I've yet to catch up with all your adventures and that being a major undertaking, it must wait until the weekend.
For now we find Oliver in London. Alas, Rula Lenska is not born yet so she can't show him around.
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À la Recherche du Temps Perdu - Part 84



14 May 1918
Royal Automobile Club
Pall Mall, London


Spent an hour this morning trying to write a letter to Eliza, but got stuck. She mentioned unanswered letters just like Mac did. How many got lost in the retreat I wonder? What is it that she needs to tell me?

Eliza gave me her St. Jude medallion. No small thing since I know she had it from her grandmother. Patron saint of lost causes. Seems appropriate. Dare I hope? I want to say so much but I’m confused. I can’t deny my feelings for Clarissa even if that love is doomed.



I’ve no idea what to say beyond thanking her for the St. Jude and hoping we can meet again soon. I’m leaving things at that and posting it.
_____________________

Late this morning I headed off in search of Orpen’s studio. Mac had given me the address. As I was searching for the correct door, I practically bumped into the man himself.

He greeted me warmly. “If it isn't Captain Ripper from 56 Squadron. To what do I owe the pleasure? Come to sit for me, are you?”

“Nothing like that, Orps. I heard about your exhibition but I’m going to miss it. I wanted to see your work.”

Orpen led me up to the second floor and showed me into a larger adjoining room was strewn with what must have been a hundred paintings.



I didn’t know Sgt. Bennett but Orpen caught the quiet intensity of the normally frenetic Boom. Hoidge was spot on. The slightly hang dog look and those shining dark eyes of his. I remembered the October day he sat for this portrait. Georgie was nearly killed on the morning patrol before shooting down a pair of two seaters. He arrived two hours late and Orpen was furious before he learned the reason.



As for the two RFC officers, why not go to breakfast before Hospital? Of the returning patrol, this could have been any day. Hoidge, Arthur and another, probably Mac if the man’s height was any indication. On some days it would be me. Arthur was always so excited when recounting the events of a combat.



I stared at the two portraits of the woman “Refugee” for a long time. There was something compelling about her I couldn’t articulate.

More to her than meets the eye

I must have muttered my thoughts aloud. Orpen gave a chuckle and put his finger to the side of his nose.



Orpen’s usually keen eye failed him here. The color palette looked all wrong, especially compared to the portraits of Sgt Bennett, Hoidge or the woman Refugee. This shallow, washed out and lifeless visage revealed nothing of the spark and ebullience of the man. It wasn’t the McCudden I knew.





The next group of paintings depicted a war of which I am almost completely ignorant. I can't see how he'll get these past the censor.







Zonnebeke reminded me of those Renaissance painters’ depictions of Hell.




Is he meant to be a ghost? Is that how Orpen imagines the dead? For a moment I thought him to represent the risen Christ.

The Somme last Summer was deserted save for the burial details. Thousands of skeletons lay in trenches or dugouts.




It was impossible to view such remarkable and evocative works without introspection and strong emotion, so when I came at the last to the portrait of Arthur the shock of it landed with far greater impact.




It was Arthur as he was in life!

Orpen caught the clear-eyed look of heightened awareness and excitement that Arthur would always get just before he went on patrol. Was there also a trace of the “what a load of ball’s” smirk? Maybe it was the flying clothes Arthur wore while sitting for the portrait that revealed him to Orpen’s sight so clearly.

In some locked corridor of my mind grief raged full force but hard experience, like the obdurate jailer who inures himself to a prisoner’s cries, kept it out of reach. I stared at the painting with a continued detachment, unable to summon any emotion other than a rising horror at the realization that I could feel nothing. Just like the dream image of a dead Arthur trapped under the wreckage of his plane, the portrait held me fast and drew me in. I tried to scream, to call out, to do anything to break the numbing hold.

“Will you take a drink, Ripper?”

The sound of his voice broke the spell. I wrenched my gaze away. Only then did I feel the tears on my face.

Orpen made no comment as he poured two fingers of whiskey into each glass. We raised our glasses in silence. He drained his at one go and refilled it immediately. I looked at him more closely. Orpen had changed. He was still the congenial Irishman, and the playful gleam remained, but he looked to have aged considerably since I’d met him last October. I wondered at the price he must have paid during the last year; an onlooker in France was the way he described himself. Aloft or safely behind the lines I could turn an eye from all the ugliness and block it out. Orpen by contrast studied it in minute detail, immersed himself entirely in all the horror of war, and did so with an artist’s eye and sensitivity. What must that have been like?



"It’s the real war you’ve caught here, Orps. The real war. The horror and the human face of it, for certain, but also the beauty.”

"Such a strange thing,” he replied pensively. “April last, when I went to the Somme battlefield, it was nothing but water, shell-holes and mud – the most gloomy dreary abomination of desolation the mind could imagine. When I came back in August… I can’t express the beauty of it, Ripper. I haven’t the words. The dreary, dismal mud was baked white and pure – dazzling white. White daisies, red poppies and a blue flower, great masses of them, stretched for miles and miles. The sky a pure dark blue, and the whole air, up to a height of about forty feet, thick with white butterflies: your clothes were covered with butterflies. It was like an enchanted land: but in the place of fairies there were thousands of little white crosses, marked 'Unknown British Soldier', for the most part."

“All these paintings, I’ve never seen their like.”

“Your portrait should be among them, boyo.” he said.

“Another day, maybe.”

“Why not sit?” he asked. “Just as you are now.”

It took some additional cajoling but I finally relented. The good-natured Orps was not an easy man to refuse. My posture was similar to Hoidge’s but turned slightly open to be more face-on like Arthur’s. With my left side closer to the artist, Orpen adjusted my arm so that the four wound stripes might show. He sketched furiously, and for long periods looked only at me as his practiced hand drew on the sketchpad. Orpen resembled then the man I’d first met, the one in the self-portrait with the spark in his eye.

It was torture. I sat, mentally bruised and bloodied from the recent ordeal, utterly exposed, my guard swept away. The prisoner, having escaped confinement, now demanded an audience. How that conflict played out on my features I cannot say, but after a time the scratching of the pencil ceased and Orpen regarded me for a long, silent minute.

“Perhaps, you’re right. We should finish this another time,” he said.

I thought I heard disappointment in his voice, as though he knew that the face he beheld today, the one that the artist in him sought so desperately to record was one he’d never see again. Was that why Orpen wanted to paint me? If so, he’d reconsidered, maybe because of what he saw, maybe out of basic decency.

I don’t know why Arthur’s death should cut me so much more than Grevelink’s or Pixley’s or the others I called friend.

Clement’s death was like that of Hector or Achilles - the mythic glory of the world diminished. That of Pixley and all the rest - a full life of friendship now extinguished. Arthur’s was that way too, but there was more to it. Grevelink and Maybery were professional soldiers from military families. They were going experience war eventually. Richard had already seen service on the Indian Frontier in 1913. Arthur was just a schoolboy doing his duty, like legions of others. Still, there was something different about him. His was no ordinary light. In his life I saw embodied the hope for a better future. Now that he was dead, only the brief glory of his exploits would be remembered. What might he have become? What might they all have become, had they lived?

LOL Carrick, your therapist is Lexi Belle, an American Porn Star. LMAO.

S!Blade<><

Blade, that’s an abnormal skill you have there to recognize certain type of people, especially when they’re still wearing their clothes.

I always considered it a gift, especially when it comes to recognizing Lexi Belle with her clothes on because that is as rare as seeing a nesting marbled murrelet. What rock have you been living under?