“Perhaps he is,” said Richard doubtfully.
Jonathan came to a stop by the easel and sighed drearily. “No,” he said, “no. I’m afraid not. In fact, I’m afraid it’s a complete give-away for me. The main point is—do you think Lady Wallingford will notice it? And what will she say if she does?”
“I shouldn’t think she would,” said Richard. “After all, I only just did myself and I’m far more used to your style than she is.”
“She may not be used to me, but she’s extremely used to him,” Jonathan said gloomily. “She’s one of the real inner circle. Betty and I will have a much more difficult time if there’s any trouble. Otherwise, I shouldn’t mind in the least. What do you people know about him, Richard?”
“We know,” said Richard, “that his name is Simon Leclerc—sometimes called Father Simon and sometimes Simon the Clerk. We gather he’s a Jew by descent, though born in France, and brought up in America. We know that he has a great power of oratory—at least, over there; he hasn’t tried it much here so far—and that it’s said he’s performed a number of very remarkable cures, which I don’t suppose we’ve checked. We know that quite intelligent people are attached to him—and that’s about all we do know; at least, it’s all I know. But, as I told you, I’ve not been particularly interested. You say you’ve heard him preach; what does he preach?”
“Love,” said Jonathan, more gloomily than ever as he looked at his watch. “They’ll be here in a minute. Love, so far as I can gather, but I was more looking at him than listening to him and it’s almost impossible for me really to do both at once. I could sort of feel his effect going on all round. But it was mostly Love, with a hint of some secret behind, which Love no doubt could find out. He sometimes gives private interviews, I know, but I really felt it’d be too embarrassing to go to one. So I can only generalize from the bits I caught while I was staring. Love, and something else.”
There was a ring at the front door bell, Jonathan threw the cover again over the painting, and said, “Richard, if you go now, I’ll never forgive you. And if you don’t say the right thing, I’ll never listen to a word of yours again.” He went hastily out.
He was back so soon that Richard had hardly time to do more than feel at a distance within him that full and recollected life which, whenever it did show itself, threatened to overthrow all other present experiences. It was his first experience of such a nature, of “another” life. Almost, as he too turned from the easel, he saw Lester’s dead face, as he had seen it, floating, dim and ill-defined, before his eyes; and the two women who came into the room, though more spectacular, were more empty and shell-like than she.
They were not unlike, with thirty years between. They were both smallish. Lady Wallingford was gray and thin, and had something almost of arrogance in her manner. Betty was fair and thinner than, at her age, one would have thought she ought to be. She looked tired and rather wan. Her eyes, as she entered, were turned on Jonathan, and Richard thought he saw her hand drop from his. Jonathan presented him. Lady Wallingford took him, so to speak, for granted—so granted as to be unnecessary. Betty gave him a quick little glance of interest, which for the moment he did not quite understand; having forgotten that she was supposed to have known Lester. He bowed twice and stepped back a pace. Jonathan said, “You’ll have some tea first, Lady Wallingford? It’s not too warm today.”
Lady Wallingford said, “We’ll look at the picture first. I’m anxious to see it.”
“I’m very cold, Mother,” Betty said—a little nervously, Richard thought. “Couldn’t we have tea?”
Lady Wallingford entirely ignored this. She said, “Is that covered thing it? Let me see it.”
Jonathan, with the faintest shrug, obeyed. He went to the easel; he said, over his shoulder, “You’ll understand that this is rather an impression than a portrait,” and he pulled aside the covering. There was a silence, concentrated on the painting. Richard, discreetly in the background, waited for its first quiver.
The first he observed was in Betty. She was just behind her mother and he saw her yield to a faint shudder. Jonathan saw it too; he almost made a movement towards her and checked it before Lady Wallingford’s immobility. After what seemed like minutes, she said, “What is our Father coming out of, Mr. Drayton?”
Jonathan pinched his lip, glanced at Betty, and answered, “What you choose, Lady Wallingford.”
