The Dreams of Cardinal Vittorini and other Strange Stories by Reggie Oliver Read Free Book Online Page B

consciousness.
    ‘And I too am in Arcadia’: that was the literal meaning. The inner meaning, said Jason’s dictionary of quotations, was obscure, but this anonymous saying was to be found on tombs. ‘Even I am in Arcadia’, was another rendering. It was clear to Jason, if not the dictionary of quotations, who or rather what the ‘I’ was.
    Jason took the painting out of the drawer and propped it up on his mantelpiece. He fetched some warm soapy water and with a damp cloth gently began to wipe away the dirt. Where the paint had been applied more thickly he used cotton buds in the same solution. The cleaning of the picture was a delightful, absorbing task which occupied the whole morning. Slowly the work revealed itself, gem-like in its vividness. Never had Jason seen such an intensely dark blue sky, such green and gold in the trees which sparkled in a slanted afternoon sun. (It could have been early morning, but Jason was sure it was meant to be late afternoon. There was something in the attitude of the old shepherd which suggested rest after a long day.) Jason’s apprehension and guilt were drowned in the wonder of holding in his hands an authentic masterpiece. The artist had captured a moment, not a single frozen instant, as in a photograph, but a fragment of time just long enough to contain a tiny vibration of real life. The watching mind oscillated within the picture between repose and anxiety.
    One moment you felt the melancholy calm of an old man resting in a forest glade enjoying the rays of a declining sun; the next moment the twisted trees and glittering leaves suggested a sudden gust of wind and you saw the dark grey cloud in the blue sky beyond. The air seemed to crackle with the electricity of an approaching storm; then your mind reverted once more to melancholy calm.
    Jason was glad now that he had appropriated the picture. Nothing would ever take away from him the intense experience he had just enjoyed with this three hundred year old piece of wood and canvas, not even a prison sentence. But there was one small frustration. He had hoped that careful cleaning would have revealed the inscription on the grey stone which the old shepherd was staring at in the picture, but he could not make it out. Tiny dark strokes of paint suggested lettering vividly without being in any way comprehensible. Et in Arcadia Ego perhaps? No, he could not make that fit.
    In two weeks time Jason had a part in The Bill , so he felt entitled to a break, and he had decided that what he must do was to find out as much as he could about the picture and its painter. The desire came partly from guilt—if he knew more about it he would be able to persuade himself that he deserved the object—partly from a wholly unspecified compulsion which seemed to emanate from the picture itself.
    As an actor, Jason was someone whose powers of concentration were above average, but he was surprised by the length of time he could spend simply looking at the picture. It began to alarm him that an hour or two might pass in this way, at the end of which he had only a very indistinct memory of what he had been thinking. After one or two of these sessions, he found that the picture’s image was etched onto his mind and formed an almost permanent background to his thought. It was like the tune that keeps playing itself inside one’s head.
    Researches in the library of the Victoria and Albert Museum, revealed Gaspr. Poussin to have been Gaspard Dughet, sometimes known as Gaspard Poussin, who worked mainly in Italy and died at Rome in 1675. He had painted classical landscapes, somewhat in the manner of the more famous Nicolas Poussin, to whom he had been apprenticed, but often with stormy or overcast skies. The books spoke of him with respect, but essentially as a somewhat derivative minor figure. Jason could find no reference to In Arcadia.
    The information he had gathered did not satisfy Jason as he had hoped it would. The one fact which haunted him was