"There was a lot of men in the boat," said Priscilla from behind the table,
where she sat daubing with little energetic grunts.
"Oh, there were, were there?" I answered from behind _The Times_.
Confident of arousing my enthusiasm in the end, she continued to issue
tantalising bulletins about the progress of the great work.
"It was an all-colour boat," she told me, "purple and yellow and green."
"A very nice kind of boat too," I agreed.
"And the biggest man of all hadn't got _any_ body at all."
I suggested weakly that perhaps the biggest man of all had left his body
behind on the table at home. The suggestion was scorned.
"No, he hadn't never had any body at all, _this_ man," she replied. And
then, as my interest seemed to be flagging again, "They all had _very_ rosy
faces; and do you know why they had?"
"I don't, I'm sure."
"Because they'd eaten up all their greens."
Vanquished at last, I went over to visit the eupeptic voyagers. Seven in
all, they stood in their bright boat on a blue sea beneath a round and
burning sun. Their legs were long and thin, their bodies globular (all save
one), and their faces large. They were dressed apparently in light pink
doublets and hose, and on his head each wore a huge purple turban the shape
of a cottage loaf, surmounted by a ragged plume. They varied greatly in
stature, but their countenances were all fixed in the same unmeaning stare.
Take it all in all, it was an eerie and terrible scene.
"I don't quite see how the boat moves along, Priscilla," I said; "it hasn't
any oars or sail."
It was a tactless remark and the artist made no reply. I did my best to
cover my blunder.
"I expect the wind blew very hard on their feathers," I said, "and that
drove them along."
"What colour is the wind?" inquired Priscilla.
She had me there. I confessed that I did not know.
"It was a brown wind," she decided, impatient at my lack of resource, and
slapped a wet typhoon of madder on the page. There was no more doubt about
the wind.
"And is the picture finished now?" I asked her.
"No, it isn't finished. I haven't drawn the pookin yet."
The pookin is a confusion in the mind of Priscilla between a pelican and a
toucan, because she saw them both for the first time on the same day. In
this case it consisted of an indigo splodge and a long red bar cutting
right through the brown wind and penetrating deeply into the yellow sun.
"It had a _very_ long beak," observed Priscilla.
"It had," I agreed.
I am no stickler for commonplace colours or conventional shapes in a work
of art, but I do like things to be recognisable; to know, for instance,
when a thing is meant to be a man and when it is meant to be a boat, and
when it is meant to be a pookin and when it is meant to be a sun. The art
of Priscilla seems to me to satisfy this test much better than that of many
of our modern _maestri_. Strictly representational it may not be, but there
are none of your whorls and cylinders and angles and what nots.
But I also insist that a work of art should appeal to the imagination as
well as to the eye, and there seemed to me details about this picture that
needed clearing up.
"Where were these men going to, Priscilla?" I asked.
"They was going to Wurvin," she answered in the tone of a mother who
instructs her child. "And what do you think they was going to do there?"
"I don't know."
"They was going to see Auntie Isabel."
"And what did they do then?"
"They had dinner," she cried enthusiastically. "And do you know what they
did after dinner?"
"I don't."
"They went on the Front to see the fire-escape."
It seemed to me now that the conception was mellow, rounded and complete.
It had all the haunting mystery and romance of the sea about it. It was
reminiscent of the _Ancient Mariner_. It savoured of the books of Mr.
CONRAD. It reminded me not a little of those strange visitations which come
to quiet watering-places in the novels of Mr. H.G. WELLS. When I thought of
those seven men--one, alas, disembodied--so strangely attired yet so
careful of elementary hygiene, driven by that fierce typhoon, with that
bird of portent in the skies, arriving suddenly with the salt of their
Odyssey upon their brows at the beach of the genteel and respectable Sussex
town, and visiting a perhaps slightly perturbed Auntie Isabel, and
afterwards the fire-escape, I felt that here was the glimpse of the wild
exotic adventure for which the hearts of all of us yearn. It left the
cinema standing. It beat the magazine story to a frazzle.
"And who is the picture for, Priscilla?" I asked, when I had thoroughly
steeped myself in the atmosphere.
"It's for you," she said, presenting it with a motley-coloured hand; "it's
for you to take to London town and not to drop it."
I was careful to do as I was told, because I have a friend who paints
Expressionist pictures, and I wished to deliver it at his studio. It seems
to me that Priscilla, half-unconsciously perhaps, is founding a new school
of art which demands serious study. One might call it, I think, the Pookin
School.