Fresh from these achievements, Axel Svengaart carried his Viking head and Parisian monocle from one New York drawing-room to another, gazing, appraising—even, though rarely, praising—but absolutely refusing to take another order, or to postpone by a single day the date of his sailing. “I’ve got it all here,” he said, touching first his brow and then his pocket; and the dealer who acted as his impresario let it be understood that even the most exaggerated offers would be rejected.
Targatt had, of course, met the great man. In old days he would have been uncomfortably awed by the encounter; but now he could joke easily about the Gugginses, and even ask Svengaart if he had not been struck by his sister-in-law, who was Mrs. Guggins’s social secretary, and was about to marry Mr. Guggins’s Paris representative.
“Ah—the lovely Kouradjine; yes. She made us some delicious blinys,” Svengaart nodded approvingly; but Targatt saw with surprise that as a painter he was uninterested in Olga’s plastic possibilities.
“Ah, well, I suppose you’ve had enough of us—I hear you’re off this week.”
The painter dropped his monocle. “Yes, I’ve had enough.” It was after dinner, at the Bellamys’, and abruptly he seated himself on the sofa at Targatt’s side. “I don’t like your frozen food,” he pursued. “There’s only one thing that would make me put off my sailing.” He readjusted his monocle and looked straight at Targatt. “If you’ll give me the chance to paint Mrs. Targatt—oh, for that I’d wait another month.”
Targatt stared at him, too surprised to answer. Nadeja—the great man wanted to paint Nadeja! The idea aroused so many conflicting considerations that his reply, when it came, was a stammer. “Why, really … this is a surprise … a great honour, of course…” A vision of Svengaart’s price for a mere head thrust itself hideously before his eyes. Svengaart, seeing him as it were encircled by millionaires, probably took him for a very rich man—was perhaps manoeuvring to extract an extra big offer from him. For what other inducement could there be to paint Nadeja? Targatt turned the question with a joke. “I suspect you’re confusing me with my brother-in-law Bellamy. He ought to have persuaded you to paint his wife. But I’m afraid my means wouldn’t allow …”
The other interrupted him with an irritated gesture. “Please—my dear sir. I can never be ‘persuaded’ to do a portrait. And in the case of Mrs. Targatt I had no idea of selling you her picture. If I paint her, it would be for myself.”
Targatt’s stare widened. “For yourself? You mean—you’d paint the picture just to keep it?” He gave an embarrassed laugh. “Nadeja would be enormously flattered, of course. But, between ourselves, would you mind telling me why you want to do her?”
Svengaart stood up with a faint laugh. “Because she’s the only really pain table woman I’ve seen here. The lines are incomparable for a full-length. And I can’t tell you how I should enjoy the change.”
Targatt continued to stare. Murmurs of appreciation issued from his parched lips. He remembered now that Svengaart’s charge for a three-quarter-length was fifteen thousand dollars. And he wanted to do Nadeja full length for nothing! Only—Targatt reminded himself—the brute wanted to keep the picture. So where was the good? It would only make Nadeja needlessly conspicuous; and to give all those sittings for nothing… Well, it looked like sharp practice, somehow…
“Of course, as I say, my wife would be immensely flattered; only she’s very busy—her family, social obligations and so on; I really can’t say…”
Svengaart smiled. “In the course of a portrait I usually make a good many studies; some almost as finished as the final picture. If Mrs. Targatt cared to accept one—”
Targatt flushed to the roots of his thinning hair. A Svengaart study over the drawing-room mantelpiece! (“Yes—nice thing of Nadeja, isn’t it? You’d know a Svengaart anywhere… It was his own idea; he insisted on doing her…”) Nadeja was just lifting a pile of music from the top of the grand piano. She was going to accompany Mouna, who had taken to singing. As she stood with lifted arms, profiled against the faint hues of the tapestried wall, the painter exclaimed: “There—there! I have it! Don’t you see now why I want to do her?”
