The Dark Clue (22 page)

I could not help reflecting, as I pictured the scene, and saw the simple pleasure it still brought Mrs. Bennett after so many years, on my own upbringing. Had Papa (dear man that he was) been right to protect me quite so assiduously from the unregulated company of male friends? Would I really have come to so much harm – looking at Amelia Bennett it was hard to think so – if I, too, had been allowed to mix with intellectual young men on terms of easy equality?

The meal over (most of Mrs. Bennett's disappeared over the side of the boat as she was carelessly stacking the plates, as if it had finally despaired of ever arousing her interest, and decided in a fit of pique to give itself to the ducks), she took up her guitar, and announced that she would sing us some of ‘the good old songs that Turner loved'. She did not, like some amateur performers, bully and embarrass us by insisting that we join in; and yet we did, of our own volition, whether we knew the words or no – for only a block of stone could have heard such unconstrained delight and remained untouched by it. It seemed, indeed, for a moment, to reach even into the depths of her husband's soul, and to bring a ray of warmth to the lump of ice that had formed there – for after half a minute or so, to my immense surprise, his wavering baritone, too, swelled the chorus.

I had never, to my knowledge, heard any of the songs before, and I can remember nothing about them now (beyond a general impression that they were all remarkably silly), save for the refrain of an absurd ditty about a nun and a gondolier:

He fiddled like the mad emperor Nero

And sang: ‘O Lady, if you'll be my Hero

I'll be Leander

Tho' I stand a

Simple gondolero!'

Or something to much the same effect.

Lulled by the music, and the wine, and the sunshine and fresh air, I at length lay down, and half-closed my eyes, and allowed fancy to carry me back forty years. The same river, the same songs, the same voice: not hard to imagine (the idea suddenly filled me with a strange, intense feeling, in which joy and longing were inextricably intertwined, that rose from the pit of my stomach, and plugged up my throat, and disturbed the motion of my heart, like a finger laid against the pendulum of a clock) that I, too, was of that same party of young people, lolling in the long sweet grass, and talking of great things, when Amelia Bennett was yet a girl, and the trees of Arcadia covered in their summer green.

It was already twilight when we again reached the boatyard. Walter seemed unnaturally silent as he shipped the oars, and helped the Bennetts ashore, and I wondered whether the afternoon might have fatigued him, or made him disconsolate for some reason; but when I glimpsed his face by a flare of light from the open shed, I saw he was merely preoccupied with his own thoughts, for his skin was taut and highly coloured, and his shining eyes kept wandering off in pursuit of some new idea. I was not surprised, therefore, when he politely declined Mrs. Bennett's invitation of a glass and a light supper, and said we should be on our way – for he intended to walk along the river, and it would be quite dark before we got home. She, for her part, absolutely refused his offer to carry the basket and the rugs back to her house, saying she would not dream of taking more of our time, when we had so little to spare, and would give sixpence to a lad from the yard to go with them. And so we thanked and
not-at-alle
d each other for a minute or two, until Mrs. Bennett suddenly shook Walter's hand, and (to my astonishment) kissed me on both cheeks, and said ‘Goodbye', and turned on her heel, and
hurried her husband into the night without another word or a glance over her shoulder.

I had imagined that Walter would break his silence as soon as we were alone together, but he barely spoke at all until we had gone a mile or two, and were passing a little waterside tavern, with welcoming yellow lamplight in the windows, and a wooden balcony carried out over the water on knock-kneed piles that looked as if they were about to give up the ghost, and tumble into the river, and drift off towards France. Stopping by the door, he said abruptly:

‘Shall we have something to eat?'

It was not the kind of place I should normally have expected Walter to choose (or not, at least, since Laura came into her fortune), but I fancy that this evening he had had it in mind to stop here, or somewhere like it; for as we made our way through a bar parlour smelling of smoke and river-mud, where little knots of boatmen, their faces ravaged by weather and drink, turned curiously to watch our progress; and past a poky kitchen, from which the heat blasted like a furnace; and upstairs, finally, to the coffee-room, he had the satisfied look of a man whose life is unfolding perfectly to plan.

‘Let's order chops,' he said, with a conspiratorial smile, as we sat at a table in the window. ‘They're hard to spoil, even in a kitchen like that. And we'll have porter, don't you think, in honour of Turner?'

