“Things I’m afraid you’ll never learn, Ames.”
The tracing finger halted on the glass. What a stupid remark, he thought. She’s out of her mind at last; there must be a taint in the family. Elizabeth. My grandfather — I’ve heard that he was not quite sane himself.
“I’d like to show you something,” said Caroline. She forced herself wearily to her feet. “In my gallery.”
His loathing for her was a force that helped him to self-control. His trembling stopped, the hysteria disappeared at once, the fury died down. He could turn now and could smile. “Ah, your paintings,” he said. “I’ve been very curious.”
He followed her up the stairs. The crunching of grit under his feet, the darkness, the closed and musty smells, the airlessness so revolted him that the last rage left him entirely, and he could smile slightly in contempt, seeing the broad black figure rising painfully above him. He followed his mother down the hall; the carpet was in shreds and stank of old dust and decay. He glanced at the door of his room, at the door of John’s room. Had he ever lived in this shut horror, this aged grime? His mother was unlocking the door of her gallery, and when she pushed it open the emerging sun shot long beams of warm yellow light into the room, and it was like walking into goldness.
He was surprised. Here all was neatness and quiet and serenity, with only one chair standing before a lined wall of paintings, and the floor was polished, the windows clear. He raised his eyebrows. His eyes involuntarily met his mother’s. She pointed mutely at the pictures. He went to them eagerly, alertly, the connoisseur once more, not knowing what to expect. It had been his opinion that his mother, who was without taste or sensitivity or perception, had bought ridiculous paintings for her private enjoyment. He stopped before one and was astonished. He bent and peered at it acutely. He went to the next, and to the next.
“David Ames!” he cried incredulously.
“Your great-grandfather,” said Caroline.
“Originals!” exclaimed Ames in awe. “Originals!” He stopped. Then he turned very slowly. “What did you say?” he said, astounded. “My great-grandfather?”
“Yes,” Caroline said. She was unknowingly wringing her hands. “They will tell you what I can’t, Ames.”
“My great-grandfather!” he said again, staring at her and then at the paintings. “Good God! Are you sure?”
She pointed to David Ames’ self-portrait, and he went to it and stood for a long time before it, remembering his young mother and seeing the absolute resemblance. Then his next sensation was exultation. He had no more need now to think of his grandfather with disdain, the ‘buccaneer nobody’. He did not need now to focus his family pride on the Esmonds. He was the great-grandson of David Ames! It was with something like profound gratitude that he swung about to his mother.
“Why didn’t you let me know before?” he demanded.
“Why should I have? Is it so important to you?” asked Caroline with that new and dreadful pity of hers, and understanding.
“Good God, yes! David Ames! I’ve seen only one original, or perhaps two. All the rest have been copies or prints.” He was elated, smiling. He walked from painting to painting, with deepening excitement and awe. He filled his eyes with color and form as a drunkard fills his mouth and belly with his one delight and one consolation.
Why, he isn’t thinking of their worth in money, thought Caroline, and her eyes filled with tears. He isn’t now even thinking of the honor of having David Ames as his great-grandfather. Elizabeth deceived me, but Ames is not deceiving me. She saw him touch a line of vivid red paint. He was moving rapidly from one painting to another, over and over, his footsteps clicking fastidiously on the polished floor. He was murmuring joyfully, lustfully, to himself and nodding his head. Then he stopped before the tower and was still. “Where — where did you get them?” he murmured, marveling. Then the tower held him once more, and he could not have enough of looking.
“Does it mean anything to you, that painting?” asked Caroline.
He did not answer for a long time. Then he said, “I’ve never seen such marvelous work. I’ve seen prints of this; they were like black-and-whites. Copies never have caught the depth, the splendor, the form, the line, the perspectives, the glow.”
“The tower,” said Caroline. “Does it mean something to you, anything at all?”
“A ruin,” said Ames, staring at it greedily and with immense pleasure. “A bleak ruin. Lost. Abandoned. Eerie. The light of another world.”
Caroline sighed. “You feel that?” she asked, and she did not know if the pain she was enduring was physical or spiritual.
“Yes. Of course. But each viewer finds something in any painting which relates to himself,” said Ames, and did not know what he was saying.
“Yes,” said Caroline, heartbroken. But Ames did not hear her. He was moving again, overcome with his powerful excitement. Caroline stood still, her hands clasped hard together, and watched his rapid movements. Then he stopped before the little painting of Mimi’s, the picture of a young girl waiting on a boulder, her profile turned ardently and with hope to the viewer, the red ribbon in her hair streaming in the wind, and the ocean before her. “This,” said Ames, frowning. “I don’t know whose this is. Childish, in many ways, but showing true strength and artistic feeling. What is it doing here?”
“A friend gave it to me,” said Caroline. “Long ago.”
“Who? Has he done much lately? What is his name?”
“It doesn’t matter,” said Caroline listlessly. She pointed to the painting of the blinded man stumbling among great stones, with the purple mountains behind him and the ominous sky above him. “Do you understand that?” she asked.
