Douglas could hear the gin gurgling as it left the bottle. He envied her her command of a bottle at her mouth. When he drank from the bottle he took it in short sips and nearly choked. Not so Mrs. Carr, she poured the stuff back.
When the bottle started to sound hollow she decided that she had better leave some for another time. Somewhere beneath the black cloak she secreted it. Mr. Carr looked annoyed and then he smiled.
“Well,” he said, “let her have it. I’ve got another.” As if by magic he produced that and took a drink himself before passing it to Douglas, saying sombrely, “Be careful she doesn’t lay her old claws on this one too.”
Mrs. Carr was vociferous. “That’s not the way to speak of your mother,” she squawled, “where were you brought up?”
“You should know,” said Mr. Carr, “I wasn’t interested. As a matter of strict fact I sometimes wonder if I ever was born at all and if I didn’t just appear from nowhere. We geniuses are like that,” he said modestly, by way of explanation.
“You were born all right,” said his mother peevishly, “you were a nice baby—but by God you’ve gone off since.”
Mr. Carr took advantage of this diversion to pick up most of his mother’s marbles and put them in his pocket. She took this action without a murmur, but Douglas noticed that, with amazing adroitness for one so aged, she removed the contents of her son’s pockets as he leaned forward.
“Ha,” she said, running her fingers through the packet of papers and removing a five-pound note, “this’ll be useful.”
“I hope so,” Mr. Carr took back his papers, “it’s a forgery and they’ll run you in the first time you try to pass it. They are making very good forgeries these days.” His mother was crackling it between her fingers and listening anxiously to the noise, “Oh, you wouldn’t know the difference unless someone told you. Give it here and I’ll shew you.”
The old lady surrendered the note unsuspectingly and Mr. Carr folded it up and put it in his trouser pocket.
“That one, I’ve just remembered,” he said happily, “is all right. But now you know that you should keep your eyes open for bad ones. There are some about, not that I’ve ever encountered them myself. They’d just better try giving me a bad fiver.”
He looked at Douglas as though he was a forger who had just tried to palm some of his products off on an unsuspecting genius.
“I don’t know why we go on sitting on the floor,” complained Mrs. Carr, “hasn’t this young man got any chairs that he can offer to an old woman? I am old,” she said as if Douglas doubted her word, “a hundred-and-three come four Sundays after Martinmass.”
Douglas did not follow this method of calculating one’s birthday, but he said, “Good Lord, yes. There are plenty of chairs in the library. Come in and make yourself at home.”
He led the way into the library. Mrs. Carr looked at the steel chairs and sniffed. She looked at the books and sniffed even harder.
“Books,” she said in a tone of disapproval, “Books, eh? I don’t approve of books, young man. They just make mischief. I had one once. Called Married Love it was and full of the most extraordinary stuff. Lots of things I didn’t know in it, too. Can’t say they did me any good.” She sniffed again, “Mechanics—that’s what it was, and I never could get on with mechanics. You take a telephone, young man, it tells you to press button A or press button B. Do you ever press the right button?” She looked at Douglas as if daring him to say that he did; “No! You always press the wrong button. Well that was me and that book. I pressed the wrong button. Every time. Seventeen I had and glad I was when it finished. If I’d had eighteen I think I might have gone mad.”
“Don’t you believe her,” Mr. Carr sounded exceedingly pessimistic, “she only had three and she killed two of ’em. Drowned ’em like kittens, I say. She would have drowned me but there was a drought at the time, and the only water she had was the drinking water and she didn’t like to spoil that.”
Douglas was beginning to think that he had wandered into the middle of a Marx Brothers’ film. There was a complete but crazy logic about Mr. Carr and his mother which seemed to have no connection with life as he knew it.
Mrs. Carr tried one of the steel and fabric Marcel Breuer chairs. She sat down very gingerly, and then she stood up again. She fingered the steel tubing anxiously.
“It looks awfully thin,” she announced, “and I don’t like tubes. You ask Ben and he’ll tell you. Tubes are the trouble of my life. If it wan’t for tubes I’d be a millionairess.”
