by George Moore
‘But you’re not going to ask me to climb those rocks,’ said Mildred. ‘There are miles and miles of rocks. It is like a landscape by Salvator Rosa.’
‘Climb that hill! you couldn’t. I’ll wait until our cobbler has made you a pair of boots. But isn’t that desolate region of blasted oaks and sundered rocks wonderful? You find everything in the forest. In a few minutes I shall show you some lovely underwood.’
And they had walked a very little way when he stopped and said: ‘Don’t you call that beautiful?’ and, leaning against the same tree, Morton and Mildred looked into the dreamy depth of a summer wood. The trunks of the young elms rose straight, and through the pale leafage the sunlight quivered, full of the impulse of the morning. The ground was thick with grass and young shoots…. Something ran through the grass, paused, and then ran again.
‘What is that?’ Mildred asked.
‘A squirrel, I think… yes, he’s going up that tree.’
‘How pretty he is, his paws set against the bark.’
‘Come this way and we shall see him better.’
But they caught no further sight of the squirrel, and Morton asked Mildred the time.
‘A quarter-past ten,’ she said, glancing at the tiny watch which she wore in a bracelet.
‘Then we must be moving on. I ought to be at work at half-past. One can’t work more than a couple of hours in this light.’
They passed out of the wood and crossed an open space where rough grass grew in patches. Mildred opened her parasol.
‘You asked me just now if I ever went to England. Do you intend to go back, or do you intend to live in France?’
‘That’s my difficulty. So long as I was painting there was a reason for my remaining in France, now that I’ve given it up—’
‘But you’ve not given it up.’
‘Yes, I have. If I don’t find something else to do I suppose I must go back. That’s what I dread. We live in Sutton. But that conveys no idea to your mind. Sutton is a little town in Surrey. It was very nice once, but now it is little better than a London suburb. My brother is a distiller. He goes to town every day by the ten minutes past nine and he returns by the six o’clock. I’ve heard of nothing but those two trains all my life. We have ten acres of ground — gardens, greenhouses, and a number of servants. Then there’s the cart — I go out for drives in the cart. We have tennis parties — the neighbours, you know, and I shall have to choose whether I shall look after my brother’s house, or marry and look after my husband’s.’
‘It must be very lonely in Sutton.’
‘Yes, it is very lonely. There are a number of people about, but I’ve no friends that I care about. There’s Mrs. Fargus.’
‘Who’s Mrs. Fargus?’
‘Oh, you should see Mrs. Fargus, she reads Comte, and has worn the same dinner dress ever since I knew her — a black satin with a crimson scarf. Her husband suffers from asthma, and speaks of his wife as a very clever woman. He wears an eyeglass and she wears spectacles. Does that give you an idea of my friends?’
‘I should think it did. What damned bores they must be.’
‘He bores me, she doesn’t. I owe a good deal to Mrs. Fargus. If it hadn’t been for her I shouldn’t be here now.’
‘What do you mean?’
They again passed out of the sunlight into the green shade of some beech trees. Mildred closed her parasol, and swaying it to and fro amid the ferns she continued in a low laughing voice her tale of Mrs. Fargus and the influence that this lady had exercised upon her. Her words floated along a current of quiet humour cadenced by the gentle swaying of her parasol, and brought into relief by a certain intentness of manner which was peculiar to her. And gradually Morton became more and more conscious of her, the charm of her voice stole upon him, and once he lingered, allowing her to get a few yards in front so that he might notice the quiet figure, a little demure, and intensely itself, in a yellow gown. When he first saw her she had seemed to him a little sedate, even a little dowdy, and when she had spoken of her intention to abandon painting, although her manner was far from cheerless, he had feared a bore. He now perceived that this she at least was not — moreover, her determination to paint no more announced, an excellent sense of the realities of things in which the other women — the Elsies and the Cissys — seemed to him to be strangely deficient. And when he set up his easel her appreciation of his work helped him to further appreciation of her. He had spread the rug for her in a shady place, but for the present she preferred to stand behind him, her parasol slanted slightly, talking, he thought very well, of the art of the great men who had made Barbizon rememberable. And the light tone of banter in which she now admitted her failure seemed to Morton to be just the tone which she should adopt, and her ridicule of the impressionists and, above all, of the dottists amused him.
