Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/118

 tal machinery that never knocked or missed—even though their mouths might be in ruins.

It was flattering too to be taken automatically for an artiste-peintre.

Lunch could be protracted, for there was any amount of time—oh any! It was frightening to think of the myriad things there weren't to do. Never in your life had there been so many. But in twenty-four hours the schedule would be in operation, then time would come back into scale. Meanwhile there was a patient landscape waiting to be recorded on a brand new sheet of oatmeal paper, and the whole afternoon in which to do it. The little island in the middle, the canal boats trailing off toward the left, the poplar's on parade, and the whole composition would lead up to the group of factory chimneys to the right,—a modern pastoral, with industry invading the meadows.

After his second Benedictine, and his fifth or sixth cigarette, he stationed himself in an advantageous corner of the garden. He was feeling uncomfortably responsible. Having come for the ostensible purpose of painting, he couldn't put it off any longer without compromising his gentlemanly understanding with himself. Of course he was perfectly willing to paint, but he dreaded the straining and tightening process which would be entailed by trying to bring "composition" out of the pretty disorder before his eyes. It was so hard to see a tree as a tree and not as a bundle of branches. If one could only be as a little child