"Interesting," said the Princess thoughtfully. "Make it actually speak, and I"ll permit you to talk with me again about these matters." So saying, giving him a mysterious smile-perhaps mocking, perhaps affectionate; in the frail moonlight and the glow of the palace not even a wizard could have decided for sure-she turned from him, gave a little tug at the leashes, and walked away toward the arched palace door with her greyhounds.
"Make it actually speak!" thought the artist, his heart beating wildly. It was hopeless, of course. Though a man had ten times the talent of poor Vlemk, no amount of care and skill could make a painting so true to its original that it could speak. If he couldn"t make a painting so perfect that it could speak the Princess would never again talk to him. And if he couldn"t find some way to talk further with the Princess-bask in that beauty that had struck him like an arrow in the chest this morning-how was he to paint? He was boxed in for certain, this time!
On the other hand, he thought, walking more rapidly down the hill toward the city, perhaps it was possible. It was, after all, an effect he"d never before attempted. The idea grew on him, and when he reached the city limits he was running full tilt, his long white artist"s frock flying out behind him, his hat mashed down on his head under one long hand.
"Ah, he"s himself again," said the regulars at the tavern as Vlemk ran by. The four-the barmaid and the three who carried arms-said nothing.
He ran full tilt, as if devils were chasing him, until he came to his house, paused only long enough to jerk open his door and slam it shut behind him, then ran full tilt up the stairs to his studio in the attic, overlooking the city. He sorted through his boxes, took the best he had on hand, and began on his project that same night.
2.
When Vlemk had worked for six weeks without sleeping, he began to get morbid, unsettling ideas. Sometimes it crossed his mind that what the Princess had said to him might be nothing but a grim, unfeeling joke, that she had no intention whatsoever of marrying him, indeed, that her purpose in giving him the seemingly impossible task was simply to make sure that he never again spoke to her. As an artist, he had difficulty believing such things, for if one gives in to the notion that visions of extraordinary beauty are mere illusion, one might as well cut off one"s hands and sit on street-corners and beg. With all the strength of his carefully nourished and trained imagination he cast back in his mind to that morning when he"d seen her in the carriage, peeking out through the curtains, and with all his dexterity and technical trickery he labored to set down that vision in paint. He could not doubt the intensity of the emotion that had surged in him or the accuracy of the vision he set down line by line. Every flicker of light in her pale blue eyes was precisely correct; the turn of the cheek, the tilt of the nose, the seven stray hairs on her forehead-all, insofar as they were finished, were indisputable.
Nevertheless, he was bedeviled by misgivings. It occurred to him for instance that the paint was controlling him, creating not an image of the Princess but something new, a creature never before seen under the sun, the painting growing like a plant under his brushes, faithful to the form of its parent but unique, evolving to singularity by sure, ancient laws-the white of the earlobe calling to the white in the lady"s eyes and demanding from the painter infinitesimal changes not true to the actual lady but true, instead, to the natural requirements of the picture on the box. It alarmed him to discover that the throat was taking on, slowly but inexorably, a greenish tint very rare if not unheard of in human beings. "Yet why am I so fretful?" he rebuked himself. "Is it not true that the emotion I feel when I look at the painting is precisely the emotion I felt when I looked at the lady, except for certain small mistakes which can easily be fixed, such as the c.o.c.k of the nostril and the false glint of the eyelid?" He stood back and looked at the painting to see if it was true. It was. "Then all is still well," he said, moving the brush again, his left eye closed; "let the throat be green as gra.s.s, so long as it feels right!"
But that was the least of his misgivings. It struck him that the feeling that had surged in him that morning was mere chemistry, nothing more. "I"d drunk a good deal the night before," he said aloud, bending over his table, mixing paints. "Just as now if I straighten up suddenly, tired as I am and tending toward dizziness, the room will strike me differently than it would if I rose slowly, so that morning-dehydrated, soaked to the bone with dew and gutter wash-I must undoubtedly have seen what I would not have seen at some other time, in some other physiological condition. Is it possible that I"m painting not the Princess but, say, my own uric-acid level? my blood pressure?" The question vexed him, but even this misgiving he was able to quiet, to some extent, with the thought-which burst out of him when he was standing at the window looking down at the old crooked streets of the city-"Very well, my condition was abnormal that morning; but the abnormality was one very common among mortals-or anyway human beings-so that the vision can hardly be called freakish or divorced from reality." If the answer was not as comforting as the painter of boxes might have liked, it was nevertheless an answer, and Vlemk for a time went on painting.
