Mary Westmacott - Giant's Bread

He clenched his hands. No, everything would be all right.

When he was twenty-one …

The room was full of cigarette smoke. It eddied and drifted about, forming a thin blue haze. Through it came the sound of three voices occupied with the betterment of the human race and the encouragement of art – especially art that defied all known conventions.

Sebastian Levinne, leaning back against the ornate marble mantelpiece of his mother’s town house, spoke didactically, gesticulating with the long yellow hand that held his cigarette. The tendency to lisp was still there, but very faint. His yellow Mongolian face, his surprised looking ears, were much the same as they had been at eleven years old. At twenty-two he was the same Sebastian, sure of himself, perceptive, with the same love of beauty and the same unemotional and unerring sense of values.

In front of him, reclining in two immense leather covered arm-chairs, were Vernon and Joe. Very much alike these two, cast in the same sharply accentuated black and white mould. But, as of old, Joe’s was the more aggressive personality, energetic, rebellious, vehement. Vernon, an immense length, lay back slothfully in his chair. His long legs rested on the back of another chair. He was blowing smoke rings and smiling thoughtfully to himself. He occasionally contributed grunts to the conversation, or a short lazy sentence.

‘That wouldn’t pay,’ Sebastian had just said decisively.

As he had half expected, Joe was roused at once to the point of virulence.

‘Who wants a thing to pay ? It’s so – so rotten – that point of view! Treating everything from a commercial standpoint. I hate it.’

Sebastian said calmly: ‘That’s because you’ve got such an incurably romantic view of life. You like poets to starve in garrets, and artists to toil unrecognized, and sculptors to be applauded after they are dead.’

‘Well – that’s what happens. Always!’

‘No, not always . Very often, perhaps. But it needn’t be as often as it is. That’s my point. The world never likes anything new – but I say it could be made to. Taken the right way, it could be made to. But you’ve got to know just what will go down and what won’t.’

‘That’s compromise,’ murmured Vernon indistinctly.

‘It’s common sense! Why should I lose money by backing my judgment?’

‘Oh, Sebastian,’ cried Joe. ‘You – you –’

‘Jew!’ said Sebastian calmly. ‘That’s what you mean. Well, we Jews have got taste – we know when a thing is fine and when it isn’t. We don’t go by the fashion – we back our own judgment, and we’re right ! People always see the money side of it, but the other’s there too.’

Vernon grunted. Sebastian went on.

‘There are two sides to what we’re talking about – there are people who are thinking of new things, new ways of doing old things, new thoughts altogether – and who can’t get their chance because people are afraid of anything new. And there are the other people – the people who know what the public have always wanted, and who go on giving it to them, because it’s safe and there’s a sure profit. But there’s a third way – to find things that are new and beautiful, and take a chance on them. That’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to run a picture gallery in Bond Street – I signed the deeds yesterday – and a couple of theatres – and later I want to run a weekly of some kind on entirely different lines from anything that has been done before. And what’s more, I’m going to make the whole thing pay . There are all sorts of things that I admire, that a cultivated few would admire – but I’m not going out for those. Anything I run’s going to be a popular success. Dash it all, Joe, don’t you see that half the fun of the thing is making it pay? It’s justifying yourself by success.’

Joe shook her head, unconvinced.

‘Are you really going to have all those things?’ said Vernon.

Both the cousins looked at Sebastian with a tinge of envy. Queer, and rather wonderful, to be in old Sebastian’s position. His father had died some years before. Sebastian, at twenty-two, was master of so many millions that it took one’s breath away to think about them.

The friendship with Sebastian, begun all those years ago at Abbots Puissants, had endured and strengthened. He and Vernon had been friends at Eton, they were at the same college at Cambridge. In the holidays, the three had always managed to spend a good deal of time together.

‘What about sculpture?’ asked Joe suddenly. ‘Is that included?’

‘Of course. Are you still keen about taking up modelling?’

‘Rather. It’s the only thing I really care about.’

A derisive hoot of laughter came from Vernon.

‘Yes, and what will it be this time next year? You’ll be a frenzied poet or something.’

‘It takes one some time to find one’s true vocation,’ said Joe with dignity. ‘But I’m really in earnest this time.’

‘You always are,’ said Vernon. ‘However, thank heaven you’ve given up that damned violin.’

‘Why do you hate music so, Vernon?’

‘Dunno – I always have.’

Joe turned back to Sebastian. Unconsciously her voice took on a different note. It sounded ever so faintly constrained.

‘What do you think of Paul La Marre’s work? Vernon and I went to his studio last Sunday.’

‘No guts,’ said Sebastian succinctly.

A slight flush rose in Joe’s cheek.

‘That’s simply because you don’t understand what he’s aiming at. I think he’s wonderful.’

‘Anaemic,’ said Sebastian, unperturbed.

‘Sebastian, I think you’re perfectly hateful sometimes. Just because La Marre has the courage to break away from tradition –’

‘That’s not it at all,’ said Sebastian. ‘A man can break away from tradition by modelling a Stilton cheese and calling it his idea of a nymph bathing. But if he can’t convince you and impress you by doing so, he’s failed. Just doing things differently to anyone else isn’t genius. Nine times out of ten it’s aiming at getting cheap notoriety.’

The door opened and Mrs Levinne looked in.

‘Teath ready, dearths,’ she said, and beamed on them.

Jet dangled and twinkled on her immense bust. A large black hat with feathers sat on top of her elaborately arranged coiffure. She looked the complete symbol of material prosperity. Her eyes dwelt with adoration on Sebastian.

They got up, and prepared to follow her. Sebastian said in a low voice to Joe:

‘Joe – you’re not angry, are you?’

There was suddenly something young and pathetic about his voice – a pleading in it that exposed him as immature and vulnerable. A moment ago he had been the master spirit laying down the law in complete self-confidence.

‘Why should I be angry?’ said Joe coldly.

She moved towards the door without looking at him. Sebastian’s eyes rested on her wistfully. She had that dark magnetic beauty that matures early. Her skin was dead white, and her eyelashes so thick and dark that they looked like jet against the even colour of her cheeks. There was magic in her way of moving, something languorous and passionate that was wholly unconscious as yet of its own appeal. Although she was the youngest of the three, just past her twentieth birthday, she was at the same time the oldest. To her Vernon and Sebastian were boys, and she despised boys. That queer dog-like devotion of Sebastian’s irritated her. She liked men of experience, men who could say exciting, half understood things. She lowered her white eyelids for a moment, remembering Paul La Marre.