Works of Grant Allen

by Grant Allen

  ‘Where is Mrs. Wood’s?’ Colin asked.

  ‘At Dean Street, Marylebone.’

  ‘Why, that’s quite close to our place,’ Colin cried. ‘Are they big boxes? I could carry ’em, maybe.’

  ‘No, you couldn’t carry them, Colin. Why, what nonsense. It wouldn’t be respectable.’

  Colin laughed. ‘I should have done it at Wootton, anyhow, Minna,’ he answered; ‘and a working stone-cutter needn’t be ashamed of anything in the way of work, surely.’

  ‘But a sculptor’s got to keep up his position,’ Minna put in firmly.

  Colin smiled again. Already he had a nascent idea in his own head that even a sculptor could not bemean himself greatly by carrying a wooden box through the streets of London for a lady — he was getting to believe in the dignity of labour — but he didn’t insist upon this point with Minna; for, young as he was, he had a notion even then that the gospel for men isn’t always at the same time the gospel for women. Even a good woman would feel much less compunction against many serious crimes than against trundling a wheelbarrow full of clean clothes up Begent Street of an afternoon in the height of the season.

  So Cohn was for calling a porter with a truck; but even that modified measure of conveyance did not wholly suit Minna’s aristocratic fancy. ‘Are they things cabs, Cohn?’ she asked quietly.

  ‘Those things are,’ Cohn answered with a significant emphasis. Minna blushed a trifle.

  ‘Oh, those things,’ she repeated slowly; ‘then I’ll have one.’ And in two minutes more, Cohn, for the first time in his life, found himself actually driving along the public streets in the inside of a hansom. Why, you imperious, extravagant little Minna, where on earth are you going to find money for such expenses as these in our toilsome, under-paid, workyday London?

  When they reached Mrs. Wood’s door, Cohn, feeling that he must rise to the situation, pulled out his purse to pay for the hansom, but Minna waved him aside with a dignified air of authority. ‘No no,’ she said, ‘that won’t do; take my purse, Cohn. I don’t know how much to pay him, and like enough he’d cheat me; but you know the ways in London.’

  Colin took the purse, and opened it. The first compartment he opened contained some silver, wrapped up in a scrap of tissue paper. Colin undid the paper and took out a shilling, which he was going to hand the cabman, when Minna laid her hand upon his arm and suddenly checked him. ‘No, no,’ she said, ‘not that, Colin. From the other side, please, will you?’

  Colin looked at the contents of the little paper once more, and rapidly counted it. It was nine shillings. He caught Minna’s eye at the moment, and Minna coloured crimson. Then Cohn knew at once what those nine shillings were, and why they were separately wrapped in tissue paper.

  He paid the cabman, from the other half, and put the boxes inside Mrs. Wood’s door way. ‘And now may I kiss you, Minna?’ he asked, in the dark passage.

  ‘If you like, Colin,’ Minna answered, turning up her full red lips and round face with child-like innocence, Colin Churchill kissed her: and when he had kissed her once, he waited a minute, and then he took her plump little face between his own two hands and kissed her rather harder a second time. Minna’s face tingled a little, but she said nothing.

  The very next morning Minna came round, by Colin’s invitation, to Cicolari’s workshop. Colin was busy at work moulding, and Minna cast her eye around lightly as she entered on all the busts and plaster casts that filled the room. She advanced to meet him as if she expected to be kissed, so Colin kissed her. Then, with a rapid glance round the room, her eye rested at last upon the Cephalus and Aurora, and she went straight over to look at it with wondering eyes. ‘Oh, Colin,’ she cried, did you do that? What a lovely image!’

  Colin was pleased and flattered at once. ‘You like it, Minna?’ he said. ‘You really like it?’

  Minna glanced carefully round the room once more with her keen black eyes, and after scanning every one of the plaster casts and unfinished busts in a comprehensive survey, answered unhesitatingly: ‘I like it best of everything in the room, Colin, except the image of the man with the plate over yonder.’

  Colin smiled a smile of triumph. Minna was not wholly lacking in taste, certainly; for the Cephalus was the best of his compositions, and the man with the plate was a plaster copy of the Discobolus. ‘You’ll do, Minna,’ he said, patting her little black head with his cleanest hand (to the imminent danger of the small hat with the red rose in it). ‘You’ll do yet, with a little coaching.’

