Herself Surprised by Joyce Cary

Author:Joyce Cary [Cary, Joyce]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: Thistle Publishing
Published: 2016-12-26T05:00:00+00:00

46

NOW I don’t know whether it was a reward or not, but Gulley was so pleased to see me again that he said, all by himself, he would agree to the exhibition at once. “It won’t do any good,” he said, “but Hickson will have to buy a few quids’ worth because it’s in his house and we’ll have a binge on it—good old Brighton.”

But I think it must have been a reward, for the same week I got a letter from the man Robb, who had kept Gulley’s old pictures. He had changed his address, but he had the pictures still and Gulley’s bill was only nine pounds and a few shillings. So I paid it and had the pictures sent straight to London, to be framed and taken at once to Mr. Hickson’s house in Portman Place, in case Gulley should mislike them and say they weren’t to be allowed.

Mr. Hickson arranged them in the drawing-room, and advertised the exhibition in the papers. Though he charged me with the cost, that is to say, I owed him for it. Also he got a famous writer to write a notice in the catalogue explaining why Gulley painted in new shapes. He and I did all the arrangements. But I could never get Gulley to fix prices, and then when the catalogues got sent to me, I found he had put mad prices on them, no painting under a hundred pounds, two more three hundred, and one was five hundred. But when I went to tell him that he must be mad, he said only that the National Gallery had just spent fifty thousand pounds on pictures much worse.

“Yes,” I said, “old masters that are dead and famous.”

“Why shouldn’t I be famous when I’m dead?”

It must have popped out by accident, but it was a giveaway too. Because Gulley always made out that he scorned fame. I saw him turn red and furious, so I said quickly that, of course, he would be.

“Not that I care, for I won’t even be here,” he said. “Dead men can’t read the papers.”

I said that he would be famous alive too, if he went on giving exhibitions. But five hundred pounds was too big to start with. “My dear Sall,” he said, “you won’t sell them anyhow, so why not put a fair price on them. Those people have no other standards but money. If I put down fifty pounds they would say these pictures can’t be much good. I wish now I’d told Hickson nothing under a thousand pounds.”

So I thought: ‘I’ll have to tell people that I’ll take less.’ But when I went up to town, the week before the exhibition, I got another great shock. I had not seen any of the pictures before, and all the ones from Mr. Robb, eleven in all, were of the queerest kind, with the red women and the green men and purple trees, and the flowers like buttercups about three times their right size.

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