The Guest of Quesnay | Page 5

pure
air in the Luxembourg gardens.
We drove out through the Bois and by Suresnes, striking into a
roundabout road to Versailles beyond St. Cloud. It was June, a dustless
and balmy noon, the air thinly gilded by a faint haze, and I know few
things pleasanter than that road on a fair day of the early summer and
no sweeter way to course it than in an open car; though I must not be
giving myself out for a "motorist"--I have not even the right cap. I am
usually nervous in big machines, too; but Ward has never caught the
speed mania and holds a strange power over his chauffeur; so we rolled
along peacefully, not madly, and smoked (like the car) in hasteless
content.
"After all," said George, with a placid wave of the hand, "I sometimes
wish that the landscape had called me. You outdoor men have all the
health and pleasure of living in the open, and as for the work--oh! you
fellows think you work, but you don't know what it means."
"No?" I said, and smiled as I always meanly do when George "talks
art." He was silent for a few moments and then said irritably,

"Well, at least you can't deny that the academic crowd can DRAW!"
Never having denied it, though he had challenged me in the same way
perhaps a thousand times, I refused to deny it now; whereupon he
returned to his theme: "Landscape is about as simple as a stage fight;
two up, two down, cross and repeat. Take that ahead of us. Could
anything be simpler to paint?"
He indicated the white road running before us between open fields to a
curve, where it descended to pass beneath an old stone culvert. Beyond,
stood a thick grove with a clear sky flickering among the branches. An
old peasant woman was pushing a heavy cart round the curve, a scarlet
handkerchief knotted about her head.
"You think it's easy?" I asked.
"Easy! Two hours ought to do it as well as it could be done--at least,
the way you fellows do it!" He clenched his fingers as if upon the
handle of a house-painter's brush. "Slap, dash--there's your road." He
paddled the air with the imaginary brush as though painting the side of
a barn. "Swish, swash--there go your fields and your stone bridge. Fit!
Speck! And there's your old woman, her red handkerchief, and what
your dealer will probably call 'the human interest,' all complete. Squirt
the edges of your foliage in with a blow-pipe. Throw a cup of tea over
the whole, and there's your haze. Call it 'The Golden Road,' or 'The
Bath of Sunlight,' or 'Quiet Noon.' Then you'll probably get a criticism
beginning, 'Few indeed have more intangibly detained upon canvas so
poetic a quality of sentiment as this sterling landscapist, who in
Number 136 has most ethereally expressed the profound silence of
evening on an English moor. The solemn hush, the brooding quiet, the
homeward ploughman--'"
He was interrupted by an outrageous uproar, the grisly scream of a
siren and the cannonade of a powerful exhaust, as a great white
touring-car swung round us from behind at a speed that sickened me to
see, and, snorting thunder, passed us "as if we had been standing still."
It hurtled like a comet down the curve and we were instantly choking in

its swirling tail of dust.
"Seventy miles an hour!" gasped George, swabbing at his eyes. "Those
are the fellows that get into the pa--Oh, Lord! THERE they go!"
Swinging out to pass us and then sweeping in upon the reverse curve to
clear the narrow arch of the culvert were too much for the white car;
and through the dust we saw it rock dangerously. In the middle of the
road, ten feet from the culvert, the old woman struggled frantically to
get her cart out of the way. The howl of the siren frightened her perhaps,
for she lost her head and went to the wrong side. Then the shriek of the
machine drowned the human scream as the automobile struck.
The shock of contact was muffled. But the mass of machinery hoisted
itself in the air as if it had a life of its own and had been stung into
sudden madness. It was horrible to see, and so grotesque that a long-
forgotten memory of my boyhood leaped instantaneously into my mind,
a recollection of the evolutions performed by a Newfoundland dog that
rooted under a board walk and found a hive of wild bees.
The great machine left the road for the fields on the right, reared, fell,
leaped against the stone side of the culvert, apparently trying to climb it,
stood straight on end, whirled backward in a half-somersault, crashed