Babylon. Volume 1

‘Very well,’ Audouin said with a sigh of relief. ‘I’ll write and inquire about the matter myself this very evening.’

‘Address the Secatary,’ Mr. Winthrop put in officially, ‘Bethabara Seminary, Athens, N.Y.’ Audouin made a note in his memorandum book of the incongruous address with a stifled sigh.

‘Mother,’ the deacon said, ‘call in Hiram.’ Mrs. Winthrop obeyed. Hiram, who had been loitering about the wood-shed in wonder at what this long interview could portend, slunk in timidly, and stood with his ragged hat in his hand beside the table.

‘Hiram,’ said the deacon, solemnly, with the voice and air of a judge publicly addressing a condemned criminal, ‘that gentleman thar has been conversin’ with mother an’ me relatively to the desirability of sendin’ you to an edoocational establishment, whar you may, p’raps, be cured from your present oncommonly idle and desultory proclivities. Though you hev allus bin, as I confess with shame, a most lazy lad, sonny, an’ hev never done anything to develop your nat’ral talents in any way, that gentleman thar, who has received a college edoocation hisself at one of our leadin’ American Universities, an’ who is competent by trainin’ an’ experience to form an opinion upon the subjeck, believes that you dew possess nat’ral talents of which you ain’t yet giv any open indication.‘Tain’t for me to say whether you may hev inherited them or not: it is sufficient to point out that that thar gentleman considers you might, with industry and application, dew credit in time to an edoocational institoot. Such an institoot of our own denomination is Bethabara Seminary, located at Athens, New York. Thar you would receive instruction not at variance with the religious teachin’ you hev enjoyed in your own residence an’ from your own parents. An eminent Hopkinsite pastor is installed over that institoot as President; I allood to Elder Ezra W. Coffin, with whose commentary on the prophet Ezekiel you air already familiar. Mother an’ me has decided, accordingly, that it will be for your good, both temporal and sperritooal we hope, to enter junior at Bethabara Seminary. That gentleman thar will make inquiries relatively to the time when you kin be received into the institootion.

We trust that when you he ventered upon this noo stage in your career, you will drop them habits of idleness an’ insubordination for which it has been my dooty on a great many occasions to correck you severely.’ Hiram stood there dazed and trembling, listening with blank amazement to the deacon’s exhortation (the same as if it was conference), and only vaguely taking in the general idea that he was to be sent away shortly to some school or other somewhere. Andouin saw at a glance the lad’s timid hesitation, and added kindly: ‘Your father and mother think, Hiram, that it would be well to send you to Bethabara’ (he suppressed his rising shudder), ‘so that you may have opportunities of learning more about all the things in which you’re already so much interested. You’ll like it, my boy, I’m sure; and you’ll get on there, I feel confident.’

The boy turned to him gratefully: ‘That’s so, I guess,’ he answered, with his awkward country gratitude; ‘I shall like it better’n this, anyhow.’

The deacon frowned, but said nothing.

And so, before a week was over, Hiram had said good-bye to his mother and Sam Churchill, and was driving over in the deacon’s buggy to Muddy Creek deepo, ong rowt for Athens, Madison County.

CHAPTER VIII. WOOD AND STONE

Colin Churchill’s first delight at the wood-carver’s at Exeter was of the sort that a man rarely feels twice in a lifetime. It was the joy of first emancipation. Hitherto, Colin had been only a servant, and had looked forward to a life of service. Not despondently or gloomily – for Colin was a son of the people, and he accepted servitude as his natural guerdon – but blankly and without eagerness or repining. The children of the labouring class expect to walk through life in their humble way as through a set task, where a man may indeed sometimes meet with stray episodes of pleasure (especially that one human episode of love-making), but where for the most part he will come across nothing whatsoever save interminable rules and regulations. Now, however, Colin felt himself free and happy: he had got a trade and a career before him, and a trade and a career into which he could throw himself with his utmost ardour. For the first time in his life Colin began dimly to feel that he too had something in him. How could he possibly have got up an enthusiasm about the vicar’s boots, or about the proper way to deliver letters on a silver salver? But when it came to carving roses and plums out of solid mahogany or walnut, why, that of course was a very different sort of matter.

Even at Wootton Mandeville, the boy had somehow suspected, in his vague inarticulate fashion (for the English agricultural class has no tongue in which to express itself), that he too had artistic taste and power. When he heard the vicar talking to his friends about paintings or engravings, he recognised that he could understand and appreciate all that the vicar said; nay, more: on two or three occasions he had even boldly ventured to conceive that he saw certain things in certain pictures which the vicar, in his cold, dry, formal fashion, with his coldly critical folding eyeglass, could never have dreamt of or imagined. In his heart of hearts, even then, the boy somehow half-knew that the vicar saw what the vicar was capable of seeing in each work, but that he, Colin Churchill the pageboy, penetrated into the very inmost feeling and meaning of the original artist. So much, in his inarticulate way, the boy had sometimes surprised himself by dimly fancying; but as he had no language in which to speak such things, even to himself, and only slowly learnt that language afterwards, he didn’t formulate his ideas in his own head for a single minute, allowing them merely to rest there in the inchoate form of shapeless feeling.

