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Title: The Amouretta landscape, and other stories

Author: Adeline Adams

Release date: January 5, 2025 [eBook #75047]

Language: English

Original publication: Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1922

Credits: The Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE AMOURETTA LANDSCAPE, AND OTHER STORIES ***






THE AMOURETTA LANDSCAPE

AND OTHER STORIES




                                   The
                           Amouretta Landscape
                            And Other Stories

                                    By
                              Adeline Adams

                              [Illustration]

                           Boston and New York
                         Houghton Mifflin Company
                      The Riverside Press Cambridge
                                   1922

                    COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY ADELINE ADAMS

                           ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

                           The Riverside Press
                        CAMBRIDGE · MASSACHUSETTS
                          PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.




CONTENTS


    THE AMOURETTA LANDSCAPE                1

    BITS OF CLAY                          45

    THE YOUNG LADY IN BLUE                57

    “C’EST UNE TAUPE”                     96

    THEIR APPOINTED ROUNDS               105

    SPEAKING OF ANGELS                   141

    THE MARQUIS GOES DONKEY-RIDING       168

    THE FACE CALLED FORGIVENESS          198

    THE ARTIST’S BIRTHDAY                228




THE AMOURETTA LANDSCAPE


I

If you search from Greenwich Village to Lawrence Park, and then from
Turtle Bay to Chelsea, you will not find in all New York a painter less
spoiled by fame than Maurice Price. It was in his nature to know from
the very first that the luckier you are, the kinder you can be. I do not
regard it as a limitation that in what he does and in what he wears he
scarcely satisfies the romantic ideal about artists and their ways. There
is nothing wild in his attire, and he does not live more dangerously
than other citizens must. Still, there is something about his type of
good looks that sets him apart and gives him away. Those who see him for
the first time, in profile, whether at the Follies or at a funeral of an
Academician, sometimes think that if they knew the man, they would esteem
him more than they would love him. That is because they have not yet met
him in front view, and discovered the eager friendliness in his gray
eyes, the sensitive, listening expression of his whole face; the look
that says, “Tell me your joke in life, and I’ll tell mine.” His merry
young wife had once declared that there were only two things that saved
his head from an intolerable Greek goddishness. Maurice’s curiosity was
roused, but the girl had kept him guessing until the end of the week,
when she explained that one of the things was his right ear, the other,
his left; both of them stuck out more than the classic law allowed; just
as well, too; since, for her part, she had preferred to marry a man, not
an archangel or a Greek coin. The man smiled, and kept on painting.

A time came when Maurice Price, suddenly finding himself in a new
environment, remembered that in ten years he had not once painted a
landscape from nature. As he stood in the wide doorway of his friend’s
country studio, and gazed with delight at the springtime beauty of the
New Hampshire hills flung down at his feet, the fact that during a whole
decade his painting had been done within doors and under glass struck him
as an absurdity, even a reproach. Ah, well, those who go about calling
ten years a whole decade must expect reproach, he reasoned. They bring it
on themselves.

Besides, the situation was explicable enough. Ever since he and his
wife had said good-bye to their cottage near Fontainebleau, exchanging
the joys of study in France for the responsibilities of family life in
their own land, his work had been chiefly portraits, with an occasional
welcome mural decoration to break the monotony of rosy lips, shimmering
pearls, crisp satins; of academic robes, frock coats, tennis trousers,
and whatever else a modern portrait-painter must cope valiantly with,
on canvas. Not that Maurice was weary of his good fortune in having
portraits to do. He often said, with that frank yet pensive smile of
his, that every sitter on earth has some personal quality which, if seen
aright, can alleviate if not actually elevate our art. Hence, after
every excursion into the field of mural decoration, he returned with new
zest to his girls with pearls, his dowagers, his bankers; while after
every surfeit of our common humanity as shown up in a north light, he
seized with ardor the chance to depict on the walls of some library or
court-house those various fables of antiquity which seem to shed the most
pleasing light on the fables of our modern civilization. But never a
landscape!

Naturally, his decorations and even his portraits often had landscape
backgrounds. Fancy our Agriculture without her wheatfields, or our Mining
Industry without her tumbled hills, or a Bridal at Glen Cove without blue
skies, lovely leafage, a beauty-haunted marble vase, a teasing vista
where Pan might lurk unseen! But very properly, such backgrounds as these
were merely arrangements, or, as one might say, apt quotations from
nature; they did not pretend to report passionate personal interviews
with her. Maurice Price loved to paint such backgrounds. Whether in a
tranquil or a stormy mood, he always kept the hope of distilling beauty
for the ages. And he knew that the backgrounds had their part in that
enterprise of his.

In his golden twenties, he had been a singularly diligent lover and
student of landscape. Many an elder painter might have envied him his
portfolios stuffed with first-hand information and first-hand illusion
concerning rocks and seas, skies and fields, trees and hills, and all
the rainbow hues and lights and darks that visited them in their repose,
their shifting moods, their crises. Maurice in the late thirties often
stood in awe of that far-off Maurice of the early twenties, who seemed
to know so much even then of the painter’s magic book of all outdoors.
To-day, he wondered whether he could beat his younger self in the game
that is played on canvas with brushes, under the sky, with everything
more or less astir, and nothing at all ever quite the same as it was a
moment before, least of all in its colors and values.

After that devastating influenza of March, his seldom-needed doctor
had ordered a few weeks’ complete rest. “Complete piffle,” Price had
growled. Nevertheless, when his friend James Anthony, a painter given
to unexpected withdrawals and fresh beginnings in art, had offered him
an opportunity for an entire change of scene, he had accepted. Anthony,
always as keen as any Vibert or Abendroth in his pursuit of the secrets
of the old masters, had suddenly decided to go abroad to study certain
gums and resins that might eventually preserve our American painting from
destruction. Anthony was like that. He was successful enough and wealthy
enough to be as whimsically conscientious as he pleased about pigments
and surfaces. He could afford to keep a bee in his hat, and call it
altruism. And now, the bee having stung him afresh, that wonderful hill
studio of his was at Maurice’s disposal.

“You will be doing me a favor,” wrote Jimmy Anthony, “if you’ll take it,
even for this one summer. There are two sculptors hounding me to rent it
to them, a man and a woman. The man I can beat off, but the woman will
work her will and get the place and wreck it for me, if you don’t come to
the rescue. I can stand a painter’s rubbish, but sculptors! No, no, not
for Jimmy. And please use up whatever you find in the line of materials.
There’s nothing there of any further interest to me. You might like all
that garance rose doré, and that pomegranate cadmium I used to swear by.
And those mahogany panels that I had especially made. Do use them. Good
on both sides, and bully for landscapes.”

When Price, after a look of delight at the spring magic framed by the
doorway, had turned to examine his new quarters, he was not surprised
that Anthony had shunned sculptors as tenants. He could not imagine the
litter of clay and plaster, wet rags and greasy plastiline, defiling
that spacious immaculate hall and its dependencies, all contrived by his
friend out of a hay-barn and stable used by the roadhouse gentry of a
hundred years ago. Boxstalls made excellent dressing-rooms for models.
Harness-closets gave ample space for easels and canvases, frames and
colors. The north light was vast, but could be curtained at any point.
The great door of the former hayloft was a proscenium arch through which
one could look east, south, and west, upon various enchanted worlds.
Again and again, that southern picture called aloud to Price to be
painted. He found himself saying, “I will!” with the exultation of a man
about to be married for the first time.

His own materials had not yet arrived; his wife, a doctor-abiding person,
had seen to that; she too had picked up that annoying slogan, a complete
rest! Perhaps Anthony’s closets would give first aid. Yes, there were
plenty of brushes and colors, all in good condition; easels great and
small; and such a panoply of varnishes and mediums as Price himself had
never dreamed of needing. No wonder Anthony’s painting ran rather hectic,
at times; he had too much stuff to paint with, yes, too much by far. His
canvases were overdressed, by Jove! Pluming himself a bit on his own very
simple palette, which he naturally regarded as an evidence of a higher
culture than Anthony’s (just as the Doric lay in literature is finer
than the Corinthian ode, he told himself), Maurice picked out from a
bewildering variety the ten colors of his heart’s desire, including the
garance rose. He looked indulgently, but not self-indulgently, on the
pomegranate cadmium, as on a pretty lady he had no wish to flirt with.

Still searching, he laughed outright to find on an upper shelf the
selfsame palette that Anthony had so often bragged about, at the Club,
and (to judge from its pristine appearance) had so seldom used, in the
studio. It was a rather large palette, acquired at no small cost by
Anthony, during his period of trying out dear Shorty Lasar’s theory,
namely: that when seen on the dull brownish wood of the ordinary palette,
any color, no matter how muddy, looks bright and pure, luring the painter
to his ruin; whereas, when shown on a brilliant, untarnished surface, say
that of pearl or of ivory, the same color is revealed at once in all its
foulness. “Nothing like mother-of-pearl,” Jimmy would say, “for exposing
the true soul of a gob of paint!” And Anthony’s Club-famous palette,
which Maurice now held in his hand, had been inlaid with pearl from
stem to stern, a splendor which had added somewhat to its weight. Price
balanced it between thumb and fingers, a little patronizingly, perhaps,
as may well happen when a man takes up another’s palette, especially a
palette more famed in theory than in practice. Not that he wanted to
quarrel with the tools he was lucky enough to find; anything in reason
would do.

As for the mahogany panels, he would gratefully use one of those, at
a pinch. It had not the kind of surface he preferred, his way being
to use a rather absorbent canvas, preparing the surface to suit the
needs of the work in hand. But here again, Maurice was not hide-bound.
Surface wasn’t the only thing; it would be a poor painter who would let
a marvel-landscape like that go unpainted, merely because he hadn’t a
fine new roll of canvas to slash into. He was glad to find, in that
inexhaustible closet, half a dozen of those panels; baywood or cherry,
perhaps, though his friend always called them mahogany. Running eager
fingers over them, he found that the one he liked best for size and
solidity, for shape and texture, had already been used, on one side; but
that mattered not at all. He knew Anthony’s three-layered panels; both
sides were good.

On bringing the panel of his choice out into the full light, he was first
dazzled and then puzzled by the painting on it. Was this really Anthony’s
work? Theory-ridden as he was, Anthony had certainly painted queer stuff,
at times. But Maurice could not insult his friend’s hospitality by taking
this weird performance in earnest. Its style out-Jimmied Jimmy. Yet it
seemed brilliantly familiar; it had Anthony mannerisms.

Then memory suddenly turned her flashlight on the thing, and told him
why it seemed familiar. Three years before, on the eve of sailing for
the Front, he had visited Anthony, and the two had inspired the boys and
girls of the artist colony to organize a “Faker Show” for the benefit of
the French wounded; children, models, and even the artists themselves
had vied with each other in producing caricatured art. The most wildly
acclaimed piece had been this very panel, painted in a joyous hour by
Anthony’s studio-boy, Pietro, from Anthony’s model, Amouretta McGowan; to
save time, he had used one of his master’s discarded portrait-studies,
and he had kept the characteristic Anthony composition throughout.

It was meant for a portrait, one saw,—the portrait of a woman, a hussy,
if you like, with dusky flesh-tints after Gauguin, and with an impudent
gown patterned and colored like that in Matisse’s once celebrated “Madras
Rouge.” But the pearls with which the minx was crowned and girdled,
draped and festooned,—ah, the pearls were surely a fling at Maurice Price
himself, “the Price-of-Great-Pearls,” as the League students called
him, just as in other days they had called Kenyon Cox, “Bunion Socks,”
George de Forest Brush, “Young-Man-Afraid-of-his-Brushes,” and Augustus
Saint-Gaudens, “Gaudy Saint August”; youthful pleasantries which harmed
no one, least of all the artists themselves.

Once again Maurice laughed aloud as he recalled how earnestly he had
explained to his students his method in painting pearls, telling them
of the many slow and careful studies he had made of pearls before he
had really mastered the mystery of pearls, and much else, after the
manner of enthusiastic and self-giving teachers the world over. In
general, the youngsters had listened and profited; otherwise, they
would have been donkeys. Also, they had jeered and jested; otherwise,
Maurice thought, they would have been prigs. And that nickname, “the
Price-of-Great-Pearls,” had clung to him, in a heart-warming way. He
felt that if his students had given him no title at all, he would have
suffered some vague loneliness of spirit when among them.

Astonishing how Pietro, in one piece of brilliant painting, had succeeded
in poking fun at two Frenchmen and two Americans! Certainly, Anthony’s
well-studied devil-may-care composition showed doubly riotous after that
boy had wreaked his genius on it; and the pearls, as Maurice saw with
a twinge of gratification, were exquisitely painted, if you considered
them as giant opalescent lamps filched from some moonlit fairyland,
and not as gems discreetly adorning a woman. And then the Gauguin
coloring, the Matisse arabesques! As a final flourish, like the “I
thank you” after a four-minute speech, Pietro had signed the work “the
Price-of-Great-Pearls.” Maurice found, on looking for that signature,
that some later jester had obliterated from it all but the one word,
“Price.” Price, indeed!

Maurice’s smile faded away into mere pensiveness as he recalled both
Pietro and Amouretta. The boy, in all his vivid brightness of youth, had
died suddenly from the epidemic in which Maurice himself had suffered,
while Amouretta—

Her real name was not Amouretta. No one’s is. She was just Anna
McGowan, golden and rosy, with hair and complexion that would have been
beyond belief if she had not insisted on showing every artist (and more
especially his wife) just how far her hair fell below her knees and just
how it grew around her temples; because, as she said, it was where the
hair started and where it left off that all that nasty peroxide business
gave those others away, poor things! Also, she would press her finger
on her cheek and lips, so that their roses would vanish and return, as
if an electric button had been touched. She loved to have the wives see
that, too. There was nothing false about Amouretta. From her golden
topknot to her pink toes, she was as good a girl, all in all, as ever
hopped high-heeled from a painter’s studio to a picture-studio (two quite
different arenas), in the effort to make both ends meet, and then cross
over. “It’s the cross-over that counts,” Amouretta used to say; “there’s
where the joy in life appears.” The name Amouretta was a business
concession to the picture industry and to the small vaudeville shows in
which she worked when posing was slack.

A singularly vivid personality, that child; her adventures, like her
hair and her complexion, sometimes seemed fabulous, at first glance,
but always gained new lustre after investigation. For instance, there
was on her shoulder a tiny red mark, which she said was due to a bite
she had received at the Kilkenny Ball, from a mad and anonymous devotee
of beauty. Could any one altogether believe that? Nevertheless, young
Cavendish (whom she had never known or even seen), on coming to himself
the day after, had confessed himself publicly, in an agony of shame. He
had taken a bite of a peach in passing; he didn’t know why, Lord help
him; and from that hour he was nevermore the strayed reveller we once
had known, but settled down into blameless and uninteresting eclipse.
Then again, there came a morning when Amouretta, posing in a green
satin bodice as an understudy for an overworked “bud,” whose portrait
Maurice Price was painting, had yielded to that self-revealing mood to
which all models are at times given; she confided to our painter that
she was engaged to be married to a middle-aged admirer, a man of great
wealth, whose name she would not tell until the engagement was publicly
announced. Could not Mr. Price guess? She meant to give up both stage and
model-stand, of course; why, she had given up cigarettes already for
that man, because he had said that the men of his family didn’t like them
for ladies. “And he was so dear, when he said it.”

Amouretta’s brilliant blush came and went so often during her story, and
finally stayed so long, that it played the very deuce with Maurice’s
entire morning; you know how difficult it is to paint emerald satin when
the wearer is blushing; the green and the red come to blows. And Maurice,
who had two daughters of his own, howbeit small, was really worried,
until one afternoon at the Century, Mr. William Saltonstall, long of
limb, lineage, and purse,—a man of undoubted probity, and a collector,
too!—had touched him on the shoulder, and poured out the whole story of
his love for Amouretta. The wedding was to be at Saint Barnaby’s, in
June. There could be no doubt as to Mr. Saltonstall’s self-surrender;
love at first sight it was, that day in the studio when Maurice had
introduced a patron of beauty to beauty herself. Naturally the painter
was delighted with this idyl—its delicate fragrance, its perfect
flowering; all unconsciously, he himself had sown the seed, his wife and
Amouretta smiling wisely thereafter at his blindness. He had always
liked William Saltonstall, and none the less because that gentleman was
not one whom every one called Bill.

After the engagement, Amouretta continued to work, because, valiant
little soul, she meant to earn her own trousseau. No man not a relative
should be able to say he had done that for her; and I’m thinking it
would be a long day before either her father or her brother, in their
good-natured shiftlessness, could provide the outfit she had in mind! But
there was no June wedding at Saint Barnaby’s, after all; for Amouretta
caught a fatal chill one raw night at the Revelries, while posing as
Innocence, insufficiently clad in white paint and a scrap of georgette,
in one of those pure-white sculpture groups which occasionally reappear
in refined vaudeville.

And there was nothing more that could ever happen now to Pietro and
Amouretta, thought Maurice. For one as for the other, their story of
bright youth was ended. For Pietro, no daring assault upon the Roman
Prize; for Amouretta, no adventure of any color at all, not even that
climax of white satin train and flower-girls at Saint Barnaby’s. Maurice
sighed as he took up a large flat brush and charged it with gray paint
to obliterate the caricature. A few vigorous strokes would suffice. But
he could not bring himself to do what he intended. He started back as if
he had hurt himself. Or had young hands pushed him back? Surely there
was something in that quaint, brilliant, impudent creature smiling on
him—some hint or vestige of that which was once Amouretta—Amouretta who
threw a kiss to the world, and was gone. And what was he, successful
Maurice Price, that he should go about with brutal paint to hush up
forever young Pietro’s jest? No, no, he could not do that. It was not
fair, not sportsmanlike. Live and let live!

He examined all the other panels, but their shapes and sizes were not
right. “Oh, well, I don’t give a damn,” lied Maurice to himself. He lit
a cigarette, but the landscape came between him and his smoke. He picked
up a frayed copy of “La Reine Margot,” but the landscape shut out Saint
Bartholomew. He sat a moment in Anthony’s Venetian chair, and covered
his eyes with his hands, but between his eyes and his hands he saw only
the miracle landscape. So he rose resolutely, took up the panel of his
choice, the Amouretta panel, and began to paint on its untouched side. A
beautifully primed surface lent itself at once to the artist’s will.


II

“In the midst of death we are in life,” he murmured. Below, in the
orchard, his wife was carolling old French songs with the children. “_On
y danse, on y danse!_” Even Maury junior, a boy to the backbone, and
little given to self-expression in song, especially foreign-language
song, boomed out a mighty “_Tout en ronde!_” Half an hour before,
Maurice senior had stood hand-in-hand with his wife, looking up into the
flowery dome of a magnificent pear tree, all aglow with golden-white
blossoms, all perfumed with their incense, and musical with legions of
bees. He knew just where to find those magic boughs in his landscape;
he recognized their golden-veiled whiteness, their garance rose. Left
and right the spendthrift river was pouring out its silver in a royal
progress, mile after mile in the May sunlight. Ascutney, the great
mountain that all the people thereabouts knew as their tutelary deity,
had chosen from his myriad mantles the one he might wear for an hour or
so, of an entrancing blue to mock the heavens themselves. Smilingly yet
warningly he confronted Maurice, singling him out from other persons, to
tell him in a secret, consoling way, of the generations of men, those
who had gone and those who were yet to come; yes, Ascutney spoke very
seriously with Maurice, reminding him of everything, whatever it might
be, that he, Maurice Price, in his great good fortune in art and life,
owed to those generations, and must joyfully repay, by painting as best
he might that lyric scene.

“Generation after generation,” thought Maurice, “but no longer Pietro
or little Amouretta.” Quivering with emotion as he was, he saw that
the passion and skill of that far-away Maurice of the twenties had not
vanished. Now, as then, he had in large measure the artist’s gift of
multiplying his personality when he was at work; his consciousness as an
artist rose many-mansioned toward the skies. With heart and mind swelling
from the scene he conned and created, he was at once the Maurice who did
not need a pearl palette to capture the glory of that violet-edged puff
of golden cloud over the meadow, who could hear the bees in the orchard,
who could see a jewelled indigo bird flaming out from the locust bush; a
Maurice whose whole being overflowed with returning health, with rapture
in painting, with pride in Maury junior, with love for the wife of his
delight, with affection for good old Jimmy Anthony, and yet a Maurice
with sharp remembrance of those vanished children of joy, Pietro and
Amouretta.

As he painted, he smiled often, because many persons, both living and
dead, came and ranged themselves beside him, and it was pleasant to be
talking with them, on that flowery hillside. Oh, Lionardo, of course, and
Père Corot; Monet and Pissarro; his own namesake, Maurice Denis, dear
Thayer of Monadnock, and John Sargent, since he too could do landscapes
and portraits and murals! And Whistler, certainly, though at times
he talked too much, interrupting quite scornfully while Maurice was
explaining to Lionardo how our American goldfinch beats his wings as he
sings; or else breaking in with a prickly jest when Maurice was giving M.
Monet his reasons why (with due respect, Monsieur!) he meant to paint all
day on that one landscape, instead of beginning another as soon as the
light should change.

Some of his younger friends came also. One would have said that half the
American Camouflage trooped in; little Robert, so strangely saved that
black night at Beaumetz-les-Cambrai; young Harry, born at the foot of
Ascutney—smiling Harry the sculptor, beside whom he himself had stood
unharmed, in the field by Reims, when a shell came, striking Harry to
nothingness; and Anthony’s nephew too, that portrait-painter whom the
papers had called brilliant-futured—debonair Charlie Anthony whom he
himself, merely Captain Price, under orders, had unknowingly despatched
to his doom. Maurice was used to that boy’s presence by now; the harsh
realities of dreams had often brought them together. Such things could
not be, and men remain dumb. All this and much more must be told in the
miracle landscape he was creating; it would be dishonest, otherwise. In
spirit, smiling Harry and his mates belonged to that scene. Even M. Monet
admitted that without doubt there is also this point of view. Not one of
those companions failed to understand why our painter had not blotted out
Pietro’s Amouretta. Not one of them was surprised when all of a sudden he
looked up from his own painting, to make sure that Pietro’s was right
side up, and uninjured by contact with the easel; Maurice laughing to
himself the while, and saying aloud, “I should worry!”

The critics declared later that this canvas was Price’s masterpiece.
They wrote of the monumental purple dignity of his mountain, the
self-contained inwardness of his middle distance, the happy audacity
of his flowery foreground. They might have found out, to be sure,
just by looking, that the painting was on wood, not canvas! But they
could not know how much of Reims and Beaumetz-les-Cambrai were playing
hide-and-seek among the shadows of Maurice’s mind when he set down
Ascutney in the mantle of the hour. They would have been startled out of
a day’s omniscience had they been aware of everything that Pietro and
Amouretta had contributed of their brave young substance to that smiling
foreground. So excuse them, please, for whatever was wrong in their
writings; they could not know, exactly, about Maurice; and after all,
they made a very good guess.


III

That summer, Maurice painted many other landscapes. There were falls,
brooks, and rocks in that glamorous country, and these he showed in
their beauty as he saw it. There was also an enchanted road under
enchanted pines, where he once beheld Paolo and Francesca walking at
twilight; this too became matter of record, to be taken up later and
played with for heart’s delight. Rumors of his latest work reached the
art galleries. New Yorkers know those galleries, dotting the Avenue from
the Library to the Plaza, and even blossoming out into side streets of
lower rental. And the merry war between artist and dealer, as eternal and
various (and perhaps as little reasonable) as the war between the sexes,
would be taken up with renewed vigor in the autumn. Price had received
letters from the Abingdon, the Buckminster, the Clarendon; from As You
Like It, even, as well as from Farintosh and from MacDuff. The letters
were similar in content; their writers had heard of his landscapes—a
new line for him, was it not? The buying public would be interested, of
course, and would he care to exhibit in their well-appointed galleries?
They would be glad to hear from him at his early convenience. Price
smiled, and answered, declining.

In fact, he was interested, not financially but sympathetically, in a
gallery from which he had received no letters;—an out-of-the-way little
gallery, a modest ground-floor-and-mezzanine affair slowly becoming
better known and liked as the Court of New Departures. He was interested
because this fantastically named refuge for originality in art was a
business venture (a venture that must be _made_ to succeed!) undertaken
by Hal Wrayne, a madcap young cousin. Hal Wrayne’s father had always kept
this only son of his well-supplied with means for cutting up harmless
capers, at school and in college; and Hal himself, both by nature and by
training the perfect comedian in life, had hardly stopped to ask where he
was going, all so joyous, until, on his father’s sudden death, he found
himself almost penniless, with a wife and baby daughter to support, and
with a mother and sister who needed his help.

But Hal did not wholly forswear the Comic Spirit even when he surveyed
the clouds on his horizon. The War had cut short his last year at law
school, but he knew enough to know that in his young hands the law
would be but a sorry staff of life for five persons, four of them in
petticoats. He had studied art, too, having been very fond of Cousin
Maurice, who had let him play about in the studio, one summer; indeed,
being clever and versatile, Hal had painted, under Maurice’s criticism,
a series of gay-garlanded borders to temper the austerity of certain
court-house decorations, and so had once really earned money as a
painter’s assistant. But a month among murals does not constitute a
career, Hal Wrayne saw. Art was even less likely than law to provide, all
at once, for his “little quartette of skirts,” as he cheerily called his
dependents, who varied in age from five months to fifty-five years. What
to do? It suddenly occurred to Hal that he might strike a happy medium by
running an art gallery.

“Art galleries nowadays,” said young Hal, “have got to have a punch to
’em. At least, the new ones have. You know—element of surprise, variety
the spice of life, the _dernier cri_ sort of thing. What little I know
about law will show me how far I can go, without being arrested for
speeding; and what little I know about art, if I spread it out thin
enough, ought to carry me along quite a ways.”

Maurice Price shook his head. Frankly, he saw nothing in it at all, for
Hal and his quartette. Nevertheless, Hal looked about manfully, head
up, early and late. He found an old stable with a loft, in the East
Fifties, and vigorously remodelled the building into a court with tiny
upstairs galleries, decorating court, staircase, and rooms in a somewhat
slapdash style, with results that were reminiscent both of his own room
at college and his cousin’s studio. As a nucleus for his first show,
he had several enigmatic Lithuanian sketches, painted with that fierce
peasant coloring which attracts jaded civilizations. There were also some
rather unusual unpublished posters by a needy French friend of Hal’s; and
by great good luck, he had obtained a whole sequence of Harriet Higsbee’s
famous landscape compositions in cut-up linoleum. (You remember Harriet
in Paris? How she never washed a paint-brush, or anything?) Between
the posters, the Lithuanian things and the linoleum, the Court of New
Departures was modestly beginning to keep its promises, even before
Hal, in a burst of inspiration, had arranged upon the staircase his own
private collection of humorous sculptures in the baser metals, among them
a certain ironic green elephant warranted to make the saddest mortal
smile again.

“You see,” he explained to the bewildered Maurice, “I want the tone of
this dive to be at once romantic, realistic, humorous, and ironic. I
guess I’ve captured it all, now.” Maurice sighed as he helped his cousin
to hang a pair of fine tapestries, begged from Hal’s trusting mother. “To
draw the dowagers,” Hal said.

Odd as it seemed to the elder man, the dowagers were really drawn. After
all, you never can tell; dowagers are not exempt. Through a judicious
one-by-one exposition (a Japanese idea, borrowed by Hal from The Book
of Tea), many valuable objects salvaged from the wreck of the Wrayne
fortunes were disposed of at excellent prices; and before the year was
out, the boy had succeeded in selling to his college friends, and their
friends, a goodly number of little pictures, studies and sketches,
mostly in the new manner, whatever that happened to be. His “quartette
of skirts,” far from being an encumbrance, were, so he stoutly declared,
“a high-class asset.” His sister Dodo was a wonder in throwing a bit of
bargain-counter drapery over a mission stool, so as to make you think of
a Doge’s palace. She and his wife organized those charming teas, which,
when presided over by his lady-mother, with her authentic air of _belle
Marquise_, made everything look thoroughly salable and artistic, from
those queer Lithuanian sketches to Hal’s own models for stage sets.
Prosperity was just around the corner; and the only singular circumstance
was, Hal began to have ideals. “No junk, girlie,” he would warn the
enterprising Dodo. “No Greenwich Village in mine! I mean to run a gallery
fit for a refined limousine trade, and I don’t want my clients to think
they’re slumming, just because I keep ’em in touch with the grand new
movements in art.”

Maurice Price looked on, fascinated by the spectacle of his young
relative’s start in a career that was neither law nor art, yet had been
suggested to Hal by his slender knowledge of both.

“Why don’t you send me up some of _your_ things?” the boy boldly asked
Maurice. “They would sell like hot cakes, mixed in with my regular stuff.”

And Maurice, full of good-will, had replied, “Perhaps I may, if I can
look up some inexpensive little bits your customers might like.”

“Not on your tintype!” retorted Hal. “Can’t you see, old
Price-of-Great-Pearls, my quartette and I have to _live_ on my thirty
per cent? _I_ don’t want your inexpensive little bits! I want your
masterpieces, the costlier the better. Bet I can sell ’em for you, too,
as easy as Farintosh, or MacDuff. Your being an Academician doesn’t stand
in _my_ way!”

Maurice flushed, not so much on account of being an Academician, as
because he suddenly saw himself self-convicted of a lack of imagination
in regard to his cousin.

“Say, Maury, think it over! What do you take me for, anyway? Do you
suppose I want to carry on a queer joint like this, always? It isn’t
merely my commission I’m thinking of when I’m asking you for your best
stuff! My littlest skirt will be growing up, and there’ll be others,
perhaps. Pants, too,—who knows? I wouldn’t like to have him, and them,
see me spend my days in a frisky, risky side-show like this!” His gesture
included the emerald-green elephant, as yet unbought, and beginning to
flake off a little at the tip of the trunk. “I like this art business—I
like it fine. But I want to carry it on in a way a fellow like you would
approve of, and respect, and be enthusiastic about!”

“Do you know,” answered Maurice, reflectively, “I begin to think that’s
just what you are doing, as fast as you can!” He spilled some cigar-ash
on the rug, and ground it in carefully with his foot, always a sign of
emotion in Price-of-Great-Pearls. And the two had parted, well pleased
with each other and with themselves.

Hence it was that Maurice, in reviewing the work of that good summer,
had decided, Academician though he was, to send to the Court of New
Departures his best-loved landscape. Farintosh was to have the rest.
They were all of them good stuff, too; he knew that. But not one of
them, either for his artist friends or for himself, surpassed in charm
and amplitude that southern picture of Ascutney, painted with Anthony’s
materials, too. At first blush, it seemed a high-keyed, ecstatic
picture, but a second glance revealed a multitude of lovely, lively
grays; dew-spangled or tear-touched, who could say? Maurice knew that
he had never before put so much of himself into any picture. It was
dyed-in-the-wool Price, by Jove it was! He told himself so, in a passion
of certainty. He knew, he knew, that beyond anything he had ever before
painted, it showed him at his best, intellectually and emotionally; it
revealed the man, and whatever mastery he had over his life and times;
and incidentally, his technique, too, a thing not to be despised in the
midst of larger considerations. Yes, the pearl among his pictures! He
smiled, remembering his nickname.

