The Hearth and Eagle (38 page)

“Hesper—” he said, his voice cool and round. “You know as well as I do, my money’s about gone. I’ve got to get some things in shape for exhibition. Maybe some dolt will buy, though I’ve done nothing decent this summer.”

She pressed her eyelids against the blackness. “It’s not my fault, is it? I’ve tried to help.”

She heard him get off the bed and walk to the washstand and pour himself a drink of water. “It’s not a question of fault, or blame.”

She pushed against the pillow and sat up. He stood by the washstand holding the dented tin pitcher. They had bought it and the tin bowl off a pushcart for ten cents. Her eyes slid down to a glued curlicue on the corner leg of the washstand. The glue had dried out and the curlicue of yellow birdseye maple dangled from a nail someone had tacked to it. Her eyes followed the bulbous little whorls back and forth.

“Why do you shut me out so?” she said very low.

He put the pitcher down and turned to her violently. “Because I can’t help it. Because nobody is very important to me for long. Because inside me there’s a core, no, it’s like a glass ball that mustn’t be touched or it’ll shatter. Do you understand that?”

“I don’t know—” she said. “I don’t know. But at first it was so different. You loved me. We were happy. Then you left me high and dry. Ah—don’t look at me as though you hated me—don’t.”

Her head drooped. She crumpled up a corner of the sheet in her hand, and smoothed it out.

He walked over to the bed and sat down beside her. “Look, Hesper. I’m not a monster. I don’t want to make you miserable. I was afraid it would be like this, that’s why I didn’t want—”

She winced, still pleating the sheet corner. “You wanted me just to sleep with a few times—and to paint. Only now neither of them is any good?”

He was silent, shocked and released by her perception. A rush of pity came to him. He looked at the curve of her down-bent head, and the beautiful hands, and she slid back into focus for him.

“No—that’s not true. There’s more than that—” he cried. “What love I have is for you.”

She held her breath, looking up at him. When he kissed her, she yielded to him silently. There must be no more time for thoughts. But now her thoughts would not still, they leaped and darted even through the passion, and underneath the dartings, like a black river, ran bitterness.

The first week in September, Goupil’s Art Gallery at the corner of Broadway and Ninth Street, held an exhibition of Evan Redlake’s paintings. These included a dozen water colors of the Connecticut and Massachusetts seacoast and half a dozen oils. One of the latter was a picture of the Hearth and Eagle, expanded from a sketch. There were no portraits of Hesper.

Very few people came to the gallery on Opening Day. Most of those interested in art had not yet returned to the city from their summer homes at Newport and Long Branch, nor was Evan a popular or well-known painter.

He and Hesper arrived at three. She wore the green dress, rather wilted now for all her anxious cleaning and pressing, and the yellow chip straw bonnet, since she had no other. Evan wore his dark blue suit, and he was in a savage mood. Nothing that he was exhibiting except two minor water colors pleased him. The gallery was badly lit and stuffy, Leeds and Miner’s far more attractive place had been unavailable.

Upon their arrival Evan retired to a corner and gloomy consultation with Mr. Goupil, the owner. Hesper wandered around, feeling nervous and self-conscious. She edged up behind the only other couple in the gallery and tried to overhear their comments. This couple were honeymooners from Cincinnati who had been sauntering up Broadway and dropped in out of curiosity. Their remarks were not cheering.

“Mercy on us, Harry!” cried the bride, giggling and poking at her husband. “What a thing to paint.”

She pointed to one of the largest oils. It showed a red country schoolhouse, set in a meadow. In the foreground a group of boys pummeled each other, while four little girls played ring-around-a-rosy. In the background to the left of the school there was a small privy. It was nearly hidden by the shadow of a vast elm, but it was to this building that the bride referred. “And what dirty children,” she added, “and maybe that school is supposed to be red, but I call it purple.”

“Yeah—” agreed her husband placidly. “Terrible. Look at that crazy lopsided house over there. The fellow can’t draw.”