“Yes,” said Mr. Carr, but he gave no explanation of the statement, so that Douglas was left in ignorance of what tubes had done to blight the life of his mother.
“What’s this?” asked the old lady, pointing to a construction in black plastic and plexiglass by Mogoly-Nagy. Douglas did his best to explain. Even in his own ears the explanation sounded rather thin.
“I don’t believe it,” said Mrs. Carr. Her son looked at her sternly.
“Don’t believe what?” he asked. She waved at the library as a whole.
“Any of this,” she said largely, “it’s not real. It’s all a dream, and I don’t believe it. It’s all gin.”
“Not at this time in the morning, mother,” Mr. Carr was insistent, “you haven’t had all that gin yet.”
“How do you know what I’ve had?” she demanded sternly. “For all you know I may have been drinking all night. In fact,” there was triumph in her tone, “I have been drinking all night.”
“Where did you get the drink?” Mr. Carr was persistent. She looked at him shyly. “Oh,” she said magnificently, “I’ve got my sources. You needn’t think I have to run to you every time I want a drink. No, indeed, I have plenty of friends who are only too willing to deal out a drink when they see me, and,” her voice was threatening, “they don’t spend the rest of the time complaining about the cost of it. My friends are not mean, thank you. I wish I could say the same for my son.”
She looked wistfully at the bottle of Bols in Mr. Carr’s hand. His knuckles whitened as he strengthened his grip on the bottle.
“You needn’t think you’ll get this,” he said, “fair’s fair and keep your fingers out of my gin. You’ve had your whack and that’s all you’ll get. You’d better make it last. Have a drink, Douglas old cock. Let us drink to bigger and better geniuses and faster horses.”
Douglas took the drink. He had decided that there was nothing he could do about it. If the Carrs always behaved like this he could not help it. He gave it up.
Chapter 7
Enigma of an Afternoon
THE FINAL preparations for the private-view went ahead smoothly. The bottles of drink gathered in a smooth array on the tables and the upturned glasses sparkled on the white cloths. Emily looked as smart and as enamelled as if she had just stepped out of the Excelsior Beauty Parlours after challenging them to do their damnedest.
Dr. Bellamy sat in a corner of her office, pulling odd faces as he made notes on a pad of paper laid out before him. It was understood that the Doctor was in the throes of preparation of his speech in which he was to declare the Museum open. No one dared to interrupt him.
Douglas, having escaped from the enervating and crazy company of the Carrs, wandered about aimlessly, flicking a Calder mobile so that the red and black discs moved in their seemingly endless variety of patterns, or looking at the materials which had combined to form a Merzbild by Kurt Schwitters. He looked at the array of drinks and wondered whether anyone would say anything if he went and helped himself to a short one. He pondered this idea lightly in his mind and decided that, perhaps, it would be tactless to take a drink before anyone arrived.
The large Max Ernst was still covered at the far end of the room. Douglas remembered that it was his job to release the expensive mechanical rat which was to draw away the veiling. All he had to do was to bend down and press back a little trigger which would release the brake and start pandemonium. It was a very real-looking rat, he reflected, and he wondered w
hether Emily would be angry if he introduced a real cat to chase the toy rat. This idea, also, appeared of little value. The cat would be sure to make a mess or to upset one of the constructions or objects which cluttered the place in a carefully arranged abandon.
Francis Varley came into the gallery. He still looked as calm and unperturbed as a summer’s day. Not one of his graying hairs was out of place.
“My dear boy,” he addressed Douglas, “have you seen Julian Ambleside anywhere about? I want to see him.”
“No,” said Douglas, “I haven’t seen him all day. I wonder what he’s up to? You’d have thought he would have been here as so many of the pictures have passed through his hands, wouldn’t you?”
“Um, yes,” Francis was cautious, “I wanted to see him about the subject of these pictures. I want to see him rather badly, so if you should run across him I wonder if you’d tell him that I was looking for him?”
“Still chasing the Chiricos?” asked Douglas flippantly, and Francis nodded seriously. His nod conveyed his feeling that there was nothing in the world more important than the question of a picture’s genuineness. The whole of Francis’s world hung on little points as to whether a certain picture was painted before or after a certain date or whether an artist had been familiar with the work of another artist at the time when he painted such-and-such a work.
