|Five years is a long slice out of a young man's life, but the five
years that Colin Churchill spent with Cicolari in London were of a sort
that he need never have regretted; for though the work he learnt to
do in the Italian's little shop and studio in the Maryle-bone Road was
mainly self-taught, he found Cicolari always sympathetic and anxious to
help him, and he had such opportunities of study and improvement at the
British Museum, and the South Kensington, and the great houses in the
suburban counties, as he could never have obtained in the artless wilds
of his native west country. It was a grand day for Colin, the day when
he first entered the smoky galleries in Great Russell Street and feasted
his eyes on those magnificent Hellenic torsos, carved by the vivifying
chisel of Pheidias himself. Cicolari was an easy master: he had
an Italian's love of art for art's sake and he was proud of 'mai
Englishman,' as he used to call him; the boy whom he had himself
discovered in the midst of a profoundly inartistic race, and released
from the petty drudgery of an uncongenial vulgar calling. He felt a
genuine interest in Colin's success; so he allowed the boy as much time
as possible for visiting the places where he could see the finest works
of art in England, and helped him to see those which are usually locked
up in rich men's tasteless houses from the eyes of all who would most
appreciate them.
Colin's own taste and love for art, too, were daily developing. He
saw all that he could see, and he read about all that he couldn't see,
spending every penny of his spare money (after he had repaid poor little
Minna's nine shillings) on books about sculpture and painting; and
making frequent visits to the reading-room and galleries at the great
Museum. Now and then, too, when the trade in mourning widows was slack,
when busts were flat and statuettes far from lively, Cicolari would run
down into the country with him, and explore the artistic wonders of
the big houses. At Deepdene they could look at Thorwaldsen's Jason and
Canova's Venus: at Knole they gazed upon Vandycks, and Rey-nolds's, and
Constables, and Gainsboroughs; in London itself they had leave to visit
the priceless art collections at Stafford House, and half a dozen other
great private galleries. So Colin Churchill's mind expanded rapidly, in
the midst of the atmosphere it should naturally have breathed. Not books
alone, but the mighty works of the mightiest workers, were the documents
from which he spelt out slowly his own artistic education. Later on, men
who met Colin Churchill at Rome--men who had gone through the regular
dull classical round of our universities--were astonished to find that
the Dorsetshire peasant-sculptor, of whom they had heard so much, was
a widely cultivated and well-read man. They expected to see an inspired
boor wielding a sculptor's mallet in a rude labourer's hand: they
were surprised to meet a handsome young man, of delicate features and
finely-stored mind, who talked about Here and Aphrodite, and the
nymphs who came to visit the bound Prometheus, as if he had known them
personally and intimately all his life long in their own remote Hellenic
dwelling places.
And indeed, though the university where Colin Churchill took his degree
with honours was not one presided over by doctors in red hoods and
proctors in velvet sleeves, one may well doubt whether he did not
penetrate quite as deeply, after all, into the inmost recesses of
the great Hellenic genius as most men who have learnt to write iambic
trimeters from well-trained composition masters, with the most careful
avoidance of that ugly long syllable before the cretic in the two
last feet, to which the painstaking scholar attaches so much undue
importance. Do you think, my good Mr. Dean, or excellent Senior Censor,
that a man cannot learn just as much about the Athens of Pericles
from the Elgin Marbles as from a classical dictionary or a dog-eared
Thucydides? Do you suppose that to have worked up the first six Iliads
with a Liddell and Scott brings you in the end so very much nearer the
heart and soul of the primitive Achæans than to have studied with loving
care the vases in the British Museum, or even to have followed with a
sculptor's eye the exquisite imaginings of divine John Flaxman?
Why, where do you suppose Flaxman himself got his Homer from, except
from the very same source as poor, self-taught Colin Churchill--Mr.
Alexander Pope's correctly colourless and ingenious travesty? Do you
really believe there is no understanding the many-sided essentially
artistic Greek idiosyncrasy except through the medium of the twenty-four
written signs from alpha to omega? Colin Churchill didn't believe so,
at least: and who that has seen his Alcestis, or his Agamemnon and
Clytemnestra, or his Death of Antigone, can fail to admit that they
are in very truth the direct offshoots of the Hellas of Sophocles, and
Æschylus, and Pheidias?
