‘I wanted to hint at a woman somewhere behind him or over him – the shadow of a hand, perhaps… something…. But then I was afraid of story-telling instead of painting.’
‘Well, nobody seems to know anything about her. Not even Sheldon.’
‘She smashed his life, that sums her up, doesn’t it?’
‘No, I want to know more. I want to know all. Otherwise he will remain as incomplete as your picture. Oh, it is very good, the likeness is excellent, and I love that floating spider immensely. Especially its club-footed shadow at the bottom. But the face is only a chance reflection. Any man can look into water.
‘But don’t you think that he did it particularly well?’
‘Yes, I can see your point. But all the same I must find that woman. She is the missing link in his evolution, and I must obtain her – it’s a scientific necessity.’
‘I’ll bet you this picture that you won’t find her,’ said Roy Carswell.
13
The first thing was to learn her identity. How should I start upon my quest? What data did I possess? In June 1929, Sebastian had dwelt at the Beaumont Hotel at Blauberg, and there he had met her. She was Russian. No other clue was available.
I have Sebastian’s aversion for postal phenomena. It seems easier to me to travel a thousand miles than to write the shortest letter, then find an envelope, find the right address, buy the right stamp, post the letter (and rack my brain trying to remember whether I have signed it). Moreover, in the delicate affair I was about to tackle, correspondence was out of the question. In March 1936, after a month’s stay in England, I consulted a tourist office and set out for Blauberg.
So here he has passed, I reflected, as I looked at wet fields with long trails of white mist where upright poplar trees dimly floated. A small red-tiled town crouched at the foot of a soft grey mountain. I left my bag in the cloakroom of a forlorn little station where invisible cattle lowed sadly in some shunted truck, and went up a gentle slope towards a cluster of hotels and sanatoriums beyond a damp-smelling park. There were very few people about, it was not ‘the height of the season’, and I suddenly realized with a pang that I might find the hotel shut.
But it was not; thus far, luck was with me.
The house seemed fairly pleasant with its well kept garden and budding chestnut trees. It looked as if it could not hold more than some fifty people – and this braced me: I wanted my choice restricted. The hotel manager was a grey-haired man with a trimmed beard and velvet black eyes. I proceeded very carefully.
First I said that my late brother, Sebastian Knight, a celebrated English author, had greatly liked his stay and that I was thinking of staying at the hotel myself in the summer. Perhaps I ought to have taken a room, sliding in, ingratiating myself, so to speak, and postponing my special request until a more favourable moment; but somehow I thought that the matter might be settled on the spot. He said yes, he remembered the Englishman who had stayed in 1929 and had wanted a bath every morning.
‘He did not make friends readily, did he?’ I asked with sham casualness. ‘He was always alone?’
‘Oh, I think he was here with his father,’ said the hotel manager vaguely.
We wrestled for some time disentangling the three or four Englishmen who had happened to have stayed at Hotel Beaumont during the last ten years. I saw that he did not remember Sebastian any too clearly.
‘Let me be frank,’ I said off-handedly, ‘I am trying to find the address of a lady, my brother’s friend, who had stayed here at the same time as he.’
The hotel manager lifted his eyebrows slightly, and I had the uneasy feeling that I had committed some blunder.
‘Why?’ he said. (‘Ought I to bribe him?’ I thought quickly.)
‘Well,’ I said, ‘I’m ready to pay you for the trouble of finding the information I want.’
‘What information?’ he asked. (He was a stupid and suspicious old party – may he never read these lines.)
‘I was wondering,’ I went on patiently, ‘whether you would be so very, very kind as to help me to find the address of a lady who stayed here at the same time as Mr Knight, that is in June 1929?’
‘What lady?’ he asked in the elenctic tones of Lewis Carroll’s caterpillar.
‘I’m not sure of her name,’ I said nervously.
‘Then how do you expect me to find her?’ he said with a shrug.
‘She was Russian,’ I said. ‘Perhaps you remember a Russian lady – a young lady – and well… good looking?’
‘Nous avons eu beaucoup de jolies dames,’ he replied getting more and more distant. ‘How should I remember?’
‘Well,’ said I, ‘the simplest way would be to have a look at your books and sort out the Russian names for June 1929.’
‘There are sure to be several,’ he said. ‘How will you pick out the one you need, if you do not know it?’
‘Give me the names and addresses,’ I said desperately, ‘and leave the rest to me.’
He sighed deeply and shook his head.
‘No,’ he said.
‘Do you mean to say you don’t keep books?’ I asked trying to speak quietly.
‘Oh, I keep them all right,’ he said. ‘My business requires great order in these matters. Oh, yes, I have got the names all right….’
He wandered away to the back of the room and produced a large black volume.
‘Here,’ he said. ‘First week of July 1935…. Professor Ott with wife, Colonel Samain….’
‘Look here,’ I said, ‘I’m not interested in July 1935. What I want….’ He shut his book and carried it away.
‘I only wanted to show you,’ he said with his back turned to me – ‘to show you [a lock clicked] that I keep my books in good order.’
He came back to his desk and folded a letter that was lying on the blotting-pad.
‘Summer 1929,’ I pleaded. ‘Why don’t you want to show me the pages I want?’
‘Well,’ he said, ‘the thing is not done. Firstly, because I don’t want a person who is a complete stranger to me to bother people who were and will be my clients. Secondly, because I cannot understand why you should be so eager to find a woman whom you do not want to name. And thirdly – I do not want to get into any kind of trouble. I have enough troubles as it is. In the hotel round the corner a Swiss couple committed suicide in 1929,’ he added rather irrelevantly.
‘Is that your last word?’ I asked.
He nodded and looked at his watch. I turned on my heel and slammed the door after me – at least, I tried to slam it – it was one of those confounded pneumatic doors which resist.
Slowly, I went back to the station. The park. Perhaps Sebastian recalled that particular stone bench under that cedar tree at the time he was dying. The outline of that mountain yonder may have been the paraph of a certain unforgettable evening. The whole place seemed to me a huge refuse heap where I knew a dark jewel had been lost. My failure was absurd, horrible, excruciating. The leaden sluggishness of dream-endeavour. Hopeless gropings among dissolving things. Why was the past so rebellious?
‘And what shall I do now?’ The stream of the biography on which I longed so to start, was, at one of its last bends, enshrouded in pale mist; like the valley I was contemplating. Could I leave it thus and write the book all the same? A book with a blind spot. An unfinished picture – uncoloured limbs of the martyr with the arrows in his side.
I had the feeling that I was lost, that I had nowhere to go. I had pondered long enough the means to find Sebastian’s last love to know that there was practically no other way of finding her name. Her name! I felt I should recognize it at once if I got at those greasy black folios. Ought I to give it , up and turn to the collection of a few other minor details concerning Sebastian which I still needed and which I knew where to obtain?
It was in this bewildered state of mind that I got into the slow local train which was to take me back to Strasbourg. Then I would go on to Switzerland perhaps…. But no, I could not get over the tingling pain of my failure; though I tried hard enough to bury myself in an English paper I had with me: I was in training, so to speak, reading only English in view of the work I was about to begin…. But could one begin something so incomplete in one’s mind?
I was alone in my compartment (as one usually is in a f second-class carriage on that sort of train), but then, at the next station, a little man with bushy eyebrows got in, greeted me continentally, in thick guttural French, and sat down opposite. The train ran on, right into the sunset. All of a sudden, I noticed that the passenger opposite was beaming at me.
‘Marrvellous weather,’
