Kitabı oku: «A Bookful of Girls», sayfa 3

Artful Madge

CHAPTER I
THE PRIZE CONTEST

“Artful Madge” was the very flippant name by which Madge Burtwell’s brother Ned had persisted in calling her from the time when, at the age of sixteen, she gained reluctant permission to become a student at the Art School.

“Not that we have any objection to art,” Mrs. Burtwell was wont to explain in a deprecatory tone; “only we should have preferred to have Madge graduate first, before devoting herself to a mere accomplishment. It seems a little like putting the trimming on a dress before sewing the seams up,” she would add; “I did it once when I was a girl, and the dress always had a queer look.”

But Mrs. Burtwell, though firm in her own opinions, was something of a philosopher in her attitude toward the contrary-minded, and even where her own children were concerned she never allowed her influence to degenerate into tyranny. When she found Madge, at the age of sixteen, more eager than ever before to study art, and nothing else, she told her husband that they might as well make up their minds to it, and, at the word, their minds were made up. For Mr. Burtwell was the one entirely and unreasoningly tractable member of Mrs. Burtwell’s flock; in explanation of which fact he was careful to point out that only a mature mind could appreciate the true worth of Mrs. Burtwell’s judgment.

The Burtwells were people of small means and of correspondingly modest requirements. They lived in an unfashionable quarter of the city, kept a maid-of-all-work, sent their children to the public schools, and got their books from the Public Library. Having no expensive tastes, they regarded themselves as well-to-do and envied no one.

If Madge Burtwell’s eyes had been a whit less clear, or her nature a thought less guileless, Ned would not have been so enchanted with his new name for her. Indeed, a few years ago she had been described by an only half-appreciative friend as “a splendid girl without a mite of tact,” and if she had succeeded in somewhat softening the asperity of her natural frankness, there was enough of it left to lend a delicate shade of humour to the name.

Artful Madge, then, was a student at the Art School, and a very promising one at that. At the end of three years she had made such good progress that she was promoted to painting in the Portrait Class, and since her special friend and crony, Eleanor Merritt, was also a member of that class, Madge considered her cup of happiness full. Not that there were not visions in plenty of still better things to come, but they seemed so far in the future that they hardly took on any relation with the actual present. Madge and Eleanor dreamed of Europe, of the old masters and of the great Paris studios, but it is a question whether the fulfillment of any dream could have made them happier than they were to-day. Certain it is, that, as they stood side by side in the great barren studio, clad in their much-bedaubed, long-sleeved aprons, and working away at a portrait head, they had little thought for anything but the task in hand. The one vital matter for the moment was the mixing and applying of their colours, and, in their eagerness to reproduce the exact contour of a cheek, or the precise shadow of an unbeautiful nose, they would hardly have transferred their attention from the most ill-favoured model to the last and greatest Whistler masterpiece.

The girls at the Art School had got hold of Ned’s name for his sister and adopted it with enthusiasm.

“If you want to know the truth, ask Artful Madge,” was a very common saying among them.

“Artful Madge says it’s a good likeness, anyhow!” modest little Minnie Drayton would maintain, when hard pressed by the teasing of the older girls.

The incongruity of the name seemed somehow to throw into brighter relief the peculiar sincerity of its bearer’s character, and by the time it was generally adopted among the students Madge Burtwell’s popularity was established.

It was well that Madge was a favourite, for in certain respects she was the worst sinner in the class. To begin with, her palette was the very largest in the room, and the most plentifully besmeared with colours, and woe to the girl who ventured too near it! As Madge stood before her easel, tall and fair and earnest, painting with an ardour and concentration which was all too sure to beguile her into her besetting sin of “exaggerating details,” she wielded both brush- and palette-arm with a genial disregard of consequences. Nor could one count upon her confining her activities to one location. Like all the students, she was in the habit of backing away from her natural anchorage from time to time, the better to judge of her work, and not one of them all had such a fatal tendency to come up against an unoffending easel in the rear, sending canvas and paint-tubes rattling upon the floor.

Instantly she would drop upon her knees, overcome with contrition, and help collect the scattered treasures, giving many a jar or joggle to neighbouring easels in the process.

“It’s a shame, Miss Folsom!” she would cry, struggling to her feet again, still clutching her beloved palette, which seemed fairly to rain colours on every surrounding object. “It’s a shame! But if you will just cast your eye upon that thing of mine, you will perceive that it was the recklessness of desperation. Look at it! There’s not a value in it!”

