Silver Shoal Light/Chapter 10
CHAPTER X
FISHASHKI
A FEW days after the picnic on Hy Brasail, Joan and Elspeth were sitting on the bench beside those flower-boxes that Jim called "the informal garden." They were reading to each other by turns and casting an eye occasionally upon Garth, who was engaged in dabbling after bait-crabs among the pools. The book proved so absorbing that they did not see the approach of a very new and much-varnished motorboat until it had gone foul of the dory's moorings, run into the landing, and expired with a final snort against the rocks.
"He oughtn't to be out in a boat alone, if that's the best he can do!" Elspeth commented. "Who can it be?"
The occupant of the launch picked himself out of the engine, looked ruefully at his once immaculate white flannels, and climbed out upon the pier.
"Gracious," whispered Joan, "it's Fishashki!"
The Russian, for it was really he, strode up the rock, staring about him as he came, and halted before Joan and Elspeth.
"Is this the keepair's wife?" he demanded of Elspeth, who had risen to greet him.
"Yes," she assented meekly. "Do you wish to see my husband?"
"No, no, do not trobble him," said the Count. "I wish to make a sketch from his landing, of the bay. I have permission?"
"I'm afraid that would be against Government rules just now," said Elspeth, "but Mr. Pemberley will speak to you about it."
The Count settled himself on the rock and opened his sketch-box tentatively.
"He takes us for natives and treats us as such," whispered Elspeth at the door. "He nearly said, 'my good woman'!"
No sooner had she stepped inside the house than the visitor began preparations for sketching. Joan, who still sat beside the garden-boxes, lifted a surprised eyebrow, but decided that remonstrance was not her business.
The Russian was wielding a large brush with astonishing results. He daubed his canvas in divers-colored patches which he then proceeded to surround by heavy black outlines and green dots. Garth imprisoned his crabs in a pen of stones and, climbing up the rock, sat down behind the Count. He looked very earnestly at the work of art, to which a number of spiral white lines were being added in various places. He looked up at the reach of blue, glittering water; the hazy pattern of mainland, in buff and green and orange; the clean-cut shape of the Ailouros, luminously white in the sunshine. He looked soberly at the face of the unconscious artist, and then he went back to the crabs.
Joan also studied the painting and observed the painter from farther away. He was a tall lithe man, with a square face illuminated by a flaming intensity of purpose in the deep-set eyes. His hair was black, and a faint moustache darkened his upper lip. Joan fancied him a perfect representative of "the true Slavic type," as she conceived it.
Jim, who had been standing with Elspeth at the door for some minutes, now strolled down and looked over the Count's shoulder.
"Neo-vorticism?" he inquired softly.
The Russian started and turned quickly, with ill-concealed amazement in the look he gave this extraordinary lightkeeper.
"Or is it cubo-futurism?" Jim ventured. "I'm not well up in the latest artistic soul-expansion. It's a long way to Greenwich Village from here."
The Count looked at him again.
"You have the appreciation," he said; "I did not expect it. You know New-York? You know The Artistic? You paint, perhaps?"
"I write unpopular books," said Jim.
"You write?" said the Russian. "It is The Artistic Appreciation, however. I must ask to apologize to the ladies for my manner. I supposed you to be of the people—impossible of explaining my art."
He produced a card from his pocket and extended it between two fingers. Jim glanced at it and, with a bow to the Russian, handed it to Elspeth. Comte Jean de Stysalski, the engraving ran.
"I prefer the French," said the Count; "my full name in my own language is of great len'th. One pronounces it St'zalky, mesdames."
"Have you finished your sketch?" Joan asked. "I should so like to hear your idea of what a sketch should be."
"It should embody the Soul," said the Count promptly, painting vermilion streaks on the rock beside him. (Jim removed them later with kerosene.) "That is what I have done in these painting; I put, beside what I see, that which I do not see but feel." ("It's quite evident that he didn't see it," Jim said afterward, "but Heaven help him if he feels that way!")
"I will explain," said the Count. "These transcendent crimson I make for the land. A land aflame with patriotism, it should be red. The whole picture contains t'ree factors—water, sky, land; therefore all is represented in triangles. The long arcs of white are the flights of sea-birds—mental flight, leaving tangible effect on the atmosphere. That is how to do,—the Soul feels an effect which the eye, perhaps, do not witness; the hand transports it to a veesible form. I belong to no School; I can not express these thing in art as I can in music."
