The good ship Red Tub is not adapted to outdoor sketching under these conditions. The poke-bonnet awning acts as a wind-drag that no amount of hard pulling can overcome. So I at once convene the Board of Strategy, Lieutenant-Commander Peter Jansen, Red Tub Navy, in the chair. That distinguished naval expert rises from his water-soaked seat on the cocoa-matting outside the poke bonnet, sweeps his eye around the horizon, and remarks sententiously:—
"It no tam goot day. Blow all dime; we go ba'd-hoose," and he turns the boat toward a low-lying building anchored out from the main shore by huge chains secured to floating buoys.
In some harbors sea-faring men are warned not to "anchor over the water-pipes." In others particular directions are given to avoid "submarine cables planted here." In Dort, where none of these modern conveniences exist, you are notified as follows: "No boats must land at this Bath."
If Peter knew of this rule he said not one word to me as I sat back out of the wet, hived under the poke bonnet, squeezing color-tubes and assorting my brushes. He rowed our craft toward the bath-house with the skill of a man-o'-war's-man, twisted the painter around a short post, and unloaded my paraphernalia on a narrow ledge or plank walk some three feet wide, and which ran around the edge of the floating bath-house.
It never takes me long to get to work, once my subject is selected. I sprang from the boat while Peter handed me the chair, stool, and portfolio containing my stock of gray papers of different tones; opened my sketch frame, caught a sheet of paper tight between its cleats; spread palettes and brushes on the floor at my side; placed the water bucket within reach of my hand, and in five minutes I was absorbed in my sketch.
Immediately the customary thing happened. The big bank of gray cloud that hung over the river split into feathery masses of white framed in blue, and out blazed the glorious sun.
Meantime, Peter had squatted close beside me, sheltered under the lee of the side wall of the bath-house, protected equally from the slant of the driving rain and the glare of the blinding sun. Safe too from the watchful eye of the High Pan-Jam who managed the bath, and who at the moment was entirely oblivious of the fact that only two inches of pine board separated him from an enthusiastic painter working like mad, and an equally alert marine assistant who supplied him with fresh water and charcoal points, both at the moment defying the law of the land, one in ignorance and the other in a spirit of sheer bravado. For Peter must have known the code and the penalty.
The world is an easy place for a painter to live and breathe in when he is sitting far from the madding crowd—of boys—protected from the wind and sun, watching a sky piled up in mountains of snow, and inhaling ozone that is a tonic to his lungs. When the outline of his sketch is complete and the colors flow and blend, and the heart is on fire; when the bare paper begins to lose itself in purple distances and long stretches of tumbling water, and the pictured boats take definite shape, and the lines of the rigging begin to tell; when little by little, with a pat here and a dab there, there comes from out this flat space a something that thrilled him when he first determined to paint the thing that caught his eye,—not the thing itself, but the spirit, the soul, the feeling, and meaning of the color-poem unrolled before him,—when a painter feels a thrill like this, all the fleets of Spain might bombard him, and his eye would never waver nor his touch hesitate.
I felt it to-day.
Peter didn't. If he had he would have kept still and passed me fresh water and rags and new tubes and whatever I wanted—and I wanted something every minute—instead of disporting himself in an entirely idiotic and disastrous way. Disastrous, because you might have seen the sketch which I began reproduced in these pages had the Lieutenant-Commander, R.T.N., only carried out the orders of the Lord High Admiral commanding the fleet.