The dark mother

by Waldo David Frank

“Giulio does not seem to be coming at any rate,” she excused herself. She went on: “If he comes, I’ll pay him and send him off.”

Why should she worry about work? She had plenty of money. She had enough left over from last year to take her through two seasons. She spent so little.

Her relief widened and deepened. It was as if she had found for herself a holiday. Let her be alone with her reveries and her anguish. Let her vegetate, if she would, or die. Let her art die, at any rate. Who cared?

As she went musing about, she hummed a broken aria, from Tristan. Very broken since all now that came from her was broken, and since, besides, she had no ear for music. But often she went to the Opera—away upstairs—and listened to the cloudy and clotted passions of Richard Wagner.

Almost unknown to herself she had taken a pile of paper and all the paraphernalia of water-color from a drawer; set it out on the table. There it was! She looked at it and smiled.

“Oh, you lazy one,” she said half aloud, “what an escape from your real work! What nonsense!” Under her hand was a set of sheets she had already daubed. A new foible, this: which she never more than half allowed. There was much of her father in Cornelia. Her sculpture she admitted: it was work. These blind, wandering daubs were play—were some sort of dissipation—were nonsense and wicked.

This morning Cornelia was indulging herself. Giulio had not come. Let her be wicked. It was no worse to be wicked than to be a wearied artist. So she spread out her daubs of water-color and examined them. And they were unlike the model of clay in this, that they seemed near her; she let her eyes and her mind wander among them and they were very near herself.

She grasped a brush and wet it and sat down. Something dim came over her eyes. It was as if they turned inward. Cornelia relaxed. Her breathing came more like the natural ebb and flow of a tide within her. Her head and neck fell easily forward. She had the sentiment of having returned, sweetly and without effort, to her night. It was like the coming to a loved trysting place. She was once more with her sleep, streaked in shreddings of dream. Her brush made strokes on paper....

Suddenly, whatever this was she painted was done. For she stopped. She left her night-world. She held out the sheet at arm’s length and tried to look critically at what she had committed: she tried to laugh. It was a very mad and incomprehensible design. It was nonsense. But she could not laugh at it. The colors were somehow lovely. Of course, color was not everything.

All the little paintings were different, yet each of them in some mysterious way was a record of her broken nights. Each of them had come to being while her mind returned to some dim hinterland, and found her nights, and brought them back. Swathes of color passionate against a brooding background; spirals of flame in space: parabolas of red and gold and green dragging a fever across darkling worlds of black and gray. In all of them was a phantasmagoria of design Cornelia had no name for: but could not wholly reject. They were herself. The diary of her passionate anguish. No one would ever see them. Whom did they hurt? She had joyous rest in looking at them, in letting herself out among their distances. She promised herself that she would always laugh at them: when she felt a little stronger and her fight was won, she promised herself to leave them and return to her Art.