Ames gave the painting all his attention. Caroline had never seen that powerful concentration of his before, that giving of himself to beauty and the terror of beauty, and her hope came again.
“A man incapable of seeing,” said Ames.
“Seeing what?”
Ames was irritated at what he considered a most foolish question.
“Form. Order. Style. It’s the picture of the perpetual fool, without taste or comprehension. The universal fool. The common man. The dolt who should never have been born. You see him on every street, everywhere you go. The blind.”
“The man who will not see?” asked Caroline.
His irritation became anger. How dare a woman like his mother have these tremendous things, these glorious things! She had bought them, of course, as one of her damned investments. Well, she had done excellently: that is all that interested her.
“The man,” said Ames, “who was born incapable of seeing, a man without discernment or sensitivity. The common man. The color-blind animal.’’
“No,” said Caroline, shaking her head heavily from side to side. But Ames did not hear her. He was again studying another painting.
Then Caroline’s new huge compassion took her again, and this time for her father, who had destroyed her and who had destroyed his grandchildren. She could only pity, and the pity devastated her. She sat down abruptly in the chair, and her head fell on her breast. Dear God, she thought, have mercy on Your children. Have mercy. Forgive us; we never know what we do, because we never try to understand. Ames was laughing delightedly.
“He must have been in Mexico,” he said. “This girl — what power, what color, what subtlety!”
He went again to the painting of the church and the apocalyptic sky and the small vivid cross soaring valiantly against the furious and threatening color, in defiance, in promise, in a strength that not even the shaking of all the earth and the heavens could move from its place, could throw down.
Ames was nodding. “Wonderful,” he murmured. “How he’s portrayed the uselessness, the vulnerability, the littleness of human superstition. The stupidity of religion. The utter defenselessness of it in the face of a crashing reality.”
Caroline was silent. Ames came to stand beside her. “What are you — ” And then he stopped.
&n
bsp; “What am I going to do with them?” said Caroline feebly. “I intend to give them to the Boston Museum, in my will. But you may make three choices, and I will arrange for you to have them when I am dead.”
Ames was aghast. “The Boston Museum!” he cried, pushing his hands deeply into his pockets. “For every dog to look at, for every blind eye to see?”
“For everyone to see,” said Caroline.
“But that’s blasphemy!”
“If you had them all, you’d lock them away? As I did, as I do? Just for yourself?”
“I tell you, it’s blasphemy,” said Ames. “Yes, I’d lock them away for myself.”
“As I did.”
Ames paused. But you only bought them as an investment, he said to himself. They have no meaning for you.
He tried to speak reasonably. “Mother, it’s true that they are worth a fabulous fortune now. They’re beyond price. You aren’t serious when you say you’ll give them — give them! — away?”
“I am perfectly serious,” said Caroline. She stood up. “Shall we go now?”
He hated her. She was mad, of course. “Don’t you know how I feel about them myself?” he said, still controlling his voice. “My great-grandfather’s paintings? Don’t you know how I’d treasure them? You know what I am.”
“Yes,” said Caroline. “I know. Please make your three choices, Ames.’’
He did, but his sickness grew during the difficulty of choosing. “Yon aren’t leaving any of them to John?”
“No.”
“He’s your son too.”
You mean, thought Caroline, that if John has a few you’ll buy them from him.
“I don’t think,” said Caroline, “that John would care for any of them.”
“He cares for anything that’s valuable,” said Ames. “Did you know, by the way, that he’s color-blind?”
“Is he?” said Caroline. “No, I didn’t know.” So her son John was married to an artist, and he would never know what she was doing; he would never see the coloring, the light, the shade of hue, the exquisite and subtle tint.
Ames had chosen the tower, the picture of the little church against the mad and insensate fury of destruction, the girl in the exotic garden. Caroline, watching him as he made his choices, saw that the painting of the blind man made him vaguely uneasy.
They went downstairs together. The maid had opened a few windows, and the ragged draperies were blowing in a fresh wind. Everything outside dripped and sparkled, even the lost garden. The sea spoke in its great voice. Ames listened. “It is the only thing I miss,” he said. “The sound of the sea.”
But nothing else, thought his mother. There was nothing else for you to remember, my son.
She watched him run lightly down the broken path to the cab he had brought. He did not look back. There was nothing to draw his eye to his mother in a last kindness, in a farewell. He had forgotten her. As I forgot him, always, when he was a child, she said to herself, desolated.
Higsby Chalmers was extremely shocked at Caroline’s appearance. She appeared to him to be dying steadily with her house, to be pacing with it in its decline into wreckage. He murmured, “My dear Caroline,” when he took her hand, and could helplessly say no more for a while. When Caroline offered him tea he accepted, though he wished to decline. He had need to recover from his human consternation and his pity. Then he became aware that there was some subtle change in her, for she was looking at him not with her old expression of withdrawal and indifference but intensely, as if weighing and considering.
