Page:The Heart of England.djvu/32

 "I should like to know you."

"With pleasure, if you can."

"What are you by profession?"

"A hard question. I profess nothing. By conviction I am an ill-used man, and for the moment I am a seller of flowers."

He showed me his flowers—kingcups, cuckoo flowers, primroses from the moist woods.

"I will buy your flowers," I said.

"No! I think I shall keep those," and he put them in a horse trough close by. I asked him if he would return into the country with me.

"No," he replied, "it would be sunrise before we got into the country, and I never spend the daytime in the country if I can avoid it."

"Why?" I asked.

"As we are brothers," he said, "I will tell you that I paint landscapes. I like nothing on earth so well as the country. I was dragged up in the Borough. The country for me! But the lover of Nature and the gamekeeper and the farmer and the landowner spoil it by day. The people are stupid, brutal. The women are not at all beautiful. Their cowsheds are the only things they have not spoilt: they are still sweet. As a lad I read the pastoral poets, and I know that these things were once far different. So I live in London and paint landscapes at sixpence a-piece, sometimes four or five of them in a morning, so that I live well. I usually put a few red flowers in with the sixpennyworth. I am sixty-eight; my son will succeed me, but badly—badly."

"How is that?"