A Prologue To Love (8 page)

The ladies were grouped about Cynthia in the drawing room, standing in postures of ecstasy, hands clasped, heads bent, and Cynthia, all triumph, was bending over a large chair on which she had placed a framed canvas. Now the gentlemen merged with the ladies and there were exclamations. Cynthia looked about her, peering over Mr. Brittingham’s shoulder. “Oh, John!” she cried. “You must come and see! I’ve been keeping this a surprise for you, but I could not — I could not hold it hidden until Christmas. I just had to show everyone.”

John had been standing in the doorway. Every head turned to him and every face smiled. “Lucky dog,” said Harper Bothwell. “Not everybody gets such a gift.”

“Oh, I’m keeping it for myself, in a way,” said Cynthia, laughing. “Of course it will be John’s, but I have just the spot for it, right over there near the south window. You see how greedy I am?”

John approached slowly, seeing no one but Cynthia. Her face was illuminated with pleasure and excitement. Cynthia seized his hand and pulled him playfully to the chair. “Look, isn’t it magnificent, and yet isn’t it terribly sad and just a little frightful? I was so lucky to get it. There are only twenty unsold, and I’m ashamed to say what I paid for it. It will be worth a fortune in a few years; in fact, it’s a fortune even now!”

What did a damned picture matter? Every wall was crowded with pictures. Then he looked down at the picture, and he was sick. He remembered it very well; he thought it had been destroyed with all the others; he had believed that not a single one had remained.

It was not an exceptionally large painting; it could not have been more than three feet square. It was of a new style called ‘impressionistic’, and when a few paintings in this style had first been on display in the Boston Museum there had been some well-bred rioting and many indignant epithets. There had been angry cries of ‘degenerate art, caricature, unrealistic, mad, crude, illiterate drawing and painting, thick-colored porridge thrown on with a palette knife, barbaric, an insult to nature and all true artists!’ Newspapers had written stern editorials; art critics had ridiculed; there was not a tea or dinner where this ‘outrage’ was not discussed in firm voices and denounced.

Cynthia’s acquisition was of this impressionistic style. The artist had painted a scene that consisted only of a dark range of chaotic purple hills, blurred as if glimpsed through a curtain of rain. The sky above them loomed with strange cloud-shapes, apocalyptic and threatening, touched with sharp fire in the gray hollows, prophetic with vague and enormous faces. The foreground undulated in a dim yet savage green, a boundless wilderness without trees or flowers, and scattered only with grotesque boulders thrown by a giant. A man walked on it, a small figure against all that palpable and frightening color, all that pressing silence, all that majestic and menacing sky, all those broken purple hills. It was hard to tell if the figure was a man or a boy; the artist had managed to suggest both age and youth in the uncertain body in its dull clothes. The face could not be clearly seen; it was partly turned away, the eyes blindfolded, the strong arms outstretched, groping.

When John Ames had first seen this thing — which had horrified him — the artist had smiled at him pleadingly and his hazel eyes had been sad. “Don’t be like this, Jack,” he had said. “Before God, don’t be blind like this. Look. See. For your soul’s sake.”

John had stepped back, repelled and full of hate, and he had said nothing. The hate was with him again. It was monstrous. It was as if some evil he thought had long been destroyed had resurrected itself and was confronting him again. But there was not only this, there were nineteen more, unsold.

“I see you’re overcome, John,” said Harper Bothwell. “And I don’t blame you. Magnificent. Even though it’s a gloomy theme and unlike the artist’s usual luminous colors, it’s compelling, vital. Not calculated, like Seurat. It’s full of emotion.”

“I admit I’m not taken with these impressionistic painters,” said Mr. Prentice. “But you have to agree they’ve brought a new dimension to art. Positive color, sensation, brilliance. Not realistic, of course, but — ”

“John,” said Cynthia, her smile disappearing, “don’t you like it?”

“Ames,” said Harper with enthusiasm, and he turned to John with a smile. “Any relative of yours?”

“No,” said John. His left hand clenched against his side. “No.”

“Don’t tease John,” said Cynthia, looking at John searchingly. “David Ames came from Genesee, New York State. And John’s from Boston. Dear John. Don’t you like your Christmas present?”

He had attracted the attention of the others; he could see the ring of faces too closely, too highly colored.

“I — I am afraid I am no judge of art,” he said dully.

“This is art at its greatest,” said Harper Bothwell with envy. “Cynthia, if John doesn’t like it, I will give you twice as much as you paid for it.”

“Then you’ll pay me eight thousand dollars,” said Cynthia. She was still studying John with anxiety. “But it’s not for sale. I had no sooner bought it than a man from the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art asked me to sell it to him for ten thousand, and I would not. I love Ames’ pictures. They don’t speak; they cry out.”

“I wonder who that poor clod is pictured there,” said Mr. Prentice, pointing to the blind figure.

“All of us, to a certain extent,” said Mr. Brittingham.

Ten thousand dollars. Ten thousand dollars — offered. John found himself breathing with difficulty; his bones seemed to be trembling in his flesh. Hatred sickened him. Ten thousand dollars — offered — for this daub, this vicious and stupid thing, this ridiculous crudity. It had first been offered for fifteen dollars, to pay a month’s grocery bill. And it had been refused.

He could remember everything so clearly, for he could never forget it. His mother, Cecilia Ames, had been buried only two days. No one knew where her husband was, ‘that crazy painter who bought that run-down Schmidt place where you couldn’t raise an ear of corn. He runs off for weeks at a time. Didn’t he go once to Mexico and come back with pictures good enough just for hanging on a barn or in a field to scare the crows? You’d think he’d try to raise chickens or a few hogs so his kid and his wife would have something to eat once in a while instead of running into debt at the general store for a little salt pork and bread’.