  Then Colin took her round the studio, as Cicolari ambitiously called it, and explained everything to her, and showed her plates of the Venus of Milo, and the Apollo Belvedere, and the Laocoon, and the Niobe, and several other ladies and gentlemen with very long names and no clothes to speak of, till poor Minna began at last to be quite appalled at the depth of his learning and quite frightened at her own unquestioning countrified ignorance. For as yet Minna had no idea that there was anything much to learn in the world except reading and writing, and the art of cookery, and the proper use of the English language. But when she heard Colin chattering away so glibly to her about the age of Pheidias, and the age of the Decadence, and the sculptors of the Renaissance, and the absolute necessity of going to Rome, she began to conceive that perhaps Colin in his own heart might imagine she wasn’t now good enough for him; which was a point of view on the subject that had never before struck the Dorsetshire fisherman’s pretty black-eyed little daughter.

  By-and-by, Colin began to talk of herself and her prospects; and to ask whether she was going to put herself down at a registry office; and last of all to allude delicately to the matter of the misspelt letter. ‘You know, Minna,’ he said apologetically, feeling his boyish awkwardness far more than ever, ‘I’ve tried a lot to improve myself at Exeter, and still more since I came to London. I’ve read a great deal, and worked very hard, and now I think I’m beginning to get on, and know something, not only about art, but about books as well. Now, I know you won’t mind my telling you, but that letter wasn’t all spelt right, or stopped right. You ought to be very particular, you know, about the stopping and the spelling.’

  Before he could say any more, Minna looked full in his face and stopped him short immediately. ‘Colin,’ she said, ‘don’t say another ‘word about it. I know what you mean, and I’m going to attend to it. I never felt it in my life till I came here this morning; but I feel it now, and I shall take care to alter it.’ She was a determined little body was Minna; and as she said those words, she looked so thoroughly as if she meant them that Colin dropped the subject at once and never spoke to her again about it.

  Just at that moment two customers came to speak to Colin about a statuette he was working at for them. It was an old gentleman and a grand young lady. Minna stood aside while they talked, and pretended to be looking at Cephalus and Aurora with a critical eye, but she was really listening with all her ears to the conversation between Colin and the grand young lady. She was a very grand young lady, indeed, who talked very fine, and drawled her vowels, and clipped her r’s, and mangled the English language hideously, and gave other indubitable signs of the very best and highest breeding: and Minna noticed almost with dismay that she called Colin ‘Mr. Churchill,’ and seemed to defer to all his opinions about curves and contours and attitudes. ‘You have such lovely taste, you know, Mr. Churchill,’ the grand young lady said; ‘and we want this copy to be as good as you can make it, because it’s for a very particular friend of ours, who admired the original so much at Rome last winter.’

  Minna listened in awe and trembling, and felt in her heart just a faint twinge of feminine jealousy to think that even such a grand young lady should speak so flattering like to our Colin.

  ‘And there’s the Cephalus, Papa,’ the grand young lady went on. ‘Isn’t it beautiful? I do hope some day, Mr. Churchill, you’ll get a commission for it in marble. If I were rich enough, I’d commission it myself, for I positively doat upon it. However, somebody’s sure to buy
it some time or other, so it’s no use people like me longing to have it.’

  Minna’s heart rose, choking, into her mouth, as she stood there flushed and silent.

  When the grand young lady and her papa were gone, Minna said good-bye a little hastily to Colin, and shrank back, crying: ‘No, no, Colin,’ when he tried to kiss her. Then she ran in a hurry to Mrs. Wood’s in Dean Street. But though she was in a great haste to get home (for her bright little eyes had tears swimming in them), she stopped boldly at a small bookseller’s shop on the way, and invested two whole shillings of her little hoard in a valuable work bearing on its cover the title, ‘The Polite Correspondent’s Complete Manual of Letter Writing.’ ‘He shall never kiss me again,’ she said to herself firmly, ‘until I can feel that I’ve made myself in every way thoroughly fit for him.’

