Mark Lambert's Supper

by J. I. M. Stewart

  I am acutely conscious that, if the full strangeness of this conclusion is to be conveyed, a more vivid image of Wendell Dauncey than has here been contrived is desirable. But this desideratum approximates to a contradiction in terms. For how to be vivid about one whom every surviving testimony suggests to have been less a man than a mist – a vapour, faintly luminous perhaps and not without a lurking hint of possible warmth, but long ago resolved, dissipated, imperceptibly melted away without anywhere or upon anyone having achieved any recorded sharpness of impression whatever? To speak of anything so positive-sounding as the salient traits of such a being must appear a wanton straining of language. Yet, as sometimes we see a cloud that’s dragonish, so in Dauncey can we with fair confidence descry, not indeed a vapour like a bear or lion, but one fairly consistently suggestive of a dove or sheep. Of the profoundly pacific cast of the phantom there can in fact be little doubt. It was a gentle ghost – yet decidedly not affable or familiar, since it spent much of its time in seclusion upon employments which, if presumably artistic, were yet appropriately nebulous. Dauncey in fact was pathologically shy – and in particular of women. His adoration of Mary Lambert, whether or not it was still an active force within him, had been, and was clearly destined to remain, a unique event in his life. The ladies of Lambert’s circle, even more than the men, found him elusive. Did one of them make any approach towards intimacy, she would find the very wrack dislimn, and the residual phenomenon show indistinct as water is in water. Yet the end of Dauncey’s absorption in and ascendancy over Lambert came about through what has all the appearance of a sudden sharp sexual rivalry. They fell out over a woman. And Dauncey married her.

  It is a thousand pities, surely, that of a story so beguiling scarcely even the broad outline survives. In filling it out we have no more than here and there the merest hint to help us; and it must be admitted at once that, on our present knowledge, no reconstruction can be more than speculative. He who penetrates to the Chiostro Verde of S. Maria Novella, and there would fain trace out the drama of Uccello’s Deluge upon a wall more pervasively stained and shadowed by the hand of time than ever by the artist’s, has a measure of the bafflement it is possible to feel before the sadly obscured action now confronting us.

  But it is at least certain that the catastrophe – itself something of a Noah’s flood in its obliterative effect upon Lambert’s interesting talent – was intimately involved with an actual literary work upon which he had engaged himself at the time. It would appear (and for this there is excellent authority) that he had for some months been labouring, rapidly and abundantly as was his habit when his imagination had once quickened, upon a painful theme. It can be recapitulated concisely enough.

  A young woman of high spirit and great beauty, the daughter of a long since deceased Italian nobleman and an American mother, is discovered moving confidently and as of right in the best Roman and Florentine society. Believing all the world to be before her, and animated by a romantic spirit of perfectionism such as Lambert frequently delighted to depict, she rejects a suitor whose qualifications in every direction she acknowledges to herself as falling very little short of the ideal. Another suitor appears. He too is strikingly eligible – although, to her refined perceptions, not quite the near-paragon represented by the first. For this second suitor she finds her mother disposed to take considerable interest. Nevertheless she rejects his addresses too, and he is succeeded by a further aspirant – one by no means impossible, but showing nevertheless as of a decidedly limited attractiveness when set in comparison with the young men already turned down. For his acceptance her mother is yet more urgent. She again refuses; and this process, with certain variations of’ circumstance, is several times repeated. Suddenly the quality of the suitors absolutely deteriorates. The girl realises that her mother is penniless; that she has herself long without knowing it been exposed upon a calculating marriage market; and that she is now so cheapened that society is unlikely to afford her other than the most miserable, even the most revolting, match. How the story was to close is unknown; nor is light to be found in the enigmatic title proposed for it. The novel was to be called The End of It All.

