|Colin Churchill's first delight at the wood-carver's at Exeter was of
the sort that a man rarely feels twice in a lifetime. It was the joy
of first emancipation. Hitherto, Colin had been only a servant, and had
looked forward to a life of service. Not despondently or gloomily--for
Colin was a son of the people, and he accepted servitude as his natural
guerdon--but blankly and without eagerness or repining. The children of
the labouring class expect to walk through life in their humble way as
through a set task, where a man may indeed sometimes meet with stray
episodes of pleasure (especially that one human episode of love-making),
but where for the most part he will come across nothing whatsoever save
interminable rules and regulations. Now, however, Colin felt himself
free and happy: he had got a trade and a career before him, and a trade
and a career into which he could throw himself with his utmost ardour.
For the first time in his life Colin began dimly to feel that he too had
something in him. How could he possibly have got up an enthusiasm about
the vicar's boots, or about the proper way to deliver letters on a
silver salver? But when it came to carving roses and plums out of solid
mahogany or walnut, why, that of course was a very different sort of
matter.
Even at Wootton Mandeville, the boy had somehow suspected, in his vague
inarticulate fashion (for the English agricultural class has no tongue
in which to express itself), that he too had artistic taste and power.
When he heard the vicar talking to his friends about paintings or
engravings, he recognised that he could understand and appreciate all
that the vicar said; nay, more: on two or three occasions he had even
boldly ventured to conceive that he saw certain things in certain
pictures which the vicar, in his cold, dry, formal fashion, with
his coldly critical folding eyeglass, could never have dreamt of or
imagined. In his heart of hearts, even then, the boy somehow half-knew
that the vicar saw what the vicar was capable of seeing in each work,
but that he, Colin Churchill the pageboy, penetrated into the very
inmost feeling and meaning of the original artist. So much, in his
inarticulate way, the boy had sometimes surprised himself by dimly
fancying; but as he had no language in which to speak such things, even
to himself, and only slowly learnt that language afterwards, he didn't
formulate his ideas in his own head for a single minute, allowing them
merely to rest there in the inchoate form of shapeless feeling.
Now, at Exeter, however, all this was quite altered. In the aisles
of the great cathedral, looking up at the many-coloured saints in the
windows, and listening to the long notes of the booming organ, Colin
Churchill's soul awoke and knew itself. The gift that was in him was not
one to be used for himself alone, a mere knack of painting pictures to
decorate the bare walls of his bedroom, or of making clay images for
little Minna to stick upon the fisherman's wooden mantelshelf: it was
a talent admired and recognised of other people, and to be employed for
the noble and useful purposes of carving pine-apple posts for walnut
bedsteads or conventional scrolls for fashionable chimneypieces. To
such great heights did emancipated Colin Churchill now aspire. Even his
master allowed him to see that he thought well of him. The boy was given
tools to work with, and instructed in the use of them; and he learnt how
to employ them so fast that the master openly expressed his surprise
and satisfaction. In a very few weeks Colin was fairly through the first
stage of learning, and was set to produce bits of scroll work from his
own design, for a wainscoted room in the house of a resident canon.
For seven months Colin went on at his wood-carving with unalloyed
delight, and wrote every week to tell Minna how much he liked the work,
and what beautiful wooden things he would now be able to make her. But
at the end of those seven months, as luck would have it (whether good
luck or ill luck the future must say), Colin chanced to fall in one day
with a strange companion. One afternoon a heavy-looking Italian workman
dropped casually into the workshop where Colin Churchill was busy
carving. The boy was cutting the leaves of a honeysuckle spray from life
for a long moulding. The Italian watched him closely for a while, and
then he said in his liquid English: 'Zat is good. You can carve, mai
boy. You must come and see me at mai place. I wawrk for Smeez and
Whatgood.'
Colin turned round, blushing with pleasure, and looked at the Italian.
He couldn't tell why, but somehow in his heart instinctively, he felt
more proud of that workman's simple expression of satisfaction at
his work than he had felt even when the vicar told him, in his stiff,
condescending, depreciatory manner, that there was 'some merit in the
bas-relief and drawings.' Smith and Whatgood were stonecutters in the
town, who did a large trade in tombstones and 'monumental statuary.' No
doubt the Italian was one of their artistic hands, and Colin took his
praise with a flush of sympathetic pleasure. It was handicraftsman
speaking critically and appreciatively of handicraftsman.
'What's your name, sir?' he asked the man, politely.
'You could not pronounce it,' answered the Italian, smiling and showing
his two fine rows of pure white teeth: 'Giuseppe Cicolari. You cannot
pronounce it.'
'Giuseppe Cicolari,' the boy repeated slowly, with the precise
intonation the Italian had given it, for he had the gift of vocal
imitation, like all men of Celtic blood (and the Dorsetshire peasant is
mainly Celtic). 'Giuseppe Cicolari! a pretty name. Da you carve figures
for Smith and Whatgood?'
'I am zair sculptor,' the Italian replied, proudly. 'I carve for zem.
