MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON
KNEW an artist once who lived in Dahlem, a suburb of I Berlin. He was a happy little man with a round pink face and gold spectacles ; he had a disconcerting habit of stopping suddenly while he laughed and, pushing his lower lip up into his moustache ; he would sing when he cooked the sausages and then he would stop singing as if his gaiety had been turned off by a tap. He was not a good artist, and upon the floor of his studio some twenty canvases were stacked with their backs to the wall. Sometimes when I was there he would run his fingers along the tops of those canvases and pull one out deftly, as if extract- ing a card from an index-file. With a sweep of the arm he would put it upon the easel. I used to hate these moments, being un- willing either to wound or lie. I would utter some vague phrase which sounded more like sympathy than approval. And then he would push his lip up into his moustache, switch the canvas off again, clap his hands and say, "Now, children, what about some supper?" And after supper he would sing Bavarian songs. His girl-friend told me once that the sudden moods of hesitation (they did not last long enough to amount to depression) which assailed this blithe cherub were the result of what she called " Eiloman." At first I took this to be a modernist form of acedy. I then learnt that the poor little man had been caught in England in August, 1914, and interned in the Isle of Man. And one day he showed me a pen-and-ink drawing which hung above the weighing machine in his bathroom. "I drew that," he said, "when I was In prison in your country." It represented several hunched figures walking with bowed necks—lonely and purposeless. The figures faced in different directions and were of different sizes ; they were scratched harshly on the paper in angry dejection. In and out of them, forming a trellis across the whole drawing, were strands of barbed wire, the knots being exaggerated to form a crown of thorns. I said to him, "It is unhealthy for you to keep that drawing above your. weighing-machine." He bit at his moustache and then he laughed gaily. "Of course it is," he said, "will you take it from me?" I have that drawing today in my room in the Temple. And every morning I see those sad men pacing up and down behind their barrier of thorns.
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