Edith Wharton - SSC 10 (4 page)

 
          
Fresh
from these achievements, Axel Svengaart carried his Viking head and Parisian
monocle from one New York drawing-room to another, gazing, appraising—even,
though rarely, praising—but absolutely refusing to take another order, or to
postpone by a single day the date of his sailing. “I’ve got it all here,” he
said, touching first his brow and then his pocket; and the dealer who acted as
his impresario let it be understood that even the most exaggerated offers would
be rejected.

 
          
Targatt
had, of course, met the great man. In old days he would have been uncomfortably
awed by the encounter; but now he could joke easily about the Gugginses, and
even ask Svengaart if he had not been struck by his sister-in-law, who was Mrs.
Guggins’s social secretary, and was about to marry Mr. Guggins’s Paris
representative.

 
          
“Ah—the lovely Kouradjine; yes.
She made us some delicious
blinys,” Svengaart nodded approvingly; but Targatt saw with surprise that as a
painter he was uninterested in Olga’s plastic possibilities.

 
          
“Ah,
well, I suppose you’ve had enough of us—I hear you’re off this week.”

 
          
The
painter dropped his monocle. “Yes, I’ve had enough.” It was after dinner, at
the Bellamys’, and abruptly he seated himself on the sofa at Targatt’s side. “I
don’t like your frozen food,” he pursued. “There’s only one thing that would
make me put off my sailing.” He readjusted his monocle and looked straight at
Targatt. “If you’ll give me the chance to paint Mrs. Targatt—oh, for that I’d
wait another month.”

 
          
Targatt
stared at him, too surprised to answer. Nadeja—the great man wanted to paint
Nadeja! The idea aroused so many conflicting considerations that his reply,
when it came, was a stammer. “Why, really … this is a surprise … a great
honour, of course…” A vision of Svengaart’s price for a mere head thrust itself
hideously before his eyes. Svengaart, seeing him as it were encircled by
millionaires, probably took him for a very rich man—was perhaps manoeuvring to
extract an extra big offer from him. For what other inducement could there be
to paint Nadeja? Targatt turned the question with a joke. “I suspect you’re
confusing me with my brother-in-law Bellamy. He ought to have persuaded you to
paint his wife. But I’m afraid my means wouldn’t allow …”

 
          
The
other interrupted him with an irritated gesture. “Please—my dear sir. I can
never be ‘persuaded’ to do a portrait. And in the case of Mrs. Targatt I had no
idea of selling you her picture. If I paint her, it would be for
myself
.”

 
          
Targatt’s
stare widened.
“For yourself?
You mean—you’d paint the
picture just to keep it?” He gave an
embarrassed
laugh. “Nadeja would be enormously flattered, of course. But, between
ourselves
, would you mind telling me why you want to do
her?”

 
          
Svengaart
stood up with a faint laugh. “Because she’s the only really pain table woman
I’ve seen here. The lines are incomparable for a full-length. And I can’t tell
you how I should enjoy the change.”

 
          
Targatt
continued to stare. Murmurs of appreciation issued from his parched lips. He
remembered now that Svengaart’s charge for a three-quarter-length was fifteen
thousand dollars. And he wanted to do Nadeja full length for nothing!
Only—Targatt reminded himself—the brute wanted to keep the picture. So where
was the good? It would only make Nadeja needlessly conspicuous; and to give all
those sittings for nothing… Well, it looked like sharp practice, somehow…

 
          
“Of
course, as I say, my wife would be immensely flattered; only she’s very
busy—her family, social obligations and so on; I really can’t say…”

 
          
Svengaart
smiled. “In the course of a portrait I usually make a good many studies; some
almost as finished as the final picture. If Mrs. Targatt cared to accept one—”

 
          
Targatt
flushed to the roots of his thinning hair. A Svengaart study over the
drawing-room mantelpiece! (“Yes—nice thing of Nadeja, isn’t it? You’d know a
Svengaart anywhere… It was his own idea; he insisted on doing her…”) Nadeja was
just lifting a pile of music from the top of the grand piano. She was going to
accompany Mouna, who had taken to singing. As she stood with lifted arms,
profiled against the faint hues of the tapestried wall, the painter exclaimed:
“There—there! I have it! Don’t you see now why I want to do her?”

 
          
But
Targatt, for the moment, could not speak. Secretly he thought Nadeja looked
much as usual—only perhaps a little more tired; she had complained of a
headache that morning. But his courage rose to the occasion. “Ah, my wife’s
famous ‘lines’, eh? Well, well, I can’t promise—you’d better come over and try
to persuade her yourself.”

 
          
He
was so dizzy with it that as he led Svengaart toward the piano the Bellamys’
parquet floor felt like glass under his unsteady feet.

 
          
  

 
          
Targatt’s
rapture was acute but short-lived. Nadeja “done” by Axel Svengaart—he had
measured the extent of it in a flash. He had stood aside and watched her with a
deep smile of satisfaction while the light of wonder rose in her eyes; when she
turned them on him for approval he had nodded his assent. Of course she must
sit to the great man, his glance signalled back. He saw that Svengaart was
amused at her having to ask her husband’s permission; but this only intensified
Targatt’s satisfaction. They’d see, damn it, if his wife could be ordered about
like a professional model! Perhaps the best moment was when, the next day, she
said timidly: “But, Jim, have you thought about the price?” and he answered,
his hands in his pockets, an easy smile on his lips: “There’s no price to think
about. He’s doing you for the sake of your beautiful ‘lines’. And we’re to have
a replica, free gratis. Did you know you had beautiful lines, old
Nad
?”