Cecilia Ames had literally died of starvation in the shaggy old farmhouse in the winter, when there was no fuel except for what her son could obtain by chopping down dead trees for the fire. She had been a gentle, silent woman. She had tried to plant a vegetable garden, but she was city — born and — bred, and so was her son. The resulting vegetables were dwarfed and meager. Frail and uncomplaining, she scrubbed to the last pushing of her strength, but the ancient house sifted dust and grit, and the bare planks of the floor breathed out dust at every step. John could remember that house well. His terror, his unending fear, his unspeakable humiliation, his hopelessness, and his hatred had been born here. But more than all else, his fear, which would never leave him, which was sleepless and lay down with him at night and rose with him in the morning. He had been fourteen years old. He and his mother lived on the little he could earn in the village four miles away, cleaning out stables, mending chimneys, currying horses, shoveling snow, washing windows, and many other chores. Some weeks he could earn nothing at all. He remembered the faces. . . .

He had been alone with his mother when she died. He had held her in his arms. The dying had not been hard, only the living. She had merely drawn one deep breath and then was still. She was so light in his arms, for there was little flesh on her patrician bones. He had laid her down very carefully, as though afraid those bones would break and a broken thing would be lying on that bed with its ragged blankets. Then he had walked through the hip-high snow to the village for the doctor, under a moon of ice, in a silence that enveloped him like death. His mother had been buried near a fence in the ‘poor corner’ of the small graveyard, and there was no marking on her grave, not even now. For she had never lived in that house where she had died; she had only been exiled there. Her son worked in the village for two months to pay for her grave, a matter of twenty dollars, which included her bare wooden coffin. Then he had gone away and never returned.

Yes, he remembered the night of her death very well; he remembered her burial. He had been alone afterward in that forlorn old farmhouse for two days. The old minister who had quavered his prayers at the grave of Mrs. David Ames had taken pity on her son and offered him temporary shelter. But John remained in the house for those two days, a boy of fourteen, wild with hatred. His father had been away two months. He had not even written his wife or sent her any money, possibly for the reason that he never had any money, he who once had been invited to Albany to be on the staff of the state prosecuting attorney.

Alone, John in his agony of mind and his rage of spirit remembered the barn where his father stored his unsold canvases and where he often added finishing touches to them. The barn began to loom before him as a dread thing. He built a fire on the cold hearth of the almost unfurnished living room, and he lit a long thick stick in it. He then went out to the barn and set it on fire. He watched it blaze. He felt that in that barn lived all the evil which had killed his mother, which had brought unsleeping agony and shame and hunger to him. He would kill the thing once and for all.

David Ames had kept all his unsold canvases but one there because his wife, who had been a Hollingshead of Albany, shuddered at the sight of them. A promising young lawyer, he had met her in her father’s house; the walls had been weighted with paintings by distinguished and formal artists. They had made him shudder, just as his own paintings had made his wife shudder. But it was in that house that he had known, like one giving instant, large, and spontaneous birth, the desire, the impelling need, to paint, the conviction that there was nothing else of value in the world.

The boy, John Ames, hugging himself in his thin and mended clothing, warmed himself at the conflagration he had created and laughed with hysterical joy. The leaping flames climbed the old gray walls; they caught on rubbish, devouring and chattering; they roared through the opened door. They soared against the black sky, blotting out the moon. They shouted and streamed in the winter wind. The fire stank of rotted wood, of paint, of straw burning, of death.

Almost beside himself, the boy did not at first hear the shouting of a man. But the shouts came nearer. Dazed with his almost voluptuous rapture, he turned his head. His father, carrying his cardboard suitcase, was floundering up the hill toward him, snow spraying in red-tinged clouds about his stocky figure, his panting breath audible even above the sound of the fire. And then he had stood twenty feet away and looked at the barn. He made no outcry now. The snow heaved like marble about him; his square face fluttered with the dancing crimson.

The man and his son stood there in utter silence, watching the barn. The roof fell in, and scarlet sparks blew upward like a fountain of terrible light, like fireworks, like the pyre of a giant. David Ames never spoke again; he never voluntarily moved again. He watched the end of his work, the end of some hundred canvases, the end of his life. Without even a sigh he sank down into the snow and died.

They found one hundred dollars in his purse. No one knew where it had come from, and no one cared. Twenty dollars of it was taken for his grave, a considerable distance from the grave of the wife he had not known had died before him. The rest was given to John, his son. John had paid the grocery bill of twenty dollars; he had paid his mother’s doctor. He had bought himself some warm clothing. There was nothing left but the debt of his mother’s funeral, and he worked in the village until he could repay that debt. He had not thought of himself as being the cause of his father’s death. But when he went away he carried David Ames’ self-portrait with him as a reminder, as a warning, as an object to inspire courage, as the source of his strength — for he had resolved never to be poor again.

He never forgot. He had thought that all but what he had of his father’s work had been burned in that holocaust. But some had escaped. That was probably the source of the mysterious one hundred dollars which had been found on David Ames’ short and stocky body. That money had brought him immortality, for it had saved those canvases.

Ten thousand dollars — offered.

He said to Cynthia now as she linked her arm in his and gazed at him with increasing anxiety, “You should have taken that ten thousand dollars, Cynthia. Yes, you should have taken it.”

Cynthia sold it. If John detested it so much, she thought with regret, then it must not be where he would be confronted with it in this house. Harper Bothwell bought it. He hung it over his Adam mantelpiece and he lent it out on exhibition. He was offered twenty thousand dollars for it a few years later and refused. He would often stand below the painting and look up at it and wonder of whom it reminded him.