"You remember those reproductions, I showed you, of Felicien Rops, the Belgium etcher. You didn't like them. I don't either. He's wonderfully clever—My God! I wish I could draw like that man—but I don't think it's art. I don't think he ever looked upward—lifted up his eyes to the hills. I guess my religion is just that indescribable something which changes craftsmanship into art. I want to draw well, I want my color to be right, I want technique—all I can get of it. But even if I was perfect in all these, I would have to lift up my eyes unto the hills for help before I could do the real thing—the thing I want to do."
"And when you lift up your eyes, Billy," I asked, "who is it that gives you help?"
He spoke rather reluctantly after a moment's pause.
"That's the trouble with talking religion. You get mixed up between the figurative and the literal. Does it really matter Who—or Where? I don't think of any person up there in the afterglow on the mountain top. There doesn't have to be any hills even. Sometimes I get 'help' in my studio—with nothing to look up to but the white-washed lights and the rafters.
"We all need 'help' and when we get it—we've 'got religion.' It's all so vague that we have to use symbols. One person has associated 'help' with high mass and choir boys and tawdry images. Another gets his connection by listening to a village quartet murder 'Nearer my God to Thee.' When Nelson was over illustrating that book on Egypt he learned the Mohammedan 'Call to Prayer.' It's a weird sing-song thing. There are millions of people who, when they hear that, get the feeling that they need 'help' and chase round to the Mosque. I haven't found anything more suggestive than those words of King David.
"Sometimes my pictures are rotten and I sign them 'William Barton.' Once in a long while I paint one that is better,—better than my brush tricks, better than my technique, better than just me—and I always put a little star after my name. It means 'this picture was painted by William Barton and God.' That's my religion."
"It's all summed up in that old Jewish song—'I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help.' Do you know it?"
Yes. I knew it. I sat in the Father's study, all one fine afternoon, when the other boys were playing ball, and learned that song by rote, in punishment for upsetting his inkwell. It seems very wonderful to me that the Bible should seem a thing of beauty to a youngster. It was at best an unpleasant piece of drudgery for me—more often a form of chastisement. What stirs the deepest emotions in Billy's heart, only reminds me of a blot of ink on the Father's desk and the shouts of the boys out in the street whom I might not join.
I had been suspecting for some time that although Billy and Marie both call me "Daddy," they were coming to realize that they are not brother and sister. My suspicions were confirmed the other day by Nina. She asked me solemnly what I thought of Billy. And when I declared that he was the straightest, cleanest, finest youngster I knew, she said.
"Perhaps. But he is not as fine as Norman was."