But the greatest misgiving of all was this: the character of the face taking shape on the box was not altogether admirable. One saw faint but unmistakable hints of cruelty, vanity, and stinginess. He did his best, as any honest artist would have done, to undo them or overcome them, but the faults seemed ineradicable; they went, literally, to the bone. Vlemk stood patting his beard, pondering. It was not the first time he"d had this experience. Indeed, more often than not when he"d set out to capture some image which had given him pleasure, he"d found as he painted that the image, under scrutiny, proved slightly less appealing than he"d imagined. This had not much troubled him on those earlier occasions, because his purpose then had been simply to paint a pretty box. As a public minister un.o.btrusively rephrases the remarks of an irate king, fixing up the grammar, dropping out the swear words, here and there inserting a line or two that the people will perhaps find more memorable, so Vlemk had offhandedly edited Nature, straightening crooked stems, giving life to drooping leaves, suppressing all traces of dog manure. In the project at hand, that was, of course, impossible. He began to perceive clearly the fact that he"d known all along but had never quite confronted: that Beauty is an artist"s vain dream; it has, except in works of art, no vitality, no body.
Abruptly, Vlemk found himself profoundly depressed. Slowly, meticulously, as if going through empty motions, he cleaned his brushes and carefully capped his paints, saw to it that his oils and thinners were exactly as they should be, removed his painter"s frock and hung it on its hook, then poked his arms into his overcoat, stepped out of the studio, and locked the door behind him.
At the tavern, things were just beginning to hum. The regulars were singing and arguing politics; the sullen, fat barmaid was pretending to smile in the arms of an old drunken seaman. Old Tom was, as usual, asleep under the stove.
"Ha!" cried one of the regulars as Vlemk came through the door, "it"s Vlemk the box-painter!"
Instantly, everyone smiled, delighted, for it was a long time since they"d seen him. "Vlemk!" they shouted, "where have you been? Pull up a chair!"
Soon poor Vlemk was as drunk as he"d ever been in all his days, riding on a horse with a milk wagon behind it-where he"d gotten the horse he had no idea-milk bottles crashing on the cobblestone streets at every jolt or sudden turn, bringing cats from every doorway; trees careening by, looking drunker than he was; people on the sidewalks going flat against the walls at his approach. Then, sometime later, he had no idea how long, though he dimly remembered sitting in some woman"s apartment, staring with drunken fixity at the birthmark on her throat, he found himself chatting with an old, bony monk in a graveyard. They were sharing a bottle of some fennel-flavored drink.
"Ah yes," said the monk, "Beauty is momentary in the mind, as the poet saith." He handed Vlemk the bottle. After a moment he continued, "I"ll tell you how I got into this business in the first place. It had to do with women."
Vlemk tipped up the bottle and thoughtfully drank. The graves all around him tilted precariously then righted themselves.
"By the highest standards I am able to imagine, I have never known a beautiful woman," said the monk, "or even a good woman, or even a relatively good mother." He sighed and tapped the tips of his fingers together. "It occurred to me early on that since we can conceive of a beautiful woman, or a good woman, or even a relatively good mother, though we find none in Nature-always with the exception of Our Saviour"s Mother-" He cleared his throat as if embarra.s.sed, and a quaver came into his voice as he continued, "It occurred to me early on that Nature is not worthy of our attention. Even the best we mortals can conceive, if we believe old books, is but a feeble reflection or ethereal vibration of the beauty G.o.d sits in the midst of, millennium to millennium."
Whatever more he had to say, Vlemk did not hear; he was fast asleep.
Sometime much later, as the sun was rising, Vlemk found himself standing at the door of his house, studying the doorway with tortuous attention, noting every stipple on the wall, every crack in the wood, making sure it was indeed his own doorway. He had never examined it quite so carefully before, which was perhaps the reason that, the more he looked, the more uncertain he was that the doorway was his own. What he did know, with certainty, was that the doorway was extremely interesting, as these things go. He ran his numb fingertips over the stone and cement and then, carefully, for fear of splinters, over the wood. He thought, for some reason, of the arched door of the palace where the Princess lived, and suddenly there welled up in him an emotion as curious as any he had ever experienced: pity for the Princess"s doorway. It was not that there was anything wrong with that grand, solemn arch. Its proportions were perfect-though more appropriate, perhaps, for a church than for a palace. Its elegance was properly understated, its craftsmanship inspired though not original-the quatrefoils, the lozenges, the mournful beaked face that formed the keystone were all done to perfection. Yet the fact remained that, like his own humble doorway, it was obscurely ridiculous. No sooner had he thought this than he was ambushed by another thought more curious than the first. If he were to be granted, like Saint John in the Bible, a vision of heaven, he would certainly feel this exact same emotion, a faintly ironic amus.e.m.e.nt mixed with pity. Let all the architects of heaven and earth work together on the project, the result would be the same: not disappointing-nothing at all like that-but touchingly ridiculous.
