by Anya Seton
Evan inclined his head. “I do. If Father will lend me or give me some money, I’ll be delighted. If he doesn’t, I’ll manage.”
In the end Evan’s father gave him twelve hundred dollars and the confidential information that the paper mill was not doing so well, “and I’d be hard put to it to find more money for you, Evan. But I must say you’ve never been a trouble to me and if you’re set on going out into the world...” He sighed. But Evan’s desire was in the best Yankee tradition, and there were no particular objections.
So Evan set out on his wanderings. He had no regrets and no special goal. He had one consuming interest, and that was a search for the best ways to express the essence of sensation, the moment of rightness when harmonious thrilling of the nerves heightened his sensitive perceptions. This harmonious thrill sped to him along the paths of taste or touch or smell. These however led to a dead end, and there was no way of capturing or reproducing the essence. Nor, for him, did the gate of release lie beyond sound, as he had no instinctive understanding of music. He had, therefore, never doubted his medium, nor until he reached New York had he had any doubts about technique, or seen the work of other artists.
He rented a small room off Broadway and haunted the exhibitions, the auction sales, and the National Academy, and he found very little to admire. He disliked the sugary romanzas of the landscape painters. Had any of them ever really seen a tree or a rock? He was bored by the tedious competency, or the flat prettiness of the historical painters, and the portraits of pretty women and wealthy merchants displeased him most of all. Flabby, he thought contemptuously, tea-and-toast painters.
But he was disquieted all the same and much as he disliked the treatment and subjects of the paintings the public admired, he was forced to admit that the artists showed a knowledge of technique of which he was entirely ignorant.
Throughout the winter Evan attended a night class at the Academy. In this class he caused never a ripple. The teacher found him attentive and competent enough at following instructions, but he also thought him lazy, since Evan produced nothing for criticism if he could possibly avoid it. In those sketches he did turn in, the teacher invariably pointed out a lack of fidelity to the subject, an element of exaggeration and lack of discipline.
Evan would compress his mouth and his eyes would take on the glaze of boredom which he had used to combat his mother. But he was not happy, and inevitably since he saw neither life nor painting in the way the others did, he was lonely.
The following June he had had enough. He shipped as steward on an old windjammer bound for Martinique and in that island for a while found delight and release.
He had always known himself appealing to women, but until his visit to the West Indies he had been too fiercely concentrated on realizing his ambition to be interested. In Fort-de-France he fell in love with a lush Creole dancer named Tini, and she, being flattered by the sketches he made of her, and responsive to his assured and imaginative love-making, soon established him in a room of her pink stucco villa.
During their association he broadened and became a man and they pleased each other. To be sure Tini was often disconcerted that he never showed the faintest jealousy.
“If you want someone else, Tini—” he would say, and use her own frequent phrase, “Vas-y, ma petite. You take nothing from me in sharing yourself with others.”
Then Tini would storm and cry, reminded again that he loved her only as a vehicle for his own twofold release, that of his body and of his art. And it took her a long time to realize that he had lost interest in her, since search as she might she could discover no other woman. But his love-making gradually became perfunctory, and as for his painting he ceased using her as a model. Instead, to her acute boredom, he drew squalid street scenes, bougainvillea or palm trees which bore scant resemblance to the originals, and he spent hours squatting on the filthy docks painting the Negro conch divers and stevedores.
In the fall of 1860 they parted amicably; Tini established herself with a rich planter and Evan returned to New York. He had a portfolio filled with water colors, and a desire at last for recognition. For recompense too. His money was nearly gone.
Evan retired again to a room on Broadway and considered the situation. If he were to attract any attention he must exhibit, preferably an oil. He leafed through his sketches and chose one of two naked Negro children sprawling on a beach; this he enlarged and reproduced in oils. He painted directly onto the canvas without underpainting or glaze, and he painted as he had seen, in vivid tonal masses, eliminating all details, and flooding the beach, the palms, and the brown bodies in a harsh tropical glare.
