Part 8

The fugitive’s crime, that is to say, the particular crime for which he was at that moment being hunted from hill to hill, was one known to the most ancient civilizations. It takes its title from shameful lost cities engulfed under Divine wrath. Yet to-day there are gentle communities where even its Biblical name, if heard by chance in the pulpit fulminations of some itinerant preacher, would not be understood. And because, deep-rooted in the nature of mankind, there is that which cries out upon this crime as an abomination, the law defines it darkly, and punishes it strictly. “_La nature a de ces bizarreries_”? Only a long-descended Mediterranean intellect, with a planetary point of view, could calmly make that comment on the case!

The outlaw lit one of the black cigars, and thrust the thin bars of chocolate into his pocket. Loathsome package food, again, but better than nothing, if worse came to the worst. Of late, he had feared even to enter the crossroads grocery stores, with their meagre yet apparently varied supplies, with their horribly unexpected little electric bulbs illuminating a customer whose trembling hope had been to remain unseen!

Royal’s cigar sickened him, and he dropped it, still burning, into the brown pine needles. He watched the tiny, red-rimmed hole it was making. The circle grew larger and larger. Curse it, why not let this be the end-all here? But just as the slowly widening red rim really flickered into a faint blaze, the red on his forehead rushed fiercely over the rest of his face. No, by God, no! Not that way! With his woollen cap he stifled the flame. It died down utterly, and with it his own last remnant of vigor.

Stiffly, and with manifest suffering, he rose from the ground. Yet, in a very real sense, he had a far better right to a place under those pines than even the poet Royal himself could claim. In his fevered outlaw imagination, conjuring up terrors where none existed, and courting dangers unaware, that place to him was sanctuary. The one spot on earth! For his fathers had cleared those hills above, and ploughed the fields beneath. That soldier of the Revolution was his own ancestor. Their names given in baptism and granted by birth were the same, Jeremiah Burton. In the year eighteen-twenty, one Jeremiah Burton had departed this life, full of honors; and now, a century later, this other Jeremiah Burton was still living, and under an exceeding weight of dishonor. A fugitive from justice, he was seeking sanctuary among his own kin. And no person in that State knew him for the Burton that he was.

No less than the boy Royal, he had aspired to the arts. Writing, painting, dancing, acting, he had loved them, every one. Yet never to the extent of drudgery, or self-sacrifice, surely! Art for a good time’s sake was his motto. He had always joyously avowed himself a “‘_carpe diem_’ fellow, don’t you know.” Perhaps his Burton ancestors, in their passion for honest toil and meritorious self-immolation, had drawn too heavily on springs of energy, both physical and spiritual, that should have been reserved for their descendants. So young Jeremiah Burton wrote skits, painted landscapes, acted in vaudeville; seldom very well, never at great pains. Of all his various arenas for the exhibition of his personality, he had concluded that the stage offered the most glamorous possibilities. Still, Jeremiah is no name to be pasted gayly up on the billboards, is it? And even Burton itself has a melancholy look when printed. Very early in life, therefore, the Jeremiah Burton of the flushed forehead and fat predatory nose had Geraldized his Christian name, and given a twist, even more romantic, to his surname. It was as Gerald Bertello that he had hoped, when scarcely older than the boy Royal, to take the world by storm from behind the footlights. It was as Gerald Bertello that he had studied and strutted and caroused through the downward zigzag of his middle years. It was as Gerald Bertello that he was designated in the warrant for his arrest. But it was as Jeremiah Burton that he was making his last stand, there on the hill, among his kinsmen. Sanctuary!

The slate stone that marked the soldier’s grave still stood erect. One could read every word carved upon it. Its willow tree wept in a perennial freshness of stem and leaf. The cherub and skull and crossbones had not turned a hair. But the more pretentious marble slab placed over the warrior’s relict, Thanksgiving Burton, was altogether a weaker vessel; at least, its foundations were less sure. It had lately fallen down flat under the hilltop winds, and in falling, had laid low a part of the slender iron fence that enclosed the graves of those early Burtons; Burtons who had wrestled with that soil and conquered it, until the soil, in turn, conquered them.

The fugitive who had lately read to the boy Royal sonorous words of the twelve youths of Troy felt strangely dizzy as he pondered on the carven tribute to his ancestor. It began, as he well remembered, “A soldier of the Revolution and of God.” Dizzy as he was, he would like to recite the whole of that inscription, with the proper emphasis, for the youngster’s benefit. Where was the kid, that little Lord Bountiful, “a traveller like myself”? Oh, yes, he remembered now, but with immense, overpowering difficulty. The boy had vanished, fled away on the wings of an Iliad. “A soldier of the Revolution,”—but the words he was staring at were dizzier than himself. Hell, they must be, whirling so! Blindly throwing out an arm, he stumbled and fell, his hand striking the fallen marble slab in memory of Thanksgiving Burton. Like Royal, he had for the present reached the end of his appointed rounds.

