The Tower of Oblivion

by Oliver Onions

I don't really think that he had the least desire to show us his pictures. The pictures had served their turn handsomely enough already. He wanted to remain under the apple tree, with Madge and myself there since we must be there, but anyway with Jennie opposite to him, eating his strawberries and jam, occasionally not knowing which way to look, the possession on which his twofold heart was set, the lovely and precious godsend he had missed once but would see us all with our throats cut rather than not clasp her to his bosom in the end.

So we sat there over our empty cups, with the wasps struggling in the jam and Coco harping on the wires of his cage, but still obstinately refusing to sing "Quand je bois." Jennie got up to give him a piece of sugar, and he cocked his yellow upside-down eye at her and showed the ribbed black tongue inside his hook of a beak. Were I a painter I should paint the picture she made against the shrill yellow of the broom, with the sun full on her white summer frock, her gleaming hair, and the sun-loving bird with his head on one side watching her. "Mind his beak," Derry called; and she smiled over her shoulder, as if his mere voice were so much that she must turn her eyes whatever it said. Then she returned to the table, but not before she had plucked a sprig of genet and put it in her breast. It lay at the pit of her stately throat like a dropped blossom at the plinth of a column.

"But what about the pictures?" Madge suddenly said. "We came here to see pictures, didn't we?"

"Then that means a trail upstairs," said Derry, springing up. "Carefully through the kitchen, Mrs Aird; it's always as dark as the pit after you've been sitting out here. Perhaps I'd better go first."

He led the way through the kitchen, up the bare polished stairs, and into his room.

He cannot have had any great wish to show them; otherwise they would have been set out, or at least ready to hand. As it was he had to rummage for them in his single cupboard, selecting some, rejecting others. He showed a dozen or more of them, mostly canvas on the stretchers, but a few watercolours among them; and I fancy, if the truth must be told, that Madge was just a shade disappointed. I think she had hoped for jazz and lightning and something to go with her drawing-room cushions. Nor did I myself quite know what to make of those pictures. The first impression of them I had was a kind of—let me say datelessness; I can't think of a better word. All were landscapes, the largest of them not more than a couple of feet by eighteen inches; and at first he set them up one after another rather negligently. But as Madge began to question him his manner rather curiously changed. That preternatural skill that he had shown for two whole afternoons seemed to drop from him. He seemed to halt a little, to take risks, to advance warily into deeper water. If Mrs Aird really wished to know, then he was sincerely ready to explain. And he began to take me, for one, through the unsuspected intricacies of what at a first glance appeared to be a few casual brush-marks on the flat.

"I dare say I'm all wrong—I feel rather an ass talking about it," he said diffidently, "but I'll try to tell you. I mean I came across a fellow one day just outside Pleudihen, and he was painting what he called a Romantic Landscape. I asked him what a Romantic Landscape was, and he was just a bit stuffy about it. 'This that I'm painting,' he said. 'But why can't you paint just a landscape?' I said. 'Because I'm doing a Romantic one and I can't do two things at once,' he said. 'What are you doing it for?' I asked him. 'The Salon,' he said. 'No, but I mean why are you doing it?' I said. 'I suppose because I belong to the Romantic School,' says he.... Well, there you are, Mrs Aird. What I mean is that he was painting it because he belonged to a school that did paint that sort of thing. If he'd belonged to another school he'd have painted something different, I suppose. So of course that set me thinking a bit."

"I suppose so," said Madge, quite out of her depth.

"So I said to him, 'What do you want to belong to a school at all for?' 'Everybody does,' says he. 'I should have thought that was all the more reason why you shouldn't,' says I. 'Oh, if you're a blooming genius!' he said ... a bit rotten of him, I thought, but he was years older than I. So I rather let myself go, I'm afraid. I picked up the nearest leaf. 'Look here,' I said to him, 'this thing's a leaf, just a leaf. It's a certain colour and a certain shape and certain other things; the point is it's itself and nothing else; and neither you nor I can alter it, sir' (I told you he was years older than I). 'The light hits it there, and only one possible thing can happen; it hits it there, where the direction alters, and only another thing can happen. In another minute the light will have changed, and a quite different set of things will have happened. Everything there is happens to that leaf in the course of a day, and if you know all about that leaf you know all about everything. And if you can paint it you can paint all the leaves in the world.' I hope I didn't seem too rude, but that's what I said to him."

I had moved to the window. He was talking with a mixture of diffidence and warmth, on a subject I had never heard him on before, and yet it seemed to me that I had heard something strangely like it all before.