But Targatt, for the moment, could not speak. Secretly he thought Nadeja looked much as usual—only perhaps a little more tired; she had complained of a headache that morning. But his courage rose to the occasion. “Ah, my wife’s famous ‘lines’, eh? Well, well, I can’t promise—you’d better come over and try to persuade her yourself.”
He was so dizzy with it that as he led Svengaart toward the piano the Bellamys’ parquet floor felt like glass under his unsteady feet.
VII.
Targatt’s rapture was acute but short-lived. Nadeja “done” by Axel Svengaart—he had measured the extent of it in a flash. He had stood aside and watched her with a deep smile of satisfaction while the light of wonder rose in her eyes; when she turned them on him for approval he had nodded his assent. Of course she must sit to the great man, his glance signalled back. He saw that Svengaart was amused at her having to ask her husband’s permission; but this only intensified Targatt’s satisfaction. They’d see, damn it, if his wife could be ordered about like a professional model! Perhaps the best moment was when, the next day, she said timidly: “But, Jim, have you thought about the price?” and he answered, his hands in his pockets, an easy smile on his lips: “There’s no price to think about. He’s doing you for the sake of your beautiful ‘lines’. And we’re to have a replica, free gratis. Did you know you had beautiful lines, old Nad?”
She looked at him gravely for a moment. “I hadn’t thought about them for a long time,” she said.
Targatt laughed and tapped her on the shoulder. What a child she was! But afterward it struck him that she had not been particularly surprised by the painter’s request. Perhaps she had always known she was paintable, as Svengaart called it. Perhaps—and here he felt a little chill run over him—perhaps Svengaart had spoken to her already, had come to an understanding with her before making his request to Targatt. The idea made Targatt surprisingly uncomfortable, and he reflected that it was the first occasion in their married life when he had suspected Nadeja of even the most innocent duplicity. And this, if it were true, could hardly be regarded as wholly innocent…
Targatt shook the thought off impatiently. He was behaving like the fellow in “Pagliacci”. Really this associating with foreigners might end in turning a plain business man into an opera-singer! It was the day of the first sitting, and as he started for his office he called back gaily to Nadeja: “Well, so long! And don’t let that fellow turn your head.”
He could not get much out of Nadeja about the sittings. It was not that she seemed secretive; but she was never very good at reporting small talk, and things that happened outside of the family circle, even if they happened to herself, always seemed of secondary interest to her. And meanwhile the sittings went on and on. In spite of his free style Svengaart was a slow worker; and he seemed to find Nadeja a difficult subject. Targatt began to brood over the situation: some people thought the fellow handsome, in the lean grey-hound style; and he had an easy cosmopolitan way—the European manner. It was what Nadeja was used to; would she suddenly feel that she had missed something during all these years? Targatt turned cold at the thought. It had never before occurred to him what a humdrum figure he was. The contemplation of his face in the shaving-glass became so distasteful to him that he averted his eyes, and nearly cut his throat in consequence. Nothing of the grey-hound style about him—or the Viking either.
Slowly, as these thoughts revolved in his mind, he began to feel that he, who had had everything from Nadeja, had given her little or nothing in return. What he had done for her people weighed as nothing in this revaluation of their past. The point was: what sort of a life had he given Nadeja? And the answer: No life at all! She had spent her best years looking after other people; he could not remember that she had ever asserted a claim or resented an oversight. And yet she wa
s neither dull nor insipid: she was simply Nadeja—a creature endlessly tolerant, totally unprejudiced, sublimely generous and unselfish.
Well—it would be funny, Targatt thought, with a twist of almost physical pain, if nobody else had been struck by such unusual qualities. If it had taken him over ten years to find them out, others might have been less blind. He had never noticed her “lines”, for instance; yet that painter fellow, the moment he’d clapped eyes on her—!
Targatt sat in his study, twisting about restlessly in his chair. Where was Nadeja, he wondered? The winter dusk had fallen, and painters do not work without daylight. The day’s sitting must be over—and yet she had not come back. Usually she was always there to greet him on his return from the office. She had taught him to enjoy his afternoon tea, with a tiny caviar sandwich and a slice of lemon, and the samovar was already murmuring by the fire. When she went to see any of her family she always called up to say if she would be late; but the maid said there had been no message from her.
