Up the narrow stairs, now in single file, and into a bedroom—evidently Knight's—full of canvases, sketching garb, fishing-rods and reels lining the walls; and then into another—evidently the guest's room—all lace covers, cretonne, carved chests, Louis XVI furniture, rare old portraits, and easy-chairs, the Sculptor opening each closet in turn, grumbling, “Just like him to try and fool us,” but no trace of Knight.
Then the Sculptor threw up a window and thrust out his head, thus bringing clearer into view a stretch of meadow bordered with clumps of willows shading the rushing stream below.
“Louis! Louis! Where the devil are you, you brute of a painter?”
There came an halloo—faint—downstream.
“The beggar's at work somewhere in those bushes, and you couldn't get him out with dynamite until the light changed. Come along!”
There's no telling what an outdoor painter will submit to when an uncontrollable enthusiasm sweeps him off his feet, so to speak. I myself barely held my own (and within the year, too) on the top step of a crowded bridge in Venice in the midst of a cheering mob at a regatta, where I used the back of my gondolier for an easel, and again, when years ago, I clung to the platform of an elevated station in an effort to get, between the legs and bodies of the hurrying mob, the outlines of the spider-web connecting the two cities. I have watched, too, other painters in equally uncomfortable positions (that is, out-of-door painters; not steam-heated, easy-chair fellows, with pencil memoranda or photos to copy from) but it was the first time in all my varied experiences that I had ever come upon a painter standing up to his armpits in a swift-flowing mill or any other kind of stream, the water breaking against his body as a rock breasts a torrent, and he working away like mad on a 3 x 4 lashed to a huge ladder high enough to scale the mill's roof.
“Any fish?” yelled the Man from the Quarter.
“Yes, one squirming around my knees now—shipped him a minute ago—foot slipped. Awful glad to see you—stay where you are till I get this high light.”
“Stay where I am!” bellowed the Sculptor. “Do you think I'm St. Peter or some long-legged crane that—”
“All right—I'm coming.”