Lady Wallingford said, “You must have some idea. What is he standing on? rock?”
“Oh yes, rock,” said Jonathan readily; and then, as if reluctantly truthful, added, “At least, you might as well call it rock.”
The private view was not going very well. Betty sat down as if her power had failed. Lady Wallingford said, “Is he standing on it?”
Jonathan answered, “It doesn’t much matter, perhaps.” He glanced rather anxiously at Richard. Richard took a step forward and said as engagingly as he could, “It’s the whole impression that counts, don’t you think?”
It was quite certainly the wrong remark. Lady Wallingford took no notice of it. She went on, still addressing herself to Jonathan, “And why are the people so much like insects?”
Betty made an inarticulate sound. Jonathan and Richard both stared at the painting. It had not occurred to either of them—not even apparently to Jonathan—that the whole mass of inclined backs could be seen almost as a ranked mass of beetles, their oval backs dully reflecting a distant light. Once the word had been spoken, the painting became suddenly sinister. Jonathan broke out but his voice was unconvincing, “They’re not … they weren’t meant … they don’t look like beetles.”
“They look exactly like beetles,” Lady Wallingford said. “They are not human beings at all. And Father Simon’s face is exactly the same shape.”
Richard saw that there at least she was right. The oval shape of the face differed only in its features and its downward inclination from the innumerable backs, and in the fact that it reflected no light. It was this lack of reflection which gave it its peculiar deadness; the backs had that dim reflection but this face none. But now he saw it as so similar in shape that it seemed to him for half a second not a face at all, but another back; but this eyed and mouthed as if the living human form ended in a gruesomeness and had a huge beetle for its head, only a beetle that looked out backward through its coat and had a wide speaking mouth there also; a speaking beetle, an orating beetle, but also a dead and watching beetle. He forgot the aesthetic remark he had been about to make.
Jonathan was saying, “I think that’s rather reading things into it.” It was not, for him, a particularly intelligent remark; but he was distracted by the thought of Betty and yet his voice was as cold as Lady Wallingford’s own. He could manage his words but not his tone.
Lady Wallingford moved her head a little more forward. Richard saw the movement and suddenly, as she stood in front of him, she too took on the shape of an overgrown insect. Outside the painting her back repeated the shapes in the painting. Richard suddenly found himself believing in the painting. This then was what the hearers of Father Simon looked like. He glanced at the face again, but he supposed he had lost that special angle of sight; it was now more like a face, though of that dead artificiality he had remarked before. Lady Wallingford leaned towards the picture as if she were feeling for it with invisible tentacles. But she was feeling with a hideous and almost dangerous accuracy. She now said, and her voice was more than cold; it was indignant, “Why have you painted our Father as an imbecile?”
Here, however, Jonathan was driven to protest more strongly. He turned his back on the painting and he said with some passion, “No, really, Lady Wallingford, I have not. I can see what you mean by complaining of the shapes, though honestly I never thought of anything of the sort, and I’ll do something.… I mean, I’ll paint something different somehow. But I never had the slightest intention of painting Father Simon in any displeasing way.…”
Lady Wallingford said, “You intended.… Look at it!” Jon
athan stopped speaking; he looked at the woman; then he looked beyond her at Betty. She looked back despairingly. Richard observed the exchange of their eyes, and the full crisis became clear to him. He felt, as they did, Betty swept away on Lady Wallingford’s receding anger; he saw her throw out a hand towards Jonathan and he saw Jonathan immediately respond. He saw him move away from the painting and go across to Betty, take her hands and lift her from her chair so that she stood against him. His arm round her, he turned again towards the painting. And again Richard’s eyes went with his.