The lopsided house was the Hearth and Eagle. Hesper followed their critical stares and a sharp pain went through her chest. Don’t you dare say anything about my home! she thought, and she glared at the bride’s unconscious face. She waited until the couple had gone out, then went over and stood by the painting. She had never until that moment taken any interest in it. Evan had painted on it mornings while she had been busy inside with Susan before the afternoons at Castle Rock. She remembered wondering rather impatiently what in the world he found to interest him about the shabby old house, and thinking as did most first beholders of Evan’s painting that the colors were very queer. Then she had forgotten all about it until he unearthed it for the exhibition.

She looked at it now in the hot New York gallery and a strange unknown sadness came into her heart. Evan had painted by the morning sun and crisp golden light bathed the high-gambreled eastern half of the house and sparkled on the waters of the Little Harbor behind it. But the rest of the house was in shadow, violent purple and green shadows under the black horse chestnut. The two divergent roofs and their wavering ridgepoles, their uncertainty much exaggerated by Evan, the rusty chimneys, the small-paned windows, and the sloping lean-to were all unified into one dominant emotion—a defiant and rugged endurance. With astonishment she saw this in the painting, although she had never seen it in the actual house.

A handful of people had drifted into the gallery and Evan went to greet them. But Hesper could not leave the painting.

It seemed to her as she stood in the hot gallery, gazing at Evan’s picture of her home, that she heard her father’s voice, not high and plaintive as it really was, but reading with a golden sonority the words about Phebe in the Lady Arbella’s letter—“A most sturdy courage to surmount any disaster—to follow her man anywhere—found a lasting home.”

“Yes—” Hesper whispered, answering her father, answering the house.

Evan’s voice, cool and defensive, cut in behind her. “And that—is a queer old inn, in Marblehead, Massachusetts. My wife’s home as a matter of fact.”

The living house flattened on the canvas into blobs of garish paint. During the instant in which she turned to Evan and the group, her exaltation became ridiculous. She faced the polite stares in bitter silence from which she could not at once arouse herself.

There were two ladies in billowing taffetas and lace shawls, a supercilious gentleman with Dundreary whiskers and a single eyeglass in his left eye, and another gentleman, short, fat, and quite bald except for a black fringe above his ears and along the back of his white collar. She heard none of their names as Evan introduced them. The ladies and the eyeglassed gentleman barely touched her finger-tips, but the fat little man bent over and kissed her hand, which she snatched back in startled reflex.

Evan laughed curtly and said to her, “Mr. Durand is the discerning gentleman who bought my ‘Two Soldiers.’” She heard the note of warning, and forced a smile. It was on the sale of the “Two Soldiers” that they had been living.

“I admire your husband’s work, madame,” said Mr. Durand, revealing a flashing set of teeth. “I believe he has a great future.”

The supercilious gentleman looked bored and adjusted his eyeglass. The ladies made cooing non-committal sounds and arching their necks gazed up at Evan. “My friends, perhaps, do not agree with me,” went on Mr. Durand imperturbably.

“Most people don’t,” said Evan on another acid laugh.

“My dear Redlake—” said the eyeglassed gentleman, languidly, “I would suggest a study of the masters, don’t you know. There’ve been none in America, of course. I mean the French masters: David, Bou-guereau, Cabanel. They could teach you a great deal.”

Evan’s face set into the sulky contempt Hesper knew so well. “Well, you’re wrong. If a man wants to be an artist, he should never look at other people’s pictures.”

Oh, why does he have to act like this, thought Hesper. The gentleman shrugged his shoulders, swept the gallery with his eyeglass, and gathering up the ladies with a cool smile moved toward the door.

Mr. Durand shook his head though his eyes twinkled. “Ah, my friend, you should not so treat our leading art critic. I had trouble enough to bring him. He will blast your little show with explosions of distaste.”

Evan’s mouth twisted, he raised his hand and let it drop again. “I can always go back to my croquet girls and dairy maids. They’ll sell if I put in enough roses and ringlets and doves.”

Mr. Durand smiled. “Oh, come, it’s not so bad as that. Your painting is Avant-Garde, I think. You paint impressions of reality as you see it, not what you think you should see or what others have seen. There is a very young man in Paris, Claude Monet, does the same. But unlike our departed critic, I do not say, study the French or study anyone. I like that you paint simple things. I like that you use brutal color and even that you distort line if you see it like that.

