Does any one, I wonder, sit as often as I do, considering how the
affairs of life would have worked out had they done this at a given
time? Or not done that? All those milestones on the road, and all those
little paths that lead to right and left—do all of them lead off Dover?
Are we free agents, or simply the slaves of some unknown inevitable law?
Some happy through it, some wretched, and most of us, God knows, not one
or the other. Puppets or kings?
I went. I remember stopping on the way out in the shrouded drawing room
of my house to look at the mantel, and remembering that it was Sidney
who had urged me to buy it and ship it back.
“It’s good,” he had said, running his long sculptor’s fingers over the
relief. “It’s damned good, Maurice. The joke of it is, you’ll never know
how good it is.”
And now it was to be copied—in cement. Shades of Sidney Bush, who
loathed imitation, and had refused to eat his dinner one night because
the hostess had garnished the wild duck with lilies cut out of turnips.
And very well cut, it had seemed to me. Sidney, who had loved almost
sensuously the feel of marble under the hand, and preferred the patina
of old rubbed satinwood to the gloss of a woman’s hair.
Cement!
But I concealed all this from Ellice Valentine, and entered as well as I
could into her enthusiasm. When my task was completed—I was, I found,
to secure a reduction in the cost—we were asked if we cared to inspect
the studio. It surprised me, rather. Cement had in my mind been a matter
of noisy crushing machines on a city street, and yet here was an
enormous and lofty room, where quiet workmen were doing deft things with
their hands, and where, stretching almost across one end was a heroic
and partially completed altar piece, the Crucifixion.