miss Bun’s ancestors were all Lowland Scots—a long line stretching back for centuries. He thought of this as he painted and saw her pedigree written in the pure lines of her face, and he saw—or thought he saw—that this purity of race must produce beauty, a beauty of its own that may or may not be attractive to an alien eye. For instance, thought Darnay, we may not admire the golden skin and slant eyes of the
pure Mongol, but who can dare to say that the Mongol has no beauty of his own? If we do not believe that purity of race is beauty then we deny God and God’s hand in our making—in the making of the races of the world. Anthropology had always interested Darnay—anthropology from a painter’s angle. It was a matter of bones beneath that outer layer of flesh and skin that produced certain differences of curve and contour indigenous to the race from which the subject sprang. Most of the people Darnay knew were mongrels in that sense. His own wife, Elise, had a French mother and he himself a Norwegian grandmother (who had probably contributed certain characteristics of her race to his tall, spare frame and the bony structure of his head). Mongrels, thought Darnay, may be attractive or even beautiful in their early youth, but they seldom age well. Miss Bun belonged to the soil upon which she had been born and bred. She would grow into a beautiful old woman—the sort that Rembrandt loved to paint.
These were fascinating conjectures, but Darnay could not pursue them as he wished, for as soon as he left off talking Miss Bun became aware of her face. The whole thing was a damned nuisance. He should never have started on a portrait of Miss Bun; he should have stuck to his trees and clouds as he had intended. Now that he had started it was impossible to stop—the beautiful faded blue of that thing on her head, and the gorgeous hair, dark as chocolate with red and gold lights, and the creamy skin. He must talk though, for again that Medusa look had petrified the delicious curves of jaw and neck.
“I shall make some studies of you first,” he told her, “and then a proper portrait. Perhaps I’ll paint you out of doors with one of your own hills for a background. Do you love your country, Miss Bun?”
“I like it well enough,” replied Sue, somewhat embarrassed by the word.
“Have you ever been to London?”
“No, the only city I’ve been to is Edinburgh. Sometimes I’ve thought it would be grand fun to live in a city.”
“It isn’t,” Darnay told her, dabbing at the canvas with his brush. “Don’t you believe it, Miss Bun. You need a hide like a rhinoceros to live in a city—and your hide is thinner than most.”
“But why?”
“Because if you walk in a city you’re jostled by hundreds of indifferent people with indifferent eyes that look at you as if you weren’t there at all. You begin to feel you must be invisible. Hundreds and thousands of eyes, and not one pair really seeing you or caring who you are. I’d rather walk down Beilford High Street and know that everybody was saying, ‘There goes the mad painter!’ It’s better to be mad than invisible.”
She wondered about that, and he painted her eyes, longing to say, “Hold it, keep like that for five minutes—or even for one,” but refraining because he knew it would spoil everything.
“The city is impermanent,” he continued, rattling on and hardly knowing what he said. “It is the country that goes on, forever the same. D’you know Hardy’s poem about the man harrowing his field? You’ve often seen men harrowing, haven’t you? The words give you the actual feel of the earth turning over.
“Only a man harrowing clods
In a slow silent walk,
With an old horse that stumbles and nods
Half asleep as they stalk.
“Only thin smoke without flame
From the heaps of couch grass,
Yet this will go onward the same
Though dynasties pass.”
It was twenty-five minutes to one when at last Sue said, “I must go, really. There will be no time for potatoes, but there’s liver and bacon for dinner.”
“You’ll go,” he agreed, throwing down his brush, “but you’ll go rest. I’ve told you we’re having bread and cheese today—it’s been a splendid morning.”
Chapter Eleven
It had been a busy day in Mr. Bulloch’s shop, but now the stream of customers was slackening, and Mr. Bulloch left Hickie in charge and mounted the stairs to his house.
“I’ll be off now,” he said to his wife. “Hickie will see to everything. I’ll be back to supper most likely.”
“I’ll just expect ye when I see ye,” replied Mrs. Bulloch comfortably. “Maybe ye’ll stay and take supper with Sue.”
Mr. Bulloch put on his overcoat and took his soft hat off the peg, but he still lingered. “I’m wishing I knew what to say,” he murmured. “It’s difficult.”
“Ye’ll soon see what to say. I never knew ye to be at a loss yet and I’ve known ye forty-seven years come February. Away with ye, Thomas, or ye’ll miss the bus.”
“I wouldn’t be weeping over it if I did,” muttered Thomas as he shut the door and descended the front stairs to the street.
