I
Letter from Walter Hartright to Laura Hartright,
18 th July, 185–
Brompton Grove,
Tuesday
My dearest love,
I hope you’re sitting down as you read this, for I have strange news. (But don’t be alarmed – good news, I think!) I’ve no time to confide it both to you and to my journal, so please keep this letter – as you’ll see, I may have need of it later.
First, though, a coincidence. You are, in a way, responsible for it, for it arose from my mood yesterday, when you left. I was so melancholy at the sight of your dear faces drawing away from me that it was all I could do to stop myself jumping on to the train, and I must own that, afterwards, I cried. Feeling unequal to explaining my tears to a cabman, I decided to walk home.
As I started west along the New Road, I suddenly saw it, as I have never seen it before, as a scene from hell: the clatter of the horses; the stench of their ordure; a crossing-sweeper nearly knocked down by a brushmaker’s wagon; a woman crying ‘Stunning oranges!’, yet so drearily you could tell she had lost all hope of selling her handful of pitifully wizened fruit, and so providing something for her child’s supper; a boy turning carter-wheels, and the men on the roof of an omnibus tossing halfpennies and farthings at him, and then guffawing as he fell into the gutter. And everywhere a yellow, choking haze, so thick that, even in the middle of the morning, you could not see more than fifty paces. And all the while a stream of tilers’ carts and brick merchants’ drays rattling by with provisions for the armies of new houses which daily carry this new Babylon still further into the lanes and meadows of Middlesex. Even as I rejoiced that you and the children would soon be breathing purer air and seeing lovelier sights, I felt myself alone and trapped inside some great engine from which all beauty, all joy and colour and mystery, had been banished.
This feeling so oppressed me that I quickly turned off and started to zig-zag through the maze of little streets and alleys to the west of Tottenham Court Road. My principle was simple enough: so long as I continued a certain distance west, and then a certain distance south, I must eventually come to Oxford Street, and avoid getting badly lost. And so it was that I crossed Portland Place (where, all those years ago, my journey to you so improbably began), entered a mean, dusty little court hung with dripping laundry that was already smudged with soot, and suddenly emerged into a street of handsome old-fashioned houses that seemed oddly familiar. But it was not the familiarity of everyday: rather the ghostly brilliance of some long-lost childish memory, or of something glimpsed once in a dream. I stood for perhaps two minutes, surveying the line of dark windows and blackened brickwork and heavy brass-handled doors. When and why had I seen them before? What was the original, of which they were such a plangent echo? Try as I might, I could not find it. All I noted was that my mind seemed somehow to associate it with feelings of powerlessness and smallness and a kind of awe.
Still musing, I set off again. After fifty yards or so I noticed a boy of eight or nine skulking in the area of one of the houses. His cap was too large for him and his jacket too small, and he wore an odd pair of boots, one black and one brown. As I turned towards him, he shrank back against the damp wall and looked up at me with the terrified stare of a cornered animal. As much to allay his fear as to satisfy my own curiosity, I called down to him:
‘What street is this?’
‘Queen Anne Street,’ he replied.
I was none the wiser: I recognized the name, but could not recall anyone I knew ever having lived there. I took a penny from my pocket and held out my hand.
‘Thank you,’ I said.
He cowered like a dog, torn between hunger for a scrap of meat and dread of being kicked.
‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘I won’t hurt you.’
He hesitated a moment, before scuttling up the steps and taking the coin. Then, instead of running off as I had expected, he gazed wonderingly at me, as if even so small an act of kindness lay entirely beyond his knowledge and understanding of life. His eyes, I saw, were unhealthily large, and the pale skin was drawn into the hollows of his cheeks, as if age could not wait to put its mark upon him. And suddenly I thought of little Walter, and of the horror I should feel if I looked into his face and saw there such a world of want and pain and sickness. So I gave the boy sixpence more, and without a word he was gone, as if he feared that in another moment the spell would break, and the natural order of things would reassert itself, and I would change my mind and take the money back again.
And that is my coincidence. I already hear you saying: ‘Walter! I see no coincidence’; but you shall, my love, I promise, if only you will be patient and read on.
I was in Brompton Grove again by three minutes to twelve. It was a sombre homecoming. The small things that spoke of our happy life here together looked already out of place, like a doll or a bonnet washed up on a beach. In the few brief hours since we’d left, the house had been occupied by an alien spirit, which now resented the return of the previous tenant. Whenever I entered a room, I seemed to feel its presence, like a silent wind, propelling me back towards the door.
Marian was still out, and only the distant murmur of the Davidsons’ voices in the kitchen told me I was not entirely alone. I felt as lost and mopish as a child. I tried to draw, but could not settle to it. After ten minutes I laid aside my pencil and took up a book, only to set it down again ten minutes later. The lunch bell promised a welcome diversion, until I found myself sitting in solitary state in the dining room like an oriental despot, with Davidson hovering near as if I might need help raising the fork to my mouth. I sent him away, saying I could take care of myself and would ring if I needed anything, and then kept the poor fellow running up and down stairs with my demands for fresh water and more mustard.
When I had finished, I went into the garden, where the workmen were marking the foundations for the new studio, and solemnly reiterated all manner of things – that I must have a north light, that the entrance must be sheltered from the weather – that they knew perfectly well already from the plans. And it was here that Marian found me when she came home, and saved them from me, and me from myself.
‘You cannot possibly come like that!’ were her first words, delivered in such a forthright tone that the three workmen started. But she was smiling, and her black eyes shone. ‘You look like a man who has walked across half London.’
‘Come where?’ I said.
‘Why, to Lady Eastlake’s,’ she said, more quietly, drawing me towards the house. ‘She was at the exhibition this morning, and afterwards I had lunch with her, and we talked of Laura’s going away today, and my staying. And so, by a natural progression, of you.’ She took my arm, and led me indoors. ‘And she asked most particularly that I should bring you to meet her this afternoon.’
I was immediately struck by the notion that this might have something to do with my painting: Sir Charles is, after all, Director of the National Gallery, and I confess that for a wild moment I imagined him emerging from behind a screen in his wife’s drawing room and saying: ‘Ah, Hartright, I much admired The Artist’s Wife and Children at Limmeridge, in Cumberland at the Academy this year, and would like to buy it for the nation.’ I soon recognized this pitiable fantasy for what it was, however, and concluded that Marian, as good and kind as ever, was merely hoping to distract me from my separation by introducing me to one of her blue-stocking friends.
As it turned out, neither explanation was remotely as strange as the truth.
Has Marian ever described the Eastlakes’ house to you? It’s too late now for me to ask her (after midnight, and she must be asleep) – so, if she has, simply pass over the next paragraph.
They live in one of those fine old stone houses in Fitzroy Square (here and there on the walls you can still see patches of the original honey gold peering through the grime), with lofty windows and a front door big enough to take a horse. As we arrived, a fashionably dressed woman in a fur-trimmed jacket and a tiny pill-box hat garnished with feathers flounced down the steps (in so far as you can flounce when you are imprisoned from the waist down in a giant birdcage) and into a waiting carriage. There were angry spots on her cheeks, and she barely acknowledged us as we passed.
The front door was opened by a tall footman with grey hair and thick dark eyebrows. Marian addressed him with a natural ease which surprised me.
‘Good afternoon, Stokes. Is your mistress at home?’
‘She is, ma‘am.’ He led us through a wide hall lined with marble busts and upstairs to a large drawing room. It was furnished in the modern style, with a heavy Turkey carpet, a set of carved oak chairs, and rows of watercolours jammed together on the green walls like carriages in Piccadilly. Above the picture-rail ran a line of Japanese plates (really made in Japan, I fancy, and not in Stafford!), and over the fireplace was a large classical landscape which, from its treaclish colouring, I took to be one of Sir Charles’s own.
As we entered, a strikingly tall woman rose from a chaise longue in the window. For a moment she was held in silhouette by the evening light, and the only distinctive feature I could make out was her head, which tilted oddly to one side, like a bird’s. As she came towards us, however, I saw that she was about fifty, wearing a soft green dress edged with braid, and with her still-dark hair pulled simply back into a net. She had a wide, uneven mouth that broke into a frank smile as she held out her hand.
‘Marian,’ she said. ‘You must have winged feet.’ Her voice was soft but clear, and I thought I detected a trace of a Scotch accent. She turned to the footman. ‘Thank you, Stokes. If anyone else should call, I am not at home.’ She touched Marian’s hand and smiled sidelong at me. ‘Did you have to rope him, and drag him to a cab, to make him come?’
Marian laughed. ‘Lady Eastlake, this is my brother – well, my half-brother-in-law – Walter Hartright.’
‘Half in-law,’ said Lady Eastlake, laughing. ‘How very complicated. I’m delighted to see you, Mr. Hartright. How do you do?’ As we shook hands, she glanced about her, as if suddenly dissatisfied with where she was. ‘I think we’ll be more comfortable in my boudoir’ – she gave the word an ironic inflection which made Marian laugh – ‘if you will forgive the clutter.’
She walked to the back of the room and threw open a pair of folding doors. Beyond them lay a light, pleasant, informal parlour, with a tall window overlooking the garden. The immediate impression was more that of an Oxford don’s study than of a lady’s sitting room. A range of bookcases, some crammed with books, others with what appeared simply to be stacks of papers, ran along the walls. In the corner was a bureau, the lid wedged half open by a cascade of notes and letters; on each side of the fireplace stood a large cabinet containing rocks, shells, pieces of broken pottery and half an Etruscan head; while in the centre (strangest of all) was a large mahogany table, entirely covered with more photographs than I have ever seen together in one place in my life. Despite myself, I could not stop my eyes straying across them in search of a unifying theme or a familiar image. In the first I failed, for the subjects seemed as various as life itself – portraits, a country cottage, a great mill veiled by the smoke from its own black chimney – but in the second I was successful, for there, between a haystack and a blurred carthorse, I quickly recognized a picture of Lady Eastlake herself.
She must have been watching me, for as I stooped to look at it more closely she said sharply:
‘Well, Mr. Hartright, what do you think?’
‘It is a fair likeness,’ I said, equivocally; for I feared that, like so many people, she might resent the camera’s merciless exposure of every blot and blemish, and feel it did her beauty less than justice.
‘I mean’, she said, ‘about photography.’
‘Well…,’ I began. I did not know how to go on, for, truth to tell, it is not something to which I have given much thought at all; but I did not wish to cause offence, either by seeming too cool, or by too warmly offering an opinion that might differ from her own. She spared me by continuing:
‘Do you practise yourself?’
‘No,’ I replied. ‘I still prefer pencil and brush.’
‘And why is that, Mr. Hartright?’
This inquisition was so far from what I had expected that I was forced to consider for a moment. At length I said:
‘Because it seems to me that photography can merely record facts.’
She gave me not an instant’s respite. ‘Whereas your pencil…?’
‘Whereas a pencil should, I hope – in the right hands – be able to hint at the truth. Which is not perhaps the same thing.’
She fixed me with an inscrutable stare, from which I could not judge whether she thought me mad, dull, or fascinatingly original. Then she opened the bureau gingerly, to prevent the overflowing papers from spilling on to the floor, and took out a small notebook and pencil. ‘Do you mind if I make a note of that?’ she said, already writing. ‘I am doing an article.’
‘So,’ said Marian, with a teasing familiarity, which again took me by surprise, ‘prepare to see your words in the next issue of the Quarterly Review.’
Lady Eastlake laughed. ‘Not unacknowledged,’ she said. ‘Whatever else I am, I am not a pickpocket. Besides, what makes you suppose I should want to claim Mr. Hartright’s thoughts as my own?’
She put the notebook away and sat in an armchair by the fireplace, gesturing Marian to the seat next to her. She sighed, shut her eyes and sank back, in a dumbshow of tiredness. I wondered if this were some further comment on what I had said, and, despite myself, felt the heat rising to my cheeks.
‘Forgive me,’ said Lady Eastlake. ‘I’ve just had to endure a duty call from Mrs. Madison. Did you see her as you came in?’
‘There was a lady leaving,’ said Marian.
‘She can only have been here for a quarter of an hour, but it felt like three days. My stock of conversation on children’s clothes is soon exhausted, I’m afraid. I did try venturing on to the weather, but even that turned out too mettlesome for her.’
Stokes entered, carrying a tea tray. He set it down on a low table by Lady Eastlake’s chair. She watched warily, her head cocked, until he was out of sight again; then she went on, more quietly:
‘She’s one of those women who believe that a member of her own sex should have no views on anything. And certainly never read a book. In which, I must say, she sets a splendid example.’
Marian laughed. Lady Eastlake started to pour the tea, then put the pot down and touched Marian’s arm. ‘That’s why I so enjoy your sister’s company, Mr. Hartright. Someone to keep pace with me. She always has something fresh and interesting to say, no matter where my runaway mind has led me.’
‘I know how deeply she values your friendship, Lady East-lake,’ I said. ‘I’m afraid that in our house she must often feel the want of an intellectual companion.’
‘Oh, that’s not true, Walter!’ burst in Marian.
‘It is not what she tells me,’ said Lady Eastlake. ‘You write, do you not, Mr. Hartright?’
I had just handed Marian a cup and was leaning down to take one myself. Lady Eastlake’s face was barely two feet from my own, and I felt the full power of her steady gaze. Again, it was impossible to avoid the sense that I was being interrogated – although to what purpose I could not begin to imagine.
‘I have written a book,’ I replied. ‘But it is no more than the history of a conspiracy against my wife, which my own experience qualified me to narrate. Perhaps it would be truer to call me a chronicler than a writer.’
Lady Eastlake nodded.
‘Or even an editor,’ I went on. ‘For, wherever possible, I told the story through the words of those who were closest to the events described, and thus best able to give a true account of them. Including Marian, whose journal was an invaluable source of information.’
I glanced at Marian. I had expected her to gainsay me: What nonsense, Walter: you are far too modest. Instead, she was watching me intently, her dark complexion flushed with excitement. As I turned back to Lady Eastlake, I saw, out of the corner of my eye, the table laden with photographs.
‘You could say’, I continued, ‘that I aspire to art in my painting. Whereas …’
‘Whereas in writing,’ said Lady Eastlake, ‘you are a camera, perhaps?’
‘Exactly,’ I said. I was taken aback, both by her acuity and by her rudeness in interrupting me. I looked again at Marian: she was smiling at Lady Eastlake, as if to say: There, I told you so. The idea that there might be some secret understanding between them, of which I was the unwitting object, unsettled me.
‘May I ask’, I said (with, I own, a certain iciness), ‘if this is tending towards some end?’
Lady Eastlake did not answer at once. She exchanged another furtive glance with Marian, then took a handkerchief from her sleeve and carefully smoothed it on her lap. At length she cleared her throat and said:
‘Mr. Hartright, would you mind closing the doors?’
‘I would not, of course, expect you to keep anything from your wife; but I must begin by asking that you do not mention this conversation to anyone else.’
I felt I could not accept this condition without knowing more, but was hard put to find a delicate way of saying so. She must have seen what was in my mind; for she said:
‘Och, you needn’t worry about your honour, Mr. Hartright. I’m not going to confess to a murder, or the theft of a child. Besides, your sister’s presence in this room should give you assurance enough.’
I felt the justice of this, and nodded. She continued:
‘My only concern is to protect my husband. His position – which God knows he never sought – is difficult enough already, and the last thing I want to do is stir up a hornets’ nest around his poor head.’
‘Very well,’ I said.
‘Thank you.’ She looked warily towards the door, and when she spoke it was in little more than a whisper. ‘Do you by any chance know a man called Thornbury?’
‘No,’ I replied. ‘Who is he?’
‘A journalist,’ she said. ‘And, I fear, an utter scoundrel.’
‘That is not surprising,’ I said. ‘A cynic might say that, to be the one, it is almost a requirement to be the other.’
Lady Eastlake laughed. ‘I have not myself met him,’ she said, ‘but, so far as I have been able to learn from my friends, he is intent – for no other reason than to sell the wretched book he is writing – on slandering a poor, misunderstood body who can no longer defend himself. And the result, I’m afraid, will be a serious injury, not only to the memory of one man, but to England herself, and to English art. For his subject was – in my view, and the view of many others – the foremost genius of our age.’
And it was then, with the force of a sprung trap, that the image of Queen Anne Street re-entered my mind, and, in the same instant, I knew why it was familiar. For a moment I was a boy of eight again, and sitting in a cab next to my poor father; the winter cold turned our breath to steam, and I huddled close to him, for in his thick coat he was an island of warmth and safety. As we jolted past a tall house with dirty windows and a heavy front door, he laid his gloved hand on mine and pointed out of the window. ‘Look, Walter,’ he said. ‘That is 47 Queen Anne Street. Where the foremost genius of our age lives.’
And now, in the space of six hours, I had walked down the same street and heard the same phrase again for the first time in thirty years. Without stopping to consider, I said to Lady East-lake: ‘Do you mean Turner?’
It was her turn to be astonished. She stared at me, her mouth half open, then looked at Marian. ‘Have you …?’
Marian was equally perplexed. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I said nothing. Walter, how did you …?’
I confess I was tempted to confound them further by pretending to some mysterious knowledge, but I merely said: ‘Oh, it was just a guess.’ And then, to forestall more questions (for both of them still looked puzzled), I went on: ‘So is Mr. Thornbury writing Turner’s biography?’
‘That is what he claims.’
‘But if you have never met him,’ I said, ‘how do you know it is defamatory?’
‘I have been following his progress, Mr. Hartright – with, I have to say, a sinking heart. A few of those closest to Turner have, wisely, refused to speak to him at all. Of the rest, he appears to have given most credence to a gang of malicious gossips, most of whom scarcely knew the man. And they, as is the way with these things, have in turn referred him to more of their own kind.’
I must own that my first thought was the old adage: There’s no smoke without fire. Perhaps she saw my scepticism, for she went on:
‘No man as eminent as Turner could avoid making enemies among those less successful or less gifted than himself – particularly a man with such a thoroughgoing disdain of flattery and convention. You’ve probably heard all manner of stories about him yourself.’
Her raised eyebrow seemed to demand an answer, but I said nothing, for – beyond a few hoary old anecdotes about his meanness, and his garbled speech, that are common currency at the Academy – in reality I was shamefully ignorant about him. She waited a moment, and then continued:
‘He was, it cannot be denied, an odd, perverse, eccentric little creature, but he was not a monster, and he deserves better than to be commemorated by tittle-tattle.’ She leaned confidentially towards me. ‘I came to know him well in his last years. Indeed’ – here her voice grew unsteady, and her eyes glittered with tears – ‘I am told that as he lay dying he called my name. Which I cannot but feel as a charge upon me. To try to protect his memory.’ She hastily dried her eyes, then clenched her handkerchief into a ball. ‘Mr. Hartright, what I am asking .. . what I am suggesting … is that you might yourself consider undertaking to write a Life of J. M. W. Turner.’
For perhaps three seconds I was, literally, speechless with astonishment. A thousand questions crowded into my head, and then flew off again before I could find words to express them. I was conscious of Marian’s gaze upon me – watchful, anxious, almost pleading – and the sense that her hopes and happiness were, in some way I could not yet fathom, bound up with my reply, only confused me further. Perhaps Lady Eastlake mistook my perplexity for calculation, for she said:
‘I have spoken to a publisher I know, and am assured that there would be a ready market for such a book …’
‘That is not my concern. I –’
‘And I’m sure I speak for all of Turner’s friends when I say we should be happy to underwrite it…’ She broke off, suddenly noting that I was following another train of thought. ‘What?’ she said. ‘You think there must be others better placed?’
I nodded. ‘What about yourself, for instance?’
‘As I explained, my connection to Sir Charles . . . Besides, there are many doors closed to a woman that a man may pass through easily and freely.’
‘I cannot believe –’ I began.
‘What you must understand, Mr. Hartright, is that poor Turner died a recluse,’ said Lady Eastlake. ‘Most of those who knew him well are long dead. Of those who are still alive, Mr. Ruskin would seem to be the natural choice, but he’ – here she smiled slightly – ‘is too Olympian to contemplate it. My situation you already know. And as for my husband – well, it’s entirely out of the question, I’m afraid.’
‘Oh, I can quite see that,’ I said. ‘But –’
She appeared not to have heard me.
‘Both Mrs. Booth, Turner’s housekeeper, and his friend George Jones are good-hearted people, but…’ She paused, and shook her head. ‘Well, frankly, neither of them is equal to it. And Mr. Jones, I believe, in any case now spends most of his time dressing up as the Duke of Wellington. At best, they might both furnish you with useful memoirs.’
She paused, and again I found myself at a loss for words. It was Marian who broke the silence:
‘There is no-one else, Walter. If you won’t do it, Thornbury will carry the day unopposed.’
‘And do not underestimate yourself, Mr. Hartright,’ said Lady Eastlake. ‘Unlike Thornbury, you are an artist, who will understand the painter in Turner . . .’
I cried – I could not stop myself – ‘You cannot compare -!’
‘He may have been a general, and you – forgive me – only a colonel,’ replied Lady Eastlake. ‘But all artists belong to the same regiment, and fight the same battles, and crave the same victory. And then’, she went on, before I could protest further, ‘you are also, by your own admission, a chronicler, who knows how to gather and evaluate and compile the accounts of different witnesses.’
‘And a crusader, who has already proven his determination to right a great wrong,’ said Marian.
Lady Eastlake nodded. ‘Who could be more ideal?’
They were quiet then, leaving me to ponder what they had said. I tried, again, to impose some order on my own jangled thoughts, but they all – save one, which rang through my head with the clarity of a bell – remained in turmoil. At length Marian said:
‘This is all so unexpected for poor Walter that I think we must allow him some time to consider his response.’
‘Yes, of course,’ said Lady Eastlake.
And so we left it. No more mention of the idea was made, and, after exchanging the usual pleasantries for a few minutes, Marian and I rose to go. Only as Stokes ushered us from the room did Lady Eastlake say:
‘I may expect to hear from you soon, I hope, Mr. Hartright?’
*
We barely spoke on the way home. I was still trying to marshal my own thoughts, which were all of you and the children, and of how our lives would change if I accepted Lady Eastlake’s strange proposal; but I was constantly deflected by waves of wild emotion – dread, and a kind of dizzy exhilaration, in about equal measure – which I could not trace confidently to their source, but which seemed to gush unbidden from some hidden spring in my mind.
Marian, for her part, was uncharacteristically constrained. I thought little of it at the time, beyond merely remarking the fact; but now I think she must have taken my silence to mean that I was angry; for when we were back in our own drawing room, and had shut the door, she laid a hand lightly on my arm and said:
‘I do hope, Walter, that you don’t think I did wrong.’
‘What,’ I said, ‘to invite me to Lady Eastlake’s?’
‘Not that,’ she said. ‘But to invite you without telling you the reason. She insisted that you should know nothing until she had met you, and could decide for herself whether you would be suitable. But when I saw you sitting there, so bewildered, it made me feel a traitor. Or, rather, made me feel that you would think me a traitor.’
Poor Marian! ‘I was taken aback, I must own,’ I said. ‘But I never suspected you of treachery, or doubted that you had my best interests at heart.’
‘I’m glad.’ She was silent for a moment, looking down at her bag and toying with the string. Then, as if she had decided at last to say something that had long been on her mind, she burst out: ‘May we talk frankly, Walter?’
‘Nothing I have ever known could prevent you talking frankly, once you were set on it,’ I said. ‘And I’m quite certain that it lies beyond my power to stop you.’
She laughed, and her voice had regained some of its old gaiety as she replied: ‘I said “we”, not “I”.’
‘Very well,’ I said.
We sat together on the sofa. It was dusk, but neither of us suggested lighting the gas. Perhaps we both felt that it would be easier to open our hearts if our faces, at least, were veiled by the deepening gloom. At length she said:
‘Many years ago I told you that we should always be friends, Walter, did I not?’
‘Yes,’ I said, taking her hand. ‘And so we shall.’
