Kingdom Swann: The Story of a Photographer

by Gibson, Miles

  ‘No hospitals,’ wheezed Swann, staring in alarm at his bloody hands. ‘I’m too old for hospitals. The doctors will put an end to me …’

  ‘No hospitals,’ promised Marsh and, once he’d found a neighbour who would volunteer to guard the shop, he walked Swann home through the fog.

  When they reached the house they were greeted by Alice who opened the door and fell back and screamed and started a great commotion. Ethel ran from the parlour, caught sight of her master and had hysterics. Old Mrs Spooner came tottering up from the scullery. The children crawled from the woodwork and stared at the mess on the carpet.

  ‘We was attacked!’ announced Marsh breathlessly, setting Swann down at the foot of the stairs. ‘Attacked by mad women in the street!’ He sent Ethel to run for towels and hot water and asked Alice to help him put Swann to bed.

  The old photographer’s face was grey, his nose was blue and his eyebrows were black with congealing blood. He looked like a corpse that had been very badly embalmed. He looked very much like Rupert Gladstone’s mistress.

  ‘I don’t like the colour of him,’ said Alice as they laid him out on the counterpane. ‘We should call the doctor. He ought to be taken to the hospital.’

  ‘No,’ snapped Marsh. ‘I promised him. I promised to bring him home. He wanted to die in his own bed. That was his last request.’

  ‘Take off his boots,’ said Ethel as she set to work sponging the blood from his hands.

  ‘I think we should keep his feet warm,’ argued Alice.

  Swann opened his eyes and moaned. ‘Faith …’ he whispered, clutching at Ethel’s wrist.

  ‘What?’ whimpered Ethel. She dropped the sponge and watched in horror as it bounced through the dust beneath the bed.

  ‘I think he wants us to pray,’ whispered Alice, dropping to her knees and propping her elbows against the mattress. She screwed up her eyes along with her courage and began to mutter the Lord’s Prayer.

  ‘Faith,’ said Swann, very weakly. ‘Where’s Faith? Don’t let her see me in this sad state …’

  ‘That’s the late Mrs Swann!’ exclaimed Marsh, startled at hearing her name again. He took it as a sign that Swann’s condition was grave. ‘He’s confused,’ he whispered. ‘He’s starting to ramble.’

  ‘He’s slipping away,’ sobbed Ethel, jumping up and kicking the bowl of water.

  ‘Talk to him,’ urged Marsh. ‘Try to keep him talking.’

  ‘Mr Swann!’ shouted Alice. ‘This is Alice speaking – you’ve had a very nasty accident!’ She reached out and squeezed his wrist, vainly searching for his pulse with her thumb.

  ‘Do you think he can hear you?’ said Ethel, hiding her face in her hands and peeking at Swann through her blood-stained fingers.

  ‘I don’t know,’ frowned Alice, shaking her head.

  ‘Try again,’ insisted Marsh. ‘It’s not too late. Try and call him back again.’

  ‘Mr Swann!’ shouted Alice. ‘This is Alice speaking …’

  But Swann had fallen asleep.

  36

  ‘I could have been killed,’ grumbled Swann, the next day, as he watched Cromwell Marsh set to work with the broom.

  ‘You’ve had a very narrow escape,’ agreed Marsh, who’d begun to believe the old man must be indestructible.

  ‘It’s not safe on the streets!’

  ‘We’ll soon get this place working again,’ said Marsh, brushing out glass from the floorboards. The door was locked. The shop window had been barricaded against any further attacks.

  ‘No more work,’ said Swann, shaking his battered head. ‘I want to die in a comfortable bed.’ His eyebrows were thick, black, hairy scabs. A thumb and two fingers were bandaged.

  ‘You mustn’t be frightened of a few rogue women,’ said Marsh.

  ‘It’s not the women that frighten me. It’s the times,’ said Swann. ‘I’m an old man. I don’t have the energy for all this pandemonium.’ He leaned against the counter and turned up his collar to shield his face from the draughts.

  Everything changing. The French filling London with foreign postcards. Cheap and nasty titillations. Cardboard keyholes. Petticoat peepshows. Frenchified nudes at sixpence a dozen. They’ll soon give them out as cigarette cards. No one cares now for Biblical Beauties. It’s all finished. Time to go home and sleep by the fire.

