II
“In the midst of death we are in life,” he murmured. Below, in the orchard, his wife was carolling old French songs with the children. “On y danse, on y danse!” Even Maury junior, a boy to the backbone, and little given to self-expression in song, especially foreign-language song, boomed out a mighty “Tout en ronde!” Half an hour before, Maurice senior had stood hand-in-hand with his wife, looking up into the flowery dome of a magnificent pear tree, all aglow with golden-white blossoms, all perfumed with their incense, and musical with legions of bees. He knew just where to find those magic boughs in his landscape; he recognized their golden-veiled whiteness, their garance rose. Left and right the spendthrift river was pouring out its silver in a royal progress, mile after mile in the May sunlight. Ascutney, the great mountain that all the people thereabouts knew as their tutelary deity, had chosen from his myriad mantles the one he might wear for an hour or so, of an entrancing blue to mock the heavens themselves. Smilingly yet warningly he confronted Maurice, singling him out from other persons, to tell him in a secret, consoling way, of the generations of men, those who had gone and those who were yet to come; yes, Ascutney spoke very seriously with Maurice, reminding him of everything, whatever it might be, that he, Maurice Price, in his great good fortune in art and life, owed to those generations, and must joyfully repay, by painting as best he might that lyric scene.
“Generation after generation,” thought Maurice, “but no longer Pietro or little Amouretta.” Quivering with emotion as he was, he saw that the passion and skill of that far-away Maurice of the twenties had not vanished. Now, as then, he had in large measure the artist’s gift of multiplying his personality when he was at work; his consciousness as an artist rose many-mansioned toward the skies. With heart and mind swelling from the scene he conned and created, he was at once the Maurice who did not need a pearl palette to capture the glory of that violet-edged puff of golden cloud over the meadow, who could hear the bees in the orchard, who could see a jewelled indigo bird flaming out from the locust bush; a Maurice whose whole being overflowed with returning health, with rapture in painting, with pride in Maury junior, with love for the wife of his delight, with affection for good old Jimmy Anthony, and yet a Maurice with sharp remembrance of those vanished children of joy, Pietro and Amouretta.
As he painted, he smiled often, because many persons, both living and dead, came and ranged themselves beside him, and it was pleasant to be talking with them, on that flowery hillside. Oh, Lionardo, of course, and Père Corot; Monet and Pissarro; his own namesake, Maurice Denis, dear Thayer of Monadnock, and John Sargent, since he too could do landscapes and portraits and murals! And Whistler, certainly, though at times he talked too much, interrupting quite scornfully while Maurice was explaining to Lionardo how our American goldfinch beats his wings as he sings; or else breaking in with a prickly jest when Maurice was giving M. Monet his reasons why (with due respect, Monsieur!) he meant to paint all day on that one landscape, instead of beginning another as soon as the light should change.
Some of his younger friends came also. One would have said that half the American Camouflage trooped in; little Robert, so strangely saved that black night at Beaumetz-les-Cambrai; young Harry, born at the foot of Ascutney—smiling Harry the sculptor, beside whom he himself had stood unharmed, in the field by Reims, when a shell came, striking Harry to nothingness; and Anthony’s nephew too, that portrait-painter whom the papers had called brilliant-futured—debonair Charlie Anthony whom he himself, merely Captain Price, under orders, had unknowingly despatched to his doom. Maurice was used to that boy’s presence by now; the harsh realities of dreams had often brought them together. Such things could not be, and men remain dumb. All this and much more must be told in the miracle landscape he was creating; it would be dishonest, otherwise. In spirit, smiling Harry and his mates belonged to that scene. Even M. Monet admitted that without doubt there is also this point of view. Not one of those companions failed to understand why our painter had not blotted out Pietro’s Amouretta. Not one of them was surprised when all of a sudden he looked up from his own painting, to make sure that Pietro’s was right side up, and uninjured by contact with the easel; Maurice laughing to himself the while, and saying aloud, “I should worry!”
The critics declared later that this canvas was Price’s masterpiece. They wrote of the monumental purple dignity of his mountain, the self-contained inwardness of his middle distance, the happy audacity of his flowery foreground. They might have found out, to be sure, just by looking, that the painting was on wood, not canvas! But they could not know how much of Reims and Beaumetz-les-Cambrai were playing hide-and-seek among the shadows of Maurice’s mind when he set down Ascutney in the mantle of the hour. They would have been startled out of a day’s omniscience had they been aware of everything that Pietro and Amouretta had contributed of their brave young substance to that smiling foreground. So excuse them, please, for whatever was wrong in their writings; they could not know, exactly, about Maurice; and after all, they made a very good guess.