• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1331 0

towns which planned to call a general strike, assassinate the cabinet, attack the barracks and give everybody the vote. Cunning, eh? The details of the revolt were mostly worked out by government agents, and when the great day dawned they had trouble getting anyone to move. However, in the villages of Strathaven and Bellshill some enthusiasts set out with red flags. Four of them actually hoisted one on Cathkin Braes and then went home to their teas, for clearly nothing was happening. So Baird, Hardie and Wilson were arrested, tried and hung, and the bloody tide of revolution receded. Then one day the government noticed it could give the vote to almost everyone without losing power. The unemployed got assisted passages to Canada, Australia, Asia and Africa, where they prospered by grabbing land from the natives. Britain became an empire, everyone lived happily ever after, and a monument was erected to Baird and Hardie and Wilson who had died to make us free. But don’t think this red-hot radicalism made us less religious, Mr. Rennie. Glasgow is still full of churches built in the last century. Half of them have been turned into warehouses. Perhaps you and I are painting what will become the best decorated motorcycle and television accessories depot in the United Kingdom.”

Later he said, “I apologize, Mr. Rennie, I don’t believe that. I believe this church will be knocked down, but first the mural must be made perfect. When a thing is perfect it is eternal. It can be destroyed afterward, or slowly decay, but its perfection is safe in the past, which is the only inevitable part of the universe. No government, no force, no God can make what has been not have been. The past is eternal and every day our abortions fall into it: love affairs we bungled, homes we damaged, children we couldn’t be kind to. Let you and I, Mr. Rennie, make eternity a present of a complete, perfect, harmonious, utterly harmless thing; something whose every part is the result of intelligent, loving care; something which isn’t a destructive weapon and can’t be sold at a profit by public-spirited businessmen. And remember, Mr. Rennie, we’re doing nothing novel. For five or six thousand years Egyptian and Etruscan and Chinese artists put their best work into graves which were never opened. The old Greeks and Romans had as many Leonardos, Rembrandts and Cézannes as we have, all painting on plaster that’s turned to powder now, apart from a few square yards in Pompeii. I’m not sorry. There are too many colour photographs of the Great Art of the Past. If it didn’t have colour reproduction, the mid-twentieth century would have no reason to think itself artistic at all … and if it didn’t have you and me, Mr. Rennie.”

“Stop condescending to me,” said a voice.

Thaw started and dropped his brush, for it was three o’clock in the morning. He laughed shakily and climbed down the ladder, saying, “I will never condescend to you again, Mr. Rennie, if you promise not to speak to me when you aren’t here. Excuse me, I’m a little tired.”

Sleeping had become as easy as work, for he dreamed he was in the mural. “Here it is: land, sky and sunlight,” he said to God his father as they strolled round the bramble bush, the serpent wagging its tail behind them. It was a clear day and anemones were singing in the tidal pools. “You’ll get it back when I’ve put it in decent order. I don’t like being in debt. As you see I’ve had no trouble with rational pain and death.” They looked up at a hawk with a young rabbit hanging from its claws, then paused on the summit of a cliff. On the river below two swans twined their necks and the first lovers knelt to each other on the far shore. On the western horizon arose the great stump of the Babylonian tower, tiny figures waved flags on the summit; to the east, on Ben Sinai, in a patch of bad weather, the minister was carving the triangulation tables of the law. “Sex and history are problems I can’t solve, so I’m returning them in the form you gave them, though stated a little more clearly. I’ll finish by the new year and then I’ll owe you nothing.