Christmas Holiday Read online

  “There!”

  They stood in a row for some minutes and Mrs. Mason gazed at the two nudes with rapture. Then she turned to the children.

  “Now let’s go and examine them close at hand.”

  They stood in front of the Odalisque.

  “It’s no good, Venetia,” said Leslie. “You may say I’m a philistine, but I don’t like the colour. The pink of that body is just the pink of that face cream you used to put on at night till I made you stop it.”

  “You needn’t reveal the secrets of the alcove to these innocent children,” said Venetia with a prim and at the same time roguish smile. “But I would never claim for a moment that Ingres was a great colourist; all the same I do think that blue is a very sweet colour and I’ve often thought I’d like an evening dress just like it. D’you think it would be too young, Patsy?”

  “No, darling. Not a bit.”

  “But that’s neither here nor there. Ingres was probably the greatest draughtsman who ever lived. I don’t know how anyone can look at those firm and lovely lines and not feel he’s in the presence of one of the great manifestations of the human spirit. I remember my father telling me that once he came here with one of his fellow-students from Julien’s who’d never seen it, and when his eyes fell on it he was so overcome with its beauty of line that he actually fainted.”

  “I think it’s much more likely that it was long past the hour at which reasonable people have lunch and that he fainted with hunger.”

  “Isn’t your father awful?” smiled Mrs. Mason. “Well, let’s just have five minutes more for the Olympia, Leslie, and then I’m ready to go.”

  They marched up to Manet’s great picture.

  “When you come to a masterpiece like this,” said Mrs. Mason, “you can do nothing but keep your mouth shut and admire. The rest, as Hamlet said, is silence. No one, not even Renoir, not even El Greco, has ever painted flesh like that. Look at that right breast. It’s a miracle of loveliness. One is simply left gasping. Even my poor father, who couldn’t bear the moderns, was forced to admit that the painting of that breast was pretty good. Pretty good? I ask you. Now I suppose you see a black line all round the figure. You do, Charley, don’t you?”

  Charley acknowledged that he did.

  “And you, Patsy?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I don’t,” she cried triumphantly. “I used to see it, I know it’s there, but I give you my word, I don’t see it any more.”

  After that they went to lunch.

  Through his long-standing acquaintance with the famous gallery and the useful information he had acquired from his mother, Charley, with Lydia by his side, entered the Salon Carré now with something of the confidence of a good tennis-player stepping on to the court. He was eager to show Lydia his favourite pictures and ready to explain to her exactly what was admirable in them. It was, however, something of a surprise to discover that the room had been rearranged and the Gioconda, to which he would naturally have taken her first, was nowhere to be seen. They spent but ten minutes there. When Charley went with his parents it took them an hour to do that room and even then, his mother said, they hadn’t exhausted its treasures. But L’Homme au Gant was in its old place and he gently led her up to it. They looked at it for a while.

  “Stunning, isn’t it?” he said then, giving her arm an affectionate pressure.

  “Yes, it’s all right. What business is it of yours?”

  Charley turned his head sharply. No one had ever asked him a question like that about a picture before.

  “What on earth d’you mean? It’s one of the great portraits of the world. Titian, you know.”

  “I daresay. But what’s it got to do with you?”

  Charley didn’t quite know what to say.

  “Well, it’s a very fine picture and it’s beautifully painted. Of course it doesn’t tell a story if that’s what you mean.”

  “No, I don’t,” she smiled.

  “I don’t suppose it’s got anything to do with me really.”

  “Then why should you bother about it?”

  Lydia moved on and Charley followed her. She gave other pictures an indifferent glance. Charley was troubled by what she had said and he puzzled his brains to discover what could be at the back of her mind. She gave him an amused smile.

  “Come,” she said. “I’ll show you some pictures.”

  She took his arm and they walked on. Suddenly he caught sight of the Gioconda.

  “There she is,” he cried. “I must stop and have a good look at that. I make a point of it when I come to the Louvre.”

  “Why?”

  “Hang it all, it’s Leonardo’s most celebrated picture. It’s one of the most important pictures in the world.”

  “Important to you?”

  Charley was beginning to find her a trifle irritating; he couldn’t make out what she was getting at; but he was a good-humoured youth, and he wasn’t going to lose his temper.

  “A picture may be important even if it isn’t very important to me.”

  “But it’s only you who count. So far as you’re concerned the only meaning a picture has is the meaning it has for you.”

  “That seems an awfully conceited way of looking at it.”

  “Does that picture say anything to you really?”

  “Of course it does. It says all sorts of things, but I don’t suppose I could put them any better than Pater did. He wrote a piece about it that’s in all the anthologies.”

  But even as he spoke he recognized that his answer was lame. He was beginning to have a vague inkling of what Lydia meant, and then the uneasy feeling came to him that there was something in art that he’d never been told about. But he fortunately remembered what his mother had said about Manet’s Olympia.

  “In point of fact I don’t know why you should say anything about a picture at all. You either like it or you don’t.”

  “And you really like that one?” she asked in a tone of mild interrogation.

  “Very much.”

  “Why?”

  He thought for a moment.

