by Grant Allen
Cohn looked at her, dazzled and stunned a little by the suddenness and conciseness of this resolute announcement. Half a dozen vague and unpleasant surmises ran quickly through his bewildered brain. ‘Why, Minna,’ he exclaimed with some apprehension, looking down hastily at her neat little figure and her pretty, dimpled gipsy face, ‘you’re not going — no you’re not going to the drapery, are you?’
Minna’s twin dimples on the rich brown cheeks grew deeper and deeper, and she laughed merrily to herself a wee musical ringing laugh. ‘The drapery, indeed,’ she cried, three-quarters amused and one-quarter indignant. ‘The drapery, he says to me! No, Mr. Colin, if you please, sir, I’m not going to be a shop-girl, thank you. A pretty shop-girl I should make now, shouldn’t I? That’s just like all you men: you think nobody can go in for bettering themselves, only yourselves. If a girl doesn’t want to be a parlour-maid any longer, you can’t think of anything but she must want to go and be a shop-girl. I wonder you didn’t say a barmaid. If you don’t beg my pardon at once for your impudence, I won’t tell you anything more about it.’
‘I beg your pardon, I’m sure, Minna,’ Colin answered submissively. ‘I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.’
‘And good reason, too, sir. But as you’ve got the grace to do it, I’ll tell you all the rest. Do you know what I do with my money, Colin?’
‘You save it all, I know, Minna.’
‘Well, I save it all. And then, I’ve got grandmother’s eleven pound, what she left me; and the little things I’ve been given now and again by visitors and such like. And I’ve worked all through the “Complete Manual of Letter Writing,” and the “English History,” and the “First School Arithmetic “: and now, Miss Woollacott — you know; her at the North London Birkbeck Girls’ Schools — she says she’ll take me on as a sort of a pupil-teacher, to look after the little ones and have lessons myself for what I can do, if only I’ll pay her my own board and lodging.’
Colin gazed at the girl aghast. ‘A pupil-teacher, Minna!’ he cried in astonishment. ‘A pupil-teacher! Why, my dear child, what on earth do you mean to do when you’re through it all?’
Minna dropped her plump brown hand from his arm at the gate of the park, and stood looking up at him pettishly with bright eyes flashing. ‘There you are again,’ she said, with a little touch of bitterness in her pretty voice. ‘Just like you men always. You think it’s all very well for Colin Churchill to want to go and be a sculptor, and talk with fine ladies and gentlemen, and make his fortune, and become a great man by-and-by, perhaps, like that Can-over, or somebody: that’s all quite right and proper; of course it is. But for Minna Wroe, whose people are every bit as good as his, to save up her money, and do her best to educate herself, and fit herself to be his equal, and become a governess, — why, that of course is quite unnatural. Her proper place is to be a parlour-maid: she ought to go on all her life long cleaning silver, and waiting on the ladies and gentlemen, and changing the plates at dinner — that’s just about what she’s fit for. She’s only a woman. You’re all alike, Colin, all you men, the whole lot of you. I won’t go any further. I shall just go home again this very minute.’
Colin caught her arm gently, and held her still for a minute by quiet force. ‘My dear Minna,’ he said, ‘you don’t at all understand me. If you’ve really got it in your mind to better yourself like that, why, of course, it’s a very grand thing in you, and I admire you for your spirit and resolution. Besides, Minna,’ and Colin looked into her eyes a little tenderly as he said this, ‘I think I know, little woman, what you want to do it for. What I meant was just this, you know: I don’t see what it’ll lead to, even when you’ve gone and done it.’
‘Why,’ Minna answered, trying to disengage herself from his firm grasp, ‘in the first place, — let me go, Colin, or I won’t speak to you; let me go this minute I say; yes, that’ll do, thank you — in the first place, what I want most is to get the education. When I’ve got that, I can begin to look out what to do with it. Perhaps I’ll be a governess, or a Board-school teacher, or suchlike. But in the second place, one never knows what may happen to one. Somebody might fall in love with me, you see, and then I should very likely get married, Colin.’ And Minna said this with such a saucy little smile, that Cohn longed then and there, in the open park, to stoop down and kiss her soundly.
