Like most painters, I have supposed the tools of my craft harder to
manipulate than those of others. The use of words, particularly, seemed
readier, handier for the contrivance of effects than pigments. I
thought the language of words less elusive than that of colour, leaving
smaller margin for unintended effects; and, believing in complacent
good faith that words conveyed exact meanings exactly, it was my
innocent conception that almost anything might be so described in words
that all who read must inevitably perceive that thing precisely. If
this were true, there would be little work for the lawyers, who produce
such tortured pages in the struggle to be definite, who swing riches
from one family to another, save men from violent death or send them to
it, and earn fortunes for themselves through the dangerous inadequacies
of words. I have learned how great was my mistake, and now I am wishing
I could shift paper for canvas, that I might paint the young man who
came to interest me so deeply. I wish I might present him here in
colour instead of trusting to this unstable business of words, so wily
and undependable, with their shimmering values, that you cannot turn
your back upon them for two minutes but they will be shouting a hundred
things which they were not meant to tell.
To make the best of necessity: what I have written of him--my first
impressions--must be taken as the picture, although it be but a
gossamer sketch in the air, instead of definite work with well-ground
pigments to show forth a portrait, to make you see flesh and blood. It
must take the place of something contrived with my own tools to reveal
what the following days revealed him to me, and what it was about him
(evasive of description) which made me so soon, as Keredec wished, his
friend.
Life among our kin and kind is made pleasanter by our daily platitudes.
Who is more tedious than the man incessantly struggling to avoid the
banal? Nature rules that such a one will produce nothing better than
epigram and paradox, saying old, old things in a new way, or merely
shifting object for subject--and his wife's face, when he shines for a
circle, is worth a glance. With no further apology, I declare that I am
a person who has felt few positive likes or dislikes for people in this
life, and I did deeply like my fellow-lodgers at Les Trois Pigeons.
Liking for both men increased with acquaintance, and for the younger I
came to feel, in addition, a kind of championship, doubtless in some
measure due to what Keredec had told me of him, but more to that
half-humourous sense of protectiveness that we always have for those
young people whose untempered and innocent outlook makes us feel, as we
say, "a thousand years old."
The afternoon following our first dinner together, the two, in
returning from their walk, came into the pavilion with cheerful
greetings, instead of going to their rooms as usual, and Keredec,
declaring that the open air had "dispersed" his rheumatism, asked if he
might overhaul some of my little canvases and boards. I explained that
they consisted mainly of "notes" for future use, but consented
willingly; whereupon he arranged a number of them as for exhibition and
delivered himself impromptu of the most vehemently instructive lecture
on art I had ever heard. Beginning with the family, the tribe, and the
totem-pole, he was able to demonstrate a theory that art was not only
useful to society but its primary necessity; a curious thought,
probably more attributable to the fact that he was a Frenchman than to
that of his being a scientist.
"And here," he said in the course of his demonstration, pointing to a
sketch which I had made one morning just after sunrise--"here you can
see real sunshine. One certain day there came those few certain moment'
at the sunrise when the light was like this. Those few moment', where
are they? They have disappeared, gone for eternally. They went"--he
snapped his fingers--"like that. Yet here they are--ha!--forever!"
"But it doesn't look like sunshine," said Oliver Saffren hesitatingly,
stating a disconcerting but incontrovertible truth; "it only seems to
look like it because--isn't it because it's so much brighter than the
rest of the picture? I doubt if paint CAN look like sunshine." He
turned from the sketch, caught Keredec's gathering frown, and his face
flushed painfully. "Ah!" he cried, "I shouldn't have said it?"
I interposed to reassure him, exclaiming that it were a godsend indeed,
did all our critics merely speak the plain truth as they see it for
themselves. The professor would not have it so, and cut me off.
"No, no, no, my dear sir!" he shouted. "You speak with kindness, but
you put some wrong ideas in his head!"
Saffren's look of trouble deepened. "I don't understand," he murmured.
"I thought you said always to speak the truth just as I see it." "I
have telled you," Keredec declared vehemently, "nothing of the kind!"
"But only yesterday--"
"Never!"
"I understood--"
"Then you understood only one-half! I say, 'Speak the truth as you see
it, when you speak.' I did not tell you to speak! How much time have
you give' to study sunshine and paint? What do you know about them?"
"Nothing," answered the other humbly.
A profound rumbling was heard, and the frown disappeared from Professor
Keredec's brow like the vanishing of the shadow of a little cloud from
the dome of some great benevolent and scientific institute. He dropped
a weighty hand on his young friend's shoulder, and, in high
good-humour, thundered:
"Then you are a critic! Knowing nothing of sunshine except that it
warms you, and never having touched paint, you are going to tell about
them to a man who spends his life studying them! You look up in the
night and the truth you see is that the moon and stars are crossing the
ocean. You will tell that to the astronomer? Ha! The truth is what the
masters see. When you know what they see, you may speak."
At dinner the night before, it had struck me that Saffren was a rather
silent young man by habit, and now I thought I began to understand the
reason. I hinted as much, saying, "That would make a quiet world of it."
"All the better, my dear sir!" The professor turned beamingly upon me
and continued, dropping into a Whistlerian mannerism that he had
sometimes: "You must not blame that great wind of a Keredec for
preaching at other people to listen. It gives the poor man more room
for himself to talk!"
I found his talk worth hearing.
I would show you, if I could, our pleasant evenings of lingering, after
coffee, behind the tremulous screen of honeysuckle, with the night very
dark and quiet beyond the warm nimbus of our candle-light, the faces of
my two companions clear-obscure in a mellow shadow like the middle
tones of a Rembrandt, and the professor, good man, talking wonderfully
of everything under the stars and over them,--while Oliver Saffren and
I sat under the spell of the big, kind voice, the young man listening
with the same eagerness which marked him when he spoke. It was an
eagerness to understand, not to interrupt.
