MARTHA’s hopes had been pinned on Dolly. She could not help thinking that fate had arranged for Dolly to be here, now, when she was needed, instead of off somewhere in Europe. The last abortion Martha had heard of had cost six hundred dollars, but that was in New York; she felt sure she could do better in Boston. Five hundred was as much as she dared ask Dolly for, in any case, since she did not know how or when she would be able to pay it back. Even that much, she feared, might make Dolly gulp a little, for Dolly, though inured to being borrowed from, was scaled, Martha knew, to the small loan. Dolly would be horrified to hear the price of an abortion, just as she used to be shocked to hear what Martha paid for her dresses during the period when Martha was acting. She would feel it was one of Martha’s extravagances. Nevertheless, she would have to be asked. If Martha shrank from it, as she drove along the road to Dolly’s cabin, it was not because she expected refusal, but simply from shame at what she would have to reveal. She was going to tell Dolly the truth.
Having nerved herself for this, she was conscious, chiefly, of gratitude when Dolly broke the bad news to her before the first, faltering sentence was fully out of her mouth. She would not have to tell now, thanks be to Heaven. Sandy Gray had been ahead of her. It was Dolly who went red with embarrassment, as though she were making a confession. She had been “helping” Sandy with some improvements in his house. He was putting in heat, for Ellen, who was coming back in a few weeks. Dolly had had to apply to her trustees for an advance. Martha inwardly, so to speak, raised her eyebrows. She and John had had an estimate on heat. Sandy, she calculated, must have nicked Dolly for five hundred dollars, at the very least, if he was only having a floor furnace. She could not but admire his audacity, even while she froze with terror at what this meant for her own predicament. Her mind seemed to split in two, as if she were under an anesthetic that permitted her to watch herself being operated on without feeling any sensation. One part of her was perfectly motionless; the other was listening to Dolly and storing up details and her own commentary, to give John as soon as she got home.
Ellen, she said to herself, impatiently. Ellen will never come back to him. Ellen, in actual fact, if Dolly only knew, was coming back here to stay with the Hubers. Martha had had it from the vicomte, whom she had met just now in the post office. Ellen’s return, according to the vicomte, had a purely commercial motive. Her alimony had been cut off, finally, and she was bringing back some Mexican tin bric-a-brac for him to sell. Her hope was to get the Hubers to set her up in a shop of her own, selling Mexican wares to the summer trade. She had found a man in Laredo who would help her smuggle things across the border. The vicomte, who was usually so bland, had turned very malicious this noon. The Hubers were his pigeon. He followed Martha out to the parking space, sprinkling libels as he went, like a fat priest with an aspergill. Had Martha heard about the custody case? Did her friend know Sandy Gray was impotent? Martha made a motion of disbelief. “Oh yes, my dear girl, positively,” the vicomte assured her, with a cough. He had had it, he attested, from Margery at the grille.
This bit of gossip was printed on Martha’s mind as though in blurred type. Warming herself by Dolly’s kerosene heater (a new acquisition, she noted absently), she tried to feel concern for what was happening to her friend. Dolly looked badly, very peaked and worn. Her little breasts seemed sunken under her pale-blue shirt and black sweater. Her eyes were sunk back too, and that bright, inflamed look, as though she had just been crying or having her cheeks scrubbed by an angry nursegirl, had become almost too real. Outside, it was a beautiful day, one of those extraordinary days in November, in which the pale-blue sky and the pines reflected in the ponds created a tropical illusion, of palms and blue lagoons. Dolly should have been out painting, but she stood, hugging herself by the stove, with a lackluster air, like a shut-in. Her collections of seashells and fish skeletons had been dismantled; a bunch of cattails stood awry in a milk bottle. The sun’s rays showed crumbs on the table. In the kitchen, through the open door, Martha could see a gallon jug, half empty, of the vicomte’s cheapest white California. A slight smell of wine was noticeable on Dolly’s breath. She had been giving Sandy lunch, she said, as if explaining herself. He was not working at the scallop place any more. He was trying to write an article.
Martha nodded stiffly. Her affective side was not working. She had dragged poor Dolly down; they were both submerging in a horrible quicksand. But this perception sent no message to her sympathies. She could only note and wonder. Her main sensation was one of constraint, which she tried to cover with a manner of formal politeness. Sandy had a writing block, Dolly was saying. “What is he doing?” Martha brought out, with an effort. In her present state, it hardly surprised her to hear that Sandy was supposed to be “discovering” Warren Coe for a women’s fashion magazine. Miles had fixed it up. At the mention of Miles’s name, Martha felt herself blanch. “Oh?” she said, smiling painfully. Yes, Dolly went on, with brightening eyes. Miles had been splendid. He had such immense energy. He had persuaded Sandy that the time had arrived for him to make his come-back as an art critic. He had sold Sandy and the article in a single, forceful long-distance call. Dolly could see that he must have been a very good editor. He had even managed to get Sandy a small advance.
