________________________________________________
_ AT that moment we were interrupted by the appearance of
Madame Coutras, who had been paying visits. She came in,
like a ship in full sail, an imposing creature, tall and stout,
with an ample bust and an obesity girthed in alarmingly by
straight-fronted corsets. She had a bold hooked nose and three chins.
She held herself upright. She had not yielded for an instant
to the enervating charm of the tropics, but contrariwise was
more active, more worldly, more decided than anyone in a
temperate clime would have thought it possible to be. She was
evidently a copious talker, and now poured forth a breathless
stream of anecdote and comment. She made the conversation we
had just had seem far away and unreal.
Presently Dr. Coutras turned to me.
"I still have in my bureau the picture that Strickland
gave me," he said. "Would you like to see it?"
"Willingly."
We got up, and he led me on to the verandah which surrounded
his house. We paused to look at the gay flowers that rioted
in his garden.
"For a long time I could not get out of my head the
recollection of the extraordinary decoration with which
Strickland had covered the walls of his house," he said
reflectively.
I had been thinking of it, too. It seemed to me that here
Strickland had finally put the whole expression of himself.
Working silently, knowing that it was his last chance, I
fancied that here he must have said all that he knew of life
and all that he divined. And I fancied that perhaps here he
had at last found peace. The demon which possessed him was
exorcised at last, and with the completion of the work, for
which all his life had been a painful preparation, rest
descended on his remote and tortured soul. He was willing to
die, for he had fulfilled his purpose.
"What was the subject?" I asked.
"I scarcely know. It was strange and fantastic. It was a
vision of the beginnings of the world, the Garden of Eden,
with Adam and Eve -- que sais-je? -- it was a hymn to the
beauty of the human form, male and female, and the praise of
Nature, sublime, indifferent, lovely, and cruel. It gave you
an awful sense of the infinity of space and of the endlessness
of time. Because he painted the trees I see about me every
day, the cocoa-nuts, the banyans, the flamboyants, the
alligator-pears, I have seen them ever since differently, as
though there were in them a spirit and a mystery which I am
ever on the point of seizing and which forever escapes me.
The colours were the colours familiar to me, and yet they
were different. They had a significance which was all their own.
And those nude men and women. They were of the earth, and yet
apart from it. They seemed to possess something of the clay
of which they were created, and at the same time something divine.
You saw man in the nakedness of his primeval instincts,
and you were afraid, for you saw yourself."
Dr. Coutras shrugged his shoulders and smiled.
"You will laugh at me. I am a materialist, and I am a gross,
fat man -- Falstaff, eh? -- the lyrical mode does not become me.
I make myself ridiculous. But I have never seen painting
which made so deep an impression upon me. Tenez, I had just
the same feeling as when I went to the Sistine Chapel in Rome.
There too I was awed by the greatness of the man who
had painted that ceiling. It was genius, and it was
stupendous and overwhelming. I felt small and insignificant.
But you are prepared for the greatness of Michael Angelo.
Nothing had prepared me for the immense surprise of these
pictures in a native hut, far away from civilisation, in a
fold of the mountain above Taravao. And Michael Angelo is
sane and healthy. Those great works of his have the calm of
the sublime; but here, notwithstanding beauty, was something
troubling. I do not know what it was. It made me uneasy.
It gave me the impression you get when you are sitting next door
to a room that you know is empty, but in which, you know not
why, you have a dreadful consciousness that notwithstanding
there is someone. You scold yourself; you know it is only
your nerves -- and yet, and yet... In a little while it is
impossible to resist the terror that seizes you, and you are
helpless in the clutch of an unseen horror. Yes; I confess I
was not altogether sorry when I heard that those strange
masterpieces had been destroyed."
"Destroyed?" I cried.
" Mais oui; did you not know?"
"How should I know? It is true I had never heard of this work;
but I thought perhaps it had fallen into the hands of a
private owner. Even now there is no certain list of
Strickland's paintings."
