Under the Skylights Part 32

DR. GOWDY AND THE SQUASH

I

When Dr. Gowdy finally yielded to the urgings of Print, Push, and Co.--a new firm whose youthful persistency made refusal impossible--and agreed to steal from his sermon-writing the number of half-hours needed for putting together the book they would and must and did have, he certainly looked for a reward far beyond any recognisable in the liberal check that had started up his pen. For _Onward and Upward_ was to do some good in the world: the years might come and go for an indefinite period, yet throughout their long procession young men--it was for them he was writing--would rise up here, there, and everywhere and call him blessed.

To scrimp his sermons in such a cause was surely justifiable; more, it was commendable. "Where it has been dozens it will now be thousands,"

said the good Doctor. "I will guide their feet into the right path, and the thanks of many earnest strugglers shall be my real recompense."

_Onward and Upward_ was full of the customary things--things that get said and believed (said from mere habit and believed from mere inertia),--things that must be said and believed (said by the few and believed by a fair proportion of the many) if the world is to keep on hanging together and moving along in the exercise of its usual functions.

In fact, the book had but one novel feature--a chapter on art.

Dr. Gowdy was very strong on art. Raphael and Phidias were always getting into his pulpit. Truth was beauty, and beauty was truth. He never wearied of maintaining the uplifting quality resident in the Sunday afternoon contemplation of works of painting and sculpture, and nothing, to his mind, was more calculated to enn.o.ble and refine human nature than the practice of art itself. The Doctor was one of the trustees of the Art Academy; he went to every exhibition, and dragged as many of his friends with him as could be induced to listen to his orotund commentaries; and he had almost reached the point where it was a tacit a.s.sumption with him that the regeneration and salvation of the human race came to little more than a mere matter of putting paint upon canvas.

These were the notions that coloured the art chapter of _Onward and Upward_. I hardly know where the good Doctor got them; surely not from the ordinary run of things in the Paris studios, nor from any familiarity with the private lives of the painters of the Italian Renaissance, which show, if anything does, that one may possess a fine and rigorous conscience as an artist, yet lapse into any irregularity or descend to any depravity as a man. But Dr. Gowdy ignored all this. Art--the contemplation of it, the practice of it--worked toward the building up of character, and promoted all that was n.o.blest in human life.

These views of his were spread far and wide. They competed with the novel of adventure on the news-stands, and were tossed into your lap on all the through trains. One copy penetrated to Hayesville, Illinois, and fell into the hands of Jared Stiles.

II

Jared was an ignorant and rather b.u.mptious young fellow of twenty-four, who was hoping to make something of himself, and was feeling about for the means. He had a firm jaw, a canny eye, and vague but determined ambitions. These sufficed.

Jared lived on a farm. He liked the farm life, but not the farm work--a fine distinction that caused his fellow-labourers to look upon him as something of a s.h.i.+rk. He would rove the fields while the rest were working in them. He thought his own thoughts, such as they were, and when a book came his way, as now and then happened, he read it.

_Onward and Upward_ was lent to him by the daughter of the county attorney. She thought it would tone him up and bring his nebulousness toward solidity--she too being anxious that Jared should make something of himself, and unwilling to wait indefinitely. Jared took the book and looked at it. He pa.s.sed quite lightly over the good Doctor's plat.i.tudes on honesty, perseverance, and the like, having already encountered them elsewhere; but the plat.i.tudes on art arrested his attention. "I shouldn't wonder but what all this might be so," said Jared to himself; "I don't know but what I should like to try it"--meaning not that he had any desire to refine and enn.o.ble himself, but only a strong hankering to "get his hand in," as the phrase goes.

It was about this time that the Western Art Circuit began to evangelize Hayesville. The Western Art Circuit had been started up by a handful of painters and literary men in "the city"; among them, Abner Joyce, notable veritist; Adrian Bond, aesthete, yet not without praiseworthy leanings toward the naturalistic; Stephen Giles, decorator of the mansions of the great, but still not wholly forgetful of his own rustic origins; and one or two of the professors at the Art Academy. All these too believed that it was the mission of art to redeem the rural regions. It was their cardinal tenet that a report on an aspect of nature was a work of art, and they clung tenaciously to the notion that it would be of inestimable benefit to the farmers of Illinois to see coloured representations of the corn-fields of Indiana done by the Indianians themselves. So presently some thirty or forty canvases that had been pushed along the line through Bainesville and Miller and Crawford Junction arrived at Hayesville, and competed in their gilt frames with the canned peaches and the drawn-work of the county fair.

"There, Jared," said the county attorney's daughter, who was corresponding secretary of the woman's club that had brought about this artistic visitation, "you see now what can be done."

Jared saw. He walked the farm, and drew beads on the barn-yard, and indulged in long "sights" over the featureless prairie landscape. The wish to do, to be at it, was settling in his finger-tips, where the stores of electric energy seemed to be growing greater every day.

"I believe I could do something of the kind myself," said Jared. "I like the country, and I'm handy at light jobs; and if somebody would give me an idea of how to start in...."

The Hayesville Seminary had just celebrated the opening of its fifth fall term by adding an "art department"; a dozen young women were busy painting a variety of objects under the guidance, good as far as it went, of an eager lady graduate of Dr. Gowdy's Academy.

"Why don't you get Miss Webb to show you?" asked the county attorney's daughter.

