“It is not easy,” he said, “to look back into one’s own past, especially when one believed that all traces had been obliterated.”
“No,” she said.
He looked at everything without touching anything. He breathed in slowly the smells of his former life.
He was terribly aware of the framed pictures and the canvases stacked against the far wall, face-in.
“Perhaps,” he said, “it is as well to leave it all in the past.”
She closed the door behind her back and he noticed that the window too was clean and was letting in a great deal of light from the sunny day outside.
“But then,” he said, “I will be haunted by it forever. I think perhaps I spoke the truth yesterday. And they are just paintings, when all is said and done.”
He walked forward, touched one of the picture frames, hesitated, drew in a breath, and lifted and turned it to set against the wall to one side.
It had been his mother’s favorite—it had hung in her boudoir. It was of the small humpbacked bridge that spanned the stream at the foot of the formal gardens to the east of the house and depicted bridge and water and overhanging trees. He turned another and set it beside the first. It was of the old gamekeeper’s hut in the woods south of the Palladian bridge, showing the weathered wood of the building, the worn path to its door, the shining, smooth old stone that formed its door sill, the trees surrounding it. He turned another.
By the time he had finished he had them all turned over, the heavier pictures in their frames at the back, the canvases propped in front of them in such a way that he could see all of them. There were the temple folly painted from across the water, one of the boats moored in the reeds, the rose arbor, and numerous other scenes, almost all of them within the park of Alvesley. There were watercolors and oils.
He had no idea how much time had passed since he began. But he became aware suddenly that Anne had not moved from her position against the door and that she had not spoken a word. He drew a deep breath and looked at her.
“They really were quite good,” he said.
“Were?”She gazed steadily at him.
“I could see,” he said, “the essential oneness of all things. I could see that the bridge connected the cultivated park and the wilder wilderness walk but that really they were all one. I could see that people had walked across the bridge, that water flowed beneath it, essential to all. I could see that the boat in this other picture had been rowed by people but that it was only a part of everything, not in any way making the people superior. That old hut was part of the woods and would return to them eventually when people were done with it. The roses were carefully cultivated, but their power was stronger than the hand that planted and pruned them—and yet that hand was a part of it all too, creating order and beauty out of wildness, which is what human nature impels us to do. Am I babbling? Am I making sense?”
“Yes,” she said. “And I know that this was your vision, Sydnam. I can see it in the paintings. They throb with something greater than themselves.”
“They were really quite good,” he said with a sigh.
“You have said it again,” she said. “Theywerequite good. Are they not good in the present tense? They amaze me. They smite me here.” She touched her hand to her heart.
“They are the work of a boy,” he said. “What amazes me is that they are not nearly as good as I remember them.”
“Sydnam—” she said, but he held up his hand.
“People change,” he said. “Ihave changed. I am not this boy any longer. I had not realized that about artistic vision. I have thought it a static thing. What was it you said yesterday? Something about the vision adapting?”
Perhaps you have allowed the vision to master you instead of bending it to your will.He could remember her exact words.
“Yes,” she said. “I thought perhaps it would if you gave it a chance.”
“You were talking about my physical condition,” he said. “But it applies to age and time too. My age and experience would have exerted an influence over the vision.”
“How would you paint differently now?” she asked.
“This boy,” he said, indicating the paintings with one sweep of his arm, “was a romantic. He thought that it was beauty that bound everything together. And for him it was true. Life had been beautiful for him. He was very young. He knew very little of life. He saw beauty but he did not feel any true passion. How could he? He did notknow. He had not really encountered the force of beauty’s opposite.”
“Are you more cynical now, then?” she asked him.
“Cynical?” He frowned. “No, not that. I know that there is an ugly side of life—and not just human life. I know that everything is not simply beautiful. I am not a romantic as this boy was. But I am not a cynic either. There is something enduring in all of life, Anne, something tough.Something.Something terribly weak yet incredibly powerful. God, perhaps, though I hesitate to use that word to describe what it is that holds all together since the mind immediately creates a picture of a superhuman being. That is not what I mean.”
“Love?” she suggested.
“Love?” He frowned in thought.
“I remember something Lady Rosthorn said that day she and David were out painting on the cliffs when you came by,” she said. “It struck me powerfully at the time and I committed it to memory. Let me see.” She closed her eyes and thought for a moment. “Yes, this is it.The real meaning of things lies deep down and the real meaning of things is always beautiful because it is simply love.”