VI

Below, just beyond a fork in the dusty stage-road, Remy Mariette, commissioner of highways, was finishing his day’s work of filling with gravel the deeper ruts and holes. He was a lithe, brown, ruddy-cheeked young man, known far and wide as a great worker, whether alone or in company. To-day he was alone. It happened that he was not only road commissioner, road laborer, mason, and the best bass of the choir; he was also the village constable. In the inner pocket of his frayed working coat was the secret warrant for the taking of Gerald Bertello. That document had been very much on his mind for the past few days, because, as he himself expressed it, “constabling was a new job for him.” However, he was not thinking, just then, of the cares of his office. He was thinking that before going home, he had plenty of time to skip up the hill and see whether the old gravestones were as badly off as reported at the last town meeting. If so, it meant another job for him; a good one, too, at mason’s wages. He swung briskly up the slope, his crowbar as staff. He might need it to pry at the fallen stone.

Well, well, a man asleep. Queer place to choose. Drunk, perhaps? Hey, there, you man asleep!

The constable leaned over the sleeper, and then drew back in mingled disgust and amazement. The disgust was for the criminal, the amazement because a criminal so clever should thus easily be caught. He knew his quarry in an instant. He recognized Gerald Bertello, in former years a summer-time figure making himself and his comrades mightily at home among the mountains. Gerald Bertello’s name and face had often been shown on the screen at the Monday movies. Looked the kind that might turn desperate, too. Just as well he had brought along the bar, in case. With his foot, yet not unkindly, he prodded the sleeper, once, twice, three times, and yet again. Gerald Bertello did not stir. Suddenly the young constable, who had a fading-flower wife whom he loved, and who was therefore wise beyond his years in the lore of hearts and pulses, knelt down by the man’s side.

When he rose, it was with a strange sense of he knew not what complexities. He was not given to self-analysis. But, because of the good French blood in his veins, he took off his cap, and bowed his head, very simply and sincerely, yet almost mechanically, in the presence of death. He was young for a constable, scarcely seven years older than the boy Royal. Indeed, the two had long been friends in that wide countryside. They were Remy and Royal together. Not without a touch of envy, Royal had last spring congratulated him on his appointment. Ah, this would be something to tell Royal about, when they should meet again; a queer boy, always wanting to know queer things!

Puzzled as to his immediate duty, the young man meditated a moment, then made a swift decision. Best leave everything untouched, and seek help and counsel from his elders, in the village below. He gazed at the sleeper’s cap, the cigars, the scattered bread, the little American flag left from last Decoration Day; but he did not alter anything he saw. Some sense of strict procedure in such cases constrained him.

Before descending the slope, he looked up curiously into the sky, to note what birds might be abroad. He remembered the crows he had seen early that morning in his new orchard; some of them were plucking deep bites from his ripest apples. So from his coat he took the warrant, and buttoned it into the pocket of his soldier shirt. Then he spread his coat carefully over the sleeper’s face, its profile half lost among the brown pine leaves and the sparse vine-wreaths springing up through them. He even succeeded in covering the hand lying against the edge of the fallen stone. He wondered whether the man had cried aloud for help. He noted, partly as a constable’s duty and partly as something to tell to the boy Royal, that the hand seemed to be stretched out in a dumb gesture, whether of hope or of despair, toward the stone and the writing on the stone,—

“_I know that my Redeemer liveth,_ _And that_”

The last line, in the stiff italic of the eighteen-thirties, was blotted out by lichens and earth-stains, but Remy Mariette knew the words well. They were in a chant the choir often sang. To-day they hurt him; since kneeling by that sleeper with the still heart, he had been thinking incessantly, with a tightening pain in his throat, of the flower-like wife at home. He leaned on his iron bar an instant, and shivered. The sun had gone away from that place. From a far wood a hermit thrush poured out its exquisite, passionless hymn of Paradise. Then it seemed to the young man that all the sadness in the world was brooding over the hill with the graves.

SPEAKING OF ANGELS

I

The youth’s name was Apollos Rivers. We admired him, used him, and for a time, despised him, too. Why we admired and used, I can easily explain. Apollos was every inch his name—blond, athletic, superb; no model in New York posed as faithfully. Why we despised—well, the logic of that is more complicated. Our contempt was doubtless merely a habit, formed on sight unseen and strengthened by hearsay. Apollos, indeed! How absurd a name for the oldest Rivers boy, seeking work in studios! In vain he had politely explained to us that his late father, a bookish Montreal goldsmith, had so greatly admired the senior Paul Revere of colonial history (the Paul Revere whose Huguenot name had originally been Apollos Rivoire) that he himself, British subject though he was, had bestowed the name Apollos on his own firstborn. Later Rivers arrivals, less magnificent in physique, had to content themselves with names less proud—Tom, Chuck, Nipper, and plain Ellen.

