Psyche (19 page)

Wandering idly amongst the queerly stunted hills, she saw him a fraction of a second before he saw her. When he raised his eyes from his canvas it was as if her slim figure, poised for flight, as immobile as the slag itself, was an hallucination materialized from the copper-coloured haze. For a long moment they regarded one another with equal curiosity. Then Psyche, as keen an observer in her own way as the artist in his, having assured herself that he presented no threat, moved slowly toward him.

Fascinated, he watched her as she approached, seeing an untidy-headed girl, a cigarette in the corner of her mouth, who walked with all the proud, indifferent grace of a young pagan princess; a bare-footed princess, with a shock of heavy golden hair, clad in faded dungarees and a shapeless black sweater.

She came to a halt out of arm's reach, but where she had an unobstructed view of his canvas, and her first words astonished him as much as the deep, vibrant timbre of her voice.

“You seen all the colours! Like me—you seen the colours. Butch an' Mag don't never see nothin' but grey.”

He smiled. If his aim was to please, he usually smiled when he spoke. “You like my picture?”

To Psyche, who had never before seen anything other than indifferent magazine and calendar art, his harshly beautiful interpretation was a revelation, but all she said was, “I like it right well.”

Anxious not to frighten her, adept at getting on with people when he chose to, he picked up his brush and began to paint, while saying conversationally, “You live near here?”

“Back a piece. What you goin' to call it?”

“My painting? ‘Mountains of the Moon'.”

“You nuts, by any chance?” Psyche's blue eyes regarded him with clinical detachment. “This ain't the moon, an' them's not mountains.”

Resisting a strong desire to laugh, he asked, “What would you call it?” and, deeming it safe to look at her again, laid down his brush.

Psyche pushed her hair back from her forehead and regarded the broken nails of her slender, high-arched feet, while she thought about this.

The artist, trained eyes discarding non-essentials, judged her to be one of the most paintable human beings he had ever seen. The beautiful balance of figure, fine bone structure, and haunting loveliness of face in repose, added up to his conception of the perfect subject. Where in the name of Satan and all his devils had she come from? No untutored miner's child, this. An illegitimate, almost certainly. From a purely aesthetic point of view he would have liked to see her better washed and combed, but first he wanted to paint her—must paint her—just as she was.

Psyche looked up, tossed away the frayed butt of her cigarette, and said quietly, “I would call it—'Mountains of the Moon'.” Already moving off, she added, “Well, I gotta be goin'.”

A man with less judgement would have tried to detain her. The artist, although he wished he could shackle her to his easel there and then, let her go with a wave of the hand and a casual goodbye.

Convinced as he was that curiosity, if nothing else, would bring her back, he yet found it impossible to concentrate properly on his work after she had gone, and that night slept more fitfully then was customary for him.

Psyche, for reasons that she could not fully fathom, did not tell Mag about this first meeting with him. Disturbed and uneasy, she mentally reviewed the brief encounter over and over again. That his interest in her was as impersonal as it was obvious, she knew instinctively, and yet she was afraid to go back. It was as though she stood on the threshold of a room whose contents, although
of compelling interest, might, in their very impersonality, prove inimical to her.

Twice, the following morning, she left the shack, and twice turned back. Seeing its shabby lack of inspiration, its poverty of colour and comfort, more clearly than she had ever done before, she yet found it dearer than ever before.

“What's the matter with you, kid?” Mag asked her curiously. “I ain't never seen you so fidgety.”

“Nothin's the matter.”

“It must be spring,” Mag said sagely. “Folks, specially young ones, tends to get restless come spring.”

Psyche did not go back until late afternoon, by which time the artist's impatience was bordering on ill-concealed fury.

His first intimation that she was there was an apparently nonchalant “Hello!” from somewhere behind him.

Swinging round, he saw her sitting on the summit of a small rise about fifty feet away from him. Annoyance, mixed with a relief he resented, got the better of his discretion. “What the devil are you doing up there?” he shouted.

