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. GigiArcangelo, 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 otherwisewould have been, for him,impossibile, she wassi 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 withCand ending inen—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 complexof 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 aboveall 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 ownhand, 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 whattext 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: “Mydear 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 therewas 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 couldfinish it. You have seen the art of the Signor! Many sculptors cannot do what the Signor can. It is themorbidezza! 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, andyet 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 owncognatohad 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 thoroughlyenjoying 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 hiscognatohad beenobligedto 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 abambino’shead, 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’smother, 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, “certamenteMademoiselle could have the lace around the wrist, if she so wished, and—”
“No, Gigi,” I interposed firmly. “The ladycannothave the lace. Notwiththe 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 alwaysdoesdoubt 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 wouldput in all themorbidezzathe 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 Praxitelesand 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 newsthat 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’slesson, 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 makethe 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 plastercast. 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 beenimpossibile, she wassi 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 Ihad 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 desiredmorbidezza. 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 intendingit 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 rawn’est-ce-pasfor 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 areader, 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 alwaystriedto 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 youstart 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 asday 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 forthe 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 nevermyhand 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 Iwaswinning; 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 backin 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 whatIfeel!”
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 aboutmorbidezza.
“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 wasuninvaded 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 didyouhappen 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 thething 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, Clarendenwasthe 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 themarble 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 blackistight 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’tquite 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’dlike 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 thatyouknew, 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 hadseen 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, themorbidezzaand 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 hishands, 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.