  It wasn’t a very exalted model of literary composition, that Complete Manual of Letter Writing, but at least its spelling and punctuation were immaculate; and for many months to come after she had secured her place as parlour-maid in an eminently creditable family in Regent’s Park, Minna sat herself down in her own bedroom every evening, when work was over, and deliberately endeavoured to perfect herself in those two elementary accomplishments by the use of the Polite Correspondent’s unconscious guide, philosopher, and friend. First of all she read a whole letter over carefully, observing every stop and every spelling; then she copied it out entire, word for word, as well as she could recollect it, entirely from memory; and finally she corrected her written copy by the printed version in the Complete Manual, until she could transcribe every letter in the entire volume with perfect accuracy. It wasn’t a very great educational effort, perhaps, from the point of view of advanced culture; but to Minna Wroe it was a beginning in self-improvement, and in these matters above all others the first step is everything.

  CHAPTER XI. EDUCATIONAL ADVANTAGES.

  And now, while Minna Wroe was waiting at table in Regent’s Park, and while Colin Churchill was modelling sepulchral images for his Italian master, Cicolari, how was our other friend, Hiram Winthrop, employing his time beyond the millpond?

  ‘Bethabara Seminary, at the time when Hiram Winthrop, the eminent American artist, was enrolled among its alumni’ (writes one of his fellow-students), ‘occupied a plain but substantially built brick structure, commodiously located in the very centre of a large cornfield, near the summit of a considerable eminence in Madison County, N.Y. It had been in operation close on three years when young Winthrop matriculated there. He secured quarters in a room with four fellow-students, each of whom brought his own dipper, plate, knife, fork, and other essential requisites. Mr. Winthrop was always of a solitary, retiring character, without much command of language, and not given to attending the Debating Forum or other public institutions of our academy. Nor was he fond of the society of the lady students, though one or two of them, and notably the talented Miss Aimed A. Stiles, now a prominent teacher in a lyceum at Smyrna, Mo., early detected his remarkable gifts for pictorial art, and continually importuned him to take their portraits, no doubt designing them for keepsakes to be given to the more popular male students. Young Winthrop always repelled such advances: indeed, he was generally considered in the light of a boorish rustic; and his singular aversion towards the Hopkinsite connection (in which he had nevertheless been raised by that excellent man, his father, late Deacon Zephaniah Winthrop, of Muddy Creek, N.Y.) caused him to be somewhat disliked among his college companions. His chief amusement was to retire into the surrounding country, oddly choosing for the purpose the parts remotest from the roads and houses, and there sketch the animated creation which seemed always to possess a greater interest for his mind than the persons or conversation of his fellow-citizens. He had, indeed, as facts subsequently demonstrated, the isolation of a superior individual. Winthrop remained at Bethabara, so far as my memory serves me, for two years only.’

  Indeed, the Hopkinsite Seminary was not exactly the sort of place fitted to suit the peculiar tastes of Hiram Winthrop. The boys and girls from the farms around had hardly more sympathy with him than the deacon himself. Yet, on the whole, in spite of the drawbacks of his surroundings, Athens was a perfect paradise to poor Hiram. This is a universe of relativities: and compared with life on the farm at Muddy Creek, life at Bethabara Seminary was absolute freedom and pure enjoyment to the solitary little artist. Here, as soon as recitation was over, he could wander out into the woods alone (after he had shaken off the attentions of the too sequacious Almeda), whenever he liked, no man hindering. The country around was wooded in places, and the scenery, like all that in Madison County, was beautifully undulating. Five miles along the leafy highroad brought him to the banks of Cananagua Lake, one of those immeasurable lovely sheets of water that stud the surface of Western New York for miles together; and there Hiram would sit down by the shore, and watch the great divers disappearing suddenly beneath the surface, and make little pictures of the grey squirrels and the soldier-birds on the margin of Cyrus Choke’s ‘Elements of the Latin Language,’ which he had brought out with him, presumably for purposes of preparation against to-morrow’s class-work. But best of all there was a drawing-master at Athens, and from him, by Audouin’s special arrangement, the boy took lessons twice a week in perspective and the other technical matters of his art — for, as to native ability, Hiram was really far better fitted to teach the teacher. Not a very great artist, that struggling German drawing-master at Athens, with his formal little directions of how to go jig-jig for a pine-tree, and to-whee, whee, whee, for an oak; not a very great artist, to be sure; but still, a grand relief for Hiram to discover that there were people in the world who really cared about these foolish things, and didn’t utterly despise them though they were so irrelevant to the truly important questions of raising corn, and pork, and potatoes.

