Studio: international art (18.1900)

On the Slope of a Sotithern Hill

trained to free supple movement by their national
"eu de paume ; the old men, erect and sinewy, in
wonderful faded clothes. One with the face of
Dante lifts his beret in dignified salute as he drives
his flock of sheep past our gate. Rustic Henry
Irvings urge their lumbering bullock-waggons down
the difficult mountain tracks. They direct their
beasts with large gestures and wavings of their ox-
goads, as though performing an incantation, and
call to them with deep-chested resonant voices.
One is struck with the fine unconscious poses of
men and women alike: their light sandals of
twisted cord enable them to walk silently, with a
certain feline grace and the women especially carry
their small heads nobly poised on their round
throats and robust shoulders. We had been told
that the Basques were too superstitious and proud
to become willing models. Of the people as a
whole we had no opportunity of judging, but
certainly it was our good fortune to find many
examples to the contrary. Our simple-hearted
neighbours took a friendly interest in us from the
first; they made us welcome to their farmyards and
fields, and their delight knew no bounds when they
were able to recognise some familiar objects in our
sketches. When they had once grasped the idea
that we wished them to pose for us, they assented
with a naive enthusiasm which was only partially
due to the pecuniary reward.

They were a people of abundant leisure and
infinite good nature. Should our model happen
to be at work in the fields when we required him,
a substitute was always at hand, ready to be dis-
patched post-haste to his release.

We were not long in making the acquaintance of
the handsome sunburnt bevy of girls who had
greeted us that first night on the old Roman bridge.
They were all sisters or cousins, lively as green
lizards on a sunny wall, and apparently as poor.

One of them, a hazel-eyed gamine of fifteen,
attached herself especially to our party. She was
an ideal model, a brown-limbed lithe young animal,
to whom blazing sun, drizzling rain, or biting
March wind appeared to be all equally unim-
portant. Her disregard of all ideas of comfort, as
we understood it, amused us. The only food for
which she cared seemed to be a dry crust, or a hand-
ful of wild sorrel-leaves. If we pressed her to par-
take of any friandise more to our own taste, she
either refused it altogether, or put it aside for her
small neighbours at home. At first we had abun-
dant opportunity for our open air studies, but the
uncertain mood of the spring put an end to them
after a while. For ten days or more, black rain-

laden clouds came rolling up heavily from the sea,
with hysterical bursts of sunshine between that
lasted just long enough to lure us out to our doom,
a thorough soaking. After a few days we gave it
up—turned our poor painted presentments of the
jocund spring dejectedly to the wall, and sought
refuge, shivering, in interiors.

And very fascinating in their way they were, these
Basque farms among the hills : wide-roofed, with
heavily timbered projecting upper storeys. The
farmer and his family live as a rule sandwiched
between the two sources of their wealth, their cattle
and the products of their fields ; the grenier packed
with corn and hay, the ground floor given up to the
cows, oxen, pigs, and sheep; and the chance visitor
to the big living-room or kitchen has his ears be-
sieged by a varied din, as though all the Street
Musicians of Bremen were performing below.

There was one queer little habitation where a
Rembrandt old woman lurked in a velvety gloom ;
she was moulding fresh butter into pats between her
crooked old hands at the window where the light fell
strongest. When the Angelus du Midi rang, she
dragged out a few sticks from a corner, and, crouch-
ing inside the big fireplace, made up a crackling
blaze. Then she stirred up a weird decoction in a
pot, and poured it out steaming for her grandson,
who came in wet and bare-footed from the fields.
She was sublime, that old woman, in her invincible
philosophy and capacity for seeing the joke of the
situation. The crazy old cottage walls shook with
her jolly laughter when a small neighbour of superior
education explained that the English stranger wanted
to paint her. Such a superlatively funny thing had
never happened to her before. She signified through
the interpreter that the stranger was welcome to the
house, such as it was, but she would not be put in
a picture, not she—her time was over for that sort
of thing. But it was a wonderful joke all the same,
and she cackled and bubbled away with merriment
all by herself for an hour after. She seemed to find
humour, too, in the fact that when the rain was at
its hardest it came down pat, pat, through the roof
and made a pool on the floor. The two tiny
windows owned not a pane of glass between them,
and the icy rain-laden wind drove through one and
out at the other.

But that marvellous old soul washed her platters
clean contentedly, apparently conscious of no hard-
ship, and with what kindly courtesy she made the
intruder welcome, even to pressing on his accept-
ance an umbrella and an astonishing old mackin-
tosh, when the time came to go home through the
pouring rain !