Testimony Of Two Men (7 page)

Yet Robert knew that she was studying him with hard thoroughness. He suddenly wanted her to like him, to know him as harmless. He swallowed, made himself speak through a tight throat. “Do you like gardening, Miss Heger?”

It was as if she either had not heard him or had no intention of replying to him. Then she shrugged and said in a dull tone, “I just work in my father’s rose gardens. He planted them himself. But he never lived to see them flower.” Her face did not change, nor the indifference in her voice.

“Sad,” said Jonathan. Robert’s full mouth tightened. Did he have to mock everything so meanly, even a girl’s natural grief for her dead father?

Jenny still looked only at Robert. “Sad,” she repeated. “He never even saw the house completed. He never lived a single day here.” She spoke without emotion. But the light in the hollow of her throat quickened.

Harald said, “Jenny was only a little girl when her father died. They were very fond of each other. Then Myrtle, Jenny’s mother, and Jenny, came to live here. It’s a happy place.”

“A very happy place,” said Jonathan. “Felicity. Charm-Sweetness. Enchantment.” He put his glass down with a thump. “And sentimental.”

“Don’t be insulting, Jon,” said Harald, with mildness. “We like it, Jenny and I. It was old Pete’s dream. It’s unfortunate for him that he didn’t live—”

“But fortunate for you,” said Jonathan.

Robert wished, all at once, that he had not accepted the invitation. His discomfort was acute. Then he saw that Jenny, for the first time, had turned her face to Jon. It had changed. Hatred was there, more fierce and relentless than ever, but something else was there too, which was secret and violent. Was it despair? Robert had never been famous for his imagination. He had always accepted things at their face value, never looking beneath the obvious for any ulterior meaning. It had never occurred to him so to look. But now he was fascinated by the girl’s expression. She had become even paler than before, as if in great pain. Her fingers were clenched on her glass, and the tips had whitened with pressure.

Jonathan was indolently studying the water again, as if forgetting everyone on the terrace. Harald said to Robert, “You mustn’t mind his nasty remarks, Bob. He’s always making them. There’s nothing personal in them, I assure you.”

“Always personal,” said Jonathan. “Come off it, Harald. I’m a gentleman. I never insult anyone except intentionally.”

Swine, thought Harald, still determinedly smiling. He was all serenity and indulgence. He said, “How’s Mother today?”

“Do you care? However, she’s as well as possible.”

Jenny regarded her glass intently. “Hasn’t she improved? It’s been a month since I last saw her. I thought she didn’t look well.”

“Heart,” said Harald with sympathy to Robert. “Not very serious, but disabling sometimes. That was the trouble with Myrtle, too. She had to take digitalis regularly.”

“I’m sorry,” said Robert, with a feeling of helplessness.

Jonathan replied to Jenny. “She isn’t very well. She’s had a lot to bear.”

“Let’s forget morbid things,” said Harald, rising. “I hear the lunch bell. Jenny?”

The girl rose swiftly, her head high and stiff, and swept
by
them into the house. “Bob?” said Harald, and Robert followed her. She was already disappearing through a wide door which had opened into the hall, and there was startling sunlight in its dimness.

The dining room was very large, with a high peaked roof of timbers. The walls were covered with rich rose damask, and the same rose color hung at tall thin windows, which had a view of the river. Here the furniture was definitely old, and Spanish, dark and heavy, the chairs carved, the seats cushioned in deep red velvet An Aubusson rug of obvious authenticity lay on the floor in tones of buff and soft blue. The long refectory table had been set with a delicate lace cloth, crystal and gleaming silver. A huge fireplace, rough and of white granite, stood at a farther wall, with copper utensils on the flagged hearth. It was a cold and forbidding room for all its taste and luxury. Jenny was already seated, remote and silent again, not lifting her eyes.

Harald sat genially at the head of the table, and Jenny at the foot where her mother had sat. Robert sat at Harald’s right hand, Jonathan opposite. “This room,” said Jonathan, “would make an excellent mortuary.”

“Oh, come on,” said Harald. “You’ve said that a hundred times. Do you think Jenny likes to hear what you think of her father’s house?”