Now, at Exeter, however, all this was quite altered. In the aisles of the great cathedral, looking up at the many-coloured saints in the windows, and listening to the long notes of the booming organ, Colin Churchill’s soul awoke and knew itself. The gift that was in him was not one to be used for himself alone, a mere knack of painting pictures to decorate the bare walls of his bedroom, or of making clay images for little Minna to stick upon the fisherman’s wooden mantelshelf: it was a talent admired and recognised of other people, and to be employed for the noble and useful purposes of carving pine-apple posts for walnut bedsteads or conventional scrolls for fashionable chimneypieces. To such great heights did emancipated Colin Churchill now aspire. Even his master allowed him to see that he thought well of him. The boy was given tools to work with, and instructed in the use of them; and he learnt how to employ them so fast that the master openly expressed his surprise and satisfaction. In a very few weeks Colin was fairly through the first stage of learning, and was set to produce bits of scroll work from his own design, for a wainscoted room in the house of a resident canon.

For seven months Colin went on at his wood-carving with unalloyed delight, and wrote every week to tell Minna how much he liked the work, and what beautiful wooden things he would now be able to make her. But at the end of those seven months, as luck would have it (whether good luck or ill luck the future must say), Colin chanced to fall in one day with a strange companion. One afternoon a heavy-looking Italian workman dropped casually into the workshop where Colin Churchill was busy carving. The boy was cutting the leaves of a honeysuckle spray from life for a long moulding. The Italian watched him closely for a while, and then he said in his liquid English: ‘Zat is good. You can carve, mai boy. You must come and see me at mai place. I wawrk for Smeez and Whatgood.’

Colin turned round, blushing with pleasure, and looked at the Italian. He couldn’t tell why, but somehow in his heart instinctively, he felt more proud of that workman’s simple expression of satisfaction at his work than he had felt even when the vicar told him, in his stiff, condescending, depreciatory manner, that there was ‘some merit in the bas-relief and drawings.’ Smith and Whatgood were stonecutters in the town, who did a large trade in tombstones and ‘monumental statuary.’ No doubt the Italian was one of their artistic hands, and Colin took his praise with a flush of sympathetic pleasure. It was handicraftsman speaking critically and appreciatively of handicraftsman.

‘What’s your name, sir?’ he asked the man, politely.

‘You could not pronounce it,’ answered the Italian, smiling and showing his two fine rows of pure white teeth: ‘Giuseppe Cicolari. You cannot pronounce it.’

‘Giuseppe Cicolari,’ the boy repeated slowly, with the precise intonation the Italian had given it, for he had the gift of vocal imitation, like all men of Celtic blood (and the Dorsetshire peasant is mainly Celtic). ‘Giuseppe Cicolari! a pretty name. Da you carve figures for Smith and Whatgood?’

‘I am zair sculptor,’ the Italian replied, proudly. ‘I carve for zem. I carve ze afflicted widow, in ze classical costume, who bends under ze weeping willow above ze oorn containing ze ashes of her decease husband. You have seen ze afflicted widow? Ha, I carve her. She is expensive. And I carve ze basso-rilievo of Hope, gazing toward ze sky, in expectation of ze glorious resurrection. I carve also busts; I carve ornamental figures. Come and see me. You are a good workman. I will show you mai carvings.’

Colin liked the Italian at first sight: there was a pride in his calling about him which he hadn’t yet seen in English workmen – a certain consciousness of artistic worth that pleased and interested him. So the next Saturday evening, when they left off work early, he went round to see Cicolari. The Italian smiled again warmly, as soon as he saw the boy coming. ‘So you have come,’ he said, in his slow English. ‘Zat is well. If you will be artist, you must watch ozzer artist. Ze art does not come of himself, it is learnt.’ And he took Colin round to see his works of statuary.

There was one little statuette among the others, a small figure of Bacchus, ordered from the clay by a Plymouth shipowner, that pleased Colin’s fancy especially. It wasn’t remotely like the Thorwaldsen at Wootton; that he felt intuitively; it was a mere clever, laughing, merry figure, executed with some native facility, but with very little real delicacy or depth of feeling. Still, Colin liked it, and singled it out at once amongst all the mass of afflicted widows and weeping children as a real genuine living human figure. The Italian was charmed at his selection. ‘Ah, yes,’ he said; ‘zat is good. You have choosed right. Zat is ze best of ze collection. I wawrk at zat from life. It is from ze model.’ And he showed all his teeth again in his satisfaction.