Ridiculous as it was under the circumstances, Martha immediately felt jealousy of Miles. “Yes,” she said curtly. “Miles is very enterprising. He should have been a salesman.” “Oh, Martha,” said Dolly, sadly. “He likes you, really. He asked a lot about you and seemed concerned about how you were.” Dolly’s coaxing look, pleading with Martha to soften, made Martha tremble with a sense of injustice and betrayal. The vision of Miles, magnanimous, and Dolly, talking her over, was really too much. “Go on,” she said tensely. But that was all there was to it; Dolly had seen Miles and he had asked how Martha was. It had come up because they were looking at the portrait. Sandy had wanted Dolly to see it again and take some notes; she was helping him with the article. She was doing the first draft now, to get him started, and then Sandy was going to go over it and put in the ideas.
A peal of genuine, incredulous laughter came from Martha. “Dolly!” she began, in fond exasperation. Her voice fell abruptly silent, as a wave of panic struck her. That was the way it had been taking her, during the past few days, in waves, like assault troops. It had happened in the parking area while the vicomte was talking. The reality suddenly grasped her and picked her up and pounded her, like a roller on the beach. But this time it was much worse, for up to now she had had the thought of Dolly to fall back on. It was only now that she fully realized that she would have to go home empty-handed. “Are you feeling sick?” she heard Dolly cry. Martha shook her head and pulled herself to her feet. “No,” she said. “I just remembered something. I have to go now.” They walked to the door. “It’s a beautiful day, don’t you think?” said Martha, gazing down at the pond. “What did you want the money for?” Dolly suddenly asked. “Nothing,” said Martha. “I’ll tell you some time. It was just one of my ‘ideas.’ Don’t tell John I asked you.” “Is it the mortgage?” said Dolly, with a face of concern. “If you could get them to wait till next month. . . .” “No,” said Martha. “Nothing like that. It was only something I wanted. Don’t worry.” Martha’s natural honesty made it hard for her to hide the fact that something was indeed the matter. But it would be only weakness, she reflected, to tell Dolly now, when there was nothing Dolly could do. To keep herself from giving way, Martha spoke in a dry, half-satirical, almost unpleasant manner that Dolly took as a rebuff. “I’m awfully sorry,” she muttered. “If you’d only asked me first.” “Never mind,” said Martha, warmly. The thought that she was still preferred to Sandy Gray made her feel momentarily better.
That night, for the first time, she could not get to sleep. She lay rigid, thinking, without hitting on a single idea that seemed feasible for more than the instant it took to turn it over. How was she to get the money when there was no one up here she dared tell? Her friends in New York seemed too far away, and she was afraid to use the mails lest a letter fall into John’s hands. Moreover, she had no excuse for going to New York in person. Boston was different. With her adaptation opening in Cambridge, John, she had decided, would not be too surprised if she announced that she was going up to see the final rehearsals. Her own play was almost finished; her spurt of work last week had accomplished miracles. There was one rough spot in the first act left to polish and then she would be done. That was the awful irony of the position. Their purposes in coming to New Leeds had been fulfilled; her play was done, more or less, and she was pregnant. It was like a fairy tale, in which you got your wish, but in such a way that you wished you had not wished it.
Yet out of this recognition issued a new temptation or rather the same one in a “higher” form. When fate, in the shape of Dolly, refused her the money, was this not to be understood as an order to accept what had happened and submit her soul in peace? In straining after an abortion, was she not seeking the impossible: to undo the past? That was precisely her criticism of the people here in New Leeds, the Sandy Grays et al. They refused to acknowledge the reality of the past; they were not accountable for their actions. In her case, to be accountable would be to have the baby.
Her head turned restively on the pillow. No, she said to herself. The past could be undone, in certain conditions. It could be bought back, paid for by suffering. That is, it could be redeemed. The money she had somehow to get was a material token of the price she had to pay for having the past obliterated. Or for having its consequences obliterated; the past itself was indelible. If suffering was the real coin demanded, there could be no doubt, Martha considered, that a genuine transaction was taking place. She was suffering horribly, more than she could have imagined possible. She felt completely exhausted by the struggle that was going on, not so much in her as on her, as though she were a battlefield torn by conflicting forces. Every time ground was gained in one place, the action started up in a new spot. Her taut muscles ached, with the effort of lying still, so that John would not sense that she was wakeful. Her head ached; her heart pounded. This very weariness and malaise gave rise to false hopes. A tempter’s voice hinted that she might have a miscarriage if she merely kept on agonizing and took no positive steps; miscarriages ran in her family—her mother had had several.
