Mrs. Calvin and Mrs. Kildrick stood on opposite sides of a back-yard
fence. Around them the romping improbabilities of early spring were
dispersed amidst the sour reality of suburban houses. Pale green
surrounded the small, square abodes, like an impish irrelevance. Each
house carried a shade of dull green, brown and red, and these shades
fitted into each other and made a meekly repressed story. Cinder
side-walks stretched in front of the houses--remorsefully dry remains
of fire, sacrificing themselves to occasional feet. The entire scene
was an unconscious reflection of the minds of Mrs. Calvin and Mrs.
Kildrick, standing on opposite sides of a back-yard fence.
These women held an unblossoming stoutness, like buds that had swollen
enormously but failed to open. Their gray muslin wrappers were too
undistinguished to be shrouds and sepulchrally flirted with red
ruffles. Mrs. Calvin had an implacably round face and it reminded one
of a merchant scolding an infant. Mrs. Kildrick’s face was round, but
softer, like that of a frustrated milk-maid.
“You ought to see her room,” said Mrs. Kildrick. “It looks like a
drunkard’s confession, as my husband says, the funniest clay figgers
and paintins you ever saw.”
“I couldn’t believe it when you told me,” said Mrs. Calvin, “the poor
dear looks so-o respectable--what can be ailing her?”
“She calls it her a-art,” said Mrs. Kildrick. “Well, as my husband does
say, we should pity those whose minds are a little bit cracked!”
The ladies continued to adulterate the wanness of their doubts and the
sunlight continued its blunt rummaging way among the rubbish-cans and
fences. The afternoon jovially began to change its glowing costume for
a pretended death scene, studying and lingering over gray effects. Just
as its melancholy was heaving toward a climax Helma Solbert strode up
the cinder walk leading to Mrs. Kildrick’s abode.
She was a woman of thirty with a body whose dying youth amply derided
middle-age. Her ovally impertinent face spoke to the first warnings of
dissolution and told them that their coming had been ill-advised. Weary
but tenaciously merry, her gray eyes were close to those of one who
has made the dagger in his side a cajoling saint. Her little nose was
a straight invitation to her widely ripe lips and they turned upward
as if to reach it. She wore a blue serge suit that was an incongruous
commonplace but did not quite succeed in effacing her. Round and black,
her small hat rested lightly upon her brown and abundant hair, like an
inconspicuous accident. She entered her room, abandoned her hat and
coat, and measured herself in a mirror as though encouraging a stranger
to play with his burden. Then a smile of delighted futility plucked
at her lips and she closed her eyes to avoid robbing the stranger of
his forlornly puzzling charm. With her eyes still closed she walked to
a couch and stretched out upon it, and everything vanished from her
face except its flesh. Framed canvases hung upon the yellow plaster
walls of the room and each frame had a shape that obviously failed
to harmonize with the painting it enclosed. Unconscious of the stiff
challenges holding them, the canvases stood in the fading afternoon
light, like a disconnected fable. One above the couch represented a
small red apple split by an enormous dark green hatchet. The hatchet
had driven one of its points into a wooden table and slanted steeply
upward, its slender handle rising to an upper corner of the painting.
Two little hemispheres of red and white apple cowered on each side
of the hatchet’s blade. The visible, level top of the table was dark
brown and terminated against a feebly violet background. The following
sentimental words were painted in black letters high upon the violet.
“The hatchet struck at weak beauty, but--”
The canvas was enclosed by a round frame painted in a shade of apple
red. Each canvas in the room held the first line of a poem that was
completed by the colored forms of the painting or a last line preceded
by visual symbols. With the air of a fanatic whose blood had tightened
into loops of fire that cast their sheen upon his voice, Helma would
say to rare visitors viewing her paintings:
“By blending into one, art, literature and painting can lose their
deficiencies and gain perfection. I am merely experimenting with the
crude promise of this future union.”
On a canvas at the opposite side of the room a huge complexly broken
arrow emerged from a pale red sky. The black arrow pieces were dotted
with tiny yellow, indigo and pink birds. Dark red lips, each twisted to
a different expression, stood in the corners of the canvas. Extending
down the left side of the painting the following line was written in
black against a strip of bare canvas.
“Thus I spoke one afternoon, because--”
Helma Solbert rose from her couch, lit a candle and stood before the
arrow-framed painting, gazing at it with a pierced and subtly colorless
face. Then she turned on an electric light and its artificial stare,
in an instant, brought her an obliterating self-consciousness. With
the bearing of one who impudently walks to a gruesome sacrifice she
disappeared behind a lavender screen in a corner of the room and fried
her evening meal. When she emerged from the screen her face had once
more perfected its defensive impertinence. Even in her sleep some hours
later her features retained the blurred suspicion of a smile that
stayed like a lurking sentinel.
The following morning she was too ill to rise and Mrs. Kildrick
summoned a doctor. He was a portly man with a steeply florid face and
a dominating beard that had the color of wet sand. While he was in the
midst of examining his patient she rose to a sitting posture and stared
at him.
“You’re what I tried to hide from; why have you come to plague me?” she
said, loudly.