by James Wilson
‘Come,’ I began, ‘why should she be angry -?’; but before I could say more a woman rushed into the room. She was about thirty, poorly but respectably dressed, and must have been handsome once; but fatigue and disappointment, like a victorious army, had traced their advance in the lines upon her face. She looked frantically about her, and then, not immediately seeing her daughter, pointed accusingly at me.
‘Where’s my girl?’ she said, panting heavily. Her voice was quiet, but some emotion she could barely master made it squeak and waver, and her eyes – remarkably like the child’s, I now saw – were feverish with anger.
Not wishing to betray the girl, but equally unwilling to tell a lie, and a useless one at that, I said nothing. I must, though, have given her away unwittingly; for my gaze strayed towards the alcove, and the woman at once read its meaning, and pushed past me towards the bed. I managed to bar her way, but not before the child had revealed herself by whimpering, and then promptly abandoned her flimsy sanctuary to take refuge behind me.
‘What ‘ave you done, you little cat?’ said the woman, lunging towards her, and raising her hand as if to strike her.
The girl made no reply, only pressing herself further into the narrow space between me and the wall; but Jenny Watts clapped her hands, and started to laugh again, as if this were a kind of Punch-and-Judy show, put on especially to entertain her.
‘She’s done no harm,’ I said, laying a hand on the mother’s arm to restrain her.
‘I shouldn’t ‘ave known, save for Sam Telfer,’ said the woman, ignoring me entirely, and addressing the girl. ‘I’m gone ten minutes, just to get the tightner, and when I’m back ‘e says ‘e sees a gentleman givin’ you brownies, and you takin’ ‘im in ‘ere.’
‘I only asked her to bring me to Mrs. Watts,’ I said.
‘Oh, so that’s what you calls it now, is it?’ said the woman, suddenly rounding on me.
I braced myself, for she was now swaying and trembling so violently that I thought her rage would not be contained; but, having been denied the girl, must vent itself on me instead. After a second or two, however, she brought herself under control, and merely clenched her fists, and said with scalding contempt:
‘“Bringin’ you to Mrs. Watts!”’
I longed to cry out: For God’s sake, woman, what do you take me for? I have a daughter myself! and yet I knew that to do so would be useless. Looking at the man before her, she saw not me but someone else entirely; for all her experience had taught her that a gentleman talks to a girl in Maiden Lane, and gives her money, with but one purpose; and nothing I could say or do would persuade her that I should have sooner died than violate her child.
‘I didn’t do nothin’! ‘E didn’t do nothin’!’ screamed the girl, suddenly darting out from behind me, and lifting up her dress. “Ere, ‘ave a look if you don’t believe me!’
And, without a word, the woman did so, barely pausing long enough to tug the blanket a few inches across the gap, and so afford her daughter a scrap of modesty.
At length, she grunted and stepped back. She said nothing, but looked at me; and for the first time I saw a doubt in her eyes, and she seemed somehow smaller, like a kite that has lost the wind, and begun to sag. For a moment, I felt, I had the advantage, and at once determined to make the best of it.
‘I will not insult you by offering you more money,’ I said, ‘but Sarah has a shilling, which she earned fairly, by bringing me here; and I think you would do well to spend it on the doctor; for that is a bad cough, and should be treated.’
And before she had time to reply, or to tell the girl to give the shilling back again, I left, shutting the door behind me, and made my way back through the court, exciting no more than some whispering, and a derisive laugh, from the boys. A few moments later I was in the Strand – which, with its street-vendors, and gas-lamps, and crowds of cheerful theatre-goers, seemed like the waking world after an oppressive dream.