Targatt got up and walked the floor impatiently; then he sat down again, lit a cigarette, and threw it away. Nadeja, he remembered, had not been in the least shocked when Katinka had decided to live with Mr. Bellamy; she had merely wondered if the step were expedient, and had finally agreed with Katinka that it was. Nor had Boris’s matrimonial manoeuvres seemed to offend her. She was entirely destitute of moral indignation; this painful reality was now borne in on Targatt for the first time. Cruelty shocked her; but otherwise she seemed to think that people should do as they pleased. Yet, all the while, had she ever done what she pleased? There was the torturing enigma! She seemed to allow such latitude to others, yet to ask so little for herself.
Well, but didn’t the psychologist fellows say that there was an hour in every woman’s life—every self-sacrificing woman’s—when the claims of her suppressed self suddenly asserted themselves, body and soul, and she forgot everything else, all her duties, ties, responsibilities? Targatt broke off with a bitter laugh. What did “duties, ties, responsibilities” mean to Nadeja? No more than to any of the other Kouradjines. Their vocabulary had no parallels with his. He felt a sudden overwhelming loneliness, as if all these years he had been married to a changeling, an opalescent creature swimming up out of the sea…
No, she couldn’t be at the studio any longer; or if she were, it wasn’t to sit for her portrait. Curse the portrait, he thought—why had he ever consented to her sitting to Svengaart? Sheer cupidity; the snobbish ambition to own a Svengaart, the glee of getting one for nothing. The more he proceeded with this self-investigation the less he cared for the figure he cut. But however poor a part he had played so far, he wasn’t going to add to it the role of the duped husband…
“Damn it, I’ll go round there myself and see,” he muttered, squaring his shoulders, and walking resolutely across the room to the door. But as he reached the entrance-hall the faint click of a latchkey greeted him; and sweeter music he had never heard. Nadeja stood in the doorway, pale but smiling. “Jim—you were not going out again?”
He gave a sheepish laugh. “Do you know what time it is? I was getting scared.”
“Scared for me?” She smiled again. “Dear me, yes! It’s nearly dinner-time, isn’t it?”
He followed her into the drawing-room and shut the door. He felt like a husband in an old-fashioned problem play; and in a moment he had spoken like one. “Nad, where’ve you come from?” he broke out abruptly.
“Why, the studio. It was my last sitting.”
“People don’t sit for their portraits in the dark.”
He saw a faint surprise in her eyes as she bent to the samovar. “No; I was not sitting all the time. Not for the last hour or more, I suppose.”
She spoke as quietly as usual, yet he thought he caught a tremor of resentment in her voice. Against himself—or against the painter? But how he was letting his imagination run away with him! He sat down in his accustomed armchair, took the cup of tea she held out. He was determined to behave like a reasonable being, yet never had reason appeared to him so unrelated to reality. “Ah, well—I suppose you two had a lot of things to talk about. You rather fancy Svengaart, don’t you?”
“Oh, yes; I like him very much. Do you know,” she asked earnestly, “how much he has made during his visit to America? It was of course in confidence that he told me. Two hundred thousand dollars. And he was rich before.”
She spoke so solemnly that Targatt burst into a vague laugh. “Well, what of it? I don’t know that it showed much taste to brag to you about the way he skins his sitters. But it shows he didn’t make much of a sacrifice in painting you for nothing,” he said irritably.
“No; I said to him he might have done you too.”
“Me?” Targatt’s laugh redoubled. “Well, what did he say to that?”
“Oh, he laughed as you are now laughing,” Nadeja rejoined. “But he says he will never marry—never.”
Targatt put down his cup with a rattle. “Never marry?
What the devil are you talking about? Who cares whether he marries, anyhow?” he gasped with a dry throat.
“I do,” said Nadeja.
