Lying Prophets. Eden Phillpotts

on work; and wealth to worthless beings like myself who are always ailing and who never spend a pound with wisdom. Make no dark cryptic mystery of Fate when you paint her. She looks to me like a mischievous monkey poking sticks into an ant-hill."

      "She's a woman," said Murdoch.

      "She's three," corrected Brady; "what can you expect from three women rolled into one?"

      "Away with her! Waste no incense at her shrine. She'll cut the thread no sooner because you turn your back on her. Fling overboard your mythologies, dead and alive, and kneel to Nature. A budding spike of wild hyacinth is worth all the gods put together. Go hand in hand with Nature, I say. Ask nothing from her; walk humbly; be well content if she lets you but turn the corner of one page none else have read. That's how I live. My life is not a prayer exactly—"

      "I should say not," interrupted Brady.

      "But a hymn of praise—a purely impersonal existence, lived all alone, like a man at a prison window. This carcass, with its shaky machinery and defective breathing apparatus, is the prison. I look out of the window till the walls crumble away—"

      "And then?" asked one Paul Tarrant, a painter who prided himself on being a

       Christian as well.

      "Then, the spark which I call myself, goes back to Nature, as the cloud gives the raindrop back to the sea from whence the sun drew it."

      "A lie, man!" answered the other hotly.

      "Perhaps. It matters nothing. God—if there be a God—will not blame me for making a mistake. Meantime I live like the rook and the thrush. They never pray, they praise, they sing 'grace before meat' and after it, as Nature taught them."

      "A simple child of Nature—beautiful spectacle," said Brady. "But I'm sorry all the same," he continued, "that you've found nothing in Cornwall to keep you here and make you do some work. You talk an awful deal of rot, but we want to see you paint. Isn't there anything or anybody worthy of you here?"

      "As a matter of face, I've found a girl," said Barron.

      There was a clamor of excitement at this news, above which Brady's bull voice roared approval.

      "Proud girl, proud parents, proud Newlyn!" he bellowed.

      "The mood ripens too," continued Barren quietly. "'Sacrifice all the world to mood' is my motto. So I shall stop and paint."

      A moment later derisive laughter greeted Barron's decision, for Murdoch, in answer to a hail of questions, announced the subject of his friend's inspiration.

      "We strolled round this morning and saw Joan Tregenza in an iron hoop with a pail of water slung at either hand."

      "So your picture begins and ends where it is, Barron, my friend; in your imagination. Did it strike you when you first saw that vision of loveliness in dirty drab that she was hardly the girl to have gone unpainted till now?" asked Brady.

      "The possibility of previous pictures is hardly likely to weigh with me. Why, I would paint a drowned sailor if the subject attracted me, and that though you have done it," answered the other, nodding toward a big canvas in the corner, where Brady's picture for the year approached completion.

      "My dear chap, we all worship Joan—at a distance. She is not to be painted. Tears and prayers are useless. She has a flinty father—a fisherman, who looks upon painting as a snare of the devil and sees every artist already wriggling on the trident in his mind's eye. Joan has also a lover, who would rather behold her dead than on canvas."

      "In fact these Methodist folk take us to be what you really are," said Brady bluntly. "Old Tregenza tars us every one with the same brush. We are lost sinners all."

      "Well, why trouble him? A fisherman would have his business on the sea.

       Candidly, I must paint her. The wish grows upon me."

      "Even money you don't get as much as a sketch," said Murdoch.

      "Have any of you tried approaching her directly, instead of her relations?"

      "She's as shy as a hawk, man."

      "That makes me the more hopeful. You fellows, with your Tam o' Shanters and aggressive neckties and knickerbockers and calves, would frighten the devil. I'm shy myself. If she's natural, then we shall possibly understand each other."

      "I'll bet you ten to one in pounds you won't have your wish," said Brady.

      "No, shan't bet. You're all so certain. Probably I shall find myself beaten like the rest of you. But it's worth trying. She's a pretty thing."

      "How will you paint her if you get the chance?"

      "Don't know yet. I should like to paint her in a wolf-skin with a thread of wolf's teeth round her neck and a celt-headed spear in her hand."

      "Art will be a loser by the pending repulse," declared Brady. "And now, as my whisky-bottle's empty and my lamp going out, you chaps can follow its example whenever you please."

      So the men scattered into a starry night, and went, each his way, through the streets of the sleeping village.

CHAPTER TWO

       Table of Contents

      IN A HALO OF GOLD

      Edmund Murdoch's studio stood high on Newlyn hill, and Barron had taken comfortable rooms in a little lodging-house close beside it. The men often enjoyed breakfast in each other's company, but on the following morning, when Murdoch strolled over to see his friend, he found that his rooms were empty.

      Barron, in fact, was already nearly a mile from Newlyn, and, at the moment when the younger artist sought him, he stood upon a footpath which ran through plowed fields to the village of Paul. In the bottom of his mind ran a current of thought occupied with the problem of Joan Tregenza, but, superficially, he was concerned with the spring world in which he walked. He stood where Nature, like Artemis, appeared as a mother of many breasts. Brown and solemn in their undulations, they rose about and around him to the sky-line, where the land cut sharply against a pale blue heaven from which tinkled the music of larks. He watched a bird wind upward in a spiral to its song throne; he noted the young wheat brushing the earth with a veil of green; he dawdled where elms stood, their high tops thick with blossom; and he delayed for full fifteen minutes to see the felling of one giant tree. A wedge-shaped cut had been made upon the side where the great elm was to fall, and, upon the other side, two men were sawing through the trunk. There was no sound but the steady hiss of steel teeth gnawing inch by inch to the wine-red heart of the tree. Sunshine glimmered on its leafy crown, and as yet distant branch and bough knew nothing of the midgets and Death below.

      Barron took pleasure in seeing the great god Change at work, but he mourned in that a masterpiece, on which Nature had bestowed half a century and more of love, must now vanish.

      "A pity," he said, while the executioners rested a few moments from their labors, "a pity to cut down such a noble tree."

      One woodman laughed, and the other—an old rustic, brown and bent—made answer:

      "I sez 'dang the tree!' Us doan't take no joy in thrawin' en, mister. I be bedoled wi' pain, an' this 'ere sawin's just food for rheumatiz. My back's that bad. But Squire must 'ave money, an' theer's five hundred pounds' value o' ellum comin' down 'fore us done wi' it."

      The saw won its way; and between each spell of labor, the ancient man held his back and grumbled.

      "Er's Billy Jago," confided the second laborer to Barron, when his companion had turned aside to get some steel wedges and a sledge-hammer. "Er's well-knawn in these paarts—a reg'lar cure. Er used tu work up Drift wi' Mister Chirgwin."

      Billy added two wedges to those already hammered into the saw-cut, then, with the sledge, he drove them home and finished his task. The sorrowful