Rosshalde (5 page)

The afternoon passed, the shadows shifted. Pierre had run away long before, Burkhardt had gradually fallen silent and dozed off, but the painting was almost finished. The painter closed his tired eyes for a moment, let his hands fall, and with almost painful delight breathed in the deep sunny silence of the hour, his friend's presence, his own appeased weariness after successful work, and the letdown of his overstrained nerves. Along with the frenzy of unstinting activity, he had long found his deepest, most comforting pleasure in these gentle moments of weary relaxation, comparable to the restful vegetative twilight states between sleep and waking.

Rising quietly for fear of waking Burkhardt, he carried his canvas carefully to the studio. There he removed his linen painting jacket, washed his hands, and bathed his slightly strained eyes in cold water. A few minutes later he came out again, glanced for a moment inquiringly at his sleeping guest's face, and then awakened him with the old familiar whistle which they had adopted twenty-five years before as their secret signal and sign of recognition.

“If you've had enough sleep, old man,” he said cheerily, “you might tell me a little more about India, I could only half listen while I was working. You were saying something about photographs; have you got them here, could we look at them?”

“We certainly could; come along.”

For some days Burkhardt had been looking forward to this moment. It had long been his wish to lure Veraguth to East Asia and keep him there with him for a while. It seemed to him that this was the last chance, and he had prepared for it methodically. As the two men sat in Burkhardt's room talking about India in the evening light, he produced more and more albums and packets of photographs from his trunk. The painter was overjoyed and surprised that there should be so many of them; Burkhardt kept very calm and seemed to attach no great importance to the photographs, but in secret he was eagerly awaiting a reaction.

“What beautiful pictures!” Veraguth exclaimed in delight. “Did you take them all yourself?”

“Some of them,” Burkhardt said tonelessly. “Some were taken by friends of mine out there. I just wanted to give you an idea of what the place looks like.”

He said this as though in passing and with an air of indifference set the photographs down in piles. Veraguth was far from suspecting how painstakingly he had put this collection together. He had had first a young English photographer from Singapore, then a Japanese from Bangkok staying with him for weeks, and in the course of many expeditions from the sea to the depths of the jungle they had sought out and photographed everything that seemed in any way beautiful or worthy of interest; and then the pictures had been developed and printed with the utmost care. They were Burkhardt's bait, and he looked on with intense excitement as his friend bit and sank his teeth into it. He showed him pictures of houses, streets, villages, and temples, of fantastic Batu caves near Kuala Lumpur, and of the jagged, wildly beautiful limestone and marble mountains near Ipoh, and when Veraguth asked if there were no pictures of natives, he dug out photographs of Malays, Chinese, Tamils, Arabs, and Javanese, naked athletic harbor coolies, wizened old fishermen, hunters, peasants, weavers, merchants, beautiful women with gold ornaments, dark naked groups of children, fishermen with nets, earringed Sakai playing the nose flute, and Javanese dancing girls bristling with silver baubles. He had photographs showing palms of every kind, lush broad-leafed pisang trees, patches of rain forest traversed by thousandfold creepers, sacred temple groves and turtle ponds, water buffalo in rice paddies, tame elephants at work and wild elephants playing in the water and stretching their trumpeting trunks heavenward.

The painter picked up photograph after photograph. Some he thrust aside after a brief glance, some he placed side by side for comparison, some figures and heads he examined carefully through the cup of his hand. Several times he asked at what time of day the picture had been taken, measured shadows, and became more and more deeply immersed.

Once he muttered absently. “One might paint all that.”

“Enough!” he finally cried out, and heaved a sigh. “You must tell me much more. It's wonderful having you here! Everything looks different to me now. Come, we'll walk for an hour. I want to show you something.”

Aroused, his tiredness gone, he went out, followed by Burkhardt. First they took the road. Homeward-bound hay wagons passed in the opposite direction. He breathed in the warm rich smell of the hay, and a memory came to him.

