ERALD TOSKIN, having cut loose from the bank of the Mississippi, floated down the midstream, and breathed deeply in the inspiration of his wonderful experience. At last, with ample funds for a year or two of river studies, he was about to come into his own field of endeavor.
"These magnificent distances—can I ever show that monster flood?" he asked himself, gazing in awe at the coiling and swirling of the surface eddies, led in his glance to the miles distance down the visible slope of the sweeping current.
He seized charcoal and tacked up a sheet of drawing paper on his board, to try by sketches to catch the spirit of the things which presented themselves to his eyes. He tried broad lines and fast strokes—and then seized a sharp pencil tip and essayed the effect with fine, hard lines on a smooth calendered surface, which he soon covered with India ink—and regarded the dozen sketches he had made with equal disfavor, since the reality was so much more wonderful than the mere suggestion of lines and shades and strokes.
He forgot to eat his lunch, he was so busy with his art; he studied the swirls of the surface and watched the diminishing spirals of the little sucks; he dropped on his hands and knees, to look over side and close at hand at the spreading of the boiling glaze, when jets from the bottom poured up and swept out upon the surface in great, circling figures of many shapes, trying to catch the lines of the crinkling edges and the weaving masses of silt as they fell into shapes of their own weave; he leaned against the cabin of his boat and looked at the low banks, with their shadows of overhang and purple mass, with their tangles of tree roots, exposed by the washing away of the earth, dooming the forest in miles of caving bend; and on approaching an island he saw on the right hand a wide, vast lake in motion, and down the chute, on the other, a rippling little river sparkling in the sunshine—and a thousand effects, a thousand spectacles, challenged his skill and doomed him to the eternal strife of doing with a few pigments and all the paints and brushes available, what the river was undertaking to show, using the floods of a thousand valleys, the light of the sun and the shadows of cyclone and hurricane clouds for its master effects.
"Oh, yes!" Toskin blinked, when in the twilight following sunset he rowed into an island eddy and heaved an anchor overboard near the edge of the main current. "There's no doubt in my mind that there are pictures down here—for one to paint! My land—and I didn't take a photograph! I've been fussing with sketching when I ought to have made photographs!"
His heart sank within him as he wandered if he should ever again see just precisely those same effects that had charmed and baffled him all the afternoon. He caught up the work that he had attempted, and by lamplight, without the spectacle of the reality to shame his work by the truth, he was startled to see, and especially to feel, in what he had done an undertone of spirit that just suggested itself to him—an atmosphere of expression which lifted him to his tiptoes, for it might mean at last a rudiment of style and themes of his own.
Those sketches, hasty, crude, and even to some extent snatches of the most commonplace phenomena of the flood mass and far perspectives of the Mississippi did reveal to him the fact that all his dreaming, all his expenditure, all his efforts were worth while, and if he were to leave the river at this very moment he should not have come in vain. A few quick scratches, a sweep of charcoal, a twist of the hand—as long as he lived, that one bit, surrounded by a dozen other attempts, would inspire him with hope and confidence, for he had seen and recorded in it the effect of a dozen acres of the Mississippi surface, with its ripples and breaks and reflections of the wilderness along the banks.
He went about cooking supper. It was surprising, now that he thought of eating, how rapidly his hunger increased, and he broiled his steak over the red-hot plate of his oil stove, fried potatoes, percolated coffee and made ample preparations to appease his ravenous appetite. Having dined, he leaned back in a luxurious arm chair that was part of the boat's outfit, and before he knew it, he was asleep. Never in his life had he had a more engrossing day, and never had he been more tired.