‘I hope so,’ she said. ‘At any rate, that is the spirit in which I now speak. You may think me impertinent; but please believe that I am prompted only by sisterly love for you and Laura.’
‘Of course I believe it,’ I said. ‘I’ve never been surer of anything in my life.’ And nor had I; but, notwithstanding, I waited with trepidation to hear what she would say next. A whole army of butterflies seemed to have taken up residence in my stomach, and my legs were so leaden that, if Davidson had rushed in at that moment shouting ‘Fire! Fire!’, I doubt whether they would have carried me to the door.
‘Thank you,’ said Marian. She breathed deeply, then went on: ‘You know that, living as close together as we do, we cannot help noticing the smallest changes in each other’s moods?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘recently I think I have noticed such a change in you. You have become restless, and distracted. You paint and draw less than you did. And, while you are still as loving a husband and father and brother as ever, I sometimes think it is with a greater effort than previously. As if … as if you have to bring yourself back from some other place in order to be with us.’
‘It’s difficult for me to paint here,’ I said, ‘until the studio is finished. And I have, as you know, been very taken up with planning it, and overseeing the work.’
‘The want of a studio never stopped you painting before,’ she said. ‘And you may, I think, safely leave building it to the workmen. They do not require you to go out twenty times a day and tell them their job.’
I remembered where she had found me that afternoon, and was glad the darkness hid my blushes.
‘No,’ she went on, ‘we must look for a deeper cause. And I think I know what it is.’
I need not burden you
I wish I could spare you what she said next; for it must inevitably hurt you, and make you think worse of me. But it is the truth, and you must know it – else you will cease to know me.
‘Dear Walter,’ she said, in a quieter, tenderer voice. ‘You are the victim of your own sensitive nature. No-one else, knowing all the circumstances, could possibly accuse you of having benefited improperly from marrying Laura, and sharing the fortune which eventually became hers. Yet that, if I am right, is the charge with which you torment yourself. You know that your conduct has always been beyond reproach, and that you have brought her more happiness than she ever knew in her life. And yet, and yet, and yet.. . You still harbour the faint suspicion that you have somehow become a pensioner, and it is an agony to you.’
I opened my mouth to speak; but, in truth, I could not find the strength to deny it. In a moment, she had cast a light into some dark corner of my being and found a canker to which, until now, I had been unable to give a name.
‘Worse still,’ she continued, ‘you feel a certain vacancy at the centre of your life. You have everything that, in the eyes of the world, should make a man happy: a gentle and loving wife, two beautiful children, a fine estate, and the regard of your brother artists. Yet something is lacking: a cause capable of stirring your soul, and carrying you beyond the concerns of family and home.’
I nodded, and I think she must have seen me; for I felt her hand tightening on mine. ‘It is nothing to be ashamed of,’ she said. ‘It is just that, like all noble natures, you know that family and home themselves are meaningless, unless they stand in relation to some greater purpose.’
Outside, a wagon squealed and rumbled across the cobbles. I clutched at the sound gratefully, and wrapped it about me like a cloak; for my eyes were full of tears.
‘For months,’ said Marian, ‘I have been looking for some way to relieve you. And that is why my heart leapt when Lady East-lake told me of her anguish over Turner’s life, for here at last, it seemed, was a great purpose you were perfectly fitted to fulfil.’ She paused, and then went on: ‘You know, I hope, that I will gladly help you, as I did once before, when fate enlisted us in the same struggle. Dear Walter, please say you will do it!’
Once, many years ago – do you remember? – I called Marian our good angel; and so she is, for like an angel she seems to know what is best and truest in us better than we know it ourselves.
For some moments I could not speak; and when I did, all I could say was: Thank you.’
And so, my love, tomorrow I shall write to Lady Eastlake, telling her that, on certain conditions, I accept. And the upshot (if she agrees) is that you will have to get to know me in yet another character. Drawing master, detective, husband, clerk of works – and now, of all things, biographer!
It is late here, and cold. I shall go to bed, and hold to myself the pillow that still bears the smell of your skin and hair.
Good night,
Walter
II
Memorandum of a letter from Walter Hartright to
Lady Eastlake, 19th July, 185-
1. Thank you for your invitation; great pleasure finally to meet you.
2. After consideration, delighted to accept your proposal that I should write a Life of J. M. W. Turner.
3. Must, however, make one stipulation: respect your feelings towards Turner, but neither they, nor wish to thwart Thornbury, can be my guide. Shall do no more, and no less, than try to discover truth (which in biography must, I think, be same as facts!). Go where trail leads me, without fear or favour. Cannot promise, therefore, to paint portrait you wish.
4. Hope you will forgive bluntness, but important to be clear at outset in order to avoid misunderstanding later.
III
Letter from Lady Eastlake to Walter Hartright,
19th July, 185–
7 Fitzroy Square,
Wednesday
My dear Mr. Hartright,
Many thanks for your letter of this morning, and for so promptly putting an end to my unease.
I am very glad that you feel able to act on my suggestion, and will give you what assistance I can. And yes – of course I accept that Truth must be your only master. I would, indeed, expect no less; and, had I suspected for a moment that you would be deflected from your purpose by partisan considerations, I should not have asked you to undertake a task which so clearly requires the greatest integrity.
I hope, nonetheless, that you will not feel I am trying to influence you improperly if I recommend that – whomever else you may talk to – you should begin by approaching Mr. Ruskin, Mr. Jones and Mrs. Booth. I have given their addresses to Marian, with this letter, and I will write to Mr. Jones and Mrs. Booth myself this evening, telling them that they may expect to hear from you. Since I know that Mrs. Booth refused to speak to Mr. Thornbury, it occurs to me that – in the first instance, at least – Marian, as another woman, might have more success in winning her confidence and securing her co-operation. As to Mr. Ruskin – I fear a letter from me would not help your case, so you must take courage and disturb the great man yourself.
Yours most truly,
Eliz. Eastlake
IV
Letter from Walter Hartright to Laura Hartright,
20th July, 185–
The Reading Room, British Museum Library,
Thursday
My dearest love,
Thank you for your letter, and for Florrie’s and Walter’s drawings – they will soon outstrip their father if I do not look to my laurels!
Yesterday I wrote to Ruskin and to George Jones, R.A., but have received no reply from either of them. Not wishing to be idle, therefore, I have taken myself – as you can see from the address – to the new Reading Room at the British Museum Library. (It is, by the by, a prodigious building, which seems to me to belong almost to a new order of object; large and hushed and awe-inspiring enough to be a great cathedral, and yet erected not as a temple to God, but rather to our knowledge of His creation. Was such a thing ever attempted before? In Alexandria, perhaps; but what mankind then knew of the world was puny by comparison. Here, in London, for the first time, the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil has been raised up in bricks and mortar; and who knows whether it will prove a blessing or a curse?)
My aim here has been to find out what I can of Turner – and, from what I have discovered so far, I think my life of him will be quick work indeed. He was born, in London, in 1775, on St. George’s Day; he drew; he painted; he died. That, in essence – save for a few incidentals, such as his journeys in this country and in Europe – is more or less all we know, at the ordinary humdrum level. He never married; never fought a duel; never fomented a revolution; never declared his love for a princess – a million Englishmen must have lived such lives, and none but their families and friends thought them worthy of a second glance. All that marks Turner out is his fanatical dedication to his art, which makes for sublime paintings, but leaves only meagre pickings for a biographer. I begin to feel sorry for poor Thornbury, who has perhaps resorted to slander in a desperate attempt to make the thin gruel of his narrative more palatable.
It is for this reason that, while I understand your anxiety, I believe it to be groundless. There will, of course, be unexpected difficulties, and I must not underestimate them, but I am sure that our separation need only be prolonged by two or three weeks – and if I thought otherwise I should, I promise you, write to Lady Eastlake this instant, telling her that I had changed my mind. Turner’s close acquaintance was, it seems, pitifully small, and is now much depleted by death; and seeing the few friends who are left (assuming they will see mel) should take only a matter of days. After that, I shall have to seek out diaries, letters and so on to help me – particularly for the early years, for which there are presumably no living witnesses at all; but then I should be able to return to Limmeridge with my booty, and do most of the work there. Although I may have to come back once or twice in the interim, just for a few days, I’m sure I shall then be safe in Cumberland until we all return to London together next season.
So please, my dearest – don’t worry! And let me end with a worry of my own: I was delighted to hear that you have been visiting our favourite haunts on the moor, but do you think, in your present condition, it is wise to walk so far, particularly when you have no companion to help you, should need arise? Please – be careful.
Your devoted husband,
Walter
V
Letter from Walter Hartright to Laura Hartright,
1st August, 185–
Brompton Grove,
Tuesday
My dearest love,
Your letter reached me this morning. Thank you! I confess I was hoping it might arrive in company, for over the last few days I have felt powerless to do more on the Life until I have heard from Jones and Ruskin (with the result that, to Davidson’s evident annoyance, I have taken to anticipating the post by pacing about the house like a caged wolf awaiting the full moon).
But your words galvanized me into action; and as soon as I had finished reading them I at once resolved to go on the offensive, and try to find my own way into Turner’s world. I confess I had no very clear idea of how, or where, I should begin (I think at the back of my mind was the notion that if all else failed I could end up at the Athenaeum, where I might happen upon someone who recollected him): my aim was merely to set out, and see where the day took me. And – although it may seem fanciful – I think my faith was rewarded.
Hyde Park was even more thronged than usual, but by avoiding the carriage-ways, and following the narrowest paths through clumps of bushes and over grassy rises, I was sometimes able, for a moment, to imagine myself not in the centre of the greatest city on earth but in some pleasant rural Eden. My way brought me at length through a fringe of trees and out by the Serpentine, which – as if pressed flat by the heavy sky – lay as still as a newly poured bath, glowing with the surly sheen of pewter. Around the shore, as their nurses looked on, children played with hoops and sticks, or put dolls to sleep in their own perambulators, or chased after a silly dog (a bundle of white curls, with no discernible face) which had made off with a ball and chewed it half to pieces. One little boy was wailing inconsolably, and I stopped to ask him the matter.
‘I’ve lost my duck,’ he sobbed, pointing to a little wooden pintail, which had bobbed out of reach and seemed to be trying to join the real ducks in the middle of the lake.
It was here that fate first took a hand; for I went back to the trees, broke off a small branch, and (after a good deal of getting it, and losing it, and getting it again) managed to retrieve the toy, and return it to its owner. And had it not been for this small delay, I should not still have been there five minutes later, when a voice suddenly called out:
‘Hartright!’
I turned, and could not for a moment identify the fashionably dressed young man who had broken from the crowd and was advancing smiling towards me. It was only when he pointed to the stick that still hung dripping from my hand, and said, laughing, ‘What? Trying to catch dinner?’ that I knew him by his voice.
‘Travis!’ I said.
It was no wonder that I had not recognized him, for he had grown a beard, and, instead of his usual get-up, was sporting a check waistcoat and a new soft felt hat. He carried a large portfolio, which he pinioned under his arm while he removed a flawless yellow glove and shook my hand.
‘Where are you going?’ we both said together, and laughed.
‘Sir William Butteridge,’ he said. He tried to sound nonchalant, but his face shone, and in struggling to suppress his smile he distorted his next words so much that all I could make out was ‘.. . discuss a . . .’
‘A what?’
‘Really? That’s wonderful!’ I said. And I was, needless to say, truly delighted for him; but I cannot deny that I felt a pang of envy, too, swiftly followed by satisfaction at the recollection of my own commission, and as swiftly again by frustration that I was sworn to secrecy, and could not, therefore, counter ‘Sir William Butteridge’ with ‘Lady Eastlake’.
‘Is it in there?’ I asked, nodding towards the portfolio.
‘Just a few sketches. You want to see?’
He laid the portfolio on a bench and opened it. Inside were some rough drawings of a sickly-looking young woman with flowing hair clutching a broken column for support. ‘She’s swooning at the sight of her lover,’ Travis explained, pointing at a vague blob on the left-hand side, ‘who is returning, mortally wounded, after a seven-year absence. Faith and Purity, that’s what Sir William wants. I think I’ve got it, don’t you?’
‘I’m sure he’ll be very pleased.’ It did occur to me that, since Sir William had made his fortune dispossessing widows and orphans from the path of railways, he might stand in greater need of faith and purity than most; but I said nothing.
‘There’s money in mediaevalism,’ said Travis, perhaps feeling he had failed to impress me as an artist, and must therefore do so as a man of the world. ‘Take my advice, Hartright. Find yourself a knight and a damsel, and set to work.’
‘I haven’t the time, just at the moment,’ I said. I hesitated, giving him an opportunity to ask me why not; but he merely busied himself with putting his sketches away, so I went on: ‘Tell me, what do you remember of Turner?’
‘Turner? I barely met him,’ he said, closing the portfolio. ‘My first Academy dinner was his last. I did see him once or twice on Varnishing Days, but it would never have occurred to me to speak to him.’ He turned towards me, and a spasm of silent laughter shook his heavy chestnut curls like blossom on a tree. ‘Like sauntering up to the altar, and helping yourself to communion wine.’
‘Was he really so extraordinary?’ I said.
‘Not to look at,’ he said. ‘Well, yes, extraordinary, but not in the way you mean. Not impressive. He was about so tall’ – he held his hand out, below the level of his own shoulder – ‘with a huge Jew nose, and beady grey eyes, and an enormous top hat with the nap brushed the wrong way, and an old-fashioned coat with tails that almost swept the ground (and couldn’t have been much dirtier if they had), and long sleeves that entirely covered his filthy hands. Like this.’ He hunched forward, miming the ridiculous little figure he had described. Several passers-by stopped to stare, and a small girl erupted in uncontrollable giggles. I could not help laughing myself – Travis always looks most beatific when he is being most malicious, and seeing his pale, noble face contort into this grotesque hobgoblin was irresistibly comical – but it made me uncomfortable, as if I had joined in the mockery of some poor unfortunate whose only fault was his unusual appearance.
‘I meant,’ I said, ‘was he really so great a genius?’
‘Certainly if you equate genius with industry,’ said Travis. ‘He never stopped. Rain, shine, awake, asleep, in the water closet… He’s doubtless at it now, scraping sunsets on his coffin lid.’
‘Oh, come now,’ I said, laughing. ‘What’s your true opinion?’
He did not reply at once, but stared gravely at the ground, as if seeking an answer there. Finally, he said:
‘We thought so then. Or, rather, we thought he was a genius who had lost his powers, and degenerated into madness.’
‘How mad?’ I said.
‘Just look at his late pictures,’ he replied. ‘Colours entirely divorced from any object. Great splotches of paint that look like nothing at all, save – splotches of paint. Pictures of nothing, as the critic said, and very like.’
‘And what do you think now?’ I said.
He shrugged. ‘Some of the early work. The Dutch sea pieces. The engravings.’
I waited for him to go on, but he didn’t: he took a watch from his pocket, looked at it, then gathered up the portfolio.
‘Can you suggest anyone else,’ I said, ‘who might have known him better?’
‘Jones?’
‘I’ve written to him.’
He shrugged again, and shook his head. It was only after we had shaken hands, and said goodbye, and gone a few paces on our separate ways, that he turned and called:
‘Try Davenant. He’s in retirement now, at Hampstead. But still has his memory, and likes to open it to the public sometimes, and display the contents.’
This slight encounter had given me, in truth, little enough; but for some reason – no more, maybe, than that I had at last taken the initiative – I came away from it filled with a new spirit. Or perhaps it would be truer to say an old spirit: for, like the face in a crowd which suddenly calls to mind a long-forgotten childhood playfellow, I knew it at once for something I had known before. My heart beat faster; my legs ached with a tremulous excitement; I filled my lungs, and found in the smoky air, which only an hour ago had tasted of drudgery and sickness, an intoxicating hint of romance – I felt, in short, like a young man again, newly released from dull routine and about to embark on some great adventure. Had you seen me striding through the Regent’s Park and up Avenue Road (it did not even occur to me to take a cab), you might have fancied you saw the ghost of that other Walter Hartright, who, fifteen years ago, his head full of simple purposes and grand hopes, used to walk from London to Hampstead three times a week, and think nothing of it. I seemed, indeed, to glimpse him myself sometimes, marching companionably at my side; and it was surely at his prompting that I broke my journey at a plain roadside inn, and sat with him over a plain luncheon of bread and cheese and ale – I the grave master of Limmeridge, and he the cheerful young drawing teacher, with neither the burden nor the privilege of fortune, and no prospect save the prospect of life itself.
Mr. Davenant (I learned at the post office) lived not half a mile from my mother’s old cottage, in one of those quaint red-brick houses in Church Row. Its once-regular facade had started to sag and buckle with age, giving it the unsteady look of a child’s drawing (Florrie, indeed, would have got the lines straighter!), as if it had tired of classical sobriety, and decided to get drunk. A big wood-clad bay window, jutting out pugnaciously from the first floor like the stern of an old man-of-war, added to the air of disorder.
The door was opened by a young manservant who still seemed pitifully uncertain of his duties. When I inquired if Mr. Davenant was at home he said: ‘I’ll go and ask him’; a moment later he came back, his cheeks flaming, to ask my name; and then, after a few steps, stopped, and turned again – presumably to find out my business. He was interrupted, however, by a man’s voice booming down from upstairs:
‘Who is that, Lawrence?’
‘Mr. Hartright, sir,’ called the boy.
‘Who?’
‘Mr. Hartright!’
‘What does he want?’ shouted the man, as if he were commanding a company of troops.
‘What do you want?’ stammered the boy.
‘To talk about Turner,’ I said.
The boy relayed this to the man upstairs, who promptly roared:
‘What the devil does that mean?’
‘What the -?’ began the boy, so thoroughly embarrassed now that you could have lit a cigar from his face. I stepped past him into the hall, to be met by a line of unsmiling family portraits and, at the foot of the stairs, a large oil-painting of what appeared to be the Battle of Waterloo. Staring down at me from the first-floor landing was a fine-looking man of seventy or so, with white whiskers, a noble nose and a heroic brow. He wore a paint-stained smock tied loosely at the neck, and was tapping the handle of a brush impatiently against the banister.
‘I was told you knew Turner well,’ I said.
‘Oh, yes,’ he said, ‘and what of it?’
‘I am hoping to write his biography.’
‘Are you, by God?’ He leant forward, peering closely at me. ‘You’re not that what-ye-call-him, been making such a damned nuisance of himself?’
‘Do you mean Mr. Thornbury?’ I said.
He grunted.
‘No,’ I said.
He pondered a moment, then said: ‘Come up. Fifteen minutes.’
A moonlit seascape hung above the stairs, and another battle scene – showing a knot of red-coated soldiers clustered round a tattered union flag, while the shadowy enemy crept towards them through a fog of gunsmoke – dominated the landing. I stopped before it, and asked:
‘Is that one of yours?’
He nodded abruptly. ‘Can’t get rid of ‘em. No-one wants anything now except pretty little pictures of their families, all scrubbed clean and dressed up like tailors’ dummies. And those damned fainting women.’ He shook his head. ‘Madness.’
I could not help smiling – he had skewered both Travis and me with a single stroke – but fortunately he was too busy wiping his fingers on his smock to notice.
‘It’s very impressive,’ I said.
He nodded again. ‘There, I shan’t smear you now,’ he said, and grasped my hand. ‘How d’ye do?’
As if that simple formality had qualified me to be admitted to his confidence, he turned and led me into a double room – divided in the middle by folding doors – which ran the entire depth of the house. At one end was the large bay, giving a distant view of the heath and washing the walls and floor with silvery light; at the other, a south-facing rear window, unshuttered, but screened with a sheet, presumably to mute the effect of the sun.
A huge unfinished canvas, held upright on a crude frame, stood in the bay, next to a table spread with brushes and an open paintbox. It was turned to catch the north light, and I could consequently only half-see the subject; but I made out enough – a woman on a horse, surrounded by armed men, and a line of sails on the horizon – to guess that the subject was Queen Elizabeth before the Spanish Armada. On a dais in the centre of the room, a woman in a blue velvet cloak and a tall hat sat for the central figure. Her ‘horse’ had been ingeniously constructed of three bolsters lashed together and laid between a pair of trestles; and she held before her a wooden sword, which – doubtless because she had been at it some time, and her arm was tired – wavered perilously.
‘Very well,’ said Davenant. ‘You can have a break, Mrs. Holt.’
‘It would be as well, sir,’ she said, taking off her hat, ‘if you’re to get your dinner.’
‘Never mind about my dinner,’ he said. ‘If I keep you here all afternoon, it’s no matter: you can send out for a pie. A cup of tea in the kitchen, to restore you; and then back to singeing King Philip’s beard.’
‘Yes, sir,’ she said, compliantly enough – but her eyes rolled with a comic exasperation that fell just short of outright insolence.
‘Begone with you, you besom,’ said Davenant, raising his hand as if to strike her. ‘And tell Lawrence to bring us some wine.’
‘Yes, sir,’ she said, laughing.
There was a moment’s silence after she had gone. Davenant glanced out of the window, then turned and fixed me with a frank gaze. With a gravity I had not heard before, he said:
‘Turner was my friend, Mr. Hartright. I’ll not do anything to injure him. If you want scandal, or gossip, you won’t get it here.’
‘I give you my word,’ I said, ‘I am only interested in the truth.’
‘I’ll tell you that, and gladly,’ he said. ‘But mind – I speak only of what I know.’ He paused; then, pulling two chairs from the wall, muttered: ‘And I could earnestly wish others would the same. Will you sit down?’
‘Thank you.’
‘I sometimes think you could knock on any door in London, and find someone there whose acquaintance with Turner extends, at most, to having once seen him get out of a cab – and who will cheerfully swear on that basis that he was the most crabbed, suspicious, miserable skinflint in creation.’
I laughed; and he acknowledged it with a chuckle, and a curious little bounce of the head, as if I had complimented him on some soldierly skill. He went on:
‘But I knew him for thirty years, and found him as kind and sociable as any man I ever met. You certainly couldn’t have asked for a tenderer friend.’ He sat down, tugging at the knees of the old-fashioned breeches beneath his smock. ‘I was sick as a dog, once – the doctors almost gave me up, and most of my family, too – but Turner’d come every day, to inquire after my health, and wish me better – even, I afterwards discovered, when I was too weak to receive him myself, and he got no more for his pains than two minutes’ conversation with my house-keeper,’ He shook his head, and his eyes sparkled with tears, which he made no effort to hide.
‘But what of his supposed moroseness, and meanness?’ I said.
‘Why, as to that – you never saw such a fellow for merriment and hilarity, when he was easy, and among friends. Get up any little social or professional party, and he’d gladly participate, and pay his share – and sometimes, to my knowledge, he’d defray the whole expense himself, without others knowing it.’
‘How then did he get such a reputation?’ I asked. I was, I confess, astonished: for this genial figure bore no relation to Travis’s crazed dwarf – or to the misanthropic miser I had heard of at the Academy, or to Lady Eastlake’s friendless recluse.
‘Oh, I won’t deny there may have been reason enough, for those who judge a man by his appearance, and never trouble to look beneath the surface,’ said Davenant. ‘He lived most of his life with his old father, and much of the rest alone; and never learnt good domestic management – and thus could not receive his friends at his own table, as he told me on many occasions he would have liked. And he could be gruff, sometimes, too – especially if he thought you were trying improperly to find out his secrets, or interfere with his habits.’
But why (I immediately thought) should a man be at so much pains to protect his privacy, unless he has something shameful to conceal? I kept the question to myself; but, as if he could look into my mind, Davenant said:
‘I don’t know if you’ve a wife, Mr. Hartright – and, if so, how you live with her, and, if not, how you do without one – but you might well feel that it was no damned business of mine, unless you chose to tell me, and I should heartily agree with you.’
The young manservant entered, carrying a tray with a decanter and two glasses. He stood trembling while Davenant made a space for it on his painting table, and then set it down without mishap.