Douglas looked nervously at his watch. The balloon was due to go up before long. He had a feeling that something was certain to go wrong with the works. Gloomily, he reflected that on such occasions there was always a great deal which could cause trouble, and, it was his experience that there usually was trouble. Trouble meant that he would have to do his best to clear things up. The thought did nothing to cheer him. He scowled at a painting by Dali which, in chromolithographic paint, presented at least a dozen different images hidden in the shapes of others.
The Flints, bickering as usual, were taking up their positions near the door. They were to collect the cards of those who had been invited to the private view. As a general rule they would have delegated this job of stewardship to some underling, but the opening of the Museum of Modern Art was of sufficient importance to demand their personal attention.
“Are you certain,” said Alison, “that old Lady Pampole got a card?”
“Yes,” said Jeremy wearily, “and Rupert Hollywell and Sir Arthur Carpathian and Edith Entwistle and Lord Lemmon and the Honourable John Figgleswick. They all got cards—every damned one of them. It’s no use going over things again and again, Alison, I think that we have done everything. If anyone fails to turn up who should turn up it is not my fault.”
His wife looked at him. Her look said as plainly as any words could have that she would certainly blame her husband for any failures. His look shewed that he knew that she would and that he knew that he would accept the reproaches, without much protest.
They saw Douglas, and Alison beckoned him across. He went slowly and unwillingly. He knew that she had thought of something for him to do, and he did not want to do anything except moon about anticipating calamity.
“Do be a dear,” said Alison, “and give us a hand by distributing the catalogues to the people as they come in. We’ll have our work cut out in collecting the invitation cards.”
“All right,” Douglas was not gracious, “I’ll hand out catalogues till the learned Doctor starts spouting and then I’ll need to go. I’ve got a job to do then.”
He took up a position by the door, beside a large pile of catalogues. He held half-a-dozen gloomily in his hand, so that the leaves drooped like the withering leaves of a plant.
People started to arrive, slowly at first, in twos and threes, but then in a crowd so that Douglas had his time fully occupied in seeing that everyone had a catalogue. The large gallery started to fill up. No one seemed to be terribly interested in the pictures and other works of art. They seemed to have met together to see one another. People greeted their friends with the fervour of those who had not met for many years, oblivious of the fact that they had had drinks together that very morning or had met at the same parties the previous evening.
Only a very few tried to see between the crowd to look at the pictures. Most people held their catalogues listlessly in their hands while the conversation ranged around their friends’ frailties and scandal.
“Hullo, cock,” it was Mr. Carr, accompanied by his mother, “you don’t mind if I bring the old girl in, do you?”
“Not the least,” said Douglas, ignoring the Flints who were looking rather askance at Mrs. Carr. Mrs. Carr was quite obviously drunk. She fixed Douglas with small bright beads and breathed Hollands Gin at him. Douglas remembered the proverb which declared that the wages of gin is breath. He thought of repeating it but people were pressing upon him for catalogues. He handed one to Mr. Carr who rolled it up and put it in his pocket. Mrs. Carr started to nibble absent-mindedly at her catalogue. The printer’s ink left black smears at the corners of her mouth. She took a final bite and washed it down with the remains of the bottle of Bols which she had had secreted somewhere on her person. With the gesture of royalty conferring a favour she handed the empty bottle to Douglas.
He looked around to see where he could dispose of it. There did not seem to be anywhere to put it.
As bad luck would have it, at that moment Dr. Cornelius Bellamy swept into the gallery, with a swish of invisible academic robes. He looked at the bottle in Douglas’s hand and glared. For a moment he seemed to be on the point of making some remark, then, with an expression that shewed that he considered that he had far more important things to do than to try to deal with the dipsomania of a poet, he passed on.
As he went down the room people became silent. He took this silence as his royal right and moved with dignity towards a little table set in front of the veiled Max Ernst. He placed himself behind the table and coughed one or twice, self importantly. Those who had been too engrossed in gossip to notice his arrival became aware of his presence. Emily stood near him.
