Miles turned to speak to Brand, but paused, silenced by the flesh-and-blood reality. Brand was looking at his own picture, absorbing it, exhausted by it. All his vitality had gone to its making, and he seemed drained of desire, as of fear. Miles was reminded of a very powerful study he had once seen of an early Latin saint; he had been struck by the fanatical abandonment of self that that drawing had displayed. And here, for the second time in his life, he encountered a similar absorption in an object, greater than the individual who planned it, yet a concrete expression of his personality. Brand to-day was unaware of his danger as he was unaware of himself. And, thought Miles, watching him sensitively, if all his peril could be expressed in tangible symptoms, laid out before him on a table, he would have been oblivious to their intent. He was possessed and devoured by this indescribable force. And Miles turned back, his words frozen on his lips.
He was not, perhaps, a great judge of pictures, but this overwhelmed him, not merely by its power but by its technical excellence. In the drab futility of the dead man, in the energy of purpose of the murderer, Brand had achieved a masterpiece. Every detail—the light thrown back from the polished table, the edge of the brass weight, the sheen of the blue leather cushion in the winged arm-chair, the dead ash of the fire, the dull surface of a terra-cotta curtain drooping near the dead man’s head—in all these he detected perfection. The effect of the whole, even on one to whom it had no peculiar significance, must be terrific. The white heat at which the crime had been committed was here surpassed by the white heat inspiring the painting.
“Well?” said Brand softly, emerging at last from his long reverie.
Miles said in an abrupt voice, “You do realise what you’ve done? What other people would say? That it’s the act of a madman. What on earth possessed you to do anything so crazy?”
Repeating the interview later to his wife, Miles said, “He seemed in those last few minutes to have undergone some startling change. I couldn’t get near him. No words can express the sheer magnificence of the man.”
This transfigured Brand, leaning forward from the edge of the table, where he had seated himself, replied, “I wish I knew the answer to that last remark of yours. The act of a madman, you said? But how can you say such a thing? How much do you or anyone else actually know? And what’s normality for that matter? Is it, in any event, worth the tremendous price—the sacrifice of originality, idealism, ambition—that we’re asked to pay for it? I suppose no one could supply a satisfactory answer. Perhaps it doesn’t even matter very much. When I was painting that, it occurred to me it might be its own explanation, but now it’s finished I feel less assured. Probably we can’t get any nearer than to say that we’re bound—morally bound—to accomplish the work that is ours to do, without questioning or refusing. If it comes to that”—he smiled, sweetly, gravely, with a tender understanding of a situation that Miles was finding intolerable—“I daresay you wouldn’t have chosen to hound me down. But some things are inevitable. In a sense, they don’t even involve free will. I could no more not have painted that canvas than you could have kept quiet and stayed in St. John’s Wood, and let Eustace hang. There comes a stage when consequences simply don’t count. A picture may lead one man to the Academy and another, it seems, to the gallows. That isn’t significant, though, not if you’ve got your values right. I think all artists feel the same. I suppose to the author the important thing is writing his book, quite apart from publication. Publication, after all, is only a sop to his vanity—except where it’s his living; and most of us don’t make enough for it to be that. What matters actually to him, if he’s worth anything, is the quality of his work. When that’s done, his essential job is over. That’s the only answer I’ve been able to puzzle out for myself during these weeks. All our experience is fused to one point—that we may adequately produce our own harvest. And I suppose,” he added reflectively, “if we were satisfied with anything less, it wouldn’t be worth going on at all.”
5
Evening had stolen down the street, that was now folded in shadow. The pinpoints of light glimmering through numberless curtains only served to intensify the gloom beyond their tiny radiance. Miles, standing by the cold north window while Brand wrote out his methodical confession, page after page, in the room behind him, shivered with a nausea he could not repress. The crossing had been a bad one, and the vessel had tossed about for some hours outside the harbour before she could attain port; then he had caught a slow and very bad