 
          
She
looked at him gravely for a moment. “I hadn’t thought about them for a long
time,” she said.

 
          
Targatt
laughed and tapped her on the shoulder. What a child she was! But afterward it
struck him that she had not been particularly surprised by the painter’s
request. Perhaps she had always known she was paintable, as Svengaart called
it. Perhaps—and here he felt a little chill run over him—perhaps Svengaart had
spoken to her already, had come to an understanding with her before making his
request to Targatt. The idea made Targatt surprisingly uncomfortable, and he
reflected that it was the first occasion in their married life when he had
suspected Nadeja of even the most innocent duplicity. And this, if it were
true, could hardly be regarded as wholly innocent…

 
          
Targatt
shook the thought off impatiently. He was behaving like the fellow in
“Pagliacci”. Really this associating with foreigners might end in turning a
plain business man into an opera-singer! It was the day of the first sitting,
and as he started for his office he called back gaily to Nadeja: “Well, so
long! And don’t let that fellow turn your head.”

 
          
He
could not get much out of Nadeja about the sittings. It was not that she seemed
secretive; but she was never very good at reporting small talk, and things that
happened outside of the family circle, even if they happened to
herself
, always seemed of secondary interest to her. And
meanwhile the sittings went on and on. In spite of his free style Svengaart was
a slow worker; and he seemed to find Nadeja a difficult subject. Targatt began
to brood over the situation: some people thought the fellow handsome, in the
lean grey-hound style; and he had an easy cosmopolitan way—the European manner.
It was what Nadeja was used to; would she suddenly feel that she had missed
something during all these years? Targatt turned cold at the thought. It had
never before occurred to him what a humdrum figure he was. The contemplation of
his face in the shaving-glass became so distasteful to him that he averted his
eyes, and nearly cut his throat in consequence. Nothing of the grey-hound style
about him—or the Viking either.

 
          
Slowly,
as these thoughts revolved in his mind, he began to feel that he, who had had
everything from Nadeja, had given her little or nothing in return. What he had
done for her people weighed as nothing in this revaluation of their past. The
point was: what sort of a life had he given Nadeja? And the answer: No life at
all! She had spent her best years looking after other people; he could not
remember that she had ever asserted a claim or resented an oversight. And yet
she was neither dull nor insipid: she was simply Nadeja—a creature endlessly
tolerant, totally unprejudiced, sublimely generous and unselfish.

 
          
Well—it
would be funny, Targatt thought, with a twist of almost physical pain, if
nobody else had been struck by such unusual qualities. If it had taken him over
ten years to find them out, others might have been less blind. He had never
noticed her “lines”, for instance; yet that painter fellow, the moment he’d
clapped eyes on her—!

 
          
Targatt
sat in his study, twisting about restlessly in his chair. Where
was
Nadeja, he wondered? The winter dusk
had fallen, and painters do not work without daylight. The day’s sitting must
be over—and yet she had not come back. Usually she was always there to greet
him on his return from the office. She had taught him to enjoy his afternoon
tea, with a tiny caviar sandwich and a slice of lemon, and the samovar was
already murmuring by the fire. When she went to see any of her family she
always called up to say if she would be late; but the maid said there had been
no message from her.

 
          
Targatt
got up and walked the floor impatiently; then he sat down again, lit a
cigarette, and threw it away. Nadeja, he remembered, had not been in the least
shocked when Katinka had decided to live with Mr. Bellamy; she had merely
wondered if the step were expedient, and had finally agreed with Katinka that
it was. Nor had Boris’s matrimonial manoeuvres seemed to offend her. She was
entirely destitute of moral indignation; this painful reality was now borne in
on Targatt for the first time. Cruelty shocked her; but otherwise she seemed to
think that people should do as they pleased. Yet, all the while, had she ever
done what
she
pleased? There was the
torturing enigma! She seemed to allow such latitude to others, yet to ask so
little for herself.

 
          
Well,
but didn’t the psychologist fellows say that there was an hour in every woman’s
life—every self-sacrificing woman’s—when the claims of her suppressed self
suddenly asserted themselves, body and soul, and she forgot everything else,
all her duties, ties, responsibilities? Targatt broke off with a bitter laugh.
What did “duties, ties,
responsibilities
” mean to
Nadeja? No more than to any of the other Kouradjines. Their vocabulary had no
parallels with his. He felt a sudden overwhelming loneliness, as if all these
years he had been married to a changeling, an opalescent creature swimming up
out of the sea…

 
          
No,
she couldn’t be at the studio any longer; or if she were, it wasn’t to sit for
her portrait. Curse the portrait, he thought—why had he ever consented to her
sitting to Svengaart?
Sheer cupidity; the snobbish ambition
to own a Svengaart, the glee of getting one for nothing.
The more he
proceeded with this self-investigation the less he cared for the figure he cut.
But however poor a part he had played so far, he wasn’t going to add to it the
role of the duped husband…

 
          
“Damn
it, I’ll go round there myself and see,” he muttered, squaring his shoulders,
and walking resolutely across the room to the door. But as he reached the
entrance-hall the faint click of a latchkey greeted him; and sweeter music he
had never heard.
Nadeja stood in the doorway, pale but
smiling.
“Jim—you were not going out again?”

 
          
He
gave a sheepish laugh. “Do you know what time it is? I was getting scared.”

 
          
“Scared
for me?” She smiled again.
“Dear me, yes!
It’s nearly
dinner-time, isn’t it?”

 
          
He
followed her into the drawing-room and shut the door. He felt like a husband in
an old-fashioned problem play; and in a moment he had spoken like one. “Nad,
where’ve you come from?” he broke out abruptly.