These were our evenings. In the afternoons the two went for their walk
as usual, though now they did not plunge out of sight of the main road
with the noticeable haste which Amedee had described. As time pressed,
I perceived the caution of Keredec visibly slackening. Whatever he had
feared, the obscurity and continued quiet of LES TROIS PIGEONS
reassured him; he felt more and more secure in this sheltered retreat,
"far out of the world," and obviously thought no danger imminent. So
the days went by, uneventful for my new friends,--days of warm idleness
for me. Let them go unnarrated; we pass to the event.
My ankle had taken its wonted time to recover. I was on my feet again
and into the woods--not traversing, on the way, a certain
poppy-sprinkled field whence a fine Norman stallion snorted ridicule
over a wall. But the fortune of Keredec was to sink as I rose. His
summer rheumatism returned, came to grips with him, laid him low. We
hobbled together for a day or so, then I threw away my stick and he
exchanged his for an improvised crutch. By the time I was fit to run,
he was able to do little better than to creep--might well have taken to
his bed. But as he insisted that his pupil should not forego the daily
long walks and the health of the forest, it came to pass that Saffren
often made me the objective of his rambles. At dinner he usually asked
in what portion of the forest I should be painting late the next
afternoon, and I got in the habit of expecting him to join me toward
sunset. We located each other through a code of yodeling that we
arranged; his part of these vocal gymnastics being very pleasant to
hear, for he had a flexible, rich voice. I shudder to recall how
largely my own performances partook of the grotesque. But in the forest
where were no musical persons (I supposed) to take hurt from whatever
noise I made, I would let go with all the lungs I had; he followed the
horrid sounds to their origin, and we would return to the inn together.
On these homeward walks I found him a good companion, and that is
something not to be under-valued by a selfish man who lives for himself
and his own little ways and his own little thoughts, and for very
little else,--which is the kind of man (as I have already confessed)
that I was--deserving the pity of all happily or unhappily married
persons.
Responsive in kind to either a talkative mood or a silent one, always
gentle in manner, and always unobtrusively melancholy, Saffren never
took the initiative, though now and then he asked a question about some
rather simple matter which might be puzzling him. Whatever the answer,
he usually received it in silence, apparently turning the thing over
and over and inside out in his mind. He was almost tremulously
sensitive, yet not vain, for he was neither afraid nor ashamed to
expose his ignorance, his amazing lack of experience. He had a greater
trouble, one that I had not fathomed. Sometimes there came over his
face a look of importunate wistfulness and distressed perplexity, and
he seemed on the point of breaking out with something that he wished to
tell me--or to ask me, for it might have been a question--but he always
kept it back. Keredec's training seldom lost its hold upon him.
I had gone back to my glade again, and to the thin sunshine, which came
a little earlier, now that we were deep in July; and one afternoon I
sat in the mouth of the path, just where I had played the bounding
harlequin for the benefit of the lovely visitor at Quesnay. It was warm
in the woods and quiet, warm with the heat of July, still with a July
stillness. The leaves had no motion; if there were birds or insects
within hearing they must have been asleep; the quivering flight of a
butterfly in that languid air seemed, by contrast, quite a commotion; a
humming-bird would have made a riot.
I heard the light snapping of a twig and a swish of branches from the
direction in which I faced; evidently some one was approaching the
glade, though concealed from me for the moment by the winding of the
path. Taking it for Saffren, as a matter of course (for we had arranged
to meet at that time and place), I raised my voice in what I intended
for a merry yodel of greeting.
I yodeled loud, I yodeled long. Knowing my own deficiencies in this
art, I had adopted the cunning sinner's policy toward sin and made a
joke of it: thus, since my best performance was not unsuggestive of
calamity in the poultry yard, I made it worse. And then and there, when
my mouth was at its widest in the production of these shocking
ulla-hootings, the person approaching came round a turn in the path,
and within full sight of me. To my ultimate, utmost horror, it was
Madame d'Armand.
I grew so furiously red that it burned me. I had not the courage to
run, though I could have prayed that she might take me for what I
seemed--plainly a lunatic, whooping the lonely peace of the woods into
pandemonium--and turn back. But she kept straight on, must inevitably
reach the glade and cross it, and I calculated wretchedly that at the
rate she was walking, unhurried but not lagging, it would be about
thirty seconds before she passed me. Then suddenly, while I waited in
sizzling shame, a clear voice rang out from a distance in an answering
yodel to mine, and I thanked heaven for its mercies; at least she would
see that my antics had some reason.
She stopped short, in a half-step, as if a little startled, one arm
raised to push away a thin green branch that crossed the path at
shoulder-height; and her attitude was so charming as she paused,
detained to listen by this other voice with its musical youthfulness,
that for a second I thought crossly of all the young men in the world.
There was a final call, clear and loud as a bugle, and she turned to
the direction whence it came, so that her back was toward me. Then
Oliver Saffren came running lightly round the turn of the path, near
her and facing her.
He stopped as short as she had.
Her hand dropped from the slender branch, and pressed against her side.
He lifted his hat and spoke to her, and I thought she made some quick
reply in a low voice, though I could not be sure.
She held that startled attitude a moment longer, then turned and
crossed the glade so hurriedly that it was almost as if she ran away
from him. I had moved aside with my easel and camp-stool, but she
passed close to me as she entered the path again on my side of the
glade. She did not seem to see me, her dark eyes stared widely straight
ahead, her lips were parted, and she looked white and frightened.
She disappeared very quickly in the windings of the path.