Her thoughts had taken the bits in their mouths, and were running away, and so, metaphorically speaking, she jumped off the runaway vehicle and came into serious collision with terra firma; literally, she took up her palette and went on with her painting.
To Tom, also, his visits to the Acropolis distinctly gained something by the constant expectation of meeting Maud there. She had run him to ground the other day when she had made him confess that he cared for nothing but his art, and though the conclusion had been forced from his mouth, he knew it was not quite true. What he cared for was life and its best possibilities in the way of beauty, and his enthusiasm, he knew, saw and tended to state everything too violently. He found Maud sympathetic, eager and charming as a companion, and no other thought had entered his head about her, until the incident of the thunderstorm, which had been unexpected and very bewildering. And in his deep perplexity as to what he had better do, he took the eminently straightforward and most promising course of doing nothing at all, of behaving normally. He had, as it were, taken a tentative mental sounding of his feelings towards her for his own satisfaction, but he found that the bottom was soon reached. In any case the depths were not unplumbable, which would have been the only reason for doing anything. He was in love with life, with all of life that was best, and the idea of falling in love with any particular little bit of it would have seemed to him as incredible as writing sonnets, in the style of the eighteenth-century poets, to women’s finger-nails; and these always appeared to him most profitless performances. To fall in love must always seem slightly ridiculous until one falls in love.
Then it came about that not long after Maud had begun painting again, Tom walked up the steps as usual, and sat with his hands clasped round one knee, on the steps at Maud’s feet, and talked as usual, and absorbed the beauty of the scene.
“It’s the only way,” he said on this particular morning, “to hope to get hold, of the spirit of Greek art. You can never arrive at the spirit of a thing through its details—the details shape themselves if you know the spirit. You see artists in the Louvre copying Raphael all their lives, but they never really remind you of him. If they were to go to Umbrian villages and live the life he lived among the people, and to feast—I don’t mean literally—on the ox-eyed faces of peasant women and then come back, they might be able to copy him with some success, or still better, if they had genius, produce original pictures which were like Raphael’s. They go the wrong way about it.”
Maud was painting intently, and did not answer for a moment.
“Yes, I think you are right,” she said. “It’s no use copying merely. A mere copy only, at its best approximates to a coloured photograph.”
“It’s so utterly the wrong way to go about it,” said Tom. “To arrive at the right results, you have to follow the right method from the beginning. For instance, when I go back to England, and am shut up in a dingy studio under a grey sky, and my work looks hideous and dead, I shall bring back the inspiration not by thinking only of Hermes, but of the time I have spent here on these steps, looking out over the Propylæa to Salamis.”
He leant back on the step where he was sitting, and looked up at Maud for a moment. She put down the brush she held and was looking at him, as if she was waiting eagerly to hear something more. But Tom apparently was unconscious of her look, and she took up her brush again.
Tom tilted his hat a little more over his eyes, and took out his cigarette-case.
“It’s becoming real to me at last,” he said. “I think I am beginning to know what it all means.”