Say heaven"s gates were of pearl, and its streets pure gold. How could one look at those effects, however grand, without drawing back a little, with charitable amus.e.m.e.nt, thinking, "Ah, how labored! how dated!" One would recognize in a flash that the dragons on the pillars were Ming Dynasty, or Swedish, or French Imperial; that the structures were Mayan, or London 1840s, or Etruscan. Suppose to avoid this G.o.d made Himself a heaven as humble as a shepherd"s hut. "How artfully simple," one would say, as one said of a thousand such creations. Or suppose G.o.d chose in His infinite wisdom to make something brand new, unheard of on earth or on any other planet. "How new!" one would cry, and a billion billion other risen souls would cry the same, in antique harmony.
Thinking these thoughts, more pleasant than grim, for if they ruled out the ultimate value of all art, they gave mud beetles, humankind, and G.o.d a kind of oneness in futility, Vlemk opened the door and entered, hoping the house was indeed his house, still waiting for some sure sign. He found the stairway more or less where he"d expected he might find it, carefully avoided two sleeping cats, and began to climb. The bannister was as smooth as dusty, dry soap, like the bannister in his own house, which perhaps it was. When he came to the door to the studio, locked, he was virtually certain that this must be the place. He tried his key. It worked.
The first thing he saw when he entered the studio was his painting on the box, the Princess"s face. With a start he realized that the picture was essentially finished. The lines he had doubted-the lines suggesting a touch of meanness in her character-were exactly right, no question about it, not that these were the most obvious of her lines. There was kindness too; generosity, a pleasing touch of whimsy. Indeed, an ordinary observer might never have noticed these slightly less pleasant qualities, though certainly they were there.
Vlemk sighed, pleased with the world in spite of its imperfections if not because of them-and made himself a large pot of coffee. The city below his window was still fast asleep except for, here and there, a garbage cart. He thought of the bony old monk in the graveyard, the woman with the birthmark. He poured himself coffee and sat looking at the painting on the box, smiling. Though she was a princess, she was no better, it seemed to him-though he knew that it might well be the alcohol-than the barmaid, the monk, the woman with the mark on her throat. Wherever the life-force could find a place to push it pushed, he mused-into barmaids, princesses, dandelions, monks, even box-painters. He laughed.
He was conscious of looking at the world as from a mountaintop. Yet even as he thought these serene, fond thoughts an uneasiness came over him. Make the picture speak, the Princess had said, and I"ll permit you to talk with me again about these matters. It was true that she was beautiful, for all her faults, more beautiful than he"d ever before realized. If it was true that all the universe was one in its comic futility, it was also true that certain comically imperfect expressions of the universal force were for some reason preferable to others to any given life-expression, such as Vlemk. Having come to understand the Princess, both the best and the worst in her, poor Vlemk had fallen hopelessly, shamelessly in love. It was not some vague, airy vision now, it was something quite specific. He wanted to be in bed with her, talking, earnestly but in full detail, as if they had years to get everything right, about questions of Life and Art. He glanced down at his coffee. Did she perhaps prefer tea? He studied the painting. It told him nothing.
Abruptly, urgently, hardly knowing what he was doing, Vlemk uncapped his paints and seized a paintbrush. He painted furiously, with nothing in his mind, putting in without thought every beauty and deformity, working almost carelessly, almost wildly. Soon the painting was so much like the Princess that not even the Princess"s mother could have told the two apart.
The picture began to speak. "Vlemk," it said, "I put a curse upon you. You shall never speak a word until I say so!"
Vlemk"s eyes widened and he tried to protest, but already the curse was in effect; he was unable to make a sound.
3.
Now began a terrible period in the life of the box-painter. He had achieved what no artist before him had achieved, had succeeded in the most arduous love-task ever dreamt of, but the victory was ashes; he was as mute as a stone. If the picture remained stubborn, and Vlemk had no reason to doubt that it would, he would never in all his life say a word to the Princess, his love and inspiration.
