XXXIX. A Date on the Calendar
1
THE memory of that portrait left Felix bewildered and irritated. It seemed that no one else saw in it quite what he had seen. Rose-Ann praised it—but with some reserve which made him feel that she did not really like it. Clive was delighted with the certainty with which the painter had captured his characteristic gesture.... Only he himself, apparently, saw it as a criticism, profound and harsh....
The painter herself least of all saw it as a criticism. “Is that what you really think of me?” he had asked her.
“I don’t think when I paint pictures,” she had said. “I’m too busy working out the problems of form and colour. Don’t you like it?”
“I like it as a picture. I don’t like it as a—a prophecy,” he said.
“A prophecy? Oh, there you come with your literary interpretations. Can’t you forget that stuff, and learn to look at a picture as a picture?”
She had ceased to be the Sybil, and become again the careless bohemian girl-artist, talking the talk of her tribe.... Pictures were just pictures—yes, he had heard that before.
Morose and fretful, he walked up and down in the studio in the evening, rejecting Rose-Ann’s plans for other entertainment; or sat at his desk, exasperatedly trying to force himself to begin work on some half-formed idea for a play. He was angry at himself for being the indecisive, inadequate figure of that painting. He saw now what being an artist meant—the calm energy, the technical erudition, the vast patience that was needed. He wished to be that kind of person. And the more he wished it, the more weak and petulant he seemed to himself. And what must he seem to Rose-Ann? She must despise him in her heart....