It was the reasoning power of the adversary that she found most intolerable. She was almost ready to have the baby, to put a stop to this arguing. She felt as though she were present, against her will, at an interminable discussion. It was like a night at the Coes’ raised to a pitch of delirium, with captious voices pleading, “Explain to me, why not? Give me one reason why not.” The medieval temptations, with all the allures of gluttony and concupiscence could not, Martha thought, have been half so trying as the sheer dentist-drill boredom of listening to the arguments of the devil as a modern quasi-intellectual. Under this badgering, she could not prove she was right, while the devil had proofs innumerable that she was wrong. That was how she knew he was the devil, but she was too tired to demonstrate that. He made chains of propositions; he argued from statistics and from norms and from social history. A Whig lady told her that she was being middle-class: it was vulgar to worry about the paternity of one’s children. The vicomte coughed. Sandy Gray announced that she was not “a real woman,” in his glowering, miasmal voice. Miles told her she did not really want a baby and was using this pretext to get rid of it.
In this awful din, Martha found herself reciting phrases from the Bible and from literature. “Father, let this cup pass from me.” “All may yet be well.” “And is there one who understands me?” Lying beside John, she was conscious of her utter solitude. He was the only one who could divine what she was going through, and he was the only one, alas, in whom she could not confide. She pressed herself close to him, feeling his heartbeat, and wept.
The next afternoon, as soon as John was gone, she started walking rapidly to the Coes’. It was her only chance to see Warren alone. John would be away for several hours, photographing a house down the peninsula for a new piece he was doing on carpenter Gothic. Jane was away too; she had gone to Trowbridge to the dentist. Despite her determination, Martha was nervous. When the Western Union man gave her a lift part way, she had the feeling that she was being hurried onstage before she was ready. She felt suddenly shy of asking Warren because of Miles’s “discovering” him. It seemed to her, now, that she should have thought of this herself. Warren was a much better friend of hers than he was of Miles. Why had it never crossed her mind to do something for him? She and John knew editors too. Comparing herself to Miles, she felt that she must appear ungenerous. It was true that once or twice she had tried to awaken some interest in Warren’s work among young art critics of the Eighth Street circle, but she had not pursued the effort when she met with no response. Her excuse had been that she was not sure enough of her own opinion. Miles was too grand for such details.
“Let the public decide,” was what he had told Warren, it seemed. She found Warren in his studio, with a mourning band on his corduroy sleeve, sitting on the broken sofa in a state of despondency. Contrary to what Martha had expected, he was not at all pleased with Miles’s activities on his behalf. His easel stood empty. He had not been able to work, he said, for nearly a week. He did not want to be discovered yet. He was not ready for it. It threw off all his calculations. And it had opened a gulf, he confided, between him and Jane. Jane, being a woman, was pleased as Punch, naturally. They had been spatting for days. He saw Jane’s side of it, but Jane did not see his. Miles said the magazine was going to send a photographer, which meant that Warren would have to take all his work out of storage and notify the insurance company. That was only a bother. He could get a man to help him clear out the studio to make room for the paintings; the old bicycles and the washing machine and the deep-freeze and the dishwasher could stay outside, for the time being, under a tarpaulin.
The worst was having to choose what paintings he wanted reproduced. Jane did not realize the seriousness of that. It involved a revaluation of his whole artistic development. To do that honestly, the way it ought to be done, would require six weeks of solid thinking. And just now he had started on a new phase; something the Lamb girl said had set him off. He did not want to interrupt himself to think about his past work. If he were really honest, he might want to reject his past completely.
“You can’t reject the past,” said Martha, in a somber voice. “You don’t think so?” cried Warren eagerly, brushing off a chair for her to sit on. “Explain that a little, will you?” Martha smiled and sighed. “Not now,” she said. “Another time.” Warren’s blue eyes were full of hungry disappointment. Martha made an effort; this, she reminded herself, was very important to Warren. “I think Miles is right,” she said carefully. “Let the public decide. Pick out an assortment of the things you think are best, in their own terms. The public may like a style you don’t like at all now. But you can’t help that. It wouldn’t be fair not to show them. That was you once.”
Warren nodded. “Jane says the fission ones are too dark to reproduce well technically. How do you feel about that?” “They are dark,” assented Martha, without interest. Warren leaned forward. “But Miles thinks I should put the emphasis on the fission series. On account of your portrait, I can understand that, of course. But the funny part is, now that that phase is behind me, I feel further away from it than I do from my middle period.” He waited. “That’s only natural,” said Martha, aware that she was supposed to comment. “Is it really?” cried Warren. “Of course,” said Martha. “In the theater, I always hated my last performance.” Warren sat very still. “I hate to remind you, Martha, but you told me just the opposite a few years ago. Then you said every artist likes his latest work best, like a mother with her youngest child.” “Oh,” said Martha. “Did I? Yes, I remember.” Actually, what she recalled saying was that an artist liked his weakest work best, but she did not want to repeat this on the present occasion. It shocked her a little to realize that, having come to borrow money from Warren, she was only dishing up what she thought he would like to hear.