Perhaps we would have accepted that explanation, if somebody (that eternally busy somebody) had not seen young Apollos at an Academy reception, his ears tinted rose-pink, with cheeks to match, and his vigorous young eyelashes weighted with whatever it is the chorus ladies use to veil and enhance their already too potent come-hither-of-the-eye. After this, do you wonder that we jumped at the conclusion that Apollos was merely a name the youth had wished on himself, a _nom de pose_, as it were? And why did he polish his nails? Unnatural in a boy of eighteen! Anyhow, we wouldn’t have done it, at that age. And I fear that with some of us, even his honest Canadian accent was against him. Take the word _been_, for instance. Those whose grandfathers had always said _ben_, and whose mothers had said _bin_, were repelled when the Montreal lad called it _bean_.

But the posing of Apollos (one can’t forget that!) was absolutely the best I had ever met anywhere. He first came to me when I was doing that big California thing; you know, the one they call Three Angels, two of the angels being winged marble youths in flat relief, kneeling, and the third a retributive sort of shrouded female figure in bronze, standing, of course, and dominating the other two. Get me? Oh, yes, in the round, she was. I had no trouble in finding her type, no trouble at all. Powerful women abound, these days. But the youths were a more difficult matter. Of course I didn’t want them to look Athenian, as if I’d just dislodged them from the Parthenon frieze, and given them a pair of wings apiece; but then, on the other hand, I didn’t care to have them suggest that I’d merely picked them up on the beach at Coney Island, the Sunday before. Angels mustn’t bear too personal a stamp, you know. To my thinking, no artist has ever surpassed Saint-Gaudens in creating the impersonal, other-worldly type. But he always used a lot of wonder-drapery for his angelic hosts; I had merely wings.

I had tried a good many youths from thirteen to thirty, before I finally decided to take with me to my summer studio, for a period of ten weeks, Apollos Rivers and Phineas Stickney. Remembering those tinted ears, I had some doubt about Apollos and his staying powers through a country summer, far from all but the most elementary sort of movies and like attractions; but I had a hope that the influence of Phineas Stickney, coupled with my own persuasions, would keep the boy on the side of the angels.

In fact, the angels were all that counted with me, that summer. The commission was an important one, and the contract ironclad. If within three years I couldn’t produce the Three Angels, “complete in place and in the final materials as hereinbefore specified,” my name, on the Golden Coast, would be mud instead of Jefferson. And the three years had by now dwindled to one year only! Time pressed. I’d been diligent and fore-handed enough, Heaven knows. If anything, I am diligent to a fault. The retributive woman was all done in bronze; but those two youths weren’t yet ready for the plaster, let alone the “final materials as hereinbefore specified.”

My work in the country studio was cut out for me. I had had an assistant there for some weeks, setting up the full-size work from a half-size study; but when I saw the thing sketched out in the large, I was not at all satisfied with my original idea of those figures. I wanted to make certain very drastic changes; I really needed both Apollos and Phineas, using each lad part of the day. Rough on me, rather; and I suppose fellows in shops and offices would open their eyes if they saw a mere artist—next door to a do-nothing, you know—beginning work every morning at five and quitting at summer sundown; yes, and perhaps stealing back for more study by twilight. For it’s twilight that wipes out all the pettiness that the day reveals; it’s twilight that knows all and tells only the good, in sculpture. If it were not for the healing touch of twilight on our work, how many of us sculptors would have abandoned the art, long ago! Well, I’ve often marvelled at the amount of work I put through that summer. Of course it makes a difference when a man’s work is such that he can make a lark out of it, as well as a living. Still, don’t run away with the idea that any art is pure ecstasy every minute. Nothing is.

I don’t know why I felt so uneasy about Apollos. All sorts of sinister anxieties haunted me. Did I fear that he would burn up my barn of a studio? No, for he smoked neither cigarettes nor a pipe. Would he elope with the cook, leaving us with an empty larder and a desecrated hearth? No, for if his own words were to be trusted, skirts bored him. Would he paint his ears, and so make talk for the village folk? How could I tell? My chief hope was in the influence of Phineas. The two would naturally be thrown together at the farmhouse where they boarded. Phineas, as I had seen him in the city, was an unusually attractive lad. His posing, to be sure, left something to be desired. But then, very few models in this world, I knew, had both the figure and the posing power that Apollos possessed. A rare combination!