He made feeble attempts at adjusting to his fate. Occasionally he"d take an order for a snuff box with pansies on it, or a quill box with a picture of the owner"s house, but his work was inaccurate and shoddy; his heart had gone out of it. People began to haggle and try to put off paying him, even local doctors and bankers who could easily have afforded to pay if they"d wished to-a sure sign, as all box-painters know, that the work was no longer giving pleasure-and as the weeks pa.s.sed business grew worse and worse; fewer and fewer people climbed the narrow stairs to his studio. That was just as well, in fact, for these days and nights Vlemk worked slowly or not at all. Even if he put in long hours, as he sometimes did in a fit of anxiety or anger turned inward, he got very little done. Ever since he"d finished his painting of the Princess, all other kinds of painting seemed beneath him, a betrayal of his gift. He found that he literally could not paint what was asked of him, and even if by dint of superhuman stubbornness he got through a given job, no one any longer praised his work, not even the stupidest oaf who came up off the street.
His fall was dramatically underscored, in Vlemk"s mind, when occasionally, to his annoyance, some customer would glance unhappily from the painted box Vlemk had just finished for him to the box, nearby, on which he"d painted his portrait of the Princess. Sometimes they would say, "It looks real enough to speak!" "It does," the painting on the box would pipe up, and the customer would stare, disbelieving. Soon there were rumors that Vlemk had made a pact with the Devil. Business got still worse and eventually dropped away entirely.
"Woe is me," poor Vlemk would think, sitting alone in his studio, pulling at his knuckles. And as if he didn"t have troubles enough these days, the painting would start speaking again, complaining and criticizing, trying to offer helpful suggestions. "How can you call yourself a painter?" it would say in its ringing little voice, a voice not much louder than an insect"s. "Where"s your dedication? Is this what your disorderly habits have at last brought you down to?"
Vlemk would put up with this-or would leave for the tavern to get away from it-though it seemed to him brutally unfair, to say the least, that the masterpiece of his life should prove his curse and his soul"s imprisonment. At times, throwing dignity to the winds, he would plead with his creation, imploring her in gesture-even going down on his knees to her-that she give him back his voice.
"No!" she would say.
"But why?" he would ask with his hands, fingers splayed wide and shaking.
"I don"t feel like it," she said. "When I feel like it I will."
"You have no mercy!" he wailed in gesture, raising his fist and sadly shaking his head.
"You tell me about mercy!" cried the box. "You created me, you monster! Do you know what it"s like, stuck here in one place like a miserable cripple, owning nothing in the world but a head and two shoulders-not even hands and feet?"
"Forgiveness is the greatest of all virtues," Vlemk would signal.
"No," the box would say. "The curse is still on!"
Vlemk would groan and say nothing more, would get up stiffly from his thick knees, and to punish the box in the only way he could, he would put on his hat and coat and descend to the street and make his way to the tavern.
Except for the inconvenience his poverty caused him, Vlemk could not honestly say he was sorry that his business as a box-painter had failed. It had never been a highly respected occupation, though people were amused by it. It had none of the prestige of gargoyle carving or stained-gla.s.s-window making or the casting of bells, and to Vlemk, who believed himself vastly superior to those other, more respected artisans, it was a relief to become, for all practical purposes, a simple citizen, no longer an artisan looked down on by artisans he despised. His inability to speak, his inability even to whimper or grunt, soon made his anonymity complete. He spent more and more of his time at the tavern, cadging the few coins he needed by holding out his hand and looking pitiful. His landlady was a problem, but only in the sense that it embarra.s.sed him to meet her. The rumor of his friendship with the Devil kept her civil and distant.
It was winter now, picturesque in Vlemk"s city if you were a rich man or only pa.s.sing through. Icicles hung glittering from the eaves of every shop; snow put pointed hats on every housetop and steeple; horses in their traces breathed out hovering ghosts of steam. He was not altogether indifferent to all this. He observed with interest how shadows changed color behind a steam cloud, how the droplets on the nostrils of a horse gleamed amber in the sunlight. But his interest was tinged, inevitably, with gloom and anger. To Vlemk and those like him, cold weather meant misery and humiliation. His clothes were thin and full of holes to let in every wandering chill. "On my wages," thought Vlemk, bitterly joking-as was more and more his habit-"I"m lucky I can still afford skin." It was a joke worth saying aloud, he thought, but the curse prohibited it, so he stared straight ahead, living inside his mind, raising his gla.s.s with the others in the tavern, now and then joining in a fistfight if the cause seemed just.
