"I spent six months
at the court in Milan," said the fair man. "I painted the
Duke and the Duchess and two great courtiers. Messer
Leonardo was away. He returned, and I visited him and
found a master. Since that time I study light and shadow
and small things and seek out inner action."
He worked in silence, then again began to speak of painters,
Italian and Spanish. He asked me if I had seen such
and such pictures in Seville.
"Yes. They are good."
"Do you know Monsalvat?"
I said that I had climbed there one day. "I dream a painting!"
he said, "The Quest of the Grail. Now I see it running
over the four walls of a church, and now I see it all
packed into one man who rides. Then again it has seemed
to me truer to have it in a man and woman who walk, or
perhaps even are seated. What do you think?"
I was thinking of Isabel who died in my arms twenty
years ago. "I would have it man and woman," I said.
Unless, like Messer Leonardo, you can put both in one."
He sat still, his mind working, while in a fair inner land
Isabel and I moved together; then in a meditative quiet he
finished his drawing. He himself was admirable, fine gold
and bronze, sapphire-eyed, with a face where streams of
visions moved the muscles, and all against the blue and the
willow tree.
At last he put away pencil, and at his gesture I came from
the boat and the reeds.
Pages:
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34