Unclouded Summer Page 2

  She laughed.

  “And I’m glad I got to like you before having seen your pictures. Don’t you think that now we’ve introduced ourselves we might have a drink?”

  “That’s a fine idea.”

  She ordered a vermouth cassis.

  Over the edge of her glass, as she sipped at her straw, she looked pensively at a group of grubby urchins who were tumbling over one another in their excited partisanship over a game of bowls which was in progress on a flat stretch of sand beyond the terrace. The players themselves were taking their game with professional unconcern, but the children yelled vociferously one against the other each time the ball was thrown.

  “I can see why you like it here,” she said. She paused, a smile came into her eyes. “Real people leading their own lives. That’s how an artist should live, in touch with something real. So many don’t, you know, after they’ve once got launched. That’s why their work goes off. They haven’t any roots. That’s why …” She paused. She smiled again. A very different smile. There had been a slightly wistful quality in the smile with which she had watched the children. But there was nothing but amused and interested friendliness in her expression as she turned back to Francis.

  “I babble on,” she said. “I can’t think why I do. There are times when I don’t know how to stop myself. I can’t think why I’m talking now, when all I want to do is to hear you talk, to hear you tell me about yourself, why you are here, what you are doing; tell me, are you very famous?”

  He shook his head. No, he wasn’t famous at all he told her. He was at the very start of his career. He doubted if anyone who did not know him personally had ever heard of him. He had had the luck to be awarded a Guggenheim fellowship. That’s how he came to be over here.

  “A Guggenheim fellowship, what’s that?”

  He explained. Some members of the Guggenheim family had formed a trust fund to aid young artists at the start of their careers. You had to be vouched for. You had to give a proof of promise. Then you had to submit a “project.”

  “If you’re an author, you may need a clear period of six months to undertake some research, or you may need to visit certain libraries to study certain manuscripts; a musician might want three months without financial worries to work upon an opera that won’t earn him any money.”

  “And what was your project?”

  “I wanted to see the picture galleries of Europe.”

  “You don’t seem to be seeing them just now.”

  “I have. I spent four months among them. Then I decided to give myself two months of painting.”

  “This is the end then of your trip.”

  “I’m sailing from Marseilles next month.”

  “I see.” She looked at him, thoughtfully. “But this isn’t your first time in Europe.”

  “The very first.”

  “Then where did you learn to paint? I thought everybody went to Paris.”

  “I know. That’s why ‘I decided not to. I thought that too many Americans had gone abroad and been Europeanized. I thought that I’d stay American.”

  “That may have been very wise. But how did you get started? You told me that someone had to vouch for you.”

  “I was very lucky. A dealer whom my father had been kind to when he was young let me exhibit in his galleries. I’ve had a lot of luck.”

  “I see.” In the town behind them, the clock was striking. Round the corner of the low-humped promontory of Cap Ferrat a smallish five-thousand-ton liner was swinging into the long deep leg-of-mutton shaped bay of Villefranche. Boats laden with carpets, under the charge of red-fezzed Algerians, were rowing out to meet it. Customs officials were getting busy by the Douane.

  “Listen,” she said, “if I know anything about this place, it’ll be a pandemonium for the next half-hour; Rex Allan will probably be on edge and Henry’ll be fussing at the villa; I’ll just have to get back home as fast as I can manage. Tomorrow, though, what about tomorrow? If you can get yourself free for lunch, I’ll come down and drive you out. You can; that’s splendid. I’ll be with you early; and don’t forget; we’ll take your pictures with us. I shan’t be able to rest till I know what Henry thinks of them.”

  Chapter Two

  In addition to the small harbor for fishing boats in front of the Hotel Welcome there was a larger harbor, a half-mile to the west, containing a dry dock, where sailing boats and yachts could anchor. Between this larger harbor and the hotel was an eighteenth-century fort, from the prow of whose battlements grew a single palm tree. It had an air of Africa. The barracks which served this fort lay on the north side of the harbor. For three days now Francis had been at work upon a picture, painted from the far side of the dry dock, with the harbor and the barracks in the foreground, the fort and the bay in the middle distance, and the Alps snow-tipped at their summit towering in the background above Beaulieu. Technically it presented a series of interesting problems in perspective, and there were attractive colour contrasts, the blue of the bay, the sand-brown of the fort, the snow upon the mountains, the fresh green of the pepper trees, the gray-green of the olives, the drab green of the single palm. He had hoped to get the picture finished that afternoon, but though he went out there early after lunch, he could not concentrate upon his work. Between his canvas and his brush intruded memories of the morning.

  He had never met anyone like Judy Marriott. He had never imagined that any Englishwoman could be in the least like that. He had always heard that the English were standoffish, cold and aloof and starched. He had been warned against that at home. “You may have some success with the French,” his sister Julia had said, “but you won’t get to first base with those cagey Englishwomen unless you’re rather more forthcoming.”