If he knew this, he would be cast into despair. He was very much upset because Sandy, who was doing the article, had not even come around to look at his recent painting. “How can he write about me when he doesn’t know what I’m doing now?” Martha laughed. As always, with Warren, she found herself amused and interested, despite herself. He appealed to her didactic instinct; she could not resist setting him straight. “It really doesn’t matter,” she now told him, half severely, “what Sandy says, as long as he praises you. You mustn’t expect anything more. I learned that in the theater.” Warren looked horrified. “But that’s just ‘puffing,’ ” he exclaimed. “I can’t lend myself to a thing like that. I was counting on some real criticism.” Martha grew impatient. “Don’t be greedy,” she said. “The main thing is for your pictures to be seen. They’ll never be seen if you sit here hungering for the ideal disinterested critic to come and discover you. Take what you can get.”
Warren’s eyes dilated. “I’d rather wait till I’m dead,” he said. “That’s what I’ve been telling Jane. I don’t want to be recognized in my lifetime. I know that now. My work is here. Some day, perhaps, somebody will find it and value it.” Martha caught her breath. Warren’s small figure was tense; he held his clasped hands aloft; a noble fire flashed from his eyes. Perhaps, she said to herself, this ridiculous, rapt person will really turn out to have been a great artist, and we are all too earthbound to see it. “But why, Warren?” she said gently. “The man who finds you in the future may be a fake too, like Sandy Gray. There’s no reason to think that the breed of art critics has been improving.” “That’s not the point,” said Warren. “I’ll be beyond it then. And I won’t be influenced in my work by what the public sees in me. That’s what I’m afraid of. Of starting to copy myself, like Picasso, because one of my styles catches on.”
“That’s a danger,” admitted Martha, gravely. “But if you’re brave enough to paint all alone and wait for posterity, you ought to be brave enough to risk being influenced by the public’s response. Every artist faces that problem. Some master it.” Warren shook his head. “I might not be one of those,” he said simply. “But you have to take that risk,” argued Martha. “You’re creating a set of very artificial conditions here.” She waved her hand about the studio, with its derelict machines. “You might as well be painting in a time-capsule. That can’t be right for your work. An artist has to have some reality-check. If you don’t get it from nature, you have to turn to an audience.” But Warren insisted that he was only interested in his own inner development; what happened outside, he had concluded, was just static.
The thought occurred to Martha that Warren was afraid of being judged by an audience. He had been neglected so long that he now clung to that condition, like a prisoner fighting off attempts to free him. But she liked Warren too well to want to believe this. She preferred to think that he was a martyr to his own literalness and simplicity. It was another case of his taking in a strict sense everything he heard and read; the dangers of fame, the need for dedication had been made too vivid to him. In one way, he had no imagination; in another, he had far too much. He visualized too readily; every text sprang into illustrations before his boyish eyes. But of course he was a painter.
Martha gritted her teeth. She had to speak some time. “Warren,” she said abruptly. “Have you any money of your own? Any that you could lend me? I’m in terrible trouble. That’s why I came to see you today. I don’t want Jane to know.” Warren hitched himself forward and looked around the room quickly, as if to make sure they were alone. “What is it, Martha?” he whispered. She raised her eyes and met his searching gaze. “I’m going to have a baby.” She drew a deep breath. “I don’t know whose it is.” Warren lowered his eyes; he laced and unlaced his fingers as he sat slumped on the couch. She could hear that he was breathing heavily, like a dog. His face was averted, but she saw, in profile, the white flare of his nostril and the grim set of his lips. She was done for, she presumed. She had foreseen this possibility. Middle-class morality was very strong in Warren. He saw red, as he put it, when a friend exceeded the speed limit. And he was prissy about casual sex. Love, for him, was the only sanction. Yet she had asked him rather than Jane just because he was moralistic. No matter what he thought, he was too high-minded to betray her confidence. Jane would not be shocked, but she would tell the whole village. “Was that supposed to be a secret?” Martha could hear her artlessly cry. Watching him now, Martha remembered how fond he was of John and how idealistic he had always been about their marriage. She supposed, without caring much, that she had broken his heart.
Warren unclenched his jaws. “Miles?” he inquired, in a toneless voice. Martha bent her head. “How did you know?” Her head hung heavy; she had never thought that Miles would tell anyone. “I saw it,” said Warren. “Saw it?” cried Martha, turning scarlet. “At the play-reading,” confessed Warren, with a shy, kind look at Martha. “I couldn’t help noticing that there was something between the two of you. Miles’s nose got purplish; it always does when he’s amorous. A painter notices those things. And you were a little high.” “High?” exclaimed Martha bitterly. “I was more than high.” “Not really,” said Warren, reassuring. “You hadn’t reached the glassy stage. But I was afraid for you.” “Oh,” said Martha. “Did Jane notice all this too?” Warren nodded apologetically. “Good God!” said Martha. “I wish I were dead.”