‘Thank you, Lawrence,’ said Davenant, as the boy withdrew. ‘That was Turner’s view,’ he went on, as if there had been no interruption. ‘To hate humbug, and meddling, and condemnation, was almost a religious principle with him. I never heard him speak ill of a fellow-creature, or fail to put the best construction he could on another’s behaviour. If he couldn’t defend you, or approve your work, he’d hold his tongue. Will you take some wine, sir?’
‘Thank you.’
‘He wouldn’t pry into your private affairs,’ he said, busying himself with the decanter, ‘and asked nothing more in return than that you shouldn’t pry into his. And all I can say is: I wish to God there were more like him.’ He handed me a glass, full to the brim with brown sherry; then raised his own, and, looking straight before him, as if he could see Turner’s face etched upon the empty air, said: ‘Here’s honour to your memory, you old scamp.’ He drank, and turned immediately towards me. ‘Your very good health, Mr. Hartright.’
‘And yours,’ I said. And yet I did not drink; for, in some obscure way, it seemed that to do so would be to set a kind of seal on our conversation, implying that I accepted not only his hospitality, but also his account of Turner – which, in truth, had left me more puzzled and unsatisfied than ever. I merely touched the glass to my lips, therefore, and tried feverishly to compose a question that would press him further without angering him.
Once again, he seemed to anticipate my thoughts.
‘You may yet wonder’, he said, sitting down again, ‘how such a man could have been the butt of so much malice, and so many hateful anecdotes? And the only answer I can give you is: envy. Most people seem to conceive of artists as little less than angels, but they’re not, by God! – in my experience, outside a schoolroom, you won’t find a bigger pack of squabbling, jealous, back-stabbing cheats and bullies anywhere on earth. They all try to make themselves into geniuses; and if they can’t do that, they’ll say anything, and believe anything, that seems to make the geniuses more like themselves.’
He hesitated; and for a moment I considered pointing out that I was an artist myself, of sorts; but quickly thought better of it.
‘And Turner was a genius, Mr. Hartright,’ he went on. ‘He was the genius, I’d take my oath upon it. Varnishing Days at the Academy, before the Exhibition, the rest of us’d just be putting the finishing touches to our work; but he’d send in a more or less bare canvas, and you’d see the younger members looking at it, and laughing, and saying: ‘What’s he going to do with that?’
And then he’d walk in, and open his little box of tricks, and get to work – never standing back, to look at what he was doing, for it was all in his head – and within a few hours he’d have conjured a picture out of nothing. If a savage had seen it, he’d have sworn it was magic. I remember, indeed, a young Scotch fellow watching it once, and going quite pale, and muttering something about sorcery.’
‘But surely’, I said, ‘no painter could fail to admire …’
He gave a derisive splutter. ‘Imagine, Mr. Hartright,’ he said, ‘you have laboured for six months on a painting, and are mightily pleased with it, and think it will get you a knighthood; and along comes Turner, and in a single day produces its nemesis, so that you are utterly eclipsed …’
I laughed nervously, for his words had struck a hidden weakness in me; and I suddenly found that I could imagine it, all too easily; and for a moment felt the chill of some bottomless desolation fall upon me like a shadow.
‘If you did a bright sun or a blue sky,’ he said, ‘he’d as like as not try to make a brighter or a bluer. Once, I recall, he’d done a beautiful grey picture of Helvoetsluys, without a hint of positive colour; and next to it was Constable’s Opening of Waterloo Bridge, which seemed to have been painted in liquid gold and silver; and Turner looked several times from one to the other, and then fetched his palette, and put a daub of red lead on his grey sea, a little bigger than a shilling, and went away without a word.’ He started to laugh. ‘And poor Constable groaned: “Turner’s been here, and fired a gun”; for, of course, his own picture now looked weak and insipid by comparison.’
‘Perhaps, then,’ I said, ‘it’s little wonder Turner was so much disliked.’
Davenant nodded. ‘But what none of them understood was, he meant no harm by it. It was but a kind of friendly rivalry, a goad to make us all strive harder, to perfect our art. If you outdid him, he’d laugh about it, and clap you on the back, and tell you to enjoy your victory. And he’d as soon help you as fight you. No man had a truer eye for what was wrong with a picture, or for how to make it right.’ He got up. ‘Let me show you something.’
I followed him on to the landing and halfway down the stairs, where he stopped before the moonlit seascape I had passed, not a quarter of an hour since, on my way up. I now noticed, picked out in black lettering on the frame, the title: Dover beach: night. By John Davenant, R.A. Exhibited 1837.
‘There,’ he said.
It was a dramatic enough scene, with moonlight spilling out from behind a great bank of dark cloud, and then shattering into a hundred pieces on the inky sea. Just below the horizon was a heeling merchantman, its full sails almost black in the eerie light.
‘It has great power,’ I said, glad to be able to praise something wholeheartedly at last.
He nodded, colouring with pleasure. ‘But the power is Turner’s. My first conception was quite different – no cloud at all, and the moonlight falling straight on to the ship, and making the sails glow white – and that is what I painted. But when I saw it framed, and hung at the Academy, I knew it was wrong, and so did my friends – but could any of us say where the fault lay?’ He shook his head. ‘Not until Turner chanced by, clutching his palette, and looked at it for half a minute, and said: “It wants depth, and contrast. You should cover over the moon – make the mass of the cloud black, and the edges silver, so you’ve got the brightest and the darkest next to each other – put the sails in shadow, and a dab of light on the bow.” Well, I felt the truth of this, but I was naturally rather cautious, and, try as I might, I could not get the effect he meant; and after coming back once or twice to see how I was getting on, he finally lost patience with me, and seized the brushes, and did it himself – two great strokes of black, two of white’ – here he mimed the words, with large sweeping gestures – ‘one, two, three, four. And of course we all saw at once that he was right.’
Davenant stood back to admire the painting, chuckling and shaking his head in wonderment; but I felt faintly disturbed – not merely by the high-handedness of Turner’s intervention, but also by its result: for it had instantaneously transformed a scene of bland tranquillity into one of louring menace. My thoughts, however, were at that instant disrupted by the sound of footsteps from below, and by Davenant’s suddenly roaring, so loudly that I nearly leapt from my skin:
‘Good God, Hartright, there’s dedication for you!’
I turned, and saw Mrs. Holt coming upstairs towards us.
‘She doesn’t wait to be called, you note!’ said Davenant. ‘Can’t wait to get back to harrying the dons!’
‘We’ll lose the light, sir, is all I was thinking,’ said the cook.
‘Very true, Mrs. Holt,’ said Davenant. He turned to me. ‘She’s quite right, I fear, Mr. Hartright. You will, I hope, forgive me …?’
‘Of course,’ I said. ‘It was very good of you to give me as much time as you have.’
‘Nonsense,’ he said. ‘Delighted to help. If I have. Which I doubt. . .’
I started to speak, but he held up his hand, and went on:
‘None of your damned flattery, now. Go on up, Mrs. Holt, and get on your regalia. I’ll be with you in a moment.’ Then he took my arm affably, and led me downstairs.
He had opened the door, and was about to shake my hand, when he stopped suddenly, and said:
‘Will you wait a minute, Mr. Hartright? Something I think may assist you.’
He crossed the hall, and entered a room at the back of the house. I stood beneath his bay window, and looked about me. To the south, the smoke hung over London like a great mantle, so thick and black that just to see it was to feel the weight of it on your chest, and its woolly itch against your skin; but here a fresh breeze ruffled my hair, and there were chinks of blue between the grey-rimmed clouds that churned and tumbled above the heath. Something in their wild motion put me in mind of sporting sea creatures, and I watched, rapt, until his voice roused me from my reverie:
‘Here,’ he said, handing me a folded sheet of paper. ‘Two more people who knew him well. But neither of them painters; so you may be sure that what they tell you will be untainted by artistic rancour. Michael Gudgeon’s an antiquary, who travelled with Turner years ago on a tour of Kent and Sussex. And Amelia Bennett is old Benjamin Waley’s daughter…’
He paused, searching my face for some sign of recognition. I shook my head.
‘You’re too young, I suppose,’ he said, with a sigh. ‘He was quite a man in his day. A great amateur, who befriended Turner when he was little more than a boy.’
I thanked him warmly, and started for Kensington in high good spirits. I had trusted to fate, and fate had amply repaid me; and some almost superstitious conviction told me that it had not done with me yet, but would repay me further still when I got home.
And I was not mistaken; for there, in the hall, was the enclosed note from Ruskin!
My love as always, to you and to the children.
Walter
VI
Letter from John Ruskin to Walter Hartright,
1st August, 185–
163 Dennmark Hill,
1st August,185–
Dear Mr. Hartright,
Thank you for your letter of 21st July. I should have replied sooner, had I been here to receive it, but I only returned yesterday from a long absence in Italy and France.
Yes, I shall be happy to talk to you about Turner – although I am not sure how far it lies within my power (or the power of any man or woman) to light your way. I fear, however, that I shall be unable to see you this week – for, as I am sure you know, it is the inevitable consequence of travel to come back and find one’s garden choked with weeds, and, if I do not set to at once, some of my tenderest plants (a book, a lecture, and a thousand shy little shoots that seem to have sprung from my words, and to want only encouragement to flourish) will surely die. Would Thursday next, at three o’clock, be convenient?
Yours very truly,
John Ruskin
VII
From the diary of Marian Halcombe, 4th August, 185-
A small cottage, with but one window on each floor, and entirely unremarkable save for a curious iron railing on the parapet, that looked as if a balcony had decided to emigrate from its original home to the roof. On one side, a tavern; on the other a little shop, advertising ‘ales’, ‘refreshments’ and ‘first-class ginger-beer’; next to that, a knock-kneed gateway bearing a weatherbeaten sign – all you could read was ‘Ale anders Boat ard’, so you had to fill in the ghosts of the missing ‘x’ and ‘y’ yourself – and leading to an untidy sprawl of spars and timbers and ropes. Facing the house, beyond the road, flowed the great river, hemmed in by a shallow embankment of rough stones, and approached by a flight of steps, which were crowded with lounging watermen smoking their pipes and waiting for custom. Further out, a desultory little army of mudlarks in ragged dress scoured the stinking mud for treasure.
‘Are you sure this is the right address?’ I asked the driver.
‘Six Davis Place, Chelsea, miss?’ he said, slowly, as if I were an idiot.
I got out. A knot of boys kicking a broken bottle stopped to stare at me, and two or three of the watermen stiffened and turned in my direction. They may simply have been bored, or hoping I would take a boat; but there seemed a kind of animal watchfulness in their unsmiling faces, as if, even at this time of day, a lone woman could have no rightful business here. I knew, though, that to show fear is to feed the monster that frightens us, so I paid the cabman and marched up the path without so much as a backward glance.
As I knocked on the door, however, I sensed a movement behind me, and, looking round, saw that the group of boys had followed me, and were pressing against the gate like a pack of wild dogs. Most of them instantly turned their heads to avoid my eyes, but one, a gangly beanpole of twelve or thirteen, held my gaze steadily.
‘You want to know about Puggy?’ he called.
I couldn’t tell whether he was mocking me or trying to be helpful; but since I have found that, if you expect the best of people, they generally strive to live up to your expectations, I smiled and said:
‘Booth. I’m looking for Mrs. Booth.’
‘She won’t tell you nothing about him,’ said the boy.
There was no sound from within the house, so I knocked again.
The boy called: ‘Ask Mr. Neave about him.’
The words were barely out of his mouth when I heard a man shouting: That’s right, miss, I knew the Admiral!’
I turned, and saw one of the watermen (presumably Mr. Neave) crossing the road towards me. He seemed to have been drinking, for he staggered a little, and waved his arms wildly to attract my attention.
‘I took them everywhere,’ he said, gesturing across the river towards Battersea. ‘You come with me, I’ll show you where they went.’
I had no idea what they were talking about, but did not want to show it, for fear that it might encourage them to take some advantage of me, so I said nothing, and knocked for a third time. But I was beginning to lose heart. What if – as now seemed probable – Mrs. Booth were out, and I had to walk down the path again, and through the throng? My cab had long since disappeared from view, and there was not another in sight. To add to my disquiet, three or four more men, apparently attracted by the commotion, now spilled out of the tavern. One was a most impressive figure, a black-bearded giant in a red flannel shirt and pleated black French trousers, who elbowed his way to the front and bellowed, in what sounded like a Russian or Polish accent:
‘I tell you about the Admiral! The bottles! The ladies!’
‘You lying foreign b-!’ shouted Mr. Neave. Emboldened by drink, he clenched his fists and lurched forward, scattering boys on every side, although he could barely reach his opponent’s shoulder.
‘Please!’ I shouted. ‘I have no interest in any Admiral!’
I hoped this would calm them, but it appeared to have no effect. The men jostled themselves into two groups, while the boys lined up against the fence, either because they wanted to watch or because they could not escape. I quickly formulated a plan: I would appeal to the beanpole’s chivalrous instincts and offer him and his friends a penny apiece to escort me safely to the nearest cab stand.
I had already started back towards them when, at last, I heard the door opening behind me. I turned and saw a handsome, dark-haired, sturdily built woman of sixty or so, wearing a plain grey dress and a white apron. Her eyes stared past me towards the crowd at the gate. Her sallow, heavy-featured face wore an expression of infinite, exasperated sadness, such as you might see on a nurse who discovers her charges, yet again, doing something they know is wrong. To my astonishment, that look alone was enough to restore order: the two opposing factions melted away without a word, and the boys, as if suddenly released from captivity, scampered at full tilt down the street.
‘Mrs. Booth?’ I said.
She turned towards me. She inclined her head slightly, but did not smile.
‘I am Marian Halcombe,’ I said. ‘I believe Lady Eastlake wrote to you …?’
‘Yes,’ she said. There was a rural lilt to her voice, but its tone was perfectly neutral, neither friendly nor unfriendly. ‘Will you please come in, Miss Halcombe?’
The hall was so poky and dark that I could see almost nothing, and had to rely on the bobbing beacon of Mrs. Booth’s apron string to guide me. But the little parlour she led me into was pleasant enough, with a lively fire burning in the grate, and a strange-looking tailless cat stretched on the rug before it. A canary chirruped in its cage in the window, and a stout grandfather clock ticked soothingly by the door, as if Time, too, had been caught and tamed, and put in a corner to add his voice to the domestic chorus.
‘Please sit down,’ said Mrs. Booth, ‘while I fetch the tea.’ She was immediately gone again, and a moment later I heard her clumping down into the basement. I rose, and looked about me. The room was, for the most part, quite unexceptional, and such as you might expect to find in the housekeeper’s quarters of any well-run large house: neat cupboards, with white-painted panelled doors, flanked the fireplace; a cavalcade of china milkmaids, led by a Macready toby jug, marched across the mantel-shelf; and on the chimney breast above hung a water-colour of a church and some miniatures in oval frames.
It was only when I turned back towards the hall that I noticed something unusual. Two oil-paintings, stacked one behind the other and half covered by a sheet, leant against the wall between door and window. Seeing the corner of a gilt frame, and a whirl of leaden colour, I was overcome with curiosity, and immediately bent down and lifted the cloth. The images that greeted me were so terrible, and yet so vague, that they seemed to have been conjured from a nightmare. The first showed a wild, grey-green sea stirred into an implacable fury; in the foreground, indistinct figures clung desperately to a queer, serpentine lump of wreckage which rose from the spume like a sea-monster, and, further off, a cutter sailed to their rescue. The second, behind it, was perhaps the same scene the following day: a crowd gathered on the shore, dumbstruck at the frightful proof of nature’s destructive power littered all about them; while on the horizon, lit by an ulcerous, unforgiving yellow sun, a disabled ship with two masts gone was just visible through the haze. Their impact – at least on me – was almost physical, and somewhat as I imagine the effect of mesmerism to be; I lost all thought of where I was, or what I was doing there, and was still staring when Mrs. Booth re-entered.
‘Ah, yes,’ she said, colouring slightly. ‘Those are his. He gave them to me.’
‘What, Mr. Turner!’ I exclaimed. I must have sounded, I fear, more amazed than I should have done – partly because the only Turner I could remember seeing was the stately engraving in the hall at Brompton Grove of London from Greenwich Park, showing a tranquil classical landscape with a distant view of the smoke-covered city and its river, which seemed to bear no relation to these desolate scenes at all; and partly because it had never occurred to me that Mrs. Booth might have any of his pictures in her possession.
‘Yes,’ she said, setting her tray down. I expected her to go on, but she busied herself instead with the tea, pouring two cups and then perching the pot at the edge of the fire basket to keep warm. Hoping to revive the subject I said:
‘That was very generous of him.’
I regretted the words even before they were out of my mouth. She coloured again, and said:
‘What, you think I didn’t deserve so much kindness?’
‘No, of course not. I merely meant…’ I could not, of course, say what I really meant: that few successful artists would have dealt so handsomely with a servant. To cover my confusion, I said:
‘Why do you not hang them?’
‘I had them upstairs, but I feared they might be stolen. My son is going to keep them safe for me.’
I confess I found myself wondering why she did not sell them, for they must surely be worth a great deal of money; and in doing so she could simultaneously remove the cause of her anxiety and ensure herself a comfortable old age. Perhaps she guessed what I was thinking, for she said:
‘I could not bear to part with them.’
‘They remind you of the sea?’ I said.
She nodded.
‘You have naval connections, perhaps?’ I said. ‘The boys outside mentioned -’
‘The Admiral?’
‘Yes.’
She nodded again, but wearily. ‘That is what they called him.’
‘Mr. Turner?’ I said; for, though it seemed unlikely, we had talked of no-one else.
‘Yes,’ she said. They called him Admiral Booth.’ She paused, and looked coolly at my astonished face; then, as if I should have divined it for myself, went on: ‘They thought he was my husband.’
I felt quite lost, like a traveller who suddenly discovers he is without both map and compass. What could I ask that would not appear rude – the most obvious question, Why?, would certainly have fallen into this category – or, on the other hand, risk eliciting some new piece of startling information which would only bemuse me further? At length I said, cautiously:
‘How long did you know Mr. Turner?’
‘Twenty years,’ she said. ‘He first came to me when I had a boarding-house in Margate. Then, after Mr. Booth died, he wanted a retreat by the river; so he asked me to move to Chelsea, and keep house for him here.’
‘He must have had great confidence in you,’ I said.
She nodded, a proud woman briskly acknowledging her due. ‘He used to call me the handmaiden of Art.’
‘You helped him in his work, then?’
‘Oh, yes, I’d set his palette every morning, and make sure everything was ready,’ She said this with a certain warmth, as if she had begun to feel easier in my presence. A second or two later, the cat unexpectedly furthered my cause by getting up and jumping into my lap, where it stood lazily sinking its claws into my dress. For the first time since my arrival, Mrs. Booth smiled.
‘Oh, you’re very honoured,’ she said. ‘Jason generally only likes men. Mr. Turner, especially. He’d sit on his knee, his shoulder – even his head, sometimes.’
I laughed, and decided this would be a propitious moment to venture a little further.
‘What kind of a man was Mr. Turner?’
‘There were times’, she said, ‘when I thought he was a god.’
‘A god!’ I said. ‘Why, did he resemble a Greek statue?’
Mrs. Booth laughed. ‘Oh, I don’t mean to look at!’ she said. ‘In his work.’ She waved a hand towards the two oil-paintings. ‘You or I could stand where he did, and see nothing but a rough old day, or a wintry sun. But he saw what ordinary mortal eyes can’t see. He saw into the heart of things.’
I found myself thinking: Dear Lord, I hope the heart of things doesn’t look like that. But I said:
‘Yes, they are magnificent.’
That seemed to please her. She brightened, and – as if surprised by her own candour – said:
‘Would you like to see the room where he died, Miss Halcombe?’
In truth, I should have preferred to stay where I was, and finish my tea, and ask her more questions; but I could not very well refuse, so I replied:
‘Yes, I should. Very much.’
We went up the cramped staircase, which squeaked under our weight like a procession of complaining mice, and entered a small attic at the front of the house. The feeble sun seeped through a square, deep-set dormer, casting a watery pattern of light and shadow on the neighbouring wall. The left-hand side of the room was dominated by a simple brass bed, and a single wheelback chair stood before the window. The boards were bare, and there was no other furniture save a plain cupboard, a small table set with a bowl and ewer, and an iron ladder leading to a trapdoor in the ceiling. It looked like the kind of lodging where a struggling actor or a poor travelling salesman might seek refuge from the disappointments of the day.
‘This was his room,’ said Mrs. Booth. ‘Every morning he would rise before dawn, and throw a blanket round him, and go up there’ – here she indicated the ladder – ‘on to the roof, and sketch the sunrise.’
‘Ah,’ I said. ‘That’s why the parapet’s railed?’
She nodded. ‘And then he’d come back to bed, and rest till breakfast time. And so he went on, right up until his last illness. He was indefatigable, Miss Halcombe. Even when I was nursing him, I had to make sure he always had pencils and paper to hand.’
‘Was he still able to paint, then?’ I asked.
‘Not at the very end,’ she said. ‘But not to have the hope of it would have killed him that much sooner. So I always kept up the pretence: Perhaps tomorrow, my dear.’
How many housekeepers call their master ‘my dear’?
‘He was very lucky to have you, Mrs. Booth,’ I said.
She did not answer, seemingly lost in her own thoughts. At length she said:
‘I’ll tell you a strange thing, Miss Halcombe. A few weeks before he died, the police dragged out of the river some poor girl, who had fallen into disgrace, and drowned herself.’ She moved towards the window, and pointed down to the embankment steps, where the watermen were still idling the afternoon away. ‘Just there. And Mr. Turner was very troubled by it, and kept waking me in the night, and saying he saw her face, and feared to sleep. “I must draw it,” he said. “I must draw that face, or I shall have no rest.” And so he drew it, and it was almost the last picture he ever made.’
‘And was he still haunted by it?’ I asked.
‘He never spoke of it again,’ she said. ‘Leastways, not that I recall.’
She was quiet then, and I feared I had lost her to her own memories. I said:
‘How did he come to see her, if he was in bed, and she outside?’
‘It was a terrible winter,’ she said. ‘Nothing but fog and smoke for weeks on end. He’d say, “I wish I could see the sun again” – but he could barely more than whisper it by then, it’d break your heart to hear him. So he’d roll on to the floor, and try to crawl to the window to look for it.’
‘I see,’ I said. ‘So he was there when the police found her?’
She nodded abstractedly, as if her mind were on something more important. ‘Sometimes’, she said, ‘he was too weak even to go that far, and I’d find him here, by the chair, and have to help him back to bed.’
Again she was silent, and, though she faced the window, I thought I saw a tear in the corner of her eye. Finally, she sighed, and said: ‘But he did see it again. One morning, it suddenly broke through; and the doctor and I got him into the wheelchair, and pushed him here to the window, so that it could shine full on his face; and an hour later, as if he was satisfied at last, he died, without a murmur, with his head against my shoulder.’
Her voice did not quaver. And yet something in the way she spoke, bringing the thoughts from the depths of her own being, and then gently replacing them there, as if they were her most cherished possessions, told me, beyond doubt, that this was a woman who had not merely served Turner, but had loved him in every sense. And I knew – however hard it might be to believe – that the man described by Lady Eastlake as the foremost genius of the day had lived and died in this mean little house, under an assumed name, as his housekeeper’s husband.
If I am honest, I have to say this realization prompted in me no other feeling for Mrs. Booth than deep pity, mingled with a genuine admiration. But what, I wondered, would Walter make of it? For the old widow, I was sure, he would share my sympathy and compassion; but would he view Turner himself in the same liberal spirit? Might the discovery of his subject’s eccentricities (to put it as charitably as I can) make him lose interest in writing the Life, even before he has begun it?
It was therefore with some trepidation that I said:
‘You have been very helpful, Mrs. Booth. Would it be possible for me to call again with my brother, who, I know, would like to talk to you himself?’