  His sister was three years younger than himself but she had been married for two years and had a six-months-old baby. She had also a husband whose activities in Wall Street maintained a seven-room Park Avenue apartment and a summer cottage. Her husband was only two years older than himself, but his success and wealth, and the aura of self-confidence that accompanies success, made Francis think of him as an uncle rather than a brother-in-law. There were times, even, when he thought of Julia as an aunt.

  Indeed it was very much as an aunt that she had taken him to task shortly before he had sailed.

  “Darling, you must really make more effort,” she had said. “It isn’t enough to be tall and dark, and to look fairly strong. Girls nowadays are prepared to come halfway to meet a man, but they do need some encouragement. Take the case of Marda.”

  “What about Marda?”

  Marda was a friend of Julia’s; a blonde of Dutch descent of whom he had seen quite a lot during the preceding winter, who suddenly, unaccountably had taken to being vague when he had tried to tie her down to dates. After a number of rebuffs he had assumed that she had another “beau” and had let it rest. But he had wondered sometimes.

  “What about Marda?” he repeated.

  “Weren’t you at all surprised when she stopped making dates with you?”

  “As a matter of fact I was.”

  “Well so was I. What’s wrong,’ I asked her, ‘between you and Francis?’ She laughed. “I wish I knew,’ she said. ‘I simply can’t make him out. Everything started off all right. We always had a good time together. But somehow we didn’t seem to be getting anywhere. It began to get on my nerves. I didn’t know where I was, what was expected of me. It was up to me to find out, I thought. I chose the right moment too; fairly but not too late at night; soft lights and Helen Morgan singing: “Francis,” I said, “Do you know that we’ve been going around now for a full half-year, and I don’t think I know you any better now than I did on the first day we met?” That’s what I said and how do you think he took it. He looked at me very thoughtfully for a minute, then he said “No, Marda, I suppose you don’t.” After that, well it didn’t give a girl much hope, now did it?’ So you see, Francis darling, don’t you?”

  “But I don’t see what was wrong with
that.”

  “Darling, I believe you don’t, that’s just the trouble.”

  There had been a mock-tragic expression in Julia’s eyes, but the light behind that expression had been very fond. “One day you’re going to go absolutely crazy over someone, and there’ll be Heaven knows what a conflagration, but in the meantime if you could only give one or two of those poor girls a chance – I mean if you could bring yourself to go just half a yard to meet them. After all, you know, though you may not have a film star’s profile, you are quite good-looking; and though you may not be a gossip column personality you do amount to something. There isn’t really any need for you to be quite so shy.”

  “But I’m not shy.”

  Which was true. He wasn’t. He was too interested in the world about him, to be shy. When he came into a strange room, he was too conscious of the room itself and of the people in it, to worry about the impression he himself was making. Always everywhere he was an absorbed spectator. It was probably because he was so indifferent to the impression that he was making that he was considered shy. Those who were genuinely shy, created a facade to conceal their shyness.

  No, he was not shy; but sometimes he was lonely; lonely because the people among whom he moved seemed to breathe a different air. Fond though he was of them, fun though he had with them, he always seemed to be in part, in essential part, apart from them. They were all so certain of themselves, of what they were, of what they liked, of what they thought, of what they stood for; certain of their tastes and their ambitions, of their personal future and of their country’s. There it stood, the American way of life, self-contained within its unchallenged frontiers, secure in its isolation, inviolable between its oceans, its industries co-ordinated by the march of science, the products of each state accessible to every other state, with vast tracts of country to be developed, with every scope offered for enterprise and for expansion. What could bar its road to the millennium? Everyone was so sure of that, everyone was so sure of everything.

  Was it just because he was a painter, because as a painter he was forced to see history in terms, decade by decade, of a readjustment of mistaken values, that he found himself unable to share that certainty, that he found himself continually qualifying his opinions, expressing them with tentative prefaces of “I think” and “It seems to me.” Looking at a picture by Cézanne, he could not understand how criticism had failed to recognize its qualities at the start. He would remember the pictures that had been admired at a time when Cézanne and Van Gogh had been derided. One laughed now at the lifeless academic statuary of Alma Tadema. Yet men of taste and judgment and wide culture had praised Watts and Leighton. Today the successors of those who had jeered at Gauguin were making high sport with Dufy and Matisse. Were they right? Himself, he thought they were. Himself, he thought that the painting that was coming now from Paris was not only decadent in itself, but the expression of a basic and deep-rooted decadence. It was his belief that the Americans who were now creating an émigré Rive gauche colony had sold their birthright. He believed that American painters should draw their sustenance from the soil in which their own roots went deep, that American painting should be national and local. But even though he believed that, he knew that he might be wrong. Forty years ago men better qualified to judge than he, had held Cézanne to be a charlatan. It might well be that forty years from now Matisse and Dufy would be seen to have set a standard by which twentieth-century painting was to be judged, in the same way that the great Russian novelists of the nineteenth century had set a standard by which every subsequent novelist was measured.