All Cohn Churchill's reading was, in its way, sculpturesque. Of poetry,
he loved Milton better than Shakespeare. Shakespeare is the painter's
poet, Milton the sculptor's; and he wearied out his soul because he
could never rise in clay to his own evasive mental image of the Miltonic
Satan. He read Shelley, too, most Greek of Englishmen, and took more
than one idea for future statues from those statuesque tragedies and
poems. But best of all he loved Æschylus, whom he couldn't read in
the original, to be sure, but whom he followed through half a dozen
translations till he had read himself into the very inmost spirit of
the Agamemnon and the Persæ and the Prometheus. The man who has fed his
fancy on Æschylus, Milton, and Shelley, and his eyes on Michael Angelo,
Thorwaldsen, and Flaxman, is not, after all, wholly wanting in the
elements of the highest and purest culture.
Two years after Colin went to live at the little workshop in the
Marylebone Road, another person came to swell the population of
the great metropolis by a unit, and to correspondingly diminish the
dwindling account at Wootton Mandeville. Minna Wroe was now sixteen, and
for a year past she had been living out at service as kitchen-maid at
the village doctor's. But Minna was an ambitious small body, and had
a soul above dish-cloths. So she kept the precious nine shillings that
Colin had returned to her well hoarded in her own little purse, and
added to them from time to time whatever sums she could manage to save
from her small wages--for wages are low in Dorsetshire, and white caps
cost money both for the buying and washing, you may be certain. When
her sixteenth birthday had fairly come and gone Minna gave notice to
her mistress, and at the end of her month started off to London, like so
many other young people of both sexes, to seek her fortune.
'Dear Colin,' she wrote to him a day or two before from the doctor's at
Wootton, 'I am coming up to London to look out for a situation on
Monday next, and I should be very glad if you could meet me at Paddinton
Station at 6.30. I have not got a situation but I hope soon to get one
there is lots to be had in London and has you are their I should like
to be in London. Please dear Cohn come to meet me as I am going to Mrs.
Woods of Wootton till I get a situation to lodge with love from all so
no more at present from your old Friend, Minna.'
Colin took the letter from the postman, as he was working at the clay
of a little bas-relief for a mural tablet, and read it over twice to
himself with very mingled and uncertain feelings. On the first reading
he felt only a glow of pleasure to think that little Minna, his
old playmate, would now be within easy reach of him. Cohn had never
considered himself exactly in love with Minna (he was only eighteen),
and he had even indulged (since the sad truth must out) in a passing
flirtation with the young lady at the open greengrocer's shop just
round the corner; but he was very fond of Minna for all that, and in an
indefinite way he had always felt as if she really belonged to him far
more than anybody else did. So his first feeling was one of unmixed
pleasure at the prospect of having her to live so near him. On the
second reading, however, it did strike even Colin, who was only just
beginning his own self-education in literary matters, that the letter
might have been better spelt and worded and punctuated. He had been
rising-in the social scale so gradually that, for the first time in his
life, he then felt as if Minna were just one single level below him,
intellectually and educationally.
He pocketed the letter with a slight sigh, and went on moulding the
drapery of St. Mary Magdalene, after the design from a fresco in St.
John Port Lateran. Would Minna care at all about Flaxman, he wondered to
himself mutely; would she interest herself in that admirable replica
by Bartolini; would she understand his torso of Theseus, or his copy
in clay of the Florentine Boar, or his rough sketch for a Cephalus and
Aurora? Or would she be merely a London housemaid, just like all the
girls he saw of a morning cleaning the front door-steps in Harley
Street, and stopping to bandy vulgar chaff with the postman, and the
newspaper boy, and the young policeman? Two years had made a great deal
of difference, no doubt, to both of them; and Cohn wondered vaguely in
his own soul what Minna would think of him now, and what he would think
of Minna.
On Monday, he was down at the station true to time, and waiting for the
arrival of the 6.30 from Dorchester. As it drew up at the platform,
he moved quickly along the third-class carriages, on the look-out for
anybody who might answer to the memory of his little Minna. Presently
he saw her jump lightly, as of old, from the carriage--a mignonne little
figure, with a dark, round, merry face, and piercing black eyes as
bright as diamonds. He ran up to greet her with boyish awkwardness and
bashful timidity. 'Why, Minna,' he cried, 'you've grown into such a
woman that I'm afraid to kiss you; but I'm very glad indeed to see you.'
Minna drew herself up so as to look as tall as possible, and answered
with dignity:
'I should hope, Colin, you wouldn't want to kiss me in any case here in
the station. It was very kind of you to come and meet me.'
Colin observed at once that she spoke with a good accent, and that
her manner was, if anything, decidedly less embarrassed than his own.
Indeed, as a rule, the young men of the working classes, no matter how
much intellectual or artistic power they may possess, are far more shy,
gauche, and awkward than the young women of the same class, who usually
show instinctively a great deal of natural refinement of manner. He was
immediately not a little reassured as to Minna's present attainments.
