was humiliated to find how few and crude and uninteresting were
the forms he could invent; the inventions of nature were without
number, inconceivably subtle and elaborate. He had done with
cubism. He was out on the other side. But the cubist discipline
preserved him from falling into excesses of nature worship. He
took from nature its rich, subtle, elaborate forms, but his aim
was always to work them into a whole that should have the
thrilling simplicity and formality of an idea; to combine
prodigious realism with prodigious simplification. Memories of
Caravaggio's portentous achievements haunted him. Forms of a
breathing, living reality emerged from darkness, built themselves
up into compositions as luminously simple and single as a
mathematical idea. He thought of the "Call of Matthew," of
"Peter Crucified," of the "Lute players," of "Magdalen." He had
the secret, that astonishing ruffian, he had the secret! And now
Gombauld was after it, in hot pursuit. Yes, it would be
something terrific, if only he could catch it.

For a long time an idea had been stirring and spreading,
yeastily, in his mind. He had made a portfolio full of studies,
he had drawn a cartoon; and now the idea was taking shape on
canvas. A man fallen from a horse. The huge animal, a gaunt
white cart-horse, filled the upper half of the picture with its
great body. Its head, lowered towards the ground, was in shadow;
the immense bony body was what arrested the eye, the body and the
legs, which came down on either side of the picture like the
pillars of an arch. On the ground, between the legs of the
towering beast, lay the foreshortened figure of a man, the head
in the extreme foreground, the arms flung wide to right and left.
A white, relentless light poured down from a point in the right