  The great joy and delight of the term, however, was Audouin’s periodical visit to his little protégé. Audouin at least was determined to let Hiram’s individuality have fair play. He regarded him as a brand plucked from the burning of that corn-growing civilisation which he so cordially detested; and he had made up his own mind, rightly or wrongly, that Hiram had genius, and that that genius must be allowed freely to develop itself. Hiram loved these quarterly visits better than anything else in the whole world, because Audouin was the one person he had met in his entire life (except Sam Churchill) who could really sympathise with him.

  Two years after Hiram Winthrop went to Bethabara, Audouin wrote to ask whether he would come and spend a week or two at Lakeside during the winter vacation. Hiram cried when he read the letter; so much pleasure seemed almost beyond the possibilities of this world, and the deacon would surely never consent; but to his great surprise, the deacon wrote back gruffly, yes; and as soon as term was finished, Hiram gladly took the cars on the New York Central down to Nine Mile Bottom, the depot for Lakeside. Audouin was waiting to meet him at the depot, in a neat little sleigh; and they drove away gaily to the jingling music of the bells, in the direction of Audouin’s cottage.

  ‘A severe artist, winter,’ Audouin said, glancing around him quickly over the frozen fields. ‘No longer the canvas and the colours, but the pure white marble and the flowing chisel. How the contours of the country soften with the snow, Hiram; what a divine cloak the winter clouds spread kindly over the havoc man has wrought upon this desecrated landscape! It was beautiful, once, I believe, in its native woodland beauty; and it’s beautiful even now when the white pall comes down, so, to screen and cover its artificial nakedness. The true curse of Ham (and worse) is upon us here; we have laughed at the shame of our mother earth.’

  Hiram hardly understood him — he seldom quite understood his friend — but he answered, with a keen glance over the white snow, ‘I love the winter, Mr. Audouin; but I apprehend I like the summer an’ autumn best. You should jest have seen the crimson and gold on Cananagua Lake last fall; oh, my, the colours on the trees! nobody could ever have painted ’em. I took out my paints an
’ tried, but I wasn’t anywhere like it, I can tell you; Mr. Mooller, he said he didn’t b’lieve Claude or Turner could ever have painted a bit of Amurrican fall scenery.’

  ‘Mr. Müller isn’t a conclusive authority,’ Audouin answered gravely, removing his cigar as he spoke; ‘but on this occasion I surmise, Hiram, he was probably not far from a correct opinion. Still, Mr. Müller won’t do for you any longer. The fact is, Hiram, sooner or later you must go to Europe. There’s no teaching here good enough for you. I’ve made up my mind that you must go to Europe. Whether the deacon likes it or not, you’ve got to go, and we must manage one way or another.’

  To Europe! Hiram’s brain reeled round at the glorious, impossible notion. To Europe! Why, that was the wonderful romantic country where Tom Jones ran away with Amelia, where Mr. Tracy Tupman rode to Ipswich on top of the mail-coach, where Moses bought the gross of green spectacles from the plausible vagabond at the country fair. Europe! There were kings and princes in Europe; and cathedrals and castles; and bishops and soldiers; ay, he could almost believe, too, there were giants, ogres, ghosts, and fairies. In Europe, Sam Wellers waited at the wayside inns; mysterious horsemen issued darkling from arched castle gates; Jews cut pounds of flesh, Abyssinian fashion, from the living breasts of Venetian shipowners; and itinerant showmen wandered about with Earley’s waxworks across a country haunted by masked highwaymen and red-coated squires, who beat you half to death for not telling them immediately which way the hare ran. As such a phantasmagoria of incongruous scenes did the mother continent of the American race present itself in some swimming panorama to Hiram’s excited brain. It was almost as though Aladdin and the oneeyed calender had suddenly appeared to him in the familiar woods of Geauga County, and invited him forthwith to take the cars for Bagdad at the urgent personal request of the good Caliph Haroun al Raschid.