Photographing Fairies: A Novel

by Steve Szilagyi

  “Not the runt. I’m talking about Doyle.”

  “Doyle? Who’s that?”

  “Your friend.”

  I ransacked my brain. I didn’t have any friend named Doyle. Unless he meant Jimmy Doyle, back in school. I shook my head at Walsmear. “I don’t — ”

  “Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,” he said exasperatedly. “The writer bloke. The bloody spiritualist. The Knight of the bloody Garter, or whatever.”

  “Oh, him.”

  “What do you call him? ‘Arthur’? ‘Artie’?”

  “I think I called him Sir Arthur when I took his picture. But that was months ago. And I hardly know him personally.”

  “He knows you.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “He had your card in his desk. He told me to see you. He said you could tell me what you thought about — my photographs.”

  “Photographs, eh?” I said knowingly. “A local blackmail case?”

  The policeman eyed me narrowly “What makes you think it’s blackmail?”

  “Not difficult,” I chuckled. “Or should I say ‘elementary.’ Ha, ha. I simply deduced it, as Sherlock Holmes might have.”

  “Who’s Sherlock Holmes?”

  “Sherlock Holmes,” I repeated.

  “Who’s that?”

  “You went to see Arthur Conan Doyle and you don’t know who Sherlock Holmes is?”

  The policeman looked at me blankly.

  “Don’t you read?” I asked.

  “I’m a simple man,” he said, jaw tightening.

  “Why, may I ask, did you go to see Sir Arthur?”

  “To show him,” he said, “these.”

  Setting his bowler on his knee, he reached in his pocket and pulled out a dirty brown envelope tied with string.

  “And what are those?”

  “The photographs,” he whispered.

  Once more I tried to guess his business. What kind of crime involving photographs would bring a rural policeman ignorant of Sherlock Holmes to consult with Arthur Conan Doyle?

  “Dirty pictures?” I asked.

  Walsmear’s head took on the color of a red bell pepper. His eyes popped and he leaped to his feet.

  “What?” he thundered.

  “I meant — ”

  “Who do you take me for?”

  “Really, I — ”

  “You think I’ve come down here to London with a packet of dirty pictures to sell? Is that what you think?”

  “Not at all — ”

  “Is that how I look to you? Well, you’re no better than the rest of them.”

  “That’s not so,” I said.

  “It is, too.”

  “It is not. But please let’s get back to your business. If it’s not blackmail and it’s not dirty pictures, what in the name of heaven is it?”

  “Never mind.”

  “What is it?”

  “No, no, that’s all right. Never mind. I’ll go some place else.”

  “Please tell me.”

  “You’ve had your chance.”

  This new outburst from the common, seemingly mad policeman made a strong contrast with my recollection of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, a dignified man, despite his sometimes outlandish views. I wondered at the connection between the policeman and the writer. Why had the writer recommended me? I recalled my brief era of acquaintance with Sir Arthur. I had photographed the eminent author for the frontispiece of his collected works, to be published in Italy. Afterward, there had been some problem with the bill. Who was to pay? Sir Arthur’s English publishers? Or the Italian publishers? Or Sir Arthur himself? My invoice went back and forth between the angry parties, until someone mediated a solution that saw the Italians paying, and Sir Arthur and his English publishers saving face for the Italians by blaming the whole thing on my somehow inept billing practices. It was even noised abroad that I had tried to bilk them in some unnamed way.

  Was Sir Arthur still abiding by this absurd fiction? Was he taking revenge by sending lunatics to harass me?

  “May I ask a question?” I said.

  Walsmear sniffed an affirmative.

  “What else did Sir Arthur say to you? I mean, besides giving you my card. . . .”

  “He said I was wasting his precious time. Then he had me thrown out.”

  “Why did he do that?”

  “He didn’t like the photographs.”

  “What’s wrong with them?”

  “Said they were poppycock.”

  “Well, let’s have a look.”

  “After what you said?”

  “Oh, come on.”

