Sleep in Peace (34 page)

In the Big Room there was a spasmodic hum of talk, an occasional preoccupied whistle; Mr. Quarmby, one foot on an easel bar, held his head back and compared the cast with the pupil's rendering of Lorenzo; Laura, closing one eye, left hand on hip, held out her pencil to measure the proportions of a lion's nose; this was Art, this was life, she was happy.

In spring and summer—or what passed for spring and summer in Hudley—when one's work was sufficiently advanced one attended a weekly sketching class. The sketching class was glorious! The dozen or so members of the class, carrying materials for a picnic tea, took a tram to one of the still rural valleys or hills surrounding Hudley, and penetrated, chattering cheerfully, into some sloping field—all the fields sloped, of course, round Hudley. One planted one's stool and easel, and sat in the chill blast, making tree studies or drawing what Mr. Quarmby called pure landscape. Whenever one finished one's sketch one naturally moved one's territory, so that after a few sessions the sketching class extended over a quarter of a mile of hillside, and one sat happily alone with oneself and the wind and the landscape, till Mr. Quarmby came stepping briskly round the corner of some old grey Yorkshire building in the middle distance, perhaps a farm, perhaps a weaver's cottage. In theory, Mr. Armistead did not disapprove of Laura's sketching class; it seemed he had himself done a little sketching in his youth, and sketches of West Riding landscape, provided it was rural, were creditably regarded in respectable circles. But in practice he was apt to grumble at Laura's prolonged absence from Blackshaw House for her sketching class, and even Ludo gently jeered, if Laura had a cold, that it would surely be better by Friday, for Friday was Laura's sketching day.

In the autumn and winter, Thursday was the danger spot of Laura's week. The Life Class occupied Wednesday night and both sessions on Thursday, and since the Life Class room, with its special
heating, its darkened door-panes, its circular crimson curtains round the entrance, yet lacked a north light, the sun beamed in at an impossible angle in the afternoons, and consequently the class was held continuously on Thursday from nine till three-thirty, with only half an hour off for a midday meal. By the happiest chance, Thursday was Bradford market day, and Mr. Armistead was almost always absent from Hudley till late in the afternoon; but if for some reason he changed his customary plan, a difficult decision presented itself to Laura. Her problem was to gain the maximum amount of time at the class with the minimum irritation of her father; she stayed at the school in the morning session till the last possible moment and then ran, arriving at Blackshaw House a few minutes past the lunch-hour, breathless, with purple cheeks and dancing, happy eyes. Sometimes Mr. Armistead changed his plans unexpectedly, and then Ludo, as always, came to Laura's rescue; a series of considerable explosions would be heard under the Life Room window, and Laura, looking out, saw Ludo waving urgently to her from his decrepit car.

Laura loved the Life Class with all her heart; especially, perhaps, at night. The lights shone down brilliantly on the ruddy flesh of some strong lad with a blunt Yorkshire face and a sturdy Yorkshire figure; outside the circle of the easels deep shadow lay over the wooden floor, Cuthbert the skeleton in its glass case, the blackboard with a half-rubbed out drawing of a tibia; a curious lovely design of symmetrical, shadowy curves patterned the ceiling, trembling slightly if some sudden movement shook an electric flex or shifted an easel. One worked with an intense quiet absorption, conscious of one's high task; one wrestled with all one's mind to
see
the model, not in the superficial idiotic way that ordinary people called seeing, but with a penetrating, a biting, a powerfully accurate vision.

For nothing should ever be vague, woolly, romanticised or slurred over in her work, vowed Laura; nothing sentimental, nothing that pretended to be something which was not, or concealed
that which was; it was easy to gain a striking effect by exaggerating, falsifying, rosifying, but she scorned such methods; a stern, clear, austere line, a passionate acceptance of forms exactly as they really were, should be her ideal always. The least satisfactory work she did was in Design.; for she revolted against the modification of natural forms to make them, as she said, fit into a pretty pattern. Why butcher the harebell to prettify a panel? Rather should it be her part to draw the harebell as nobody had ever drawn it before, with an absolutely passionate acceptance of the harebell, a rendering which should be passionately harebellian.

“But that's not Art, that's photography, that's copying,” obpected the pupil-teacher who corrected her work.

“If it's mere copying, why has there been so little of it, then?” contended Laura.