Douglas began to work his way through the crowd towards the mechanical rat, which was hidden beneath a decent white cloth.
The Doctor cleared his throat once more. If he had had a gavel he would have thumped the table briskly, not that this was required, for there was a deep silence, broken only by the grunting of Mrs. Carr who had found the tables of drink and was, apparently, intent upon reducing their quite ridiculous load as quickly as possible.
“Ah,” said the Doctor and even Mrs. Carr became silent, “we are met together this afternoon to—ah—celebrate an occasion unique in the history of these islands, nothing less, in short, than the foundation of a Museum of Modern Art. And when I say ‘Modern Art’ I mean the art of to-day, the living and vital art which is being created around us, in the world in which we live. To become the home, the centre of this art, is the aim of this Museum with which I consider myself honoured to be connected.”
He looked around the room as if asking for contradiction. There was none.
“I suppose,” he went on, “that you are all familiar with the controversy which the generosity, the very great generosity, of my friend Miss Emily Wallenstein has occasioned in the columns of the—ah—Press? Yes. Well, as you no doubt know, all movements of intelligence have had their detractors and their opponents whom time has scarified. So let it be in this case. We do not need to worry about the yapping of the gutter-Press, nor do we need to concern ourselves with the no less ignorant mumblings which come from old gentlemen, securely ensconced in their club chairs. Fortunately, I may say, we have no reason to fear their criticism nor to thank them for their tolerance.”
Emily had blushed pinkly at the Doctor’s references to her generosity. Her generosity had been largely actuated by her love of being in the “centre of things.”
“Never before in the history of art in this country has there been an individual sufficiently interested and enthralled to devote not only the money, but the thought and care necessary, to the job, for I may call it a job
, of presenting art as art, and not as we see it through the glasses of a Royal Academician, to the peoples of this country.” The Doctor, Douglas thought grimly, was gradually getting into his stride. He went on, “Oh how often, how very often, have I been asked by my students and by those who are interested, where they could see works by modern artists, and I have been shamed, yes, shamed, by having to reply that these works, the vital living works expressing the experience of our time, could only be seen in private collections—that the spectator who enjoyed them was privileged indeed. Certainly,” his voice was smooth, “there have been galleries in London which presented the works of the artists of to-day. We remember the London Gallery, that noble venture of Monsieur Edouard Mesens—we remember the Guggenheim Jeune, where the interested could see the works of Yves Tanguy for the first time, and we remember the Mayor Gallery, the storehouse of Paul Klee and Picasso drawings. Yes, as I say, we remember these, and we recall, also, the International Surrealist Exhibition of 1936, the shows organised by the Seven and Five. We recall the Redfern Gallery and we recall Messrs. Reid and Lefevre, and Mr. Ernest Brown of the Leicester Gallery. We recall these and we are grateful. We honour those who organised the exhibitions and who risked their reputations by backing the vital artists of our time. These names are the roll of honour of art. They are emblazoned on the sheet of time. Yes. Yes, I say, nothing can ever take the honour from Mr. Anton Zwemmer of his Miró and Picasso exhibitions. Let us think of these honourable men, for they were honourable and brave men. Let us think of them. Let us praise Herbert Read and Mr. Wilenski. Let us sing the praises of the Listener and those lesser papers which praised and reproduced the art of to-day. Yes, I repeat, we cannot forget them. But,” his voice was sombre, “was this enough? No! Most decidedly no! We needed more than that. We needed more than the transitory show—the pictures round a gallery walls which vanished at the end of the month—into a private collection, perhaps, or—more likely, to adorn the collection of the artist himself, neglected and forgotten. For the artist goes on. He does not stand still. The work which he has finished, is finished so far as he is concerned. It is only the spectator who knows and appreciates the value of what has been finished. Yet these works, incomparable works, were neglected or hidden in the sitting-rooms of those who had the taste and the courage to purchase them. Now, however, no longer is the work of art an object which is left on the artist’s hands, or something hidden in a private house—no, indeed, it has become the privilege and, I may say, the right of the man in the street to come and see it when he wishes.”
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