The green screen slowly rose, covering the lower portion of the broad
studio window where Heron, the gem-cutter, was at work. It was Melissa,
the artist’s daughter, who had pulled it up, with bended knees and
outstretched arms, panting for breath.
“That is enough!” cried her father’s impatient voice. He glanced up at
the flood of light which the blinding sun of Alexandria was pouring into
the room, as it did every autumn afternoon; but as soon as the shadow
fell on his work-table the old man’s busy fingers were at work again,
and he heeded his daughter no more.
An hour later Melissa again, and without any bidding, pulled up the
screen as before, but it was so much too heavy for her that the effort
brought the blood into her calm, fair face, as the deep, rough “That is
enough” was again heard from the work-table.
Then silence reigned once more. Only the artist’s low whistling as
he worked, or the patter and pipe of the birds in their cages by the
window, broke the stillness of the spacious room, till the voice and
step of a man were presently heard in the anteroom.
Heron laid by his graver and Melissa her gold embroidery, and the eyes
of father and daughter met for the first time for some hours. The very
birds seemed excited, and a starling, which had sat moping since the
screen had shut the sun out, now cried out, “Olympias!” Melissa rose,
and after a swift glance round the room she went to the door, come who
might.
Ay, even if the brother she was expecting should bring a companion, or
a patron of art who desired her father’s work, the room need not fear a
critical eye; and she was so well assured of the faultless neatness of
her own person, that she only passed a hand over her brown hair, and
with an involuntary movement pulled her simple white robe more tightly
through her girdle.
Heron’s studio was as clean and as simple as his daughter’s attire,
though it seemed larger than enough for the purpose it served, for only
a very small part of it was occupied by the artist, who sat as if in
exile behind the work-table on which his belongings were laid out: a set
of small instruments in a case, a tray filled with shells and bits
of onyx and other agates, a yellow ball of Cyrenian modeling-wax,
pumice-stone, bottles, boxes, and bowls.
Melissa had no sooner crossed the threshold, than the sculptor drew up
his broad shoulders and brawny person, and raised his hand to fling away
the slender stylus he had been using; however, he thought better of
it, and laid it carefully aside with the other tools. But this act of
self-control must have cost the hot-headed, powerful man a great effort;
for he shot a fierce look at the instrument which had had so narrow an
escape, and gave it a push of vexation with the back of his hand.
Then he turned towards the door, his sunburnt face looking surly enough,
in its frame of tangled gray hair and beard; and, as he waited for the
visitor whom Melissa was greeting outside, he tossed back his big head,
and threw out his broad, deep chest, as though preparing to wrestle.
Melissa presently returned, and the youth whose hand she still held was,
as might be seen in every feature, none other than the sculptor’s son.
Both were dark-eyed, with noble and splendid heads, and in stature
perfectly equal; but while the son’s countenance beamed with hearty
enjoyment, and seemed by its peculiar attractiveness to be made--and
to be accustomed--to charm men and women alike, his father’s face was
expressive of disgust and misanthropy. It seemed, indeed, as though
the newcomer had roused his ire, for Heron answered his son’s cheerful
greeting with no word but a reproachful “At last!” and paid no heed to
the hand the youth held out to him.
Alexander was no doubt inured to such a reception; he did not disturb
himself about the old man’s ill-humor, but slapped him on the shoulder
with rough geniality, went up to the work-table with easy composure,
took up the vice which held the nearly finished gem, and, after holding
it to the light and examining it carefully, exclaimed: “Well done,
father! You have done nothing better than that for a long time.”
“Poor stuff!” said his father. But his son laughed.
“If you will have it so. But I will give one of my eyes to see the man
in Alexandria who can do the like!”
At this the old man broke out, and shaking his fist he cried: “Because
the man who can find anything worth doing, takes good care not to waste
his time here, making divine art a mere mockery by such trifling with
toys! By Sirius! I should like to fling all those pebbles into the
fire, the onyx and shells and jasper and what not, and smash all those
wretched tools with these fists, which were certainly made for other
work than this.”