And the jewel had a suitable setting. To his joy, he had discovered among
the hills an old Frenchman, cultivating his garden—a frame-maker who had
long been with Chartier. Think of it, a man who not only could carve to
perfection the delicately reserved mouldings Maurice Price desired, but
who also really knew how to gild, in the reliable old manner! Such finds
as these make life worth living. The Frenchman’s frame was a masterpiece,
Maurice declared. He sent it, in advance, to the Court of New Departures;
he felt that it might have an elevating influence there. But he kept the
landscape by him, for pure joy in its presence, until the last moment.
Sometimes, when he put it away at night, out of the reach of thieves
and other insects, he looked at Amouretta, on the back of the panel,
and wondered. But he had no wish to blot out that strange likeness. It
was part and parcel—there was something about it, too—He left it there,
just as Pietro of the merry heart had left it, until a later jester had
wreaked himself upon the signature, sparing only the name Price.

In the Court of New Departures, Hal Wrayne was expecting that picture.
Maurice had laconically written of his fresh adventures in painting, that
summer; he had added that what he was about to send was “the gem of the
whole outfit.” All of his new pictures were new departures, according to
Maurice. However, he honestly believed that this one, the gem! had in its
inspiration something at once deeper and fresher than the others could
boast. No need to mention that fact to Farintosh, of course; for he had
decided to let Farintosh exhibit all but the gem. Thus Maurice, half in
jest and all in earnest. Hal was jubilant. He did not know whether the
gem was a portrait, or a fragment of a decoration. What did that matter?
A gem is a gem. When the frame arrived, he recognized its beauty, and
danced for joy. He commissioned Dodo to keep her weather eye out for a
harmonizing remnant.

At that time, he had in his employ a long lean German, straight as a die,
body and soul; a man whose services were really worth more than Hal could
afford to pay, but who nevertheless had begged to remain, because he was
happy in the Court of New Departures, and had been unhappy elsewhere.
He called himself the famulus, and had made himself well liked as such.
Hal decided that when the pearl among pictures should at last arrive,
the famulus, who was perfect in such duties, should unpack it, set it
into its frame, and hang it in the place of honor, so that he himself
might view it unexpectedly, from across the room. He carefully explained
to the famulus that this picture, coming down from the mountains, was a
new departure by a very great artist, and that he himself wanted to see
it just as a buyer might see it; with a fresh eye, don’t you know? Just
for the big impression, so to speak, and to avoid letting his mind get
confused by a lot of little impressions, as would surely happen if he
took it out of the box himself, and fussed around with the hanging. There
was something of the boy and the comedian still left in Hal, you observe.
The famulus, who had seen and heard strange things in art and from men,
both here and abroad, nodded sagely. He understood.

Even so, after he had unpacked the panel, he scarcely knew which of
the two sides it were best to show, in that frame whose workmanship he
had already lovingly examined. In his honest conceit, he did not wish
to seek counsel from his employer. To him, the landscape looked more
beautiful than the lady! On the other hand, Mr. Wrayne had spoken of the
great artist’s work as a new departure; surely the lady, rather than the
landscape, fitted that specification! Ach, it was a turvy-tipsy world,
these days. No one knew what was beauty, any more. Turning the lady’s
bright image this way and that, he noted a signature, Price. Yes, that
settled it; Price was the name Mr. Wrayne had spoken, many times already.
With a sigh for the passing of the old régime in art as in life, the
German famulus fitted the Italian boy’s “fake” study of the Irish girl
within the Frenchman’s faultless frame, and set the picture in the place
of honor, for rich Americans to see.

Not even to his “quartette of skirts” has Hal Wrayne ever disclosed
his real feelings on seating himself in the buyer’s seat, to take in
suddenly, “in one big impression,” the effect of Maurice’s new departure.
He himself did not know what his real feelings were. He had once had some
little taste, he told himself, some little training; but these had been
set at naught by certain of his recent exploits in salesmanship. More
than once, of late, he had experienced the acute distress of a frank
soul that does not know whether it is lying or not.

“That’s what a joint like this brings a man to,” mused Hal. “First,
intellectual dishonesty, in other words, blinking; and next, total
blindness of the mind’s eye.” Amouretta’s lively blue glance dismayed
him. Was that girl with pearls really a Price—a Price of deeper and
fresher inspiration than was to be discerned in those Prices the great
Farintosh was soon to show, on the Avenue? He could not believe his
eyes. Yet there was the signature. It did not look like Maurice’s usual
signature; but then, there was nothing like Maurice, in the whole thing.
A new departure indeed! Hal’s spirit quailed.

“They always said Maurice Price could paint anything, in any way; but
this stumps me. And it sure does give me a pain all over when I try to
like it. Perhaps there’s something in one of those eyes that gets me,
somehow. Is there, or isn’t there? If there is, hanged if I know whether
it’s the near eye or the off eye!” Still playing the part of a buyer, Hal
writhed in the buyer’s seat, a spurious Renaissance antique discarded by
Maurice.

Hal was always immaculately dressed. Through thick and thin, he had kept
his air of purple and fine linen about him. Never a morning without a
white flower in his buttonhole; and day after day, his eternally crumpled
bright blond hair was all that saved him from the dandiacal. But now! You
would have been sorry for him had you found him humped in his counterfeit
throne, his cigarette awry on his lip, and his carnation lying all
forlorn on the parquet. Had fate allowed him but ten seconds more, he
would have set himself right. Too late! Mr. William Saltonstall had just
entered the gallery. The ruler of the Court of New Departures had hard
work to pull himself together, and recapture his pleasant alertness. It
must be done, however; Mr. Saltonstall was too good a client to lose. Hal
sprang to his feet, kicked the carnation under the throne, and with it
cast aside for the moment his problem of the true and the false in art,
as if it were an entangling garment that would burden him in a race....


IV

The next day, Maurice Price, packing up his belongings to return to the
city in time for the November elections, was puzzled by a telegram from
his helter-skelter cousin. Just what could it mean? In telegrams, if in
no other form of composition, the youth resorted to punctuation; he felt
that periods gave clearness, an idea he had picked up while doing war
work for the Government.

    Can sell picture period

    Top price cash down period

    On condition immediate withdrawal from gallery period

    Buyer buyer waits your wire period

                                                              WRAYNE

As Maurice motored down to the station, the maple and beech leaves
spurned by his tires rose up in their passing glory and sang Hal’s
message, over and over, with variations; and on the night train, the
wheels took up the refrain, with grinding insistence. “Buyer buyer waits
your wire,” though probably due in part to a mistake at the office,
sounded a little like the new poetry; Maurice hoped there might be truth
as well as poetry in it. “Top price cash down” had its own music, of
course; but “immediate withdrawal from gallery” was less pleasing to the
ear. It had implications. That part of the message, reverberated in the
too sonorous breathing of lower nine, just opposite, really annoyed our
painter. As he afterward told Hal, adapting his language to his hearer,
“it got his goat.” “Immediate withdrawal,” indeed! Such words were not to
be addressed to a Price.

Emerging from the sordid practicalities of the Pullman, he sought his
Club for breakfast; he felt that the morning air on his face, even in the
few steps from the Grand Central to the Century, might supplement the
sketchy passes he had made before the shiny Pullman basin, while lower
nine, perspiring in purple pajamas, awaited his turn; lower nine, in
waking as in sleeping hours, still suggesting “immediate withdrawal.” The
offending phrase followed Maurice into the breakfast-room. He had eaten
it in his grapefruit and was thoughtfully stirring it into his coffee,
when Mr. William Saltonstall, that early bird among collectors, sauntered
in, and after a moment’s hesitation, hastened to grasp his hand.

Maurice in his absorption did not associate his enigmatic “buyer buyer”
with Mr. Saltonstall. Indeed, that gentleman was known everywhere as a
connoisseur in figure-pieces; he never bought landscapes. Yet there was
something unusual in his manner; his dark melancholy eyes, usually very
gentle, were smouldering with a kind of suppressed excitement, in which
both joy and pain were suggested.

“Surely I have the right explanation, haven’t I?” he began, with anxious
courtesy.

“If you have,” replied Maurice, “I wish you’d share it with me, along
with breakfast.”

Acting on a fantastic impulse to match another man’s perplexities with
his own, he pushed the crumpled telegram across the table.

Mr. Saltonstall smiled. “Oh, yes, I asked Wrayne to wire you.”

A glimmer of light broke over Maurice. “Are you—by any chance—this ‘buyer
buyer’?”

His friend nodded nervously. “Still waiting your wire! But I don’t ask
immediate withdrawal, now. That is, if the truth is what I think it is.”

“But what _is_ the truth?” cried the bewildered painter.

“You should know,” returned the other. “I have my belief, my strong
belief!—but you, you have the knowledge! For God’s sake, man, was it a
landscape or—a lady—that you sent down to that cousin of yours?”

Maurice could see that Saltonstall was trembling with emotion. In a
flash, he remembered Amouretta. “Oh,” he cried out, in a shocked voice,
“a landscape, a thousand times a landscape! Did you think I _could_ have
meant the other, the one on the back? _Amouretta?_”

Mr. Saltonstall looked relieved, triumphant, ashamed. “Yes, I did, at
first! And why not, when it was just that ribald portrait, and nothing
else, that Wrayne showed me there, in an exquisite frame, in his
confounded Court of New Departures? I tell you, Maurice Price, I was wild
when I saw it. In my heart I vowed vengeance on you and all your tribe.
I couldn’t believe it of you—you, of all men; yet there it was before
my eyes. I couldn’t let that thing stay there! No man, who felt as I
did about Amouretta, could let it stay, to be gaped at by the multitude
looking for new sensations in art, and to be written up in the art
column of the Sunday papers! Oh, I admit, of course, there was something
captivating about it, too; captivating as well as desecrating, yes. Well,
I made Wrayne take an oath to put it away, away, out of the world’s
sight, and send you a wire.”

Maurice of the compassionate eyes saw the drops of sweat gather on
Saltonstall’s lean temples.

“You must know,” said the artist gently, “it was never I who painted that
portrait of Amouretta. It was Anthony’s studio assistant; you remember,
the lad that died just before our Roman Prize was awarded. If you’ve
looked at the painting, you know, of course, there’s diabolically clever
work in it. Those pearls—_I_ couldn’t surpass them! But if you saw only
that portrait (and right there, if you please, there’s something that
Master Hal will have to explain off the map!) how on earth did you happen
to find my landscape?”

Saltonstall smiled in his sad way. “Well, I wanted to be sure Wrayne
had kept his word about hiding the picture, so I dropped in on him
unexpectedly, yesterday afternoon. Wrayne was all right! The thing was
swathed and roped and even sealed. In fact, he had insisted on calling in
that famulus of his the day before, when I was there, and having him do
all that in my very presence, while he and I sat back and watched.”

“Perfectly good gesture,” laughed Maurice.

“Oh, yes, and in the grand style, I assure you! Queer chap, Wrayne, but
he’ll succeed, even though he doesn’t yet know the rudiments of his
trade. Can you believe it, he had not observed that the painting was on
wood instead of canvas! I was wild to see it again; I made him uncover
it and show it to me. My wrath hadn’t gone down with the sun, I can
tell you, but I had sense enough left to see that the frame was quite
out of the common; good as the Stanford White frames, but different. So
I stepped behind to find the maker’s name, if I could; and behold, a
landscape of great Price! Wrayne never even knew it was there. Mistake of
that famulus, I believe.”

“You liked it?” Maurice put the question almost timidly. The landscape he
loved seemed to him suddenly to lose importance, in the presence of his
friend’s deep feeling.

“You’ve surpassed your best self in it! I can’t tell why, but there’s
something in it that assuages for me the grief of things; something of
yourself that you’ve put into it, I suppose,—some beauty or solemnity
that was not there, really, until you yourself brought it there,
with your own two hands. Perhaps I never knew, till now, why men buy
landscapes—” Saltonstall spoke dreamily. His recollective eyes, looking
far beyond his listener, seemed to peer into some Paradise not wholly
lost.

Both men were moved. They had more to say to each other, things not to be
told over egg-shells and coffee-stains.

“I suppose,” hesitated Maurice, as they took their hats, “you wonder why
I never painted out that figure on the back, at any rate, before I sent
off the landscape?”

“Oh, no,” answered the other, simply. “I know how you felt, I do, indeed!
You couldn’t quite bring yourself to do it, could you, even though you
tried? Neither could I, I am sure. Something keeps me from wanting to
destroy it; I don’t yet know whether it’s the person or the painting!
Though, of course, I never saw any picture of Amouretta that was really
right, except that one little thing of yours you showed last winter in
the Vanderbilt Gallery; and what’s-his-name, the man at the desk, said
very emphatically it wasn’t for sale—”

“No,” interrupted Maurice, “it wasn’t for sale, and never will be. It is
one of the few things I couldn’t take money for! My wife and I intended
to give it as a wedding-present to Amouretta. We both of us loved that
child; we felt her roseleaf exquisiteness! Helen was so happy, tying up
that little portrait in white paper. And afterwards,—well, I boxed it up
and addressed it to you, with a note explaining it and begging you to
keep it. But it was overlooked and forgotten, during my illness; and when
I got up, I found I had lost my nerve about sending it to you. I feared
you might not like it, or worse yet, might think I was trying to sell you
something—”

“Oh, Maurice Price,” sighed the collector, “then even _you_ didn’t know
how much I _needed_ Amouretta, and anything that would recall her truly,
just as she was, and not as those who didn’t know her imagined her to be?
We Saltonstalls—” But the rest was lost in the roar of the traffic, as
the men crossed the avenue, and walked rapidly together toward the Court
of New Departures. It was not too late in the day to read the morning
lesson to young Hal; it would do him good. After all, though, he was a
plucky chap; the sooner he had whatever per cent was coming to him, the
better. An amicable three-cornered arrangement could be made, about that.
Certainly, where there’s a quartette of skirts, somebody must pay the
piper!




BITS OF CLAY


What a curious thing is a piece of clay, and, dear Lord, how willing it
is, under our fingers! Look now, here is a bit of clay, no larger than a
pullet’s egg, and no one knows what may come of it. Shall I mould you a
few petals, with my thumb and forefinger, like this, and then shape up a
closed golden heart, like that, and next fuss and fuse them all together,
thus? You see, it is a rose! It has all the form a clay rose need ask,
for the moment; if it had but color and perfume, it might be the rose of
the world! However, I set no great store by it; I shall tear my rose in
twain, to please you; and if you like, I will pinch up the lesser part
into a bishop’s mitre, and the greater part into a churchly face, no
feature lacking. Indeed, I will put in as many features as you suggest,
though, of course, from the modern point of view, too few are better than
too many.

Will you have Stephen Langton, or Thomas à Becket, or Saint Francis
himself, God reward him, or would you prefer my dear old neighbor
there across the street, Father Geronimo of the Carmelites? One is
as easy as the other, when the clay is obedient. Or if by mischance
you do not “love a priest and love a cowl and love a prophet of the
soul,” I can easily transform my monk into—You would like to go back
to that rose-of-the-world idea? Very well, we shall make the hood into
a mantilla, thus, and the good priestly face into the flower-like
countenance of a girl. The flower must have a stem, too, a well-rounded,
slender stem; and the petal of her lower lip needs caressing. Surely
you see that it is a girl; a señorita, signora, fräulein, mademoiselle,
miss. A lady of any country; yes, perhaps even the gracious Madonna of
all lands! What a curious thing is a piece of clay, and how willing it is
under the fingers!

The boy Raymond Brooke had often seen and heard his father the sculptor
do and say such things, while resting.

But—but—it was nevertheless a mistake of the boy Raymond, when, on
finding a bit of clay in his hands, he looked about him with starry
eyes, seeking something to adorn, with whatever he and his accomplice
clay should create. And I hold it very strange, too, that on this bright
June morning, with all the beautiful shapes still unsummoned from the
deep, he could think of nothing better to mould into a fine symmetry than
a pair of fierce moustaches and a goatee; and further, that he could
discover no better use for these vain ornaments than to affix them neatly
upon the countenance of the clay lady in his father’s studio, that noble
new-made portrait of the venerable mistress of Highcourt.

Raymond was seven. Surely at this age, if ever, a child should show
himself “_un enfant déjà raisonnable_.” The new governess had said so;
she had added, in gentle despair, that without doubt it was different
with the children of artists and the criminal classes. She was a
puzzle-headed young creature from the devastated regions, and not yet
hardened to life’s surprises. Her career among us had early been darkened
by the discovery that the children of American artists have no real
feeling for the relative pronoun, in French. And what, she passionately
demanded of the elder Brooke girl, what would our noble French literature
be, without its relative pronouns? She was in earnest, and looked very
pretty and bright-eyed as she asked it. Raymond, poor Nordic, was
fascinated by that slender dark streak above her upper lip. It seemed
very firm and permanent, yet fragile and downy, too; he wondered
whether, if you touched it, it would vanish. But Mademoiselle chose that
moment to inquire of him, the youngest infant of the Brooke trio, whether
he had the very smallest idea what a relative pronoun was, or even an
ordinary pronoun, for example! Raymond was either unable or unwilling to
throw light on the situation, and had fled toward the studio to escape
his responsibilities. From Scylla to Charybdis, from French literature
to American art! He was not thinking of his pronouns, either; he was
thinking of that downy shadow. But this, I admit, scarcely excuses his
grotesque conduct.

His father was not in the studio; the clay lady reigned supreme; a
fine challenging old lady she was, drawing her breath with that superb
kindliness the clay allows. The portrait was still, according to its
creator, in the chrysalis stage. Later, it would be transformed into
white plaster, and later yet, if luck held, it would issue, gleaming
and triumphant, in spotless Carrara. The sculptor was by no means
dissatisfied with that clay portrait; the world called it a speaking
likeness. He himself found it a trace too masculine, perhaps; but that
was inevitable, with a type so full of high character. He was glad it
was so, because he knew well enough that the marble would only too easily
soften and spiritualize his interpretation of the old lady of Highcourt,
with her white hair nobly tossed up from her candid brow.

She was a very beautiful old lady, truly; no one denied that; straight
as an arrow and graceful as a palm, for all her seventy years; not fat,
not lean; greatly given to charming clothes, too, and not particularly
scandalized by our shocking modern custom of short skirts for all,
especially grandmothers. You see her own feet were very shapely. And
her profile was that of Cato’s daughter, softened by centuries. All the
little wrinkles around her eyes were kind and smiling ones. No wonder
those college girls had voted that the old lady of Highcourt should be
immortalized in fair Carrara, at a fair price, and shrined in a niche in
their stately new Library, her gift.

But Raymond, you remember, was only seven years high in his sandal
shoon. His nose hardly reached to the top of the modelling-stand. He was
forced to mount a box to carry out his decorative intentions. The little
typewriter box would do. Now! A slender sausage of clay moustache on the
left of the lady’s mouth, another on the right; for the chin, a rather
stouter lump. No compromises anywhere; swift work, and sure. Raymond
stepped down from his box, and walked slowly backward, quite in his
father’s manner, to study the effect. Alas, how brief is the delirium of
design! Raymond’s flight of genius was over, and the result appalled him.

Indeed, it was rather remarkable, that transformation; and very curious
is the power of a bit of clay, in willing fingers! That beautifully
modelled countenance no longer suggested Madam Randolph of Highcourt; it
had become the face of some Light-Horse Harry, some devil-may-care D’Arcy
of the Guards. If that portrait had been scarce feminine enough before,
what was it now, with those singular additions bristling from lips and
chin? A warrior, no less. A moment ago, a lady; at present, a grenadier!
An uninstructed observer, suddenly encountering that piece of family
sculpture, might well ask, in his bewilderment, “But why does the noble
Confederate officer wear a lace kerchief over his epaulets?”

Raymond himself could no longer endure the power of his own performance.
He darted back toward his box, to annul his handiwork. Too late! In
his terror he heard a voice in the garden, near at hand; his father was
talking with the old lady of Highcourt.

Having finished their excellent morning sitting (indeed, it was the last
sitting that would be needed until marble-time should come), artist and
model had strayed into the garden to see the Antonin Mercié phlox in
all its glory; Raymond’s father made a specialty of that, in honor of
M. Mercié, his old master in sculpture. The two had touched lightly on
many topics,—phlox, M. Mercié, old masters, sculpture,—_que sais-je?_
And now the old lady of Highcourt, with a new thrill in her voice, was
speaking very earnestly about a projected portrait in bronze, a work the
sculptor seemed unwilling to undertake. He said, with force, that he much
preferred to work from life. In working from photographs, he couldn’t
do justice to himself, or his subject, or his client. And the old lady
was ruthlessly chaffing him because, in his Northern way, he was putting
himself, the artist, first, and herself, the client, last. Her face
beamed with mischief as she spoke. Beware of that old lady, she has her
designs on the sculptor; she means, by hook or by crook, to make him do
her bidding! She has managed many men, in her time; and always in her
own way, so that they shall not perceive what is happening to them, until
at last they have become the willing clay in her fingers.

However, Mr. Brooke was holding out bravely; I’ll say that for him. He
had had previous experience in making bronze portraits of dear women’s
dead fathers. He well knew that the odds were bitterly against any artist
who should pledge himself to show forth Father, in his era of prosperity,
just by imagining all things from a dim, lean profile of Father in
his salad days. In short, according to Mr. Brooke, we were now in the
nineteen-twenties; and back in the nineteen-tens, he had taken an oath,
had Mr. Brooke, never again to interpret for the world, by means of the
willing clay, just how a great man who died in the eighteen-eighties
really looked in the eighteen-seventies, when all there was to go by
was a wraithlike, looking-glassy daguerreotype of the eighteen-sixties.
Yes, Madam, no matter how elegant the crimson velvet brocade that lined
the little leather case! The old lady of Highcourt had plenty to say in
answer to that; but long before she had begun to say it, the culprit
Raymond, stricken by the lightning of his own genius, had fled away,
away on sandalled feet, to hide behind the tomato plants and the tall
corn.

A great persuader, Madam Randolph! She refused to see herself as beaten.
“I don’t ask you to promise me anything to-day. I only ask you to give
this matter your prayerful consideration. And wouldn’t it be rather
criminal on your part if you, a strong man, should allow me, a weak old
lady, to degrade our American art by giving this commission to some one
else, who would no doubt make a bigger mess of it than you will? Mr.
Brooke, you don’t know how much I want to leave behind me, for those
grandsons of mine, at least some inkling of what my honored father looked
like in Civil War days!”

They were stepping into the studio. It was a high step, but the old lady
was a high-stepper, and Mr. Brooke chuckled over her disdain of his
helping hand. Suddenly his smile vanished. A look of incredulous horror
engulfed it utterly. His precious handiwork had been profaned, Southern
womanhood insulted!

“Good God, what devil has been here?” He himself groaned aloud the
shameful answer, “That devil Raymond!”

It is hard to find a really neat thing to say at such moments; luckily
actions speak louder than words. In wrathful haste, the sculptor strode
forward to kick away Raymond’s box, and to tear off those bits of clay
foully misplaced on the portrait of a lady.

But the dame of Highcourt, though in her seventies, had a longer and
quicker sight than even Mr. Brooke himself; she had a larger experience
in the misdeeds of the young; it was she, not the sculptor, who had spied
those sandalled feet winging toward the tomato plants. And indeed she was
a valiant little old person, whom life had trained to all sorts of ready
readjustments. Long before Mr. Brooke had worked himself up to anywhere
near the height of passion he fully intended to reach, Madam Randolph had
viewed the situation by and large, and had resolved it into its elements.
With a singular phrase, borrowed no doubt from her grandchildren, she
pulled our sculptor down on his haunches, so to speak; she stayed his
hand in midair.

“Cut it out, old dear,” she said soothingly, as if she were reining in
her favorite thoroughbred. “And oh, won’t you please, _please_, stop,
look, listen? Mr. Brooke, Mr. Brooke, can’t you see what it looks
like? Dear sculptor-in-wrath, it’s my father, Dad to the life; it is,
indeed, Captain Carteret! Ask any one who ever saw him. All it needs is
the uniform!” And she brandished in triumph before Mr. Brooke the dim
daguerreotype he had just refused to consider.

Well, what can we all do when events literally leap out of our hands, and
shape themselves firmly, in defiance of our ethics and ultimatums? An old
lady and a piece of clay are matters to be considered; they are curiously
frail things under our fingers; we shall not shatter them unnecessarily.
Mr. Brooke saw that Madam Randolph was right, in the main; and when she
said, in a voice trembling between laughter and tears, “You will add
years to my life if you do what I ask,” what could he do but yield? There
were to be two portraits, then; that was settled. The lady’s would be in
marble, the officer’s in bronze; Raymond’s genius for clay had arranged
it. But Mr. Brooke, for all Madam Randolph’s challenging eyes, refused to
model those moustaches in her presence.

“No doubt my boy Raymond might do it,” he said, with a slight acerbity.
“He appears to have the soul of a barber.” He was still smarting a little
from the profanation of his own sacred handiwork; one did not expect a
woman to understand how one felt about such things.

Who shall measure man’s ingratitude? Was Raymond ever congratulated upon
his own small part in that day’s playlet? Not at all. Behind the tomato
plants, in the cool of the evening, could be heard the lamentations of a
small boy; and behind the small boy—but I make an end.

In his little white bed, a subdued Raymond sobbed out repentance, in
long-drawn gusts. “Oh, mother dear, I didn’t mean to spoil father’s
lovely lady, I didn’t, I didn’t!” His mother said to herself, in fine
disdain of human decisions, “And this poor suffering child must not be
told what a lucky thing for him his badness really is; he must not find
out that his disgraceful act has put into our family coffers enough to
earn him his new pony!” She marvelled at the complexities, nay, the
complicities of parenthood. And Raymond, soon to be cast up safely into
dreamland on the ebbing tide of remorse, repeated, in a diminuendo of
infantine rhythms, “Mademoiselle ast me so very _suddingly_ something
I couldn’t know—I only wanted to see how the lady would look, with
whiskers—I made ’em just like Mr. Smith’s at the grocery-store—The clay
felt so curious under my fingers—”




THE YOUNG LADY IN BLUE


As my wife says, I am by nature unduly sensitive to beauty. You would
hardly expect this fault in a sculptor—you who perhaps judge all
sculptors from the war memorials you have seen. And with me, the worst
of it is, I am even more susceptible to color than to form. My long
acquaintance with form has put me on my guard against its wiles, and
my joy in beautiful shapes is forever enhanced by the free play of my
critical faculty. But in the presence of lovely color, I am unarmed,
weak-kneed. All I can do is to take pleasure in it, for I do not know
enough about it to be critical, in any satisfying way. This explains why
I fell, and fell far, for the young lady in blue. I admit that I would
not have done for Senator Bullwinkle just what I did for her.

Yet, when I first saw the young lady, she was not in blue, if you forget
for a moment her forget-me-not eyes. She was in deepest black, and, I
have reason to believe, the most expensive and fashionable black to be
had in New York. Gigi Arcangelo, my seldom-sinning super-assistant,
broke all the rules of the studio when he let her in, that bright May
afternoon. Gigi knew perfectly well that after a vexatious sitting from
Senator Bullwinkle (who, in order to keep awake while posing, always
had his speeches of a decade ago read aloud to him by my wife) I would
be in no mood for trifling with mere beauty. Gigi knew that I needed
three hours of uninterrupted work on my head of Christ, before I could
well show it to an enlightened Bishop; he knew that I was behind with my
Iowa figures; he knew that my bust of General Daly ought to have been
finished, boxed, and shipped a month before; he knew that my big clay
relief of the Spanker-Sampson children had developed a crack across the
nose of the middle boy, making him look more cross-eyed than he really
was, so that his likeness was wholly unfit for the inspection of a fond
and fabulously rich Middle-Western aunt, due to arrive on the Wednesday.
In short, Gigi knew that I was counting on this priceless afternoon, of
all the afternoons of my life, to justify, yes, to glorify, my career as
an artist. And to think that at such a time as this, he could show in
that girl, simply because, as he afterward explained, to do otherwise
would have been, for him, _impossibile_, she was _si bella, bella_! Gigi
shared my weakness, you observe; he too was pledged to beauty.

At arm’s length, he pushed up her card to me as I stood on my high
ladder. The name was a long one, beginning with _C_ and ending in
_en_—Chittenden, of course. I waved away the name and would have had
Gigi do likewise by the owner. Too late! She was already inside the
door. Grudgingly enough, I climbed down from my head of Christ, well
resolved to make short shrift of the girl and all her works. But even
before I reached the ground, I was somewhat disarmed, because, clad
wholly in black as she was, with the heavenly young radiance of her eyes
merging softly into the faint rosy radiance of her uplifted face and the
shadowed golden radiance of her hair, while the three radiances together
were enclosed within the black-rimmed, transparent circle of her veiled
hat, she was beyond any mortal doubt an engaging sight. I caught myself
saying, under my breath, “Oh, happy hat!” This struck me at the time
as an asinine remark, even when privately made, and I ascribed it to
the spring season. Looking back, I see that the observation was quite
correct. In reality, the girl was just a complex of radiances, bounded
by black; sweet and twenty, and in mourning.

Walking respectfully behind this glorious sad young person was a footman
who failed to supply the contrast of usefulness to beauty. He was not
even carrying the white oblong box which was evidently one of the
properties of this ill-timed visit. I saw with relief that it was too
narrow to contain a death-mask. Miss Chittenden held this box between
her hands as if it were a very precious thing; a fold of her veil had
been laid reverently around its corners. In her unconsciousness of self
and in her absorption in the business that occupied her, she seemed to
me a figure both sculptural and symbolic. Turned into stone, she would
have been a Pandora on an antique vase, or rather a Saint Cunegonde or
Saint Scholastica weathering the centuries on some mediæval portal. All
her motions had a kind of free and classic largeness mingled with their
high-heeled modernness; yet her attitude toward that box was, as I told
myself, purest Gothic.

As we undid the box together, Miss Chittenden explained that ever since
she had seen my statuette of a Dancer in the new Museum in her home town,
more than a year ago, she had longed above all things to possess a piece
of marble from my chisel, my own chisel; “the personal touch, you know!”
So (and here the forget-me-not eyes became more misty and the young voice
more vibrant) when her mother died, in April, she had had a cast made
from her mother’s hand, which to her was the most beautiful thing in the
world; and she hoped, oh, so much, that I would be willing to copy it for
her in marble. Done in the way I would do it, she was good enough to say,
it would be something really living—something she could have and love
forever and ever.

My dismay was complete. Indeed, copying plaster casts in marble was
not at all in my line. Right or wrong, I felt myself capable of higher
things. Apparently this Miss Chittenden was not only classic, mediæval,
and modern, but also quite Victorian, all in the same breath. For surely
it was a preposterous Victorian idea of hers to want a marble hand! As we
drew the cast from its wrappings, its fragile beauty moved me, I confess;
but I steeled myself, steadfastly considering how on earth, without
hurting the girl’s feelings, I could make her understand my point of view.

“The hand is perfection itself,” said I, in all honesty. “And,” I added,
glancing at her own hand, from which she had removed her ugly black
glove, the better to handle the cast, “it is very like your own, in
construction; I mean—”

“You mean my hand is built like hers, but it’s not so pretty—”

“Not so small, certainly!” I wondered whether this might vex her a bit,
on her Victorian side. But no, she seemed rather pleased than otherwise.

“I’m three inches taller than mother was,” she observed, cheerily. “Her
size hand wouldn’t have looked at all well, on me.”

