The children were growing and Jonas was glad to see them happy and healthy. They were now in school and came home at four o’clock. Jonas could still enjoy them Saturday afternoons, Thursdays, and also for whole days during their frequent and prolonged vacations. They were not yet big enough to play quietly but were hardy enough to fill the apartment with their squabbles and their laughter. He had to quiet them, threaten them, sometimes even pretend to hit them. There was also the laundry to be done, the buttons to be sewed on.
Louise couldn’t do it all. Since they couldn’t house a servant, nor even bring one into the close intimacy in which they lived, Jonas suggested calling on the help of Louise’s sister, Rose, who had been left a widow with a grown daughter. “Yes,” Louise said, “with Rose we’ll not have to stand on ceremony. We can put her out when we want to.” Jonas was delighted with this solution, which would relieve Louise at the same time that it relieved his conscience, embarrassed by his wife’s fatigue.
The relief was even greater since the sister often brought along her daughter as a reinforcement. Both were as good as gold; virtue and unselfishness predominated in their honest natures. They did everything possible to help out and didn’t begrudge their time. They were helped in this by the boredom of their solitary lives and their delight in the easy circumstances prevailing at Louise’s. As it was foreseen, no one stood on ceremony and the two relatives, from the very beginning, felt at home.
The big room became a common room, at once dining-room, linen closet, and nursery. The little room, in which the last-born slept, served as a storeroom for the paintings and a folding bed on which Rose sometimes slept, when she happened to come without her daughter.
Jonas occupied the master bedroom and worked in the space separating the bed from the window. He merely had to wait until the room was made up in the morning, after the children’s room. From then on, no one came to bother him except to get a sheet or towel, for the only cupboard in the house happened to be in that room. As for the visitors, though rather less numerous, they had developed certain habits and, contrary to Louise’s hope, they didn’t hesitate to lie down on the double bed to be more comfortable when chatting with Jonas.
The children would also come in to greet their father. “Let’s see the picture.” Jonas would show them the picture he was painting and would kiss them affectionately. As he sent them away, he felt that they filled his heart fully, without any reservation. Deprived of them, he would have merely an empty solitude. He loved them as much as his painting because they were the only things in the world as alive as it was.
Nevertheless Jonas was working less, without really knowing why. He was always diligent, but he now had trouble painting, even in the moments of solitude. He would spend such moments looking at the sky. He had always been absent-minded, easily lost in thought, but now he became a dreamer. He would think of painting, of his vocation, instead of painting. “I love to paint,” he still said to himself, and the hand holding the brush would hang at his side as he listened to a distant radio.
At the same time, his reputation declined. He was brought articles full of reservations, others frankly unfriendly, and some so nasty that they deeply distressed him. But he told himself that he could get some good out of such attacks that would force him to work better. Those who continued to come treated him more familiarly, like an old friend with whom you don’t have to put yourself out. When he wanted to go back to his work, they would say: “Aw, go on! There’s plenty of time.” Jonas realized that in a certain way they were already identifying him with their own failure.
But, in another way, there was something salutary about this new solidarity. Rateau shrugged his shoulders, saying: “You’re a fool. They don’t care about you at all!” “They love me a little now,” Jonas replied. “A little love is wonderful. Does it matter how you get it?” He therefore went on talking, writing letters, and painting as best he could. Now and then he really would paint, especially Sunday afternoons when the children went out with Louise and Rose. In the evening he would rejoice at having made a little progress on the picture under way. At that time he was painting skies.
The day when the dealer told him that, because of the considerable falling-off in sales, he was regretfully obliged to reduce the remittance, Jonas approved, but Louise was worried. It was September and the children had to be outfitted for school. She set to work herself with her customary courage and was soon swamped. Rose, who could mend and sew on buttons, could not make things. But her husband’s cousin could; she came to help Louise.
From time to time she would settle in Jonas’s room on a corner chair, where the silent woman would sit still for hours. So still that Louise suggested to Jonas painting a Seamstress. “Good idea,” Jonas said. He tried, spoiled two canvases, then went back to a half-finished sky.
The next day, he walked up and down in the apartment for some time and meditated instead of painting. A disciple, all excited, came to show him a long article he would not have seen otherwise, from which he learned that his painting was not only overrated but out of date. The dealer phoned him to tell him again how worried he was by the decline in sales. Yet he continued to dream and meditate.
He told the disciple that there was some truth in the article, but that he, Jonas, could still count on many good working years. To the dealer he replied that he understood his worry without sharing it. He had a big work, really new, to create; everything was going to begin all over again. As he was talking, he felt that he was telling the truth and that his star was there. All he needed was a good system.
During the ensuing days he tried to work in the hall, two days later in the shower-room with electric light, and the following day in the kitchen. But, for the first time, he was bothered by the people he kept bumping into everywhere, those he hardly knew and his own family, whom he loved. For a little while he stopped working and meditated. He would have painted landscapes out of doors if the weather had been propitious. Unfortunately, it was just the beginning of winter and it was hard to do landscapes before spring.
He tried, however, and gave up; the cold pierced him to the marrow. He lived several days with his canvases, most often seated beside them or else planted in front of the window; he didn’t paint any more.
Then he got in the habit of going out in the morning. He would give himself the assignment of sketching a detail, a tree, a lopsided house, a profile as it went by. At the end of the day, he had done nothing. The least temptation—the newspapers, an encounter, shopwindows, the warmth of a café—would lead him astray. Each evening he would keep providing good excuses to a bad conscience that never left him.
He was going to paint, that was certain, and paint better, after this period of apparent waste. It was all just working within him, and the star would come out newly washed and sparkling from behind these black clouds. Meanwhile he never left the cafés.
He had discovered that alcohol gave him the same exaltation as a day of good productive work at the time when he used to think of his picture with the affection and warmth that he had never felt except toward his children. With the second cognac he recovered that poignant emotion that made him at one and the same time master and servant of the whole world. The only difference was that he enjoyed it in a vacuum, with idle hands, without communicating it to a work. Still, this was closest to the joy for which he lived, and he now spent long hours sitting and dreaming in smoke-filled, noisy places.
Yet he fled the places and sections frequented by artists. Whenever he met an acquaintance who spoke to him of his painting, he would be seized with panic. He wanted to get away, that was obvious, and he did get away. He knew what was said behind his back: “He thinks he’s Rembrandt,” and his discomfort increased. In any event, he never smiled any more, and his former friends drew an odd and inevitable conclusion from this: “If he has given up smiling, this is because he’s very satisfied with himself.” Knowing that, he became more and more elusive and skittish.
It was enough for him, on entering a café, to have the feeling that someone there recognized him for everything to cloud over within him. For a second, he would stand there, powerless and filled with a strange sadness, his inscrutable face hiding both his uneasiness and his avid and sudden need for friendship. He would think of Rateau’s cheering look and would rush out in a hurry. “Just look at that guy’s hangover!”
