PART SECONDVIIIA STUDIO FOR IMPRESSIONS
THE voyage across the Atlantic from New York to the Gibraltar proved a constant series of sapphire days. Skies light azure often cloudless, the ocean a richer shade with enough wind to curl the sea-foam into delicate lace-like patterns. When the billows rose into the domain of direct sunlight, myriads of brilliant points scintillated like sparkling gems decorating the wave crests,—the sea-foam not unlike flossy embroidery or ruffles of lace upon silk of blue.
Adele’s first experience of things as they are in the great motion constant, onward, ever forward, in the very being of the boundless deep; also her first impressions of the ways and means amid a cosmopolitan crowd on board an ocean-flyer. Nature and humanity, each in constant movement, the former with majesty and potency profound, the latter on the grand rush, often to obtain something to eat.
Towards sunset she stood with the Doctor watching the crimson disk grow less and less in brilliancy, and finally through a veil of luminous atmosphere disappear in the mysterious beyond.
They spoke little, as if under some fascination. The varied movements in the sky and unstable water-foundation were indeed somewhat hypnotic in effect, but a psychologist would have been puzzled to detect the outcome of their meditations. While they gazed, a passing breeze crossed the surface immediately before them, changing the delicate traceries in nature’s handiwork. The Doctor at once responded, for the complicationsappealed to him, and most naturally he spoke in terms of his own previous experience of similar impressions.
“Those changes in the wave curves are not unlike harmonic modulations, and I can actually hear the difference.” Adele seemed surprised.
“Yes,” continued the Doctor, “the slow, dignified progression is certainly symphonic in character, yet the infinite variety in less melodic forms piles up little by little until the greater movement is itself influenced. How wonderful, majestic, yet exceedingly subtle, and always refined! It is certainly sound-color or color as sound, and the drawing of the design—well, ’pon my soul, the drawing is too quick for me. I can’t see how it is done, it flits from me, is gone, living only in memory, not unlike the technical element in the rendition of music. But the sound-color, the real harmony. Ah! that I hear in my mind’s ear and see in my mind’s eye for long afterwards.” Adele, much younger than the Doctor, was also working out her own impressions according to previous experience, the experience of youth.
“Oh, yes! I see what you see,—very artistic,—you can talk about it in that style if you choose, but——” and she seemed in doubt how to describe what she really felt. The Doctor waited till she was ready.
“It’s so awfully real! It’s alive!”
“H’m!”
“Yes, a great real picture, that which I like in pictures.”
“No doubt an original,” remarked the Doctor, smiling. “The original of many marines.”
Adele called attention to the magnificent contour lines which themselves swayed to and fro over the curved surface.
“Don’t you see, it’s alive; the whole thing moves, it’s so true; and you and I with it, we’re all going. Isn’t that just glorious!”
“Oh!” exclaimed the Doctor, “in Him we live and move and have our being,—that’s what you mean?”
“Just so,” and she paused before continuing: “He was the Artist, and it is a living picture, a real one, just ready to be painted.”
It was the apparent living earth, the breathing of the deep sea which had impressed Adele, the suppressed emotion of the planet, ever existing, ever apparent to those who had eyes to see and ears to hear for observation; and this over the whole vast expanse.
“Of course,” whispered Adele, “a living picture, by so great an Artist, must be sublimely artistic.”
“True,” mused the Doctor, “the greater will include the less,—a masterpiece, an original, to lead the artistic sense onward and upward.”
But there were few on board who gave even a passing thought to this physical breathing of the earth, nor to the invisible moisture ascending by evaporation. The majority thought no more of it than they did of their own individual breathing; they took it as a matter of course, no more, no less. They had, however, other impressions, quite as mundane, and equally apparent. Some sought impressions from watching card-sharpers in the smoking-room; others by listening to fluent talkers who really abused good natural endowments by promiscuous discussion of any and every subject that came up; men who did not hesitate an instant to suggest what they considered to be improvements upon nature. The conceit of some seemed indeed colossal, especially when they, too, waved their arms about, forming contour lines over curved ideas, to carry their impressions far beyond the briny deep. Even such, however, were really small harmless game compared to what Mrs. Cultus soon encountered.