Every other day Nick left the studio to go into a neighbouring village to buy food. Psyche, while he was gone, would wash dishes and prepare the meals for the day.
The first time he left her alone, he paused at the top of the staircase, and said, “You won’t run away while I’m gone, Venus?”
“Where would I run to?”
The hazel eyes smiled. “You have a point there. I won’t be gone long.”
On these occasions he never was away long, but later on he quite often left her alone in the evenings, and twice he was away all night. He offered neither excuse nor explanation for these absences, and Psyche asked for none. She missed him, but not acutely, and the studio was a place in which she never felt lonely, where she had no cause to be uneasy, and where she could occupy herself for any given length of time.
She would clean house, enjoying the texture as well as the sight of objects that all had quality. She would study and restudy an art gallery of which she never tired. And she would carefully press and sponge any article in her wardrobe that she had worn even once. That she had as many clothes as she did was due not to over-generosity on Nick’s part, but to the fact that on rainy days—when the light was not right for work on what he now called The American Venus—he did sketches of her to be incorporated later in magazine illustrations. He never asked her to pose in the nude because he considered nude paintings to be as devoid of personality as they were of clothing, and it was the individuality of her beauty that made her so valuable to him.
On the evenings when he stayed at the studio, and this was of tener than not, he insisted that they each turn into their respective beds as soon as it was fully dark.
“A Venus with blue circles under her eyes is not—although there are those who would undoubtedly find this pleasantly suggestive—what I have in mind at the moment,” he told her.
In the twilit hours between dinner and dusk, more content in each other’s company than either of them realized, they rarely did anything at all constructive. Sometimes they merely sat in chairs pushed back from the gate-leg table at which they had eaten, smoking and making desultory conversation; a way of putting in time for Nick; a further exploration of the English language for Psyche. Sometimes they strolled around the perimeter of the big field, the twin glow of their cigarettes not dissimilar to the fireflies that haunted the long, dew-soaked grass. Very often these walks would bring them eventually to the car, where Nick would turn on the radio. Then, he lounging in the front seat and Psyche stretched on a rug on the ground so that she might look up at the stars, they would listen to music that, no matter what its tempo, seemed to her to emanate from some heavenly rather than earthly source; music that, though fuller and clearer in tone, yet seemed in many ways as remote as the long-lost melodies of an ancient gramophone whose loss she still, on occasion, regretted.
In this way a warm June drifted into a warmer July, and Nick and Psyche drifted closer to a moment that neither of them anticipated.
The rich green of the field became yellowed by the summer suns; daisies and buttercups gave way to goldenrod and everlasting; and “The American Venus” emerged, an almost living perfection, from a once dead canvas.
Cynic and unbeliever though he was, Nick felt, as he worked, something very like reverence, for he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that what he was doing with eye and hand, brush and palette, was destined to become immortal.
Psyche realized that he was satisfied with the painting, but she had no conception of the depth of that satisfaction; for, although he often talked while he painted, a running monologue more colourful than the colours on his palette, he never at any time touched on anything personal to himself.
“Now you take Van Gogh——” he would begin, and a well-informed commentary on the times, works, and idiosyncrasies of the painter would consume anything from ten minutes to an hour.
Or it might be artists in general who were the subject of his dissertation. “Free Souls we’re called by a proletariat wallowing in its own abysmal ignorance. Free! My God, an artist’s body and soul are in fetters from the day he is bom until the day he dies. He lives for his work, nothing else ever counts. Not wine, women, or song. Look at us, Venus. How many of the damn fools would believe that I am interested only in painting you? None of them. Your head is down a quarter of an inch. Because they’re fleshly nincompoops themselves, they believe everyone else is. They have no comprehension of art for art’s sake. They credit us with all the sins in the decalogue, with orgies that would make your beautiful hair stand on end.”
“What are orgies, Nick?”
“Don’t ask me. I’m just a hard-working artist who wouldn’t have the slightest idea. How many times do I have to tell you not to talk while you’re posing?”
“It ain’t easy when you——”
“Look, Venus, I’ll throw something at you if you don’t keep quiet. And, for the love of God, don’t ever say ‘ain’t’ again in my hearing. I thought you had learned better by now.”
A day arrived when Psyche judged her position strong enough to rebel against the injustice of being eternally on the receiving end of a one-sided conversation.
A not sufficiently silent audience to an uninhibited lecture on the private life of Toulouse-Lautrec, she had been told twice, and in no uncertain terms, to hold her tongue, when, to Nick’s utter astonishment, she simply stepped down from the stand and walked away from it.
“You’re damned unfair,” she said coolly. Then, without another word, she took her old, dismembered Bible from the bookcase where she kept it, sank with unconscious grace onto a low hassock, and calmly began to read.
For once rendered speechless, Nick looked at her partially averted face, and seeing no more emotion than he had read in her voice, realized that he had received a reproof requiring more than a temporary apology. Suppressing an impulse to swear at her, he felt in his pockets for cigarettes, while an at first unwilling smile erased the dark frown that had preceded it.
“Well—well,” he murmured.