  “All right. I’ll show them to you. But watch what you say, I don’t like to be stepped on.”

  “You can trust me.”

  “I may be a fool,” he went on. “And if I act like a fool, you can say so. But whatever you say, Mr. Castle, don’t you dare — ” and here he leveled a long finger at my nose “ — don’t you dare say a word against those girls.”

  “What girls?” I asked.

  Walsmear’s expression grew woeful. “I suppose you ought to see for yourself.”

  He held the package out toward me. As I reached for it, he suddenly drew it back.

  “Doyle said you would know what you were talking about,” he said.

  The package was coming toward me again. Again I reached for it. Again it was withdrawn.

  “If it turns out that I am wrong,” he said, “I don’t want you gloating. I don’t want you humiliating — ”

  Here I fairly snatched the package from his hand.

  He gave a surprised jerk, coughed into his hand, and said, “Yes, of course.”

  I pulled my chair under the skylight, right over a brilliant, bright square on the Oriental rug. I put the package on my knee and began undoing the dirty string with my fingernails. It was the devil to get off, and I was tempted to use my teeth. Finally, however, the knot was undone; the string floated through the air, and I pulled away a lot of extraneous wrapping material to expose two ordinary postcard-size snapshots.

  “These are them?” I asked.

  Walsmear nodded.

  “The photographs?”

  Walsmear nodded again.

  I studied the top picture. It showed a pretty little girl, dressed in a modest white pinafore, standing in a garden. There were beds of delphinium to either side of her, and a gnarled tree in the background. The second picture showed another, younger girl, blonder, and similarly dressed. She was standing in almost the same spot, in profile and reaching out to touch the longest petal of a drooping iris.

  The pictures were in crisp focus; but the frames were skewed, and both shots were marred by small, bright splotches here and there around the girls’ figures.

  These splotches immediately struck me as somewhat odd, if not exactly remarkable. There was something familiar about them. After musing about it, I recalled the way sunlight plays off the surface of a running stream and dapples the bottom of an overhanging bough. But how did such dapples get onto these photographs? They were not on any surface, but scattered around the image. I attributed the phenomenon to dust, or some other factor extrinsic to the scene.

  “Now, tell me, what am I looking at?” I asked.

  “What do you see?”

  “Two charming little girls. Two poor photographs.”

  I suddenly remembered what Walsmear had said about being “humiliated.”

  “What I mean to say,” I hurriedly added, “is that the photographs are not bad, in the sense of being ‘bad photographs.’ I mean, for an amateur. They are just poorly printed. Did you — uh — take them?”

  “Not me,” he said. “The girls took them. One of the other.”

  “Oh, well, for being taken by children they’re very good. How old are these girls?�
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  “One is six and one is nine. What else do you see?”

  There wasn’t much else. But I had to say something. So I bent closer and studied the girls’ faces.

  “I see,” I said, “innocence. I see purity. I see the springtime of life.”

  The words came out of my mouth, but I couldn’t believe I was saying such cornball stuff. I looked up at Walsmear. He was looking back at me as if “innocence, purity, and the springtime of life” were exactly what he expected me to say.

  “What I mean is — ”

  What did I mean?

  Get a hold on yourself, Castle, I thought. I looked back down at the photographs. I was reassured. There was nothing special there. The pictures were mundane in the way that only amateur snapshots can be. Of course, the girls were beautiful. That was something. And they were beautiful in their own special way. There was nothing of that insipid, dimple-cheeked sweetness that usually passed for childish beauty. There was a golden, unsullied quality about these two girls. I’d call it “goodness.” But what does that mean anymore? Suddenly, I had a horrible thought.

  “Are these girls missing?” I asked. “Have they been kidnapped?”

  Walsmear shook his head. “They gave me these photographs themselves.”

  I was enormously relieved. But I was also becoming annoyed with Walsmear’s guessing game.

