CHAPTER XI
ART AND NATURE
The early days of June, all of them of the same quality of golden weather, were hardly over, before our wanderer from Ohio found himself on terms of quite pleasant familiarity with the celibate vicar of Nevilton, whose relations with his friend Gladys so immensely interested him.
The conscientious vicar had sought him out, on the very day after his visit to the mill copse and the artist had found the priest more to his fancy than he had imagined possible.
The American’s painting had begun in serious earnest. A studio had been constructed for him in one of the sheds near the conservatory, a place much more full of light and air and pleasant garden smells, than would have been the lumber-room referred to by Mrs. Romer, adjoining the chaste slumbers of the laborious Lily. Here for several long mornings he had worked at high pressure and in a vein of imaginative expansion.
Something of the seething sap of these incomparable days seemed to pass into his blood. He plunged into a bold and original series of Dionysic “impressions,” seeking to represent, in accordance with his new vision, those legendary episodes in the life of the divine Wanderer which seemed most capable of lending themselves to a half-realistic, half-fantastic transmutation, of the people and places immediately around him. He sought to introduce into these pictures the very impetus and pressure of the exuberant earth-force, as he felt it stirring and fermenting in his own veins, and in those of the persons and animals about him. He strove to clothe the shadowy poetic outline of the classical story with fragments and morsels of actual experience as one by one his imaginative intellect absorbed them.
Here, too, under the sycamores and elms of Nevilton, the old world-madness followed the alternations of sun and moon, with the same tragic swiftness and the same ambiguous beauty, as when, with tossing arms and bared throats, the virgins of Thessaly flung themselves into the dew-starred thickets.
Dangelis began by making cautious and tentative use of such village children as he found it possible to lay hands upon, as models in his work, but this method did not prove very satisfactory.
The children, when their alarm and inquisitiveness wore off, grew tired and turbulent; and on more than one occasion the artist had to submit to astonishing visits from confused and angry parents who called him a “foreigner” and a “Yankee,” and qualified these appellations with epithets so astoundingly gross, that Dangelis was driven to wonder from what simple city-bred fancy the illusion of rural innocence had first proceeded.
At length, as the days went on, the bold idea came into his head of persuading Gladys herself to act as his model.
His relations with her had firmly established themselves now on the secure ground of playful camaraderie, and he knew enough of her to feel tolerably certain that he had only to broach such a scheme, to have it welcomed with enthusiastic ardour.