"I can't study with a lot of girls," muttered Jared loutishly.

"Of course not," quickly replied the other. "Make it a private, individual matter. Get some ideas from her, and then go ahead alone."

Jared picked up a few elementary facts about colours, canvas, and composition in the art atmosphere of the Seminary, and then set to work by himself. "Something sizable and simple, to start with," he said.

Autumn was over the land; nothing seemed more sizable, more simple, more accessible, than the winter squash. "Some of 'em do grapes and peaches,"

he observed, in reminiscence of the display of the Circuit at the fair, "but round here it's mostly corn and squashes. I guess I'll stick to the facts--that is, to the verities," he amended, in accord with the art jargon whose virus had begun to inoculate the town.

He elected the squash. And he never went far beyond it. But the squash sufficed. It led him on to fame (fame of a certain curious kind) and to fortune (at least a fortune far beyond any ever reached by his a.s.sociates on the farm).

III

Yes, Jared kept to the squash, and made it famous; and in due course the squash made him famous. He came to be known all over Ringgold County, and even beyond, as the "squash man." He painted this rotund and n.o.ble product of the truck-farm in varying aspects and with varying accessories. Sometimes he posed it, gallantly cleft asunder, on the corner of the bran-bin, with its umber and chrome standing out boldly against a background of murky bitumen; and sometimes he placed it on the threshold of the barn door, with a rake or a pitchfork alongside, and other squashes (none too certain in their perspective) looming up from the dusky interior.

Jared mastered the squash with all the ease of true genius. He painted industriously throughout the early winter. He had saved two or three of his best models from the fall crop, and they served him for several months. Squashes keep. Their expression alters but slowly. This one fact alone makes them easier to paint than many other things--the human countenance, for example. By the end of January Jared was emboldened to exhibit one of his squashes at a church sociable.

"Well, Jared," said the minister's wife, "you _be_ a genius. I don't know that I ever see anything more natural." Other ladies were equally generous in their praise. Jared felt that at last he had found his life-work. Henceforward it was to be onward and upward indeed.

The men were more reserved; they did not know what to make of him. But none of them openly called him a fool--a sort of negative praise not without its value. Nor was this forbearance misplaced--as was seen when, along in March, Jared's father ended his fifty unprofitable years of farm routine by dying suddenly and leaving things more or less at loose ends.

Farming was not his forte--perhaps it is n.o.body's. He had never been able to make it pay, and he had gone in seeming willingness to shuffle off the general unsatisfactoriness of it all on to other shoulders.

In the settlement that followed, n.o.body got the better of Jared. There were itching fingers among the neighbours, and sharp wits too in the family itself, but Jared shrewdly held his own. He climbed into the saddle and stuck there. He cajoled when he could, and browbeat when he must. "No, he ain't no fool," said Cousin Jehiel, who had come up from Bainesville, with his eye on a certain harvester and binder. "He may make the farm pay, even if the old man didn't."

About this time Jared, partly for solace, subscribed to an art journal.

It came once a month, and its revelations astounded him. He took a day off and went into "the city," and spent eleven dollars to satisfy himself that such things could really be.

"I declare, Melissa," he reported to the daughter of the county attorney on his return to Hayesville, "but it was an eye-opener. The way the people poured into that place!--and just to look at creeks and corn-fields and sacks of potatoes!"

"Of course," replied the girl. "Why not? Doesn't your paper tell you that the hope of American art is in the West, and that the best thing we can do is to paint the familiar things of daily life? That's all the cry just now, and you want to take advantage of it."

"And there was a sort of book," pursued Jared, "hung up by the door near the desk where that girl sat and kept track of things. I see people looking at it, so I looked too. You won't believe me! 'No. 137, two hundred and fifty dollars. No. 294, six hundred and seventy-five dollars.' I looked for No. 137, and what do you suppose it was when I found it? It wasn't more'n two foot by eighteen inches--just a river and a haystack and a cow or two. No. 294 was some bigger, but there wasn't nothin' in it except a corn-field--just a plain corn-field, with some hills 'way off and mebbe a few clouds. And there was a ticket on it, and it said 'Sold.' What do you think of that?"

"That's all right," said Melissa. "If you want to get money, you've got to get it out of the people that have got it. And you've got to go where they are _to_ get it."

"And there was another picture that the book said was 'still life'--apples and ears of corn and a bunch of celery or such and a summer squash. Not my kind, but a squash all the same. About a foot square--one hundred and twenty dollars. What do you think of that?"

"I think the squash has its chance, the same as anything else."

"I asked the girl who it was painted all these things. 'This is the second annual ex'bition of the Society of Western Artists,' says she."

"There!" cried Melissa. "'Western artists'!"

"'Are they all for sale?' says I.

"'Cert'nly,' says she.

"'Are folks interested?' says I.

"'Look around you,' says she.

"I did look around. People was walking along close to the wall, one after another, a-smellin' every picture in turn. In the other rooms there was women standin' on clouds, and there was children with wings on and nothin' else; but everybody give them things the complete go-by. Yes, sir, let me tell you, Melissa Crabb, all those folks was once just country folks like you and me. Those there city people had all come from the country some time or other, and they was all a-longin' for country sights and country smells. They're Western people, too, and they want Western scenes painted for them by Western artists. There's fame a-waitin' for the man who can do that--and money too. I guess I'm beginning to see a way to make the old farm pay, after all."