Forgive me, my darling, if what I have described distresses you; but – as you may imagine – it troubled me, and we have agreed that we must have no secrets from each other. I am haunted not merely by the thought of that poor child and her mother, and the knowledge that, quite unintentionally, I have brought more care into their already over-burdened lives, but also by the nagging question of why Ruskin should have suggested I go to Maiden Lane at all. Surely he must have known – as I know myself, if I pause to reflect upon it – that after almost sixty years it is almost inconceivable I should find someone who remembers the Turners? Yet what, otherwise (save only malice; and I hesitate to believe he would be so cruel to a man who has done him no harm) could have prompted him to send me to a stinking slum, from which all traces of the family have been long since obliterated?
My one hope is that I shall find the answer when I see Turner’s pictures – in which case, I shall know it soon enough, for Marian and I go to Marlborough House on Monday.
My love to you always,
Walter
XII
Letter from Michael Gudgeon to Walter Hartright,
15th August, 185-
Box Cottage, Storry, East Sussex,
August
Dear Mr. Hartright,
Lord, yes! – I remember Turner, though the journey I took with him must have been almost forty years ago now. If I were to draw up an inventory of my memories, I should list them under the following chief heads:
1. Being very cold.
2. Being very wet.
3. Being sick in a boat.
4. Being footsore and saddle-sore in about equal measure.
5. Being ill-housed and ill-fed.
6. Being well housed and well fed.
7. Not giving a damn about any of the above; for my companion was a Great Genius, and I a lusty, impudent, carefree young fellow.
8. Turner very silent when sober.
9. Turner very boisterous when drunk.
I fear I cannot furnish you with a long memoir, for my hand is rheumatic (my poor long-suffering wife, indeed, is taking this letter down to my dictation); and nowadays I do not go about much. My friends, however, are good enough to call upon me here; and if you think it worth the time and expense to do likewise, I should be delighted to welcome you as one of them, and to tell you all I can recall.
Yours very truly,
Michael Gudgeon
XIII
From the diary of Marian Halcombe, 16th August, 185–
Marlborough House is not, I am sure, the most magnificent palace in the world: a long, plain red-brick building in the Palladian style, it hangs back a little from Pall Mall, as if ashamed to show its dowdy fagade in such distinguished company. And the crowds that throng it – now that the ground floor has become a temporary art gallery – make it feel more like a railway station hotel than a private residence. But palace it is, and the first I have ever entered; and as we walked down a long covered passage into the lofty hall (so vast that Jenny Lind has sung here, before an audience of hundreds), and paid our shilling for a guidebook, I could not but reflect on how different it was from the house in which Turner had spent his last years, and in which I had first seen one of his paintings.
Perhaps Walter was preoccupied by a similar idea; for he was unusually silent all the way there; and, when we arrived, looked about him with an almost incredulous air, as if comparing it with the scene of his last adventure – for surely the filthy little street where Turner had been born, though nearer in miles, must have presented an even starker contrast to this place than the cottage in which he had died?
But then we turned, and all such thoughts and calculations instantly evaporated. We had both seen individual Turners before, of course; but never – for this is the first public exhibition since his death – more than thirty of them displayed together. All at once our eyes were assailed by the most brilliant radiance I have ever seen in paintings – and far more, I have to say, than I should have conceived possible. Reds, oranges and yellows, as hot and tumultuous as burnin
g coals, erupted from the walls, making even the brightest objects about them – a woman’s gaudy green dress, a huge picture of the Battle of Blenheim above the chimney-piece – appear suddenly drab and lifeless. They seemed, indeed, more intensely real than the press of people staring at them, or the building itself – as if we were trapped in Plato’s cave, and the pictures, rather than merely flat pieces of canvas hanging inside, were in fact holes in the rock, through which we could glimpse the unimagined world beyond.
