Lying Prophets Part 1

Lying Prophets.

by Eden Phillpotts.

BOOK ONE

_ART_

CHAPTER ONE

NEWLYN

Away beyond the village stands a white cottage with the sea lapping at low cliffs beneath it. Plum and apple orchards slope upward behind this building, and already, upon the former trees, there trembles a snowy gauze where blossom buds are breaking. Higher yet, dark plowed fields, with hedges whereon grow straight elms, cover the undulations of a great hill even to its windy crest, and below, at the water line, lies Newlyn--a village of gray stone and blue, with slate roofs now s.h.i.+ning silver-bright under morning sunlight and easterly wind. Smoke softens every outline; red-brick walls and tanned sails bring warmth and color through the blue vapor of many chimneys; a sun-flash glitters at this point and that, denoting here a conservatory, there a studio. Enter this hive and you shall find a network of narrow stone streets; a flutter of flannel underwear, or blue stockings, and tawny garments drying upon lines; little windows, some with rows of oranges and ginger-beer bottles in them; little shops; little doors, at which cl.u.s.ter little children and many cats, the latter mostly tortoise-sh.e.l.l and white. Infants watch their elders playing marbles in the roadway, and the cats stretch lazy bodies on the mats, made of old fis.h.i.+ng-net, which lie at every cottage door. Newlyn stands on slight elevations above the sea level, and at one point the road bends downward, breaks and fringes the tide, leading among broken iron, rusty anchors, and dismantled fis.h.i.+ng-boats, past an ancient buoy whose sides now serve the purposes of advertis.e.m.e.nt and tell of prayer-meetings, cheap tea, and so forth. Hard by, the mighty blocks of the old breakwater stand, their fabric dating from the reign of James I., and taking the place of one still older.

But the old breakwater is no more than a rialto for ancient gossips now; and far beyond it new piers stretch encircling arms of granite round a new harbor, southward of which the lighthouse stands and winks his sleepless golden eye from dusk to dawn. Within this harbor, when the fis.h.i.+ng fleet is at home, lie jungles of stout masts, row upon row, with here and there a sail, carrying on the color of the plowed fields above the village, and elsewhere, sc.r.a.ps of flaming bunting flas.h.i.+ng like flowers in a reed bed.

Behind the masts, along the barbican, the cottages stand close and thick, then clamber and straggle up the acclivities behind, decreasing in their numbers as they ascend. Smoke trails inland on the wind--black as a thin crepe veil, from the funnel of a coal "tramp" about to leave the harbor, blue from the dry wood burning on a hundred cottage hearths. A smell of fish--where great split pollocks hang drying in the sun--of tar and tan and twine--where nets and cordage lie spread upon low walls and open s.p.a.ces--gives to Newlyn an odor all its own; but aloft, above the village air, spring is dancing, sweet-scented, light-footed in the hedgerows, through the woods and on the wild moors which stretch inland away. There the gold of the gorse flames in many a sudden sheet and splash over the wastes whereon last year's ling-bloom, all sere and gray, makes a sad-colored world. But the season's change is coming fast. Celandines twinkle everywhere, and primroses, more tardy and more coy, already open wondering eyes. The sea lies smooth with a surface just wind-kissed and strewed with a glory of sun-stars. Away to the east, at a point from which brown hills, dotted with white dwellings, tend in long undulations to the cliffs of the Lizard, under fair clouds all banked and sunny white against the blue, rises St. Michael's Mount, with a man's little castle capping Nature's gaunt escarpments and rugged walls. Between Marazion and Newlyn stretches Mount's Bay; while a mile or two of flat sea-front, over which, like a string of pearls, roll steam clouds, from a train, bring us to Penzance. Then--noting centers of industry where freezing works rise and smelting of ore occupies many men (for Newlyn labors at the two extremes of fire and ice)--we are back in the fis.h.i.+ng village again and upon the winding road which leads therefrom, first to Penlee Point and the blue-stone quarry, anon to the little hamlet of Mousehole beyond.

Beside this road lay our white cottage, with the suns.h.i.+ne lighting up a piece of new golden thatch let into the old gray, and the plum-trees behind it bursting into new-born foam of flowers. Just outside it, above the low cliff, stood two men looking down into the water, seen dark green below through a tangle of brier and blackthorn and emerald foliage of budding elder. The sea served base uses here, for the dust and dirt of many a cottage was daily cast into the lap of the great scavenger who carried all away. The low cliffs were indeed spattered with filth, and the coltsfoot, already opening yellow blossoms below, found itself rudely saluted with cinders and potato-peelings, fishes' entrails, and suchlike unlovely matter.

The men were watching a white fleet of bird boats paddling on the sea, hurrying this way and that, struggling--with many a plunge and flutter and plaintive cry--for the food a retreating tide was bearing from the sh.o.r.e.

"'White spirits and gray,' I call them," said the younger of the two spectators. "The gulls fascinate me always. They are beautiful to see and hear and paint. Swimming there, and wheeling between the seas in rough weather, or hanging almost motionless in midair with their heads turning first this way, then that, and their b.r.e.a.s.t.s pressed against the wind-- why, they are perfect always, the little winged G.o.ds of the sea."

