The block of flats rose up before him, dowdily sumptuous. ‘Twenty years younger than I,’ Mrs Probus remarked, when he had incautiously commented on the marbleness 84of its halls. He entered, and the smell of steam-heating and brass-polish obliterated any sense of the autumn afternoon. The porter got into the lift with him (it was that kind of lift), saying, as he pressed the button, ‘A wonderful old lady, sir. A great loss.’ He agreed, and the lift was stopped at the third floor with a condoling smoothness and exactitude. He got out, the doors clanged to behind him, the lift went down into its pit unblamed. There he was, on the same level of air as Shadwell and only four doors away. 21, 22, 23, 24. He rang the bell.

Shadwell opened the door, looking just as usual, rubbed unobtrusive as stones are rubbed smooth. She wore her afternoon uniform of black serge, and a short black apron, a form of vestment denoting superior servitude. Her eyes, which that morning had looked on death, retained their shallow brightness, her anteroom appearance was unchanged, her air of being a preliminary to Mrs Probus. So she still considered herself, for her words were, ‘You would wish to see Mrs Probus, sir,’—and she preceded him to a door, and opened it, standing back for him to enter. But it was a different door.

Death is a leveller. Irene Probus, lying wrapped in fine linen on her Louis Seize bed, looked like an old peasant woman, or, even more, like a masterpiece of peasant art, as though some village craftsman, with only the truth to guide him, had carved her, with every wrinkle, every blemish of age, and the overall plain statement of death, superlatively rendered in some smooth yellowish wood. This is equal to anything by Epstein, he thought, scarcely able to restrain 85himself from exclaiming in delighted admiration at the way the heavy wrinkles of the cheek enfolded the plane of the cheekbone and threw into relief the pure sailing arch of the aquiline nose.

‘I hope you approve, sir. Mrs Probus did not wish anyone but me to touch her.’

He turned to Shadwell, saying, ‘Did you do it?’ And it was as though he had turned away from the imperious vitality of the work of art to the inadequacy of real life, for Shadwell seemed extinguished, a shabby and negligible dummy, not very firm on its legs. ‘It is beautiful, it could not be done better,’ he added. She replied, ‘I am glad you approve, sir. And I am glad that someone has come to see her.’

It was inevitable, his errand being what it was, that Shadwell should wring his heart, but he could not have foreseen this particular pathos of the neglected artist. He said, before any more assaults could be made on his feelings, ‘Shadwell, we must talk a little business.’

With her trained sense of what was befitting, she showed him into the dining-room, and pulled forward a chair.