Chapter IV (1)

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_.