Colin took a little of Cicolari’s moist clay up in his hand and began roughly moulding it into the general shape of the little Bacchus. He did it almost without thinking of what he was doing, and talking all the time, or listening to the Italian’s constant babble; and Cicolari, with a little disdainful smile playing round the corners of his full lips, made no outward comment, but only waited, with a complacent sense of superiority, to see what the English boy would make of his Bacchus. Colin worked away at the familiar clay, and seemed to delight in the sudden return to that plastic and responsive material. For the first time since he had been at Begg’s wood-carving works, it sudddenly struck him that clay was an infinitely finer and more manageable medium than that solid, soulless, intractable wood. Soon, he threw himself unconsciously into the task of moulding, and worked away silently, listening to Cicolari’s brief curt criticisms of men and things, for hour after hour. In the delight of finding himself once more expending his energies upon his proper material (for who can doubt that Colin Churchill was a born sculptor?) he forgot the time – nay, he forgot time and space both, and saw and felt nothing on earth but the artistic joy of beautiful workmanship. Cicolari stood by gossiping, but said never a word about the boy’s Bacchus. At first, indeed (though he had admired Colin’s wood-work), he expected to see a grotesque failure. Next, as the work grew slowly under the boy’s hands, he made up his mind that he would produce a mere stiff, lifeless, wooden copy. But by-and-by, as Colin added touch after touch with his quick deft fingers, the Italian’s contempt passed into surprise, and his surprise into wonder and admiration. At last, when the boy had finished his rough sketch of the head to his own satisfaction, Cicolari gasped a little, open-mouthed, and then said slowly: ‘You have wawrked in ze clay before, mai friend?’

Colin nodded. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘just to amuse myself, don’t ee see? Only just copyin the figures at the vicarage.’

The Italian put his head on one side, and then on another, and looked critically at the copy of the Bacchus. Of course it was only a raw adumbration, as yet, of the head and bust, but he saw quite enough to know at a glance that it was the work of a born sculptor. The vicar had half guessed as much in his dilettante hesitating way; but the workman, who knew what modelling was, saw it indubitably at once in that moist Bacchus. ‘Mai friend,’ he said decisively, through his closed teeth, ‘you must not stop at ze wood-carving. You must go to Rome and be a sculptor. Yes. To Rome. To Rome. You must go to Rome and be a sculptor.’

The man said it with just a tinge of jealousy in his tone, for he saw that Colin Churchill could not only copy but could also improve upon his Bacchus. Still, he said it so heartily and earnestly, that Colin, now well awakened from his absorbing pursuit, laughed a boyish laugh of mingled amusement and exultation. ‘To Rome!’ he cried gaily. ‘To Rome! Why, Mr. Cicolari, that’s where all the pictures are, by Raffael and Michael Angelo and them that I used to see at the vicarage. Rome! why isn’t that the capital of Italy?’ For he put together naively the two facts about Rome which he had yet gathered: the one from the vicar’s study, and the other from the meagre little geography book in use at the Wootton national school.

‘Ze capital of Italy!’ cried the Italian contemptuously. ‘Yes, mai friend, it is ze capital of Italy. And it is somesing more zan zat. I tell you, it is ze capital of art.’

Colin Churchill was old enough now to understand the meaning of those words; and from that day onward, he never ceased to remember that the goal of all his final endeavours must be to reach Rome, the capital of art, and then learn to be a sculptor.

CHAPTER IX. CONSPIRACY

After that, Colin went many days and evenings to see Cicolari: and the more he talked with him and the more he watched him, the more dissatisfied did the boy get with the intractability of wood, and the more enamoured did he become of the absolute plasticity of clay and marble. How could he ever have been such a fool, he thought to himself, after having once known what he could do with the kneaded mud of Wootton lake, as to consent – nay, to consent gladly – to work in stupid, hard, irresponsive walnut, instead of in his own familiar, plastic, all potential material? Why, wood, do what you would to it, was wood still: clay, and after clay marble, would answer immediately to every mood and fancy and idea of the restless changeable human personality. The fact was the ten or twelve months Colin Churchill had spent at Exeter had made a vast difference to his unfolding intellect. He was going to school now – to the university of native art; he was learning himself and his own powers; learning to pit his own views and opinions against those of other and less artistic workmen. Every day, though he couldn’t have told you so himself, the boy was beginning to understand more and more clearly that while the other artificers he saw around him had decent training, he himself had instinctive genius. He ought to have employed that genius upon marble, and now he was throwing it away upon mere wood. When one of the canons called in one day patronisingly to praise his wooden roses, he could scarcely even be civil to the good man: praising his wooden roses, indeed, when he saw that fellow Cicolari engaged in modelling from the life a smiling Bacchus! It was all too atrocious!

