Under the pine trees she was far enough from the house to consider it as a whole. She studied its weatherbeaten secrecy. She had the anxious apprehension of the artist, who needs to feel his subject, purge it of mere reality, before he can begin work. The long line of the roof sagged a little, like an animal inured to carry burdens. The two semicircled bays, flanking the veranda, kept the garden under scrutiny. Each of all those windows had its own outlook on life. A thread of smoke stole from the kitchen chimney, sifting into the hazy morning. Imperceptible greyness was in the nebulous light, filtered through a gauze of ocean fog. The house was waiting, waiting. That vapoury air dimmed the bright world like breath on a mirror. Yet, for her mood, it was somehow right. A morning of fire and blue would have been indecent.
Houses, built for rest and safety, and then filled with the tension of such trivial sufferings. I wonder if any one has ever done a true portrait of a house? The opaque pearly light now seemed to her more sincere than any glamour of sun or moon. But how reluctant it was to surrender its meaning. She could hear the excited voices of the children, calling to and fro. Her mind was still pursuing something, she didn’t know just what. It was like trying to think of a forgotten word. The house hasn’t yet quite got over being empty so long, she thought. It’s still a little bit empty. Or it believed that being lived in again would be such fun, and now it’s disappointed. It had forgotten that life is like this.
She began to paint. This picture was for George, to remind him of things he did not know he knew. It must have love in it, and something more, too. The name of this picture, she said to herself, is A Portrait of a House Saying Good-bye.
The shading was very odd along the veranda, between the two turreted bays and beneath the overhang of the sleeping porch. The light came from no direction, it was latent and diffused, softened in slopes and patches among many angles. She had already dabbed in the profile of the building when she realized what it was that she wanted. It was not the outside of the house but an interior that was forming in her mind. She left the outline tentative, as it was, and imagined the side of the house to be transparent. Under the sharp projection of the balcony her brush struck through the glassed veranda and found itself in the dining room. The tinted panes gave her a clean spot of colour to focus on. Below these the room was obscure, but then the brush had discovered a pool of candlelight to dip in. Shadowy figures were sitting there, but just as she was about to sketch them they seemed to dissolve from their chairs and run toward the windows, looking outward furtively. There was another, too, outside the little sitting room, whispering in a dapple of black and silver chiaroscuro. Oh, if I could only catch what this means. If someone could help me. If George were here to help me. His large patience, his dear considering voice with the wandering parentheses of thought that she had so often mocked and loved. Voice so near her now and soon so impossible to hear. No one would help her. No one can ever help the artist. Others she saves, herself she cannot save....
She had saved him. She had saved Phyllis’s George, given Phyllis the greatest gift of all. Given her back those Georges, enriched with understanding and fear. But could she save her own poor phantom, or even herself? At any rate she was going back to her own life. She thought of that adored city waiting for her, its steep geometries of building, its thousand glimpses that inflame the artist’s eye. Extraordinary: you’d expect to find a painter exultantly at work on every street corner; and how rarely you see ’em!—The correct miseries of polite departure, a few gruesome hours in the train (ripping out the stitches of her golden fancy) and she would be there. There, where the whole vast miracle seemed, in moments of ecstasy, to have been planned for her special amazement and pleasure. The subway, with rows of shrewd and weary faces; girls with their short skirts and vivid scarves; men with shaven, sharply modelled mouths ... the endless beauty of people, and their blessed insensibility to the infernal pang.... Yes, that was what Phyllis could do for him better than she: dull and deaden that nerve in his mind: chloroform George the Fourth, the poor little bastard!
She was going back to her own life. Back to the civilized pains of art: its nostalgia for lost simplicity, its full and generous tolerance, its self-studious doubt, its divinely useless mirth, its disregard of things not worth discussing among the cheerfully disenchanted. Ah, never try to explain things you know are true. As soon as you begin to do that, they seem doubtful.
A darkness kept coming into the picture. It was as though the silence that had been stored up in that house was now draining out of it, seeping into the absorbent air. The fog was thickening and distorted perspectives. The house was out of drawing. That tricky shadow under the balcony was baffling: it made the whole porch seem out of plumb. Holding up a brush to get a true horizontal, she saw that Martin was coming across the lawn.
“Why, it’s Bunny!” he said, pointing to the figure she had suggested with a few hasty strokes. “I know now why she wanted you to help me.”
Joyce did not look up.
“You must go, at once,” she said.