There's been far too much “design” in art and life, she thought; making things fit in, pretending, prettifying, conventionalising, concealing—it's all a lie! Life is not like that; life is not lived in nice agreeable little patterns, with all their ends tucked in and their colours harmonising. The great characteristic of life is its continuity; it doesn't stop, break off and start again at a more colourful and interesting moment, so as to make an agreeable pattern. There may be an immense pattern, perhaps, but it's so immense that the shape of its curves is hardly visible: it is a lie to pretend that the pattern can easily be seen, and everything fitted neatly into it. It's life itself I want to render; and how can one proceed to render life by lying? Mr. Quarmby would have something to say if I lied about a muscle!

Seeing that this intense fidelity to the truth of outward form displeased even Mr. Quarmby, who scolded her for a too childish insistence on petty realism in detail, Laura spoke of her philosophy of Art no more. But she was accustomed to hold with private tenacity views which her environment repudiated, and she clung to this view too, secretly and tenaciously. At least, as she
told herself, it made her memory drawings quite remarkably successful.

One wrestled, then, all day at the School of Art with eye and hand and brain, so that one came out gloriously tired, conscious of powers deeply satisfied by expression, conscious too of powers increased and extended since the day before. As one strolled slowly homewards, hands in pockets, head thrown back, alone and free, one had deep thoughts. It was dark, a keen wind blew; clouds rolled across the sky in careless majesty; the black hills, with their sparse chains of lights, loomed up on every side; by contrast the bright little shops had a perky, cosy, friendly air. Everything seemed particularly alive, rich, deep, exciting; life; art; ah! One shed one's family preoccupations, one's status in life; one shed, indeed, Laura Armistead altogether, that silly creature full of tiresome wants and petty failings and feeble powers; one saw life with the calm impersonal vision of the artist. One saw the wheels of a dray as lines and curves and deep rich shadows, as the
wheels
of a
dray
, not as something threatening one's own personality; one saw the bright shaft of light from a shop window as a bright shaft of light, not as Hollins' window where Laura Armistead liked to see a pretty blouse. One saw everything as itself, not as related to one's own self at all. When one saw things as themselves, one loved them; one loved everything—the clouds, the sombre hills, the black rocks, the stunted rustling oaks, the ants, the little barking dog, the grubby sheep, the trams, and all one's fellow-men. One could not divide the world up into this and that; one could not divide up people into rich and poor, or Liberal and Conservative, or good and bad; they were all a matter of muscles and tissues, plane surfaces, shadows, angles. They were all One. Yes, one had deep thoughts; one reviewed heaven and hell, God, the earth, life and death, love and hate; one looked at all these things impartially, objectively, with the same absolute devotion to truth, to seeing to the very core, that one displayed towards a difficult perspective, an awkward pose of the knee. How great the power of
art! How incomparably grand, to make men SEE, to strip away all the false, deluding veils, the lying tinsel trappings, to open the sealed, the hooded eyes, to make men brilliantly, joyously CONSCIOUS of their superbly complex but homogeneous world! And when one thought thus, a sudden rush of power and joy thrilled through one's whole frame; one felt capable of great works, noble in conception, brilliant in execution, powerful to enrich the life of one's beloved fellow-men. Yes, one had deep thoughts!

Sometimes one did not take the direct way home, but went round instead by the high open Lancashire Road, whence one could gaze out west towards the tumbled massif of the main Pennine chain. One leaned against the rough low black wall, looked up at the velvet-black summits, down at the clusters of lights in the winding vales; the wind stung one's cheeks, vague forms of dusky grandeur and lofty strains of music pursued each other through one's brain. Nobody has ever put you on paper, mused Laura, looking fondly at the nocturne of hills and towns; who has ever really drawn a row of cottage houses under the shadow of a mill in a West Riding street? Who has ever drawn these mill-chimneys, these dark, sombre, interlocking hills, these tenacious, powerful faces, exactly as they really are? Not to make them funny, or pretty, or jolly, not to make them ugly or despicable or ludicrous; but to present them just as they are as one of life's manifestations, to get at their truth and express it resolutely, without deviation, and be content thus to express. That would be grand!

Oh, yes, one had glorious thoughts at night, returning from the Hudley School of Art.

