The Complete Short Stories of Evelyn Waugh - Evelyn Waugh [154]
The hour after breakfast was normally devoted to letter-writing, but today a railway strike had been called and there were no posts. Moreover, since it was the start of term, there was no Sunday Lesson. The whole morning was therefore free and Charles had extracted permission to spend it in the Drawing School. He collected his materials and was soon happily at work.
The poem—Ralph Hodgson’s “’Twould ring the bells of Heaven The wildest peal for years, If Parson lost his senses And people came to theirs . . .”—was one of Frank’s favourites. In the happy days when he had been House Tutor of Head’s, Frank had read poetry aloud on Sunday evenings to any in Head’s who cared to come, which was mostly the lower half of the House. He read “There swimmeth One Who swam e’er rivers were begun, And under that Almighty Fin the littlest fish may enter in” and “Abou Ben Adhem, may his tribe increase” and “Under the wide and starry sky” and “What have I done for you, England, my England . . . ?” and many others of the same comfortable kind; but always before the end of the evening someone would say “Please, sir, can we have ‘The Bells of Heaven’?” Now he read only to his own house but the poems, Frank’s pleasant voices, his nightingales, were awake still, warm and bright with remembered firelight.
Charles did not question whether the poem was not perfectly suited to the compressed thirteenth-century script in which he had written it. His method of writing was first to draw the letters faintly, freehand in pencil; then with a ruler and ruling pen to ink in the uprights firmly in Indian ink until the page consisted of lines of short and long black perpendiculars; then with a mapping pen he joined them with hair strokes and completed their lozenge-shaped terminals. It was a method he had evolved for himself by trial and error. The initial letters of each line were left blank and these, during the last week of the holidays, he had filled with vermilion, carefully drawn, “Old English” capitals. The T alone remained to do and for this he had selected a model from Shaw’s Alphabets, now open before him on the table. It was a florid fifteenth-century letter which needed considerable ingenuity of adaption, for he had decided to attach to it the decorative tail of the J. He worked happily, entirely absorbed, drawing in pencil, then tensely, with breath held, inking the outline with a mapping pen; then, when it was dry—how often, in his impatience, he had ruined his work by attempting this too soon—rubbing away the pencil lines. Finally he got out his watercolours and his red sable brushes. At heart he knew he was going too fast—a monk would take a week over a single letter—but he worked with intensity and in less than two hours the initial with its pendant, convoluted border was finished. Then, as he put away his brushes, the exhilaration left him. It was no good; it was botched; the ink outline varied in thickness, the curves seemed to feel their way cautiously where they should have been bold; in places the colour overran the line and everywhere in contrast to the opaque lithographic ink it was watery and transparent. It was no good.
Despondently Charles shut his drawing book and put his things together. Outside the Drawing School, steps led down to the Upper Quad past the doors of Brent’s House—Frank’s. Here he met Mercer.
“Hullo, been painting?”
“Yes, if you can call it that.”
“Let me see.”
“No.”
“Please.”
“It’s absolutely beastly. I hate it, I tell you. I’d have torn it up if I wasn’t going to keep it as a humiliation to look at in case I ever begin to feel I know anything about art.”
“You’re always dissatisfied, Ryder. It’s the mark of a true artist, I suppose.”
“If I was an artist I shouldn’t do things I’d be dissatisfied with. Here, look at it, if you must.”
Mercer gazed at the open page. “What don’t you like about it?”
“The whole thing’s nauseating.”
“I suppose it is a bit ornate.”
“There, my dear Mercer, with your usual unerring discernment you have hit upon the one quality that is at all tolerable.