"G.o.ds kissing carrion," sneered the other. "Beautiful enough, no doubt, but their music holds no charm for me. Nothing is quite beautiful which has for its cause something ugly. Those echoing cries down there are the expression of a greedy struggle, no more. I hate your Newlyn gulls. They are ruined, like a thousand other wild things, by civilization. I see them scouring the fields and hopping after the plowman like upland crows. A Cornish seabird should fight its battle with the sea and find its home in the heart of the dizzy cliffs, sharing them with the samphire. But your 'white spirits and gray' behave like gutter-fed ducks."

The first speaker laughed and both strolled upon their way. They were artists, but while Edmund Murdoch dwelt at Newlyn and lived by his profession, the older man, John Barron, was merely on a visit to the place.

He had come down for change and with no particular intention to work.

Barron was wealthy and wasted rare talents. He did not paint much, and the few who knew his pictures deplored the fact that no temporal inducement called upon him to handle his brush oftener. A few excused him on the plea of his health, which was at all times indifferent, but he never excused himself. It needed something far from the beaten track to inspire him, and inspiration was rare. But let a subject once grip him and the artist's life centered and fastened upon it until his work was done. He sacrificed everything at such a time; he slaved; labor was to him as a debauch to the drunkard, and he wearied body and mind and counted his health nothing while the frenzy held him. Then, his picture finished, at the cost of the man's whole store of nervous energy and skill, he would probably paint no more for many months. His subject was always some transcript from nature, wrought out with almost brutal vigor and disregard of everything but truth.

His looks belied his work curiously. A small, slight man he was, with sloping shoulders and the consumptive build. But the breadth of his head above the ears showed brain, and his gray eyes spoke a strength of purpose upon which a hard, finely-modeled mouth set the seal. Once he had painted in the West Indies: a picture of two negresses bathing at Tobago. Behind them hung low tangles of cactus, melo-cactus and white-blossomed orchid; while on the tawny rocks glimmered snowy cotton splashed with a crimson turban; but the marvel of the work lay in the figures and the refraction of their brown limbs seen through crystal-clear water. The picture brought reputation to a man who cared nothing for it; and Barron's "Bathing Negresses" are only quoted here because they ill.u.s.trate his method of work.

He had painted from the sea in a boat moored fore and aft; he had kept the two women s.h.i.+vering and whining in the water for two hours at a time. They could not indeed refuse the gold he offered for their services, but one never lived to enjoy the money, for her prolonged ablutions in the cause of art killed her a week after her work was done.

John Barren was a lonely sybarite with a real love for Nature and absolutely primitive instincts with regard to his fellow-creatures. The Land's End had disappointed him; he had found Nature neither grand nor terrific there, but sleepy and tame as a cat after a full meal. Nor did he derive any pleasure from the society of his craft at Newlyn. He hated the clatter of art jargon, he flouted all schools, and pointed out what n.o.body doubts now: that the artists of the Cornish village in reality represented nothing but a community of fellow-workers, all actuated indeed by love of art, but each developing his own bent without thought for his neighbor's theory. Barron indeed made some enemies before he had been in the place a week, and the greater lights liked him none the better for vehemently disclaiming the honor when they told him he was one of themselves. "The shape of a brush does not make men paint alike," he said, "else we were all equal and should only differ in color. Some of you can no more paint with a square brush than you can with a knife. Some of you could not paint though your palettes were set with Nature's own sunset colors. And others of you, if you had a rabbit's scut at the end of a hop-pole and the gray mud from a rain puddle, would produce work worth considering. You are a community of painters--some clever, some hopeless--but you are not a school, and you may thank G.o.d for it."

John Barron was rough tonic, but the fearless little man generally found an audience at the end of the day in this studio or that. The truth of much that he said appealed to the lofty-minded and serious; his dry cynicism, savage dislike of civilization, and frank affection for Nature, attracted others. He hit hard, but he never resented rough knocks in return, and no man had seen him out of temper with anything but mysticism and the art bred therefrom. Upon the whole, however, his materialism annoyed more than his wit amused.

Upon the evening which followed his insult to the Newlyn gulls, Barron, with Edmund Murdoch and some other men, was talking in the studio of one Brady, known to fame as the "Wrecker," from his love for the artistic representation of maritime disaster. Barron liked this man, for he was outspoken and held vigorous views, but the two quarreled freely.

"Fate was a fool when she chucked her presents into the lap of a lazy beggar like you," said Brady, addressing the visitor. "And thrice a fool,"

he added, "to a.s.sort her gifts so ill."

"Fate is a knave, a mad thing playing at cat's cradle with the threads of our wretched little lives," answered John Barron, "she is a coward--a bully. She hits the hungry below the belt; she heaps gold into the lap of the old man, but not till he has already dug his own grave to come at it; she gives health to those who must needs waste all their splendid strength 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 G.o.ds 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 carca.s.s, 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. G.o.d--if there be a G.o.d--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 wors.h.i.+p 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?"