“In the midst of death we are in life,” he murmured. Below, in the
orchard, his wife was carolling old French songs with the children. “_On
y danse, on y danse!_” Even Maury junior, a boy to the backbone, and
little given to self-expression in song, especially foreign-language
song, boomed out a mighty “_Tout en ronde!_” Half an hour before,
Maurice senior had stood hand-in-hand with his wife, looking up into the
flowery dome of a magnificent pear tree, all aglow with golden-white
blossoms, all perfumed with their incense, and musical with legions of
bees. He knew just where to find those magic boughs in his landscape;
he recognized their golden-veiled whiteness, their garance rose. Left
and right the spendthrift river was pouring out its silver in a royal
progress, mile after mile in the May sunlight. Ascutney, the great
mountain that all the people thereabouts knew as their tutelary deity,
had chosen from his myriad mantles the one he might wear for an hour or
so, of an entrancing blue to mock the heavens themselves. Smilingly yet
warningly he confronted Maurice, singling him out from other persons, to
tell him in a secret, consoling way, of the generations of men, those
who had gone and those who were yet to come; yes, Ascutney spoke very
seriously with Maurice, reminding him of everything, whatever it might
be, that he, Maurice Price, in his great good fortune in art and life,
owed to those generations, and must joyfully repay, by painting as best
he might that lyric scene.
“Generation after generation,” thought Maurice, “but no longer Pietro
or little Amouretta.” Quivering with emotion as he was, he saw that
the passion and skill of that far-away Maurice of the twenties had not
vanished. Now, as then, he had in large measure the artist’s gift of
multiplying his personality when he was at work; his consciousness as an
artist rose many-mansioned toward the skies. With heart and mind swelling
from the scene he conned and created, he was at once the Maurice who did
not need a pearl palette to capture the glory of that violet-edged puff
of golden cloud over the meadow, who could hear the bees in the orchard,
who could see a jewelled indigo bird flaming out from the locust bush; a
Maurice whose whole being overflowed with returning health, with rapture
in painting, with pride in Maury junior, with love for the wife of his
delight, with affection for good old Jimmy Anthony, and yet a Maurice
with sharp remembrance of those vanished children of joy, Pietro and
Amouretta.
As he painted, he smiled often, because many persons, both living and
dead, came and ranged themselves beside him, and it was pleasant to be
talking with them, on that flowery hillside. Oh, Lionardo, of course, and
Père Corot; Monet and Pissarro; his own namesake, Maurice Denis, dear
Thayer of Monadnock, and John Sargent, since he too could do landscapes
and portraits and murals! And Whistler, certainly, though at times
he talked too much, interrupting quite scornfully while Maurice was
explaining to Lionardo how our American goldfinch beats his wings as he
sings; or else breaking in with a prickly jest when Maurice was giving M.
Monet his reasons why (with due respect, Monsieur!) he meant to paint all
day on that one landscape, instead of beginning another as soon as the
light should change.
Some of his younger friends came also. One would have said that half the
American Camouflage trooped in; little Robert, so strangely saved that
black night at Beaumetz-les-Cambrai; young Harry, born at the foot of
Ascutney—smiling Harry the sculptor, beside whom he himself had stood
unharmed, in the field by Reims, when a shell came, striking Harry to
nothingness; and Anthony’s nephew too, that portrait-painter whom the
papers had called brilliant-futured—debonair Charlie Anthony whom he
himself, merely Captain Price, under orders, had unknowingly despatched
to his doom. Maurice was used to that boy’s presence by now; the harsh
realities of dreams had often brought them together. Such things could
not be, and men remain dumb. All this and much more must be told in the
miracle landscape he was creating; it would be dishonest, otherwise. In
spirit, smiling Harry and his mates belonged to that scene. Even M. Monet
admitted that without doubt there is also this point of view. Not one of
those companions failed to understand why our painter had not blotted out
Pietro’s Amouretta. Not one of them was surprised when all of a sudden he
looked up from his own painting, to make sure that Pietro’s was right
side up, and uninjured by contact with the easel; Maurice laughing to
himself the while, and saying aloud, “I should worry!”
The critics declared later that this canvas was Price’s masterpiece.
They wrote of the monumental purple dignity of his mountain, the
self-contained inwardness of his middle distance, the happy audacity
of his flowery foreground. They might have found out, to be sure,
just by looking, that the painting was on wood, not canvas! But they
could not know how much of Reims and Beaumetz-les-Cambrai were playing
hide-and-seek among the shadows of Maurice’s mind when he set down
Ascutney in the mantle of the hour. They would have been startled out of
a day’s omniscience had they been aware of everything that Pietro and
Amouretta had contributed of their brave young substance to that smiling
foreground. So excuse them, please, for whatever was wrong in their
writings; they could not know, exactly, about Maurice; and after all,
they made a very good guess.