“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 Album’ 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 refreshing to complete a stage of anything. I began to feel less hot and tired, as I passed 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 cumulus 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 passed. 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.