It was a fine evening, cold and starry, a thin film of ice was forming on the moist pavements as Bulloch walked down to the Market Cross. He caught the bus with a few minutes to spare and very soon he was well on his way to Tog’s Mill. The bus stopped at the top of the hill for him to alight, and he stood—as Sue had stood that first night—and watched the lights disappear down the road before descending the rough track to the house.
Mr. Bulloch had been pressed into this adventure by the importunities of his wife. He did not see what good could come of it, but he had no alternative suggestion to offer and he realized that something must be done. It was bad enough for Sue to take any sort of job, and this job was “queer”—they both felt that. Sue was too young to be shut up alone with a man, and Darnay, being an artist, was an unknown quantity to the Bullochs. He might be all right or he might not. The situation of Tog’s Mill did not help to reassure the Bullochs—Tog’s Mill was a queer place, deserted, solitary.
Mr. Bulloch had come to Tog’s Mill as a plenipotentiary. He was to see how the land lay and try to persuade Sue to come home. If possible he was to have a “wee crack” with Darnay himself and suggest that another housekeeper be found—it was a delicate mission.
Sue was very much surprised when she answered the door and found her grandfather standing on the step.
“There’s nothing wrong, is there?” she asked anxiously.
“What should be wrong?” he inquired. “Can I not come see ye without ye thinking something’s wrong?”
Sue hesitated. “Come in, then,” she said reluctantly.
He came in, well aware of her reluctance and considerably alarmed by it, and found Mr. Darnay sitting by the kitchen fire.
“This is my grandfather, Mr. Darnay,” declared Sue, and she washed her hands of the situation.
Mr. Darnay was quite equal to it. In fact, he seemed unaware that there was a situation at all. He rose and shook hands with Mr. Bulloch and invited him to sit down.
“This is the only warm room in the house,” he said, laughing, “so I’m allowed to sit here—it’s a great privilege I can tell you. The fact is we’re short of coal and the coal merchant has refused to deliver his black diamonds until the end of the week.”
“It’s a comfortable kitchen,” Mr. Bulloch said.
“You two will want a little chat,” declared Darnay, “so I’ll just leave you to it.”
“No, no!” cried Mr. Bulloch. “That’ll never do, Mr. Darnay. There’s no earthly need for ye to go freeze in a cold room—I’m not staying long anyway.”
“But you must stay to supper.”
There was a good deal of argument about it, but eventually they both gave in. Mr. Darnay remained by the kitchen fire and Mr. Bulloch stayed to supper. The two men sat down in a friendly manner and Sue resumed her place at the table near the lamp, for she was mending the linen, and light was necessary for the task.
Sue had been considerably embarrassed by her grandfather’s unexpected arrival, but now she saw that everything was all right, for they were talking to each other in the friendliest way imaginable. She listened to their talk with a queer inner excitement, surprised to find that they had so much in common. She had known her grandfather all her life, of cou
rse, but she had never heard him talk like this—it was quite a shock to find that there was so much more in him than she had suspected.
Somehow or other they had plunged straight into an argument about faith. (It was not remarkable that Darnay should talk about faith, for he would talk about anything, and his mind was packed full of information upon every subject under the sun, but that her grandfather should discuss such a subject with a perfect stranger was almost incredible. Indeed, unless Sue had heard him with her own ears, she would not have believed it.) Darnay was swift and keen. He went straight at the root of things and outran Mr. Bulloch, but Bulloch was very sure. He had thought a great deal and, arriving at certain conclusions, knew his reasons for that arrival.
“You can’t get anything worth having for nothing,” Darnay declared, offering his guest a fill of tobacco from his pouch, “and faith is worth having—it’s the only thing that can save us now, when the whole world has straws in its hair. Faith is worth working for.”
Bulloch considered this while he filled his pipe.
“To some people it’s a leap in the dark,” Darnay continued earnestly. “To others, a struggle, like the time Israel wrestled with God. To others it’s a search (but I think you must have had it and lost it before you can search for it), like the woman who lost the piece of silver and had to sweep out the whole house before she found it.”
“We’ve fought for it,” Mr. Bulloch put in, “and it was more real then—more important to us.”
“Your Covenanters fought for the right to interpret faith in their own way.”
“That’s what I was meaning. Ye’ve got to have freedom first. It’s no use believing what other folks say; the only thing is for each man to fend for himself, Mr. Darnay. Each man standing on his own feet, finding his own path—”
“Grand!” cried Darnay with flashing eyes. “It’s a religion of super men.”
“It’s a religion of free men,” Bulloch replied.
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