“Do you remember,” he asked, laughing, “the summer after my first semester at the Academy, when we were in the country together? I painted hay, nothing but hay, do you remember? For two weeks I wore myself out trying to paint some haystacks on a mountain meadow, they just wouldn't come out right, I couldn't get the color, that dull hay gray! And then when I finally had it—it still wasn't exactly delicate, but at least I knew I had to mix red and green—I was so happy that I couldn't see anything but hay. Oh, what a wonderful thing it is, that first trying and searching and finding!”

“It seems to me,” said Otto, “that there's always more to learn.”

“Of course. But the things that torment me now have nothing to do with technique. Do you know, more and more often in the last few years something I see brings back my childhood. In those days everything looked different; one day I hope to put something of that in my painting. Once in a while I recapture the feeling for a moment or two, suddenly everything has that special glow again—but that's not enough. We have so many good painters, sensitive, discriminating men who paint the world as an intelligent, discriminating, unassuming old gentleman sees it. But we have none who paints it as a fresh, high-spirited, imperious boy sees it, and most of those who try to are poor craftsmen.”

Lost in thought, he plucked a reddish-blue gypsy rose at the edge of the field and stared at it.

“Am I boring you?” he asked as though suddenly waking, with a diffident look at his friend.

Otto said nothing but smiled.

“You see,” the painter went on, “one of the pictures I should still like to paint is a bouquet of wildflowers. My mother, you must know, could make bouquets such as I've never seen since, she was a genius at it. She was like a child, almost always singing, her step was very light and she wore a big brownish straw hat, that's how I always see her in my dreams. Some day I should like to paint a bouquet of wildflowers, the kind she liked: gypsy rose and yarrow, and little pink bindweed, with a few blades of fine grass and a green oat stalk. I've brought home a hundred such bouquets, but they're never quite right, the full fragrance has to be there, it has to be as if she herself had made it. She didn't like white yarrow for instance, she only took the fine rare variety with a dash of violet in it; she would spend half the afternoon choosing among a thousand blades of grass before selecting one … Oh, it's no use, you don't understand.”

Burkhardt nodded. “I do understand.”

“Yes, sometimes I think of that bouquet for hours on end. I know exactly how the picture ought to be. Not your famous excerpt of nature seen by a good observer and simplified by a skillful energetic painter, and not sweet and sentimental either, as a painter-of-the-native-scene would do it. This picture must be perfectly naive, as seen through the eyes of a gifted child, unstylized and full of simplicity. The painting in my studio of the fish and the morning fog is the exact opposite—but a painter must be able to do both … Oh, I have much more to paint, much more!”

He turned off into a narrow path leading across the meadows, rising gently to a little rounded knoll.

“Now keep your eyes open,” he said eagerly, peering ahead like a hunter. “You'll see it from up there! That's what I'm going to paint this fall.”

They reached the top. On the far side, a leafy copse traversed by a slanting evening light halted the eye, which, made lazy by the clear open meadow, was slow to find its way through the trees. A path led to a group of tall beech trees with a mossy stone bench under them. Following the path, the eye found an opening; passing the bench, it made its way through a dark passage between treetops into the fresh luminous distance, a valley lined with willow and scrub, the twining river glittering blue-green, and still farther on, chains of hills reaching out to infinity.

Veraguth pointed down. “I'm going to paint that as soon as the beeches take color. I shall sit Pierre down on the bench in the shade so as to look past his head down into the valley.”

Burkhardt said nothing. His heart was full of compassion as he listened to his friend. How hard he tries to lie to me, Burkhardt thought with a secret smile. How he speaks of plans and work! He had never done that before. He seemed to be carefully listing the things in which he still took pleasure, that still reconciled him to life. His friend knew him and made no attempt to meet him halfway. He knew that it could not be long before Johann broke a silence that had become unbearable and unburdened himself of everything that had been accumulating over the years. And so he walked along beside him, waiting with apparent serenity, yet inwardly sad, surprised that so superior a man should become such a child in misfortune, as though seeking his way blindfold and with tied hands through brambles.