'I want to go to Mrs. Wood's,' Minna said, as calmly as if she had been
accustomed to Paddington Station all her lifetime; 'and I've got two
boxes; how ought I to get there?'
'Where is Mrs. Wood's?' Colin asked.
'At Dean Street, Marylebone.'
'Why, that's quite close to our place,' Colin cried. 'Are they big
boxes? I could carry 'em, maybe.'
'No, you couldn't carry them, Colin. Why, what nonsense. It wouldn't be
respectable.'
Colin laughed. 'I should have done it at Wootton, anyhow, Minna,' he
answered; 'and a working stone-cutter needn't be ashamed of anything in
the way of work, surely.'
'But a sculptor's got to keep up his position,' Minna put in firmly.
Colin smiled again. Already he had a nascent idea in his own head that
even a sculptor could not bemean himself greatly by carrying a wooden
box through the streets of London for a lady--he was getting to believe
in the dignity of labour--but he didn't insist upon this point with
Minna; for, young as he was, he had a notion even then that the gospel
for men isn't always at the same time the gospel for women. Even a good
woman would feel much less compunction against many serious crimes than
against trundling a wheelbarrow full of clean clothes up Begent Street
of an afternoon in the height of the season.
So Cohn was for calling a porter with a truck; but even that modified
measure of conveyance did not wholly suit Minna's aristocratic fancy.
'Are they things cabs, Cohn?' she asked quietly.
'_Those_ things are,' Cohn answered with a significant emphasis. Minna
blushed a trifle.
'Oh, those things,' she repeated slowly; 'then I'll have one.' And in
two minutes more, Cohn, for the first time in his life, found himself
actually driving along the public streets in the inside of a hansom.
Why, you imperious, extravagant little Minna, where on earth are
you going to find money for such expenses as these in our toilsome,
under-paid, workyday London?
When they reached Mrs. Wood's door, Cohn, feeling that he must rise to
the situation, pulled out his purse to pay for the hansom, but Minna
waved him aside with a dignified air of authority. 'No no,' she said,
'that won't do; take my purse, Cohn. I don't know how much to pay him,
and like enough he'd cheat me; but you know the ways in London.'
Colin took the purse, and opened it. The first compartment he opened
contained some silver, wrapped up in a scrap of tissue paper. Colin
undid the paper and took out a shilling, which he was going to hand the
cabman, when Minna laid her hand upon his arm and suddenly checked him.
'No, no,' she said, 'not that, Colin. From the other side, please, will
you?'
Colin looked at the contents of the little paper once more, and rapidly
counted it. It was nine shillings. He caught Minna's eye at the moment,
and Minna coloured crimson. Then Cohn knew at once what those nine
shillings were, and why they were separately wrapped in tissue paper.
He paid the cabman, from the other half, and put the boxes inside Mrs.
Wood's door way. 'And now may I kiss you, Minna?' he asked, in the dark
passage.
'If you like, Colin,' Minna answered, turning up her full red lips and
round face with child-like innocence, Colin Churchill kissed her: and
when he had kissed her once, he waited a minute, and then he took her
plump little face between his own two hands and kissed her rather harder
a second time. Minna's face tingled a little, but she said nothing.
The very next morning Minna came round, by Colin's invitation, to
Cicolari's workshop. Colin was busy at work moulding, and Minna cast
her eye around lightly as she entered on all the busts and plaster casts
that filled the room. She advanced to meet him as if she expected to be
kissed, so Colin kissed her. Then, with a rapid glance round the room,
her eye rested at last upon the Cephalus and Aurora, and she went
straight over to look at it with wondering eyes. 'Oh, Colin,' she cried,
did you do that? What a lovely image!'
Colin was pleased and flattered at once. 'You like it, Minna?' he said.
'You really like it?'
Minna glanced carefully round the room once more with her keen black
eyes, and after scanning every one of the plaster casts and unfinished
busts in a comprehensive survey, answered unhesitatingly: 'I like it
best of everything in the room, Colin, except the image of the man with
the plate over yonder.'
Colin smiled a smile of triumph. Minna was not wholly lacking in taste,
certainly; for the Cephalus was the best of his compositions, and the
man with the plate was a plaster copy of the Discobolus. 'You'll do,
Minna,' he said, patting her little black head with his cleanest hand
(to the imminent danger of the small hat with the red rose in it).
'You'll do yet, with a little coaching.'
