A PRIVATE VIEW
From the first room, a kitchen and general living room, such as she had
learned to know in the other ranch houses, he conducted her up two steps
to a doorway, from which he pushed aside a Navajo blanket with its rude
coloring of black and red. There was disclosed beyond this an apartment
of a sort with which she was more familiar, a spacious studio with its
large window giving to the north. In the clear light her eyes ran
quickly over its details: the chinked logs that made its walls, the huge
stone fireplace on one side, the broad couch along the opposite wall,
covered with another of the vivid Navajo weaves, the skins of bear and
lynx and cougar on the stained floor, the easel before the window, a
canvas in place on it; the branching antlers over the fireplace,
contrived into a gun rack; a tall, roughly made cabinet, its single
shelf littered with half-squeezed tubes of paint, a daubed palette, and
a red-glazed jar from which brushes protruded. Above the couch were some
shelves of books, and between it and the fireplace was a table strewn
with papers, magazines, a drawing board with a sheet of paper tacked to
it, and half a dozen sharpened pencils.
He indicated the couch. "It will be a good thing for you to rest a
little," he said. She seated herself with a smile of assent. He rashly
began to arrange the pillows for her, but left off in a sudden
consciousness of his temerity, withdrawing a few paces to regard her.
He was still apprehensive, but his boy's eyes were full of delight,
amusement, curiosity, and, more than all, of a wistfulness like that of
a dumb creature. He stepped to the door for the pitcher of water and
glass that Ben now brought.
She had studied him coolly as he spoke--the negligent out-of-doors
carriage of the figure, not without a kind of free animal grace, the
grace of a trampling horse rather than that of soft-going panthers. The
floor boards reechoed to his careless, rattling tread, and occasionally,
his attention being drawn to this reverberation, he was at great pains
for a moment to go on tiptoe. He was well set up, with a sufficient
length of thigh. Mrs. Laithe approved of this, for, in her opinion, many
a goodly masculine torso in these times goes for nothing because of a
shortness of leg. His hair was a lightish brown and so straight that a
lock was prone to come out behind and point uncompromisingly toward
distant things. This impropriety he wholly disregarded, whereas the more
civilized man would have borne the fault in mind and remembered
occasionally to apply a restrictive hand. His face was a long, browned
square, with gray eyes, so imbedded under the brow that they had a look
of fierceness. His lips showed only a narrow line of color, and trembled
constantly with smiles. These he tried to restrain from time to time,
with an air of pinning down the corners of his mouth.
She had noted so much while he poured out the water, and now he came to
her, walking carefully so as not to thunder with his boots.
"You must have been frightened," he said, and his eyes sought hers with
a young, sorry look.
"Not after we left the woods; it wasn't funny among those trees."
He brightened. "I'd always thought women don't like to look funny."
"They don't," said the lady incisively, "no more than men do."
"But you can laugh at yourself," he insisted.
"Can you?" She meditated a swift exposure of his own absurdity at their
meetings in the valley, but forbore and spoke instead of his pictures.
"You must show me your work," she said.
For a moment it seemed that she had lost all she had gained with him. He
patently meditated a flying leap through the door and an instant
vanishing into the nearest thicket. She had an impulse to put out a hand
and secure him by the coat. But he held his ground, though all his
geniality was suddenly veiled, while he vibrated behind the curtain,
scheming escape, like a child harried by invading grown people in its
secret playhouse.
She looked cunningly away, examining a rip in her glove.
"I tried to paint a little myself once," she essayed craftily. Nothing
came of it. He remained in ambush.
"But it wasn't in me," she continued, and was conscious that he at least
took a breath.
"You see, I hadn't anything but the liking," she went on, "and so I had
the sense to give it up. Still, I learned enough to help me see other
people's work better--and to be interested in pictures."
"Did anyone try to teach you?" he asked.
"Yes, but they couldn't make me paint; they could only make me see."
