Great Britain -- Social life and customs -- 19th century -- Fiction; Short stories
At the funeral she saw, for the first time, her father's relations, the
rich relations who had cast him off; and she hated them for being there,
for speaking to her kindly, for offering to look after her. She was rude
to them, and she wished to be rude. 'My father would never touch your
money,' she said, 'and I am sure he wouldn't like me to, and I don't
want it. I don't want to have anything to do with you.' She clung to the
severe aunt who had been good to her father; and she tried to smile on
her other uncle and aunt, and on her cousin, who was not many years
older than she was: he had seemed to her so kind, and so ready to be her
friend. 'I will go with my aunt,' she said. The rich relatives
acquiesced, not unwillingly. They did not linger in the desolate house,
where this unreasonable child, as they thought her, stood away from them
on the other side of the room. She seemed to herself to be doing the
right thing, and what her father would have wished; and she saw them go
out with relief, not giving a thought to the future, only knowing that
she had buried her childhood, on that day of the funeral, in the grave
with her father.
THE DEATH OF PETER WAYDELIN.
Peter Waydelin, the painter of those mysterious, brutal pictures, who
died last year at the age of twenty-four, spent a week with me at
Bognor, trying to get better, a little while before it was quite
certainly too late; and we had long talks of a very intimate kind as we
lay and lounged about the sand from Selsey to Blake's Felpham, along
that exquisite coast. To him, if he were to be believed, all that meant
very little; he hated nature, he was always assuring you; but at Bognor
nature deals with its material so much in the manner of art that he can
hardly have been sincere in not feeling the colour-sense of those
arrangements of sand, water, and sky which were perpetually changing
before him. One of our conversations that I remembered best, because he
seemed to put more of himself into it than usual, took place one
afternoon in June as we lay on the sand about half-way towards Selsey,
beyond the last of those troublesome groins, and I remember that as I
listened to him, and heard him defining so sincerely his own ideas of
art, I was conscious all the time of a magnificent silent refutation of
some of those ideas, as nature, quietly expressing herself before us,
transformed the whole earth gradually into a new and luminous world of
air. He did not seem to see the sunset; now and then he would pick up a
pebble and throw it vehemently, almost angrily, into the water. We were
talking of art. He began to explain to me what art meant to him, and
what it was he wanted to do with his own art. I remember almost the very
words he used, sometimes so serious, sometimes so petulant and boyish. I
was interested in his ideas, and the man too interested me; so young and
so experienced, so mature already and so enthusiastic under his
cynicism.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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