Day after day, day after day, he would walk to the tavern as soon as it opened, trudging with great, gaping holes in his shoes over ice and through slush, hunched in his frayed old overcoat, snow piling up on his hat and shoulders, his fists clenched tight in the pockets that no longer held things. "What a box!" he would think, then would quickly shake his head as if the voice were someone else"s, for he grew tired of his thoughts, now that he had no one to vent them on-tired and increasingly critical, for it had struck him, now that he must listen and not speak, that an immense amount of what was said in the world was not worth saying.
As the cold settled in and the snow deepened, fewer and fewer strangers were to be found in the streets of Vlemk"s city, and begging became increasingly difficult. Sometimes whole days went by when Vlemk couldn"t gather enough coins for a single gla.s.s of wine. On these days Vlemk walked bent double from hunger pains-not surprisingly, since wine was now almost all he lived on. If he was lucky one of his unsavory friends-the petty thieves and marauders who gathered at the tavern every evening-would give him some of their wine; but the generosity of thieves is undependable. Sometimes their mood was wrong; sometimes they"d found nothing to burgle for weeks, so that their stomachs were as empty as Vlemk"s.
"What am I to do?" his friend the ex-violinist would growl at him. "The rich have nothing but their money on their minds. They walk around the city with one hand in their billfold and the other on their pocket.w.a.tch." And with a stubborn, guilty look, he would drink his cheap wine, if he happened to have any, himself.
"Don"t look at me with those mournful eyes," his friend the ex-poet would say to him. "Solomon in all his glory was not guarded and zipped like one of these!"
The axe-murderer-or rather, would-be axe-murderer, for so far he"d never found the perfect occasion, the aesthetically perfect set of murder victims, and he was nothing if not a perfectionist-the axe-murderer would sit staring at the table with his icy stare, lost in thought-perhaps thoughts of killing Vlemk for his belt and shoelaces-and would let out not one word.
"I must do something," thought Vlemk. "Life is not fit to be endured if a man"s cold sober!"
One night as this was happening-that is, as he was sitting at his table in the tavern with his misbegotten friends, clenching his belly against the hunger pains and shivering from the cold he had no wine to drive away-he saw the fat, sullen barmaid serve wine to a customer, a stooped old man with a white goatee, and leave his table without asking him to pay. In great agitation, Vlemk poked the poet with his elbow, pointed at the old man, and splashed his hands open to show he had a question. The poet studied him, managed the translation, then turned around to look at the old man.
"Oh, him," said the poet. "She always serves him free." He returned his attention to his drinking.
Again Vlemk poked him and splashed open his hands, this time raising his eyebrows as well and jerking his head forward, showing that his question was urgent.
" "Why?" " said the poet, translating.
Eagerly, Vlemk nodded.
"The old man is a composer," said the poet. "Years ago he wrote the barmaid into an opera. She"s showing her grat.i.tude."
The axe-murderer slowly closed his eyes in disgust. So did the tomcat beside him. The ex-violinist looked depressed.
Abruptly, Vlemk stood up, said goodbye with his hands, and hurried, bent over with hunger, to his freezing-cold studio. He painted all night like a man possessed, grimly ignoring the comments of the picture of the Princess, which stood watching, objecting in its piping little voice to every stroke he set down. He painted quickly, easily, as he"d painted in the old days, perhaps because his project, however suspect, was his own idea and had a certain morbid interest. In the morning, when his new painted box-lid was finished, he went to curl up in his bed until the paint was dry. As soon as it was safe, he wrapped the painted box in a sc.r.a.p of purple satin, which he"d stolen from the laundry chute weeks ago, and carried his gift through the slanting, soft snow to the barmaid.
When he set it on the bar, nodding and smiling, pointing from the box to the barmaid and back, the barmaid for a long time just stared at him. She had never really liked him-she liked almost no one, especially men, for she"d been badly used. Sometimes (Vlemk had noticed it only as he painted) she would come in bruised and battered from a night with some sailor who had strong opinions, or some farmer who knew only about cows. Sometimes-and this too he had remembered only when his brush reminded him-her eyes would suddenly fill with tears as she was pouring a gla.s.s of ale.