Artful Madge was always forgiven, and no one ever thought of calling her awkward, and when, in the early autumn, a Saturday sketching club was organised, it was christened “The Artful Daubers” in honor of Madge, and she was unanimously elected president.

The girls were not in the habit of paying much attention to chance visitors who came in from time to time and made the perilous passage among the easels, and lucky was the “parent” or “art-patron” who escaped without a streak of colour on some portion of his raiment. When Mrs. Oliver Jacques looked in upon them one memorable morning in February no premonition of great things to come stirred the company; only indifferent glances were directed upon her by the few who deigned to observe her at all. And this pleased Mrs. Oliver Jacques very much indeed.

Yet, if the girls had paused to consider, – a thing which they never did when there was a model on the platform, – they would have been aware that their visitor was a person of importance in the world of Art, for importance in no other world would have secured to her the personal escort of Mr. Salome, the adored teacher of their class. Yet Mrs. Jacques was a charming little old lady who would have commanded attention on her own merits in any less preoccupied assembly than that of the studio. Her exceedingly bright eyes and her exceedingly white hair seemed to accentuate her animation of manner; there was so much sparkle in her face that even her silence did not lack point.

She had accomplished her tortuous passage among the easels without meeting with any mishaps in the shape of Cremnitz-white or crimson-lake. She had paused occasionally and had bestowed a critical nod upon the one “blocked-in” countenance, or had drawn her brows together questioningly over a study in which the nose had a startlingly finished appearance in a still sketchy environment, but not until she had successfully avoided the last easel, planted at an erratic angle just where the unwary would be sure to stub his toe, did she make any remark.

“A lot of them, aren’t there?” she observed.

“Yes, the school is pretty full,” Mr. Salome replied. “In fact, we’re a little bothered for room.”

“Any imagination among them?”

“Well, as to that, it’s rather early to form an opinion. Our aim just now is to keep them to facts. Some of them,” the artist added with a smile, “are rather too much inclined to draw upon their imagination. Now there is one girl there who is, humanly speaking, certain to paint the model’s hair jet-black, or as black as paint can be made. And yet, you see, there is not a black thread in it.”

“I wonder whether you would object to my making an experiment?” Mrs. Jacques asked, abruptly.

And from that seemingly unpremeditated question of Mrs. Jacques’, and from the consultation that ensued, grew the Prize Contest, destined to be famous in the annals of the school.

When, on that very afternoon, the students were assembled for the occasion, they had not yet had time to adjust their minds to the magnitude of the interests involved. Yet the conditions were simple enough. That student who should, in the space of two hours, produce the best composition illustrative of “Hope” was to receive a prize of five hundred dollars! The conviction prevailed among them that the vivacious little old lady with the white hair could be none other than the fairy godmother of nursery lore, and it was only too delightful to find that agile and beneficent myth interesting herself in the cause of Art.

When once the class was fairly launched upon its new emprise, a change in the usual aspect of things became apparent. In the first place, most of the students were seated; for, in a task of pure composition, there was no occasion either for standing or for “prowling,” – the term familiarly applied to the sometimes disastrous backward and forward movements of which mention has been made, and which ordinarily gave so much action to the scene. Furthermore, the use of watercolor, as lending itself more readily than oils to rapid execution, deprived the scene of one of its most picturesque features, – namely, the brilliant-hued palette which, with its similarity to a shield, was wont to lend its bearer an Amazonian air, not lost upon the class caricaturists. Subdued, however, and almost “lady-like” as the appearance of the class had become, hardly half an hour had passed before the genial spirit of creation had so taken possession of the assembly as to cast a glow and glamour of its own upon it. Here and there, to be sure, might still be seen an anxious, intent young face with eyes fixed upon vacancy, or an idle, if somewhat begrimed and parti-coloured hand, fiercely clutching a dejected head; but nearly all were already busily at work, eagerly painting, or as eagerly obliterating strokes too hastily made. The subject, hackneyed as it certainly is, had pleased and stimulated the girls. There was a mingled vagueness and familiarity in its suggestion which puzzled them and spurred them on at the same time.

Among the most impetuous workers, almost from the outset, was Artful Madge. She had instantly conceived of Hope as a vague, beckoning figure, which was to take its significance from the multitude and variety of its followers. She chose a large sheet of paper and quickly sketched in the upper left-hand corner a very indefinite hint of a winged, luminous something, – it might have been an angel or a bird or a cloud, seen from a great distance, against a somewhat threatening sky. Without defining the form at all she very cleverly produced an impression of receding motion; – she ventured even to hope that there was something alluring in the motion. That, however, must be made unmistakably clear through the pursuing figures with which she proposed to fill the foreground.

