A SOPHISTRY OF ART
By Eugene Smith
On the station platform in Quanah, one morning, I stopped “waiting for the train” for a moment to watch a man and woman painting on a large signboard across the way. The inevitable wiseacre in the little group of travelling men explained that they were really talented artists, a man and wife.
The husband had contracted—er—a throat affection in their studio back East, and physicians had ordered him to the open air and high, dry altitude of west Texas. So they had come, and were earning expenses, making a series of paintings on signboards, advertisements of a lumber corporation, throughout the Panhandle country.
I walked out across the tracks near where the slightly stooped husband, in overalls, and his little wife, looking very attractive in her neat apron and sunbonnet, were at work.
There was a pathos about the thing that went straight to my heart. The loyal little woman and the stricken husband there in the clear, crisp morning air and sunshine, earnestly striving, undismayed. Something—a common sympathy—thrilled me.
And now the painting seemed artistic. The general idea was a lovely cottage home (built, of course, with Oakley’s lumber, as was intimated). But the cottage was not glaringly new—rather mellowed a bit with time, it seemed, and was the more homelike for it.
In the front stood a sweet little woman, looking down a winding road, and in the expression on her face, painted by the real little woman, was joyous hope—almost certainty—of seeing the husband coming down the road to her and home, after his day’s work.
The colours of sunset added to the beauty of the conception, which altogether made desirable the having such a little wife to wait for one each evening at such a little cottage home. And that was the purpose of it; when you thought of home-building, you also thought of Oakley’s lumber.
The painters were happy in their work—happy as two birds building a nest. The wife, seated on her little stepladder, with palette and brushes, was deftly pointing up the vines about the windows, as all good wives should. She hummed something of a tune, now and then looking gayly down at him, who laughed back up at her from his work on the winding road and distant trees.
A courteous inquiry and my being an Easterner, was a passport into their confidences. “We only paint a little while in the cool of the morning and afternoon of each day,” he was saying to my remarks on the weather. “It’s dangerous to lay on much paint at a time,” he continued, “for the sand ruins it.”
“Oh, if it wasn’t for the sand storms!” she chimed in. “But we love the country, and the folks, too; they seem so much a part of the out of doors, you know. Though we hope—we expect—to go back home before long.” She was looking fondly down at him.
“I had a little trouble with my throat,” he explained depreciatively. “But this western air has just about put me in the running again. It’s wonderful.” I could see the thankfulness in his eyes, as he smiled up at his companion. I didn’t blame him for loving life.
In the smoking-car of the belated train we travelling men discussed the case of the painters.
“It’s only his throat that bothers him a bit,” I denied with some heat. “Besides, he is nearly recovered, and looks it.”
“Yes, I know; that’s characteristic. It’s what they all say when they begin to perk up in a change of climate,” persisted the Pessimist in the crowd. “But the average is 100 to 1 against them. I’ve seen too many lungers out here in this country.”
Damn a Pessimist with his statistics, anyhow!
· · · · · · ·
Several months later I made another trip through the Texas Panhandle country, and at each town going up from Quanah toward Amarillo I saw one of the Oakley lumber advertisements prominently displayed on large bill-boards. They were all the same, like the first one; that is, if your glance was but a passing one. But to me, who had grown interested in Art and things artistic, there was a difference in the paintings. Yes, a difference! I wasn’t so sure at first. “It’s just imagination,” I pooh-poohed the idea. But later on——
Anyhow, I soon found myself going directly from the station, on each arrival, to look up the Oakley bill-board. It was never hard to find. Somehow, I just got to wondering—worrying—about the welfare of the young husband, the artist, I had met.
In the first few of the paintings I found portrayed all the life and glad hope and expectancy that I had seen some time before in the one at Quanah.
Then came the inevitable. Strange as it was, I knew that I had been expecting—dreading—it; though rather in the gossip around the hotels than in the pictures themselves, where I really found it. That was the only surprise.
I remember, in Clarendon—the first town after you get up on the Cap-rock of the Staked Plains—there I saw—or imagined—it first. One is ever instinctively wary of eyesight in that land of mirages.
And in each succeeding village and town as I travelled westward and upward, I felt it—saw it—there on the bill-boards, as if painted in half-unconsciously by the artist: a faint trace of querulous doubt in the face of the little, waiting wife, spirit of melancholia lying dull in the picture.
As I was getting out of Goodnight one afternoon—a little ahead of time—in the automobile that daily makes the round trip to Claude, we drove past the Oakley signboard. I was in a hurry to get on to Claude to see the trade before night, and be ready to leave for Amarillo the next morning. But forgetting all this at the sight of the picture on the bill-board, I asked the chauffeur to stop a minute before it.
She was still smiling, the little wife waiting there in front of their home for her husband’s return, but the smile was hollow and lifeless. I knew—could see—she was full of uneasiness and dread, and was only smiling to keep up her courage.
“That’s quite a lumber advertisement—there,” I ventured. The chauffeur was drinking water from the canvas canteen.
“Uh-huh!” he gulped. “I seen ’em painting it.”
“A man and woman?”
“Well, yes; but the woman did most of it. I saw her there every day for some time. Once in a while the man—her husband, I guess—would be tryin’ to help paint, but he was all in. You could tell it, the way he looked.”
I winced at his words. So here it was, confirmed, what I had been hoping was only imagination. Confound that Pessimist!
“They must have painted a good many of these signs; I see them everywhere,” I continued, in a disinterested manner.
“There’s another’n over at Claude,” yawned the chauffeur. “I think I remember hauling them people over in the car.”
“Over to Claude?”
“Yes—I fergit. I never pay much attention to the folks I haul,” he remarked casually, eying me in a bored way.
Then we drove on.
A day later I arrived in Amarillo from Claude, glad, for it was my trip’s end. I started walking uptown from the station to stretch my legs, besides—well, there across the street, on a vacant lot, was the Oakley bill-board, and the picture. The late afternoon sunlight fell full across it.
I looked at the woman in the picture, whom I had come to know for the real little wife, the artist, painting from her heart. She stood smiling, but behind the smile I read doubt and dread realized, and hope—almost—dying hard. For the smile was but a poor attempt, and the joyous expectancy I saw shining in her eyes months before at Quanah was not there now. There was a subtle air of unmistakable despair about her. Her very frailty and dependency and loyal effort to keep her smile wrung from me a quick sympathy.
I turned back to the drab routine of life sadly, and picking up my grips, saw the Pessimist standing on the sidewalk with his detestable knowing look. There behind him came the Wiseacre. It was one of those little coincidences of a drummer’s life which so often find the same parties together again.
“I was just looking at another one of the pictures—the last one, I guess,” I said suddenly, feeling unashamed of my concern and sadness.
“Last one!” exclaimed the Wiseacre, full of ready information. “Why, man! That’s their first one. Here’s where they began last year. I saw them in St. Paul three weeks ago, happy as wrens.”