also because he had never seen a gelding stale before, and because it was indeed worth drawing. Partly because of its size and its rigid, unaccustomed pose, partly because of its dangling penis (so startling) and partly because of some quality of the light he was suddenly seeing a horse for the first time – an intimation of the ideal horse.
They moved on, lingering past a man who wished to sell them a gold watch wrapped in a ten-shilling note for sixpence, providing they could tell the right packet from the packets full of chaff, and dawdled through the penetrating reek of swine to the herbalist’s, where a grave, attentive crowd looked at a picture of a transparent man, or rather of a partially transparent man, for where none of his vitals were concerned he was solid enough: only here and there his purple liver, his spleen and bowels showed through. His bearded face, however, with its serious and evangelical expression was scarcely one that could rightly belong to an undressed body, far less to a transparent one; it floated on another plane, surrounded by pinned-up shrivelled plants, a dusty halo; and there were other bunches round the body below, with ribbons leading from them to the parts they healed, and with a wand the herbalist pointed them out as he described the diseases. Rising of the lights; strangury; horseshoehead and head-mouldshot; dropsy, marthambles, the strong fives and the moon-pall; stone; gravel; pox. Some of the audience were willing to pay their money early on – there were shillings and half-crowns held up in the air – but the herbalist would not stop or spare them anything; in a high, unfriendly, didactic voice he went right on through cancer, consumption, bloody flux, the quinsy and worms. Jocelyn and Ham, shocked and fascinated, stayed on; but Richard was still amazed by his discovery of the horse and he was unreceptive; and as he also had a message to deliver he left them standing there.
He went up one of the steep lanes that led towards the High Street, and as he turned the corner the bawling of the calves, the squealing, baaing, roaring and shouting of the market place died to a mild composite hum: only by some freak of acoustics a single voice pursued him up the lane, calling out with passionate conviction, ‘Honest Bill Podpiece. Honest Bill Podpiece gives everyone a chance. Some has a watch, some has chaff. I will not deceive you, gents: pick the right one and you get a valuable prize. Come on, gents, a gold watch for a tanner – you only have to pick the right one, gents …’
He turned into the broad, mild splendour of the High Street and stood looking up and down it, for his message was to Mr Atherton, who would be painting there: on the left was the barbican, then the pink brick and white stone court-house with its curving flight of steps and the royal arms in its pediment, then a long row of bow-fronted shops; on the right the Harp and Crown with its enormous sign, the Palladian corn-exchange and the little Regency theatre, followed by a recessed line of the grander houses of the town, with white steps, green doors and brass knockers. The pavement in front of these houses was remarkably broad, wider than the street, and this allowed one to see round the ascending curve to the Norman towers of Saint John’s, which closed the vista. Mr Atherton’s easel was there, far off on the corner of Butter Lane, and the back of his canvas could be seen, a sudden white square against the soft, diversified background; from time to time little knots of people gathered behind it, to look with that invariable penetrating knowing glance from the canvas to the view and back again. But there were not many of them, and they did not stay – the town had known Mr Atherton, man and boy, for more than seventy years: he was an Academician, and they were proud of him; furthermore he had a way of lunging backwards and stabbing the air (and sometimes those who bored him) with a loaded brush.
It was to avoid this that Richard stepped forward and delivered his message: Miss Theobald was sure that Mr Atherton would not forget Mrs James at five o’clock.
‘Oh, it is you, is it? Thank you, thank you, Richard,’ he said. ‘I shall not forget her. What did you say her name was?’ He stared shrewdly at his picture, with both Richard and Mrs James receding from his mind: he could pin the floating tower by making the tree much more determined. He worked else to the easel for five minutes and then stood back again. ‘No. It was a mistake,’ he said, resuming the low monologue that always accompanied his painting, ‘a bloody error – should have left it alone – that silly green – vexed. Now I shall have to start again. Why did the old fool daub on the green?’
Richard gazed at the picture. The High Street itself did not move him – the High Street pure remained unseen: but the High Street on canvas, filtered through Mr Atherton, stirred him profoundly – once he had seen it in pictorial terms it acquired a new prestige. The picture seemed to him excellent: he could not see why Mr Atherton was unsatisfied. And indeed no one could deny that the picture was wonderfully accomplished, from the technical point of view: as for the Venetian light that bathed Easton Colborough’s corn-exchange, Richard thought it a great improvement. But whereas Richard at that time knew nothing about Guardi, Mr Atherton did, and he turned away from his easel with a sigh. ‘I shall not do any more today,’ he said. ‘Would you like to come back with me? We can do a little drawing until this woman arrives.’
They walked off, with Richard carrying the easel respectfully and attentively, a symbol of their religion, and at the next turning they left the gentle business of the High Street for the tree-lined quiet of Hog Lane and the alley labelled No Thoroughfare that led to the green garden door in the wall.
‘Mind the easel in the fig,’ said Mr Atherton. ‘That reminds me, I must tell you about fig-tree sap as a medium. You use the milk from the young shoots on the south side. Cenino says …’
They came to the door, a lumpish green door in a brick wall covered with rank ivy – a door which opened outward and brushed against the ivy, so that whenever Richard passed through it he smelt the coarse green smell of the leaves, and damp and snails; but every time he passed through it and closed it behind him, he stepped into the scent of turpentine and paint, for although the door had all the appearance of a garden door it opened straight into the studio, a quiet, vast, luminous room with soft dust on the floor, and canvases and stretchers against the walls, frames, buckets here and there to catch drips, a model’s throne, three easels: a benign great place, a world in itself.
Miss Theobald was Mr Atherton’s god-child and cousin; she lived with him and she kept the living part of the house in a state of old maid’s cleanliness; but this was not occupation enough for her boundless maiden energy and for the last twenty years she had been running drawing-classes in the town. In almost every one of these years she had found a budding Michael Angelo and had brought him to Mr Atherton; but she was more enthusiastic than discerning and in spite of his benevolence Mr Atherton had grown so disgusted by a succession of mediocre young people who would not work that he had sworn never to put himself in the way of disappointment again – no more prodigies: and he would never have broken his oath this time without an uncommon certainty of talent.
He had had a good many disappointments, and the earliest and most striking of these was Miss Theobald herself; for it was he who had encouraged her as a child and it was he who throughout her adolescence had insisted upon conscientious work and had taught her the arduous, painstaking techniques that would ensure her productions a dreadful immortality: the children with huge feet and cheeks like buttocks, the fubsy bunnies and the pussies would last a thousand years. However, this did not affect his belief in hard work as something of more than rational value; and by hard work he meant primarily drawing, all kinds of drawing, from plaster cones and prisms to the most elaborate anatomical studies. In an appropriate, tall cupboard he kept a skeleton, mounted upon lead-alloy wire; he encouraged Richard to draw it from every angle, and he often joined in the holy exercise himself. But he also attached great importance to the crafts of the studio, and Richard ground colours until he was first blistered and then calloused from the wear of the pestle. He grew intimately acquainted not only with linseed, sunflower and poppyseed oil, egg tempera, wax emulsions and so on, but also with the more recondite preparations of honey, rabbit-skin size and Armenian bole; and he was obliged to make his own stretcher and stretch his own canvas upon it before ever he was allowed to begin to lay on the paints that he himself had ground. Mr Atherton could do all these things well: his manual dexterity could have earned him a comfortable living as a handyman if a revolution had made it necessary, and he valued it highly in others. His aesthetics were much simpler, being summed up in the expression, ‘Theory is all stuff.’ The only exceptions to this broad statement were some parts of Reynolds’s Discourses;