The Guest of Quesnay Part 9

"Yes, monsieur," said Amedee complacently; "it is an American lady who has married a French n.o.bleman."

CHAPTER VIII

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 plat.i.tudes.

Who is more tedious than the man incessantly struggling to avoid the ba.n.a.l? 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 rea.s.sure him, exclaiming that it were a G.o.dsend 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 inst.i.tute. 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 rea.s.sured 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 pa.s.s 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 pa.s.s 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 un.o.btrusively 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 b.u.t.terfly 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 pa.s.sed 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 att.i.tude 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 att.i.tude 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 pa.s.sed 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.

CHAPTER IX

He came on more slowly, his eyes following her as she vanished, then turning to me with a rather pitiful apprehension--a look like that I remember to have seen (some hundreds of years ago) on the face of a freshman, glancing up from his book to find his doorway ominously filling with soph.o.m.ores.

I stepped out to meet him, indignant upon several counts, most of all upon his own. I knew there was no offence in his heart, not the remotest rude intent, but the fact was before me that he had frightened a woman, had given this very lovely guest of my friends good cause to hold him a boor, if she did not, indeed, think him (as she probably thought me) an outright lunatic! I said:

"You spoke to that lady!" And my voice sounded unexpectedly harsh and sharp to my own ears, for I had meant to speak quietly.

"I know--I know. It--it was wrong," he stammered. "I knew I shouldn't--and I couldn't help it."

"You expect me to believe that?"

"It's the truth; I couldn't!"