She glanced at Eleanor, who had not yet mixed a colour.

“What are you waiting for?” she asked.

“I don’t seem ready to begin,” said Eleanor, in an absent tone of voice.

“Have you got an idea?”

“I think so.”

“Then do hurry up and go ahead, or you’ll get left.”

Madge sat a moment, looking straight before her.

“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 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.

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 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.

A moment later the studio was in a tumult. The sketches had been handed over to the three judges, who had gone into instant consultation over them. Mrs. Jacques had decreed, with characteristic decision, that the judges were bound to be as prompt as the competitors, and the award was promised within half an hour. What wonder if the usual tumult of dispersion was increased tenfold by the excitement of the occasion? The voices were pitched in a higher key, the easels clattered more noisily than ever, there was a more lively movement among the many-hued aprons, as they were pulled off and consigned with many a shake and a flourish to their respective pegs.

“What did you paint?” asked one high voice, whose owner was enthusiastically shaking the water from her paint-brush all over the floor.

“I painted you – working for the prize.”

“Not really!”

“Yes, really! You were just at the right angle for it, and you did look so hopeful!”

“You can’t make me believe you played such a shabby trick upon me, Mary Downing!”

“Shabby! If you knew how good-looking you were at a three-eighths’ angle you would be grateful to me! You did have such an inspired look for a little while, – before you got disgusted, and began to wash out.”

“Jane Rhoades did an awfully pretty thing – a white bird with a boy running after it. But I felt perfectly certain that the little wretch had a gun in his other hand!”

“What a fiery head you gave your angel, Mattie Stiles! He looked like Loge in Rheingold!”

“I don’t care,” said Mattie, in a tone of voice that showed that she did care very much indeed. “I do like red hair, and we haven’t had a chance to paint any all winter.”

“Red hair wouldn’t make Titians of us,” sighed Miss Isabella Ricker, who was of a despondent temperament.

“It wouldn’t be any hindrance, anyhow!” Mattie insisted.

Meanwhile the half-hour was drawing to a close. A general air of rough order had descended upon the studio. The girls were sitting or standing about in groups, their remarks getting more disjointed and irrelevant as the nervousness of anticipation grew upon them. Madge and Eleanor had found a seat on the steps of the platform. The former was making a pencil sketch of Miss Isabella Ricker, who had abandoned herself to dejection in a remote corner of the room. Madge looked up suddenly, and found that Eleanor was watching her work.

“Your thing is very interesting,” she remarked, in a reserved tone, which, nevertheless, sent the colour mounting slowly up her friend’s sensitive cheek. They both understood that no more commendatory adjective than “interesting” was to be found in the art-student’s vocabulary.

“You’re partial, Madge.”

“Not a bit of it. But I know an interesting thing when I see it. If you win the prize,” she asked abruptly, “what shall you do with the money?”

“If you go to the moon next week, what shall you do with the green cheese?” Eleanor retorted, with an unprecedented outburst of sarcasm.

“I think you might answer my question,” said Madge; and at that instant the door opened and a hush fell upon the room.

The suspense was not painfully prolonged. The Curator of the Art Museum, who had been associated with Mrs. Jacques and Mr. Salome as judge, stepped upon the platform, from which Madge and Eleanor had precipitately retreated, and made the following announcement:

“We have, on the whole,” he said, “been very well pleased with the work we have had to consider. In fact, several of the sketches were better than anything we had looked for. Nevertheless our decision was not a difficult one, and our choice is unanimous. The prize which Mrs. Jacques has had the originality and the generosity to offer has been awarded to Mary Eleanor Merritt.”

“And now will you answer my question?”

Madge and Eleanor were walking home together through the light snow which had just begun to fall. They had been curiously shy of speaking, and, before the silence was broken, a pretty wreath of snow had formed itself about the rim of each of their black felt hats, while little ribbons of it were decorating the folds of their garments.

“What are you going to do with your green cheese?”

“I shall go to Paris next autumn,” said Eleanor, tightly clasping the check which she held inside her muff.

“That’s what I thought,” said Madge; and if her eyes grew a trifle red and moist it was perhaps natural enough, since the snow was flying straight into them.

CHAPTER II
THE MINIATURE

“What makes you keep looking at me, Eleanor Merritt? You’re not a bit of a good model!”