  “Well, you see, I’ve known it practically all my life.”

  “That’s why you like your friend Simon, isn’t it?” she smiled.

  He felt it was an unfair retort.

  “All right. You take me and show me the pictures you like.”

  The position was reversed. It was not he, as he had expected, who was leading the way and with such information as would add interest to the respective canvases, sympathetically drawing her attention to the great masterpieces he had always cared for; but it was she who was conducting him. Very well. He was quite ready to put himself in her hands and see what it was all about.

  “Of course,” he said to himself, “she’s Russian. One has to make allowances for that.”

  They trudged past acres of canvas, through one room after another, for Lydia had some difficulty in finding her way; but finally she stopped him in front of a small picture that you might easily have missed if you had not been looking for it.

  “Chardin,” he said. “Yes, I’ve seen that before.”

  “But have you ever looked at it?”

  “Oh, yes. Chardin wasn’t half a bad painter in his way. My mother thinks a lot of him. I’ve always rather liked his still lifes myself.”

  “Is that all it means to you? It breaks my heart.”

  “That?” cried Charley with astonishment. “A loaf of bread and a flagon of wine? Of course it’s very well painted.”

  “Yes, you’re right; it’s very well painted; it’s painted with pity and love. It’s not only a loaf of bread and a flagon of wine; it’s the bread of life and the blood of Christ, but not held back from those who starve and thirst for them and doled out by priests on stated occasions; it’s the daily fare of suffering men and women. It’s so humble, so natural, so friendly; it’s the bread and wine of the poor who ask no more than that they should be left in peace, allowed to work and eat their simple food in freedom.
It’s the cry of the despised and rejected. It tells you that whatever their sins men at heart are good. That loaf of bread and that flagon of wine are symbols of the joys and sorrows of the meek and lowly. They ask for your mercy and your affection; they tell you that they’re of the same flesh and blood as you. They tell you that life is short and hard and the grave is cold and lonely. It’s not only a loaf of bread and a flagon of wine; it’s the mystery of man’s lot on earth, his craving for a little friendship and a little love, the humility of his resignation when he sees that even they must be denied him.”

  Lydia’s voice was tremulous and now the tears flowed from her eyes. She brushed them away impatiently.

  “And isn’t it wonderful that with those simple objects, with his painter’s exquisite sensibility, moved by the charity in his heart, that funny, dear old man should have made something so beautiful that it breaks you? It was as though, unconsciously perhaps, hardly knowing what he was doing, he wanted to show you that if you only have enough love, if you only have enough sympathy, out of pain and distress and unkindness, out of all the evil of the world, you can create beauty.”

  She was silent and for long stood looking at the little picture. Charley looked at it too, but with perplexity. It was a very good picture; he hadn’t really given it more than a glance before, and he was glad Lydia had drawn his attention to it; in some odd way it was rather moving; but of course he could never have seen in it all she saw. Strange, unstable woman! It was rather embarrassing that she should cry in a public gallery; they did put you in an awkward position, these Russians; but who would have thought a picture could affect anyone like that? He remembered his mother’s story of how a student friend of his grandfather’s had fainted when he first saw the Odalisque of Ingres; but that was away back in the nineteenth century, they were very romantic and emotional in those days. Lydia turned to him with a sunny smile on her lips. It disconcerted him to see with what suddenness she could go from tears to laughter.

  “Shall we go now?” she said.

  “But don’t you want to see any more pictures?”

  “Why? I’ve seen one. I feel happy and peaceful. What could I get if I saw another?”

  “Oh, all right.”

  It seemed a very odd way of doing a picture gallery. After all, they hadn’t looked at the Watteaus or the Fragonards. His mother was bound to ask him if he’d seen the Embarkation for Cythera. Someone had told her they’d cleaned it and she’d want to know how the colours had come out.

  They did a little shopping and then lunched at a restaurant on the quay on the other side of the river and Lydia as usual ate with a very good appetite. She liked the crowd that surrounded them and the traffic that passed noisily in the roadway. She was in a good humour. It was as though the violent emotion from which she had suffered had rinsed her spirit clean, and she talked of trivial things with a pleasant cheerfulness. But Charley was thoughtful. He did not find it so easy to dismiss the disquietude that affected him. She did not usually notice his moods, but the trouble of his mind was so clearly reflected on his face that at last she could not but be struck by it.

  “Why are you so silent?” she asked him, with a kindly, sympathetic smile.

  “I was thinking. You see, I’ve been interested in art all my life. My parents are very artistic, I mean some people might even say they were rather highbrow, and they were always keen on my sister and me having a real appreciation of art; and I think we have. It rather worries me to think that with all the pains I’ve taken, and the advantages I’ve had, I don’t seem really to know so much about it as you do.”

  “But I know nothing about art,” she laughed.

  “But you do seem to feel about it very strongly, and I suppose art is really a matter of feeling. It’s not as though I didn’t like pictures. I get an enormous kick out of them.”

