What’s Bred in the Bone tct-2

by Robertson Davies

  Charlie was just twenty-one and Ismay was nineteen. Francis, who was twenty-four, felt middle-aged and dull when he listened to them. His was not a political mind, nor was he quick in argument, but he was convinced that something was wrong with Charlie’s philosophy. Charlie had not spent three years at Carlyle Rural, or he might have thought differently about the aspirations and potentialities of the workers. Charlie’s grandfather had not hacked his way out of the forest and into the seat of a Chairman of the Board with a woodsman’s broadaxe. Educate the workers, said Charlie, and you will see the world changed within three generations. Thinking of Miss McGladdery, Francis was not so sure the workers took readily to education or to any change that went beyond their immediate and obvious betterment. Charlie was a Canadian like himself, but Charlie’s family were Old Money. Francis had seen enough of Old Money at Colborne College to know that hypocrisy, stupidity, and bloody-mindedness were just as natural to that class as Charlie said they were. Francis was cursed with an ability, not great but real, to see both sides of the question. It never occurred to him that three years in age might make a difference in Charlie’s outlook, and certainly it never entered his head that he himself had the temperament of the artist, detesting both high and low, and anxious only to be let alone to get on with his own work. Charlie was the upper class flinging itself into the struggle for justice on behalf of the oppressed; Charlie was Byron, determined to free the Greeks without having any clear notion of what or who the Greeks were; Charlie was a Grail knight of social justice.

  Francis cared little what might happen to Charlie, but he grieved and brooded over Ismay. He had a strong intuition that Charlie was a bad influence, and the more he saw of Charlie at Buys-Bozzaris’s gambling sessions the stronger that intuition became. There were now too many regulars at the evening sessions for bridge, and the game had become poker; for poker Charlie had no aptitude at all. Not only was he a rash gambler; he delighted in the role of the rash gambler. He seemed almost to claw his chips toward him; he flung down his cards with an air of defiance; he took stupid risks—and lost. He did not pay, he gave IOUs which Buys-Bozzaris tucked in his waistcoat pocket almost as if he did not notice them. Francis knew quite enough of the grammar of money to know that an IOU is a very dangerous scrap of paper. Worst of all, on the rare occasions when Charlie won, he exulted in an unseemly way, as if by pillaging the Oxonians around him he was indicating the have-not class. Francis fretted about Charlie, without quite seeing that Charlie was a fool and a gull. For Charlie had something that looked like romantic sweep and dash, and these were qualities that Francis knew he lacked utterly.

  He saw a lot of Ismay, for Ismay was drawn by the easy glasses of excellent sherry, the meals at the George, the visits to the cinema and the theatre that Francis could provide, and was eager to provide. Ismay was even willing to let Francis kiss her and paw her (paw was her expression when she was impatient and wanted him to stop) as a reasonable return for the luxuries he commanded. This gave Francis even deeper anxiety; if she allowed him such liberties, what did she permit to Charlie?

  He was miserable, as only a worried lover can be, but his love had another and happier aspect. Ismay was willing to pose for drawings, and he did many sketches of her.

  When he had completed a particularly good one she said:

  “Oh, may I have that?”

  “It’s not much more than a study. Let me try for a really good one.”

  “No, this is terrific. Charlie would love it.”

  Charlie did not love it. He was furious and tore it up, and made Ismay cry—she did not often cry—because he said he would not have that oaf Cornish looking at her in the way the sketch made it very clear that he did look at her—as a lover, an adorer.

  Ismay, however, rather enjoyed Charlie’s pique, so much more fiery than Francis’s sluggish jealousy, disguised as concern, so stuffy and possessive. So things went further, and when one day Francis worked himself up to the pitch of asking Ismay if he might draw her in the nude, she consented. He was overjoyed, until she said, “But none of the old Artists-and-Models-in-Paris stuff, you understand?” which he thought reflected on his phlegmatic, objective artist’s attitude toward the unclothed figure. He admitted to himself that Ismay had a coarse streak—but that was part of her irresistible allurement. Coarse, like some splendid woman of the Renaissance aristocracy.

  So he sketched Ismay in the nude, as she lay on the sofa in his sitting-room on the top floor of Canterbury House, where the light was so good and the coal fire kept the room so warm, and on many subsequent occasions he sketched her in the nude, and though his excellent experience in Mr. Devinney’s embalming parlour enabled him to do it very well, the thought of all those work-worn corpses never entered his head.

  One day, when he had finished a good effort, he threw down his pad and pencil and knelt beside her on the sofa, kissing her hands and trying to keep back the tears that rushed to his eyes.

  “What is it?”

  “You are so beautiful, and I love you so much.”

  “Oh Christ,” said Ismay. “I thought it might come to this.”

  “To what?”

  “To talk about love, you prize ass.”

  “But I do love you. Have you no feeling for me at all?”

  Ismay leaned toward him, and his face was buried between her breasts. “Yes,” she said. “I love you, Frank—but I’m not in love with you, if you understand.”

  This is a nice distinction, dear to some female hearts, which people like Francis can never encompass. But he was happy, for had she not said she loved him? Being in love might follow.

