by James Wilson
In the event, she deposited me at Brighton station in ample time for the train to Chichester, by which I was to start my journey to Petworth, and I -
But no – if I embark on that now, I shall be another day in the writing. So, let Petworth be the matter of my next letter, and this one delay no longer its most important business – telling you that I am well, and that I love you.
Walter
XVI
From the journal of Walter Hartright, 19th September, 185-
Michael Gudgeon told me one thing more about Turner, which I set down here (as nearly as I can remember) exactly as he said it:
‘One day, I recall, everything pleased him: a gothic ruin, a view of the sea, an effect of the light he especially loved, where the sun breaks through at a slant, and grains the cloud like a piece of slate. Late in the afternoon we stopped at an ale-house, and then rolled back to the Royal Oak at Poynings, singing “I am a Friar of Orders Grey”.
‘Do you know the Royal Oak, Mr. Hartright? No? Well, I dare say you’d think it a simple enough house – I dare say I should, now – but it seemed a very palace then, after what we’d been accustomed to, for the beds were comfortable, and we had a room apiece, for a marvel.’ [A pause. A laugh.] That night, as we sat drinking after supper, we fell into conversation with two big village girls, and Turner, I remember, told them his name was ‘Jenkinson’ – with a twinkle in his eye, that told me not to gainsay him – and that made me laugh; and the girls laughed too, though I am sure they didn’t know why; and the upshot, by and by, was that I took the one with the brown ringlets to my room, and he took the other to his.’
[I confess I do not know what I did to provoke this next comment; certainly I said nothing.]
‘Lord! You young people are such prudes, Mr. Hartright. Do you mean to say you’ve never had resort to a jolly girl?’ [Another pause, another laugh.] ‘I must say, though, Turner’s didn’t look so jolly the next day. Her eyes were red, and her skin was all chafed.’
XVII
Letter from Mrs. Tobias Bennett to Marian Halcombe,
21st September, 185-
Brentford,
21st September
Dear Miss Halcombe,
Thank you for your letter of 17th September. I should be delighted to see you – and your brother, if he is returned from his travels – any day next week. Thereafter we shall not be here, for the doctor orders us to the coast for my husband’s health, and we may be gone some months.
Mention Turner, and my first thought always is of the Thames, and boats, and picnics. I know this time of year is famously wild and wayward, but if we should be blessed with a fine day, would you care to undertake a modest expedition with us on the river (we keep a small skiff, just big enough for four), and see some of the haunts I most fondly associate with him?
Please be so good as to let me know what day would suit best, and whether my little proposal is agreeable.
Yours very truly,
Amelia Bennett
XVIII
Letter from Walter Hartright to Laura Hartright,
22nd September, 185-
Brompton Grove,
Friday
My dearest love,
It is past three o’clock, and here I am, at last, setting about the letter I promised you yesterday. I should have started this morning; but, having woken early, I decided to take myself to the park, and try to paint the dawn. The result – as I should have foreseen – is dreadful: an overboiled egg squashed on a bed of cinders. How did the man get such colours from his palette?
So – where did I leave you? Entering the train at Brighton railway station, I think; which proceeded to hurtle me at breakneck speed through Shoreham and Worthing, Angmering and Littlehampton, and at length – little more than an hour after I had left – delivered me, like a well-cared-for parcel, at Chichester. I was then obliged to continue my journey to Petworth by walking to the Ship Inn and taking the London coach – which, needless to say, contrived to cover only half the distance in twice the time, and lurched and bumped so much that I soon boasted a fine pair of bruises on my shoulder and forehead, and was starting to feel like a very badly-cared-for parcel.
