Artists in Crime

CHAPTER III Class Assemblies

On the 10th of September at ten o’clock in the morning, Agatha Troy opened the door in the eastward wall of her house and stepped out into the garden. It was a sunny morning with a tang of autumn about it, a bland, mellow morning. Somewhere in the garden a fire had been lit, and an aromatic trace of smouldering brushwood threaded the air. There was not a breath of wind.

“Autumn!” muttered Troy. “And back to work again. Damn! I’m getting older.” She paused for a moment to light a cigarette, and then she set off towards the studio, down on the old tennis court. Troy had built this studio when she inherited Tatler’s End House from her father. It was a solid square of decent stone with top lighting, and a single window facing south on a narrow lane. It stood rather lower than the house, and about a minute’s walk away from it. It was screened pleasantly with oaks and lilac bushes. Troy strode down the twisty path between the lilac bushes and pushed open the studio door. From beyond the heavy wooden screen inside the entrance she heard the voices of her class. She was out of patience with her class. “I’ve been too long away,” she thought. She knew so exactly how each of them would look, how their work would take shape, how the studio would smell of oil colour, turpentine, and fixative, how Sonia, the model, would complain of the heat, the draught, the pose, the cold, and the heat again. Katti would stump backwards and forwards before her easel, probably with one shoe squeaking. Ormerin would sigh, Valmai Seacliff would attitudinise, and Garcia, wrestling with clay by the south window, would whistle between his teeth.

“Oh, well,” said Troy, and marched round the screen.

Yes, there it all was, just as she expected, the throne shoved against the left-hand wall, the easels with fresh white canvases, the roaring gas heater, and the class. They had all come down to the studio after breakfast and, with the exception of Garcia and Malmsley, waited for her to pose the model. Malmsley was already at work; the drawings were spread out on a table. He wore, she noticed with displeasure, a sea-green overall. “To go with the beard, I suppose,” thought Troy. Garcia was in the south window, glooming at the clay sketch of Comedy and Tragedy. Sonia, the model, wrapped in a white kimono, stood beside him. Katti Bostock, planted squarely in the centre of the room before a large black canvas, set her enormous palette. The rest of the class, Ormerin, Phillida Lee, Watt Hatchett and Basil Pilgrim, were grouped round Valmai Seacliff.

Troy walked over to Malmsley’s table and looked over his shoulder at the drawings.

“What’s that?”

“That’s the thing I was talking about,” explained Malmsley. His voice was high-pitched and rather querulous. “It’s the third tale in the series. The female has been murdered by her lover’s wife. She’s lying on a wooden bench, impaled on a dagger. The wife jammed the dagger through the bench from underneath, and when the lover pressed her down — you see? The knife is hidden by the drape. It seems a little far-fetched, I must say. Surely it would show. The wretched publisher man insists on having this one.”

“It needn’t show if the drape is suspended a little,” said Troy. “From the back of the bench, for instance. Then as she falls down she would carry the drape with her. Anyway, the probabilities are none of your business. You’re not going a ‘before and after,’ like a strip advertisement, are you?”

“I can’t get the pose,” said Malmsley languidly. “I want to treat it rather elaborately. Deliberately mannered.”

“Well, you can’t go in for the fancy touches until you’ve got the flesh and blood to work from. That pose will do us as well as another, I dare say. I’ll try it. You’d better make a separate drawing as a study.”

“Yes, I suppose I had,” drawled Malmsley. “Thanks most frightfully.”

“Of course,” Valmai Seacliff was saying, “I went down rather well in Italy. The Italians go mad when they see a good blonde. They used to murmur when I passed them in the streets. ‘Bella’ and ‘Bellissima.’ It was rather fun.”

“Is that Italian?” asked Katti morosely, of her flake-white.

“It means beautiful, darling,” answered Miss Seacliff.

“Oh hell!” said Sonia, the model.

“Well,” said Troy loudly, “I’ll set the pose.”

