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.Jonathan and Richard both stared at the painting.It had not occurred to either of them—not even apparently to Jonathan—that the whole mass of inclined backs could be seen almost as a ranked mass of beetles, their oval backs dully reflecting a distant light.Once the word had been spoken, the painting became suddenly sinister.Jonathan broke out but his voice was unconvincing, “They’re not … they weren’t meant … they don’t look like beetles.”“They look exactly like beetles,” Lady Wallingford said.“They are not human beings at all.And Father Simon’s face is exactly the same shape.”Richard saw that there at least she was right.The oval shape of the face differed only in its features and its downward inclination from the innumerable backs, and in the fact that it reflected no light.It was this lack of reflection which gave it its peculiar deadness; the backs had that dim reflection but this face none.But now he saw it as so similar in shape that it seemed to him for half a second not a face at all, but another back; but this eyed and mouthed as if the living human form ended in a gruesomeness and had a huge beetle for its head, only a beetle that looked out backward through its coat and had a wide speaking mouth there also; a speaking beetle, an orating beetle, but also a dead and watching beetle.He forgot the aesthetic remark he had been about to make.Jonathan was saying, “I think that’s rather reading things into it.” It was not, for him, a particularly intelligent remark; but he was distracted by the thought of Betty and yet his voice was as cold as Lady Wallingford’s own.He could manage his words but not his tone.Lady Wallingford moved her head a little more forward.Richard saw the movement and suddenly, as she stood in front of him, she too took on the shape of an overgrown insect.Outside the painting her back repeated the shapes in the painting.Richard suddenly found himself believing in the painting.This then was what the hearers of Father Simon looked like.He glanced at the face again, but he supposed he had lost that special angle of sight; it was now more like a face, though of that dead artificiality he had remarked before.Lady Wallingford leaned towards the picture as if she were feeling for it with invisible tentacles.But she was feeling with a hideous and almost dangerous accuracy.She now said, and her voice was more than cold; it was indignant, “Why have you painted our Father as an imbecile?”Here, however, Jonathan was driven to protest more strongly.He turned his back on the painting and he said with some passion, “No, really, Lady Wallingford, I have not.I can see what you mean by complaining of the shapes, though honestly I never thought of anything of the sort, and I’ll do something.… I mean, I’ll paint something different somehow.But I never had the slightest intention of painting Father Simon in any displeasing way.…”Lady Wallingford said, “You intended.… Look at it!” Jonathan stopped speaking; he looked at the woman; then he looked beyond her at Betty.She looked back despairingly.Richard observed the exchange of their eyes, and the full crisis became clear to him.He felt, as they did, Betty swept away on Lady Wallingford’s receding anger; he saw her throw out a hand towards Jonathan and he saw Jonathan immediately respond.He saw him move away from the painting and go across to Betty, take her hands and lift her from her chair so that she stood against him.His arm round her, he turned again towards the painting.And again Richard’s eyes went with his.It was as he had last seen it.Or was it? Was the face not quite so down-turned? was it more lifted and already contemplating the room? Had he misjudged the angle? of course, he must have misjudged the angle.But to say it was “contemplating” was too much; it was not contemplating but only staring.What he had called bewilderment was now plain lack of meaning.Jonathan’s phrase—“an absolute master and a lost loony at the same time”—recurred to him.The extended hand was no longer a motion of exposition or of convincing energy, holding the congregation attentive, but rather drawing the congregation after it, a summons and a physical enchantment.It drew them towards the figure, and behind the figure itself perhaps to more; for the shadow of the figure on the cliff behind was not now a shadow, but the darkness of a cleft which ran back very deeply, almost infinitely deep, a corridor between two walls of rock.Into that corridor the figure, hovering on its shadowy platform, was about to recede; and below it all those inclined backs were on the point of similar movement.A crowd of winged beetles, their wings yet folded but at the very instant of loosing, was about to rise into the air and disappear into that crevice and away down the prolonged corridor.And the staring emaciated face that looked out at them and over them was the face of an imbecile.Richard said impatiently to himself, “This is all that old woman talking,” because, though one did get different angles on paintings, one did not usually so soon see on the same canvas what was practically a different painting.Blatant and blank in the gray twilight, where only a reflection of the sun shone from the beetles’ coats, the face hung receding; blank and blatant, the thousand insects rose towards it; and beyond them the narrow corridor hinted some extreme distance towards which the whole congregation and their master were on the point of unchecked flight
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