And it was with relief, as well as disappointment, that I heard her reply:
‘I mean no offence, Miss Halcombe, but Mr. Turner’s memory is sacred to me. I do not like to talk about him; and, to speak plain, I have already said more than I meant to. So, while I shall always be pleased to see you, if you pass this way, I must ask that you do not bring your brother here; for I could tell him nothing more than I have told you today.’
VIII
Letter from Walter Hartright to Laura Hartright,
11th August, 185–
Brompton Grove,
Friday
My dearest love,
Your letter is by me as I write – I glance over, and read ‘I am so proud of you, Walter’; and the words sting me like a slap, for I am sure that had you seen me today you would have been anything but proud. I am just returned from Ruskin, you see, and know not what to make of him, or of what he told me – but I fear he has made a fool of me, and I of myself, and the result is that I am cast down, and quite confused.
The start of my perplexity is the man himself. Strange, is it not, how a famous name may produce an image in our minds, composed of who knows what scraps and trifles and odds and ends, yet strong enough, in the absence of personal experience, to be that person for us? Before today, without in the least reflecting on it, I saw Ruskin as a wild shaggy creature lurking in the dark somewhere (his natural abode has always seemed a cave, or a dungeon), waiting to rush out without warning and impale some poor unsuspecting painter. Perhaps this idea arises partly from my own dread, whenever I exhibit, that he will single out something of mine for particular scorn; and partly from – do you remember it? – that verse in Punch:
I paints and paints, and no complaints;
I sells before I’m dry;
Then savage Ruskin sticks his tusk in
And nobody will buy.
And just think – had I had no occasion to meet him, this fancy might, through sheer force of habit, have finally established itself in my mind as the truth; and so been passed on by our grandchildren to their grandchildren as a lifelike portrait of the great man!
At all events, they, and I, will be spared that; for the revolution of the last twelve hours has entirely deposed all my preconceptions, and despatched them to an exile from which they will never return.
My first surprise came even before I had met him, for 163 Dennmark Hill turns out to be a tall, rambling old house which – far from shrinking into the shadows – announces its presence with the beefy self-importance of a provincial lord mayor. It has its own porter’s lodge (where I was obliged to state my business to a burly man with suspicious eyes and licorice breath, who said: ‘That’s Mr. John Ruskin, is it?’ and then, before I was able to reply, peered at me through the window of the cab, and answered his own question: ‘Yes, it’ll be Mr. John’); and a carriage sweep; and walls furred with ivy; and a front door approached by railed steps, and almost hidden in the recesses of a heavy portico. From its size, in short, and its John Bull posture – feet splayed, elbows out – it looked more like the house of one of our fox-hunting neighbours in Cumberland than the home of the world’s most celebrated art critic, on the fringes of the world’s greatest city.
The footman who opened the door seemed ordinary enough; but for a fleeting moment I had the odd impression that the dim square hall behind him was filled with pale, elderly faces (it was difficult to be sure, for my eyes had not yet adjusted to the gloom), which promptly scattered, as soon as they saw me, like rabbits startled by a walker.
‘Is Mr. Ruskin at home?’ I asked.
‘Mr. John Ruskin?’ replied the man, in a stiff parody of the lodge-keeper.
‘Yes,’ I said, wondering secretly how many others there might be, and whether they all had opinions on Art.
He went upstairs; and, as soon as he had gone, two of the rabbits (as I supposed) reappeared. One was an old woman in a bonnet and a black dress; the other, a stocky man with ragged white hair and thick whiskers, wearing a dark jacket and a speckled twill waistcoat. Neither looked exactly like a servant, and there was something proprietorial in their manner; yet they hovered at the margins of the hall, as if they feared to take full possession of it, smiling uneasily at me, and looking away again – like prosperous innkeepers, perhaps, whose house is their own, but who must defer to others within its walls.
‘Mr. Hartright,’ said a soft, gracious voice; and, looking up, I saw a man descending the stairs towards me. At first glance he seemed immensely tall; but as he reached the hall, and stood level with me, I saw that in fact he was merely extremely thin, with a long, close-fitting blue coat that hugged his slender frame and emphasized all the vertical lines in his appearance. He was about my own age, or a little older, with a bright complexion, thick yellow hair and whiskers, and beetling eyebrows. There was something almost foppish – even feminine – in the way he moved, and in the evident care he had taken in arranging his watch-chain and tying his cravat; but it was entirely contradicted by his sharp nose and deep-set blue eyes, which gave him the wary, petulant look of a beast disturbed in its lair.
‘How very pleasant to meet you,’ he said, taking both my hands in his. His lower lip, I noticed, was slightly deformed; but his smile more than atoned for it, transforming his expression, in an instant, from bad temper to sweetness. He turned to the old people and said, with a courtly air:
‘Papa, Mama, this is Mr. Hartright. He’s here to talk about Turner.’
I had heard, of course, of the poor man’s marital difficulties; but the idea that in his middle years, and at the height of his eminence, he should have abandoned the part of a husband only to resume that of a son was strange indeed. I thought of what Davenant had told me of Turner and his father, and Marian had learnt from Mrs. Booth; and wondered if it was a mark of genius to be incapable of normal domestic arrangements.
‘How d’ye do?’ said the old man; and, as he and his wife stepped forward awkwardly to shake my hand, I at last recognized their odd mixture of pride and diffidence and concern for what it was, and felt suddenly – and quite unexpectedly – like a schoolboy invited to the home of a gifted but over-sensitive friend.
‘Will you indulge me, Mr. Hartright,’ said Ruskin, ‘and take a walk in the garden? I’ve been in the thick of it all morning, and can’t see for the smoke, or think for the noise of the guns.’
Without waiting for a reply, he ushered me quickly out of the front door again, as if anxious to make good his escape before his parents had time to forbid it.
‘In the thick of what, may I ask?’ I said, as we turned on to the carriage sweep. ‘A new piece of criticism?’
‘I am struggling to finish the last volume of Modern Painters,’ he said. ‘But I’m afraid I’ve come to the wretched conclusion that all my critical and historical work up till now has been almost valueless.’
‘Oh, come .. .!’ I said.
‘It is a sad thought,’ he said. ‘Especially when you’ve devoted your whole life to a thing, as I have. But when I look about me, and see the burden of dumb misery in the world, and calculate what an infinitesimally small fraction of it I have managed to lift with my ruminations on Turner or Veronese or the Gothic …’ He shook his head.
‘But Modern Painters’ , I said, ‘has given delight – and instruction – to thousands. Millions.’ I confess that I was slightly abashed, when I reflected how little of it I had read, and how long ago; but not sufficiently to prevent my adding: ‘Myself included.’
‘You are kind to try to console me, Mr. Hartright,’ he said. He stopped, and turned on me a gaze of extraordinary candour. ‘But – forgive me – you do not look miserable – at least, not in the way I mean. When I speak of misery, I am thinking of that great mass of suffering humanity which surrounds us, and which we see – and yet do not see – every day; and which we barely touch with all our ideals and concerns.’
He rounded the end of the house, and ducked his head to enter a dark tunnel, pungent with the scent of damp leaves, formed by a dense old laurel bush pressing against the wall.
‘And that is why’, he said, the words – suddenly muffled now – floating back to me in the close air, ‘I have begun to turn my attention to the question of political economy.’
I was, I must admit, surprised that he should be so frank with me, and not a little flattered; yet mingled with my gratification, as I followed his stooping figure through the dimness, was a slight repugnance – although I could not, at the time, have told you the reason for it.
‘You may, of course, feel I have little enough reason to complain myself,’ he said with a laugh, as we emerged behind the house. He gestured languidly towards the lawn, dotted with trees and artfully laced with winding paths that stretched away below us; and at the kitchen gardens and orchards and a row of farm buildings beyond. ‘Our own milk and pigs,’ he said, ‘and peaches from the hothouses; and a meadow for the horses. Everything a mortal could desire, in fact, save a stream – and mountains.’ I glanced towards him, and saw that he was smiling, and that he had the grace to blush.
‘But enough of me, Mr. Hartright,’ he said, suddenly setting off again. ‘I have a lecture this evening, and fear I must leave at four o’clock. So, tell me, how fares your tremendous undertaking?’
‘It’s scarcely begun,’ I said. ‘But I have spoken to a few people who knew Turner.’
‘Ah, yes,’ he said. ‘Who?’
I told him. He made no response of any kind; so I went on:
‘And my sister has been to see his housekeeper.’
‘Ah, the good Mrs. Booth,’ he murmured. ‘Did she elucidate the mystery, or add to it?’
From his sharp sidelong look I deduced that this was a test of some kind, and that his good opinion of me depended on my making the right answer; but since I had no idea what that might be, I said lamely:
‘I don’t know.’
He did not reply, but nodded; and, stopping by a green gate in a wall, opened it, and led me into one of the kitchen gardens. Around the perimeter ran a pleasant grassy walk, lined with fruit trees and rambling roses, and broken here and there by an arbour with a wooden seat.
‘Peace,’ he said, looking round. ‘And the last blessed warmth of the sun.’
We sat on one of the benches, beneath a trailing rose that was still, even now, covered with flowers. Ruskin gazed silently at two apple trees near the opposite wall, as if gathering his thoughts. At length he said:
‘You do know, do you not, that you are not alone, Mr. Hartright? There is already another labourer in the vineyard?’
‘You mean Mr. Thornbury?’ I said.
He nodded. ‘What, if you will forgive my asking, makes you think that you are better qualified than he?’
This was delicate indeed, and I hesitated before answering:
‘I was approached by a friend of Turner’s, who expressed some confidence in me – and none whatever, I’m sorry to say, in Mr. Thornbury.’
‘And may I inquire which friend?’
‘That, I’m afraid, I cannot tell you.’
‘I see.’ He tapped his fingers and nodded, as if beating time to a tune in his own head.
I had chosen my words carefully, but I was forced to acknowledge that, even to my ears, they had sounded flimsy and unconvincing; and I was not entirely surprised when he went on:
‘Sometimes, Mr. Hartright, we may deceive ourselves, or allow others to deceive us, into thinking we are capable of some great task which is beyond us. I speak here as a friend, and from my own experience. I regarded Turner as my earthly master. I venerated him. I knew him personally for the last ten years of his life, and for much of that time, and for long after his death, I thought of little but him and his work. And yet in many respects I feel I did not know him at all.’
Anxious not to appear still more foolish, I said nothing. He reached out to touch a white rose which drooped above his shoulder. A drop of moisture broke free from the petal where it had taken refuge, and rolled down his finger.
‘Perhaps you know, Mr. Hartright, that the first volume of Modern Painters was intended as a defence of Turner against his critics. It was – as I am all too keenly aware – a youthful effort, full of a young man’s zeal and prejudices – but it did enjoy a certain success. Yet it gave Turner, I believe, not an ounce of pleasure. Cold and solitary though he was, the flame of my approbation did not warm him. It was a year and a half before he even mentioned the book to me; and then, indeed, he did thank me, in his way – for he invited me in, one night after dinner, and insisted that I take a glass of sherry with him, in an under-room as chilly as the tomb, and lit by a single tallow candle. Yet he always made it plain that – though I regarded him, as I still regard him, as the greatest landscape painter in the history of the world – I had not grasped the meaning, or the purpose, of his work. And I fear he was right.’
A wiry, grizzled man in a white shirt entered the kitchen garden, pushing a wheelbarrow. He stopped when he saw us, and tipped his moth-eaten felt hat.
‘Good afternoon, Pearce,’ called Ruskin.
‘Good afternoon, sir.’
‘Please, don’t mind Mr. Hartright and me,’ said Ruskin; and the man continued on his way. Ruskin turned to me again.
‘But just how little I saw . ..’ He shook his head.’ That I only discovered this past winter, when I undertook to catalogue and preserve his drawings and sketches – which, naturally enough, this being England, were gathering dust and mildew in a basement at the South Kensington Museum.’
An electric tremor started in my stomach, and ran tingling to my fingertips.
‘What did you find?’ I asked.
He sighed. ‘I found such pessimism, Mr. Hartright. And such courage.’ He turned suddenly, and pulled the rose down so that it was close to my face. ‘He saw the flower, in all its beauty, with a truer eye than any man who ever lived. And’ – here he plunged his thumb deep into the petals, prising them apart – ‘he saw the canker within, just as truly, and did not flinch from it. Look at any of his pictures with discernment enough, and at its heart you will find a dark clue.’
There was something in his manner as he said this – a portentous quiver in his voice, his eyes as mournful as a bloodhound’s – that made me want to laugh. I mastered the impulse, however, and said:
‘Clue to what?’
He did not reply; but raised a magisterial finger, and gave me a sternly pitying look – like a schoolmaster correcting a particularly obtuse pupil who has once again failed to understand some simple point.
I tried to keep the irritation from my voice. ‘Are you speaking of any works in particular?’
‘There are more than nineteen thousand of them,’ he said. ‘You must see them yourself. I can give you a note.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Indeed, the best advice I can offer you, if you would hope to know Turner, is: immerse yourself in his work.’
‘But what of the man himself?’ I said. ‘His character? His tastes? His habits?’
He did not answer at once; but, raising his hand, called out to the gardener, who was passing with his newly filled barrow:
‘Pearce!’
‘Yes, sir?’ said the man, stopping, and squinting towards us.
‘Would you go to the house, and ask Crawley to fetch my Turner self-portrait, and …?’
‘Beg pardon, sir, but fetch your what?’
‘My Turner self-portrait,’ said Ruskin (a trifle peevishly, I thought). ‘And bring it here.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘What were you saying?’ said Ruskin, when the man had gone; and then, before I could speak, he went on: ‘Ah, yes, his character. Well, all I can do for you is what I did for Mr. Thorn-bury. And that is tell you what – in my view – were Turner’s principal qualities.’
‘That would be very helpful,’ I said.
He breathed deeply; and then, looking ahead, as if the words were written on a bill on some invisible hoarding, said slowly:
‘Uprightness. Generosity. Tenderness. Sensuality. Obstinacy. Irritability. Infidelity.’ He turned towards me. ‘And never forget: he lived and died alone and without hope, knowing that none could understand him or his power.’
And what, in heaven’s name, I thought, am I to make of that?
‘Forgive me,’ said Ruskin earnestly. ‘Have I been too cryptic? It’s a perennial fault of mine, I’m afraid – and what makes it all the worse is that I’m equally guilty, on occasion, of its opposite’ – here he suddenly laughed – ‘and drive my friends mad with my discursiveness.’
Again, the same boyish ingenuousness showed in his face; and I reflected that I had never before heard a man speak so eloquently, or with such feeling, about his own failings. Yet as I looked into the limpid brilliance of his eyes, I knew suddenly why I was as much troubled as disarmed by it; for behind the patina of openness and warmth lay a kind of reptilian coldness, which put me strangely in mind of those Arctic regions where the surface thaws in summertime, but the earth beneath is permanently frozen.
‘I must confess,’ I said, ‘I feel rather daunted.’
‘I am truly sorry if that is my doing,’ he said. ‘I meant only to point out the deserts you must cross and the peaks you must climb on your great journey.’
‘I fear’, I said, smiling, and endeavouring to make light of it, ‘that you think me unequal to it, and believe that I shall fall by the wayside.’
He did not (as I own I had expected) hasten to reassure me; but rather looked off into the distance again, and resumed drumming on his knee. After a few seconds he leaned towards me and lightly touched my arm: ‘I think perhaps it will be best’, he said, ‘if you continue your inquiries, and come to see me again at a later date. It may be then that what I have to say will seem less impenetrable.’
He spoke with such ineffable condescension that I bridled, and could not entirely keep the irritation from my voice as I replied:
‘And how, in the meantime, do you suggest I proceed?’
‘Proceed?’ he said, as if his mind were already elsewhere, and he had to force it back again. He pondered a moment, and then went on:
‘Few people, you will find, had even a faint inkling of Turner’s true nature. But you might write to Colonel Wyndham at Petworth, whose father knew him well –’
‘You mean the Third Earl of Egremont?’ I said, anxious to show that I was not entirely ignorant, and remembering – from my researches at the library – that Turner had spent some time at Petworth in the Third Earl’s day. Ruskin responded with a weary blink, which perfectly conveyed that he found my interruption tiresome, and resented having to pause, even for a second, to accommodate it.
‘The colonel may yet preserve some family traditions about Turner,’ he went on. ‘As, too, may Hawkesworth Fawkes of Farnley, the son of another patron, and himself a true lover of art, and a true friend of Turner’s.’
‘May I mention your name?’ I asked, with some trepidation.
‘Of course,’ he said. ‘And go to Maiden Lane; for to know Turner you must see where he was born, and brought up,’ He frowned, as if a new thought had struck him. ‘Are you returning to London at once, Mr. Hartright? When we are finished here?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, I can take you, if you wish; for I am going to Red Lion Square.’
‘Thank you.’
He took his watch from his pocket, glanced at it, nodded, then hurriedly slipped it back again.
‘But I must warn you that I have a great deal of preparation to do,’ he said, rising, and brushing a petal from his sleeve. ‘So I shall act as if you were not there; and you must promise not to be offended.’
We started together back towards the house, each occupied with his own thoughts, and had reached the lawn when we saw a manservant hurrying towards us, carrying a slim package wrapped in white muslin.
‘Good heavens, Crawley!’ cried Ruskin. ‘Whatever is the matter?’
‘Pearce said you wanted this, sir,’ said the man gravely, holding out the package.
Ruskin stared at it for a moment, and then said: ‘So I did, so I did. Put it in the carriage; and it can help Mr. Hartright to while away the time.’
He had not exaggerated: all the way there we sat as if in different worlds, he taking objects from a box – pieces of crystal, an apple, a ball on a chain – and consulting a notebook, or drawing (most beautifully, I have to say) a rose, on the margin of a page, as he thought; I, opposite him, at first looking out of the window, as we made our way up Vauxhall Road, and across the bridge; and then taking up the Turner picture, and unwrapping it.
To my surprise, it showed not a man, but a boy, with intense eyes looking out directly – and with something approaching insolence – from beneath dark eyebrows. The nose was long and fleshy, and there was a hint of wantonness in the full, unsmiling mouth. He was fashionably dressed in the style of sixty or seventy years ago, in a brown coat, with a white stock carefully tied at his throat, and his hair neatly parted in an inverted ‘V’. On the back was a handwritten label which read: ‘Turner, aet c. 24 years, by himself. Given by Hannah Danby.’
‘Who was Hannah Danby?’ I said.
‘His housekeeper. At Queen Anne Street,’ murmured Ruskin, without looking up.
I turned the picture over again. As I stared at it, I found myself – already unnerved by my conversation with Ruskin – thrown into turmoil; for, yet again, instead of deepening my knowledge of Turner, I seemed merely to have discovered a different version of him. This was not a portrait of Travis’s buffoon, or Davenant’s good fellow, or Ruskin’s misunderstood martyr: it seemed to be of someone else entirely – and someone who, in the enigmatic image he had left of himself, challenged me to find him out, and declared that I should fail. For a moment, I felt something akin to panic; and only finally succeeded in bringing myself under control by reasoning that, in view of the young age at which he had drawn it, it was perhaps not surprising that it bore no resemblance to the man remembered from later life.
As we drew up in Red Lion Square, Ruskin at last looked up from his work, and closed his box, and said:
‘Well, Mr. Hartright, here, I fear, we must say goodbye.’
I wrapped the picture up again, and handed it to him.
‘I shall show it to my working men,’ he said. ‘To inspire them.’
The coachman held the door; and, as I followed Ruskin out, I said:
‘Are there any other portraits of him?’
‘Very few,’ said Ruskin. ‘He hated being painted. I believe he went several times to Mayall’s photographic studio in Regent Street. You could ask there.’
And so we parted, he already nine-tenths in his lecture, and I so distracted that I barely remembered to thank him.
And all the way home my mind churned; and I found myself asking, again and again:
What is it you have undertaken to do? Where will it lead you? What if you cannot do it?
And I am still no nearer a resolution now; but it is nearly one in the morning, and, though sleep feels an impossibility, I know that if I do not go to bed I shall never think straight again.
So let me end with a kiss, and that which I do know:
I love you.
Walter
IX
Letter from George Jones, R.A., to Walter Hartright,
14th August, 185-
The Royal Academy, Trafalgar Square,
14th August
Dear Sir,
I write in answer to yours of July 24th. I have already communicated a brief memoir of Turner to another gentleman, whose subsequent conduct – to speak plain – has resolved me to hold my tongue in future. I fear, therefore, that I shall be unable to accommodate you with a meeting.
Yours truly,
George Jones
X
Memorandum of a letter from Walter Hartright to
J. Ruskin, Esq., 14th August, 185-
1. Thank you for seeing me – very helpful.
2. Have written to Lord Egremont and Mr. Fawkes.
3. This afternoon will go to Covent Garden as you suggested (if the rain eases!)
4. If – as I feel sure it will – it would be helpful to talk further at a later date, may I accept kind offer to see me again?
Letter from Walter Hartright to Laura Hartright,
15th August, 185-
Brompton Grove,
Tuesday
My dearest love,
Lord! The rain today! – it continued without let, from dawn until the middle of the afternoon. And not just a downpour, but a biblical deluge, so that you might suppose God had tired of the filth and squalor to which we have reduced His world, and sent a second Flood to wash it away. Indeed, the spectacle filled me, for an instant, with a superstitious awe; for the violence of the weather seemed of a piece with my discouraging letter from Jones (which, though it had been provoked by Thornbury, yet I could not help taking as a personal rebuff) and my pained recollections of the day before – and it was easy enough to imagine that all three had been ordained by some great force with the express purpose of thwarting me!
I soon put such unworthy thoughts behind me, however (and it was not just the fear of Marian’s mockery that made me do so!), and resolved that, rather than seeing these set-backs as a deterrent, I would take them as a spur to further action. I therefore busied myself with reading and correspondence until, a little after four o’clock, the rain relented sufficiently for me to venture out of doors without being immediately soaked to the skin.
Perhaps, as it turned out, it would have been better if I had been more credulous, and stayed at home all day after all.
Maiden Lane is a narrow little street lying between Covent Garden and the Strand. I must have passed it a hundred times, on my way to and from the theatre; yet I am ashamed to own that, before today, I scarcely knew of its existence. It is, in truth, a mean, poor, dingy kind of a place – yet not entirely abject, for two or three of the houses still have vestiges of respectability, which cling to them like the shreds of some finery passed on by one of their richer neighbours in Buckingham Street or Villiers Street. This afternoon, however, it looked desolate enough: for the rain seemed to have swept down all the detritus from Covent Garden market, and knots of children squatted in the gutters, patiently making little mountains of mud and old cabbage leaves and broken fruit. They turned and looked at me as I approached; and then, as I passed, returned without a word to their game.
Turner’s father, I knew, had kept a barber’s shop on the corner of Hand Court; but whether Hand Court still existed, and, if so, which of the half-dozen or so gloomy little entrances (crammed here and there between the houses at odd angles, as if a giant dentist had prised the bricks apart to accommodate them) might lead to it, I had no idea. As I looked about for someone to ask, my eye fell on a girl of twelve or thirteen, standing a little apart from the rest.
‘Good afternoon,’ I said.
She stared at me, but said nothing. Her large eyes, I noticed, were brown, and flecked with amber. Her dark hair was matted, and there was a grey smudge on one cheek; but had you washed her, and dressed her in new clothes, and placed her in any drawing room in Harley Street or Berkeley Square, she would have been counted very striking, and made much of by the ladies.
‘Can you tell me’, I said, ‘which is Hand Court?’
Again, she did not speak; but continued to stare, as if trying to find some meaning in my face that she had not heard in my words. At length she wiped her hand on her grubby pinafore, and jerked her cracked thumb towards a gloomy passage on the other side of the street. It was barred by an iron gate, beyond which nothing was visible save a line of discoloured wooden slats that seemed to dissolve, after a few yards, into pitch-blackness.
