“I’d have bet any amount you were an out-of-work writer, or a young man slung out of a respectable house for reading poetry in church. You don’t look like the sort of fool who gets messed up by women, though almost any man is that kind of fool.”
René tried to protest against that, and to point out that he had been married and therefore serious in his folly, if folly it were. Kilner only grunted at him.
“H’m!” he said. “Looks as if you’d been in the habit of taking things seriously simply because they happened to yourself. That’s idiotic. Most things that happen are dirty little jokes, opportunities fumbled because one isn’t fit to handle them, or situations forced out of greed or conceit, or injured vanity, or mere pigheadedness. There are divine things happen: doing a good bit of drawing is one of them, finding a friend is another, falling in love is another. Those things happen simply because you can’t help doing them, because you’d die one of many deaths if you didn’t. Once you’ve done one of those things, nothing else matters. You have something in you that you must keep alive. Let the others make the world hideous and vulgar and untidy. It is not your affair. If they won’t or can’t love what you love, then they are not for you and you are not for them. Don’t you think?”
René could find nothing to say. He found it so absorbing to watch Kilner, to listen to his monologue delivered in a voice of wonderful sweetness that seemed always to be trembling into laughter. The zest, the humor of the man thrilled through him, and made him feel that all his life was full of promise, rich and ripe with romance.
Kilner began to tell him about painting and painters, about Rembrandt and Van Eyck and Cranach, happy Cranach who could paint women without being either sensual or sentimental, and Dürer and Holbein and della Francesca, and how he himself, the son of a mason in Buckinghamshire, had always painted, at first without taste and without purpose, from sheer delight in objects, their form and their color, and how little by little he had learned to see the beauty shining through them and to wish to have that beauty also shining through his pictures and drawings. And how he had come to London to learn his art, financed by rich people near his home; and how he had assumed that every man who touched brush and paint had also desired to render the shining beauty that used all things for its dwelling-place; and how incidentally he had suffered from arrogance and blown vanity, though never losing sight of his one object; and how he had been taught a certain kind of drawing, to be accurate in imitation, and then again accurate and again accurate; and how he had quarreled with those of his teachers who had wished him not to use the power of accuracy they taught him, but to regard it as in itself an end; quarreled with his fellow-students, with his patrons, with his family, with exhibiting societies, with—apparently—everybody, because he could not learn to keep his opinions to himself or conceive that men who painted vilely with constant sacrifice of beauty to their desire to please, did so because that was how they saw things and how they liked things and loved them so far as they could love at all. And he told René of many love affairs he had had, some casual, some unhappy and desperate, some light-hearted and gay, and one ecstatic though it had lasted only for five weeks in spring. He described with a vivid power how he and she lay in the grass in Richmond Park and the soft air above them was alive with light, quivering up to the blue where the clouds swam and slowly faded out of form and being and other clouds came; and near them was an almond-tree in blossom, and above them shone the gummy buds of the beeches; crisp to the touch was the grass, moist and cool was the earth. And he touched her white arm and she trembled. He trembled too. And she turned her face toward him with a sweet trouble and wonder in her eyes and they kissed.
“That ended in tears, my tears and hers. I was too coarse for her, I think; too violent. She was very delicate and beautiful.”
After a long silence, René said:
“I have had nothing in my life but foolishness.”
“There’s no harm in that,” said Kilner. “It’s bitterness that kills. When shall I see you again?”
“Do you want to?” René was startled into asking.