SALAD AND MOONSHINE
"Do you remember that first salad you made us, Colin?" I said, as we sat
over our coffee, and Colin was filling his little pipe. "A daring work of
art, a fantastic _tour de force_, of apples, and lettuce, and wild
strawberries, and I don't know what else."
"I believe I mixed in some May-apples, too. It was a great stunt ...
well, no more May-apples and strawberries this year," he finished, with a
sigh, and we both sat silently smoking, thinking over the good Summer
that was gone.
After our first meeting, Colin had dropped in to see me again from time
to time, and when his work at the great house was finished, I had asked
him to come and share my solitude. A veritable child of Nature himself,
he fitted into my quiet days as silently as a squirrel. So much of his
life had been passed out-of-doors with trees and skies, long dream-like
days all alone sketching in solitary places, that he seemed as much a
part of the woods as though he were a faun, and the lore of the elements,
and all natural things--bugs and birds, all wildwood creatures--had
passed into him with unconscious absorption. A sort of boyish
unconsciousness, indeed, was the keynote and charm of his nature. A less
sophisticated creature never followed the mystic calling of art.
Fortunately for me, he was not one of those painters who understand and
expound their own work. On the contrary, he was a perfect child about it,
and painted for no more mysterious reason than that his eye delighted in
beautiful natural effects, and that he loved to play with paint and
brushes. Though he was undoubtedly sensitive somewhere to the mystic side
of Nature, her Wordsworthian "intimations," you would hardly have guessed
it from his talk. "A bully bit of colour," would be his craftsmanlike way
of describing a twilight full of sibylline suggestiveness to the literary
mind. But, strangely enough, when he brought you his sketch, all your
"sibylline suggestiveness" was there, which of course means, after all,
that painting was his way of seeing and saying it.
The moon rose as we smoked on, and began to lattice with silver the
darkness of the glen, and flood the hillside with misty radiance. Colin
made for his sketch-box.
"I must make good use of this moon," he said, "before we go."
"And so must I," said I, laughing as we both went out into the night, he
one way and I another, to make our different uses of the moon.
An hour later Colin turned in with a panel that seemed made of moonlight.
"How on earth did you do it?" I said. "It is as though you had drawn up
the moon in a silver bucket from the bottom of a fairy well."
"No, no," he protested; "I know better. But where is your _clair
de lune_?"
"Nothing doing," I answered.
"Well, then, say those lines you wrote a week or two ago instead."
"'Berries already,' do you mean?"
"Yes."
Here are the lines he meant:
_Berries already, September soon,--
The shortening day and ike early moon;
The year is busy with next year's flowers
The seeds are ready for next year' showers;
Through a thousand tossing trees there swells
The sigh of the Summer's sad farewells.
Too soon those leaves in the sunset sky
Low down on the wintry ground will lie,
And grim November and December
Leave naught of Summer to remember--
Saving some flower in a book put by,
Secure from the soft effacing snow,
Though all the rest of the Summer go._