There was a silence. Nadeja was lifting her tea-cup to her lips, and something in the calm tree movement reminded him of Svengaart’s outburst when he had seen her lift the pile of music. For the first time in his life Targatt seemed to himself to be looking at her; and he wondered if it would also be the last. He cleared his throat and tried to speak, to say something immense, magnanimous. “Well, if—”
“No; it’s useless. He will hear nothing. I said to him: ‘You will never anywhere find such a plastik as Mouna’s’ …”
“Mound’s?”
She turned to him with a slight shrug. “Oh, my poor Jim, are you quite blind? Haven’t you seen how we have all been trying to make him want to marry Mouna? It will be almost my first failure, I think,” she concluded with a half-apologetic sigh.
Targatt rested his chin on his hands and looked up at her. She looked tired, certainly, and older; too tired and old for any one still well under forty. And Mouna—why in God’s name should she be persecuting this man to marry Mouna? It was indecent, it was shocking, it was unbelievable… Yet not for a moment did he doubt the truth of what she said.
“Mouna?” he could only repeat stupidly.
“Well, you see, darling, we’re all a little anxious about Mouna. And I was so glad when Svengaart asked to paint me, because I thought: ‘Now’s my opportunity.’ But no, it was not to be.”
Targatt drew a deep breath. He seemed to be inhaling some life-giving element, and it was with the most superficial severity that he said: “I don’t fancy this idea of your throwing your sister at men’s heads.”
“No, it was no use,” Nadeja sighed, with her usual complete unawareness of any moral rebuke in his comment.
Targatt stood up uneasily. “He wouldn’t have her at any price?”
She shook her head sadly. “Foolish man!”
Targatt went up to her and took her abruptly by the wrist.
“Look at me, Nadeja—straight. Did he refuse her because he wanted vow?”
She gave her light lift of the shoulders, and the rare colour flitted across her pale cheeks. “Isn’t it always the way of men? What they can’t get—”
“Ah; so he’s been making love to you all this time, has he?”
“But of course not, James. What he wished was to marry me. That is something quite different, is it not?”
“Yes. I see.”
Targatt had released her wrist and turned away. He walked once or twice up and down the length of the room, no more knowing where he was than a man dropped blindfold onto a new planet. He knew what he wanted to do and to say; the words he had made up his mind to speak stood out in letters of fire against the choking blackness. “You must feel yourself free—.” Five words, and so easy to speak! “Perfectly free—perfectly free,” a voice kept crying within him. It was the least he could do, if he were ever to hold up his
head again; but when he opened his mouth to speak not a sound came. At last he halted before Nadeja again, his face working like a frightened child’s.
“Nad—what would you like best in the world to do? If you’ll tell me I—I want you to do it!” he stammered. And with hands of ice he waited.
Nadeja looked at him with a slowly growing surprise. She had turned very pale again.
“Even if,” he continued, half choking, “you understand, Nad, even if—”
She continued to look at him in her grave maternal way. “Is this true, what you are now saying?” she asked very low. Targatt nodded.
A little smile wavered over her lips. “Well, darling, if only I could have got Mouna safely married, I should have said: Don’t you think that now at last we could afford to have a baby?”‘
(Hearst’s International Cosmopolitan 96, February 1934)
Pomegranate Seed.
I.
Charlotte Ashby paused on her doorstep. Dark had descended on the brilliancy of the March afternoon, and the grinding rasping street life of the city was at its highest. She turned her back on it, standing for a moment in the old-fashioned, marble-flagged vestibule before she inserted her key in the lock. The sash curtains drawn across the panes of the inner door softened the light within to a warm blur through which no details showed. It was the hour when, in the first months of her marriage to Kenneth Ashby, she had most liked to return to that quiet house in a street long since deserted by business and fashion. The contrast between the soulless roar of New York, its devouring blaze of lights, the oppression of its congested traffic, congested houses, lives, minds and this veiled sanctuary she called home, always stirred her profoundly. In the very heart of the hurricane she had found her tiny islet—or thought she had. And now, in the last months, everything was changed, and she always wavered on the doorstep and had to force herself to enter.
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