“Now that we have the photograph, there is no more need for exact representation in painting, and we may forget all but art’s two functions. These, interpretation and true emotion, I feel in your works.”

There was a silence, and Hesper looked up at her husband wonderingly. His lips were parted, and his breath came fast. “Thank you,” he said in a low humble voice. “You’ve said it all for me.”

I’ve never seen him like that, thought Hesper—defenseless, happy—Never has he been like that with me.

She shut her eyes and walked away. In the center of the gallery there was a circular red plush seat. She sank onto it leaning her head against the high tufted back. A cold tide rose and lapped at her heart. Nothing I can ever give him will make him look like that. She thought of the last weeks, since the afternoon when she had forced an issue between them. She had believed them to be closer since, the tension less. They had gone out a few times together, and sometimes they had made love. She had silenced the inner doubts, chiding herself for expecting too much, for feeling that their partially renewed intimacy of mind and body cost him laborious effort. But he had done no more creative painting, nothing except varnishing and minor changes and spot-work on the pictures already finished.

She turned her head to find him. He was circling the gallery with Mr. Durand, pausing before each picture and talking with an eager animation. Near them at that end of the gallery, there was a handful of people. She saw a young dark-haired girl in violent silk walk up to the art collector and be introduced to Evan, who gave her his warm quick smile. She saw pleased response in every line of the girl’s slight figure, saw her laugh and touch Evan’s arm with a pretty gesture.

That won’t get you anywhere, my lass, thought Hesper, whatever you may think, unless he wants to paint you. And even then—

She withdrew her eyes from the group, a threesome now, and a spasm of nausea twisted at her stomach, sending bitter fluid into her throat. The gallery and its colored paintings swam around her in a sickening spiral. She held her breath, and her stomach settled. She licked her lips, holding her handkerchief tight against her mouth.

In her head she heard a peal of derisive laughter. Oh yes, and there’s
that
too, she thought. I suppose it’s that.

She turned her head to the left and looked again at the picture of the Hearth and Eagle. “Sturdy courage—to follow her man anywhere?” But supposing he doesn’t want me to follow? What then? What would you do then, Phebe? Fight? Clutch at what you never really had?

From Evan’s picture there was no answer.

M
R. DURAND
bought a water color of marsh grass and the oil of the schoolhouse and children. For these Evan received three hundred dollars, which was fortunate, since nobody else bought anything. The supercilious art critic duly lambasted Evan Redlake in his paper, and no other critics bothered to come.

The unsold canvases returned to the studio loft, and Evan disappeared for an entire night, returning the next morning at eleven quite sober but smelling strongly of whiskey. As on the similar occasion of their wedding eve, he gave no explanation, but Hesper saw that he was in a good mood. He kissed her, when she met him silently on the landing, and he had bought her a present. A brooch oddly shaped in a triangle of beaten silver which enclosed a large cat’s-eye. Hesper thanked him with delighted astonishment, privately thinking the thing very queer, but he pinned it on her work apron and admired the effect.

“Suits you, my dear—” he said, “silvers and browns and greens like your own Marblehead.”

“Marblehead seems a long way off,” she said without meaning to. He pushed the baize curtain back and threw himself down on the bed.

“Homesick?” he asked lazily.

“No—” she snapped, but the question disturbed her. That night and morning waiting for him to come back, wondering once, in the cowardly hour at dawn, if he would indeed come back, she had pictured herself in her cool passionless chamber at home, felt the south wind pouring off the sea through her windows. And this morning, when she had dragged herself from bed and been sick in the slop pail, she had thought of her mother in an entirely new way, longing for the practiced fingers on her hot head, longing even for the tart, guttural speech.

“Evan—” she said, coming to stand over by the bed and looking down at him. “I guess I’m going to have a baby.”

Ah, I knew it—she thought bitterly, watching his face change.

“Are you sure?” The icicle voice, cold and smooth and sharp.

“I think so. All the signs.” She walked over to the bureau and began to straighten their brushes and combs. “I don’t like it any better than you do.” But I guess I would if you did, she added silently.

He got up and began to walk back and forth across the creaking floor.