If I touched his skin, I thought – looking at his flushed cheeks, and feeling their warmth even across two feet of tablecloth – it would resonate like a drum, or the rind of a ripe melon: he is so
full,
so buoyed with wild excitement, that it must break out in a mad rush of words, or a flamboyant dance – or else he will strike some unsuspected rock, and explode, and all will go to waste, soaking into the barren soil.

‘So what do you think? What do you think?' he said. ‘Is Ruskin right?'

‘About what?'

‘Turner. Was he a tortured genius?'

‘A genius, certainly,' I said, cautiously. ‘As to
tortured
… Well, what do you think?'

He dismissed the question with a shake of the head.

‘Come on,' he said. ‘What kind of a man was he?'

‘Well,' I began tentatively (for I did not wish to deter him by offering a view very different from his own, and so prove, unwittingly, to be the rock myself), ‘what do we know? He was humbly born; a little eccentric, perhaps – but no more, probably, than anyone else so dedicated to his art; a man who loved England – its countryside, its coasts, its people.'

I looked questioningly at Walter, who nodded enthusiastically, giving me the courage to continue more confidently:

‘He was somewhat rough-and-ready – that we must attribute to his troubled childhood – and could appear stern, or even rude, sometimes – but at bottom kind-hearted, I believe, and a loyal friend.'

Walter nodded again; but then a shadow seemed to cross his face, and he said:

‘And what of his morals?'

‘His morals,' I repeated slowly. His gaze was so intense that I had to look away, and was too confused for a moment to reply. Then I said:

‘I wonder – I wonder, Walter, in all sincerity, whether it is possible to be a great artist, and yet live a life of monastic seclusion and purity?'

I could not tell whether he was amazed or appalled at what I had said, or merely indifferent to it, for his expression changed not one iota, and he continued to stare at me. Eventually (for I found it embarrassing to be scrutinized in that way, and doubly so when the scrutinizer was my own brother) I looked past him through the window at the Thames. The fog was silently returning, and casting a white film over the river – so you could barely see it at all, but only trace its course by the chain of reflections from gas-lamps, and oil-lamps, and the red glow of a ship's boiler, smeared on its surface like broken fruit.

At length Walter turned to see what I was looking at, and at once let out a gasp.

‘Wouldn't Turner have loved that?' he said. ‘The ghostliness. The
imprecision.
'

‘Yes,' I said.

‘Not just a great artist,' he said, facing me again, and taking my hand. ‘The
greatest
artist in the history of the world!'

XX

Letter from John Farrant to Walter Hartright,
1st October, 185-

20 Trotter Street,
Farringdon

Dear Sir,

I have heard you intend a life of the late Mr. J. M. W. Turner, and cannot rest easy until I have told you what I know of him; for I fear you shall never have the truth from his ‘fellow artists' – I mean, Mr. Jones, Mr. Davenant &c., &c. – or from the polite ladies he kept company with at Isle worth and Brentford. They saw only the face he cared to show to the world; I saw the other.

I was an engraver by trade – and would be to this day, if my sight had not failed me. You will not, I hope, think me proud when I tell you that I had a name for a good eye and a sure hand, for any who knew my work would say the same; and it was on account of that that Mr. Turner heard of me, and asked if I would make some plates for him. This was, I think, in the spring of 180-. He told me that a publisher had engaged with him for a set of coastal scenes, to be engraved and printed in a book; but they had quarrelled, and he had decided to publish them himself. I should, I suppose, have taken warning from this history, but I was young, and little acquainted with the ways of the world, and gratified that a coming artist like Turner should have chosen me to execute his design. He seemed reasonable enough, and quite businesslike, and we soon agreed terms: he would etch the outlines, and then pass the plates on to me to add aquatint, mezzotint, and any further engraving that might be necessary. For this I was to receive eight guineas a plate.

The life of an engraver is a solitary and an arduous one, even at the best of times; you spend twelve or fourteen hours a day in the closework-room, poring over a plate with a magnifying glass, trying to realize an artist's most brilliant conceptions by carefully removing small pieces of metal – and then, quite often, when you at last come to ‘prove' it, you find there is some small deficiency in the plate, which obliges you to efface the effort of many days, and do it over again.