Yet although I did not realize it at the time – indeed, I was inwardly cursing my ill-fortune, in terms you would have been shocked to hear! – fate was smiling on me; for among my fellow-passengers (who also included two elderly widowed sisters; and a young draughtsman with a case full of drawings, which he tried manfully to review, until a jolt sent them on to the floor; and a party of drunken students outside, who whooped and jeered with every swerve) was a pleasant-looking woman of about forty, who sat opposite me – and, as it turned out, was to play a material part in my adventure. She was well but not fashionably dressed – from her appearance, you might have supposed her to be the wife of a country doctor or attorney – and, as we bounced this way and that, smiled at me, with the conspiratorial air of a fellow-sufferer. At length (when I had received my knock on the head), she grimaced, gave a solicitous ‘ooh’, and said:
‘Jabez Bristow.’
‘I beg your pardon?’ I said.
‘Jabez Bristow,’ I must have still looked blank, for she went on: ‘You’re not from these parts, then?
‘No.’
‘Jabez is famous. Or infamous, rather. Can’t drive unless he has a pint of brandy inside him to keep him warm, And who cares for anything after a pint of brandy?’
I smiled. I could not place her voice; it was not that of a lady, but it had a kind of confidence that spoke of prosperity, and a practised ease in conversing with people of all sorts and conditions.
‘How far do you go?’ she said,
‘Petworth.’
She nodded. Her eyes flickered towards the two widows, and then she leant towards me and said, more softly: ‘Pity the poor souls who are going all the way to London. At least we shan’t have to endure this much longer.’
We felt the horses slow, and then strain forward, as if their load had suddenly become heavier. Looking out of the window, I saw a little farm bounded with knobbly flint walls, and, beyond it, our road rising sharply up into the downs.
‘In a year or two,’ said my companion, ‘we shan’t have to endure it at all.’
‘Why?’ I said. ‘Are they building a railway?’
She nodded. ‘Though you’ll still have to walk when you get the other end,’ she said, with a smile. ‘Or take a gig; for the station will be a clear two miles from the town.’
‘Good Lord!’ I said. ‘Is it impossible to build it closer?’
She shook her head. ‘The colonel won’t have it near his park.’
‘Colonel Wyndham?’ I asked.
She nodded; and then, after a moment, said: ‘Why, do you know him?’ Her tone was neutral, but she studied my face intently as she spoke, as if the question was prompted by something more than mere common politeness.
‘No,’ I replied. ‘But I am hoping to meet him.’
‘Indeed?’ she said non-committally, still watching me closely.
I had the strong impression that she knew something about the colonel, which might prove helpful to me, but that – like a card-player unwilling to disclose her hand until she has seen her opponent’s – she would only confide it to me once she had satisfied herself as to my own purpose in visiting him, and established that it was of a purely professional nature, and that I was an entirely disinterested party, who posed no threat to her. I therefore said:
‘I am writing a life of Turner.’ She did not reply at once, so I added: ‘The artist?’
‘Oh, yes, I knew Turner,’ she said. ‘I knew all of them, in the Third Earl’s time. Chantrey, Carew, Phillips, Haste, Constable …’
This was more than I had dared to hope; and, scarce able to believe my luck, I began: ‘What was …?’ At that exact moment, however – to my extreme annoyance – one of the two widows leaned towards me, scowling; and in a stern tone – as if she had caught me red-handed trying to make off
with something that was rightfully hers – said:
‘Are you talking about Turner?’
‘Yes,’ I said. I held her gaze for what seemed the minimum demanded by good manners, and then turned back decisively to the woman opposite. ‘What was he like?’
‘Oh,’ she said – and I suppose, by now, I should have come to expect her next words – ‘he was a funny little man. Ruddy face’ – she paddled her fingers against her own cheek – ‘and always carried a big umbrella. You’d never have thought he was an artist, to look at him. More like . .. more like a . ..’
She pondered a moment, and the hesitation was fatal; for it allowed Widow A to recharge her conversational guns, and – at the very instant my companion concluded, ‘like a sea captain’ – to boom:
‘We saw The Fighting Temeraire, at the Academy, in ‘thirty-nine’; and then, as if I might be disinclined to believe this startling intelligence on the strength of her word alone, she turned to her sister and shouted: ‘Didn’t we?’
