Edith Wharton - Novel 14 by A Son at the Front (v2.1) Read Free Book Online

out that she
was not paintable. She never forgot the epithet, and it loomed large in their
subsequent recriminations.
                 Adele
Anthony—it was just like her—gave him his first order, and she did prove
paintable. Campton made a success of her long crooked pink-nosed face; but she
didn’t perceive it (she had wanted something oval, with tulle, and a rose in a
tape hand), and after heroically facing the picture for six months she hid it
away in an attic, whence, a year or so before the date of the artist’s present
musings, it had been fished out as an “early Campton,” to be exhibited half a
dozen times, and have articles written about it in the leading art reviews.
                 Adele’s
picture acted as an awful warning to intending patrons, and after one or two
attempts at depicting mistrustful friends Campton refused to constrain his
muse, and no more was said of portrait-painting. But life in Paris was growing too expensive. He persuaded Julia
to try Spain , and they wandered about there for a year. She was not fault-finding,
she did not complain, but she hated travelling, she could not eat things cooked
in oil, and his pictures seemed to her to be growing more and more ugly and
unsalable.
                 Finally
they came one day to Ronda, after a trying sojourn at Cordova. In the train
Julia had moaned a little at the mosquitoes of the previous night, and at the
heat and dirt of the second-class compartment; then, always conscious of the
ill-breeding of fretfulness, she had bent her lovely head above her Tauchnitz.
And it was then that Campton, looking out of the window to avoid her fatally
familiar profile, had suddenly discovered another. It was that of a peasant
girl in front of a small whitewashed house, under a white pergola hung with
bunches of big red peppers. The house, which was close to the railway, was
propped against an orange-coloured rock, and in the glare cast up from the red
earth its walls looked as blue as snow in shadow. The girl was all blue-white
too, from her cotton skirt to the kerchief knotted turbanwise above two folds
of blue-black hair. Her round forehead and merry nose were relieved like a
bronze medallion against the wall; and she stood with her hands on her hips,
laughing at a little pig asleep under a cork-tree, who lay on his side like a
dog.
                 The
vision filled the carriage-window and then vanished; but it remained so sharply
impressed on Campton that even then he knew what was going to happen. He leaned
back with a sense of relief, and forgot everything else.
                 The
next morning he said to his wife: “There’s a little place up the line that I
want to go back and paint. You don’t mind staying here a day or two, do you?”
                 She
said she did not mind; it was what she always said; but he was somehow aware
that this was the particular grievance she had always been waiting for. He did
not care for that, or for anything but getting a seat in the diligence which
started every morning for the village nearest the white house. On the way he remembered
that he had left Julia only forty pesetas, but he did not care about that
either… He stayed a month, and when he returned to Ronda his wife had gone back
to Paris , leaving a letter to say that the matter
was in the hands of her lawyers.
                 “What
did you do it for—I mean in that particular way? For goodness knows I
understand all the rest,” Adele Anthony had once asked him, while the divorce
proceedings were going on; and he had shaken his head, conscious that he could
not explain.
                 It
was a year or two later that he met the first person who did understand: a
Russian lady who had heard the story, was curious to know him, and asked, one
day, when their friendship had progressed, to see the sketches he had brought
back for his fugue.
                 “Comme
je vous