Katherine Keenum (37 page)

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

Pont Aven Again

W
hen it was time to leave for Pont Aven in August, Edward took Jeanette and Effie to the Montparnasse train station, where they met Amy and Louise Steadman, who had been enlisted to replace Emily at the Gernagans’ farm.

While the others took their seats, Jeanette lingered on the platform with Edward. Station noises hardly made ideal conditions for conversation, but what she said about stopping at Vitré didn’t matter anyway. I’m going to miss you, she thought, almost as if it were a revelation. Their train’s whistle blew loud and shrill. “I guess it’s really time,” she said, but still did not move. The train gave a little preliminary lurch.

Edward hastily took her elbow to assist her up. “Jeanette!” He spoke in an urgent voice so low that no one inside the compartment could hear him. She half turned to look back. He could not declare himself there, not on an open platform, not in so many words—or perhaps only in the one:
Jeanette
.

Smoothly, slowly, the train began to move in earnest. “Till the end of the month?” she said, hastily. He nodded as he closed the door behind her, acquiescing—to what, he was not entirely sure; he hoped to everything.

For the first hour, Jeanette was so dazed that she could only pretend to follow what the others were saying and doing. Time and again throughout the day, she slipped into staring out the window, basking in those last few minutes on the platform, yet feeling a little afraid. Not yet, not yet, not yet, clacked a part of her mind, as insistently as the rails under the train.

*   *   *

On the following evening, just as the year before, it was well after dark when the diligence from Quimperlé rattled down Toullifo Hill into Pont Aven. When it came to a stop outside the Hôtel des Voyageurs, Mlle. Julia stood in the doorway to invite travelers inside to supper. On the way into the common room, Amy stopped beside a table where a pair of chess players was being watched by a third.

“Rag-Tag, Bobtail! Well, we are home, aren’t we,” she said. “Where’s Post?”

“Ah, Miss Richardson, good evening. Long, sad story,” said Ragland, shuffling to his feet.

“Not that long if you leave out the details unfit for ladies’ ears,” said his opponent.

“He’d been drinking, you see,” said Nagg, from the sideline.

“We know that part,” said Amy.

“You only think you do,” said Ragland, who resumed his seat at the chess board. “I trust you never saw him in extremity.”

“Lying in his own mess, choking on vomit,” muttered Cousin Effie.

“Good lord, you did see him!” exclaimed Ragland, trying to get a better view of Miss Pendergrast in the semidarkness.

“Miss Pendergrast is a stalwart at charitable institutions for the deserving poor, who tend to be surrounded by their undeserving relations,” explained Amy. “She has seen everything. I take it that Post sank to some new level of degradation, thereby enabling himself to rise to new heights of folly?”

“He took up a saber we had lying around the place one night,” said Ragland.

“Only a prop, you understand,” said Nagg, “from the Omnium Gatherum.”

“He slashed his Salon painting to ribbons.”

Jeanette imagined the sickle moon and oncoming waves fluttering on canvas tatters. She felt sick.

“He turned up later in Concarneau, with only a knife. Got in a fight with some Russian sailors. If only he’d stayed close to home, it might have been local fishermen and then everything would have turned out differently. Everybody around here knew him.”

“They’d have soaked his head in a bucket,” said the other chess player.

“But these
frics
—they beat him unconscious. Broke three ribs, his nose, and his cheek. Knocked out some teeth. The worst of it was they took out an eye.”

Jeanette gasped.

“We have something for you, Miss Palmer,” said Ragland. “Post said he thought you might come through Pont Aven again some day.”

“Where is he now?” demanded Amy.

“Ah, this really is the worst part,” said Ragland. “The gendarmes took him to a surgery. When the shreds of his shirt were peeled back, they found a piece of paper pinned inside:
In case of my demise, notify Elmo T. Post at such and such an address in Rochester, New York. Recompense guaranteed.
Or words to that effect. The authorities didn’t wait for him to peg out or wake up—they just sent off a telegram. Elmo T. wired back he was on his way.”

“Was it his father?” asked Jeanette.

Ragland shook his head. “Mincing bookkeeper of a brother in a pince-nez. I never saw a man with such prissy little hands. He really deserved squashing.”

