When he was free to turn to her, she was awake, her eyes clouded with fear and uncertainty. “Nickâwhat was it? I heard somethin'âI dunno what.”
He laid a hand over both of hers, and finding them ice-cold, began to chafe them. “You cried out, Venus. That's all. You were asleep, and must have been dreaming. Don't you remember now?”
Psyche shook her head. She did not want to remember. “I remember nothin'.”
“We've just passed over a very rough piece of road. I'll fix you up on the back seat and you can sleep properly.”
“I don't think I want to sleep no more.”
“You need it. You can at least try.”
He rolled up his trench-coat as a pillow for her, made her take off her scuffed shoes, and wrapped her in a motor-rug.
As he was closing the door, Psyche lifted her head from the improvised pillow. “You're bein' very good to me, Nick.”
“You didn't expect that?”
“Not for sure.”
When he saw no need for pretense, Nick attempted none. “We are, at the moment, a mutual-benefit society, Venus. It would be stupid not to protect each other's interests with as much grace as the situation allows.”
It was a different brand of honesty from Psyche's own, but it was, nevertheless, honesty, and as such more reassuring than any gentle evasion. It established in words, and without equivocation, the only possible relationship that could for long be satisfactory to both of them.
They had moved out of the storm area, and Psyche, as the car again travelled southwards, lay watching an ever-changing pattern of stars and tree-tops. After the static horizons of the world in which she had lived for so long, this simple night-time panorama held a breathless fascination for her. Knowing that at last she had been caught up in the current of a moving stream, conscious of a deep, wordless satisfaction that this should be so, she went tranquilly to sleep.
They stopped for breakfast, with more than five hundred miles of highway unrolled behind them, on the outskirts of a large city; a city whose widening spokes reached out from a lakeside hub still eleven miles distant.
It was scarcely eight o'clock, but the restaurant was almost full. Nick led Psyche past the crowded confusion of the counter to an empty booth at the back. Amongst a clientele at that hour composed mainly of truckers they passed unnoticed, the tall, shabby girl, and the poised man in the paint-stained flannels and leather windbreaker.
Nick ordered orange juice, eggs, and coffee, and when they
were served they ate in silence, occupied with thoughts they had no wish to communicate to one another.
Nick was concerned with purely practical problems. Situated as the studio was, he saw no real reason why Psyche's presence there should become known. He had at no time encouraged visitors, and moreover was expected to remain in the north country until Alice's return and the reopening of the city house in the fall. If he could contrive to do the necessary shopping on his own, and did not, by some foul chance, run into anyone he knew, he would spare himself endless complications and a tedious tissue of lies. The buying of food would be relatively simple. Clothes for Psyche presented greater difficulties, but she could not be left in her present disreputable state.
“What size are you?” he asked.
Psyche looked at him in surprise, as she answered automatically, “Fourteen, Tall.”
“You don't know your exact measurements, do you?”
All the clothes she had ever owned had been bought by mail, and so she did know. She told him.
“The Greeks had a word for it,” Nick murmured, and without further comment or explanation retired again into silent preoccupation.
Psyche, meanwhile, had been realizing with painful clarity how entirely dependent she was on a virtual stranger, and how little claim she had on him. In the isolation of the slag she had thought of him as an old friend. She knew now that this was not true. Studying, unobserved, the sharp, well-modelled planes of his face, the thin mobile mouth, high intelligent forehead beneath curling grey hair, and startling hazel eyes, she knew that she could safely depend on this man only for as long as she was of real use to him. From what she already knew of him, it seemed to her highly unlikely that he would make any personal demands on her, but in every other way he would probably expect absolute compliance with his wishes. His work, his hours, and his habits would control all her waking hours. Any consideration she received from him would be in direct proportion to her willingness to work with and for him. That she was valuable to him, he had proved. Until
she could determine exactly how great that value was, she saw that she would be very foolish to display any initiative, to ask for anything he did not offer voluntarily. To be looked upon in the light in which he obviously regarded her, as a more or less mindless chattel, both irritated and dismayed her, but it really frightened her to think of what her situation might have been without him.
She broke the silence with a single question. “I can't never go back, can I?”
“No, Venus, one can't ever go back. One always has to go on. That's life.”
It was the answer she had expected, and she accepted it without argument. It would be a long time before it would be safe for her to return to the shack. During that time the space which she had occupied would close over, would cease to exist. They would miss her at first, Butch and Mag, in a multitude of ways, as sheâ tears pricking her eyelidsâalready missed them. Later on they would, if not forget her, at least accept her absence without active regret, for in spite of their affection for her they had never had any real need of her, and her need of them existed only for as long as she dwelt with them. Dimly she caught a glimpse of the beautiful, elemental simplicity of her long relationship with them; the caring for the young and weak by the mature and strong until, but only until, the young could stand alone. She had left them too suddenly, but it had been time to leave.
Nick was right. She could never go back to the shack. But he was not entirely right, for she was going back somewhere else, somewhere she could not even remember. This she neither could nor would doubt.
“Are you ready to move on?” Nick asked.
“I'm ready.”
The tumult of sound and confusion of movement that assailed her as they drove into the city proper were, at first, almost more than she could bear. Before long, however, excitement and curiosity overcame her initial recoil, and she began to besiege the artist with questions.
He stood it as long as he could, displaying a patience which
those who knew him well would have found it difficult to credit. He told her how street-cars were operated. He explained the use of traffic signals. He concurred in her belief that the parks were attractive. He did not agree with her that the people were also attractive. He said, yes, the street lights were left on all night. He told her that there were more than a million inhabitants of this city. He commented on the number of denominations represented by what were, to her, a surprising number of churches, and told her cynically that if she counted the movie houses she would find there were even more of them. He explained that dogs were kept on leads so that they would neither get lost nor bite people.
