Read All Hallows' Eve for Free Online Page A

But what exactly had Jonathan caught? and why had Jonathan chosen to create precisely that effect of attempted escape and capture?
    Richard said at last, “It’s a wonderful effect—especially the color of the face. I don’t know how you got that dark deadness. But what——” He stopped.
    â€œRichard,” Jonathan said accusingly, “you were going to ask what it meant. ”
    â€œI don’t think I was,” Richard answered. “I may have been going to ask what he meant. I feel as if there was something in him I hadn’t grasped. He’s—” and again he paused.
    â€œGo on!” Jonathan said. “The ladies won’t be here just yet, and you may now have got a general idea of why I’d like you to be here when they do come. Anyhow, go on; say anything that occurs to you.”
    Richard obediently renewed his study and his reverie. They had done this together on a number of occasions before a new painting. Richard did not mind sounding foolish before his friend and Jonathan did not mind being denigrated by his friend; in fact, he always swore that one soliloquy of this kind was worth a great deal of judicious criticism. Painting was the only art, he maintained, about which it could be done; one couldn’t hear a poem or a symphony as one could look at a painting; in time one could never get the whole at once, but one could in space—or all but; there was bound perhaps to be a very small time lag even there. Except for that, all the aural arts aspired to escape from recollection into the immediate condition of the visual.
    Richard said, “The skin looks almost as if it were painted; I mean—as if you were painting a painted effect. Very dark and very dull. Yet it’s a sort of massive dullness—much like your mass and light; only the opposite. But what I don’t get is the expression. At first he seems to be just a preacher driving his point home—convicting them of sin or something. Only, though that mass makes him effective enough—even his hand seems to be pressing down on them, though it is back downwards; it might almost be pulling the sky down on them by a kind of magic—a sort of Samson and the pillars of cloud—yet the more I look at what I can see of the face, the more I think that it doesn’t mean anything. It seems to be as near plain bewilderment as anything I ever saw.”
    â€œHo!” said Jonathan, getting off the table to which he had retired. “Ho! You’re a genius, Richard. I thought that too. But I’ve looked at it so often that I can’t make out now who’s bewildered—him or me.”
    Richard looked a question.
    â€œI began painting the damned fellow, as one does,” Jonathan went on, pacing up and down the room and frowning at the floor. “Of course, he wasn’t sitting for me, so I had to do the best I could from one meeting at St. Bartholomew’s, a couple of orations, seven photographs in Picture Post , a dozen daily papers and other oddments. Lady Wallingford says he won’t sit because of his reserve, which may of course be true. But at a pinch I can manage to get something out of such a general hodge-podge fairly well, tiresome as the whole business always is, and this time I took particular notice. I wasn’t trying to paint his soul or anything; I just wanted to get him done well enough to please Betty’s mother. And when I’d done it I stared at it and I thought, ‘Either I don’t know what he is or he doesn’t know where he is.’ But a fellow who’s put it over all America and bits of England is likely to know where he is, I suppose, so I must just have got him completely wrong. It’s odd, all the same. I generally manage to make something more or less definite. This man looks as if he were being frightfully definite and completely indefinite at the same moment—an absolute master and a lost loony