  Such then was Lambert’s not uncharacteristic theme; and there can be little doubt that he communicated his progress with it to the faithful Dauncey. But there was something else that Dauncey, however secluded, could scarcely have failed to learn as well. Florence itself at that moment was witnessing the progress of just such a sombre story. The intuition of Mark Lambert had distinguished it in its early stages, followed it with attention, and constituted it the theme of a novel now far advanced towards completion. We can readily picture the manner in which the farther implications of this state of affairs dawned upon the alarmed Dauncey. The scene is set before the Villa Pastorelli at evening, and from the plain below, filled with the light of evening, the city seems to float up like some long-sunken treasure now mysteriously rising through a sea of gold. It is close; to Dauncey’s sense threateningly close as he watches his friend pace restlessly up and down the terrace, talking – wonderfully, absorbedly – of his theme. For there, as it seems but a stone’s throw away, there in some cheap pensione in a dusty square, is an actual disgraced and desperate mother, an actual tragically disillusioned and still beautiful girl. And Lambert’s gaze – Dauncey can be sure of it as he sits in the deep two-arched loggia and studies something at once brooding and predatory in his hero – is travelling down to Florence in a manner for long blessedly unfamiliar, but in a manner that Dauncey well remembers from long ago.

  Facilis descensus Averno! Easy, alas, the plunge from that serene and gentle slope, sacred to the creative contemplations of the young Michelangelo and the venerable Landor, to the hot, hurried, passionate city; to the squalid contriving of chances and surprises and persuasions; to the prostituting of the great capacious intellect in carnal stratagem!

  Dauncey was in despair. The excellent creature’s native morals, virtually unimpaired despite their long expatriation from the wholesome simplicities of his native wild, were outraged; his acquired artistic perceptions, although still perhaps scarcely recondite, were apprehensive before the likely fatality of his hero’s so plainly regressive step. For Lambert had regressed. He had recklessly picked up a fable virtually on his own doorstep; and now he was all too clearly prompted to erupt upon it in person in the old disastrous way – if indeed he had not already done so. The consequence must be a potential masterpiece confounded and destroyed. The baleful distraction had returned to Settignano. Dauncey was distracted.

  Even in venturing thus far I may be taxed with passing a shade beyond the bounds of secure inference. Yet is there not one further small supposition which both biographical art and psychological science seem not only to permit but even to enjoin? We know that there was a dispute: an actual affair of raised voices, high tempers, threats, defiances, conceivably even blows. This astonishing climax rumour variously locates in a restaurant, during a rural walk, and – very scandalously – at some interrupted assignation in the favouring gloom of Or San Michele. Dauncey’s marriage almost immediately followed. Whether it was successful or not we cannot tell; and whether it might have remained or become so we shall never know. Within little more than a twelvemonth Dauncey’s bride was dead. If she died regarding her husband as a veritable St George she was not far wrong. But if she believed that it was herself that he had been minded to rescue she was in radical if merciful error. For it was Mark Lambert, assuredly, that the dim domiciliary presence had turned warrior to preserve from the dragon. This is a queer conclusion enough, but no other makes sense. We reflect mournfully that the sacrifice, which may have been a grievous one, was in vain. Dauncey had defeated that first symptom of relapse in the God of his idolatry by decisive action – but it was action all too decisive. The breach it occasioned was perhaps in some sense repaired. But Dauncey’s puzzling ascendency was over. For the first time in ten years, Mark Lambert ceased to look bewildered; returned, indeed, to looking insp
ired. And his writing responded as we might expect. Even before the dangerous Mrs Dauncey was dead, it had become once more the old muddied and muddled stuff.

  THREE

  Miss Bave closed Rupert Poyle’s book and examined the window by which she sat. It was her rather vague supposition that it might let down with a strap and thus permit the jettisoning of a piece of property which she had no desire to retain. But no strap was in evidence; and Miss Bave, recalling that she was warm and breathing normally while many thousands of feet in air, concluded that access to the outer atmosphere was impracticable, and that she and this most disagreeable writer were effectively encapsulated together until the end of the journey. But at least this was not now to be long delayed. Ahead, and having the character of a gathering inundation about to wash away the Alps forever, was a surging ocean of cloud which gave every appearance of extending to infinity. Into this Miss Bave’s machine presently hurled itself upon a bold diagonal, and with such impetus that infinity was traversed as she gazed, to be succeeded by bright sunshine and the prospect, almost directly beneath her, of a small, red-roofed Italian town half encircled by a winding river.