When he had finished he knew that it was good, and he sent it to the Academy with perfect confidence. It was promptly rejected. Evan was first stunned and then angry. He brushed his one good suit, clipped his waving dark hair which had grown too long in the tropics, and went straight to the Academy.
Here he encountered two members of the jury and some very unpleasant criticism. They remembered the entry well, and thought it was against policy to explain a rejection; both gentlemen were annoyed by Evan’s truculence, and they enlightened him without mercy.
“One would have thought that canvas the work of a child, Mr. Redlake. Except that fortunately no child would choose to portray so ugly and unrefined a subject. Nudity where it has place at all can only be excused by classic beauty. Besides, the canvas shows no evidence of composition, and the coloring is beyond belief raw and crude.”
“Have you ever been to Martinique, sir?” asked Evan.
“I suggest, Mr. Redlake,” said the gentleman with an exasperated side glance to his confrere, “that you give up this odious dabbling in an art that you are quite unfitted for. You’re young, we all make mistakes.” Evan bowed, picked up his shabby hat, turned on his heel, and went out. Fury sustained him on the walk back to his dismal room. But when he had locked his door, he threw himself on his cot and found that his heart was pounding, his mouth dry, and that there was a pricking at the base of his nose and under his eyelids.
He lay on the cot until the rumble of drays and the clop-clop of carriage horses thinned to silence on the street, and the wavering light of the gas lamp outside the window faded into dawn.
Then he got up and opened a dusty flask of Chianti which he had been saving. While he drank and munched on a stale baker’s roll, he stared at the canvas “Martinique.”
After a while he got up and turned the canvas to the wall. He opened his carpet bag, rummaged under a pile of dirty socks, and fished out a cardboard box. He opened it and counted his money. Thirty-two dollars. He stuffed it back in the carpet bag, went to a book seller’s and bought magazines which he studied intently. Then he picked up pencil and drawing block and walked up to Central Park.
He went past the Mall toward the Refectory and sat down under a rustic arbor to wait. Very soon he was rewarded. Two pretty young school misses approached from the Sixty-fifth Street entrance. They were stylishly dressed, one in mauve, one in bottle green barege. Their hoops swayed above their small kid slippers, they held identical round seal muffs against their waists like small shields, and their steps were at once mincing and provocative.
Evan jumped up and accosted them, smiling. Would they pose right there under the arbor for just an instant? He was courteous and determined. They recognized in his voice the unmistakable accents of education, and after the requisite amount of blushing, giggling, and protest they did as he wished, whispering to each other that he looked romantic but awfully shabby, poor thing, and deciding that while this would be a wonderful tale to tell the other girls, it need not be mentioned to Mama.
Evan kept them there rather longer than was exciting, but they were delighted with the result. He had made them as pretty as the fashionplate ladies in Godey’s by conferring a chiseled piquancy on their noses, cupid’s bows on their pouting lips, and greater luxuriance to their flowing ringlets. “Capital,” they cried, “utterly charming. How talented you are, sir! But
what is that we have in our hands?” For Evan had eliminated the muffs.
“Croquet mallets I think,” said Evan politely. “Don’t you play croquet? Or maybe it’s a shepherdess’ crook. Not sure yet.”
They giggled again and plied him with questions but Evan had lost interest. He thanked them and departed, leaving them to cast disappointed glances at his retreating back.
Once again in his room he made two finished drawings from the sketch. The first one was of the young ladies holding croquet mallets delicately balanced in tapering fingers and behind them the piazzas and porticos of a shore hotel. Underneath in flowing script he wrote “Summer Pastime.”
Then he did the young ladies all over again substituting ribbons in their hair for the pork-pie hats, removing the hoops, shortening the skirts a trifle, and sketching in crooks, showers of roses, and a distant sheep, the latter copied from a farmers’ almanac he had bought.