‘Is that a barber’s shop?’ I asked, pointing at the corner building.
She hesitated a moment, then at last broke her silence. ‘No, sir,’ she said, in a flat, weary voice. ‘It belongs to Parkin.’
‘Parkin?’
‘The grocer, sir. ‘E keeps it for a warehouse.’
I walked to the window, wiped a film of soot from one of the little panes, and peered in. All I could see to start with was a heavy metal grille, but as my eyes adjusted to the meagre grey light I at length made out a row of shadowy tea chests stacked against the far wall. So much for my hope of finding the shop unchanged, and perhaps even occupied by a member of the same family.
‘Does anyone live in the court?’ I said, turning back to the girl.
She looked at me as if I had asked her whether the sun was warm, or water wet. ‘Why, yes, sir.’ She started to laugh. “Unnerds of ‘em!’
For the life of me I could not imagine where hundreds of people would fit, unless the court were a mile long; but I contented myself with asking:
‘Anyone called Turner?’
‘Turner? No, sir, not as I knows.’
‘Any old people, who might remember how it was years ago?’
‘Well, sir …’ She frowned, and her gaze flickered towards the gate. ‘There’s old Jenny Watts, as I’ve ‘eard tell is ninety …’
There was a sudden eagerness in her tone; and I could not help noticing that her eyes followed my hand as it reached into my pocket and drew out a shilling.
‘Will you take me to her?’ I said.
For answer, she glanced at the pawnbroker’s across the street, then trotted to her charges playing in the gutter, and said something to the eldest girl. Then she ran back and took the money, before looking round furtively again, and muttering:
‘Only I mustn’t be long.’
She opened the gate easily enough, but as we passed through, a boy of perhaps fifteen suddenly emerged from the shadows and blocked our way. Without taking his eyes from us he half-turned his head and shouted a word – I could not make it out, but it sounded like ‘khulim’ – into the court behind him. All at once, in the darkness beyond, I saw figures hurrying about, and there was a frantic chink and scraping of metal, which led me to suppose that they had been gambling, and were gathering up the evidence.
‘All’s well,’ said the girl. “E’s not’ – and again I could not discern the word, but it might have been ‘esclop’, or possibly “Islop’. The boy seemed no more inclined to let us pass; for he spread his feet, and folded his arms, and started, slowly and insolently, to whistle.
‘Come on, Sam,’ said the girl. ‘We’re just going to Jenny Watts’.’
The boy widened his eyes and grinned; and then, glancing behind him again, to see that his companions had finished their business, lazily stepped aside.
Perhaps it was their slang which put the idea in my head (for there seemed a distinctly Arabic ring to it), but my first thought as we entered the court was that I had been transported to some city of the East. The buildings, four or five storeys high, faced each other across a space so narrow that – as, supposedly, in Damascus or Baghdad – a woman on the top floor could shake hands with her neighbour opposite without fear of mishap. The eight or nine boys who stood about, watching me silently, only added to the impression; for, if there was nothing exotic about their clothes or their complexions, yet their blank sullen faces made it all too easy to imagine that they belonged to a different race entirely. Only when you looked up, and saw a strip of foul grey tinged with brown – made fouler and browner every second by smoke from the fires of those who could afford them – did you realize that this was not a cool refuge from the Mediterranean sun, but a part of our own city, which we have condemned to perpetual twilight.
‘In ‘ere, sir,’ said the girl, stopping by a green door that had wrenched its hinge from the frame. She pushed it open with her shoulder, and led me into a kind of lobby which gave access to a scuffed and dirty wooden staircase. The air was cool but close, and so foetid that I had to press my handkerchief to my nose.
‘Are you not well, sir?’ said the girl, clearly unaccustomed to such faint-heartedness. ‘It’s a bit of a way; and ‘ard if you ain’t got your wind.’
The cause of her concern was soon apparent. Treading gingerly (for the steps were bowed and shiny with use, and I feared my boots might go through them altogether), I followed her up three flights of stairs to the top of the building, where she succumbed to a terrible fit of coughing so violent that I found myself looking for blood on the hand she held to her mouth.
It was almost a minute before she had recovered enough to knock on the door. A frail voice answered (though too faintly for me to understand what it said), and the girl pushed her face to the wood and wheezed:
‘Sarah Bateman. With a gentleman to see you.’
And this time I heard, distinctly enough:
‘Oh! Come in!’
The girl opened the door, and – how to describe what met my eyes? First, the light: a pearly grey haze, diffused through a grimy skylight, which almost dazzled me for a moment, after the gloom of the lower storeys; then an impression of space, which I soon saw came not from the great size of the room, but from its bareness. The floor was uncovered, and there was nothing on the walls, save – on the chimney – piece – an engraving of a sportsman and his dog. A single iron cooking pot, its bottom smeared with ash, hung above the lifeless fire. A small table, a crate which had been pressed into service as a dresser, and a crude bed in an alcove completed the domestic arrangements.
But what struck me most was the figure sitting in the small attic window. She was probably, in truth, little bigger than the girl; but her upright bearing, and her old-fashioned sea-green silk dress, gave her a kind of stateliness that made her appear too large for the Lilliput in which she found herself. Heaps of clothes were piled against the wall behind her; and she held before her a pair of black breeches, which she seemed to have just finished mending. Her face was the colour of cork, and wrinkled like a monkey’s; and, as we entered, she turned and looked at me with light, curious eyes and an ingratiating smile.
I expected the girl to say something more, by way of introduction, but she merely stood aside; and, after a few seconds, I realized I must speak for myself.
‘Mrs. Watts?’ I began.
The woman made no response, and I wondered whether she might be deaf; but the girl said:
‘Go on, she can ‘ear well enough.’
‘I believe’, I said, ‘that you remember this place as it was, many years ago?’
Again she said nothing; but cocked her head, and shifted in her chair – like Florrie preparing to hear her favourite story.
‘I am interested in a family called Turner,’ I continued.
She frowned; and then, after a few seconds, said: ‘Toorner?’ Her voice was strong and clear; but having no teeth, she seemed to hold the word in her lips, almost squeezing the life out of it.
‘They kept a barber’s shop,’ I said. ‘On the corner of the court.’
‘Oh, the barber’s.’ She nodded. ‘Yes. Where Captain Wyatt went.’
‘Captain Wyatt?’ I asked.
‘To ‘ave ‘is ‘air dressed, o’ course!’ she said, as if I must as well know who Captain Wyatt was as why he would go to a barber.
‘Did you know them?’ I said. ‘William Turner? And Mary? And their son?’
She nodded again. And then, to my surprise, she winked at me, as if she knew something remarkable about them, and was acknowledging my shrewdness in guessing it.
Even though I knew it to be foolish, the thought that I might be the first person to discover some secret about Turner’s childhood (for I could not imagine Thornbury coming here, and I fancied that she would have been less conspiratorial with me if he had) set my heart beating faster.
‘Can you tell me something of them?’ I said.
The woman reached down beside her chair, and brought out a little stool, which she gave to me. I sat down, and – since she said nothing more – coaxed her by going on:
‘I should especially like to hear about the boy.’
‘Ah!’ She grimaced knowingly. “E was a slippy one.’
‘Slippy?’
‘Up and down, sir. In and out.’
‘Up and down the court, you mean?’
She nodded. ‘Reg’lar little fish.’
The girl giggled; and, after eyeing her uncertainly for a moment, Mrs. Watts joined in – as though she thought she had made a joke, but needed confirmation to be sure.
‘And what about the Strand?’ I asked. ‘Did he go there much, to see the river?’
‘Oh, yes, sir.’
‘That’s well enough, for a fish,’ said the girl; and they both laughed again.
I pressed ahead doggedly, anxious lest the whole interview dissolve in merriment:
‘What, he liked the ships, did he?’
‘Ah, yes,’ said Mrs. Watts. ‘The ships. They was much thicker then, before they built the new docks.’
‘And did he paint them at all, or draw them, that you remember?’
‘Ay, sir,’ she said; yet I doubted that she did, for her tone was quite mechanical, and she immediately went on:
‘My father was a purlman, and plied all the vessels ‘ere-abouts; but them docks pretty much ruined him, for after they was made ‘e couldn’t get near the boats, and when a seaman’s ashore ‘e don’t want purl, do ‘e, sir?’
‘No -’ I began; but before I could say more she continued:
‘For nothing’ll please ‘im but to sit in a tavern, with ‘is mates, and them women.’ She laughed, and looked past me, towards the girl. ‘In’t Jenny right, pet?’
‘Do you recall anything of the mother?’ I said, hoping that a different approach might nudge her back to the subject.
‘Why, yes, sir,’ she said, with sudden animation, ‘that I do.’ She shook her head. ‘She, sir – oh, my, she was a very gale –’
‘A what?’ I asked, thinking I had misheard her, or that this was her form of ‘girl’.
‘A gale, sir. You’d think the end of the world ‘ad come.’ She looked about her; and, her eye lighting on the little casement, seized the handle, and shook it, and then drummed her fingers on the glass. ‘Like that. Captain Wyatt heard ‘er once, ‘owlin’ up from the basement; and ‘e said ‘e never ‘eard nothing like it, no, not in the Indies, where ‘e saw a ship go down once, in a ‘urricane.’
‘A fish,’ said Sarah, ‘and ‘is ma’s a gale.’ She giggled; and after a few seconds the woman joined in again, and soon they were whinnying and spluttering like a pair of infants, until the exertion proved too much, and sent the girl into another paroxysm of coughing. Even this Mrs. Watts seemed to take only as evidence that the child had reached some new pitch of hilarity; for she continued to watch her with streaming eyes, laughing herself, until I said:
‘Can’t you see the poor girl is ill?’
I sounded, perhaps, unduly harsh; for I was beginning to suspect that this had been an entirely wasted journey, and that the old woman was either too deranged or too simple to tell me anything of value. I decided, however, to make one final attempt.
‘Do you recollect’, I said more gently, ‘any particular stories about them?’
She looked perplexed for a moment, as if she had not understood me; and then pressed her hands together and said:
‘The frost fair! ‘Ard to credit now, sir, what with them takin’ down the bridge, but them days the river was all-over ice, ‘ere to Southwark, and there was fireworks, and puppets, I even seed a ‘orse-race; and after, the Captain walked me down the City Road, and stopped before a stall; and ‘e said, “You’re nothing but skin and bone, girl, you need a bit of meat on you.” And ‘e bought me a pudding.’
‘How old would you have been then?’ I asked.
‘Ooh, let’s see.’ She sucked in her cheeks, and counted on her fingers. ‘Sixteen, I’d say, sir, pretty near.’
And that settled the matter; for I had vivid memories of my father telling me about the last frost fair – there was a great mall in the middle, Walter, where the ladies and gentlemen promenaded; and they called it ‘City Road’ – which, I knew, had been held in the winter of 1813. If she had been sixteen at the time, she must have been born in 1797, when Turner was already a successful artist, and only two years before he had moved from Hand Court to Harley Street. There might be the remnant of some genuine anecdote or local tradition about the family in what she had told me; but, if so, it was inextricably jumbled with the recollections of her own life, like the image in a splintered looking-glass.
I rose to leave, thanked her, gave her sixpence (which she left lying on her open palm, as if I might add to it), and beckoned to the child. We had barely reached the door, however, when, from below, came the sound of hurried footsteps on the stairs, and a woman’s voice calling: ‘Sarah! Sarah!’ The girl gasped, and stopped quite dead; then, crying, ‘My ma, she’ll flay me!’ she ran back into the alcove, and hid herself, as best she could, behind the blanket that served as a curtain.
‘Come,’ I began, ‘why should she be angry -?’; but before I could say more a woman rushed into the room. She was about thirty, poorly but respectably dressed, and must have been handsome once; but fatigue and disappointment, like a victorious army, had traced their advance in the lines upon her face. She looked frantically about her, and then, not immediately seeing her daughter, pointed accusingly at me.
‘Where’s my girl?’ she said, panting heavily. Her voice was quiet, but some emotion she could barely master made it squeak and waver, and her eyes – remarkably like the child’s, I now saw – were feverish with anger.
Not wishing to betray the girl, but equally unwilling to tell a lie, and a useless one at that, I said nothing. I must, though, have given her away unwittingly; for my gaze strayed towards the alcove, and the woman at once read its meaning, and pushed past me towards the bed. I managed to bar her way, but not before the child had revealed herself by whimpering, and then promptly abandoned her flimsy sanctuary to take refuge behind me.
‘What ‘ave you done, you little cat?’ said the woman, lunging towards her, and raising her hand as if to strike her.
The girl made no reply, only pressing herself further into the narrow space between me and the wall; but Jenny Watts clapped her hands, and started to laugh again, as if this were a kind of Punch-and-Judy show, put on especially to entertain her.
‘She’s done no harm,’ I said, laying a hand on the mother’s arm to restrain her.
‘I shouldn’t ‘ave known, save for Sam Telfer,’ said the woman, ignoring me entirely, and addressing the girl. ‘I’m gone ten minutes, just to get the tightner, and when I’m back ‘e says ‘e sees a gentleman givin’ you brownies, and you takin’ ‘im in ‘ere.’
‘I only asked her to bring me to Mrs. Watts,’ I said.
‘Oh, so that’s what you calls it now, is it?’ said the woman, suddenly rounding on me.
I braced myself, for she was now swaying and trembling so violently that I thought her rage would not be contained; but, having been denied the girl, must vent itself on me instead. After a second or two, however, she brought herself under control, and merely clenched her fists, and said with scalding contempt:
‘“Bringin’ you to Mrs. Watts!”’
I longed to cry out: For God’s sake, woman, what do you take me for? I have a daughter myself! and yet I knew that to do so would be useless. Looking at the man before her, she saw not me but someone else entirely; for all her experience had taught her that a gentleman talks to a girl in Maiden Lane, and gives her money, with but one purpose; and nothing I could say or do would persuade her that I should have sooner died than violate her child.
‘I didn’t do nothin’! ‘E didn’t do nothin’!’ screamed the girl, suddenly darting out from behind me, and lifting up her dress. “Ere, ‘ave a look if you don’t believe me!’
And, without a word, the woman did so, barely pausing long enough to tug the blanket a few inches across the gap, and so afford her daughter a scrap of modesty.
At length, she grunted and stepped back. She said nothing, but looked at me; and for the first time I saw a doubt in her eyes, and she seemed somehow smaller, like a kite that has lost the wind, and begun to sag. For a moment, I felt, I had the advantage, and at once determined to make the best of it.
‘I will not insult you by offering you more money,’ I said, ‘but Sarah has a shilling, which she earned fairly, by bringing me here; and I think you would do well to spend it on the doctor; for that is a bad cough, and should be treated.’
And before she had time to reply, or to tell the girl to give the shilling back again, I left, shutting the door behind me, and made my way back through the court, exciting no more than some whispering, and a derisive laugh, from the boys. A few moments later I was in the Strand – which, with its street-vendors, and gas-lamps, and crowds of cheerful theatre-goers, seemed like the waking world after an oppressive dream.
Forgive me, my darling, if what I have described distresses you; but – as you may imagine – it troubled me, and we have agreed that we must have no secrets from each other. I am haunted not merely by the thought of that poor child and her mother, and the knowledge that, quite unintentionally, I have brought more care into their already over-burdened lives, but also by the nagging question of why Ruskin should have suggested I go to Maiden Lane at all. Surely he must have known – as I know myself, if I pause to reflect upon it – that after almost sixty years it is almost inconceivable I should find someone who remembers the Turners? Yet what, otherwise (save only malice; and I hesitate to believe he would be so cruel to a man who has done him no harm) could have prompted him to send me to a stinking slum, from which all traces of the family have been long since obliterated?
My one hope is that I shall find the answer when I see Turner’s pictures – in which case, I shall know it soon enough, for Marian and I go to Marlborough House on Monday.
My love to you always,
Walter
XII
Letter from Michael Gudgeon to Walter Hartright,
15th August, 185-
Box Cottage, Storry, East Sussex,
August
Dear Mr. Hartright,
Lord, yes! – I remember Turner, though the journey I took with him must have been almost forty years ago now. If I were to draw up an inventory of my memories, I should list them under the following chief heads:
1. Being very cold.
2. Being very wet.
3. Being sick in a boat.
4. Being footsore and saddle-sore in about equal measure.
5. Being ill-housed and ill-fed.
6. Being well housed and well fed.
7. Not giving a damn about any of the above; for my companion was a Great Genius, and I a lusty, impudent, carefree young fellow.
8. Turner very silent when sober.
9. Turner very boisterous when drunk.
I fear I cannot furnish you with a long memoir, for my hand is rheumatic (my poor long-suffering wife, indeed, is taking this letter down to my dictation); and nowadays I do not go about much. My friends, however, are good enough to call upon me here; and if you think it worth the time and expense to do likewise, I should be delighted to welcome you as one of them, and to tell you all I can recall.
Yours very truly,
Michael Gudgeon
XIII
From the diary of Marian Halcombe, 16th August, 185–
Marlborough House is not, I am sure, the most magnificent palace in the world: a long, plain red-brick building in the Palladian style, it hangs back a little from Pall Mall, as if ashamed to show its dowdy fagade in such distinguished company. And the crowds that throng it – now that the ground floor has become a temporary art gallery – make it feel more like a railway station hotel than a private residence. But palace it is, and the first I have ever entered; and as we walked down a long covered passage into the lofty hall (so vast that Jenny Lind has sung here, before an audience of hundreds), and paid our shilling for a guidebook, I could not but reflect on how different it was from the house in which Turner had spent his last years, and in which I had first seen one of his paintings.
Perhaps Walter was preoccupied by a similar idea; for he was unusually silent all the way there; and, when we arrived, looked about him with an almost incredulous air, as if comparing it with the scene of his last adventure – for surely the filthy little street where Turner had been born, though nearer in miles, must have presented an even starker contrast to this place than the cottage in which he had died?
But then we turned, and all such thoughts and calculations instantly evaporated. We had both seen individual Turners before, of course; but never – for this is the first public exhibition since his death – more than thirty of them displayed together. All at once our eyes were assailed by the most brilliant radiance I have ever seen in paintings – and far more, I have to say, than I should have conceived possible. Reds, oranges and yellows, as hot and tumultuous as burning coals, erupted from the walls, making even the brightest objects about them – a woman’s gaudy green dress, a huge picture of the Battle of Blenheim above the chimney-piece – appear suddenly drab and lifeless. They seemed, indeed, more intensely real than the press of people staring at them, or the building itself – as if we were trapped in Plato’s cave, and the pictures, rather than merely flat pieces of canvas hanging inside, were in fact holes in the rock, through which we could glimpse the unimagined world beyond.
The effect on Walter was immediate; and so dramatic that I wish I could have found some means to record it, for it would have convinced even the dourest sceptic of the power of art. He stopped dead, and drew himself up, as if someone had suddenly lifted a great weight from his back; his mouth set in a small, surprised smile, and the skin appeared to tighten across his forehead, raising his eyebrows into an expression of wonderment and pleasure. His gaze was fixed on a square picture on the opposite wall, which showed an indistinct white figure apparently emerging from the smoke and flames of a raging fire. From where we were standing it was impossible to make out more; but, rather than going closer (which, indeed, would have been difficult, so dense was the press of people), Walter remained there, seemingly uninterested in the subject, content merely to bask in the radiance of the colour, like a cat stretching itself in the sun. I waited for him a moment, and then, since he still showed no inclination to move, set off on my own to explore further.
The impressions of the next half an hour were so forceful and so contradictory that I must try to set them down here in some detail, before they disintegrate into brilliant confusion. There were more than thirty pictures in the exhibition, and what you noticed about them first was simply their enormous variety. The view I had always associated with Turner, London from Greenwich Park, was there – although the original had a grandeur and richness you could not have guessed from our engraving of it; and a terrifying picture of a puny cottage caught in a mountain avalanche, and crushed by a deluge of broken ice and uprooted trees and a giant rock (so ferociously painted that the pigment was as thick and ridged as mortar), recalled some of the dread and horror the pictures in Mrs. Booth’s house had inspired in me. Almost everything else, however, took me by surprise. Here was a magnificent sea piece, showing distant ships heeling in a stiff breeze, which (save for the waves, which gathered menacingly in the bottom right-hand corner and threatened to spill over the frame and wet your feet) might have been by a Dutch master; there a gorgeous classical landscape saturated with honey light, or a sublime mountain darkened by angry clouds. Most striking of all were those wild swirls of paint – like those which had so captivated Walter – in which the pure colour seemed to strive for freedom, detaching itself from form like the soul leaving the body, so that you could not clearly discern a subject at all.
I think most people, confronted by such splendid profusion, would find it hard to believe that it could all have sprung from one hand. Certainly, as I embarked on my tour, that was the uppermost thought in my mind. It was only after I had examined three or four of the pictures more closely that I recognized – with that sudden dawning that comes when you at last become conscious of some insistent sound, like a dog barking in the distance – that there was, indeed, a family relationship, suggested not by obvious similarities of style, but by certain recurrent quirks and oddities. What they mean, or whether they mean anything at all, I still do not know; but they have left me with the nagging idea that they are a kind of message in code, and that I need but the right key in order to decipher it.
The first painting I looked at (for no other reason than that it was the closest) was a luminous, gold-tinged historical scene which, at a casual glance, I should have taken to be by Claude. I failed, in my eagerness, to note the exact title, but the subject was the decline of Carthage. You are standing, as it were, in the bottom left-hand corner of the picture – in the entrance, perhaps, of a great palace, for the foreground is in shadow. Immediately before you, like flotsam on the shore, lies a clutter of objects: a pile of fruit; a standard bearing a shield and a wreath of withered flowers; discarded cloaks and weapons; and a strange, bulbous brown blob with a protuberance at the top, which might be a buoy with a chain but which also – you realize after a few seconds – has a fleshly quality about it, like a giant squid, or the internal organ of a beast. Beyond that is a narrow quay, and then a dazzling strip of water, fringed in the distance by lines of hazy masts, which stretches to the horizon. Above it – almost in the centre of the canvas, but a little to the left – hangs a burning sun, filling the sky with an incandescence so bright that it stings your eyes to look at it.
On either side of the harbour, like the jaws of a vice, are clusters of classical buildings, their steps crowded with little doll-like figures. Those on the left are floridly baroque, and covered with ornate carvings, but those on the right – to which, because of the diagonal perspective, your gaze is naturally drawn – are more restrained: passing an odd little tower that looks like a dwarf lighthouse, you enter them by a narrow flight of steps (so narrow, indeed, you feel the walls will squeeze the breath from your body), and then ascend gradually until, at length, you reach a temple of Parthenon-like simplicity on the summit of a distant hill.
I could remember little about the fall of Carthage, save that she had been reduced to surrendering her arms and children to Rome, but the import of the picture seemed clear enough. It was, in effect, a moral tale, told (unlike a written narrative) from top right to bottom left: once, the Carthaginians had had the vigour and discipline to climb the straight and narrow path; but, as their wealth and power grew, they had abandoned the austere and lofty heights of greatness, neglecting their industry and defences, and descending into the flyblown city on the left, where they had dissipated their strength in idleness and luxury.
The picture was dated ‘1817’, a mere two years after the defeat of Napoleon, and it suddenly occurred to me that Turner must have intended it as a warning to England – which, with her great trading empire, must surely be the Carthage of the modern age – against lowering her guard and sinking into complacency. Convinced (but how foolishly, I think now, looking back) that I had correctly divined his meaning, I turned to a second Claudian scene, The Bay of Baiae, with Apollo and the Sibyl, to see if my great perspicacity could unlock its secrets, too.