‘Then you’ve really arranged it all, have you, Minna?’ he asked wonderingly. You’ve really decided to go to Miss Woollacott’s?’
Minna nodded.
‘Well, Minna,’ Colin said in a tone of genuine admiration, ‘you may say what you like about us men being all the same (I suppose we are, if it comes to that), but I do admire you immensely for it. You’ve got such a wonderful lot of spirit and determination. Now, I know what you’ll say; you’ll go and take it wrong again; but, Minna, it’s a great deal harder and more remarkable for a woman to try to raise herself than for a man to go and do it. Why, now I come to think of it, little woman, I’ve read of lots of men educating themselves and rising to be great people — George Stephenson, that made the steam-engines on railways, and Gibson the sculptor, and lots of painters and architects and people — but really and truly, I believe, Minna, I never read yet of a woman who’d been and done it.’
‘That’s because the books are all written by men, stupid, you may be certain,’ Minna answered saucily. ‘Anyhow, Colin, I’m going to try and do it. I’m going to leave my place at the end of the month, and go for a pupil-teacher at Miss Woollacott’s. And I’m beginning the geography now, and the Second Grade English Grammar, so that I can get myself fit for it, Colin, a bit beforehand. I don’t see why you should be reading all these fine books, you know, and I should be content with being no more nor a common parlourmaid.’
It was in the park, but it was getting dusky, and lovers in London are not so careful of secrecy as in the unsophisticated and less limited country. The great perennial epic of each human heart must needs work itself out somehow or other even under the Argus eyes of the big squalid ugly city. So Colin stooped down beneath the shade of the plane trees and kissed Minna twice or three times over in spite of her pretended struggling. (It is a point of etiquette with girls of Minna’s class that they should pretend to struggle when one tries to kiss them.)
‘Minna,’ he said earnestly, ‘I’m proud of you. My dear little girl, I’m really proud of you.’
‘What a funny thing it is,’ thought Minna to herself, ‘that he never makes love to me, though! I don’t know even now whether he considers himself engaged to me or not.
‘Beneath the shade of the plane-trees.
How queer it is that he never makes me a proper proposal!’ For Minna had diligently read her ‘London Herald,’ and knew well that when a young man (especially of Colin’s attainments) proposes to a young lady, he ought to do it with all due formalities, in a set speech carefully imitated from the finest literary models of the eighteenth century. Instead of which, Colin only kissed her now and again quite promiscuous like, just as he used to do long since at Wootton Man-deville, and called her ‘Minna’ and ‘little woman.’ Still she did think on the whole that ‘little woman’ sounded after all a great deal like an irregular betrothal. (She distinctly recollected that Mabel in the ‘London Herald,’ and Maud de Vere in the ‘Maiden’s Stratagem,’ always called it a betrothal and not an engagement.)
CHAPTER XV. A DOOR OPENS
Another year had passed, and Colin, now of full age, had tired of working for Cicolari. It was all very well, this moulding clay and carving replicas of afflicted widows; it was all very well, this modelling busts and statuettes and little classical compositions; it was all very well, this picking up stray hints in a half-amateur fashion from the grand torsos of the British Museum and a few scattered Thorwaldsens or antiques of the great country houses; but Colin Churchill felt in his heart of hearts that all that was not sculpture. He was growing in years now, and instead of learning he was really working. Still, he had quite made up his mind that
some day or other he should look with his own eyes on the glories of the Vatican and the Villa Albani. Nay, he had even begun to take lessons in Italian from Cicolari — counting his chickens before they were hatched, Minna said — so that he might not feel himself at a loss whenever the great and final day of his redemption should happen to arrive. The dream of his life was to go to Rome, and study in a real studio, and become a regular genuine sculptor. Nothing short of that would ever satisfy him, he told Minna: and Minna, though she trembled to think of Colin’s going so far away from her — among all those black-eyed Italian women, too — (and Colin had often told her he admired black eyes, like hers, above all others) — poor little Minna could not but admit sorrowfully to herself that Rome was after all the proper school for Colin Churchill. ‘The capital of art,’ he repeated to her, over and over again; must it not be the right place for him, who she felt sure was going to be the greatest of all modern English artists?
