Deerskin Read Online Free Page A

all his last commission—which might otherwise have kept him through the winter, so that he need not paint portraits of ugly arrogant people with money for some months—to hire a horse, to carry his exactingly stretched canvas and his paint-boxes and his beautifully tipped and pointed brushes, because this was going to be the commission, and the painting, of his life, and after this he would be able to pick and choose who hired him. He would even be able to sell paintings—large paintings—of his own composition, including the several already completed during the occasional months that he was enough ahead, for he lived frugally at all times, to paint what he wished, and not what people who did not know how to spend their money thought they wanted.
    In the first days of waiting he had set up his beautiful naked canvas and begun the first sketching strokes of the portrait he would make of the queen, for he had the kind of armored single-mindedness that enabled him to work even when other, possibly rival, painters peered over his shoulder. This was a useful talent, and one that had earned him more than one winter’s rent and food at harvest festivals. But this was no quick study to be thrown off in an hour; this was a masterpiece, and he felt it tingling in his fingers, till he had no need of concentration to ignore the other painters around him, for he forgot their existence.
    The queen would be standing, looking a little over her shoulder toward her audience, and her royal robes would be so gorgeous that only paint could render them, for no mere dyed and woven cloth could have produced such drapes and billows, such tints, such highlights and fine-edged hues. And yet she would be lovelier, far lovelier, than all. It hurt his heart, standing before his empty canvas, his hand poised to make the first mark, how beautiful she would be.
    But he stood now in the wide, light-filled chamber, having succeeded in winning the commission that would change his life, staring at the canvas with the few graceful lines on it, and his hand shook, and his mind’s eye was full of shadows, and the velvets and silks and the soft gloss of skin and sparkle of eye would not come to him. He had put the canvas away very soon in that great receiving-hall, although it was not the waiting that preyed upon him. He stared at his canvas now, and felt as mad as the king.
    The word went round that the young painter never slept; he called for lamps and candles at twilight, and, as the queen had ordered that he have everything he wanted, lamps and candles were brought. More! he shouted. More! And more were brought, till the room was brighter than daylight, and the chamber was a sea, and its rippled surface was the fragile points of hundreds of burning candles and oil-soaked wicks, and the painter gasped a little as he worked, keeping his head above that sea. He pulled down the curtains that hung round his bed, and told the servants to bear them away. The chamber pot he kept not under the bed but beside it, that he need not reach into even the small vague grey shadows of a well-swept floor under a high-framed bed.
    In the morning, said the servants, the candles had burnt to their ends and even some of the lamps—full the night before—were empty for they had burnt through the night; and the painter was still working. Each evening he called again for candles, and fresh candles were brought, round and sweet-smelling; and the lamps, refilled, were again set alight. And in the morning, when the servants brought him breakfast, all were still burning, or guttering, or entirely consumed, and the painter still lashed his canvas.
    It was not true that he never slept; it was true that he slept little, lying down for a few minutes or half an hour, till the light flickering against his eyelids brought him awake again, rested enough to work a little longer. But the underlying truth was that he hated the dark, hated it here, in this palace, hated and feared it, which he