t 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 from nature its rich, subtle, elaborate forms, but his
aim was always to work them into a whole that should have the thrilling
simplicity and formality of an idea; to combine prodigious realism
with prodigious simplification. Memories of Caravaggio's portentous
achievements haunted him. Forms of a breathing, living reality emerged
from darkness, built themselves up into compositions as luminously
simple and single as a mathematical idea. He thought of the "Call of
Matthew," of "Peter Crucified," of the "Lute players," of "Magdalen."
He had the secret, that astonishing ruffian, he had the secret! And
now Gombauld was after it, in hot pursuit. Yes, it would be something
terrific, if only he could catch it.

For a long time an idea had been stirring and spreading, yeastily,
in his mind. He had made a portfolio full of studies, he had drawn a
cartoon; and now the idea was taking shape on canvas. A man fallen from
a horse. The huge animal, a gaunt white cart-horse, filled the upper
half of the picture with its great body. Its head, lowered towards the
ground, was in shadow; the immense bony body was what arrested the eye,
the body and the legs, wh