Really this girl had some sense. Besides, she was quick to divine that
the commission she was offering me was not precisely attractive to me.
She seemed to search for the cause.

“You know,” she said, eagerly, “I wouldn’t want to hamper you in your
imagination! Oh, no, not that! I wouldn’t dream of asking you to copy
the cast just as it is. It would be all right if you put in a Bible
or something under the hand, and some lace around the wrist, or some
knitting-work and knitting-needles sticking out from the book. Mother
often left her knitting at a favorite passage, so that when I came to put
away her work at night, as I always did, I might guess what text it was
that interested her. We made a regular game of it. And” (here she flushed
and hesitated) “I’m perfectly willing and able to pay the going price for
any extras you put in. Only, I don’t really know much about such things.”
Her smile was wistful, rather than embarrassed; but in an instant, it had
widened into a boyish and wholly fascinating grin. “I don’t know whether
it shows on me or not, but this is the first time I’ve ever been East.
I suppose I’m not so—sophisticated and so on—as if I’d had a genuine
Eastern education, as mother had. Oh, but you don’t know what it is to
have first a Missouri uncle and then a Fifth Avenue aunt protecting you
to death, every step you take! I might have asked Auntie all about this
kind of thing, of course. She has lived in New York always, and knows the
ropes. You see, I’m staying with her until I go abroad in June. But, I
just didn’t want to talk with her about it. I’m my own mistress, now! The
moment I saw that Dancer of yours, I said to myself, ‘When I come into my
own money, I shall have that man carve a piece of marble for me, and do
something to elevate American art!’ And now the time is come.”

What I ought to have said then was this: “My dear young lady, if you
really want to advance your country’s art (and very laudable it is on
your part!) and if you insist that your heart’s desire is to be carried
out in marble, by my chisel, as you put it, why in the name of all that’s
young and gay and jubilant don’t you ask me to do you a dancer, or a
fountain figure, or a nymph, or a faun, or even a mantelpiece, with some
joyous caryatids?” But I didn’t say anything of the kind. Besides, a
horrid thought came to me that perhaps she might not understand caryatid,
or might get the word confused with hermaphrodite, as I have observed
that tourists returning from Italian galleries sometimes do, even when
duly instructed. Indeed, the forget-me-not eyes rested so lovingly on the
plaster cast that I hadn’t the heart to be coldly frank with her, and to
tell her that in a few years the marble hand she now wanted might seem
an encumbrance; something that for old sake’s sake she couldn’t bear to
tuck away in the attic, and yet something that one really couldn’t, if
one kept up with the times, put in a glass case on a library shelf, or on
one’s own dressing-table. Some of our sculptors might have managed it.
I can imagine that brute of a Schneider, for example, telling her that
there was nothing in it for her; that a “marple hant would be too pig
for a baber-wade, and too liddle for a lawn-tecoration.” He would be able
to suggest that the proper move for her to make would be to build a fine
large monument to her mother, with the hand “joost as a veature.” But
since I’m not Schneider, all I could say was, “This cast is beautiful,
indeed, but aren’t you afraid that when translated into marble, it will
no longer seem so lovely and so living to you?”

“Ah, but,” persisted the girl, “the marble of it is part of all I want!
All I want is mother’s hand, done by your hand.” She blushed, and so did
I.

“It’s very kind of you to want my work,” I stammered. “Really, it makes
me feel awfully grateful, and humble, too! But do you realize that very
few of our sculptors carve in marble the things they model in clay? The
custom is, to let some carver, generally an Italian, do most if not all
of the marble-carving, just as it’s the custom to have a bronze foundry
cast our bronze statues. You see,” I went on, warming to my task of
educating this bright being, “things are different now from what they
were in Cellini’s time, or Michael Angelo’s. In Renaissance days, a
sculptor could do the whole job from start to finish, if he wanted to,
but to-day, he can’t, and doesn’t want to. He saves himself for what
he fondly thinks is the imaginative and intellectual part. He models
in clay, of course, but there’s a lot besides that. There’s building
armatures, and making plaster casts, and so on; and he generally lets
Gigi do it.”

We glanced at Gigi, who, for the second time that afternoon, was sinning.
Gigi had not retired to his customary labors behind the burlap curtain,
but was standing near us, carving at a bit of plaster medallion,
ostensibly turning it this way and that to get a better light on it, but
in reality feasting his Latin eyes on Miss Chittenden’s beauty. And then
Gigi, usually a silent soul, did a strange thing. He began to talk, very
eagerly.

“The hand of the Signorina’s mother is truly beautiful.” (The Signorina
giggled, and then was shocked by her own levity. She told me afterward
that she couldn’t help laughing; she had felt as if Gigi were pouring
out a page from a foreign-language grammar all over her.) “In marble,”
continued Gigi, “the marble that grows in my part of the world, how very
fine it would be! I myself could well begin it, and the Signor could
finish it. You have seen the art of the Signor! Many sculptors cannot do
what the Signor can. It is the _morbidezza_! The others do not attain it.”

Miss Chittenden flashed upon Gigi a smile more dazzling than any she had
yet given to me. “Now as I understand it,” she cried, “he could rough
out your design and do the heavy work on it, and then you could take the
marble and finish it up, and give it the more—what-do-you-call-it?”

We all three laughed aloud at that, and while I was trying to explain to
the girl, as tactfully as possible, that after she had been abroad and
seen the works of art in many countries, she might not care for a marble
hand on a book, even with lace at the wrist, and with knitting-needles
sticking out of the book, Gigi returned to his den, from which one then
heard the sound of hard labor. I was finding it rather difficult to
convince Miss Chittenden that she was asking for what was obsolete, from
the world’s point of view, and impossible, from mine. I tried to dissuade
her by telling her that it would be only a fragment. With astounding
quickness she replied, “Oh, but that wouldn’t matter, would it? Lots
of those old part-gods in the Museum are only fragments, and yet the
teachers in the Art Department are always praising them up, just the
same!”

Before I could frame an answer to that, Gigi emerged, pushing before
him a little stand on which was a block of fine pink marble which I had
obtained years before, in peculiar circumstances. It was a piece I had
long been guarding for some future master-work of mine—something that
was to be absolutely original, yet wholly classic; one has such dreams.
And here was Gigi showing it to that girl! His admiration for her had
become so boundless that he opened up his heart to her in all the three
languages he could use. If the Signorina would deign, he would explain
to Mademoiselle that this was a little, little block of marble which his
own _cognato_ had stolen one night (knowing it to be a good action) from
the workshop of the marvellous Duomo which she herself would see when she
saw the most beautiful cathedral in all Italy! And his brother-in-law
had sold it to a great sculptor who was visiting Italy at that time, but
of course did not know it was stolen. (Gigi was lying a little, but his
lying blends so agreeably with his candor that I myself cannot always
distinguish one from the other.)

I saw that the blue-eyed girl was thoroughly enjoying Gigi. Though this
was before the day of the so-called Greenwich Village, I am sure that
Miss Chittenden thought that now at last, freed alike from her Missouri
uncle and her Fifth Avenue aunt, she was seeing Bohemia; perfectly
respectably too. If only a celebrated model or two had strayed in, her
happiness would have been complete. As it was, she garnered up Gigi’s
sayings with the same single-hearted attention she had given to my own.
He explained, in his party-colored way of speech, that this little
block was marvellously fine in grain; it was free from dark streaks,
too—he would stake the tomb of his fathers on that!—while its crowning
exquisiteness lay in its color, a pale surpassing pink as of earliest
dawn over Tuscany. There was no other marble in the world quite like it.
That was why his _cognato_ had been _obliged_ to steal it, for the sake
of art. If you had any taste at all, any love for the beautiful, you
would call it using, not stealing! And again, behold! While it was too
small for a head (except a _bambino’s_ head, and it was a little too long
for that, unless you wasted a great deal, and certainly it was more of a
sin to waste such marble than to steal it), it was just exactly the right
size for the dear hand of the Signorina’s mother, lying upon the open
book, or even on the closed book, with the knitting-needles protruding;
difficult, of course, but where there’s a wish, there’s a road—

I stared astounded at Gigi. In all the ten years he had worked for me, I
had never heard from him so many words at once. I could not dam the flood.

“_Ah, oui_,” he pursued, “_certamente_ Mademoiselle could have the lace
around the wrist, if she so wished, and—”

“No, Gigi,” I interposed firmly. “The lady _cannot_ have the lace. Not
_with_ the knitting-needles. At one or the other I draw the line.” Again,
we three laughed together. What was there about this dewy-eyed girl that
made us so natural and human? Was it the Missouri in her? Old Schneider
was from Missouri, but he never made me feel human. Was it her beauty?
Very likely, but at the time, I doubted it. One always _does_ doubt it,
at the time. The result was, as I have already confessed, I fell for the
girl in blue, as I was to call her in later days. I weakly told her that
if Gigi would rough out the hand and the book, in the pale pink marble, I
would be willing to finish it for her; yes, I added cynically, I would
put in all the _morbidezza_ the most exacting client could require. I
would charge her four hundred dollars for the completed work. It was a
high price, I told her. Others might do it for less; not I. And mind,
there were to be no knitting-needles and no lace, unless I should greatly
change my idea. She drooped visibly, not at the price, which seemed to
be of little moment to her, but at the loss of the homely details in
the work by which she hoped to elevate our art. To console her, I said
that I would probably design a bit of drapery to take the place of the
lace, but nothing fussy or obtrusive. I told her that she could have the
thing completed, on her return to New York, a year later. Just as she was
leaving the studio, to rouse the footman from his colored supplement in
the anteroom, where he had remained, doubtless under orders from Auntie,
I pulled myself together to contemplate the extent to which I had fallen.
Perhaps I could climb up again. Perhaps my high ideals in art were not
lost forever.

“Remember, Miss Chittenden,” said I, in what I hoped would be an
impressive manner, “remember this! If after you have visited galleries
and studios abroad, and seen the works of Rodin and Dampt and Donatello
and Bourdelle and Praxiteles and Maillol and a few others, remember, if
one year later, when you’ve had more observation of art, you should no
longer care to have this hand in marble, I for my part will call this
contract of ours null and void; and you may do the same.” It sounded
well, as I said it.

The blue-eyed one flashed back on me her friendly, all-conquering smile.
“I shall remember,” she said. “But you know, my name isn’t Chittenden,
at all. Never was, and never will be, I hope! In fact, I have other
plans—but no matter! You thought I was a chit, and so you called me
Chittenden—”

This bit of girlish reasoning struck me as being so straight from Sigmund
Freud that I was disconcerted. But she hastened to cover my confusion.

“It’s all right,” she laughed. “I didn’t want to take up your time by
correcting a perfectly reasonable mistake. And if you’d rather call me
Chittenden, pray do! But my name is really Clarenden, with Mariellen in
front. See!” She offered me another of her cards. Her face took on a look
of charming gravity as we shook hands. “Whatever happens,” she said, “I
know you will be very careful of the plaster cast. I know you understand
my feeling about it.”

The following April, Mariellen Clarenden wrote to me from Paris, to tell
me that I might expect her in my studio about the middle of May. She had
visited the Salon, she said, and had seen strange sights in the world of
art. Also, she had worked hard on her French; luckily, she added, she
had a good Missouri foundation. The closing sentence of her letter went
to my head a little. “_Mon Dieu_,” she wrote, “_Mon Dieu_, how great you
are—you and Auguste Rodin!” “_Mon Dieu_,” indeed! Was this girl becoming
sophisticated, like the others? Time would tell.

Early in the morning, on May 15th, I had a telephone message to the
effect that Miss Clarenden, according to promise, would revisit my studio
promptly at ten, if I would permit. As I have always been a collector
of coincidences, I noted with zest that May 15th was exactly one year
from the date of my absurd one-sided party-of-the-first-part contract
concerning the marble hand. I further noted, not without dismay, that
Senator Bullwinkle was to have his final sitting that very afternoon.
Still adding to my collection, I recalled that it had happened like that
the year before; Clarenden day had been Bullwinkle day, a day of mingled
sun and cloud.

Now that Bullwinkle bust had always been a vexation to my spirit,
partly because old Bullwinkle had so often played truant, instead of
giving me the necessary sittings. He was forever travelling about the
country for political purposes, or else attending the funerals of near
relatives. Sometimes I fancied that he would go to any lengths, no
matter how criminal, rather than face me from the sitter’s chair. The
commission, given to me by a group of Bullwinkle enthusiasts, was to be
handsomely paid, but was to be kept a profound secret from the world
until the finished bronze bust should be set in place as the crowning
ornament of the celebrated five-million-dollar Bullwinkle Building, at
that time under way. To me, there was something rather childish about
this pseudo-secrecy, openly kept up for nearly two years. But above
all, that bust bothered me because I myself had not yet mastered it.
As it stood there in the searching May light, I saw in its loose ends,
its uninteresting planes, its prosaic light-and-dark, its flabbiness
of brow and cheek, its dreary wastes of shirt bosom and lapel, only a
monument to my own incapacity to seize and reveal the characteristics
of my subject;—to tell in my clay all the news that was fit to print
about him, with just enough more to keep the spectator guessing. Lord,
how I had tried, and failed, to penetrate the Bullwinkle personality! At
first, I had privately laughed at the Senator as a ridiculous old card,
holding on to the present and yearning toward the future, but in reality,
living only on the past and its triumphs. Indeed, his middle years had
been a pageant of triumphs. Very soon, however, I found I was not getting
on with my work. The man worried me. I could not discover what there
was within him that had lifted him above the shoulders of the crowd.
I could not for the life of me isolate his own private germ of human
grandeur, and inoculate my clay with it. Yet I acknowledged grandeur in
him. It would be absurd to attribute to anything so blind as chance his
astounding command over human votes.

To be baffled by a Bullwinkle was a chastening lesson. I dreaded that
afternoon sitting. My wife was away, and there could be no readings from
the “Congressional Record.” What would that do to him? Would it bring
him out, or shut him in? To get a running start, I had pulled the bust
out into the fresh morning light, and like a dull child trying to find
his place in yesterday’s lesson, I was fumbling about on the pedestal,
the shirt-front, and the senatorial dewlaps, when a ring at my door and
voices in the anteroom warned me to slip a cover over this work of high
secrecy.

What a contrast to the various Bullwinkles of my career was the young
lady in blue, who now stood before me! This time, she was followed, not
by a mere footman, but by a young man wearing her colors in his tie and
his heart on his sleeve. There they were in their victorious springtide,
the suitor and the suited; for there could be no earthly doubt that
this young man was hers, and that the two were lovers forever. That was
evidently what was most of all in their minds, and I, for one, thought
they were right. Incredible as it would have seemed to me if I had not
been there, Miss Clarenden’s former radiancy was enhanced by her new
experiences, her bright garments. What an exquisite thrilling azure was
that of her veil as it fluttered against the discreet dark blue of her
costume! Maxfield Parrish should have been there to immortalize it. Yet I
did not regret his absence, at the time. There were all kinds of lovely
blue tones about her, and these tones in their very harmony conspired
together to make the blue of her eyes something beyond description
matchless and unforgettable. She was one of those girls who, whether they
put on a pinafore or a Paquin gown, manage to make mankind believe two
things: first, that they are more beautiful than ever, and next, that
what they have on does not look too expensive. There are a few such girls
left, I am told. The mere sight of her smoothed out my Bullwinkle worries.

She came to the point at once, taking advantage of a moment when her
cavalier’s manly attention was caught by the workings of an enlarging
machine in the corner; her Jack was an engineer, it appeared. She paused
an instant, then plunged in, somewhat breathlessly, as if she were not
quite sure of her ground.

“Jack and I,” she said,—“well, we think now that perhaps you were right
in what you told me a year ago. Yes, you were right! I was mistaken
when I thought I would be fully satisfied if I could have forever with
me the marble copy of mother’s hand, carved by your hand. Travel is so
broadening, isn’t it? And now, since I’ve seen all Italy and France”
(here she smiled widely at her own fatuity), “I’ve learned better, indeed
I have! And if you don’t mind, I’ll take away the plaster cast. I shall
want to keep it always, of course. But it’s nature, not art, that makes
me want to.”

I stood aghast. The girl was actually taking me at my word, and
repudiating the contract of yesteryear. What a change in a twelvemonth,
and, O Education, what crimes are committed in thy name! She saw me
looking about for her cast, and very gently begged me not to bother,
unless it was quite handy. Resisting an ironic impulse to tell her that
of course a plaster cast of a hand was always more or less handy, I
dusted off her confounded box, and gave it to her with what courtesy I
could muster. I remembered Gigi’s saying that to do otherwise would have
been _impossibile_, she was _si bella, bella_.

It chanced that not six feet away from the lady in blue, and behind a
little curtain adroitly arranged by Gigi, the marble hand was enshrined.
And strange as it will seem to you after all I have said, there was
something interesting about it, something that would compel your pleased
attention, even if you were an artist, or only a lover of art. Paul
Manship liked parts of it; and a painter friend of mine said—but no
matter about that now. Gigi had poured his whole Mediterranean soul into
his part of the work, and I had designed, as best I could, the open book
and the drapery. To be candid, I had taken real pleasure in finishing
the marble, with the desired _morbidezza_. I had enjoyed every stroke I
had given to that most beautiful stone, for Gigi had kept my tools in
exquisite condition all the time. He seemed to know just how I wanted
every tool to feel in my hand when I was modelling the marble. I longed
to show the girl what we had done for her. But how could I do that, after
all I had said to her, a year ago, and all she had said to me, to-day?
Was there not a certain sprightly finality in her remarks? With decision,
she took the box from my hands and entrusted it to her Jack.

“_Au voir_,” she sang to me, over her shoulder. “_Au plaisir de vous
voir!_ But I shall come again, if I may. Very soon, _n’est-ce-pas_?” The
good Missouri foundation was quite evident in her farewell address.

Naturally, I was nonplussed. Think of it, I, a rising—yes, you might say,
an arrived—young sculptor, in Manhattan, and she, a chit of a Chittenden
from Missouri! But my chagrin was as nothing to Gigi’s. For of course
I had not meant to pocket that money myself, just for a few hours’
pleasant work on a bit of pink marble. I was intending it as a sort of
well-earned present for Gigi, who has, you must know, a rather large
flock of kids to be shepherded up to the highest pastures of our American
democracy. There was one little fellow named Mario, the most gifted of
all, and he had been hard hit by infantile paralysis; we were planning
to use this money for his special education in art. And now the chit had
left us planted there, with nothing but a raw _n’est-ce-pas_ for our
pains. It served me right, I admit. But what of Gigi, and the lad Mario?
Why, Mario could model you a better rabbit out of yesterday’s chewing-gum
than Schneider could ever evolve from the fairest block of marble in
Milan Cathedral. That girl had talked of elevating American art; and here
she was, actively stifling American genius. I could not meet Gigi’s eye.
Perhaps, after all, there was no great contrast between the young lady in
blue and the Senator, except on the surface. The world was probably full
of chits and Bullwinkles.

That afternoon, the dreaded sitting began badly. The Senator missed my
wife and her ministrations. He was writing his memoirs, and wanted to
refresh his memory about his third tariff speech. His secretary was no
good as a reader, he complained, but my wife had seemed to have some
sense about her. He couldn’t understand why a woman of sense should want
to go gallivanting. His manner implied that it was wholly my fault that
my wife should prefer Bar Harbor realities to Little Rock recollections.
Half-peevishly and half-humorously, he writhed about in his chair, like
a bad little boy grown old. He did not like the cigar he had brought,
and scorned the best I could offer. He drove me to despair by presenting
square front view when I needed to verify dewlaps in profile; he brushed
off imaginary flies from his Roman nose, just as if my studying his nose
had made it itch. He attempted every grotesque perversity in the sitter’s
calendar, and even invented some original bedevilments of his own. He
turned his attention to my rendering of the details of his attire,
telling me that he had always _tried_ to tie his tie as tight as he could
get it, and that if I didn’t mind (indeed, I did mind!) he wanted to have
that third button of his waistcoat fastened up, if the dam’ thing was to
go down to posterity in imperishable bronze. Alas, my sitter was eluding
me again. His reality as a human being was hidden from me in a fog of
momentary misconduct.

Suddenly the Senator straightened. He was looking toward the corner where
a stricken Gigi was still hovering about our rejected collaborative
masterpiece, and contemplating the wreck of Mario’s future. “Where on
God’s footstool did you get that hand?” shouted the Senator, the big
W-shaped vein on his left temple swelling in his excitement.

“Gigi and I made it,” I replied, calmly accepting the fact that either
the Senator or I had at last gone crazy under the strain of the
Bullwinkle bust. The man had never before shown a spark of any interest
whatsoever in my works, whether clay or plaster, bronze or marble. I
wondered whether a strait-jacket would have been a good thing to include
in my studio equipment, but I was not quite sure which one of us needed
it the more, so bewildered was I by the change that had seized on the
Senator. He bounded from his chair, snatching the ground, one might say,
from under Gigi’s feet.

“That hand,” bellowed Mr. Bullwinkle, shaking his forefinger at me as
if I were his political opponent, “that hand is a fine thing! I tell
you, it’s a great thing! It’s the best thing you’ve got in your whole
shooting-gallery, and don’t you start in to deny it! I’d rather have
that one piece of alabaster marble than the whole of Westminster Abbey!”

To my amazement, the Senator stood at bay over the marble, as if it
were a prize to be defended against all comers. He fairly flamed with
intensity. I never saw a man more alive, more tingling with a sense of
being alive. For the first time, I could learn, from my own eyes and not
from historic hearsay, something of his power over his fellow-men. His
eyes looked large, his jowls turned taut, his upstanding hair, which
I had thought almost ridiculous, became sublime. He seemed a creature
expressly framed for the applause of listening senates. In a twinkling,
and when I least expected it, I saw more of the real man than I had found
out in all my passionate searching during those frustrate sittings. No
doubt, my searching had helped toward my present illuminated vision;
that vision was but the culmination, the happy ending, of my quest. Like
Childe Roland, I had been expecting too much, perhaps, from my Dark
Tower. What a fool I had been to suppose that the Senator’s germ of
greatness lay in some noble difference between himself and others! Why,
it was plain as day that his greatness lay, not in his difference from
the rest of the world, oh, no, not that; his greatness was mainly in his
rich, happy, sympathetic commonness. He was not so much a man above men,
as a man among men. My mistake was, I had been trying to win the Senator;
I should have let him try to win me, according to his bent and usage. So
I sprang back to my modelling, and let him be himself. It did not matter
to me, now, that he was striding, gesticulating, quivering; at heart, I
have always believed, with George de Forest Brush, that a model on the
move, and really alive, is far better to work from than one sitting still
as a sod.

And now, as I studied my man anew, I perceived all at once that a
dozen good dominating strokes rightly placed on my clay could turn it
from a mess to a masterpiece. I became two persons, as every artist
at times must. Each was sharply awake. One of these two was modelling
for dear life on that portrait, smiting the thing now here, now there;
unhasting, unresting; gathering up rich handfuls of all the released
individuality of greatness that I now saw radiating from a transfigured
Senatorial countenance, and compressing that individuality into clay
for the plaster-moulder’s sacrifice and the bronze-founder’s furnace.
The other man in me was listening amiably to a Bullwinkle speech of
self-revelation. I suppose that under my skin there was even a third
person, ironically reminding me that it was never _my_ hand that had
touched the button to switch all this new light on a stale matter. It was
another hand, a lady’s hand, a marble hand, too; and a hand rejected by
a chit. Such reminders drive a man to humility, even while he is winning
the game. For I _was_ winning; there could be no doubt of that, now.

“You young artist fellers,” the Senator was saying, vehemently, “of
course you all think of me as a tough old politician. So I am, and so I
want to be! But the mistake you make is, thinking I’m nothing else. That
young Mather that painted me was just the same. He made a swell portrait
of me, of course, red plush curtain and all;—I know enough not to deny
that. But he wasn’t so much interested in me as he was in his way of
painting me. And it shows in his work, sticks out all over!”

I took to heart this luminous bit of art-criticism while the Senator ran
on. “And I can tell you, young man, that this hand carries me back in
a way you don’t dream of. You don’t even guess at the sort of feeling
I have when I look at it and touch it! You’re incapable of knowing!
You’re not old enough or wise enough or kind enough, perhaps! You’re too
college-sure in your own way of feeling to care a continental about what
_I_ feel!”

I could not help seeing that some strong emotion had visited his heart.
But I thought he’d like it best if I didn’t say much; besides, I had my
work to do. The Bullwinkle Building must not lack its crowning touch
through any failure of mine to seize the supreme moment. So I calmly
swept my big tool alongside of the Senator’s clay face, half-erasing a
thousand fussy unnecessary markings from its map. My erstwhile sitter was
still hovering excitedly over the marble. He had nothing whatever to say
about _morbidezza_.

“Look here,” he exclaimed, turning upon me with a gesture of real
dignity, “you probably don’t see, or imagine you see, any resemblance
between this great paw of mine and that lovely lady’s hand! No, I
wouldn’t expect you to!”

Now I had often observed that the Senator’s hand was still handsome and
energetic. An unusual hand, I had thought, for a politician. It was
uninvaded either by chalky deposit on the knuckles, or fatty increment on
the fingers, or even by swollen veins on the back. Hence I was glad to
admit the likeness he saw; and weighing my words, while I laid in a good
strong dark under a resounding lock of hair he had just tossed up from
his forehead, I congratulated him on his artistic discernment. He shook
off the compliment with a growl, though I know he liked it.

“But what I want to know is,” he went on, “how the deuce did _you_ happen
to make this lovely thing? Is it for sale? What price, f.o.b., young
feller, what price?”

Gigi leaked out from his burlap. I could feel his eyes imploring me, for
Mario’s sake, to play my part as a man!

The Senator noted my hesitation. “Isn’t it for sale?”

“Upon my word,” I replied, intent on fixing the Bullwinkle nostril for
posterity, “I hardly know whether it’s for sale or not.” For the moment
I didn’t care, a happy issue out of the Bullwinkle bust being from every
point of view more important to me, just then, than all the marble hands
from here to Genoa.

“With the good help of Gigi here, I made the thing for a lady, who
doesn’t seem to want it, now it’s done. She’s been to Europe since she
ordered it, and she’s gotten herself educated, so she thinks, to higher
forms of art.” Perhaps I spoke a trifle bitterly.

“What’s her fool name?” The Senator was still enkindled. I was surprised
to see with what tenderness he was passing his fingers over the surface
of that marble;—and he shouting the while as if we were all at a caucus!

“Her name?” I hesitated, even then desiring to protect the name of
beauty, and to pardon the grotesque shabbiness of that girl’s act in
taking me at my word. “Let’s see. Oh, it was a Miss Chittenden, as I
remember it. Just a chit from Missouri.”

“Chittenden,” returned the Senator, with a puzzled air, “Chittenden?”
Then a great light broke upon him. “Chittenden nothing! It’s Clarenden,
that’s what it is. And if she told you anything else, she’s sailing under
false pretences. Just like her, too!”

“No, indeed,” I interposed, warmly, “I’m sure she wouldn’t do that—there
must be something she’d draw the line at. Come to think of it, Clarenden
_was_ the name she gave.”

“A long young dame,” pursued Bullwinkle, “blue eyes, you know, and a way
with her? Mariellen Clarenden?”

I nodded. The Senator leaped in triumph. He turned upon me with the
friendliest smile in the world. “What were you charging her?”

“Four hundred dollars. And I don’t sell it for a cent less to anybody.”

“Give you five hundred! Done!” The Senator snatched a checkbook and a
fountain pen from the region of that waistcoat button we had lately
wrangled over. I had no idea his motions could be so swift and so
majestic. Perhaps I might have stayed his hand, in some effete idea of
ethics, or professional etiquette; but Gigi’s inexorable eye was on me,
dangling Mario before my hesitating soul. I compromised by taking the
check, with vague thankfulness, and laying it on the table. I told myself
I would think it over. It might be that five hundred dollars was not too
much for a master-work, preferred above all Westminster Abbey.

“You wonder at me,” the Senator went on, with a guffaw that was like a
sob. “Well, then, sit up and wonder all you like. Sometimes I wonder
at myself. This hand—” he stroked the marble with the same sort of
reverence the girl had shown about that plaster cast. “Oh, hang it, boy,
we’re all human, even if you are studio-bred-and-broke, God help you,
and I’m from Missouri! Listen, kid. I had a sister, a twin sister. A
smart Aleck like you would probably say it sounds like opera-buff, or a
dime novel, but it’s just plain fact, right out of my own life. And I
was fonder of that girl than of any other human being that ever lived.
This necktie you’ve been fussing over because it’s too tight and hard,
you said;—well, it’s black, for her. And black _is_ tight and hard,
sometimes. Ah, well!” The Senator resolutely put away sadness, and again
stretched out his own fine capable hand.

“My sister had the prettiest little hand in the county. County! Her hand
was known all over the State, and many a young newspaper feller touched
it—on paper—in the old days. Foot, too!” He meditated a moment on his own
very good-looking shoes. “After she married Clarenden, the big railroad
man, we saw less of each other, of course, but we were chums to the last.
And the instant my eye lit on this lovely work, this masterpiece, though
I say it that shouldn’t, I knew there was something in it for me! I
didn’t quite know what, of course, until I found out that Mariellen was
mixed up in it, and then ’twas clear as day. Had you copy a plaster cast,
didn’t she?” He chuckled with pleasure in his perspicacity. “We Senators
know all about plaster casts and death-masks and that sort of thing.
Unless we want to miss a trick, we have ’em done to us, as soon as the
time comes. But what I don’t understand is why Mariellen got cold feet!
She’s a girl of some sense, I tell you, or was, until she got a hankering
for New York, and what she calls the higher things in art!”

The Senator’s last words mimicked to perfection both the girl and myself.
It was that kind of mimicry which creates good understanding, and leaves
a smile, not a sting. Oh, I could see how he, like the girl, captivated
mankind!

“Even now,” he continued, “she’s my favorite of the whole bunch, and
they’ve all of ’em got plenty of the Bullwinkle pep. Some face, that
girl, hey? Pretty ain’t the word!”

No, it wasn’t the word. But I couldn’t give any one word that would
really cover the case, I admitted.

“Mariellen gets the better of everybody. She even puts it over on a smart
artist like you. I’d like to take her across my knee! And before I’ve
finished with her, I shall make her feel like thirty cents about this
job. Gave the marble heart to my marble hand, did she? She’ll be wishing
she kept it, the moment she sees I’ve got it. But mark my words, it’ll
never be hers, until after I’ve taken the Big Subway for good and for
all. And if she tries to bamboozle me out of what I’ve bought and paid
for, I’ll—”

A peal of the bell and voices in the anteroom caused the speaker to
suspend sentence, and I slipped out to find, in eager converse with
Gigi, the young person from Missouri. Was the sky raining coincidences,
that day? With a gesture absurdly like her uncle’s, she was drawing from
that much-embroidered handbag of hers a checkbook not unlike his own
in general effect. Had Shakespeare been there, he would have indited a
sonnet to the checkbook of beauty, and its likeness to that of brains and
power.