When on their return to Rosshalde they asked after Pierre, they were told that he had gone to town with Frau Veraguth to meet Herr Albert.

Chapter Four

A
NGRILY, ALBERT VERAGUTH PACED THE FLOOR
of his mother's music room. At first sight he resembled his father, for he had the same eyes, but in reality he looked far more like his mother, who stood leaning against the piano, following him with affectionate, attentive eyes. When he came close to her, she took him by the shoulders and turned his face to hers. A lock of blond hair hung down over his broad pale forehead, his eyes gleamed with boyish agitation, and his full handsome mouth was twisted with anger.

“No, Mother,” he cried, freeing himself from her clasp, “you know I can't go over to see him. That would be sheer comedy. He knows I hate him, and you can say what you like, he hates me too.”

“Hate!” she said with gentle severity. “Don't use such words, they distort everything. He is your father and there was a time when he loved you very dearly. I forbid you to speak like that.”

Albert stopped still and glared at her.

“Of course you can forbid me to use words, but what does that change? Do you expect me to be grateful to him? He has ruined your life and my home, he has turned our beautiful, happy, wonderful Rosshalde into a place of misery and loathing. I grew up here, Mother, and sometimes I dream night after night of the old rooms and hallways, of the garden and stable and dovecote. I have no other home that I can love and dream of and be homesick for. And now I have to live in strange places and I can't even bring home a friend at vacation time, because I wouldn't want him to see the life we lead! And whenever I meet someone and he hears my name, he sings hymns of praise to my famous father. Oh, Mother, I'd rather we had no father at all and no Rosshalde, I'd rather we were poor people and you had to sew or give lessons, and I'd help you make a living.”

His mother took hold of him and pressed him into a chair; she sat down on his knees and stroked his hair into place.

“There,” she said in her deep quiet voice, the sound of which was home and hearth to him. “There. Now you've told me everything. Sometimes it's a good idea to get things off your chest. It's good to be conscious of what we have to bear. But we mustn't churn up the things that hurt us, child. You're as tall as I am now, you'll soon be a man, and I'm glad. You are my child and I want you to go on being my child, but you see, I'm alone a good deal of the time and I have all sorts of worries. I need a manly friend, and that must be you.

“You must play four-handed with me and stroll in the garden with me and look after Pierre, and we shall have a fine vacation together. But you mustn't fume and fuss and make things still harder for me, because that would make me feel that you were still half a child and that I have a long time to wait for the intelligent friend I want so much.”

“Yes, Mother, of course. But when things make me unhappy, must I always keep them to myself?”

“It's the best way, Albert. It's not easy, and one can't expect it of children. But it's the best way. —Shall we play something now?”

“Yes, let's play. Beethoven, the Second Symphony—would you like that?”

They had hardly begun to play when the door opened quietly and Pierre slipped in, sat down on a stool, and listened. He looked thoughtfully at his brother, the back of his neck, the collar of his silk sports shirt, his hair moving to the rhythm of the music, and his hands. Now that the eyes were hidden from him, he noticed Albert's close resemblance to his mother.

“Do you like it?” Albert asked during a pause. Pierre only nodded, but a moment later he quietly left the room. In Albert's question he had sensed a trace of the tone which in his experience most grownups assumed in speaking to children; he could not bear its sham friendliness and ponderous arrogance. He was glad his big brother had come, he had looked forward with eagerness to his visit and had welcomed him joyfully at the station. But that tone, no, he wouldn't put up with it.

Meanwhile, Veraguth and Burkhardt were waiting in the studio for Albert, Burkhardt with unconcealed curiosity, the painter in nervous embarrassment. His brief loquacious gaiety had suddenly left him when he learned that Albert had arrived.

“Is his arrival unexpected?” Otto asked.

“No, I don't believe so. I knew he was coming any day.”

Veraguth took some old photographs from a box of odds and ends. He picked out the picture of a little boy and held it side by side with a photograph of Pierre. “This is Albert at exactly the same age that Pierre is now. Do you remember him?”