Пользователь - WORLD'S END

Did Marcel guess what was in her heart? She had to fight him, and lie vigorously; how else would he be persuaded to go on living? She and her son and her son's tutor had to make real to themselves the game they played. It wasn't hard for Lanny, because art counted for so much with him; also, it was wartime, and everybody was full of fervors, and wounds were a medal or badge of glory. The marriage made Beauty a "respectable woman" for the first time; but oddly enough it meant a social comedown, the name of Budd being one of power. She would have to get busy and boost Marcel's paintings, and make herself "somebody" again!

VII

The first thing was to contrive something for him to wear over his face. Hero or no hero, he couldn't bear to let anybody look at that mask of horror. He would cover the top of his head with a skullcap, and across his forehead would hang a close-fitting silk veil, with small holes for eyes and nose. Beauty went out and got some pink silk lingerie material, but he wouldn't wear pink; he wanted gray, so that it wouldn't show the dust; they compromised on white when Beauty said that she would make a lot of them and wash them with her own hands. She made a pattern, and after that had something to keep her fingers busy while she sat by his bedside.

It was springtime before he was able to move about, and they took him back to Juan in the car, making a two-day journey of it, so as not to put any strain on him. He looked not so bad with his skullcap and veil; the world was getting used to the sight of mutilйs - and not yet tired of them. Jerry supported him on one side and Lanny on the other, and they got him into Bienvenu without mishap.

Oh, the glory of that sunshine in the little court; the almost overpowering scent of orange blossoms and jasmine in the evening, and the song of the nightingales! Here were three women to adore him and wait upon him, and nobody to disturb him; here Beauty meant him to spend the rest of his days in peace, and paint whatever wonderful things he might have in him.' She was going to give up all her frivolous life - save only such contacts as might help in a campaign to win recognition for genius.

There were just a few painter friends Marcel wanted to see, and these would come to him, and bring their work for him to look at - or if it was too big, Lanny would bring it in the car. The patient was soon able to sit up and read, and there were plenty of books and magazines. Often they read aloud; Jerry came and tutored Lanny, and Marcel would listen and improve his English. They had music; and when he grew stronger he walked about the place. The furies of pain would never let him entirely alone, but he learned to outwit them. He was a more silent man than he used to be; there were things going on inside him about which he did not tell and did not wish to be asked by anyone.

VIII

The military deadlock at the front continued. All winter long the Allies had spent their forces trying to take trenches defended by machine guns - a weapon of which the Germans had managed to get the biggest supply. It was something that Robbie Budd had helped to teach them - and which he had tried in vain to teach the French and British. He couldn't write freely about it now, but there were hints in his letters, and Lanny knew what they meant, having been so often entertained by his father's comic portrayals of the British War Office officials with whom he had been trying to do business. So haughty they were, so ineffable, almost godlike in their self-satisfaction - and so dumb! No vulgar American could tell them anything; and now dapper young officers strolled out in front of their troops, waving their swagger sticks, and the German sharpshooters knocked them over like partridges off tree limbs. It was sublime, but it wasn't going to win this war of machines.

All the nations had come to realize that they were facing a long struggle. Old M. Rochambeau, who came often to see Beauty and her husband, used a terrible phrase, "a war of attrition." It was like the game of checkers in which you had one more man than your enemy, so every time you swapped with him, you increased your advantage. "Yes, dear lady," said the ex-diplomat, in answer to Beauty's exclamation of horror, "that is the basis on which military strategy is being calculated, and no one stops to ask what you or I think about it."

Man power plus manufacturing power was what would count. Britain had sacrificed her little professional army in order to save the Channel ports, and now she was rushing a new army into readiness, a volunteer army of a million men. There would be a second million, and as many more as needed; they would be shipped to some part of the fighting line, and swapped for Germans, man for man, or as near to it as possible.

The Turkish politicians had been bought into the war on the German side; which meant that the Black Sea was shut off, and nothing could be sent into Russia's southern ports. So a British expedition had been sent to take the Dardanelles. Rick informed Lanny that a cousin of his was going as a private in one of these regiments; Rosemary wrote that her father had been promoted to the rank of colonel, and was to command this same regiment. Rosemary had extracted a promise from her mother to be allowed to study nursing after one more year, and perhaps she would some day be on one of those ships. She promised that she would wave to Lanny as she went by!

It wasn't long before Italy was bought by the Allies, and that was important to people who lived in Provence. It lifted a fear from their souls, and freed the regiments guarding the southeastern border. "You see," said Marcel to his wife, "I saved a few months by volunteering!" It had been a sore point, that he had gone out of his way to get himself smashed up. Now she could congratulate herself that it had been done quickly!

IX

Marcel's paintings had been stored in the spare room of the villa, and now he would set them up one by one and look at them. He wanted to see what sort of painter he had really been, in those days that now seemed a different lifetime. Lanny and Jerry and M. Rochambeau would join him, and make comments, more or less expert. Lanny and his tutor thought they were marvelous, but the painter took to shaking his head more and more. No, they weren't much; it was too easy to do things like that; there was no soul in them. Lanny protested; but the old diplomat said: "You've become a different man."

It was something which happened now and then to painters, poets, musicians. Sometimes it amounted to a transformation. Verdi had changed his style entirely in his middle years; Tolstoy had decided that his greatest novels were useless, even corrupting. Van Gogh had painted everything gloomy and grim in Holland, and then had come to the Midi and exploded in a burst of color. "You will start work all over," said the old gentleman; "find some new way to say what you feel."

People who didn't understand art - people like Marcel's wife, for example - were going to have an unhappy time while he was groping his way into that new stage of life. He became restless and discontented; he found fault with everybody and everything; his life had come to nothing. He took to going out at night, when people couldn't stare at his mask, and wandering about the roads on the Cap. Beauty was exasperated, but she dared not show it; she was haunted by the idea that if she made him unhappy he might try to get back into the army, or else in some fit of melancholia he might seek to release her from her burden by jumping off the rocks. She had never forgotten Lanny's suggestion of that possibility, at the time when she was thinking about Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She ordered built for her genius a little studio in an out of the way corner of the place; north light, and all modern conveniences, including a storeroom for his canvases; the whole place of stone, entirely fireproof. She got him a new easel, and a pneumatic cushion for his chair, to spare his sore bones. There was everything ready for him - everything but his own spirit. He would go to the place and sit and brood. He would spend much time stretching canvases on frames, and would sit and dab paint on them, and finally would take them out behind the studio and burn them, saying that he was no good any more. What he wanted to say couldn't be said in any medium known.