Chapter 12

CHAPTER XII.

Blight, Mildew, and Smut..." Mary was puzzled and distressed.
Perhaps her ears had played her false. Perhaps what he had
really said was, "Squire, Binyon, and Shanks," or "Childe,
Blunden, and Earp," or even "Abercrombie, Drinkwater, and
Rabindranath Tagore." Perhaps. But then her ears never did play
her false. "Blight, Mildew, and Smut." The impression was
distinct and ineffaceable. "Blight, Mildew..." she was forced to
the conclusion, reluctantly, that Denis had indeed pronounced
those improbable words. He had deliberately repelled her
attempts to open a serious discussion. That was horrible. A man
who would not talk seriously to a woman just because she was a
woman--oh, impossible! Egeria or nothing. Perhaps Gombauld
would be more satisfactory. True, his meridional heredity was a
little disquieting; but at least he was a serious worker, and it
was with his work that she would associate herself. And Denis?
After all, what WAS Denis? A dilettante, an amateur...

Gombauld had annexed for his painting-room a little disused
granary that stood by itself in a green close beyond the farm-
yard. It was a square brick building with a peaked roof and
little windows set high up in each of its walls. A ladder of
four rungs led up to the door; for the granary was perched above
the ground, and out of reach of the rats, on four massive
toadstools of grey stone. Within, there lingered a faint smell
of dust and cobwebs; and the narrow shaft of sunlight that came
slanting in at every hour of the day through one of the little
windows was always alive with silvery motes. Here Gombauld
worked, with a kind of concentrated ferocity, during six or seven
hours of each day. He was pursuing something new, something
terrific, if only he could catch it.

During the last eight years, nearly half of which had been spent
in the process of winning the war, he had worked his way
industriously through cubism. Now he had come out on the other
side. He had begun by painting a formalised nature; then, little
by little, he had risen from nature into the world of pure form,
till in the end he was painting nothing but his own thoughts,
externalised in the abstract geometrical forms of the mind's
devising. He found the process arduous and exhilarating. And
then, quite suddenly, he grew dissatisfied; he felt himself
cramped and confined within intolerably narrow limitations. He
was humiliated to find how few and crude and uninteresting were
the forms he could invent; the inventions of nature were without
number, inconceivably subtle and elaborate. He had done with
cubism. He was out on the other side. But the cubist discipline
preserved him from falling into excesses of nature worship. He
took