“Of course,” said the young lady, giving me at once her charming smile
and her signed check, “I knew that _you_ knew, from what I said when
I went away from here this morning, that I meant to come back just as
soon as I could, to deliver the goods, and to get the goods.” What I
had seen of her uncle helped me to recognize a genuine emotion hiding
behind the flippancy of her words. I freely confess that if my wife or
my sister had said or done just what Miss Clarenden did, I would have
found it preposterous, alarming, in bad taste. But that girl had some
strange power to make one see at once that what she did was simple and
natural; the best thing in the circumstances, and therefore not foolish
or ill-bred.

“I know you’ll understand, the moment I explain: I’ve always said to
myself that the man who carved that Dancer would understand a lot. Well,
when I came here this morning, I simply couldn’t shake Jack. He stuck to
my skirts like a burr. You know we’re to be married in the autumn.” The
pink roses in her cheeks flamed into American Beauties for an instant,
and then became themselves again, in a way that I’ve often wished might
be managed on the stage.

“Jack has nothing in the world but what he earns. To be sure, he earns a
lot, being—no, no, not a plumber, but a very, very civil engineer.” Her
time-worn jests seemed dewy-fresh as they fell from her lips. Witty as
well as beautiful, I thought. Oh, I admit my weakness!

Miss Clarenden continued her explanation. “Very likely, though, we shall
have to economize, at first. And I didn’t want Jack to see me spend four
hundred dollars right off bang, the very day after we landed, even for
something I long for as I do for that marble hand; real art, too. You
see, Jack got awfully gloomy over that last dozen pairs of gloves I got
at the Bon Marché, the day before we sailed. Said he feared that at first
he couldn’t give me all I’d been accustomed to, and so on. And, honestly,
I was afraid that he’d be doing a bit of mental arithmetic right here in
your studio, and doing it wrong! Saying to himself that if twenty-four
kid gloves cost a hundred francs, why should one marble hand cost so many
hundred dollars, or something like that!” I saw that the tears were very
near those laughing eyes of hers, but she went bravely on. “Jack doesn’t
know much about art yet, but I’m going to explain it all to him, the
_morbidezza_ and everything. And I’m just crazy to see what you’ve done
for me.”

Her voice with its smiles and tears floated in to Senator Bullwinkle as I
led her toward the work of her hope. The marble was fairly heavy, but the
Senator was more than fairly strong, and in my absence, he had gathered
it up between his hands, and had sat down to muse upon it. In fact,
it lay across his knees, just where he had said he would like to take
Mariellen. I don’t know how, but he presently succeeded in making a place
for both. I think Mariellen helped him.

Of course it was the Senator who kept the masterpiece, the buccaneer in
him prizing it all the more when he learned from a grateful Gigi the
origin of the raw material. He tells me he doesn’t care a whoop whether
the work elevates American art or not; it elevates him. Mariellen admits
it’s better so, since the lad Mario is the gainer by the one hundred
dollars with which the Senator had built up the price. To clinch the
matter, she wanted, for Mario’s sake, to add her own check to her
uncle’s, her very first glance at that boy’s amazing sculpture in various
lowly substances having convinced her of the wisdom of such a step. But I
prevailed upon her to wait a year, at least; and that part does not come
into this tale, at all.

“Ah, well, there are more ways than one to elevate art, or anything else.
It’s up to Mario, now,” blithely remarked the young lady in blue.




“C’EST UNE TAUPE”


I feel sure that everybody, at least everybody who _is_ anybody, really
knows, in the bottom of his heart, just what a _taupe_ is. But in case
there should be any person with such weighty world affairs on his mind
that he could not possibly move them around to discover hidden among
them an insignificant matter like a _taupe_, I will say that a _taupe_
is a small furry thing that burrows in the ground. By no means an
unfashionable creature, I assure you! Its color is always modish. Its
skins, when collected by hundreds and thousands, go to make up what I am
informed are “among the most authoritative fur garments of the coming
season.” In short, a _taupe_ is a mole, all told.

Also, I am reasonably certain that most of us, if we should stop to
consider the subject, would understand perfectly the nature of a
_limace_. A slimy, limy _limace_! Its very name tells its story. It is
not exactly one of the “slithy toves” of the old song, but they may all
have had similar ancestors. And if you have guessed that a _limace_ is
a slug, poor thing,—a big slug, no more and no less,—you are entirely
right. So there you have the two characters, the mole, the slug; the
furry, fashionable _taupe_, the slippery yet sticky _limace_.

In the Bois de Meudon, on the most beautiful summer morning in the world,
a _limace_ was lying curled up like a thick brown half-moon on a bright
green leaf. In its sluggish way, it was coquetting with the sunbeams. The
_limace_ was in love with life, and at peace with all the earth. So were
the little Parisians who had come out from the city to make holiday. At
first there were not many of them; only M. Petitpot, the kind, red-eyed
mason of the rue Delambre; Mme. Petitpot with the baby, in his straw hat
built like a life-preserver; the good grandmother, not ashamed of her
white cap; and the boy Pierre Petitpot, in his newest black apron. There
were also the two doubly-opening baskets for the luncheon. M. Petitpot
himself carried the basket that had the bread and the salad, with the
two bottles of red wine slanted in, one at each end. But the grandmother
kept fast hold of the smaller basket, because that one contained a truly
magnificent roasted chicken, wrapped in a napkin. What an aroma, my
friends! A _déjeuner sur l’herbe_ was contemplated. Messrs. Manet and
Monet are not the only artists of the _déjeuner sur l’herbe_.

Presently other Parisians came, from various quarters of the city, and
from various businesses. All were seeking a little Sunday happiness in
the open. They were not really familiar with the secrets of the wood, as
you shall see. But they had curiosity and discernment, and these two,
keeping together, will go far toward finding knowledge. Unlike English
people, these French persons chatted with each other, without mistrust.
Also, they revealed the beauties of nature to each other. How dazzling
and glorious were the clouds that day! The grocer’s lady pointed out to
Mme. Petitpot that the good God must surely possess a giant egg-whip, to
be able to produce a _méringue_ as colossal and light as those masses of
cloud over there! And Mme. Petitpot had replied that eggs were better and
cheaper, now that it was June, but that her own egg-beater had a kink in
it, so that she was about to buy another.

Black-aproned Pierre was a pale bright-eyed child with a bulging
forehead, and hands that looked as if they wanted to play the piano or
something. Easy to see that he was predestined for the paths of learning.
_Per aspera ad astra_; the latter for Pierre, the former for his
parents. Even for this one holiday, they had not been able to separate
him from his new “Petit Atlas du Monde”; he hugged it so tightly that the
crimson cover had already stained his hands, freshly washed that very
morning. His delighted glance skipped like a bird from tree to bush. He
nodded his head in smiling ecstasy when the grocer’s lady expressed that
airy fantasy of hers as to the clouds.

But it was one of the later comers, a pink-sashed little girl from the
Montrouge quarter, who first saw the _limace_, and shouted aloud in
joyous fright. “What a droll of a beast! I beg of thee, Mamma, regard me
that!”

All the world pressed forward to inspect the _limace_. There were some
who even had the hardihood to touch the creature with little sticks.
“Hold, hold, my infant! _Faut pas la toucher!_ Perhaps it is a poisonous
one, _hein_? Demand of thy papa whether it is envenomed.”

By now, quite a little crowd had gathered. One would say, amateurs in
_limaçonnerie_! Papa, not knowing in the least whether it was envenomed
or otherwise, preferred not to make any statement before the other
Parisians, who, if the truth were discovered, were no better informed
than he himself as to the nature of the thing there. Strange as it may
seem, those Parisians were really less wise about the _limace_ than you
and I are, to-day! For not one of them really knew that all of them were
looking at a _limace_. But they one and all wanted to talk about it,
solo, fugue, and chorus; and they did not know how best to mention it.
Now it is absurd to keep on calling a thing _la chose_. So at last some
one asked aloud, as all had been asking within, “What is it that that is,
that that?”

Ah, if only M. J. Henri Fabre had been there, M. Fabre, the “insects’
Homer”! But M. Fabre was far away, and no one answered for him. There
was a pause. Parisians hate a pause. The day had begun so joyous, and
there they all were, pausing. Insupportable! A pretty lady with a
primrose-colored parasol said that if it were a serpent, now, she would
be able to tell you. She felt herself something of a connoisseur in
serpents; there had been a serpent at the last _pique-nique_ she had
attended. The gentleman on whose arm she was leaning said, with emotion,
“Ah, I can well believe that, Mademoiselle!” Then everybody laughed
a merry “_Hé, hé!_” But all this graceful _badinage_ brought them no
nearer to knowledge. Hence those who really thirsted for knowledge were
glad when the white-capped grandmother Petitpot, with proud beady eyes,
pushed forward pale little Pierre with his bulging forehead. In fine, our
Pierre, a child well instructed, could inform those ladies.

Appalling yet entrancing moment for black-aproned Pierre! He clasped his
thin little Atlas of the World against his stomach, and silently prayed
for knowledge to descend upon him from on high. Then he looked earnestly
down on the _limace_, to put himself _en rapport_ with the creature in
her underworld life.

A touch of rose pink bloomed a moment on his sallow cheek. “I think,” he
said, in his eager fluty voice of a born “teacher’s favorite,” “I think,
yes, I believe well!—_c’est une taupe_.” The very utterance of his faith
created in him a faith more abundant. He nodded his head sagely, even
boldly. “_Ah, oui, Madame, sans doute, c’est une taupe._”

Swiftly the words of the young scholar penetrated all the little groups
of Parisians. _Une taupe!_ Lady and gentleman, girl and boy, mason and
grocer, one after the other took up that goodly revelation. “_C’est une
taupe!_” Some repeated it a little sadly, as if it were a mistake, or
at least an indelicacy, on the part of the _taupe_ not to have been
something else. Others repeated it with exquisite gayety, as if a _taupe_
were the one object of joy the world had waited for, until then. Still
others repeated it without passion and without surprise, as if a _taupe_
were no more than should have been expected at such a time. But in one
way or another, they all repeated it. _C’est une taupe._ Even those
who had never had so much as a cornerwise glance at the _limace_ went
their ways, saying, with a fine discriminating wave of the hand, “_une
taupe_.” Indeed, not having seen the _limace_, they were naturally far
more confident than those who had really gone quite near to that brown
half-moon on the green leaf, and touched it with twigs. The distribution
of knowledge is a moving spectacle, is it not?

My friend who was beside me in that lovely wood, with the blue sky above
the waving branches, and with the flower-like children springing up from
the grass, and the autumn-leaf grandmothers walking abroad with baskets
for the _déjeuner_, suddenly asked me why I was laughing like that, and
the tears running down my cheeks.

“You do not know why!” I answered. “Oh, surely if you know anything
at all, you must know! It is because I can see, at this moment, this
same spectacle shaping itself everywhere on our planet; yes, from the
Arctic to the Antarctic, on Capricornus and on Cancer, and even in the
Equatorial belt where the lazy peoples live. Everywhere, everywhere
on this round globe of ours, there is a poor _limace_ among the green
leaves, and no one knows what she is; but everywhere there is a good
old grandmother, pushing forward a pale little Pierre with a bay-window
brow, to tell the world, ‘_C’est une taupe._’ And the world listens, and
repeats, and so becomes wise.”

My friend, a sadly literal person, objected. It couldn’t be like that,
among the Esquimaux, in their igloos. And I had all I could do to
prove that among the Esquimaux, in their igloos, it was not only just
like that, but more so. On the return boat for Paris, we were still
arguing the question. The beady-eyed little grandmother had already
helped to remove the life-preserving hat from the Petitpot baby. She
continued to guard her basket, which now held only an aroma, and, please
God, the _carcasse_ for the morrow’s soup. Black-aproned Pierre, with
an unrelenting grip upon his Atlas of the World, laid his sleepy,
knowledge-burdened head against her shoulder. Mme. Petitpot whispered
over that head into the grandmother’s ear, and the grandmother nodded and
smiled. The two were agreed that it was truly a miracle; in all that fine
company, the boy was the only one who knew. Surely there was a future for
this child, already so well instructed! And with what agreeable courtesy
he had said it, “_Madame, c’est une taupe!_”

The women smiled, yet there was something sad and lofty in their smiling.
For they knew that they were guarding between them a very precious
vessel, and they prayed for strength equal to the honored task. The
evening breeze freshened sweetly; and in case that fabled Gallic monster,
a _courant d’air_, might come stalking through the boat, the grandmother
spread a fold of her voluminous black skirt over Pierre’s bare knees.




THEIR APPOINTED ROUNDS


I

They were destined to dislike each other on sight, those two whose
appointed rounds, unexpectedly interlacing, had brought them together
under the ancient pines keeping watch over the grave of a Revolutionary
soldier. The man disliked the boy, because he himself had at that moment
a loathing and a horror of himself and his probable fate, and the lad’s
pliant figure vividly recalled to him what his own had been, in days long
past. The boy’s reason for disliking the man was far more obscure, but no
less potent.

That little pine-clad hill with the graves was pleasantly sheltered by
hills higher than itself. The pines were very tall and shapely. They
soared skyward like clustering brown masts, decked out at their far
tops with tossing banners of holiday green. The summer sunlight paid
long visits at their feet. If you should lay down your head under those
trees, and then lift your eyes, you would be startled to discover the
unbelievable purple pomp of those woven branches, and the intense
blueness beyond. The shadows on the ground were more golden there than
elsewhere, the sunbeams more serious-minded. They had all played together
there for so many years, seeing the same sights and thinking the same
thoughts, that they had at last come to look somewhat like each other.
L’Allegro and Il Penseroso had mingled their identities. A scarlet
tanager flared down from a far purple bough, to sing the peace that
brooded over the place. Both the man and the boy had their reasons for
seeking peace. Though unknown to each other, they knew that peace might
be found under those pines, but they had no mind for sharing it with each
other.


II

The boy Royal had a poem of his own make in his pocket, and being on his
travels, he had climbed up from the east to rest himself, and to re-read
his verses yet again in solitude. Perhaps he was about to add to them
some touch of immortality, some wistful trace of that philosophy which
may not revisit the mind of man after his seventeenth year, but day by
day loses itself more deeply in the underbrush of uncharted, enchanted
woodways. The poem was about a maiden called Amaryllis. In the prose
of private life, Royal’s Amaryllis was a wholly good and pretty girl a
little older than himself. Her name was Mary, but even at nineteen she
was still signing herself Maimée. However, what is poetry for, unless to
quicken and rechristen all worlds into strangeness and beauty? Let Royal
keep his Amaryllis a while longer, I beg!

Is there any good and comfortable thing that the heart of youth will not
flee from, in its longing for the untrodden way? The boy Royal was a
fugitive from the eggs-and-bacon type of breakfast. He was in search of
some ambrosial, sit-by-the-brookside food more precious and sustaining to
his spirit, so he dreamed, than any of the comestibles, fine or gross,
involving his parents in worrisome monthly bills at the grocer’s. For
him, life and letters were mingled mysteriously in the same sparkling
cup, and he wanted to drink of that cup freely. One can do such things
better away from home. He had therefore wrung from his mother, his father
being absent in the city, working for the wherewithal, her unwilling
consent to a solitary three days’ walking tour, his entire luggage to
consist of a flashlight, the Iliad, and a toothbrush. Oh, of course, a
full tin of provender slung across the back of his Norfolk jacket! You
will doubtless understand what his twin brother Peter meant when he said
that the difference between Royal’s travels and R. L. S.’s was all in one
word; a preposition, don’t they call it? Stevenson’s Travels were With a
Donkey, Royal’s were Of a Donkey. Peter was sore because he had not been
invited to be a donkey too.

The twins loved one another dearly, but now that adolescence was upon
them, they often wounded one another sorely. Each boy, recognizing
certain superiorities in the other, felt all the more bound to rescue and
protect and assert his own individuality. Who knows what dire harm to
ourselves may issue from our brother’s excellences? And Royal, even more
than Peter, longed for a more emphatic identity of his own—something so
distinct and compelling that the world would forever cease contrasting
and comparing him with another.

Their father was a painter, their mother a writer. Peter took to
colors, Royal to ink. But Peter, luckily for the world, was no such
born-in-the-blood Romantic as poor Royal then was, and might forever
be, unless something could be done about it! That boy’s parents had
showered upon him all the benefits of education, dentistry, operations
for adenoids. They had even had him psycho-analyzed, since Uncle Tom’s
business in life was exactly that. My uncle the psychiatrist; the boys
often stuck the phrase into their cheeks, for the benefit of their mates.
The work on Royal had been done with the utmost secrecy, of course. Uncle
Tom had made a mental diagram of Royal’s case, as carefully as for a
paying patient. In seven closely typewritten pages, bristling with words
like prognosis, adolescence, stimuli, adaptability, environment, Royal’s
young soul-history may still be found among Uncle Tom’s files. And
Uncle Tom would be the first to tell you that for the unlearned, those
seven pages might be summed up in seven words: a poet is growing, let
him alone. Royal’s parents were cheered by that report. They had always
rejoiced in the harmonious understanding that existed between the uncle
and nephew. There was a strong family likeness between the two; they
turned their heads to the same side when arguing, and waved a good-bye in
the same manner. Often Royal at his most poetical made observations that
staggered Uncle Tom at his most psychological. Uncle Tom sometimes found
it ludicrous when, simply because “_maxima debetur puero reverentia_,”
he had refrained from saying something, and then found that Royal, with
immense earnestness, was saying it himself.

Royal was a lean, rangy, bright-haired lad, with a clear skin and a good
carriage. He had nobly-set blue eyes whose depths seemed practically
bottomless, the young eyes that suggest both heaven and hell. He had
also a determined chin that often pushed him into positions in which his
undetermined nose was of no use whatever. Oh, quite the ordinary type
of boy whose unusualness is chiefly within! Perhaps the most striking
thing about him, thus far, was his passion for beauty; beauty to be seen,
heard, tasted, clasped, protected, prayed to. There was Scotch blood in
him; he had plenty of second sight, but was often found lacking in that
vulgar variety of first sight known as common sense.

In planning his travels, he had seen himself, now as a sailor in tarry
trousers, jingling strange coins in foreign ports that reeked with
incredible oaths and aromas; now as a gifted young scholar, teaching
French to some sturdy blacksmith’s fair daughters, in exchange for a
noggin of milk and a brace of doughnuts, since you can’t expect cakes
and ale in this country; and now as a prince-in-disguise mechanic out of
work, in smutched overalls, with nothing clean at all about him but his
teeth; his toothbrush would tell the world. Royal recognized the weakness
of his own fables. He knew well enough that, unlike practical Peter he
himself could scarcely tell a bolt from a bit-stock, or a belaying-pin
from a bo’s’n’s whistle; and also (here Peter would be no better off)
that he would certainly be unable to explain away the French subjunctive,
in case the prettier of the blacksmith’s daughters should show an
unfortunate curiosity about a topic so repugnant. Yes, Royal was a stern
critic of his own castles, and therefore spent much time in rebuilding
them.

Royal on his travels soon found that three days were all too brief a term
for such adventures as he sought. His mother and he had been reading the
“Crock of Gold” together, and he knew that she would understand him when
he wrote, on the second day of his faring:

“_Dear Mother_, I am with the leprecauns, and so shall not return as
early as we said. Fear not, all is well with me. The world is wide, the
weather fine, and the extra $3.75 you gave me is hardly touched as yet.
Besides, I can earn what I need, if I need more than I have. I love the
feel of this life in the open, and you know how much I want to spin the
wheel of life, in my own philosopher fashion.”

Thus wrote Royal, giving neither date nor address, and incontinently
planning to reach far cities by means of gondola cars. His mother was
hurt, irritated, and anxious, in equal parts; but she understood her boy
well enough to know that there was some fabric to his fustian. Uncle Tom
jeered openly, saying that people who breakfast with the leprecauns may
have to sup with the lepers, if they don’t watch out. These psychiatrists
have a way of taking the worm’s-eye view of high doings.


III

Within a week, the Royal progress had swept through parts of three of
our United States, without serious damage either to the lad or to the
landscape. The curve of operations was now fast shaping itself into a
circle. Day and night, the weather had been magically lovely. Royal had
gladly passed the first three nights _à la belle étoile_; with keen
relish, he rolled the phrase under his tongue, thinking that now not a
boy in Froggy Beaurivage’s French Literature classes understood its
charm as well as he. His Norfolk coat, a bore by day, proved a godsend
in the chill hours before dawn, and he knew the use of a Sunday paper as
a mattress. Before falling asleep, he would gaze with delight into the
skies; thrilled with their beauty and immensity, he would say to himself,
“After this, I am changed forever; I shall always be something more than
I was before I came here.” No doubt he was right.

And his days were no less wondrous, for their sun, and shade, and good
going. Sometimes, when he was beginning to feel dusty or weary, an
unexpected pool would signal to him from beside a shaded road; and when
he came up from it, he was a new-made creature. He liked being solitary,
yet he liked stopping at sudden inns for frugal meals, and he liked
chatting with the wayfarers he met. The latter half of the week had
moments less idyllic. His fourth night he spent in a box car, his fifth
in a boarding-house for Polish immigrants, and his sixth, in part at
least, in the jail-room of a village town-hall, where he had been held in
custody on a false charge of having stolen an automobile.

His code was very explicit as to stealing. He made a point of stealing
and begging nothing but rides of various sorts. He had begged and
received rides in hay-carts, touring-cars, lumber-trucks: he had also
managed to get without cost considerable railroad transportation. It
sounds crooked, to me! But of course each type of ride has its good
and bad points. He took whatever fruit he saw lying on the ground, on
the public side of fences; it was astonishing what excellent pickings
were to be had in this way; he felt that an essay on economics might be
written on this subject. But he never entered an orchard, never even
shook a wayside tree. His head was full of these delicate distinctions.
From Kipling he had imbibed the idea that the white man’s burden can
best be sustained in dark lands by the unfailing practice of wearing a
dinner jacket in the evening, no matter how solitary the meal. _Noblesse
oblige!_ And it keeps you from sinking. The idea had appealed to Royal,
and he had invented a variant of it to use in his travels. He would at
all times deal with the fruits of the earth exactly as if the owner of
them were watching him. No unheroic task! If he should fall once, he told
himself, it would be all the easier to fall again, and yet again; and
then where are you? As a matter of exact record, he did not fall once;
and I see no reason why this may not be set down to his credit. It is of
course regrettable that a principle which worked so well for agriculture
could not have been applied to transportation also.

Thus, by being partly prig, partly poet, partly his own stage-manager,
and altogether boy, Royal was taking steps toward being a man. There was
absolute truth in his protestations before the one-armed justice of the
peace (apparently the universal functionary of the village) that he knew
nothing of the stolen car, nothing whatever, from fender to tail-light.
Unluckily, on being asked his father’s name and address, he gave a wholly
fantastic reply, his brain being stuffed to capacity with material for
such purposes. I believe that he had a laudable idea of protecting the
family by “putting one over” on the village Dogberry. But by a lamentable
oversight, disclosed to the one-armed man on consulting directories and
maps, the county of Chesterfolk, in the adjoining State, acknowledged
no township called Four Bridges; and even had there been such a place,
it still remains doubtful whether Royal’s putative father, Algernon M.
Hollingsworth, that splendid creature born of necessity’s invention,
would ever have been content to live there. Other questions were put;
Royal’s _Whither_ was found to be fully as obscure as his _Whence_. He
was therefore clapped as a “suspicious vagrant” into the jail-room,
a high and narrow cubicle left over from the previous century, and
unused for years except for the occasional storing of the movie-man’s
impedimenta on wet evenings.

In lieu of a left hand, the one-armed justice of the peace had a steel
hook, which he managed with an address that Royal could but admire.
He carefully examined our poet’s possessions; his purse, food, poems,
matches, wristwatch, toothbrush, Iliad, flashlight. The purse, poems, and
food he regarded as negligible. The Iliad received from him both respect
and scorn; respect because it was print, scorn because it was print he
couldn’t read.

“Your Koran, ain’t it?” He asked the question with the irony he thought
due to those who gave false addresses. Royal trembled when hand and hook
turned those Homeric pages. His father’s bookplate might give the whole
show away. But fortunately that telltale emblem escaped the hook-and-eye
of justice. And the man’s idea of calling the book a Koran had in it
something that appealed strongly to the inventor’s own imagination; he
played upon the theme with alliterative variations.

“Kid carries Koran,” he ejaculated while pulling out a rickety settee for
the repose of the accused. Hooking up Royal’s flashlight, he discovered
a tattered blanket belonging to the movie-man, and this he threw over
the settee, still improvising. “Koran concealed on Courteous Kid.”
Perhaps that fancy of his softened his fibre. He had pocketed Royal’s
matches, and was about to confiscate his flashlight also, when a humane
thought occurred to him. For our humor may at times produce humanity in
ourselves, if not in those whom we expose to it.

“Well, kid, I guess I’ll leave you your light to read your Koran by.
Sorry we can’t give you a prayer-rug too, but our finest Orientals are
in storage, this season.” (He’d show the young fella ’t givin’ false
addresses was a game two could play at!) Royal was relieved when at last
the justice really locked the door, and departed. Something to tell old
Peter, this.

He wondered what Peter, the practical genius, would do in that
ill-smelling hole. Peter, he concluded, would explore things. Royal’s
flashlight revealed two flimsy packing-cases; the movie-man was his
Providence, that night. He waited until midnight, by his watch. He then
set one box on the other, and by cautious climbing, managed to reach the
tiny barred window, high in the wall. The bars were ancient in their
shallow sockets; Royal was lean, even leaner than usual; in a twinkling
he had leaped down crashing into some mournful sumac trees, and after
that, escape was easy, along the adjoining church and churchyard. Surely
the leprecauns were on his side! All of a sudden he realized that his act
of self-preservation from so-called justice was one of the most practical
bits of work he had ever performed in his life. He had a momentary gleam
of shame for his impractical, un-Peter-like past, and even gave a thought
to his father, in his hot city studio, working for the wherewithal. But
that mood soon passed. The ecstasy of escape from the troubles he had
brought on himself gave him wings. Until nearly dawn, he swept straight
ahead, under a favoring moon. He was composing a Sonnet to Some Sumacs.

    “A prisoner pent, I flew to your fond arms,
    And maybe broke a few of them, my dears”;—

A wonderful beginning! It would require some fine work with _charms_,
_harms_, _alarms_; with _fears_, _cheers_, _reveres_. But Royal was
perfectly happy; and no one can say that his inspiration was not
authentic.

Not twenty miles from his own home with its bacon-and-eggs breakfasts, he
saw a belated or else be-earlied furniture-van approaching from a wooded
road that met the highway. Its driver, so Royal judged as a bearded face
emerged out of the morning mist, was one of those how-could-I-help-it
persons who are always a little late or a little early, a type toward
which he felt drawn. He waited there, at the heart of the crossroads.
The man hailed him, and Royal, in his character-part of young man out of
work, accepted the proffered lift, and ate heartily of the rude liberal
bread and cheese that tasted of the leather seat. They chatted at ease
of brakes, tires, clutches, and children, as they rode quietly into the
morning. Royal contributed most of the listening; he was quite as much at
home among elderly workers for a living as with frivolous persons of his
own age.

When they reached Falmouth Junction, a railway centre of note, their ways
diverged. At the station, Royal bought coffee, sandwiches, and fruit,
all of which he shared with the man; and the man gave him two black
cigars at parting. Royal liked that furniture-fellow. He considered that
when compared with the one-armed miscarrier of justice, the man had the
makings of an excellent leprecaun in him; his beard sticking out of the
mist was just like a leprecaun’s. But although the man, in his dreamy
behindhand (or else beforehand) way, had confided much to Royal, with a
wealth of detail as to his youngest child, “cutest kid of the bunch, and
a reg’lar Dannle Webster with his spellin’-book,” our traveller did not
in return open his heart about his escape from the jail-room. For a long
time after that incident, Royal was inclined to suspect both justice and
peace in quarters where they were least intended. Falmouth town boasts a
traffic policeman; Royal, on spying those bright buttons, took swiftly to
the road again.

And now, on the last stretch of his wander-week, he bethought himself
of the soldier grave on that little hill, scarcely an hour’s walk from
the very end of his appointed round. He loved the place; he felt drowsy,
in spite of the railway coffee and the fresh morning air, and he wanted
to lie down and sleep for a pleasant hour under those pines, his head
pillowed on heroic ashes. He phrased it thus to himself, although he knew
that he would probably find a better resting-place on the warm ground
somewhat removed from the grave. After a good little snatch of sleep,
there would be time for a few last touches on the Amaryllis poem, and
then, home. The Sumac Sonnet could wait. After all, a beefsteak luncheon
has its merits.

Royal was more tired than he knew. His pleasant hour of sleep multiplied
itself by two, by three, by four. He woke with a start to find that the
day was no longer young. He would have to step lively if he hoped to
reach home by tea-time; scones, fresh from the oven! But he had just had
a very marvellous dream, and surely, before the glamour of it should
vanish, he owed it to the world to put some breath of it into his poem.

Enthralled by his verses, the poet resented the approach of that other
traveller, just puffing up over the western slope of the little hill.
The man was forty-five or fifty or even sixty, the boy guessed; oh,
ever so old! He was soiled, obese, crumpled, out of breath; he needed a
shave. Limp gray hairs straggled behind his plaided cap. His profile
was fattened, yet highly predacious. But his tweeds seemed rather better
in quality than Royal’s, his shoes no worse. Royal’s bookish theory that
you can always tell at a glance whether a man is a gentleman or not fell
to pieces under that fugitive’s weary, wary eye. Certainly no poet, our
sumac sonneteer decided. Villon never looked quite like that, nor Poe,
nor Vachel Lindsay.


IV

Yet any wise observer of our poor dust would have known at once, on
seeing the two travellers together, that the hand of art had been laid
inevitably on each; lightly and graciously enough on the youth, rudely
and ironically and with stripes and lashes on the man. Phœbus Apollo
hardly knew, as yet, whether he should ever really need the boy Royal or
not. However, he meant to lend the child his lute for a summer morning or
two, and hear whatever trailing wisps of song those smooth young fingers
could coax goldenly from its strings. Yes, Royal was a true probationer
of Apollo. But with the man, the god would plainly have no more to do,
except by way of bitter punishment. For the man was too old, too ill,
too evil, even, to be of any further service in the temple of the Muses.
Those ladies do not carry a pardoner’s wallet. They have no pension
system; uncompromising dames, the Nine, when all is told.

Little as he liked the looks of the man in his tumbled tweeds, Royal
nevertheless gave him a good-day. Why not? The man enveloped the boy with
a strange, hunted-yet-hunting glance, and after returning the salutation
in a mannerly enough way, threw himself down heavily on the pleasant
pine leaves, rather close to the spot that Royal had chosen for his own
perfect seclusion with song. Our poet’s second sight instantly declared
that there was something wrong. What if this were the wretch who had
really stolen the car whose loss had threatened the Royal liberties?
Well, if so, that was the one-armed justice’s affair, not Royal’s. The
boy had lately read in a newspaper that our Anglo-Saxon law presupposes
the innocence of the accused, until proven guilty. An excellent idea!
Fair play for all, then, including the disinherited.