  “Listen here,” I said. “I can’t imagine what this is all about. Why did you bring these photographs to Sir Arthur, and now to me? What am I supposed to be seeing here? You have to give me some help. Or I’ll have to start preparing for my next appointment. I don’t have time for this nonsense.”

  Walsmear didn’t move. He gave me a look that seemed to say that I was acting just the way he was expecting me to act. But how was I supposed to act?

  “That’s it,” I said, handing him the photographs. “That’s all. You’ll have to go.”

  Does that sound harsh? Was I being a little short with the man? I was, but the snapshots of the two girls had a peculiar effect on me. They’d gone down inside me and were stirring my feelings. I felt like I was a great vat of yeasty dough being churned by a giant oar. (I’d actually photographed such a thing for a commercial bakery — like many industrial concerns, a good source of jobs.) I was upset, you see.

  How unfortunate that I had sent Roy away. My next client was coming in soon, and Roy would have been invaluable. He attended to many details well, but the most important thing he did was chat up the clients. He was full of those polite obsequiousnesses and commonplace observations that make ordinary people comfortable. I used to have a knack for that sort of thing myself back when I was first starting out and the choice was to chat or starve. Lately, however, a thick tide of mopery and introspection had been rolling in. Now I dreaded meeting this new client; and why? Simply because I would have to think of things to say to her.

  The second factor contributing to my uneasy state of mind was Walsmear’s having revived some latent bitterness in reminding me of that Arthur Conan Doyle business. It was really a small disaster! I was made the scapegoat there. It was a matter of small print in his contract with his Italian publishers; and while Sir Arthur and the Italians had long since signed a peace treaty, I had been stuck with a reputation for shady billing practices. It was not fair. (But let the young photographer note here that business is not necessarily fair. The prices go to the quick, the canny, the forceful, and the manipulative.)

  Finally, there were those two little girls in the photographs. Damned how they affected me! It is strange the sort of things that breach the walls of criticism, skepticism, and irony we build around our emotions. A good cheap song will do that. Or when Little Eva dies in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. (Maybe that’s just me.) But that’s just what the angelic faces of those two little girls did. They seemed to burst right out of those common, uninteresting snapshots and right into my heart.

  And the thought occurred to me: Just like Little Eva, those girls were going to die. Not soon, I hoped, or not for many decades; but someday their bright, fresh, freckled faces would wither and disintegrate. Just as those cheap photographs would someday turn brown and curl up at the edges.

  I looked down at my hands. I was kneading them. This was surprising to me. Hand kneading was not in my repertoire of anxious gestures. I stopped and watched as the blood rushed back into my pallid fingers. I couldn’t think why I was doing this. Now that I’m reviewing the incident, I think I understand. My hands were working in concert with deep impulses. They were trying to grab something: Time. They were trying to stop it, shape it, and mold its passing beauties into some permanent form. (I find it interesting that my hands instinctively sculpted. They tried to shape time as if it were clay. Does this say something about sculpture as an art form? Is sculpture the most fundamental artistic medium? Is it the medium most directly responsive to the most primitive sectors of our nervous systems? Isn’t it a wonder that I can still take an interest in these questions — even though I am scheduled to hang tomorrow morning?)

  So much to be done! I felt a strange urgency. A thousand plans and notions swamped my brain. So much beauty in the world. I had to find it, celebrate it, immortalize it. I had places to go, things to do. Tableaux, compositions, still lifes, interiors, portraits, landscapes, catalogues, close renderings, and luminous vistas.

  I forgot about the policeman, Roy, my next client, the studio, and the gaping hole in my darkroom wall. Why was I sitting on my duff when so much beauty was out there, waiting to be crystallized into art? It was a crime to let it decay. Hell, it was almost immoral. Right then and there, I almost dug out my old paints and brushes and struck out on the road for — where? Why not — where did those little girls live?