  ‘How long have we been working here?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Marsh.

  ‘I bought this place in 1849,’ said Swann gloomily. ‘Two years before the Great Exhibition. I was twenty-four years old and I thought I was a painter. God forgive me, I hoped to be president of the Academy. When I married Mrs Swann, and that was ’73, I was already serving behind a camera.’

  ‘A long time,’ admitted Marsh. ‘A lifetime of dedication. Be careful – you’re treading on glass.’

  ‘It seems like another world,’ sighed Swann. ‘It was nothing but wet plates in those days. Your fingers stained black with silver nitrate and your eyes always full of the flash-powder smoke. Now they have celluloid films in rolls and cameras no bigger than notebooks. Everyone owns a camera. You can’t walk down the street without meeting someone taking a snap of a horse, a house or a pile of shit. What do they do with those pictures?’

  ‘I dare say it’s the novelty with some of them tiny cameras,’ said Cromwell Marsh.

  ‘Novelty, is it!’ barked Swann. ‘So that’s what became of the world’s most influential invention. In Hamburg, thirty years ago, they felt so frightened of the machine they banned photographs of nudes. They banned photographs of paintings of nudes! Now any man who owns a Kodak owns twenty-five photographs of his wife undressed down to her short and curlies. Nude knitting. Nude drinking tea. Nude reading Home Chat in carpet slippers. What can you make of it?’

  ‘That’s socialism,’ grinned Marsh. ‘The world is changing.’

  ‘I’m tired of the changing. I was happier with the past.’

  ‘You can’t walk backward into the future,’ said Cromwell Marsh. ‘You’ll miss the opportunities if you’re always looking into the past.’ He set down the broom and searched his pockets for cigarettes.

  ‘The past is the future. What happens tomorrow was already decided yesterday. Cause and effect. You don’t know where you’re going unless you look back over your shoulder.’

  Marsh looked disheartened.

  ‘It’s different for you,’ said Swann gently. He drew up a little bamboo chair that was set aside for customers and squatted down beside the door. ‘A young man like you can look to the future with something approaching excitement. Take the studio, with my blessing, and seize your damn opportunities.’

  ‘And where would I find such an artist,’ said Marsh, ‘as might hope to imitate the lovely visions of your own majestic imagination? There’s no artist in London could hope to capture the spirit of your noble nudes! Do you want to break my heart? No, no, it’s quite impossible! I’d rather set fire to the whole damn business and toss myself to its flames!’ He lit a cigarette and flicked the match to the floor.

  ‘It’s no good,’ sighed Swann. ‘I’m worn out. You must do as you want.’ He stood up and ambled through the back of the shop into the silent studio. Marsh followed him, trailing the broom.

  ‘It’s nothing without you,’ said Marsh, ‘and I can’t pretend that it’s otherwise.’ It was cold. Frost against the windows and a stove full of yesterday’s ashes.

  ‘And what will you do with yourself when I’m gone?’ said Swann. He was grateful, at least, that Marsh had not suggested the introduction of a younger man.

  Marsh was silent for a long time. ‘I was thinking of nickelodeons,’ he said at last. He was fascinated by the moving pictures, knew the names of all the actors and followed the newsreels with interest. Here men were seen to run about the flickering screen, silently shouting, waving their arms, full of self-importance. Ships were launched. Flags were raised. Mobs marched and cavalry charged. So much animation!

  ‘The picturedrome?’ said Sw
ann.

  ‘That’s it,’ said Marsh, walking through the racks of scenery. He paused at a painted window on a peeling canvas wall. ‘Everybody wants moving pictures. There’s nothing like it. You see the people up there on the screen and they look so real you expect them to talk.’ He peered through the window at a Persian garden full of strange and wonderful birds.

  ‘What do you know about such things!’ scoffed Swann.

  ‘I’ve made a few enquiries,’ said Marsh. ‘There’s a company in Cricklewood as might welcome a small investment.’

  Swann had never see the moving pictures, having heard they injured the eyes. ‘You’ll be throwing your money away,’ he warned.

  ‘Films is the future,’ said Marsh, emerging from the Persian garden. ‘There’s no stopping it.’

  ‘The Titanic was the future,’ said Swann. ‘The future can sink without trace.’