Still, it was but natural that he should try to put a self-protecting
distance between himself and the other, tramps though they both were.
So he hid his ode in his pocket, and pulled out his Iliad, that epic
which before now had laid heavy conditions upon him, and was likely to
do so in the future. Impressive gesture! Royal had several times used
it to advantage during his travels. Pulling out your Iliad, no matter
how amiably, is a way of drawing the line. This particular Iliad had,
it is true, been something of a disappointment to him, at the start. He
had meant to carry his school copy, a pocket edition that contained only
one book of the poem, with English notes so copious as to constitute a
“pony.” In the confusion of a brother’s departure, mischievous Peter had
contrived to dislodge Royal’s own Iliad from its place in Royal’s pocket,
and to substitute for it an Iliad from his father’s library. The parental
Iliad, though like the other in size and shape, was a poor thing. It had
all the books of the poem, to be sure, but in solid Greek; not a word
of English from cover to cover. Some German had printed it that way.
Annoying! But after his first dismay was over, Royal had managed very
well with the volume; to-day, he drew it out as readily as if it had the
English notes.

With this man, however, the trick was wasted. When the boy laid his Iliad
down casually beside him, the man picked it up, no less casually. Homer
had no terrors for him, it would seem. With a hand whose trembling he
could not quite conceal, he turned over the leaves to regain his lost
breath. In a leisurely, yet largely gesticulating way, he adjusted his
black-ribboned eyeglass, and contemplated both bookplate and title-page.
He then made short work of Royal’s pretensions to classic learning,
merely by turning to Book XXIII, virgin soil as yet untrod by any foot in
Royal’s form. Book XXIII appeared to interest him. Suddenly he began to
read out, in orotund English, the episode of the funeral pyre, with all
its meaty details.

As a matter of fact, this was but a gesture of the traveller; a gesture
fully as empty as Royal’s, a scrap of drama within a drama. The rascal
was not translating. He was reciting from memory a fragment from Lord
Derby’s translation. In palmier days, he had constantly used those twenty
lines with telling effect, in his popular dramatic elocution classes. He
had even incorporated them, with full directions as to tempo, emphasis,
and climax, into his Dramatic Interludes No. 1, a book which, though not
precisely a best seller, had often been bought along the borderline that
separates the real stage folk from the stage-struck fringe of the shadowy
general public. And now, for an audience of one, that “slow-pac’d ox,”
those “jars of honey,” the “four powerful horses,” the “nine dogs,” were
all presented with an unction that seemed incredible in a stout man so
out of breath a moment before. The reciter licked his lips feverishly
over his “slaughtered carcasses,” and yet was able to reserve some
climacteric gusto for the closing lines,

    “Last with the sword, by evil counsel swayed,
    Twelve noble youths he slew, the sons of Troy.”

He appeared to find this an especially appetizing detail, and repeated
the couplet, laying his hot fingers on Royal’s wrist.

The boy’s second sight had been caught napping during that recitation,
but at the touch, sprang up, alert.

“Royal child,” she whispered, “quick, quick! Whatever are you about?
Can’t you see that this wretched actor-man is far uncleaner and viler
than anything you observed, with fearful curiosity, in the Polish
boarding-house?”

And when Royal saw those fat fingers on his wrist, they looked to him
like worms, and he wanted to be gone. But he wanted to be a man of the
world, too, if a poet may; one who would needlessly insult no passer-by.

“Hot stuff, eh,” he remarked carelessly as he rose from the pine leaves.
It seemed to him an appropriate thing to say about a funeral pyre found
in the classics. The man had dropped the book; the boy swooped easily
down, Discobolus-like, and swept it to safety within his pocket. “Well,
I’m off! Date down below. Afraid I’m late, as it is.” His eyes were
appalled by the ferocious hunger of the eyes they met; the hunger, the
anger, the fatigue, the despair. Had he but known in his own young
body and soul just what these things meant, and just how horribly they
were gnawing that man’s vitals, he would have stayed, in common human
kindness. But he could not know. Besides, his second sight had him
cannily in her grip, and with all her might and main was pushing him
straight home. Curiously enough, unaware as he was of “my uncle the
psychiatrist’s” worm’s-eye prophecies, he said to himself, using Uncle
Tom’s very words, “I started out with the leprecauns, and now perhaps
I’m winding up with the lepers!” It gave him a pleased sense of his own
individuality, that Fate had arranged it so. It was the sort of thing
that didn’t happen to most boys, he thought. Without knowing why, he
added to himself, “Just as well, perhaps.” Yet he felt sorry for the
tweed-clad flesh down there at his feet. “Whatever’s the matter with the
poor fish? Sure there’s something bothering his bean. The Ford, perhaps.”

Whatever it was, he knew he could not stop to set it right. But at any
rate, he could offer a sandwich. The law of the road’s hospitality was
in his heart. He opened his tin box, and with his inimitable rippling
puppy-dog grace, emptied out its contents beside the stranger. The
articles thus disclosed had by now attained a composite flavor through
close contact within the sun-warmed tin. Royal suddenly knew this, and
was sorry. There were the three thick railway sandwiches, the two black
cigars, and several bars of chocolate he had bought the day before at
the Charlemont five-and-ten, from a radiant, chiffon-clad girl whom he
had secretly christened Lalage; for his next poem, of course, after the
Amaryllis one was done, oh, quite, quite done. He kept for himself one
bar of the chocolate. Its cover had the color of the girl’s warm dark
eyes, and so would be a material witness, during his inspiration for the
Lalage stanzas.

“Excuse me, but you seem to be a traveller, like myself. I’d be awfully
glad if you can use these things.” From his jacket pocket he drew out two
ripe peaches, oozing, and these he added to the store. “Cheero!” He loped
down the hill, with long, uneasy strides, not really happy until he was
far away. His thoughts were confused. “What a dreadful old beast! Actor,
of course, probably screen. Face seemed familiar, too familiar. Some
villain, what? Needed the car to make a getaway from something or other.”

All of a sudden the Homeric couplet mouthed by the man returned with
terrific force to his mind.

    “Last with the sword, by evil counsel swayed,
    Twelve noble youths he slew, the sons of Troy.”

The poet stopped short in his tracks. “Golly-dieu! I see it all now. I’ve
been talking with a _murderer_! And they always come back to revisit
the scene, every one knows that. Of course, he didn’t do up as many as
twelve. It was remorse made him nutty about the number. I wonder now—”

His wonder lit his eyes and freshened his steps until he reached the
garden-gate, with the great apple tree over it, and the carved millstone
below as a tread. Old Peter was probably just coming up from the
pool. He himself needed a bath, frightfully! Then he saw his mother,
in the white-and-purple iris dress he loved, walking toward the green
tea-table under the pergola. Agnes with her tray would soon appear. For
the present, Royal’s appointed rounds were over. An immense wave of
tenderness suffused his whole being. Mother, bath, scones, sanctuary!
Those first and last words he called aloud. Mother, sanctuary!


V

Left to himself, the elder traveller pounced on the peaches and devoured
them, smearing their juice on his dry lips. He then tore the meat from
the poor hearts of the sandwiches, and began to eat it greedily. It was
his first meat in four days, and he was distinctly of the carnivorous
order, and no mere nut-eater. The maid at the Canaan inn had looked
suspiciously at him, four days ago, and from that moment, fear had
palsied him. Not daring to buy gas under the pitiless publicity of the
red pump, he had abandoned his stolen Ford. Like Royal, he was now on a
solitary walking tour.

Since the incident at the inn, he had lived on package food, bought
at obscure crossroads grocery stores. All his life, he had kept a fine
contempt for package food, the various frugal tinned and cartoned things
the _bourgeois_ eat. He himself always wanted everything fresh from the
vine, he used to say. Everything except the grape; that was different.
Just at present, he was more thirsty than hungry. Royal’s black cigars
were a poor substitute for a living drink.

“Blast the boy with his clean airs! ‘A traveller like myself!’ Little
Lord Bountiful, to be sure!”

His face looked very old in the afternoon light. It was purplish red as
to the forehead, and that whitishness around the mouth was not wholly
to be explained by a four days’ stubble of graying beard. Even while he
blasted the boy, he likened himself to him. “Just what I was at his age,
a little Lord Bountiful! And, God, look at me now!”

If ever a man needed God’s look at that moment, it was this fugitive. Let
it be understood clearly, however, he was not at all the murderer Royal’s
imagination had conjured up. That boy’s second sight had been working
overtime, and had fallen into error. Except in an indirect way, the man
had never been a murderer. He had never desired the death of any human
being. Yet he had undoubtedly turned the feet of at least “twelve noble
youths” into the roads that lead to death. Also, he was revisiting a
scene. Therefore we may as well admit that Royal’s imaginings had strange
truths mingled with their errors. Perhaps his visions, like yours and
mine, were made up wholly from truths, but truths mysteriously misplaced;
truths disordered, and so, unserviceable.

The fugitive’s crime, that is to say, the particular crime for which
he was at that moment being hunted from hill to hill, was one known
to the most ancient civilizations. It takes its title from shameful
lost cities engulfed under Divine wrath. Yet to-day there are gentle
communities where even its Biblical name, if heard by chance in the
pulpit fulminations of some itinerant preacher, would not be understood.
And because, deep-rooted in the nature of mankind, there is that which
cries out upon this crime as an abomination, the law defines it darkly,
and punishes it strictly. “_La nature a de ces bizarreries_”? Only a
long-descended Mediterranean intellect, with a planetary point of view,
could calmly make that comment on the case!

The outlaw lit one of the black cigars, and thrust the thin bars of
chocolate into his pocket. Loathsome package food, again, but better
than nothing, if worse came to the worst. Of late, he had feared even to
enter the crossroads grocery stores, with their meagre yet apparently
varied supplies, with their horribly unexpected little electric bulbs
illuminating a customer whose trembling hope had been to remain unseen!

Royal’s cigar sickened him, and he dropped it, still burning, into the
brown pine needles. He watched the tiny, red-rimmed hole it was making.
The circle grew larger and larger. Curse it, why not let this be the
end-all here? But just as the slowly widening red rim really flickered
into a faint blaze, the red on his forehead rushed fiercely over the
rest of his face. No, by God, no! Not that way! With his woollen cap he
stifled the flame. It died down utterly, and with it his own last remnant
of vigor.

Stiffly, and with manifest suffering, he rose from the ground. Yet, in a
very real sense, he had a far better right to a place under those pines
than even the poet Royal himself could claim. In his fevered outlaw
imagination, conjuring up terrors where none existed, and courting
dangers unaware, that place to him was sanctuary. The one spot on earth!
For his fathers had cleared those hills above, and ploughed the fields
beneath. That soldier of the Revolution was his own ancestor. Their names
given in baptism and granted by birth were the same, Jeremiah Burton. In
the year eighteen-twenty, one Jeremiah Burton had departed this life,
full of honors; and now, a century later, this other Jeremiah Burton was
still living, and under an exceeding weight of dishonor. A fugitive from
justice, he was seeking sanctuary among his own kin. And no person in
that State knew him for the Burton that he was.

No less than the boy Royal, he had aspired to the arts. Writing,
painting, dancing, acting, he had loved them, every one. Yet never to the
extent of drudgery, or self-sacrifice, surely! Art for a good time’s sake
was his motto. He had always joyously avowed himself a “‘_carpe diem_’
fellow, don’t you know.” Perhaps his Burton ancestors, in their passion
for honest toil and meritorious self-immolation, had drawn too heavily
on springs of energy, both physical and spiritual, that should have been
reserved for their descendants. So young Jeremiah Burton wrote skits,
painted landscapes, acted in vaudeville; seldom very well, never at great
pains. Of all his various arenas for the exhibition of his personality,
he had concluded that the stage offered the most glamorous possibilities.
Still, Jeremiah is no name to be pasted gayly up on the billboards, is
it? And even Burton itself has a melancholy look when printed. Very early
in life, therefore, the Jeremiah Burton of the flushed forehead and fat
predatory nose had Geraldized his Christian name, and given a twist, even
more romantic, to his surname. It was as Gerald Bertello that he had
hoped, when scarcely older than the boy Royal, to take the world by storm
from behind the footlights. It was as Gerald Bertello that he had studied
and strutted and caroused through the downward zigzag of his middle
years. It was as Gerald Bertello that he was designated in the warrant
for his arrest. But it was as Jeremiah Burton that he was making his last
stand, there on the hill, among his kinsmen. Sanctuary!

The slate stone that marked the soldier’s grave still stood erect. One
could read every word carved upon it. Its willow tree wept in a perennial
freshness of stem and leaf. The cherub and skull and crossbones had not
turned a hair. But the more pretentious marble slab placed over the
warrior’s relict, Thanksgiving Burton, was altogether a weaker vessel;
at least, its foundations were less sure. It had lately fallen down
flat under the hilltop winds, and in falling, had laid low a part of
the slender iron fence that enclosed the graves of those early Burtons;
Burtons who had wrestled with that soil and conquered it, until the soil,
in turn, conquered them.

The fugitive who had lately read to the boy Royal sonorous words of the
twelve youths of Troy felt strangely dizzy as he pondered on the carven
tribute to his ancestor. It began, as he well remembered, “A soldier of
the Revolution and of God.” Dizzy as he was, he would like to recite the
whole of that inscription, with the proper emphasis, for the youngster’s
benefit. Where was the kid, that little Lord Bountiful, “a traveller
like myself”? Oh, yes, he remembered now, but with immense, overpowering
difficulty. The boy had vanished, fled away on the wings of an Iliad. “A
soldier of the Revolution,”—but the words he was staring at were dizzier
than himself. Hell, they must be, whirling so! Blindly throwing out an
arm, he stumbled and fell, his hand striking the fallen marble slab in
memory of Thanksgiving Burton. Like Royal, he had for the present reached
the end of his appointed rounds.


VI

Below, just beyond a fork in the dusty stage-road, Remy Mariette,
commissioner of highways, was finishing his day’s work of filling with
gravel the deeper ruts and holes. He was a lithe, brown, ruddy-cheeked
young man, known far and wide as a great worker, whether alone or in
company. To-day he was alone. It happened that he was not only road
commissioner, road laborer, mason, and the best bass of the choir; he was
also the village constable. In the inner pocket of his frayed working
coat was the secret warrant for the taking of Gerald Bertello. That
document had been very much on his mind for the past few days, because,
as he himself expressed it, “constabling was a new job for him.” However,
he was not thinking, just then, of the cares of his office. He was
thinking that before going home, he had plenty of time to skip up the
hill and see whether the old gravestones were as badly off as reported
at the last town meeting. If so, it meant another job for him; a good
one, too, at mason’s wages. He swung briskly up the slope, his crowbar as
staff. He might need it to pry at the fallen stone.

Well, well, a man asleep. Queer place to choose. Drunk, perhaps? Hey,
there, you man asleep!

The constable leaned over the sleeper, and then drew back in mingled
disgust and amazement. The disgust was for the criminal, the amazement
because a criminal so clever should thus easily be caught. He knew his
quarry in an instant. He recognized Gerald Bertello, in former years
a summer-time figure making himself and his comrades mightily at home
among the mountains. Gerald Bertello’s name and face had often been
shown on the screen at the Monday movies. Looked the kind that might
turn desperate, too. Just as well he had brought along the bar, in case.
With his foot, yet not unkindly, he prodded the sleeper, once, twice,
three times, and yet again. Gerald Bertello did not stir. Suddenly the
young constable, who had a fading-flower wife whom he loved, and who was
therefore wise beyond his years in the lore of hearts and pulses, knelt
down by the man’s side.

When he rose, it was with a strange sense of he knew not what
complexities. He was not given to self-analysis. But, because of the good
French blood in his veins, he took off his cap, and bowed his head, very
simply and sincerely, yet almost mechanically, in the presence of death.
He was young for a constable, scarcely seven years older than the boy
Royal. Indeed, the two had long been friends in that wide countryside.
They were Remy and Royal together. Not without a touch of envy, Royal
had last spring congratulated him on his appointment. Ah, this would be
something to tell Royal about, when they should meet again; a queer boy,
always wanting to know queer things!

Puzzled as to his immediate duty, the young man meditated a moment, then
made a swift decision. Best leave everything untouched, and seek help and
counsel from his elders, in the village below. He gazed at the sleeper’s
cap, the cigars, the scattered bread, the little American flag left from
last Decoration Day; but he did not alter anything he saw. Some sense of
strict procedure in such cases constrained him.

Before descending the slope, he looked up curiously into the sky, to
note what birds might be abroad. He remembered the crows he had seen
early that morning in his new orchard; some of them were plucking deep
bites from his ripest apples. So from his coat he took the warrant, and
buttoned it into the pocket of his soldier shirt. Then he spread his coat
carefully over the sleeper’s face, its profile half lost among the brown
pine leaves and the sparse vine-wreaths springing up through them. He
even succeeded in covering the hand lying against the edge of the fallen
stone. He wondered whether the man had cried aloud for help. He noted,
partly as a constable’s duty and partly as something to tell to the
boy Royal, that the hand seemed to be stretched out in a dumb gesture,
whether of hope or of despair, toward the stone and the writing on the
stone,—

    “_I know that my Redeemer liveth,_
    _And that_”

The last line, in the stiff italic of the eighteen-thirties, was blotted
out by lichens and earth-stains, but Remy Mariette knew the words well.
They were in a chant the choir often sang. To-day they hurt him; since
kneeling by that sleeper with the still heart, he had been thinking
incessantly, with a tightening pain in his throat, of the flower-like
wife at home. He leaned on his iron bar an instant, and shivered. The sun
had gone away from that place. From a far wood a hermit thrush poured out
its exquisite, passionless hymn of Paradise. Then it seemed to the young
man that all the sadness in the world was brooding over the hill with the
graves.




SPEAKING OF ANGELS


I

The youth’s name was Apollos Rivers. We admired him, used him, and
for a time, despised him, too. Why we admired and used, I can easily
explain. Apollos was every inch his name—blond, athletic, superb; no
model in New York posed as faithfully. Why we despised—well, the logic
of that is more complicated. Our contempt was doubtless merely a habit,
formed on sight unseen and strengthened by hearsay. Apollos, indeed!
How absurd a name for the oldest Rivers boy, seeking work in studios!
In vain he had politely explained to us that his late father, a bookish
Montreal goldsmith, had so greatly admired the senior Paul Revere of
colonial history (the Paul Revere whose Huguenot name had originally been
Apollos Rivoire) that he himself, British subject though he was, had
bestowed the name Apollos on his own firstborn. Later Rivers arrivals,
less magnificent in physique, had to content themselves with names less
proud—Tom, Chuck, Nipper, and plain Ellen.

Perhaps we would have accepted that explanation, if somebody (that
eternally busy somebody) had not seen young Apollos at an Academy
reception, his ears tinted rose-pink, with cheeks to match, and his
vigorous young eyelashes weighted with whatever it is the chorus ladies
use to veil and enhance their already too potent come-hither-of-the-eye.
After this, do you wonder that we jumped at the conclusion that Apollos
was merely a name the youth had wished on himself, a _nom de pose_, as it
were? And why did he polish his nails? Unnatural in a boy of eighteen!
Anyhow, we wouldn’t have done it, at that age. And I fear that with some
of us, even his honest Canadian accent was against him. Take the word
_been_, for instance. Those whose grandfathers had always said _ben_, and
whose mothers had said _bin_, were repelled when the Montreal lad called
it _bean_.

But the posing of Apollos (one can’t forget that!) was absolutely the
best I had ever met anywhere. He first came to me when I was doing
that big California thing; you know, the one they call Three Angels,
two of the angels being winged marble youths in flat relief, kneeling,
and the third a retributive sort of shrouded female figure in bronze,
standing, of course, and dominating the other two. Get me? Oh, yes, in
the round, she was. I had no trouble in finding her type, no trouble
at all. Powerful women abound, these days. But the youths were a more
difficult matter. Of course I didn’t want them to look Athenian, as
if I’d just dislodged them from the Parthenon frieze, and given them
a pair of wings apiece; but then, on the other hand, I didn’t care to
have them suggest that I’d merely picked them up on the beach at Coney
Island, the Sunday before. Angels mustn’t bear too personal a stamp,
you know. To my thinking, no artist has ever surpassed Saint-Gaudens in
creating the impersonal, other-worldly type. But he always used a lot of
wonder-drapery for his angelic hosts; I had merely wings.

I had tried a good many youths from thirteen to thirty, before I finally
decided to take with me to my summer studio, for a period of ten weeks,
Apollos Rivers and Phineas Stickney. Remembering those tinted ears, I had
some doubt about Apollos and his staying powers through a country summer,
far from all but the most elementary sort of movies and like attractions;
but I had a hope that the influence of Phineas Stickney, coupled with my
own persuasions, would keep the boy on the side of the angels.

In fact, the angels were all that counted with me, that summer. The
commission was an important one, and the contract ironclad. If within
three years I couldn’t produce the Three Angels, “complete in place
and in the final materials as hereinbefore specified,” my name, on the
Golden Coast, would be mud instead of Jefferson. And the three years
had by now dwindled to one year only! Time pressed. I’d been diligent
and fore-handed enough, Heaven knows. If anything, I am diligent to a
fault. The retributive woman was all done in bronze; but those two youths
weren’t yet ready for the plaster, let alone the “final materials as
hereinbefore specified.”

My work in the country studio was cut out for me. I had had an assistant
there for some weeks, setting up the full-size work from a half-size
study; but when I saw the thing sketched out in the large, I was not at
all satisfied with my original idea of those figures. I wanted to make
certain very drastic changes; I really needed both Apollos and Phineas,
using each lad part of the day. Rough on me, rather; and I suppose
fellows in shops and offices would open their eyes if they saw a mere
artist—next door to a do-nothing, you know—beginning work every morning
at five and quitting at summer sundown; yes, and perhaps stealing back
for more study by twilight. For it’s twilight that wipes out all the
pettiness that the day reveals; it’s twilight that knows all and tells
only the good, in sculpture. If it were not for the healing touch of
twilight on our work, how many of us sculptors would have abandoned the
art, long ago! Well, I’ve often marvelled at the amount of work I put
through that summer. Of course it makes a difference when a man’s work is
such that he can make a lark out of it, as well as a living. Still, don’t
run away with the idea that any art is pure ecstasy every minute. Nothing
is.

I don’t know why I felt so uneasy about Apollos. All sorts of sinister
anxieties haunted me. Did I fear that he would burn up my barn of a
studio? No, for he smoked neither cigarettes nor a pipe. Would he elope
with the cook, leaving us with an empty larder and a desecrated hearth?
No, for if his own words were to be trusted, skirts bored him. Would he
paint his ears, and so make talk for the village folk? How could I tell?
My chief hope was in the influence of Phineas. The two would naturally
be thrown together at the farmhouse where they boarded. Phineas, as I
had seen him in the city, was an unusually attractive lad. His posing,
to be sure, left something to be desired. But then, very few models in
this world, I knew, had both the figure and the posing power that Apollos
possessed. A rare combination!

Phineas was a boy with no end of ancestry. His father had been a
Mayor, filling out some one’s term, in a great New England city; his
grandfather had been Governor of a near Western State; and to crown all,
his grandfather’s great-grandfather had been a Signer. I wondered how he
could stoop to pose, after all that! But for some reason, he wanted to
study modelling, and so had begged me to take him on as assistant. When I
declined the honor, he offered to pose; anything to forward his artistic
studies. I engaged him, and naturally thinking that so august a personage
deserved more consideration than Apollos, I allotted to the aristocrat
the easier, briefer afternoon sessions, and took Apollos with the morning
dews.

We had a routine. From five till quarter past, Apollos and I disposed of
three buttered health biscuits and two hot doughnuts apiece, the whole
made interesting by the very good coffee which I myself made over an
oil stove; in the deep country, wise housekeepers ask no crack-of-dawn
exploits from any cook, no matter how greatly underworked. The doughnuts
down, we worked easily and steadily until my normal family breakfast, at
which I sat down with appetite. No loafing, however! At eight, Apollos
and I were in the studio again, working till noon. Thus Apollos posed six
hours, and Phineas four.

From the first, I tried to work in a little fatherly counsel for Apollos
during the pose. “That knee just a bit to the left, please, and the rear
hoof as far back as you can get it. Fine! Well, you know you’re in luck,
up here in the country air, along with a lad like Phineas! Not that he
poses any better than you; no one does. But his manners are certainly
good, aren’t they?”

“Are they, sir?”

I asked myself whether Apollos was perhaps jealous of his more fortunate
co-worker. His face, however, showed only a perfect Apollonian calm,
combined with a gratifying attention to business. It was a kneeling
pose, you remember; and those who have never knelt much can’t know
what grit it takes, when long drawn out. I thought it wiser to defer
advice to a more convenient season. Next morning, when I was working on
a comparatively easy place, I happened to say to Apollos that Phineas
talked remarkably well for a boy of his age. Apollos preserved his pose
and made no reply. I pressed the subject.

“Perfectly good talker, sir, just as you say,” replied Apollos, squirming
ever so slightly with the foot I was not modelling, “but of course you
hire us to pose, not talk. I rather fancied you liked the place kept
quiet.”

“Righto, boy. But sometimes a little conversation helps the slow minutes
to skip by.”

“That depends, sir.”

“On what?”

“Oh, on who does the talking, and what is said.”

The reply caught my fancy. I wondered what response Phineas, that
excellent conversationalist, would have made; I decided to put the same
question to him, in the afternoon. Unfortunately, his posing happened to
be less satisfactory than usual that day, and it thrust me out of the
mood for easy converse with him. Besides, he himself had so much to say
of his ambitions, prospects, and great-grandfathers, that I did not care
to add anything to the welter of talk. A few days later, however, I found
occasion to remind him that with his inheritance—I meant blue blood, of
course—he was fortunate in being able to help those boys with whom he
came in contact.

“I’ve tried to help Apollos with his manners,” he replied, “but,
confidentially, it’s rather uphill work.”

“Oh, I don’t know. Apollos doesn’t appear so badly. Seldom speaks unless
spoken to, and then pretty sensibly, I find. Besides” (here I thought
a helpful suggestion might be in order), “his posing is so absolutely
perfect that anything else he does perhaps seems imperfect in comparison.”

“Yes, poor fellow! Pity that just posing should be what a fellow’s fitted
for, isn’t it? For my part—”

“For your part,” I interrupted rather testily, “if you will kindly keep
that left leg of yours—well, ever so slightly _reminiscent_ of what it
was when you began to pose it for me, I shall be most appreciative.” I
had never before spoken like that to the scion of a Signer, but I saw he
needed it. It was gradually being revealed to me that long descent is by
no means the main desideratum in a model. Phineas had developed a rather
unusual and uncanny gift for slumping in his pose;—making it easier
and easier for himself, minute by minute, so that at the end of the
half-hour, there was really nothing left that was of the slightest use
to me. I had to do my work from knowledge, instead of from Phineas. Of
course, most models have this infirmity of self-protection, but Phineas
could give all comers cards and spades in the game of slumping.

Still, in the excellent séances I had with Apollos, I would sometimes
enlarge upon Phineas’s advantages. Once I expressed a hope that Apollos
was profiting duly by the companionship.

“It profiteth me nothing,” was the unexpected reply. “Phineas talked me
over once. Never again, sir!”

“How so?”

“Oh, nothing of any importance, really. A silly fool business. I couldn’t
make any one, an adult, I mean, understand just how it happened.”

“Try me! Boy myself once.”

A slow color shot up over Apollos’s classic torso, and flamed fiercely
in his ears. He even became white around the mouth, as if the blood had
receded from that part to concentrate in his listening apparatus. Then
his confidence gushed forth, as if long pent up.

“I wanted some money to get my little sister a birthday present. She’d
been ill in bed for five weeks, and was peevish as a wasp, driving Aunt
Lise distracted asking for a big doll. Much as ever we could pay for the
doctor and medicines, let alone a French doll, but I wanted to get it
for her. She’s the only girl we have. Well, I was walking by Flatto’s
one day, with Phineas, and I was fool enough to say I’d give my boots if
I could get her a beauty doll we saw there in the window. ‘Gosh,’ says
Phin, ‘I can tell you how you can earn that doll, on the side, without
working.’ ‘How so?’ says I. ‘Well,’ says Phinny, ever so thoughtful, ‘a
rich feller and I got talking about the way girls paint up their faces,
and I said men sometimes did it too. He said rats, and I bet him ten
I could prove it, and he took me up on it. I was thinking about the
Academy exhibition,’ says Phinny, ‘and I knew Mr. Lucas was sending
his self-portrait to the show. But now,’ says Phinny, ‘I’ve found out
that portrait wasn’t accepted; and maybe my friend wouldn’t ante, just
for a painted _portrait_, not a real _person_. But,’ says Phinny, very
earnestly, ‘if I could get a regular feller, like you, to make up with
paint, I’d give him half what I make; and that would net you the five
plunks for the doll.’”

Apollos paused as if ashamed of “telling.” But his recollections were too
much for him, and upon my encouragement, he went on.

“Well, I fell for it. I didn’t stop to think how it would look; I only
knew the money would look good to me. And I knew Phinny was a little
brother to the rich; some of his fool-friends just wallow in coin. So
on the spur of the moment, we went round to Phin’s house for him to do
me. He’s in with the set that do private theatricals, and he has all the
stuff from a rabbit’s-foot down. _I_ thought it would be funny if he
would do my nose good and red; but, no, he just did my cheeks and ears,
and blackened up my eyelashes, and we went right over to the Academy
exhibition then and there, and met his fool-friend. One of the artists
had given Phinny tickets on account of his ancestors. I had no idea what
I looked like. People stared, of course, but I thought that was part of
the programme.”

Evidently a very painful thought still lurked in Apollos’s mind.

“You got the money,” I remarked, casually.

“Oh, no.” Apollos rapidly wiggled all his ten toes. “I threw it back at
him and told him to go to Hell with it.”

“For Heaven’s sake, why?”

Again a bright red suffused the boy’s face.

“When I got up to the L station and looked in the mirror, I saw for the
first time that he’d made me up to look like a _girl_!” Clearly the
horror of that realization had not yet departed from Apollos. “It was a
low-down trick, and I beat him up for it.”

With a new respect for the kneeling boy, I watched the blush die away
from his countenance; it lingered last of all in his ears. How often I
myself had repeated that stupid tattle about Apollos and his ears at
the Academy! I dare say I may have turned red myself, when I recognized
how small the talk was, and what a small thing had started it. Perhaps
Apollos observed this, for he continued, “You know what it is to have
a habit of blushing, don’t you? The more you try not to, the more it
happens. Well, Phineas noticed it on me, my Canadian ears, you know, that
first day we met in your New York studio. So he thought he could put one
over on me. And I’ll say he did.”

“So I suppose you two down there at the boarding-house never speak as you
pass pie?”

“Sure we do! What’s the use of holding a grudge? We’ve got on fine since
we fought.” A big generous smile swept the shadows from his eyes. “And
the best of it was, Ellie got her doll, after all. Who from? From Phinny,
to be sure. Said he couldn’t feel right about it, any other way, so I let
him.” Having been a boy myself, I saw the point; and I marvelled once
more at the intricacies of boy nature.

At that moment, I was modelling a hand, one of the important details,
as it happened. Apollos had superb hands, strong and sinewy, with those
noble bones we sculptors are always looking for. To my surprise, I found
that I was actually copying the youth’s hand, every bit of it. And that’s
something one can’t often do; one generally has to juggle with Nature, in
the interest of Art. It’s part of the game, especially if you are doing
angels.

“Say, ’Pollos, what’s the idea, manicuring your nails? Thank Heaven you
do, as far as I’m concerned; all I have to do is to copy that left hand
of yours.”