  “You mustn’t be worried. It’s very natural that you should look at pictures differently from me. You’re young and healthy, happy and prosperous. You’re not stupid. They’re a pleasure to you among a lot of other pleasures. It gives you a feeling of warmth and satisfaction to look at them. To walk through a gallery is a very agreeable way of passing an idle hour. What more can you want? But you see, I’ve always been poor, often hungry, and sometimes terribly lonely. They’ve been riches to me, food and drink and company. When I was working and my employer had nagged me to distraction I used to slip into the Louvre at the luncheon hour and her scolding didn’t matter any more. And when my mother died and I had nobody left, it comforted me. During those long months when Robert was in prison before the trial and I was pregnant, I think I should have gone mad and killed myself if it hadn’t been that I could go there, where nobody knew me and nobody stared at me, and be alone with my friends. It was rest and peace. It gave me courage. It wasn’t so much the great well-known masterpieces that helped me, it was the smaller, shyer pictures that no one noticed, and I felt they were pleased that I looked at them. I felt that nothing really mattered so very much, because everything passed. Patience! Patience! That’s what I learnt there. And I felt that above all the horror and misery and cruelty of the world, there was something that helped you to bear it, something that was greater and more important than all that, the spirit of man and the beauty he created. Is it really strange that that little picture I showed you this morning should mean so much to me?”

  To make the most of the fine weather they walked up the busy Boulevard St. Michel and when they got to the top turned into the gardens of the Luxembourg. They sat down and, talking little, idly watched the nurses, no longer, alas, wearing the long satin streamers of a generation ago, trundling prams, the old ladies in black who walked with sober gait in charge of little children, and the elderly gentlemen, with thick scarves up to their noses, who paced up and down immersed in thought; with friendly hearts they looked at the long-legged boys and girls who ran about playing games, and when a pair of young students passed wondered what it was they so earnestly discussed. It seemed not a public park, but a private garden for the people on the left bank, and the scene had a moving intimacy. But the chilly rays of the waning sun gave it withal a certain melancholy, for within the iron grille that separated it from the bustle of the great city, the garden had a singular air of unreality, and you had a feeling that those old people who trod the gravel paths, those children whose cries made a cheerful hubbub, were ghosts taking phantom walks or playing phantom games, who at dusk would dissolve, like the smoke of a cigarette, into the oncoming darkness. It was growing very cold, and Charley and Lydia wandered back, silent friendly companions, to the hotel.

  When they got to their room Lydia took out of her suit-case a thin sheaf of piano pieces.

  “I brought some of the things Robert used to play. I play so badly and we haven’t got a piano at Alexey’s. D’you think you could play them?”

  Charley looked at the music. It was Russian. Some of the pieces were familiar to him.

  “I think so,” he said.

  “There’s a piano downstairs and there’ll be nobody in the salon now. Let’s go down.”

  The piano badly wanted tuning. It was an upright. The keyboard was yellow with age and because it was seldom played on the notes were stiff. There was a long music stool and Lydia sat down by Charley’s side. He put on the rack a piece by Scriabin that he knew and after a few resounding chords to try the instrument began to play. Lydia followed the score and turned the pages for him. Charley had had as good masters as could be found in London, and he had worked hard. He had played at concerts at school and afterwards at Cambridge, so that he had acquired confidence. He had a light, pleasant touch. He enjoyed playing.

  “There,” he said when he came to the end of the piece.

  He was not displeased with himself. He knew that he had played it according to the composer’s intention and with the clear, neat straightforwardness that he liked in piano-playing.

  “Play something else,” said Lydia.

  She chose a piece. It was an a
rrangement for the piano of folk songs and folk dances by a composer of whom Charley had never heard. It startled him to see the name of Robert Berger written in a firm, bold hand on the cover. Lydia stared at it in silence and then turned the page. He looked at the music he was about to play and wondered what Lydia was thinking now. She must have sat by Robert’s side just as she was sitting by his. Why did she want to torture herself by making him play those pieces that must recall to her bitter memories of her short happiness and the misery that followed it?

  “Well, begin.”

  He played well at sight and the music was not difficult. He thought he acquitted himself of his task without discredit. Having struck the last chord he waited for a word of praise.

  “You played it very nicely,” said Lydia, “but where does Russia come in?”

  “What exactly d’you mean by that?” he asked, somewhat affronted.

  “You play it as if it was about a Sunday afternoon in London with people in their best clothes walking around those great empty squares and wishing it was time for tea. But that’s not what it is at all. It’s the old, old song of peasants who lament the shortness and the hardness of their life, it’s the wide fields of golden corn and the labour of gathering in the harvest, it’s the great forest of beech-trees, and the nostalgia of the workers for an age when peace and plenty reigned on the earth, and it’s the wild dance that for a brief period brings them forgetfulness of their lot.”

  “Well, you play it better.”

  “I can’t play,” she answered, but she edged him along the bench and took his seat.

  He listened. She played badly, but for all that got something out of the music that he hadn’t seen in it. She managed, though at a price, to bring out the tumult of its emotion and the bitterness of its melancholy; and she infused the dance rhythms with a barbaric vitality that stirred the blood. But Charley was put out.

  “I must confess I don’t see why you should think you get the Russian atmosphere better by playing false notes and keeping your foot firmly on the loud pedal,” he said, acidly, when she finished.