Illyrian Spring Read online

  As Lady Kilmichael walked out through the Nord station to get a taxi, she looked as little like the common conception of an artist as can well be imagined. Her dark clothes were of that distinguished simplicity, so unobtrusive as almost to render the wearer invisible, which well-bred women affect for the street; only her height and slenderness marked her out in any way from any hundred of other well-dressed, quietly good-looking, grey-eyed Englishwomen, with nice complexions and faultless hair. While the taxi rattled through the sunny streets of Paris, noisy with a different noise, busy with a different liveliness from the streets of London, she sniffed the air, with its burden of unwonted smells, and her spirits rose a little. Delicious Paris! And it would be nice to see Gillani’s stuff. But at the Rosenthal Gallery disappointment awaited her. The doors were closed; a vast limousine glittered, rich and sombre, before them. As she turned away, with the curious sense of incredulity which attends an unexpected disappointment, the door half-opened, and a short elderly man, with a grizzled well-trimmed beard and pince-nez, came out. He glanced at her, looked again, brightened into a positive effulgence of delighted recognition and came up to her, hat in hand. ‘Mademoiselle Stanway! Quel plaisir inattendu!’ With a start she recognised M. Breuil, the dealer who occupied himself, to use his own phrase, with her pictures.

  M. Breuil was one of those dealers who are something more than the mere name implies. He was something of a critic and a genuine connoisseur as well; he had a gallery of his own; he discovered painters, and if he thought well, ‘made’ them. He had discovered and ‘made’ Miss Stanway, rescuing her work from the degrading nullity of the Salon and placing it with success in select shows of modern art in his own gallery, and in London; he sold it cleverly. He knew quite well that it was not absolutely first-class – if it had been, it would have been far harder to sell; but she had the gift, undoubtedly, Mlle Stanway; she was a very fluent artist; and he had made of her a person to be reckoned with. She did far too little work – but that, too, kept prices up. M. Breuil himself was emphatically also a person to be reckoned with. Now, as he stood talking to Lady Kilmichael on the steps of Rosenthal’s, while his immense limousine purred below, other late departers from the gallery pointed him out to one another in respectful undertones – ‘C’est le vieux Breuil, celui-là aux cheveux gris’; and ‘Tiens!’ said their hearers, impressed.

  M. Breuil was charmed to see ‘Miss Stanway.’ He had a great deal to say, and said it very fast indeed, in rather charming guttural tones. He had no idea that she was in Paris; she must come tomorrow and see how well ‘Afternoon Tea’ looked in his new show; it was having a success formidable and unheard-of – moreover, he had a lot of commissions for her. Could she lunch with him tomorrow? It was some time before Lady Kilmichael could get in enough words at a stretch to make him understand that she was not, strictly speaking, in Paris at all, but passing through – leaving, indeed, in under three hours. At this desolating intelligence M. Breuil became Napoleonic. In that case, he said, leading her down the steps, they must at once talk business; shepherding her into the car, he swept her off to his gallery for a glass of sherry; drinking the sherry, still talking to her, he nevertheless contrived to convey to his factotum precise instructions about a restaurant, a table and an early dinner of three courses. And would she, he asked, allow him also to invite Count Schiaparelli? Who was insistent, determined, that he must have a Stanway of his wife, his son and his daughter-in-law, in their miraculous garden outside Tours.