They all turned to watch her. She stepped on the throne, which was the usual dais on wheels, and began to arrange a seat for the model. She threw a cerise cushion down, and then, from a chest by the wall she got a long blue length of silk. One end of this drape she threw across the cushion and pinned, the other she gathered carefully in her hands, drew round to one side, and then pinned the folds to the floor of the dais.

“Now, Sonia,” she said. “Something like this.”

Keeping away from the drape, Troy knelt and then slid sideways into a twisted recumbent pose on the floor. The right hip was raised, the left took the weight of the pose. The torso was turned upwards from the waist so that both shoulders touched the boards. Sonia, noticing the twist, grimaced disagreeably.

“Get into it,” said Troy, and stood up. “Only you lie across the drape with your head on the cushion. Lie on your left side, first.”

Sonia slid out of the white kimono. She was a most beautiful little creature, long-legged, delicately formed and sharp-breasted. Her black hair was drawn tightly back from the suave forehead. The bony structure of her face was sharply defined, and suggested a Slavonic mask.

“You little devil, you’ve been sunbathing,” said Troy. “Look at those patches.”

“Well, they don’t like nudism at Bournemouth,” said Sonia.

She lay across the drape on her left side, her head on the cerise cushion. Troy pushed her right shoulder over until it touched the floor. The drape was pressed down by the shoulders and broke into uneven blue folds about the body.

“That’s your pose, Malmsley,” said Troy. “Try it from where you are.”

She walked round the studio, eyeing the model.

“It’s pretty good from everywhere,” she said. “Right! Get going, everybody.” She glanced at her watch. “You can hold that for forty minutes, Sonia.”

“It’s a terrible pose, Miss Troy,” grumbled Sonia. “All twisted like this.”

“Nonsense,” said Troy briskly.

The class began to settle itself.

Since each member of Troy’s little community played a part in the tragedy that followed ten days later, it may be well to look a little more closely at them.

Katti Bostock’s work is known to everyone who is at all interested in modern painting. At the time of which I am writing she was painting very solidly and smoothly, using a heavy outline and a simplified method of dealing with form. She painted large figure compositions, usually with artisans as subjects. Her “Foreman Fitter” had been the picture of the year at the Royal Academy, and had set all the die-hards by the ears. Katti herself was a short, stocky, dark-haired individual with an air of having no nonsense about her. She was devoted to Troy in a grumbling sort of way, lived at Tatler’s End House most of the year, but was not actually a member of the class.

Valmai Seacliff was thin, blonde, and very, very pretty. She was the type that certain modern novelists write about with an enthusiasm which they attempt to disguise as satirical detachment. Her parents were well-to-do and her work was clever. You have heard Katti describe Valmai as a nymphomaniac and will be able to draw your own conclusions about the justness of this criticism.

Phillida Lee was eighteen, plump, and naturally gushing. Two years of Slade austerity had not altogether damped her enthusiasms, but when she remembered to shudder, she shuddered.

Watt Hatchett, Troy’s Australian protégé, was a short and extremely swarthy youth, who looked like a dago in an American talking picture. He came from one of the less reputable streets of Sydney and was astoundingly simple, cocksure, egotistical and enthusiastic. He seemed to have no aesthetic perceptions of any description, so that his undoubted talent appeared to be a sort of parasite, flowering astonishingly on an unpromising and stunted stump.

Cedric Malmsley we have noticed already. Nothing further need be said about him at this stage of the narrative.

The Hon. Basil Pilgrim, son of the incredible Primitive Methodist peer, was a pleasant-looking young man of twenty-three, whose work was sincere, able, but still rather tentative. His father, regarding all art schools as hot-beds of vice and depravity, had only consented to Basil becoming a pupil of Troy’s because her parents had been landed gentry of Lord Pilgrim’s acquaintance, and because Troy herself had once painted a picture of a revivalist meeting. Her somewhat ironical treatment of this subject had not struck Lord Pilgrim, who was, in many ways, a remarkably stupid old man.

