Unfinished Portrait

There was silence.

‘After all,’ she said, ‘it’s natural. If a cinder jumps out of a fire and burns a dog, he’s frightened of the fire in future. He never knows when another cinder might come. It’s a form of intelligence, really. The complete fool thinks a fire is just something kind and warm—he doesn’t know about burning or cinders.’

‘So that really,’ I said, ‘it’s the possibility of—happiness you won’t face.’

It sounded queer as I said it, and yet I knew that it wasn’t really as strange as it sounded. I know something about nerves and mind. Three of my best friends were shell-shocked in the war. I know myself what it is for a man to be physically maimed—I know just what it can do to him. I know, too, that one can be mentally maimed. The damage can’t be seen when the wound is healed—but it’s there. There’s a weak spot—a flaw—you’re crippled and not whole.

I said to her: ‘All that will pass with time.’ But I said it with assurance I did not feel. Because superficial healing wasn’t going to be any good. The scar had gone deep.

‘You won’t take one risk,’ I went on. ‘But you will take another—a simply colossal one.’

She said less calmly, with a touch of eagerness:

‘But that’s entirely different—entirely. It’s when you know what a thing’s like that you won’t risk it. An unknown risk—there’s something rather alluring about that—something adventurous. After all, death might be anything—’

It was the first time the actual word had been spoken between us. Death …

And then, as though for the first time a natural curiosity stirred in her, she turned her head slightly and asked:

‘How did you know?’

‘I don’t quite profess to be able to tell,’ I confessed. ‘I’ve been through—well, something, myself. And I suppose I knew that way.’

She said:

‘I see.’

She displayed no interest in what my experience might have been, and I think it was at that moment that I vowed myself to her service. I’d had so much, you see, of the other thing. Womanly sympathy and tenderness. My need—though I didn’t know it—was not to be given—but to give.

There wasn’t any tenderness in Celia—any sympathy. She’d squandered all that—and wasted it. She had been, as she saw herself, stupid about it. She’d been too unhappy herself to have any pity left for others. That new hard line about her mouth was a tribute to the amount of suffering she had endured. Her understanding was quick—she realized in a moment that to me, too, ‘things had happened’. We were on a par. She had no pity for herself, and she wasted no pity on me. My misfortune was, to her, simply the reason of my guessing something which on the face of it was seemingly unguessable.

She was, I saw in that moment, a child. Her real world was the world that surrounded herself. She had gone back deliberately to a childish world, finding there refuge from the world’s cruelty.

And that attitude of hers was tremendously stimulating to me. It was what for the last ten years I had been needing. It was, you see, a call to action.

Well, I acted. My one fear was leaving her to herself. I didn’t leave her to herself. I stuck to her like the proverbial leech. She walked down with me to the town amiably enough. She had plenty of common sense. She realized that her purpose was, for the moment, frustrated. She didn’t abandon it—she merely postponed it. I knew that without her saying a word.

I’m not going into details—this isn’t a chronicle of such things. There’s no need to describe the quaint little Spanish town, or the meal we had together at her hotel, or the way I had my luggage secretly conveyed from my hotel to the one she was staying at.

No, I’m dealing only with the essentials. I knew that I’d got to stick to her till something happened—till in some way she broke down and surrendered.

As I say, I stayed with her, close by her side. When she went to her room I said:

‘I’ll give you ten minutes—then I’m coming in.’

I didn’t dare give her longer. You see, her room was on the fourth floor, and she might override that ‘consideration for others’ that was part of her upbringing and embarrass the hotel manager by jumping from one of his windows instead of jumping from the cliff.

Well, I went back. She was in bed, sitting up, her pale gold hair combed back from her face. I don’t think she saw anything odd in what we were doing. I’m sure I didn’t. What the hotel thought, I don’t know. If they knew that I entered her room at ten o’clock that night and left it at seven the next morning, they would have jumped, I suppose, to the one and only conclusion. But I couldn’t bother about that.

I was out to save a life, and I couldn’t bother about a mere reputation.

Well, I sat there, on her bed, and we talked.

We talked all night.

A strange night—I’ve never known a night like it.

I didn’t talk to her about her trouble, whatever it was. Instead we started at the beginning—the mauve irises on the wallpaper, and the lambs in the field, and the valley down by the station where the primroses were …

After a while, it was she who talked, not I. I had ceased to exist for her save as a kind of human recording machine that was there to be talked to.

She talked as you might talk to yourself—or to God. Not, you understand, with any heat or passion. Just sheer remembrance, passing from one unrelated incident to another. The building up of a life—a kind of bridge of significant incidents.

It’s an odd question, when you come to think of it, the things we choose to remember. For choice there must be, make it as unconscious as you like. Think back yourself—take any year of your childhood. You will remember perhaps five—six incidents. They weren’t important, probably; why have you remembered them out of those three hundred and sixty-five days? Some of them didn’t even mean much to you at the time. And yet, somehow, they’ve persisted. They’ve gone with you into these later years …

It is from that night that I say I got my inside vision of Celia. I can write about her from the standpoint, as I said, of God … I’m going to endeavour to do so.

She told me, you see, all the things that mattered and that didn’t matter. She wasn’t trying to make a story of it.

No—but I wanted to! I seemed to catch glimpses of a pattern that she couldn’t see.

It was seven o’clock when I left her. She had turned over on her side at last and gone to sleep like a child … The danger was over.

It was as though the burden had been taken from her shoulders and laid on mine. She was safe …

Later in the morning I took her down to the boat and saw her off.

And that’s when it happened. The thing, I mean, that seems to me to embody the whole thing …

Perhaps I’m wrong … Perhaps it was only an ordinary trivial incident …

Anyway I won’t write it down now …

Not until I’ve had my shot at being God and either failed or succeeded.

Tried getting her on canvas in this new unfamiliar medium … Words …

Strung together words …

No brushes, no tubes of colour—none of the dear old familiar stuff.

Portrait in four dimensions, because, in your craft, Mary, there’s time as well as space …

BOOK II (#ulink_b3d6aa73-e256-58a8-ac42-71f08917ec4e)

Canvas (#ulink_b3d6aa73-e256-58a8-ac42-71f08917ec4e)

‘Set up the canvas. Here’s a subject to hand.’