  Miss Bave gathered her possessions about her. She even, upon second thoughts, stuffed the offensive volume in her bag – a receptacle which might have been likened to its owner in combining a worn, puffy and distended appearance with the obstinate suggestion of an article decidedly superior of its kind. The theme of distraction at Settignano was by no means done with. Miss Bave was making this journey in order to keep a discreet eye on it. For purposes of reference, at least, she might require Poyle’s deplorable essay yet. It might indeed be prudent to attempt a brief retrospective analysis of it now.

  In visiting Italy Miss Bave had never before employed her present mode of conveyance. Nevertheless she was well aware that it was not anything in the novelty of her airy situation that had several times in the last half-hour reduced her to a physical condition only to be described as tremulous. Anger, not funk, had been at work. Miss Bave, who believed in thinking twice before crossing the boundary between respect for good scholarship and indignation against bad, was annoyed at discovering herself in this emotional condition. It was true that there were places where Poyle was entirely intolerable: in the reiterated facetiousness, for example, of his references to Wendell Dauncey’s transatlantic origins, or in his mention of Anthea as “one of Lambert’s legitimate children”. Nevertheless the general tone of the piece was less offensive than it might have been. Its main trespass was a very common one, which in one guise or another Miss Bave held professional reckonings with every week of her life. Bad historians are less concerned to arrive at the authentic relations of the persons they study than to get them where they want them. In Poyle’s case, this was in a posture that could be represented as steadily if mildly ridiculous. Poyle’s vision – it occurred to Miss Bave – bore out Aristotle’s opinion that the ludicrous is a species of the ugly.

  Yet Poyle’s essay might have been uglier than it was. Miss Bave was conscious that she had finished it, even if in much distaste, yet with a certain obscure sense of relief. But in this itself she recognised something ominous. She was aware of several doubtful matters about which it was possible to have a somewhat urgent sense of the necessity of arriving at the truth. And to take Poyle’s specious structure to pieces was perhaps the first necessary step.

  The essay contained two elements that were readily distinguishable. There was a substratum of authentic fact: matter of common knowledge and known provenance, the accuracy of which could be checked by anybody who cared to do so. And there was a top-dressing of unashamed fancy: this Poyle dignified with the title of “speculation”, but it would be simpler to describe it as invention pure and simple. So far, the picture presented no difficulty. But there was also a third element, and this vastly complicated the business of deciding just where sheer invention began. Poyle had enjoyed access to fresh facts. He had probably distorted them; certainly he had carefully brought them forward in a manner making it hard to detect where reliance upon them stopped off and mere fancy began. But there could be no doubt as to their existence. One point proved this clearly. There was no sign that Poyle had ever seen a copy of the privately printed Settignano Memorandum Book; indeed he could not have done so, since it contained matter with which he could have made considerable play. And he had certainly never had the benefit of any contact with the acute perceptions of young Garth Dauncey. Yet he revealed to the world – for the first time in print – that Mark Lambert had once nearly completed a novel to be called The End of It All. How had Poyle come by this information?

  The question upon which Miss Bave had thus arrived accompanied her to earth at Malpensa and served substantially to distract her mind from the horrors of the autostrada upon which she presently found herself. It may however have been some species of nervous rebound from the extravagant aggressiveness of that advertisers’ elysium that presently brought the dimly conjectured figure of Wendell Dauncey insistently before her imagination. Was he not a probable source of Poyle’s information upon the existence of The End of It All? Was he not indeed the only person from whom Poyle could have derived the perplexed and unedifying circumstances with which the essay declared that ill-starred novel to have been implicated?