  But Cromwell Marsh only smiled and sucked on the stump of his cigarette. He had gone to great pains to secure his own future. He had laid down the plans many months ago when he’d sensed the old man had come to the end of his natural working life. Everything was ready and waiting. There was only one question left to him. ‘What will become of the studio?’

  ‘Sell it,’ shrugged Swann. He had a notion he might paint again. But this time he’d not suffocate in the dusty air of a studio, mixing his oils with flattery, counting the chins on wealthy matrons. He pictured himself on the beach at Brighton, painting cold, empty stretches of sea.

  ‘And the camera?’

  ‘Sell it!’ shouted Swann, turning on his heel and walking away. ‘Sell everything. I’ve finished!’

  37

  It is with much regret, Marsh informed the subscribers, that the Swann studio, after many years, now feels obliged to close the door on its golden pavilion of pleasure. We thank our faithful friends for their generous support and trust they have always found satisfaction. It was ever our grand ambition to furnish the artist, the connoisseur and the armchair adventurer with views of Womankind that might kindle the heart and excite the sensibilities. And if we succeeded, in any measure, to cast the light of a woman’s true beauty into the darkness of the world, we may count ourselves the most fortunate of men and retire from the stage contented.

  There were more than a thousand photographs remaining in the stockroom. Cromwell Marsh packed them and sent them direct to Lord Hugo Prattle, in the hope that they might fit his library.

  The glass plates, of which there were nearly fifteen thousand, were sold to Godiva Imperial, a successful Haymarket publishing house, who intended to publish the work, at their own discretion, in strictly limited editions. The owner of Godiva was a dubious individual by the name of Clarence Clark. Marsh didn’t like the look of him but Clark seemed so anxious to own the plates and offered such vast sums of money, that Cromwell Marsh was persuaded.

  Swann was happy and flattered to know that the best of his work would continue to be published. One day, perhaps, when he was long dead and gone, the world might recover its senses and judge his nudes, with an unjaundiced eye, as elemental paintings forged from sunlight and shadow. He had made arrangements, if Marsh should fail to find them a home, to store the plates in his cellar.

  The building was put up for sale and all the equipment sent out for auction. The studio, with its wooden stage and fine north window, attracted a number of side-show proprietors in search of London premises. Marsh sold out to a character called Captain Bones who exhibited waxwork cannibals.

  38

  Swann went home and settled down to a life of leisure. It was 1914. While he sat and toasted his feet by the fire, suffragettes attacked the paintings in the National Gallery and burned down Yarmouth’s Britannia Pier. They stoned politicians in the street and jeered at His Majesty the King. A bomb exploded in Westminster Abbey. He followed the rumpus in the evening papers with all the detachment of great old age and fell asleep in his favourite chair. The suffragettes had lost their power to outrage his sensibilities. Nothing surprised him. He was eighty-nine years old. This, alone, astonished him.

  It seemed to him that he’d grown so old he should be dead. There were times when he thought he was dead. Without the demands of the studio to occupy his days he began, at once, to feel his years. He was growing deaf. His elbows and knees had rusted away. There were some days when he felt so bad he couldn’t find the strength to leave his bed. He drifted now between life and sleep. Ethel cooked him puddings and Alice dosed him with Doctor Mountjoy’s Famous Gripe Water which, taken in generous quantities, contained enough milk of opium to soothe the pain in his arms and legs.

  Marsh attended the bedside whenever he came to town. He had invested all his money in the British All Star Vitascope Company, making two-reeler comedies from a converted cattle-shed in Cricklewood. Within a month of his arrival the company had been persuaded to produce the first of its Venus films featuring Pansy Waters, the popular circus star. Pansy, dressed as a scullery-maid, catches her petticoats in the mangle. The mangle explodes. Her frock falls apart. Pansy falls down in confusion. The film had been such a success that Marsh had been given the task of writing and directing a series of fifteen Venus adventures and was always in search of amusing ways for Pansy to be robbed of her clothes.

  ‘They say I’ll double my money in less than five years,’ he bragged, chewing on a small cigar. He enjoyed his visits. He was nearly sixty years old himself but an afternoon spent with Kingdom Swann made him feel like a boy again. The poor old bugger looked terrible.

  ‘You should have done it years ago,’ whispered Swann. ‘You shouldn’t have listened to an old man.’

