‘Really! ‘ Burlap protested.
‘Yes, really,’ Rampion mimicked. He liked baiting the fellow, making him look like a forgiving Christian martyr. Serve him right for coming in that beloveddisciple attitude and being so disgustingly reverential and admiring.
‘Toddling wide-eyed little St. Hugh. Toddling up to the women so reverently, as though they were all madonnas. But putting his dear little hand under their skirts all the same. Coming to pray, but staying to share madonnina’s bed.’ Rampion knew a good deal about Burlap’s amorous affairs and had guessed more. ‘Dear little St. Hugh! How prettily he toddles to the bedroom, and what a darling babyish way he has of snuggling down between the sheets! This sort of thing is much too gross and unspiritual for our little Hughie.’ He threw back his head and laughed.
‘Go on, go on,’ said Burlap. ‘Don’t mind me.’ And at the sight of his martyred, spiritual smile, Rampion laughed yet louder.
‘Oh dear, oh dear!’ he gasped. ‘Next time you come, I’ll have a copy of Ary Scheffer’s “St. Monica and St. Augustine” for you. That ought to make you really happy. Would you like to see some of my drawings?’ he asked in another tone. Burlap nodded. ‘They’re grotesques mostly. Caricatures. Rather ribald, I warn you. But if you will come to look at my work, you must expect what you get.’
He opened a portfolio that was lying on the table.
‘Why do you imagine I don’t like your work?’ asked Burlap. ‘After all, you’re a believer in life and so am I. We have our differences; but on most matters our point of view’s the same.’
Rampion looked up at him. ‘Oh, I’m sure it is, I know it is,’ he said, and grinned.
‘Well, if you know it’s the same,’ said Burlap, whose averted eyes had not seen the grin on the other’s face, ‘why do you imagine I’ll disapprove of your drawings?’
‘Why indeed? ‘ the other mocked.
‘Seeing that the point of view’s the same…’
‘It’s obvious that the people looking at the view from the same point must be identical.’ Rampion grinned again. ‘Q. E. D.’ He turned away again to take out one of the drawings. ‘This is what I call “Fossils of the Past and Fossils of the Future.”’ He handed Burlap the drawing. It was in ink touched with coloured washes, extraordinarily brilliant and lively. Curving in a magnificently sweeping S, a grotesque procession of monsters marched diagonally down and across the paper. Dinosaurs, pterodactyls, titanotheriums, diplodocuses, ichthyosauruses walked, swam or flew at the tail of the procession; the van was composed of human monsters, huge-headed creatures, without limbs or bodies, creeping slug-like on vaguely slimy extensions of chin and neck. The faces were mostly those of eminent contemporaries. Among the crowd Burlap recognized J. J. Thomson and Lord Edward Tantamount, Bernard Shaw, attended by eunuchs and spinsters, and Sir Oliver Lodge, attended by a sheeted and turnipheaded ghost and a walking cathode tube, Sir, Alfred Mond and the head of John D. Rockefeller carried on a charger by a Baptist clergyman, Dr. Frank Crane and Mrs. Eddy wearing haloes, and many others.
‘The lizards died of having too much body and too little head,’ said Rampion in explanation.’so at least the scientists are never tired of telling us. Physical size is a handicap after a certain point. But what about mental size? These fools seem to forget that they’re just as top-heavy and clumsy and disproportioned as any diplodocus. Sacrificing physical life and affective life to mental life. What do they imagine’s going to happen?’
Burlap nodded his agreement. ‘That’s what I’ve always asked. Man can’t live without a heart.’
‘Not to mention bowels and skin and bones and flesh,’ said Rampion. ‘They’re just marching towards extinction. And a damned good thing too. Only the trouble is that they’re marching the rest of the world along with them. Blast their eyes! I must say, I resent being condemned to extinction because these imbeciles of scientists and moralists and spiritualists and technicians and literary and political uplifters and all the rest of them haven’t the sense to see that man must live as a man, not as a monster of conscious braininess and soulfulness. Grr! I’d like to kill the lot of them.’ He put the drawing back into the portfolio and extracted another. ‘Here are two Outlines of History, the one on the left according to H. G. Wells, the one on the right according to me….’
