Adeline Adams

“ SPEAKING OF ANGELS I
The youth’s name was Apollos Rivers. We admired him, used him, and for a time, despised him, too. Why we admired and used, I can easily explain. Apollos was every inch his name—blond, athletic, superb; no model in New York posed as faithfully. Why we despised—well, the logic of that is more complicated. Our contempt was doubtless merely a habit, formed on sight unseen and strengthened by hearsay. Apollos, indeed! ”

“ 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. ”

“ There was nothing false about Amouretta. From her golden topknot to her pink toes, she was as good a girl, all in all, as ever hopped high-heeled from a painter’s studio to a picture-studio (two quite different arenas) , in the effort to make both ends meet, and then cross over. “It’s the cross-over that counts,” Amouretta used to say; “there’s where the joy in life appears.” The name Amouretta was a business concession to the picture industry and to the small vaudeville shows in which she worked when posing was slack. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Amouretta’s brilliant blush came and went so often during her story, and finally stayed so long, that it played the very deuce with Maurice’s entire morning; you know how difficult it is to paint emerald satin when the wearer is blushing; the green and the red come to blows. And Maurice, who had two daughters of his own, howbeit small, was really worried, until one afternoon at the Century, Mr. William Saltonstall, long of limb, lineage, and purse,—a man of undoubted probity, and a collector, too!—had touched him on the shoulder, and poured out the whole story of his love for Amouretta. ”

“ I really needed both Apollos and Phineas, using each lad part of the day. Rough on me, rather; and I suppose fellows in shops and offices would open their eyes if they [145] saw a mere artist—next door to a do-nothing, you know—beginning work every morning at five and quitting at summer sundown; yes, and perhaps stealing back for more study by twilight. For it’s twilight that wipes out all the pettiness that the day reveals; it’s twilight that knows all and tells only the good, in sculpture. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Gerald slouched a little, after the custom of his generation; this made him seem more blasé than he really was. Steven Grant was straight as a pine tree; this gave him a challenging look that people liked. The ties of blood and their pursuits bound the two together in a harmony that would scarcely have borne out the theories of Shaw, Samuel Butler, and other dispraisers of the Family.
That night, they were like a pair of girls in their wish to live the dinner over again, with the added joy of uncensored comment. “We’ll get our golden halters off,” said Uncle Steve, “and browse at our ease.” ”

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

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

“ Yet any wise observer of our poor dust would have known at once, on seeing the two travellers together, that the hand of art had been laid inevitably on each; lightly and graciously enough on the youth, rudely and ironically and with stripes and lashes on the man. Phœbus Apollo hardly knew, as yet, whether he should ever really need the boy Royal or not. However, he meant to lend the child his lute for a summer morning or two, and hear whatever trailing wisps of song those smooth young fingers could coax goldenly from its strings. Yes, Royal was a true probationer of Apollo. ”

“ Still, don’t run away with the idea that any art is pure ecstasy every minute. Nothing is.
I don’t know why I felt so uneasy about Apollos. All sorts of sinister anxieties haunted me. Did I fear that he would burn up my barn of a studio? No, for he smoked neither cigarettes nor a pipe. Would he elope with the cook, leaving us with an empty larder and a desecrated hearth? No, for if his own words were to be trusted, skirts bored him. Would he paint his ears, and so make talk for the village folk? How could I tell? My chief hope was in the influence of [146] Phineas. ”

“ But Anita’s face with its majestic calm held me there; that, and the example of Janvier’s fortitude. And, well, life must be lived! There might be something I could do for Janvier, or Giuseppe, for that matter, on their return. Once again I went to the alcove, this time carrying a lighted candle, to be doubly sure of a dreadful thing. The tiny bronze face with closed eyes implored only peace—a shadow praying to return to its rest among shadows. ”

“ In his golden twenties, he had been a singularly diligent lover and student of landscape. Many an elder painter might have envied him his portfolios stuffed with first-hand information and first-hand illusion concerning rocks and seas, skies and fields, trees and hills, and all the rainbow hues and lights and darks that visited them in their repose, their shifting moods, their crises. Maurice in the late thirties often stood in awe of that far-off Maurice of the early twenties, who [5] seemed to know so much even then of the painter’s magic book of all outdoors. ”

“ The dinner, that masterpiece, had faded from the foreground.
“I never told you,” said Gerald, abruptly, “how I longed to make a death-mask of father, when he died there in London, away from you all. I wanted to preserve—and to show to you yourself, Stevedear!—the look of peace that came upon him. As a sculptor, I knew how, of course. Every kid studying sculpture has made casts—from life, anyway. ”

“ I became two persons, as every artist at times must. Each was sharply awake. One of these two was modelling for dear life on that portrait, smiting the thing now here, now there; unhasting, unresting; gathering up rich handfuls of all the released individuality of greatness that I now saw radiating from a transfigured Senatorial countenance, and compressing that individuality into clay for [85] the plaster-moulder’s sacrifice and the bronze-founder’s furnace. The other man in me was listening amiably to a Bullwinkle speech of self-revelation. ”

“ 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 [49] 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 ”

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

“ Everywhere, everywhere on this round globe of ours, there is a poor limace among the green leaves, and no one knows what she is; but everywhere there is a good old grandmother, pushing forward a pale little Pierre with a bay-window brow, to tell the world, ‘C’est une taupe.’ And the world listens, and repeats, and so becomes wise. ”

“ Maurice was used to that boy’s presence by now; the harsh realities of dreams had often brought them together. Such things could not be, and men remain dumb. All this and much more must be told in the miracle landscape he was creating; it would be dishonest, otherwise. In spirit, smiling Harry and his mates belonged to that scene. Even M. Monet admitted that without doubt there is also this point of view. Not one of those companions failed to understand why our painter had not blotted out Pietro’s Amouretta. ”