“A human beetle,” agreed Nagg, “insectival.”

“So he’s gone for good,” said Jeanette. “Poor Mr. Post.”

“You will come by, won’t you, Miss Palmer?”

She was not sure she wanted to. “Of course,” she said.

*   *   *

On the first full day of work, Jeanette headed up into the Gernagans’ orchard for her rendezvous with the Belle d’Eté. She knew at once she would keep her vow to paint its lichen-splotched trunk and bent limbs. From a higher ledge, she looked out. Oh, how she wished Edward could see this! Before her lay her major composition for the month. The orchard dropped to the farmhouse and gardens on the left—small-scale, hard-won, and human. Beyond and all around them spread untamed land, sea, and sky. Pewter, olive, amber, and silver. To bring the farm into focus, touches of yellow ochre and vermilion, while high above shone the luminous, cloud-veiled orb of the sun.

But first the Belle d’Eté. With a sense of ritual dedication, she set up a secondhand portable easel and stool beside the tree, placing them where she could peer through a gap among branches to its knobby trunk and major limbs. She worked steadily, the forefront of her mind at one with her hand, the back of her mind elsewhere
(till the end of the month; Jeanette)
. Two hours, two and a half; her hand cramped. A tree demanded no break, but she did. Arching her back, she spread her arms wide and wriggled her fingers.

To stretch her legs, she wandered back up onto the ledge. She still saw her big project. Reason and experience—not to mention the difficulties of perspective—warned that accomplishment would fall short of ambition, but she didn’t care. To draw and to paint was the inevitable, the natural extension of seeing; and all around her was country that endured. She would paint it so that Edward could see it, and it would be hers for life.

*   *   *

Jeanette held to her program for three days, until a steady rain kept them all inside. On Sunday, they decided that the sight of the devout attending church in Breton attire, followed by a hot lunch at the Voyageurs amid company, was worth a soaking. Not surprisingly, half the painters in Pont Aven had decided the same thing, at least about the midday meal. Jeanette listened happily to arguments about the renderings of shadows with color and the old-fashioned use of bitumen until the lunch party began to break up. She slid down their bench to sit next to Ragland. “You said you had something for me from Mr. Post.”

“So we do,” said Ragland.

As before, in the fishy, smoky, turpentine-laden atmosphere of the converted warehouse, Ragland’s cot and corner were shipshape, Nagg’s side a mess. The Omnium Gatherum was more cluttered than ever by fishing gear, costumes, and the fateful saber. Yet the place was utterly different without Charlie Post’s giant picture. “Here,” said Ragland. From its place against the wall, he picked up a small, rectangular parcel wrapped in brown paper, longer than it was wide.

“It isn’t . . .” Jeanette could feel a wooden support through the paper and had a premonition.

“Open it,” he said.

On top of a canvas lay a note scratched out in a small, eccentric hand:
Beata, You saw the gleam. I no longer can. C.P.

Amy had been watching over Jeanette’s shoulder. “Oh, gawd, Post!” she exclaimed, almost angrily. “Why did you do this to yourself!”

The painting was Charlie Post’s first
esquisse
of a long, low wave tumbling toward the viewer at dusk with the gleam of a sickle moon vibrant and distant on the horizon. “He should have kept this,” said Jeanette, with a catch in her throat.

“Lucky it survived at all,” said Ragland. “When the rage was on him that night, he kicked and slashed, left and right.”

“Does anything else survive?”

“Odds and ends,” said Nagg.

“Mabel Reade has offered to buy one,” said Ragland. “We thought if we could sell some of the others, just among friends, we might be able to raise a few francs to send him.”

“Beer money,” said Nagg.

“Oh, no, no, no, not that,” said Effie, shaking her head emphatically. “No, no. He must be kept from drink at all cost.”

“Elmo T. no doubt shares your opinion, ma’am,” said Ragland. “He’ll hold the purse strings tight. Call it pin money—but any way you look at it, a man must have a few bits in his pocket if he wants to call his soul his own.”

“I ought to pay—” began Jeanette, ignoring Effie’s disapproval.

“No,” said Ragland, gently. “This was a gift. You are his muse.”

“But I can’t be! I’ve hardy ever seen him. I do love this picture, but—”

“You told him so last year.”

