“Listen!” I exclaimed. “I’ve no choice. None whatever! I’ve work to do, which only I can do, and I’ve got to do it. I don’t care tuppence about anything else. I’ve lived with one aim for years: to go to Paris and study under Marcel Bon. When I heard, a long time ago, that Oswald Otway, the art critic, had shown some of my work to Bon and Bon said he would take me as a pupil, I was mad with joy. I’ve lived for that. And you think I’m going to give it up! You think I’m going to throw in being an artist for the sake of what you call happiness! I don’t want to go through the world half-dead!”
Before he could say anything, I raced on:
“All you say is true enough. My parents were queer—and they brought me up in a queer way. I know it. I’ve reason to. It was made very plain when I went to school. But what’s all that to do with anything now? I’m not expecting an easy time. I know more about myself than you think. Much more. My parents were isolated. And I’m isolated—in a different way. It won’t be a picnic—I know that. You’re right about the effects of early experience. Something happens when you’re a child—and it’s years before you discover what it has done to you. I know all that. But I also know what I’ve got to do. And I care about nothing else.”
“Nothing?”
“You mean women. You think I’ll go with a lot of women when I get to Paris. Well, you’re wrong. I loathe all that. I like women, but I loathe—that. It only seems attractive when everything else deserts you.”
He said nothing and I went on to argue that I should go to Marcel Bon immediately, but, after a long discussion, we agreed to postpone my going to Paris till I was twenty-one. In the meantime, I would study at an art school in London.
During the next three years, I lunched or dined with Gurney every week and the more intimate we became, the more I was surprised by the extraordinary contrast between the lawyer and the man. The latter had remarkable knowledge of all sorts of out-of-the-way subjects—and an almost embarrassing insight into the psychology of others. So much so that it was long after his death, in 1927, that I discovered the implications of things he had told me about myself while we walked together in Richmond Park on Sunday afternoons.
These scenes from the past rose before me with such reality that I was as unaware of my actual surroundings as a man in a trance. And I should have remained unaware of them if the repeated and mechanical ringing of a bell had not startled me back to the present.
Nevertheless, for some moments, the sitting-room of this Chelsea flat seemed strange. I looked in turn at the military text-books on the shelves; at the solitary etching; at the encyclopædia in its revolving case; but the sensation of strangeness persisted and I found it difficult to believe that this had been my “home” since the outbreak of war, over five years ago.
Meanwhile, the bell continued to ring with robot regularity. I crossed to the telephone, picked up the receiver and gave my name.
It was Mervyn Maitland.
“Listen, Max! I’ve been worried about you ever since I put you into that taxi after lunch. You really did look simply ghastly at the club. I know it’s insane to telephone a sick man at four in the morning to ask how he is, but I can’t sleep for thinking about you. I stayed late at the club. What? Yes, devilish late. Four or five of us were talking about the Carol Norton murder. It’s going to be a sensation all right. One fellow said the police already have a clue. When I left the club, I went to Jimmy Letts’ place. I’m sleeping there. You know Jimmy. Oh, surely! Used to be a journalist—now at Ministry of Information—married a contortionist. But what I want to know is—are you better? That’s grand! And I didn’t wake you up? That’s grand too! Let’s meet soon. Oh, by the way, Antony Lawless knew Carol Norton. I haven’t seen him for years, but they tell me he used to take her out quite a bit. Incidentally, her photograph is in the evening paper. You haven’t seen it? I’ve been staring at it for an hour—and it does things to you. At least, it does to me. Well, look after yourself. And let me know if there’s anything I can do.”
I put down the receiver.
Only twelve hours since Mervyn put me in that taxi! . . . It was four in the morning. . . . They were all talking about the Carol Norton murder. . . . The police had a clue. . . .
Then I realised how unbelievably stupid I had been not to tell Mervyn that I knew Carol. To-morrow, or the next day, he and every one else would know that she had been the model for a nude I had painted about three years ago. The picture had fetched a remarkable price on changing hands for the second time, but the more important fact was that my agent had sold the copyright to its first purchaser, a dealer, who had disposed of reproduction rights to a printer—with the result that reproductions of the picture had been on sale in the shops for a long time, and might be still, for all I knew. It was quite certain, therefore, that I should be intimately associated with a melodramatic murder—and one in which Mervyn was very interested. And I had not told him that I knew Carol!
But nothing makes a man act so automatically as habit, and I had never discussed Carol with any one. She knew that I wanted secrecy and I am certain she told no one that we were lovers. Or almost certain.
The dominant fact in the whole situation is that I loathed my physical dependence on her. I hated her because she symbolised that servitude as no other woman had done. This was inevitable because sex, for me, has always been apostasy—profanation—a Black Mass. I know perfectly well that this is the long-term result of the revulsion felt on that Whit-Monday, when I was a boy of eight and wholly innocent. Of course I know it! But I also know that the effect of overwhelming emotional experience is not removed by logic. It is eradicated only by a deeper emotional experience, different in kind from the original one. Logic won’t deliver you from lust. Only love can do that.
But what did all this matter now?
Had I murdered Carol?
That was the issue, and I was alone with it—and should remain alone with it. Whether others would suspect me, whether I should be tried and found guilty, seemed wholly secondary. In dire emergency, you find yourself in a realm remote from humanity, ringed by principalities and powers. In dire emergency, you discover that your past—which appeared to be as fixed and defined as a frozen river—assumes an entirely new aspect, wholly related to the issue confronting you. Everything irrelevant to that issue becomes obscure; everything relevant to it is illuminated.
No greater illusion exists than the belief that the past is incapable of change—that memory is a static landscape. Memory is plastic to the mood which invokes it. We have as many pasts as we have moods.
Two days ago, it would have been impossible to imagine that Carol would dominate my thoughts—floodlighting everything I long to forget and darkening everything I love to remember. But now she so rules my mind that everything exists only in relation to her; and that is difficult to believe because, two days ago, she would not have been even a background figure in the picture of the past.
Wholly other memories would have claimed me. Perhaps the vicissitudes of my life as an artist since I went to Paris as a pupil of Marcel Bon. Or perhaps I should have relived my travels during the years between the wars; glimpsing countless faces, hearing innumerable voices. Or I might nave visualised my studio-villa at Avignon, which I bought with the legacy left me by John Gurney. That villa contains everything I treasure: my mother’s portrait by Zuter; my father’s books; his study furniture; the little blue table at which Hilda and I so often had tea on winter afternoons. It contains the collection of rare butterflies left me by Dr. Gandy—Marcel Bon’s study of the Pont Neuf, which he gave me just before he died—drawings and books given me by artists and authors. That villa epitomises everything I love to remember. It is more evocative than any diary. And it has probably been looted by the Germans.