This one he tided “Yankee Pastoral.” He worked on the sketches two days, achieving a glossy neatness in every line. When he had finished he stared at them with loathing, mixed however with a bitter triumph.
The next morning he braved his first editorial offices. Godey’s Lady’s Boo took the shepherdesses, and Hearthside the croquet.
He was now the richer by twenty-five dollars. Throughout the early spring he produced and sold a drawing a week for these markets.
Then in April war was declared. Evan, whose knowledge of Negroes was confined to those in Martinique, was not kindled by the cause of abolition, nor by any deep regional patriotism. But he did feel a compulsive curiosity. In his grate he burned all the lady’s magazines and all the sketches of pretty girls. He stored his Martinique water colors with his landlady and volunteered.
During the war he was promoted to a lieutenancy, and was‘slightly wounded at the Battle of Shiloh. The sights and sounds and smells of war excited him at first and he reproduced many in his sketch book. Later they disgusted him and he began to long for the strength and serenity of nature; particularly he longed for the sea. After Shiloh, he saw no fighting and the constant pressure of many men about him rasped on his nerves. He made a few friends, but when peace came at last, he found that he cared little about them. He paid a brief and unsatisfactory visit to his parents and returned to New York. It was then that he painted his one battle picture. A startling conception of two privates in torn and bloodied uniforms, one Confederate and one Union, fishing amicably together on the ruins of a bridge.
This painting had force and fidelity, the faces were clearly drawn, and the subject was sentimentally apt to the first reactions of peace.
He sent it to the Academy and it was accepted by a jury who knew nothing of his earlier rejection. Its subject caused a mild flurry and some public approval. The critics were not impressed. They scolded him in terms with which he was to become increasingly familiar. “Garish use of color,” “lack of taste in selection,” “incomprehensible distortion.”
But the picture was bought by an art collector, a quiet French Jew called Durand who paid Evan’s price of five hundred dollars without protest, saying only, “I like the way you paint, my young friend. You have a new vision. Do not let them discourage you.”
“I don’t,” said Evan, who banked most of the money and set out up the New England coast, sketching as he went. The Long Island Sound and later the flat sandy coast below Boston did not greatly appeal to him.
He sought for a more rugged sea, for turbulence and grandeur; for bleakness too, an outer severity enclosing a subtlety of emotion more seductive, because more elusive, than the sea scapes he had attempted in Martinique.
He knew at once upon his arrival in Marblehead that he was approaching his object. And from his first glimpse of Hesper playing in the waves, he had seen that she might interpret it. He had felt on their first afternoon no particular wish to make love to her; indeed, since she so obviously insisted on eliciting the personal, like all women, he had been somewhat repelled. And in her ugly clothes, with her rich hair hidden, a clumsy self-consciousness enveloped her. The Lorelei of the rocks and ocean vanished. However, the insight which never failed him on any subject connected with his art showed him that to win back his first vision he must, however reluctantly, give her something of himself.
His brain, that first night at the Hearth and Eagle, teemed with pictures. He saw the thick, shimmering green of the advancing wave and Hesper’s body flattened beneath it. He saw her standing sturdily on the beach, her shoulders drooped a little, her head uplifted while she seemed to search the horizon with the age-long patience of the fisher wives. Someday he would interpret the sea in itself alone without human accent, but not yet. He lay in the yellow bedroom of the new wing at the Inn, sleepless because of a rich excitement.
Hesper, too, could not sleep. She relived each moment of their afternoon, and each section was informed with strong emotion. Fear, relief, pleasure, mortification. But at least they were emotions, better, even the worse ones, than the aridity of these last years.
He had indicated that he would stay some time at the Inn if Hesper posed for him, and he had vanquished Susan’s strenuous objections by the same imperviousness which had daunted his own forceful mother. He had also found an unexpected ally in Roger.
“Let the girl go, my dear. The fresh air’ll do her good, and you can get somebody to help out in the taproom.”