On one such night in early spring, when, having been considering the long roll of human history in connection with the sculpture of the Greeks, Laura opened the front door of Blackshaw House with her head still in the stars, her eyes wide, her cheeks glowing, her hair storm-tossed, she was startled to see Ludo advancing towards her down the hall with his finger on his lips.
His customary bedroom slippers formed an odd contrast to his conspiratorial expression, as he silently beckoned her towards the drawing-room. Not knowing whether to be alarmed or amused, Laura followed him on tiptoe, and found the Armisteads' supper of milk and cake uncomfortably laid out on the card table in the fireless room. The sound of distant voices hinted the reason for this banishment, namely that Mr. Armistead had visitors in the dining-room.

“Who is it?” whispered Laura.

“Gwen,” said Ludo.

Laura now distinguished her sister's voice, which rose suddenly into a crescendo of heavy sobs.

“Come, Gwen, come!” soothed Mr. Armistead.

Ludo very quietly shut the drawing-room door, and the voices diminished.

“What's the matter?” whispered Laura.

Ludo hesitated. “A row with Frederick, I expect,” he said.

They both sighed.

Presently the dining-room door was flung open. Ludo and Laura, uncertain whether Gwen would prefer to be greeted or left alone, both decided at the same moment that since they did not wish to go to her, it was probably their duty to do so, and they moved out into the hall. Their sister with quick, impatient gestures was adjusting her hat and buttoning her coat. With her matronly figure and flushed, tear-stained face she seemed an almost grotesquely defeated and humiliated version of their composed, elegant Gwen, and Ludo and Laura hung back in the shadows, afraid to speak to her. She saw them, however.

“Well, Ludo. Well, Laura,” she said shortly, a complete indifference in her tone.

“Hullo, Gwen!” they returned, artificially cheerful.

“Well, I must be getting back to Geoffrey,” said Gwen.

Her face changed on the child's name, and she smiled.

Mr. Armistead, returning the smile rather sadly, opened the
front door for his daughter; darkness and wind arose behind her. The contrast between the wild spring night, where Laura's spirit had wandered free, and the personality of Gwen, so cribb'd, cabin'd and confined, struck Laura painfully, and she thought with joyous defiance:

“Thank God I'm not married!”

The trouble which had driven Gwen across the barriers of her pride to seek consolation with her father was her second pregnancy. At first she was incredulous, could not believe it; then she would not believe it. She set all her strong will, her determined tenacity, against the notion; she did not want to have a second child and she would not have a second child. She was too busy with Geoffrey; she did not want to be taken away from him by ill-health, fatigue, the exacting demands of a new-born infant. She would not be taken away from him; she did not wish it and it should not be. But as the weeks went by she found that the laws of nature were stronger than Gwen Hinchliffe; she was with child, and nothing could be done. Then she raged against her fate. She turned savagely on Frederick, told him he was a beast, a brute, she hated him, could not bear the sight of him, wished she had never seen him. She would not have him near her; she banished him from her bed and almost from her board, for often when he returned from the mill he found the table set for himself alone, and on his timid enquiry found that Gwen and Geoffrey had already eaten. When he came near, said Gwen, it made her feel sick. It was true that she was often sick; in contrast to her first comparatively calm pregnancy, the months now were filled with nausea, dizziness, fainting, long bouts of tears, strange whims. At last Frederick in despair decided that she must go away to the seaside, have a change; and he approached his father for a loan of the necessary funds. Mr. Hinchliffe was totally unsympathetic to
such a request; Mrs. Hinchliffe when applied to replied with her usual calm severity:

“I don't see why I should lend Gwen money to leave you comfortless.”

This was meant as a prelude to granting the loan, but the sensitive Frederick did not take it so, and flung away in an agony. Mrs. Hinchliffe decided that it was time something was done; she must “speak to” Gwen. That afternoon she called on her daughter-in-law, and having admired Geoffrey's new little brown washing suit, of tunic and trousers, made for him by his adoring mother, she uttered grave remonstrances concerning Gwen's behaviour to her husband. Gwen received these with flushed cheeks and angry eyes until Mrs. Hinchliffe came to the world
scandal
. “You wouldn't wish any scandal, I am sure,” she said. Gwen was frightened. Scandal! She burst into tears and appealed to Mrs. Hinchliffe as woman to woman; in her condition surely she ought not to be judged harshly. Mrs. Hinchliffe assured her that she was not judging her at all harshly, nor was Frederick, and departed well satisfied with her afternoon's work.