“Watchin' you,” replied Psyche, too used to Butch's harmless rages to be perturbed by this greeting.

“Why do it from there, for God's sake?”

“You was busy.”

“Well, I'm not busy now. Come on down.”

Rising in one fluid movement. Psyche descended the precipitous slope with a graceful ease requiring neither forethought nor any particular attention. “Hot, ain't it? You done a lot since yesterday, ain't you? You near finished?”

The man looked at his painting, and was surprised to find that, in spite of his preoccupation, he had accomplished something. “No,” he said, “it's not nearly finished, but I need a rest from it. How would it be if I painted you for a change?”

“That wouldn't be no rest.”

“It would, for me. Do you think you could stay still for—say, ten minutes?”

“I guess. You a real artist?”

He mimicked her. “I guess.”

Psyche smiled. It was the first time he had seen her smile, and his desire to paint her, not once but many times, was redoubled. Smiling, she had an allure he had not recognized in her before; she became more woman, less child.

“What's your name?” she asked.

“Nick.”

“Nick? I ain't never known nobody with that name before.”

Setting up a fresh canvas, he asked, without much interest, “What's yours?”

Hesitantly Psyche searched his sharply handsome profile. If she told him, and he laughed as those others had done——Her breathing a little uneven, her hands thrust belligerently into her trouser pockets, she spelled out the name that was hers, the name that she could not, to her infinite shame, pronounce.

A flicker of surprise showed in narrowed hazel eyes as he glanced up at her. “Psyche?” he said, with some interrogation but no mockery.

Transfixed, Psyche let the two softly crisp syllables sink deep into her consciousness, and the artist, looking at her radiant face, thought with astonishment, my God—she looks as though she has seen the Holy Grail. Then, the urge which was always his primary moving force banishing all curiosity, he said quietly, “Don't move. Stay just as you are—for as long as you can manage it. I'm going to paint you now, just like that.” Before he had finished speaking, his brush was moving across the clean canvas with swift, sure strokes.

Psyche, automatically doing what he asked, scarcely heard him. Her eyes lifted to the muted blue of the sky, she gave thanks to an Old Testament God for the gift He had just bestowed upon her. At last she was a person, a real person like everybody else, a person with a name. Psyche—Psyche—Psyche—this was herself, a self to whom anything was now possible. With quick excitement she knew that far horizons were miraculously closer than they had been, and that given the opportunity she was at last fully prepared to explore them.

The rays of the setting sun were slanting arrows that no longer struck the floor of the darkening gully when the artist's fierce
absorbtion was disturbed by a quiet but definite voice, saying, “You almost through? I'm gettin' bloody awful stiff.”

“Couldn't you just” he began, and then, catching sight of

his watch, said, “Lord, I'd no idea! Sit down. That's enough for to-day. You've been marvelous, really marvelous.”

Slowly Psyche drew her hands from her pockets, raised numbed arms above her head, and gently massaged the back of her aching neck.

Nick was beside her at once. “Here, let me do that.”

Psyche jerked away from him. “I don't like nobody touchin' me!”

“Don't be a damn fool. With a stiff neck you might be useless to me for days.”

The curt objectivity of his concern was so unmistakable that Psyche allowed him to push aside her thick hair and manipulate the muscles of her neck with probing fingers that brought her an immediate relief.

“That better? Good. Now, about to-morrow. Can you be here in the morning? I'll pay you for the time you spend posing.”

Irritated by his calm assurance that she would come back again, Psyche stared at him; the lines of his face and hard, lean body were clearly limned, forceful in an integration that openly disclaimed any pressures except from within himself. She was not at all sure that she liked him, but she knew now that her meeting with him was the most important thing that had happened to her within her memory. His speech, so different from that to which she was accustomed, fascinated her. The authority and precision with which he moved and worked were already changing her whole conception of what a man—or a woman—could be, and ought to be. Above all, he represented the outside world, and therefore, in some inexplicable way, seemed to form the first tangible link with her own long-lost beginnings. This, more than anything else, was what had drawn her back to him, and would continue to bring her back.

