Christmas Holiday Page 19

  Charley moved uneasily on his plush seat, for that also, somewhat to his dismay, was what he had found it.

  “He lives an extraordinary life, you know. He works sixteen hours a day. The squalor and discomfort of his surroundings are indescribable. He’s trained himself to cat only one meal a day.”

  “What is the object of that?”

  “He wants to strengthen and deepen his character. He wants to make himself independent of circumstances. He wants to prepare himself for the role he expects one day to be called upon to play.”

  “And has he told you what that role is?”

  “Not precisely.”

  “Have you ever heard of Dzerjinsky?”

  “No.”

  “Simon has talked to me about him a great deal. Alexey was a lawyer in the old days, a clever one with liberal principles, and he defended Dzerjinsky at one of his trials. That didn’t prevent Dzerjinsky from having Alexey arrested as a counter-revolutionary and sending him for three years to Alexandrovsk. That was one of the reasons why Simon wanted me so much to take him to see Alexey. And when I wouldn’t, because I couldn’t bear that he should see to what depths that poor, broken-down man had sunk, he charged me with questions to put to him.”

  “But who was Dzerjinsky?” asked Charley.

  “He was the head of the Cheka. He was the real master of Russia. He had an unlimited power over the life and death of the whole population. He was monstrously cruel; he imprisoned, tortured and killed thousands upon thousands of people. At first I thought it strange that Simon should be so interested in that abominable man, he seemed to be fascinated by him, and then I guessed the reason. That is the role he means to play when the revolution he’s working for takes place. He knows that the man who is master of the police is master of the country.”

  Charley’s eyes twinkled.

  “You make my flesh creep, dear. But you know, England isn’t like Russia; I think Simon will have to wait a hell of a long time before he’s dictator of England.”

  But this was a matter upon which Lydia could brook no flippancy. She gave him a dark look.

  “He’s prepared to wait. Didn’t Lenin wait? Do you still think the English are made of different clay from other men? Do you think the proletariat, which is growing increasingly conscious of its power, is going to leave the class you belong to indefinitely in possession of its privileges? Do you think that a war, whether it results in your defeat or your victory, is going to result in anything but a great social upheaval?”

  Charley was not interested in politics. Though, like his father, of liberal views, with mildly socialistic tendencies so long as they were not carried beyond the limits of prudence, by which, though he didn’t know it, he meant so long as they didn’t interfere with his comfort and his income, he was quite prepared to leave the affairs of the country to those whose business it was to deal with them; but he could not let these provocative questions of Lydia’s go without an answer.

  “You talk as though we did nothing for the working classes. You don’t seem to know that in the last fifty years their condition has changed out of all recognition. They work fewer hours than they did and get higher wages for what they do. They have better houses to live in. Why, on our own estate we’re doing away with slums as quickly as it’s economically possible. We’ve given them old age pensions and we provide them with enough to live on when they’re out of work. They get free schooling, free hospitals, and now we’re beginning to give them holidays with pay. I really don’t think the British working man has much to complain of.”

  “You must remember that the views of a benefactor and the views of a beneficiary on the value of a benefaction are apt to differ. Do you really expect the working man to be grateful to you for the advantages he’s extracted from you at the point of a pistol? Do you think he doesn’t know that he owes the favours you’ve conferred on him to your fear rather than to your generosity?”

  Charley was not going to let himself be drawn into a political discussion if he could help it, but there was one more thing he couldn’t refrain from saying.

  “I shouldn’t have thought that the condition in which you and your Russian friends now find yourselves would lead you to believe that mob-rule was a great success.”

  “That is the bitterest part of our tragedy. However much we may deny it, we know in our hearts that whatever has happened to us, we’ve deserved it.”

  Lydia said this with a tragic intensity that somewhat disconcerted Charley. She was a difficult woman; she could take nothing lightly. She was the sort of woman who couldn’t even ask you to pass the salt without giving you the impression that it was no laughing matter. Charley sighed; he supposed he must make allowances, for she had had a rotten deal, poor thing; but was the future really so black?