Francis Ormerin was a slight and delicate-looking Frenchman who worked in charcoal and wash. His drawings of the nude were remarkable for their beauty of line, and for a certain emphatic use of accent. He was a nervous, oversensitive creature, subject to fits of profound depression, due, said Troy, to his digestion.

And lastly Garcia, whose first name — Wolf — was remembered by nobody. Garcia, who preserved on his pale jaws a static ten days’ growth of dark stubble which never developed into a beard, whose clothes consisted of a pair of dirty grey trousers, a limp shirt, and an unspeakable raincoat. Garcia, with his shock of unkempt brown hair, his dark impertinent eyes, his beautiful hands, and his complete unscrupulousness. Two years ago he had presented himself one morning at the door of Troy’s studio in London. He had carried there a self-portrait in clay, wrapped about with wet and dirty cloths. He walked past her into the studio and unwrapped the clay head. Troy and Garcia stood looking at it in silence. Then she asked him his name and what he wanted. He told her—“Garcia”—and he wanted to go on modelling, but had no money. Troy talked about the head, gave him twenty pounds, and never really got rid of him. He used to turn up, sometimes inconveniently, always with something to show her. In everything but clay he was quite inarticulate. It was as if he had been allowed only one medium of expression, but that an abnormally eloquent one. He was dirty, completely devoid of ordinary scruples, interested in nothing but his work. Troy helped him, and by and by people began to talk about his modelling. He began to work in stone. He was asked to exhibit with the New Phoenix Group, was given occasional commissions. He never had any money, and to most people he was entirely without charm, but to some women he was irresistible, and of this he took full advantage.

It was to Garcia that Troy went after she had set the pose. The others shifted their easels about, skirmishing for positions. Troy looked at Garcia’s sketch in clay of the “Comedy and Tragedy” for the new cinema in Westminster. He had stood it on a high stool in the south window. It was modelled on a little wooden platform with four wheels, a substitute he had made for the usual turntable. The two figures rose from a cylindrical base. Comedy was nude, but Tragedy wore an angular robe. Above their heads they held the conventional masks. The general composition suggested flames. The form was greatly simplified. The face of Comedy, beneath the grinning mask, was grave, but upon the face of Tragedy Garcia had pressed a faint smile.

He stood scowling while Troy looked at his work.

“Well,” said Troy, “it’s all right.”

“I thought of—” He stopped short, and with his thumb suggested dragging the drape across the feet of Comedy.

“I wouldn’t,” said Troy. “Break the line up. But I’ve told you I know nothing about this stuff. I’m a painter. Why did you come and plant yourself here, may I ask?”

“Thought you wouldn’t mind.” His voice was muffled and faintly Cockney. “I’ll be clearing out in a fortnight. I wanted somewhere to work.”

“So you said in your extraordinary note. Are you broke?”

“Yes.”

“Where are you going in a fortnight?”

“London. I’ve got a room to work in.”

“Where is it?”

“Somewhere in the East End, I think. It’s an old warehouse. I know a bloke who got them to let me use it. He’s going to let me have the address. I’ll go for a week’s holiday somewhere before I begin work in London. I’ll cast this thing there and then start on the sculping.”

“Who’s going to pay for the stone?”

“They’ll advance me enough for that.”

“I see. It’s coming along very well. Now attend to me, Garcia.” Troy lowered her voice. “While you’re here you’ve got to behave yourself. You know what I mean?”

“No.”

“Yes, you do. No nonsense with women. You and Sonia seem to be sitting in each other’s pockets. Have you been living together?”

“When you’re hungry,” said Garcia, “you eat.”

“Well, this isn’t a restaurant and you’ll please remember that. You understand? I noticed you making some sort of advance to Seacliff yesterday. That won’t do, either. I won’t have any bogus Bohemianism, or free love, or mere promiscuity at Tatler’s End. It shocks the servants, and it’s messy. All right?”

“O.K.,” said Garcia with a grin.

“The pose has altered,” said Katti Bostock from the middle of the studio.

