And yet it is possible that even without this immense assistance he would have recovered fairly soon: one of the most striking sights upon a sheep-farm is the castration of the ram-lambs; they undergo their mutilation with a few little inward groans and stand as it were amazed for one or two minutes; then they start to graze again. And although they do not play that day, nor the next, after some time they do, almost as if the thing had never been done to them. In any case, after the mingled shock of travel and exhaustion was over, Richard found himself as much at home in this new house as ever he was likely to be, familiar with its hours, the arrangement of his room and the distance from this place to that, and he was not without taking pleasure from it.
During his life there, other pupils appeared from time to time – once there were as many as four together – but they usually stayed only a few months, to cram for a Beaux Arts examination; and the regular inhabitants were Monsieur and Madame Durand, Fifine the maid, and himself. It was difficult to believe that the desiccated, fussy, pedantic Monsieur Durand could ever have been a boon-companion of Mr Atherton’s youth, an habitué of the Lapin Agile and a friend of some of the best, most hopelessly disreputable painters in Paris before the ’14 war; and looking at his competent, frigid, official pictures it was difficult to believe that he had ever seen any painting since Puvis de Chavannes – difficult, that is, for one who had no experience of the chilling force of virtue. Monsieur Durand was nine parts dead from self-imposed rectitude and conscience; but he was a capable teacher of official art, and in his dry, pompous manner he was not unkind. (He looked like a piano-tuner.) Madame was less amiable, a big, strong, moustachioed woman with too great a love for economy; she was an ardent church-goer, and there were several others who looked just like her in the local charitable society. The sight of a congregation of them made one wonder how the Church had lasted so long. Both Monsieur and Madame Durand avoided any close contact with the pupils: they cultivated the high degree of formality usual in bourgeois circles in the France of that time, and Richard remained Monsieur Temple to the end.
The other permanent face in the household was that of Fifine, the maid. It was a pale, bald, waxy face with a nose, a Gothic face, a universal peasant face, shrewd and ignorant. She was employed for all duties, and Madame Durand’s all meant everything; fortunately, Fifine had been brought up in a mountain village of the dry Corbières, a little to the south, where they work fourteen hours a day to keep alive, and she was constitutionally very strong. She was not only willing but also able to clean the house, wash and iron all the laundry, prepare the food and then take a heavy two-pronged mattock and labour the kitchen-garden before dealing with the poultry and cutting the wood for the next day’s fires. She was of some age between thirty and fifty, and she spoke the harsh patois of her region more easily than French. She was a deeply pious woman: her earthy and often superficially irreverent religion informed her whole life: it was an immensely practical religion, and yet it was lit with a fine unselfconscious mysticism. She answered the question that her mistress raised, for a church of Fifines was likely to outlast time.
It was a pity that she was no better a cook, however: though indeed a high degree of talent would have been wasted on the penitential fare that passed through the Durand kitchen – haricots, stockfish, blood-pudding and chick peas, for the most part. She did not take to Richard for some time: it needed weeks and even months for her kindness to overcome her suspicion of anything new, above all foreign as well as new; but after that she became his frequent companion, and she was certainly the best friend he made in France, the most interesting and agreeable person in that house.
The house itself was built of glazed purple bricks, and it had a high-pitched slate roof; it stood in a vineyard about a mile outside the town, a striking contrast to the usual houses of the neighbourhood, with their white walls, low pink-tiled roofs and small grilled windows. Madame Durand always referred to it as ‘my house’, just as she spoke of ‘my garden’ and ‘my vineyard’. The vineyard was a broad flat expanse of some twelve acres, although it looked larger because there were no hedges to prevent it seeming to merge with the precisely similar vineyards beyond it and to either side: it was planted with seventy-five thousand vines in hundreds and hundreds of perfectly regular rows, an industrial exploitation of the unwilling earth for the manufacture of the lowest grade of common wine. The vineyard came right up to the house on three sides – the house swam naked in the field – and it was let on the usual share-cropping basis. Cheating was a major occupation both on the Durands’ and the tenant’s side; but the tenant, although he had less courage and less tenacity than Madame Durand, always came out on top; for every year, just at the crucial season of the vintage, the family was obliged to go up to Paris for three months. Monsieur Durand sat on two official juries and several ministerial committees; he also conducted a course of appreciation and the history of art at the Institute, and he renewed his contacts with the official world, the galleries and the auction rooms; it was a necessary and a profitable voyage, but the leer on the tenant’s face was a flood of gall in Madame’s heart, and the certainty that she was being rolled embittered her existence. On the fourth side of the house there was a kitchen-garden, maintained by Fifine; and this garden, too, came right up to the very wall of the house, taking away nothing of its naked irrelevance. It was a harsh house and it stood jaggedly in a harsh and arid landscape, unrelated to it and indifferent.
The landscape was an indefinite repetition of the vineyard – field after flat field of vines going on and on to the vague horizon, or on the south to the remote line of the Corbières, the division between the Languedoc and the Roussillon – and he remembered it under two aspects only, summer and winter. In summer it was a sea of coarse, dusty, sulphured and sulphated leaves drooping under the weight of the heat while an infinity of cicadas filled the quivering air with an omnipresent metallic din that seemed to emanate from the sun or the brilliant sky: and its winter aspect was that of a naked plain with rows upon rows of twisted amputated black stumps that bowed under the shrieking assault of the wind from the north – dust whirling under a pale and cloudless sky. It was an uncompromising landscape and an uncompromising house – both equally devoid of comfort. Yet Richard was not unhappy there. He either did not notice or did not mind the absence of country (in the English sense), books, comfort, bathroom, decent food or intelligent companionship: in many ways his values were essentially those of a painter and curiously enough of a modern painter – he was already indifferent to the picturesque, and where a young man of a predominantly literary cast might have deplored a howling desert, he saw order and a world of light. And indifferent though the house was, to be sure, it was here that he had his cardinal experience.
He had been there a year and more – they had been up to Paris twice – and all this time he had worked according to Monsieur Durand’s rigid and exacting plan: it must have been the winter of his second year when he decided to paint a picture as a first-communion present for Fifine’s nephew Sebastien – a martyrdom of the saint. He had always heard a great deal about this nephew, who was chez les Frères, and he had been told every stage in the poor child’s long drawn out agony with the multiplication table, but his primary object was to give pleasure to Fifine and therefore his intention was to paint a perfectly direct saint undergoing a really painful martyrdom, with the arrows sticking into him right up to their feathers, and those feathers wet with scarlet blood. But for some time before this his mind had also been haunted by a curious formal pattern, and he determined to include it in the picture.
The Durand’s house stood within the range of the last of the municipality’s lights, a swan-necked, cast-iron brute that stood in charming incongruity among the vines and shone a beam through Richard’s window in the night. The shadow that it projected on the ceiling was the pattern in question, and it was a very subtle pattern, being composed not only of the crosses of the casement and two fortuitous diagonals made by hanging cables, but doubled and trebled by reflections whose origin he could not determine, and multiplied, at certain times, by the moon: these crosses and planes lay upon one another in different intensities of grey, and not only did they present a singular and to him fascinating technical exercise, but they seemed to him ominously important – he had an obscure feeling that it was necessary for him to acknowledge them. The notion of luck, possibly of religion, entered into this, and there was some indefinite association between the pattern and his love of the kind darkness – that darkness which his most private fantasies represented as containing a hundred unknown nameless colours of marvellous intensity.
When