Burlap looked, smiled, laughed outright. ‘Excellent!’ he said. The drawing on the left was composed on the lines of a simple crescendo. A very small monkey was succeeded by a very slightly larger pithecanthropus, which was succeeded in its turn by a slightly larger Neanderthal man. Paleolithic man, neolithic man, bronze-age Egyptian and Babylonian man, iron-age Greek and Roman man—the figures slowly increased in size. By the time Galileo and Newton had appeared on the scene, humanity had grown to quite respectable dimensions. The crescendo continued’ uninterrupted through Watt and Stephenson, Faraday and Darwin, Bessemer and Edison, Rockefeller and Wanamaker, to come to a contemporary consummation in the figures of Mr. H. G. Wells himself and Sir Alfred Mond. Nor was the future neglected. Through the radiant mist of prophecy the forms of Wells and Mond, growing larger and larger at every repetition, wound away in a triumphant spiral clean off the paper, towards Utopian infinity The drawing on the right had a less optimistic composition of peaks and declines.
The small monkey very soon blossomed into a good-sized bronze-age man, who gave place to a very large Greek and a scarcely smaller Etruscan. The Romans grew smaller again. The monks of the Thebaid were hardly distinguishable from the primeval little monkeys. There followed a number of good-sized Florentines, English, French. They were succeeded by revolting monsters labelled Calvin and Knox, Baxter and Wesley. The stature of the representative men declined. The Victorians had begun to be dwarfish and misshapen. Their twentieth-century successors were abortions. Through the mists of the future one could see a diminishing company of little gargoyles and foetuses with heads too large for their squelchy bodies, the tails of apes and the faces of our most eminent contemporaries, all biting and scratching and disembowelling one another with that methodical and systematic energy which belongs only to the very highly civilized.
‘I’d like to have one or two of these for the World,’ said Burlap, when they had looked through the contents of the portfolio. ‘We don’t generally reproduce drawings. We’re frankly missionaries, not an art for art concern. But these things of yours are parables as well as pictures. I must say,’ he added, ‘I envy you your power of saying things so immediately and economically. It would take me hundreds and thousands of words to say the same things less vividly in an essay.’
Rampion nodded. ‘That’s why I’ve almost given up writing for the moment. Writing’s not much good for saying what I find I want to say now. And what a comfort to escape from words! Words, words, words, they shut one off from the universe. Three-quarters of the time one’s never in contact with things, only with the beastly words that stand for them. And often not even with those—only with some poet’s damned metaphorical rigmarole about a thing. “Nor what soft incense hangs upon the bough,” for example. Or “every fall soothing the raven wing of darkness till it smiled.” Or even” then will I visit with a roving kiss the vale of lilies and the bower of bliss.”’ He looked at Burlap with a grin. ‘Even the bower of bliss is turned into a metaphorical abstraction. Vale of lilies, indeed! Oh, these words! I’m thankful to have escaped from them. It’s like getting out of a prison—oh, a very elegant fantastic sort of prison, full of frescoes and tapestries and what not. But one prefers the genuine country outside. Painting, I find, puts you in real touch with it. I can say what I want to say.’
‘Well, all I can do,’ said Burlap, ‘is to provide an audience to listen to what you’ve got to say.’
‘Poor devils!’ laughed Rampion. ‘But I think they ought to listen. One has a responsibility. That’s why I’d like to publish some of your drawings in the World. I feel it’s really a duty.’
‘Oh, if it’s a question of the categorical imperative,’ Rampion laughed again, ‘why then of course you must. Take what you like. The more shocking the drawings you publish, the better I shall be pleased.’
Burlap shook his head. ‘We must begin mildly,’ he said. He didn’t believe in Life to the point of taking any risks with the circulation.
‘Mildly, mildly,’ the other mockingly repeated. ‘You’re all the same, all you newspaper men. No jolts. Safety first. Painless literature. No prejudices extracted or ideas hammered in except under ail anaesthetic. Readers kept permanently in a state of twilight sleep. You’re hopeless, all of you.’
‘Hopeless,’ repeated Burlap penitently, ‘I know. But, alas, one simply must compromise a little with the world, the flesh and the devil.’
‘I don’t mind your doing that,’ Rampion answered. ‘What I resent is the disgusting way you compromise with heaven, respectability and Jehovah. Still, I suppose in the circumstances you can’t help it. Take what you want.’
Burlap made his selection. ‘I’ll take these,’ he said at last, holding up three of the least polemical and scandalous of the drawings. ‘Is that all right?’
Rampion glanced at them. ‘If you’d waited another week,’