  “Tell me about Dzerjinsky,” he said, stumbling a little over the pronunciation of the difficult name.

  “I can only tell you what Alexey has told me. He says the most remarkable thing about him was the power of his eyes; he had a curious gift, he was able to fix them upon you for an immensely long time, and the glassy stare of them, with their dilated pupils, was simply terrifying. He was extremely thin, he’d contracted tuberculosis in prison, and he was tall; not bad-looking, with good features. He was absolutely single-minded, that was the secret of his power, he had a cold, arid temperament; I don’t suppose he’d ever given himself up with a whole heart to a moment’s pleasure. The only thing he cared about was his work; he worked day and night. At the height of his career he lived in one small room with nothing in it but a desk and an old screen, and behind the screen a narrow iron bed. They say that in the year of famine, when they brought him decent food instead of horseflesh, he sent it away, demanding the same rations as were given to the other workers in the Cheka. He lived for the Cheka and nothing else. There was no humanity in him, neither pity nor love, only fanaticism and hatred. He was terrible and implacable.”

  Charley shuddered a little. He could not but see why Lydia had told him about the terrorist, and in truth it was startling to note how close the resemblance was between the sinister man she had described and the man he had so surprisingly discovered that Simon was become. There was the same asceticism, the same indifference to the pleasant things of life, the same power of work, and perhaps the same ruthlessness. Charley smiled his good-natured smile.

  “I daresay Simon has his faults like the rest of us. One has to be tolerant with him because he hasn’t had a very happy or a very easy life. I think perhaps he craves for affection, and there’s something that people find repellent in his personality which prevents him from getting it. He’s frightfully sensitive and things which wouldn’t affect ordinary people wound him to the quick. But at heart I think he’s kind and generous.”

  “You’re deceived in him. You think he has your own good nature and unselfish consideration. I tell you, he’s dangerous. Dzerjinsky was the narrow idealist who for the sake of his ideal could bring destruction upon his country without a qualm. Simon isn’t even that. He has no heart, no conscience, no scruple, and if the occasion arises he will sacrifice you who are his dearest friend without hesitation and without remorse.”

  viii

  THEY WOKE next day at what was for them an early hour. They had breakfast in bed, each with his tray, and after breakfast, while Charley, smoking his pipe read the Mail, Lydia, a cigarette between her lips, did her hands. You would have thought, to see them, each engaged on his respective occupation, that they were a young married couple whose first passion had dwindled into an easy friendship. Lydia painted her nails and spread out her fingers on the sheet to let them dry. She gave Charley a mischievous glance.

  “Would you like to go to the Louvre this morning? You came to Paris to see pictures, didn’t you?”

  “I suppose I did.”

  “Well, let’s get up then and go.”

  When the maid who brought them their coffee drew the curtains the day that filtered into the room from the courtyard had l
ooked as gray and bleak as on the mornings that had gone before; and they were surprised, on stepping into the street, to see that the weather had suddenly changed. It was cold still, but the sun was bright and the clouds, high up in the heavens, were white and shining. The air had a frosty bite that made your blood tingle.

  “Let’s walk,” said Lydia.

  In that gay, quivering light the Rue de Rennes lost its dinginess, and the gray, shabby houses no longer wore the down-at-heel, despondent air they usually do, but had a mellow friendliness as though, like old women in reduced circumstances, they felt less forlorn now that the unexpected sunshine smiled on them as familiarly as on the grand new buildings on the other side of the river. When they crossed the Place St. Germain-des-Prés and there was a confusion of buses and trams, recklessly-speeding taxis, lorries and private cars, Lydia took Charley’s arm; and like lovers, or a grocer and his wife taking a walk of a Sunday afternoon, they sauntered arm in arm, stopping now and then to look into the window of a picture-dealer, down the narrow Rue de Seine. Then they came on to the quay. Here the Paris day burst upon them in all its winter beauty and Charley gave a little exclamation of delight.

