Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/119

 and see credulously! A third Benedictine was of no help whatever: it softened the outlines instead of giving them an edge.

He resharpened his charcoal and filled a page of a sketch block with studies of the cat that had begged him for part of his excellent lunch. The cat scratching, the cat washing her face, the cat yawning, the cat sound asleep—and it was already four-thirty. Oh Time in thy flight! Real artists, he was thinking, don't approach their Muse so gingerly; they take her by storm, the brutes. Unlike real artists I have only a finite capacity for taking pains; it would therefore seem that I am no genius.

Painting was like fishing. It was one thing to lie on the bank of a stream and watch flashing ideas dart in and out amongst the mysterious mosses, but it was quite another to be a clever angler and induce them to attach themselves to your expedient hook. And if by chance you did succeed in landing one, you were disheartened at the utter unattractiveness of the thing as it lay gasping and moribund at your feet, reproaching you for having wheedled it out of its setting, resisting you with its last volt of energy. Even Mona Lisa, compared with the image on the painter's retina, was a fish out of water. And how infinitely far removed from her was anything you might ever hope to depict.

So with those damn chimneys. Here one sat, seeing a perfect allegory: man-made clouds of smoke