‘Mai friend,’ Cicolari said to him one day, as he was moulding a bit of clay in his new acquaintance’s room, into the counterfeit presentment of Cicolari’s own bust, ‘you should not stop at ze wood wawrk. You have no freedom in ze wood, no liberty, no motion. It is all flat, stupid, ungraceful. You are fit for better sings. Leave ze wood and come, here and wawrk wiz me.’

Colin sighed deeply. ‘I wish I could, Mr. Cicolari,’ he said eagerly. ‘I was delighted with the wood at first, and now I’m disgusted at ‘un. But I can’t leave ‘un till I’m twenty-one, because I’m bound apprentice to it, and I’ve got to go on with the thing now whether I like ‘un or not.’

Cicolari made a wry face, expressive of a very nasty taste, and went through a little pantomime of shrugs and open hand-lifting, which did duty instead of several vigorous sentences in the Italian language. Colin readily translated the pantomime as meaning in English: ‘If I were you, I wouldn’t trouble myself about that for a moment.’

‘But I can’t help it,’ Colin answered in his own spoken tongue; ‘I’m obliged to go on whether I choose to or not.’

Cicolari screwed himself up tightly, and held his hands, palms outward, on a level with his ears, in the most suggestive fashion. ‘England is a big country,’ he observed enigmatically.

Colin’s face flushed at the vague hint, but he said nothing.

‘You see,’ Cicolari went on quickly, ‘you are a boy yet. When you come to Exeter, you are still a child. You come from your own village, your country, and you know nossing of ze wawrld. Zis master and ze priest of your village between zem, zey bind you down and make you sign a paper, indenture you call it, and promise to wawrk for zem zese six years. It is ridiculous. When you come here, you do not know your own mind: you do not understand how it differs, wood and marble. Now you are older: you understand zat; it is absurd zat you muss stand by ze agreement.’

Cohn listened and took in the words eagerly. ‘But what can I do, Mr. Cicolari?’ he asked in suspense. ‘Where can I go to?’ ‘England is a big country,’ the Italian repeated, with yet another speaking pantomime. ‘Zere are plenty railways in England. Zere is wawrk for clever lads in London. I have friends zere who carve in marble. Why should you not go zere?’’

‘Run away?’ Cohn said, interrogatively.

‘Run away, if you call it zat,’ Cicolari replied, bowing with his curved hands in front of his breast, apologetically. ‘What does it matter, ze name? Run away if zey will not let you go. I care not what you call it. Zey try to keep you unjustly; you try to get away from zem. Zat is all.’

‘But I’ve got no money to go with,’ Colin cried, faltering

‘Zen get some,’ Cicolari answered with a shrug.

Colin thought a good deal about that suggestion afterwards, and the more he thought about it, the more did it seem to him just and proper. A week or two later, little Minna came over to Exeter for a trip, nominally to do a few errands of household shopping, but really of course to see Colin; and to her the boy confided this difficult case of conscience. Was the signature obtained from him when he first came to Exeter binding on him now that he knew more fully his own powers, and rights, and capabilities?

Colin was by this time a handsome lad of sixteen, while little black-eyed gipsy-faced Minna, though two years younger than him, was already budding out into a pretty woman, as such dark types among the labouring classes are apt to do with almost Oriental precocity.

‘What should you do, Colin?’ she repeated warmly, as the boy propounded his question in casuistry to her for her candid solution. ‘Why, just you go and do what Mr. Chickaleary tells you, won’t ‘ee, sure?’

‘But would it be right, Minna?’ Colin asked. ‘You know I signed the agreement with them.’

‘What’s the odds of that, stupid?’ Minna answered composedly. ‘That were a year ago an’ more, weren’t it? You weren’t no more nor a boy then, Lord bless ‘ee.’

‘A year older nor you are now, Minna,’ Colin objected.

‘Ah, but you didn’t know nothing about this sculpturin’ then, you see, Colin. They tooked advantage of you, that’s what they did. They hadn’t ought to have done it.’

‘But I say, Minna, why shouldn’t I wait till I’m twenty-one, an’ then take up the marble business, eh?’

‘What rubbish the boy do talk,’ Minna cried, imperiously. ‘Twenty-one indeed! Talk about twenty-one! Why, by that time you’d ‘a’ got fixed in the wood-carving, and couldn’t change your trade for marble or nothin’. If you’re goin’ to change, you must do it quickly.’

‘I hate the wood-carving,’ Colin said, gloomily.