"When he grew blind he would sit hour after hour in those two
rooms that he had painted, looking at his works with sightless
eyes, and seeing, perhaps, more than he had ever seen in his
life before. Ata told me that he never complained of his
fate, he never lost courage. To the end his mind remained
serene and undisturbed. But he made her promise that when she
had buried him -- did I tell you that I dug his grave with my
own hands, for none of the natives would approach the infected
house, and we buried him, she and I, sewn up in three
pareos joined together, under the mango-tree -- he made her
promise that she would set fire to the house and not leave it
till it was burned to the ground and not a stick remained."
I did not speak for a while, for I was thinking. Then I said:
"He remained the same to the end, then."
"Do you understand? I must tell you that I thought it my duty
to dissuade her."
"Even after what you have just said?"
"Yes; for I knew that here was a work of genius, and I did not
think we had the right to deprive the world of it. But Ata
would not listen to me. She had promised. I would not stay
to witness the barbarous deed, and it was only afterwards that
I heard what she had done. She poured paraffin on the dry
floors and on the pandanus-mats, and then she set fire. In a
little while nothing remained but smouldering embers, and a
great masterpiece existed no longer.
"I think Strickland knew it was a masterpiece. He had
achieved what he wanted. His life was complete. He had made
a world and saw that it was good. Then, in pride and
contempt, he destroyed, it."
"But I must show you my picture," said Dr. Coutras, moving on.
"What happened to Ata and the child?"
They went to the Marquesas. She had relations there. I have
heard that the boy works on one of Cameron's schooners.
They say he is very like his father in appearance."
At the door that led from the verandah to the doctor's
consulting-room, he paused and smiled.
"It is a fruit-piece. You would think it not a very suitable
picture for a doctor's consulting-room, but my wife will not
have it in the drawing-room. She says it is frankly obscene."
"A fruit-piece!" I exclaimed in surprise.
We entered the room, and my eyes fell at once on the picture.
I looked at it for a long time.
It was a pile of mangoes, bananas, oranges, and I know not
what. and at first sight it was an innocent picture enough.
It would have been passed in an exhibition of the Post-
Impressionists by a careless person as an excellent but not
very remarkable example of the school; but perhaps afterwards
it would come back to his recollection, and he would wonder
why. I do not think then he could ever entirely forget it.
The colours were so strange that words can hardly tell what a
troubling emotion they gave. They were sombre blues, opaque
like a delicately carved bowl in lapis lazuli, and yet with a
quivering lustre that suggested the palpitation of mysterious
life; there were purples, horrible like raw and putrid flesh,
and yet with a glowing, sensual passion that called up vague
memories of the Roman Empire of Heliogabalus; there were reds,
shrill like the berries of holly -- one thought of Christmas
in England, and the snow, the good cheer, and the pleasure of
children -- and yet by some magic softened till they had the
swooning tenderness of a dove's breast; there were deep
yellows that died with an unnatural passion into a green as
fragrant as the spring and as pure as the sparkling water of a
mountain brook. Who can tell what anguished fancy made these
fruits? They belonged to a Polynesian garden of the Hesperides.
There was something strangely alive in them, as though
they were created in a stage of the earth's dark history
when things were not irrevocably fixed to their forms.
They were extravagantly luxurious. They were heavy with
tropical odours. They seemed to possess a sombre passion of
their own. It was enchanted fruit, to taste which might open
the gateway to God knows what secrets of the soul and to
mysterious palaces of the imagination. They were sullen with
unawaited dangers, and to eat them might turn a man to beast
or god. All that was healthy and natural, all that clung to
happy relationships and the simple joys of simple men, shrunk
from them in dismay; and yet a fearful attraction was in them,
and, like the fruit on the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and
Evil they were terrible with the possibilities of the Unknown.
At last I turned away. I felt that Strickland had kept his
secret to the grave.
" Voyons, Rene, mon ami," came the loud, cheerful voice of
Madame Coutras, "what are you doing all this time? Here are
the aperitifs. Ask Monsieur if he will not drink a
little glass of Quinquina Dubonnet."
" Volontiers, Madame," I said, going out on to the verandah.
The spell was broken. _
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