‘I don’t know why they come here at all,’ he said, ‘unless it be to prove to themselves that nature falls far short of their pictures. I wonder why they come here? They could paint their gummy tapestry stuff anywhere.’
‘I can imagine your asking them what they thought of Corot. Their faces would assume a puzzled expression, I can see them scratching their heads reflectively; at last one of them would say:
‘“Yes, there is Chose who lives behind the Odeon — he admires Corot. Pas de blague, he really does.” Then all the others in chorus: “he really does admire Corot; we’ll bring him to see you next Tuesday.”’
Morton laughed loudly, Mildred laughed quietly, and there was an intense intimacy of enjoyment in her laughter.
‘I can see them,’ she said, ‘bringing Chose, le petit Chose, who lives behind the Odeon and admires Corot, to see you, bringing him, you know, as a sort of strange survival, a curious relic. It really is very funny.’
He was sorry when she said the sun was getting too hot for her, and she went and lay on the rug he had spread for her in the shade of the oak. She had brought a book to read, but she only read a line here and there. Her thoughts followed the white clouds for a while, and then she admired the man sitting easily on his camp-stool, his long legs wide apart. His small head, his big hat, the line of his bent back amused and interested her; she liked his abrupt speech, and wondered if she could love him. A couple of peasant women came by, bent under the weight of the faggots they had picked, and Mildred could see that Morton was watching the movement of these women, and she thought how well they would come into the picture he was painting.
Soon after he rose from his easel and walked towards her.
‘Have you finished?’ she said. ‘No, not quite, but the light has changed. I cannot go on any more to-day. One can’t work in the sunlight above an hour and a half.’
‘You’ve been working longer than that.’
‘But haven’t touched the effect. I’ve been painting in some figures — two peasant women picking sticks, come and look.’
XVI.
Three days after Morton finished his picture. Mildred had been with him most of the time. And now lunch was over, and they lay on the rug under the oak tree talking eagerly.
‘Corot never married,’ Morton remarked, as he shaded his eyes with his hand, and asked himself if any paint appeared in his sky. There was a corner on the left that troubled him. ‘He doesn’t seem to have ever cared for any woman. They say he never had a mistress.’
‘I hear that you have not followed his example.’
‘Not more than I could help.’
His childish candour amused her so that she laughed outright, and she watched the stolid childish stare that she liked, until a longing to take him in her arms and kiss him came upon her. Her voice softened, and she asked him if he had ever been in love?
‘Yes, I think I was.’
‘How long did it last?’
‘About five years.’
‘And then?’
‘A lot of rot about scruples of conscience. I said, I give you a week to think it over, and if I don’t hear from you in that time I’m off to Ital
y.’
‘Did she write?’
‘Not until I had left Paris. Then she spent five-and-twenty pounds in telegrams trying to get me back.’
‘But you wouldn’t go back.’
‘Not I; with me, when an affair of that sort is over, it is really over. Don’t you think I’m right?’
‘Perhaps so…. But I’m afraid we’ve learnt love in different schools.’
‘Then the sooner you relearn it in my school the better.’
At that moment a light breeze came up the sandy path, carrying some dust on to the picture. Morton stamped and swore. For three minutes it was damn, damn, damn.
‘Do you always swear like that in the presence of ladies?’
‘What’s a fellow to do when a blasted wind comes up smothering his picture in sand?’
Mildred could only laugh at him; and, while he packed up his canvases, paint-box, and easel, she thought about him. She thought that she understood him, and fancied that she would be able to manage him. And convinced of her power she said aloud, as they plunged into the forest:
‘I always think it is a pity that it is considered vulgar to walk arm in arm. I like to take an arm…. I suppose we can do what we like in the forest of Fontainebleau. But you’re too heavily laden—’
‘No, not a bit. I should like it.’
