Beggars on Horseback

Excerpt

A SHEPHERDESS OF FAUNS

Archie Lethbridge arrived in Provence thoroughly satisfied with life. He had just sold a big picture; was contemplating, with every prospect of success, giving a "one-man-show" in London of the work he would do in Provence; and the girl he loved had accepted him.

Miss Gwendolen Gould was eminently eligible—her income, though comfortable, was not large enough to brand her husband as a fortune-hunter; she was pretty in a well-bred way that satisfied the eye without causing it to turn and gaze after her; and above all, she could be relied upon never to do, say, or think an unusual thing. Like all painters, when they are conventionally minded, Archie was the fine flower of propriety—he owned to enough wild oats of his own sowing to save him from inferiority in the society of his fellow-men, and he held exceedingly rigid views on the subject of his womenkind. Gwendolen might—doubtless had, for she was one of the large army of young women brought up to no profession save that of sex—give this or that man a kiss at a dance, but she would never have saved all of passion and possibilities for one man, and lavished them on him, regardless of suitable circumstances. Archie's name (that he hoped one day to adorn with some coveted letters at which he now pretended to sneer) would be perfectly safe with Gwendolen.

The only drawback to his complete content was that his fair, sleek person showed signs of getting a trifle too plump—for he was only young as a man who is nearly "arrived" counts youth. On the whole, however, it was with a feeling of settled attainment that Archie left Nice and proceeded to strike up into the Alpes Maritimes, totally unprepared for any bizarre or inexplicable event—he would have laughed satirically at the bare idea.

To do him justice, he worked hard, and he had a tremendous facility and a certain charm that concealed his lack of true artistic sensitiveness. There is probably nothing more difficult to interpret in paint than an olive-tree—the incredible grey brilliance of the thing, each leaf set at a slightly different angle, and refracting the light till the whole tree seems made of blown mist and sharp-cut shadows. Archie painted olives under every effect; sparkling in the sun, fog-grey on a grey day, and pale with the shimmering under-side of straining leaves against a storm-dark sky. He also painted very dirty children picking the ranked violets and stocks that grew along the olive terraces, and this he achieved without once descending into the realms of the "pretty-pretty," while at the same time infusing just the right amount of sentiment to ensure a sale.

He painted here and there from Grasse to Le Broc, and then one day, feeling he had taken all he could from the soft-scented land of olives and flowers, he hired a motor to convey him up into the Back o' Beyond, and drop him there. Once he met a couple of women bearing on their heads the sheaves of tight little red rosebuds that look exactly like bundles of radishes, and caught a whiff of the strange, bitter-sweet smell of the newly cut stems....