Psyche (26 page)

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

I
T
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, when she was alone, wondered where he had gone and why. Beyond that she did not think. A Grecian goddess tending a modern electric stove, she moved in a trance, doing her share toward setting the stage for a one-act play in which she did not consciously want to take a part.

He came back when a purple dusk had isolated the old barn from hills and woods and sky, setting it adrift on the quiet, dark tides of the approaching night.

Hearing his step on the stairs, she had an instant of lucidity in which panic, cold and sharp, set her free from the spell he had cast upon her. Then he was beside her, his timing, his actions, perfect.

“For you, Venus.”

Psyche, looking at the great armful of golden roses he held out to her, felt the coldness recede before a warmth such as she had
never known. Her cheeks flushed with pleasure, she gathered them to her, heedless of thorns, and buried her face in these, the first flowers any man had ever given her.

When, at last, she looked up, it was to find that he had turned out the lamps and that the studio was now lit only by two tall candles.

“Nick—I—”

“Don't thank me, Venus,” he said gently. “It wouldn't be right.”

He had found both caviar and champagne, and with them, it seemed, a reckless gaiety that carried them throughout dinner on the crest of a wave of laughter.

The candles were guttering low in the candlesticks when Nick rose from the table, circled it, and lifted her to her feet.

“Nick—don't. Please.”

His face against her soft hair, he murmured, “Don't run away from me, Venus. Not yet. Not to-night.”

“Please—no, Nick.”

“Look at me, Venus. Look at me and tell me—if you can with truth—that you don't need me now as much as I need you. Tell me this, Venus, then leave me—if you must.”

If his hand at her waist had increased its pressure then, if the firm fingers that slowly turned her face up to his had used anything other than the gentlest coercion, she would have broken free from him while she still could, would have shaken off the warm languor induced by that deep, persuasive voice.

When her eyes met his, it was too late to run from him or from herself.

His first kisses were as tender, as undemanding as his embrace, his lips lightly tracing the contours of her face, while his arms drew her gradually closer. Unresisting now, Psyche allowed him to make love to her, becoming as passionate in her submissiveness as he was in the steadily increasing passion and variety of his lovemaking. And when he carried her to the couch where all summer long he had slept alone, she clung to him, the heavy pulse of her blood telling her what her mind no longer tried to deny, that this was everything she had ever sought, that this was love. For he was an expert in his way, an expert at creating illusions.
not only on canvas, but also on the more delicate fabric of the emotions.

And he talked all the time, his usually staccato diction softened to a whisper as gentle as his sensitive, caressing hands.

Psyche, caught beyond hope of recall, lulled to a false sense of security by the hypnotic rhythm of that voice that promised so much with such effortless beauty of word and phrase, gave herself to him and—as she thought then—to a love which would enfold and keep her not just for that night, but for all the days and nights to come.

How long she slept, before waking to find the candles dead and the studio invaded by the first grey light of dawn, she did not know. For an instant, seeing the beamed roof high above her, feeling the unexpected texture of the couch, she thought she must be dreaming still, and then memory returned—Nick. But where was he? Why was he no longer beside her? Raising herself on one elbow, pulling the rug he must have laid over her more closely around her shoulders, her eyes searched the studio with an unformulated apprehension that turned to immediate relief when she saw him, his sleeping face toward her, stretched out on another couch that stood against the opposite wall.

For several minutes she stayed where she was, revelling in a sense of complete well-being, at first refusing to think in any really concrete manner of anything at all.

Where her doubts came from, she could not have said, but suddenly her sensuous pleasure was gone, and she was alone with a desperate need for reassurance, for Nick's arms again holding her, his voice again telling her—ice closed slowly around a heart that seemed to stand still—what he had not told her, what he had not said even once, that he loved her.

Her mind, that beautifully precise instrument that was as much a part of her as her warm blood, reviewed with cold clarity every word he had said to her at a time when she was scarcely aware that she heard him at all, and she could find nothing that could be interpreted as other than endearments without lasting value of any kind. If he had been naturally inarticulate, she might still have hoped. Her mouth curling in a smile as bitter and unamused
as her unsmiling eyes, she did not delude herself. If there were ever occasions when Nick did not say exactly what he intended to say, no more and no less, she had yet to encounter one.

Pain and humiliation made her feel literally ill, and the knowledge that she had been a very stupid, very young fool, left an acrid taste in her mouth.

Briefly she had glimpsed a paradise in which she walked side by side with someone who cared only for her, who would be with her both in joy and sorrow. She had offered heart and mind and body to a man who had wanted only the least part of the gift. The giving of herself physically was, because she had done this in good faith, of little importance beside the searing hurt of not being wanted as a person. That she should be desired as a woman was to her, because she was entirely without vanity, no compliment; rather it constituted an insult to her real person—to Psyche, the individual.

It was an insult, she vowed silently, that she would not endure again from Nick, or from any other man. Somewhere, some time, she would meet and love a man who did not want to leave her when the sun rose, who would want to be with her always, who would need her as she needed him. And until she met that man, she would walk alone, sleep alone, and, in any way that really counted, live alone.

But Nick—what was she to say to him when he woke? Nick— whom she had thought she knew so well, how could he have done this thing to her, how been so wilfully cruel, unless he had thought it would mean as little to her as she was now sure it had meant to him. Had he, in his own way, been as mistaken as she in hers?

Noiselessly she gathered the rug around her, and rising, tiptoed across the room until she was standing within less than three feet of him. Scarcely breathing, she studied his face, stripped in sleep of his usual half-humorous cynicism, defenseless as that of a young boy. Could this be Nick, this stranger who must, she knew without question, at times be in need of outside support, of close companionship of some kind? Had this man, in part really understood for the first time, lived by and for himself alone for thirty years or more? Her gaze never leaving his face, she thought not;
and a hundred details, noticed from time to time but not fitted together, presented her with a staggering truth. This man whom she now realized she had never known at all, was not in any real sense at home when he lived at the studio. The artist might be at home there, but the man was not. And when he was at home, did he live alone? It seemed highly unlikely.

Suppressing a wild, hysterical desire to laugh, she saw that she had been more than half in love with a myth as unreal as the Venus who had stood silent watch over their lovemaking.