Edith Nolan pressed her fingertips over eyes grown tired from work.
Possibly when she opened them and looked again at the broad sheet of
drawing paper on the table, she would know whether her curious urgency
of the last hour, the sense of good achievement that had driven her to
this exhaustion, had been something more than self-deception. A glance
at her wrist watch before she closed away vision had told her it was
past one in the morning. Time to quit, if she was not to arrive for the
next courtroom session hopelessly unintelligent from weariness and lack
of sleep.
She lowered her hands, looking very briefly down. The faces, hands,
shadows of the big drawing did leap astonishingly into life; but she
said half-aloud: "Not yet." She got up without another look at it and
crossed the room to stand, huddling in the blue bathrobe stiff and a
little cold, before Callista's watercolor of a pine tree on a windy
hill. She could not quite see Callista's vision, or not as much of it as
she wished; she resisted a while longer the pull of what waited for her
back at the drawing table. _It may be_, she thought. _This once I just
may have done it._
In the past, no work of her own had ever pleased Edith Nolan enough to
give her a complete sense of belonging by natural right in that small
company who can now and then draw from the confusion of the world's raw
material a new synthesis, a work of disciplined imagination worthy to
last a while. She knew the company, in books, music, painting; and in at
least one other person: Callista, who belonged there so inevitably that
the girl had probably never even wondered whether she had a "right" to
call herself an artist. In need of hard work and long study, yes, but
Callista knew it, and while she had struggled and learned and enjoyed
the struggle, she had still been drawing and painting as naturally as a
robin sings in the morning.
Sam Grainger had considered that he did not belong. "I'm a performer,"
he said once, "so I may get well-to-do some day; and a performer, as of
course you've noticed, Red-Top, can be an awful nice guy, _but_ ... but
God damn it, I can't compose, and I have a most un-American impulse to
get down and lick the boots of anyone who can."
She remembered saying: "Why, you're creative." Sam had just grunted,
inarticulately annoyed. In those days Edith had not been fully aware of
the dismal condition rapidly overtaking that once honorable word, and
Sam had been surprisingly insensitive to words and the rich changeable
life of words, as if he could hear only one kind of music, or believed
other kinds irrelevant. Nowadays Edith's skin crawled when the corpse of
the word "creative" was being kicked around. It gave off a squashy
noise; was almost as offensively decayed as the corpse of "heritage."
Today everything's creative, including beauty culture, business letters,
and the application of new superlatives to old laxatives. There was,
Edith had heard, an operation known as "creative selling." We wait
perhaps, she thought, for the day when the market will offer a creative
toilet as an aid to positive thinking.
Reluctant, not quite frightened, Edith returned to the drawing table and
looked down at twelve pen-and-ink faces. They returned the gaze, with
intensity, with the force, savor, complexity of an authentic life that
no exploration could ever exhaust. _But--my hand--My hand?_
Certainly no other. Technique of course; that much, after long effort of
years, Edith could take for granted. But this--wasn't it beyond
technique?
For the first time that evening--it had been nowhere near her while she
was deep in work--Edith recalled Daumier's "The Jury." She took down the
volume of his work, not trusting memory. After the comparison she could
say _No_: a round, unworried, satisfying _No_. This curious thing of her
own, this hating-fearing-loving-pitying distillation of the jury in
_People vs. Blake_, owed no more to Daumier (or to Callista) than any
work should honestly owe to whatever the artist has encountered in the
past. Conception, development, fulfillment--unmistakably a Nolan
original. Perhaps the first.
The drawing frightened her then in a different way, grown temporarily
larger than her mind's resistance. These people were all looking at her,
as the twelve faces of flesh and blood had seemed to for a moment in the
afternoon, when someone in the row behind her had a loud coughing spell.
They looked at her now, bloated Hoag and ancient Emerson Lake and
cloth-brained Emma Beales and kindly Helen Butler, and by a trick of her
exhausted mind they made her no longer Edith Nolan but a woman at the
defense table, whose life would end or begin afresh somehow according to
the will of those twelve imperfect beings. Who meant well; who wanted to
"do the right thing," whatever that was; who (except maybe Hoag)
wouldn't dream of turpentining a dog or pulling the wings off flies or
starving a child.
She forced herself out of that illusion. Well, the illusion was at least
fair evidence of power in the work. She warned herself: _Discount
everything: tired; the illusion is strong because of personal
involvement in People vs. Blake; by morning the pen-and-ink may be
ashes._ But leaving it, turning out the light, Edith almost knew that it
would not.
And she marveled, with something like the wonder of a child to whom all
discovery is fresh and nothing worn down to the stale and bromidic, at
the stubborn power of life to draw out of mold and decay an oak tree or
a flower; out of confusion or sorrow a work of enduring good.
5
It is indeed some Excuse to be mad with the greater Part of
Mankind.