But at last the barmaid accepted the present, seeing that only if she did so would she ever be rid of him, and with a look oddly childlike, fearful and embarra.s.sed, she removed the purple cloth. When the barmaid saw the painting she gave a cry like a brief yelp of sorrow and her lips began to tremble; but before you could count ten, the tremble became a smile, and she reached out with both plump hands for Vlemk"s bearded face, drew it close, and kissed it.
Vlemk was bitterly ashamed, for nothing was ever less deserved than that kiss, but he forced himself to smile, and he smiled on, grimly, as the barmaid ran from table to table with her gift, showing it to the regulars one after another, all of whom heartily praised it.
No one seemed to know except the ex-poet, the ex-violinist, and the axe-murderer that the painting on the box was a lie, a fraud, an outrage. He"d given the barmaid a childlike smile, though it was as foreign to her sullen, lumpy face as Egypt to an Eskimo. He"d given her the eyes of a twelve-year-old milk-maid, though her own eyes had nothing but the exact same brown of the irises in common. He"d reddened her chin and removed certain blemishes, turning others-for example the birthmark on her throat, which he paid close attention to only as he painted it-to beauty marks. He"d lifted her b.r.e.a.s.t.s a little, tightened her skin, raised a sagging eyebrow, increased the visibility of her dimple. In short, he"d made her beautiful, and he"d done it all so cunningly that no one but an artist could have told you where the truth left off and the falsehood began.
"Wine for the box-painter!" cried one of the regulars.
"Wine whenever he wants it!" cried the barmaid, and abruptly, as if changed into some other person, she smiled.
The troubles of Vlemk the box-painter were over-or at any rate Vlemk"s most immediate trouble. From that night on when he went to the tavern he got all he asked for, wine, beer, and whiskey until only with the help of a friend could he find his way home, and sometimes not even then. As for the barmaid, a curious thing happened. She became increasingly similar to the fraudulent painting, smiling as she served her customers, looking at strangers with the eyes of an innocent, standing so erect, in her foolish pride, that her b.r.e.a.s.t.s were almost exactly where Vlemk had painted them. The success of her after-hours business increased, so much so that Vlemk began to worry that perhaps she would get married and leave the bar, which would throw him back on begging. Sometimes to his distress, he would catch her stealing a little look at the box, which she kept prominently displayed, and once-far worse for Vlemk"s sense of honor-she gave him a look that made him think for an instant that she knew what he had done. Why not, of course. Wasn"t she also a dabbler in visions, a creator and destroyer? She said nothing, however; for which Vlemk was profoundly grateful.
With other people, Vlemk was all too often less fortunate. Because he was a mute now, people began telling him things, all of them eager to share their troublesome and shameful secrets, yet concerned that their secrets remain unknown. Women, looking into his gray, all-seeing eyes, and a.s.sured that he was voiceless, as safe as a boulder, would reveal to him such horrors of frustration and betrayal, remorse, inexpressible indignation, and despair, that his sleep would be troubled for weeks by alarming dreams. Gentle old men told him stories of rape and arson, cruelty to animals, and heaven knows what else. Vlemk the box-painter became a walking cyclopedia of the sins and transgressions of humanity-more scapegoat than priest, alas, since he was powerless to forgive or condemn.
He learned, among other things, why the poet no longer wrote poetry and the ex-violinist had turned in disgust against music.
"My audience," said the poet, lips trembling, eyebrows twitching, "has, collectively, the brains of one pig." He pursed his lips. "Perhaps that"s unfair," he said. "Perhaps I underestimate pigs." This the poet said in Vlemk"s studio, where no one could hear him but Vlemk and the painting of the Princess on the box, who said nothing. "What good is it," the poet asked, pacing up and down, flaxen hair flying, "telling my audience things they can never understand?" He puffed at his pipe, sending up angry little clouds, and continued, jabbing with his pipestem and pacing again, "We know, you and I, the sad truth of the matter: to fools, nothing can be said; to the wise, nothing need be said. Take all the wisdom of Homer and Virgil. We knew it in our hearts when we were four, you and I-No, I"m serious, my friend!" He raised his hand as if Vlemk might find his voice and object. "Who learns anything-I say, anything-from poetry? Say I describe all the agony of love with magnificent precision, showing true and false, revealing the applications for the priesthood and men engaged in business. If I"m right, exactly and precisely right, what do you say-you, the reader? "that"s right," you say, if you"re wise and not a fool. What have I taught you, then? Nothing, of course! Nothing whatsoever! I have said, with a certain elegance, exactly what you know. And what does the fool say? Why, nothing, of course. "I never really cared much for poetry," says he. "I like a man to say what he means." Poetry"s a trinket, then, a luxury and amus.e.m.e.nt, a kind of secret handshake between equals. Nothing wrong with that, of course. It"s an occupation no worse than, say, being a cook"-his lips twisted to a sneer-"a cook, ha ha, a man whose art is consumed and goes sliding back to earth!" He heaved a deep sigh. "I have therefore abandoned that paltry mistress poesy." He stood now angrily gazing down at the crooked little streets. "I have put my intelligence to more interesting uses," he said quietly, glancing past his shoulder. "I steal people"s jewelry. I kidnap people"s children. That surprises you?"