Her voice rang out in the big studio. “Me too,” said Warren. “I ought to be shot.” “You?” Warren’s head bobbed. “It was my fault, when you come down to it. I should’ve let you go home when you wanted to. I was getting such a kick out of listening to you and Miles. I’ll never forgive myself, Martha.” He suddenly picked up an ashtray and hurled it against the wall. “That’s what I’d like to do to myself,” he said, in explanation. “Poor Warren,” said Martha sadly. “Don’t take it so hard. I didn’t have to stay. The real mistake was mine. I never should have come to dinner. John and I should never have come here in the first place. I knew that.” “You always said so,” agreed Warren. “But I never could see why.” “Now you see,” said Martha, with a mournful stare.
Warren knitted his brows. “Not altogether,” he admitted. “Show me the logical connection. Just because this happened this once. . . .” “It didn’t have to happen. Is that what you mean?” Warren nodded. He was waiting, modestly, for Martha to assemble her thoughts. He wanted a “proof.” “No,” she said. “It wasn’t necessary, in the philosophical sense. It was contingent. Everything in human behavior is contingent.” “Then how do you know—?” began Warren. “I don’t ‘know,’ ” exclaimed Martha, suddenly out of patience with Warren, who even at this moment had to feed questions to her as if she were an IBM machine. “But I do know, in the plain ordinary sense. Something bad was bound to happen, if I had any feelings, if Miles had any feelings. Any fool could see that. That’s what’s wrong with you, Warren. That’s what’s wrong with this horrible place. Nobody will admit to knowing anything, until it’s been proved. Sandy Gray can pass for a decent man here because the contrary hasn’t been proved yet, to the community’s satisfaction. He’s ‘only’ had four wives run away from him. That isn’t a fair sample, statistically, you can remind me.” “Only three,” emended Warren. “The first one died, you know.”
Martha groaned. “ ‘Only three,’ ” she said. “You act as if the human race had learned nothing, as if everything were possible, as if we could all start on a new phase every day. Or a new wife. It’s all the same. You take up a doubting posture. But you don’t really doubt. You just ask questions, like a machine.” Her voice rose, in slight hysteria. Warren looked at her in consternation. “Forgive me,” she put in. “But it’s true. And the whole world is getting like you, like New Leeds. Everybody has to be shown. ‘How do you know that?’ every moron asks the philosopher when he’s told that this is an apple and that is a pear. He pretends to doubt, to be curious. But nobody is really curious because nobody cares what the truth is. As soon as we think something, it occurs to us that the opposite or the contrary might just as well be true. And no one cares.”
“Don’t you think that’s the effect of advertising?” ventured Warren. “I mean, the companies make all these claims, and nobody believes them, so that when you come right down to it, the ordinary person gets pretty darn skeptical. He wants to question every big assumption that’s offered him.” He smiled brightly. “I suppose that could be a bad thing if you wanted to look at it that way. I never thought of that side of it. But how would you fit in Socrates?” Martha groaned again. “Socrates,” she said, “assumed that the ordinary person knew something. The problem was to get the ordinary person to remember what he already knew. Socrates showed that by demonstration when he got the slave boy to work out, for himself, a problem of mathematics.” She broke off. “What are we talking about?” she said crossly. “Warren, I have to have an abortion.”
Warren nodded. “You see that?” she cried, wonderingly. “Why, yes,” said Warren. “It goes with what you’ve just been saying, doesn’t it? You care about the truth. You don’t want to have a baby when you don’t know whose it is.” “Exactly!” sighed Martha, with joy. “I began to think nobody would understand it.” “I’m not very bright up here,” said Warren, tapping his head, “but I know you, Martha. You couldn’t stand a situation like that. From your point of view, that would be hell on earth. A person like Jane”—he twinkled—“wouldn’t be bothered at all. When the baby was born, she’d have blood tests to find out who the father was.” Martha looked at him in surprise; she had not thought him so perceptive. She laughed. “It would be almost worth it,” she said, “to make Miles submit to giving a blood sample. He has an awful fear of the needle.” Warren’s eyes lit up with boyish glee; sadly, then, he renounced the picture. Despite the gravity of the occasion, he and Martha were on the edge of giggles, like children conspiring, as they started to map out a campaign. The need to be ingenious and secret, in the face of danger, made them lightheaded; it was only when they came to speak of John that they were altogether serious, for they did not look on him as an enemy. To Martha’s relief, Warren took it for granted that John should not be told. He applauded Martha’s decision as in the interests of the public safety. Twenty years ago, he told her, when he was John’s age, he would probably have killed Miles if he had got Jane in this fix.
Warren, unfortunately, had very little money of his own on hand; it was Jane who held the purse strings. His tiny inheritance was managed by her mother’s man of business. And Jane, he agreed, had better not know. Miles, Warren said, logically, was the person who ought to pay. Contrary to Warren’s principles, he was boldly taking sides. Inside himself, he confessed, he was hopping mad at Miles. Martha was glad to see this, despite her better nature, but she was also mystified, for she had not told Warren a word about the circumstances of her fall. He assumed Miles was in the wrong, and the reason, it turned out, was simple: Miles, said Warren, darkening, had evidently neglected to take precautions.