  “You like this?” smiled Lydia.

  “It’s a picture by Raffaelli.” He remembered a line in a poem that he had read at Tours: “Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd’hui.”

  The air had a sparkle so that you felt you could take it up in your hands and let it run through your fingers like the water of a fountain. To Charley’s eyes, accustomed to the misty distances and soft haze of London, it seemed amazingly transparent. It outlined the buildings, the bridge, the parapet by the side of the river, with an elegant distinctness, but the lines, as though drawn by a sensitive hand, were tender and gracious. Tender too was the colour, the colour of sky and cloud, the colour of stone; they were the colours of the eighteenth-century pastelists; and the leafless trees, their slim branches a faint mauve against the blue, repeated with exquisite variety a pattern of delicate intricacy. Because he had seen pictures of just that scene Charley was able to take it in, without any sense of surprise, but with a loving, understanding recognition; its beauty did not shatter him by its strangeness, nor perplex him by its unexpectedness, but filled him with a sense of familiar joy such as a countryman might feel when after an absence of years he sees once more the dear, straggling street of his native village.

  “Isn’t it lovely to be alive?” he cried.

  “It’s lovely to be as young and enthusiastic as you are,” said Lydia, giving his arm a little squeeze, and if she choked down a sob he did not notice it.

  Charley knew the Louvre well, for every time his parents spent a few days in Paris (to let Venetia get her clothes from the little dressmaker who was just as good as those expensive places in the Rue Royale and the Rue Cambon) they made a point of taking their children there. Leslie Mason made no bones at confessing that he preferred new pictures to old.

  “But after all, it’s part of a gentleman’s education to have done the great galleries of Europe, and when people talk about Rembrandt and Titian and so on, you look a bit of a fool if you can’t put your word in. And I don’t mind telling you that you couldn’t have a better guide than your mother. She’s very artistic, and she knows what’s what, and she won’t waste your time over a lot of tripe.”

  “I don’t claim that your grandfather was a great artist,” said Mrs. Mason, with the modest self-assurance of someone who is without conceit aware that he knows his subject, “but he knew what was good. All I know about art he taught me.”

  “Of course you had a flair,” said her husband.

  Mrs. Mason considered this for a moment.

  “Yes, I suppose you’re right, Leslie. I had a flair.”

  What made it easier to do the Louvre with expedition and spiritual profit was that in those days they had not rearranged it, and the Salon Carré contained most of the pictures which Mrs. Mason thought worthy of her children’s attention. When they entered that room they walked straight to Leonardo’s Gioconda.

  “I always think one ought to look at that first,” she said. “It puts you in the right mood for the Louvre.”

  The four of them stood in front of the picture and with reverence gazed at the insipid smile of that prim and sex-starved young woman. After a decent interval for meditation Mrs. Mason turned to her husband and her two children. There were tears in her eyes.

  “Words fail me to express what that picture always makes me feel,” she said, with a sigh. “Leonardo was a Great Artist. I think everybody’s bound to acknowledge that.”

  “I don’t mind admitting that I’m a bit of a philistine when it comes to old masters,” said Leslie, “but that’s got a je ne sais quoi that gets you, there’s no denying that. Can you remember that bit of Pater’s, Venetia? He hit the nail on the head and no mistake.”

  “You mean the bit that begins: ‘Hers is the head upon which all the ends of the world are come.’ I used to know it by heart years ago; I’m afraid I’ve forgotten it now.”

  “That’s a pity.”

  “Well, my memory isn’t what it was. Let’s go and look at the Raphael now, shall we?”

  But it was impossible to avoid seeing the two vast canvases of Paolo Veronese that faced one another on opposite walls.

