CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Showing how a Genius worshipped Devils in the Mountains

All young men love paying pilgrimages, especially when the pilgrimage is to some rather exotic and remote hermit who happens to be in the vogue. Incidentally, I am quite convinced that the hermits like it too. How often has one read, in memoirs, of the humble, too humble, delight of some wild musician who is visited, in his retreat in the Northern Hebrides, by young things from Oxford, who group themselves in decorative attitudes round his carpet slippers. ‘To me, living in the realm of art,’ he writes, ‘these visits from fellow-spirits in the outer world are infinitely sweet, infinitely welcome. Mr. Bernard Bank, of Brasenose, arrived to-day at dawn, praying that I might come down, so that he should throw himself at my feet. I did. And he did. I feel “remarkably refreshed.”’

I rather wish that I had gone to see Norman Lindsay in this way. He has all the qualifications for a really good hermit scene. He lives in the heart of the Blue Mountains beyond Sydney, he is an utterly isolated figure in an immense continent, and his finely erotic designs have given a great many dull people fits.

But my visit to him, though picturesque, was sophisticated. I went out to see him with Melba in an exceedingly comfortable car, and after three hours of speeding along under tall white gum-trees, with the flash of green parrots in the branches, we arrived at the broken, tumble-down road which leads to the house where Norman Lindsay lives with his wife and children.

The instant I had passed through the wooden gate, which was blistered by the eternal blaze of sunshine, I had a feeling of stepping on to enchanted ground. (You observe, the hermit complex was already at work.) From some bushes over in the corner a fawn’s head leered at me through the shadows, and on the grass leading up to the house a concrete lady with an enormous chest stared haughtily in front of her. Advancing to the veranda one had a glimpse of the same lady, flying in haste from presumably the same fawn--a really beautiful piece of rough statuary which Lindsay afterwards informed me had been roughly ‘thrown together’ in the space of a single afternoon.

As for Lindsay himself--he did not walk towards us--he fluttered to us, like a bird. So like a bird is he that I had a feeling, all the time, that I must catch hold of the end of his jacket in order that he should not fly up to a gum-tree and pipe his distracting arguments from the topmost branch. He was so thin, so fluttering, his eyes were so bright, his nose so like a beak, perched on top of the tiny neck.

As for his talk--that, too, was bird-like--the words pouring out one after the other, making one think of when the swallows homeward fly. As difficult to follow, too, as a bird. In the first half-hour of our conversation--(I say ‘our,’ although my contribution was limited to negatives and affirmatives)--he had smashed the whole Christian philosophy, set Nietzsche on a pedestal, made at least a hundred genuflexions to him, pulled a long nose at Rubens, kicked Chopin out of the house, and invited me three times to have a drink without doing anything more about it.

We went for a walk in the garden, Lindsay still talking. A child appeared--a rosy cheeked thing with cherries embroidered round its collar. It was clasping a doll firmly in its arms.

‘The maternal instinct developed already, you see,’ he said.

Odd, I thought. I felt that Freud had dropped something which Lindsay had picked up, taken to a looking-glass, and read backwards.

Somebody again suggested a glass of white wine. This time his eyes sparkled. We went back into the house and drank. I watched him. He talked of the wine as though he were a Bacchanalian. One had the impression that he was only five minutes off a bout of drunkenness. Yet, he sipped only a mouthful, and even that was taken with pursed lips, as an old lady takes her tea.

Odd, again. It was the _idea_ of intoxication, you see, that appealed to him. The gesture was the important thing, not the reality. I honestly believe that Lindsay could get quite drunk on coloured water, if he were persuaded the water was wine.

And then we went into lunch. I remember a room with huge windows and sunshine blazing in. I remember an enormous plate of chicken and some very red carrots. And most of all I remember Lindsay’s sudden pæan of praise in favour of Beethoven’s Appassionata Sonata.

‘He’s my god,’ he said excitedly, digging his fork into a particularly beautiful carrot and waving it wildly about. ‘My god. The Appassionata Sonata contains everything of life that life has to give. In its rhythm you can find the secret of the entire universe.’ He ran from the room and returned bearing a mask of Beethoven which he triumphantly placed beside him.

I cannot give you much of Norman Lindsay’s talk because I simply did not understand it. He talks at such an immense speed, dragging so many tattered philosophies in his wake, that one could only follow, exceedingly faint, but pursuing.

However, I did not give up the attempt. I tried to keep him strictly to facts, and after lunch I led him to one of his concrete ladies and asked him how he did it.

His thin hand stroked the concrete lady’s chin with a lingering affection. But he took not the faintest notice of my question, and started off on a different tack.

‘There are only two people whom I want to meet in England,’ he said. ‘I wonder if you can guess who they are?’

Now, I never guess when asked. It is too dangerous. Do you know the sort of people who have a face massage, arrange the lights, hold their chins very high, and say, ‘You won’t guess _my_ age, I’m sure.’ They are quite right. I won’t.

Norman Lindsay relieved the suspense. ‘Aldous Huxley and Dennis Bradley,’ he said.

‘_What?_’

There must have been something a little tactless in my tone of voice, for he frowned and said, ‘Well, I don’t see why you should be so surprised.’

I was surprised, however, because it seemed such an odd couple to choose. Lytton Strachey I could have imagined. Shaw, at a pinch. Augustus John more than most. But Aldous Huxley and Dennis Bradley....

I still do not know, from the whirl of words with which he defended his two idols, exactly what he meant. But from out of the chaos there did eventually emerge something--that he considered them both anti-Christian. Perhaps, after the psychic experiments of Dennis Bradley, his ardour may have abated. I don’t know.

Lindsay hates Christ. He hates him as one man hates another. It is in no way the feeble sort of dislike which so many modern anti-Christians entertain--the dislike which is explained merely by the fact that Christ makes them feel uncomfortable, as though he were a skeleton at the feast of life. It is a militant, violent hatred, the clash of one philosophy against another. He ranges himself, a solitary figure, against the angels, his whole mind and body tense with rage, his hand gripped grimly round an unsheathed sword.

It was not till I went with him to his studio, which is a sort of wooden shack at the end of the garden, that I began to understand this dislike. He danced round with portfolio after portfolio, producing drawings which were a riot of pagan beauty, a miracle of design. But the beauty and the art he seemed to pass by. It was the satire--the anti-Christian satire--which he was longing to show me.

‘Look,’ he said. I looked. He was holding up an immense engraving crowded with figures. I have a dim memory of light shining through pillars, of an endless staircase, of a conglomeration of strange, dishevelled shapes, darkly etched in the foreground.

‘Amazing,’ I said.

‘Yes--yes--but don’t you see him?’

‘Him?’

‘Jesus Christ, man. Look.’

He put his finger on to the design. It touched a pale face--sickly, anæmic, almost half-witted. It was like a patch of fever in the riotous health and brutality which crowded it in on all sides.

He laughed loud and long. I could not laugh. I felt absurdly, desolatingly shocked. Not, I think, by what Lindsay had shown me of Christ. But by something which he had shown me of--myself.