‘What?’ yelled Widow B.
‘See The Fighting Temeraire!
‘What!?’ repeated her poor sister, who must have been completely deaf; for even the students on the roof heard the commotion, and one of them banged on the door with a mittened hand and bellowed: ‘Hoi! Less noise there below!’ His fellows promptly erupted into stifled laughter, and I confess that I was suddenly possessed by a kind of desperate hilarity myself, and had to avoid catching the eye of my new friend opposite, for fear I might join them.
Widow A finally gave up on her sister, and fixed me with a gimlet eye. ‘It was of particular interest to us,’ she said, in the same accusing tone (which I was beginning to realize was her normal manner of address), ‘for our father served with Nelson, in just such a ship as that.’
‘Really?’ I said. ‘How fascinating.’ And so, indeed, it might have been, in other circumstances; but at that instant, and in that place, it seemed nothing but a monstrous imposition, and I felt my temper rising. Once again, though, fate came to my assistance; for the young draughtsman – with a discreet wink in my direction, which said, as clearly as if he had spoken the words, Leave this to me – removed his hat, and held out his hand to Widow A, and said:
‘Well, now, there’s a thing – I’m in the ship-building business myself, in a small way; and it’s an honour to make your acquaintance.’
In less than a minute, he had charmed both the sisters into submission – though one could not have heard what he said, and the other could barely have understood it, since the ships he talked of had nothing to do with the romantic old man-of-war in Turner’s painting, and everything to do with the modern steamboat tugging it to its doom. And my companion, too, was touched by his spell, if only obliquely – for, seeing our fellow-passengers engrossed in a conversation of their own, she seemed visibly to relax a little, and to be more willing to talk frankly to me.
‘Yes, it was altogether different, in those days,’ she said, settling back in her seat.
‘Petworth House, you mean?’
She nodded. ‘Liberty Hall. People would come and go as they pleased, and there’d always be a bed for them, and a meal, and a room for them to work in, if they wished.’
‘Were they all artists, then?’
‘Many of them. The greatest patron in England, the Third Earl, that’s what I heard say. And with the finest collection. I wouldn’t know, myself, though I liked to creep into the gallery, and look at the statues. It was quite a thing, for a fourteen-year-old girl, to see a marble man with no clothes on.’
I glanced at the widows, but they showed no sign of having heard. I wanted to ask her how she came to be there, at such an age; but since it was clear that she was not a member of the family (and to assume that she was would have been a kind of mirror-image condescension, as bad as the thing it reflected), and the only other probable explanation was that she had been a servant, I could not think of a way to frame the question without the risk of insulting her. Instead, I said:
‘And was Turner there a great deal?’
‘Oh, yes; his lordship gave him the use of the Old Library, as his studio; and Turner’ – it suddenly struck me that she said ‘Turner’, rather than ‘Mr. Turner’, which seemed curious, when the man she was talking of was a guest in her master’s house – ‘Turner shut himself away there, all morning sometimes; and no-one was allowed to disturb him, save his lordship himself.’ She smiled, and laughed softly. ‘One time, I heard, Sir Francis -’
‘Sir Francis?’
‘Chantrey. The sculptor?’
‘Oh, yes,’ I said.
‘Well, he decided to play a trick on Turner; and he imitated his lordship’s footsteps in the corridor, and his special knock on the door, and did it so wonderfully well that Turner was deceived, and admitted him.’
‘And what happened?’ I said, impatiently. It was galling to find that even now, when I had supposed I was beginning to understand Turner, I could not guess the answer for myself. It all depended which Turner you believed in – the suspicious recluse, jealous of his privacy, or the hearty good fellow described by Gudgeon? The one would surely have resented such a prank; the other, equally surely, would have slapped his thigh, and made light of it.
‘Oh, he took it in good part, and laughed when he saw his mistake,’ said my companion. ‘He and Sir Francis were old friends, so I believe, and liked to tease each other. There was much merriment about it that evening at dinner, you may be sure.’