"Do you play, too?" Elspeth asked.
"The flute," said Stysalski. "Music is that, really, by which the Soul can escape."
"Yes," Joan said; "it's rather difficult to paint a feeling, I should imagine. Music's a more flexible medium."
"You play?"
"The piano, when I'm at home," Joan replied.
"This is very delightful," Stysalski exclaimed. "I did not dream to find charming friends at a lighthouse. The rest of Quimpaug is—" he shrugged his shoulders—"canaille. My landlord, Schmidt—a German; my neighbors,—peasants."
And might he, perhaps, now see the view from the tower? He laid aside his sketch-box as he spoke and prepared to follow Jim, who, however, did not move.
"I'm very sorry," said Jim, "but, you see, chance visitors are not allowed in the Light nowadays. Government orders, not personal inclination. I regret that I must ask you to return to the mainland, but such is my painful duty as keeper of this light-station."
The Count bowed, a faint, disappointed bow, and stooped to fasten his sketch-box. As he rose he became aware of Garth, apparently for the first time, and strode to him.
"How do you do, my yo'ng friend?" he cried suddenly, extending his hand to Garth, who, quite unprepared for this tardy greeting, had not time to dry his own hand in the least.
("He needn't have minded," Garth said afterward; "it was perfickly clean wet sea-water."
"Why didn't you wipe it off?" his mother asked; "it must have been rather frog-like."
"I hadn't time," Garth explained; "I had to drop the nicest crab, even then.")
The two men walked toward the landing, and when Joan and Elspeth joined them the Count wore a puzzled expression, and Jim was saying gravely:
"The whole of art can be summed up thus, can it not? The Thought is revealed in nine high-flamed bursts of symmetry,—the circum-ambient arc of effusion is transmuted to the myopic nerve; the result: sublimely superneurotic, replete with a transcendental temerity."
"It is a t'eory," Stysalski admitted, "yes, a t'eory."
But as he walked to his boat he seemed to be pondering deeply.
"It has been a charming episode," said the Count, as he made his adieux; "I hope to repeat your acquaintance. But if not here, will you not all have tea with me,—on Friday, let us say? A tea in the outdoors, as in my co'ntry. There is a delightful hill where it would be mos' pleasant."
Jim was making sail on his boat, for it was time to go in for the mail, and he did not hear the invitation, which Elspeth accepted.
"I will bring you in with my launch on Friday," Stysalski planned. "Oh, yes, indeed; we can return in time for M'sieur to take charge of his lamp."
"Why on earth did you say we'd come?" grumbled Jim, when the motorboat had passed the Ailouros and was careening gaily toward Quimpaug. "I can think of lots better things to do with an afternoon than to take tea with that!"
"Why, we thought he was quite nice," Elspeth said; "wild as to art, of course, but fascinating, in a way. And it was rather hard, having to turn him away. I do think he's amusing. His picture is ridiculous, but he really seems so earnest about his ideas."
"That's what I liked about him," Joan agreed. "He has that whole-souled, fiery enthusiasm of other Russians I've met, though his manner is fearfully affected."
"He can't help that, I suppose," Elspeth said, "being a titled furriner."
"I'd never have thought it of my usually sane wife!" Jim groaned. "Why, he's a monumental ass. Did you see him taking in all that rubbish of mine as we came down?"
"Yes, but that was rather horrid of you. He probably hasn't a wide enough English vocabulary to know whether it was rubbish or not."
"Then he ought to have said so, instead of saying, 'Yes, a theory!' Upon my word, I really can't see anything in a man who butchers a thing like this—" Jim swept his arm landward—"and then tells you that he represents it in triangles because there are three elements in the picture! Ugh! He might as well have stayed in Russia and painted pictures from imagination!"
"Why, how wrathy you are!" Joan remonstrated. "Of course he's misguided, but he seems to believe so intensely in his music and his art."
Jim pulled tremendously hard at his pipe and remained silent.
"How do you like him, Garth?" asked his mother.
"I don't," Garth answered briefly.
"Your father's own son!" cried Jim. "If you have a crab in your paw the next time you shake hands with him, don't drop it!"
"Jim!" rebuked Elspeth.
"Oh, he'd be all right hanging over a samovar in a new-art studio," growled Jim. "He just doesn't fit in with my ideas, that's all. Slide along there, Pem, and let me have a little room to steer."