I carve ze afflicted widow, in ze classical costume, who bends under ze
weeping willow above ze oorn containing ze ashes of her decease husband.
You have seen ze afflicted widow? Ha, I carve her. She is expensive. And
I carve ze basso-rilievo of Hope, gazing toward ze sky, in expectation
of ze glorious resurrection. I carve also busts; I carve ornamental
figures. Come and see me. You are a good workman. I will show you mai
carvings.'
Colin liked the Italian at first sight: there was a pride in his
calling about him which he hadn't yet seen in English workmen--a certain
consciousness of artistic worth that pleased and interested him. So the
next Saturday evening, when they left off work early, he went round to
see Cicolari. The Italian smiled again warmly, as soon as he saw the boy
coming. 'So you have come,' he said, in his slow English. 'Zat is well.
If you will be artist, you must watch ozzer artist. Ze art does not come
of himself, it is learnt.' And he took Colin round to see his works of
statuary.
There was one little statuette among the others, a small figure of
Bacchus, ordered from the clay by a Plymouth shipowner, that pleased
Colin's fancy especially. It wasn't remotely like the Thorwaldsen at
Wootton; that he felt intuitively; it was a mere clever, laughing, merry
figure, executed with some native facility, but with very little real
delicacy or depth of feeling. Still, Colin liked it, and singled it out
at once amongst all the mass of afflicted widows and weeping children
as a real genuine living human figure. The Italian was charmed at his
selection. 'Ah, yes,' he said; 'zat is good. You have choosed right.
Zat is ze best of ze collection. I wawrk at zat from life. It is from ze
model.' And he showed all his teeth again in his satisfaction.
Colin took a little of Cicolari's moist clay up in his hand and began
roughly moulding it into the general shape of the little Bacchus. He
did it almost without thinking of what he was doing, and talking all the
time, or listening to the Italian's constant babble; and Cicolari, with
a little disdainful smile playing round the corners of his full lips,
made no outward comment, but only waited, with a complacent sense of
superiority, to see what the English boy would make of his Bacchus.
Colin worked away at the familiar clay, and seemed to delight in the
sudden return to that plastic and responsive material. For the first
time since he had been at Begg's wood-carving works, it sudddenly struck
him that clay was an infinitely finer and more manageable medium
than that solid, soulless, intractable wood. Soon, he threw himself
unconsciously into the task of moulding, and worked away silently,
listening to Cicolari's brief curt criticisms of men and things, for
hour after hour. In the delight of finding himself once more expending
his energies upon his proper material (for who can doubt that Colin
Churchill was a born sculptor?) he forgot the time--nay, he forgot time
and space both, and saw and felt nothing on earth but the artistic joy
of beautiful workmanship. Cicolari stood by gossiping, but said never
a word about the boy's Bacchus. At first, indeed (though he had admired
Colin's wood-work), he expected to see a grotesque failure. Next, as
the work grew slowly under the boy's hands, he made up his mind that
he would produce a mere stiff, lifeless, wooden copy. But by-and-by, as
Colin added touch after touch with his quick deft fingers, the Italian's
contempt passed into surprise, and his surprise into wonder and
admiration. At last, when the boy had finished his rough sketch of the
head to his own satisfaction, Cicolari gasped a little, open-mouthed,
and then said slowly: 'You have wawrked in ze clay before, mai friend?'
Colin nodded. 'Yes,' he said, 'just to amuse myself, don't ee see? Only
just copyin the figures at the vicarage.'
The Italian put his head on one side, and then on another, and looked
critically at the copy of the Bacchus. Of course it was only a raw
adumbration, as yet, of the head and bust, but he saw quite enough to
know at a glance that it was the work of a born sculptor. The vicar had
half guessed as much in his dilettante hesitating way; but the workman,
who knew what modelling was, saw it indubitably at once in that moist
Bacchus. 'Mai friend,' he said decisively, through his closed teeth,
'you must not stop at ze wood-carving. You must go to Rome and be a
sculptor. Yes. To Rome. To Rome. You must go to Rome and be a sculptor.'
The man said it with just a tinge of jealousy in his tone, for he saw
that Colin Churchill could not only copy but could also improve upon his
Bacchus. Still, he said it so heartily and earnestly, that Colin, now
well awakened from his absorbing pursuit, laughed a boyish laugh of
mingled amusement and exultation. 'To Rome!' he cried gaily. 'To Rome!
Why, Mr. Cicolari, that's where all the pictures are, by Raffael and
Michael Angelo and them that I used to see at the vicarage. Rome! why
isn't that the capital of Italy?' For he put together naively the two
facts about Rome which he had yet gathered: the one from the vicar's
study, and the other from the meagre little geography book in use at the
Wootton national school.
'Ze capital of Italy!' cried the Italian contemptuously. 'Yes, mai
friend, it is ze capital of Italy. And it is somesing more zan zat. I
tell you, it is ze capital of art.'
Colin Churchill was old enough now to understand the meaning of those
words; and from that day onward, he never ceased to remember that the
goal of all his final endeavours must be to reach Rome, the capital of
art, and then learn to be a sculptor.