Hesper had seen at once that Roger liked Evan. He had hailed him as a fellow creative artist. After supper, and Evan had not failed to praise the fishcakes and gingerbread, Roger had even fetched the ink-stained pages of the “Memorabilia” from his study and shyly read passages aloud.
The verses celebrating the launching of the ship Desire in 1636 and the tragic attendant accident to Mark, the first Honeywood.
Evan had listened, and made appreciative comments, but Hesper, watching him covertly as she moved around the kitchen putting away the supper dishes, had wondered if he were bored.
His slanting heavy lids had fallen across his eyes, hiding their brightness, his narrow face, turned to the older man in the Windsor chair, held a sleepy look.
But as the summer days went by, and each afternoon Hesper posed for him by Castle Rock, she discovered that she could seldom read Evan’s inner feelings from, his face. There was but one expression of which she could be sure, the one she came to call the “painting look.” In this his dark eyes burned with a cold concentration, his mouth thinned and became immobile; and for hours at a time he saw and heard nothing that was not relevant to the canvas on his easel.
He was sketching her in oils now, and she understood the results no better than the original drawing, but during those afternoons she was happy, because once the light changed he stopped painting, and on the. walks across the Neck back to the landing he became hers. He talked little about himself, because the subject of his past life or experiences did not interest him. Nor did he talk about his future, for of its general pattern he had no doubt. But he asked her many questions and soon knew the scanty facts of her own life. These did not interest him either, but she found that her background and surroundings did. He enjoyed every bit of Marblehead folklore she could tell him. He listened avidly to Roger’s tales of the old house and eight generations of Honeywoods, and he pumped Susan for legends of the sea and fisher folk.
“I don’t see what you like about that old stuff,” said Hesper one day, as they walked back across the Neck. “It’s so silly and all past.”
Evan gave her remark unusual attention. “Because—” he said thoughtfully, “it makes a richness. I need it to get the painting right.”
“Oh,” she said. “The painting.” And what about me? she thought. I’m in the painting too. A pain went through her heart, and the contentment vanished. Since the first day he had not tried to kiss her again. At first she had been wary, on the defensive. Then relieved. Now the relief had gone too, leaving dissatisfaction.
Evan gave her a quick look. “Sit down a minute.” He pointed to
a pine log.
She hesitated, though to this new gentle tone she responded with a secret hope. “Tide’ll soon be running out,” she said. “It’ll be harder rowing.” After the first day Evan had hired a skiff, and they rowed themselves back and forth across the harbor.
Evan ignored this remark and drew her down beside him on the pine log. He put his arm around her and after a moment she leaned her head against his shoulder.
He felt her tremble and looked down at the radiant head against his faded blue shirt. Her hair shone like tiny copper wires, and it smelled of the sea mist.
“Why are you discontented, Hesper?” he said.
She stirred uneasily. That was not what she hoped to hear. “I hate Marblehead,” she said. “Hate it.” Though until that moment she had not realized this.
“But why? You’re part of it and it of you. That old house of yours and the sea and the rocks, you’re woven into them. You belong to them.”
“I don’t,” she snapped. “Just because Phebe and Mark Honeywood happened to settle here two hundred and whatever years ago. What's that got to do with me?”
“It makes a quite beautiful pattern,” he said after a moment.
“Well I don’t think it makes any pattern at all. And I don’t see why you think so. You left your own birthplace.”
“True. But I wasn’t rooted there. Mother came from New Bedford, and my father from Pennsylvania. Besides, I’m cut out to be a wanderer.”
She felt the warning in his stress on the last word, and she straightened her shoulders, drawing away from him.
“Like all men—” she said coldly. “Marbleheaders wander as much as anybody. Not only to the Banks and further, but let anyone blow a bugle or wave a flag and off they rush to war.” She moved still further from him, thinking of Johnnie, and the dull old pain merged to this present aching.
Evan laughed. “You’re hard on the men. It takes both to make full life. The rushing out, and the coming back to something steady and warm and sure that’s been waiting.”