"Perhaps you could tell me some things," he admitted at last, "if you've
tried." He paltered a little longer. Then, "Ben Crider says this is the
best thing I've ever done," and he quickly took a canvas from against
the wall and placed it on a chair before her.
She considered it so quietly that he warmed a little, like a routed
animal lulled once more into security by the stillness.
"Do you get the right light?" he asked anxiously.
She nodded, and managed a faint, abstracted smile, indicative of
pleasure. She heard him emit a sigh of returning ease. He spoke in
almost his former confiding tone.
"That's our lake, you know, painted in the late afternoon. Ben is set on
my sending it down to the Durango fair next month."
It was the lake, indeed, but, alas! an elaborate, a labored parody of
it. The dead blue water, the granite wall evenly gray in shadow,
garishly pink where it caught the sun, the opaque green of the trees,
the carefully arranged clouds in the flat blue sky--all smirked
conscious burlesque. It recalled the things in gilt frames which Mrs.
Laithe remembered to have seen in front of "art emporiums," on
Fourteenth Street, tagged "Genuine Oil Painting," the "$12.00" carefully
crossed out and "$3.98" written despairingly below to tempt the alert
connoisseur.
She knew the artist's eyes were upon her in appeal for praise. She drew
in her under lip and narrowed her eyes as one in the throes of critical
deliberation.
"Yes, I should recognize the spot at once," she dared to say at last.
"How well you've drawn the rock."
"I hoped you'd like it. I don't mind telling you I put in a lot of time
on that thing. I 'carried it along' as my father used to say. I don't
believe I could better that. And here are some others."
He displayed them without further urging, his shyness vanished by his
enthusiasm, in his eye a patent confusion of pride and anxiety. She
found them in quality like the first. In one the valley of the
Wimmenuche from the east bench was as precisely definite as a
topographical map; in another the low-lying range of hills to the south
had lost all their gracious and dignifying haze.
"They are immensely interesting," observed his critic with animation,
"It may be"--she searched for a tempering phrase--"it is just possible
there's a trick of color you need to learn yet. You know color is so
difficult to convict. It's shifty, evasive, impalpable. I dare say that
lake isn't as flatly blue as you've painted it, nor that cliff as flatly
pink in sunlight. And those hills--isn't there a mistiness that softens
their lines and gives one a sense of their distance? Color is _so_
difficult--_so_ tricky!"
She had spoken rapidly, her eyes keeping to the poor things before her.
Now she ventured a glance at the painter and met a puzzled seriousness
in his look.
"You may be right," he assented at last. "Sometimes I've felt I was on
the wrong track. I see what you mean. You mean you could reach over a
mile and pick up the ranch house at Bar-7--that it's like a little
painted doll's house; and you mean you could push your finger into those
hills, though they're meant to be a hundred miles away. Well, it serves
me right, I guess. My father warned me about color. And I never saw any
good pictures but his, and that was years ago. I've forgotten how they
ought to look. He sold all his when I was young--all but one."
"You've done well, considering that."
"He said I must learn to draw first--really to draw--and he taught me to
do that. I _can_ draw. But black and white is so dingy, and these colors
are always nagging you, daring you to try them. If I could only learn to
get real air between me and those hills. I wonder, now, if my colors
seem like those Navajo blankets to you." He flung himself away from the
canvases like an offended horse.
"Let me see your black-and-whites," she suggested hastily.
"Oh, those! They don't amount to much, but I'll show you." He thrust
aside the canvases and opened a portfolio on the chair.
She saw at a glance that he had been right when he said he could draw.
She let her surprise have play and expanded in the pleasure of honest
praise. She had not realized how her former disappointment had taken her
aback. But he could draw. Here were true lines and true modeling, not
dead, as he had warned her, but quick with life, portrayed not only with
truth but with a handling all his own, free from imitative touches. He
had achieved difficult feats of action, of foreshortening, with an
apparently effortless facility--the duck of a horse's head to avoid the
thrown rope; the poise of the man who had cast it; the braced tension of
a cow pony holding a roped and thrown steer while his rider dismounted;
the airy grace of Red Phinney at work with a stubborn broncho, coming to
earth on his stiff-legged mount and raking its side from shoulder to
flank with an effective spur. There was humor in them, the real feeling
in one of the last. Mrs. Laithe lingered over this.