Not a trace of embarrassment appeared in the lad’s reply. “I’m very
pleased if it’s right, sir. You see, I studied it all out, from the hands
on Michael Angelo’s David. I saw that most of you sculptors use that type
of hand, nails all trued up, and so on; and I concluded I’d better dress
the part, as long as I was on the job.”

So then, the manicuring was but a part of the amazing Apollonian
thoroughness!—the same thoroughness that I had remarked in him when he
went out one afternoon with an old gun of mine, and brought me back three
pairs of wings—a sapsucker’s, a crow’s, and a goose’s. The goose’s wings,
in particular, he told me in his serious, smiling way, might perhaps give
me some suggestion for the other angel, “the Phineas feller.” He was
right, too. In making an angel’s wing, one does not _copy_ a goose’s, but
one gets light from on high.

“I suppose you mean to go on with this work, don’t you? Posing, studio
jobs, and so on?”

Apollos opened wide eyes. “Not I, sir! For me, it’s only a _pis-aller_,
if you’ll excuse my saying so. _Faute de mieux_, you know.”

I was astonished, for I had no idea that Apollos knew a word of French,
even the tags he had just used. I thought I would be jocose.

“What are you going to do, then? Teach languages?”

“I’ve tried that,” replied the best model I ever saw, “but I found it
unsatisfactory. You see my mother was French, born in Strasbourg. So
while she lived, we always spoke the three languages at home, meal-times;
English for breakfast, German for dinner, and French for supper. Father
liked it so, and we boys couldn’t look back on a time when it wasn’t so.
I had the French conversation classes for two terms at the Elmdale High
School, and I got on fine until one of the trustees wanted the job for
his wife’s sister. So he went ahead and found out that I was a minor, and
had me fired.”

“What a shame!”

“Why, no, it didn’t matter much. If I might rest this elbow just a
moment, it seems a bit dead—I meant to quit, anyway. There was nothing in
it for me, it wasn’t leading to anything I wanted.”

“Well, what was it you wanted?”

Apollos made no answer other than that slow blush of his, swarming all
over his face and finally demobilizing in his ears. For a moment, his
whole figure had an expression that would have been wistful in a smaller
lad; even as it was, there was something very touching about it. I could
only hope that his ambition, however humble, was at least honorable. I
reminded myself that I must not expect, in a Canadian boy, the same lofty
impulses that would quicken the blood of a Signer’s descendant.

Meanwhile, my work with Phineas was going rather badly. I could not teach
his aristocratic spirit to get down to brass tacks. His posing became
worse instead of better. Before long, I found myself doing over again,
every morning, from Apollos, all that I had bungled in doing, every
afternoon, from Phineas. It occurred to me that perhaps I was too tired,
in the afternoon, to do justice to Phineas, and that possibly Phineas’s
pose was the more difficult one. However, when I changed about, things
were still worse. I realized at last that my sprig of nobility was a
hindrance rather than a help. What to do? I had promised him work through
the summer. If I should pay him handsomely and discharge him, with his
part of the bargain unfulfilled, I should write myself down an easy mark
for models—a reputation no serious artist seeks. It would be complicity
after the crime. Besides, Apollos might well become discontented, on
beholding the rewards of the ungodly.

Toward the middle of the summer, the tension became too great. Precious
as time was, with that ironclad contract haunting my dreams, I saw that
perhaps I should gain, in the end, if I should leave my studio, for a
double-size week-end, and go a-fishing from Friday to the following
Tuesday. I was working in plastiline instead of clay, and I could safely
leave my angels, without fear of their drying up on me as soon as my back
was turned. The holiday might not hurt the boys, either. Apollos had
stuck valiantly to his “_pis-aller_” job; perhaps Phineas would do better
after a few days’ change; at any rate, I told myself, he couldn’t do
worse. In that, however, I was mistaken.


II

By Thursday midnight, my motor had already borne me north two hundred
miles from my studio and all its works. Some men sit by a brookside
to think, but I go fishing to forget. I wanted an oblivious antidote
against art and angels in art. But my respite was brief. Sunday night, on
returning to the mountain inn at the head of the lake, carrying with me
a gorgeous string of trout that I knew would win me the plaudits of all
guests at Monday’s breakfast, I was confronted with a telegram.

    Studio destroyed. Come as soon as you can.

                                                    PHINEAS STICKNEY

For a second, I had an hallucination; I saw also the words, “Angels in
ashes. Contract ironclad.” But I waved that aside; and, I hardly know
why, my utter dismay was soon followed by a sort of exhilaration, the
exhilaration a fellow feels when he suddenly has to make a fresh start,
and knows he has strength for it. No Sunday trains served those remote
God-fearing parts; I must return as I came. A few years before, my hill
and home had been struck by lightning, but no damage had been done,
except to a drinking-glass and the cook’s Thursday afternoon corsets.
Turning my motor’s nose homeward, I wondered whether the lightning had
returned to finish a work thus timidly begun. More likely fire, though!
Did Apollos smoke, after all? Or Phineas? My curiosity was almost equal
to my consternation.

All night long, my runabout raced up hill and down dale, sometimes beside
a moonlit brook, sometimes through clean, sweet forests, and again along
dusty country roads with straggling farmhouses fast asleep, not even
giving a dream to _my_ troubles! Grateful guests at the inn had pressed
upon me loaves in exchange for my fishes, and by way of a solitary
breakfast among the morning mists, I disposed of an incredible number
of sandwiches as well as all the hot coffee in my own miracle-bottle. I
propitiated my engine for the last lap.

The day had not lost its freshness when I reached the foot of my hill,
and strained my eyes for a glimpse of the disaster. To my surprise, the
big barn studio, as far as I could judge from the road, was still intact.
But it was in the back part that my angels were! And when I had at last
finished rounding that interminable uphill bend over the roots of the elm
trees, I saw that there was no longer any back part. There was only a
pile of charred timbers.

At a little distance stood a metal garage, one of those ugly, useful
structures that invite scoffing from all persons of taste. It was
untouched by the fire. The door was open. I could see Phineas just
within. Beyond Phineas, stretched out flat on those trestles I had been
grumbling about for years because the carpenters never took them away,
were my angels, uncovered, and looking, to the casual eye, as good as
new. I was glad, then, that I knew how to thank God. And before long, I
was glad, according to the custom of my tribe, to get a new light on my
angels. Sculptors are like that. They would go through fire and water to
get a new light, it seems.

“Your work?” I asked the question of Phineas, and pleasantly enough.

The boy’s eyes filled. “Yes, sir.”

“Where’s Apollos?”

“In bed, burned arm, broken leg—Oh, dear, oh, dear!” With this childlike
exclamation, the son of a hundred Stickneys broke down utterly.

Between sobs, Phineas made his foolish city boy’s confession. He had
merely made a fire to roast some corn in the ear, and meaning to be
extremely careful, had kindled his sticks close up against an old stone
wall a few feet away from the studio with the angels. Yes, he had spoken
about it to Apollos the day before, and Apollos had warned him. But, such
is the stubbornness of the sons of the Revolution, he had felt perfectly
sure it would be safe. His distress was so evident that I refrained, at
that time, from pointing out what a consummate jackass he was.

“Before I knew it,” he went on, “the wind veered clean around, and the
fire burst through the wall quicker’n chain lightning, and began climbing
the dry grass on the bank up toward the studio. And all those last year’s
leaves! You would never believe it!”

“Oh, yes, I would,” I retorted, a little bitterly. “I am still in my
right mind.”

“Apollos was in the garage, tinkering on a bust he brought in there
when you went away, and I was planning to surprise him with the roast
corn. So I hollered to Apollos, and Apollos hollered to Henry, and Henry
telephoned to the town-hall to ring the bell like blazes. And in ten
minutes half the men in the village were here with brooms and shovels.”

“But who got out the angels? Or did they soar out, under their own steam?”

“Well,” said Phineas, “they never could have come through if it hadn’t
been for Apollos! ‘Those angels have just _got_ to be saved, if any of us
are,’ says Apollos. So he grabbed up a saw and a screw-driver, and what
the saw couldn’t do, the screw-driver could. He worked like lightning,
Apollos did. ‘Easy, boys, easy,’ he kept saying, calm as if he was
down at the boarding-house, eating griddle cakes. ‘It’ll be quite a
disappointment for the boss, anyhow, the best we can do,’ says Apollos.
So while the rest of the fellers were fighting the fire outside with
brooms and spades and inside with whatever water they could get, and,
gosh, it wasn’t much, Apollos got Prince Eugene Gage, the town drunkard,
you know, and One-Eye Sims that’s supposed to keep the toll-house, and
that hulkingest one of the two big Beecher boys, and the three of them,
along with him and me, we got those angels out somehow, safe enough, and
not much jarred, really, sir. And we carried them into the garage here,
and stuck ’em on the horses, as you see.”

“Good work, my lad, but how about Apollos?”

“Well, you know how thorough Apollos is. He suddenly remembered that the
half-size study was in back there, right in the midst of the fire; and
he’d heard you say you wanted to keep it and send it down to New York.
We couldn’t stop him. He got away from us, went in there, slid the thing
quick down onto the little green truck, and pushed it out over the sill
just in time. Only not quite in time. That’s how he got his broken leg.
And his shirt had just begun burning on him when he fell over himself.
The doctor says the arm will be all right inside a week, but the leg’s a
longer job.”

I had rather lost interest in Phineas, before I went away, but now I
found myself changing. I was glad to see that boy’s complete loyalty
to Apollos; recognition of valor had apparently left no room for the
customary Stickney complacency. I had noted, too, that the aristocratic
Stickney countenance was somewhat disfigured by a red wound across the
upper lip, but I forbore to ask the boy if he got it eating roast corn.
Within the garage, I took careful account of my angels. Their celestial
composure was scarcely shaken, it would seem. If only I could get them
upright again, as successfully as Apollos and his band of ne’er-do-weels
had laid them flat, all would yet be well, and the name of Jefferson
unmuddied.

By the end-window of the garage, in what chanced to be a good north
light, I saw a bust; the bust that Apollos, of all persons in the world,
had been modelling from memory in the dark privacy of his farmhouse
attic room, and immediately on my departure, had brought to the garage
for an orgy of peaceful study. Even from the distance at which I stood,
I perceived that the thing was a startlingly good likeness of myself;
myself in a somewhat heroic aspect, to be sure, but still unmistakably
me, almost life-size, in clay. My me-ness stuck out all over it. It
really gave me a start, offered me an ideal to live up to. I don’t say
it was finer than anything of Houdon’s or Rodin’s. I merely say it was
amazing for a boy who had had no instruction save the crumbs he had
picked up while posing. The lad’s secret ambition was quite evident to
me now. But for my own rather heartless absorption in my Three Angels, I
might have guessed it before. I felt ashamed.

“Phineas,” I remarked very seriously, and I suited the action to the
word, “I take off my hat to Apollos!”

Phineas answered, with a sincerity not to be doubted in a Stickney, “So
do I, and I always shall. That is, if he keeps on like this!”

The fire gave me a new light on my models. I learned to my surprise that
my aristocrat was something of a carpenter. He was full of plans for
rebuilding the destroyed wing of my studio, and even drew everything out
carefully on paper in scale, and very creditably too. I saw that if I
could get a few men at once, it would take but a short time to rig up a
temporary refuge for finishing my angels. Late haying being over, the
thing was somehow accomplished; Phineas worked like a boy possessed; and,
as Apollos was soon hobbling about very capably on crutches, we had a
studio-warming, during which the two lads superintended the replacing of
the angels, by the efforts of their former crew, Prince Eugene Gage, the
town drunkard, One-Eye Sims that’s supposed to keep the toll-house, and
the hulkingest Beecher boy. Those three were the scum of the village.
Hence I often say, In an emergency, don’t scorn the scum.

But the oddest part of the adventure was this. And I’ve not yet finished
marvelling at it. After the two angels were really up again, and Phineas
and Apollos and I stood staring at them, Apollos, with that little air of
authority that nobly earned crutches sometimes confer, suddenly said out,
quite loud, “But there’s nothing to do to them, really, Mr. Jefferson!
They’re _done_!” And after one good glance, my inward eye told me that
he was absolutely right. I might never have known that they _were_ done,
however, if I had kept on working at them, and if I had not, in despair,
gone a-fishing! That very night, I telegraphed for my plaster-moulder.

Did both boys become sculptors? Oh, no, nothing so tragic as that.
Apollos is the sculptor, but Phineas went into architecture; he knows
more about stone walls than he did before the fire. Since the fire, the
two are fast friends, and work together when they can. They are the two
young fellows who lately captured the commission for that big Unknown
Heroism monument the papers have been printing pictures of. I think
they’ll make good, too. But you never would have guessed it would end
that way, if you had seen them together at the Academy. The rosy-eared
Apollos!




THE MARQUIS GOES DONKEY-RIDING


I

My great-grandmother was by no means an accomplished French scholar. Was
yours? And even in English, my great-grandmother’s spelling was far from
faultless. In those well-thumbed receipt-books of hers, written by her
own hand, and still beautifully legible, you will note that she sometimes
doubles the _t_ in butter, and sometimes not; she generally gives an _h_
to sugar, and seldom allows an egg more than one _g_ to stand on. But the
far-flung fame of her cooking did not suffer in consequence. And had her
prowess in languages and in orthography been equal to her skill in the
household arts of her day (spinning, weaving, brewing, and the like), my
cousin Felix might never have known the joyous adventures of a collector
of Lafayette silver. For frankly, it was my great-grandmother, who, owing
to a slip in her French, first sent the marquis on his donkey-riding.
Lafayette in Egypt! Cousin Felix never rested until he got to the bottom
of the matter.

Felix Bradford, you must know, is one of the great color manufacturers
of the age. Tube colors, of course. There’s more in the business,
and perhaps less in the tubes, than one would expect. But Felix is a
thoroughly good sport; and twenty years ago, finding that he was making
a comfortable income from the art of painting (other men’s painting),
he decided to become a collector of something besides money. Colonial
silver, for example; and he hoped to include among his treasures the lost
Lafayette porringer, from which as a child he had often been spiritually
fed.

He had never seen that porringer, though our grandmother Bradford had
frequently described its glories, and had told us just how, at the age
of eight, she had lost the better part of it forever. It had been bought
in Paris, by her seafaring father, a petty officer under Paul Jones.
Very likely the museums would not call it a porringer, for it was larger
and finer than most vessels in that class; besides, it had a cover.
Grandmother Bradford, sinful little child though she once was, had not
lost the cover. Felix as a boy had often seen it and even handled it,
delightedly running his fingers over its fluted silver dome, topped by a
flaming torch wrought in silver, with touches of gold inlaid among the
flames. He had an exquisite joy in caressing that silver-gilt finial.
Sometimes, to vary his beautiful imaginary pain in being burned by it,
he would wet a thumb and forefinger before touching it, though he knew
Grandmother Bradford did not approve the gesture. Evidently Cousin Felix
was early marked for some important contact with the fine arts.

Felix was a little boy of six when that great American awakening, the
Philadelphia Centennial, showed the world as by a lightning-flash just
how backward we were in matters of art. It was annoying, but it had to
be admitted, that all those peoples across the water (who, we strongly
suspected, did not keep the Ten Commandments nearly so well as we did)
were our superiors in the creation of beauty. From that time onward,
Felix felt the influence of our shamed national gropings in art, and
groped with the best. I say nothing for his early pencil copy of a work
called Pharaoh’s Horses, a copy finally completed after prodigious
efforts on the part of an anæmic Saturday morning drawing-teacher to keep
him at the job for many weeks. Nor can I endorse the lady’s method, the
first important step of which was completely to cover a steel engraving
of Pharaoh’s Horses with tissue paper, a small square portion of this
being torn off at the beginning of each session, to disclose the exact
amount of horseflesh that must be completed within the two hours. Somehow
the square inch that Felix happened to be producing at any given moment
never seemed in itself to be far wrong; yet the more inches he completed,
the less right his copy looked. This vaguely troubled both teacher and
pupil, but neither of them knew what to do about it, except to press
on. Houdon’s celebrated maxim, “_Copiez, copiez, copiez toujours_,”
has never I hope, had a more literal and ruthless application. For
years thereafter, Felix could not look upon a 4-H pencil without active
loathing.

But even Pharaoh’s Horses, for all their fiery eyes and swelling neck
veins, could not quite trample the life out of Felix’s love of the
beautiful. On rainy holidays, with a plate of ginger cookies at hand,
he still liked to peer inside grandmother’s corner cabinet, where she
kept the “bug china,” the Mandarin teacups, the thin silver teaspoons,
the curiously elaborate sugar-tongs, and the sugar-bowl with a castle
on it. If there were no other boys about, he would gladly listen to the
old lady’s story of the Lafayette porringer, with its engraving of the
marquis on donkey-back. Lafayette in Egypt! It was a tale to invite
dreams.

Grandma Bradford had two quite different ways of talking. When she spoke
of modern things, or read a paper at the Ladies’ Circle, she used her
modern manner; but when she talked of old-time things, she generally
dropped into a style to correspond.

“There I set on the front porch,” she would say, “eatin’ my cold porridge
out of the porringer. I was the only girl, and they allus called it I was
some indulged. But I guess folks wouldn’t call it that, nowadays! ’Twas
a hot evenin’, and Aunt Car’line hed company, and they wanted to talk
by theirselves, so she let me set out on the porch with my supper. And
when I got it et, I put the porringer up onto the porch jest as car’ful
as I could, and begun playin’ with Rover. He was a real young dog, Rover
was; a puppy, you might say, but a big dog, too. I dunno how ’tis, but
dogs don’t seem to _come_ as big now as they did then! And fust thing I
knew, he lep’ up onto the porch, and got that porringer into his maouth,
and rushed off downhill, me racin’ after him. And that was the last our
family ever saw of it. And Rover never stopped till he got to the brook;
it was roarin’ turrible, the brook was, ’cos it had be’n a rainy summer;
and the more I called, the more he didn’t hear, but kep’ a-runnin’. And
he run and he run, all along the brookside, till he got to the path that
led square up to the Ellicksenders’ house, and then he turned up sharp—”

Grandma paused for breath, and let Felix take up the familiar tale.

“And the Ellicksenders’ house,” recited Felix, with gusto, “was no better
than a den of thieves.”

“Yes, and jest then I heard Aunt Car’line callin’, and back I flew to the
haouse. And when she said, ‘Why, Lydia Fairlee, where is the rest of the
porringer?’—oh, my, wa’n’t I scairt? I hope it will be a lesson to _you_,
Felix, the way I was too scairt to tell the hull truth. I was scairt o’
bein’ punished, so I told a part-truth, which is a near-lie, same as some
boys I know of.”

Felix reddened, and deemed it wise to advance the story as hurriedly
as possible. “You told her you put it up onto the porch, careful as
anything—”

“Yes, but I didn’t dass tell her Rover hed snatched the porringer, and
was carryin’ it straight as a streak o’ lightnin’ to the Ellicksender
boys. No, sir, as long as I was in my right mind, I never owned up a
syllable of it to anybody!” A note of sinful triumph rang in the old
lady’s voice. “’Twa’n’t till two years later it all came out. I hed
scarlet fever, and was dretful deleerious, and raved a lot about Rover
and the porringer and the Ellicksender haouse; so Aunt Car’line knew
at last jest what happened. That sickness spared me the rod, I guess!”
Grandma chuckled at the thought of this immunity, but at once recollected
herself. “No, Felix, ’tain’t any use. Be sure your sin will find you out.”

Again Felix squirmed away from any impending moral, mentally making a
note to the effect that he must study ways to avoid scarlet fever, if not
actual sin.

“But of course ’twas too late then to accuse the Ellicksenders. And one
o’ them, the wust one, hed died in jail, anyhow; so you see, Felix, if
he _did_ take that porringer, his sin found _him_ out, too. The youngest
boy turned out real good, it seems. Grew up to be a minister, real
celebrated, too. Some younger’n me, he was.”

But the career of the boy who “turned out real good” had no vital
interest for Felix. His thoughts wandered toward the “wust one,” the one
who died in jail. Not that he himself wanted to die in jail; far from it.
But he certainly did not want to grow up to be a minister, either; and he
hoped in his secret heart that there might be some middle course. A most
determined little fellow was Felix. That day, while listening to one half
of the porringer story, and repeating the other, he made up his mind that
when he should reach man’s estate, he would get to the bottom of this
Lafayette business.

Very delicately, he twirled the silver cover over his palm, as if it were
a kind of sacred top too fine for human nature’s daily play. He flicked
it lightly, connoisseur-fashion, with his handkerchief. For a second, he
was almost sorry that the handkerchief, from its nature and uses, had
to be so grimy. Then he heaved a sigh for beauty vanished. I have often
thought that if Cousin Felix had gone into poetry instead of paint, he
would have made good in that, too.

“Too bad there’s no bottom when there’s such a beautiful top! Say,
Grammer, show us the drawing you made when you were little.”

Nothing loath, Grammer unlocked one of the small drawers of her cabinet,
and took from it a packet of ancient letters. In the heart of the packet
was a square of brownish paper, on which was traced a circle about six
inches in diameter, with two projecting lacelike ears. One might call
it a plan view of the bowl of the porringer. Little Lydia Fairlee had
drawn it by the simple expedient of laying the object upside down on the
paper, and pencilling around the outline. Evidently the pierced handles
had attracted the child, for these had been drawn with great care. In
the space beneath, she had done her own hand, by the same process. Many
a time Felix had fitted his own five fingers over that symbol. Once
his hand had been a rather good fit, but of late, it had been growing
steadily beyond bounds.

“Yes, sir,” Madam Bradford was saying, “that’s the drawin’, and I can
assure you I was well cuffed by Aunt Car’line for usin’ up her paper.
Those days, folks didn’t throw paper araound, the way they do to-day. I
suppose, ef I’d be’n a child these times, I’d ’a’ had Sattidy drawin’
lessons, and I hope I could ’a’ profited by ’em. But nobody ever gave me
a chance at Pharaoh’s hosses.”

Felix grinned, guiltily.

“Anyways, your great-grandfather saved up that drawin’, pretty car’ful!
We found it among his papers. And when I’m through, I shall leave it
to you, along with the silver cover. You’re the one that loves lovely
things.”

Felix was too well used to that reference, “when I’m through,” to feel
it very deeply other than as a part of the porringer story. But he
was an affectionate child, and there being no spectators, he gave his
grandmother the kiss she wanted. Then he fitted the cover over the
drawing, as he had often done before.

“And there was a picture of Lafayette on the side of the bottom part?”

Madam Bradford suddenly switched to her most modern style of speech. She
often took a sly pleasure in disconcerting her hearers by making these
lightning changes.

“An engraving is the correct term, I believe.” There was a world of
prunes and prisms in her tone. “An engraving upon silver, executed in
Paris. And underneath it was engraved, all in the French language,
‘Lafayette in Egypt.’ Your great-grandmother, who was quite a French
scholar for those days, used to translate it for me. Very Frenchy writing
it was, too; very Frenchy and flourishy. And in the picture, I mean
the engraving, there was Lafayette on donkey-back, plain as anything,
all wrapped up in a big cloak, and right alongside was a man, his
body-servant, I expect, urging the donkey on. I can see it in my mind to
this day. If I was a drawer, I could draw it for you.”

Felix sighed again, a sigh of yearning and disillusion. Somehow
donkey-riding, even in Egypt, and with a body-servant, seemed to him
rather tame work for Lafayette. He himself would have preferred for
his hero something in more heroic vein. He knew from a picture in his
geography that donkeys went with the Pyramids and the mouths of the
Nile. Of course donkey-riding is well enough, in an everyday sort of
way; but was Lafayette an everyday sort of man? In his heart Felix felt
it a pity that the marquis hadn’t had a go at Pharaoh’s horses, or their
descendants. Once in church the minister had read out in a great voice
something about a Bible horse, whose neck was “clothed in thunder.”
That Bible horse, Felix reasoned, would have been just the mount for
Lafayette! For a moment, the little boy’s mind even harbored a doubt as
to his great-grandmother’s French scholarship.

“Grammer, are you sure it _was_ a donkey? Do you remember the ears?”

Madam Bradford replied with a majesty that withered all doubt, “I do. If
I was a drawer, I could draw those ears for you. Lafayette in Egypt.”


II

To-day, Cousin Felix himself hardly knows at what age he began to fit
various facts together, with an accuracy damaging to the Lafayette myth.
If, as family tradition had it, the porringer had been ordered in Paris
by our seafaring ancestor, in the year 1779, was it really likely that at
that date Lafayette’s exploits, either warlike or otherwise, either in
Egypt or elsewhere, were already so noised abroad as to be stock subjects
for the silversmith’s skill? Absurd! “Any sophomore would know better,”
reasoned the youth Felix; “even a Harvard man.” But by the time Felix
had taken his degree at Yale, and was beginning at the bottom round of
the paint business, his interest in the vanished porringer had become
dormant; for many years thereafter, his business career, his new home and
growing family occupied his mind to the exclusion of childish trifles.

Nevertheless, at the destined hour, his collector’s passion overtook
him, and was thenceforth to remain with him. He began to haunt auction
rooms, private collections, museums. Pictures, books, furniture—he loved
them all; but Colonial silver was his chief desire. He read much, studied
much, and even wrote a little, now and then, upon this subject paramount.
And though he scarcely owned it, even to himself, the missing part of
the Fairlee porringer was the central object of his quest. As the years
rushed on with gathering speed, the by-products of this pursuit became
very considerable; his collection vied with that of Lockwood or of Halsey
or of Clearwater. Silver tankards and platters were his; also silver
braziers and caudle cups and chocolate pots, silver ladles and buckles
and patchboxes. But porringers were really his long suit, he said. Of
these, he possessed enough to lend a score to various museums, and yet to
keep in his own cabinet a more than sufficient number (all of the middle
period) to serve as soup-bowls for his famous dinners of twelve.

Naturally his delight in what he had merely whetted his longing for what
he had not. Whenever his birthdays impended, as they continued to do with
annoying annual precision, his wife and the elder children (especially
young Felicia) would once more set out hunting for “the Lafayette
bottom,” and failing always in their search, would in despair purchase
some costly and inadequate substitute for the thing they sought. Indeed,
“Father’s feeling for antique silver, you know!” had made him no niggard
with modern gold, and his offspring, even in their early youth, had their
many-leaved, rigorously inspected check-books. Nor could I ever see that
they were in any way the worse for this indulgence.

Felix smiled happily enough when, on the morning of his fifty-first
birthday, young Felicia bounded into his study, and plumped down upon
his table an ill-favored bulbous tankard of somewhat baroque design; a
piece which she jubilantly declared was “a genuine John Cony,” but which
was really, as our wise expert whispered to himself in the midst of his
outspoken praise and thanksgiving, “no more a Cony than I am a king.”

“No use, dad,” said young Felicia, shaking a wise blonde head, in her
funny little perpetual morning-glory way. “Mother and I have given up
the Lafayette bottom for keeps. We’ve searched high and low for the old
thing, from Salem, Massachusetts, to Baltimore, Maryland, and so have
you. Nothing doing. _I_ don’t believe there ever _was_ a Lafayette
bottom, anyway!” This last with the air of uttering a superb and daring
heresy, possibly epoch-making in the annals of silver-collecting in
America.

“As for that,” replied Felix, whose self-imposed rôle it was never to
turn a hair at the opinions of youth, “I haven’t believed it myself, this
long time.”

Felicia started indignantly. “Why, Payrent, Payrent! What do you mean by
such—recalcitrating? I thought you staked your life on that Lafayette
business!”

“I’m afraid you haven’t been keeping up with the times,” retorted the
parent. “For the past ten years, at least, I’ve discounted the tale. I’ve
been putting two and two together, and I really don’t see the sense in
trying to make a baker’s dozen out of it, do you?”

“Oh, well, if you’re bringing it down to cold mathematics, father, I
rather think you’re going to miss some of the joys of your job!”

“On the contrary, my dear Flickey, the joys will be all the keener.”

“Well, I wish you’d explain your change of base.”

“I haven’t made any change of base. And haven’t I told you a hundred
times that the true collector should never venture out of doors without
being armored in doubt? Why, from the time of dear Grammer Bradford’s
maunderings about Lafayette in Egypt, when I was a little boy in a
wine-colored plaid shirt, I had my misgivings about the tale. It’s the
doubt that makes the chase interesting. Of course, all of us Bradfords
know that our Fairlee ancestor was with Paul Jones on the ship Ranger in
the harbor of Quiberon in 1779 when that ship received the first national
salute ever given to the American flag in Europe.”

Flickey stifled a yawn behind her preposterous dinner-ring.

“So far, so good. Next, we have reason to believe that our seafaring
grandsire got up to Paris that same year, and there ordered the Fairlee
porringer, the cover of which I now possess, the bowl being mysteriously
dog-lost.”

“Yes, dog-gone lost, forever and a day.”

Felix fingered the scrolled thumb-piece of the supposed John Cony. “But
didn’t you ever stop to think, my dear, just what Lafayette was up to,
those days? He was only twenty when he came over to us, in 1777. Is it
at all likely that he’d ever been in Egypt before that time? Not enough
to notice, I’ll be bound! No, I can’t think he was celebrated enough in
1779 to warrant having his exploits, real or imaginary, engraved on the
side of a porringer, to make a household word of himself.”

“Another illusion overboard,” cried Felicia hopefully, as if pleased with
a parent’s progress. But she departed, thoughtful.

“Do you know,” she announced to her mother, afterwards, “dad doesn’t
really swallow that Lafayette stuff, any more than you and I do?”

“Of course not, dearie!”

“Well, of all the gay parental deceivers, you two are the limit! You’ll
be saying there’s no Santa Claus, next!” Flickey flounced off in a
dudgeon not wholly pretended. She was thoughtful, too. As her parents’
interest in the quest waned, her own waxed stronger.

“The old dears got a rise out of _me_, all right,” she confided to Jimmy
Alexander, a Princeton boy who had succeeded in wresting forever from
Yale Felicia’s sworn allegiance, originally granted to Harvard, and for a
brief hour wavering between Amherst and Columbia.

“So much depends upon where you spend your summers,” Felicia had once
ingenuously remarked; and not without some anxiety, her parents had made
a similar observation. However, it was with a certain feeling of relief
that Felix and his wife had compared notes upon the subject of Jimmy
Alexander. Weighed in the balance with every other collegian in Flickey’s
career, the young man triumphed conspicuously. Incidentally, he had
an interest in old silver, an interest which even the skeptical Felix
believed was genuine.

The fount and origin of that interest would have been clear to our cousin
the collector could he have overheard Flickey and Jimmy in the arbor,
after a game of tennis. “I’ll beat you to it,” Flickey was saying. “You
find me that Lafayette bottom, and your fortune’s made, with father.
He tells us now, after all these years, that he doesn’t believe there
_is_ such a thing. But all the same there’s a look of holy faith shining
behind those shell rims of his. Say, Jimmy, did you ever notice how blue
father’s eyes are? They’re the eyes of a believer, every time!”

Jimmy was too much engrossed with Felicia’s eyes to spare a thought for
Felix’s. But the girl’s suggestion about the Lafayette bottom caught his
fancy. An up-and-coming lawyer, such as he intended eventually to be,
ought to be able to hunt down a silver bowl; or rather, what is more to
the point with lawyers, to get some one else to do it.

