A Prologue To Love by Taylor Caldwell Page B

everyone.”
     
    John had been standing in the doorway. Every head turned to him and every face smiled. “Lucky dog,” said Harper Bothwell. “Not everybody gets such a gift.”
     
    “Oh, I’m keeping it for myself, in a way,” said Cynthia, laughing. “Of course it will be John’s, but I have just the spot for it, right over there near the south window. You see how greedy I am?”
     
    John approached slowly, seeing no one but Cynthia. Her face was illuminated with pleasure and excitement. Cynthia seized his hand and pulled him playfully to the chair. “Look, isn’t it magnificent, and yet isn’t it terribly sad and just a little frightful? I was so lucky to get it. There are only twenty unsold, and I’m ashamed to say what I paid for it. It will be worth a fortune in a few years; in fact, it’s a fortune even now!”
     
    What did a damned picture matter? Every wall was crowded with pictures. Then he looked down at the picture, and he was sick. He remembered it very well; he thought it had been destroyed with all the others; he had believed that not a single one had remained.
     
    It was not an exceptionally large painting; it could not have been more than three feet square. It was of a new style called ‘impressionistic’, and when a few paintings in this style had first been on display in the Boston Museum there had been some well-bred rioting and many indignant epithets. There had been angry cries of ‘degenerate art, caricature, unrealistic, mad, crude, illiterate drawing and painting, thick-colored porridge thrown on with a palette knife, barbaric, an insult to nature and all true artists!’ Newspapers had written stern editorials; art critics had ridiculed; there was not a tea or dinner where this ‘outrage’ was not discussed in firm voices and denounced.
     
    Cynthia’s acquisition was of this impressionistic style. The artist had painted a scene that consisted only of a dark range of chaotic purple hills, blurred as if glimpsed through a curtain of rain. The sky above them loomed with strange cloud-shapes, apocalyptic and threatening, touched with sharp fire in the gray hollows, prophetic with vague and enormous faces. The foreground undulated in a dim yet savage green, a boundless wilderness without trees or flowers, and scattered only with grotesque boulders thrown by a giant. A man walked on it, a small figure against all that palpable and frightening color, all that pressing silence, all that majestic and menacing sky, all those broken purple hills. It was hard to tell if the figure was a man or a boy; the artist had managed to suggest both age and youth in the uncertain body in its dull clothes. The face could not be clearly seen; it was partly turned away, the eyes blindfolded, the strong arms outstretched, groping.
     
    When John Ames had first seen this thing — which had horrified him — the artist had smiled at him pleadingly and his hazel eyes had been sad. “Don’t be like this, Jack,” he had said. “Before God, don’t be blind like this. Look. See. For your soul’s sake.”
     
    John had stepped back, repelled and full of hate, and he had said nothing. The hate was with him again. It was monstrous. It was as if some evil he thought had long been destroyed had resurrected itself and was confronting him again. But there was not only this, there were nineteen more, unsold.
     
    “I see you’re overcome, John,” said Harper Bothwell. “And I don’t blame you. Magnificent. Even though it’s a gloomy theme and unlike the artist’s usual luminous colors, it’s compelling, vital. Not calculated, like Seurat. It’s full of emotion.”
     
    “I admit I’m not taken with these impressionistic painters,” said Mr. Prentice. “But you have to agree they’ve brought a new dimension to art. Positive color, sensation, brilliance. Not realistic, of course, but — ”
     
    “John,” said Cynthia, her smile disappearing, “don’t you like it?”
     
    “Ames,” said