A simpler and more tranquil piece, this, with soft light and sweet curves in place of the other’s fierce sun and harsh architectural planes. You are standing (again, a little to the left of centre) on a wide sandy path that draws you enticingly to a golden beach. A stone pier lined with boats reaches diagonally into the sea – which is no more than a long finger of blue, really, laid across the middle of the canvas, and yet enough to give you a pang of longing, and make you think you feel the warm breeze on your face, and smell its cargo of salt and the scent of wild flowers. The bay is ringed by gentle hills of a pale yellowy-green, which fades into grey on the horizon and differentiates itself into darker shrubs and bushes and leaves as it reaches the near-distance. It is only when you look closely that you see that among the rocks and foliage there are also ruined buildings: broken stone walls crumbling back into the sand, or a pair of subterranean archways – two great eyes separated by a brick nose, like the top of a buried skull – half hidden under a tangle of scrub. As if to heighten the air of menace, a barely visible serpent, almost the same colour as the earth, lurks in the bottom right-hand corner, waiting for its prey.
The picture is dominated by a V-shaped pair of trees on the right, which start close to the bottom of the canvas and reach almost to the top, spreading a band of shadow nearly to the left-hand edge. It is here that the only creatures – apart from the snake – appear: first, immediately under the trees themselves, a tiny white rabbit (soon to be the reptile’s victim?); and then, on the other side of the path, the figures of Apollo and the Sibyl. He, dressed in a wreath and a red robe, is holding his hand towards her; while she, naked from the waist up, kneels on a rock, arms outstretched, inclined slightly towards him. Both of them seem somehow flat, and too small, giving the odd impression that they have been cut from another picture and pasted on. And the Sibyl, in particular, has the same doll-like appearance as the figures in The Decline of Carthage, as if she were the work of a gifted child rather than of the genius who painted the rest of the picture. There is something strange, too, in her hands and feet, which have the blunt shape of flippers rather than the complex geometry of human limbs. You might almost think that Turner had conceived her as a mermaid rather than a woman – an impression accentuated by her dress, which has a sort of scaly brightness, and clings to her legs like a skin.
Walter has several times reproached me for being too practical, and preferring dry facts to the sweeter but less substantial world of myth and fancy; and now, for once, I felt the justice of his criticism; for if I had ever known the story of Apollo and the Sibyl, I had quite forgotten it, and was forced to seek him out, and ask him to explain it to me. I found him gravitating – as if drawn by magnetic attraction – towards another of those bolts of colour that had so struck us upon entering: a square canvas, cut in half by a horizontal blood-red bar so vivid that you could have seen it from half a mile away. Falling into step beside him, I said:
‘What did Apollo do to the Sibyl? Or can you not tell me in such august company?’
‘Sad,’ he said, ‘but perfectly respectable. He granted that she should have as many years of life as she held grains of sand.’
That at least explained what she was doing with those fin-like hands. ‘And what happened?’
‘He was as good as his word; but she failed to ask for perpetual youth, and gradually wasted away until only her voice was left.’
I felt I now understood the subject; but I was still left with the faint consciousness – which remains with me still – of an unanswered question. It was put out of my mind at the time, however, by the square picture, which, as we approached it, imperiously claimed our attention with mysteries of its own. The red strip, I now saw, was a flaming sunset, spreading, it seemed (the painting was so indistinct it was difficult to be sure) across some desolate seashore. Before it stood Napoleon, his arms folded, his eyes cast pensively down, entirely alone save for a lone British sentry standing behind him, and his own elongated reflection in the wet sand. He was staring at a tiny triangular object on the ground, which I could only identify by looking at the title: The Exile and the Rock Limpet, 184.2. To the right was a pile of debris that might have been a wrecked ship, and above that the smoking ruins of a war-torn city.
We stood looking at it in silence for a few seconds, and then Walter sighed and said:
‘“And the light shineth in darkness.”’
He paused, and seemed to be waiting for me to go on; so I said:
‘“And the darkness comprehended it not.”?’
He nodded, but said nothing more. I am not sure what he meant – unless, as a painter himself, he was merely admiring the ability to create colour so radiant that it seems to burn from within – but his words nonetheless helped to galvanize something in my mind; for they startled me almost as if he had uttered a profanity. After a moment’s reflection I realized why: Turner had, without question, captured the beauty of the sun more gloriously than any artist I knew; but in the paintings I had seen there was always something terrible about it, too – a cruelty, a heedless power to destroy, that made it seem a fitter symbol for the bloodthirsty deity of the Aztecs than for the pure love of our Lord, expressed in that lovely passage from St. John.
I said nothing of this to Walter, for I did not wish to disturb him, at least until I had had a chance to see more, and discover if my impression was justified. I did not, however, scruple to point out another idiosyncrasy I had come to recognize; for, although the technique was entirely different from Turner’s earlier works – the paint so coarse and mixed that it looked as if it had been applied by a madman in a frenzy – yet Napoleon and his guard had the familiar toylike quality, making them look more like tin soldiers than men, and I felt I could safely generalize about his figures.
‘At least your people are better than his,’ I said, laughing.
I thought this compliment would please Walter, but he barely even acknowledged it; and after a moment I left him again to his reverie, to continue my researches on my own. Rather than examining another picture in detail, I decided to test my theory by merely glancing at them all; and flitting rapidly from one to the next I soon persuaded myself that I was right. I cannot remember every painting now, but enough to prove the point: a gory sunset lights the last journey of an heroic old warship, The Fighting Téméraire, towards its destiny in a breaker’s yard; terrified people flee the wrathful Angel Standing in the Sun, the flesh burned from their bones by his all-engulfing fire; even a sun-soaked picture of Venice, which at first sight seems like a cheerful Canaletto seen through a heat-haze, at length reveals its own tragic secret – for its subject, you realize on closer inspection, is the Bridge of Sighs, which carried condemned criminals to their death
My exploration also yielded another discovery. As I was hurrying past a dark picture – which I had already dismissed in advance as unsuitable for my purpose, since there seemed no sunlight in it at all – my eye was caught by a glint of gold, and the hint of a familiar form, in the middle of the canvas. Stopping to examine it, I saw that it was the coil of a giant serpent, emerging from a low, dark cave half hidden by brush, which immediately put me in mind of the snake and the ruins in the Bay of Baiae. There was more to come; for confronting the beast, in the foreground, is a man – presumably Jason, for the piece is called Jason in Search of the Golden Fleece – kneeling on a split and twisted fallen tree – which, when you look at it, seems to turn into a writhing monster, or two monsters, like the buoy in The Decline of Carthage. Less than two minutes later I happened upon The Goddess of Discord in the Garden of the Hesperides, where the effect is inverted: beyond a gently wooded valley, peopled with nymphs and goddesses, stand two mountainous walls of stone, leaning ominously towards each other (like the sides of a half-formed arch) across a narrow pass. In one place, the top of the rock has an odd serrated shape; which – when you examine it closely – turns out not to be rock at all, but the back of a terrifying monster guarding the entrance, with stone-coloured wings and crocodile jaws that might almost have been hollowed from the granite by wind and rain.
I had, and still have, no idea what to make of these connections, but I must confess that finding them excited me, and made me think, for a moment, that I should turn critic, and go into competition with Mr. Ruskin. At the same time, they troubled me (for they are undeniably disturbing), and put me in a quandary which I have still not resolved as I write this: should I point them out to Walter? To do so would have been to risk casting him back into gloom just at the moment when his delight in Turner’s work seemed to have lifted his spirits; but to keep silent would have been to leave him in ignorance of something that might be important – and also (I must be honest!) to deny myself the chance of demonstrating my own insight.
Fate, however, spared me from having to make an immediate decision, for when I looked about for Walter I could not at first see him; and no sooner had I eventually found him again – standing in front of another lustrous canvas, in a corner I had missed – than I heard a voice behind me calling ‘Marian!’
I turned, and saw Elizabeth Eastlake – her head towering above all the other women, and most of the men – making her way towards me. She was not, it seemed, alone; for as the crowd parted before her I noticed a little cavalcade in her wake: a middle-aged couple (as I supposed) and their daughter, and an old woman in a bath chair pushed by a manservant.
‘Marian!’ she repeated, as she drew near; and then, seeing Walter: ‘Oh! And Mr. Hartright too! What a pleasant surprise!’ After shaking our hands she turned towards the old woman in the bath chair, and, raising her voice, said:
‘Lady Meesden, may I introduce Miss Halcombe?’
I bowed, and for a moment had the extraordinary idea that I was meeting one of Turner’s doll-people; for the woman’s face was chalk-white with powder, save for a dab of rouge on each cheek, and the skin seemed to have folded in about her eyes, reducing them to no more than a pair of black shining buttons. She stared at me, unsmiling, for a moment, and then bobbed her head, like a bird pecking water from a pool.
‘And her brother-in-law, Mr. Hartright,’ said Lady Eastlake. Walter can usually extort a smile from the stoniest misanthrope, but the old woman was as frosty with him as she had been with me; and it was, I thought, with some relief that Lady Eastlake turned away from her to present us to the other members of her party: Lady Meesden’s daughter, Mrs. Kingsett; her husband (who appeared, among his other misfortunes, to be called Mauritius); and their own daughter, Florence, an awkward, coltish seventeen-year-old who blushed when you looked at her.
‘Marian is a particular friend of mine, Lydia,’ said Lady East-lake.
‘Indeed?’ said Mrs. Kingsett. She was about fifty, with plaited greying hair coiled neatly behind her head, and wearing a loose-fitting walking dress in a fine red-and-white check that looked wonderfully free and comfortable. She was too square and craggy to be considered beautiful; but there was a certain vivacious charm to her voice when she smiled and said:
‘Well, there can’t be a better recommendation than that.’
‘Perhaps “By Appointment to the Queen”?’ said Lady East-lake.
Mrs. Kingsett laughed; and – as if trying to make up for her mother’s coldness – shook my hand in the most easy and affable manner imaginable.
‘Sir Charles and I are away on our autumn visit to Italy next week,’ Lady Eastlake went on. ‘And I have come to remind myself what great English art can be.’
‘What do you think, Miss Halcombe?’ said Mrs. Kingsett, casting her eyes about her in a way that seemed to include the whole exhibition. ‘Are you quite overwhelmed?’
‘Quite,’ I said.
‘I, too.’
At this, her husband, who was standing at her elbow, gave a derisive ‘tk’ – which she studiedly ignored – and looked away with a long-suffering smile. Nature had not dealt kindly with him; for he had a turned-up nose like a pig, and a pulled-down mouth, with too many teeth, like a wolf; and whiskers so curled that you’d think they’d been singed by his hot and florid complexion; and in his little gesture of defiance, and his wife’s pointed refusal to acknowledge it, I suddenly fancied that (as sometimes happens) I could read the whole history of their connection. Here were a plain man and a plain woman, who had married – as they thought – for mutual advantage: he for the respectability that came with her station, and her mother’s title; she, poor thing, for fear that a shy and ungainly girl like herself might have no husband at all if she refused him. But over the years, both had come to realize that she was his intellectual, as well as his social, superior; and as she had grown in confidence, and blossomed into maturity, so he had dwindled into sourness and disappointment. Any true feelings they might have had for each other had been eaten away by the acid of his resentment and her contempt – leaving the marriage an empty shell, into which she had steadily expanded, by developing as independent a life as was consistent with respectability, and he had been reduced to sulking in a corner.
You could not help but feel sorry for both of them, but I must own that the balance of my sympathy lay with her – if only because her fate, or something like it, might all too easily have been my own. Perhaps Mr. Kingsett sensed this; for, though he shook my hand (he really could not do otherwise, when his wife had already done so), his grip was as slack and uninterested as a dead fish, and he immediately turned away with an inaudible mumble, and fixed his watery gaze on the fireplace. To my surprise, as I moved myself, I noticed that Lady Meesden was scowling at us, with a ferocity that suggested she had witnessed the whole episode.
Certainly, Mr. Kingsett’s hostility cannot have arisen from any consciousness of social distinction, for he received Walter as one greets an old friend – or, perhaps it would be truer to say, as a drowning man greets a log, for here was a promise of rescue from the ocean of females in which the poor man found himself, and he clung to it for dear life. Within less than a minute he had manoeuvred Walter away from me and established a small gentlemen’s club, with a membership of two, in the corner. A moment later I heard him opening the proceedings with: ‘I think a picture should be of something, and you should be able to see what it is.’
Not wanting to add to Walter’s embarrassment by eavesdropping on his reply, I turned back towards Mrs. Kingsett; but she – doggedly pursuing her policy of disregarding her husband altogether – was already deep in conversation with Lady Eastlake again, and I felt I could not intrude. Rather than brave the bellicose Lady Meesden or her tongue-tied granddaughter, therefore, I decided to study the picture before us.
It was another classical subject: Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus. Again, we are close to the bottom left-hand corner, looking diagonally across the canvas to a brilliant sunrise on the low horizon, which casts its rays into the sky, burnishing the underside of the clouds and veining them with bloodshot streaks. The foreground is dominated by Ulysses’ ship, its gilded hull trimmed with stripes of black and red, moving from left to right into the centre of the canvas as it makes for the open sea. The water is soporifically calm, with tiny lapping waves that seem barely to have the energy to reach the shore, but on board everything is bustle: the decks are crowded, the oars are out, and sailors swarm up the mast and yards, frantically setting the ornately decorated sails or raising their red flags. Behind them, almost in darkness, is the dark mass of Polyphemus’s island.
I knew, I think, even before I had consciously noted any of the details, that this picture was unlike the others – or, rather, that it somehow fulfilled the others; for, like a song, of which, up until now, you have only a few notes and half the chorus, it seemed to bring together all those peculiarities which I had glimpsed elsewhere, and miraculously fuse them into a glorious whole. Here was the beautiful but merciless sun; here the entrance to the underworld – the mouth of Polyphemus’s cave, its blackness broken this time not by the gleam of a serpent, but by a single smear of reddish gold, which could be the glow of a fire within, or of the sun without; here, above all, those weird hybrid objects that seemed to be two things at once, or one thing in the process of turning into another. The prow of Ulysses’ ship was a gaping fish-jaw, its shape echoed by two great arch-like rocks in the sea beyond, while about it, in the foam, played silvery figures – nymphs? spirits? – which gradually faded into transparency, until they were one with the water, and disappeared. Saluting it, on the right edge of the canvas, was the figurehead of another ship, which rose up like a clenched fist – or one of those odd flipper-limbs: fish, and flesh, and wood, all at once – before a cluster of clouds that turned out, on closer inspection, to be the horses of Apollo’s chariot, drawing the sun into the sky. And the wounded giant himself, rearing in agony above his island, was so vague that he, too, might be a cloud, or the mist-covered peak of a mountain.
Each of these effects taken on its own could have been merely disturbing, but in their totality they seemed to achieve a kind of dreamlike enchantment which made me think for a moment that I had at last glimpsed (though I could not put it into words) Turner’s purpose. The subject was sombre enough, and its treatment strange to the point of insanity: yet (in this picture, at least) the beauty seemed finally to outweigh the horror and the madness – and to be, indeed, all the greater for having absorbed the base elements of our experience, and transmuted them into gold. Exhilarated, I opened my notebook and wrote: ‘Magician. Alchemist.’
I had barely finished when I was startled (the ‘t’ of ‘Alchemist’ has a long squiggling tail to prove it) by someone speaking at my elbow:
‘I sing the cave of Polypheme,
Ulysses made him cry out…’
Astonished, I looked round. There was Lady Meesden – one hand raised, to signal to the manservant that he should stop – gliding into place at my side. Without pausing, she continued:
‘For he ate his mutton, drank his wine,
And then he poked his eye out.’
Her voice was rather faint, but there was something commanding about it – not the imperious tone you might imagine from a woman in her position, but rather a kind of operatic flourish that made you think you were listening to a performance rather than a conversation. I noticed several other people glancing at her as if they expected her to break into song; and, in truth, I half-expected it myself, for I had no idea what she was talking about, and it seemed as likely as anything else that she was mad, and merely reliving some entertainment from her youth – like Walter’s old woman in Hand Court.
‘Tom Dibdin,’ she said, as if by way of explanation.
The name was familiar – it somehow conjured in my mind a world of stage-coaches and sailing-ships and breezy spring mornings, before railways and factories turned England into a great machine, and swaddled it in smoke – but I could not for a moment place it.
‘Melodrame Mad. 1819.’
And then I remembered: Thomas Dibdin’s Reminiscences had been a great favourite of my father’s when I was a child – although, fearful that it might corrupt me, and make me run away, and become a travelling player like its author, he forbade me to read it. (This interdiction, of course, only increased its romance for me, prompting me to sneak into the library whenever I could, and stealthily devour two or three pages of an anecdote about a theatre manager or an actress, before approaching footsteps forced me to make my escape.) I still could not see the relevance to Turner’s work, however; and the perplexity must have shown on my face, for, pointing a wavering finger at the picture, Lady Meesden said:
‘His inspiration for that. Or so he claimed.’
‘Turner, you mean?’ I said.
‘Of course Turner,’ she snapped; but then softened it by (for a marvel) smiling at me, and saying more gently: ‘But he might not have meant it.’
‘Why should he say it, then?’
‘Why, to shock,’ she said, as if nothing could be more natural, and I must be an idiot to ask. ‘It was some damned silly woman, as I recall, whispering to a clergyman. So misty, so spiritual, so ethereal, Mr. Whatever-his-name-was. Upon my word, I don’t know how Turner does it. He must be a magician. Or some such nonsense.’
I confess I felt myself blushing, but had the grace to smile.
‘And he told her he’d got the idea not from The Odyssey, as we’d all supposed, but from a ditty in a comic spectacle.’ She shook her head, and started to laugh, almost silently. ‘I bet she never dared offer another opinion in her life.’
‘Were you there yourself?’ I asked.
‘He told me of it afterwards.’
‘Oh, so you knew him personally?’
‘Oh, yes, I knew Turner,’ she replied, with a knowing emphasis on the T and the ‘Tur’ that immediately made me wonder if their acquaintance had been more than mere friendship. The same thought, I fancy, must have struck the little audience that had gathered around us; for a stout woman who had been listening (and pretending not to) from the beginning, shot Lady Meesden a stern glance, and turned her back; and a man behind us took his wife by the arm and hurried her away.
‘He was a great lover of the theatre,’ Lady Meesden went on, entirely heedless of the stir she had created. There was something proprietorial in her tone which suggested that the theatre was her world, and she would therefore naturally know anyone who frequented it; and for the first time it occurred to me that – improbable as it might seem – she might, from her appearance and the way she spoke, have once been an actress.
‘Did you appear there yourself?’ I said – with just enough levity to be able to pretend, if necessary, that I was merely joking.
‘Lord, yes,’ she said, laughing; and then, to save me from the need for a further question (which I was already trying to devise): ‘I’m Kitty Driver.’
‘Mrs. Driver?’
She nodded. ‘Or was, until Meesden plucked me from the green room, and set me down in the drawing room.’ The phrase had a worn, over-rehearsed air, and I wondered how many times she must have resorted to it over the last fifty years, hoping that a show of wit in discussing her origins might disarm disapproval of them.
‘I was never fortunate enough to see you – ’I began.
‘Of course, you’re too young.’
‘But Walter’s mother still speaks of your Lady Wurzel.’
She shook her head, but the faintest glow of pleasure appeared beneath the white mask.
‘That was the end of my career. My Mrs. Mandible, 1810, now, there was a thing. Or Lucy Lovelorn in All in a Day. Meesden saw it thirty-nine times.’
‘Really?’
She nodded again. ‘He wrote to me every night; and at the end he met me at the stage door and said: “There’s no denying it, by God, you’ve got my heart, fair and square, Mrs. D. And if you give it back again, I’ll go straight into the street and offer it to the first woman I meet there, damn me if I won’t – for, if you won’t have me, I don’t care what happens to me.”’
There was another ripple in the crowd about us, which, again, Lady Meesden seemed not to notice; for she guffawed and went on: ‘What could I do but marry the dog?’
I laughed. ‘And what of Turner?’ I said – a trifle clumsily, for I could think of no other way to guide the conversation back to its original subject. ‘Was he also an admirer?’
She did not answer directly, but rested her chin on her hand and stared at the floor for a moment, as if the idea surprised her. At length she said. ‘He was a sly, secretive fellow, Miss . . . Miss … Miss …’
‘Halcombe.’
‘Miss Halcombe. He felt a hurt more keenly, I think, than any man I ever knew – and, as a consequence, was morbidly careful to avoid any risk of public humiliation. Few of us knew anything of his private affairs – save that he lived with his father, and had a mad housekeeper. There were les on-dits, of course, about a woman, but…’ She paused, and shook her head.
‘An actress?’ I said, with some trepidation.
‘A pretty widow, so the story went. Who gave him a bastard or two. But you can’t credit everything you hear.’
A gentleman at my shoulder – of whom I was only aware because of the strong smell of cigar smoke – cleared his throat noisily, and clumped off; and I must have looked discomfited myself, for Lady Meesden said:
‘Lord, woman! – what’s the matter with that? It ain’t natural for a man to be alone, nor yet a woman, neither.’ She suddenly fixed me with her gimlet eyes, discomfiting me further. ‘Sooner one warm bed than two cold.’
How foolish to feel embarrassed and confused, yet I did; and, for fear of hearing more such confidences (or rather, if I am honest, of being seen to hear them in that place), I started towards Walter, saying:
‘My brother is writing a biography of Turner, did you know that?’
And I wish now that I hadn’t; for, had I been less delicate, I might have learned more.
‘Don’t fetch the men,’ said Lady Meesden plaintively. ‘They’re all such infernal prigs nowadays – like lawyers and schoolmasters.’
I paused, but it was too late. I heard Walter say, ‘I, too, have a daughter called Florence’ – as if all topics of conversation, beyond the coincidence of their children sharing a name, had already been exhausted – and then he caught my eye, and gave me an imploring look that would have melted an iceberg, and made it impossible for me to withdraw.
‘I’m beginning to think we should have called ‘em “Venice”,’ said Mr. Kingsett, with a snorting laugh, and a wave towards The Bridge of Sighs.
Walter edged in my direction, his face frankly saying what his lips could not: Save me!
‘Lady Meesden was a friend of Turner’s,’ I said. ‘Did you know that, Walter?’
‘Oh, no,’ he said, moving towards her. ‘How interesting.’
But Mr. Kingsett, with a nimbleness I would not have suspected, was there before him; and a moment later, as if some signal had passed between them (though I own, if it did, I saw nothing), his wife had joined him, and was saying:
‘Now, Mama, we mustn’t detain Miss Halcombe and Mr. Hartright any longer. If we don’t continue on our way, we shall be here all night, and most of tomorrow.’
I was, for a moment, quite furious; and then I remembered my own response to the old woman, and was forced to reflect that, had she been my mother, and I had heard her chattering indiscreetly to a stranger, I should probably have acted in the same way.
It was when I had shaken hands with them all, and Walter was exchanging a few polite words with Lady Eastlake on the subject of his researches, that I suddenly thought – like a sailor with time enough to snatch only one treasure from a sinking ship – of a final question for Lady Meesden. Leaning down, I said:
‘Which painting here do you think is truest of Turner the man?’
And without a moment’s hesitation she replied: ‘Calais Pier.’
After they had gone, Walter and I sought it out. It is another marine picture, with a marbled grey sea churning and breaking beneath a stormy sky. On the right-hand side, a ramshackle wooden pier lined with disorderly knots of figures juts out towards the horizon – where two distant ships appear in silhouette, and a crack in the clouds lays a pencil-stroke of sunlight on the water. Closer at hand, in the centre of the picture, is a chaos of boats trying to put into, or set out from, the harbour. In the nearest – which an oarsman with only one oar is frantically trying to keep from being dashed against the wooden piles – a man in the stern, far from helping, is angrily shaking a bottle of cognac at his wife on the pier above. Only the approaching English packet, its sails confidently set, appears to be under control.
The bluff, John-Bullish air – a crowd of drunken, cowardly, disorganized French people being shown up by English seamanship – is echoed by the full title: Calais Pier, with French Poissards Preparing for Sea: An English Packet Arriving; for, according to my dictionary, poissard means not (as one might suppose) ‘fisherman’, but ‘base’ or ‘vulgar’.