Martha laughed, but actually she had to admit that her own view was not so different from Warren’s except that it was herself she blamed, not Miles. It was an explanation but not an excuse to say that, trying to have a baby, she had got out of the habit. She ought to have thought. This failure to think was what she could not forgive herself. And it was what John would not forgive her if he were ever to find out. Warren did not agree. That was the man’s duty, he said sternly; the woman was at his mercy. “Amn’t I right?” He folded his arms.
“I guess so,” said Martha, weakly, not wanting to lose her champion over a quibble. But she would rather die, she declared, than have Miles know what had happened. If Warren told him, she would kill herself. It was a question of her honor, as John’s wife, that Miles should never know what straits he had reduced her to. Her tears suddenly gushed out; she cried from self-hatred and an abrupt conviction of the hopelessness of her efforts to salvage a little honor—for that was all it amounted to—from the abominable mess she was in. Warren drew out a handkerchief. “I’m not going to tell him,” he repeated, soothingly, as he wiped her face. He had a better idea, he confided, when he finally could get her to listen.
Miles had not paid for the portrait yet. Tomorrow, without telling Jane, Warren would go to Digby and collect the purchase price from him. This would more than pay for the abortion. Warren would bank the rest under his own name; later on, if Martha could not pay him back, he could tell Jane some fib to account for the difference. Miles would never suspect and it was not Jane’s business, Warren announced heroically, how he spent his own money.
But it was Helen who had bought the portrait, objected Martha, looking up. Warren might find it very awkward to ask her under the circumstances. She was not the guilty party. Warren shook his head. Helen, he said, had the money, but Miles was the real arbiter. If Helen did not pay for it, Warren would take the picture back. Miles would not want that because it might frustrate his scheme of discovering him. Warren’s enthusiasm gradually persuaded Martha. She sat up and rearranged her hair while Warren ran into the house to fetch her a cigarette. The possibilities of collecting a large sum of money from Miles seemed unreal to her, on the face of it, but everything seemed unreal: her condition, her visit to the doctor, this cabal in the cobwebby studio. And it was true, as Warren said, that Helen Murphy had money and that they did owe for the portrait. Why should it seem unnatural that Warren would expect to be paid? If there was a lingering strangeness in the situation, it was the strangeness of New Leeds, which submitted everything that passed here to its own angle of distortion. She could not help feeling, moreover, that there was a kind of convincing poetic justice in what Warren proposed. Warren’s very goodness and simple, open heart made her trust in him, like some visionary little friar. It was right that Miles, who had been treating himself like a Renaissance condottiere, pillaging the countryside from his stronghold, should finally have to pay up. Warren was one of those people, God’s disinterested innocents, who had a right to appear humbly at the doors of the mighty demanding reparation.
In Digby, the next morning, Warren was directed to Miles’s study, up above the gymnasium. Downstairs, where the portrait hung, the baby was standing in a play-pen, in charge of a native girl. Helen was busy, taking dictation from Miles. In his role of creditor, Warren felt a little uncomfortable, claiming to be a friend to see Mrs. Murphy. When Miles heard his voice, he yelled at him to come up. In trepidation, breathing quickly, Warren appeared at the head of the spiral staircase. But Miles was in high good humor, freshly shaved and scrubbed and smelling of lotion. He was wearing rimless spectacles and a big white wool dressing gown, with a green cord; his feet were in brown suede booties with a fleece lining. He sat at a huge table, which was covered with books with markers in them. Helen, in a plain dress, was in a low chair beside him, holding a pad in her lap. The tower room was lined with bookcases and filing cases. There was a dictionary-stand and a pair of library steps, as well as a bird-cage, containing a strange black bird, like a raven, Warren thought. The room was rather cold, and a revolving electric heater stood by Miles’s side, warming his bare calves. Little dishes of water were placed all around the room: Miles had a phobia about the air being dehydrated. Glass jars full of something that looked to Warren like mold stood on a shelf; lately, Miles had been interesting himself in natural history, which doubtless explained the bird. Miles was probably observing its habits.
Warren could not help feeling excited by the scholarly apparatus of Miles’s sanctum. “I don’t usually see people in the morning,” Miles explained, with a kindly look over his glasses. He supposed, naturally enough, that Warren had come about the article. “See Sandy about it,” he advised. “Get him to go over your pictures with you. Tell him what to write, if you want. Don’t let him patronize you. When it’s finished, I’ll look it over and fix up the spelling and punctuation.” Warren tried to indicate that this was not his purpose in coming, but Miles did not seem to hear him. “Don’t worry,” he genially roared. “It’s going to be a great thing for you. But you don’t want to let it distract you from your work. You ought to be home, at your easel, at this hour, instead of gadding around. What are you painting now? I’ll be down to see you one of these days. Give my love to Jane.” Having fired these remarks at Warren, he settled his glasses on his long nose and picked up a book from the table. His lips moved slightly as he read. It was plain that Warren was supposed to be off now. So as not to disturb him, Warren began to talk to Helen in whispers.