“My Aunt Amanda at Lost River,” he mused aloud, “has quite a little
collection of such trifles, and I’m sure she’d be glad to advise—”

“Your Aunt Amanda, at Lost River,” hooted Felicia, the morning-glory
willingly assuming the rôle of owl. “Oh, Jimmy, you innocent, don’t
you suppose father has been up hill and down dale, from Lost River to
Newfoundland Bay, looking for that bowl? Don’t you know that half the
dealers in New York are out with bloodhounds seeking stuff for father’s
cabinets to devour? Your Aunt Amanda, indeed! And Lost River! Huh!”

Jimmy was nettled, but not defeated. “All the same,” he retorted
stubbornly, “my Aunt Amanda is just as good as anybody else’s, and in
fact a lot better than most; and there’s as good fish in Lost River
as you can buy in all New York. And furthermore, if you don’t mind my
mentioning it, my Aunt Amanda is an authority on Early American silver.
You probably are not aware of the fact that it was she who wrote the
famous Blakeney monograph! Amanda Alexander Blakeney is her name.”

Flickey was taken aback for a fraction of a second. “A. A. Blakeney? Why,
we were brought up on her! I thought it was a him, I did, really! Dad
swears by his Blakeney.”

“Then why shouldn’t we Dodge up to Lost River,” urged Jimmy, appeased,
“and see auntie about it?”

Felicia’s eyes shone, but her words were circumspect. “Of course we
could Dodge it in your car, or Ford it in mine; but hadn’t we better get
father and mother to take us up in the family ark, with Priscilla and the
children—?”

“Not on your blooming passport! Where do I come in, with a deal like
that? If anything results, does little Jimmy draw the prestige? No, no,
I want to perform the quest by myself—with you, of course. Can’t ask any
one else, my runabout won’t stand for it. After all, I’m furnishing an
aunt; and I think I ought to have something to say.”

“I’ll see how mother feels about it,” vouchsafed Flickey. She added to
herself, “I’ll wear my pink-and-white stripe, with the rose blazer. But
perhaps not the earrings—you never can tell about earrings—”


III

Late one July afternoon, Amanda Alexander Blakeney had ensconced herself
with Queen Victoria in a shady corner of the terrace, and was looking
forward to an hour of tranquil enjoyment with Lehzen’s caraway seeds, and
Lord M. To her vexation, the very first paragraph was punctuated for her
by footsteps on the brick walk; and peering through the pine boughs, she
spied a gay young pair who had evidently just descended from a car, left
in quite the wrong place in her courtyard.

“I hope,” she said to herself, “it isn’t another brazen couple come to
ask if this is a ‘gift-shop-’n’-tea-house,’ and can they have something
wet. Well, they’ll hear from me, and—”

A brisk voice broke in, man-fashion.

“Hello, hello, Aunt Mandy! Anything wet for the weary prodigal nevvy?”

“Well, of all things,” replied the great Museum authority on silver,
beaming with pleasure upon her favorite Alexander nephew. Lord M. was
readily enough forgotten in the vivid presence of the young people, and
the subject of silver readily enough approached with the arrival of a
tea-tray laden with various products reflecting credit alike upon the
collector and her cook. Mrs. Blakeney was a childless widow, distinctly
pretty, with a young face framed by abundant white hair. In her fresh
lilac gown with its touches of old lace, and in her daintily buckled
slippers, of a Victorian slenderness, she was, as Felicia afterwards
declared, a “regular story-book fairy-godmother person.” Old silver was
her love, her life, her knowledge. Everybody’s silver was of interest to
her; she was always ready to talk or even to hear others talk concerning
caudle cups or apostle spoons or salt-cellars or tankards.

She gave a delicately amused attention to Flickey’s chatter of her
father’s quest for the Lafayette bottom. The young girl naturally felt
that her hostess’s interest was due, in part, to her own pleasing
vivacity in telling the story of the child Lydia, the Fairlee porringer,
Rover, and the evil Ellicksenders. At the mention of that name,
_Ellicksender_, Mrs. Blakeney started, and even changed color; one would
have said that a feeling of indignant protest surged over her when the
“den of thieves” was blithely insisted upon by young Felicia; but the
lady did not interrupt.

“And the fun of it is,” Felicia continued, stimulated by the fact that
Jimmy was admiring her within an inch of his life, while even Mrs.
Blakeney was spellbound, “the fun of it is, father still has the drawing
his Grandma Bradford made when she was a little girl. You know she made a
drawing of the Lafayette bowl just by laying it down on paper and tracing
around it, as young things do!” One would have supposed that the speaker
was a thousand years removed from such simplicities.

“But that isn’t all,” added Flickey, taking from her beaded bag a folded
paper, and passing it to Mrs. Blakeney. “What must father do but go ahead
and have half a dozen copies made of that old drawing, perfect in every
detail; and he has given one to each of us children, mother included,
so that wherever we are, we can always be prepared to find a porringer
bottom that will fit exactly, if there is such a thing. Regular Bradford
family identification tag, I call it. Of course father has the top; but
we’ve never had any luck in finding the bottom, though mother and I
have hunted and delved and dug. Sometimes the circle would be right,
or almost right, but the handles—oh, dear! We’ve looked at _gorms_ of
handles, all of them terribly wrong.”

She paused a moment to wonder whether she had been talking too much;
she did not wish to appear the raw young feminine ignoramus in the eyes
of a person so delightful as Aunt Amanda, who, as Felicia now saw, was
studying that drawing, and with a kind of passionate earnestness, too.
The expert’s face was itself a study; doubt, amazement, and recognition
were to be seen struggling there. The polite interest had become acute.

Flickey, jubilantly aware that as usual she was making a success of
her conversation, was inspired to further efforts. In imitation of her
father’s most discriminating manner, she continued, “Of course, from the
collector’s point of view, we don’t attach any undue importance to the
Lafayette myth, and—”

“Neither do I,” observed Mrs. Blakeney, with unexpected decisiveness. “If
you’d both care to come and look at some of my things, perhaps you’ll see
why not.”

The boy and girl followed the lady into her gray-panelled drawing-room,
fresh and delicately fragrant with the spice of July pinks nodding from
crystal vases. It seemed to Felicia that she had never before entered
a room that was at once so simple and so sophisticated, so withdrawn
from the world, yet so inviting to a guest. Mrs. Blakeney, no less
than Felicia, carried a beaded handbag; but Mrs. Blakeney’s, Felicia
subsequently reported to an attentive father, made her own look like
thirty cents.

Mrs. Blakeney’s bag held a key, with which she opened a highboy, gleaming
discreetly from a nook just beyond the fireplace. Its shelves were laden
with treasure; and Flickey, although long inured to the surprises that
a collector can spring upon his family, exclaimed with joy before those
marshalled riches. For Felicia, like her father before her, was fated
to pursue beauty; even her girlish mistakes—her collection of athletic
collegians, for example, her amethystine earrings, her overwrought,
overworking dinner-ring in all its preposterousness—resulted from her
thirst after loveliness rather than from her vanity. Jimmy himself was to
her largely one last pure product of the beautiful. In Mrs. Blakeney’s
drawing-room, before the highboy and its spoils, her eyes filled with
tears of thankfulness for beauty. She felt that the ranks of silver
vessels beaming and gleaming upon her had in some mysterious way gathered
into themselves and greatly multiplied all over their surfaces all
possible beauty from all known worlds, only to reflect it back upon
those who were fortunate enough to be near. Not only the faded rose of
the hangings and the dim gray of the panelling and the dusky orange
outline of the spinet were reflected winkingly from those silver shapes;
it seemed to her that the very fragrance of the pinks and the breath of
summer itself were wafted to her by silver voices. Flickey sometimes
passed for flippant; but this was not her flippant day. Indeed, she was
startled out of a mood that was partly pleasure and partly prayer by Aunt
Amanda’s matter-of-fact remark,—

“My French stuff, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. I keep it locked
because—oh, well, there are just a few trifles—Jimmy, reach me down that
top piece, will you, please? The one at the right of the alms basin.”

With a certain grave excitement, Mrs. Blakeney had already placed
Felicia’s drawing upon a little table; she smoothed out the folds of the
paper, especially those that crossed the lacelike handles. Then, with
but a casual glance at the delicately wrought bowl that Jimmy put into
her hands, she set it, with dramatic exactness, over the outline traced
by the child Lydia.

Each one of the trio felt for a moment the touch of a bygone day. There
could be no doubt whatever that the lost piece of silver was found.
Unless, indeed, as the young lawyer’s mind profanely suggested, those
old boys made such things by the gross, like the green spectacles that
Moses bought! But the surmise was too grotesque for utterance. Even with
his slender knowledge of the silversmith’s art, he could discern that
the Fairlee porringer was no machine-made product. It had been created
by many touches, but by few hands; perhaps by only one pair of hands,
and that a master’s. Felicia’s eyes (not wholly untrained, however
subject to occasional error) rested admiringly, even reverently, on a
master-craftsman’s work.

She turned toward Mrs. Blakeney. “I feel just as if you had taken down a
receiver, and asked me to listen into it, and that I heard a voice say,
oh, ever so long-distance! ‘This is little Lydia speaking.’”

Jimmy, too, was thoughtful. “But where does Lafayette come in, I wonder?
Lafayette in Egypt?”

Aunt Amanda smiled, picked up the bowl, and pointed out, just below the
rim, a tiny engraving of a long-eared beast, bearing a cloaked figure,
while another personage trudged at the side. Palm trees and a pyramid
completed the scene. How strange that any one, above all a God-fearing
Fairlee, could ever have failed to recognize the Bible story of Mary and
Joseph, fleeing with the Child! Many curves and scrolls enclosed this
specimen of the graver’s art, and among these could be discerned, in the
flourishy French writing of which Grandma Bradford had often spoken, the
legend—

                         _La Fuite en Egypte_

For a collector, Mrs. Blakeney was certainly sportsmanlike, yes,
magnanimous. We called it broad-minded when she gave to Jimmy Alexander’s
bride, as a wedding-gift, her “Flight into Egypt” piece; an object so
tenderly cherished by her that she had never even made mention of it
in any of her monographs, but had kept it unspotted from the world,
in her own collection. She had always, and with reason, considered it
an Alexander heirloom to which she was justly entitled, through the
bequest of her grand-uncle, Judge Alexander. She knew, however, that
the Alexanders, like most of us, had had ups and downs; she knew that
one branch of the family, had been prolific in good-for-nothings,
some of whom had fallen so low as to misspell the family name for a
whole generation, writing it Ellicksender, when they wrote it at all.
Though she doubted the justice of calling the humble Ellicksender home
a “den of thieves,” she nevertheless believed it probable that Judge
Alexander’s “_La Fuite en Egypte_” porringer had come into his family’s
possession in some vague, unexplained way, rather than by purchase. For
Judge Alexander’s father, Dr. Phineas Alexander, that pillar of the
Presbyterian faith, had originally been a mere Ellicksender, so-called;
he it was who had “turned out real good,” and so had failed to win
the interest of either Felix or myself, in our childish days. As Mrs.
Blakeney said, “The ironies of Time certainly do iron out everything, if
you wait long enough”; and it was Dr. Alexander, _alias_ Ellicksender,
who had lifted up the fallen fortunes of his family to their former lofty
place in American history.

Felicia is really a kindly little soul. When I went to see Cousin Felix
after the wedding, I was not surprised to find that on the ground of
safety first, she insists that the Lafayette bottom shall remain, during
her father’s lifetime, remarried to its fluted, flame-topped cover. The
_écuelle_ is easily the pride of the collector’s heart. “Of course I have
costlier pieces,” quoth Felix, “but none so dear to me as this.”

We grinned at each other as he repeated his boyhood’s gesture, wetting a
thumb and forefinger before he touched the flame.




THE FACE CALLED FORGIVENESS


The little dinner was a masterpiece. From hail to farewell, there had
been no falling-off in quality; the crystal chalices of liquid topaz
that heralded the feast (or shall I say plainly, the cocktail-glasses?)
were not more graciously cut than the quips of the final speech of
congratulation. Guests, viands, vintages, and starry flowers had been
chosen by the law of hospitality wedded to the spirit of beauty. The
purse they had between them was not unduly large, but it had been
joyously and wisely spent.

It was an artist’s dinner given by an uncle to a nephew, a dinner in
honor of an honor. Twenty years before, Steven Grant had received the
coveted Gold Medal for Sculpture; to-day, a like mark of distinction
had been awarded to his favorite nephew, Gerald Weldon. Steven was a
bachelor, and nephews counted. What more natural than a dinner of reunion
and rejoicing?

There were ladies present; and some of them had satisfied alike their
decorative and their hero-worshipping instincts by sending in advance
to the house of their host two lengths of wide ribbon of cloth-of-gold,
with a command that both host and guest of honor should use them to bind
about their necks the beautifully sculptured tokens of their greatness.
Very ample and splendid is that famous gold medal. A little weighty for
festal wearing, indeed; but to refuse would have been churlish, and uncle
and nephew had adjusted their adornments with the air of men who do not
mean to dodge any part of the day’s work. Having done that, they promptly
forgot the big bright plaques on their chests, except when playfully
reminded of them by the lady who had conceived the idea, and who basked
gladly in the thought of her originality.

It was indeed an evening to remember; but, just like an evening to
forget, it had to come to an end. The last and loveliest lady, revealing
the exact amount of lacy stocking demanded by fashion, had with Gerald’s
aid tucked up her slender glittering trail within her glass coach; the
last and most uninteresting gentleman had been sped clubward. Uncle and
nephew went up the broad stairs to talk it all over in Steven Grant’s
den, a great orderly panelled room always very dear to young Gerald.

Steven Grant’s main studio, being a sculptor’s, was naturally doomed
to the basement of his house. The second-floor den was not precisely a
studio, though works of art had been created there. It was a room not
quite like a library, yet with plenty of space for books, and books
for the space; a room that was a bit larger than a smoking-room, and
rather less elegant than a drawing-room; comfortable chairs abounded
and cheerful tones prevailed, evidently in complete amity with a pair
of dim, priceless tapestries that seemed to know all and pardon all in
both furniture and folk. It was a room in which old memories and new
conveniences were happy together; a bachelor had somehow managed it so.
As years went by, Steven Grant became increasingly glad that the McKim,
Mead and White panelling of the late eighties had piously respected the
delicate acanthus cornice of the early forties. He often said that he was
the only artist in New York whose career had begun and would end under
the same roof.

You would have taken uncle and nephew for a pair of brothers, one silvery
and one golden. Evening dress and the bright decorations emphasized the
resemblance. Both men were tall, slender, clean-shaven. Steven Grant
carried his sixty years lightly, as artists often do, while Gerald at
thirty sometimes showed a seriousness in accord with his honors rather
than with his years. His forehead was already higher than his uncle’s;
both men chuckled over that, but naturally Uncle Steve’s chuckle was
heartier. Gerald slouched a little, after the custom of his generation;
this made him seem more _blasé_ than he really was. Steven Grant was
straight as a pine tree; this gave him a challenging look that people
liked. The ties of blood and their pursuits bound the two together in a
harmony that would scarcely have borne out the theories of Shaw, Samuel
Butler, and other dispraisers of the Family.

That night, they were like a pair of girls in their wish to live the
dinner over again, with the added joy of uncensored comment. “We’ll get
our golden halters off,” said Uncle Steve, “and browse at our ease.”

“Wasn’t Mrs. Storms the limit?” laughed Gerald. “Talk about the immodesty
of our maidens! Strikes me, Uncle Steve, your generation is fully as mad
as ours.”

“Don’t judge all dowagers by one,” urged the other, turning on the light.

Gerald stopped short in the midst of a jesting answer, forgetting both
maidens and dowagers as he suddenly saw over his uncle’s familiar hearth
something he had never seen there before; the cast of a beautiful head,
palely tinted.

“Why, Uncle Steve,” he cried, “you have it too, that face called
Forgiveness!”

“Is that its name?” asked Steven Grant quietly.

“I don’t really know, but it’s the only name I’ve heard given to it. I
never saw any cast of it till yesterday, coming home from my trip West.
I had an hour before my train left, so I ran in to take a look at the
Museum. Say, those Middle-Westerners are alive, all right! Priceless,
that Museum! And just as I was leaving, my eyes fell on this wonderful,
wonderful thing. Seeing it was the big adventure of my whole trip. Its
beauty has haunted me ever since.”

“Take down my copy, if you like,” said Grant.

“Oh, how exquisitely you’ve colored it, Stevedear! No one can beat you in
such things. You’ve brought out every beauty, somehow. And it suggests
both dawn and twilight.” Gerald passed his fingers with appreciative
tenderness over the broad brow of the face called Forgiveness, and went
on, with animation.

“At the Museum, there was a nice old cabinet-maker, German type, fitting
a frame for their cast. Recent addition, it seems. He looked intelligent,
so I asked him what it was. He said he didn’t know exactly; it hadn’t
been ‘catalocked’ yet. But a poet friend of his had said it ought to be
called the Rose of Pardon. Then he told me, musingly, that it made him
think of the Virgin at Nuremberg.”

“That might well be,” observed Uncle Steve, pushing over the matches.

“Well, then, next a little Italian girl came along, with her sketch-book.
She saw my interest, and showed me the astonishingly good pencil sketch
she had made from the cast. So I asked her what it was, where it was
from. She said she didn’t know; she understood that it was called
Forgiveness. Then she looked me all over to see what manner of man I was,
and shyly said that to her it was very beautiful, like the Madonna at
Perugia.”

“I can see what she meant, of course.”

“But that isn’t the half, dearie! Just then a French painter, evidently a
Friday lecturer or something of the sort, came in with a class of young
boys. Lord, how they burbled, all over the place! One of the kids asked
him the question that was trembling on my lips, and he answered that he
wasn’t sure, but that he believed the cast was called Forgiveness. It was
rather touching to hear him repeat very reverently, in his pronounced
‘Parrhisian’ accent, ‘Forgive us our trespasses.’ The boys felt it, too,
and they were very quiet for a moment. Then the Frenchman, with a bright
glance at me (guessing no doubt that I too was an artist), added that for
him, it was like the Virgin of the Visitation, so miraculously saved out
of the destruction at Reims.”

“It seems to me more beautiful than that, even,” interposed the elder
man, “but I can understand his feeling.”

“Exactly! And then, last of all, a real live American art student came
hustling up, just the kind you see here at the League, only more so.
He, too, said the face was called Forgiveness, adding briskly, ‘Perfect
American type, don’t you think? Beats Gibson, what?’”

“They were all more or less right, you thought?” Steven Grant’s eyes were
fixed curiously on Gerald’s face, still bent over the cast.

Gerald looked up. “Yes, they were right, each in his own way. You know,
Stevedear, it all reminded me, in a beautifully wrong-side-out fashion,
of the different witnesses in Poe’s murder story, you remember?”

“You mean the one where men of different nationalities all hear an ape
chattering in the dark, and not knowing in the least what it is, each one
is sure it’s some language not his own?”

“That’s right! The Frenchman, who doesn’t know Spanish, says it’s
Spanish, the Englishman, who doesn’t understand German, says it’s German,
while the Italian, who doesn’t know English, feels sure it’s English, and
so on. But those people at the Museum were all so splendidly different
from that! Each one wanted to guard and to claim for his own race the
heritage of beauty breathing from the mask. The German, the little
Italian girl, the French painter, the American art student—they were
all alike in this. They found in that cast Nuremberg, Perugia, Reims,
Chicago!”

“‘Beats Gibson, what?’” mocked Steven Grant.

“Do you think it’s a cast from nature?” asked Gerald, still intent on the
face. “Perhaps a death-mask?”

The other nodded. “Without doubt, a death-mask.”

“But there’s nothing of the sharpness of death about it, is there? It
seems a face unprofaned by earthly suffering.”

Again Steven Grant gazed at his nephew, as if waiting for the eyes of
young manhood to see more.

“Strange,” pursued Gerald, “that a mere death-mask can mean so much to
living men. There’s Fraser’s Roosevelt, and the Lincoln, and the Dante
that used to be in everybody’s library, and—”

A silence fell between the two. Surely Mrs. Storms, the lady who was the
limit, was far from their thoughts. The dinner, that masterpiece, had
faded from the foreground.

“I never told you,” said Gerald, abruptly, “how I longed to make a
death-mask of father, when he died there in London, away from you all. I
wanted to preserve—and to show to you yourself, Stevedear!—the look of
peace that came upon him. As a sculptor, I knew how, of course. Every
kid studying sculpture has made casts—from life, anyway. But when mother
saw what I was about, she trembled so violently I couldn’t go on, in
the presence of her suffering. And _I_ trembled, too. I’ve never told
you about it, because I was ashamed of my weakness, or whatever it was!
Well, since then, I’ve never even _tried_ to make a death-mask! People
send for me, of course, and I often go, when they seem to need a friendly
presence. But it’s some moulder who does the work, not I. I can’t seem to
bring myself—”

He set the cast on the table beside him, still conning its planes and
shadows. Again the silence of understanding enveloped uncle and nephew,
until Steven Grant said, as if in answer to a question, “Well, yes; it
was much the same with me. I never made but one death-mask. Just one.
There was no way out.”

“How was that?”

“It happened when I was younger than you are, so I couldn’t be expected
to have much sense, could I? You trembled, because it was your father. I
trembled, because it was the girl I’d loved, and in a sense, lost.”

“Oh, I could understand!” And Gerald, thinking of that most lovely lady
with the glittering train, stretched out a sympathetic hand.

“A very beautiful girl she was, Anita Vaughn! The pride of our young
circle. I made the mistake, if it was a mistake, of introducing my best
friend to her. After that, I had no show whatever. They fell in love.”

“Hard luck, for you, anyway!”

“Yes, and a shock to my conceit, too. In a way, it was one of the
sacrifices I made to art. I’d been moving Heaven and Hell to get that
Emancipation group of mine well along. I didn’t want to ask Anita to
marry me until I had proved my earning power, and that group would
have settled things. Your gramper, as you know, didn’t think much of
sculpture, and I was shy about asking him to shell out. So I waited and
worked, and in the meantime,—ah, well, it was all simple enough. She
preferred my friend to me, as well she might—”

“I don’t know about that,” bristled Gerald.

“No, you don’t, but I do. You see, it was Janvier.”

The younger man started. “Not Janvier, the famous Dr. Janvier!”

“Yes, _the_ Dr. Janvier. And no finer fellow ever lived. I’ve been
thankful ever since that I didn’t let his luck in love stand between us
as friends. Oh, of course, I sulked in my studio a few weeks, and took
on a deep cynicism about life and love. But nobody seemed to notice my
airs, so I gave ’em up, and picked out the prettiest wedding-present I
could find for Anita.”

“And of course you had your work—”

“Indeed I had! My career was very much on my mind, those days!” He smiled
at young ambition, and dexterously flicked a lengthened cigar ash into
the fireplace. “But I suffered, too, don’t think I didn’t suffer! And
strange as you may find it, that pair comforted me. To be sure, it never
works out so, in books; but it was so, with us. The Janviers had me with
them often, after their marriage. As I look back on it, I see that it was
all far more beautiful than I could know, then. They were rare souls,
both.”

“Did Janvier’s fame come early in life?”

“Yes, but he was too busy and quixotic to take much note of it. I first
met him when I was making my studies for that confounded Emancipation
group, and we became friends at once, because of my subject. He was
interested in the welfare of the negroes, and gave up a lot of his time
to charitable work among them. He used to bring me different types of
colored men as models; I’ve often told you how I studied thirty-five
different darkies for those reliefs on the pedestal. In our leisure,
when we had it, Janvier and I would discuss racial traits, and so on.”

“New Yorker?”

“Yes, but of Canadian ancestry. His father was one of the early lumber
kings, and left him a lot of money; otherwise, he couldn’t have given
so much unpaid service among the negroes. I never knew a human being so
frantically possessed with the idea of justice for all the world.”

“His wife sympathized?”

“Oh, Lord, yes! Whatever he did was perfect in her sight. Strange, too,
because she was a Louisiana girl, whose family had lost their all through
the Civil War. And of course her ideas about the negro race were not in
the least like his. How could they be? Ah, well, Anita Janvier, my lost
Anita Vaughn, was certainly a shining example of that motto there, under
your feet!”

Gerald picked up the bellows from the hearthrug, and studied its carven
legend, as he had often done when a child. “‘_Amor Omnia Vincit._’ Love
conquers all.”

“Love surely had his hands full, in her case. Just fancy the prejudices
Anita Janvier had to overcome, before she could enter into her husband’s
work as she did! She told me once, with that wonderful smile of hers,
that she was glad she had been brought up on a plantation, because
understanding negroes so much better than Dr. Janvier could, she could
save him from the sort of mistakes most Northerners made.”

“Did she win out?” laughed Gerald.

Steven Grant did not answer directly, but continued in musing
recollection.

“Franklin Janvier had a house and office in Tenth Street, just a few
doors from my studio here. We saw each other constantly, and kept in
touch with each other’s work. I was surprised, however, when he took
on, as office assistant, a young surgeon just graduated from a foreign
school, a man who looked like a Spaniard, but who had a trace, oh, a mere
trace, of negro blood. Pleasant fellow, too; very gifted and modest, and
with an attachment for Janvier that amounted to idolatry, all told. A
doctor born, Janvier said. His grandfather was a noted English surgeon
who came out to the West Indies in the old days. Well, Charles Richmond
was a fixture in Frank’s office before Anita came to live in the big
Tenth Street house. She accepted him just as simply as she accepted all
the rest of her new life. But she told her husband, very frankly, that
Dr. Richmond’s strain of the darker blood, however negligible for us
Northerners, was perfectly evident to any one brought up among negroes.”

“Southerners often say such things,” said Gerald, “but I never know quite
all they mean, do you?”

“We tried to make her explain. It was a little of everything; just
this and that; hair, lips, nails, palms, of course! And a certain
indescribable smooth fullness under the skin, a rounder build of the
eyeball, a more springing curve of the lashes, and so on. Janvier was
even then getting together the data for that famous book of his on
‘Ethnic Details,’ and he used to encourage Anita in such observations,
and check them up. One couldn’t help admiring her astonishing acuteness
and probity. The three of us would often compare notes about young
Richmond, but never with malicious intent, I assure you. And though Anita
always treated him with the respect she knew was due him, it sometimes
fell short of what he longed for.”

“The Moor was haughty, then?”

“Haughty enough, but by no means a Moor, any more than you are. His eyes
were blue, and really lighter than yours, my boy. With a queer shine
in them, sometimes! I was sorry for him, and so was Anita. But Janvier,
with his obsession about equality and justice, sturdily refused to see
that there was anything to be sorry about, except our nasty human point
of view. He gave a lot of the care of his colored patients to Richmond,
who did nobly by them, too. Only, by some mysterious instinct, they
always recognized _him_ as one of _them_. And it hurt him, clean through
and through. How that boy suffered! He had real genius, we knew. And I
suppose this helped Janvier to put up with Richmond’s occasional frantic
outbursts against his fate. We used to call them his cyclones of the
soul, not dreaming that a similar expression was to be invented long
afterward. These storms of passion always left him crumpled up into
nothingness before Janvier, Anita, even myself! I tell you, Gerald, the
man’s agonies were atrocious. He had a kind of gallant courage, too, for
all his self-abasement; you would be pretty dull, if you couldn’t see
the sublimity of it. After every outbreak, and the subsequent surrender,
he would painfully pick up the pieces of himself, and put them together
again in a dazed sort of way, and next day devote himself to his work,
more single-mindedly than ever. Janvier was his chosen pattern and
example, in that.”

“But perhaps the poor chap worked _too_ hard,” suggested Gerald.

“Exactly! And there’s where Janvier and I were wrong, not to have known
it. Anita, with a far finer vision than we had, often warned us that the
bent bow was strung too tight. But we couldn’t see it so; men are blind,
sometimes, in the heat and burden of the day. Richmond was six feet tall,
and broad in proportion. A magnificent physique! That’s what we went by.
We laughed at Anita’s fears—accused her of plantation-coddling. And there
was a lot to be done, too, that year after the Janviers were married.
It was a horrible winter, disease stalking everywhere, especially among
the ‘coloreds.’ Both Janvier and Richmond were overworked. You would
have thought that the sort of office Janvier had, with so many colored
patients, would have hurt his practice. Not a bit of it. People felt a
trust in him. Children always took to him, and he was very successful, as
you know, in children’s diseases.

“It happened that in the following spring, Janvier was suddenly called
to Toronto to see his mother, who had but a few days to live. He asked
me to look after things a little, in his absence. Of course, I said I
would, but I told him, half-laughingly, that I hoped to goodness Charles
Richmond wouldn’t treat me to a cyclone of the soul; and if he did, I
should turn the hose on him. Janvier looked rather troubled, but said he
didn’t expect anything of the sort. In fact, a storm had occurred only
the day before, and another such tempest wouldn’t be due for a long time.
It struck me that if I’d been in Frank’s place, I would have been worried
about leaving Anita. Very likely, Frank _was_ worried, for he had tried
to persuade her to visit her sister while he was away. But the girl was
tremendously interested in some sick little pickaninnies she was helping
both doctors to pull out of various croups and itises, and she felt that
those children needed her. And, anyway, Frank would be back in a few
days.”

A new tone had crept into the sculptor’s voice, and Gerald guessed that
his uncle was about to speak of things hitherto untold. “Poor Stevedear,”
he thought, with a thrill of loving sympathy, “he’s come to the place
where the novels always have a row of asterisks, or something.”

“And,” continued the other steadily, “Franklin Janvier did come back,
summoned by a telegram I sent him, telling him that Richmond had
committed suicide. He had shot himself at the Tenth Street house. More
than that, Anita had seen it all, and was prostrated by the shock. She
had often warned us that Richmond’s end might be madness. We had laughed
at her, and now—Well, no use dwelling on that part now, this evening of
your happiness, Gerald! It’s enough to tell you that Janvier went through
the hell of seeing his young wife’s mind give way completely, from the
shock. Specialists came, and after a while they held out a distinct hope
that a few months might bring a change for the better. She regained
something of her former sweetness, but it was evident that most of the
time her mind was a blank. Once, in one of her rare outbursts, she cried
out that her soul was snared in a web, not of her own weaving. You can
imagine what Janvier felt, hearing this truth from her lips.

“The young couple had looked forward happily to the birth of children;
but now, in extreme anguish of spirit, Frank Janvier told me that it
was not worth the price; nothing could be worth the price his wife was
paying. But he didn’t give up hope. The doctors still believed that the
coming of the child might end forever the terrible shadow. Anita was
naturally an unusually well-balanced person. It was part of her charm,
the kind of sweet steadiness she had. I know Janvier counted on it to
save her, in the end. So it was with very great eagerness that we all
awaited the arrival of the Janvier heir.

“By tacit agreement, I stopped going to the Tenth Street house, but
Janvier came often to my studio. He seemed to cling to me in his trouble,
and I wanted to help him, of course. He kept himself in hand, pluckily
enough; but sometimes, in unguarded moments, the suffering that showed
itself in his face was horrible to see. So summer and autumn passed, and
winter came.

“One bitter December night as I was reading in this very room, a
messenger brought me a note from Janvier, begging me to come to him at
once. He had, as I already knew, passed through two days of alternate
hope and despair. And now, so the note told me, both wife and child had
died. Anita’s face had taken on a look of exquisite beauty, the look of
her wedding-day. He wanted me to make the mask that would preserve it.
You know how I must have felt.”

“Oh, Stevedear!”