Vlemk shrugged.
"I do not kill people," said the poet; "that"s against my principles! I merely upset them a little-teach them values, like Goethe and Schiller."
Vlemk nodded. It crossed his mind that if his friend the ex-poet was really a jewel-thief and kidnapper of children he"d be a good deal better off than he was; but Vlemk let it go. Poetic license. It was true-Vlemk knew because he"d seen it-that the man picked pockets and stole eggs.
The violinist said, not many nights later, sitting in the abandoned railroad car which was his temporary home, "I have only one real ambition in life: getting even."
Vlemk splashed his hands open and lifted his eyebrows.
" "With whom?" you say," said the ex-violinist, translating. His spectacles flashed, catching a little light from the candle on the crate between them. "Audiences, composers, conductors, violin makers ... Everyone"s my enemy! Why should I make exceptions?" He pa.s.sed Vlemk the crackers and Chianti, for in small things he was generous, and the Chianti had turned. The ex-violinist sat grinding his teeth, his fingertips trembling, then continued very softly, "You have to understand how it is for us performers. Some fool writes a piece and we interpret with all our hearts, but there"s nothing to interpret, just the noises a fool makes, or if there"s something there the conductor gets the tempo wrong, or the audience dislikes it because they"ve heard on good authority that all Slavs are sentimental. At best, a string on the violin breaks." Loudly, he cracked his knuckles, all ten of them in rapid succession, so that a shudder ran down Vlemk"s back. Though the light in the railroad car was dim-too dim for Vlemk to make out what the creatures were, moving now and then in the corners-it seemed to Vlemk that as he spoke there were tears in the ex-musician"s eyes. "Thousands of dollars" worth of music lessons, thousands of hours of arpeggios and scales-for that! Very well!" He sucked in breath. "There are other uses for dexterity like mine!"
Vlemk raised his eyebrows and opened his hands.
The musician leaned forward, confidential, trembling violently. "I steal valuables from purses in coatrooms," he said. "There"s no real money in it, but the response of the crowd is tremendous."
Vlemk had long made a point of never being alone with the third of his unsavory friends, the axe-murderer, but one night in January, when he ducked into a doorway to avoid an icy rain, that too happened. The axe-murderer was a dour man with thick, hairy forearms, short, thick legs, and a neck as big around as a large man"s thigh. He had a mouth made unpleasant by small, open sores, and eyes that seemed never to fix on anything but to stare with fuming discontent in whatever direction his small, shiny head was turned. He rarely spoke, but tonight, pinned shoulder to shoulder beside Vlemk in the doorway, waiting for the rain to stop-the street full of shadows, the lamps not yet lit-the murderer abruptly, for no reason, broke his rule. "Vlemk," he said, in a voice as low and gravelly as a frog"s, "the trouble with you is, you"re insensitive to the power of evil."
Vlemk nodded, shuddering, and made an effort to look thoughtful. He craned his head forward, thinking the rain was perhaps lighter than he"d imagined, but the shoulder of the murderer pinned him tightly against the doorjamb, and he soon realized that the pressure against him was intentional; he was meant to stay, hear the murderer out, listen attentively, as if his life depended on it, for indeed, conceivably, it did.
"You have a strange point of view," said the axe-murderer. "It seems to you quite normal, because the herd of humanity generally shares it; but believe me your view is in fact both strange and irrational."
Again Vlemk nodded.
"You look for Beauty in the world," said the axe-murderer. "You formulate impressions in the archaic vocabulary of Grace. This is a mistake. What the intelligent man looks for is interest. Look at our friends the ex-poet and the ex-musician. They started out as pursuers of Beauty, devotees of supernatural premises. What are they now?" He laughed so deep in his throat it might have come from a well. "They are retired, my friend. And even in retirement they have no more understanding of the truth than a pair of fat ducks." He turned his sore-specked, expressionless face, allowing the eyes to bore coldly into Vlemk. "I, on the other hand," he said, "am not retired. Actually, strictly speaking, I haven"t yet begun. Many people say I will never begin, but I spit in their eyes." He glanced downward, indicating that Vlemk should do the same, and from under the skirt of his overcoat showed the blade of an axe.