We stood before that picture for perhaps fifteen minutes, and I must have thought of it every hour since; for although it was easy enough to imagine the author of this jaunty, humorous, patriotic satire quoting Tom Dibdin, I could find not the slightest evidence to suggest that the same artist could also have painted Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus.
Letter from Colonel George Wyndham to
Walter Hartright, 29th August, 185–
Petworth,
29th Augt, 185–
Dear Sir,
I have received yours of 17th August, and will be glad to see you here if you are near Petworth. I fear, however, that you may find it a wasted journey, for there is very little I can tell you about Turner, or my father’s dealings with him.
Yours truly,
George Wyndham
XV
Letter from Walter Hartright to Laura Hartright,
19th September, 185–
Brompton Grove,
Tuesday
My dearest love,
I fear you may have begun to grow anxious about me, so long is it since I last wrote; but the truth – which I hope you guessed – is that what with being rattled about in coaches and railway carriages, and twice nearly thrown from a fly, and having to make so early a start (on the one morning when I thought I should have leisure to write) that I was still half asleep as I left, I have scarce had thirty minutes together in which to put pen to paper. But here I am, home again at last, with nothing worse to show for my adventures than a bruise or two, and a pair of boots scuffed white by the downland chalk.
The new railway to Brighton is a marvel of speed and convenience (as you will see; for I am resolved that when we are next in town together, we shall astonish the children by taking them to the seaside, and bringing them back again, all in the same day!); but for this very reason I found that it depressed my spirits. Every mile seemed to be putting a greater distance not merely between me and London, but also between me and Turner; for his journey to Michael Gudgeon, all those years before, must have been an entirely different affair – a jolting, jostling, daylong lurch from one inn to the next, by dusty roads where the only sound was the clop of hooves and the squeak and rumble of wheels, and the only steam the vapour from the horses’ flanks. Just at the moment when I felt I had finally glimpsed his elusive figure, in those extraordinary pictures at Marlborough House, I now seemed to be losing sight of it again, in the smoke and bustle of the modern world.
But matters soon mended after we arrived. I took a fly at the station, and within ten minutes we were driving through streets of white stuccoed boarding-houses, with square, cheerful faces, that must have been there in Turner’s day; and after ten minutes more we had begun to climb into the downs – which it was hard to imagine had changed greatly since Caesar first saw them, or for a thousand years before that. On every side stretched a rolling, billowing ocean of grass; and when I looked behind, I saw, in the distance, a broadening ribbon of silver-gilt sea.
After perhaps three miles, at the entrance to a small village, we bore left down a narrow lane lined with bramble hedges. It soon dwindled into no more than a cart-track, and it was here that the first near-accident occurred; for, while the driver was momentarily distracted, the horse trotted blithely ahead on to the rough surface, where it missed its footing, and – twisting violently to right itself – dropped one of our wheels into a deep ruck with a tremendous bang that almost overturned the fly. The driver had to hurl himself across his seat to avoid being flung out. The next moment he pulled up abruptly.
‘I’m sorry, sir,’ he said. ‘I can’t go no further. Another knock like that, and I shall want a new axle.’
‘Is it far?’ I said.
‘Not half a mile,’ he said, pointing to a smoking chimney just beyond the next brow.
So I paid him, and picked up my valise, and set off on foot, picking my way carefully between the ruts. The soft wind stroked my face; and for a moment everything that connected me to the humdrum world seemed to be vanishing with the retreating fly, and I was left with nothing but the cuff and slither of my own boots, and the cry of the larks urging me back to some great task, or reminding me of some great grief, that I had somehow forgotten in the noise and distraction of everyday
As I came over the brow I saw below me what appeared to be a small farm, with a muddy yard, bounded on two sides by ranges of ramshackle outbuildings, and on the third by a long, low house of whitewashed stone, protected to the rear by a line of trees. It was so unlike the snug cottage I had expected that I immediately supposed the driver must have brought me to the wrong place, and by the time I reached the gate I had quite persuaded myself that I should have to retrace my steps to the village, or even go back to Brighton and start afresh.
A gaunt black-and-white dog signalled my approach by springing up and barking furiously, jerking on the end of its chain like a child’s toy, and scattering a troupe of chickens which were strutting across the yard. Moments later, a red-faced woman of perhaps sixty-five, with her sleeves rolled up to the elbows, appeared from one of the outbuildings and started rapidly towards me. She moved with the rolling, exaggerated gait of the comic widow in a pantomime, which at first made me think she might be drunk; but then I noticed that she was merely working on to her feet a pair of stout wooden clogs to lift her above the mire.
‘Good morning,’ I called. ‘I’m looking for Mr. Gudgeon.’
The cacophony of squawks and barks must have drowned my words; for she frowned and shook her head, and then – shooing the last of the hens on its way, and shouting to the dog to be quiet – cupped a hand behind her ear, and raised her eyebrows, and opened her mouth, in a charade of “I beg your pardon?”
‘Mr. Gudgeon?’ I said again.
‘Are you Mr. Hartright?’ she asked, in a gentle Sussex brogue; and, when I nodded, she held out her hand in a forthright manner, and said: ‘I’m Alice Gudgeon.’
‘How do you do?’ I said.
‘The man’s in his study. Will you forgive me if I take you through the back?’
She led me across the yard and into a warm kitchen filled with steam and the tang of boiling bacon and the sweet smoky fumes of meat roasting on a spit. From the low beamed ceiling, and the black range cluttered with pots, and the brace of hares just visible through a half-open pantry door, you would have supposed – again – that this was the home of a prosperous yeoman. Only the table seemed out of place; for, beneath the old sheet which entirely covered its surface, you could just see four finely turned mahogany legs, which suggested that it might have once adorned a dining room, but had fallen on hard times.
We entered a cool hall, floored with polished flagstones, where Mrs. Gudgeon stopped. ‘Will you leave your bag here,’ she said, pointing to the foot of the stairs, ‘and we’ll show you to your room after?’ Something in the way she spoke – slowly and loudly, and with an eye on a door opposite – made me suppose that this was as much for her husband’s benefit as for mine. Having thus alerted him to my arrival, she huffed and fussed and muttered over my valise for a few seconds, before standing back with her hands on her hips and saying: ‘There, no-one’ll break their necks on that now.’ Then, without knocking, she opened the door.
What I noticed first was the paper – single sheets, and rough heaps tied loosely together with ribbons, and old notebooks piled into rickety columns that looked as if they would collapse if you breathed on them – which seemed to cover almost every square inch of floor and furniture. The air was heavy with the smell of mildew and old leather, and the dust so thick that you could see a great funnel of it floating before the window like a muslin curtain. Here, I immediately decided, was something I had never thought to see: a room even more disorderly than Lady Eastlake’s boudoir.
But this impression was immediately dispelled when I turned to Gudgeon himself. He was a slight, dapper little man, with amber eyes and a shock of white hair sweeping up from his forehead, wearing a snowy cravat (as white and plump as a swan’s breast) and a well-cut brown worsted coat which made him look fastidiously neat. As he came to greet me, he picked his way carefully between the papers like a general anxious not to disturb the disposition of his troops.
‘Mr. Hartright?’ he said, looking at his wife. She nodded; and he extended his left hand towards me. ‘How kind of you to come, sir.’
The kindness is yours -’ I began, surprised at his tone; but he stopped me with a shake of the head.
‘You’re an angel,’ he said. ‘Sent from heaven to save me.’ He swept his hand about him, like a sower broadcasting seed. ‘You see what I am reduced to.’ He shook his head sorrowfully, and broke into a rueful smile – from which I took courage to ask:
‘Why – what is all this?’
‘The work of forty years,’ he said. ‘And it will take me forty more to organize it, if I do not make haste.’
I looked at the stack nearest to me. It was bound with a piece of twine, and beneath the knot someone (presumably Gudgeon himself, or his wife) had slipped a small card, marked with an alpha, and the number ‘7’. Above it, in faint pencil, was written ‘Chap. 1? Chap. 3? Chap. 4?’
‘You are planning to write a book?’ I asked.
At this, his wife – who stood still in the doorway, watching him fondly with bright indulgent eyes – began to laugh; and, after glancing sharply at her for a moment, he joined in himself, with a deep, self-mocking chuckle.
‘When I was younger, Mr. Hartright,’ he said, ‘I was elected to the Beef-steak Club in Brighton; where, at the monthly dinner, you might be required, at the whim of the chairman, to compose an extempore epitaph – either for yourself, or for another member. And Jack Marwell, of the Theatre Royal, who was a humorous fellow, wrote this on me:
Here lyeth, friend, a gentle wight
Who did no wrong, but could not write
Each day he’d plan – but plan in vain -
A book – and then he’d plan again;
Until at last his soul was took -
Yet, though his life hath left no book,
Pray, with his grieving friends and wife
His name be in the Book of Life.
There were tears in his eyes when he had finished – though whether from merriment, or the recollection of his friends, or merely the melancholy that the thought of our own death must arouse in us all, I could not tell. At length, however, he chuckled again, and said: ‘But I took my revenge the following month; for the chairman demanded I should compose one on Marwell, and I said, “I’m still planning it”; and was excused for my wit.’
I laughed; and, looking about me, said: ‘It seems to me you were slandered; for you must have the makings of at least half a dozen books here-’
‘Oh, the makings!’ he said. ‘The makings! But how to make ‘em? – that’s the question! Here are graves’ – pointing to one pile – ‘and Roman fortifications’ – indicating another – ‘and a giant’s thigh-bone, and druidical stones, and a thousand other curiosities; and between them they would amount to a very respectable Guide to the Natural Wonders and Ancient Remains of the County of Sussex, which is what I always intended them to be.’ He paused a moment, perhaps because he had suddenly recalled the reason for my visit; for he went on: ‘That was, indeed, part of my original object in travelling with Turner – I hoped he might furnish me with engravings.’
‘And did he refuse?’ I asked.
‘I did not ask him outright, but I think perhaps he guessed my intention, for he told me plainly that all the pictures were destined for a publisher, who wished to make his own book. Later, I heard that failed, and I could have approached him then; but felt I was still not sufficiently advanced.’ He shook his head in a sudden frenzy of frustration. ‘Try as I may, I can never find a way to arrange my material; and just at the point when I seem about to manage it, damn me if something new doesn’t turn up, and throw the whole thing off the road, horses and all.’ He began jabbing the air, as vigorously as the conductor of an orchestra. ‘If I order everything according to place, I must jumble together temples to Diana and mediaeval coins and batteries from the late war; if I do it chronologically, I make myself and my reader giddy by flying from one side of the county to the other – and back again – in a single afternoon.’ He shook his head. ‘It will end by making me mad.’
‘Perhaps I might help?’ I suggested; for I could not but feel for the poor man, and yearn to cut him free from the net in which he had enmeshed himself. ‘I do have some small experience – and, indeed, am beginning to face similar problems in my Life of Turner.’
‘Lord bless you!’ said Gudgeon. ‘It’s uncommon good of you to offer; but God knows I mustn’t waste your life, as well as my own. Besides’ – here he smiled at his wife, who coloured and smiled back, as though they had some secret understanding – ‘the woman’s depending on you to restore me to sanity – if only for an instant – by taking me away from the whole sorry business.’ He laid a finger on my arm. ‘Come, we’ll go to the museum. And there, I swear, I’ll talk nothing but Turner.’
From our preparations – he insisted I put on my coat again, and borrow a muffler; and he himself donned an old redingote, and seized a shepherd’s crook – you’d have thought the ‘museum’ must be a day’s journey away, and up a mountain. It turned out, however, to be no further than the corner of the yard, squeezed into an old cattle-shed between the end of the house and a tack room and stable – from which, as Gudgeon fiddled with the latch, a brown pony with a shaggy white mane watched us, tossing its head and twitching impatiently. Inside, the room (if room it may be called) was cold and damp, smelling of wet earth and old hay, and lit only by a row of small dirty windows set high in the wall, which gave it something of the feel of a gloomy church. I could see nothing clearly, but was aware of being surrounded by indistinct shapes – which nonetheless somehow conveyed a sense of bulk and presence, for they seemed to press in upon me as palpably as a crowd of people.
Gudgeon took down a lantern from the back of the door; lit it with surprising adroitness (considering that his right hand could do no more than hold the box of matches), and then slung it on to the crook.
‘Would you be so good as to hold this?’ he said. ‘I think we shall get on better if I can point.’
I raised the staff like a bishop’s crosier, spilling light on to a broken black stone slab that leant against the wall immediately before me (so immediately, indeed, that, had I taken one step more in the darkness, I should indubitably have tripped on it). There were uneven letters scratched into the surface; and, bending down to read them, I saw:
Gaius Ter
Et sua coniunx caris
HSE
‘From a Roman cemetery near Lewes,’ said Gudgeon. ‘Gaius Tertius, I imagine. Et sua coniunx carissima.’ He ran his fingers gently along the top, and nodded, as if in approval; and I fancy he was thinking of his beloved wife – as I, most assuredly, was of mine.’ Hie Situs Est – so he died before she did, and her name was added later.’
‘I find it rather touching,’ I said.
He nodded again. ‘But Turner would have none of it. Said that a true painter could be married only to his art. An idea for which he gave, as I recall, no less an authority than Sir Joshua Reynolds,’ He smiled, and said: ‘See, I’m as good as my word! Nothing but Turner!’ – and then turned abruptly, and marched off into the void.
I followed him, bearing the lantern aloft, and watching the shadows dissolve in its yellow glow. My first thought was that I had stumbled upon the cave of some demented Aladdin; for the walls were lined with rough shelves – divided into rectangular compartments, something like the berths in a ship’s cabin – which appeared to overflow with the biggest hotch-potch of rubbish I have ever seen: broken pots; a horn knife-handle without a blade; the sole of an old shoe, dotted with rusty studs; half a black, fibrous wooden box (the other half, presumably having rotted clean away); a tray of flint chips that might have been crude arrowheads, but so frayed about the edges that they looked as if they had been nibbled into shape by a teething dog rather than formed by a human hand. Surely, I thought, this must be the product of some disease of the mind (had not the study, indeed, already afforded me a glimpse of it?) which renders its victim incapable of discarding anything, however small or useless, and hence of ever imposing any kind of pattern on his life?
But if this was madness there was certainly some method in it; for each section bore a neat handwritten label, stating a place and a date – ‘Braysted, 1845’, or (the ink here faded with age) ‘Tamberlode, 1816’.
‘Are these all finds that you made?’ I asked.
He nodded curtly, and muttered something I could not hear. I could not but feel awed by his industry (if not by his discrimination!), but he seemed to think it scarcely worthy of comment, for he continued on his way without altering his pace or turning his head, and said nothing more until he had reached the end of the room, and slapped a shelf with his hand, sending up a plume of dust.
‘Here’s Turner for you,’ he announced proudly. ‘He loved this spot.’
There were, I saw, objects from four different excavations here – the earliest dated 1811, the last 1825 – yet they all appeared to come from a single place, identified by a large sign in the centre of the wall: ‘Sturdy Down’.
‘He never said so, for he was taciturn about such matters, but I think he liked it for its layers,’ said Gudgeon.
‘Layers?’ I said, not sure if I had heard him correctly.
Gudgeon nodded. ‘Stand on the top of Sturdy Down, and within two miles – if you have eyes to see – you’ll find evidence of almost every stage in our island’s past.’ He lifted a pitted iron axe-head, and weighed it in his hand. ‘Anglo-Saxon, from some princeling’s grave.’ Before I had had time to examine it, he set it down again, and picked up a shiny fragment of orange tile, which he dropped into my palm. ‘Roman. From the hypocaust of a villa in the valley.’ As quickly again, he pointed to an intricate brooch, gracefully curved like an elongated snail’s shell. ‘Bronze Age. Buried with some priestess or chieftain’s daughter, to allow her to appear in the next world with proper dignity.’ He was jabbing his finger so rapidly now that I had barely even glimpsed one treasure before he was on to the next. ‘A stone from the mediaeval priory, most of which has been plundered to build that damned folly up there. A flint spear-point, which might have killed a mammoth.’
‘But why was Turner so fascinated?’ I asked – partly to slow him down, but partly out of genuine puzzlement – for while, in the pictures at Marlborough House, there had been abundant evidence of a taste for mythological subjects, and even more of a passion for the moods and effects of nature, I could remember none suggesting a deep interest in British history.
‘He was a man of the people,’ said Gudgeon. ‘A man of the labouring people. Many times I have seen him stop to sketch a fisherman, or a shepherd – not as a curiosity, or as some fanciful figure in a classical scene, but as a fellow-man, with the sympathy born of common experience. A great part of his purpose, indeed, was to present the mass of British men and women – those who would never enter a gallery, or have the means to buy a painting – with views of their country.’
‘But still -’ I began.
‘For he, too, you see,’ said Gudgeon, interrupting me (yet with a little nod, that seemed to say that he noted my objection, and would answer it in due course) ‘knew what it was to be poor, and footsore, and storm-lashed, and to work hard all the day long, and go to bed hungry.’ He paused, and then went on more quietly. ‘There were tears in his eyes as he stood there. Almost as if could see them, marching across the landscape – all those generations who had lived and toiled and died in that one place.’ Emotion, or the raw air, had thickened Gudgeon’s voice, and he had to clear his throat before continuing: ‘I confess I did not truly understand it myself at the time. I was too young. It’s easier for me now; for I find, as I get older, I feel closer to the people who made these things’ – here he looked about him and nodded, as if he were greeting a party of old friends – ‘and used them, and at length died, and left them behind for me to find.’ He was silent for a few seconds; and then – perhaps in an effort to master his feelings, for he seemed close to tears himself now – turned away abruptly, and seized another object from the shelf. ‘Here’s something will interest you, Mr. Hartright.’
At first I could not identify it at all, but as he brought it into the light I saw that it was the lower jaw of some great animal, long and lined with jagged teeth like a crocodile’s. But it was so huge that – if the rest of the body were in proportion – the brute must have been at least five or six times bigger than even the largest crocodile you have seen in the Zoological Gardens; and I confess that when I took it in my hands I let out an involuntary gasp of amazement.
‘Part of an extinct dragon,’ said Gudgeon, with the practised chuckle of a man who has seen the same response many times before. ‘What I believe Owen now calls a dinosaur.’
‘Owen?’ I said.
‘William. Sir William, I should say.’ (You would have supposed from his emphasis that no man ever deserved a knight-hood less.) ‘Superintendent of the British Museum. And so, naturally, to be deferred to on every point of classification.’
He glowered round at his collection, his mouth working, like a rumbling volcano about to erupt; and I prepared myself for the long catalogue of his differences with Sir William. At length, however – perhaps again recalling his undertaking to talk of nothing but Turner – he nodded at the jawbone and said:
‘At all events, Turner and I saw it being dug out of the chalk, and he stood there, quite mesmerized for a moment, his face all aglow like a schoolboy’s; and then he started to sketch, like this’ – making wild thrusts with his hand – ‘as if his life depended on it. Later, I believe, he clothed it in flesh, and put it in one of his pictures.’
‘Yes,’ I said; for, as he spoke, the monster in The Goddess of Discord in the Garden of the Hesperides suddenly slithered before my mind’s eye, and I recognized it for this creature as surely as you may recognize a face that you have seen before only in a photograph. ‘I know it.’
‘And here’, said Gudgeon, laughing, ‘is a paintbrush, left on the down by the greatest artist of our age.’ He handed me a worn wooden handle.
‘You mean this was his?’ I said; and, when he nodded, felt a tremor pass across my skin like a crackle of lightning, for (save, perhaps, for Mr. Ruskin’s self-portrait) I had never yet held anything that Turner had held; and for a fanciful moment I imagined that his power might still reside in this slender shaft of wood, and communicate itself to me, so that I might paint as he did. Then I lifted it to the lantern-light, and saw that only one bristle remained.
Gudgeon must have noticed my amazement; for he laughed again, and said: ‘He was happy to keep working with only three hairs left, he told me, and content with two; but when he was reduced to one even he had to admit defeat.’
‘But why?’ I said, thinking with a prick of guilt how easily I will condemn a brush for the slightest fault. ‘Surely he could have afforded to replace it sooner?’
Gudgeon nodded. ‘Yes, he was already a rich man when I knew him. But he chose to live simply.’
‘Surely,’ I said, suddenly remembering some of the rumours I had heard. To call such behaviour “simple living”, when there is no occasion for it, might seem …?’
‘Yes,’ said Gudgeon, ‘I know that he was considered mean. But that is not how I should describe him. Frugal, yes. Careful – and quick to anger, undoubtedly, if he feared he was being cheated, or imposed upon. But I have seen him give five shillings to a young widow with a crying child at her breast, and tell her to buy something for it, and make sure it went to church, and learnt right from wrong.’
‘Was it bravado, then?’ I said, recalling Turner’s delight in displaying his skill on Varnishing Days.
‘In part, perhaps. He certainly took a great pride in being able to make do. And partly, too, that he feared losing his independence; for he told me once, when we had both drunk too much, that he detested above everything being subject to the whim of patrons.’ He paused; and when he went on again, it was with a doubtful tone, as if he was giving voice to some question that had just struck him, and that he had not yet resolved. ‘But there was, I think, something else, too. Something akin to a superstition.’
‘You mean,’ I said – and I don’t know why, save that it seemed, of a sudden, to fit with all those recurrent images of luxury and ruin and destruction at Marlborough House – ‘that he believed that if he was wasteful it might provoke some sort of a catastrophe?’
For some reason Gudgeon coloured slightly, as if I had confounded him; and then he nodded and said: ‘That is very astute of you, Mr. Hartright. And not just a catastrophe for himself. But for the country. Or even for the world.’ He smiled, and laid a finger impulsively on my arm. ‘I think you will do very well, sir. Very well indeed.’ And then, nodding towards the brush. ‘Keep it, please. I should like you to have it.’
‘Really?’
He nodded again.
‘I shall carry it with me always,’ I said, slipping it into my pocket. ‘As a talisman.’
It was a small enough thing, of course, and yet I could not help feeling delighted by it; for this was the first real encouragement I had received from anyone but Lady Eastlake – Mr. Ruskin’s comments, for all their ineffable condescension, having had much the same effect on my spirits as a bucket of cold water over the head. And it seemed to confirm what I had increasingly begun to feel (though still scarcely dared to hope) since seeing Turner’s paintings: that I was, at last, starting to get the measure of the man. It was, in consequence, in the highest good humour that – when Gudgeon took a watch from his pocket, and looked at it, and said: The woman’ll have dinner ready, I fancy; best not to keep her waiting; shall we go in?’ – I replied, ‘Gladly, sir,’ and followed him back into the house.
It was a hearty, old-fashioned meal, in an old-fashioned dining room with heavy beams and a huge open fire that must have consumed a whole tree in the time it took us to eat a boiled fowl, a pudding, and half a leg of mutton. Since Gudgeon could not carve, I thought his wife might ask me to do it in his stead; but she took the burden on herself, and I soon saw why: when she came to her husband’s portion, she discreetly cut it into little pieces, so he should not be humiliated either by his own incapacity to hold a knife, or by having to ask, like a child, to have it done for him on his own plate. Another man, perhaps, understandably reluctant to draw attention to his disability, might have chosen not to acknowledge this kindness; but Gudgeon touched the back of her hand, and thanked her with a smile of a great sweetness. I must have seen, as we sat together, twenty such instances of their mutual affection and regard. Let us hope, my love, when we are their ages, that we make such a picture!
