The Dark Clue (14 page)

Here lyeth, friend, a gentle wight

Who did no wrong, but could not write

Each day he'd plan – but plan in vain -

A book – and then he'd plan again;

Until at last his soul was took -

Yet, though his life hath left no book,

Pray, with his grieving friends and wife

His name be in the Book of Life.

There were tears in his eyes when he had finished – though whether from merriment, or the recollection of his friends, or merely the melancholy that the thought of our own death must arouse in us all, I could not tell. At length, however, he chuckled again, and said: ‘But I took my revenge the following month; for
the chairman demanded I should compose one on Marwell, and I said, “I'm still planning it”; and was excused for my wit.'

I laughed; and, looking about me, said: ‘It seems to me you were slandered; for you must have the makings of at least half a dozen books here-'

‘Oh, the makings!' he said. ‘The makings! But how to make ‘em? – that's the question! Here are graves' – pointing to one pile – ‘and Roman fortifications' – indicating another – ‘and a giant's thigh-bone, and druidical stones, and a thousand other curiosities; and between them they would amount to a very respectable
Guide to the Natural Wonders and Ancient Remains of the County of Sussex,
which is what I always intended them to be.' He paused a moment, perhaps because he had suddenly recalled the reason for my visit; for he went on: ‘That was, indeed, part of my original object in travelling with Turner – I hoped he might furnish me with engravings.'

‘And did he refuse?' I asked.

‘I did not ask him outright, but I think perhaps he guessed my intention, for he told me plainly that all the pictures were destined for a publisher, who wished to make his own book. Later, I heard that failed, and I could have approached him then; but felt I was still not sufficiently advanced.' He shook his head in a sudden frenzy of frustration. ‘Try as I may, I can never find a way to arrange my material; and just at the point when I seem about to manage it, damn me if something new doesn't turn up, and throw the whole thing off the road, horses and all.' He began jabbing the air, as vigorously as the conductor of an orchestra. ‘If I order everything according to place, I must jumble together temples to Diana and mediaeval coins and batteries from the late war; if I do it chronologically, I make myself and my reader giddy by flying from one side of the county to the other – and back again – in a single afternoon.' He shook his head. ‘It will end by making me mad.'

‘Perhaps I might help?' I suggested; for I could not but feel for the poor man, and yearn to cut him free from the net in which he had enmeshed himself. ‘I do have some small experience – and, indeed, am beginning to face similar problems in my
Life of Turner.
'

‘Lord bless you!' said Gudgeon. ‘It's uncommon good of you
to offer; but God knows I mustn't waste your life, as well as my own. Besides' – here he smiled at his wife, who coloured and smiled back, as though they had some secret understanding – ‘the woman's depending on you to restore me to sanity – if only for an instant – by taking me away from the whole sorry business.' He laid a finger on my arm. ‘Come, we'll go to the museum. And there, I swear, I'll talk nothing but Turner.'

From our preparations – he insisted I put on my coat again, and borrow a muffler; and he himself donned an old redingote, and seized a shepherd's crook – you'd have thought the ‘museum' must be a day's journey away, and up a mountain. It turned out, however, to be no further than the corner of the yard, squeezed into an old cattle-shed between the end of the house and a tack room and stable – from which, as Gudgeon fiddled with the latch, a brown pony with a shaggy white mane watched us, tossing its head and twitching impatiently. Inside, the room (if room it may be called) was cold and damp, smelling of wet earth and old hay, and lit only by a row of small dirty windows set high in the wall, which gave it something of the feel of a gloomy church. I could see nothing clearly, but was aware of being surrounded by indistinct shapes – which nonetheless somehow conveyed a sense of bulk and presence, for they seemed to press in upon me as palpably as a crowd of people.

Gudgeon took down a lantern from the back of the door; lit it with surprising adroitness (considering that his right hand could do no more than hold the box of matches), and then slung it on to the crook.

‘Would you be so good as to hold this?' he said. ‘I think we shall get on better if I can point.'

