Lark Ascending. Mazo de la Roche
and closed the door softly behind him.
The ground floor of the barn had been converted into a dining-room with a kitchen at one end separated from it by a screen. The shutters were closed and the room dim. He mounted the closed-in stairway and reached the large living-room above without having been heard by the girl who stood looking out of the window across the harbour.
Cautiously he laid the things he carried on the table and glided up behind her. He put a hand on each of her hips, then put his head beside hers, his chin resting on her shoulder. She gave a cry of fright and turned so that her face touched his, their eyes close together.
“Jimmie!” she cried. “How you frightened me! You’re a perfect brute! You think it’s funny, don’t you? But I don’t see anything funny in it—sneaking up that way and sticking your black face over my shoulder.”
“Aren’t you polite! If people knew what a temper you have they wouldn’t always be saying what a nice quiet little thing Josie Froward is.”
She had turned pale with fright. Now her colour, of a flower-petal freshness, came back into her cheeks. She was a thin, fanciful girl of medium height, grey eyes, mouse-brown hair, vivid only in the colour of her cheeks. She carried herself with an air of stubborn courage as though she were in the habit of undertaking more than her strength was equal to, and carrying it through. She was morbidly afraid of strangers, of sudden noises and starts, but she was not afraid of Diego. They had been in the house together since she had come, a little girl of thirteen, an orphaned cousin of his mother’s. She called Diego Jimmie.
She had sprung back from him, facing about, so that he was able to watch the delicate bright colour return to her cheek, her grey eyes widen in anger, in a way that had always pleased him. She had a queer beauty at these moments in spite of her extreme thinness and irregularity of feature. The fact that he could make her look like this gave him a sweet sense of power. He watched her paling, quivering, flaming, as an indolent cat might watch a fluttering bird—interested in a puzzled, feline, lazy way. His stillness fascinated her, as her fluttering interested him. When he was in the room she could never keep her eyes off him. If he raised his hand to pass it through his dense, black hair, that gesture was as mysterious, as strange to her, as the play of moonlight. If he rose out of the waves when they were bathing, it was as though some strange sea-god rose and stretched himself. Yet he was not a young god to her. She was contemptuous of his talent. She despised his sloth. She had always been ready, eager, to exert herself beyond her strength. He must be goaded to any activity beyond what his healthy body craved. Yet his fascination for her was renewed with the freshness of each new day.
He looked about the room, saw the piled-up quilts and blankets on the couch that was used as a bed.
“No wonder you’re frightened,” he said. “You’ve been doing nothing. Haven’t got the bed-clothes put away. Yes—and been drinking coffee! I see the coffee-pot and milk pitcher. Oh, what a nice, quiet, energetic girl Josie Froward is! However would you get on without her, Mrs. Palmas?”
“You dare sneer at me!” she cried. “How much have you done this afternoon? Come—let’s see your old picture!”
“Now,” he said, holding it in front of her, “what do you think of that?”
She looked, drew back, bent forward. “Why—why—what is it? I can’t make it out! It looks like the bit of sea between Thornton’s and Fred Taylor’s but—what’s happened? My God, what a mess it is!”
“New Art,” said Diego, bending to look over the top of the picture at its wet scarred surface. “Study in the Nude. Emaciated nude girl hanging out clothes in backyard—high wind—sea beyond—I think it’s great!”
“You can’t bluff me! It’s been on the ground. I see dirt sticking to it. . . .” She looked intently at the picture with mounting interest—“Oh, what a pity, because there’s something good in it. Why, you can feel the wind! It’s full of movement.” She took the picture from him and studied it. “Jimmie, how could you have been so stupid as to let it fall?”
“The wind blew it off my easel. It was a regular gale. Do you think anything can be done with it?”
“I don’t know. You’d better try to-morrow.” Her tone was challenging.
“You know I won’t try again. Have a go at it yourself.”
She repeated in a tense voice—“What a pity you dropped it! It’s so seldom you do anything worth while!”
“You always say the same thing. For my part—I don’t care what becomes of it. Here—give it to me! I’ll throw it on the rubbish heap.”
She knew he was capable of this. “Don’t be an idiot! I’ll see what I can do. But, upon my word, it’s good, Jimmie!” She carried the picture across and held it beneath one, on a similar note, of those that covered the wall—half-finished studies left by the artist who owned the studio. “Look—it’s better than this one of Mr. Selby’s! But it’s like everything you paint—there’s something wrong with it.”
“Till you take it in hand, eh? You’ve conceit enough for the two of us. I hate conceited girls.”
“And I hate flabby men—and flabby pictures!”
But she looked enviously at the picture as she held it against the wall. He had the ability to create and she knew she did not have it. But she had the power to interpret what he created. She could take his formless, ill-judged creations and build them up, coax them into a kind of serenity, so that they satisfied the senses, not tormented them. Josie loved painting as Diego did not. She had conquered her shyness sufficiently to come secretly with Diego to Mr. Selby for lessons. She had got up at dawn, she had worked into the night, in order to find time for this secret expression of her being. All she did she kept hidden in her attic room where no one went but herself. But it was over the pictures which she and Diego had painted together that she exulted. He got all the credit for these. No one knew that she had put a brush to them. These were the pictures that puzzled Mr. Selby. Under his eye Diego shewed only a chaotic, primitive promise. Away from him Diego painted things that made him stare. He scarcely gave a second thought to Josie. She had a slight talent, to be sure, but he found the girl more interesting than her work. There was something in her mingled shyness and hardness; the detached, fanciful look in her eyes; her beautiful colour that paled and flamed—in a town where sallowness was the usual thing—which attracted those who met her. But so few met her. Lately she refused to attend to the shop. She preferred to burn her cheeks and redden her hands baking endless cakes, pies and loaves of bread. To Diego’s father she had given more of her inner self than to anyone else. They had talked together by the hour while they kneaded, stirred, spiced and iced in the heat of the big range. He had been a man quite apart in the narrow, conventional community. He had been regarded with suspicion because he was an agnostic. Strange books by writers like Edward Carpenter and Wynwood Reade had been propped on a shelf above the baking-board while he worked. He had read a paragraph, thumped the dough, and expounded his convictions to Josie Froward. Now that he was gone, that part of her mind that had been open to him was closed. She gave herself up to her fancies, to her painting, to her fascinated watching of Diego. She did the baking in a kind of feverish dream.
Between the baker and his son there had been no understanding. The strain of Portuguese from one side, the strain of Indian from the other, had merged in Diego, making him a foreigner to his father. He was an exotic. He did not belong to the bakeshop. He did not belong to Saltport. He belonged only to his mother and to himself. . . .
Josie stood holding the picture against the wall, drinking in its strange, clumsy beauty; wondering what it was that he could do and she could not; itching for a brush in her hand, itching to make the attempt to drag it up from its chaos in a crescendo of beauty. Sometimes she could do this, sometimes not. What would be her luck this time? Everything Diego did so fascinated her she could not look at the marred spot caused by the nettle without seeing something of Diego in it.
He went and threw himself on a couch, pushing aside the piled - up quilts and extending himself on his back in a feline way, like a dark glowing-eyed