Lark Ascending. Mazo de la Roche
didn’t care a hang for form. But when they’re finished they’re first-rate, and I’ll not be surprised if you make a name for yourself.”
Diego watched him with an expression half amused, half sulky. He did not trouble himself about conversation. He let other people do the talking while he, with an aloofness almost feline, accepted or rejected what was said. Now he accepted this remark of Purley Bond’s in silent acquiescence.
Bond laid the painting on the desk and puffed at his pipe. “It’s a good thing that New York artist takes an interest in you,” he said. “If it hadn’t been for him your father would never have agreed to your studying art.”
“Yes,” agreed Diego contemptuously. “He’d have made a baker of me, like himself.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that. He was ambitious for you all right when you were a little boy. I’ve heard him talk of putting you through for a Civil Engineer. You mustn’t forget that he was one when he married your mother. It was only when his health broke down that he went in for baking.”
“What a business to go in for!” Diego shrugged a heavy young shoulder in a manner he had picked up from the New York artist.
“Well, he had to do something that he could keep warm at. . . . He’d a wife to support.” The last sentence was uttered in a lower tone, almost as though to himself.
Diego laughed. “He kept warm all right! Sweat was always running off him. Seems to me I was brought up in an oven. Raised—like a cake! And now my mother’s doing it. . . . It makes me sick!”
“Yes, it’s pretty bad for her. But—Josie does a good deal, doesn’t she?”
“Well”—Diego scowled—“she ought to, I guess! She’s always had her living off us!”
Purley Bond laughed in his turn. “Josie has certainly earned anything she has had from your family. She’s been standing behind that counter almost as long as she could see over it! And it would have taken a pretty smart person to fool her on the change, even then.”
Diego picked up his artist’s paraphernalia.
Bond knocked out his pipe and got up. He was not very fond of Diego, but he did not want him to leave just yet—not until he had spoken again of Diego’s mother, whom he loved. He said:
“Don’t go without something to drink. You like this kind of slop, don’t you? It’s the last week of the season for it, thank God! What’ll you have?” He had led the way into the store, and he now stood behind the polished soda fountain, revealed as a well-built man of thirty-five, in a dark tweed suit.
“Pineapple ice-cream soda,” said Diego laconically.
There was a hissing, a gurgling, a spurting. A ball of ice-cream was taken from a tin container and dropped into the frothing glass in its nickel holder. Diego set his easel against the counter and laid his picture on it. He sat himself on one of the high stools and watched the mixing of the confection with absorbed interest. “Thanks,” he muttered, and introduced two straws between his full red lips.
Bond stood looking down at him, wondering what went on in that black head beneath the beret. He allowed him a long undisturbed pull at the straw, then he said:
“If only your mother could sell the business and you could begin to make something, it wouldn’t be so bad. But she’ll scarcely be able to sell at the end of the season.”
“The bakery’s always busy,” grumbled Diego, fishing for the ice-cream with a spoon.
“But she and Josie mustn’t wear themselves out. What with nursing your father through last winter . . . then his death . . . and the tourist season on top of that . . . she’s had the devil of a time.”
“I’ll say she has! Her nerves won’t hold out much longer. She’s in for a breakdown or something. You’d better come in to-night and have a talk. She told me to tell you.” He gave a sly look into Bond’s face as he said the last words.
Bond replied imperturbably—“Very well, I will. Tell her to expect me about eight. Are you going straight home?”
“No, I’m going down to the studio to put my things away.”
“Decent of Mr. Selby to let you share it with him, isn’t it?”
“It’s just as much to his advantage as mine. I look after it for him—see that it isn’t interfered with. Shut it in the Fall and open it up in the spring. Josie’s down there this afternoon putting away the bedding.”
Josie! Always Josie, thought Bond. He said—“But you’ve a good deal to be grateful to him for, just the same. He persuaded your father to let you study art, and then he gave you lessons for nothing. I call that pretty decent of him. What does he think of you?”
Diego again shrugged his massive shoulders. “Oh, he thinks I’m a genius. Well—” he added self-consciously, “he thinks like you do—that I work in a queer sort of way. He can’t make me out.” He gave a little laugh and again picked up his things.
A small boy entered and laid a coin on the counter. “Pleh, I wah a bohhle o’ cahor oil,” he said.
Bond got the castor oil and began wrapping it up. “Has Mamie got the stomach-ache again?” he asked.
“Yeh. Eah hoo muh rhuburb.”
Diego asked, when the child had gone—“Say, Purley, what makes so many folks here talk like that?”
Bond drew down the corners of his mouth in a grimace of mingled resignation and disgust. “Inbred. That’s what’s the matter. We’ve married and intermarried till we haven’t palates enough to go round. Nothing but the summer people coming and going makes any stir here. And that’s only on the surface. Be thankful you’re all there, Diego!”
“Well, I’ve different blood in me, anyway.”
“Yes, you certainly have.” Purley Bond looked at him speculatively. “A queer mixture. A strain of Portuguese in your dad. A dash of Indian in your mother. No wonder you’re an oddity, Diego.”
“Am I an oddity?” He wanted to hear that he was different from other Saltporters.
“Do you ever look at yourself in the glass?”
Diego looked gratified. “Mother’s different, too.”
“Yes. She’s different.” Again he spoke in a muffled tone, as though the image of her produced a hush in his being.
Diego went on—“Well, I’m not going to stay here and intermarry and get kids with cleft palates, you can bet!”
Bond smiled grimly. “Wait till you’re grown up yourself before you begin to worry. I’ll come along to-night and talk things over.”
A customer came in, and Diego, with a nod of half-sulky friendliness, went out.
His big limbs were weary of stillness. He had stood before his easel most of the afternoon; he had sat on the stool in the drug store. Now he wanted to run, but he was cumbered by his wet picture, the easel and the box containing his palette, brushes and paints. He went in a heavy jog-trot down the steep little side street that led between the tea-house and the drug store to the sea.
A change had taken place while he was indoors. The hazy yellow sunshine of the September afternoon had deepened to the dense still light that comes before sundown. Every object was intensely visible in the light, as though magnified. The wind had fallen, but the dark blue waves still shouldered each other carelessly as they climbed the beach. Gulls romping above them swam along the dying wind with tenuous cries.
At the foot of the street Diego turned and began to climb the shell-encrusted rocks that circled the harbour. He made for a large square wooden building—a barn that had been converted into a studio. Windows had been cut in it, the shutters of which and the door had been painted a bright blue in imitation of doors and gates not uncommon in the village,