It was as he had last seen it. Or was it? Was the face not quite so down-turned? was it more lifted and already contemplating the room? Had he misjudged the angle? of course, he must have misjudged the angle. But to say it was “contemplating” was too much; it was not contemplating but only staring. What he had called bewilderment was now plain lack of meaning. Jonathan’s phrase—“an absolute master and a lost loony at the same time”—recurred to him. The extended hand was no longer a motion of exposition or of convincing energy, holding the congregation attentive, but rather drawing the congregation after it, a summons and a physical enchantment. It drew them towards the figure, and behind the figure itself perhaps to more; for the shadow of the figure on the cliff behind was not now a shadow, but the darkness of a cleft which ran back very deeply, almost infinitely deep, a corridor between two walls of rock. Into that corridor the figure, hovering on its shadowy platform, was about to recede; and below it all those inclined backs were on the point of similar movement. A crowd of winged beetles, their wings yet folded but at the very instant of loosing, was about to rise into the air and disappear into that crevice and away down the prolonged corridor. And the staring emaciated face that looked out at them and over them was the face of an imbecile. Richard said impatiently to himself, “This is all that old woman talking,” because, though one did get different angles on paintings, one did not usually so soon see on the same canvas what was practically a different painting. Blatant and blank in the gray twilight, where only a reflection of the sun shone from the beetles’ coats, the face hung receding; blank and blatant, the thousand insects rose towards it; and beyond them the narrow corridor hinted some extreme distance towards which the whole congregation and their master were on the point of unchecked flight. And yet the face was not a true face at all; it was not a mockery, but the hither side of something which was hidden and looking away, a face as much stranger than the face they saw as that—face or back—from the other insect backs below it.
They had all been silent; suddenly they all began to speak. Richard said recklessly, “At least the coloring’s superb.” Betty said, “Oh Jon, need you?” Jonathan said, “It’s a trick of this light. Don’t cry, Betty. I’ll do something else.” Lady Wallingford said, “We won’t keep you, Mr. Drayton. If that’s serious, we have very little in common. If it’s not serious, I didn’t expect to be insulted. We’ll go, Betty. My daughter will write to you, Mr. Drayton.”
“This is quite absurd,” Jonathan said. “Ask Mr. Furnival, and he’ll tell you that it wasn’t in the least like that until you talked us into believing it. I’m extremely sorry you don’t like it and I’ll do something different. But you can’t think that I meant to show you a painting of a madman and a mass of beetles as a portrait of your Father Simon. Especially when I know what you think about him. Is it likely?”
“It appears to be a fact,” said Lady Wallingford. She had turned her back on the canvas and was looking bitterly at Jonathan. “If we are nothing more than vermin to you—Betty!”
Betty was still holding on to Jonathan. It seemed to give her some strength, for she lifted her head and said, “But, Mother, Jonathan is going to alter it.”
“Alter it!” said Lady Wallingford. “He will alter it to something still more like himself. You will have nothing more to do with him. Come.”
Jonathan interrupted. “Lady Wallingford,” he said, “I’ve apologized for something I never thought or intended. But Betty’s engagement to me is another matter. I shan’t accept any attempt to interfere with that.”
“No?” Lady Wallingford said. “Betty will do what I tell her and I have other plans. This pretended engagement was always a ridiculous idea and now it is finished.”
