his irritable old father. He
remembered her death--and those pictorial effects in the white-sheeted
room--effects of light and shadow--of flowers--of the grey head
uplifted; he remembered also trying to realise them, stealthily, at
night, in his own room, with chalk and paper--and then his passion
with himself, and the torn drawing, and the tears, which, as it were,
another self saw and approved.

Then came school-days. His father had sent him to an old endowed
school at Penrith, that he might be away from home and under
discipline. There he had received a plain commercial education,
together with some Latin and Greek. His quick, restless mind had
soaked it all in; nothing had been a trouble to him; though, as he
well knew, he had done nothing supremely well. But Homer and Virgil
had been unlocked for him; and in the school library he found
Shakespeare and Chaucer, 'Morte d'Arthur' and 'Don Quixote,' fresh
and endless material for his drawing, which never stopped. Drawing
everywhere--on his books and slates, on doors and gate-posts, or on
the whitewashed wall of the old Tudor school-room, where a hunt, drawn
with a burned stick, and gloriously dominating the whole room, had
provoked the indulgence, even the praise, of the headmaster.

And the old drawing-master!--a German--half blind, though he would
never confess it--who dabbled in oil-painting, and let the boy watch
his methods. How he would twirl his dirty brush round and dab down a
lump of Prussian blue, imagining it to be sepia, hastily correcting
it a moment afterwards with a lump of lake, and then say chuckling
to himself: 'By Gode, dat is fine!--dat is very nearly a good purple.
Fenwick, my boy, mark me--you vill not find a good purple no-vere!
Some-vere--in de depths of Japanese art--dere is a good purple. Dat I
believe. But not in Europe. Ve Europeans are all tam fools. But I
vill not svear!--no!--you onderstand, Fenwick; you haf never heard me
svear?' And then a round oath, smothered in a hasty fit of coughing.
And once he had cut off part of the skirt of his Sunday coat, taking
it in his blindness for an old one, to clean his palette with; and it
was thought, by the boys, that it was the unseemly result of this rash
act, as disclosed at church the following Sunday morning, which had
led to the poor old man's dismissal.

But from him John had learnt a good deal about oil-painting--something
too of anatomy--though more of this last from that old book--Albi