But here we were interrupted. About ten that evening I ran across Smith, and he asked me up to his parlour to help him smoke and drink hot Scotch. It was a cosy place, with its comfortable chairs, its cheerful lamps, and its friendly open fire of seasoned olive-wood. To make everything perfect, there was a muffled booming of the surf outside. After the second Scotch and much lazy and contented chat, Smith said:
‘Now we are properly primed—I to tell a curious history and you to listen to it. It has been a secret for many years—a secret between me and three others; but I am going to break the seal now. Are you comfortable?’
‘Perfectly. Go on.’
Here follows what he told me:
‘A long time ago I was a young artist—a very young artist, in fact—and I wandered about the country parts of France, sketching here and sketching there, and was presently joined by a couple of darling young Frenchmen who were at the same kind of thing that I was doing. We were as happy as we were poor, or as poor as we were happy—phrase it to suit yourself. Claude Frere and Carl Boulanger—these are the names of those boys; dear, dear fellows, and the sunniest spirits that ever laughed at poverty and had a noble good time in all weathers.
‘At last we ran hard aground in a Breton village, and an artist as poor as ourselves took us in and literally saved us from starving—Francois Millet—’
‘What! the great Francois Millet?’
‘Great? He wasn’t any greater than we were, then. He hadn’t any fame, even in his own village; and he was so poor that he hadn’t anything to feed us on but turnips, and even the turnips failed us sometimes. We four became fast friends, doting friends, inseparables. We painted away together with all our might, piling up stock, piling up stock, but very seldom getting rid of any of it. We had lovely times together; but, O my soul! how we were pinched now and then!
‘For a little over two years this went on. At last, one day, Claude said:
‘“Boys, we’ve come to the end. Do you understand that?—absolutely to the end. Everybody has struck—there’s a league formed against us. I’ve been all around the village and it’s just as I tell you. They refuse to credit us for another centime until all the odds and ends are paid up.”