All Kneeling/Chapter 4
Christabel wrote in her Secret Journal: "Let me work at white heat, let me be molten in the flame!
"What is anything in comparison with this lonely shining Joy of Creation? This welling of the water from the deep below the deep, this blessed privilege of being the cup to hold the water that brims over for the thirsty? Nothing must interfere with my work, no thoughts of self, no selfish joy or sorrow. The bees have flown far, in orchards and meadows. Now I call them back to the hive, and in darkness and silence they make the golden honey.
"Oh, Passion of Work, fill me and flood me! Is there a World? I forget."
She had inked her finger, so she washed her hands and rubbed cold cream into them, looking at them critically. Elliott said her hands made him believe in God. She tried them in different positions.
Well, now to work.
First she cleared her desk of the quill in its glass of shot, the snowstorm paperweight Gobby had found for her, her mother's latest letter, Mrs. Talbot Emery Towne's invitation to Sunday luncheon, an invitation to read from her poems at the Saturday Salon, and a note from Elliott, which she reread, glowing pleasantly. Then she sharpened a handful of pencils and put them in a row by a pile of yellow paper.
If she didn't answer Mrs. Towne's invitation before she began to work, it would be a gnat in her mind. And that Salon thing. She wrote the notes. What should she wear when she read her poems? In spite of the dirty snow, it was too near spring for velvet. Her blue dress with lace collar and cuffs? That made her look like a demure child. She was going to read the three unpublished poems that made up "Love on the Mesa," "Vermillion paint and slanting eagle feather," "The yellow cactus bloomed for us today," and "Death coiled and rattling in the blue rock shadow." She could see herself, hear herself, hear her audience. How has that child lived long enough to have felt so deeply, to have suffered so?
The earth in her pot of hyacinths was hard and gray. White hyacinths to feed the soul. She watered it, watching the water bubble up through the cracks. She yawned.
Now to work.
She was writing a romance of old Spain, called Carnation Flower. "Chapter Eight," she wrote, and gazed at the words. Then she drew three lines under them and yawned again.
Now what? Annunciata had to be gotten to the bull-fight, but how to get her there? A true artist never wrote:
"Chapter Eight.
"Annunciata went to the bull-fight to see Juan" though that was what must be conveyed.
How to begin the chapter? She pulled book after book from her shelves and dipped in to see how other authors did. Dostoevski, Hardy, James. She would sit at the feet of the masters.
"Two days after the incident I have described I met her"
"On an early winter afternoon, clear but not cold, when the vegetable world was a weird multitude of skeletons"
"It will probably not surprise the reflective reader"
Somehow they were not helpful. Lesser lights might show the path.
"''Enery,' said Mrs. Hawkins, severely, as the cutlets sputtered in the pan"
"Corinthia sat in her coach, her cheeks glowing faintly, her full skirts drifting like snow about her"
Christabel tumbled the books back into their places, and wrote quickly:
"Annunciata sat in her box, her skin glowing faintly with the patina of pale old gold, a snowfall of white lace drifting across hair that reflected the light like black water. She was in white except for the red rose, deep as velvet, that held the mantilla to the extravagant comb, and the great fan, painted with death and glory, that hid the passionate beating of her heart. The dark eyes curtained by proud lids, the beautiful scornful mouth, the languid hand unfurling the fan, were calm, but as Juan ran into the bull ring she was a flame wrapped in snow."
Then she stopped again.
How could she write about passion until she had felt it in more than the general way all artists feel everything? Didn't she owe it to her art to live more fully? She had been thinking so, off and on, all winter, and now spring made her sure. These conventions, these old taboos! Chains to a soul that longed for freedom, chains that one touch of truth and courage would break.
She knew Elliott loved her. That he had never told her so in words only made her more certain, especially after talks with Boyd Benjamin, full of thrilling psychological explana tions. Chiefly, Boyd said, he was afraid of admitting his passion because it might interfere with his work. Interfere! Christabel laughed with tender mockery. It would release the floods of artistic creation in him as well as in her. We will be together on the mountain tops, my dearest. You and I together, and the world forgotten. We will know the deepest and the highest, we will know heart-piercing reality.
No use in hesitating, now that she had decided. "Oh, at last!" she whispered to herself as she stepped out of her clothes and inte her best chemise. Her hands were snow against her flaming cheeks. She went over to her desk and read the last words she had written. "She was a flame wrapped in snow."
How her heart was pounding! She patted Lilas blanc behind her ears and got out fresh gloves. The slushy snow made galoshes necessary. That was annoying.
At the door she paused and covered her face with her hands. "Oh, my dear, be very gentle to me," she whispered.
Elliott's door was unlocked, but his room was empty. It had always been set in order for company when she had visited it, and the way it looked now was a surprise. A cat and a loaf of bread lay in his unmade bed, assorted objects on the floor had to be stepped over, obscene pictures were drawn with red chalk on the walls. Christabel looked at them, feeling how astonishing it was that she, brought up as she had been, could be so broad-minded and tolerant about them, could even admire the cleverness of their execution.