  ‘You might be right. You might be wrong,’ said Cromwell Marsh. ‘But I don’t regret a moment. I can thank God I worked with one of the world’s great artists. It was my privilege and pleasure to help bare the bums of London’s most lovely women. I’ve seen some sights and no mistake. Every picture was a masterpiece. Every one a coconut. Why, I shouldn’t be surprised if they don’t decide to build you a museum.’

  ‘A museum?’ smiled Swann, trying to imagine the galleries and the colonnades.

  ‘I shouldn’t be surprised,’ said Marsh. ‘A museum of natural beauty. The most lovely women of the century displaying all the good Lord gave ’em in very artistic attitudes.’

  ‘There’s been nothing like it in history,’ said Swann.

  ‘It would be a scientific phenomenon,’ said Marsh. ‘A national library of the female nude.’

  Swann grunted. ‘There’ll soon be no women left fit for nudes,’ he said sadly. ‘Have you seen ’em? Swaggering up and down the streets. Smoking pipes. Dressed like men. Where’s the sense to it?’

  ‘They’re queer times,’ said Marsh.

  ‘What?’ shouted Swann.

  ‘Queer times!’ roared Marsh.

  ‘Time I was gone,’ said Swann, sinking back into the pillows.

  ‘You need some fresh air,’ said Marsh, blowing a smoke ring at the ceiling. ‘Buy yourself a little motor and get Alice to drive you about the place. It’s not healthy to stay in bed. It gives the germs a chance to settle.’

  ‘I’m learning to be old,’ said Swann. ‘I’m a man staring into the twilight.’

  ‘You’ll learn nothing in bed,’ said Marsh.

  But Swann was already falling asleep. His dreams were full of ghostly women. Spirits and sprites, seraphs and sirens. From the far shores of death they gathered to call out and beckon him into the marble halls of his fabulous mausoleum.

  As the weeks passed he grew more and more reluctant to be stirred from Doctor Mountjoy’s opium dream. He felt comfortable and serene. The Artist Takes His Leave of Creation. He saw himself sliding gracefully from the withered remains of his body and floating out to heaven.

  And then it happened. He was woken one morning by the sound of marching soldiers. Children shouting. Dogs barking. A brass band playing beneath the window. He screwed up his eyes and pulled the bedclothes over his head. But it was no good. The no
ise continued. Swann was infuriated. He wasn’t going to die to the tune of a marching band. He dressed and went down to breakfast.

  ‘What’s happening to the world?’ he shouted at Ethel as he savaged a plate of scrambled eggs. A child wandered out of the scullery and settled itself at the old man’s feet. Swann peered down at the little face. The child grinned back at Swann and chewed the head from a clothes-peg doll.

  ‘It’s the Kaiser causing a stink,’ Ethel said cheerfully. ‘The Germans are in France, the Russians are in Germany and we’ll soon be in the thick of it.’ She was pleased to see him in such a fine temper. He looked quite restored as he sat in his chair at the kitchen table. His ears blazed and his whiskers bristled.

  ‘Fighting the Frenchie?’ he shouted, spitting egg the length of his beard. ‘Are we off to fight the French?’

  ‘No,’ said Ethel. ‘This time we’re out to stop the Kaiser.’

  ‘But he’s at war with ’em,’ said Swann, sucking at a finger of toast.

  ‘That’s it,’ said Ethel.

  Swann frowned and shook his head. He didn’t like the sound of it. ‘My father fought the Frenchies. Napoleon damn near blew his head off. We don’t owe them any favours.’

  ‘I think we’re helping the French,’ said Ethel, growing confused. ‘Alice knows more about it. She’s been reading the newspaper.’

  ‘We can’t be helping the Russians!’ said Swann.

  Alice came into the kitchen nursing a pail of milk. ‘What are you doing out of bed?’ she scolded when she saw her master at the table.

  ‘I can’t rest for the noise in the street,’ grumbled Swann. ‘Ethel says we’re at war with the Kaiser.’

  ‘That’s nothing to worry your head about,’ said Alice. ‘It will all be finished before it gets started.’

  ‘How’s that?’ said Ethel.

  ‘They say we’re going to war at sea,’ announced Alice. ‘There’s to be a battle as big as Trafalgar.’