Six to Sixteen Part 24

"How fortunate for those who do not!" said Jack. "Now, Margery dear, don't look sulky. I knew you wouldn't grudge me a bit of paper to get into the 'Household Alb.u.m' with. Come down into the ravine. You're as white as a blank sheet of Whatman's hot-pressed water-colour paper!"

The increasing heat was really beginning to overpower me, but I refused to leave my sketch. Jack pinned a large white pocket-handkerchief to my shoulders--"to keep the sun from the spine"--and departed to the ravine.

By midday my outline was in. One is no good judge of one's own work, but I think, on the whole, that it was a success.

It is always refres.h.i.+ng to complete a stage of anything. I began to feel less hot and tired, as I pa.s.sed a wash of clean water over my outline, and laying it in the sun to dry, got out my colours and brushes.

As I did so, one of the little gusts of wind which had been an unpleasant feature of this very fine day, and which, threatening a change of weather, made us anxious to finish our sketches at a sitting, came down the sandy road. In an instant the damp surface of my block looked rough enough to strike matches on. But impatience is not my besetting sin, and I had endured these little catastrophes before. I waited for the block to dry before I brushed off the sand. I also waited till the little beetle, who had crept into my sky, and was impeded in his pace by my first wash, walked slowly down through all my distances, and quitted the block by the gate in the foreground. This was partly because I did not want to hurt him, and partly because a white c.u.mulus cloud is a bad part of your sketch to kill a black beetle on.

I washed over my paper once more, and holding it on my knee to dry just as much and no more than was desirable, I looked my subject in the face with a view to colour.

A long time pa.s.sed. I had looked and looked again; I had washed in and washed out; I had realized the difficulty of the subject without flinching, and had tried hard to see and represent the colouring before me, when Clement (having exhausted his water in a similar process) came down the hill behind me, with a surly and sunburnt face, to replenish his bottle at a wayside water-trough.

It was then that, as he said, he found me crying.

"It's not because it's difficult and I'm very stupid," I whimpered. "I don't mind working on and trying to make the best of a thing. And it's not the wind or the sand, though it has got dreadfully into the paints, particularly the Italian Pink; but what makes me hopeless, Clement, is that I don't believe it would look well if I could paint it perfectly.

It looked lovely as we were driving home the other evening, but now---- Just look at those fields, Clem; I _know_ they're green, but really and truly I _see_ them just the same colour as this road, and I don't think there is the difference of a shade between them and that gate-post. What shall I do?"

A tear fell out of my eyelashes and dropped on to my river. Clement took the sketch from me, and dried up the tear with a bit of blotting-paper.

Then to my amazement he gave rather a favourable verdict. It comforted me, for Clement never says anything that he does not mean.

"It's not _half_ bad, Margery! Wait till you see mine! How did you get the tints of that hillside? You've a very truthful mind, that's one thing, and a very true eye as well. I do admire the way you abstain from filling up with touches that mean nothing."

"Oh, Clement!" cried I, so gratified that I began to feel ready to go on again. "Do you really think I can make anything of it?"

"Nothing more," said Clement. "Don't put another touch. It's unfinished, but no finis.h.i.+ng would do any good. We've got an outlandish subject and a bad time of day. But keep it just as it is, and three months hence, on a cool day, you'll be pleased when you look at it."

"Perhaps if I went on a little with the foreground," I suggested; but even as I spoke, I put my hand to my head.

"Go to Eleanor in the ravine, at once," said Clement imperatively. "I'll bring your things. What _did_ make us such fools as to come out without umbrellas?"

"We came out in the cool of the morning," said I, as I staggered off; "besides, it's almost impossible to hold one and paint too."

Once in the ravine, I dropped among the long gra.s.s and ferns, and the damp, refres.h.i.+ng coolness of my resting-place was delicious.

Eleanor was not faint, neither had she been crying; but she was not much happier with her sketch than I had been with mine. The jutting group of birch-trees was well chosen, and she had drawn them admirably. But when she came to add the confused background of trees and undergrowth, her very outline had begun to look less satisfactory. When it came to colour--and the midday sun was darting and glittering through the interstices of the trees, without supplying any effects of _chiaroscuro_ to a subject already defective in point and contrast--Eleanor was almost in despair.

"Where's Jack?" said I, after condoling with her.

"He tried the birches for ten minutes, and then he went up the stream to look for _algae_."

At this moment Jack appeared. He came slowly towards us, looking at something in his hand.

"Lend me your magnifying-gla.s.s, Eleanor," said he, when he had reached us.

Eleanor unfastened it from her chatelaine, and Jack became absorbed in examining some water-weed in a dock-leaf.

"What is it?" said we.

"It's a new species, I believe. Look, Eleanor!" and he gave her the leaf and the gla.s.s with an almost pathetic anxiety of countenance.

My opinion carried no weight in the matter, but Eleanor was nearly as good a naturalist as her mother. And she was inclined to agree with Jack.

