Netherby Gomme went and lit a candle, holding it for her that she might see the better.
“What does that say to you?” he asked the solemn child. She was gazing intently at Timothy Cole’s exquisite wood engraving of Millet’s “Sower.”
“It says—no, it sings to me,” she said, trying with deliberate searching to find the absolute word, as a young thrush tries its notes; and the effort of her intellect to express the right hair’s-breadth value touched Gomme’s instincts and made the art leap within him. He nodded. The child faced the picture, and went on haltingly:
“It sings to me of—— It is a man walking in a furrow—and all the earth seems to be whispering—in a sort of hush—as if live things were coming out of the silence. Twilight is far more full of spirits than any other time—things that beckon and tell secrets. The dusk is always filled with whispers, as if sweet young things were being born, and poor dying things were glad to be going to sleep.... That’s the sower—he walks along and sows. And he is solemn, because he knows that all that he flings on the dark earth will spring in the dusk, and become alive.”
Netherby stroked her head:
“Betty,” said he, “do you think the artist who painted that picture meant you to feel all that?”
“Didn’t he?” she asked simply. She looked at it again with serious grey eyes. She shook her head doggedly. “No; that isn’t just a man in a field. Sometimes pictures look as if they had been painted just because the painter wanted to show how cleverly he could draw an eye or an ear or a bootlace; but, look! this sower has not got any of these things, yet somehow they are there—they seem to come in as one looks. The sowing in the twilight is the thing. I can hear the big clumsy man walking with long strides, his heavy footfall all muffled in the brown earth. I can see it and hear it and smell it——”
The child ceased speaking, at a loss to explain, her little brows knit as she stood searching for expression.
The boy Noll stood at gaze, wondering.
Netherby Gomme said not a word.