“I felt I couldn’t do it! But I had a studio-man who was an expert in
casting, and I roused him from his bed to go with me to Janvier’s. Poor
Giuseppe had been up several nights with his youngest child. It happened
that Dr. Janvier, who had a helping hand for every workman in the
quarter, had been taking care of Giuseppe’s boy, right in the midst of
his own troubles; and Giuseppe was glad enough to do anything he could
for _il Signor Dottore_.

“Well, I won’t tell you about that bedside, and Frank’s silent anguish;
you know well enough about such scenes—The room was large and lofty, not
unlike this. At the far end was an alcove, curtained off; and behind the
drapery I could discern a light, and a cradle; but we did not speak of
those things. There was no attendant. Anita’s old nurse, Loretta, who was
a kind of mother to us all, was sleeping in the next chamber, worn out
with labor and sorrow. And the others, those terrible, necessary others
that you and I can never get used to, were not to appear until the morrow.

“It was like Janvier not to waken Loretta. He himself brought water and
towels. Giuseppe was just about to mix his first plaster when a knock
was heard. Janvier stepped out, but soon returned to tell Giuseppe, very
gravely, that little Emilio was once more in agony, and that both of
them must go at once, in the hope of saving the child’s life. You see
Janvier had made some important studies in children’s lung troubles, and
had worked out some successful methods that he didn’t yet dare trust to
others, without supervision.”

“You mean to say he and Giuseppe left you there?”

“It was the only thing to do, wasn’t it? If Janvier could bear his part,
why shouldn’t I bear mine? I knew it might be hours before he would leave
Giuseppe’s child. And I knew, too, that the exalted loveliness of that
dead face might vanish at any moment; such looks do not stay long among
us. Janvier’s quiet putting aside of his own feelings showed me what to
do. I steeled myself and made the mould. I don’t mind telling you, a cold
sweat broke out all over me; but dreading it was really much harder to
bear than doing it. There was something in the still beauty of the girl’s
face that strengthened me; I seemed to see and feel this loveliness even
while I was veiling it under layers of plaster. And when I had taken
the mould away, and the face was revealed again, no less peaceful than
before, and quite unprofaned by my work, I felt a kind of consolation.
My part of the work had been rightly done, for all my trembling; and
Giuseppe could easily make the cast itself, in my studio.

“A long time, as it seemed to me, I sat there by the bed, watching that
beloved face. I wondered whether the same radiant peace shone from the
face of the dead child. I knew Anita would wish to have me look at her
child; I owed it to her memory.

“I parted the alcove curtains, and turning up the light, I lifted the
delicate little linen sheet that covered the cradle. What I saw I have
never yet spoken of to any one, not even to Janvier; perhaps least of all
to Janvier, Janvier with his great dream of justice! I know that what I
say is safe with you, Gerald? You promise? The little face, exquisitely
fashioned and peaceful, indeed, was unmistakably one of those darker
blossoms on the tree of life. The darker strain! And it was far more
clearly marked than in Richmond.”

Gerald recoiled in horror. “Richmond—”

“Yes! In one hideous, backward-looking lightning-flash, I saw just what
had been Anita’s fate. I saw her long months of mental eclipse, following
the attack of a madman. I had often noted her not unkindly meant attitude
of racial superiority toward the frantically sensitive Richmond; and I
understood just how a mere glance or word of hers had whipped to the
surface the one black drop in his high-strung, overwrought frame, driving
him to an unspeakable betrayal. No wonder he had killed himself. No
wonder the proud, blameless girl had cried aloud to her husband, out of
the abyss of darkened reason, that she was caught and crushed in a web
not of her own weaving!”

“I suppose,” hesitated Gerald, “there was never any doubt of Richmond’s
crime?”

“None whatever. There was even a witness! As a matter of fact, poor
faithful Loretta, who worshipped Anita, and followed her like a shadow,
had been working in the room next to the office, when she heard Richmond
talking to Mrs. Janvier, in a crazy, shrieking way, about a prescription.
His tone was so strange and threatening that she was terrified for her
mistress, and rushed toward the office. The door was slammed violently
in her face, and locked. She beat on the panels, and screamed, but help
came too late.”

The level voice faltered a moment, then continued: “My first impulse was
to escape from the room, anywhere, anywhere, out of the horror of it. But
Anita’s face with its majestic calm held me there; that, and the example
of Janvier’s fortitude. And, well, life must be lived! There might be
something I could do for Janvier, or Giuseppe, for that matter, on their
return. Once again I went to the alcove, this time carrying a lighted
candle, to be doubly sure of a dreadful thing. The tiny bronze face with
closed eyes implored only peace—a shadow praying to return to its rest
among shadows.

“Until gray morning, I waited in that still house for Janvier. I did not
know what I should do or say; I only knew that I knew what were better
left unknown, perhaps. But how small my own distresses seemed when he
came in, and shed the light of his indomitable spirit over that place of
sorrows! He seemed a creature emerging out of the wreck of all his own
hopes, supported out of chaos solely by his will to re-create hope in the
world.

“‘Giuseppe’s boy will live, I think,’ he said, simply. ‘We’ve brought
him through the crisis. Thank you, Steven, for giving me the chance to
save him. I could not have left Anita unless you had stayed. Poor Loretta
was tired beyond endurance, and I had sent away the trained nurse. She
was worn out, too.’

“I wrung his hand. ‘I loved Anita,’ I sobbed out, weakly enough.

“‘I know, I know,’ he said. And then a great light came to me. I saw that
it wouldn’t be necessary for me, then or at any other time, to debate
passionately with myself whether or not I should speak to him of what I
had learned. The largeness of his grief sheltered all my anxieties. His
arm around my shoulder, we stood together looking down upon the face
of a much loved and deeply wronged woman. In life, it had been a face
to delight in; a face with loyal blue eyes under upraised dark lashes,
a delicate straight nose, and lips vividly curved like the petals of a
rose. In death, with the eyes forever shadowed, the flower-like coloring
effaced, its beauty of form was enhanced. But more than this, a spiritual
significance, not previously apprehended by us, shone through the pale
clay. We both of us felt it. Janvier did well to have such loveliness
preserved.

“That was the only mould I have ever made from a human face. Giuseppe
made two casts, one for Janvier, one for me. Janvier’s was destroyed in
that fire you’ve heard about.”

“And is your copy still in existence?” Half involuntarily, Gerald took up
the cast called Forgiveness.

“Yes,” replied the elder man, “it is in your hands now.”

The other laid his lips reverently on the smooth brow of the face which
had reminded the German of the Nuremberg Virgin; the face which the
Frenchman had thought French, the Italian girl Italian, and the American
boy American.

“That cast, which you say is now called Forgiveness, has been enshrined
in this room, behind the corner tapestry there, for more than a
generation. It is older than you are. After Janvier died, I told myself
it was not right to hide so much beauty from the world. But it wasn’t
until after the Armistice that I mustered up courage to have three
plaster copies made. And it was only last week that I sent a copy to each
of our three largest art schools.”

“And you gave the casts the name, Forgiveness?”

“Ah, no, I left them nameless! But I must tell you a strange thing about
that, too. At the time when I made the mould, we young artists were very
much under the spell of Omar Khayyám’s fuzzy, fezzy philosophy; yes,
quite entangled in the obscurantist beauty of the Vine! Fitzgerald’s
verses and our own Vedder’s drawings were a cult with us. _I_ couldn’t
forgive as greatly as Janvier did. My wrong was less, and my pardoning
power was less. And whenever I thought of the whole dreadful business,
one of the Fitzgerald quatrains would ring in my ears; the one that ends

    “‘For all the sin with which the face of man
    Is blackened, Man’s forgiveness give—and take!’

“We thought it a sublime blasphemy in those days, but in these modern,
higher-keyed times, no doubt it sounds tame enough. Anyway, it haunted
me horribly; and to get rid of it, I carved it one rainy afternoon, in
fine close letters like slanting rain, all around the outer edge of my
cast. But times change, and we change. Thirty-five years later, when I
looked the cast over, before giving it to the moulder to make the copies
from, I knew that those lines no longer expressed what was in my heart. I
had outgrown them. I knew that a better inscription would be, ‘Forgive
us our trespasses, as we forgive those that trespass against us.’ But I
decided to have no inscription whatever, and to let the cast carry its
own message of beauty. So, with a file, and very carefully, as I thought,
I erased every word of that inscription like the slanting rain. Again and
again I passed my fingers over it, until I was sure it was gone. Still,
I suppose I must have left some breath of that word, Forgiveness, which
the students at the Museum discovered. Though for the life of me, I can’t
find a trace of it!”

He took up a magnifying-glass, and passed it to Gerald, who peered
through it intently, all along the rim of the cast.

“No word here,” said Gerald. He passed his fingers around the circling
edge, as if, after all, a sculptor’s fingers were more to be trusted than
a glass. “No, there’s nothing, really! The face must have told its own
name. But tell me, Stevedear, if you don’t mind,—did you yourself really
forgive, in the end?”

Steven Grant smiled, and replaced the cast above his hearth-fire. Before
answering, he rumpled Gerald’s hair, exposing the too high forehead.

“Your question, my boy, makes me think of Mrs. Storms. Because, like that
lady, it is not exactly a wrong ’un, but still, it comes very near the
danger line.”

And Gerald knew it was time to turn from the past to the present, and
to talk of the dinner, that masterpiece. Besides, as Steven Grant had
guessed, the younger sculptor was longing to speak of his own Anita,
that most beautiful lady whose shining train he had hovered over, at
the door of the glass coach. The elder man rejoiced with all his heart
that there was no Emancipation group to thwart his nephew’s happiness.
In honor of Gerald’s Anita, he was loyally ready to shout with the best,
“Long live the Queen!” But he did not say to himself, sorrowfully, of the
earlier Anita, “The Queen is dead.” He saw in his mind the face called
Forgiveness. He listened to the German cabinet-maker, the French painter,
the Italian girl, the American student. There were others, too, coming
and going in the Museum; and what they said of the face made him think of
life, not death.




THE ARTIST’S BIRTHDAY


One winter evening, in a snugly built little stone cottage near the
northern border of Vermont, a young family of three had gathered beside a
glowing hearth and a cheerful lamp to enjoy an hour of that contentment
which is most deeply felt when the fire is bright, the curtain closely
drawn, and a storm is raging without. It was the birthday of the child
Samuel. He was three years old, and as a birthday indulgence, he was to
sit up until seven o’clock, and carve things with the jack-knife that his
father, himself a carver of renown, had brought him as a birthday gift.
This was by no means his first adventure with a knife. For a year or more
he had managed a knife, at first feebly, but later with an astonishing
ease. His father was proud of the infant Phidias, and even his mother had
ceased to be terror-stricken at the conjunction of child and knife. The
motions of the boy Samuel were happy and accurate. At the present hour,
such gestures as his would be called eurhythmic, or something of that
sort; even in those days of preposterous precocity, he was regarded with
wonder.

It was the month and the year when for the first time there was a
Confederacy, with a President to be prayed for, or else against. Stirring
era! No lack of interesting items for the father to read aloud from
his Weekly; Nancy, the young wife busy with her sewing, was as deeply
interested as he himself in the doings at Fort Sumter. Her comments
on Lincoln and Davis were no less keen than his. With eyes now bent
on her work, a fine linen handkerchief to be hemmed on four sides,
and now returning to the child seated on the braided rug at her feet,
she still had time and thought to give to her husband’s reading; at
twenty-three, she rejoiced to be living in portentous times. And pray
do not imagine that because the home was remote from great cities, the
mother necessarily comported herself as a poor rustic creature, or as one
unfamiliar with the counsels of “Godey’s Lady’s Book.” Her ample gown was
of the finest cashmere, triple-dyed of a deep rose-color, and it was well
spread out upon a hoop-skirt which she managed with the kind of skill
that a rose in full bloom must employ when keeping its petals in order.

The guests at the birthday feast had been a pair of grandparents, a
young uncle and aunt, and a ten-year-old girl from the farmhouse down
the road. The little girl, brave in her well-flounced, orange-spotted
purple delaine, wore pantalets that had been made much too long for her,
in anticipation of some prodigious growth which had not taken place;
and these had been starched too stiffly, so that she creaked audibly
during locomotion. But she was very happy at the party; and though her
costume might appear but ill-suited to the rigors of a Vermont winter,
it must be remembered that in those days female attire had no commerce
with common sense. Promptly at half-past five her mother came for her,
bustling competently into the house, with an accompaniment of impatient
sleigh-bells outside; and she glanced with undisguised curiosity at the
spread table, not yet cleared away, the birthday cake with its heathenish
three candles, and the young heir himself.

“They say he hain’t never been punished none?”

Nancy flushed, and held back an angry answer. She was aware that the
subject had already been torn to tatters by the village gossips.
“Punished? No, not yet.”

“I want to know! Wal, I guess he’s needed it, afore now!” The farm-wife
was emphatic; but there was motherly love as well as village curiosity in
her scrutiny of little Samuel. “Looks jest like a young American flag,
don’t he? Them blue pants, and red cheeks, and eyes stickin’ out so kinda
starry. But all childern needs punishments,” she chirped. “They’re all
of ’em limbs of Satan. I’ve had seven, and I guess I know.” She cast an
eagle eye on the pantalets of her first “limb.” “Them Hamburg points
allus ketch up every mite of dust,” she lamented, as she tucked her child
under a buffalo robe and drove away through the snow.

“Wal, she knows a lot, if she knows all she thinks she doos,” was the
grandmother’s placid comment, as she and the aunt cleared away the
feast. “Nancy has no call to mind _her_.” It was evident that Nancy was
a creature lovingly set apart in that little world. Having borne the
brunt of the birthday preparations, she was not allowed to put on her
all-enveloping kitchen apron again, but was forced down into her own
chair in the bright sitting-room. Rather early, because of the bitter
weather, the guests had gone, and the family was left to itself in a
loving intimacy precious to each of the three.

The young mother’s face, softly banded with dark hair, rose flower-like
above a lace collar, fastened at the throat by a large elliptical shell
cameo representing Ganymede teasing the eagles of Jupiter. To the
wearer that brooch was a pleasing and a precious thing. It had been her
mother’s, and had been bought in Rome by her father, our first American
translator of Tasso. Whether or not as an aid to his own understanding of
the Italian poet, the New England scholar had married a gentle Sicilian
girl, and Nancy herself had been born in Rome and christened Annunziata,
an outlandish name that American relatives, after the scholar’s return,
had promptly transformed into Nancy. And all her life Nancy had been
conscious, not without joy, of her twofold nature as a New Englander
and an Italian. Nancy and Annunziata were both of them under her skin.
She never knew which one triumphed the oftener. In the kitchen, Nancy,
perhaps; in the sitting-room, Annunziata.

That evening, as she sewed her fine seam, the ample roseate sleeves
of her gown and the white undersleeves flowing beneath them moved in
and out of the lamplight in a kind of stately melody as for a minuet.
Watching the child at his carving, she hoped and dreamed for him the
life beautiful, the life of a sculptor. Had Raphael been there, she
would have been a Madonna; a Madonna of the hoop-skirt, but not of
the rocking-chair. No, indeed! The chair she sat in was one that her
husband had made and carved for her, after a drawing in an ancient book
on Italian furniture; its beauty and strength were a constant delight
to her. And even without the chair, and the Ganymede, and the crimson
curtains, it would have been evident that this young pair were among the
aristocrats of the village; they felt that they belonged to the only
aristocracy the place permitted, the aristocracy of mind. They had more
books than the minister even. And no doubt Nancy’s birth in Rome, that
far-off city where the Pope lives, had added a secretly savored pagan
touch to the picture the hamlet had made of her.

Still more than the woman with her Madonna vision, the man exulted in
the child’s rapt industry. With vigilant eye he noted the process of
creation. A cat, it seemed; Samuel was carving a cat; no, _the_ cat! Once
in a while, as if to refresh a memory perhaps somewhat dimmed by his
three years’ stay among mortals, Samuel would glance toward Pharaoh, the
great green-eyed old black torn; but mostly his head with its long fair
curls was bent over his work. Samuel was not copying a cat; he was rather
evolving the cat from the deeps of his inner consciousness. Samuel’s
cat was not the lithe and lordly beast of Barye, nor yet the affable
companion that Frémiet has given to the world; it was rather a cat of the
Egyptians, the mystery of cathood incarnate. And just as Michelangelo
knew that an angel slept in his marble block, so Samuel knew that all
cathood crouched within a wooden chip. The father, seeing the child’s
difficulty in separating the cat-mass from the scrap of board in his tiny
hand, would gladly have performed the rude preliminaries. But the boy had
drawn back, and clasping the wood to his chest, had said firmly, in his
usual way of speaking only the key-words of a situation, “Self do all!”
Samuel knew no baby-talk. From his mother and her New England forbears
(scholars, theologians, translators, and the like) he had inherited a
great fund of words fit to be spoken, and from his father a passion
for perfection in all things. He had a natural longing to say things
rightly, and so saved his larynx for the essential syllables. The father,
well-pleased with that confident “Self do all,” returned to his reading.
But Samuel, rather than Fort Sumter, filled his mind that night.

An odd-looking creature, one would say, if Samuel should suddenly appear
in our modern circle. Yet his oddity was rather in what had been done
to him than in what he was. His yellow hair was arranged in seven tight
spirals hanging to his shoulders; an eighth spiral made a sort of shining
ridgepole on the roof of his head, from the brow backwards. Beyond
question, a pretty child, with the delicately brilliant coloring of the
Nordic; and his fine strong hands and feet had a definite character of
their own. He wore a low-necked, short-sleeved tunic, very voluminous as
to its skirt; it was made of thick blue woollen material woven by his
grandmother. Beneath the tunic were ridiculous shapeless breeches of the
same stuff; then came a section of bare calf, and after that, white wool
socks and stout, copper-toed ankle-ties. As he sat on the braided rug,
among his blue homespun billows, his back against his adoring slave, the
sheep-dog Ajax, and his heart and soul bound up in his job of carving,
he was at once the most absurd and lovable object in all Vermont.
Disquieting, too, perhaps, for his next of kin.

Seven o’clock was to be his bed-knell; and now seven o’clock suddenly
sounded from the tall shape in the corner. At once the mother rose,
smoothed her ample skirt, and held out her hand. “Bedtime, Samuel.”

Samuel looked at her beseechingly, but he knew that his look was
lost. Already in his short life he had learned that in the realm of
prohibitions, woman is of sterner stuff than man. He therefore gazed
toward the spot where help was more likely to be found. Still seated
firmly, clutching his cat in one hand and his new knife in the other, he
stretched out his arms to his father, and cried aloud, “None done, papa!”
Invincible argument from creator to creator, “None done!”

The parents exchanged irresolute glances. “Very well, Samuel, just ten
minutes more.” Samuel, victorious, returned to his art. But what are
minutes to him whom the dream has possessed? At the end of ten minutes,
when the mother rose again, and delicately flicked her cashmere folds,
Samuel was far more unready than before. And now, his clear infantine
voice with its uncannily correct enunciation had lost its former coaxing
grace. The tone was haughty, argumentative. “None done, papa!”

“It’s his birthday, _caro mio_.” The young mother spoke softly,
hesitating; the father, in secret delight, relinquished responsibility.
“May as well make it half-past seven,” he growled. “Perhaps he’ll be
tired out by then.” But when he said that, he must have forgotten his
own elation in carving his violins of an evening. By day he worked on
patterns for huge machinery, shaping them with deft mechanical skill. But
every night, between nine and eleven, when the evening reading was over
and the little house under the pines was very still, he used to bring
out one of his violins, and carve and caress and polish its exquisite
surfaces. The patterns for machines were his livelihood, but the violins
were his love. How could he have forgotten his own raptures of carving!
Ah, no, Samuel was by no means “tired out by then!”

When the half-hour sounded, the husband stood up, beckoning to the wife
to remain seated. No more woman’s foolishness; the boy must to bed. “Come
on, young man! Time’s up!” Yet his voice did not sound so commanding as
he had hoped. Samuel felt its indecision; and indeed he was at the moment
too high in the clouds of carving to give any attention whatsoever to
things beneath. “None done, papa!” The voice was no longer coaxing;
it was not even argumentative; it was hostile, truculent to a degree.
And when his father approached him, to make an end, the boy looked
wildly around as if praying to the gods to take his work of art under
their protection. But no gods intervened, and Samuel, at bay before
his universe, seized his carving in all its cathood, hid it among his
back breadths, and sat down strongly upon it, glaring defiance at his
progenitors. “None done!”

The mother rose quickly, Nancy trampling on Annunziata. Her face was
pale. “This is disobedience,” she said in a shaken voice, “and it must
have its punishment. It is the third time, within three months, that he
has needed punishment. The first time was the eggs. The second time it
was the spectacles. And now, it is—insubordination.” Her heart contracted
with suffering. Insubordination! A large word to use on so small a being!

Ah, yes, the eggs, and the spectacles! The young father remembered the
eggs and the spectacles; and even in the midst of a misery scarcely less
acute than the mother’s, a smile twitched his lips. The eggs!

In brief, little Samuel, at the age of quarter before three, had noted
with a curious eye that Matilda, the brown hen, had one egg that differed
from others. It was hard, white, shiny; it had nothing of the soft,
pale-brown, pleasant egg-color the other eggs had. One day he took it
out of the nest to consider it. He put it on the barn floor. There was
a hammer near at hand. Samuel liked hammers. With the hammer, he struck
the china egg once, twice, thrice. Nothing happened. Curious! He then
put one of the pleasant egg-colored eggs on the floor. He struck it but
once, and his whole world dissolved into a filthy chaos not to be borne.
Overwhelmed with remorse and bad-egg juice, he fled in terror to his
mother. He wept so long and earnestly that she considered him punished
enough.

As for the spectacles, there was an evil deed for you! His grandmother
had set her spectacles on the tall mantel-shelf, just under the picture
of sorrowful flowers made from the hair of young and old. Most of the
flowers were black, or white, or brownish drab. Samuel did not like the
picture, but the spectacles had always interested him. He dragged a chair
to the mantel, and by heroic climbing, reached them. He seldom broke
things, his motions being accurate, and he came down to earth with the
spectacles unharmed. What to do with them? And there was grandmother’s
lace cap, too. How about Ajax, the sheep-dog? Not without difficulty, but
without mishap, Samuel was forcing the glasses upon Ajax, when help came
to the good dog, and in the person of the master of the house. At the
sight of the woe-begone spectacled animal, and the lace cap, no longer
what it once was, Samuel’s father had laughed so loud and long that both
parents agreed that punishment would be inconsistency itself.

But now, with little Samuel sitting defiant on his work of art, a picture
of insubordination, punishment could no longer be delayed. The mother put
her arms around her husband’s neck. “Oh, remember how tiny he is, Abel,”
she wailed. “I shall stay in the kitchen till it’s done.” She ran into
the cold, dark kitchen, where she knelt in anguish, an ear against the
keyhole.

The father, alone with his offspring, was agitated too. His hands were
so strong! Surely, in a better world than this, a better way could be
found. How was he to know how much he ought to hurt his own child? He
groaned as he picked up the boy, slipped down those absurd and shapeless
breeches, and with firm hand directed toward the infirm, time-honored
spot, administered chastisement. A shriek of surprise and anger, a burst
of sobs, then silence. The woman at the keyhole could bear the shriek and
the sobs, but not the silence. She bounded into the room, and clasped the
insubordinate one to her heart. In truth, even the dog Ajax was disturbed
by that homely scene of punishment; the hair on his shoulders stiffened,
and he made an evil noise in the back of his throat. Of all those
present, the cat Pharaoh alone remained unmoved, detached as the Pyramids
themselves, in a stony indifference to human woe. Pharaoh, though in a
sense connected with the origin of the trouble, washed his paws of it,
and kept his calm.

Silent tears ran down Samuel’s cheeks, from which, as the mother saw with
terror, the dazzling rosy color had now quite faded. The Nancy in her
died; only the Annunziata was left. Oh, what if, what if?—But her alarm
was needless. Samuel had the proud blood of survivors in his veins. Not
for nothing was he a Vermonter born. Welsh seers and Norman craftsmen
and Scottish covenanters had stubbornly watched his cradle; his fair
substance had come all the way to Vermont from old Rome via Bunker
Hill. The father brought from the adjoining bedroom the child’s woolly
nightgown, ugly and comfortable and orange-dyed. He warmed it before the
blaze. As the parents undressed the culprit, they noted, with an almost
guilty surprise, how much smaller he seemed now that his blue tunic was
off. The father held the boy in his arms before the fire, while the
mother, kneeling, wiped away the soundless tears welling continually. No
word was spoken. At last the father carried the dusky orange cocoon into
the bedroom, and set it in its crib, and covered it gently. The mother,
worn out by the artist’s birthday, crept away to bed, leaving her husband
to console himself with his violins, if he could.

That hour with the violins was always very dear to Abel. As he busied his
hands with their beautiful bodies, his soul lost itself in happy reveries
in which Samuel played no small part. Annunziata also shone, in rich,
incredible rainbow robings from foreign looms, and with the wealth of
foreign continents on her neck and fingers; from the first moment when he
saw her, he had been mad about her touch of foreignness; he had seen it
as a sure amulet against the encroaching hated drabness of New England
milltown life. It was Annunziata who had set his spirit free. He always
called her Annunziata in those golden visions; never Nancy. And sometimes
he thought it odd, indeed, that in his violin hours, when wife and child
were away, safe in a dreamland of their own, he felt and cherished their
existences even more deeply than when they were at his side.

But to-night he had no joy in craftsmanship; he stared helplessly at the
scrolled neck-piece in his hand. “The little shaver!” he muttered. “He
took it like a soldier. The little shaver! Damned if I’ll do it again, in
a hurry.” Then he smiled that sudden whimsical smile of his. “But perhaps
he’ll be damned if I don’t! Queer world.” He was startled to find that
for the first time in his life, his violins had no interest for him; he
put away his veneers and glue-pot. He could not wait any longer; he must
see for himself whether those silent tears had ceased.

Samuel in his crib lay very quiet, eyes wide open, tears still coursing
into the collar of his orange nightgown. The perplexed father decided to
meet the situation with jocularity. “Say, laddie, aren’t you going to
shut those peepers?” And the child, as before, answered with what was
uppermost in his mind, “None done, papa!”

A long time the parents lay in their great square bed, saying nothing,
but each guessing at the other’s thought. Annunziata was trying to be
Nancy, as Vermont expected, and Abel was seeking to be Providence for
his all. At last he stretched out a cautious hand toward the crib, to
find that the child also was awake. Without more ado, he lifted Samuel
into the big bed, and there the parents cherished the child between
them, until the small body relaxed in the pleasant warmth. Next morning,
when the carver went to his work, Samuel was still sleeping, as rosy and
peaceful as if he had never known either insubordination or punishment.

The new day was a marvel of sunshine. During the night, the snow had
changed to rain; this in turn had given way to colder weather, and now
myriads of jewels hung from enchanted apple trees. A white fairyland!
The child clapped his hands with delight as his mother wrapped him warm
in his various rabbit-skin garments, and gathered his curls up under a
raccoon cap, and led him down the garden path to frolic with old Ajax in
the clean snow. When she brought him in, he was glowing and sparkling
with unearthly glee. She thought she had never dreamed of anything so
beautiful. She wondered whether Joseph and Mary in the carpenter’s shop
had ever punished Jesus for playing too long among the shavings, and what
the Child had said. Probably something much more moving than “None done,
papa.” But if so, she wondered how Mary could bear it.

Samuel’s elfin merriment quieted down in the warm room. No longer
insubordinate, he allowed his mother to take him up on her lap, and to
brush the tangled curls over a round stick, until they became orderly
spirals once more. He had not yet learned that curls were effeminate;
that battle was to be much later. He made no move to take up his carving,
or to defend his past, reserving such discussions as these for a
meeting with the masculine mind. All the afternoon he seemed a creature
both isolate and expectant, darting to the window whenever a vagrom
sleigh-bell tinkled in fairyland. Isolate and expectant! His mother
wondered whether all artists were doomed to be so. Once she caught him up
in her arms, and cried out to him in her childhood’s tongue, “_O caro,
caro, perché?_” And Samuel passed his fingers over her forehead, and
then over the Ganymede brooch, saying three words that his father had
taught him in jest, but which he had learned in earnest, “_Beau, bello,
beau-ti-ful!_” He loved those three words, and very often, apropos of
nothing, he spoke them in his incredibly distinct way. But to-day his
mother felt his aloofness; she knew that he was waiting for something,
something not in her power to give.

The young carver was a privileged person in the shop where he worked.
That day he could not fix his mind on those wooden models of wheel and
shaft. He was unsatisfied about his child, and in the middle of the
afternoon abruptly put away his tools and went home. Early as it was,
Samuel was already waiting. The child had been listening for that step
in the passage. There was something to be explained; the indignity of
yesterday’s happening had not yet passed into forgetfulness. He took his
unfinished cat in hand, and hitched his trousers higher. If last night’s
encounter was to be repeated, he would not easily be separated from his
defensive armor!

The father, coming in glowingly from the freshness of the winter day, was
dazed by that militant figure and its immediate challenge, “None done,
papa!” He hardly knew how to answer whatever demand was thereby made
upon him. No parent relishes the rôle of Goliath! But love aided him. He
warmed his hands at the blaze, and seizing the belligerent, tossed him
high in the air many times, knowing that Samuel had never yet had enough
of that sport. Then he sat down before the fire, the boy in his arms, and
poured out a thousand foolish tendernesses over the seven spirals, and
the shining ridgepole. The sensitive child caught the shadow of anxiety,
even as it was vanishing from his father’s face. What sorrow was this?
His own sorrows had been two: a work of art undone, a first whipping. His
father was the one who gave, not took whippings; his father’s sorrow was
therefore about the work of art. Ah, that was something he himself could
well understand, and perhaps console; though the cat was unfinished,
there was many another work not yet begun. He laid a valiant hand on his
blue woollen chest, and declared, “Self make more!” Perhaps he saw a long
vista of bright shapes clamoring to be carved for the comfort and delight
of the world.

Hastily he slipped down from his father’s arms to his own place on the
hearthrug, and brought out his little box of clean chips from beneath
the sofa. A great company of living beings was hidden there, waiting,
waiting in the wood. Samuel looked up, and announced with jubilation,
“Self—make—all!” He pondered a moment on his next subject. The carving
of a cat had ended in disaster; let us then attempt the dog, the friend
of man, not the heartless watcher by his fire. The child passed a thumb
over the knife-edge, as the elders do, then chose a block, and addressed
himself to it. “Dog.” No more.

The parents looked at each other, understanding profoundly that Samuel
was no longer a child of three. Overnight, he had become a boy in the
fourth year of his age. In mingled joy and anxiety they perceived also
that for a certainty their wish had been granted; there was an artist in
the family. And an artist, they supposed, would have his isolations, and
tremulous expectancies; his aspirations, too, and perhaps his anguish in
high enterprises, “None done.” But joy alone radiated from Samuel and
his shining spirals. From the sorrow of a dream never to be finished he
had passed to the incalculable rapture of a vision newly begun. “Dog,”
he murmured, “dog.” He knew that the creature was lying low there in
the chip, just for the express purpose of being summoned forth by him,
Samuel. In his abounding bliss he had time to bestow on his parents three
words to describe what he was about to make; and he spoke these words as
if they were three priceless jewels, “_Beau—bello—beautiful!_”


THE END





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