"It's too good to be true! But I certainly don't know it. Where did you find it?"

"No, thank you," said Jack derisively. "I mean to keep the habitat to myself for the present. For _a very good reason_. Margery, my child, put that sketch of mine into the pocket of your block. (The paper is much about the size of your own!) It is going into the 'Household Alb.u.m.'"

We went home earlier than we had intended. Even the perseverance of Eleanor and Clement broke down under their ill-success. Jack was the only well-satisfied one of the party, and, with his usual good-nature, he tried hard to infect me with his cheerfulness.

"I think," said I, looking dolefully at my sketch, "that a good deal of the fault must have been in my eyes. I suspect one can't see colours properly when one is feeling sick and giddy. But the glare of the sun was the worst. I couldn't tell red from green on my palette, so no wonder the fields and everything else looked all the same colour. And yet what provokes one is the feeling that an artist would have made a sketch of it somehow. The view is really beautiful."

"And that is really beautiful," said Eleanor, pointing to the birch group and its background. "And what a mess I have made of it! I wish I'd stuck to pencil. And yet, as you say, an artist would have got a picture out of it."

"I'll tell you what," said Jack, who was lying face downwards with my picture spread before him, "I believe that any one who knew the dodges, when he saw that everything looked one pale, yellowish, brownish tint with the glare of the sun, would have boldly taken a weak wash of all the drab-looking colours in his box right over everything, picked out a few stones in his foreground wall, dodged in a few shadows and so on, and made a clever sketch of it. And the same with Eleanor's. If he had got his birch-trees half as good as hers, and had then seen what a muddle the trees behind were in, I believe he would only have washed in a little blue and grey behind the birches, 'indicated' (as our old drawing-master at school calls it) a distant stem or two--and there would have been another clever sketch for you!"

"Another clever falsehood, you mean," said Clement hotly, "to ruin people's taste, and encourage idle painters in showy trickery, and make them believe they can improve upon Nature's colouring."

"Nature's colouring varies," said Jack. "Distant trees often _are_ blue and grey, though these, just now, are of the rankest green."

Clement replied, Jack responded, Clement retorted, and a fierce art-discussion raged the whole way home.

We were well used to it. Indeed all conversations with us had a tendency to become controversial. Over and above which there was truth in Keziah's saying, "The young gentlemen argle-bargles fit to deave a body's head; and dear knows what it's all about."

Clement finished a vehement and rather didactic confession of his art-faith as we climbed the steep hill to the Vicarage. The keynote of it was that one ought to draw what he sees, exactly as he sees it; and that every subject has a beauty of its own which he ought to perceive if his perception is not "emasculated by an acquired taste for prettinesses."

"I shall be in the 'Household Alb.u.m' this evening," said Jack, in deliberate tones. "My next ambition is the Society of Painters in Water Colours. The subject of my first painting is settled. Three gra.s.s fields (haymaking over the day before yesterday). A wall in front of the first field, a hedge in front of the second, a wall in front of the third. A gate in the middle of the wall. A spotted pig in the middle of the field. The sun at its meridian; the pig asleep. Motto, 'Whatever is, is beautiful.'"

Eleanor and I (in the interests of peace) hastened to change the subject by ridiculing Jack's complacent conviction that his sketch would be accepted for the "Household Alb.u.m."

And yet it was.

The fresh-water _alga_ Jack had been lucky enough to find was a new species, and threw Mrs. Arkwright and Eleanor into a state of the highest excitement. But all their entreaties failed to persuade Jack to disclose the secret of the habitat.

"Put my sketch into the 'Household Alb.u.m,' and I'll tell you all about it," said he.

Mrs. Arkwright held out against this for half-an-hour. Then she gave way. Jack's sketch was gummed in (it took up a whole page, being the full size of my block), and he told us all about the water-weed.

It was described and figured in the _Phycological Quarterly_, and received the specific name of _Arkwrightii_, and Jack's double triumph was complete.

We were very glad for his success, but it almost increased the sense of disappointment that our share of the expedition had been so unlucky.

"It seems such a waste," said I, "to have got to such a lovely place with one's drawing things and plenty of time, and to come away without a sketch worth keeping at the end, just because one doesn't know the right way of working."

"I think there's a good deal in what Jack said about your sketch," said Eleanor; "and I think if one looked at the way real artists have treated similar subjects, and then went at it again and tried to do it on a similar principle----"

"If ever we do go there again," Clement interrupted, "but I don't suppose we shall--these holidays. And the way summer after summer slips away is awful. I'm more and more convinced that it's a great mistake to have so many hobbies. No life is long enough for more than one pursuit, and it's ten to one you die in the middle of mastering that. One is sure to die in the early stages of half-a-dozen."

Clement is very apt to develop some odd theory of this kind, and to preach it with a severity that borders on gloom. I never know what to say, even if I disagree with him; but Eleanor takes up the cudgels at once.