This time, however, he soon gave up his search and got to his feet. The merchant’s story had moved him deeply. It touched lightly upon an incident in his own life, and even his usual devotion to the magic of art failed him today. The mild radiance of that picture of the Virgin painted by the young Italian master seemed to illuminate the faces of all the women he saw today, even if they were only stout fishwives. Dreaming and thoughtful, he wandered indecisively for a while past the crowd in its Sunday best, but then he stopped trying to resist his longing to go back to the cathedral and look at the strange portrayal of that beautiful woman again.
A few weeks had passed since the conversation in which the painter agreed to his friend’s request for a second picture to complete the altarpiece for the Mother of God, and still the blank canvas in his studio looked reproachfully at the old master. He almost began to fear it, and spent a good deal of time out and about in the streets of the city to keep himself from brooding on its stern admonition and his own despondency. In a life full of busy work—perhaps he had in fact worked too hard, failing to keep an enquiring eye on his true self—a change had come over the painter since he first set eyes on the young Italian’s picture. Future and past had been wrenched abruptly apart, and looked at him like an empty mirror reflecting only darkness and shadows. And nothing is more terrible than to feel that your life’s final peak of achievement already lies just ahead if only you stride on boldly, and then be assailed by a brooding fear that you have taken the wrong path, you have lost your power, you cannot take the last, least step forward. All at once the artist, who had painted hundreds of sacred pictures in the course of his life, seemed to have lost his ability to portray a human face well enough for him to think it worthy of a divine subject. He had looked at women who sold their faces as artist’s models to be copied by the hour, at others who sold their bodies, at citizens’ wives and gentle girls with the light of inner purity shining in their faces, but whenever they were close to him, and he was on the point of painting the first brushstroke on the canvas, he was aware of their humanity. He saw the blonde, greedy plump figure of one, he saw another’s wild addiction to the game of love; he sensed the smooth emptiness behind the brief gleam of a girlish brow, and was disconcerted by the bold gait of whores and the immodest way they swung their hips. Suddenly a world full of such people seemed a bleak place. He felt that the breath of the divine had been extinguished, quenched by the exuberant flesh of these desirable women who knew nothing about mystical virginity, or the tremor of awe in immaculate devotion to dreams of another world. He was ashamed to open the portfolios containing his own work, for it seemed to him as if he had, so to speak, made himself unworthy to live on this earth, had committed a sin in painting pictures where sturdy country folk modelled for the Saviour’s disciples and stout countrywomen as the women who served him. His mood became more and more sombre and oppressive. He remembered himself as a young man following his father’s plough, long before he took to art instead, he saw his hard peasant hands thrusting the harrow through the black earth, and wondered if he would not have done better to sow yellow seed corn and work to support a family, instead of touching secrets and miraculous signs, mysteries not meant for him, with his clumsy fingers. His whole life seemed to be turned upside down, he had run aground on the fleeting vision of an hour when he saw an image that came back to him in his dreams, and was both torment and blessing in his waking moments. For he could no longer see the Mother of God in his prayers except as she was in the picture that presented so lovely a portrayal of her. It was so different from the beauty of all the earthly women he met, transfigured in the light of feminine humility touched with a presentiment of the divine. In the deceptive twilight of memory, the images of all the women he had ever loved came together in that wonderful figure. And when he tried, for the first time, to ignore reality and create a Mother of God out of the figure of Mary with her child that hovered before his mind’s eye, smiling gently in happy, unclouded bliss, then his fingers, wielding the brush, sank powerless as if numbed by cramp. The current was drying up, the skill of his fingers in interpreting the words spoken by the eye seemed helpless in the face of his bright dream, although he saw as clearly in his imagination as if it were painted on a solid wall. His inability to give shape to the fairest and truest of his dreams and bring it into reality was pain that burnt like fire now that reality itself, in all its abundance, did not help him to build a bridge. And he asked himself a terrible question—could he still call himself an artist if such a thing could happen to him, had he been only a hardworking craftsman all his life, fitting colours together as a labourer constructs a building out of stones?
Such self-tormenting reflections gave him not a day’s rest, and drove him with compelling power out of his studio, where the empty canvas and carefully prepared tools of his trade reproached him like mocking voices. Several times he thought of confessing his dilemma to the merchant, but he was afraid that the latter, while a pious and well-disposed man, would never understand him, and would think it more of a clumsy excuse than real inability to begin such a work. After all, he had already painted many sacred pictures, to the general acclaim of laymen and master painters alike. So he made it his habit to wander the streets, restless and at his wits’ end, secretly alarmed when chance or a hidden magic made him wake from his wandering dreams again and again, finding himself outside the cathedral with the altarpiece in its chapel, as if there were an invisible link between him and the picture, or a divine power ruled his soul even in dreams. Sometimes he went in, half-hoping to find some flaw in the picture and thus break free of its spell, but in front of it he entirely forgot to assess the young artist’s creation enviously, judging its art and skill. Instead, he felt the rushing of wings around him, bearing him up into spheres of calm, transfigured contemplation. It was not until he left the cathedral and began thinking of himself and his own efforts that he felt the old pain again, redoubled.