Thus reproved, Eleanor once more fixed her eyes upon a very bad oil-portrait of Great-grandfather Burtwell, an elderly man of a wooden countenance, in stock and choker, surmounting an expanse of black broadcloth which occupied two-thirds of the canvas.

The girls were established in what was known as the spare-room of the Burtwell house, which, with its north light and usual freedom from visitors made a very good studio. Madge was painting a miniature of Eleanor. The diminutive size of her undertaking was causing her a good deal of embarrassment, and she was consequently inclined to be rather severe with her sitter.

“You know I am not going to have many more chances of looking at you for a year to come,” Eleanor urged, in a tone of meek dejection.

“And I can’t see you, even now,” Madge persisted, “if you don’t turn more toward the light.”

There was silence again for some minutes, while Madge painted steadily on. Difficult as was this new task which she had set herself, she was captivated with it. However the miniature might turn out as a likeness, she felt sure that each stroke of her brush was making a prettier picture of it. The eyes already had the real Eleanor look, and the hair was “pretty nice.” The mouth was troublesome, to be sure, and to-day she did not feel inspired to improve it, and had turned her attention to less important details.

“You’ve got such a pretty ear!” she remarked presently, as she touched its outermost rim with a hair line, cocking her head to one side, the while, in a very professional manner; “Did you ever notice what a pretty ear you have?”

“Better be careful how you talk about it,” Eleanor laughed, “for fear it should begin to burn!”

The artist looked in some trepidation at the feature in question, but its soft hue did not deepen. She took the precaution, however, to change the subject; to one which she often chose, indeed, for the sake of the animation it brought into the pretty face of her model. Eleanor’s “repose” sometimes bothered her.

“What shall you do the first day in Paris?” Madge asked.

“I shall write to you.”

“Good gracious! You won’t write to me before you have seen the Louvre!”

“I shall write to you the very first minute. And then I shall write again that same evening, and tell you whether there really is a Louvre! If there shouldn’t be one, you know, I shouldn’t feel so like a pig in being there without you!”

“You needn’t feel like a pig, as far as that goes,” said Madge. “I couldn’t have gone to Paris if I had won the prize.”

“Why not?”

“Well, I had it out with Father this morning. He says it’s not a mere matter of money; that if he and Mother thought well of my going, they could manage it.”

“O Madge! Can’t you make them think well of it?”

“I’m afraid not. Father never did really believe in my going in for art, and I think he believes in it less now than he ever did. He says I’ve been at it for three years, and I haven’t painted a pretty picture yet. And he says he doesn’t see what good it’s going to do me in after-life; that if I marry I sha’n’t keep it up, and there wouldn’t be any good in my trying to; – which is, of course a mistake, only I can’t make him believe that it is, – and he says that if I don’t marry, I’ve got to earn my living sooner or later.”

“Why, but that’s just it, Madge! You’re going to be able to earn your living! You’re sure to!”

But Madge was again engrossed in her work. The afternoon would soon draw to a close, and if she wished to carry out her designs upon that ear it behooved her to stop talking. Though her little picture was an oval of three inches by four, it had cost her more strokes than any canvas of ten times the size had ever done. And Eleanor was to sail in a fortnight!

At last the light began to fade, and Madge knew that she must stop.

“What do you suppose Father said to me this morning?” she asked, as she washed out her brushes and put her paint-box in order.

“I can’t imagine.”

“Well, he said that when any good judge thought my pictures worth paying for in good hard cash, it would be time to think of sending me ‘traipsing over the world with my paint-pot.’ He said that if I would come to him with a fifty-dollar bill of my own earning he should begin to think there was some sense in my art-talk.”

“Did he really say that? Why, Madge, who knows?”

Madge had shut up her paint-box and moved to the window, where she was gloomily looking down into her neighbours’ backyards.

“If you mean Noah’s Dove,” she said, “You might as well give him up. He’s come back for the thirteenth time.”

Now “Noah’s Dove” was the name which Madge had bestowed upon a small bundle of pen-and-ink sketches which she had been sending about to the illustrated papers for two or three months past, and which had earned their name by the persistency with which they had found their way back again. The girls had both thought them funny and original; indeed Eleanor, with the partiality of one’s best friend, did not hesitate to pronounce them better than many of the things that got accepted. Up to this time, however, no editor had seemed disposed to recognise their merits, and they had been repeatedly and ignominiously rejected.

“But you’ll keep on sending them, won’t you, Madge?” Eleanor insisted.