“Yeah, that’s right,” said Watt Hatchett. The others looked coldly at him. His Sydney accent was so broad as to be almost comic. One wondered if he could be doing it on purpose. It was not the custom at Troy’s for new people to speak until they were spoken to. Watt was quite unaware of this and Troy, who hated rows, felt uneasy about him. He was so innocently impossible. She went to Katti’s easel and looked from the bold drawing in black paint to the model. Then she went up to the throne and shoved Sonia’s right shoulder down.

“Keep it on the floor.”

“It’s a swine of a pose, Miss Troy.”

“Well, stick it a bit longer.”

Troy began to go round the work, beginning with Ormerin on the extreme left.

“Bit tied up, isn’t it?” she said after a minute’s silence.

“She is never for one moment still,” complained Ormerin. “The foot moves, the shoulders are in a fidget continually. It is impossible for me to work — impossible.”

“Start again. The pose is right now. Get it down directly. You can do it.”

“My work has been abominable since three months or more. All this surrealism at Malaquin’s. I cannot feel like that and yet I cannot prevent myself from attempting it when I am there. That is why I return to you. I am in a muddle.”

“Try a little ordinary study for a bit. Don’t worry about style. It’ll come. Take a new stretcher and make a simple statement.” She moved to Valmai Seacliff and looked at the flowing lines so easily laid down. Seacliff moved back, contriving to touch Ormerin’s shoulder. He stopped working at once and whispered in her ear.

“I can understand French, Ormerin,” said Troy casually, still contemplating Seacliff’s canvas. “This is going quite well, Seacliff. I suppose the elongation of the legs is deliberate?”

“Yes, I see her like that. Long and slinky. They say people always paint like themselves. Don’t they?”

“Do they?” said Troy. “I shouldn’t let it become a habit.”

She moved on to Katti, who creaked back from her canvas. One of her shoes did squeak. Troy discussed the placing of the figure and then went on to Watt Hatchett. Hatchett had already begun to use solid paint, and was piling pure colour on his canvas.

“You don’t usually start off like this, do you?”

“Naow, that’s right, I don’t, but I thought I’d give it a pop.”

“Was that, by any chance, because you could see Miss Bostock working in that manner?” asked Troy, not too unkindly. Hatchett grinned and shuffled his feet. “You stick to your own ways for a bit,” advised Troy. “You’re a beginner still, you know. Don’t try to acquire a manner till you’ve got a little more method. Is that foot too big or too small?”

“Too small.”

“Should that space there be wider or longer?”

“Longer.”

“Make it so.”

“Good oh, Miss Troy. Think that bit of colour there’s all right?” asked Hatchett, regarding it complacently.

“It’s perfectly good colour, but don’t choke the pores of your canvas up with paint till you’ve got the big things settled. Correct your drawing and scrape it down.”

“Yeah, but she wriggles all the time. It’s a fair nark. Look where the shoulder has shifted. See?”

“Has the pose altered?” inquired Troy at large.

“Naow!” said Sonia with vindictive mimicry.

“It’s shifted a whole lot,” asserted Hatchett aggressively. “I bet you anything you like— ”

“Wait a moment,” said Troy.

“It’s moved a little,” said Katti Bostock.

Troy sighed.

“Rest!” she said. “No! Wait a minute.”

She took a stick of chalk from her overall pocket and ran it round the model wherever she touched the throne. The position of both legs, one flank, one hip, and one shoulder were thus traced on the boards. The blue drape was beneath the rest of the figure.

“Now you can get up.”

Sonia sat up with an ostentatious show of discomfort, reached out her hand for the kimono and shrugged herself into it. Troy pulled the drape out taut from the cushion to the floor.

“It’ll have to go down each time with the figure,” she told the class.

“As it does in the little romance,” drawled Malmsley.

“Yes, it’s quite feasible,” agreed Valmai Seacliff. “We could try it. There’s that Chinese knife in the lumber-room. May we get it, Miss Troy?”

“If you like,” said Troy.

“It doesn’t really matter,” said Malmsley languidly, getting to his feet.