"It's Beulah Pierce's wife in that flower garden of hers," the artist
explained. "It seems kind of sad when she goes out there alone
sometimes. You know how tired she generally is, and how homesick she's
been for twenty years or so--'all gaunted up,' as Ben says, like every
ranchman's wife--they have to work so hard. And in the house she's apt
to be peevish and scold Beulah and the boys like she despised them. But
when she goes out into that garden----"
"Tell me," said his listener, after waiting discreetly a moment.
"Well, she's mighty different. She stands around mooning at the
hollyhocks and petunias and geraniums and things, the flowers that grew
in her garden back East, and I reckon she kind of forgets and thinks
she's a girl back home again. Her face gets all gentled up. I've watched
her when she didn't notice me--she's looking so far off--and when she
goes into the house again her voice is queer, and she forgets to rampage
till Shane Riley lets the stew burn, or Beulah tracks mud into the front
room, or something. I tried to show her there, looking soft, just that
way." He sounded a little apologetic as he finished.
"It's delightful," she insisted, "and they're all good--I can't tell you
how good. You must do more of them, and"--she paused and shot him a
careful glance to determine how wary it behooved her to be--"and I
believe you should let color alone for awhile, until you've had a
teacher show you some things. You must learn the trick."
"Oh, I'd try to learn fast enough, if I had the chance." His eyes
lighted with a kind of furtive wistfulness, as if he would not have her
wholly fathom his longing.
"Of course you could learn. I believe you can do something--something
fine."
She rose from the couch and glanced over his books, with an air of
wishing to touch other matters before they dwelt long on this. She
noticed with some surprise a set of Meredith.
"Do you read these?" she asked, taking down one of the volumes.
There was an instant return of his former shyness, a hint of the child
and the invaded playhouse. But she knew what to do. Without further
remark she calmly lost herself in "Diana."
"Those books were my father's," he said at last, with the air of
addressing an explanation to some third person. She ignored this, not
even glancing at him. "But I've read them," he added, still as if to
another person.
At last, after studying her face a bit, he ventured, "Have you read them
all?" He spoke low, so as not to interrupt her too pointedly. She did
not look up, but nodded, with a smile that said confidentially, "Well, I
should think so!" He edged nearer then, like one who would be glad, if
pressed, to share his secrets.
"I was sorry when I reached the last one," he began. "It was another
world. Oh, he's a great writer. He writes as if he was thinking all the
time in fireworks, and he makes you do the same thing. Every page or two
he sets off a bunch of firecrackers in your mind that you didn't know
you had there. But he writes as if he didn't care whether anybody
understood him or not. It's a blind trail, lots of the way, and on some
pages I just bog down."
She smiled sympathetically. "Many of us have that trouble with him." She
put "Diana" back on the shelf and held up the poems of Robert Browning.
"And this?"
"Oh, do you read that, too?" he counterquestioned with sparkling
curiosity. She could see that he was enlivened beyond his
self-consciousness for the moment. "Well, I do, too, in spots. He's
pretty good in spots. But other times he's choppy and talky and has a
hard time getting into the saddle. Why, sometimes when Ben Crider is
talking to himself, it would sound just like Browning, if you broke it
up into poetry lengths and gave it a good title."
"And this you like, too?" She was opening a volume of Whitman.
"_Sure!_" he rang out. "Don't you? There's the man." He began walking
about with a fine smile that was almost a friendly grin. She felt
suddenly sure that he had never talked about the books before, and that
it was a kind of feast day for him.
