The Painter and Our Spring

THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB

I THINK the month was February, but naming the month tells very little of the tale of the seasons in our country. Spring, for instance, is purely a matter of rains. The rains may come anywhere from November to March, bringing in their wake soft skies, a veil of green over the sandy earth, and flowers. If it has been a dry year the grasses turn quickly to gold and bronze and brown, and the year’s youth is over. If the wet season has been prolonged we have spring almost as they know it in other regions, except for a fragility of grass and flower that green lands do not know.

On the afternoon we remember, a south wind blew softly up from Palomar, and high white clouds trailed their shadows over the bare ranges. The ridges of San Jacinto looked Olympian in the dreamlike remoteness the drenched air gave them. With such an earth and sky it was impossible to keep indoors, so we said we would go and see if the river was running and if the windflowers had come into bloom.

We took the winding road across the plateau to the river-bed. The tops of cottonwoods and willows and sycamores, faintly green with the first leaves, showed above the rim of the bluff. Against a miniature Grand Canyon of a cliff across the stream, swallows were darting in and out of airy dwellings, crying with delight over their return. Our hearts rose on a great surge of life and gladness at their cry, and we hurried our pace, longing to be down by the running water. But as we turned into the Indian road that wound down the bluff we had to pull out abruptly, for there, square in the track, his easel planted as if for all time, was the painter.

The painter had been in our valley for several weeks. He was a quiet, reserved man, pleasant enough when spoken to, but apparently not interested in making acquaintances. We had not even known whether he was much of a painter or not until a sophisticated Eastern visitor instructed us about him.

‘Not one of the extreme moderns,’ said the visitor, ‘but with a vogue both here and abroad. His landscapes are haunting.’

We could agree with the visitor there, for we had already had glimpses of familiar bits of road and mesa caught on his canvases. It was uncanny the way he could gather up the color on a dun slope, or suggest by vague splashes of paint the distances a sycamore lane can hold, or the lonely shadows a shadowless waste can draw to itself in the evening. We had seen him tell with a few strokes of his knife the starkness of yucca and dune and earthquake scarp; but this afternoon for the first time we saw him at work on clouds and running water. He was painting — it seemed to us without distinction — a bit of river and cottonwoods and sycamores along the green bench below.

I think he was bored with his own work, for he greeted us with an interest he had never shown before. He asked us where we were going, and because spring was in our blood we answered him with enthusiasm. We said we were going to look for windflowers and to watch the river run.

He smiled at our proud mention of the river. He was a Maine man himself, and used to real rivers. This river — why, he was told it was bonedry most of the year!

We thought we understood now why he was painting our river so badly; but not being accustomed to telling artists their shortcomings we held our peace, and after a few commonplaces on the weather we left the car and went down the bluff, carefully avoiding the rags and palettes flung in lordly monopoly of the trail.

Cloud shadows moved quietly over the sward, picking out the various grasses and making them separately alive and full of color. Vernal and feather and dropseed and creeping grama grass veiled the wild phlox and tidytips with a mist of greenbronze, green-gold, and blue-green. We watched with a pleasant thrill of alarm a snake in its bright new skin glide away from under our feet, bending the grasses as a wind from Pluto’s world might bend it, with a stirring of roots rather than tops. With eyes on the ground, so as not to tread on the sliding danger, we came to the bank where the brown water lapped the reddened roots of sycamores. There in the dark leaf-mould washed down from the upper mountains were the windflowers — blood-red, solitary, so fragile that with the gentlest touch their petals loosened from the stem and drifted away.

Blood-red windflowers, such as once long ago we had seen by a short-lived Attic stream. We bent over them, gazing at their beauty, gazing also back over the years at those other blossoms we had know n when we were still too young to be quite sure the gods were dead. And while we were kneeling there the painter joined us. He wanted to know jokingly if the sight of so much water had hypnotized us; and then his eyes fell on the windflowers in their dusky plot, and he took off his cap and knelt on the sycamore roots beside us and, bending his closecropped head, looked in silence at the slender-stemmed blossoms, faintly tremulous even to the stirring of our breath.

I think it must have been the way the painter looked at those windflowers that broke the ice, for presently we were talking to him as if we had known him well, telling him why our river had a charm beyond the rivers of his land. Those, by his own confession, were like Tennyson’s tiresome stream, rippling on forever. Ours was a more magic river, akin to the limpid waters beloved of gods and muses, Ilissus and Eridanus and the Dircæan streams, coming with the spring and vanishing before you had drunk to satiety of their beauty.

And like those rivers, we told the painter, ours left a marble loveliness behind in the dry white bed that was so mysterious under summer moons.

But you did n’t get the river life along uncertain waters like these, the painter protested. No river life? we said. We showed him the swallows crying down the wind. We showed him the dragon flies dreaming on an island of reeds in the middle of the river where, even as we looked, a young Indian Pan waded, bare to the knees, cutting a straight-stemmed tule for his primitive flute. We held our peace, and the painter could hear the cry of killdeer and the hum of bees in the wild parsley at his feet.

We did not see the painter again before he left the valley. He was not talked of among us as most visitors are, having kept himself apart from valley life. But when the Eastern visitor returned next winter she had much to say of the painter’s success in an autumn exhibit. The critics, it seemed, had been chiefly impressed by a canvas called ‘Brief Spring.’ She herself did not see much in it, merely a dun cliff above a small river and some blurred figures on a shadowflecked strip of meadow with bright patches of flowers. It reminded her of our own valley, and she thought perhaps that was why it made her feel so odd when she looked at it. She much preferred one of the painter’s earlier canvases called ‘April in Maryland.’ There was real, luxuriant spring for you, the sort you felt as if you could reach out and touch.

We listened in respectful silence; but in our hearts we wondered if it were not the sight of our river that ran but a little while, of our windflowers that vanished at a sigh, that had helped the painter to his triumph; if through these things he had learned the great secret and had been able to trouble the idle gazers with a glimpse of it — the secret that only brief loveliness can be immortal.