The Stand-In by David Helwig

Author:David Helwig [Helwig, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Biblioasis
Published: 2018-01-03T17:04:27+00:00

THREE

AS I LOOK down from this bare platform at the little loyal group of you gathered for the last of my lectures, I wonder whether there is among you the person who phoned me last night. A cruel prank. I was asleep, exhausted after a long day, dinner at The Boat Shed with your President—and thank you sir, it was a great kindness—and I was roused from sleep by the telephone ringing. Not the first time of course, and I stumbled from bed, my pyjamas tangled, and lifted the phone, though perhaps I should have known enough not to, but I did it, I lifted the phone and spoke, and there was that long painful resonant silence, and then something. I can’t say exactly what it was, a voice, I suppose, but it seemed far off and blurred, the voice itself cracked and uncomfortable, as if speech was a great effort. It’s true that I am growing a little deaf, that it is more difficult to separate voices from the surrounding noise and I’m sure that the highest pitches are gone, but it was more than that.

Back in bed, damp with sweat and yet shivering with cold, I tried to understand who it might be and told myself old stories all over again. The fire of driftwood in the middle of the August darkness, the sound of the waves as I walked back along the beach alone from the place where I had left her standing at the water’s edge. Soon enough they were gone, all of them. Very late in the night, I remembered that I had mentioned to this audience the mysterious calls, oh not that many really, over the years, but they go on. It was then I realized that it must be a cruel prank, created by someone who has been sitting here listening to me. Now I look at every face staring toward me and wonder who it was.

To business. You will of course remember from our first hour J. W. Morrice living on the Left Bank, painting and drinking. It appears that in the 1890s he was in touch with a number of American artists, Maurice Prendergast, Robert Henri, William Glackens, and for a short while, there was among the group another Canadian artist. Probably you will know the name, though it is now more obscure than in the days of my boyhood. A man who was, among other things, the founder of the American Boy Scouts.

There is an astonishing story about this man’s youth. He had a plan for what he wished to do with his life, and his father dismissed it, saying No, become something important. Become an artist. That in Toronto in the late nineteenth century. It sounds unlikely enough doesn’t it? The father appears to have been an unlikely character.

The man who was there in Paris, though he was out of place and knew it, was Ernest Thompson Seton. One of the studies tells us that he was still calling himself Thompson at this time, but I think that is wrong.

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