"Yes," he continued easily; "when I get to feeling too much alone up
here I pretend I see him striding in off the trail, his head up,
sniffing the air, his eyes just _eating_ these big hills, and he'd march
right in and sit down. Only I can't ever think of what we'd say. I
reckon we'd sit here without a word. He must have had wonderful eyes.
He's good in winters when you're holed up here in the snow and get on
edge with nothing to do for five or six months but feed the stock and
keep a water hole open. Sometimes I wonder if Ben and I won't come out
crazy in the spring, and then I read old Whitman and he makes me feel
all easy-like and sure of myself."
He paused again, but she only waited.
"I had a funny thought last winter," he pursued. "It seemed to me that
if people turn into other things when they die--the way some folks
believe, you know--that Whitman must have become a whole world when _he_
died, whirling away somewhere off in space; a fine, big, fresh world,
with mountains and valleys and lakes, with big rivers and little ones,
and forests and plains and people, good people and bad people, he just
liked all sorts--it didn't seem to make much difference to him what they
were, so they were people--and he'd carry them all on his back and
breathe in and out and feel great."
He laughed as if the idea still delighted him, and she laughed with him.
"I'd like to have told him that," he continued, almost meditatively.
"But I'll bet he often thought of it himself. I guess he wouldn't be
satisfied with anything less than that."
When he stopped they stood a moment smiling at each other. Then she went
back to the couch with rather a businesslike air.
"How old are you?" she asked.
"I'm twenty-four. How old are you?"
She smiled, quite disarmed by the artlessness of this brutality.
"I am twenty-seven."
"That's pretty old, isn't it?" he commented, gravely. "I shouldn't have
said you were older than I am. Some ways you look younger. And what a
lot you must have seen out yonder!"
"You should go there yourself, to work, to study." She felt that he was
curiously watching her lips as she spoke rather than listening to her.
"Now I see it's only your profile that's sad," he began in the same
detached, absent way he had spoken of the books, the way of one talking
in solitude. "Your full face isn't sad; it's full of joy; but there's a
droop to the profile. Here--I'll show you." He took a sketch-book from
the table.
"I'll show you this, now we're such good friends. I could only draw the
profile because--well, that was the only thing I could look at much."
She looked and saw herself on three pages of the book, quick little
drawings, all of the side face.
"I didn't dream you had seen me enough," she said. "And you have
everything from cap to boots, and Cooney----"
"I knew Cooney, and I've--well--I've watched you some when you didn't
know."
"Certainly you never watched me when I did know," she retorted.
"I should think not!" He laughed uneasily. "But you see the sadness
there. I tried to locate it, but I couldn't. I only knew it was there
because I found it in the sketches when they were done. I think I caught
the figure pretty well in that one. Stand that way now, won't you?"
She rose graciously.
"Here's your quirt, and catch your skirts the way you've done
there--that's it. Yes, I got that long line down from the shoulder. It's
a fine line. You are beautiful," he continued critically. "I like the
way your neck goes up from your shoulders, and your head has a perky
kind of a tilt, as if you wouldn't be easy to bluff."
She smiled, meditating some jocose retort, but he still surveyed her
impersonally, not seeing the smile. She dropped to the couch rather
quickly.
"Let us talk about you," she urged. But he did not hear.
"Your face, though--that's the fine thing--" He was scanning it with
narrowed eyes. But a protesting movement of hers restored him to his
normal embarrassment. He writhed in uncomfortable apology before her.
"I'd 'most forgot you were really here," he explained. "I've seen you
that way so often when you _weren't_ here. There now--I see that
sadness; it's in the upper lip. It showed even when you laughed then."
"Really, this must stop," she broke in. "People don't talk this way."
"Don't they? Why don't they? I'm sorry--but all that interested me." The
wave of his hand indicated the fluent grace of the lady impartially from
head to foot.
"Of course," he added, "I knew there must be people like you, out there,
but I never dreamed I'd have one of them close enough to look at--let
alone get friendly with. I hope you won't hold it against me."