Jonathan yawned. He looked at the immense buffet, dark with age, and surmounted by wrought-iron candlesticks. “Still a mortuary,” he said. “Why the hell don’t you turn this damned place over to the town as a museum?”

“It’s Jenny’s home. She might object” Harald was lightly amused.

He doesn’t like this place, either! thought Robert, astonished.

“Jenny,” said Jonathan, “would you object?”

She did not answer. “Now, Jenny,” said Harald, “be nice and answer your dear Uncle Jon.”

The girl still did not answer. Again Robert wished he had not come. The strange hostility had followed them here.

“Do answer your dear Uncle Jon,” said Jonathan.

The girl jumped to her feet. There were tears in her eyes. “I’ll have a tray. In my room,” she said, and before the men could rise, she had run out.

“See what you’ve done. Again,” said Harald, but without animosity. He smiled apologetically at Robert. “I don’t know what’s the matter with those two. Jon is always annoying poor Jenny, and baiting her, and she can’t stand him. You’d think they’d control themselves, wouldn’t you? Especially seeing we have you as a guest.”

“Stop being the perfect host,” said Jonathan, not in the least disturbed by Jenny’s wild rush from the dining room.

Swine, thought Harald again. He can’t behave for a minute. I hope to God he gets out soon. He said with serenity to Robert, “I see we have mock turtle soup today, and a nice fresh fish. I hope you enjoy it. Wine?”

The food was wonderfully seasoned and served. Robert usually had a healthy appetite, and he had been hungry. He was no longer hungry; he had the strongest urge to leave this place, and the company of brothers who so evidently hated each other. He was shocked. He had never seen fraternal hatred before; he had not really thought it existed. He did not wonder what had caused it. It was enough for him that it existed, and he was deeply shaken. It was against nature!

“You aren’t eating,” said Jonathan, and for the first time Robert heard genuine kindness in that deep voice.

Robert looked at him, and was startled and shaken again. It was as if Jonathan were pitying him! Robert was suddenly and confusedly angry.

Harald pleasantly insisted on showing Robert part of the house after a lunch which had seemed disastrous to him. “And don’t forget your studio,” Jonathan suggested. “The studio, by all means.” Harald was not perturbed. “What a joker,” he said, with the utmost amiability. He took Robert’s arm.

The vast drawing room was in the tower wing, and it had been made oval accordingly. The ceiling was beamed in mahogany, the stone floor covered with Oriental rugs like dimmed jewels, the walls lined in deep green silk damask in a fleur-de-lys pattern, the casement windows hung with tapestry draperies. Here was another big fireplace of whitish granite, but larger, the background bricks heavily coated with soot. In this heavy grandeur the French furniture appeared frivolous: small gilt chairs, little gilt and velvet settees, round marble tables with gilt legs, sofas in bright blue damask and satin, crystal-and-gold lamps, pedestals holding Dresden china figurines of shepherds and shepherdesses in pastel colors, old paintings of eighteenth-century wigged gentlemen and pre-French Revolution ladies with white hair and bared bosoms, ornate and massive mirrors, the frames in intricate gilt design, little buhl cabinets filled with
objets d’art,
and footstools in tapestry and velvet Apparently some designer had wished to lighten the weight of the room, but even Robert, who knew nothing of balance and proportion and suitability, felt the furniture made the room absurd. He could not explain why. He looked at the windows and again saw the blue of the water, the opposite shore and the purpling mountains.

“Silly, isn’t it?” asked Jonathan. Harald only smiled. Robert said, “It is a very nice room.” Jonathan chuckled. Robert again had the impression that both brothers were laughing together this time, and this made him feel uneasy.

“Now, what would you have on this island instead?” Harald asked his brother with good humor.

“I’ve told you before. A sturdy large farmhouse of field-stone, or, at the most pretentious, a Georgian house. Poor old Pete and his delusions of grandeur! A peasant dreaming of a palace.”

“There’s nothing wrong with dreams,” said Harald. “How can a man live without a dream of something greater than himself?”

