________________________________________________
_ It was in the train that I learnt of his death. Although a very
greedy eater of literature, I can only enjoy reading when I have
little time for reading. Give me three hours of absolute leisure,
with nothing to do but read, and I instantly become almost
incapable of the act. So it is always on railway journeys, and so
it was that evening. I was in the middle of Wordsworth's
Excursion; I positively gloated over it, wondering why I should
have allowed a mere rumour that it was dull to prevent me from
consuming it earlier in my life. But do you suppose I could
continue with Wordsworth in the train? I could not. I stared out
of the windows; I calculated the speed of the train by my watch; I
thought of my future and my past; I drew forth my hopes, examined
them, polished them, and put them back again; I forgave myself for
my sins; and I dreamed of the exciting conquest of a beautiful and
brilliant woman that I should one day achieve. In short, I did
everything that men habitually do under such circumstances. The
Gazette was lying folded on the seat beside me: one of the two
London evening papers that a man of taste may peruse without
humiliating himself. How appetizing a morsel, this sheet new and
smooth from the press, this sheet written by an ironic,
understanding, small band of men for just a few thousand persons
like me, ruthlessly scornful of the big circulations and the idols
of the people! If the Gazette and its sole rival ceased to appear,
I do believe that my existence and many similar existences would
wear a different colour. Could one dine alone in Jermyn Street or
Panton Street without this fine piquant evening commentary on the
gross newspapers of the morning? (Now you perceive what sort of a
man I am, and you guess, rightly, that my age is between thirty
and forty.) But the train had stopped at Rugby and started again,
and more than half of my journey was accomplished, ere at length I
picked up the Gazette, and opened it with the false calm of a
drunkard who has sworn that he will not wet his lips before a
certain hour. For, well knowing from experience that I should
suffer acute ennui in the train, I had, when buying the Gazette at
Euston, taken oath that I would not even glance at it till after
Rugby; it is always the final hour of these railway journeys that
is the nethermost hell.
The second thing that I saw in the Gazette (the first was of
course the 'Entremets' column of wit, humour, and parody, very
uneven in its excellence) was the death of Simon Fuge. There was
nearly a column about it, signed with initials, and the subheading
of the article ran, 'Sudden death of a great painter'. That was
characteristic of the Gazette. That Simon Fuge was indeed a great
painter is now admitted by most dilettantes, though denied by a
few. But to the great public he was not one of the few great
names. To the great public he was just a medium name. Ten to one
that in speaking of him to a plain person you would feel compelled
to add: 'The painter, you know,' and the plain person would
respond: 'Oh yes,' falsely pretending that he was perfectly
familiar with the name. Simon Fuge had many friends on the press,
and it was solely owing to the loyalty of these friends in the
matter of obituary notices that the great public heard more of
Simon Fuge in the week after his death than it had heard of him
during the thirty-five years of his life. It may be asked: Why, if
he had so many and such loyal friends on the press, these friends
did not take measures to establish his reputation before he died?
The answer is that editors will not allow journalists to praise a
living artist much in excess of the esteem in which the public
holds him; they are timid. But when a misunderstood artist is dead
the editors will put no limit on laudation. I am not on the press,
but it happens that I know the world.
Of all the obituary notices of Simon Fuge, the Gazette's was the
first. Somehow the Gazette had obtained exclusive news of the
little event, and some one high up on the Gazette's staff had a
very exalted notion indeed of Fuge, and must have known him
personally. Fuge received his deserts as a painter in that column
of print. He was compared to Sorolla y Bastida for vitality; the
morbidezza of his flesh-tints was stated to be unrivalled even by
--I forget the name, painting is not my speciality. The writer
blandly inquired why examples of Fuge's work were to be seen in
the Luxembourg, at Vienna, at Florence, at Dresden; and not, for
instance, at the Tate Gallery, or in the Chantrey collection. The
writer also inquired, with equal blandness, why a painter who had
been on the hanging committee of the Societe Nationale des Beaux
Arts at Paris should not have been found worthy to be even an
A.R.A. in London. In brief, old England 'caught it', as occurred
somewhere or other most nights in the columns of the Gazette. Fuge
also received his deserts as a man. And the Gazette did not
conceal that he had not been a man after the heart of the British
public. He had been too romantically and intensely alive for that.
The writer gave a little penportrait of him. It was very good,
recalling his tricks of manner, his unforgettable eyes, and his
amazing skill in talking about himself and really interesting
everybody in himself. There was a special reference to one of
Fuge's most dramatic recitals--a narration of a night spent in a
boat on Ham Lake with two beautiful girls, sisters, natives of the
Five Towns, where Fuge was born. Said the obituarist: 'Those two
wonderful creatures who played so large a part in Simon Fuge's
life.'
This death was a shock to me. It took away my ennui for the rest
of the journey. I too had known Simon Fuge. That is to say, I had
met him once, at a soiree, and on that single occasion, as luck
had it, he had favoured the company with the very narration to
which the Gazette contributor referred. I remembered well the
burning brilliance of his blue-black eyes, his touching assurance
that all of us were necessarily interested in his adventures, and
the extremely graphic and convincing way in which he reconstituted
for us the nocturnal scene on Ham Lake--the two sisters, the boat,
the rustle of trees, the lights on shore, and his own difficulty
in managing the oars, one of which he lost for half-an-hour and
found again. It was by such details as that about the oar that,
with a tint of humour, he added realism to the romantic quality of
his tales. He seemed to have no reticences concerning himself.
Decidedly he allowed things to be understood...! Yes, his was a
romantic figure, the figure of one to whom every day, and every
hour of the day, was coloured by the violence of his passion for
existence. His pictures had often an unearthly beauty, but for him
they were nothing but faithful renderings of what he saw.
My mind dwelt on those two beautiful sisters. Those two beautiful
sisters appealed to me more than anything else in the Gazette's
obituary. Surely--Simon Fuge had obviously been a man whose
emotional susceptibility and virile impulsiveness must have opened
the door for him to multifarious amours--but surely he had not
made himself indispensable to both sisters simultaneously. Surely
even he had not so far forgotten that Ham Lake was in the middle
of a country called England, and not the ornamental water in the
Bois de Boulogne! And yet.... The delicious possibility of
ineffable indiscretions on the part of Simon Fuge monopolized my
mind till the train stopped at Knype, and I descended.
Nevertheless, I think I am a serious and fairly insular
Englishman. It is truly astonishing how a serious person can be
obsessed by trifles that, to speak mildly, do not merit sustained
attention.
I wondered where Ham Lake was. I knew merely that it lay somewhere
in the environs of the Five Towns. What put fuel on the fire of my
interest in the private affairs of the dead painter was the
slightly curious coincidence that on the evening of the news of
his death I should be travelling to the Five Towns--and for the
first time in my life. Here I was at Knype, which, as I had
gathered from Bradshaw, and from my acquaintance Brindley, was the
traffic centre of the Five Towns. _
Read next: PART XII - THE DEATH OF SIMON FUGE: CHAPTER II
Read previous: PART XI - FROM ONE GENERATION TO ANOTHER: CHAPTER II
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