  Lady Kilmichael declined the Count, with unusual firmness. She was tired, her toilette was unsuitable, her plans uncertain. M. Breuil must tell her about it, and she would think, and write. Then a picture caught her eye, and she rose and went over to it, glass in hand – surely, she said, this was someone new? And immediately she was engulfed in the delightful business of appreciating, criticising, seeing and enjoying the work of others, with a very acute connoisseur beside her. Back again in this happy familiar world, all her faculties expanded; here she was not stupid or a failure; the ferocity with which M. Breuil controverted some of her opinions was in itself the sincerest flattery. And there was plenty of the more direct thing too. Over the very perfect little dinner to which the limousine presently bore them off, M. Breuil told her of the advance in her latest work, the greater fluidity and smoothness in her grouping, the more assured treatment of the figures and characterisation. ‘Cela avance – de toile en toile, il y a des progrès – même très marqués,’ he averred. And now, in Italy, what was she going to paint? How many pictures would she do? He had a little plan – for a one-man show of her work next winter, in his smaller gallery, combined with a big show – a collection of the later Impressionists. The collection was an important one; to be associated with it would advertise her yet more; success was assured, ‘mais cela rehaussera encore plus les prix’; buyers would be there from all over the world. (M. Breuil was a man of business as well as a connoisseur.)

  He was, therefore, the more shocked at his client’s vagueness and unpracticalness when she told him that for the next few weeks she did not mean to paint. ‘Pas une toile!’ she declared, to his horror. The little sketches for the American papers he derided as sheer waste of time – ‘à moins que vous ne travaillez un peu votre architecture. C’est là que vous manquez un peu de force, d’assurance.’ But she must rest, she told him – later on, presently, she would paint again – might even come back to Paris to do the Schiaparelli family. Ah well, to rest, M. Breuil understood the necessity; he too was surmené; his bronchitis had afflicted him this winter; he was going on a cruise, very soon – ‘le médecin y insiste.’ To sustain her on her journey, he made the maître d’hôtel put up a special flask of ’75 brandy; when they arrived at the station the factotum was waiting at the door of her coach with an immense bouquet of white orchids and red roses. M. Breuil kissed her hand in farewell, and the sleeping-car attendant ushered her, flowers and all, into her sleeper. Lady Kilmichael, sitting down, suddenly caught sight of The Times lying on the seat. She remembered how she had hidden her tears behind it only that morning, in the train from Victoria. Oddly enough, she did not feel in the least like crying now.

  TWO

  The great figure of the Madonna dominates the apse of the basilica at Torcello, her black draperies sweeping downwards across the golden mosaic curve of the semi-dome, mosaic tears falling down her pale and tragic face. The figure is so vast, its unrelieved black so solitary, there in the golden dome, as to make it one of the most moving things in the world. So Grace Kilmichael thought, sitting in the empty church staring at it, her Ruskin in her hand; she found herself pondering on why Ruskin, who was so moved by Torcello, had so caught the whole touching wonder of the place, should have devoted pages to the pulpit, and barely mentioned the Virgin! She had been reading the great chapter that morning as she rowed across from Venice in a gondola, past Murano, past Burano; now looking ahead to the pale confusion of low shores and dim hills, now looking backwards to the outline of Venice itself, a clear tracery of spires and domes etched above the floor of the sea. People could make fun of Ruskin as much as they liked, but if some of his art criticism was nonsense, it was noble nonsense, and that chapter one of the great splendours of English prose. Book in hand, she had spent the morning wandering round the island and climbing the Campanile, trying to make the neat buildings of today – the small Museum, the house which proffers coffee down on the narrow fondamento where the gondolas tie up – fit in with the desolation which Ruskin found and described. She couldn’t do it, really – except for the two churches, it was all too different; and presently she gave up the attempt and simply surrendered herself to the lost and lazy charm of the place – the wild rosemary scenting the muddy shores, the wild asparagus feathering over the still waters of the narrow inlets, the peasants cutting hay in the scraps of meadow between the buildings. The scythe-blades sweeping down the small bright familiar flowers, among fragments of stone and marble carved in strange shapes, gave her an idea for a picture, a
nd she made one or two careful studies – it was really a pity she had brought no painting things, sent them all to Antibes. If only she had even some watercolours to make notes! While she sketched, the peasants came and looked on, and said ‘Molto bene!’ loudly and cheerfully; a very old man, warming his frail body in the sun, leant on a stick beside her and told her that he was over ninety. Lady Kilmichael, sketching away, gave him a lira and a cigarette, and told him that her children’s Nonno was of the same age; she felt warmly to the old man, he reminded her of Walter’s father, whom she loved dearly.