One afternoon he had been wandering through the colourful streets once more, and this time he felt that his tormenting doubt was eased. The first breath of spring wind had begun to blow from the south, bringing with it the brightness, if not the warmth, of many fine spring days to come. For the first time the dull grey gloom that his own cares had cast over the world seemed to leave the painter, and a sense of the grace of God poured into his heart, as it always did when fleeting signs of spring announced the great miracle of resurrection. A clear March sun washed all the rooftops and streets clean, brightly coloured pennants fluttered down in the harbour, the water shone blue between the ships rocking gently there, and the never-ending noise of the city was like jubilant song. A troop of Spanish cavalry trotted over the main square. No hostile glances were cast at them today; the townsfolk enjoyed the sight of the sun reflected from their armour and shining helmets. Women’s white headdresses, tugged wilfully back by the wind, revealed fresh, highly coloured complexions. Wooden clogs clattered on the cobblestones as children danced in a ring, holding hands and singing.
And in the usually dark alleys of the harbour district, to which the artist now turned feeling ever lighter at heart, something shimmering flickered like a falling rain of light. The sun could not quite show its bright face between the gabled roofs here as they leant towards each other, densely crowded together, black and crumpled like the hoods of a couple of little old women standing there chattering, one each side of the street. But the light was reflected from window to window, as if sparkling hands were waving in the air, passing back and forth in a high-spirited game. In many places the light remained soft and muted, like a dreaming eye in the first evening twilight. Down below in the street lay darkness where it had lain for years, hidden only occasionally in winter by a cloak of snow. Those who lived there had the sad gloom of constant dusk in their eyes, but the children who longed for light and brightness trusted the enticement of these first rays of spring, playing in their thin clothing on the dirty, potholed streets. The narrow strip of blue sky showing betwee
n the rooftops, the golden dance of the sunlight above made them deeply, instinctively happy.
The painter walked on and on, never tiring. He felt as if he, too, were granted secret reasons to rejoice, as if every spark of sunlight was the fleeting reflection of the radiance of God’s grace going to his heart. All the bitterness had left his face. It now shone with such a mild and kindly light that the children playing their games were amazed, and greeted him with awe, thinking that he must be a priest. He walked on and on, with never a thought for where he was going. The new force of springtime was in his limbs, just as flower buds tap hopefully at the bast holding old, weather-beaten trees together, willing it to let their young strength shoot out into the light. His step was as spry and light as a young man’s, and he seemed to be feeling fresher and livelier even though he had been walking for hours, putting stretches of the road behind him at a faster and more flexible pace.
Suddenly the painter stopped as if turned to stone and shaded his eyes with his hand to protect them, like a man dazzled by a flashing light or some awesome, incredible event. Looking up at a window, he had felt the full beam of sunlight reflected back from it strike his eyes painfully, but through the crimson and gold mist forming in front of them a strange apparition, a wonderful illusion had appeared—there was the Madonna painted by that young Italian master, leaning back dreamily and with a touch of sorrow as she did in the picture. A shudder ran through him as the terrible fear of disappointment united with the trembling ecstasy of a man granted grace, one who had seen a vision of the Mother of God not in the darkness of a dream but in bright daylight. That was a miracle of the kind to which many had borne witness, but few had really seen it! He dared not look up yet, his trembling shoulders did not feel strong enough to bear the shattering effect of finding that he was wrong, and he was afraid that this one moment could crush his life even more cruelly than the merciless self-torment of his despairing heart. Only when his pulse was beating more steadily and slowly, and he no longer felt it like a hammer blow in his throat, did he pull himself together and look up slowly from the shelter of his hand at the window where he had seen that seductive image framed.
He had been mistaken. It was not the girl from the young master’s Madonna. Yet all the same, his raised hand did not sink despondently. What he saw also appeared to him a miracle, if a sweeter, milder, more human one than a divine apparition seen in the radiant light of a blessed hour. This girl, looking thoughtfully out of the sunlit window frame, bore only a distant resemblance to the altarpiece in the chapel—her face too was framed by black hair, she too had a delicate complexion of mysterious, fantastic pallor, but her features were harder, sharper, almost angry, and around the mouth there was a tearful defiance that was not moderated even by the lost expression of her dreaming eyes, which held an old, deep grief. There was a childlike wilfulness and a legacy of hidden sorrow in their bright restlessness, which she seemed to control only with difficulty. He felt that her silent composure could dissolve into abrupt and angry movement at any time, and her mood of gentle reverie did not hide it. The painter felt a certain tension in her features, suggesting that this child would grow to be one of those women who live in their dreams and are at one with their longings, whose souls cling to what they love with every fibre of their being, and who die if they are forced away from it. But he marvelled not so much at all this strangeness in her face as at the miraculous play of nature that made the sunny glow behind her head, reflected in the window, look like a saint’s halo lying around her hair until it shone like black steel. And he thought he clearly felt here the divine hand showing him how to complete his work in a manner worthy of the subject and pleasing to God.
