basis. Cheating was a major occupation both on the Durands’ and the tenant’s side; but the tenant, although he had less courage and less tenacity than Madame Durand, always came out on top; for every year, just at the crucial season of the vintage, the family was obliged to go up to Paris for three months. Monsieur Durand sat on two official juries and several ministerial committees; he also conducted a course of appreciation and the history of art at the Institute, and he renewed his contacts with the official world, the galleries and the auction rooms; it was a necessary and a profitable voyage, but the leer on the tenant’s face was a flood of gall in Madame’s heart, and the certainty that she was being rolled embittered her existence. On the fourth side of the house there was a kitchen-garden, maintained by Fifine; and this garden, too, came right up to the very wall of the house, taking away nothing of its naked irrelevance. It was a harsh house and it stood jaggedly in a harsh and arid landscape, unrelated to it and indifferent.
The landscape was an indefinite repetition of the vineyard – field after flat field of vines going on and on to the vague horizon, or on the south to the remote line of the Corbières, the division between the Languedoc and the Roussillon – and he remembered it under two aspects only, summer and winter. In summer it was a sea of coarse, dusty, sulphured and sulphated leaves drooping under the weight of the heat while an infinity of cicadas filled the quivering air with an omnipresent metallic din that seemed to emanate from the sun or the brilliant sky: and its winter aspect was that of a naked plain with rows upon rows of twisted amputated black stumps that bowed under the shrieking assault of the wind from the north – dust whirling under a pale and cloudless sky. It was an uncompromising landscape and an uncompromising house – both equally devoid of comfort. Yet Richard was not unhappy there. He either did not notice or did not mind the absence of country (in the English sense), books, comfort, bathroom, decent food or intelligent companionship: in many ways his values were essentially those of a painter and curiously enough of a modern painter – he was already indifferent to the picturesque, and where a young man of a predominantly literary cast might have deplored a howling desert, he saw order and a world of light. And indifferent though the house was, to be sure, it was here that he had his cardinal experience.
He had been there a year and more – they had been up to Paris twice – and all this time he had worked according to Monsieur Durand’s rigid and exacting plan: it must have been the winter of his second year when he decided to paint a picture as a first-communion present for Fifine’s nephew Sebastien – a martyrdom of the saint. He had always heard a great deal about this nephew, who was chez les Frères, and he had been told every stage in the poor child’s long drawn out agony with the multiplication table, but his primary object was to give pleasure to Fifine and therefore his intention was to paint a perfectly direct saint undergoing a really painful martyrdom, with the arrows sticking into him right up to their feathers, and those feathers wet with scarlet blood. But for some time before this his mind had also been haunted by a curious formal pattern, and he determined to include it in the picture.
The Durand’s house stood within the range of the last of the municipality’s lights, a swan-necked, cast-iron brute that stood in charming incongruity among the vines and shone a beam through Richard’s window in the night. The shadow that it projected on the ceiling was the pattern in question, and it was a very subtle pattern, being composed not only of the crosses of the casement and two fortuitous diagonals made by hanging cables, but doubled and trebled by reflections whose origin he could not determine, and multiplied, at certain times, by the moon: these crosses and planes lay upon one another in different intensities of grey, and not only did they present a singular and to him fascinating technical exercise, but they seemed to him ominously important – he had an obscure feeling that it was necessary for him to acknowledge them. The notion of luck, possibly of religion, entered into this, and there was some indefinite association between the pattern and his love of the kind darkness – that darkness which his most private fantasies represented as containing a hundred unknown nameless colours of marvellous intensity.
When he came to it he found it much more difficult than he had supposed. He was using a thin wooden panel, and in the bottom right-hand corner he had already painted three crossbow men, very close to the observer and crowded together, pointing their bows at the saint, who was tied to a low cross on the left of the picture and who had already received a great many arrows, or bolts: he was a little farther away than is usual in such a case – at the back of the foreground rather than in the middle of it. The light came from the bottom left-hand corner, the strong cold light of a declining January day in the south, and it lit the intent, crowded bowmen side-face, and their gleaming horizontal metal bows. The saint stared back at them with a harsh fortitude and in the pale space between, parched by winter, the ground was spotted with crimson flowers that showed the arrows’ path: the bowmen, their pointing, the flowers and the cross formed a right to left diagonal in the lower half of the picture, and he intended to fill the top right-hand part with his pattern, which in its main axis would form the other diagonal, pinning and suspending the martyr at the crossing of the two lines. The picture was lit from the bottom left-hand, and the pattern (which was essentially one of crosses) would start with the shadow of the saint’s gibbet stretching up towards the right-hand top; from this shadow others would arise, multiply, and superimposed fill the receding air.
He had already painted the crossbow men, a villainous set of brutes, all with faces that Fifine would recognise (he was clever with likenesses), and he had already done the saint, a painstaking anatomical study: so far the picture was a competent piece of work that he had worked over with great industry in his spare time during the past few weeks – it was a little dull, even rather laborious, and it showed the uncertainty of his literal taste, for whereas the bowmen derived ultimately from Bosch, the saint had a faint air of Géricault, and they existed in different kinds of reality, in different states of mind. But now he was to attack the upper part of the picture: this pattern, which preoccupied his mind, was to provide the force of counterpoise and contrast that would draw the cross into the centre of the picture and make it rise and glow – give it a far greater significance and perhaps harmonise the incongruity that he sensed but could not see.
He had the whole of the day – it was a Thursday – and he hoped to finish this piece and with it the whole picture before the evening. Yet it was far more difficult than he had supposed: he had made a few sketches, but he had not really related them to the whole picture; and now, having painted the hard shadow of the upright, he paused. He had meant to work directly from his palette on to the picture but suddenly he felt a waning of his confidence – doubted his own dexterity. This whole series of planes was to be based on straight lines and an impure edge at any point would be disastrous. He hooked his brush into the fingers of his left hand, and taking a piece of charcoal he drew in the uprights. It was easy enough, he thought, standing back to look at them – it was easy enough to get them perfectly exact, one behind the other, when it was only strokes of charcoal that he could blow off in a moment: and indeed they did look very well. He was excited by the prospect and yet he was afraid of it; he wanted to be at it, and yet he was unwilling to begin. He felt a strong temptation to fiddle about and he yielded to it for half an hour, until a recklessness that came from a mixture of guilt and shame drove him to mix his colour and to sweep it on with a stroke that had the good luck to fall between arrogance and caution. It needed a sure and disciplined hand: apart from the rigid precision of the drawing he was obliged to make a continuous gradation from umber to a high blue grey and from a moderately rich texture of paint to the flatness of a gouache, each stage imperceptible. He became quite absorbed in the technical problem: he rattled his easel down to breast level, upright, and worked with his nose almost touching the paint. Every few minutes he lunged backwards and stared, a disembodied pair of eyes, a hand.
Unknown excitement began to rise in him, and on the wooden panel a complex series of planes came into a dream-like existence. From these planes rose others, ruled by a logic that was clear to him; and suddenly with a strong dark line, a receding parabola that he would presently touch with vermilion, he gave them a unity that they had never possessed in his idea before. It was a vital line, one that had never physically existed in the pattern, although his mind must have postulated it, and it did wonders; but he was not content, and standing
