“I hope you don’t mind; the door was open, and I thought ... so to keep myself busy while I waited, I-” She makes a smile, and tries harder and makes another, but smiles over hands which rapidly clasp and unclasp are unconvincing. “I’ll go,” says Miss Brandt, “but I wanted to tell you I think you did a splendid thing.”
I look at the clean, shelved dishes and the drum-tight bedclothes, and my paints and brushes sensibly left untouched. But what impresses me is the unthinkable statement that I have done a splendid thing. I sit on the bed and look at her.
“How did you ever find out?” she asks. “You weren’t to know, ever.”
“I know a lot now,” I tell her. “What specially do you mean?”
“About the money. Giving it back.”
“I gave it away,” I admit. And, because it’s the truth, “I don’t call that so splendid.”
“It was, if . . .” And then, as if she’s had the question held down tight and can’t control it any longer, she flashes a glance at the easel, and asks, “Does it mean you’ll paint again?”
My eye follows hers and I shudder. She turns pale as the new light at the window. “Oh,” she says in a very small voice. “I—guess I’ve done the wrong thing.” She snatches up a shiny black pocketbook and runs to the door. But there’s a Giles standing there first, who pushes her back hard so she sits down—plump!—on the bed.
I am tired and hurt and disappointed and I want no more wonderments. “You tell me all the things you’ve done, wrong and otherwise, right from the beginning.”
“Oh, how it began. Well, I’m her secretary, you know, and we had a sort of quarrel about you. She’s a mean, small, stupid sort of person, Giles, for all her money and the way she looks—she is lovely, isn’t she? In case you want to know (everybody does) that streak of silver is real. Anyway, I-”
“You’re her secretary?”
“Yes. Well I got so terribly distressed about-” She waves at the easel again, and the miraculous lashes point away, “-you, you know, that I suppose I got on her nerves. She said some mean things about you and I sort of blew up. I said if I had her money I’d see to it that you started painting again.”
“Just like that.”
“I’m sorry. It was—so important; I couldn’t bear to have you just-”
“Go on with the story.”
“She said if I had her money and tried to use it that way I’d just make a fool of myself. Well, maybe she was right, but ... it went like that until she swore at me and said if I was so positive, go ahead. Take all the money I wanted and just see how far I’d get.” All the while she talks she is pleading, underneath. I don’t listen to that part of it. “So I came here yesterday and I was to phone her the way you sign your name, and she would call the bank and fix it up.”
“Nice of her.”
“No it wasn’t. She did it because she thought it would be amusing. She has so much money that it wouldn’t cost her anything. Anything she’d notice. And then you found out about it, I don’t know how, and gave her the checkbook. When she came back last night she was wild. It wasn’t half the fun she thought. All you did was to be amusing in a restaurant for a couple of hours. Please don’t look at me like that. I just did what I could. I—had to. Please—I had to.”
I keep on looking at her, thinking. Finally, “Miss Brandt, you said a thing yesterday—my God, was it only yesterday? —about my not being able to paint now because I don’t know why I painted before. Do you know what you were talking about?”
“I-” and the lashes go down, the hands busy themselves, “-I only know sort of generally. I mean, if you can do a thing and know how you do it and—and especially why, and then something stops you, I think it’s easy to see the thing that stops you.”
So I lean against the door and look at her in the way that makes her squirm (I’m sorry but that’s the way I look when I’m thinking) and I think:
Does anyone ask a painter—even the painter himself— why he paints? Now me, I painted . . . used to . . . whatever I saw that was beautiful. It had to be beautiful to me, through and through, before I would paint it. And I used to be a pretty simple fellow, and found many completely beautiful things to paint.
But the older you get the fewer completely beautiful things you see. Every flower has a brown spot somewhere, and a hippogriff has evil laughter. So at some point in his development an artist has to paint, not what he sees (which is what I’ve always done) but the beauty in what he sees. Most painters, I think, cross this line early; I’m crossing it late.
And the simple—child?—artist paints for himself . . . but when he grows up he sees through the eyes of the beholder, and feels through his fingertips, and helps him to see that which the artist is gifted to see. Those who had wept over my work up to now, I used to say, had stolen meanings out of it, against my will. When I grow up, perhaps they will accept what I willingly give them. And because Miss Brandt feels this is worth giving, she has tried to get more of it for people.
So I had stopped painting because I had become too discerning, and could find nothing perfect enough to paint. But now it occurs to me that the girl with the silver in her hair can be painted for the beauty she has, regardless of her other ugliness. Atlantes had a magic, and in it one walked the battlements of a bastion—which was only, in truth, a byre. Miss Brandt can paint me, in her mind, as a man who turned back all the money in the world, and, for her, this is a real nobility.
The only key to the complexity of living is to understand that this world contains two-and-a-half-billion worlds, each built in a person’s eyes and all different, and all susceptible to beauty and hungry for it.
I ran out of things to paint . . . and now, now, there’ll never be enough time to paint beauty! Rogero did a knightly thing on the black rock, because he was not a good knight. I did a manly thing about the money because I was a fool. All successes are accidents in someone’s world ... so: “You tell her it worked, Miss Brandt. I’m going to paint, Miss Brandt; I’m going to paint you, Miss Brandt, because you’re beautiful.”
And I paint, and she is, because I paint, because she is.
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Star SHort Novels - [Anthology] Page 20