  So, when he had agreed to her condition that he must not talk about love, it was decided by Ismay that the afternoons of posing in the nude might continue from time to time. She liked it. It gave her a sense of living fully and richly, and Francis’s adoring eyes warmed her in places where the glow of his generous coal fire could not reach—places that Charlie did not seem to know existed.

  Who taught you to draw? In one of the guest-rooms at Exeter, where he was staying for a few days in the Spring Term, Saraceni was looking over the sketches and finished pictures that Francis had brought him.

  “Harry Furniss, I suppose.”

  “Extraordinary! Just possible, but—he died—let me see—surely more than ten years ago!”

  “But only from a book. How to Draw in Pen and Ink–it was my Bible when I was a boy.”

  “Well, you have his vigour, but not his coarse style—his jokey, jolly-good-fellow superficial style.”

  “Of course, I’ve done a great deal of copying since those days, as you can see. I copy Old Master drawings, at the Ashmolean every week. I try to capture their manner as well as their matter. As you said you did when you restored pictures.”

  “Yes, and you didn’t learn anatomy from Harry Furniss, or from copying.”

  “I picked it up in an embalming parlour, as a matter of fact.”

  “Mother of God! There is a good deal more in you than meets the eye, Mr. Cornish.”

  “I hope so. What meets the eye doesn’t make much impression, I’m afraid.”

  “There speaks a man in love. Unhappily in love. In love with this model for these nude studies that you have been trying to palm off on me as some of your Old Master copies.”

  Saraceni laid his hand on a group of drawings of Ismay that had cost Francis great pains. He had coated an expensive handmade paper with Chinese white mixed with enough brown bole to give it an ivory tint, and on the sheets thus prepared he had worked up some of his sketches of the nude Ismay, drawing with a silver-point that had cost him a substantial sum, touching up the drawing at last with red chalk.

  “I didn’t mean to deceive you.”

  “Oh, you didn’t deceive me, Mr. Cornish, though you might deceive a good many people.”

  “I mean I wasn’t trying to deceive anybody. Only to work in the genuine Renaissance style.”

  “And you have done so. You have imitated the m
anner admirably. But you haven’t been so careful about the matter. This girl, now: she is a girl of today. Everything about her figure declares it. Slim, tall for a woman, long legs—this is not a woman of the Renaissance. Her feet alone give the show away; neither the big feet of the peasant model nor the deformed feet of a woman of fortune. The Old Masters, you know, when they weren’t copying from the antique, were drawing women of a kind we do not see today. This girl, now—look at her breasts. She will probably never suckle a child, or not for long. But the women of the Renaissance did so, and their painters fancied the great motherly udders; as soon as those women had given up their virginity they seemed to be always giving suck, and by thirty-five they had flat, exhausted bladders hanging to their waists. Their private parts were torn with child-bearing, and I suppose a lot of them had piles for the same reason. Age came early in those days. The flesh that showed such rosy opulence at eighteen had lost its glow, and fat hung on bones far too small to support it well. This girl of yours will be a beauty all her life. This is the beauty you have captured with a tenderness that suggests a lover.

  “I am not pretending to be clairvoyant. Looking deep into pictures is my profession. It is simple enough to see that this model is a woman of today, and the attitude of the artist to his sitter is always apparent in the picture. Every picture is several things: what the artist sees, but also what he thinks about what he sees, and because of that, in a certain sense it is a portrait of himself. All those elements are here.

  “None of this is to say that this is not good work. But why go to such pains to work in the Renaissance style?”

  “It seems to me to be capable of saying so much that can’t be said—or I should say that can’t be said by me—in a contemporary manner.”

  “Yes, yes, and to compliment the sitter—I hope she is grateful—and to show that you see her as beyond time and place. You draw pretty well. Drawing is not so lovingly fostered now as it used to be. A modern artist may be a fine draughtsman without depending much on his skill. You love drawing simply for itself.”

  “Yes. It sounds extreme, but it’s an obsession with me.”

  “More than colour?”

  “I don’t know, I haven’t really done much about colour.”

  “I could introduce you to that, you know. But I wonder how good a draughtsman you really are. Would you submit to a test?”

  “I’d be flattered that you thought it worth your trouble.”

  “Taking trouble is much of my profession, also. You have your pad? Draw a straight line from the top of the page to the bottom, will you? And I mean a straight line, done freehand.”

  Francis obeyed.

  “Now: draw the same line from the bottom to the top, so exactly that the two lines are one.”

  This was not so easily done. At one point Francis’s line varied a fraction from the first one.

  “Ah, that was not simple, was it? Now draw a line across the page to bisect that line—or I should say those two indistinguishable lines. Yes. Now draw a line through the centre point where those two lines bisect; draw it so that I cannot see a hint of a triangle at the middle point. Yes, that is not bad.”

  The next part of the test was the drawing of circles, freehand, clockwise and anti-clockwise, concentric and in various ways eccentric. Francis managed all of this with credit, but without perfection.