“Mother——” Betty began. Lady Wallingford, who had been looking at Jonathan, turned her eyes slowly to her daughter. The slight movement of her head was so deliberate that it concentrated a power not felt in that room till then. Her eyes held Betty as in the painting behind her the outstretched hand held the attentive congregation; they summoned as that summoned. Jonathan was thwarted, enraged and abandoned. He stood, helpless and alone, at the side of an exchange of messages which he could not follow; he felt Betty flag in his arm and his arm was useless to her. He tightened it, but she seemed to fall through it as a hurt dove through the air by which it should be supported. Richard, as he saw that slow movement, was reminded suddenly of Lester’s way of throwing up her hand; the physical action held something even greater than the purpose which caused it. It was not only more than itself in its exhibition of the mind behind it, but it was in itself more than the mind. So killing, though it may express hate, is an utterly different thing from hate. There was hate in the room, but that particular hate was not so much hate as killing, as pure deliberate murder. As a man weak from illness might try to wrestle with a murderer and fail, he thought he heard himself saying sillily, “Lady Wallingford, if I may speak, wouldn’t it be better if we talked about this another time? There’s no need to murder the girl at once, is there? I mean, if Jonathan did something different, perhaps we could avoid it? or we might look at it—at the portrait—in a different light? and then you might see her in a different light? Sometimes a little attention …”
He was not quite sure how much of this he had actually said, but he stopped because Jonathan was speaking. Jonathan was speaking very angrily and very quickly, and he was talking of Betty’s father the Air Marshal, and of his own aunt who would put Betty up for a few days, and how they would get married almost tomorrow, and how all the paintings and all the parents and all the prophets under heaven could not interfere. He spoke close above Betty’s ear and several times he tried to get her to turn and look at him. But she did not; she had gone even paler than she had been before, and as Lady Wallingford took the first step towards the door she too began to turn towards it. She twisted herself suddenly out of Jonathan’s arm and she said nothing in reply to the entreaties, persuasions and commands which he continued to address to her. Richard thought her face as she did so was very like another face he had seen; the identification of that other troubled him for a moment and then was suddenly present—it was Lester’s when he had last seen it, Lester’s when she was dead. The common likeness of the dead was greater than any difference between their living faces; they were both citizens of a remoter town than this London, and the other town was in this room. He saw beyond Betty, Lady Wallingford, who had walked across the room and was looking back at Betty from the door, and her face, though it was not that of the dead, was like a hard cliff in the world of the dead, or like a building, if the dead had buildings, a house or a temple of some different and disastrous stone. The whole ordinary room became only an imitation of a room; Jonathan and he were ghosts in a ghostly chamber, the realities were the man in the cleft of the rock and the rising beetles, and the dead face of Betty, and the living face—but in what way living?—of her tyrant. Even while he shivered in a sudden bleakness, Betty had disengaged herself from Jonathan and gone over to her mother. Lady Wallingford opened the door. She said to Betty, “We will go to Holborn.” She motioned her daughter before her; they went out. The two men heard the shutting of the outer door.
They looked at each other. With that departure the room became again a room, and no more the outskirts of another world. Richard drew a breath and glanced again at the painting. It seemed to him now impossible to miss its actuality. Seen as human beings, those shapes had been motionless; seen as
beetles, they were already in motion and on the point of flight. The painting lived, as the Mona Lisa does, in the moment of beginning, in the mathematical exactitude of beginning. Yet now Richard uncertainly felt more; there was an ambiguity in it, for the shapes might be either. That was its great, apparently unexpected, and certainly unwanted, success: men who were beetles, beetles who were men; insects who had just been men, men who had just become insects. Metamorphosis was still in them. But could he then, he wondered, still gazing, think of them the other way, insects who had just become men, men who had just been insects? why not? Could humanity be living out of them?—some miracle in process? animality made newly rational? and their motion the rising into erect man? and the stretched arm the sign and power that called them?
He looked along the arm; his eyes rose to the face that ruled and called them? He saw it was impossible. That blank face could never work miracles; or if it could, then only miracles of lowering and loss. He could not persuade himself that it was growing into power; the metempsychosis there, if any had been, was done. The distance in the cleft behind, which he now clearly saw, as if the walls of it palely shone with their own light, held no promise of a lordlier change. There was no life there but that of rock—“tutto di pietra di color ferrigno—all iron-hued stone.” What other life that stone might hold in itself, the life in the woman’s face by the door, the life that had seemed to impinge on the room, could not be known by a face that had lost understanding. And then he remembered that this was but the backward-looking, the false, the devised face. What might the true face be that looked away down the cleft, between the walls, to the end of the corridor, if there was an end? That indeed might know more, much and very terribly more.