I raised the staff like a bishop's crosier, spilling light on to a broken black stone slab that leant against the wall immediately before me (so immediately, indeed, that, had I taken one step more in the darkness, I should indubitably have tripped on it). There were uneven letters scratched into the surface; and, bending down to read them, I saw:

Gaius Ter

Et sua coniunx caris

HSE

‘From a Roman cemetery near Lewes,' said Gudgeon. ‘
Gaius Tertius,
I imagine.
Et sua coniunx carissima.'
He ran his fingers gently along the top, and nodded, as if in approval; and I fancy he was thinking of
his
beloved wife – as I, most assuredly, was of mine.'
Hie Situs Est
– so he died before she did, and her name was added later.'

‘I find it rather touching,' I said.

He nodded again. ‘But Turner would have none of it. Said that a true painter could be married only to his art. An idea for which he gave, as I recall, no less an authority than Sir Joshua Reynolds,' He smiled, and said: ‘See, I'm as good as my word! Nothing but Turner!' – and then turned abruptly, and marched off into the void.

I followed him, bearing the lantern aloft, and watching the shadows dissolve in its yellow glow. My first thought was that I had stumbled upon the cave of some demented Aladdin; for the walls were lined with rough shelves – divided into rectangular compartments, something like the berths in a ship's cabin – which appeared to overflow with the biggest hotch-potch of rubbish I have ever seen: broken pots; a horn knife-handle without a blade; the sole of an old shoe, dotted with rusty studs; half a black, fibrous wooden box (the other half, presumably having rotted clean away); a tray of flint chips that might have been crude arrowheads, but so frayed about the edges that they looked as if they had been nibbled into shape by a teething dog rather than formed by a human hand. Surely, I thought, this must be the product of some disease of the mind (had not the study, indeed, already afforded me a glimpse of it?) which renders its victim incapable of discarding anything, however small or useless, and hence of ever imposing any kind of pattern on his life?

But if this was madness there was certainly some method in it; for each section bore a neat handwritten label, stating a place and a date – ‘Braysted, 1845', or (the ink here faded with age) ‘Tamberlode, 1816'.

‘Are these all finds that
you
made?' I asked.

He nodded curtly, and muttered something I could not hear. I could not but feel awed by his industry (if not by his discrimination!), but he seemed to think it scarcely worthy of comment, for
he continued on his way without altering his pace or turning his head, and said nothing more until he had reached the end of the room, and slapped a shelf with his hand, sending up a plume of dust.

‘Here's Turner for you,' he announced proudly. ‘He loved this spot.'

There were, I saw, objects from four different excavations here – the earliest dated 1811, the last 1825 – yet they all appeared to come from a single place, identified by a large sign in the centre of the wall: ‘Sturdy Down'.

‘He never said so, for he was taciturn about such matters, but I think he liked it for its layers,' said Gudgeon.

‘Layers
?' I said, not sure if I had heard him correctly.

Gudgeon nodded. ‘Stand on the top of Sturdy Down, and within two miles – if you have eyes to see – you'll find evidence of almost every stage in our island's past.' He lifted a pitted iron axe-head, and weighed it in his hand. ‘Anglo-Saxon, from some princeling's grave.' Before I had had time to examine it, he set it down again, and picked up a shiny fragment of orange tile, which he dropped into my palm. ‘Roman. From the hypocaust of a villa in the valley.' As quickly again, he pointed to an intricate brooch, gracefully curved like an elongated snail's shell. ‘Bronze Age. Buried with some priestess or chieftain's daughter, to allow her to appear in the next world with proper dignity.' He was jabbing his finger so rapidly now that I had barely even glimpsed one treasure before he was on to the next. ‘A stone from the mediaeval priory, most of which has been plundered to build that damned folly up there. A flint spear-point, which might have killed a mammoth.'

‘But why was Turner so fascinated?' I asked – partly to slow him down, but partly out of genuine puzzlement – for while, in the pictures at Marlborough House, there had been abundant evidence of a taste for mythological subjects, and even more of a passion for the moods and effects of nature, I could remember none suggesting a deep interest in British history.

