Jared was an ignorant and rather bumptious young fellow of twenty-four,
who was hoping to make something of himself, and was feeling about for
the means. He had a firm jaw, a canny eye, and vague but determined
ambitions. These sufficed.
Jared lived on a farm. He liked the farm life, but not the farm work--a
fine distinction that caused his fellow-labourers to look upon him as
something of a shirk. He would rove the fields while the rest were
working in them. He thought his own thoughts, such as they were, and when
a book came his way, as now and then happened, he read it.
_Onward and Upward_ was lent to him by the daughter of the county
attorney. She thought it would tone him up and bring his nebulousness
toward solidity--she too being anxious that Jared should make something
of himself, and unwilling to wait indefinitely. Jared took the book and
looked at it. He passed quite lightly over the good Doctor's platitudes
on honesty, perseverance, and the like, having already encountered them
elsewhere; but the platitudes on art arrested his attention. "I shouldn't
wonder but what all this might be so," said Jared to himself; "I don't
know but what I should like to try it"--meaning not that he had any
desire to refine and ennoble himself, but only a strong hankering to "get
his hand in," as the phrase goes.
It was about this time that the Western Art Circuit began to evangelize
Hayesville. The Western Art Circuit had been started up by a handful of
painters and literary men in "the city"; among them, Abner Joyce, notable
veritist; Adrian Bond, aesthete, yet not without praiseworthy leanings
toward the naturalistic; Stephen Giles, decorator of the mansions of the
great, but still not wholly forgetful of his own rustic origins; and one
or two of the professors at the Art Academy. All these too believed that
it was the mission of art to redeem the rural regions. It was their
cardinal tenet that a report on an aspect of nature was a work of art,
and they clung tenaciously to the notion that it would be of inestimable
benefit to the farmers of Illinois to see coloured representations of the
corn-fields of Indiana done by the Indianians themselves. So presently
some thirty or forty canvases that had been pushed along the line through
Bainesville and Miller and Crawford Junction arrived at Hayesville, and
competed in their gilt frames with the canned peaches and the drawn-work
of the county fair.
"There, Jared," said the county attorney's daughter, who was
corresponding secretary of the woman's club that had brought about this
artistic visitation, "you see now what can be done."
Jared saw. He walked the farm, and drew beads on the barn-yard, and
indulged in long "sights" over the featureless prairie landscape. The
wish to do, to be at it, was settling in his finger-tips, where the
stores of electric energy seemed to be growing greater every day.
"I believe I could do something of the kind myself," said Jared. "I like
the country, and I'm handy at light jobs; and if somebody would give me
an idea of how to start in...."
The Hayesville Seminary had just celebrated the opening of its fifth fall
term by adding an "art department"; a dozen young women were busy
painting a variety of objects under the guidance, good as far as it went,
of an eager lady graduate of Dr. Gowdy's Academy.
"Why don't you get Miss Webb to show you?" asked the county attorney's
daughter.
"I can't study with a lot of girls," muttered Jared loutishly.
"Of course not," quickly replied the other. "Make it a private,
individual matter. Get some ideas from her, and then go ahead alone."
Jared picked up a few elementary facts about colours, canvas, and
composition in the art atmosphere of the Seminary, and then set to work
by himself. "Something sizable and simple, to start with," he said.
Autumn was over the land; nothing seemed more sizable, more simple, more
accessible, than the winter squash. "Some of 'em do grapes and peaches,"
he observed, in reminiscence of the display of the Circuit at the fair,
"but round here it's mostly corn and squashes. I guess I'll stick to the
facts--that is, to the verities," he amended, in accord with the art
jargon whose virus had begun to inoculate the town.
He elected the squash. And he never went far beyond it. But the squash
sufficed. It led him on to fame (fame of a certain curious kind) and to
fortune (at least a fortune far beyond any ever reached by his associates
on the farm).