I suppose it isn’t a very ordinary situation. Not many people can have murdered their father in a fit of rage; and so it may be difficult for the majority to believe that I simply couldn’t understand, couldn’t make my mind understand, that is—what had occurred. I repeated over and over again, “He’s dead. I’ve killed him. I’m a murderer. Murderers hang.” But it was no use. I couldn’t believe it, and presently, through sheer repetition, the words ceased to have any meaning at all, and became as incongruous as any casual collection of letters might, if you stared at them long enough. Even the word “murderer,” the word “hang,” meant nothing.
And the second thing that struck me was the effect that death has on people, the instantaneous, humiliating effect. I am thirty-two, but I haven’t come in contact with death much. The only other time I remember was when Hartley died in Paris, and everything was different then. He was not six years old, and he died in agony, and everything was prolonged to a nightmare extent. That wasn’t like death as I had ever conceived it. That was an anguished withering of childhood into a premature decay. There was nothing peaceful or beautiful about him as he lay in his coffin, an absurd white satin affair, with lilies of the valley round that dreadful shrivelled face. That was the sole occasion when I found myself compelled to realise that there is an agony known to men that cannot merely stir, but actually wring the heart. Even now I can’t bear people to talk to me about him, and one of the reasons why I left Paris was because I wanted to settle among people who had never seen him. He’s the one thing, besides my work, that I have cared for in my life, and he has gone out of it. It’s ironical, if you care to stop and think about it, to realise that I married Sophy solely for his sake, and now he’s vanished, and I am left with her and Margot and Eleanor and Dulcie and Anne, and the baby, whose father I most probably am not, though, of course, I can’t find out, and anyway now it has ceased to matter.
But here there was something so shocking, so abominable about death that I stared at my father’s face in a kind of repelled fascination. I had expected something, in adult death at least, of dignity, a certain majesty and grandeur. But there was none, not a trace of heroism. Now that the corners of the mouth were no longer kept under control by the tense jaw—and it’s queer how I had never realised the desperate effort it must have cost him to preserve that aspect of nobility that made men admire him and women feel a peculiar attraction towards him—the muscles sagged to a weak peevishness; his nostrils, that had been finely modelled as a younger man, became pinched and fretful; the eyes were vacant and the whole face, in shedding its handsome scholarly asceticism, that had been so fine a mask during his life, betrayed now an astounding cupidity.
Of course, it didn’t surprise me, any more than it would surprise Richard or Amy or—I fancy—Miles Amery, whom I have always credited with more than the usual amount of commonsense, that isn’t without its shrewd vein of cynicism. And I don’t think he was ever deceived by my father’s manner. He (my father) liked to appear a philosopher, a man of tranquil moods and reflections, and if some company in which he held shares passed its dividend, or if the shares themselves went down a point or two, he’d sulk like a child, refuse food, make the most humiliating scenes about trifles in household expenditure, curtail this or that necessity, and in general behave as though he had lost thousands of pounds.
I looked up and saw the eyes of the first Hildebrand watching me. I was named for him, the famous prince of the Church of the early sixteenth century, whose portrait hangs in one of the recesses of the library. It’s supposed to be immensely valuable. There was another Hildebrand, too, but he was an obscure preaching friar, who took the habit and lived in a manner that we—even I, who pig it in a squalid hole in Fulham, where the ceilings are cracked and the wallpapers speckled with damp and the sanitation unspeakable—should regard as absolutely disgusting. Autres temps, autres modes. It appeared to suit him very well, and shortly after his death so many miracles were reported at his nameless grave that his beatification was accelerated, and perhaps he is now in a superior position to the Cardinal. Which exemplifies the Church’s teaching about the first and the last, and is therefore quite fitting.
This Hildebrand who hangs in the library has the expression of a statesman, a disillusioned statesman who knows his own power and despises it. I am never wholly comfortable when I meet his eyes. But, if it comes to that, I’m never wholly at ease in that room at all. It gives you some notion of the type of man my father was that he could sit there and brood over his financial affairs without a sense of self-abasement or even of discomfort. On second thoughts, I’m not sure it isn’t the kind of room every artist should have to work in—by which I mean, should be compelled to work in. It isn’t a room where such a man could produce scamped work or be satisfied with the second-rate or even with the first-rate that came easily to him. Because it is
