XV. Read the story and give full answers to the questions that follow the text. Make a list of the words in the text which you could use in your answers:

ONE COAT OF WHITE

Mr. and Mrs. Gregg met M.^* Lautisse on the Queen Elizabeth coming back from, their first trip to Europe. By a curious chance they learned that M. Lautisse was a well-known artist who had suddenly retired at fifty-three to a villa on the Riviera and lived alone there except for his servants, and never saw anyone. He hadn't painted anything for many a year and was heard to say he would never touch another brush as long as he lived.

M. Lautisse was going to America incognito and asked the Greggs to keep his name a secret. He took to the young couple and accepted their invitation to spend a weekend in their home in "the country.

Lautisse arrived on the noon train Saturday and I met him at the station. We had promised him that we wouldn't have any people in and that we would respect his desire to remain incognito and that we wouldn't try to talk to him about art.

Driving out from the station, I asked him if he wanted to do anything in particular, like playing croquet or going for a swim or a walk in the woods, and he said he just wanted to sit and relax.

So we sat around all afternoon, and Lautisse looked at a baseball game on television for about five minutes, and couldn't understand it, and I took him down to the basement and showed him the oil burner (I sold oil burners), and he couldn't understand that either. Mostly we just sat and talked.

I was up at seven-thirty the next morning and when I was having breakfast I remembered a job I had to do. Our garden fence needed a coat of paint. I got out a bucket half full of white paint, and a brush and an old kitchen chair. I was sitting on the chair, stirring, when I heard footsteps and there stood Lautisse.

"Had breakfast?" I asked, and he said Madame was fixing it. I said I had been getting ready to paint the garden fence but now that he was up, I'd postpone it. He protested - I should go on with it. I took up the brush, but he seized it from my hand and said, "First, I'll show you!"

I'm no Tom Sawyer - I wasn't looking for anybody to paint that fence. It was my pride and joy, for I had built it with my own hands. I let him finish two sides of the post and then I interrupted.

"I'll take it from there," I said, reaching for the brush.

"No, no, no!" he cried out, just like a little child. He had finished half a dozen pickets when Betsy yelled from the kitchen door that his breakfast was ready.

"No, no!" he said, with an impatient wave of the brush. "No breakfast. I will paint the fence."

I argued with him but he wouldn't even look up from his work; so I went into the house and told Betsy. "You know very well how

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I feel about that fence, and ... that man came out there and practically wrested the brush away from me ..."

Betsy laughed at me. "Let him paint it!" she said. "He's having a good time."

I went back to the Sunday papers but every now and then I'd get up and go out and watch him for a couple of minutes. He spent three hours at it and finished the fence, all four sections of it. You should have seen him when he walked around the house to the terrace where I was sitting - he had white paint all over him. And he was beaming.

"I finish her!" he exclaimed. He was as happy as a kid with a new rocket ship, and all my resentment faded. He escorted me back to the garden to examine his handiwork.

He had me stand off at a distance and look, and then move up closer and inspect the pickets.

He went back to town on the 9.03 that evening and at the station shook my hand and said I was a fine fellow and that he hadn't enjoyed himself so much in years and that he wanted Betsy and me to come to New York and have dinner with him some night.

We didn't hear anything from him or about him for ten days, and then the story broke in the New York papers. Some UP correspondent on the Riviera had got wind of Lautisse's secret trip to New York and cabled the New York office, and somehow they found out. He denied his identity at first, but then he confessed all and gave them an interview. Along towards the end of the story was a paragraph saying:

Since his arrival M. Lautisse has spent all his time in New York City, except for a weekend at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Hervey Gregg in North Westchester. He met the Greggs on the ship coming over.

The day after the story appeared a reporter and photographer from one of the papers arrived at our house while I was off selling my oil burners, and Betsy did the honours. They wanted to know every single detail - every move the great man had made, every word he had uttered, and Betsy told them of course about the garden fence. They took pictures of it, and more pictures of the paint buckets, and the brush, and the next morning the paper had quite a story, done in a humorous vein, and the Headline said:

LAUTISSE PAINTS AGAIN

It gave us a sort of funny feeling, all this publicity, but we didn't have much time to think about it. Early on the same day that story appeared, an excitable little man arrived in a chaufeur-driven limousine. He leaped out of the car, rushed up to me, grabbed me by the shoulders and began shouting:

"Where is it? Where is the fence?" I knocked his hand down and demanded to know who he was, but he kept yelling things like: "Has anybody else been here?" and "Show me the fence!" Finally he said

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he was Mr. Vegaro from the Millard Galleries, and he wanted to see the fence Lautisse had painted.

He stood before that picket fence clasping and unclasping his hands, and crying out: "Magnificent!" and "Superb!" and things like that. Then all of a sudden he quieted down, and said: "Mr. Gregg, I would like to buy your fence, I will give you five hundred dollars cash for it."

He had no more than got the words out when another car came roaring up the driveway and out jumped two men. They came at us with a rush, waving their arms wildly, screaming "Stop! Stop!"

All three men now surrounded me, shouting and gesticulating. So now I did a little yelling of my own. They calmed down, and it turned out that the second two men were from the Weddicome Galleries and they, too, wanted my garden fence, because it had been painted by the great Lautisse.

"You people," I said, "are either drunk or crazy - maybe both."

All three of them looked at me as if I were the one who was drunk or crazy. Didn't I realize that Lautisse had not had a paint brush in his hands for twelve long years? That Lautisse had sworn he would never paint again? That a single painting by Lautisse was worth as much as a quarter of a million dollars?

"Look, gentlemen," I said, "I'm a business man, an oil burner man. I don't know anything about painting. I mean painting pictures. But I do know a thing or two about painting a fence. A mule could have held a paint brush in his teeth and done almost as good a job on that fence as Lautisse did."

"A thousand dollars for the fence!" said one of the Weddicome men.

"Twelve hundred!" said little Mr. Vegaro.

"Fifteen hundred!" cried the Weddicome man.

"Hold it!" I yelled. "I'm beginning to think you're serious. How on earth are you going to get fifteen hundred out of that fence?"

"Good lord, man!" exclaimed the second fellow from the Weddicome, "don't you realize that your garden fence is a genuine Lau-lisse?"

I stared at them in amazement.

(After H. A. Smith)

Questions

1. How did M. Lautisse spend time at the Greggs'? 2. Why was Mr. Gregg so particular about the garden fence he was going to paint in the morning? What did he mean by saying: "I am no Tom Sawyer"? 3. What did Mr. Gregg complain to his wife about? How did she try to comfort him? 4. How was Lautisse's identity discovered? 5. What happened scon after the article about Lautisse's week-end at the Greggs appeared in the newspaper? 6. What made Gregg think that the world was mad?

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