“Where is it, Miss Seacliff?” asked Hatchett eagerly.

“On the top shelf in the lumber-room.”

Hatchett went into an enormous cupboard by the window, and after a minute or two returned with a long, thin-bladed knife. He went up to Malmsley’s table and looked over his shoulder at the typescript. Malmsley moved away ostentatiously.

“Aw yeah, I get it,” said Hatchett. “What a corker! Swell way of murdering somebody, wouldn’t it be?” He licked his thumb and turned the page.

“I’ve taken a certain amount of trouble to keep those papers clean,” remarked Malmsely to no one in particular.

“Don’t be so damned precious, Malmsley,” snapped Troy. “Here, give me the knife, Hatchett, and don’t touch other people’s tools in the studio. It’s not done.”

“Good oh, Miss Troy.”

Pilgrim, Ormerin, Hatchett and Valmai Seacliff began a discussion about the possibility of using the knife in the manner suggested by Malmsley’s illustration. Phillida Lee joined in.

“Where would the knife enter the body?” asked Seacliff.

“Just here,” said Pilgrim, putting his hand on her back and keeping it there. “Behind your heart, Valmai.”

She turned her head and looked at him through half-closed eyes. Hatchett stared at her, Malmsely smiled curiously. Pilgrim had turned rather white.

“Can you feel it beating?” asked Seacliff softly.

“If I move my hand — here.”

“Oh, come off it,” said the model violently. She walked over to Garcia. “I don’t believe you could kill anybody like that. Do you, Garcia?”

Garcia grunted unintelligibly. He, too, was staring at Valmai Seacliff.

“How would he know where to put the dagger?” demanded Katti Bostock suddenly. She drew a streak of background colour across her canvas.

“Can’t we try it out?” asked Hatchett.

“If you like,” said Troy. “Mark the throne before you move it.”

Basil Pilgrim chalked the position of the throne on the floor, and then he and Ormerin tipped it up. The rest of the class looked on with gathering interest. By following the chalked-out line on the throne they could see the spot where the heart would come, and after a little experiment found the plot of this spot on the underneath surface of the throne.

“Now, you see,” said Ormerin, “the jealous wife would drive the knife through from underneath.”

“Incidentally taking the edge off,” said Basil Pilgrim.

“You could force it through the crack between the boards,” said Garcia suddenly, from the window.

“How? It’d fall out when she was shoved down.”

“No, it wouldn’t. Look here.”

“Don’t break the knife and don’t damage the throne,” said Troy.

“I get you,” said Hatchett eagerly. “The dagger’s wider at the base. The boards would press on it. You’d have to hammer it through. Look, I’ll bet you it could be done. There you are, I’ll betcher.”

“Not interested, I’m afraid,” said Malmsley.

“Let’s try,” said Pilgrim. “May we, Troy?”

“Oh, do let’s,” cried Phillida Lee. She caught up her enthusiasm with an apologetic glance at Malmsley. “I adore bloodshed,” she added with a painstaking nonchalance.

“The underneath of the throne’s absolutely filthy,” complained Malmsley,

“Pity if you spoiled your nice green pinny,” jeered Sonia.

Valmai Seacliff laughed.

“I don’t propose to do so,” said Malmsley. “Garcia can if he likes.”

“Go on,” said Hackett. “Give it a pop. I betcher five bob it’ll work. Fair dinkum.”

“What does that mean?” asked Seacliff. “You must teach me the language, Hatchett.”

“Too right I will,” said Hatchett with enthusiasm. “I’ll make a dinkum Aussie out of you.”

“God forbid,” said Malmsley. Sonia giggled.

“Don’t you like Australians?” Hatchett asked her aggressively.

“Not particularly.”

“Well, I’ll tell you one thing. Models at the school I went to in Sydney knew how to hold a pose for longer than ten minutes.”

“You don’t seem to have taken advantage of it, judging by your drawing.”

“And they didn’t get saucy with the students.”‘

“Perhaps they weren’t all like you.”

