Rosshalde (9 page)

“Good afternoon,” said Veraguth.

“Good afternoon,” his son replied, with embarrassment, and began to busy himself at the music cabinet.

“You've been playing?” Veraguth asked amiably.

Albert shrugged his shoulders as though to ask: Haven't you heard? He blushed and hid his face deep in the shelves of the cabinet.

“It was beautiful,” Veraguth continued, smiling. He was keenly aware that his visit was unwelcome; he said with a certain malicious pleasure: “Won't you play something else? Whatever you like. You've made good progress.”

“Oh, I'm not in the mood any more,” said Albert irritably.

“I'm sure it will go very well. Please do.”

Frau Veraguth looked at her husband inquiringly.

“Come along, Albert, sit down,” she said, setting a book of music on the rack. As she did so, her sleeve grazed a little silver vase filled with roses, and a few pale petals fell on the black, highly polished wood.

The boy seated himself on the piano stool and began to play. Bewildered and angry, he reeled off the music like a tedious exercise, fast and unlovingly. For a time his father listened attentively, then he sank into thought, and at length he stood up and left the room without a sound before Albert had finished. Once outside, he heard the boy hammer furiously on the keys and stop playing.

“They won't miss me at all when I'm gone,” the painter thought as he descended the stairs. “Good Lord, how far apart we are, and yet we were once a family of sorts.”

In the hallway Pierre ran toward him, beaming and very much excited.

“Oh, Papa,” he cried breathlessly, “I'm glad you're here. Guess what, I've got a mouse, a little live mouse! Look, here in my hand—can you see his eyes? The yellow cat caught him, she was playing with him, she tortured him, she kept letting him run a little way and then she caught him again. So I reached out quick, quick, and snatched the mouse out from under her nose. What shall we do with him now?”

He looked up, glowing with pleasure, but shuddered as the mouse struggled in his small, tightly closed hand, emitting short frightened squeaks.

“We'll take him out to the garden and let him go,” said his father. “Come along.”

He provided himself with an umbrella and took the boy out with him. The sky had grown brighter and the rain had subsided to a drizzle; the wet smooth trunks of the beech trees glistened black like cast iron.

They stopped in a spot where the roots of several trees formed a hard intricate tangle. Pierre crouched down and very slowly opened his hand. His face was flushed and his light gray eyes flashed with excitement. Then suddenly, as though his expectation had become too great for him to bear, he opened his hand wide. The mouse, a tiny little creature, shot blindly out of his prison, stopped a few feet away beside a great knot of roots, and sat there quietly, his flanks heaving and his shining little black eyes darting fearfully this way and that.

Pierre cried out for joy and clapped his hands. The mouse took fright and vanished as though by magic into the ground. Gently, the father stroked the child's thick hair.

“Will you come with me, Pierre?”

The child put his right hand in his father's left and went with him.

“Now the little mouse is home with his papa and mama, telling them all about it.”

The words bubbled out of him and the painter held his warm little hand tightly. With every word and joyful cry the child uttered, his heart quivered and sank back into servitude to the heavy charm of love.

Oh, never again in his life would he experience such love as he did for this child. Never again would he know moments so full of glowing warm tenderness, so full of playful self-forgetfulness, of poignant, melancholy sweetness as with Pierre, this last lovely image of his own youth. His charm, his laughter, his self-possessed freshness were, so it seemed to Veraguth, the last note of pure joy in his life, the last flowering rosebush in an autumnal garden. In it lingered warmth and sunshine, summer and pastoral joy, but when storm or frost stripped its petals, then all delight, every intimation of happiness would be at an end.

“Why don't you like Albert?” Pierre asked suddenly.

Veraguth pressed the child's hand more tightly. “I do like him. It's just that he loves his mother more than he does me. I can't help that.”

“I think he doesn't like you at all, Papa. And do you know, he doesn't like me as much as he used to, either. He's always playing the piano or sitting alone in his room. The first day he came, I told him about my garden that I had planted myself, and all he did was make a high-and-mighty face and say: ‘Very well, we'll go and look at your garden tomorrow.' But he hasn't mentioned it the whole time. He's not a good friend, and besides he's beginning to have a little mustache. And he's always with Mother, I can hardly ever have her to myself.”