  The elder Dauncey had been born in the early eighteen-seventies; and if Poyle had not, in fact, come into contact with him, it would be quite in Poyle’s manner to assume that he was dead. But if Poyle had met him? Miss Bave scowled at a succession of gigantic sewing-machines which were hurtling past her bus at this moment. Suppose that in the last few years the elder Dauncey had declined sufficiently far into senility to make him substantially vulnerable to impertinent curiosities? This, after all, was a supposition more or less in line with what Miss Bave had recently been told about the old painter by his son. Three years ago, standing on the Lungarno and pointing across river at the Piazzale Michelangelo, Wendell Dauncey had been prompted to let some sort of cat out of the ancient bag of his personal memories. Suppose that Poyle had had the good fortune and unscrupulousness to come upon and exploit such a weakness: would this not very precisely account for the sort of information which he had retailed and no doubt fantasticated in the essay now ignominiously buried in Miss Bave’s bag? And having successfully extracted from old Dauncey a story which could, with more or less of additional colouring, be used to depict him in an absurd light, might Poyle not have seen a pleasant stroke of additional humour in the bland assertion that he was long since dead and forgotten?

  The industrial skyline of outer Milan was before her while Miss Bave was still canvassing the various implications of this question. The source of Poyle’s knowledge was perhaps of no great moment, although she rather hoped that old Dauncey would prove to be a bad guess, and the truth lie in another direction which, upon reflection, seemed conceivable to her. More important was simply the story itself and the fact of its publication. It was just the sort of thing that Anthea Lambert and her young man – as she understood the matter – were now in Florence hunting after; and it was certainly a sufficiently disagreeable exemplification of what she herself had done her best to represent as the injudiciousness of their proceedings. Perhaps one such piece of picturesque but faintly malodorous excavation would be enough, even though it had been achieved by a spade other than their own. Perhaps the young people would now give themselves to other employments. It was of course possible that the lure of unearthing The End of It All would compel them to go on; Miss Bave herself acknowledged considerable excitement in the thought that a virtually complete Mark Lambert of the mature period might really exist. But Miss Bave was hopefully sceptical about the depth of Anthea’s, and even of Garth Dauncey’s, literary interests here. It was her persuasion that for them Mark Lambert and all his works had been fulfilling a function which for most of their contemporaries was represented by a river-picnic, a tennis-party or a ball; that a force more powerful than the mild genius of antiquarian scholarship had in
fact taken them firmly in hand from the start. Reiterating this conviction to herself cheered Miss Bave up wonderfully. When the unassuming façade of La Scala came into view she greeted it as an old friend, and was presently addressing herself with a good heart to the painful business of extricating herself from her bus and inserting herself into a taxi.

  The End of It All – thought Miss Bave, resuming her reflections as she jolted towards the railway-station – The End of It All had undeniably started something. Whether the manuscript turned up or not, it had already done that. Poyle’s account was sufficiently striking to prompt a certain amount of curiosity in the literary world at large. And an odd consequence was already apparent.

  It was Garth Dauncey, far more than Anthea Lambert, who now seemed likely to figure as what Anthea called an animated footnote in English literary history. Poyle’s story might be grossly distorted, but it had not the appearance of an entire fabrication. It tied up too neatly – if still enigmatically – both with the young man’s story of his father’s impulsive communication and with the reminiscence of which Sir Charles Shaxby had so innocently delivered himself over the air. Of the first of these Poyle still could know nothing. The second had certainly not been public property until after his book was in the press; for Sir Charles, it appeared, had never committed to print anything but a very general impression of Lambert’s personality and conversation. Poyle’s story, then, must be founded upon some species of fact. And as it stood, it represented Garth Dauncey’s mother as the original of the heroine in the missing novel. It also represented her as a girl whose painful and humiliating history had culminated in the occasioning of a grotesquely motivated quarrel between Mark Lambert and the obscure person who was presently to marry her. If these facts were true they would stand, for as long as Lambert’s memory endured, as constituting one of the oddest episodes in English literary history. And, as between the two young people, it was decidedly Garth Dauncey’s affair. Indeed, Anthea Lambert had no place in it at all. While these obscure events were transacting themselves her birth still lay several years ahead.