“Ah, it’s you,” said Rampion. “Can’t shake hands at the moment, I’m afraid.” He was cleaning his brushes. “How are you?”
Burlap shook his head and said that he needed a holiday but couldn’t afford to take it. He walked round the studio looking reverentially at the paintings. St. Francis would hardly have approved of most of them. But what life, what energy, what imagination! Life, after all, was the important thing. “I believe in Life.” That was the first article of one’s creed.
“What’s the title of this?” he asked, coming to a halt in front of the canvas on the easel.
Wiping his hands as he came, Rampion crossed the room and stood beside him. “That?” he said. “Well, ‘Love,’ I suppose, is what you’d call it.” He laughed; he had worked well that afternoon and was in the best of humours. “But less refined and soulful people might prefer something less printable.” Grinning, he suggested a few of the less printable alternatives. Burlap’s smile was rather sickly. “I don’t know if you can think of any others,” Rampion concluded maliciously. When Burlap was in the neighbourhood it amused him, and at the same time he felt it positively a duty, to be shocking.
It was a smallish painting, in oils. Low down in the left-hand corner of the canvas, set in a kind of recess between a foreground of dark rocks and tree trunks and a background of precipitous crags, and arched over by a mass of foliage, two figures, a man and a woman, lay embraced. Two naked bodies, the woman’s white, the man’s a red brown. These two bodies were the source of the whole illumination of the picture. The rocks and tree trunks in the foreground were silhouetted against the light that issued from them. The precipice behind them was golden with the same light. It touched the lower surface of the leaves above, throwing shadows up into a thickening darkness of greenery. It streamed out of the recess in which they lay, diagonally into and across the picture, illuminating and, one felt, creating by its radiance an astounding flora of gigantic roses and zinnias and tulips, with horses and leopards and little antelopes coming and going between the huge flowers, and beyond, a green landscape deepening, plane after plane, into blue, with a glimpse of the sea between the hills and over it the shapes of huge, heroic clouds in the blue sky.
“It’s fine,” said Burlap slowly, wagging his head over the picture.
“But I can see you hate it.” Mark Rampion grinned with a kind of triumph.
“But why do you say that?” the other protested with a martyred and gentle sadness.
“Because it happens to be true. The thing’s not gentle-Jesusish enough for you. Love, physical love, as the source of light and life and beauty—Oh, no, no, no! That’s much too coarse and carnal; it’s quite deplorably straightforward.”
“But do you take me for Mrs. Grundy?”
“Not Mrs. Grundy, no.” Rampion’s high spirits bubbled over in mockery. “Say St. Francis. By the way, how’s your life of him progressing? I hope you’ve got a good juicy description of his licking the lepers.” Burlap made a gesture of protest. Rampion grinned. “As a matter of fact, even St. Francis is a little too grown up for you. Children don’t lick lepers. Only sexually perverted adolescents do that. St. Hugh of Lincoln, that’s who you are, Burlap. He was a child, you know, a pure, sweet cheeyild. Such a dear snuggly-wuggly, lovey-dovey little chap. So wide-eyed and reverent toward the women, as though they were all madonnas. Coming to be petted and have his pains kissed away and be told about poor Jesus—even to have a swig of milk if there happened to be any going.”
“Really!” Burlap protested.
“Yes, really,” Rampion mimicked. He liked baiting the fellow, making him look like a forgiving Christian martyr. Serve him right for coming in that beloved-disciple attitude and being so disgustingly reverential and admiring.
“Toddling, wide-eyed little St. Hugh. Toddling up to the women so reverently, as though they were all madonnas. But putting his dear little hand under their skirts all the same. Coming to pray, but staying to share madonnina’s bed.” Rampion knew a good deal about Burlap’s amorous affairs and had guessed more. “Dear little St. Hugh! How prettily he toddles to the bedroom and what a darling babyish way he has of snuggling down between the sheets! This sort of thing is much too gross and unspiritual for our little Hughie.” He threw back his head and laughed.
“Go on, go on,” said Burlap. “Don’t mind me.” And at the sight of his martyred, spiritual smile, Rampion laughed yet louder.
“Oh dear, oh dear!” he gasped. “Next time you come, I’ll have a copy of Ary Scheffer’s St. Monica and St. Augustine for you. That ought to make you really happy. Would you like to see some of my drawings?” he asked in another tone. Burlap nodded. “They’re grotesques mostly. Caricatures. Rather ribald, I warn you. But if you will come to look at my work, you must expect what you get.”
He opened a portfolio that was lying on the table.
“Why do you imagine I don’t like your work?” asked Burlap. “After all, you’re a believer in life and so am I. We have our differences; but on most matters our point of view’s the same.”
Rampion looked up at him. “Oh, I’m sure it is, I know it is,” he said, and grinned.
“Well, if you know it’s the same,” said Burlap, whose averted eyes had not seen the grin on the other’s face, “why do you imagine I’ll disapprove of your drawings?”
“Why indeed?” the other mocked.
“Seeing that the point of view’s the same …”
“It’s obvious that the people looking at the view from the same point must be identical.” Rampion grinned again. “Q.E.D.” He turned away again to take out one of the drawings. “This is what I call Fossils of the Past and Fossils of the Future.” He handed Burlap the drawing. It was in ink touched with
