“I think so.”
“Then do hurry up and go ahead, or you’ll get left.”
Madge sat a moment, looking straight before her. 77
“What are you going to put in there?” asked Eleanor.
“What I want is all the people in the world,” Madge replied, with perfect gravity. “But there is not room for them.”
A moment later she was working furiously, with hot cheeks and shining eyes and breath coming faster and faster.
First she would have a soldier. Madge had always loved a soldier; her father had been one in the great and splendid days before she was born. Yes, a soldier must come first. And forthwith a very sketchy warrior stepped, with a very martial air, upon the paper. Then an artist ought to come next;—only she could not think of any way of indicating his calling without the aid of some conventional emblem. A mere look of inspiration might belong to a poet or a preacher as well as to an artist. Besides which, she was by no means sure that she knew how to paint a look of inspiration. And then it came to her that, unless she could paint just that, her picture must be a failure; and so she fell upon it, and began sketching in figures of 78 old and young, rich and poor, trying only to put into each face the eager, upward look which should focus all, in spirit as well as in actual direction, upon the flying, luminous figure. In some attempts she succeeded and in some she failed. There was one old woman, with abnormally deep wrinkles, and shoulders somewhat out of drawing, whose face had caught a curiously inspired look; Madge did not dare touch her again for fear of losing it. Her artist, on the other hand, the young man with the ideal brow and very large eyes, grew more and more inane and expressionless the more eagerly his creator worked at him.
On the whole, the production as a two-hour composition by a three-year student was rather good than bad. When time was called Madge felt pretty sure that she should not win the prize; she had undertaken too much, both for the occasion and for her own ability. And yet it was borne in upon her to-day that she was going to make a better artist than she had ever before dared hope. 79
So absorbed had she been in her own work, that she had completely forgotten Eleanor, and had not even been aware that her friend had begun painting an hour ago. Now she turned to her with compunction in her heart. Eleanor held her finished sketch in her hand, but her eyes had wandered to the high, broad north window which was one great sheet of radiant blue sky.
Eleanor’s composition was very simple, but extremely well done, and in the glance Madge was able to give it before the sketches were handed in she saw that it was delicately suggestive. It represented a curving shore, a quiet sea, and a saffron sky,—no sails on the sea, no clouds in the sky. Upon the shore stood a solitary pine-tree, almost denuded of branches, and against the tree leaned the slender figure of a youth, looking dreamily across the sea to the horizon, where the saffron colour was tinged with gold. That was all, but Madge felt sure that it was enough; and, as she thought about it, she felt herself very small and crude and 80 confused, and she was conscious of a perfectly calm and dispassionate wish to tear her own sketch in two. She did not do so, however. There was no irritation, nor envy, nor even displeasure, in her mind. She had not supposed that either she or Eleanor could do anything so good as that sketch,—since one of them could, why, that was just so much clear gain.