Beowulf

centred their lives on dogs. Perhaps to be on the safe side, he would add a vague sentence about animals. “I once had the unique privilege of sketching two of the late Queen Victoria’s cream ponies for my little nephews.” The sentence was pleasantly historical if she happened to prefer the animal world. “Actually, I wanted to ask you, forgive my discursiveness, would you care to have your mother’s letter returned to your own keeping? She was so truly thoughtful for others that I have always treasured it and cannot bear that it should be turned over by strangers.” He reached a cold hand unwillingly towards the tray again—but it was age, a good sentence had a habit of slipping away like those dear little cirrus clouds he was so fond of, if he did not jot it down. “And you, I fear you must be finding it difficult in these hard times to keep the beautiful garden cared for as you would wish?” He had done a sketch of Mrs. Johnson’s hollyhocks one summer. It had been, in fact, the way that their acquaintanceship had begun. She had found him sketching in a neighbouring meadow, had offered him tea and eventually the commission to do her paved walk. The pen scratched, the ink was running dry; it was, no doubt, the cold. “At least you have been spared, I hope, the attentions of our unwelcome visitors. Yours most sincerely, Horatio Rashleigh.”
First he must wait a moment for his chilly hands to thaw under the blanket, then he would get up and light the fire. After breakfast he would make a clean copy of the letter and write, perhaps, a postcard to Agatha. It was no morning to be tardy if he were going to buy his tea; unless he reached Mr. Dobbie’s shop by a quarter to ten, there would be no opportunity for a chat.
Horatio rubbed his hands together, impatient for an activity that the icy room denied. His seascape seemed to reproach him with its galleons and billowing clouds. He had hung it directly over what had once been the fireplace but was now, alas, blocked in except for the chalklike pipes of the gas stove. Perhaps it was, as they had teased him in his youth, a shade too influenced by Turner, but it was his own spirit that was in every line of Drake’s ship. The firm precise lines of the rigging stood out as if drawn in sepia, gallantly, under the clouds and flame of the Spanish hull. A prophecy perhaps: “We are all now, Miss Evelyn, Drakes in our own small way,” to which the child had replied (these modern schools, what did they care about the past?), “Well, if the Ministry of Food continues its wilful course we could do with some more ducks.”
Forty years ago the picture had hung proudly in the Academy. Not, naturally, in a good light, but then not all whom the Muses called were able to withstand the intoxication of success. If his peers had passed him by, Art, itself, had not failed him. It was better to bring beauty to untutored eyes, and now that he was an old man he could say this convincingly, than to hang bleakly in a gallery before a dozen students and halfhearted visitors tramping from room to room to while away the time. His ships had been the gay cover for First Steps to History, Part II. They had been a calendar, even a jigsaw puzzle. Some might laugh, like that fellow Dale who sneered about “coloured photographs” just because he had never learned to draw but made splotches in red and black with his thumb that he called Abstract No. 7. What the world needed was not machinery but penitence, a return to apprenticeship, to straight lines and “taking pains.” Why, this war was raging because people wanted to make haste, were shoddy, indifferent to detail, selfishly avid of some temporary laurel, unlike the anonymous craftsmen who had spent a lifetime on some obscure corner of a cathedral wall. “The artist abhors engines,” he had said stiffly to Evelyn only the night before. “And what about Leonardo and his flying machines?” she had joked; it had surprised him that she knew a painter’s name. “Da Vinci,” he had rebuked her, “was a genius, but there is an element about his work, I except the Mona Lisa, that we can only describe as, well… bitter.” He had not cared, though the young women of today talked about things that hardly entered even a man’s head, to mention the unfortunate circumstances of Leonardo’s family life. “Someday,” he had suggested, for you never knew, some chance words might reveal the treasures of the spirit to the young, “you must come with me to the National Gallery. There is a blue in a Fra Angelico there that is the absolute colour of the Tuscan sky.” “I’ll be so glad, Mr. Rashleigh, when peace comes that I’ll do anything”; and he had recalled with a start that the pictures, of course, were transferred to the country for the duration.
After the war. Horatio shivered suddenly, less with cold than with hatred. Those vandals! All his life he had been resisting some mysterious power, and there it was in the sky with its shrieking engines (Grandfather had been right to predict the doom of the world at his first sight of a locomotive) tearing up moral values, lustily destroying homes. (Miss Tippett had told him yesterday that men and women were sleeping together in the shelters, without even a screen.) If one were seventy-six, every moment counted. There were no brave words about death except when one was young. Suppose he were too ailing, when it stopped, to go to the National Gallery again? Suppose Agatha should really be unable to send him his allowance, his hand fail, his last clients abandon calendars? It was dreary enough to be an old man and have no soul