A Table of Green Fields, Guy Davenport [ebook reader screen .TXT] 📗

one kind of contrast with the tight drab uniform Ross seemed to be bound in, with no give at all anywhere, and horse-blanket tough, and Leo's want of a stitch made another.

Ross was interested in the picture on the easel, which was the one that got named Morning Splendour, two of us in a dory and me on the strand as naked as the day I came into the world. It hangs in Baden-Powell House, in London, bought by the Boy Scouts. The color harmonies are the same as those of the more famous August Blue that's in the Tate.

This visit of Ross's was a summer morning in 1922. And a nice little watercolor came of it, of Ross undressing for a swim. Except that it isn't Ross.

What was it about him? He was at ease with us, as many are not, but he wasn't at ease with himself. Tuke got on with his painting. He posed Leo with a leg up on the dory.

—And your hand on your knee, just so. Turn a bit so that the light runs gold down your chest and left thigh.

He explained to Ross how he made quick watercolor studies, light being fugitive.

—There's nothing here, you know, but color. Light on a boy's back can be as mercurial as light on the sea.

Ross, it turned out as they talked, knew a lot about painters. He said that Augustus John is a crack draftsman but that of light and air he knows nothing.

Tuke smiled, and then he laughed, with his head back.

—These modernists. Ah, yes.

—And Wyndham Lewis paints a world that has neither air nor light.

—Do you know Lewis?

—I've met him. I dropped over his garden wall one evening. He was drawing in a back room. I introduced myself. It gave him quite a start. A childish trick on my part, but it amused him immensely. He fancies eccentricity.

He mentioned Eric Kennington, Rothenstein, Lamb. At one point Tuke gave him a very hard stare.

When Willy and I undressed, horsing around, as was our way, Ross paced as he talked with Tuke, holding his left wrist and wrenching it, as if he were screwing it off and on. He talked about Mantegna's bathing soldiers, which we had a print of in the studio, and a bathing place called Parson's Pleasure at Oxford. He was like a professor with a subject. One thing reminded him of another, and he thought out loud about it.

—Oh yes, well, Eakins in America. No one can get near him, Tuke said.

—Things return, Ross said. Here in the autumn of time you are recovering a spring which we have forgotten in our culture, a spring we know about in Greece and in the late Middle Ages.

Did Tuke know a man named Huizinga? A Dutchman. —Meredith, Tuke said, has a lovely scene of boys bathing, in Feverel.

It was Leo, stretching between poses, who asked Ross why, if he was as educated as he sounded, he wasn't an officer.

—Cowardice, probably, Ross said.

—Leo didn't mean that in an untoward way, did you, Leo?

—Lord, no.

The sea had taken on a wonderful green brightness, a shuffling of silver, and the sky was glorious in its blue. Willy had swum out, dog-paddling. Tuke had removed his scarf. I was beginning to ponder what this visit of the little soldier Ross was all about. Tuke seemed to know things about him that we didn't, and to be keeping a secret. A confidence, perhaps I should say.

Willy did a devil dance on the sand, to get warm.

—We've often turned fair blue with cold for Mr. Tuke, he said.

In many of the pictures where we all appear to be toasty brown in fine sunlight we were actually freezing our ballocks off.

—Will you pose, Aircraftsman Ross? Tuke said abruptly. I covet your profile.

—I wonder, Ross said with a smile that was also a frown.

—We're a kind of comitatus here, Tuke said. Friends, all. The vicar, who likes to visit at tea, usually when the boys are still half undressed, has his doubts about the propriety of it all.

—Eats his doubts in muffins, Leo said, and drowns 'em in tea.

—He reads Housman, and Whitman.

—But brought back the Edward Carpenter we lent him without a word to say about it.

I liked the mischief in Ross's eyes as he listened to all this. —We are hypocritical dogs, we English.

—Decent, Leo said, patting his tranklements.

—A naked English lad is as decent as a calf, Willy said. Though the best painting I've posed for is fully clothed with Mary Baskins in the apple orchard.

—For which, Tuke said, I hope to be remembered, if at all, that and August Blue.

—It is insufferably egotistical, Ross said, unbuttoning his tunic, to assume that one cannot possibly be understood by another, or for that matter by people at large, but there is that residuum of privacy at our center which we do despair of exposing to the world's mercy.

Tuke thought that over carefully, very interested, you could tell by the cock of his head.

—True, he said. We aren't quite ready to admit that we are all alike, all human. And in our sameness we are wonderfully different.

His tunic open on an Aertex vest, Ross sat to unwind his leggings and to pull off his glossy hobnailed boots.

—I'm wondering, he said, what I've come here to find. I'm forever, I think, looking for one thing or another. When I first saw your painting, Tuke, I recognized a fellow spirit, and life is not so long that we can afford to put off meeting one's kin.

He shed his trousers, which had a complexity of buttons and flaps. Naked as Willy, Leo, and I, he seemed little more than a boy with a shock of hair and shy blue eyes. There was something wrong with his balls, as if they hadn't come down properly, or were stunted.

—Sit on the sand, Tuke said. I can do a crayon study fairly quickly.

—The sun feels good.

—Have you been drawn by any of these artists you've talked about?

—John. He did me in pencil. Kennington, pastel.

—Would it be a liberty, Leo said, as I had wanted to say, to pry into how a private in the RAF is so up on painters, sitting for