“Sonia,” said Troy, “that will do. If you boys are going to make your experiment, you’d better hurry up. We start again in five minutes.”

In the boards of the throne they found a crack that passed through the right spot. Hatchett slid the thin tip of the knife into it from underneath and shoved. By tapping the hilt of the dagger with an easel ledge, he forced the widening blade upwards through the crack. Then he let the throne back on to the floor. The blade projected wickedly through the blue chalk cross that marked the plot of Sonia’s heart on the throne. Basil Pilgrim took the drape, laid it across the cushion, pulled it in taut folds down to the throne, and pinned it there.

“You see, the point of the knife is lower than the top of the cushion,” he said. “It doesn’t show under the drape.”

“What did I tell you?” said Hatchett.

Garcia strolled over and joined the group.

“Go into your pose, Sonia,” he said with a grin.

Sonia shuddered.

“Don’t,” she said.

“I wonder if the tip would show under the left breast,” murmured Malmsley. “Rather amusing to have it in the drawing. With a cast shadow and a thin trickle of blood. Keep the whole thing black and white except for the little scarlet thread. After all, it is melodrama.”

“Evidently,” grunted Garcia.

“The point of suspension for the drape would have to be higher,” said Troy. “It must be higher than the tip of the blade. You could do it. If your story was a modern detective novel, Malmsley, you could do a drawing of the knife as it is now.”

Malmsley smiled and began to sketch on the edge of his paper. Valmai Seacliff leant over him, her hands on his shoulders. Hatchett, Ormerin and Pilgrim stood round her, Pilgrim with his arm across her shoulder. Phillida Lee hovered on the outskirts of the little group. Troy, looking vaguely round the studio, said to herself that her worst forebodings were likely to be realised. Watt Hatchett was already at loggerheads with Malmsley and the model. Valmai was at her Cleopatra game, and there was Sonia in a corner with Garcia. Something in their faces caught Troy’s attention. What the devil were they up to? Garcia’s eyes were on the group round Malmsley. A curious smile lifted one corner of his mouth, and on Sonia’s face, turned to him, the smile was reflected.

“You’ll have to get that thing out now, Hatchett,” said Troy.

It took a lot of working and tugging to do this, but at last the knife was pulled out, the throne put back, and Sonia, with many complaints, took the pose again.

“Over more on the right shoulder,” said Katti Bostock.

Troy thrust the shoulder down. The drape fell into folds round the figure.

“Ow!” said Sonia.

“That is when the dagger goes in,” said Malmsley.

“Don’t — you’ll make me sick,” said Sonia.

Garcia gave a little chuckle.

“Right through the ribs and coming out under the left breast,” murmured Malmsley.

“Shut up!”

“Spitted like a little chicken.”

Sonia raised her head.

“I wouldn’t be too damn’ funny, Mr. Malmsley,” she said. “Where do you get your ideas from, I wonder? Books? Or pictures?”

Malmsley’s brush slipped from his fingers to the paper, leaving a trace of paint. He looked fixedly at Sonia, and then began to dab his drawing with a sponge. Sonia laughed.

“For God’s sake,” said Katti Bostock, “let’s get the pose.”

“Quiet!” said Troy, and was obeyed. She set the pose, referring to the canvases. “Now get down to it, all of you. The Phoenix Group Show opens on the 16th. I suppose most of us want to go up to London for it. Very well, I’ll give the servants a holiday that week-end, and we’ll start work again on Monday.”

“If this thing goes decently,” said Katti, “I want to put it in for the Group. It it’s not done, it’ll do for B. House next year.”

“I take it,” said Troy, “you’ll all want to go up for the Group’s private view?”

“I don’t,” said Garcia. “I’ll be pushing off for my holiday about then.”

“What about us?” asked Valmai Seacliff of Basil Pilgrim.

“What do you think, darling?”

“ ‘Us?’ ” said Troy. “ ‘Darling’? What’s all this?”

“We may as well tell them, Basil,” said Valmai sweetly. “Don’t faint, anybody. We got engaged last night.”