The youth laid an arm round his father’s stalwart neck, and gayly
interrupted his wrath. “Oh yes, Father Heron, Philip and I have felt
often enough that they know how to hit hard.”
“Not nearly often enough,” growled the artist, and the young man went
on:
“That I grant, though every blow from you was equal to a dozen from the
hand of any other father in Alexandria. But that those mighty fists on
human arms should have evoked the bewitching smile on the sweet lips of
this Psyche, if it is not a miracle of art, is--”
“The degradation of art,” the old man put in; but Alexander hastily
added:
“The victory of the exquisite over the coarse.”
“A victory!” exclaimed Heron, with a scornful flourish of his hand.
“I know, boy, why you are trying to garland the oppressive yoke with
flowers of flattery. So long as your surly old father sits over the
vice, he only whistles a song and spares you his complaints. And then,
there is the money his work brings in!”
He laughed bitterly, and as Melissa looked anxiously up at him, her
brother exclaimed:
“If I did not know you well, master, and if it would not be too great
a pity, I would throw that lovely Psyche to the ostrich in Scopas’s
court-yard; for, by Herakles! he would swallow your gem more easily than
we can swallow such cruel taunts. We do indeed bless the Muses that work
brings you some surcease of gloomy thoughts. But for the rest--I hate to
speak the word gold. We want it no more than you, who, when the coffer
is full, bury it or hide it with the rest. Apollodorus forced a whole
talent of the yellow curse upon me for painting his men’s room. The
sailor’s cap, into which I tossed it with the rest, will burst when
Seleukus pays me for the portrait of his daughter; and if a thief robs
you, and me too, we need not fret over it. My brush and your stylus
will earn us more in no time. And what are our needs? We do not bet on
quail-fights; we do not run races; I always had a loathing for purchased
love; we do not want to wear a heap of garments bought merely because
they take our fancy--indeed, I am too hot as it is under this scorching
sun. The house is your own. The rent paid by Glaukias, for the work-room
and garden you inherited from your father, pays for half at least of
what we and the birds and the slaves eat. As for Philip, he lives on air
and philosophy; and, besides, he is fed out of the great breadbasket of
the Museum.”
At this point the starling interrupted the youth’s vehement speech with
the appropriate cry, “My strength! my strength!” The brother and sister
looked at each other, and Alexander went on with genuine enthusiasm:
“But it is not in you to believe us capable of such meanness. Dedicate
your next finished work to Isis or Serapis. Let your masterpiece grace
the goddess’s head-gear, or the god’s robe. We shall be quite content,
and perhaps the immortals may restore your joy in life as a reward.”
The bird repeated its lamentable cry, “My strength!” and the youth
proceeded with increased vehemence:
“It would really be better that you should throw your vice and your
graver and your burnisher, and all that heap of dainty tools, into the
sea, and carve an Atlas such as we have heard you talk about ever since
we could first speak Greek. Come, set to work on a colossus! You have
but to speak the word, and the finest clay shall be ready on your
modeling-table by to-morrow, either here or in Glaukias’s work-room,
which is indeed your own. I know where the best is to be found, and can
bring it to you in any quantity. Scopas will lend me his wagon. I can
see it now, and you valiantly struggling with it till your mighty arms
ache. You will not whistle and hum over that, but sing out with all
your might, as you used when my mother was alive, when you and your
apprentices joined Dionysus’s drunken rout. Then your brow will grow
smooth again; and if the model is a success, and you want to buy marble,
or pay the founder, then out with your gold, out of the coffer and its
hiding-place! Then you can make use of all your strength, and your dream
of producing an Atlas such as the world has not seen--your beautiful
dream-will become a reality!”
Heron had listened eagerly to his son’s rhapsody, but he now cast a
timid glance at the table where the wax and tools lay, pushed the rough
hair from his brow, and broke in with a bitter laugh: “My dream, do you
say--my dream? As if I did not know too well that I am no longer the man
to create an Atlas! As if I did not feel, without your words, that my
strength for it is a thing of the past!”
