Пользователь - WORLD'S END

They could watch the sea part of the time, and it stayed smooth as the millpond from which the Bluebird soap factory derived its power. But Mr. Hackabury was not to be fooled - he was sure that when they got on it they would find it was heaving and sinking. "The food ain't so good in these Eye-talian inns," he said, "but what I eat I keep. And anyhow, we can say we've seen the country."

IV

They bade farewell to Pierre and the motorcar, and went on board the yacht, which put to sea. The smells improved - but the treacherous element behaved just as Mr. Hackabury had said, and he took to his cabin and did not appear again until they were under the shelter of the rocky Peloponnesus.

Meanwhile a new friendship opened up for Lanny Budd. On the deck sat Marcel Detaze before his easel, wearing his picturesque little blue cap and his old corduroy trousers; he had sketched out a view of the Bay of Naples with Capri for a background, and a fisherboat with a black sail crossing the dying sun. Marcel worked on this for days, trying to get the thing which he called "atmosphere," which made the difference between a work of art and a daub. "Do you know Turner's atmosphere?" he asked of Lanny. "Do you know Corot's?"

Marcel was one of those painters who don't mind talking while they work. So Lanny drew up a camp chair and watched every stroke of the brush, and received lectures on technique. Every painter has his own style, and if you took a microscope to the brushwork, you could tell one from another. The despair of Marcel was the infinity of nature; a sunset like this shifted its tints every moment, and which would you choose? You had to get the effects of distance, and you had to make a flat surface appear endless; you had to turn a dead mineral substance into a thousand other things - not to mention the soul of the painter who was looking at them all. "No landscape exists until the painter makes it," said Marcel.

When his work wasn't going right, he was restless, and wanted to pace the deck. Lanny liked to walk too, so they kept each other company. The boy was. so used to being with grown people, it didn't occur to him as surprising that a serious-minded artist should give so much time to him. Only gradually he realized that Marcel was availing himself of this opportunity to make friends. Hitherto he had had to hide from Lanny, but now he was taking him into the family - Marcel's family.

The boy was pleased to find the painter a person who worked so hard at his job. Marcel deliberately refused to learn to play cards, and while the others stayed up half the night, he went to bed, like Lanny, and, like Lanny, was fresh in the morning. He would get up early to watch the pearly tints in the sky, and when he told Lanny about this, the lad got up early too, and heard a discourse on color, and learned the names of many shades, and something about how paints are mixed. Lanny began to think that maybe he was missing his true vocation; he wondered what his father and mother would say if he were to get himself an easel and a palette and join one of the art classes which painters conducted on the Cфte d'Azur.

This relationship between Lanny and Marcel seemed strange to a Middle Western American, but not in the least to a Frenchman.

The painter was prepared to become an extra father to Lanny, if this was permitted, and it was. The boy observed what was going on between Marcel and his mother, and realized that the man was trying to persuade her to give less of her time and energy to these fashionable people, and more of it to him. Marcel thought that Beauty was wearing herself out running about to social functions, depriving herself of sleep, and being so excited that she hardly took time to eat. Every now and then these "smart" ladies would find themselves threatened with a breakdown, and would have to go away and take baths or cures or what not to restore themselves. "It's a silly way of life," declared the hard-working man of art.

V

A cold wind was blowing from the snow-covered Mount Olympus, and the yacht sought shelter behind the long island called Euboea. Here was a wide channel, blue and still and warm; Mr. Hackabury said: "This is all I ever want to see of the Isles of Greece, and let's stay right here."

The channel ran for a hundred and fifty miles, and they would steam to a new place and anchor, and the party would be rowed ashore to some bedraggled village, and would climb a hill, and there -would be the ruins of an ancient building, the stones once white now mottled and grayish, a great column lying in the dust, the segments which composed it having come apart, so that it looked like a row of enormous cheese boxes laid end to end. Sheep grazed among the ruins, and the bronzed old shepherd had built himself a hut of brush, pointed at the top like an Indian tepee.

Marcel had a guidebook, and would read about the temple which had stood there, and who had built it. Most of the company would be bored, and wander off in pairs and chat about their own affairs. One ruin was just like another to them. But the painter knew the differences of styles and periods, and would point these out to Lanny; so came a new stage in the boy's education. He had never known much about Greece, but now he became excited. Something wonderful had been here, more than two thousand years ago. A great people had lived, and had dreamed lovely things, such as Lanny caught gleams of in music and tried to catch and express in a dance. Now those splendid people were gone, and it was sad; when you stood among their old marbles and watched the sun going down across the blue-shadowed bay, feelings of infinite melancholy stole over you; you felt that you too were dying and being forgotten.

Marcel had a book with verses and inscriptions of these ancient ones. Invariably the verses were sad, as if the people had foreseen the fate which was to befall them. "Perhaps they had seen ruins of earlier people," suggested Lanny; and the painter said: "Civilizations rise and fall, and nobody has been able to find out what kills them."

"Do you suppose that can happen to us?" asked Lanny, a bit awe-stricken; and when the painter said that he believed it would happen, the boy watched the sun go down, with shivers that were not entirely from the north winds.

Marcel Detaze developed a great interest in this newly adopted son. The rest of the company were well-bred people, whom it was pleasant to travel with, but they were conventional and had little understanding of what went on in the soul of an artist. But this boy knew instinctively; something in him leaped in response to an art emotion. So Marcel would supplement the guidebook with everything he knew about Greek art, and he found that Lanny remembered what he heard. Later on, when they visited Athens, the boy found an English bookstore with books about ancient Greece, and so was able to read the history which had provided English statesmen with their examples, and the mythology which had provided English poets with their similes, for three or four hundred years.

Marcel and Lanny and Mr. Hackabury did the walking for the party. The latter had no interest in ruins, but he toiled up the slopes because he didn't want to put on more weight. While the younger pair examined columns Ionic or Corinthian, Mr. Hacka-

bury would wander off and talk in sign language to the shepherds. Once he bought a lamb; not because he wanted it, but because of his curiosity as to prices current in this country. He put out a handful of coins, and pointed, and the shepherd took one small piece of silver. Ezra gave him some soap for good measure, and tucked the lamb under his arm and carried it to the ship. When the ladies heard that they were to have it for dinner, they said it was a horrid idea; they were used to eating roast meat, but not to seeing the creature first!

VI

Warm sunshine and peace settled over the Aegean Sea, and the Bluebird ventured forth to explore the islands famed in song and story. They are the tops of sunken chains of mountains, and to the unpoetic they look much alike; the fact that Phoebus Apollo was born on one and Sappho on another didn't mean much to modern society ladies. What counted was the fact that they had no harbors, and you had to be rowed ashore, and there was nothing to see but houses of plastered stone, and men with white starched skirts like ballet dancers. Swarms of children followed you, staring as if at a circus parade, and it was not very interesting to buy laces and sponges which you didn't need, or to eat pistachio nuts when you weren't hungry. Having once drunk coffee out of copper pots with long handles, and discovered that it was sticky and sweet, you decided that it was pleasanter on deck dancing to the music of a phonograph or trying to win back the money you lost at bridge the night before. Ezra, in his capacity as host, would propose a party to visit one of the "hanging monasteries," but his wife would say that she was tired and would prefer to rest and read a novel; one of the gentlemen would say that he would stay and keep her company; others would follow suit, and so it would come to the usual trio of sightseers, Ezra, Marcel, and Lanny: