For a second, I had an hallucination; I saw also the words, “Angels in
ashes. Contract ironclad.” But I waved that aside; and, I hardly know
why, my utter dismay was soon followed by a sort of exhilaration, the
exhilaration a fellow feels when he suddenly has to make a fresh start,
and knows he has strength for it. No Sunday trains served those remote
God-fearing parts; I must return as I came. A few years before, my hill
and home had been struck by lightning, but no damage had been done,
except to a drinking-glass and the cook’s Thursday afternoon corsets.
Turning my motor’s nose homeward, I wondered whether the lightning had
returned to finish a work thus timidly begun. More likely fire, though!
Did Apollos smoke, after all? Or Phineas? My curiosity was almost equal
to my consternation.
All night long, my runabout raced up hill and down dale, sometimes beside
a moonlit brook, sometimes through clean, sweet forests, and again along
dusty country roads with straggling farmhouses fast asleep, not even
giving a dream to _my_ troubles! Grateful guests at the inn had pressed
upon me loaves in exchange for my fishes, and by way of a solitary
breakfast among the morning mists, I disposed of an incredible number
of sandwiches as well as all the hot coffee in my own miracle-bottle. I
propitiated my engine for the last lap.
The day had not lost its freshness when I reached the foot of my hill,
and strained my eyes for a glimpse of the disaster. To my surprise, the
big barn studio, as far as I could judge from the road, was still intact.
But it was in the back part that my angels were! And when I had at last
finished rounding that interminable uphill bend over the roots of the elm
trees, I saw that there was no longer any back part. There was only a
pile of charred timbers.
At a little distance stood a metal garage, one of those ugly, useful
structures that invite scoffing from all persons of taste. It was
untouched by the fire. The door was open. I could see Phineas just
within. Beyond Phineas, stretched out flat on those trestles I had been
grumbling about for years because the carpenters never took them away,
were my angels, uncovered, and looking, to the casual eye, as good as
new. I was glad, then, that I knew how to thank God. And before long, I
was glad, according to the custom of my tribe, to get a new light on my
angels. Sculptors are like that. They would go through fire and water to
get a new light, it seems.
“Your work?” I asked the question of Phineas, and pleasantly enough.
The boy’s eyes filled. “Yes, sir.”
“Where’s Apollos?”
“In bed, burned arm, broken leg—Oh, dear, oh, dear!” With this childlike
exclamation, the son of a hundred Stickneys broke down utterly.
Between sobs, Phineas made his foolish city boy’s confession. He had
merely made a fire to roast some corn in the ear, and meaning to be
extremely careful, had kindled his sticks close up against an old stone
wall a few feet away from the studio with the angels. Yes, he had spoken
about it to Apollos the day before, and Apollos had warned him. But, such
is the stubbornness of the sons of the Revolution, he had felt perfectly
sure it would be safe. His distress was so evident that I refrained, at
that time, from pointing out what a consummate jackass he was.
“Before I knew it,” he went on, “the wind veered clean around, and the
fire burst through the wall quicker’n chain lightning, and began climbing
the dry grass on the bank up toward the studio. And all those last year’s
leaves! You would never believe it!”
“Oh, yes, I would,” I retorted, a little bitterly. “I am still in my
right mind.”
“Apollos was in the garage, tinkering on a bust he brought in there
when you went away, and I was planning to surprise him with the roast
corn. So I hollered to Apollos, and Apollos hollered to Henry, and Henry
telephoned to the town-hall to ring the bell like blazes. And in ten
minutes half the men in the village were here with brooms and shovels.”
“But who got out the angels? Or did they soar out, under their own steam?”
“Well,” said Phineas, “they never could have come through if it hadn’t
been for Apollos! ‘Those angels have just _got_ to be saved, if any of us
are,’ says Apollos. So he grabbed up a saw and a screw-driver, and what
the saw couldn’t do, the screw-driver could. He worked like lightning,
Apollos did. ‘Easy, boys, easy,’ he kept saying, calm as if he was
down at the boarding-house, eating griddle cakes. ‘It’ll be quite a
disappointment for the boss, anyhow, the best we can do,’ says Apollos.
So while the rest of the fellers were fighting the fire outside with
brooms and spades and inside with whatever water they could get, and,
gosh, it wasn’t much, Apollos got Prince Eugene Gage, the town drunkard,
you know, and One-Eye Sims that’s supposed to keep the toll-house, and
that hulkingest one of the two big Beecher boys, and the three of them,
along with him and me, we got those angels out somehow, safe enough, and
not much jarred, really, sir. And we carried them into the garage here,
and stuck ’em on the horses, as you see.”
“Good work, my lad, but how about Apollos?”
“Well, you know how thorough Apollos is. He suddenly remembered that the
half-size study was in back there, right in the midst of the fire; and
he’d heard you say you wanted to keep it and send it down to New York.
We couldn’t stop him. He got away from us, went in there, slid the thing
quick down onto the little green truck, and pushed it out over the sill
just in time. Only not quite in time. That’s how he got his broken leg.
And his shirt had just begun burning on him when he fell over himself.
The doctor says the arm will be all right inside a week, but the leg’s a
longer job.”
I had rather lost interest in Phineas, before I went away, but now I
found myself changing. I was glad to see that boy’s complete loyalty
to Apollos; recognition of valor had apparently left no room for the
customary Stickney complacency. I had noted, too, that the aristocratic
Stickney countenance was somewhat disfigured by a red wound across the
upper lip, but I forbore to ask the boy if he got it eating roast corn.
Within the garage, I took careful account of my angels. Their celestial
composure was scarcely shaken, it would seem. If only I could get them
upright again, as successfully as Apollos and his band of ne’er-do-weels
had laid them flat, all would yet be well, and the name of Jefferson
unmuddied.
By the end-window of the garage, in what chanced to be a good north
light, I saw a bust; the bust that Apollos, of all persons in the world,
had been modelling from memory in the dark privacy of his farmhouse
attic room, and immediately on my departure, had brought to the garage
for an orgy of peaceful study. Even from the distance at which I stood,
I perceived that the thing was a startlingly good likeness of myself;
myself in a somewhat heroic aspect, to be sure, but still unmistakably
me, almost life-size, in clay. My me-ness stuck out all over it. It
really gave me a start, offered me an ideal to live up to. I don’t say
it was finer than anything of Houdon’s or Rodin’s. I merely say it was
amazing for a boy who had had no instruction save the crumbs he had
picked up while posing. The lad’s secret ambition was quite evident to
me now. But for my own rather heartless absorption in my Three Angels, I
might have guessed it before. I felt ashamed.
“Phineas,” I remarked very seriously, and I suited the action to the
word, “I take off my hat to Apollos!”
Phineas answered, with a sincerity not to be doubted in a Stickney, “So
do I, and I always shall. That is, if he keeps on like this!”
The fire gave me a new light on my models. I learned to my surprise that
my aristocrat was something of a carpenter. He was full of plans for
rebuilding the destroyed wing of my studio, and even drew everything out
carefully on paper in scale, and very creditably too. I saw that if I
could get a few men at once, it would take but a short time to rig up a
temporary refuge for finishing my angels. Late haying being over, the
thing was somehow accomplished; Phineas worked like a boy possessed; and,
as Apollos was soon hobbling about very capably on crutches, we had a
studio-warming, during which the two lads superintended the replacing of
the angels, by the efforts of their former crew, Prince Eugene Gage, the
town drunkard, One-Eye Sims that’s supposed to keep the toll-house, and
the hulkingest Beecher boy. Those three were the scum of the village.
Hence I often say, In an emergency, don’t scorn the scum.
But the oddest part of the adventure was this. And I’ve not yet finished
marvelling at it. After the two angels were really up again, and Phineas
and Apollos and I stood staring at them, Apollos, with that little air of
authority that nobly earned crutches sometimes confer, suddenly said out,
quite loud, “But there’s nothing to do to them, really, Mr. Jefferson!
They’re _done_!” And after one good glance, my inward eye told me that
he was absolutely right. I might never have known that they _were_ done,
however, if I had kept on working at them, and if I had not, in despair,
gone a-fishing! That very night, I telegraphed for my plaster-moulder.
Did both boys become sculptors? Oh, no, nothing so tragic as that.
Apollos is the sculptor, but Phineas went into architecture; he knows
more about stone walls than he did before the fire. Since the fire, the
two are fast friends, and work together when they can. They are the two
young fellows who lately captured the commission for that big Unknown
Heroism monument the papers have been printing pictures of. I think
they’ll make good, too. But you never would have guessed it would end
that way, if you had seen them together at the Academy. The rosy-eared
Apollos!