‘He was a man of the people,' said Gudgeon. ‘A man of the
labouring
people. Many times I have seen him stop to sketch a fisherman, or a shepherd – not as a curiosity, or as some fanciful figure in a classical scene, but as a fellow-man, with the sympathy
born of common experience. A great part of his purpose, indeed, was to present the mass of British men and women – those who would never enter a gallery, or have the means to buy a painting – with views of their country.'

‘But still -' I began.

‘For he, too, you see,' said Gudgeon, interrupting me (yet with a little nod, that seemed to say that he noted my objection, and would answer it in due course) ‘knew what it was to be poor, and footsore, and storm-lashed, and to work hard all the day long, and go to bed hungry.' He paused, and then went on more quietly. ‘There were tears in his eyes as he stood there. Almost as if could see them, marching across the landscape – all those generations who had lived and toiled and died in that one place.' Emotion, or the raw air, had thickened Gudgeon's voice, and he had to clear his throat before continuing: ‘I confess I did not truly understand it myself at the time. I was too young. It's easier for me now; for I find, as I get older, I feel closer to the people who made these things' – here he looked about him and nodded, as if he were greeting a party of old friends – ‘and used them, and at length died, and left them behind for me to find.' He was silent for a few seconds; and then – perhaps in an effort to master his feelings, for he seemed close to tears himself now – turned away abruptly, and seized another object from the shelf. ‘Here's something will interest you, Mr. Hartright.'

At first I could not identify it at all, but as he brought it into the light I saw that it was the lower jaw of some great animal, long and lined with jagged teeth like a crocodile's. But it was so huge that – if the rest of the body were in proportion – the brute must have been at least five or six times bigger than even the largest crocodile you have seen in the Zoological Gardens; and I confess that when I took it in my hands I let out an involuntary gasp of amazement.

‘Part of an extinct dragon,' said Gudgeon, with the practised chuckle of a man who has seen the same response many times before. ‘What I believe Owen now calls a
dinosaur.
'

‘Owen?' I said.

‘William.
Sir
William, I should say.' (You would have supposed from his emphasis that no man ever deserved a knight-hood
less.) ‘Superintendent of the British Museum. And so, naturally, to be deferred to on every point of classification.'

He glowered round at his collection, his mouth working, like a rumbling volcano about to erupt; and I prepared myself for the long catalogue of his differences with Sir William. At length, however – perhaps again recalling his undertaking to talk of nothing but Turner – he nodded at the jawbone and said:

‘At all events, Turner and I saw it being dug out of the chalk, and he stood there, quite mesmerized for a moment, his face all aglow like a schoolboy's; and then he started to sketch, like this' – making wild thrusts with his hand – ‘as if his life depended on it. Later, I believe, he clothed it in flesh, and put it in one of his pictures.'

‘Yes,' I said; for, as he spoke, the monster in
The Goddess of Discord in the Garden of the Hesperides
suddenly slithered before my mind's eye, and I recognized it for this creature as surely as you may recognize a face that you have seen before only in a photograph. ‘I know it.'

‘And here', said Gudgeon, laughing, ‘is a paintbrush, left on the down by the greatest artist of our age.' He handed me a worn wooden handle.

‘You mean this was his?' I said; and, when he nodded, felt a tremor pass across my skin like a crackle of lightning, for (save, perhaps, for Mr. Ruskin's self-portrait) I had never yet held anything that Turner had held; and for a fanciful moment I imagined that his power might still reside in this slender shaft of wood, and communicate itself to me, so that I might paint as he did. Then I lifted it to the lantern-light, and saw that only one bristle remained.

Gudgeon must have noticed my amazement; for he laughed again, and said: ‘He was happy to keep working with only three hairs left, he told me, and content with two; but when he was reduced to one even he had to admit defeat.'

‘But why?' I said, thinking with a prick of guilt how easily I will condemn a brush for the slightest fault. ‘Surely he could have afforded to replace it sooner?'

Gudgeon nodded. ‘Yes, he was already a rich man when I knew him. But he chose to live simply.'