"And what did he say?" Madge asked.
"Oh, he said something, but he was years older than I, so I just said good afternoon. I suppose he went back to school," said Derwent Rose.
Once more I was disturbed. Was this a new phase, or an old one all over again? If he was going to abolish schools and precedents and all the accepted apparatus by which the world's thought is carried on, it seemed to me to matter very little whether he dealt in words, as before, or in paint, as now. True, this parallelism might exist largely in my own imagination; he had said nothing that another man might not have said without arousing anxiety; but again he was trying to see something, though only a leaf, as if it had never been seen before, and I noted it carefully as I looked out over the sunny northward water.
"So that's more or less what I'm after," he was saying. "I know they're pretty bad, but I think they start right. That sky's as clumsy as it can be, but it is horizontal. That tree's got a back you don't see as well as a front you do. So I simply don't go to look at other people's stuff.... Ah, this branch will explain what I mean."
It did when he pointed it out, but I should never have seen for myself. As completely as a worshipping pagan he sought to subdue himself to one given thing in one given moment. As I say, I know nothing about painting. That may be a valid theory of painting landscape or it may not. But it was his, there was no ear-say or eye-say about it, and it is of him and not of his pictures that I am speaking.
"I believe I shall pull it off one day; in fact I know I shall.... And now that's quite enough about me. That's my view, Mrs Aird, and this is where I live. My old landlady's a perfect dear, and Madeleine and Hortense are all right. But sometimes that brute Coco simply won't sing——"
I saw Jennie drinking in every detail of his room. There was not to be one inch of it that she could not reproduce when she went to bed that night and turned her face in the direction of St Briac. Her eyes took in his moulded ceiling-beams, the glass knob of his door, his neat bed, the herring-boned parquet of the floor. It was a little bare, perhaps, but then he spent all his days out of doors, painting those wonderful paintings, and, of course, this was not his real home. She hated that older painter—a hundred at least—who had been rude to him about the Romantic Landscapes; instantly and passionately she had taken sides with her hero. She loved the fat old Frenchwoman who looked after him and was nearly seventy; she did not so much love the two Breton women who looked after him and were not nearly seventy. Coco was a naughty bird not to sing "Quand je bois" when he was told, and if his window did not face towards Dinard, at any rate he had the tram opposite, and could watch it every time it started, and know that it was going almost past the gates of Ker Annic. She stood with puckered brows before his canvases. She loved trees. They would always be different to her now that he had shown her about them. She had no doubt whatever about his theory of landscape; how could it be wrong if it was his? Her fingers touched the blossom of broom at her throat that had grown on his tree.
Then she came over to the window to make sure that Dinard really did not lie that way. Most stupidly it did not. Actually it lay miles away past the glass door-knob, and the Garde Guérin to the right was invisible from Dinard. But she pressed my arm lightly. "September, Uncle George?" the pleading pressure silently said. "You'll ask us both down in September, the moment we get back from here?"
I looked at my watch.
Then I heard Madge's voice across the room, and my heart almost stopped at the swift peril.