The effect on Walter was immediate; and so dramatic that I wish I could have found some means to record it, for it would have convinced even the dourest sceptic of the power of art. He stopped dead, and drew himself up, as if someone had suddenly lifted a great weight from his back; his mouth set in a small, surprised smile, and the skin appeared to tighten across his forehead, raising his eyebrows into an expression of wonderment and pleasure. His gaze was fixed on a square picture on the opposite wall, which showed an indistinct white figure apparently emerging from the smoke and flames of a raging fire. From where we were standing it was impossible to make out more; but, rather than going closer (which, indeed, would have been difficult, so dense was the press of people), Walter remained there, seemingly uninterested in the subject, content merely to bask in the radiance of the colour, like a cat stretching itself in the sun. I waited for him a moment, and then, since he still showed no inclination to move, set off on my own to explore further.
The impressions of the next half an hour were so forceful and so contradictory that I must try to set them down here in some detail, before they disintegrate into brilliant confusion. There were more than thirty pictures in the exhibition, and what you noticed about them first was simply their enormous variety. The view I had always associated with Turner, London from Greenwich Park, was there – although the original had a grandeur and richness you could not have guessed from our engraving of it; and a terrifying picture of a puny cottage caught in a mountain avalanche, and crushed by a deluge of broken ice and uprooted trees and a giant rock (so ferociously painted that the pigment was as thick and ridged as mortar), recalled some of the dread and horror the pictures in Mrs. Booth’s house had inspired in me. Almost everything else, however, took me by surprise. Here was a magnificent sea piece, showing distant ships heeling in a stiff breeze, which (save for the waves, which gathered menacingly in the bottom right-hand corner and threatened to spill over the frame and wet your feet) might have been by a Dutch master; there a gorgeous classical landscape saturated with honey light, or a sublime mountain darkened by angry clouds. Most striking of all were those wild swirls of paint – like those which had so captivated Walter – in which the pure colour seemed to strive for freedom, detaching itself from form like the soul leaving the body, so that you could not clearly discern a subject at all.
I think most people, confronted by such splendid profusion, would find it hard to believe that it could all have sprung from one hand. Certainly, as I embarked on my tour, that was the uppermost thought in my mind. It was only after I had examined three or four of the pictures more closely that I recognized – with that sudden dawning that comes when you at last become conscious of some insistent sound, like a dog barking in the distance – that there was, indeed, a family relationship, suggested not by obvious similarities of style, but by certain recurrent quirks and oddities. What they mean, or whether they mean anything at all, I still do not know; but they have left me with the nagging idea that they are a kind of message in code, and that I need but the right key in order to decipher it.
The first painting I looked at (for no other reason than that it was the closest) was a luminous, gold-tinged historical scene which, at a casual glance, I should have taken to be by Claude. I failed, in my eagerness, to note the exact title, but the subject was the decline of Carthage. You are standing, as it were, in the bottom left-hand corner of the picture – in the entrance, perhaps, of a great palace, for the foreground is in shadow. Immediately before you, like flotsam on the shore, lies a clutter of objects: a pile of fruit; a standard bearing a shield and a wreath of withered flowers; discarded cloaks and weapons; and a strange, bulbous brown blob with a protuberance at the top, which might be a buoy with a chain but which also – you realize after a few seconds – has a fleshly quality about it, like a giant squid, or the internal organ of a beast. Beyond that is a narrow quay, and then a dazzling strip of water, fringed in the distance by lines of hazy masts, which stretches to the horizon. Above it – almost in the centre of the canvas, but a little to the left – hangs a burning sun, filling the sky with an incandescence so bright that it stings your eyes to look at it.
On either side of the harbour, like the jaws of a vice, are clusters of classical buildings, their steps crowded with little doll-like figures. Those on the left are floridly baroque, and covered with ornate carvings, but those on the right – to which, because of the diagonal perspective, your gaze is naturally drawn – are more restrained: passing an odd little tower that looks like a dwarf lighthouse, you enter them by a narrow flight of steps (so narrow, indeed, you feel the walls will squeeze the breath from your body), and then ascend gradually until, at length, you reach a temple of Parthenon-like simplicity on the summit of a distant hill.
