Conrad Aiken: The Collected Short Stories of Conrad Aiken

Whereupon Mr. Lynton would shut up his eyes and bury his little brown beard in his chest, and Mrs. Lynton would become extraordinarily girlish, and my poor father would become positively foolish. And Phil and I, exchanging covert sorrows, would decide to be glum, if only for the preservation of decency.

Apparently, the Lyntons were as poor as we were. Mr. Lynton was an architect, with an office of his own, but no business. Mrs. Lynton was an artist, with a little studio in Joy Street, to which she went every day, always bringing back with her a new sunset or landscape. I thought her pictures were terrible, and never was in the least surprised that she couldn’t sell them. So far as I know, she never did sell them—not one. But every night when she returned to Oxford Street, there would be a new canvas under her arm; and every night, just before dinner, we all had to file into the Lyntons’ room, where the new masterpiece would be tilted on a chair, or on the carefully propped pillows of the bed, and with an air of mystery and secrecy we would have to put our heads on one side and say, “Wonderful! Marvelous! That effect of shadow among the trees! The delicious sense of distance!… Was it an actual scene somewhere? Oh, done from a note? from memory? It’s beautiful!” And I could feel my father uneasily wondering whether the Lyntons expected him to buy it, and how much it would cost, and groping for phrases about painting (of which he didn’t know a thing), and then we would have a cup of fruit punch, and go down to dinner.

Both my father and mother thought Mrs. Lynton was captivating—simply captivating! My father perhaps a little more than my mother. Now and then it seemed to me I detected a note of faint scepticism on the part of my mother. “Isn’t she charming? ridiculous?” my father would say, “she’s like a child. She’s never grown up.…”

Which was perfectly true. She was nothing if not playful. Playful was her middle name. She had more facial tricks than I ever remember to have seen in a single creature. She rolled those great conscious eyes to every point in the compass—arched her careful eyebrows singly or together, blushed at will—to give a touch of girlish modesty to some outrageous statement—pouted, frowned, or looked hurt like a spanked baby—and all with an air of entire assurance. She assumed that she was the best be-all and end-all of existence. Not that she wasn’t pretty!—she was. Her small face was really quite charming. But that she should so perpetually consider it necessary to behave like a girl of ten, and take it for granted that everyone would be enslaved to her, as her husband was—this increasingly infuriated both Phil and myself. It was evident that she thought herself a great artist, and that her husband thought so, too.

But did he?

One night after dinner Phil burst into my room, where I was pegging away at a problem in specific gravity, and said, with a scared face—

“Come upstairs, boy. Say, they’re having the hell of a row!”

“Who?”

“The laughing hyenas.”

We sprinted up the stairs and listened. Phil’s room adjoined the Lyntons’. Sure enough, I could hear Mrs. Lynton—not laughing, for once—but actually crying. I was astounded. I was embarrassed. She was crying hysterically, and trying to talk at the same time, her voice rising and falling with extraordinary fluctuations and breaks and changes.

“No—no—no—no—” she said, “go away from me, don’t touch me! you’ve broken my spirit! I’ll never paint again! I hate you, go away, go away!” And then more sobs, and unintelligible murmurs, and then Mr. Lynton’s voice, quite surprisingly harsh and loud—as if he suddenly turned, as it were, “at bay”—

“Shut up!… I’m tired of having to treat you like a child! Why in God’s name don’t you grow up? Stop being a damned kitten!”

“I’m not a kitten. You know it’s just my nature!”

“Nature? it isn’t human nature!”

We could hear Mr. Lynton’s footsteps pacing the floor, to and fro, to and fro, and it was as if we could actually see him, with his hands in his pockets, and his beard pressed firmly down on his necktie.

“Why are you so cruel to me? You know I only try to be happy!”

“Idiot!… You’re driving me mad. Your happiness is just plain selfishness, that’s what it is! What in hell do you ever think of but yourself? Not me certainly. All I exist for is to appreciate you. I have to be amused by you. Good God, I’ve had to flirt with you publicly for fifteen years, and I’m sick of it. Your whole life has just been one long promiscuous flirtation with the whole damned Western Hemisphere!… What kind of a life is that for me ?”

“You’re a brute, that’s what you are; you’re a sadist! You don’t love me any more, that’s what it is! And you want to stop me from painting! And you want to get rid of me!”

There was a silence, as if both of them were standing still. Then abruptly the door slammed, and we heard steps rushing down the stairs. In a moment Mrs. Lynton began to sob, more loudly than ever; and Phil and I crept back to my room to discuss this amazing turn of events. Words failed us. The event stupefied us. We decided that all was not well in Denmark, and let it go at that.

And the very next night—as if nothing at all had happened—we were all invited to go to Mrs. Lynton’s studio in Joy Street for a Patriot’s Day party.

At dinner, the Lyntons were as hilarious as ever. Mrs. Lynton was bubbling over with her comic misadventures in the preparations for the celebration—Chinese lanterns had caught fire, a beer bottle had exploded frothily over the fireplace, two of the eggs had been bad, and had smelled like Roman catacombs, mice had eaten half the sardines, and so on, and so on. She rolled her brown eyes, grimaced, was arch and moody by turns, became almost tearful as she told us of the sardines—poor little things—and my father and Mr. Lynton fairly crowed with delight. Phil and I looked at her with renewed wonder.

And the whole party went off in that fashion. Never was a studio so consciously arty. There were no chairs at all—only black cusions on a scarlet floor—and we had to squat round the hearth and toast marshmallows at the wood-fire (though it was a very warm night) and another lantern blazed up, and the sardines (what remained of them) were rancid—but everything was made into one huge, uproarious, continuous joke. Paintings were stacked everywhere; and it seemed to me that a little—perhaps commercial?—pressure was being put upon my poor ignorant father to look at every one of them. In fact, we all had to look at them. They were stood for us in every conceivable light: autumn trees, violet sunsets, marshes in moonlight, haystacks on Cape Cod, cranberry bogs, wharfs, dories hauling up nets—water-colors, oils, crayons, every damned kind of picture that I ever heard of. And all of them atrocious. We went through the vocabulary of praise till it was worn to a fiber. “Wonderful! Marvelous!… Did you do this one recently?… It seems to me your sense of color has deepened.… And that aerial perspective, that effect of fog!” Though I myself ventured only a few scared words, my throat began to feel as parched as if I’d been ten days on a desert. And all the while Mrs. Lynton was coquettish and playful, laughed girlishly, wrung her hands, was so pleased with everything—wasn’t it a sweet little studio? A sweet view over the river and the bridge? And what a lark to have to sit on the floor like Indians! And to eat rotten little fishes!…

It was then that the shock, the terrible shock, of pure hard reality occurred, and from the most unexpected quarter.

My mother was looking at a painting of a sandy beach, with grass-covered dunes and lobster-pots, all done in a purple light that never was, thank God, on land or sea.