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He was a man of few words, but in three sentences he had given me a battle-picture as clearly visualised as a canvas of Verestchagin. The reminiscences of the plumber provoked the paperhanger to further recollections, more particularly the stunning effects of the French shell-fire. He had found four dead Germans they had been surprised by a shell while playing cards in a billet.
"His face is so frightfully swollen," she tells us, "that his eyes look merely like two wrinkles, the sun scorches his head, his hand can scarcely hold the palette, and yet he insists on finishing his sketches. I cannot imagine," she reflects, "how Verestchagin could make such studies."
He was aware that there were studios in Chicago; that certain men were supposed to be doing good work he saw it in the papers. There were mentions now and then of exhibitions, mostly free, which the public attended but sparingly. Once there was an exhibition of some of the war pictures of Verestchagin, a great Russian painter who had come West for some purpose.
Where did this virile, blood-full, throbbing Russian literature come from; this Russian painting of Verestchagin, that smites us like a sword with the consciousness of the tremendous meaning of existence? Is there a barbaric force left in the world that we have been daintily trying to cover and apologize for and refine into gentle agreeableness? These questions are too deep for these pages.
Englishwomen even more than Englishmen continued to be haunted by the memories of the Mutiny, which remained painfully present to a generation who, whether Indians or British, had lived through that tempest, and if to Indians the Mutiny recalled such scenes as "The Blowing of Indians from British Guns" which the great Russian painter Verestchagin depicted with the same realism as the splendid pageant of the entry of the Prince of Wales into Delhi in 1876, it was the horrors of Cawnpore that chiefly dwelt in the minds of Europeans.
Here in Europe are artists by the score painting year after year the same old European scenes. And there in the Himalaya is the grandest scenery in the world, and not a painter from Europe ever goes there except just one, the great Russian Verestchagin, whose pictures, alas! are now buried somewhere in Russia.
"But I do mean," she added, as he looked away from her, "that, whether it be the consequence of the altruism of the day, or of advancing age, as I said at first, it has grown to be provokingly difficult to ignore those who lose more serious things than a college championship. Verestchagin and such people have spoiled history for us.
Several thousand feet below us all was wrapped in a pure blue shadow; the summits of the peaks were resplendent in purple flames. Verestchagin waited and waited and would not begin his sketch. "By and by, by and by," said he; "I want to look at it still; it is splendid!"
"What is the price of this?" Eugene asked. "Ten thousand dollars," was the reply. He smiled solemnly. "It's a wonderful thing," he said, and turned to go. The attendant put out the light. This picture, like those of Verestchagin, made a sharp impression on him. Curiously he had no longing to paint anything of this kind. He only rejoiced to look at it.
Nothing harder than unshod horses, than goats and sheep, and the soft pads of camels had ever worn these gleaming ways. The brush of a Verestchagin, a Gérôme, a Bida, skilled in the colors of the Orient, would have been needed to paint even an impressionistic coup d'oeil of this scene surpassing strange, now opening out before the Legionaries' eyes.
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