“You manage fine. You always did,” said Jonathan.

“You’re so subtle,” replied Harald. “I don’t think you yourself know what you’re saying most of the time.”

There was the breakfast room, round and cheerful, with Amish furniture in birch and maple, which Robert liked at once, and the morning room, as Harald called it with a curious wide-eyed expression, all dark oak and bright chintz, and the library, thin, narrow, long and gloomy, lined with books which obviously no one ever read, and whose leather

covers had been chosen only for their color value. The leather furniture in black, dark blue and crimson was ponderous and forbidding, and there was a dank and leathery smell here, as of disuse. Great dull portraits were hung on what wall space remained, bearded Victorian gentlemen and prim ladies. “Old Pete’s illustrious ancestors,” said Jonathan.

“Don’t gibe,” said Harald. “If Pete invented ancestors, it did them no harm, nor him, either. He wouldn’t be the first in America.”

Robert was very weary not only of the castle, which did not seem to him to be as charming as at first, but of the wrangling brothers. There was an undertone in their objective insults which vaguely alarmed him, for though the overtone was light, the one below was vicious. Harald, at least, was tolerant and had a sense of humor, Robert thought. It was Jonathan who was the most offensive, determined to be insulting and even crude. It’s strange, thought Robert, I never considered him to be deliberately obnoxious and uncouth and cruel before. That poor girl! If he does, indeed, despise her as he admitted to me, ordinary good manners should have kept him from baiting her.

“Now the studio!” said Jonathan, in a voice ringing with false enthusiasm. “The heart of the castle, the real reason for its being!”

“Oh, shut up,” said Harald, smiling broadly. “Bob wouldn’t be interested in my daubs.” But Robert, who was liking him more and more in contrast to Jonathan, whom he was liking less and less, said, “I don’t know much about art—”

“But you know what you like,” said Jonathan with a straight face. Robert flushed. Harald took his arm again, as if in amused consolation. “I tell you again, Bob, you mustn’t listen to him. Just a rough, unpolished diamond, our dear Jon. Do you really want to see my studio? It’s on the second floor with a good north light.”

He led the way up the dark and uncarpeted oaken staircase with its somber window of stained glass. Here the dankness of the air appeared concentrated and Robert was conscious of an odd feeling of oppression again. The narrow hall above was lined with heavy oaken doors, carved and cold, and the floor was covered with a narrow Oriental runner. Harald opened one door on a chill and sunless northern light, and they entered a large and bare room, the wooden walls stacked with canvases, the curtainless big window looking out on a river which appeared too cool, too broad, and empty. Some of the paintings were already hung on the walls; one large canvas was on an easel. The room smelled of paint and turpentine and wood and dust, and brackish water.

Robert saw at once that not a single unfinished or finished painting was like anything he had remotely seen before, for none contained anything recognizable. There were whirling whorls of violent color, splashes of red with magenta and blue, black lines in geometric designs, twisting spirals in opposed hues, flat lengths of color that led to no conclusions. He was bewildered.

“Look at this,” said Jonathan, drawing his attention to the wildest hung canvas of them all. Robert dubiously approached. There was something like a scarlet sun burning in the very center, but the rays and crooked lines and whirls were violet, green, purple, pink, blue, black, yellow, and every shade in between. On the left-hand upper corner there was a splotch of enameled white dotted with staring black.

“Magnificent, isn’t it?” asked Jonathan, with an air of tremendous admiration.

“I’m not familiar with art in this form,” said Robert, trying to find some meaning in this furious and incoherent mass. “Just New York Metropolitan, I’m afraid.”

“You’re provincial,” said Jonathan. “Now,
I’ll
tell you what this is. It’s Harald’s impression of the war, in which he wasn’t engaged, he being in Paris at the time, while I was sweltering away in those damned Cuban jungles and getting malaria.”

“It does look like a jungle,” said Robert, who had never seen a jungle.

“It isn’t a jungle,” said Harald without annoyance. “Jon
‘s
at it again. It’s my impression of American towns.”

Surely he was joking, thought Robert. Then he saw that Harald wasn’t joking at all.