  Now and again a motor launch arrived from Venice, and the sunny isolation of this quiet friendly place was broken by an influx of tourists, who were swept breathlessly through both churches, through the museum, and off again. They appeared to be allowed forty minutes in which to ‘do’ Torcello. Each time, when they had gone, and only the voices of the peasants and the swish of the scythes broke the sunny stillness, Lady Kilmichael settled down into a deepened sense of contentment. She had been here for hours, and felt almost an inhabitant compared to the tourists on the launches. Altogether, that morning, she was content. This journey was being rather a success. Tucked away in an obscure pension overlooking the Giudecca, she had evaded all acquaintances; even her friend Lady Roseneath, who had a Palazzo on the Grand Canal in which she collected all visitors to Venice. She had had a narrow escape, though, from Lady Roseneath one day, in the Merceria; and only saved herself by nipping very swiftly into a small dark shop, and bending her head over a counterful of brightly coloured braces, till all danger was past. She had spent a happy week, sightseeing, pottering and sketching; Venice was marvellous, her freedom more marvellous still. And the paintings! How small, as an artist, they made one feel! Her little trumpery people in their bright garden settings, nothing to them but the contrast of their modernity of clothes and attitude with the perennial, the timeless and effortless perfection of the flowers – what were they in comparison to the maturity of conception exhibited by these grave Madonnas and wise-lipped Doges? Feeling small, Grace Kilmichael felt happy – she was like that; especially since there was nothing personal in the noble superiority of Tintoretto and Bellini, no deliberate putting of her down. And remembering some laughing flick of Walter’s, she would wince then – but catching sight of another glorious picture, she would forget Walter and go and stand before it, lost in pleasure.

  The freedom was really the most astonishing part. When she had ricked her neck for some time examining a ceiling panel, one day in the Ducal Palace, she noticed an elderly German in spectacles quietly lying on his back on the floor, observing the ceiling in comfort. Lady Kilmichael had not the courage to follow his example there and then, but she went early next morning, when the place was nearly empty, and rather timidly lay down on her back. It was perfect! One rested, and one saw. And no one paid the smallest attention. So, unhurried and unscolded, Lady Kilmichael lay down all over Venice to gaze at ceilings – and whenever she did so she tasted her freedom triumphantly. For what would Walter or Linnet have said?

  But when she had eaten a belated lunch at Torcello, in a sunny corner, and went to look at the church, somehow or other the sight of the great Madonna had dimmed her contentment, and brought back the recollection of her private disquiets. Sitting there now, forgetting Ruskin and his views on pulpits, she thought of Walter. Walter must be back by now – back for two or three days. He would have got her letter. She wondered what he would make of it – what his answer would be. A sudden chill of fear ran over her, startling her by its violence – suppose he did take her at her word, and ended the thing? For a moment her world rocked about her – her safe, her accustomed world, of the boys and Linnet, and Walter and his tiresomeness and his amusingness, the whole fabric of her life. To lose all that was not conceivable. And in her panic she felt that she had been mad to write, mad to come away.

  She pulled herself together presently, and summoned pride to her aid. No – if Walter wanted Rose Barum or really couldn’t bear her, Grace, she was better away. She would wait, and not write – do nothing, let it all slide. She was very happy here, she told herself – happier than she had been for years. She would not worry. And she began to study the Madonna again, conscientiously. But the Madonna is not the best of companions for wives and mothers who have abandoned their families – immense, still, sorrow-stricken and quietly accepting sorrow, there she stands – timeless, the mother who cannot escape her motherhood, and would not if she could. And looking at her, Lady Kilmichael, instead of thinking about Byzantine tendencies in art, as she had meant to do, began to think about Linnet. She hoped the child was happy with Gina, and Gina being reasonably careful about what she did – not letting her motor too wildly with that headlong Herbert boy, in his car with the long nose – she didn’t really at all like that boy; and discouraging her from going to dinner without her stockings in the wrong houses – at Lady Netherhampton’s, for example. Darling Linnet! She was so lovely and so sweet, but she knew so little, really. Oh, how she hoped she was all right.