A point, I thought, to Gudgeon. I smiled and said: ‘That’s an illuminating story. Do you suppose the colonel will remember more, and be able to tell me?’
‘He might.’ She hesitated, and clenched and unclenched her jaw before going on grimly: ‘But he’s not like his father.’
‘In what way?’
‘He’s very shy. And has a terrible temper on him.’ She paused, as if her own words had surprised her. ‘Well, so did his father, come to that. But… but the colonel doesn’t love like his father. That’s the difference.’
‘Love what, or whom?’ I said.
‘Everything,’ she muttered, flushing slightly; and then, more confidently: ‘His people.’
‘Why, you make him sound like a monarch!’ I said, laughing.
‘And so he was!’ she cried. ‘Wasn’t there a French king once, they called the Sun King?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Louis XIV.’
‘That is how the Third Earl was,’ she said. ‘He was our Sun.’
We had reached the top of the hill now, and could feel the horses gaining speed, and hear the harness jingling freely again, as it eased about their shoulders. My companion glanced out of the window, but I kept my eyes on her face, in the hope that she would return to her subject. She seemed to think she had said enough, however, and after a long silence I decided I must prompt her, or risk losing her attention altogether.
‘Louis was a despot,’ I said.
‘Hm?’ She turned sharply, like a straying animal suddenly recalled by a tug on its rope.
‘A tyrant,’ I said. ‘He ruled by fear. Hundreds died building his palace. I take it you don’t mean -’
‘Oh, no!’ she said. She seemed genuinely shocked, and frowned, and looked this way and that, casting about for a way to explain what she meant. At length she said: ‘All I meant was, the sun shines on you, don’t it? That’s what his lordship did, he shone on us all. Even the animals; for he doted on his dogs and horses and cattle, and loved to have them about him, and you could fall over a sow on your way to the kitchen garden, or even see her galloping through one of the rooms, and all her little ones behind her.’ She smiled, and her eyes hazed with recollection, and she lowered her heavy eyelids to brush the moisture from them. ‘And the people, too. They’d play cricket on his lawn, and walk in his park as if it were their own – Lord! you should have seen them, sometimes – the boys’d scratch their names on his walls and windows, and he’d say nothing about it.’
‘Truly?’ I said; for I could
not conceive of any landowner I know willingly suffering such behaviour – and, indeed, would not tolerate it myself, at Limmeridge.
She nodded. ‘And every year he’d mark his birthday with a great feast for the poor. Once, when he was past eighty, it could not be held at the usual time, because he was ill; and so he arranged a fete in the park the next May. Four thousand tickets were given, but many more came; and the old man could not bear that any should go hungry outside his gates, and went himself, and ordered the barriers taken down, so that all could enter. I’ve heard six thousand were fed that day – think of it! six thousand! – even our Saviour did not feed so many. I was there, and I know I shall never see such a sight again – a great half-circle of tables spread before the house, and carts full of plum puddings and loaves, piled like ammunition, and an endless army of men marching back and forth, carrying sides of mutton and beef on hurdles. And his lordship forever slipping in and out of his room, for the pleasure of looking upon it all, and reflecting what he had done.’
‘Magnificent,’ I began, ‘but -’
‘Yes, magnificent,’ she said, so swept up now in the torrent of memory and feeling that she could not contain herself, but must rush on. ‘And he provided houses for the poor, and a doctor; and brought gas to the town, twenty years before they had it in Midhurst…’
‘Like the sun, indeed,’ I murmured.
‘What?’ she said, almost snappishly. Then, as if she had just caught my meaning, she laughed, and said: ‘Oh, yes, I had not thought of that!’
‘But a hard example’, I said, returning to my theme, ‘for an ordinary mortal to follow.’
‘What, his son, you mean?’
I nodded; and, in truth, I did feel sorry for the colonel; for only an angel could avoid being unfavourably compared with such a splendid figure, and only a saint bear it without rancour. Before I could speak, however, the woman shook her head fiercely, and said: