A Prologue to Love Page 8

  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 i
t 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.

  Chapter 5

  Caroline Ames loved the autumn of the year. She knew that many people preferred the spring and spoke of it as being hopeful. But she was never so hopeful as in the autumn, and she could not explain it to anyone. She had read somewhere: ‘The seed is the prophecy of the tree’. Seeds came only at this time of the year. When Beth Knowles complained that autumn was only ‘the beginning of those awful winters’, Caroline thought of it as the busiest time of all the months. Under the warm brown silence of the days she sometimes believed she could hear the bustlings of seeds settling down in the earth, the hurrying of nature to prepare plants and flowers for the next year. She watched squirrels scuttling to bury nuts, half of which they would never remember; she thought of the trees that would arise from the buried treasure of life, the first tiny saplings that would appear in the spring. There was a secret excitement in the quiet air, a kind of authoritarian housekeeping filled with competent voices directing how each thing must be prepared, how each ordered. Without autumn, there would be no more springs.

  It was early October. There would be a note for her from Tom Sheldon discreetly enclosed in a letter to ‘my dear friend, Mrs. Knowles’. The girl did not understand or even know of this discretion, but it had been arranged by Tom and Beth five years ago. “You never know about Mr. Ames,” Beth had told Tom. “He doesn’t want poor Carrie ever to have any friends. He thinks they’re a waste of time.”

  As there was no preparatory school in Lyndon, which was an old and very poor outlying town near Boston and engaged only in industries, mainly textile, in which young children and men and women were employed, Caroline now attended a drab private school in an ancient house occupied by an elderly woman in reduced circumstances. Miss Brownley taught girls, some twenty-five of them ranging from fourteen to seventeen, and it was her positive opinion that young ladies needed to know nothing more than how to walk properly, how to play the piano with élan, how to engage in ‘edifying conversation’, how to greet and how to depart, how to conduct oneself in the drawing room, how to adjust to something she ominously called necessity, how to dance with propriety, how not to dress ‘to attract vulgar attention’, how to modulate one’s voice, how not to offend anyone under any circumstances, and how to write the most elegant copperplate. Her young ladies were drawn from the families of rising factory managers, rather unsuccessful lawyers and doctors practicing in Lyndon, and daughters of ‘old’ families as ‘reduced’ as she was herself. She maintained quite a delicate but firm distinction between the girls of ‘new people’ and those with ‘background’. This made for cliques, backbiting, snubs and coldness, and the cruel rivalries which only women understand. Caroline was aware of cliques and inner circles; she was part of neither and rejected by all. She had accepted this as one of the peculiar aspects of her existence and bore no malice.

  She was known to be the daughter of the ambiguous John Ames, who was rarely in Lyndon. He was reputed to be very wealthy. None of the girls believed it. Caroline’s clothing was certainly not that of a rich man’s daughter. Her shabbiness aroused laughter among her schoolmates, who did not fail to point out to her that the elbows of her drooping wool frocks and her meager coats were obviously darned and patched, that her shoes were cheap and that she wore, at fifteen, heavy cotton stockings instead of lisle or even silk. But more than all else, it was less than tactfully called to her attention that she had no beauty, no presence, no grace. None of this depressed Caroline, for so far as she was concerned the girls were only frivolous annoyances. Her realities were her father, Beth Knowles, Tom Sheldon, and the moldering library of the house in Lyndon. These were her life, not tossing curls, not dances, not gay trippings in the narrow halls of the house of her teacher, not fluttering dresses and dainty slippers, not fashion and style, not rings and bracelets, not secrets whispered in class and the exchange of notes. Above all, not carriages bringing the other girls to school. She walked the four miles to Miss Brownley’s house and walked them home, and the weather was of no physical concern to her. Walking was an adventure. The girls declared she skulked and was ashamed of her wretched state and pretended to pity her.

  Caroline believed herself ugly and was not disturbed by it. Tom Sheldon liked her. He did more than like her; he loved her. He was nearly eighteen now, and he wrote her of ‘the day when we’ll be married’. He never failed to write of her beautiful eyes. ‘A lady on one of the canal ships had a big topaz ring on her finger, and it was just like your eyes, Carrie, all full of brown light and twinkles. I sure wanted to see you again right away when I saw that ring.’ And Beth had told her roundly, “If men married only pretty and beautiful girls, the world wouldn’t have many people in it, believe me! You have to have something else, and I call it spirit.”

  Caroline was not sure what spirit was. Was it what poor old dead Kate had called character? Was it intelligence? The girls at school, whom she hardly noticed, possessed neither of these things. Caroline often wondered if she did, and she would reread all of Tom’s letters, looking for enlightenment. Tom loved her, though she was stocky and clumsy and could never talk very well and there was no curl in the long hair as black and fine as straight silk and her clothes were coarse and mended. Therefore, she must have ‘spirit’. She was surprised to find that she was not entirely satisfied. Her Aunt Cynthia had recently adopted a little girl, and Melinda was very beautiful, almost as beautiful as Cynthia, for all she had been taken from an orphanage and had no family. Melinda was now four, a grave little girl who was nearly as silent as Caroline. But sometimes she would laugh, and the laugh tinkled and her gray eyes shone.

  The Ames house in Lyndon stood on five acres of wooded land, wild and unkempt, for old Jim would do only sporadic gardening. He did keep an area about the house free of tall grass and fallen branches, but he never bothered with flowers; the family was away at the seashore from early June to the first of October. As he never planted seed, obstinately insisting that was Nature’s job, the cleared grass was coarse, heavy, and full of pigweed with thick branching leaves. He took care of the rig and the elderly horse and used it only when Beth went on shopping errands or he was to meet ‘the master’ at the station. Occasionally, with languor, he would wash windows grown dull with summer dust and rain or winter sleet, leaving, as Beth said irascibly, a worse smudge than before. But he was an old man; he helped Beth inside the house and complained constantly about the amount of wood she used in the ancient black iron stove and in t
he living-room fireplace. He liked the stable best, where he could talk to the horse and congratulate him that he was used so seldom and needed very little currying. Then he would swipe at the old rig with a dirty cloth, sit down in a rocking chair, and sleep. He disliked everyone except Caroline, whom he would entertain with hoary but fascinating stories. He was part Negro; his stories often had the richness of rain forests dripping in green dusk under a hot equatorial sun or the mystery of those who lived half of their conscious lives in a state of awed wonder. He had been a slave.

  Jim called the Ames house a mansion, which it was not and which it had never been. It was not in a good section of town; beyond the wooden fence, which was the only article Jim kept in perfect order and strength, stood shacks, working people’s little homes, full of children and noise and fury and drunken shouts on Saturday nights, and gloomy factories constantly increasing. But the house lay in a kind of somber enchantment of its own among its old and rotting trees, hidden from the sight and sound of neighbors. It had been built long ago, and no one knew who had been its original owner. Of dull red brick overgrown with glossy green ivy, it stood tall and thin, three stories high, with a widow’s walk on the top story, though the house was far from the sea. It had long windows as thin as splinters, and brown shutters and brown doors, all moldering. A path led from the locked gate and served as both walk and drive and was narrow and dusty and without gravel or stone, the earth hard-packed in summer and greasy with sliding brown mud in the winter. Once Jim had caught three little boys climbing the cronelike apple trees in the autumn and devouring the wormy fruit. They had evidently bolted over the high gate with its sharp points. He drove them off savagely and reinspected the gate and tested its bolts. Sometimes John Ames wondered acridly at this. A slave, of all people, should detest both fences and gates after he was free.