WORLD'S END

So it went, the whole trip. Carrara with its famous marble quarries reminded Mr. Hackabury of the new postoffice they were building in Reubens; he had a picture postcard of it. When he saw a dog lying in the road, he was reminded of the hound with which he had hunted coons when he was a boy. When the soapman saw a peasant digging in hard soil, he told about Asa Cantle, who was making a good living raising angleworms to be planted in soil to keep it aerated. There were a million things we could learn about nature that would make life easier for everybody on earth. Ezra told as many of them as there was time for.

They could watch the sea part of the time, and it stayed smooth as the millpond from which the Bluebird soap factory derived its power. But Mr. Hackabury was not to be fooled - he was sure that when they got on it they would find it was heaving and sinking. "The food ain't so good in these Eye-talian inns," he said, "but what I eat I keep. And anyhow, we can say we've seen the country."

IV

They bade farewell to Pierre and the motorcar, and went on board the yacht, which put to sea. The smells improved - but the treacherous element behaved just as Mr. Hackabury had said, and he took to his cabin and did not appear again until they were under the shelter of the rocky Peloponnesus.

Meanwhile a new friendship opened up for Lanny Budd. On the deck sat Marcel Detaze before his easel, wearing his picturesque little blue cap and his old corduroy trousers; he had sketched out a view of the Bay of Naples with Capri for a background, and a fisherboat with a black sail crossing the dying sun. Marcel worked on this for days, trying to get the thing which he called "atmosphere," which made the difference between a work of art and a daub. "Do you know Turner's atmosphere?" he asked of Lanny. "Do you know Corot's?"

Marcel was one of those painters who don't mind talking while they work. So Lanny drew up a camp chair and watched every stroke of the brush, and received lectures on technique. Every painter has his own style, and if you took a microscope to the brushwork, you could tell one from another. The despair of Marcel was the infinity of nature; a sunset like this shifted its tints every moment, and which would you choose? You had to get the effects of distance, and you had to make a flat surface appear endless; you had to turn a dead mineral substance into a thousand other things - not to mention the soul of the painter who was looking at them all. "No landscape exists until the painter makes it," said Marcel.

When his work wasn't going right, he was restless, and wanted to pace the deck. Lanny liked to walk too, so they kept each other company. The boy was. so used to being with grown people, it didn't occur to him as surprising that a serious-minded artist should give so much time to him. Only gradually he realized that Marcel was availing himself of this opportunity to make friends. Hitherto he had had to hide from Lanny, but now he was taking him into the family - Marcel's family.

The boy was pleased to find the painter a person who worked so hard at his job. Marcel deliberately refused to learn to play cards, and while the others stayed up half the night, he went to bed, like Lanny, and, like Lanny, was fresh in the morning. He would get up early to watch the pearly tints in the sky, and when he told Lanny about this, the lad got up early too, and heard a discourse on color, and learned the names of many shades, and something about how paints are mixed. Lanny began to think that maybe he was missing his true vocation; he wondered what his father and mother would say if he were to get himself an easel and a palette and join one of the art classes which painters conducted on the Cфte d'Azur.

This relationship between Lanny and Marcel seemed strange to a Middle Western American, but not in the least to a Frenchman.

The painter was prepared to become an extra father to Lanny, if this was permitted, and it was. The boy observed what was going on between Marcel and his mother, and realized that the man was trying to persuade her to give less of her time and energy to these fashionable people, and more of it to him. Marcel thought that Beauty was wearing herself out running about to social functions, depriving herself of sleep, and being so excited that she hardly took time to eat. Every now and then these "smart" ladies would find themselves threatened with a breakdown, and would have to go away and take baths or cures or what not to restore themselves. "It's a silly way of life," declared the hard-working man of art.

V

A cold wind was blowing from the snow-covered Mount Olympus, and the yacht sought shelter behind the long island called Euboea. Here was a wide channel, blue and still and warm; Mr. Hackabury said: "This is all I ever want to see of the Isles of Greece, and let's stay right here."