Psyche paid no attention to him. Her soft white draperies, falling from bare shoulders, remained unstirred by any movement. She was reading Joshua. When “the sun stood still” she never failed to find it a credible phenomenon. There had been times, with midsummer heat trapped in the slag hills, when she had almost believed the sun stood still again, so gradually had it moved beyond the heavy copper haze.
“Can’t you find something more topical to read than that?”
Psyche, wise enough to recognize an olive branch when offered, looked up. “1 have nothing else.”
Nick’s reply was a sweeping gesture that encompassed three well-filled bookcases. “You are fasting in the midst of plenty.”
“But they’re yours.”
“I don’t glue them to the shelves. Help yourself.”
Unwilling to ask him for anything he did not offer, Psyche, much as she had wanted to, had never at any time touched his books. Now, laying aside her Bible, she began to examine the contents of the bookcase within her reach at the moment.
Without further comment, Nick waited for her reaction.
The sixth book into which she had looked open on her lap, she said with obvious disappointment. “But they’re all artists and pictures. Nothing else.”
“That doesn’t mean they’ll poison you, does it?”
“They just don’t mean anything to me, that’s all. For instance, who’s this Rubbins? Do you like his stuff? Is it any good?”
Running his hands through his hair, Nick looked down at the top of her blonde head with amused exasperation. “Rubbins— Rubbins! What in hell are you blithering about, my impossibly ignorant young Venus?”
“It says Rubbins right here. Look for yourself, if you don’t believe me.”
Leaning over, Nick said, “Ah—yes, Rubens. Susannah and the Elders. A masterpiece.”
“You mean it’s good? All I see is a nasty old guy peering through some leaves at a fat girl with nothin’ on.”
&
nbsp; “Heaven help me! I suppose it would be too much to expect you to refer to him as a lecherous old gentleman, but surely, surely you can manage to say nothing.”
Psyche smiled. “You’re teasing me.”
“Never.”
“Honestly—do you really like this picture?”
“Since you specifically ask for honesty, I am compelled to say that I do not. But I admire it. Enormously.”
“Why?”
“You ask a devil of a lot of questions, Venus. Must I have a stated reason?”
“There’s a reason for everything, isn’t there?”
“Oh wise young judge! The technique is flawless, and the skin tones reminiscent of the work of the incomparable Titian.”
“Tech-nique,” Psyche repeated faithfully. “What does that mean? And who is Titian?”
Nick looked at his painted Venus, and then back to the living counterpart who was causing him so much more trouble. Forcing continued patience upon himself, he said mildly, “It will be noon in another half-hour, Venus. Don’t you think you could call a halt, to your barrage of questions until after lunch?”
Psyche’s sceptical eyes, and the tilt of her head, told him before she spoke that she recognized the evasion for what it was. “You mean that you will be ready to answer questions after lunch?”
Nick’s nod was a promise, but an ungracious one.
Inwardly Psyche knew an intense satisfaction. To have allowed this to become apparent would have been a mistake. “Please— Nick. I have to learn something sometime. You know so much, and I—well, I have to know things, too.”
“Do you? Perhaps you do. Though I can assure you that with what you’ve got you won’t find advanced education essential to your success in life.”
Psyche did something then that she had never done before in her life. Of her own initiative, she put her hand on someone. “Please. I’m serious.”
The slender hand resting lightly on his bare forearm, and the wistful, husky voice, together made an appeal that he suddenly found it impossible to resist. “All right, Venus,” he said gently, “we’ll make a gentleman’s agreement, you and I. In future I will devote one precious, irreplacable hour of every mortal day to answering all questions, suitable or unsuitable, on or pertaining to my own particular field. In return you will contract to keep your lovely trap shut while you are posing.”
Her hand increased its pressure for an instant before its warmth was withdrawn. “Thank you, Nick.”
For the rest of the morning Psyche stood in the exact position that she had held for four or five hours a day for what was now more than six weeks, and Nick concentrated with his customary fervour on the work that he loved more than anything else the world could offer him. Outwardly nothing had changed. Nevertheless, their battle of wills, and the manner in which Psyche had won it, marked a subtle but very definite change in their relationship. Nick continued to treat her for the most part with an amused tolerance, but it was no longer the kind of tolerance he might have shown to a child. Psyche, on her part, made an even greater effort than before to conform to the standards of speech and manners which he represented, without realizing, however, that she was now doing it to please him as well as herself.
The siesta hour, as Nick ironically called it, became a part of the day to which she looked forward from the moment she got up in the morning. Receptive to fresh knowledge of any kind, she became for the time being almost as interested as Nick himself in the subject that he never really tired of talking about.
Velasquez, Goya, Frans Hals, Tintoretto, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Titian, Rembrandt—at one time and another he talked to her at length about all of them, gave her demonstrations of their various brush strokes, and explained and analyzed colour plates of their works. To Psyche, these painters and many others became personalities never to be forgotten, their individual styles usually recognizable at a glance.
Rembrandt’s work she admired above all, and Nick congratulated her on her taste.
“He must have been one of the rich ones, surely, Nick?”
“No. He died in abject poverty.”