Then Colin took her round the studio, as Cicolari ambitiously called it,
and explained everything to her, and showed her plates of the Venus
of Milo, and the Apollo Belvedere, and the Laocoon, and the Niobe, and
several other ladies and gentlemen with very long names and no clothes
to speak of, till poor Minna began at last to be quite appalled at the
depth of his learning and quite frightened at her own unquestioning
countrified ignorance. For as yet Minna had no idea that there was
anything much to learn in the world except reading and writing, and the
art of cookery, and the proper use of the English language. But when she
heard Colin chattering away so glibly to her about the age of Pheidias,
and the age of the Decadence, and the sculptors of the Renaissance,
and the absolute necessity of going to Rome, she began to conceive that
perhaps Colin in his own heart might imagine she wasn't now good enough
for him; which was a point of view on the subject that had never before
struck the Dorsetshire fisherman's pretty black-eyed little daughter.
By-and-by, Colin began to talk of herself and her prospects; and to ask
whether she was going to put herself down at a registry office; and last
of all to allude delicately to the matter of the misspelt letter. 'You
know, Minna,' he said apologetically, feeling his boyish awkwardness far
more than ever, 'I've tried a lot to improve myself at Exeter, and still
more since I came to London. I've read a great deal, and worked very
hard, and now I think I'm beginning to get on, and know something, not
only about art, but about books as well. Now, I know you won't mind my
telling you, but that letter wasn't all spelt right, or stopped right.
You ought to be very particular, you know, about the stopping and the
spelling.'
Before he could say any more, Minna looked full in his face and stopped
him short immediately. 'Colin,' she said, 'don't say another 'word about
it. I know what you mean, and I'm going to attend to it. I never felt it
in my life till I came here this morning; but I feel it now, and I shall
take care to alter it.' She was a determined little body was Minna; and
as she said those words, she looked so thoroughly as if she meant them
that Colin dropped the subject at once and never spoke to her again
about it.
Just at that moment two customers came to speak to Colin about a
statuette he was working at for them. It was an old gentleman and a
grand young lady. Minna stood aside while they talked, and pretended
to be looking at Cephalus and Aurora with a critical eye, but she was
really listening with all her ears to the conversation between Colin
and the grand young lady. She was a very grand young lady, indeed,
who talked very fine, and drawled her vowels, and clipped her r's, and
mangled the English language hideously, and gave other indubitable signs
of the very best and highest breeding: and Minna noticed almost with
dismay that she called Colin 'Mr. Churchill,' and seemed to defer to
all his opinions about curves and contours and attitudes. 'You have such
lovely taste, you know, Mr. Churchill,' the grand young lady said; 'and
we want this copy to be as good as you can make it, because it's for a
very particular friend of ours, who admired the original so much at Rome
last winter.'
Minna listened in awe and trembling, and felt in her heart just a faint
twinge of feminine jealousy to think that even such a grand young lady
should speak so flattering like to our Colin.
'And there's the Cephalus, Papa,' the grand young lady went on. 'Isn't
it beautiful? I do hope some day, Mr. Churchill, you'll get a commission
for it in marble. If I were rich enough, I'd commission it myself, for I
positively doat upon it. However, somebody's sure to buy it some time or
other, so it's no use people like me longing to have it.'
Minna's heart rose, choking, into her mouth, as she stood there flushed
and silent.
When the grand young lady and her papa were gone, Minna said good-bye a
little hastily to Colin, and shrank back, crying: 'No, no, Colin,' when
he tried to kiss her. Then she ran in a hurry to Mrs. Wood's in Dean
Street. But though she was in a great haste to get home (for her bright
little eyes had tears swimming in them), she stopped boldly at a small
bookseller's shop on the way, and invested two whole shillings of her
little hoard in a valuable work bearing on its cover the title, 'The
Polite Correspondent's Complete Manual of Letter Writing.' 'He shall
never kiss me again,' she said to herself firmly, 'until I can feel that
I've made myself in every way thoroughly fit for him.'
It wasn't a very exalted model of literary composition, that Complete
Manual of Letter Writing, but at least its spelling and punctuation were
immaculate; and for many months to come after she had secured her place
as parlour-maid in an eminently creditable family in Regent's Park,
Minna sat herself down in her own bedroom every evening, when work
was over, and deliberately endeavoured to perfect herself in those two
elementary accomplishments by the use of the Polite Correspondent's
unconscious guide, philosopher, and friend. First of all she read a
whole letter over carefully, observing every stop and every spelling;
then she copied it out entire, word for word, as well as she could
recollect it, entirely from memory; and finally she corrected her
written copy by the printed version in the Complete Manual, until
she could transcribe every letter in the entire volume with perfect
accuracy. It wasn't a very great educational effort, perhaps, from the
point of view of advanced culture; but to Minna Wroe it was a beginning
in self-improvement, and in these matters above all others the first
step is everything.
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