The Other Margaret
LIONEL TRILLING
M ARK
jENNINGS
stood the picture up on the wide counter and
he and Stephen Elwin stepped back and looked at it. It was one of
Rouault's kings. A person looking at it for the first time might find
it repellent, even brutal or cruel. It was full of rude blacks that might
seem barbarically untidy.
But the two men knew the picture well. They looked at it in sil–
ence. The admiration they were sharing made a community between
them which at their age was rare, for they had both passed forty .
J ennings waited for Elwin to speak first-they were friends but Elwin
was the customer. Besides, the frame had been designed by Jennings
and in buying a reproduced picture the frame is of great importance,
accounting for more than half the cost. Elwin had bought the pic–
ture some weeks before but he was seeing it framed for the first time.
Elwin said, "The frame is very good, Mark. It's perfect." He was
a rather tall man with an attractive, competent face . He touched
the frame curiously with the tip of his forefinger.
Jennings replied in a judicious tone, as if it were not his own good
taste but that of a very gifted apprentice of his.
"I
think so," he said.
And he too touched the frame, but intimately, rubbing briskly up
and down one moulding with an artisan's possessive thumb, putting
an unneeded last touch. He explained what considerations of color
and proportion made the frame right for the picture. He spoke as if
these were simple rules anyone might find in a book.
The king, blackbearded and crowned, faced in profile to the
left. He had a fierce quality that had modulated, but not softened,
to authority. One could feel of him-it was the reason why Elwin had
bought the picture- that he had passed beyond ordinary matters of
personality and Was worthy of the crown he was wearing. Yet he
was human and tragic. He was not unlike the sculptured kings of
Chartres. In his right hand he held a spray of flowers.
"Is he a favorite of yours?" Elwin said. He did not know whether
he meant the king or the king's painter. Indeed, as he asked the ques–
tion, it seemed to him that he had assumed that the painter was this
