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By Root 2311 0

him the look of a sommelier at an expensive French restaurant. By then we had known each other for several years. He had moved house more than once since the days when he had lived above Mr. Deacon’s antique shop, emigrating for a time as far north as Camden Town. Still unmarried, his many adventures with women were a perpetual topic between us. In terms of literature, Barnby might have found a place among Stendhal’s heroes, those power-conscious young men, anxious to achieve success with women without the banal expedient of ‘falling in love’: a state, of course, necessarily implying, on the part of the competitor, a depletion, if not entire abrogation, of ‘the will’. Barnby was, on the whole, more successful than his Stendhalian prototypes, and he was certainly often ‘in love’. All the same, he belonged in that group. Like Valmont in Les Liaisons Dangereuses, he set store ‘upon what terms’ he possessed a woman, seeking a relationship in which sensuality merged with power, rather than engaging in their habitual conflict.

Like everyone else, at that moment, Barnby was complaining of ‘the slump’, although his own reputation as a painter had been rising steadily during the previous two or three years. The murals designed by him for the Donners-Brebner Building had received, one way and another, a great deal of public attention; the patronage of Sir Magnus Donners himself in this project having even survived Barnby’s love affair with Baby Wentworth, supposed mistress of Sir Magnus. Indeed, it had been suggested that ‘the Great Industrialist’, as Barnby used to call him, had been glad to make use of that or some other indiscretion, soon after the completion of the murals, as an excuse for bringing to an end his own association with Mrs. Wentworth. There appeared to be no bad feeling between any of the persons concerned in this triangular adjustment. Sir Magnus was now seen about with a jolie laide called Matilda Wilson; although, as formerly in the Baby Wentworth connexion, little or nothing definite was known of this much discussed liaison. Baby herself had married an Italian and was living in Rome.

‘You’ll never get that introduction now,’ Barnby said, after listening to my story. ‘St. John Clarke in these days would think poor old Isbister much too pompier.’

‘But they are still great friends.’

‘What does that matter?’

‘Besides, St. John Clarke doesn’t know a Van Dyck from a Van Dongen.’

‘Ah, but he does now,’ said Barnby. ‘That’s where you are wrong. You are out of date. St. John Clarke has undergone a conversion.’

‘To what?’

‘Modernism.’

‘Steel chairs?’

‘No doubt they will come.’

‘Pictures made of shells and newspaper?’

‘At present he is at a slightly earlier stage.’

I asked for further details.

‘The outward and visible sign of St. John Clarke’s conversion,’ said Barnby, portentously, ‘is that he has indeed become a collector of modern pictures—though, as I understand it, he still loves them on this side Surrealism. As a matter of fact he bought a picture of mine last week.’

‘This conversion explains his friendly notice of my book.’

‘It does.’

‘I see.’

‘You yourself supposed that something unusual in the quality of your writing had touched him?’

‘Naturally.’

‘I fear it is all part of a much larger design.’

‘Just as good for me.’

‘Doubtless.’

All the same, I felt slightly less complimented than before. The situation was now clear. The rumours already current about St. John Clarke, less explicit than Barnby’s words, had equally suggested some kind of intellectual upheaval. Isbister’s portraits of politicians, business men and ecclesiastics, executed with emphatic, almost aggressive disregard for any development of painting that could possibly be called ‘modern’, would now certainly no longer appeal to his old friend. At the same time the ray of St. John Clarke’s approval directed towards myself, until then so phenomenal, was in fact only one minute aspect of the novelist’s new desire to ally himself with forces against which, for many years, he had openly warred.

‘That secretary of his even suggested