“Enter,” called Travers.
He was a little frail old man, with a peaked, grey face framed in a plenitude of iron-grey hair, and ending in a white Vandyke beard. A nervous trouble made him twitch his right eye continually, sometimes emphasising his statements with curious effect. He believed he was one of the greatest painters in the world; yet that very day three of his best pictures had been refused by the Academy.
“I knew it,” he cried excitedly; “I knew when I sent them they’d come back. It’s happened for the last ten years. They know if they hung me I’d kill every one else in the room. They’re afraid of my mountains.” (A wink.) “Their little souls can’t conceive of any scenery beyond Connecticut. But it’s the last time I’ll send.” (A wink.) “I’ll get recognition elsewhere, London, Paris; then when they want my pictures for their walls they’ll have to come and beg, yes, beg for them.” (A portentous wink.)
Every year he vowed the same thing; every year he canvassed the members of the hanging committee; every year his pictures came cruelly back; yet his faith in himself was invincible.
“I tell you what,” I said; “you might be one of the popular painters of the day if you only looked at it right. Here you go painting straight scenery as it was in the days before Adam. You object to the least hint of humanity—a hut, a bridge, a boat. My dear sir, what the General Public wants is the human, the dramatic. There’s that River Rapids picture you did two years ago, and it’s still on your hands. Now that’s good. That water’s alive, it boils; as I look at it I can hear it roar, and feel the sting of the spray. But—it’s straight water, and the G.P. won’t take its water straight. Now just paint two men in a birch-bark canoe going down these rapids. Paint in a big rock, call it A Close Shave, and you’ll sell that picture like winking.”
“Oh, I couldn’t do that. You’re talking like a tradesman.”
“There’s that sunset,” I went on. “It’s splendid. That colour seems to burn a hole in the canvas. But just you paint in a black cross against that smouldering sky, and see how it gives significance, aye, and poetry to the picture. Call it The Lone Grave.”
“But don’t you see,” said Travers, with some irritation, “I’m trying to express a mood of Nature. Surely there’s enough poetry in Nature without trying to drag in lone graves?”
“Not for the G.P. You’ve got to give it sentiment. Did that millionaire brewer buy anything?”
Travers sighed rather wofully.