“Nay, father,” exclaimed the painter. “Is it right to cast away the
sword before the battle? And even if you did not succeed--”
“You would be all the better pleased,” the sculptor put in. “What surer
way could there be to teach the old simpleton, once for all, that the
time when he could do great work is over and gone?”
“That is unjust, father; that is unworthy of you,” the young man
interrupted in great excitement; but his father went on, raising his
voice; “Silence, boy! One thing at any rate is left to me, as you
know--my keen eyes; and they did not fail me when you two looked at each
other as the starling cried, ‘My strength!’ Ay, the bird is in the right
when he bewails what was once so great and is now a mere laughing-stock.
But you--you ought to reverence the man to whom you owe your existence
and all you know; you allow yourself to shrug your shoulders over
your own father’s humbler art, since your first pictures were fairly
successful.--How puffed up he is, since, by my devoted care, he has been
a painter! How he looks down on the poor wretch who, by the pinch of
necessity, has come down from being a sculptor of the highest promise to
being a mere gem-cutter! In the depths of your soul--and I know it--you
regard my laborious art as half a handicraft. Well, perhaps it deserves
no better name; but that you--both of you--should make common cause with
a bird, and mock the sacred fire which still burns in an old man, and
moves him to serve true and noble art and to mold something great--an
Atlas such as the world has never seen on a heroic scale; that--”
He covered his face with his hands and sobbed aloud. And the strong
man’s passionate grief cut his children to the heart, though, since
their mother’s death, their father’s rage and discontent had many a time
ere now broken down into childish lamentation.
To-day no doubt the old man was in worse spirits than usual, for it was
the day of the Nekysia--the feast of the dead kept every autumn; and he
had that morning visited his wife’s grave, accompanied by his daughter,
and had anointed the tombstone and decked it with flowers. The young
people tried to comfort him; and when at last he was more composed and
had dried his tears, he said, in so melancholy and subdued a tone that
the angry blusterer was scarcely recognizable: “There--leave me alone;
it will soon be over. I will finish this gem to-morrow, and then I must
do the Serapis I promised Theophilus, the high-priest. Nothing can come
of the Atlas. Perhaps you meant it in all sincerity, Alexander; but
since your mother left me, children, since then--my arms are no weaker
than they were; but in here--what it was that shriveled, broke, leaked
away--I can not find words for it. If you care for me--and I know you
do--you must not be vexed with me if my gall rises now and then; there
is too much bitterness in my soul. I can not reach the goal I strive
after and was meant to win; I have lost what I loved best, and where am
I to find comfort or compensation?”
His children tenderly assured him of their affection, and he allowed
Melissa to kiss him, and stroked Alexander’s hair.
Then he inquired for Philip, his eldest son and his favorite; and on
learning that he, the only person who, as he believed, could understand
him, would not come to see him this day above all others, he again broke
out in wrath, abusing the degeneracy of the age and the ingratitude of
the young.
“Is it a visit which detains him again?” he inquired, and when Alexander
thought not, he exclaimed contemptuously: “Then it is some war of words
at the Museum. And for such poor stuff as that a son can forget his duty
to his father and mother!”
“But you, too, used to enjoy these conflicts of intellect,” his daughter
humbly remarked; but the old man broke in:
“Only because they help a miserable world to forget the torments of
existence, and the hideous certainty of having been born only to die
some horrible death. But what can you know of this?”
“By my mother’s death-bed,” replied the girl, “we, too, had a glimpse
into the terrible mystery.” And Alexander gravely added, “And since
we last met, father, I may certainly account myself as one of the
initiated.”
“You have painted a dead body?” asked his father.
“Yes, father,” replied the lad with a deep breath. “I warned you,” said
Heron, in a tone of superior experience.
And then, as Melissa rearranged the folds of his blue robe, he said
he should go for a walk. He sighed as he spoke, and his children
knew whither he would go. It was to the grave to which Melissa had
accompanied him that morning; and he would visit it alone, to meditate
undisturbed on the wife he had lost.