I could remember little about the fall of Carthage, save that she had been reduced to surrendering her arms and children to Rome, but the import of the picture seemed clear enough. It was, in effect, a moral tale, told (unlike a written narrative) from top right to bottom left: once, the Carthaginians had had the vigour and discipline to climb the straight and narrow path; but, as their wealth and power grew, they had abandoned the austere and lofty heights of greatness, neglecting their industry and defences, and descending into the flyblown city on the left, where they had dissipated their strength in idleness and luxury.
The picture was dated ‘1817’, a mere two years after the defeat of Napoleon, and it suddenly occurred to me that Turner must have intended it as a warning to England – which, with her great trading empire, must surely be the Carthage of the modern age – against lowering her guard and sinking into complacency. Convinced (but how foolishly, I think now, looking back) that I had correctly divined his meaning, I turned to a second Claudian scene, The Bay of Baiae, with Apollo and the Sibyl, to see if my great perspicacity could unlock its secrets, too.
A simpler and more tranquil piece, this, with soft light and sweet curves in place of the other’s fierce sun and harsh architectural planes. You are standing (again, a little to the left of centre) on a wide sandy path that draws you enticingly to a golden beach. A stone pier lined with boats reaches diagonally into the sea – which is no more than a long finger of blue, really, laid across the middle of the canvas, and yet enough to give you a pang of longing, and make you think you feel the warm breeze on your face, and smell its cargo of salt and the scent of wild flowers. The bay is ringed by gentle hills of a pale yellowy-green, which fades into grey on the horizon and differentiates itself into darker shrubs and bushes and leaves as it reaches the near-distance. It is only when you look closely that you see that among the rocks and foliage there are also ruined buildings: broken stone walls crumbling back into the sand, or a pair of subterranean archways – two great eyes separated by a brick nose, like the top of a buried skull – half hidden under a tangle of scrub. As if to heighten the air of menace, a barely visible serpent, almost the same colour as the earth, lurks in the bottom right-hand corner, waiting for its prey.
The picture is dominated by a V-shaped pair of trees on the right, which start close to the bottom of the canvas and reach almost to the top, spreading a band of shadow nearly to the left-hand edge. It is here that the only creatures – apart from the snake – appear: first, immediately under the trees themselves, a tiny white rabbit (soon to be the reptile’s victim?); and then, on the other side of the path, the figures of Apollo and the Sibyl. He, dressed in a wreath and a red robe, is holding his hand towards her; while she, naked from the waist up, kneels on a rock
, arms outstretched, inclined slightly towards him. Both of them seem somehow flat, and too small, giving the odd impression that they have been cut from another picture and pasted on. And the Sibyl, in particular, has the same doll-like appearance as the figures in The Decline of Carthage, as if she were the work of a gifted child rather than of the genius who painted the rest of the picture. There is something strange, too, in her hands and feet, which have the blunt shape of flippers rather than the complex geometry of human limbs. You might almost think that Turner had conceived her as a mermaid rather than a woman – an impression accentuated by her dress, which has a sort of scaly brightness, and clings to her legs like a skin.
Walter has several times reproached me for being too practical, and preferring dry facts to the sweeter but less substantial world of myth and fancy; and now, for once, I felt the justice of his criticism; for if I had ever known the story of Apollo and the Sibyl, I had quite forgotten it, and was forced to seek him out, and ask him to explain it to me. I found him gravitating – as if drawn by magnetic attraction – towards another of those bolts of colour that had so struck us upon entering: a square canvas, cut in half by a horizontal blood-red bar so vivid that you could have seen it from half a mile away. Falling into step beside him, I said:
‘What did Apollo do to the Sibyl? Or can you not tell me in such august company?’
‘Sad,’ he said, ‘but perfectly respectable. He granted that she should have as many years of life as she held grains of sand.’
That at least explained what she was doing with those fin-like hands. ‘And what happened?’
‘He was as good as his word; but she failed to ask for perpetual youth, and gradually wasted away until only her voice was left.’