During those five years I worked—in my sense of the word—whenever I could. At first Sophy encouraged me, till she realised it wouldn’t mean more grist to the mill. She would follow me to the studio, saying, “But, Brand, why not do a pretty picture of the bridge? There are always men painting that bridge, and they sell them and come back and do more.”
“And sell those and come back again,” I suggested.
She nodded.
“And that’s your idea for me?”
She became, as usual, abusive, tart, and vulgar. “My idea is that the children shall have shoes and I shall have underclothes that I would not be utterly ashamed to be found in in an accident,” she shrilled.
One becomes accustomed to this outlook at last—that practically everyone really professes and believes it to be more important to earn a living than to do your own job. No doubt I was to blame in getting married, but I wasn’t going to waste my precious leisure painting bloody little pictures of the Battersea Bridge or the view from Hammersmith down to Putney.
My sister, Olivia, was another person who could not leave me alone. I daresay Sophy went to her asking for money, probably taking a child in a ragged frock. I have always detested Olivia, and particularly since she married that smooth-faced double-dealing Jew financier, Eustace Moore. He’s tremendously proud of her; they go about “simply everywhere, my dear,” and she writes damnable bright letters in the Illustrated Weeklies—“Cherry, darling, I simply must tell you of a hat I saw on the boulevard this morning,” and “They do say the most extraordinary thing happened at the Monroe-Phillips’ last night…” Eustace thinks the earth of her because she can look like a lady (his conception of a lady anyhow) and yet makes money like a business woman. They have two sons, called Montague and Arnold, and a car whose photograph gets into the papers. Every now and again Olivia writes to me, or even comes down to Fulham (“Pray for me, darling, I’m going slumming. Yes, my poor relations. Too revolting, isn’t it?”—I can hear her say that to her fashionable friends).
“You mustn’t think me unsympathetic, Brand,” she says in what I believe is known as a liquid voice, “it isn’t that I don’t feel for you. But life is even greater than art, and you have your children to think of. It isn’t as if I couldn’t see your point of view. But Eustace would feel himself dreadfully badly used, and so would the boys, if I didn’t tear myself away when they need me. And yet I’m sure when I’m in the mood I scarcely feel as if any other world existed. It’s all a question of discipline, and even if I do resent Eustace sometimes interrupting me, I comfort myself by thinking that discipline is as necessary in the study—or the studio—as in the nursery.”
“And all this bloody stuff I do at Higginsons is good discipline for me?” I suggested.
She beamed and said yes, it was. For years now, whenever I’ve thought of her or seen her, I have dreamed of getting my own back. Between her and Sophy and my father, things have been almost intolerable. I reminded him of that to-night. You know how it is sometimes, when the dignity of life holds you and you instinctively respond, feeling a kind of nobility in yourself simply for being linked to life. And then there are other days—and this evening was one—when dignity is a word without a meaning, and you feel yourself cheap and vulgar and uncontrolled. That’s called a nervous outburst or hysteria, I believe. It really means a stage when you’ve endured all that’s possible. After the past seven weeks at Fulham this evening’s scene with my father was the last straw. I had known when I came down to King’s Poplars that I wasn’t really ready for the interview; I wanted a little time to get my second wind. But when I saw Richard and Eustace hovering like vultures over a corpse not quite dead enough for them, but prepared with beak and talons to defend their carrion, I knew I dared not wait. My brooding on the kind of life I henceforth proposed to live had given me a quite unfounded optimism, and when I went down to my father I give you my word, though no one will believe me, I did so with an assurance that this time I should make him appreciate my point of view and fall in with my suggestions. Within five minutes I realised the kind of fool I had been. Anticipations and hope might have changed me, but he was the same as ever. I could repeat his strictures for him. Always the same stuff about responsibility and the family name and the value of honourable work. I tried to make him see that it wasn’t honourable, either in essence or in fact, and that for a man of my potentialities to remain there was as bad as theft. Of course, he dismissed all this in the most slighting manner—Fulham oratory he called it—and both our tempers began to split. He was quietly, futilely, impertinently humorous at the expense of men whose shoes he is not fit to black. The scene became increasingly violent; having lost my head, I was soon at the end of my tether. It was then that I seized the paper-weight.
He laughed. “You’re quite right,” he said; “arguments like yours need solid reinforcements.”
And then I struck him, with no more notion of what I was doing in the moment of performance than the weight itself. The moment he dropped, so quietly and without a groan, I felt all passion
