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The Artist
by
"Yes, I told her, now I knew where he had been. And they had called him back from there—here?
"’When my father died,’ she repeated, ‘my uncle was all my grandmother and my mother had. We were five little children, and the oldest not seven, and we were all very poor.’
"’How old was your uncle then?’ I asked.
"’A young man—he was younger than my mother. Perhaps he was twenty-five.’
"I looked at the sketch in my hand. Twenty-five, and called back from Paris—here!
"’When did he go back?’
"’Oh, he never went back.’ She told me this quite placidly, as she said everything else.’He never went back at all.’
"He had stayed there the rest of his life, and worked the little farm that was all his sister had, and made a living for them—not large, the farm being poor and he not a first-class farmer, but still enough. He had always been kind to them—if he was quite queer and absent. She had heard her grandmother say that at first, the first ten years, perhaps, he had had strange, gloomy, savage fits, like a person possessed that you read of in the Bible; but she herself could never remember him as anything but quiet and smiling. He had a very queer smile, unlike any one else, as I would notice for myself when I went to see him about the picture. You could tell him by that, and by his being very lame.
"That brought me back with a start. I rushed at her with questions.’How about the picture? Were there others? Were there many? Had he always painted? Had he never shown them to any one? Was he painting now?
"She could not tell me much. It had been a detail of their common life she had but absently remarked, as though she had lived with a man who collected snail-shells, or studied the post-marks on letters. She had never noticed—that was the answer to most of my questions. No, she did not think there were very many now, though he must have painted ‘most a million. He was always at it, every minute he could spare from farming. But they had been so poor he had not felt he could afford many canvases. The paints cost a good deal too. So he painted them over and over, first one thing and then another, as he happened to fancy. He painted in the horse-barn.’Had a place rigged up,’ in her phrase, in one corner of the room where the hay was stored, and had cut a big window in the roof that was apt to let in water on the hay if the rain came from the east.
"’What did he paint?’ ‘Oh, anything. He was queer about that. He’d paint anything! He did one picture of nothing but the corner of the barn-yard, with a big white sow and some little pigs in the straw, early in the morning, when the dew was on everything. He had thought quite a lot of that, but he had had to paint over it to make the picture of her little sister with the yellow kittie—the one she’d sent down to the village to try to sell, the one—’
"’Yes, yes,’ I told her, ‘the one I saw. But did he never try to sell any himself? Did he never even show them to any one?’
"She hesitated, tried to remember, and said that once when they were very poor, and there was a big doctor’s bill to pay, he had sent a picture down to New York. But it was sent back. They had made a good deal of fun of it, the people down there, because it wasn’t finished off enough. She thought her uncle’s feelings had been hurt by their letter. The express down and back had cost a good deal too, and the only frame he had got broken. Altogether, she guessed that discouraged him. Anyhow, he’d never tried again. He seemed to get so after a while that he didn’t care whether anybody liked them or even saw them or not—he just painted them to amuse himself, she guessed. He seemed to get a good deal of comfort out of it. It made his face very still and smiling to paint. Nobody around there so much as knew he did it, the farm was so far from neighbors.