Bring Larks and Heroes by Thomas Keneally

Before its massive kindliness, the coves and beaches, cliffs and islands stood back. Halloran sat beside the artist and saw that the man had begun to use his eyes.
    â€˜What do you think of it?’ he had to ask.
    â€˜It’s pleasant looking,’ Ewers murmured.
    â€˜How does it seem to you?’
    Ewers frowned at him.
    â€˜I think it seems the same to me as it seems to you, Corporal. Why do you want to know?’
    â€˜I mean, would you feel moved to paint a picture of it?’
    Ewers smiled. He had long, very innocent lips.
    â€˜Not today. I have no patience with it today.’
    â€˜Oh,’ said Halloran. An artist was an artist to Halloran, as a poet was a poet; and when an artistsaid he had no patience with any given square mile of beauty, you didn’t argue.
    â€˜If I painted this landscape,’ Ewers explained, ‘those who ever saw it would think that the forests behind the beaches were teeming with fruit and game. They would think that this river led to a kingly town, that Eden lay at the headwaters.’
    Eden lay at the headwaters was such a nice phrase that Halloran suspected he was listening to a recitation, perhaps part of the artist’s private journal.
    â€˜Yet all it serves is to connect the world’s worst town to the world’s worst village, tyranny to tyranny, slave to slave.’
    No doubt about it; here was the starched-up rhetoric with which artists, apparently, treated of their subject-matter.
    â€˜Corporal, as you were so kind as to ask me, I find this land a land of broken promises to the artist, as it is to the stomach.’
    Ewers’ pronounced lips rubbed together, very red, very much in need of each other’s fellow-feeling; both elbows went up on his knees, the fingers sought the wrists.
    â€˜Of course, it’s useless for me to have ideas about the face of the land. I am under command to paint it, which solves the matter.’
    â€˜Whose command would that be?’
    â€˜Surgeon Partridge’s command, and MajorSabian’s. I am assigned to Surgeon Partridge, you know. I perform at his demand, and he loans me out to perform on demand for his friends. By God who made me, no wonder I perform badly.’
    â€˜Painting’s a better business than hauling timber,’ Halloran suggested, ‘or the clay-pits.’
    This made the Scotsman’s cheeks go polemically hollow. He squinted at Halloran, trying to discern through precisely which pore of the flesh the barbarian in him had emerged.
    â€˜That is not an argument,’ said Ewers. ‘That is the same proposition as commending patience to a man who’s been burgled, on the grounds that he may have been murdered also. Society couldn’t stand on the basis of such an argument.’
    So says the master-forger ,Halloran thought. But he wouldn’t risk saying it yet. He had a dread of going into history simply as one of those abounding scoffers who appear in the lives of every artist, philosopher and saint.
    â€˜In a civilized city,’ went on the master-forger, ‘you can hire a sawyer, you can hire a digger. But you cannot hire the Arts. You may patronize them and endow them; but you cannot hire them and have them at your command. Yet Surgeon Partridge is such a Goth that not knowing the Arts from, shall we say, a sow’s snout, he thinks that he can command them. He will see cloud-banks above mangrove trees, and he’ll say, “Paint that, Ewers!” Imagine!’
    â€˜I’ll give you that in,’ murmured Halloran. ‘He’s the sublimest fool of a man.’
    Now the river had narrowed down between high timbered banks. There were some tenuous little beaches, much threatened by forest. Halloran was not at all sure of the way, and there were a number of inlets up which the two transports, if captious enough, could take him. But behold, they were hissing and meaning it! The Marines were reeling at their oars. He