I suppose I would never have found the solution had it not been for
Ellice Valentine and her absurd mantel. The final arrangements were to
be made for the casts before my departure, and we went together to the
studio to complete them.
“At noon,” her note said. “I don’t want to meet him, and I want to study
the altar piece.”
There was nobody around, and we sauntered alone into the studio. The
group was complete now. The Mother stood below the cross, looking up,
and Ellice gazed at it for some time without speaking.
It was Anne.
I suppose nothing he will ever do, and he has done some big things
since, will be as truly great as that figure, buried to-day in a small
Lithuanian Church. Courage, anguish and love are epitomised in it; all
the suffering of all the motherhood of the world.
And it was Anne.
Ellice did not speak until we were outside again. Then she said:
“How terribly he loves her!”
I do not think she had reasoned it out then. She simply felt it. But
later on she explained it.
“He couldn’t have done it if he hadn’t loved her,” she said. “And he
couldn’t have done it if—everything had been happy between them. Don’t
you see?”
“You mean, he has to reach for a star?”
“Don’t you? Cynara was the dream of a lost love. This is the dream of a
lost motherhood. Probably he doesn’t know it himself, but it is true.”
But he did know it. It was that fact which brought about the tragedy.
Anne, it seems, went to the studio that evening to bring him home, for
the streets had turned icy. She saw the Madonna, and had a moment, I
gather, of sheer happiness. But he only stood near her, saying nothing
and brooding. And on the way home he had told her a man could build out
of the mud, if he had his gaze on the stars. He had built the Cynara out
of his mistress at the time, and now—this.
She went upstairs very quietly when they got home, and even laid out his
night things and turned down his bed. I can see her seeing that there
were matches and tobacco beside the bed. She had an idea, I suppose,
that what she meant to do would only touch the surface of his life. Her
being there or not being there had seemed to matter so little.
Then she got his revolver—he was still downstairs—and shot herself in
the chest. . . .
He was standing outside the door when I got there. They were keeping him
out. You see, he had never been in Anne’s room, and he knocked against
things and got in the way. And besides, he kept yelling at them to do
something, when they were doing all they could.
He refused to let me pass, although Anne had sent for me, and somehow or
other he had got hold of the revolver, and would not give it up. It took
me a good half hour to get him away from the door and downstairs, and
even then he kept hold of the revolver. If Anne died I knew he would
shoot himself, and I wasn’t at all sure he wouldn’t shoot me.
It was a nightmare. He insisted on talking—anything that welled to the
surface of his mind. He said the Italian at the studio was not an
Italian but a Levantine Jew, and that he wouldn’t keep the place warm.
From that he began to boast about the way he got about the streets, and
what he said to the people who offered to help him. His terrible pride
again. And all the time he was listening. Just listening.
He broke in once, however, on this monologue to ask me how I knew, and
why I had come.
“Did she send for you?”
“Yes. We were old friends, Sidney.”
“Ah, I know what she wants.” He turned his distorted face toward me.
“She wants you to promise to take care of me. I’ll see you in hell
first.”
After a time he began groping around the room, and at last he found a
small model of the Madonna for the altar piece. He stood holding it,
running his fingers lightly over it.
“I tried to keep her out of it,” he said. “I tried. But I couldn’t.”
He put the figure back, and then he dropped on his knees before it and
raised his face.
“Oh, holy mother of God,” he said. “Intervene for us. Forgive me and
save her. For without her there is nothing.”