“But he'll only be here for a few weeks, my boy, don't forget that. And if you don't find Mama alone, you can always come and see me. Don't you like to?”

“It's not the same, Papa. Sometimes I like to go and see you and sometimes I'd rather see Mama. And besides, you always have to work so terribly hard.”

“You mustn't let that worry you, Pierre. When you feel like seeing me, you can always come—always, do you hear, even if I'm in the studio working.”

The boy made no answer. He looked at his father, sighed a little, and looked dissatisfied.

“Doesn't that suit you?” Veraguth asked, distressed by the expression on the child's face, which only a moment ago had shone with boyish high spirits but now looked withdrawn and much too old.

He repeated his question. “Speak up, Pierre. Aren't you pleased with me?”

“Of course I am, Papa. But I don't really like to go and see you when you're painting. I used to now and then…”

“Well, and what displeased you?”

“You know, Papa, when I go and see you in the studio, you always stroke my hair and you don't say anything and you have entirely different eyes, and sometimes they're angry. Yes. And then if I say something, I can see by your eyes that you're not listening, you just say yes, yes, and you don't pay attention. And when I come and want to tell you something, I want you to listen to me.”

“All the same, you must come again, sweetheart. You see, if I'm thinking hard about my work and I have to rack my brains about the best way of doing something, then sometimes I can't shake myself free right away and listen to you. But I'll try the next time you come.”

“Yes, I understand. It's the same with me. Sometimes I'm thinking about something and somebody calls me and I'm supposed to come—it's beastly. Sometimes I want to be still and think all day, and that's just when I have to play or study or do something, and then I get very angry.”

Pierre looked off into space, straining under his effort to express his meaning. It was hard, and most of the time no one understood you anyway.

They had entered Veraguth's living room. He sat down and held the child between his knees. “I know what you mean, Pierre,” he said soothingly. “Would you like to look at pictures now, or would you rather draw? Why couldn't you draw the story of the mouse?”

“Oh yes, I'll do that. But I'll need a nice big sheet of paper.”

Veraguth took a sheet of drawing paper from the table drawer, sharpened a pencil, and pulled up a chair for the boy.

Kneeling on the chair, Pierre began at once to draw the mouse and the cat. Not to disturb the child, Veraguth sat behind him, watching his thin, sunburned neck, his graceful back, and aristocratic, willful head. Pierre was deep in his work, which he accompanied with impatient lip movements. Every line, every successful or unsuccessful stroke, was clearly reflected in his restless lips, in the movements of his eyebrows and the creases in his forehead.

“Oh, it's no good,” Pierre cried out after a time. Straightening up and propping his cheeks on his open hands, he examined his drawing with a critical frown.

“It's not getting anywhere,” he said with plaintive impatience. “Papa, how do you make a cat? Mine looks like a dog.”

His father took the paper and inspected it earnestly.

“We'll have to erase a little,” he said gently. “The head is too big and not round enough, and the legs are too long. Wait, we'll get it.”

Cautiously, he ran his eraser over Pierre's paper, took a fresh sheet, and drew a cat on it.

“Look. This is how it must be. Look at it for a moment, and then draw a new cat.”

But Pierre's patience was exhausted, he gave back the pencil, and now his father had to draw, after the cat, a little kitten, then a mouse, then Pierre coming and setting the mouse free, and then finally the child demanded a carriage with horses and a coachman on the box.

Then suddenly that bored him too. Singing, the boy ran about the room, looked out the window to see if it was still raining, and danced out the door. His frail high voice could be heard singing under the windows, and then there was silence. Veraguth sat alone, holding the sheet of paper with the cats on it.

Chapter Eight

V
ERAGUTH STOOD FACING HIS LARGE CANVAS
with the three figures, working on the woman's light bluish-green dress. On her throat a small gold ornament glittered sad and forlorn, alone to catch the precious light which found no resting place on the shaded face and glided alien and joyless over the cool blue dress … the selfsame light which played gaily and tenderly in the blond tousled hair of the beautiful child beside her.

There was a knock at the door. The painter stepped back in irritation. When after a brief wait the knocking was repeated, he strode to the door and opened it a crack.

