Dangelis was particularly lucky in arriving at Nevilton at this especial moment. An abnormally retarded spring had led to the most delicious over-lapping in the varied flora of the place. Though June had begun, there were still many flowers lingering in the shadier spots of the woods and ditches, which properly belonged not only to May, but to very early May. Certain, even, of April’s progeny had not completely faded from the late-flowering lanes.
The artist found himself surrounded by a riotous revel of leafy exuberance. The year’s “primal burst” had occurred, not in reluctant spasmodic fits and starts, as is usual in our intermittent fine weather, but in a grand universal outpouring of the earth’s sap. His imagination answered spontaneously to this appeal, and his note-books were speedily filled with hurried passionate sketches, made at all hours of the long bright days, and full of suggestive charm. One particularly lovely afternoon the American found himself wandering slowly up the hill from the little Nevilton station, after a brief excursion to Yeoborough in search of pigments and canvas. He was hoping to take advantage of this auspicious stirring of his imaginative senses, by entering upon some more important and more continuous work. The Nevilton ladies had assured him that it would be quite impossible to find in the little town the kind of materials he needed; and he was returning in high spirits to assure them that he had completely falsified their prediction. He suspected Gladys of having invented this difficulty with a view to confining his labours to such easily shared sketching-trips as she might accompany him upon, but though the fascination of the romping and toying girl still retained, and had even increased, its power over him; he was, in this case, impelled and driven by a force stronger and more dominant than any sensual attraction. He was in a better mood for painting than he had ever been in his life, and nothing could interfere with his resolution to exploit this mood to its utmost limit. With the most precious of his newly purchased materials under his arm and the more bulky ones promised him that same evening, Dangelis, as he drifted slowly up the sunny road chatting amicably with such rural marketers as overtook him, felt in a peculiarly harmonious temper.
He had recently, in the western cities of the States, won a certain fiercely contested notoriety in the art of portrait-painting, an art which he had come more and more to practise according to the very latest of those daring modern theories, which are summed up sometimes under the not very illuminative title of Post-impressionism, and he had, during the last few days, indulged in a natural and irresistible wish to associate this new departure with his personal experiences at Nevilton.
Gossiping nonchalantly with the village-wives, as he ascended the dusty road, by the vicarage wall, his thoughts ran swiftly over the motley-coloured map of his past life, and the deviating track across the world which he had been led to follow. He congratulated himself in his heart, as he indulged in easy persiflage with his fellow-wayfarers, upon his consistent freedom from everything that might choke or restrain the freedom of his will.
How fortunate, how incredibly fortunate, that he should, in weather like this, and in so abounding a mood of creative energy, be completely his own master, except for the need of propitiating two naive and amusing women! He entertained himself by the thought of how little they really knew him, — these friendly Romers — how little they sounded his real purposes, his essential feelings! To them no doubt, he was no more than he was to these excellent villagers, — a tall, fair, slouching, bony figure, with a face, — if they went as far as his face, — massively heavy and irregular, with dreamy humorous eyes and a mouth addicted to nervous twitching.
A clump of dandelions, obtruding their golden indifference to human drama, into the dust of the road at his feet, mixed oddly, at that moment, in these obscure workings of his brain, with a sort of savage caress of self-complacent congratulation which he suddenly bestowed on his interior self; as, beneath his pleasant chatter with his rural companions, he thought how imperturbable, how ferocious, his secret egoism was, and how well he concealed it under his indolent good-nature! He had passed now the entrance to the vicarage garden, and in the adjoining field he observed with a curious thrill of psychic sympathy the tenacious grip with which a viciously-knotted ash-tree held to the earth with its sturdy roots. Out-walked at last by all the other returned travellers, Dangelis glanced without pausing down the long Italianated avenue, at the end of which shone red, in the afternoon sun, the mullioned windows of the great house. He preferred to prolong his stroll, by taking the circuitous way, round by the village. He knew the expression of that famous west front too well now, to linger in admiration over its picturesque repose in the afternoon sunshine. As a matter of fact a slight chill of curious antipathy crossed his consciousness as he quickened his steps.
Happily situated though he was, in his pleasant lodging beneath that capacious roof, the famous edifice itself had not altogether won his affection. The thing suggested to his wayward and prairie-nurtured soul, a stately product rather of convention than of life. He felt oddly conscious of it as something symbolic of what would be always intrinsically opposed to him, of what would willingly, if it were able, suppress him and render him helpless.
Dangelis belonged to quite a different type of trans-Atlantic visitor, from the kind that hover with exuberant delight over everything that is “old” or “English” or “European.” He was essentially rather an artist than an antiquary, rather an energetic workman than an epicurean sentimentalist. Once out of sight of the Elizabethan pile, the curious chill passed from his mind, and as he approached the first cottages of the village he looked round for more reassuring tokens. Such tokens were not lacking. They crowded in upon him, indeed, from every side. Stopping for a moment, ere the houses actually blocked his view, and leaning over a gate which faced westward, Dangelis looked out across the great Somersetshire plain, to which Leo’s Hill and Nevilton Mount serve the office of watchful sentinels. Tall, closely-clipped elm-trees, bordering every field, gave the country on this side of the horizon, a queer artificial look, as if it had been one huge landscape-garden, arranged according to the arbitrary pleasure of some fantastic artist, whose perversion it was to reduce every natural extravagance to the meticulous rhythm of his own formal taste.
This impression, the impression of something willed and intentional in the very formation of Nature, gave our eccentric onlooker a caressing and delicate pleasure, a sense as of a thing peculiarly harmonious to his own spirit. The formality of Nevilton House depressed and chilled him, but the formality of agetrimmed trees and hedges liberated his imagination, as some perverse work of a Picasso or a Matisse might have done. He wondered vaguely to himself what was the precise cause of the psychic antipathy which rendered him so cold to the grandeur of Elizabethan architecture, while the other features of his present dwelling remained so attractive, and he came to the temporary solution, as he took his arms from the top of the gate, that it was because that particular kind of magnificence expressed the pride of a class, rather than of an individual, whereas he himself was all for individual self-assertion in everything — in everything! The problem was still teasing him, when, a few minutes later, he passed the graceful tower of St. Catharine’s church.