A carter roughly jostled the painter as he stood in the middle of the street, lost in thought. “God’s wrath, can’t you watch out, old man, or are you so taken with the lovely Jew girl that you stand there gaping like an idiot and blocking my way?”
The painter started with surprise, but took no offence at the man’s rough tone, and indeed he had scarcely noticed it in the light of the information provided by this gruff and heavily clad fellow. “Is she Jewish?” he asked in great surprise.
“So it’s said, but I don’t know. Anyway, she’s not the child of the folk here, they found her or came by her somehow. What’s it to me? I’ve never felt curious about it, and I won’t neither. Ask the master of the house himself if you like. He’ll know better than me, for sure, how she comes to be here.”
The ‘master’ to whom he referred was an innkeeper, landlord of one of those dark, smoky taverns where the liveliness and noise never quite died down, because it was frequented by so many gamblers and seamen, soldiers and idlers that the place was seldom left entirely empty. Broad-built, with a fleshy but kindly face, he stood in the narrow doorway like an inn sign inviting custom. On impulse the painter approached him. They went into the tavern, and the painter sat down in a corner at a smeared wooden table. He still felt rather agitated, and when the landlord put the glass he had ordered in front of him, he asked him to sit at the table with him for a few moments. Quietly, so as not to attract the attention of a couple of slightly tipsy sailors bawling out songs at the next table, he asked his question. He told the man briefly but with deep feeling of the miraculous sign that had appeared to him—the landlord listened in surprise as his slow understanding, somewhat clouded by wine, tried to follow the painter—and finally asked if he would allow him to paint his daughter as the model for a picture of the Virgin Mary. He did not forget to mention that by giving permission her father too would be taking part in a devout work, and pointed out several times that he would be ready to pay the girl good money for her services.
The innkeeper did not answer at once, but kept rubbing his broad nostrils with a fat finger. At last he began.
“Well, sir, you mustn’t take me for a bad Christian, by God no, but it’s not as easy as you think. If I was her father and I could say to my daughter, off you go and do as I say, well, sir, the bargain would soon be struck. But with that child, it’s different… Good God, what’s the matter?”
He had jumped up angrily, for he did not like to be disturbed as he talked. At another table a man was hammering his empty tankard on the bench and demanding another. Roughly, the landlord snatched the tankard from his hand and refilled it, suppressing a curse. At the same time he picked up a glass and bottle, went back to join his new guest, sat down and filled glasses for them both. His own was soon gulped down, and as if well refreshed he wiped his bristling moustache and began his tale.
“I’ll tell you how I came by that Jewish girl, sir. I was a soldier, fighting first in Italy, then in Germany. A bad trade, I can tell you, never worse than today, and it was bad enough even back then. I’d had enough of it, I was on my way home through Germany to take up some honest calling, because I didn’t have much left to call my own. The money you get as loot in warfare runs through your fingers like water, and I was never a skinflint. So I was in some German town or other, I’d only just arrived, when I heard a great to-do that evening. What set it off I don’t know, but the townsfolk had ganged up together to attack the local Jews and I went along with them, partly hoping to pick something up, partly out of curiosity to see what happened. The townsfolk went to work with a will, there was storming of houses, killing, robbing, raping, and the men of the town were roaring with greed and lust. I’d soon had enough of that kind of thing, and I left them to it. I wasn’t going to sully my honourable sword with women’s blood, or wrestle with whores for what loot I could find. Well then, as I’m about to go back down a side alley, I see an old Jew with his long beard a-quiver, his face distorted, holding in his arms a small child just woken from sleep. He runs to me and stammers out a torrent of words I can’t make out. All I understood of his Yiddish German was that he’d give me a good sum of money in return for saving the pair of them. I felt sorry for the child, looking at me all alarmed with her big eyes. And it didn’t seem a bad bargain, so I threw my cloak over the ol
d man and took them to my lodgings. There were a few people standing in the alleys, looking like they were inclined to go for the old man, but I’d drawn my sword, and they let all three of us pass. I took them to the inn where I was staying, and when the old man went on his knees to plead with me we left the town that same evening, while the fire-raising and murder went on into the night. We could still see the firelight when we were far away, and the old man stared at it in despair, but the child, she just slept on calmly. The three of us weren’t together for long. After a few days the old man fell mortally sick, and he died on the way. But first he gave me all the money he’d brought away with him, and a piece of paper written in strange letters—I was to give a broker in Antwerp, he said, and he told me the man’s name. He commended his granddaughter to my care as he died. Well, I came here to Antwerp and showed that piece of paper, and a strange effect it had too—the broker gave me a handsome sum of money, more than I’d have expected. I was glad of it, for now I could be free of the wandering life, so I bought this house and the tavern with the money and soon forgot the war. I kept the child. I was sorry for her, and then I hoped that as she grew up she’d do the work about the place for me, old bachelor that I am. But it didn’t turn out like that.