  No, he did not feel shy as he entered a new room, but yes, he did feel lonely; at the close, say, of a party in the village, when he had returned to his own studio, and had recalled as he undressed the contempt with which his contemporaries had derided the painters and writers of the early 1900’s, the enthusiasm with which they had acclaimed the rebels of the Dial and the Shakespeare Bookshop. If only he could have shared their fervor and their disgust; if only he had not had to sit there, listening, a spectator, interested and inquisitive, interpolating an occasional question. If only he could have shared their certainty.

  He had felt lonely then, just as he had felt lonely in Julia’s apartment, when he had heard her husband Max explaining the difference between the European and American acceptance of modern mechanical innovations. “If an English or Italian manager discovers a machine that will enable one man to do the work of ten, he will sack nine of his employees and let his savings on his wage bill pay for the installation of his new machine. An American manager on the other hand buys ten machines. He increases his output tenfold. He knows that there’s no limit to absorption, provided you maintain high wages and full employment.” Max’s eyes would sparkle as he spoke, visualizing the successively higher levels to which the standard of general living would ascend. If only he himself could welcome as wholeheartedly this prospect of more lavish living. If only he could be convinced that life itself would be made richer, keener, by this increase of material benefits. He wanted for himself, naturally, the embellishments of success, large and well furnished rooms, facility to travel and to entertain. But it was as a means not as an end he wanted them. He could not enter completely into Max’s dream, any more than he could enter completely into his mother’s or his father’s dreams.

  He would look sometimes at his mother’s face as she came back from the altar at early service. It carried a rapt, entranced, mystical expression. She was traveling in a country for which he held no visa. He would have the same feeling as he sat on summer evenings on his father’s porch, looking out over the broad curving river, remembering how a Greek philosopher had in the symbol of flowing water interpreted the pattern of human life, listening while his father’s friends enunciated in clear firm periods the policies that would ensure their country’s supremacy in world affairs. None of them seemed to know what doubt was. Was there nobody besides himself who hesitated, who wondered, who asked questions?

  He did not need Julia’s telling him that the young women of her acquaintance found him slow. He knew they did. He had had his flirtations, naturally, and there had been the wild college parties, the inevitable corollary to Prohibition, the hip flasks and the roadhouses and the cars parked outside country clubs. But he had never, he knew it, let himself really go. Something had held him back. His New England conscience had been once or twice flung at him in accusation, but it was not that, though maybe it had contributed, it was something other than that, something that went deeper than that – the feeling that he could never relax, never be himself with people who did not speak his language. Surely, he had thought, there must be somewhere people like himself, who wondered and made reservations, who pondered and withheld judgment, people who wanted to compare opinions, not to enforce their own. He had heard so much argument; so little discussion. Surely there were people like himself who wanted, not so much to inhabit an ivory tower as to stand if not above at least outside the battle. Surely some day he would meet people like himself.

  He had waited, he had looked. He had not met them. Perhaps after all they did not exist. Perhaps he was a freak. Perhaps it was this apartness in himself that had made a painter of him, that had turned him away from one of the obvious careers – scholarship, commerce or the law – for which his training had been designed. So he had argued with himself over these last two years, but now …

  Before him was spread the panorama that of all those that he had seen since he had left America, had seemed most suited to a painter’s brush. Behind him the sun was sinking: the shadow of Montboron was striking diagonally across the port: another hour and the water would have lost its blue, would have assumed the luminous, lavender effect of wine that Homer wrote of: another hour and that combination of contrasting colors that he had hoped to fix upon his canvas would exist no longer. He must hurry if he was to capture it. But though the panorama was before his eyes, he was not seeing it. His thoughts were distant.

  What was
it that Judy Marriott had said about the artist having an interior struggle, and later what was it that she had added about artists needing to be in touch with something real, that the work of artists who hadn’t roots went off. He remembered the puzzled expression on her face when she had stood looking towards the empty harbor; he remembered the youthful enjoyment with which she had bitten into the fig; he remembered how her arm had swung back like a baseball player’s into the socket of her shoulder; he remembered how she had laughed; and how deep her voice had been, almost a contralto. Anyhow, he had met her halfway. She had sat at his table, true. But he had bought the figs for her, it was he who had suggested that they should swim, he who had borrowed the bathing dress. He had met her halfway, yet it had never occurred to him that he was doing that. He had acted spontaneously, because he had felt at ease, utterly at ease with her, from the beginning. He had known intuitively that she had known those things about the artist, about his interior struggle, his need for roots. He had known, without knowing that he had known, that they talked the same basic language, that they could discuss, not argue, comparing points of view.

  He would probably never see her again after tomorrow. She was very busy, she moved in a world not his; her roots were in another country. Her invitation to lunch had not meant that she wanted to begin a friendship. She had invited him in the same way that she had invited Rex Allan because it amused her to meet new people. Some people might resent that trait in her, might dislike being treated as an exhibit, being collected. Himself, it was a trait that he respected; he admired her avidity for life. It flattered him that she should have been interested in him, that she should have wondered about him before he had told her that he was a painter. Before he had told her that he was a painter, she had recognized that he was not the playboy that he might well have seemed to be. Surely there was an affinity in that.