She shook her head with a little motherly, smiling sigh. She gathered up boots, paintrags, and a frying-pan with bits of egg still stuck in it, and pushed them behind a bulging curtain. She took his best silk muffler, hanging over a chair back, to dust with, and then threw it after the boots and frying-pan. The sheets went, too. The curtain bulged like a sail in a storm.
She saw herself and Elliott in varied striking tableaux. She saw him kneeling, kissing the hem of her skirt. "My little saint! My little shining saint!" She felt his arms about her; his kisses closed her eyes. Oh, my dear, be very gentle to me!
She set the kettle to boil, and lit the candles on either side of the primroses she had brought him. "Blessed!" she said aloud, and kissed them. Shining pale yellow in the candlelight, symbols of innocent gentleness. The time she had had getting them! The clerk had been a perfect fool, and she had told him just what she thought when he had tried to make her take the ordinary mauve ones.
She had meant to have Elliott come, tired and lonely out of the cold, to find her there with her great grave gift of love and understanding and peace. Three accompanying gentlemen had been no part of her plan. But there they were, looking more startled than she felt, for their conversation on the stairs had been loud and unstudied.
They got tea jerkily behind another curtain; she heard their agitated murmurs and smelled scorching toast. Then came the sound of scraping. But she prudently refused the dingy slices, remembering where the loaf had lain.
There was a chair for Christabel. The others sat on the floor at her feet. Elliott, Peabody Baxter, whose drawings sometimes appeared in The Dial, a Russian model, and a timid youth who kept on a large muffler throughout for fear his collar was not clean enough for this radiant being.
The Russian understood no English, but turned his face to each speaker, his mouth full of scorched toast, his childlike eyes shining happily.
"Isn't it dreadfully sloppy?"
"Dreadfully! The penalty of spring is slush."
"Did you notice my primroses, Elliott? They make me feel four years old again, with apple cheeks and a fresh white pinny."
If there had been no primroses in her childhood, there were plenty in the Kate Greenaway books that she had almost succeeded in forget ting were fairly recent purchases, the books on whose fly-leaves she had written Christabel Caine in large childish letters.
"Spring in England"
"Oh! Primroses in the hedges—wet primroses with tall pink stems and crisp ruffled leaves!"
She could hear her voice, charming, with a little breathless catch in it now and then. She did not so much think, I am like a primrose, as hope some of the gentlemen were thinking it. Like a primrose, innocently gay, fresh, touching
She outstayed the others. Even Elliott's nervous offers to take her home had no effect.
"Don't send me away, my dear. I have something I must say to you. Help me!"
"I certainly will, if you'll tell me"
"It is so foolishly hard! And I ought to be able to say it as easily, as simply, as a bird sings, as those primroses bloom."
"I"
"I won't be so silly, so frightened! Elliott! I have seen everything!"
"I—uh—uh"
"You have been wonderful in your silence, and I know it was because you were afraid of startling me, shocking me, wasn't it? Don't think I didn't understand, and love you for it. But one doesn't need words for the greatest things, I think, and I have understood your wordless message, dear. You do care for me a little, don't you?"
"Oh, I should say I do! Why, I really practically—worship you. You know I do, Christabel! I sort of feel—well, religious, when I'm with you"
"Love is religion, I think. But don't make asaint of me, my dear. I'm just a woman who needs her lover's arms."
She waited for him to answer, but he remained silent and motionless, gazing at her with an expression of adoring horror, so she went on.
"Can't we speak to each other truly? Must there be this barrier of pretense between us?"
"Oh, Christabel, of course! I mean, of course not—I mean"
"I have come to you. Do you understand? Will you take my gift?"
He knelt before her. His head went down in her lap. She bent above him tenderly; she stroked his hair with a hand she couldn't keep from shaking.
"Look at me, my lover!"
"Do you mean—Christabel! Do you mean you'll be engaged to me?"
Well, perhaps it's better, she thought, relieved and disappointed, as she received his teverent kiss. Because, after all, one must think of others. Mother and father, the aunts. Love isn't true love if it makes us selfish. A cloud of white satin and tulle floated through her mind, trailing a fragrance of orange-blossoms. Poor Gerald Smith. I, Christabel, take thee, Elliott Yes, this was better.
While her hand, steady now, still stroked his hair, she shifted her position, for the chair was beginning to get a little hard. What is he thinking about? she wondered. Should she carry lilies, or a prayer-book? Donatia Platt in an orange smock blotted out the gleaming vision of herself in her wedding dress, and the phrase popped into her mind, she didn't know why, Sacred and Profane Love.
What are you thinking about, my darling? What words can I find that are beautiful enough to break this beautiful silence between us?