But how was Colin ever to get there?
Going to Rome costs money; and during all these years Colin had barely been able to save enough to buy the necessary books and materials for his self-education. The more deeply he felt the desire to go, the more utterly remote did the chance of going seem to become to him. ‘And yet I shall go, Minna,’ he said to her almost fiercely one September evening. ‘Go to Rome I will, if I have to tramp every step of the way on foot, and reach there barefoot.
Minna sighed and the tears came into her eyes; but strong in her faith and pride in Colin, strong in her eager desire that Colin should give free play to his own genius, she answered firmly with a little quiver of her lips, ‘You ought to go, Colin; and if you think it’d help you, you might take all that’s left of my savings, and I’d go back again willingly to the parlour-maiding.’
Colin looked at the pretty little pupil-teacher with a look of profound and unfeigned admiration. ‘Minna,’ he said, ‘dear little woman, you’re the best and kindest-hearted girl that ever breathed; but how on earth do you suppose I could possibly be wretch enough to take away your poor little savings? No, no, little woman, you must keep them for yourself, and use them for making yourself — I was going to say into a lady — but you couldn’t do that, Minna, you couldn’t do that, for you were born one already. Still, if you want me to be a real sculptor, I want you, little woman, just as much to be a real educated gentlewoman.’ Colin said the last word with a certain lingering loving cadence, for it had a good old-fashioned ring about it that recommended it well to his simple straightforward peasant nature.
‘Well, Colin,’ Minna went on, blushing a bit (for that last quiet hint seemed half unintentionally to convey the impression that Colin really possessed a proprietary right in her whole future), ‘we must try our best to find out some way for you to go to Rome at last in spite of everything. You know, meanwhile, you’ve got good employment, Colin, and that’s always something.’
‘Ah yes, Minna,’ Colin answered with his youthful enthusiasm coming strong upon him, ‘I’ve got employment, of course; but I don’t want employment; I want opportunities, I want advice, I want instruction, I want the means of learning, I want to perfect myself. Here in London, somehow, I feel as if I was tied down by the leg, and panting to get loose again. I like Cicolari, and in my own native untaught fashion I’ve done my best to improve myself with him; but I feel sadly the lack of training and competition. I should like to see how other men do their work; I should like to pit myself against them and find out whether I really am or am not a sculptor. Let me but just go to Rome, and I shall mould such things and carve such statues — ah, Minna, you shall see them! And the one delight I have in life now, Minna, is to get out like this, and talk it over with you, and tell you what I mean to do when once I get at it. For you can sympathise with me more than any of them, little woman. I feel that you can realise my longing to do good work — the work I know I’m fitted for — a thousand times better than a mere decent respectable marble-hacking workman like Cicolari.’
Poor little Minna! She sighed again, and her heart beat harder than ever. It was such a privilege for her to feel that Colin Churchill, with all that great future looming large before his young imagination, still loved her best to sympathise with him in his artistic yearnings. She pressed his arm a little, in her sweet simplicity, but she said nothing.
‘You see,’ Colin went on, musingly, for he liked to talk it all over again and again with Minna, ‘art doesn’t all come by nature, Minna, as most people fancy; it wants such a lot of teaching. Of course, you’ve got to have the thing born in you to begin with; but you might be born a Pheidias, it’s my belief, Minna, and yet, without teaching, the merest wooden blockhead at the Academy schools would beat you hollow as far as technicalities went. Look at the dissecting now! If I hadn’t saved that five pounds that Sir William gave me for carving the group on the mantelpiece, I should never have known anything at all about anatomy. But just going in my spare time for those six months to the anatomy class at the University College Hospital — why, it gave me quite a different idea altogether about the human figure. It showed me how to clothe my bare skeletons, Minna.’
‘I never could bear your going and doing that horrible dissection, all the same, Colin,’ Minna said with a chilly little shudder. ‘It’s so dreadful, you know, cutting up dead bodies and all that — just as bad as if you were going to be a medical student.’