Do not think I exaggerate when I tell you that, with Mr. Turner,
this hard existence became a kind of hell.

Item.
He did not keep his word about the outlines, but required me to do them, saying ‘he was too occupied with other matters to attend to them'. He thus loaded me with a deal more work when I scarce had time enough to do what I had already undertaken with him; but when I asked for a deferment he grew angry, and said ‘if I could not accommodate myself to his requirements, he believed there were other engravers in London who would be glad to do so'.

Item.
He constantly found fault with my workmanship, demanding that I should re-do plates in which neither I, nor my wife, nor any other person could discern any imperfection whatever – so that I might have done five engravings for anyone else in the time it took me to complete one to his satisfaction.

Item.
All this might yet have been tolerable had he treated me as an artist like himself, engaged with him in a common endeavour; but his manner towards me was always that of an irascible master towards a wilful, good-for-nothing servant. One day in November, soon after I had sent Mr. Turner the proof of a plate over which I had laboured long hours, and of which I was – I think justly – proud, and expected great things, I came into the parlour to find my wife (who was then carrying our first child) crying. On my inquiring the matter, she showed me a letter that had come that moment from Mr. Turner, in which he thanked me stiffly, and said (I still remember his words, tho' it is more than fifty years since I saw them) that ‘he noted that I had extended the aquatint into the sea, an indulgence for which he had not asked; and he was sorry so much time had been lost, for it would not do, and I must rework it'.

My wife said she could bear no more, and begged me to go and see him, there and then, to see if I might adjust matters between us; and fearing for her health, and for that of the child (which we lost, indeed, less than a month later), I did as she asked. And so we come to the meat of my story.

Mr. Turner was living then at Harley Street, where I found him at home; but when I tried to explain to him the difficulties I was under, and told him I thought I should have ten guineas a plate, instead of eight, for all the extra work he had put me to,
he grew livid, and flew into a rage, and seemed unable to speak, but only trembled, and ground his teeth, and slammed the door in my face.

I was, as you may imagine, too agitated to go straight home to my wife, and went instead to a public at the end of the street, where I had something to steady myself; but far from calming me, it only made me feel the more aggrieved, and emboldened me to think I should return to Mr. Turner's house, and confront him once more with my demands – matching his anger, if necessary, with my own.

Whether I should really have had the courage to carry this plan through I cannot now say; for as I approached his door – my legs feeling heavier, I must confess, with every step – it suddenly opened, and Mr. Turner himself emerged, dressed in his tall hat, and a long coat, and looked about him surreptitiously, as if satisfying himself that he was not observed. I was no more than fifty yards from him, and he would surely have recognized me – but for the fact that it was dusk, and a fog was starting to form, and I had the presence of mind to turn quickly into another doorway, from which I was able to watch him without his seeing me.

Mr. Turner glanced this way and that two or three times more, and then set off down the street at a quick pace. After scarcely a moment's hesitation, I began to follow him. Even at the time, I remember, I was puzzled by my own actions, and justified them to myself by reasoning that some opportunity might present itself to speak to him again, when he should not find it so easy to escape me. I now realize that this was a young man's self-delusion, and that my real motive was the hope that I might learn something which would give me greater power over him, and so assist me to redress the imbalance between us which I felt so bitterly.

Without a backward glance, Mr. Turner turned east into Weymouth Street, and, crossing Portland Road, made a dog-leg into Carburton Street, and then turned again into Norton Street. Here he took me by surprise; for, about halfway along, he stopped suddenly before a certain house, and again looked about him suspiciously. I only avoided discovery by dodging quickly behind a passing brewer's cart, and crossing the street;
from where I saw him disappearing into the hall, and the front door closing behind him. My first thought was that this must be a bawdy house or an accommodation house, for why else would he wish to conceal his business there? Yet only the lower windows were lit, and I saw no-one else either entering or leaving; and after only a few minutes Mr. Turner himself came out again – too soon, I imagined, for anything in that way to have happened. He still seemed to fear detection, however; for he had taken pains to disguise himself, by putting on a heavy cloak in place of his coat, and winding a muffler about his face; and before he finally stepped into the street he once more glanced furtively about him.