Phineas was a boy with no end of ancestry. His father had been a Mayor, filling out some one’s term, in a great New England city; his grandfather had been Governor of a near Western State; and to crown all, his grandfather’s great-grandfather had been a Signer. I wondered how he could stoop to pose, after all that! But for some reason, he wanted to study modelling, and so had begged me to take him on as assistant. When I declined the honor, he offered to pose; anything to forward his artistic studies. I engaged him, and naturally thinking that so august a personage deserved more consideration than Apollos, I allotted to the aristocrat the easier, briefer afternoon sessions, and took Apollos with the morning dews.

We had a routine. From five till quarter past, Apollos and I disposed of three buttered health biscuits and two hot doughnuts apiece, the whole made interesting by the very good coffee which I myself made over an oil stove; in the deep country, wise housekeepers ask no crack-of-dawn exploits from any cook, no matter how greatly underworked. The doughnuts down, we worked easily and steadily until my normal family breakfast, at which I sat down with appetite. No loafing, however! At eight, Apollos and I were in the studio again, working till noon. Thus Apollos posed six hours, and Phineas four.

From the first, I tried to work in a little fatherly counsel for Apollos during the pose. “That knee just a bit to the left, please, and the rear hoof as far back as you can get it. Fine! Well, you know you’re in luck, up here in the country air, along with a lad like Phineas! Not that he poses any better than you; no one does. But his manners are certainly good, aren’t they?”

“Are they, sir?”

I asked myself whether Apollos was perhaps jealous of his more fortunate co-worker. His face, however, showed only a perfect Apollonian calm, combined with a gratifying attention to business. It was a kneeling pose, you remember; and those who have never knelt much can’t know what grit it takes, when long drawn out. I thought it wiser to defer advice to a more convenient season. Next morning, when I was working on a comparatively easy place, I happened to say to Apollos that Phineas talked remarkably well for a boy of his age. Apollos preserved his pose and made no reply. I pressed the subject.

“Perfectly good talker, sir, just as you say,” replied Apollos, squirming ever so slightly with the foot I was not modelling, “but of course you hire us to pose, not talk. I rather fancied you liked the place kept quiet.”

“Righto, boy. But sometimes a little conversation helps the slow minutes to skip by.”

“That depends, sir.”

“On what?”

“Oh, on who does the talking, and what is said.”

The reply caught my fancy. I wondered what response Phineas, that excellent conversationalist, would have made; I decided to put the same question to him, in the afternoon. Unfortunately, his posing happened to be less satisfactory than usual that day, and it thrust me out of the mood for easy converse with him. Besides, he himself had so much to say of his ambitions, prospects, and great-grandfathers, that I did not care to add anything to the welter of talk. A few days later, however, I found occasion to remind him that with his inheritance—I meant blue blood, of course—he was fortunate in being able to help those boys with whom he came in contact.

“I’ve tried to help Apollos with his manners,” he replied, “but, confidentially, it’s rather uphill work.”

“Oh, I don’t know. Apollos doesn’t appear so badly. Seldom speaks unless spoken to, and then pretty sensibly, I find. Besides” (here I thought a helpful suggestion might be in order), “his posing is so absolutely perfect that anything else he does perhaps seems imperfect in comparison.”

“Yes, poor fellow! Pity that just posing should be what a fellow’s fitted for, isn’t it? For my part—”

“For your part,” I interrupted rather testily, “if you will kindly keep that left leg of yours—well, ever so slightly _reminiscent_ of what it was when you began to pose it for me, I shall be most appreciative.” I had never before spoken like that to the scion of a Signer, but I saw he needed it. It was gradually being revealed to me that long descent is by no means the main desideratum in a model. Phineas had developed a rather unusual and uncanny gift for slumping in his pose;—making it easier and easier for himself, minute by minute, so that at the end of the half-hour, there was really nothing left that was of the slightest use to me. I had to do my work from knowledge, instead of from Phineas. Of course, most models have this infirmity of self-protection, but Phineas could give all comers cards and spades in the game of slumping.

Still, in the excellent séances I had with Apollos, I would sometimes enlarge upon Phineas’s advantages. Once I expressed a hope that Apollos was profiting duly by the companionship.

“It profiteth me nothing,” was the unexpected reply. “Phineas talked me over once. Never again, sir!”

“How so?”

“Oh, nothing of any importance, really. A silly fool business. I couldn’t make any one, an adult, I mean, understand just how it happened.”

“Try me! Boy myself once.”

A slow color shot up over Apollos’s classic torso, and flamed fiercely in his ears. He even became white around the mouth, as if the blood had receded from that part to concentrate in his listening apparatus. Then his confidence gushed forth, as if long pent up.