‘She understands my work,’ threw out the young man. ‘I want to work over there … new impressions — new world — sky-scrapers.’
‘But perhaps I don’t want sky-scrapers,’ said Richard with a smile. ‘Perhaps I prefer Sussex.’
‘Go ahead Robert!’ cried Nelly mockingly. ‘Explain yourself. I told you how absurd you were.’
‘It’s like this, Storm,’ went on the tow-headed youth, screwing up his eyes and prodding the wall with the tip of his billhook. ‘It’s like this, Storm—’
‘Well, my friend, what is it like?’ inquired Richard blandly, laying his hand familiarly on his wife’s knee. ‘Do you intend to carry us both off with you, or are you thinking of kidnapping Nelly?’
‘She understands my work, Storm. She knows nothing of painting, of course—’
‘Thank you, Rob dear!’ cried Nelly from her perch on the wall, giving him a kick with her foot. ‘You can leave out the “of course”.’
‘But she understands what I am aiming at. She helps me. You can’t work without one person who knows what you want to do.’
‘I don’t know in the least what he’s talking about,’ cried Nelly. ‘And please don’t think I put all this into his head.’
‘Of course he knows you didn’t!’ protested the painter. ‘He knows only too well you didn’t!’ he added with a profound sigh.
‘Well then,’ began Richard, feeling extremely well pleased with this queer turn of fate but prepared to get the full credit for magnanimity, ‘it appears that you want to drag me to America with you as a sort of necessary item, troublesome but inevitable, in the train of my wife?’
‘Don’t try and be sarcastic like that,’ interrupted Nelly. ‘It annoys me and it goes completely over Rob’s head.’
Richard at this removed his hand from her knee. Her words irritated him more than, at that moment, he could have guessed was possible. In his heart he roundly accused her of ill-breeding and he revenged himself on her by reverting with a sweep of his imagination to the large heroic gestures of Elise Angel.
It was one of Richard’s weaknesses to dislike beyond everything else the flick or sting or smart of a well-placed rebuke; especially if administered by a woman he cared for. His temperament had a certain equine sensitiveness to the lash of the human tongue. He himself was singularly slow of wit in these verbal encounters. Externally he kept his temper, to avoid looking a fool; internally he revenged himself out of all proportion to the affront. And he never really forgave.
‘It’s like this, Storm,’ repeated the young painter, dropping his billhook and coming nearer to the man he addressed. ‘If you and your wife don’t come with me on this American trip my work will stop dead. I shan’t do another stroke of the brush. I can’t work without her. I can’t deal with my thoughts without her. I can’t cope with existence without her. I can’t endure it without her.’
His words came out pellmell, one on the top of another. He seemed all in a moment to lose control of himself. His clenched hand quivered at his side. His voice became shrill and harsh. His lips trembled. ‘I can’t endure it without her,’ he repeated. ‘I know you don’t understand my work, but you said it was good. You know it is good. You know I shall go very far with it. If you take her away from me now it’ll be the end. It’ll finish me. I can’t stand it. I shall chuck the whole thing and just go off.’
‘But Robert dear—’ began Nelly.
He raised his hand. ‘I know all that,’ he said. ‘I used not to mind not seeing her; but she’s too much for me. I can’t bear it any more. I must see her. I must have her within reach, where I can get to her. I thought I could sail without a word. I can’t. I can’t go away. If she doesn’t go with me, if you two don’t go with me, I am done in. I’d better give up at once. Without seeing her I can’t do my work; and without my work what’s life or anything in it to me? I hate it all! So you see you must come with me, Storm.’
It gave Nelly a strange and curious feeling to hear herself spoken of as if she were not present. A chilly sense of ghostliness fell upon her and she looked at Canyot’s agitated features with a queer mixture of compassion and remoteness.
‘If you two don’t come with me,’ the young man continued, ‘it’ll just finish me off. I thought I could bear not having her — I gave her up.’ He still kept talking of Nelly in the third person. ‘I didn’t know myself. I was proud of letting her go. But I can’t do it. I’ve found that out. I can’t do it. So you must come. I only want to be somewhere near her — on the same side of the sea. But I can’t do without her. Life is short. Everything else is unimportant. I only want just to see her — I–I love her too much! It’s like that, Storm. I love her too much!’
‘Well?’ murmured Nelly looking at Richard with inscrutable eyes. ‘Well?’
Richard was simply and directly touched. Canyot’s feeling was so genuine and so deep that it swept him off his feet. It was one of those moments when he showed the best that was in him. He was awed and he was impressed; a real impulse of generosity stirred within him. He would have made the same response had there been no Elise Angel in the world. At that moment, oddly enough, he actually wished that Elise Angel was not in America; so that his response could be disinterested. The power of that passion passing like a tornado across the artist’s twisted and corrugated countenance shamed him, disarmed him, liberated him from himself.
‘Well?’ repeated Nelly.
Richard bowed over the girl’s hands as they lay in her lap and taking one of them into his own kissed it with a grandiose gesture.
Then he turned from her to Canyot and laid his hand on his shoulder.
‘Of course I’ll bring her. Of course we’ll come, Robert,’ he said. ‘I’ve always thought I ought not to settle down without seeing America, and Nelly’s never been out of England. Of course we’ll come. I like Nelly to be of use to a real artist.’
Canyot’s expression when he heard this was one of such rapturous relief that Richard had a reciprocal thrill of emotion.
The young painter blurted out some inarticulate words of gratitude and then without a glance at either of them strode off over the graves, his heavy shoulders shaken with childish crying.
‘That was nice of you, Richard,’ the girl whispered. ‘At least I think it was nice of you. But I never quite know. You are not an easy person to understand, my husband!’
‘It was a little bit nice of me, sweetheart,’ he responded. ‘But I quite sympathize with your difficulty in understanding me. I’m damned if I understand myself.’
‘I wouldn’t have let another woman come with us,’ Nelly continued, ‘certainly not that woman who wrote that letter!’
This was indeed a sharp thrust. Richard’s mind visualized that little hole under the leaves into which he had prodded Elise’s last communication. In one brief moment he was hurled down from the heights of magnanimity.
‘I don’t know that I would have agreed,’ he said, ‘if he hadn’t been what he is. But he’s a real artist and one must do what one can when it’s a question of that. You really do seem to have been an inspiration to him. Yes; his work is good. Canyot’s a genius in his way; with his mother dead, one couldn’t very well do anything else.’
‘Well! It’s nice of you. It is nice of you! I only hope I shan’t be seasick. But it’ll be fun anyhow. I shall enjoy it. Come, dear! Aren’t you going to lift me off this old wall?’