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Introducing Irony (Version 2)

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[78] <h2 class="nobreak">ART</h2> MRS. CALVIN and Mrs. Kildrick stood on opposite sides of a back-yard fence. Around them the romping improbabilities of early spring were dispersed amidst the sour reality of suburban houses. Pale green surrounded the small, square abodes, like an impish irrelevance. Each house carried a shade of dull green, brown and red, and these shades fitted into each other and made a meekly repressed story. Cinder side-walks stretched in front of the houses—remorsefully dry remains of fire, sacrificing themselves to occasional feet. The entire scene was an unconscious reflection of the minds of Mrs. Calvin and Mrs. Kildrick, standing on opposite sides of a back-yard fence. These women held an unblossoming stoutness, like buds that had swollen enormously but failed to open. Their gray muslin wrappers were too undistinguished to be shrouds and sepulchrally flirted with red ruffles. Mrs. Calvin had an implacably round face and it reminded one of a merchant scolding an infant. Mrs. Kildrick’s face was round, but softer, like that of a frustrated milk-maid. “You ought to see her room,” said Mrs. Kildrick. “It looks like a drunkard’s confession, as my husband says, the funniest clay figgers and paintins you ever saw.” “I couldn’t believe it when you told me,” said Mrs. Calvin, “the poor dear looks so-o respectable—what can be ailing her?” “She calls it her a-art,” said Mrs. Kildrick. “Well, as my husband does say, we should pity those whose minds are a little bit cracked!” The ladies continued to adulterate the wanness of their doubts and the sunlight continued its blunt rummaging[79] way among the rubbish-cans and fences. The afternoon jovially began to change its glowing costume for a pretended death scene, studying and lingering over gray effects. Just as its melancholy was heaving toward a climax Helma Solbert strode up the cinder walk leading to Mrs. Kildrick’s abode. She was a woman of thirty with a body whose dying youth amply derided middle-age. Her ovally impertinent face spoke to the first warnings of dissolution and told them that their coming had been ill-advised. Weary but tenaciously merry, her gray eyes were close to those of one who has made the dagger in his side a cajoling saint. Her little nose was a straight invitation to her widely ripe lips and they turned upward as if to reach it. She wore a blue serge suit that was an incongruous commonplace but did not quite succeed in effacing her. Round and black, her small hat rested lightly upon her brown and abundant hair, like an inconspicuous accident. She entered her room, abandoned her hat and coat, and measured herself in a mirror as though encouraging a stranger to play with his burden. Then a smile of delighted futility plucked at her lips and she closed her eyes to avoid robbing the stranger of his forlornly puzzling charm. With her eyes still closed she walked to a couch and stretched out upon it, and everything vanished from her face except its flesh. Framed canvases hung upon the yellow plaster walls of the room and each frame had a shape that obviously failed to harmonize with the painting it enclosed. Unconscious of the stiff challenges holding them, the canvases stood in the fading afternoon light, like a disconnected fable. One above the couch represented a small red apple split by an enormous dark green hatchet. The hatchet had driven one of its points into a wooden table and slanted steeply upward, its slender handle rising to an upper corner of the painting. Two[80] little hemispheres of red and white apple cowered on each side of the hatchet’s blade. The visible, level top of the table was dark brown and terminated against a feebly violet background. The following sentimental words were painted in black letters high upon the violet. “The hatchet struck at weak beauty, but—” The canvas was enclosed by a round frame painted in a shade of apple red. Each canvas in the room held the first line of a poem that was completed by the colored forms of the painting or a last line preceded by visual symbols. With the air of a fanatic whose blood had tightened into loops of fire that cast their sheen upon his voice, Helma would say to rare visitors viewing her paintings: “By blending into one, art, literature and painting can lose their deficiencies and gain perfection. I am merely experimenting with the crude promise of this future union.” On a canvas at the opposite side of the room a huge complexly broken arrow emerged from a pale red sky. The black arrow pieces were dotted with tiny yellow, indigo and pink birds. Dark red lips, each twisted to a different expression, stood in the corners of the canvas. Extending down the left side of the painting the following line was written in black against a strip of bare canvas. “Thus I spoke one afternoon, because—” Helma Solbert rose from her couch, lit a candle and stood before the arrow-framed painting, gazing at it with a pierced and subtly colorless face. Then she turned on an electric light and its artificial stare, in an instant, brought her an obliterating self-consciousness. With the bearing of one who impudently walks to a gruesome sacrifice she disappeared behind a lavender screen in a corner of the room and fried her evening meal. When she[81] emerged from the screen her face had once more perfected its defensive impertinence. Even in her sleep some hours later her features retained the blurred suspicion of a smile that stayed like a lurking sentinel. The following morning she was too ill to rise and Mrs. Kildrick summoned a doctor. He was a portly man with a steeply florid face and a dominating beard that had the color of wet sand. While he was in the midst of examining his patient she rose to a sitting posture and stared at him. “You’re what I tried to hide from; why have you come to plague me?” she said, loudly. <hr class="chap" /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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