Rosshalde Read Free

a calendar from the drawer of the little desk in the corner, and wagged his head with satisfaction as he looked at it. Up to the middle of the month, more than twenty of his paintings would be on exhibit in Brussels. That was a good thing. It meant that his friend, whose sharp eye he rather feared and from whom he would not be able to conceal the devastation of his life in the last few years, would at least have a good impression of him, an impression he could take pride in. That would make everything easier. He saw Otto with his somewhat rough-hewn transoceanic elegance striding through the Brussels gallery, looking at his paintings, his best paintings, and for a moment he was thoroughly glad he had sent them to the show, though only a few were still for sale. And he immediately wrote a note to Antwerp.
    â€œHe still remembers everything,” he thought gratefully. “He’s right, the last time we stuck almost entirely to Moselle, and one night we really drank.”
    On reflection, he concluded that there was sure to be no Moselle left in the cellar, which he himself rarely visited, and decided to order a few cases that very day.
    Then he sat down again to his work, but felt distracted and uneasy and was unable to regain the pure concentration in which good ideas come unsummoned. He put his brushes in a glass, pocketed his friend’s letter, and sauntered irresolutely into the open. The mirror of the lake glittered up at him, a cloudless summer day had risen, and the sun-drenched park resounded with the voices of many birds.
    He looked at his watch. It was time for Pierre’s morning lessons to be over. He strolled aimlessly through the park, looked absently down the brown, sun-mottled paths, listened in the direction of the house, walked past Pierre’s playground with its swing and sand piles. At length he approached the kitchen garden and looked with momentary interest up into the high crowns of the horse-chestnut trees with their shadow-deep masses of leaves and last joyous-bright candles. The buzzing of the bees came and went in soft waves as they swarmed round the many half-open rosebuds in the garden hedge, and through the dark foliage the merry little turret clock in the manor house could be heard striking. The number of strokes was wrong, and Veraguth thought again of Pierre, whose proudest ambition it was, later, when he was bigger, to repair the ancient clockwork.
    Then he heard, from the other side of the hedge, voices and steps which in the sunny air of the garden blended softly with the buzzing of the bees and the cries of the birds, with the lazy-blowing fragrance of the carnation border and of the bean blossoms. It was his wife with Pierre; he stood still and listened attentively.
    â€œThey’re not ripe yet, you will have to wait a few days more,” he heard the mother say.
    The boy’s reply was a twittering laugh. For a fragile, fleeting moment the peaceful green garden and the soft resonance of this childlike conversation, muffled by the breeze, seemed in the expectant summer stillness to come to Veraguth from the distant garden of his own childhood. He stepped up to the hedge and peered through the leaves into the garden, where his wife in a morning dress stood on the sunny path, holding a pair of flower shears in her hand and on her arm a delicate brown basket. She was hardly twenty paces from the hedge.
    The painter watched her for a moment. The tall figure was bending over the flowers; her grave, disillusioned face was entirely shaded by a large, limp straw hat.
    â€œWhat are those flowers called?” asked Pierre. The light played over his brown hair, his bare legs stood thin and sunburnt in the bright glow, and when he bent down, his loose-fitting blouse revealed the white skin of his back below his deeply tanned neck.
    â€œCarnations,” said the mother.
    â€œOh, I know that,” said Pierre. “I want to know what the bees say to them. They must have