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Page 57
The English girl looked very cool and sweet and fresh to the heated
painter. His impression of her as a nice girl and a pretty girl was
speedily reinforced, and he remembered that dark-haired girls with
gray-blue eyes under dusky lashes had been his favorite type not so
long ago ... before he had seen Arlee's fairy gold.
"We've just been driving through the old cemetery--such interesting
tombs," said the elder lady, and Lady Claire added, "I should think
you could get better views there than here."
By this time they had reached the easel and stood back of it in
observation.
Blue, intensely blue, and thickly blue was the sky that Billy had
lavished. Green and rigid were the palms. Purple was the palace.
Very black lay the shadows like planks across the orange road.
Miss Falconer looked as if she doubted her own eyes. Hurriedly she
unfolded her lorgnette.
"It--it's just blocked in," said Billy, speaking with a peculiar
diffidence.
"Quite so--quite so," murmured the lady, bending closer, as if
fascinated.
Lady Claire said nothing. Stealing a look at her, Billy saw that she
was looking it instead.
Miss Falconer tried another angle. The sight of that lorgnette had a
stiffening effect upon Billy B. Hill.
"You get it?" he said pleasantly. "You get the--ah--symphonic chord
I'm striking?"
"Chord?" said Miss Falconer. "Striking," she murmured in a peculiar
voice.
"It's all in thirds, you see," he continued.
"Thirds!" came the echo.
"Perhaps you're of the old school?" he observed.
"Really--I must be!" agreed the lady.
"Ah!" said Billy softly, commiseratingly. He cocked his head at an
angle opposite from the slant of the lorgnette and stared his own
amazing canvas out of countenance.
"Then, of course," he said, "this hardly conveys----"
"What are you?" she demanded. "Is this a--a school?"
"I?" He seemed surprised that there could be any doubt about it. "I
am a Post-Cubist."
Miss Falconer turned the lorgnette upon him. "Oh, really," she said
vaguely. "I fancy I've heard something of that--you're quite new and
radical, aren't you?"
"Oh, we're old," he said gently, "very, very old. We have returned
to Nature--but not the nature of mere academicians. We paint, not
the world of the camera, but the world of the brain. We paint, not
the thing you think you see, but the way you think you see it--its
vibrations of your inner mentality. To paint the apple ripening on
the bough one should reproduce the gentle swelling of the maturing
fruit in your perception.... Now, you see, I am not trying to
reproduce the precise carving of that door; I do not fix the wavings
of that palm. I give you the cerebellic----"
"Quite so," said Miss Falconer, dropping her lorgnette and giving
the canvas the fixity of her unobstructed gaze. "It's most
interesting," she said, a little faintly. "Are there many of you?"
"I don't know," said Billy. "We do not communicate with one another.
That always influences, you know, and it is better to work out
thought alone."
"I should think it would be." Something in her tone suggested that
the inviolated solitude of the asylum suggested itself to her as a
fitting spot. "Well, we won't interrupt you any longer. You've been
most interesting.... The sun is quite hot, isn't it?" and with one
long, lingering look at the picture, a look convinced against its
will, she went her way toward the victoria.
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