She took his arm and walked by his side with a sweet caressing movement, and they talked eagerly until they reached the motive of his second picture.
‘What I’ve got on the canvas isn’t very much like the view in front of you, is it?’
‘No, not much, I don’t like it as well as the other picture.’
‘I began it late one evening. I’ve never been able to get the same effect again. Now it looks like a Puvis de Chavannes — not my picture, but that hillside, that large space of blue sky and the wood-cutters.’
‘It does a little. Are you going on with it?’
‘Why?’
‘Because there is no shade for me to sit in. I shall be roasted if we remain here.’
‘What shall we do? Lie down in some shady place?’
‘We might do that…. I know what I should like.’
‘What?’
‘A long drive in the forest.’
‘A capital idea. We can do that. We shall meet some one going to Barbizon. We’ll ask them to send us a fly.’
Their way lay through a pine wood where the heat was stifling; the dry trees were like firewood scorched and ready to break into flame; and their steps dragged through the loose sand. And, when they had passed this wood, they came to a place where the trees had all been felled, and a green undergrowth of pines, two or three feet high, had sprung up. It was difficult to force their way through; the prickly branches were disagreeable to touch, and underneath the ground was spongy, with layers of fallen needles hardly covered with coarse grass.
Morton missed the way, and his paint-box and canvases had begun to weigh heavy when they came upon the road they were seeking. But where they came upon it, there was only a little burnt grass, and Morton proposed that they should toil on until they came to a pleasanter place.
The road ascended along the verge of a steep hill, at the top of which they met a bicyclist who promised to deliver Morton’s note. There was an opening in the trees, and below them the dark green forest waved for miles. It was pleasant to rest — they were tired. The forest murmured like a shell. They could distinguish here and there a tree, and their thoughts went to that tree. But, absorbed though they were by this vast nature, each was thinking intensely of the other. Mildred knew she was near the moment when Morton would take her hand and tell her that he loved her. She wondered what he would say. She did not think he would say he loved her, he would say: ‘You’re a damned pretty woman.’ She could see he was thinking of something, and suspected him of thinking out a phrase or an oath appropriate to the occasion. She was nearly right. Morton was thinking how he should act. Mildred was not the common Barbizon art student whose one idea is to become the mistress of a painter so that she may learn to paint. She had encouraged him, but she had kept her little dignity. Moreover, he did not feel sure of her. So the minutes went by in awkward expectancy, and Morton had not kissed her before the carriage arrived.
She lay back in the fly smiling, Morton thought, superciliously. It seemed to him stupid to put his arm round her waist and try to kiss her. But, sooner or later, he would have to do this. Once this Rubicon was passed he would know where he was…. As he debated, the tall trunks rose branchless for thirty or forty feet; and Mildred said that they were like plumed lances.
‘So they are,’ he said, ‘like plumed lances. And how beautifully that beech bends, what an exquisite curve, like a lance bent in the shock of the encounter.’
The underwood seemed to promise endless peace, happy life amid leaves and birds; and Mildred thought of a duel under the tall trees. She saw two men fighting to the death for her. A romantic story begun in a ball-room, she was not quite certain how. Morton remembered a drawing of fauns and nymphs. But there was hardly cover for a nymph to hide her whiteness. The ground was too open, the faun would soon overtake her. She could better elude his pursuit in the opposite wood. There the long branches of the beeches swept the heads of the ferns, and, in mysterious hollows, ferns made mysterious shade, places where nymphs and fauns might make noonday festival.
‘What are you thinking of?’ said Mildred.
‘Of fauns and nymphs,’ he answered. ‘These woods seem to breathe antiquity.’
‘But you never paint antiquity.’
‘I try to. Millet got its spirit. Do you know the peasant girl who has taken off her clothes to bathe in a forest pool, her sheep wandering through the wood? By God! I should like you to see that picture.’
