A Likely Story

by William De Morgan

The Picture's tale. It was so well painted—that was why it could hear four hundred years ago. How its painter hungered and thirsted for its original, and vice versa. How old January hid in a spy-hole, to watch May, and saw it all. Of Pope Innocent's penetration. Of certain bells, unwelcome ones. How two innamorati tried to part without a kiss, and failed. Nevertheless assassins stopped it when it had only just begun. But Giacinto got at January's throat. How the picture was framed, and hung where May could only see it by twisting. Of the dungeon below her, where Giacinto might be. How January dug at May with a walking-staff. How the picture was in abeyance, but loved a firefly; then was interred in furniture, and three centuries slipped by. How it sold for six fifty, and was sent to London, to a picture-restorer, which is how it comes into the tale. How Mr. Pelly woke up.

You ask me to tell you what is earliest in my recollection. I will do so, and will also endeavour to narrate as much as I can remember of the life of the lady I was painted from; whose memory, were she now living, would be identical with my own.

The very first image I can recall is that of my artist, at work. He is the first human being I ever saw, as well as the first visible object I can call to mind. He is at work—as I am guided to understand by what I have learned since—upon my right eye. It is a very dim image indeed at the outset, but as he works it becomes clearer, and at last I see him quite plainly.

He is a dark young man, with hair of one thickness all over, like a black door-mat, and a beautiful olive skin. As he turns round I think to myself how beautiful his neck is at the back under the hair, and that I should like to kiss it. But that is impossible. I can recall my pleasure at his fixed gaze, and constant resolute endeavour. Naturally I want him to paint my other eye. Then I shall see him still better.

I am not surprised at his saying nothing—for remember!—I did not know what speech was then. He had painted my mouth, only, of course, I did not know what to do with it. Needless also to say that I had not heard a word, for I had no ear at all. I have only one now, but it has heard all that has been spoken near it for four hundred years. I heard nothing then—nothing at all! I only gazed fixedly at the fascinating creature before me who was trying his best to make me beautiful too—to make me as beautiful as something that I could not see—something his eyes turned round to at intervals, something to my right and his left. What I recall most vividly now is my curiosity to know what this thing or person was that took his eyes off me at odd moments; to which he made, now and again, slight deprecatory signs and corrective movements with his left hand; from which he received some response I could not guess at, which he acknowledged by a full-spread smile of grateful recognition. But always in perfect silence, though I saw, when his brush was not in front of my incomplete eye, that his lips moved, showing his beautiful white teeth; and that he paused and listened—a thing I have learned about since—with a certain air of deference, as towards a social superior. Oh, how I longed to see this unseen being, or thing! But I was not to do so, yet awhile.

My recollection goes no farther than the fact of this young artist, working on in a strange, systematic way, quite unlike what I have since understood to be the correct method for persons of genius, until at the end of some period I cannot measure, he paints my other eye, and I rejoice in a clearer image of himself; of the huge bare room he works in; of the small window, high up, with its cage of grating against the sky; of the recess below it, in which, at the top of two steps, an old woman sits plaiting straws, and beside her a black dog, close shaved, except his head, all over. But I get no light upon the strange attraction that takes my creator's attention off me, until after a second experience, as strange as my first new-found phenomenon of sight—to wit, my hearing of sound. As he painted my ear, it came.

At first, a musical, broken murmur—then another, that mixes with it. As one rises, the other falls; then both together, or as the threads of a cascade cross and intersect in mid-air. Then a third sound, a sound with a musical ring that makes my heart leap with joy—a sound that comes back to me now, when in the early mornings of summer, I hear, through the window of this room opened outwards to let in the morning air, the voice of the little brown bird that springs high into the blue heaven, and unpacks its tiny heart in a flood of song. And then I think to myself that that is the language in which I too should have laughed, had laughter been possible to me.

For what I heard then from behind the easel I stood on as the young artist painted me was the laughter of Maddalena Raimondi, from whom he was working; whom I may describe myself as being. For ought not the name written on the frame below me to be hers also, with the date of her birth and death? Are not my eyes that I see with now hers? Is not the nostril with the lambent curve—that is what a celebrated Art-Critic has called it—hers, and the little sea-shell ear hers that heard you say, but now, that my original cannot have been more than twenty?...

More than twenty! No, indeed!—for in those days a girl of twenty was a woman. And the girl that one day a little later came round at a signal from behind the panel, to see the portrait that I now knew had received its last touch from its maker, was one who at eighteen had been threatened, driven, goaded into harness with an old Devil of high rank, to whom she had been affianced in her babyhood; and who is now, we may hope, in his proper Hell, as God has appointed. Yet it may well be he is among the Saints; for his wealth was great, and he gave freely to Holy Church. But to Maddalena, that was myself—for was I not she?—he was a Devil incarnate.

For mark you this: that all she had known I too knew, in my degree, so soon as ever I was completed. Else had I been a bad portrait. It all came to my memory at once. I remembered my happy girlhood, the strange indifference of my utter innocence when I was first told I was destined to marry the great Duke, whose vassal my father was, and how my marriage would somehow—I am, maybe, less clear about details than my original would have been—release my father from some debt or obligation to the Raimondi which otherwise would have involved the forfeiture of our old home. So ignorant was I that I rejoiced to think that I should be the means of preserving for my family the long stretches of vine-clad hills and the old Castello in the Apennines that had borne our name since the first stone was laid, centuries ago. So ignorant, innocent, indifferent—call it what you will!—that the moment I was told my destiny I went straight to Giacinto, the page, with whom I had grown from infancy, to tell him the good news, that he might rejoice too. But he would not rejoice at my bidding, and he was moody and reserved, and I wondered. I was but twelve and he thirteen. Although a girl may be older than a boy, even at those years, her eyes are not so wide open to see some things, and it may be he saw plainer than I. I know not.