On the last four words he changed, and Carston saw the sister in the brother, in the elegant, frightened boy now explaining that what he wanted was not vision, but fashionable routine.
“Of course, there is nothing in it. I only meant that the find’s a reminder.”
“Reminder of what?”
“Of what it would remind you, of course. Oh! I see you don’t know. Never mind, it’s a long story.”
Carston gave out. He was not pleased. He had been atrociously taken into confidence, and he had not understood. His earlier dislike of them returned, with an uncomfortable respect. The Sanc-Grail did not call on everybody. The boy was a young thing, telling him how much he hated poverty and dreams. What a snob he was. All about the things you could not do. Felix remembered that Ross had prepared them to be misunderstood. It did not occur to him that he had no right to expect that Carston should understand.
Picus was alone in his room, modelling the body of Scylla in wax. One of the little things he did. Clarence was a serious and accomplished painter, discovered and produced by Ross. Picus played about with wax, which grew more transparent as he touched it. Exceedingly powerful in body, he looked like wax, in a gauze-thin blue sweater rolled up his neck. He looked out of the window at the wood swimming in the mid-day heat, let out a little breath and waited an answer from the wood. He smiled and began to dance, like a marsh-bird, swinging up a leg, effortlessly, in any direction.
Then his face expressed pain. He put up his hands to his head and pressed them in. In a kind of despair, he turned and dug his nails in the wax of Scylla’s flesh.
Carston came upstairs to wash, bewildered by the dark stair, the corridor crossed with sun motes. He walked into Picus’s room by mistake. There he saw him, very gracious, in a room shabbier than his own, making the portrait of Scylla in wax. He saw brightness, nakedness, a toy. A liveliness of colour to remind him that she was a young woman alone among young men.
“I don’t like it,” said Picus, and broke it.—“I’ll make another after tea.” Carston could have cried. The waste of richness, the shocking petulance, a toy that excited him shewn and taken away. For a moment he had embraced Scylla. Another of the little things they did in their spare time.
Pushed out of his politeness, he said:
“You’re the one who discovered the cup, aren’t you?”
“No,” said Picus, “I only thought of the spear to poke about with. It was Felix’s find.”
“Miss Taverner’s brother seems a bit upset about it.”
“Does he?”
“You shouldn’t have broken that statue.”
Picus covered up both statements like a perfect young gentleman, rather a stupid one. It occurred to Carston that he was stupid; also that perhaps it had scandalised him to have shewn Scylla naked to a stranger, and hoped it was that.
They went down to lunch. It was his first lunch, but he felt as though never in his life had he done anything but eat there. Once he had lived in America, once he had come to Europe, but that did not count any more. That theatre was as another earth, and the plays were not the prologue to his play. For this play there had been no rehearsal and he did not know his part. Or, if he had a part, he had to improvise it, and it must be a good part. Lost in a green transparent world, he was blind. Beginning to see in a new way he disliked, a seeing like jealousy, without arrangement; principally a sensibility about Scylla, likely to become a fury of desire. He remembered its modest beginnings the night before, his rejection of it on further acquaintance with her brother. That it had started again in Picus. Somebody said: “What do we do this afternoon?” The heat answered that. Laid down on the verandah in a wicker chair like a shell, he lay still, face to face with the wood. One by one the others disappeared.
Ross went up the hill, carrying his painting things. The place he wanted could not be seen from any shade there was on the down-top. He planted his easel in the full light.
The cliffs down the coast were too good-looking. He chose the somberest patch of barn and field in the next valley and drew it hard, his shirt-sleeves rolled up his amber arms, his back square to the house in the wood, several hundred feet together.