“Money?” Miles exclaimed, immediately looking up. “What money?” Warren blurted out that he had come to be paid for the picture. Miles stared. Helen’s hand went out impulsively to a checkbook that Warren could see lying on the table. She started to look for a pen. “Of course,” she murmured. “Right away.” Miles raised a hand. He was smiling. “Just a minute,” he said. “Jane told Helen there was plenty of time. I don’t know that we can swing it this month.” He glanced affably at Warren. “Why don’t you leave me your bill?” he proposed. “Then Helen can take care of it when she does the accounts next month.” Warren swallowed. Owing to Martha’s condition, the word, month, had acquired a terrible significance for him. He did not know what to say. Miles was looking at him in such a friendly, unconcerned way, as though the subject were closed. “But I need it now, this month,” Warren declared, in a thin, squeaky voice, turning humbly to Helen. Helen’s long thin hand went out again, capably, for the checkbook. “Nonsense, old man,” Miles interrupted, with a slightly irritable laugh. “You and Jane are rolling in it. I’m a poor man, comparatively, with a lot of expenses. I’ve still got the car to finish paying for and I’m still buying books for my work.” A testy note came into his voice; he fitted a cigarette into his holder. “You can see for yourself,” he went on, flourishing the holder. “I’ve had to advertise for most of this stuff. I’ve got a couple of rare-book dealers running things down for me.”
Warren felt like a moneychanger as his eyes, following Miles’s gesture, took in the array of books on the shelves, most of them in foreign languages, Greek, German, French, Latin, Italian, rare editions, doubtless, and all in fine bindings. These books must have cost Miles a fortune. And they were necessary to Miles’s work, for which Warren still felt a keen respect. His eye lit on a tiny volume of Kierkegaard: “De omne dubitandum esse,” he read. His loyalty to Martha wavered for an instant. He remembered how good Miles had been to him, how generous he had been with his library. Jane was a bit stingy about books. They were dust-catchers, she said. It was cheaper, according to her, to join a library that would send you any book you wanted. But she always forgot to send them back, so that Warren was ashamed to use their memberships. He yearned to borrow that Kierkegaard. If he asked for it, Miles would press it on him. People said Miles was mean about paying his bills, but perhaps he was really strapped, as he was saying now. Warren’s gaze went wistfully to Helen. “But if Warren needs it, dearest,” she murmured.
Miles pulled up his dressing gown and put his hands on his hips. “Why would he be needing it?” he said, with a suggestion of a brogue. Warren blinked. He had not been prepared for Miles to ask him his reasons. “I have a lot of expenses too,” he said gamely, “in connection with my mother’s estate. My uncle needs cash to settle it. He doesn’t want to sell now, with the market down.” He felt a momentary pride in this story, the first he had ever invented; it had just the right amount of truth in it, he considered. “Why don’t you ask Jane?” inquired Miles, sensibly. Warren gulped. Now that he thought of it, it seemed a logical question. “I can’t,” he said wretchedly. “I can’t ask her to sell stocks, either, till the market comes up again. She’s done so much for me.” “She married you,” said Miles. “Why should you turn to me instead of her?” “Because you owe it to me,” Warren brought out faintly, blushing up to his eyes. He could see Miles’s point of view perfectly. From Miles’s point of view, he looked a real son of a bitch, yes, a son of a bitch, coming down here to dun Miles, just to save a few filthy dollars on the stock market. He would not blame Miles if he never spoke to him again.
A nerve began to twitch in Miles’s shaved pink cheek. His foot came forward in its bootie and kicked the heater off. “Look here, Warren,” he went on, still patiently. “You’re going to make a lot of money thanks to Helen buying that portrait. Sandy’s article is going to put you on the map. As soon as that piece comes out, dealers will be beating a path to your door. Wait and see. I know how these things work. Why, man, you ought to pay Helen for her vision in buying that picture. A picture of Martha, mind you, my former wife. It took generosity for Helen to do that.” “I know that, Miles,” put in Warren, sadly. His fifty summers turned to fifty winters; he was withered with shame at his importunacy. He could see that he was putting Miles’s back up every time he spoke. “By the way, how is Martha?” he heard Miles say in his most Jovian tones. “She’s fine,” said Warren, coloring again. All at once, he remembered that it was Miles who ought to be blushing. This thought, when he concentrated on it, brought his blood to a boil. “Why, yes, you might say,” Miles continued, winking, “that you owed Helen money. It’s the turning point of your career. Now don’t get excited,” he added, pacifically, noticing that Warren’s fists had clenched. “I don’t mean that Helen isn’t going to pay you. That was just a jeu d’esprit. Let’s say she gives you a couple of hundred next month and a couple of hundred the month after. That’ll see to your Christmas stocking.” “No,” said Warren.