The teacups were sticky, the tea itself foul, the little cakes uneatable. But Higsby, usually fussy about such matters, was not aware of them now. He was conscious only of Caroline. There was a change in her; it was as if she had come up a cobwebbed companionway from the dark bowels of some ruin of a ship, and her eyes were looking, for the first time, on the running sea and comprehending its existence.
Caroline always came to the point, unlike other people, and Higsby was not surprised when she said, “I read your letter fully and then put it aside. It did not concern me. But lately it has. Why isn’t of importance. Tell me more.”
Higsby put down his teacup, leaned forward toward her, clasping his plump hands between his knees. “As I’ve written you, Caroline, the thing that is in the world now, the war, is the opening of the grand design against mankind. You told me last year that you had known of it since you were less than twenty-four. President Wilson is dimly coming to understand too; you will remember that only lately he warned America again never to permit a strong centralized government in Washington.”
Mr. Chalmers stood up and walked slowly and distressfully up and down the gritty floor. He stopped and stared through a smudged window at the wild garden, and he thought: That is the way it will all be soon unless we can stop it.
“Can we stop it?” asked Caroline in her low, rough voice. “I don’t think so, Higsby. We have too many idealists and simple men like Mr. Roosevelt in Washington. I’ve known all you’ve been telling me since I was a young girl. We can’t stop it, Higsby.”
“Perhaps not,” said Higsby with sadness. “We have the enemy here, too, in full force. Eugene Debs, who was indicted for conspiracy to kill. The Socialist movement. Now new, in America, as it is not new in Europe. Like you, Caroline, I feel that these creatures will force us into a war with Germany to prevent a quick, negotiated peace between Germany and England. And to give impetus to revolution, beginning in Russia.”
“I know, I know,” said Caroline. “I’ve known, perhaps, for much longer than you have, Higsby. But you must have some plan or you’d not be here.”
He sat down and wiped his cherubic face. “I have. Education of the people. A foundation, such as the Carnegie Foundation which established free libraries. I even have a name for it,” and he smiled sadly. “The American Foundation for Constitutional Freedom. The Constitution stands in the way of the tyrants. It will be destroyed unless we begin to enlighten the people. I have the idea of a large, permanent building somewhere, perhaps in New England. We will staff it with informed intellectuals, experts on the Constitution, teachers, professors, historians, people aware of what is truly happening in the world. They will write pamphlets, sheets, bulletins, perhaps a newspaper. All this will be disseminated profusely over every section of the country. Free. To schools, to clubs, to organizations, to newspapers, to universities and colleges, to the professional and business people. Without charge. We must alert writers and newspapermen, everyone who has access to the public means of communication.”
Caroline shook her head. “You won’t win, Higsby. It’s impossible. The American people will be offered everything in exchange for their liberty. You must remember ancient Rome. A country never greedily took the path to tyranny, in all the world’s history, and turned back. Not once, anywhere.”
Higsby said stoutly, “There was never a Constitution like ours, Caroline, in the history of the world. You see, miracles do happen. Perhaps America will turn back one day. Who knows? But shall we let her go without one protest, by default? Shall we hopelessly, by our silence, accede to her destruction? For our souls’ sake, we cannot!”
“How much?” said Caroline. Higsby sat down and talked quietly and steadily. Then Caroline, when he had finished, went to her study and wrote out a check. She brought it downstairs again and gave it to Higsby, He caught his breath.
“That is only the beginning,” said Caroline. “There will be more. And I will establish a trust for your hopeless, your surely hopeless, foundation.” She smiled grimly. “But we’ll have tried, won’t we?”
She folded her hands together and looked beyond him. “I’ve never taken any interest in my country until now. I never took any interest in anything until now. When it is too late, perhaps.”
Chapter 6
Before calling on his mother, John Sheldon first went to see his mother-in-law, Melinda Bothwell, who had a great affection for him. He did not deliberately take advantage of that affection
, but he reached for it greedily. He everlastingly wanted to be liked, to be regarded fondly. It was like a protection which he urgently needed. Melinda always spoke to him kindly and tenderly, knowing his desperate need, and he basked in whatever she said and in her accepting presence. She knew how weak he was now; she only prayed that that weakness would not injure her daughter.
He laughed when she told him that her son Nathaniel had enlisted for an officers’ training school. “He was always quixotic, wasn’t he, Mother Bothwell?” said John. He resented Nathaniel’s existence; he would inherit half of the Bothwell fortune, and Nathaniel did not particularly care about his brother-in-law.
Melinda looked at John gravely, her beautiful calm face showing no annoyance. “Quixotic? Perhaps. Both my children always had passions of devotion to something or other. It is their nature. Nathaniel is sure we’ll be in this war; he wants to do his duty, he says. It is not that he’s convinced this is a just war, but he wants to help his country if she needs him.”
A Prologue to Love Page 88