  “You should work on this sort of thing,” said Saracem. “You have ability, but you have not refined it to the full extent of your capabilities. This is the foundation of drawing, you must understand. Now, will you try a final test? This is rather more than command of the pencil; it is to test your understanding of mass and space. I shall sit here in this chair, as I have been doing, and you shall draw me as well as you can in five minutes. But you shall draw me as I would look if you were sitting behind me. Ready?”

  Francis was wholly unprepared for this, and felt that he made a mess of it. But when Saraceni looked at the result, he laughed.

  “If you think you might be interested in my profession, Mr. Cornish—and I assure you it is full of interest—write to me, or come and see me. Here is my card; my permanent address, as you see, is in Rome, though I am not often there; but it would reach me. Come and see me anyhow. I have some things that would interest you.”

  “You mean I might become a restorer of old paintings?” said Francis.

  “You certainly could do so, after you had worked with me. But I see you do not take that as a compliment; it suggests that your talent is not first-rate. Well, you asked me for an opinion, and you shall have it. Your talent is substantial, but not first-rate.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “A lack of a certain important kind of energy. Not enough is coming up from below. There are dozens of respected artists in this country and elsewhere who cannot begin to draw as well as you, and who have certainly not as fine an eye as you, but they have something individual about their work, even when it looks crude and stupid to the uninstructed eye. What they have is what comes from below. Are you a Catholic?”

  “Well—partly, I suppose.”

  “I might have known. You must either be a Catholic, or not be one. The half-Catholics are not meant to be artists, any more than the half-anything-elses. Good night, Mr. Cornish. Let us meet again.”

  “What would you like for your birthday?”

  “Money, please.”

  “But Ismay, money isn’t a present. I want to give you something real.”

  “What’s unreal about money?”

  “Will you promise to buy something you really want?”

  “Frank, what do you expect me to do with it?”

  So Francis gave her a cheque for ten pounds. When Charlie came to Buys-Bozzaris’s poker-night two days later with ten pounds to risk, Francis was immediately suspicious.

  “Did you give Charlie that ten quid?”

  “Yes. He was in a hole.”

  “But I meant it for you!”

  “Charlie and I believe in property in common.”

  “Oh? And what does Charlie share with you?”

  “What right have you to ask that?”

  “Damn it, Ismay, I love you. I’ve told you so more times than I can count.”

  “I think the porter at the Examination Schools loves me; he always looks sheepish when I speak to him. But that doesn’t give him the right to ask me about my private life.”

  “Don’t talk like a fool.”

  “All right, I won’t. You think I’m sleeping with Charlie, don’t you? If I were—and I don’t say I am—what would it be to you? Aren’t you pushing the cousin thing a bit far?”

  “It isn’t the cousin thing.”

  “Do you remember what you said, the first time you spoke to me? ‘Marry come up, m’dirty cousin.’ I said I’d trace that, and I have. A chap in Eng.Lit. ran it down for me. It’s from an old play: ‘Marry come up, m’dirty Cousin; he may have such as you by the Dozen.’ Is that what you mean, Frank? Do you think I’m a whore?”

  “I never heard that; I just thought it was something you said to pushy people. And you were very pushy and you still are. But not a whore. Certainly not a whore.”

  “No; not a whore. But Charlie and I have ideas far beyond yours. You’ve some frightfully backwoods notions, Frank. You must understand: I won’t be questioned and I won’t be uncled by you. If that’s the way you want it, we’re through.”

  Apologies. Protestations of lover-like concern for her welfare—which made her laugh. An expensive lunch at the George. An afternoon during which she posed for him again; before they settled to work, Ismay struck a number of whorish poses which tormented him, and made her laugh at his torment. And before she went, he gave her another cheque for ten pounds, because she must have a present for herself, and no, no, no, don’t stake Charlie at poker if you really care for him at all, because it will be his ruin.

  What Ismay bought with the cheque Francis never knew, for he dared not ask her, and he knew from his bank statement tha
t the cheque was not cashed. Doubtless she was keeping it until something appeared that she really wanted.

  What Basil Buys-Bozzaris wanted was becoming clear. After the poker sessions he always asked Francis to stay and talk for a while, and as they lived in the same house there was no need for Francis to leave before midnight; they were free of the rule governing all junior members of the University, who must be in their lodgings or their colleges by midnight, or risk expulsion. Roskalns stayed, as well, because he was not a member of the University, and could come and go as he pleased. And what was the drift of the talk?

  Francis understood it long before Buys-Bozzaris knew that he did. The count (if he were a count) from Bulgaria (if that were his place of origin) had what he called advanced political ideas, and although these were not so naive as Charlie’s, they tended in Charlie’s direction. It was not difficult to broach such subjects at Oxford at that time, where it was common talk among shoals of undergraduates that the political world was, in the popular expression, “polarized”. Democracy had failed, and its forms of government might be expected to collapse at any time. Everybody with a head on his shoulders was aware, whether he formulated the thought clearly or not, that he was either a fascist or a communist, and if his head was a good head, there was only one choice. Not to take a side was to be an “indifferentist”, and when the show-down came the indifferentists would surely suffer for their foolishness. Buys-Bozzaris knew which way the cat would jump.