There stood Albert, who had not set foot in the studio since the start of his vacation. Holding his straw hat in hand, he looked rather uncertainly into his father's tense face.

Veraguth let him in.

“Hello, Albert. I suppose you've come to look at my pictures. There isn't much here.”

“Oh, I didn't wish to disturb you. I only wanted to ask you…”

But Veraguth had closed the door and had gone past the easel to a gray-painted rack where his pictures were standing in tall narrow drawers equipped with rollers. He pulled out the painting with the fishes.

Albert stood awkwardly beside his father and both looked at the silvery-shimmering canvas.

“Are you interested in painting?” Veraguth asked airily. “Or do you care only for music?”

“Oh, I'm very fond of painting, and this one is beautiful.”

“You like it? I'm glad. I'll have a photograph of it made for you. And how does it feel to be back in Rosshalde?”

“Thank you, Papa, it feels wonderful. But I really didn't want to disturb you. I only came to ask you…”

The painter was not listening. With the groping, rather strained expression that he always had when working, he looked absently into his son's face.

“Tell me, how do you young people feel about art these days? I mean, do you hold with Nietzsche, or do you still read Taine—he was intelligent, I've got to admit, but boring—or have you new ideas?”

“I haven't read Taine yet. I'm sure you've thought about such things a lot more than I have.”

“Formerly, yes, art and culture, and the Apollonian and the Dionysian and all that, seemed terribly important. But today I'm satisfied if I can turn out a good picture, I don't see problems any more, in any case not philosophical problems. If I had to tell you why I'm a painter and why I spread paint on canvas, I should say: I paint because I have no tail to wag.”

Albert looked with astonishment at his father, who had not spoken to him like this in a long time. “No tail? What do you mean?”

“It's very simple. Dogs and cats and other talented animals have tails; their tails, with their thousands of flourishes, provide them with a wonderfully complete language of arabesques, not only for what they think and feel and suffer but for every mood and vibration of their being, for every infinitesimal variation in their feeling tone. We have no tails, and since the more lively among us need some such form of expression, we make ourselves paintbrushes and pianos and violins…”

He broke off as though suddenly losing interest in the conversation, or as though it had just dawned on him that he was talking alone, meeting with no real response in Albert.

“Well, thank you for your visit,” he said abruptly.

He had gone back to his canvas and taken up his palette, and was staring searchingly at the spot where he had made his last brush stroke.

“Excuse me, Papa, I wanted to ask you something…”

Veraguth turned around; already his eyes were remote, he had lost contact with everything outside his work.

“Yes?”

“I'd like to take Pierre for a drive in the carriage. Mama said I could but she wanted me to ask you.”

“Where do you want to go?”

“A few hours' drive in the country, maybe to Pegolzheim.”

“I see … Who's going to drive?”

“Me, of course, Papa.”

“All right, you may go with Pierre. But take the coupé and the bay. And see that he doesn't get too much oats.”

“Oh, I'd much rather take the carriage and pair.”

“I'm sorry. When you're alone, you can do as you please, but when the little fellow's with you, you've got to take the bay.”

Somewhat disappointed, Albert withdrew. At other times he would have argued or pleaded, but he saw that the painter was once more absorbed in his work, and here in the studio, amid the aura of his paintings, his father, for all the boy's inner resistance, still made a powerful impression on him. Elsewhere he did not recognize his father's authority, but here he felt pitifully boyish and weak in his presence.

Instantly, the painter was deep in his work, the interruption was forgotten, the outside world had vanished. With intense concentration he compared the canvas with the living picture within him. He felt the music of the light, how its resounding stream dispersed and came together again, how it flagged on meeting resistance, how it was absorbed but triumphed invincibly anew on every receptive surface, how it played on the colors with capricious but infallibly precise sensibility, intact despite a thousand refractions and in all its playful meanders unswervingly faithful to its inborn law. And with relish he breathed the heady air of art, the bitter joy of the creator who must give himself till he stands on the brink of annihilation, and can find the sacred happiness of freedom only in an iron discipline that checks all caprice and gains moments of fulfillment only through ascetic obedience to his sense of truth.