“Perhaps I could give him something now, Miles,” Helen intervened. “No,” said Warren. Hectic spots burned in his cheeks. “A couple of hundred won’t do.”
Miles cinched in his robe. Under Warren’s fascinated gaze, a change began to take place in him. He swelled, as if inflating with air, like a balloon slowly distending. As he swelled, his cheeks got redder and his eyes, two green gimlets, receded into their fleshy upholstery. “Why, you’re off your chump, man,” he said. “Nobody buys pictures that way. Ask any dealer. They sell them on tick. Don’t you know that much about your own trade? I’ll tell you what’s the matter with you.” “Hush, darling,” said Helen anxiously. “You mustn’t let yourself get excited. Warren doesn’t mean—” “Hush, yourself,” said Miles, in a strange, rough voice. “Don’t try to run me. Go on downstairs, to your child. Tend to your knitting.” Helen retreated, with her pad, smiling fixedly at Warren, as if apologizing for herself. She did not go all the way down. Warren heard her footsteps pause, somewhere in the middle; she was listening. Tears stood in Warren’s eyes; he wanted to punch Miles and make his crooked nose bleed, for the way he behaved toward women. “I’ll tell you what’s the matter with you, Coe,” Miles repeated. “Your head’s got too big for your hat. You’re suffering from delusions of grandeur. I ought to have expected this. When Helen told me the price you were trying to put on that painting, I set it down to temporary insanity. I was sorry for you. Here, I said, is a decent, modest little chap who’s so starved for recognition that his first sale unhinges him. ‘Don’t argue,’ I said. ‘Just keep the painting and let him come to his senses. The price is merely symbolic; he’s too much of a gentleman to play a friend for a sucker.’ Frankly, I thought you’d consider yourself lucky to collect on the quarter-dollar. He needs ego-satisfaction, I said to myself, and I drummed up this magazine piece for you. Sandy thought I was bats when I first put the idea up to him.” He paused to let this sink in; his thin lips were set in that narrow, cruel line they had when he was drunk. Warren, across the desk, accepted blow after blow to his vanity without flinching; the only thing that hurt him, really, was to be called “Coe.”
He did not mind what Miles thought of him as an artist; it was his friendship that was bleeding away, in this eyrie, while the silent bird swung in its cage and the gold lettering of the books shone. “Mind you,” Miles continued, in even tones, “none of this affects my attitude toward your work. I can see you for what you are, as a man, without losing faith in your picture, downstairs. As a human being, you’re a wretched little rentier and a leech. I’ve put up with you for ten years, having you pick my brains whenever you and your frau invite me over to put on the feedbag. But you’re a damned fine draughtsman. I always said so. I say it again. And I’m going to pay you for the picture. Don’t think I’m going to default on it. I’ll pay you what I think it’s worth, in my own sweet time. If you don’t like that, you can sue me. Now, go on, peddle your papers.”
He took up a book and pencil and swung sideways in his swivel chair. Warren did not move. Miles finally looked up, as if casually, and discovered him still there. “Well?” said Miles. “Give me my money or I’ll take the picture back,” said a low, threatening voice issuing from Warren. He was re-testing the theory, which had not proved true in boarding school, that all bullies are cowards. Miles leapt up. “Helen,” he yelled. “Come up here, damn it! Get this bill-collector out of my study.” Warren’s fists, which had doubled up in self-protection, did a little dance. “Helen!” Miles bellowed. “Coming,” a faint voice answered. They heard her footsteps on the stairs. Warren’s fists fell; his shoulders slumped. He could not hit Miles in front of his wife. And Miles would probably refuse if Warren invited him to step outside. “I’ll take back the picture,” he declared wildly, as he cast a last vengeful look at Miles and started to run down the stairs, nearly bumping into Helen, who swerved aside to let him pass. He came pounding into the gymnasium and rushed up to the portrait, which seemed to look askance at him with its curving ironical smile. His threat, he recognized, had been perfectly idle. He could no more remove the picture than he could beat up Miles. It was too big.
Even as he tugged at one corner of it, he admitted defeat. The picture began to teeter. Carefully, Warren set it straight. He was afraid that if it fell, in the heavy frame Miles had put on it, the crash would disturb the baby. He smiled wanly at the little creature, wiggled his ears, and softly took his departure. His heart was downcast, because he had failed Martha, but he could not help feeling a mite of satisfaction. Just for one minute, Miles, with his dumbbells and his Indian clubs, had been afraid of him.
He sat, conscientiously warming the motor, in the Murphys’ driveway. He was not thinking, yet, of the terrible things Miles had said to him, which made him feel sorrier for Miles, almost, than he did for himself. He was concentrating on the money. And all at once he saw, very simply, how he could get it.