“Did him a world of good,” said Nagg. “Bucked him up.”

“For a while,” said Ragland.

“I’ll hang it in my studio, always,” said Jeanette, studying the picture held down at arm’s length. “It’s very beautiful.” She looked up at everyone, fiercely. “And he did see something.”

“For a while,” repeated Ragland. “More than most of us.”

*   *   *

“Post followed the gleam,” said Miss Reade, when they stopped in to show the sisters the picture. “Carolus sees it, too.”

Derision sprang into Miss Steadman’s face. Amy said quickly, “It was very kind of you to offer to buy one of Post’s daubs.”

“Sister and I have been thinking,” chimed in Miss Isobel, just as quickly, with a nervous glance at Miss Reade. “We believe a little charity sale with contributions from the rest of the colony might be in order at the end of August.”

Miss Reade quit scowling at Miss Steadman and said, “Post’s picture might bring him more if we auctioned it.”

“Or perhaps a sort of artistic bring-and-buy,” continued Miss Isobel. “Everybody contributing a drawing or watercolor; everybody going home with someone else’s work as a souvenir—wouldn’t it be delightful?”

All doubts about the wisdom of sending beer money to Charlie Post vanished from Cousin Effie’s mind. “A show,” she said, “and stalls! A rummage sale, not just artwork—props, old clothes, bric-a-brac. And picnics in baskets.”

“Penders, you’ve hit it! A charity fête for the end of the month!” exclaimed Miss Isobel. “We could have recitations and music and lovely crêpe paper streamers.”

“Sack races,” muttered Jeanette, “skits.”

“Hush, they’ll hear you and do them, too,” Amy muttered back.

“Only three weeks left,” said Miss Isobel, rubbing her hands. “Oh, Penders, what a lot of work you and I have to do! The
artists
mustn’t be interrupted, but
we
shall make a great success.”

Jeanette and Amy and Miss Steadman left them already deep in plans.

*   *   *

Back at the farm, Jeanette hung the little unframed canvas in a place of honor over the mantel. “There. Diana’s sickle moon. A symbol of pure inspiration.”

“Jeanette is given to enthusiasms,” explained Amy. “We all had to paint cheeses last fall, when she was in her round, blond phase; now she’s on to weirdly cropped compositions of scenes out windows. And when it comes to men, well! I’m afraid that first it was Robbie Dolson.”

“A pity about your Peregrine Partout,” said Miss Steadman, settling back comfortably. “It was quite good.”

“And then Charlie Post, of all sorry choices.”

“He chose me. I did not choose him.”

“You spoke kindly to him, which was enough to sway a man of Post’s weak character.” Then remembering how distressed Jeanette had been by the scene at the Salon, Amy softened. “You know, I think you really did touch him.”

Jeanette shook her head. “I’m a figment of his imagination.”

“Beata is,” said Amy. “Muses generally are.” For a moment Jeanette thought she had dropped her banter, but then Amy resumed. “From Post, it was a decided step up to join the acolytes of Carolus-Duran, but your soft heart is now safe even from him.”

Jeanette gave Amy a warning look.

“You protest? But why? Is it not love, true love, this time?”

Before Jeanette could answer, Miss Steadman chuckled. “You can’t stand on a platform mooning—if that’s the word I want in this context—and expect no one to notice.”

“Oh, shut up, both of you.”

“Well,” said Amy, turning icy, “it’s not as if you weren’t going to have to make up your mind one of these days about where
you
see the gleam—in Dr. Edward Murer or in your work.”

“I’ve never heard that artists can’t fall in love,” said Jeanette, who had been wrestling with the question but was not ready to admit it. “If anything, aren’t we accused of being too free?”

“Certainly, the men are, to the ruin of many a model,” said Amy. “But we’re not talking about amorous adventure, are we? With Robbie Dolson, it couldn’t have been anything else, and I’ll willingly drop Post and Carolus-Duran. But when it comes to a serious affair of the heart, let me tell you it does involve choice. Look at the wives of artists! The very men who should know better quickly demote their ladies to helpmeet and secondary status. You don’t see Pauline Carolus-Duran or Marie Bracquemond’s work any more, do you, and they were both quite good.”