  Chapter Three

  How I Came to Be a Photographer

  Photography has been my living. Painting, however, is my metier. Many years ago, back in America, I studied drawing, painting, and printmaking under no less a master than Nolan Price, “The Bouguereau of Bridgeport.” It was the noble Price who advised me to quit the U.S. and (since I couldn’t speak French) move to London; to follow in the footsteps of his personal hero, John Singleton Copley. From a base in London, he argued, I could take advantage of the Continent’s centuries-long tradition of drawing, painting, and sculpture. And if I worked hard enough, if I worshiped nature and paid her patient homage with pencil and brush, I might someday hope to join the fraternity of immortals: Giotto, Raphael, Michelangelo, Rubens, Rembrandt, David, Landseer . . .

  By the time I got to London, however, the fraternity of immortals had altered its membership policy. Once there might be said to have been a single branching line of artistic descent from ancient Greece to modern Europe. Now that line was shattered into a thousand “isms.” Each artist began history with himself. The past was a thing to be ridiculed, nature a thing to scorn. I myself was not immune to this trend. For a time, I stopped studying nature; I called myself an “oatist,” and wore an empty rolled-oats tin on my head for a hat. I smashed up bowls and crockery and stuck the broken pieces to canvases; was briefly successful with women; felt like an idiot.

  In time, I came to hate the pretensions of modern art; but I was too young to consider myself a conservative. Quite by accident, I made friends with some young photographers at a Chelsea pub. I discovered that photography was the great alternative. In practicing it, I could be modern without abandoning the pleasure of observing nature, and without having to worry what brush stroke was in fashion that week.

  To ground myself thoroughly in photography’s most basic processes, I went to work in a commercial darkroom. From the darkroom, I moved on to work as an assistant in the studio of Pierre Marquand, the famous portraitist. Marquand showed me that photography was a business as well as an art. In his company, I began to yearn for professional rewards and the sight of my own name in gold letters on a portrait case. After much planning, I broke the news to Marquand: I was going
out on my own; starting my own studio. What an adventure! The high point of my life; and an adventure I hoped only to enjoy once — the studio I established I intended as a life sinecure.

  Something about those two girls — I suddenly felt that maybe I’d taken the wrong turn in life. I felt like I’d sold out Art and Beauty for security. And I was still so young! Only thirty-two!

  I turned away so I wouldn’t have to look at Walsmear and his blasted photographs. My mind was in a turmoil. Where to rest my eyes? I looked across to my right. My eyes fell on a little alcove. That was a bad place to look. That alcove was where my desk stood.

  My desk was a sight I usually avoided. Why? Because it was the place from which I conducted the business side of my studio. Its blotter was covered with unanswered letters and unread notices. Due bills spewed from the pigeonholes.

  Some artist I turned out to be. My paths of glory had led only to a life of debt and petty calculation; I was no different from any miserable little shopkeeper or pin manufacturer.

  It was all too much for me.

  “Go,” I croaked, turning back to Walsmear. “Go back to wherever you come from. Or go bother somebody else. I don’t know who you are. I don’t know what you want. And you know what? I don’t care. You and Sir Arthur can all — ”

  Policemen don’t like being told off. Walsmear stood up. I could see his fingers reaching instinctively toward the place on his belt where his truncheon ordinarily hung. As he took a step forward, I took a step back and tumbled over a prop Greek column. My back thumped against the floor; breath deserted me.

  While I gasped, the policeman continued his minatory advance. I fully expected to share the fate of the cigar he now hurled to the floor and mashed with his foot. I closed my eyes and felt the floorboards tremble beneath his tread. When I opened them, Walsmear had passed. He’d stepped right over me and made for the window. I raised myself and twisted around to see what he would do. What he did was put his foot up on the sill and stare thoughtfully down at the street.

  The thoroughfare was giving forth its usual midday cacophony. If you weren’t used to this commotion, it sounded like a combination of a train wreck and the rape of the Sabine women. But if you listened closely, the sounds separated out. You could distinguish street vendors, taxicab horns, gear-grinding omnibuses, and the shrieks of the street arabs. It was all tied together by the hum of motors and the murmur of the million conversations taking place in the heart of the greatest city on earth.