第56章

He gave a gasp.It was the picture of a woman lying on a sofa, with one arm beneath her head and the other along her body; one knee was raised, and the other leg was stretched out.The pose was classic.Stroeve's head swam.It was Blanche.Grief and jealousy and rage seized him, and he cried out hoarsely; he was inarticulate; he clenched his fists and raised them threateningly at an invisible enemy.He screamed at the top of his voice.He was beside himself.He could not bear it.That was too much.He looked round wildly for some instrument; he wanted to hack the picture to pieces; it should not exist another minute.He could see nothing that would serve his purpose; he rummaged about his painting things; somehow he could not find a thing; he was frantic.At last he came upon what he sought, a large scraper, and he pounced on it with a cry of triumph.He seized it as though it were a dagger, and ran to the picture.

As Stroeve told me this he became as excited as when the incident occurred, and he took hold of a dinner-knife on the table between us, and brandished it. He lifted his arm as though to strike, and then, opening hishand, let it fall with a clatter to the ground.He looked at me with a tremulous smile.He did not speak.

"Fire away," I said.

"I don't know what happened to me.I was just going to make a great hole in the picture, I had my arm all ready for the blow, when suddenly I seemed to see it.""See what?"

"The picture.It was a work of art.I couldn't touch it.I was afraid."Stroeve was silent again, and he stared at me with his mouth open and his round blue eyes starting out of his head.

"It was a great, a wonderful picture.I was seized with awe.I had nearly committed a dreadful crime.I moved a little to see it better, and my foot knocked against the scraper.I shuddered."I really felt something of the emotion that had caught him.I was strangely impressed.It was as though I were suddenly transported into a world in which the values were changed.I stood by, at a loss, like a stranger in a land where the reactions of man to familiar things are all different from those he has known.Stroeve tried to talk to me about the picture, but he was incoherent, and I had to guess at what he meant.Strickland had burst the bonds that hitherto had held him.He had found, not himself, as the phrase goes, but a new soul with unsuspected powers.It was not only the bold simplification of the drawing which showed so rich and so singular a personality; it was not only the painting, though the flesh was painted with a passionate sensuality which had in it something miraculous; it was not only the solidity, so that you felt extraordinarily the weight of the body; there was also a spirituality, troubling and new, which led the imagination along unsuspected ways, and suggested dim empty spaces, lit only by the eternal stars, where the soul, all naked, adventured fearful to the discovery of new mysteries.

If I am rhetorical it is because Stroeve was rhetorical.(Do we not know that man in moments of emotion expresses himself naturally in the terms of a novelette?) Stroeve was trying to express a feeling which he had never known before, and he did not know how to put it into common terms. He was like the mystic seeking to describe the ineffable.Butone fact he made clear to me; people talk of beauty lightly, and having no feeling for words, they use that one carelessly, so that it loses its force; and the thing it stands for, sharing its name with a hundred trivial objects, is deprived of dignity.They call beautiful a dress, a dog, a sermon; and when they are face to face with Beauty cannot recognise it.The false emphasis with which they try to deck their worthless thoughts blunts their susceptibilities.Like the charlatan who counterfeits a spiritual force he has sometimes felt, they lose the power they have abused.But Stroeve, the unconquerable buffoon, had a love and an understanding of beauty which were as honest and sincere as was his own sincere and honest soul.It meant to him what God means to the believer, and when he saw it he was afraid.

"What did you say to Strickland when you saw him?" "I asked him to come with me to Holland."I was dumbfounded.I could only look at Stroeve in stupid amazement.

"We both loved Blanche.There would have been room for him in my mother's house.I think the company of poor, simple people would have done his soul a great good.I think he might have learnt from them something that would be very useful to him."1

"He smiled a little.I suppose he thought me very silly.He said he had other fish to fry."I could have wished that Strickland had used some other phrase to indicate his refusal.

"He gave me the picture of Blanche."

I wondered why Strickland had done that.But I made no remark, and for some time we kept silence.

"What have you done with all your things?" I said at last.

"I got a Jew in, and he gave me a round sum for the lot.I'm taking my pictures home with me. Beside them I own nothing in the world now but a box of clothes and a few books.""I'm glad you're going home," I said.

I felt that his chance was to put all the past behind him.I hoped thatthe grief which now seemed intolerable would be softened by the lapse of time, and a merciful forgetfulness would help him to take up once more the burden of life.He was young still, and in a few years he would look back on all his misery with a sadness in which there would be something not unpleasurable.Sooner or later he would marry some honest soul in Holland, and I felt sure he would be happy.I smiled at the thought of the vast number of bad pictures he would paint before he died.

Next day I saw him off for Amsterdam.