At the corner of the carrefour, the serpent catcher showed them two vipers in a low flat box. They darted their forked tongues against the wire netting, and the large green snake, which he took out of a bag, curled round his arm, seeking to escape. In questioning him they learnt that the snakes were on their way to the laboratory of a vivisectionist. This dissipated the mystery which they had suggested, and the carriage drove in silence down the long forest road.
‘We might have bought those snakes from him, and set them at liberty.’
‘We might have, but we didn’t.’
‘Why didn’t we?’
‘What would be the good? … If we had, he would have caught others.’
‘I suppose so. But I don’t like the idea of that beautiful snake, which you compared to me, being vivisected.’
The forest now extended like a great temple, hushed in the beautiful ritual of the sunset. The light that suffused the green leaves overhead glossed the brown leaves underfoot, marking the smooth grosund as with a pattern. And, like chapels, every dell seemed in the tranquil light, and leading from them a labyrinthine architecture without design or end. Mildred’s eyes wandered from the colonnades to the underwoods. She thought of the forest as of a great green prison; and then her soul fled to the scraps of blue that appeared through the thick leafage, and she longed for large spaces of sky, for a view of a plain, for a pine-plumed hill-top. Once more she admired, once more she wearied of the forest aisles, and was about to suggest returning to Barbizon when Morton said:
‘We are nearly there now; I’m going to show you our lake.’
‘A lake! Is there a lake?’
‘Yes, there’s a lake — not a very large one, it is true, but still a lake — on the top of a hill where you can see the forest. Under a sunset sky the view is magnificent.’
The carriage was to wait for them, and, a little excited by the adventure, Mildred followed Morton through rocks and furze bushes. When it was possible she took his arm, and once accidentally, or nearly accidentally, she sprang from a rock into his arms. She was surprised that he did not take advantage of the occasion to kiss her.
‘Standing on this flat rock we’re like figures in a landscape, by Wilson,’ Mildred
said.
‘So we are,’ said Morton, who was struck by the truth of the comparison. ‘But there is too much colour in the scene for Wilson — he would have reduced it all to a beautiful blue, with only a yellow flush to tell where the sun had gone.’
‘It would be very nice if you would make me a sketch of the lake. I’ll lend you a lead pencil, the back of an envelope will do.’
‘I’ve a water-colour box in my pocket and a block. Sit down there and I’ll do you a sketch.’
‘And, while you are accomplishing a work of genius, I’ll supply the levity, and don’t you think I’m just the person to supply the necessary leaven of lightness? Look at my frock and my sunshade.’
Morton laughed, the conversation paused, and the water-colour progressed. Suddenly Mildred said:
‘What did you think of me the first time you saw me? What impression did I produce on you?’
‘Do you want me to tell you, to tell you exactly?’
‘Yes, indeed I do.’
‘I don’t think I can.’
‘What was it?’ Mildred asked in a low affectionate tone, and she leaned towards him in an intimate affectionate way.
‘Well — you struck me as being a little dowdy.’
‘Dowdy! I had a nice new frock on. I don’t think I could have looked dowdy, and among the dreadful old rags that the girls wear here.’
‘It had nothing to do with the clothes you wore. It was a little quiet, sedate air.’
‘I wasn’t in good spirits when I came down here.’
‘No, you weren’t. I thought you might be a bore.’
‘But I haven’t been that, have I?’
‘No, I’m damned if you’re that.’
‘But what a charming sketch you’re making. You take that ordinary common grey from the palette, and it becomes beautiful. If I were to take the very same tint, and put it on the paper, it would be mud.’
Morton placed his sketch against a rock, and surveyed it from a little distance. ‘I don’t call it bad, do you? I think I’ve got the sensation of the lonely lake. But the effect changes so rapidly. Those clouds are quite different from what they were just now. I never saw a finer sky, it is wonderful. It is splendid as a battle’…