“Of course I shall, as long as there is a picture-paper left in the country; though the postage does cost an awful lot!”

The sun had set, and a tinge of rosy colour was spreading across the northern sky behind the chimneys. The girls stood silent for a moment, watching the colour deepen, while a wistful look came into Eleanor’s face.

“After all, Madge,” she said; “it must be nice to have somebody think for you, even when he doesn’t think the way you want him to.”

“Oh, of course, Father’s a dear. I don’t suppose I would swap him off, even for Paris!”

“I wish I could even remember my father or my mother, or anybody that really belonged to me!” Eleanor said; then, feeling that she was making an appeal for sympathy, a thing which she was principled against doing, she turned her eyes away from the tender, beguiling colour behind the chimneys, and looked, instead, at the big oil portrait on the wall. “It’s something to have even a painted grandfather of your own!” she declared.

“How I should love to give you mine!” laughed Madge. “He’s such a horrible daub, and I should so like to have the frame when it comes time to exhibit! You would not insist upon having him in a frame, would you, Nell?”

Presently the girls went down-stairs together and Eleanor stayed to tea, and told the family all about her Paris plans, and how she felt like a pig to be going without Madge. And all the time, as she talked to these kindly, sympathetic people, it seemed to her that Madge was even more to be envied than she; and she wished she knew how to say so in an acceptable manner. But Eleanor found as much difficulty as most of us do, in expressing our best and truest thoughts, and so the Burtwell family never knew what a heart-warming impression they had made upon their guest.

Eleanor had lived for the past three years with a married cousin, a daughter of the not particularly congenial or affectionate Aunt Sarah, now deceased, who had brought her up from babyhood. The gentle, sensitive girl, with the artistic temperament, had never been happy with her cousin, though the latter was far from suspecting the fact. Mrs. Hamilton Hicks was fond of Eleanor, or imagined herself to be so, and she always gave her young cousin her due share of credit, in view of the fact that they had “never had any words together.” Nevertheless, she had acceded very readily to the Paris plan, and had herself taken pains to find a suitable chaperon for the young traveller.

The result was, that on the fifteenth of September Eleanor went forth into the great world in company with a lively and voluble Frenchwoman, a lady whom she had seen but twice before in her life, who had promised to establish her in a good private family in Paris. And since Mrs. Hamilton Hicks had negotiated the arrangement, its success was a foregone conclusion.

When Madge left the railway station after bidding Eleanor good-bye, and stepped out into the crowded city thoroughfare, the world seemed to her very empty and desolate, in spite of the multitude of her fellow-creatures who jostled against her. She could think of nothing but Eleanor, standing on the platform of the car as the train moved out of the station, and she was desperately sorry to have lost the last sight of her friend’s tearful face, because of a curious blur that had come over her own eyes at the moment. At the recollection, she mechanically put her hand into her pocket in search of the miniature which she usually carried about with her. She had left it at home lest she should lose it in the crowded railway station. It gave her a pang not to find it, and she made up her mind then and there that she would never go without it again.

The moment she reached her own room she seized the picture and had a good look at it. She had placed it in the inner gilt rim of an old daguerreotype, which set it off very nicely. She had discarded the hard leather daguerreotype case, as being too clumsy to carry about in her pocket, and in its place had made a sort of pocket-book of red morocco which was a sufficient protection for the glass, in her careful keeping.

She had never liked the picture so well as she did to-day, for she thought of it now for the first time, not as a work of art, but as a likeness, and imperfect as it was, even from that point of view, it gave her very great pleasure to look at it. Yes, decidedly, she must always have it by her hereafter; and she slipped it into her pocket while she made herself ready for tea.

But supposing she should have her pocket picked! A pickpocket, she reflected, might, in the hastiness which must always characterise his operations, mistake the little leather case for a purse, and then – how should she ever get the precious miniature back again? “Not that he would want to keep it,” she said to herself, as she took it out once more for a parting look, – “unless he should lose his heart to that ear!” – and she regarded the tiny pink object with pardonable pride. But with the best intentions in the world, how would he be able to restore it? She must put her address in the case; that would be a simple matter.

An hour later, the family were gathered about the great round table in the pleasant sitting-room, pursuing their various avocations by the light of an excellent argand burner. Mr. Burtwell was reading his evening paper, imparting occasional choice bits to his wife and his eldest daughter, Julia, who were dealing with a heap of mending. The two younger children were playing lotto, while Ned was having a hand-to-hand tussle with his Cicero, a foeman likely to prove worthy of his steel.