“But who knows?” he pursued encouragingly. “If you do nothing else perhaps you will come to paint big pictures with gold frames—like the ones under the procuratie in the Piazza San Marco. My cousin says the artists who paint those are signori. Then it will be a trade! I shall never be a signor at mine. Do you know how long it takes me to earn ten francs?”
The painter remembered how often he had seen fishermen in their long brown stockings and wooden shoes before the brilliant windows of the Piazza. Never before had he conceived of them otherwise than as a picturesque foil to the glitter of civilisation.
“No,” he replied. “But your mestiere is better than mine. It keeps you out of doors; and what you do is necessary to people more than what I do.”
“Ma! It is a pleasure to be on the sea in a good wind. I would not like to be shut up in a shop, or anything like that. But we make so little. And the winter! Sometimes we do not even catch enough to eat. You can make a picture whenever you want, but I can’t catch a fish whenever I want!”
“Yes, but you can eat your fish when you do catch him, while my picture is no good to me unless I sell it. I can’t eat it. And it isn’t the kind of thing that everybody wants to buy, like a fish.”
“That is so. But if people don’t like your picture you can ask them what they do like, and sit down and paint it for them. Ecco! And in the winter you can stay comfortably by the hearth in the kitchen, and make your pictures of boats and flowers and summer and what else do I know, while outside it snows. But I have to go into the sea to get my fish, if I get shipwrecked for it.”
The painter smiled, still envying the strong brown body buried in the sand beside him. And then he suddenly asked:
“Have you ever been shipwrecked?”
“Only once,” answered the fisherman, as if it were an every-day matter.
“Tell me about it,” demanded the painter eagerly, turning on his elbow to eye this person who had been through shipwrecks and thought nothing of it.