  “It’s worth while giving them a glance,” she said. “Your grandfather had a very high opinion of them. Of course Veronese was neither subtle nor profound. He had no soul. But he certainly had a gift of composition, and you must remember that there’s no one now who could arrange so great a number of figures in a harmonious, and yet natural, design. You must admire them if for no other reason because of their vitality and for the sheer physical vigour Veronese must have had to paint such enormous pictures. But I think there’s more in them than that. They do give you an impression of the abundant, multicoloured life of the period and of the pleasure-loving, pagan spirit which was characteristic of patrician Venice in the heyday of its glory.”

  “I’ve often tried to count the number of figures in the Marriage of Cana,” said Leslie Mason, “but every time I make it different.”

  The four of them began to count, but none of the results they reached agreed. Presently they strolled into the Grande Galerie.

  “Now here is L’Homme au Gant,” said Mrs. Mason. “I’m not sorry you looked at the Veroneses first, because they do bring out very clearly the peculiar merit of Titian. You remember what I said about Veronese having no soul; well, you’ve only got to look at L’Homme au Gant to see that soul is just what Titian had.”

  “He was a remarkable old buffer,” said Leslie Mason. “He lived to the age of ninety-nine and then it needed the plague to kill him.”

  Mrs. Mason smiled slightly.

  “I have no hesitation,” she continued, “in saying that I consider this one of the finest portraits that’s ever been painted. Of course one can’t compare it with a portait by Cézanne or even by Manet.”

  “We mustn’t forget to show them the Manet, Venetia.”

  “No, we won’t do that. We’ll come to that presently. But what I mean to say is that you must accept the idiom of the time at which it was painted, and bearing that in mind I don’t think anyone can deny that it’s a masterpiece. Of course just as a piece of painting it’s beyond praise, but it’s got a distinction and an imaginative quality which are very unique. Don’t you think so, Leslie?”

  “Definitely.”

  “When I was a girl I used to spend hours looking at it. It’s a picture that makes you dream. Personally I think it’s a finer portrait than Velasquez’s Pope, the one in Rome, you know, just because it’s more suggestive. Velasquez was a very great painter, I admit that, and he had an enormous influence on Manet, but what I miss in him is exactly what Titian had—Soul.”

  Leslie Mason looked at his watch.

  “We mustn’t waste too much time here, Venetia,” he said, “or we shall be late for lunch.”

  “All right. We’ll just go
and look at the Ingres and the Manet.”

  They walked on, glancing right and left at the pictures that lined the walls, but there was nothing that Mrs. Mason thought worth lingering over.

  “It’s no good burdening their minds with a lot of impressions that’ll only confuse them,” she told her husband. “It’s much better that they should concentrate on what’s really important.”

  “Definitely,” he answered.

  They entered the Salle des Etats, but at the threshold Mrs. Mason stopped.

  “We won’t bother about the Poussins to-day,” she said. “You have to come to the Louvre to see them, and there’s no doubt that he was a Great Artist. But he was more of a painter’s painter than a layman’s, and I think you’re a little young to appreciate him. One day when you’re both of you a bit older we’ll come and have a good go at him. I mean you have to be rather sophisticated to thoroughly understand him. The room that we’re coming to now is nineteenth century. But I don’t think we need bother about Delacroix either. He was a painter’s painter too, and I wouldn’t expect you to see in him what I do; you must take my word for it that he was a very considerable artist. He was no mean colourist and he had a strong romantic feeling. And you certainly needn’t trouble your heads with the Barbizon School. In my young days they were very much admired, but that was before we understood the Impressionists even, and of course we hadn’t so much as heard of Cézanne or Matisse; they don’t amount to anything and they can be safely ignored. I want you to look first at the Odalisque of Ingres and then at the Olympia of Manet. They’re wonderfully placed, opposite one another, so that you can look at both of them at the same time, compare them and draw your own conclusions.”

  Having said this Mrs. Mason advanced into the room with her husband by her side, while Charley and Patsy followed together a step or two behind. On reaching the exact spot where she thought the two pictures which she particularly wanted her offspring to admire could be seen to best advantage, she stopped with the triumphant air with which a conjurer extracts a rabbit from a hat and cried: