by Grant Allen
‘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.
‘Then run away from it and be done wi’ it.’
‘Run away from it! Oh, Minna, do you know that they could catch me and put me in prison?’
‘I’d go to prison an’ laugh at ’em, sooner nor I’d be bound for all those years against my will,’ Minna answered firmly. ‘Leastways I would if I was a man, Colin.’
That last touch was the straw that broke the camel’s back with poor Colin. ‘I’ll go,’ he cried; ‘but where on earth can I go to? It’s no use goin’ back to Wootton. Vicar’d help ’em to put me in prison.’
‘I’d like to see ’em,’ Minna answered, with her little eyes flashing. ‘But why can’t you go to London like Mr. Chickaleary told you?’ ‘Cicolari, Minna,’ Colin said, correcting her as gravely and distinctly as the vicar had corrected Miss Eva. ‘The Italians call it Cicolari. It’s as well to be right whenever we can, ain’t it? Well, I can’t go to London, because I’ve got no money to go with. I don’t know as I could get any work when I got there; but I know I can’t get there without any money; so that settles it.’
Minna rose from the seat in the Northernhay where they were spending Colin’s dinner-hour together and walked slowly up and down for a minute or two without speaking. Then she said, with a little hesitation, ‘Colin!’
‘Well, Minna.’
‘I could lend ‘ee — lend you — nine shillin’.’ ‘Nine shillings, Minna! Why, where on earth did you get ’em from?’
‘Saved ’em,’ Minna answered laconically. ‘Fish father give me. In savin’s bank.’
‘What for, Minna?’
Minna hesitated again, still more markedly. Though she was only fourteen, there was a good deal of the woman in her already. ‘Because,’ she said at last timidly,’ ‘I thought it was best to begin savin’ up all my money now, in case — in case I should ever want to furnish house if I was to get married.’
Country boy as he was, and child as she was, Colin felt instinctively that it wouldn’t be right of him to ask her anything further about the money. ‘But, Minna,’ he said, colouring a little, ‘even if I was to borrow it all from you, all your nine shillings, it wouldn’t be enough to take me to London.’
Minna had a brilliant idea. ‘Wait for a ‘scursion,’ she said simply.
Colin looked at her with admiring eyes. ‘Well, Minna,’ he cried enthusiastically, ‘you are a bright one, and no mistake. That’s a good idea, that is. I should never have thought of that. I could carve you, Minna, so that a stranger anywhere’d know who it was the minute he set eyes on it; but I should never have thought of that, I can tell you.’ Minna smiled and nodded, the dimple in her brown cheek growing deeper, and the light in her bright eye merrier than ever. What a vivacious, expressive little face it was, really! ‘I’ll tell you what I’d do,’ Minna said, with her sharp determination as if she were fifty. ‘I’d go first and ask Mr. What’s-his-name to let me off the rest of my ‘prenticeship. I’d tell him I didn’t like wood, an’ I wanted to go an’ make statues. Then if he said to me: “You go on with the wood-carvin’ an’ don’t bother me,” I’d say: “No, I don’t do another stroke for you.” Then if he hit me, I’d leave off, I would, an’ refuse to work another turn till he was tired of it. But if he hardened his heart then, an’ wouldn’t let ‘ee go still, I’d wait till there was a ‘scursion, I would, and then I’d run away to Mr. Chick-o-lah-ree’s friends in London. That’s what I’d do if I was you, Colin.’
‘I will, Minna,’ Colin faltered out in reply; ‘I will.’
‘Do ‘ee, Colin,’ Minna cried eagerly, catching his arm. ‘Do ‘ee, Colin, and I’ll send ‘ee the money. Oh, Colin, I know if you’d only get ‘prenticed to the sculpturin’, you’d grow to be as grand a man — as grand as parson.’
‘Minna,’ Colin said, taking her hand in his as if it were a lady’s, ‘thank you very much for the money, an’ if I have to work my fingers to the bone for it, I’ll send it back to ‘ee.’
‘Don’t ‘ee do that, Col
in, oh don’t ‘ee do that,’ Minna cried eagerly. ‘I’d a great deal rather for you to keep it.’
When Colin told Cicolari of this episode (suppressing so much of it as he thought proper), the Italian laughed and showed all his teeth, and remarked with a smile that Colin was very young yet. But he promised staunchly to keep the boy’s secret, and to give him good introductions to his former employer in London.
The die was cast now, and Colin Churchill resolutely determined in his own mind that he would abide by it. So a few days later he screwed up courage towards evening to go to Mr. Begg, his master, and for form’s sake, at least, ask to be let off the remainder of his apprenticeship. ‘At any rate,’ he thought to himself, ‘I won’t try running away till I’ve tried in a straightforward way to get him to cancel the indentures I signed when I didn’t really know what I was signing.’
Mr. Begg, that eminently respectable Philistine cabinet-maker, opened his eyes in blank astonishment when he actually heard with his two waking ears this extraordinary and unprecedented request. ‘Let you off the rest of your time, Churchill!’ he cried, incredulously. ‘Was that what you said, boy? Let — you — off — the rest — of — your — time?’
‘Yes,’ Colin answered, with almost dogged firmness, ‘I said that.’
‘And why, Churchill?’ Mr. Begg asked again, lost in amazement. ‘And why?’
‘Because, sir, I don’t like wood-carving, and I feel I could do a great deal better at marble.’
Mr. Begg gazed up at him (he was a little man and Colin was tall) in utter surprise and hesitation. ‘You’re not mad, are you, Churchill?’ he inquired cautiously. ‘You’re not mad, are you?’
‘No, sir,’ Colin replied stoutly; ‘but I think I must have been when I signed them indentures.’
The cabinet-maker went into his little office, called Colin in, and then sat down in a dazed manner to hear this strange thing out to its final termination. Colin burst forth, then, with his impassioned pleading, astonishing himself by the flood of native eloquence with which he entreated Mr. Begg to release him from that horrid wood-carving, and let him follow his natural calling as a sculptor in clay and marble. He didn’t know what he was doing when he signed the indentures; he had only just come fresh from his life as a servant. Now he knew he had the makings of a sculptor in him, and a sculptor alone he wished to be. Mr. Begg regarded him askance all the time, as a man might regard a stray dog of doubtful sanity, but said never a single word, for good or for evil. When Colin had worn himself out with argument and exhortation, the cabinet-maker rose from his high seat, unlocked his desk mechanically, and took out of it his copy of Colin’s indentures. He read them all through carefully to himself, and then he laid them down with the puzzled air of one who meets for the first time in his life with some inexplicable practical enigma. ‘This is very strange, Churchill,’ he muttered, coolly, half to himself; ‘this is really most remarkable. There’s no mistake or flaw of any sort in those indentures; nothing on earth to invalidate ’em or throw doubt upon them in any way. Your signature’s there as clear as daylight. I can’t understand it. You’ve always been a good workman — the best apprentice, take you all round, I’ve ever ‘ad ’ere; and Canon Melville, he’s praised your carving most uncommonly, and so they all do. A good, honest-working, industrious lad I’ve always found you, one time with another; not such a great eater neither; and I was very well satisfied altogether with you till this very evening. And now you come and say you want to cancel your indentures, and go to the stone-cutting! Never heard anything so remarkable in all my life! Why, you’re worth more than a hundred pounds to me! I couldn’t let you go, not if you was to pay me for it.’
