• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1927 0

figure of an old woman—a very old woman—rising or falling along the left pillar, with every detail of her fallen flesh remorselessly and lovingly recorded—flat, flaccid breasts, withered thighs, hanging bag of a belly. A dead child trampled her head, another pressed its face into her stomach. Olive stood there, in her pale pink dress, and her hat with roses, and gripped the pommel of her pretty blush-pink parasol. She felt anger with the sculptor for having observed the descent of flesh with such indifferent glee, neither love nor hate, she thought, but a pleasure in mastery, of every kind. And so she felt mastered, but stood there, pink and charming. She, like Charles/Karl, had observed the midinettes and the street-women, and had said to herself with Northern realism, there but for the grace of God, and her own lucky face and figure, and Humphry’s magnanimity and eccentricity, went she. She caught the sculptor looking at her out of the corner of his eye. Undressing her? What did he see, this man who could model gauche passion, and shame and shamelessness and voracity in women? She turned her face modestly down in the shade of her hat-brim, swung her bottom under her skirt, and moved off to talk to Prosper Cain.

Philip could not bear the Gates. They were more unbearable than The Crouching Woman, because they, like what filled his mind, were a pattern of interlinked human figures. He could not discern or analyse the pattern, though its presence was overpowering and annihilated him. He wanted to tear up his sketch-book, but instead he doggedly got it out, and began to draw the one rhythm he was sure he could see, a dance of repeating rounds in the tympanum, breasts and buttocks, cheeks and curls, intermingling with grinning death’s-heads and grotesques. He thinks with his fingers, close-up, Philip knew. And one form gives him the idea for another, even before he is finished with the first. Is he ever at a loss for a form? I think not, I think he fears he will never get it out and down.

Drawing calmed him. He squatted on the edge of a plinth and devised a notation to get it down quickly. They would probably drag him off to eat French food, and he would not have seen.

A shadow fell across the paper. He looked up. Rodin was looking down at him, peering at the drawing. Philip grasped his sketch-book to his chest.

“Je peux? Ne vous inquiétez-pas, c’est bon,” said the sculptor. Philip’s face was red and damp. Benedict Fludd came to join them. Rodin turned the paper. “Ah bon, c’est intéressant. Un potier comme Palissy.” Philip understood “Palissy.” He looked up at Fludd, and then automatically held out his hands to the sculptor, and made the airy shape of clay on the wheel with his fingers. Fludd laughed a deep laugh, made the same gesture, and said “Benedict Fludd, potier, élève de Palissy, épouvanté par Auguste Rodin. Anglais. Philip Warren, mon apprenti. Qui travaille bien, comme vous voyez, je pense.”

Rodin said he knew Fludd’s work. He tapped the Gien-majolica-candlestick men with his clay-ingrained finger, and said they were interesting. Wait, he said, and opened a cupboard, and brought out a large celadon-coloured greenish jar, with a twisting female figure incised in the glaze. These, he said, he made himself at the Sèvres porcelain works.

“There is much to learn, in all forms of the clay,” he said. And to Fludd, “I know your work. You are a master.” Fludd ran his fingertips over the porcelain as he had run them over The Crouching Woman. He was in a good mood, alert and benign.

Out on the moving pavement, he began to look at the women, and comment to Philip in an undertone on their shapes and attitudes. He asked Philip if he was enjoying himself—and do look at that lovely sulky little visage, the one with the shiny little hat—are you widening your knowledge of the world, would you say?

“It is all a bit much. Too much too good too new, all at once.”

“And too stimulating, I suppose, with all this flesh sailing past on the fast strip?”

“Sailing or standing,” said Philip with a sigh, “too much.”

“I think I should