Part 9

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

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

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

The boy’s eyes filled. “Yes, sir.”

“Where’s Apollos?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE MARQUIS GOES DONKEY-RIDING

I

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Felix grinned, guiltily.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

II

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

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