“Do they often bite people here, Nick?”
“For God's sake, Venus, shut up! I can't drive in heavy traffic and talk at the same time.”
Psyche thoughtfully regarded the crowds thronging a main intersection at which they had stopped for a red light. Morning sunlight flooded brick canyons across whose concrete floors there flowed an unceasing tide of humanity.
“It must be awful tough to be alone here,” she said slowly. “I mean with perhaps nowhere to go, with no folks like.” Almost as if she had a premonition of her own future, she continued, with real urgency: “A person wouldn't rightly know what to do, Nick, what would a person do if they was alone here?”
The light turned green, and they shot forward on the crest of a mechanized wave. Nick, absorbed with the problem of a present, rather than a future survival, did not reply.
They made three stops, and each time he parked on a side street and left Psyche in the car. Content to wait for him, once for nearly an hour, she watched a parade that was to her a department-store catalogue come to life. Here were the wonderful clothes, the matching shoes and handbags, the feathered hats and white gloves, that she had always so much admired. And, if they had all been smiling, even the painted faces might have been lifted complete from those glossy, much-thumbed pages. The absence of the never-failing smiles disturbed her profoundly.
That these fortunate mortals should not be as carefree as she
had always supposed them to be necessitated a rescaling of values that upset most of her preconceived notions. Watching the expressions of the passers-by she found them shuttered, possessed of a studied indifference to others both chilling and new to her. Did one have to look like this? she wondered. Was this expression something one put on for the street along with suitable clothes, or did it go deeper, representing an actual indifference to everything outside of purely private concerns? Could she, Psyche, look this way, if she chose to?
Reaching up, she turned the rear-view mirror to an angle where she could regard her own reflection. Her eyes betrayed her. But when she lowered her long lashes until her eyes were shadowed, partially hidden, she saw a self as cool and apparently uninterested as any she had seen that morning.
She returned the mirror to the precise position in which it had been, and let her glance travel downward over her cheap, creased blouse, threadbare coat, and long-unpolished shoes, and knew that she was ashamed of them not because they were old and worn, but because they were not clean. Catching sight of her dirty, ragged nails, she felt her face go hot, and thrust them out of sight beneath the folds of her coat.
Once more watching the people walking past, her regard was now subjective instead of objective, prepared to discard for the moment anything that could not be turned to a useful personal application.
It was nearly noon before Nick headed the big car towards the northern suburbs again.
Pysche rarely suffered from headaches, but her forehead was throbbing painfully by the time she realized, with unqualified relief, that their eventual destination was to be outside the city.
Although she was to know every tree, every bush, almost every blade of grass in the gentle valley surrounding the converted barn, she never forgot her first sight of it. If she had entered into paradise itself, she could not have been more enchanted.
Here was a place in its own way as remote from the world as the shack had been; but this was a soft seclusion without harshness of any kind, a seclusion protected and tranquil, with no
memory of past upheaval or threat of future dissolution. The valley was composed of an immense field thickly sown with wild flowers, its lush green grass patterned with the shadows of a few tall elms, its boundaries wooded hills sloping gradually backward toward the calm inverted bowl of the summer sky. The barn, approached only by a footpath, stood in the middle of the field, its weathered brown timbers, red roof faded by many summer suns, and solid field-stone foundations as integral a part of the landscape as the pines and maples on the hillsides.
The car in low gear, they wound slowly down the steep gradient of a narrow, rutted track that disappeared entirely where long grass and woods met to give way one to another. Here Nick turned the car, backed it under the shelter of a huge maple, and cut the ignition.
Gazing upon such beauty as she had previously only dreamed about, Psyche gave a deep sigh. “The flowers,” she said softly. “They's so beautiful.”
“They're beautiful.”
“They're beautiful,” Psyche repeated, unconscious that she had been corrected, or that she had accepted the correction. “They yours, Nick?”
“They're anybody's. They're wild.”
This was what Mag had told her about. Incredibly, here was tangible proof of a truth she had never quite been able to accept. Although later she was to fill the studio with fresh flowers every day, she was not ready for it yet. Stepping out of the car, she dropped on her knees and contented herself with breathing in the fragrance all around her while gently touching a single petal of a single white daisy.
Nick, watching her, saw a classical shepherdess in a field of asphodels, and, in seeing her thus, failed to see her at all. His fingers itching for brush and palette, he looked at his watch. “Come on, Venus, we've still a lot to do to-day.”
Both of them burdened with the purchases he had made that morning, they followed the path single file across the field to the barn and a small green door let into the stone foundations.
As Psyche discovered on the following day, when she went
exploring on her own, there was a door on the other side of the barn that gave access to a dim world of empty stalls, mounds of dusty hay, and the disintegrating remnants of a long-disused farm wagon. But the door that Nick now unlocked opened on nothing but an enclosed staircase, up which they mounted.
No one who had ever been to Nick's studio had failed to stop at the head of the stairs and pay immediate tribute to the striking beauty of its proportions. The cathedral vault of the beamed roof, finding an apex in a single mighty roof-tree, framed, at the far end of the room, an immense triangular window that was in itself almost the entire north wall. The east and west walls, against which were clustered groupings of well-proportioned modem furniture, were lined with brilliant canvasses. And, supported by the wide pine planking of a floor sanded and waxed to a clean, pale beige, were an easel, work-table, and model's stand which, close to the great north window, made up a still-life study oddly attractive in that setting.
“This must be the most beautiful room in the world,” Psyche said quietly.
Nick looked around him with the pleasure he always felt when he returned to this place after any absence from it, but he was not given to exposing his feelings, even in so unimportant an instance as this.