“But why? Why should so many of them have been poor when they didn’t really need to be?”
A shadow seemed to fall briefly across the lean, alert face. “An artist is a complex piece of machinery, Venus. He is not like other people. You cannot judge him as a man and as an artist at one and the same time. To do so is a mistake. A mistake made too often by too many people.” Then, deliberately changing the subject, he said, “Let’s take a look at some of the moderns. We’ve been neglecting them.”
In this way Psyche, who had never heard of the Battle of Hastings, and who had difficulty with the multiplication table, became unusually well informed in a highly specialized field. For she not only listened to him with fierce attention, but also spent the greater part of her evenings, when alone in the studio, poring over books he had used to illustrate points that, when he made them, were never dull.
Inexperienced in human relationships, unaware of how insidiously propinquity can impair normal judgement, she became, as the summer waned, as fascinated by the teacher as by his teachings. Her initial clear-eyed appraisal of him blurred by a gently moving stream of days undisturbed by any interruption from the outside world, she began to see virtues in him that he did not have, and never had had. Reason, if she had consulted it, would have told her that she was no closer to being a part of Nick’s private life than at the moment when she first laid eyes on him, that this desert-island existence could not possibly represent his pattern of behaviour either past or future.
That she did not betray her altered attitude to him was due chiefly to the fact that she did not herself know consciously how much it was changing. She had gloried in the realization that she was growing up. That there was more than one way of doing this, and that it could be a painful process, she had yet to learn.
Without knowing why she did so, she took even more trouble than usual with the combing and arranging of her hair, with the manicuring of long, immaculate nails. And when she looked in her mirror she was pleased to see that she was far from plain.
Her sleep disturbed more and more often by dreams in which she again saw lightning and a cruelly handsome face, she failed to see that these dreams had any significance in relation to a present from which they seemed far removed.
One evening when they walked, she and Nick, around the field in the short dusk of late August, she stumbled, and, catching her hand to steady her, he did not afterwards let go of it.
Nick scarcely noticed that they were, as they had never done before, walking hand in hand.
Psyche, who usually disliked being touched, was sharply aware of it.
6
IT was on an evening towards the middle of September that nick finished “the american venus”, and on the evening of the same day that he destroyed a measure of the unsophistication that had made it possible.
When he laid down his brush with the knowledge that it would be a desecration to lift it again to that particular canvas, it was also with the knowledge that he had created a masterpiece. For some minutes he studied every detail of a goddess at whose shrine the world would in all probability worship for generations to come. Then, his inner exultation tempered by an undefined regret, he turned his back on his easel to look out at a countryside, sultry beneath a hot blue sky, as motionless as any painted landscape would have been.
“Nick! Aren’t you going to work any more to-day?”
“It’s finished, Venus. You can step down from your pedestal for good.”
Psyche’s protest was completely involuntary. “No!”
“You feel as I do? I hadn’t expected that. Odd, isn’t it? We should be toasting our achievement in vintage champagne and throwing paper streamers at one another. Instead——”
It was the closest he had ever come, or ever would come, to offering her his friendship. Later Psyche was to look back at that moment and recognize it for what it was—the end, rather
than the beginning, of an idyl. An idyl remarkable enough in itself, yet chiefly remarkable because it had lasted as long as it had. During the long, warm days of a summer that had seemed as if it might never end, they had been an indissoluble trinity, she, and Nick, and the painted Venus. With the completion of the work that had bound them to a common aim, a single ambition, they had lost the ingredient that had held them together.
Sufficient unto herself, the Venus withdrew into an ethereal world of her own, leaving Nick and Psyche alone as they had not been since their first twenty-four hours in the studio nearly four months earlier.
Silently Psyche watched while Nick lifted the picture from his easel and set it up against the wall close to the window. It was as if a piece of herself were being detached, taken away without warning, leaving her incomplete, temporarily unsure of her own identity.
She looked down at the revealing white costume that she would never wear again. “I’ll go and change.”
“Don’t!” Nick said abruptly.
“But——”
“I like you the way you are.”
“But, Nick, I don’t feel properly dressed.”
His brilliant eyes caught and held hers from across the room. “Does that matter?”
Actually it had not mattered before. Now it did. Psyche, opening her mouth to protest again, closed it without having uttered a sound.
Still watching her, an unreadable expression on his face, he said slowly, “Why shouldn’t we celebrate, Venus, you and I? Caviar and champagne and—you and I, Venus. The idea appeals to me, and there will never be another occasion as suitable. Pygmalion—and a Galatea who, bare-footed, will vanish at midnight unable to leave a slipper behind her. If I mix my allusions, forgive me. I find no exact parallel, nor wish to.”
He is seeing me, really seeing me for the first time, Psyche thought, and her voice, when she spoke, was unsteady. ‘Must you always talk in riddles?”
“Have I? Do I? Perhaps I do. Forgive me again. In simpler terms, we are going to have a party that neither of us, I think, will ever forget. I am going out now. I will be back before dark. While I am gone prepare a feast fit for the goddess that, pro tern., you still are.”
Psyche Page 19
