A Buyers Market - Anthony Powell [74]
Barnby screwed up his face in thought.
“Of course,” he said. “I realise that a poor man competing with a rich one for a woman should be in a relatively strong position if he plays his cards well. Even so, Donners possesses to a superlative degree the advantages of his handicaps—so that one cannot help feeling a bit agitated at times. Especially with Theodoric cutting in, though I don’t think he carries many guns.”
“What about Mrs. Wentworth’s husband?”
“Divorced,” said Barnby. “She may even want to marry Donners. The point is, in this—as, I believe, in business matters too—he is rather a man of mystery. From time to time he has a girl hanging about, but he never seems to settle down with anyone. The girls themselves are evasive. They admit to no more than accepting presents and giving nothing in return. That’s innocent enough, after all.”
Although he spoke of the matter as if not to be taken too seriously, I suspected that he was, at least for the moment, fairly deeply concerned in the matter of Baby Wentworth; and when conversation turned to the supposed whims of Sir Magnus, Barnby seemed to take a self-tormenting pleasure in the nature of the hypotheses he put forward. It appeared that the position was additionally complicated by the fact that he had sold a picture to Sir Magnus a month or two before, and that there was even some question of his undertaking a mural in the entrance of the Donners-Brebner building.
“Makes the situation rather delicate,” said Barnby.
He was, so I discovered, a figure of the third generation (perhaps the descent, if ascertainable, would have proved even longer) in the world in which he moved: a fact that seemed to give his judgment, based on easy terms of long standing with the problems involved, a scope rather unusual among those who practise the arts, even when they themselves perform with proficiency. His father—though he had died comparatively young, and left no money to speak of—had been, in his day, a fairly successful sculptor of an academic sort; his grandfather, not unknown in the ’sixties and ’seventies, a book illustrator in the Tenniel tradition.
There were those, as I found later, among Barnby’s acquaintances who would suggest that his too extensive field of appreciation had to some degree inhibited his own painting. This may have been true. He was himself fond of saying that few painters, writers or musicians had anything but the vaguest idea of what had been thought by their forerunners even a generation or two before; and usually no idea at all, however much they might protest to the contrary, regarding each other’s particular branch of aesthetic. His own work diffused that rather deceptive air of emancipation that seemed in those years a kind of neo-classicism, suggesting essentially that same impact brought home to me by Paris in the days when we had met Mr. Deacon in the Louvre: an atmosphere I can still think of as excitingly peculiar to that time.
Sir Magnus’s interest in him showed enterprise in a great industrialist, for Barnby was then still comparatively unknown as a painter. In some curious manner his pictures seemed to personify a substantial proportion of that wayward and melancholy, perhaps even rather spurious, content of the self-consciously disillusioned art of that epoch. I mention these general aspects of the period and its moods, not only because they serve to illustrate Barnby, considered, as it were, as a figure symbolic of the contemporary background, but also because our conversation, when later we had dinner together that night, drifted away from personalities into the region of painting and writing; so that, by the time I returned to my rooms, I had almost forgotten his earlier remarks about such individuals as Widmerpool and Gypsy Jones, or Mrs. Wentworth and Sir Magnus Donners.
As it turned out, some of the things Barnby had told me that night threw light, in due course, on matters that would otherwise have been scarcely intelligible; for I certainly did not expect