I
Perry Cunningham and I had been friends for years. I was older than he,
and I had taught him in his senior year at college. After that we had
traveled abroad, frugally, as befitted our means. The one quarrel I had
with fate was that Perry was poor. Money would have given him the
background that belonged to him--he was a princely chap, with a
high-held head. He had Southern blood in his veins, which accounted
perhaps for an almost old-fashioned charm of manner, as if he carried on
a gentlemanly tradition.
We went through the art galleries together. There could have been
nothing better than those days with him--the Louvre, the Uffizi, the
Pitti Palace. Perry's search for beauty was almost breathless. We swept
from Filippo Lippi to Botticelli and Bellini, then on to Ghirlandajo,
Guido Reni, Correggio, Del Sarto--the incomparable Leonardo.
"If I had lived then," Perry would say, glowing, "in Florence or in
Venice!"
And I, smiling at his enthusiasm, had a vision of him among those golden
painters, his own young beauty enhanced by robes of clear color, his
thirst for loveliness appeased by the sumptuous settings of that age of
romance.
Then when the great moderns confronted us--Sorolla and the rest--Perry
complained, "Why did I study law, Roger, when I might be doing things
like this?"
"It is not too late," I told him.
I felt that he must not be curbed, that his impassioned interest might
blossom and bloom into genius if it were given a proper outlet.
So it came about that he decided to paint. He would stay in Paris a year
or two in a studio, and test his talent.
But his people would not hear of it. There had been lawyers in his
family for generations. Since the Civil War they had followed more or
less successful careers. Perry's own father had made no money, but
Perry's mother was obsessed by the idea that the fortunes of the family
were bound up in her son's continuance of his father's practice.
So Perry went home and opened an office. His heart was not in it, but he
made enough to live on, and at last he made money enough to marry a
wife. He would have married her whether he had enough to live on or not.
She was an artist, and she was twenty when Perry met her. We had been
spending a month in Maine, on an island as charming as it was cheap.
Rosalie was there with a great-aunt and uncle. She was painting the sea
on the day that Perry first saw her, and she wore a jade-green smock.
Her hair was red, drawn back rather tightly from her forehead, but
breaking into waves over her ears. With the red of her cheeks and the
red of her lips she had something of the look of Lorenzo Lotto's lovely
ladies, except for a certain sharp slenderness, a slenderness which
came, I was to learn later, from an utter indifference to the claims of
appetite. She was one of those who sell bread to buy hyacinths.
I speak of this here because Rosalie's almost ascetic indifference to
material matters, in direct contrast to Perry's vivid enjoyment of the
good things of life, came to have a tragic significance in later days.
Perry loved a warm hearth in winter, a cool porch in summer. He had the
Southerner's epicurean appreciation of the fine art of feasting. The
groaning board had been his inheritance from a rollicking, rackety set
of English ancestors, to whom dining was a rather splendid ceremony. On
his mother's table had been fish and game from Chesapeake, fruits and
vegetables in season and out--roast lamb when prices soared high in the
spring, strawberries as soon as they came up from Florida. There had
always been money for these in the Cunningham exchequer, when there had
been money for nothing else.
Rosalie, on the other hand, ate an orange in the morning, a square of
toast at noon, a chop and perhaps a salad for dinner. One felt that she
might have fared equally well on dew and nectar. She had absolutely no
interest in what was set before her, and after she married Perry this
attitude of mind remained unchanged.
She was a wretched cook, and made no effort to acquire expertness. She
and Perry lived in a small but well-built bungalow some miles out from
town, and they could not afford a maid. When I dined with them I made up
afterward for the deficiencies of their menu by a square meal at the
club. There was no chance for Perry to make up, and I wondered as the
years went on how he stood it.
He seemed to stand it rather well, except that in time he came to have
that same sharpened look of delicacy which added a spiritual note to
Rosalie's rich bloom. He always lighted up when he spoke of his wife,
and he was always urging me to come and see them. I must admit that
except for the meals I liked to go. Rosalie's success at painting had
been negligible, but her love of beauty was expressed in the atmosphere
she gave to her little home; she had achieved rather triumphant results
in backgrounds and in furnishing.
I remember one spring twilight. I was out for the week-end, and we dined
late. The little house was on a hill, and with the French windows wide
open we seemed to hang above an abyss of purple sky, cut by a thin
crescent. White candles lighted the table, and there were white lilacs.
There was a silver band about Rosalie's red hair.
There was not much to eat, and Perry apologized, "Rose hates to fuss
with food in hot weather."
Rosalie, as mysterious in that light as the young moon, smiled dreamily.
"Why should one think about such things--when there is so much else in
the world?"
Perry removed the plates and made the coffee. Rosalie did not drink
coffee. She wandered out into the garden, and came back with three
violets, which she kissed and stuck in Perry's coat.
The next morning when I came down Rosalie was cutting bread for toast.
She was always exquisitely neat, and in her white linen and in her
white-tiled kitchen she seemed indubitably domestic. I was hungry and
had hopes of her efforts.
"Peer is setting the table", she told me.
She always called him "Peer". She had her own way of finding names for
people. I was never "Roger", but "Jim Crow". When questioned as to her
reason for the appellation she decided vaguely that it might be some
connection of ideas--dances--Sir Roger de Coverley--and didn't somebody
"dance Jim Crow"?
"You don't mind, do you?" she had asked, and I had replied that I did
not.
I did not confess how much I liked it. I had always been treated in a
distinctly distant and dignified fashion by my family and friends, so
that Rosalie's easy assumption of intimacy was delightful.
Well, I went out on the porch and left Rosalie to her culinary devices.
I found the morning paper, and fifteen minutes later there came up
across the lawn a radiant figure.
Rosalie, hearing the garden call, had chucked responsibility--and her
arms were full of daffodils!
We had burned toast for breakfast! Rosalie had forgotten it and Perry
had not rescued it until it was well charred. There was no bread to make
more, so we had to eat it.
For the rest we had coffee and fruit. It was an expensive season for
eggs, and Rosalie had her eye on a bit of old brocade which was to light
a corner of her studio. She breakfasted contentedly on grapefruit, but
Perry was rather silent, and I saw for the first time a shadow on his
countenance. I wondered if for the moment his mind had wandered to the
past, and to his mother's table, with Sunday waffles, omelet, broiled
bacon. Yet--there had been no bits of gay brocade to light the
mid-Victorian dullness of his mother's dining-room, no daffodils on a
radiant morning, no white lilacs on a purple twilight, no slender
goddess, mysterious as the moon.
It was in the middle of the following winter that I began to realize
that Perry was not well. He had come home on a snowy night, tired and
chilled to the bone. He was late and Rosalie had kept dinner waiting for
him. It was a rather sorry affair when it was served. Perry pushed his
chair back and did not eat. I had as little appetite for it as he, but I
did my best. I had arrived on an earlier train, with some old prints
that I wanted to show him. Rosalie and I looked at them after dinner,
but Perry crouched over the fire and coughed at intervals.
At last I couldn't stand it any longer.
"He needs some hot milk, a foot bath, and to be tucked up in bed."