Vlemk swallowed and quickly nodded. The rain was beginning to let up now, but still the firm pressure of the murderer"s shoulder boxed him in.
"You"re an idealist, Vlemk," said the axe-murderer. "Reality, you think, is what might be, or what peeks from behind what is. What evidence have you for this shadow you prefer to the hard, smelly world we exist in? Look again!" Again they looked down, both of them, at the axe. "Reality is matter in all its magnificent complexity," said the murderer, "the sludge of actuality in infinite mechanical aspiration. Break the machine and you begin to know its usefulness! Close off the view of the mountains with a curtain and you begin to see the glory of the view." He pressed harder against Vlemk and asked with a sneer, "You imagine you search out Reality, painter of little boxes?" He laughed. "You"re an evader and avoider! I give you my a.s.surance-experience is the test-chop off the heads of a family of seven, let the walls and the floors be splashed with their blood, let the dogs howl, the cats flee, the parakeets fly crazily in their filthy wicker cages, then ask yourself: is this or is this not Reality?-this carnage, this disruption of splendid promise? Take the blinders from your eyes! Death and Evil are the principles that define our achievements and in due time swallow them. Ugliness is our condition and the basis of our interest. Is it our business to set down lies, or are we here to tell the Truth, though the Truth may be unspeakably dreadful?"
Vlemk nodded slowly and thoughtfully, and pursed his lips.
The murderer"s face grew more unpleasant than usual, and when he spoke again his grumble was so low and disheartened that Vlemk could barely hear him. "Admittedly all this is as yet still a little theoretical. The police are everywhere, and how is one to get proper coverage? The newspapers suppress things, edit things. I"m like you, my friend Vlemk, if what I hear about the picture of the Princess is true: a genius who"s never reached his audience." He chuckled, miserable as a snake. Suddenly the murderer drew in one sharp breath and became still all over, his hand clamped firm as a vise on the box-painter"s arm. "Perhaps this is it!" he whispered. A family of five was entering the old empty church across the street, ducking in out of the rain, perhaps. As soon as the door closed behind them, the murderer stepped softly from the doorway, tipping up his coat-collar and pulling down his hat, then hurried away through the rain to the farther curb. At once, before the murderer could change his mind, Vlemk set off, almost running, in the direction of the tavern. He need not have hurried. When he met the axe-murderer the following night he learned that, as usual, he"d done nothing. Nothing, as usual, had been quite as he required. For some arts, the difficulties are all but insurmountable.
4.
So Vlemk"s life continued, day after day and week after week. Insofar as possible, he kept himself drunk. In due time, were it not for the picture, he might have forgotten his unhappiness and learned to be content.
But the talking picture of the Princess would give him no rest. It complained and nagged until he was ready to throw it out the window; yet complaint and unpleasantness were by no means all that the picture was capable of. Sometimes when Vlemk was so sunk in gloom that it took him all his strength to raise his chin from his fists and his elbows from his knees, the picture would speak to him so kindly, with such gentle understanding, that he would burst into tears. At such moments it grieved him that he"d abandoned his profession, that all order had gone out of his life, all trace of dignity. He wrung his hands and ground his teeth and looked longingly at the brushes laid in shabby disarray on the table.
"Well, why don"t you paint, then?" said the picture on the box, who had been watching him narrowly for some time. "It can make you no more miserable than you are!"
"Ha!" Vlemk thought, "you know nothing!" He wished with all his heart that he could say it aloud, but owing to the curse he could speak not a single syllable, even to the box. "No one knows anything!" he wanted to say, for the opinions of his friends had persuaded him. "We artists are the loneliest, most miserable people in the world, misunderstood, underestimated, scorned and mocked, driven to self-betrayal and dishonesty and starvation! We"re masters of skills more subtle than the skills of a wizard or king, yet we"re valued less highly than the moron who carves out stone statues with no reference to anything, or sticks little pieces of colored gla.s.s together, or makes great bra.s.s bell-molds in endless array, the first one no different from the last one!"
"Does it help," asked the picture, "to stand there shaking your fists like that?"