Gilbert Chesterton: The Return of Don Quixote

The end of the longest room at Seawood Abbey was full of light; for the walls were almost made of windows and it projected upon a terraced part of the garden above the park on an almost cloudless morning. Murrel, called Monkey for some reason that everybody had forgotten, and Olive Ashley were taking advantage of the light to occupy themselves with painting; though she was painting on a very small scale and he on a very large one. She was laying out peculiar pigments very carefully, in imitation of the flat jewellery of medieval illumination, for which she had a great enthusiasm, as part of a rather vague notion of a historic past. He, on the other hand, was highly modern, and was occupied with several pails full of very crude colours and with brushes which reached the stature of brooms. With these he was laying about him on large sheets of lath and canvas, which were to act as scenery in some private theatricals then in preparation. They could not paint, either of them; nor did they imagine that they could. But she was in some sense trying to do so; and he was not.

“It’s all very well for you to talk about discords,” he was saying somewhat defensively, for she was a critical lady, “but your style of painting narrows the mind. After all, scene-painting is only illumination seen through a microscope.”

“I hate microscopes,” she observed briefly.

“Well, you look as if you wanted one, poring over that stuff,” replied her companion, “in fact I fancy I have seen people screwing a great thing in their eye while they did it. I hope you won’t go so far as that: it wouldn’t suit your style at all.”

This was true enough, no doubt, for she was a small, slight girl, with dark delicate features of the kind called regular; and her dark green dress, which was aesthetic but the reverse of Bohemian, had something akin to the small severities of her task. There was something a shade old maidish about her gestures, although she was very young. It was noticeable that though the room was strewn with papers and dusters and the flamboyant failures of Mr. Murrel’s art, her own flat colour-box, with its case and minor accessories, were placed about her with protective neatness. She was not one of those for whom is written the paper of warnings sometimes sold with paint-boxes; and it had never been necessary to adjure her not to put the brush in the mouth.

“What I mean,” she said, resuming the subject of microscopes, “is that all your science and modern stuff has only made things ugly, and people ugly as well. I don’t want to look down a microscope any more than down a drain. You only see a lot of horrid little things crawling about. I don’t want to look down at all. That’s why I like all this old Gothic painting and building; in Gothic all the lines go upwards, right up to the very spire that points to heaven.”

“It’s rude to the point,” said Murrel, “and I think they might have given us credit for noticing the sky.”

“You know perfectly well what I mean,” replied the lady, painting placidly, “all the originality of those medieval people was in the way they built their churches. The whole point of them was the pointed arches.”

“And the pointed spears,” he assented. “When you didn’t do what they liked, they just prodded you. Too pointed, I think. Almost amounting to a hint.”

“Anyhow the gentlemen then prodded each other with their spears,” answered Olive, “they didn’t go and sit on plush seats to see an Irishman pummelling a black man. I wouldn’t see a modern prize-fight for the world; but I shouldn’t mind a bit being a lady at one of the old tournaments.”

“You might be a lady, but I shouldn’t be a lord,” said the scene-painter gloomily. “Not my luck. Even if I were a king, I should only be drowned in a butt of sack and never smile again. But it’s more my luck to be born a serf or something. A leper, or some such medieval institution. Yes, that’s how it would be–the minute I’d poked my nose into the thirteenth century I’d be appointed Chief Leper to the king or somebody; and have to squint into church through that little window.”

“You don’t squint into church through any window at present,” observed the lady, “nor has it occurred to you even to do so through the door.”

“Oh, I leave all that to you,” he said, and proceeded to splash away in silence. He was engaged on a modest interior of “The Throne Room of Richard Coeur de Lion,” which he treated in a scheme of scarlet, crimson and purple which Miss Ashley strove in vain to arrest; though she really had some rights of protest in the matter, having both selected the medieval subject and even written the play, so far as her more sportive collaborators would allow her. It was all about Blondel, the Troubadour, who serenaded Coeur de Lion and many other people; including the daughter of the house; who was addicted to theatricals and kept him at it. The Hon. Douglas Murrel, or Monkey, cheerfully confronted his ill-success in scene-painting, having succeeded equally ill in many other things. He was a man of wide culture, and had failed in all subjects. He had especially failed in politics; having once been called the future leader of his party, whichever it was. But he had failed at the supreme moment to seize the logical connection between the principle of taxing deer-forests and that of retaining an old pattern of rifle for the Indian Army: and the nephew of an Alsatian pawn-broker, to whose clear brain the connection was more apparent, had slipped into his place. Since then he had shown that taste for low company which has kept so many aristocrats out of mischief and their country out of peril, and shown it incongruously (as they sometimes do) by having something vaguely slangy and horsey about his very dress and appearance, as of an objectless ostler. His hair was very fair and beginning to blanch quite prematurely; for he also was young, though many years older than his companion. His face, which was plain but not common-place, habitually wore a dolorous expression which was almost comic; especially in connection with the sporting colours of his neckties and waistcoats, which were almost as lively as the colours on his brush.

“I’ve a negro taste,” he explained, laying on a giant streak of sanguine colour, “these mongrel greys of the mystics make me as tired as they are. They talk about a Celtic Renaissance; but I’m for an Ethiopian Renaissance. The banjo to be more truly what’s-its-name than old Dolmetch’s lute. No dances but the deep, heart-weary Break-Down–there’s tears in the very name–no historical characters except Toussaint L’Ouverture and Booker Washington, no fictitious characters except Uncle Remus and Uncle Tom. I bet it wouldn’t take much to make the Smart Set black their faces as they used to whiten their hair. For my part, I begin to feel a meaning in all my mis-spent life. Something tells me I was intended for a Margate nigger. I do think vulgarity is so nice, don’t you?”

She did not reply; indeed she seemed a little absent-minded. Her humour had been faintly shrewdish; but when her face fell into seriousness it was entirely young. Her fine profile with parted lips suddenly suggested not only a child, but a lost child.