When we had finished, Mrs. Gudgeon cleared away the dishes, and then left her husband and me alone with the wine. We talked a little of his family; and then, without my having to prompt him, he started to tell me more of his adventures with Turner: of how Turner loved storms – ‘the fouler the weather, the better’ – of how they took a boat once at Brighton, and a gale came up, and the sea broke over the gunwales with a sound like thunder, and all were ill, save Turner, who merely stared intently at the water, remarking its movement and colour, and muttering ‘Fine! Fine!’; of how they walked twenty or thirty miles a day, in rain, shine or deluge, and put up sometimes at the meanest inns, where Turner would be content with a piece of bread and cheese, and a glass of porter, and a table to rest his head on, if there was no bed to be had. Those were wonderful evenings for a young man,’ said Gudgeon at last, shaking his head in wonderment at the memory, ‘for there was Turner, who would show you nothing of his work, and barely say a word, during the day; but when the ale had freed his tongue would sing, and make jokes (though you could hardly understand them), and boast of his success, and how he meant to be the greatest painter in the world.’
He was silent a long while after this, and I think must have fallen asleep, for he nodded, and then jerked his head up again, and stared at me for a moment, as if he did not know who I was. And then he smiled, yet still said nothing, as if our sitting there companionably were conversation enough. There was no sound save the plaintive stammering of distant sheep, and the whisper of the fire – which, like us, seemed to have grown sated and sleepy; for, though Gudgeon had thrown another log on when he had last filled our glasses, the flames had scarcely even charred it. The candles had burned low, and through the window I could see the first stars appearing in the sky; and I thought of those far-off days (yet not so far off, in truth) when young Gudgeon and not-yet-old Turner had sat together, just like this; and of how – in no more than one flickering iota of a second in a star’s life – Time creeps up on us all, and overtakes us. And so at length must have fallen asleep; for the next I knew was that Mrs. Gudgeon was shaking my shoulder, and laughing, and offering to light me upstairs with a lamp.
The following day I rose late, and made a leisurely breakfast in the kitchen – at that hour, thanks to the fire, the only warm room in the house. Afterwards, I sat a while with Gudgeon in his study, and we exchanged ‘Thank you’s and ‘It’s been a great pleasure’s until, at length, his wife entered, and told me that it was time to leave if I wished to be sure of the train. He came out into the yard with me – where the resourceful woman had already harnessed the trap to the brown pony, which waited, stamping its feet, as if anxious to be off. Then, sheltering in the doorway against the sharp east wind, Gudgeon unwound the cravat from his neck and stood waving it, like a scarf, in his good hand, as his wife drove me away.
In the event, she deposited me at Brighton station in ample time for the train to Chichester, by which I was to start my journey to Petworth, and I -
But no – if I embark on that now, I shall be another day in the writing. So, let Petworth be the matter of my next letter, and this one delay no longer its most important business – telling you that I am well, and that I love you.
Walter
XVI
From the journal of Walter Hartright, 19th September, 185-
Michael Gudgeon told me one thing more about Turner, which I set down here (as nearly as I can remember) exactly as he said it:
‘One day, I recall, everything pleased him: a gothic ruin, a view of the sea, an effect of the light he especially loved, where the sun breaks through at a slant, and grains the cloud like a piece of slate. Late in the afternoon we stopped at an ale-house, and then rolled back to the Royal Oak at Poynings, singing “I am a Friar of Orders Grey”.
‘Do you know the Royal Oak, Mr. Hartright? No? Well, I dare say you’d think it a simple enough house – I dare say I should, now – but it seemed a very palace then, after what we’d been accustomed to, for the beds were comfortable, and we had a room apiece, for a marvel.’ [A pause. A laugh.] That night, as we sat drinking after supper, we fell into conversation with two big village girls, and Turner, I remember, told them his name was ‘Jenkinson’ – with a twinkle in his eye, that told me not to gainsay him – and that made me laugh; and the girls laughed too, though I am sure they didn’t know why; and the upshot, by and by, was that I took the one with the brown ringlets to my room, and he took the other to his.’
[I confess I do not know what I did to provoke this next comment; certainly I said nothing.]
‘Lord! You young people are such prudes, Mr. Hartright. Do you mean to say you’ve never had resort to a jolly girl?’ [Another pause, another laugh.] ‘I must say, though, Turner’s didn’t look so jolly the next day. Her eyes were red, and her skin was all chafed.’
Letter from Mrs. Tobias Bennett to Marian Halcombe,
21st September, 185-
Brentford,
21st September
Dear Miss Halcombe,
Thank you for your letter of 17th September. I should be delighted to see you – and your brother, if he is returned from his travels – any day next week. Thereafter we shall not be here, for the doctor orders us to the coast for my husband’s health, and we may be gone some months.
Mention Turner, and my first thought always is of the Thames, and boats, and picnics. I know this time of year is famously wild and wayward, but if we should be blessed with a fine day, would you care to undertake a modest expedition with us on the river (we keep a small skiff, just big enough for four), and see some of the haunts I most fondly associate with him?
Please be so good as to let me know what day would suit best, and whether my little proposal is agreeable.
Yours very truly,
Amelia Bennett
XVIII
Letter from Walter Hartright to Laura Hartright,
22nd September, 185-
Brompton Grove,
Friday
My dearest love,
It is past three o’clock, and here I am, at last, setting about the letter I promised you yesterday. I should have started this morning; but, having woken early, I decided to take myself to the park, and try to paint the dawn. The result – as I should have foreseen – is dreadful: an overboiled egg squashed on a bed of cinders. How did the man get such colours from his palette?
So – where did I leave you? Entering the train at Brighton railway station, I think; which proceeded to hurtle me at breakneck speed through Shoreham and Worthing, Angmering and Littlehampton, and at length – little more than an hour after I had left – delivered me, like a well-cared-for parcel, at Chichester. I was then obliged to continue my journey to Petworth by walking to the Ship Inn and taking the London coach – which, needless to say, contrived to cover only half the distance in twice the time, and lurched and bumped so much that I soon boasted a fine pair of bruises on my shoulder and forehead, and was starting to feel like a very badly-cared-for parcel.
Yet although I did not realize it at the time – indeed, I was inwardly cursing my ill-fortune, in terms you would have been shocked to hear! – fate was smiling on me; for among my fellow-passengers (who also included two elderly widowed sisters; and a young draughtsman with a case full of drawings, which he tried manfully to review, until a jolt sent them on to the floor; and a party of drunken students outside, who whooped and jeered with every swerve) was a pleasant-looking woman of about forty, who sat opposite me – and, as it turned out, was to play a material part in my adventure. She was well but not fashionably dressed – from her appearance, you might have supposed her to be the wife of a country doctor or attorney – and, as we bounced this way and that, smiled at me, with the conspiratorial air of a fellow-sufferer. At length (when I had received my knock on the head), she grimaced, gave a solicitous ‘ooh’, and said:
‘Jabez Bristow.’
‘I beg your pardon?’ I said.
‘Jabez Bristow,’ I must have still looked blank, for she went on: ‘You’re not from these parts, then?
‘No.’
‘Jabez is famous. Or infamous, rather. Can’t drive unless he has a pint of brandy inside him to keep him warm, And who cares for anything after a pint of brandy?’
I smiled. I could not place her voice; it was not that of a lady, but it had a kind of confidence that spoke of prosperity, and a practised ease in conversing with people of all sorts and conditions.
‘How far do you go?’ she said,
‘Petworth.’
She nodded. Her eyes flickered towards the two widows, and then she leant towards me and said, more softly: ‘Pity the poor souls who are going all the way to London. At least we shan’t have to endure this much longer.’
We felt the horses slow, and then strain forward, as if their load had suddenly become heavier. Looking out of the window, I saw a little farm bounded with knobbly flint walls, and, beyond it, our road rising sharply up into the downs.
‘In a year or two,’ said my companion, ‘we shan’t have to endure it at all.’
‘Why?’ I said. ‘Are they building a railway?’
She nodded. ‘Though you’ll still have to walk when you get the other end,’ she said, with a smile. ‘Or take a gig; for the station will be a clear two miles from the town.’
‘Good Lord!’ I said. ‘Is it impossible to build it closer?’
She shook her head. ‘The colonel won’t have it near his park.’
‘Colonel Wyndham?’ I asked.
She nodded; and then, after a moment, said: ‘Why, do you know him?’ Her tone was neutral, but she studied my face intently as she spoke, as if the question was prompted by something more than mere common politeness.
‘No,’ I replied. ‘But I am hoping to meet him.’
‘Indeed?’ she said non-committally, still watching me closely.
I had the strong impression that she knew something about the colonel, which might prove helpful to me, but that – like a card-player unwilling to disclose her hand until she has seen her opponent’s – she would only confide it to me once she had satisfied herself as to my own purpose in visiting him, and established that it was of a purely professional nature, and that I was an entirely disinterested party, who posed no threat to her. I therefore said:
‘I am writing a life of Turner.’ She did not reply at once, so I added: ‘The artist?’
‘Oh, yes, I knew Turner,’ she said. ‘I knew all of them, in the Third Earl’s time. Chantrey, Carew, Phillips, Haste, Constable …’
This was more than I had dared to hope; and, scarce able to believe my luck, I began: ‘What was …?’ At that exact moment, however – to my extreme annoyance – one of the two widows leaned towards me, scowling; and in a stern tone – as if she had caught me red-handed trying to make off with something that was rightfully hers – said:
‘Are you talking about Turner?’
‘Yes,’ I said. I held her gaze for what seemed the minimum demanded by good manners, and then turned back decisively to the woman opposite. ‘What was he like?’
‘Oh,’ she said – and I suppose, by now, I should have come to expect her next words – ‘he was a funny little man. Ruddy face’ – she paddled her fingers against her own cheek – ‘and always carried a big umbrella. You’d never have thought he was an artist, to look at him. More like . .. more like a . ..’
She pondered a moment, and the hesitation was fatal; for it allowed Widow A to recharge her conversational guns, and – at the very instant my companion concluded, ‘like a sea captain’ – to boom:
‘We saw The Fighting Temeraire, at the Academy, in ‘thirty-nine’; and then, as if I might be disinclined to believe this startling intelligence on the strength of her word alone, she turned to her sister and shouted: ‘Didn’t we?’
‘What?’ yelled Widow B.
‘See The Fighting Temeraire!
‘What!?’ repeated her poor sister, who must have been completely deaf; for even the students on the roof heard the commotion, and one of them banged on the door with a mittened hand and bellowed: ‘Hoi! Less noise there below!’ His fellows promptly erupted into stifled laughter, and I confess that I was suddenly possessed by a kind of desperate hilarity myself, and had to avoid catching the eye of my new friend opposite, for fear I might join them.
Widow A finally gave up on her sister, and fixed me with a gimlet eye. ‘It was of particular interest to us,’ she said, in the same accusing tone (which I was beginning to realize was her normal manner of address), ‘for our father served with Nelson, in just such a ship as that.’
‘Really?’ I said. ‘How fascinating.’ And so, indeed, it might have been, in other circumstances; but at that instant, and in that place, it seemed nothing but a monstrous imposition, and I felt my temper rising. Once again, though, fate came to my assistance; for the young draughtsman – with a discreet wink in my direction, which said, as clearly as if he had spoken the words, Leave this to me – removed his hat, and held out his hand to Widow A, and said:
‘Well, now, there’s a thing – I’m in the ship-building business myself, in a small way; and it’s an honour to make your acquaintance.’
In less than a minute, he had charmed both the sisters into submission – though one could not have heard what he said, and the other could barely have understood it, since the ships he talked of had nothing to do with the romantic old man-of-war in Turner’s painting, and everything to do with the modern steamboat tugging it to its doom. And my companion, too, was touched by his spell, if only obliquely – for, seeing our fellow-passengers engrossed in a conversation of their own, she seemed visibly to relax a little, and to be more willing to talk frankly to me.
‘Yes, it was altogether different, in those days,’ she said, settling back in her seat.
‘Petworth House, you mean?’
She nodded. ‘Liberty Hall. People would come and go as they pleased, and there’d always be a bed for them, and a meal, and a room for them to work in, if they wished.’
‘Were they all artists, then?’
‘Many of them. The greatest patron in England, the Third Earl, that’s what I heard say. And with the finest collection. I wouldn’t know, myself, though I liked to creep into the gallery, and look at the statues. It was quite a thing, for a fourteen-year-old girl, to see a marble man with no clothes on.’
I glanced at the widows, but they showed no sign of having heard. I wanted to ask her how she came to be there, at such an age; but since it was clear that she was not a member of the family (and to assume that she was would have been a kind of mirror-image condescension, as bad as the thing it reflected), and the only other probable explanation was that she had been a servant, I could not think of a way to frame the question without the risk of insulting her. Instead, I said:
‘And was Turner there a great deal?’
‘Oh, yes; his lordship gave him the use of the Old Library, as his studio; and Turner’ – it suddenly struck me that she said ‘Turner’, rather than ‘Mr. Turner’, which seemed curious, when the man she was talking of was a guest in her master’s house – ‘Turner shut himself away there, all morning sometimes; and no-one was allowed to disturb him, save his lordship himself.’ She smiled, and laughed softly. ‘One time, I heard, Sir Francis -’
‘Sir Francis?’
‘Chantrey. The sculptor?’
‘Oh, yes,’ I said.
‘Well, he decided to play a trick on Turner; and he imitated his lordship’s footsteps in the corridor, and his special knock on the door, and did it so wonderfully well that Turner was deceived, and admitted him.’
‘And what happened?’ I said, impatiently. It was galling to find that even now, when I had supposed I was beginning to understand Turner, I could not guess the answer for myself. It all depended which Turner you believed in – the suspicious recluse, jealous of his privacy, or the hearty good fellow described by Gudgeon? The one would surely have resented such a prank; the other, equally surely, would have slapped his thigh, and made light of it.
‘Oh, he took it in good part, and laughed when he saw his mistake,’ said my companion. ‘He and Sir Francis were old friends, so I believe, and liked to tease each other. There was much merriment about it that evening at dinner, you may be sure.’
A point, I thought, to Gudgeon. I smiled and said: ‘That’s an illuminating story. Do you suppose the colonel will remember more, and be able to tell me?’
‘He might.’ She hesitated, and clenched and unclenched her jaw before going on grimly: ‘But he’s not like his father.’
‘In what way?’
‘He’s very shy. And has a terrible temper on him.’ She paused, as if her own words had surprised her. ‘Well, so did his father, come to that. But… but the colonel doesn’t love like his father. That’s the difference.’
‘Love what, or whom?’ I said.
‘Everything,’ she muttered, flushing slightly; and then, more confidently: ‘His people.’
‘Why, you make him sound like a monarch!’ I said, laughing.
‘And so he was!’ she cried. ‘Wasn’t there a French king once, they called the Sun King?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Louis XIV.’
‘That is how the Third Earl was,’ she said. ‘He was our Sun.’
We had reached the top of the hill now, and could feel the horses gaining speed, and hear the harness jingling freely again, as it eased about their shoulders. My companion glanced out of the window, but I kept my eyes on her face, in the hope that she would return to her subject. She seemed to think she had said enough, however, and after a long silence I decided I must prompt her, or risk losing her attention altogether.
‘Louis was a despot,’ I said.
‘Hm?’ She turned sharply, like a straying animal suddenly recalled by a tug on its rope.
‘A tyrant,’ I said. ‘He ruled by fear. Hundreds died building his palace. I take it you don’t mean -’
‘Oh, no!’ she said. She seemed genuinely shocked, and frowned, and looked this way and that, casting about for a way to explain what she meant. At length she said: ‘All I meant was, the sun shines on you, don’t it? That’s what his lordship did, he shone on us all. Even the animals; for he doted on his dogs and horses and cattle, and loved to have them about him, and you could fall over a sow on your way to the kitchen garden, or even see her galloping through one of the rooms, and all her little ones behind her.’ She smiled, and her eyes hazed with recollection, and she lowered her heavy eyelids to brush the moisture from them. ‘And the people, too. They’d play cricket on his lawn, and walk in his park as if it were their own – Lord! you should have seen them, sometimes – the boys’d scratch their names on his walls and windows, and he’d say nothing about it.’
‘Truly?’ I said; for I could not conceive of any landowner I know willingly suffering such behaviour – and, indeed, would not tolerate it myself, at Limmeridge.
She nodded. ‘And every year he’d mark his birthday with a great feast for the poor. Once, when he was past eighty, it could not be held at the usual time, because he was ill; and so he arranged a fete in the park the next May. Four thousand tickets were given, but many more came; and the old man could not bear that any should go hungry outside his gates, and went himself, and ordered the barriers taken down, so that all could enter. I’ve heard six thousand were fed that day – think of it! six thousand! – even our Saviour did not feed so many. I was there, and I know I shall never see such a sight again – a great half-circle of tables spread before the house, and carts full of plum puddings and loaves, piled like ammunition, and an endless army of men marching back and forth, carrying sides of mutton and beef on hurdles. And his lordship forever slipping in and out of his room, for the pleasure of looking upon it all, and reflecting what he had done.’
‘Magnificent,’ I began, ‘but -’
‘Yes, magnificent,’ she said, so swept up now in the torrent of memory and feeling that she could not contain herself, but must rush on. ‘And he provided houses for the poor, and a doctor; and brought gas to the town, twenty years before they had it in Midhurst…’
‘Like the sun, indeed,’ I murmured.
‘What?’ she said, almost snappishly. Then, as if she had just caught my meaning, she laughed, and said: ‘Oh, yes, I had not thought of that!’
‘But a hard example’, I said, returning to my theme, ‘for an ordinary mortal to follow.’
‘What, his son, you mean?’
I nodded; and, in truth, I did feel sorry for the colonel; for only an angel could avoid being unfavourably compared with such a splendid figure, and only a saint bear it without rancour. Before I could speak, however, the woman shook her head fiercely, and said:
‘Oh, I shouldn’t waste your sympathy on him.’
‘Why?’ I said. ‘What has he done?’
‘He began as he meant to go on,’ she said, ‘by putting me out of my place, and scores with me. For no worse offence than that we were employed by his lordship. Truly, you wouldn’t think they were of the same race, let alone the same family.’
And suddenly, a question which had only been fluttering at the edge of my mind until now, like a half-seen moth, sprang into consciousness.
‘Why is he only a colonel, if his father was an earl?’
‘Because he is a bastard,’ she said venomously.
I tried to press her further, but she evaded my every inquiry, and at length lapsed into silence. Only once, when we had stopped some time later at a lonely little tollhouse (much like the cottage in a fairy tale, with diamond-paned windows, and a tall chimney) by a country bridge, did she venture another remark; pointing to a deep scar in the valley, where a team of navvies was at work, she said:
‘There! That’s where Petworth station is going to be. That’s how well Colonel Wyndham likes humanity!’
The guidebook mentioned three hotels in Petworth; and I had decided in advance, out of a childish fancy, that I should put up in the first of them that I saw. This proved to be the Swan Commercial Inn, a long, white, nondescript building of uncertain age – distinguished only by a great picture of its namesake fixed over the central first-floor window – which overlooked the little market square where the coach set us down. It was not, I had to own, the romantic hostelry I had envisaged – even as I looked at it, I felt I could see within, to the too-bright dining room, and the smoking room full of stale air and stale travelling salesmen; but I kept to my resolve, and having bade a grateful farewell to the draughtsman, and a fond one to my companion, I crossed the street, and went inside.
It was, if anything, drearier than I had imagined, with a dingy hall smelling of sour beer, and I approached the girl behind the desk, to ask for a room, with a sinking heart. Once again, however, luck was on my side; for she told me that all their beds were taken, and directed me to the Angel, where she was sure I should be accommodated to my satisfaction.
She was right, for the Angel turned out to be an ancient, lopsided, timber-framed inn, with arthritic joints and drooping eaves, yet clean and well kept within, with bright scrubbed floor-tiles, and a welcoming fire in the hall. I was greeted by an old man in a stiff leather apron, who gravely took down from the rack behind him a key big enough to secure the Tower of London, and led me upstairs to a neat little room, with coals ready-laid in the fireplace, and a casement overlooking a row of quaint houses. And when he had gone, I sat on the bed, and listened to the breathy stir and thud of a herd of cattle being driven through the street below, and thanked my own good angel for bringing me here, and wondered how many travellers over the years had had the same thought, and thanked their own.
I soon had another reason to be grateful that I had ended up at the Angel; but I was not to discover that for an hour or two more, and shall come to it in its rightful place.
Nothing prepares you for Petworth House. You leave the market square by a dingy cobbled alley, lined with small shops and taverns that offer no hint of what is to come, and all at once – there it is! a mass of roofs and chimneys, of kitchens and stables and coach-houses, coiled around the northern edge of the town like a giant serpent that, having set out to crush the whole place in its embrace, has tired and fallen asleep before it could accomplish its aim.
A gate, with a small lodge beside it, stood open, from which it was apparent that in one respect, at least, Colonel Wyndham still continued the traditions of the Third Earl’s day; for even now, on a cold September afternoon, a stream of people seemed to be passing through it, on their way to or from the park, as freely as if they had been strolling by the Serpentine – and, while I should have been startled indeed to see any of those respectable matrons or sober-suited shopkeepers scrawling their names on the walls, they might, had they chosen, have done so with ease, since their path took them close to the side of the house for a hundred yards or more. By screwing up my eyes, and so blurring the details of their clothes, I could fancy myself back thirty years, and Turner yet in his studio – an illusion aided by the fading light, and the wistful autumn smells of fallen leaves and distant bonfires, which always seem to raise the ghost of other times so palpably that you feel its presence in a tightening of the throat and a prickling of the skin. In that hazy, magical moment, I allowed myself to hope that my companion on the coach had been exaggerating, and that I should, after all, find the son as welcoming as the father.
To enter Petworth House is to repeat, after a fashion, your experience of approaching it from the outside. The lodge-keeper directed me to a door so unassuming that I should have missed it entirely if he had not pointed it out – it stood in an odd angle of the wall, with none of the clues (steps, or columns, or a pediment) that normally suggest the entrance to a great house – and for a dizzying second or two I wondered if Petworth were so magnificent that even the tradesmen dressed as I did, and he had mistaken me for a butcher or a grocer, and sent me to the kitchens. At length, however, the most immaculate footman I have ever seen – wearing a livery of dark blue coat, yellow-and-blue striped waistcoat and moleskin breeches which would not have disgraced an ambassador – answered the bell; and, on being told that I had come to see Colonel Wyndham, nodded and ushered me inside.
I recall walking along an unremarkable passage, which would have seemed too plain for the hall of a simple country parsonage, let alone one of the grandest mansions in England. And then, without warning, we passed through another door, and all at once I found myself in a world conceived on an entirely different scale, and built on entirely different principles. We entered it beneath the first flight of a vast staircase, which rises (you see, as you emerge into the light) round three walls of a cavernous hall, until at length it reaches a great balustraded landing extending the full width of the fourth side. Above the middle section are two huge windows, each as tall as three men; but almost every other square inch of space seems cluttered with ornament: swags and festoons; medallions and urns; laughing putti holding shields; painted figures, in togas and laurel crowns, standing in painted niches; and marble busts, in flowing marble wigs, haughtily surveying the world from real ones. And, dominating everything, a series of enormous wall-and ceiling-paintings in the Baroque style – a gaunt Prometheus fashioning mankind from clay, Jupiter forcing Pandora to open her box, a woman (perhaps some ancestral Wyndham) drawn in state on a chariot, accompanied by earthly and celestial attendants, and a black-and-white dog. It was hard, indeed, to find a surface that someone had not somehow contrived to cover (even the underside of the stairs was panelled and painted), save only for one doorway, which – yielding to the practical necessity of allowing people to enter and escape this odd dream-state – has been cut straight through a woman’s figure, leaving a great notch in the middle of her.
The effect, I have to say, is rather like being swaddled in a giant tapestry; but, for all that I found it oppressive, I should have liked to look a while longer – partly to feast my own eyes on this great dragon’s hoard, and partly to try to see it through the eyes of a man brought up in Hand Court, to whom it must surely have seemed even more alien than it did to me. The footman, however – determined to prove himself a man of the world, by affecting a complete indifference to his surroundings, and clearly expecting me to do the same – marched ahead, and stood waiting for me by a door at the other end of the hall, with a bored expression that plainly said: The master will not be kept waiting.