‘Ah, but no sculpture worth calling sculpture’s possible without it, I tell you, Minna,’ Colin answered warmly. ‘Why, Michael Angelo, you know — Michael Angelo was a regular downright out-and-out anatomist. It can’t be wrong to do like Michael Angelo, now can it? That was a man, Michael Angelo! And Leonardo, too, he was an awful stickler for anatomy as well, Leonardo was. Why, every great sculptor and every great painter that ever I’ve read of, Minna, had to study anatomy. I suppose the Greeks did it, even; yes, I’m sure the Greeks did it, for just look at the legs of the Discobolus and the arms of the Theseus; how the muscles in them show the knowledge of anatomy in the old sculptors. Oh yes, Minna, I’m quite sure the Greeks did it. And the Greeks! well, the Greeks, you know, they were really even greater, I do believe, than Michael Angelo.’
‘Well, Colin,’ Minna answered, with the charming critical confidence of love and youth and inexperience, ‘I’ve seen all your engravings of images by Michael Angelo, and I’ve seen the broken-nosed Theseus, don’t you call him, at the Museum, and I’ve seen all the things you’ve sent me to look at in the South Kensington; and it’s my belief, Rome or no Rome, that there isn’t one of them fit to hold a candle any day to your Cephalus and Aurora, that you made when you first came to London; and I should say so if the whole Royal Academy was to come up in a lump and declare your figures weren’t worth anything.’
A week or two passed, and Minna, busy at staid Miss Woollacott’s with her little pupils, saw no more chance than ever, though she turned it over often in her mind, of helping Colin on his way to Rome. Indeed, the North London Birkbeck Girls’ School was hardly the place where one might naturally expect to find opportunities arise of such a nature. But one morning, in the teachers’ room, Minna happened to pick up the ‘Times,’ which lay upon the table, and, looking over it, her eye fell casually upon an advertisement which at first sight would hardly have attracted her attention at all, but for the word Rome printed in it in small capitals. It was merely one of the ordinary servants’ advertisements, lumped together promiscuously under the head of Wanted.
‘As Valet, to go abroad (to Rome), a young man, not exceeding 30. Good wages. Some knowledge of Italian would be a recommendation. Apply to Sir Henry Wilberforce, 27 Ockenden Square, S.W.’
Minna laid down the paper with a sickening feeling at her heart: she thought she saw in it just a vague chance by which Colin could manage to get to Rome and begin his education as a sculptor. After all, it was the getting there that was the great difficulty. Colin had ten or eleven pounds put away, she knew, and though that would barely suffice to pay the railway fare on the
humblest scale, yet it would be quite a little fortune to go on upon when once he got there. Minna knew from her own experience how far ten pounds will go for a careful person with due economy. Now, if only Colin would consent to take this place as valet — and Minna knew that he had long ago learnt a valet’s duties at the old vicar’s — he might get his passage paid to Rome for him, and whenever this Sir Henry Wilberforce got tired of him, or was coming away, or other reasonable cause occurred, Colin might leave the place and employ all his little savings in getting himself some scraps of a sculptor’s education at Rome. Wild as all this would seem to most people who are accustomed to count money in terms of hundreds, it didn’t sound at all wild to poor little Minna, and it wouldn’t have sounded so to Colin Churchill.
But should she tell Colin anything about it? Could she bear to tell him? Let him go away from her across the sea to that dim far Italy of his own accord, if he liked; it was his fortune, his chance in life, his natural place; she knew it; but why should she, Minna Wroe, the London pupil-teacher, the Wootton fisherman’s daughter — why should she go out of her way to send him so far from her, to banish herself from his presence, to run the risk of finally losing him altogether? ‘After all,’ she thought, ‘perhaps I oughtn’t to tell him. He might be angry at it. He might think I shouldn’t have looked upon such a place as at all good enough for him. He’s a sculptor, not a servant; and I got to be a schoolmistress myself on purpose so as to make myself something like equal to him. It wouldn’t be right of me to go proposing to him that he should take now to brushing coats and laying out shirt studs again, when he ought to be sculpturing a statue a great deal more beautiful than those great stupid, bloated, thick-legged Michael Angelos. I dare say the wisest thing for me to do would be to say nothing at all to him about it.’