“I don't want no money,” she told him quietly.

“You're a funny girl. Isn't there anything you want that you haven't got?”

“Nothin' that money can buy.”

He looked at her in surprise; both her answer, and the manner in which it had been given, were unexpected. She was to continue to surprise him from time to time because he never took the trouble to know her as an individual, as a human being with something more to offer than a lovely face and figure. In due course he learned her story, as much of it as she herself knew, and briefly he was to be attracted to her as a woman, but at no time did he ever credit her with a heart and mind worthy of recognition.

On this occasion it was typical of him that he asked for no explanation of her reply. All he cared about was that she come. Her reasons were of no interest to him.

“What time can you be here?”

“'Bout nine.”

“Good. Don't be late.”

When he arrived at the gully the following morning it was to find Psyche there ahead of him.

“Good morning!” he called out.

Psyche did not return his greeting. Instead, she said woodenly, “I can't stay, an' I can't come no more, because Mag don't know you.”

Nick carefully deposited easel, camp stool, paint box, and case of canvasses on the unyielding slag. “And who is Mag?” he asked levelly.

“Butch an' Mag's my folks.”

“She let you come yesterday.”

“I didn't tell her nothin' about you till last night.”

Suppressing a strong desire to curse Butch, Mag, all their antecedents, and the universe which encompassed them, Nick considered how he was to deal with this idiotic obstruction. Something in the way in which she had spoken seemed to indicate that these people were not her parents, but her obedience to their wishes was, he guessed, the habit of many years. To suggest rebellion would probably be worse than useless. Greatly as it irritated him, there appeared to be only one thing to do.

“She—Mag—must be persuaded to change her mind.”

Psyche shrugged. “I told her you don't make no passes nor nothin' like that, but it didn't make no difference.”

He took out a package of cigarettes, and offered one to her. “Since the chief obstacle seems to be that she hasn't met me, she must do so, and at once.”

Psyche's wooden mask slipped, and hope and doubt chased each other across her usually expressive face. “I dunno—do you think?”

“Let's not waste time thinking. Which way do we go?”

“Thissaway.”

The artist traversed the tortuous route to the shack with a long, fast stride, oblivious of the increasing heat of the day. Psyche, keeping up with him without difficulty, became, the closer they drew to their destination, more and more nervous about the impending meeting. She had not accepted Mag's dictum without argument; argument hotter and more sustained than she had produced in any cause since coming to the shack. Mag, however, suspicious not only of artists, but of strangers in general, had remained adamant. Psyche, conscious of all she owed to the big woman, had at last given in, but with a sense of loss no less bitter because, even to herself, it seemed unreasonable in its intensity.

An innate wisdom cautioning her against letting the artist know that her desire to prolong their association was, for very different reasons, as strong as his own, she walked beside him in silence, speaking only when it was necessary to give brief instructions.

They topped a sharp rise, and the shack lay below them.

Nick stood stock-still. “Is that it?”

Psyche nodded.

“It's marvelous.”

Psyche refrained from comment because she had already realized that they spoke, more often than not, an entirely different language, and that this outrageous falsehood had for some incomprehensible reason been uttered in good faith.

“Is that Mag?” He indicated the billowing shape which at that moment appeared in the open doorway.

“Yeah, that's her.”

“Excellent. We shall proceed to storm the citadel. And it would be wiser, my slag-born Venus, if you left the negotiations entirely tome.”

Psyche's blue eyes questioned him. “You mean for me not to talk?”

He bestowed on her the brilliance of his glancing smile. “I am not always kind, am I, Venus? Yes, it would be better if I did the talking. Introduce us, and then leave it to me.”

Mag, arrayed as usual in a faded wrapper, accepted the introductions with hostile majesty, but she was not proof for long against a calculated charm that had melted resistence much stiffer than hers.