  Lady Kilmichael was at all times subject to these rushes of maternal feeling, even unprompted by the presence of the Madonna; and they generally issued in an impulse to do something for one of the children. But the older children get, the more difficult it is to find anything which they really at all want done for them, and the enfeebled impulse is liable to be finally extinguished in a letter – frequently a letter which arouses a faint, if amused, irritation in the recipient. The Edwardian mother who wrote to her soldier son, sitting fever-ridden and solitary among his black troops in the jungles of Nigeria –‘I hope, my dearest boy, you aren’t going in for too much of that horrid betting and gambling,’ has her parallels today, and closer home.

  Lady Kilmichael, however, was fortunate in finding almost at once, and even in so improbable a place as Torcello, something which she could do, not for Linnet, but for Nigel. Emerging from the high-lit chill of the basilica into the hot and brilliant sunshine outside, she went round with a vague intention of making a drawing of the apse – pottered through the priest’s garden, where among the trim fruit trees and beds of salads she found no quite appropriate position for a sketch, and so passed out into the grassy meadow beyond. There, having found the perfect aspect, she looked about for something to sit on among the fragments of marble heaped casually at the edge of the field. And there, to her immense astonishment, she came on one of Nigel’s stones. It was a long narrow piece of greyish pietra dura, broken off at one end, and carved throughout its length in a curious intricate scroll pattern of flat thongs plaited and twisted in and out of one another, like immensely elaborate basketwork, forming a general design of squares, circles and triangles. It was, so far as Lady Kilmichael could see, exactly like the patterns on those incised tomb slabs and crosses of the Western Highlands of which Nigel was always making rubbings on linen and ‘squeezes’ in Barcelona paper. Nigel was a good deal of an archaeologist, and some of his mother’s happiest days had been spent under the sycamores and ash trees of small lonely West Highland churchyards, clearing the turf and nettles off half-buried stones, scrubbing them clean with a brush and the bucket out of the Minister’s kitchen; or on windy days holding the length of calico down firmly, while Nigel rubbed and rubbed with a piece of cobbler’s wax. But she had always been led to suppose that these stones were peculiar to the West Coast of Scotland and the Isle of Man, save for a few Irish crosses showing the same type of design – and here in Italy, at Torcello, she suddenly found one of the most familiar patterns of all. She could not be mistaken – she had seen far too many rubbings, scrubbed far too many stones herself. It was most surprising and unexpected. Nigel would be thrilled. But knowing Nigel’s Cambridge caution, she realised that nothing short of ocular demonstration would convince him; and abandoning the apse, she sat down on a broken capital covered with acanthus leaves, and began to make a sketch of the scroll-work stone, happy again to be doing something for one of the children.

  But while Lady K
ilmichael was sketching in Torcello, Linnet in London was again writing to her best friend:

  I’m sure I was right about Mums, and that there is some funny business going on. For one thing, she hasn’t written, and you know how terrifically they write as a rule. And when Poppy got back the other day, he came flying round here in no end of a well-restrained flap – Where’s your Mother? I told him she’d gone to Gags, though I didn’t believe it; and as a matter of fact she hasn’t. Because when I popped in yesterday for some clothes, Grimes said, Would I take a foreign telegram for the master over the instrument? – silly old porpoise, he’s getting so deaf, he’s useless on the telephone. And it was from Gags – ‘Expecting Grace any day, but no address.’ So you see he must have wired. Meanwhile I gather our Rose is holding his hand – Grimes asked if I should be staying to lunch, and when I asked if Poppy was alone, he made his super-butler face and said ‘Mrs Barum was expected.’ So I beat it. How I loathe that woman! I hope Mums will have the guts to stick it out for a good long time, till she gets rubbed off; I can’t believe that will last forever. But Mums is so terribly soft – and I daresay that fidgets Poppy just like it does me.