His words rang exultantly.
"Anybody with eyes kin see," deprecated Samson, wiping his fingers on
his jeans trousers.
"You think so? To the seer who reads the passing shapes in a globe of
crystal, it's plain enough. To any other eye, there is nothing there
but transparency." Lescott halted, conscious that he was falling into
metaphor which his companion could not understand, then more quietly he
went on: "I don't know how you would progress, Samson, in detail and
technique, but I know you've got what many men have struggled a
lifetime for, and failed. I'd like to have you study with me. I'd like
to be your discoverer. Look here."
The painter sat down, and speedily went to work. He painted out
nothing. He simply toned, and, with precisely the right touch here and
there, softened the crudeness, laid stress on the contrast, melted the
harshness, and, when he rose, he had built, upon the rough cornerstone
of Samson's laying, a picture.
"That proves it," he said. "I had only to finish. I didn't have to
undo. Boy, you're wasting yourself. Come with me, and let me make you.
We all pretend there is no such thing, in these days, as sheer genius;
but, deep down, we know that, unless there is, there can be no such
thing as true art. There is genius and you have it." Enthusiasm was
again sweeping him into an unintended outburst.
The boy stood silent. Across his countenance swept a conflict of
emotions. He looked away, as if taking counsel with the hills.
"It's what I'm a-honin' fer," he admitted at last. "Hit's what I'd
give half my life fer.... I mout sell my land, an' raise the money....
I reckon hit would take passels of money, wouldn't hit?" He paused, and
his eyes fell on the rifle leaning against the tree. His lips tightened
in sudden remembrance. He went over and picked up the gun, and, as he
did so, he shook his head.
"No," he stolidly declared; "every man to his own tools. This here's
mine."
Yet, when they were again out sketching, the temptation to play with
brushes once more seized him, and he took his place before the easel.
Neither he nor Lescott noticed a man who crept down through the timber,
and for a time watched them. The man's face wore a surly, contemptuous
grin, and shortly it withdrew.
But, an hour later, while the boy was still working industriously and
the artist was lying on his back, with a pipe between his teeth, and his
half-closed eyes gazing up contentedly through the green of overhead
branches, their peace was broken by a guffaw of derisive laughter. They
looked up, to find at their backs a semi-circle of scoffing humanity.
Lescott's impulse was to laugh, for only the comedy of the situation at
the moment struck him. A stage director, setting a comedy scene with
that most ancient of jests, the gawking of boobs at some new sight,
could hardly have improved on this tableau. At the front stood Tamarack
Spicer, the returned wanderer. His lean wrist was stretched out of a
ragged sleeve all too short, and his tattered "jimmy" was shoved back
over a face all a-grin. His eyes were blood-shot with recent drinking,
but his manner was in exaggerated and cumbersome imitation of a rural
master of ceremonies. At his back were the raw-boned men and women and
children of the hills, to the number of a dozen. To the front shuffled
an old, half-witted hag, with thin gray hair and pendulous lower lip.
Her dress was patched and colorless. Her back was bent with age and
rheumatism. Her feet were incased in a pair of man's brogans. She stared
and snickered, and several children, taking the cue, giggled, but the
men, save Tamarack himself, wore troubled faces, as though recognizing
that their future chieftain had been discovered in some secret shame.
They were looking on their idol's feet of clay.