(From _The Ladies' Home Journal_)
1922
There was a maroon wall paper in the dining-room, abundantly decorated
with sweeping curves unlike any known kind of vegetation. There were
amber silk sashes to the Nottingham lace curtains at the huge bow
window and an amber winding sheet was wrapped about the terra cotta pot
in which a tired aspidistra bore forth a yearly leaf. Upon the Brussels
carpet was a massive mahogany dining table, and facing the window a
Georgian chiffonier, brass railed and surmounted by a convex mirror.
The mantlepiece was draped in red serge, ball fringed. There were
bronzes upon it and a marble clock, while above was an overmantel,
columned and bemirrored, upon the shelves of which reposed sorrowful
examples of Doulton ware and a pair of wrought-iron candlesticks. It
was a room divorced from all sense of youth and live beings, sunless,
grave, unlovely; an arid room that bore to the nostrils the taint and
humour of the tomb.
From somewhere near the Edgware Road came the clot-clot of a late
four-wheeler and the shake and rumble of an underground train. The
curtains had been discreetly drawn, the gas turned off at the metre and
an hour had passed since the creaking of the old lady's shoes and the
jingle of the plate basket ascending the stairs had died away. A dim
light from the street lamp outside percolated through the blinds and
faintly illuminated the frame and canvas of a large picture hanging
opposite the mantlepiece.
It was a beautiful picture, a piece of perfect painting--three figures
in a simple curve of rocks, lit as it were by an afterglow of sunset.
In the centre was a little Madonna draped in blue and gold. Her elbows
were tight to her sides and her upturned palms with their tender
curving fingers were empty. It seemed almost as though they cradled
some one who was not there. Her mouth was pulled down at the corners,
as is a child's at the edge of tears, and in her eyes was a questing
and bewildered look. To her right, leaning upon a slender staff, was
the figure of St. John the Baptist, and upon his face also perplexity
was written. A trick brushwork had given to his eyes a changing
direction whereby at a certain angle you would say he was looking at
the Madonna, and again that he was following the direction of her gaze
out into unknown places. His lips were shaped to the utterance of such
a word as "why" or "where." It seemed as though the two were in a
partnership of sorrow or of search.
The third figure was of Saint Anne, standing a little behind and
looking upward. A strange composition, oddly incomplete, giving an
impression of sadness, of unrest and of loss irredeemable.
A clock was chiming the parts of an hour when the little Madonna
stepped from the frame and tiptoed across the room. To her own
reflection in the mirror opposite she shook her head in a sorrowful
negative. She peeped into a cupboard and behind the draperies of the
mantlepiece, but there was nothing there. She paused before an
engraving of Raphael's Holy Family, murmured "Happy Lady" and passed
on.
On a small davenport table next to one of the two inexorable armchairs
she found the old lady's workbasket. That was a great piece of good
fortune, since nightly it was locked away with the tea, the stamps and
other temptations that might persuade a soul to steal should
opportunity allow.
In the many years of her dwelling in the house, but three times only
had she found it unguarded. There are glorious possibilities in a
workbasket. Once she had found wool there, not carded, but a hank of
it, soft, white and most delicate to touch. To handle it had given her
the queerest sensation. She had shut her eyes, and it had seemed to
weave itself into the daintiest garments--very small, you understand,
and with sleeves no longer than a middle finger. But it was a silly
imagining, for not many days afterward, looking down from the canvas,
she had seen the old lady, with her clicking ivory needles, knit the
wool into an ugly pair of bed socks.
Quite a while she played in the basket that night. She liked the little
pearl buttons in the pill box, and the safety pins were nice too. Kind
and trustworthy pins they were to hide their points beneath smooth
round shields. She felt it would be good to take some of them back in
one of her empty hands and hide them in that little crevice of rock
under the juniper tree.
It was the banging of a front door opposite and the sound of running
footsteps that moved her to the window. She drew back the curtain and
peeped out across the way. There were lights in an upstairs window and
a shadow kept crossing and recrossing the blind. It was a nice shadow
and wore a head-dress like her own except that it was more sticky out.
The hall, too, showed a light, and, looking up the street, she saw a
maidservant, running very fast, disappear round the corner. After that
there was silence for a long time. In the street no one moved; it was
deserted, empty as the little Madonna's arms, and dark. A fine rain was
falling, and there were no stars. The sound of distant traffic had died
away. The last underground train had drilled its way through sulphurous
tunnels to the sheds where engines sleep.
She could not tell what kept her waiting at the window; perhaps it was
the moving shadow on the blind, perhaps a prescience, a sense of
happenings near at hand, wonderful yet frightening. A thousand other
times she had looked across the street in the dead of night, only to
shake her head and steal back sorrowfully to her canvas. But to-night
it was different; there was a feeling of promise, as though the
question that she ever asked with her eyes might at last be given an
answer.
The front door opened a second time, and a man came out and, though he
was quite young, he looked older than the world. He was shaking and
very white; his hair was disordered and straggled across his brow. He
wore no collar, but held the lapels of his coat across his throat with
trembling fingers. Fearfully he looked up the street where the maid had
gone, then stamped his foot on the paving stones and with his free hand
rubbed his forehead and beat it with his knuckles.
"Oh, will he never come!" she heard him cry, and the words echoed
through her as though they had been her own. If it was a prayer he had
uttered it was swiftly answered; for at the moment the maid and a
bearded man came round the corner at a fast walk. The bearded man had a
kind face and broad shoulders.
She did not hear what passed between them; but the bearded man seemed
confident and comfortable and compelling, and presently he and the maid
went into the house, while the other man leaned against the railings
and stared out before him at a tiny star which had appeared in a crack
between the driven clouds. Lonely and afraid he looked, and strangely
like herself. The misery of him drew her irresistibly. Always before,
she had shunned the people of every day, having no understanding of
their pleasures or sorrows, seeing little meaning in their lives or
deaths. But here was a mortal who was different, who was magnetic, and,
almost without realising, she passed out of the house, crossed the road
and stood before him, the corners of her cloak draped across her arms.
He did not seem aware of her at once, and even when she spoke to him in
Italian of the Renaissance he did not hear. So she spoke again and this
time in English: "What is it?"
He started, rubbed his eyes, blinked at her and answered: "Hullo, who
are you?"
"What is it?" she repeated. "Have you lost something?"
"Don't--don't!" he pleaded. "Don't even suggest such a thing, little
lady."
"I won't. I only thought--and you looked so sad."
"Be all right directly. It's the waiting. Kind of you to stop and speak
to me." His eyes strayed over the gold and blue of her cloak. "Been to
a theatre?" he asked.
She shook her head and looked up at him with a child's perplexity.
"A play?" he amended.
"I've no one to play with," she answered simply. "See!" And she held
out her empty arms.
"What's wrong then?"
"I don't know." She seemed to dwell on the last word. "I only
thought--perhaps you could tell me."
"Tell you what?"
"Help me to find it perhaps. It seemed as if you were looking, too;
that's why I came."
"Looking?" he repeated. "I'm waiting; that's all."
"Me too. But it's such a long time, and I get no nearer."
"Nearer to what?"
"Finding."
"Something you lost?"
"I think so. Must be. I'll go back now."
He put out a hand to stop her. "Listen," he said. "It'll be hours
before I shall know. I'm frightened to spend them alone. Be a friend,
little lady, and bear me company. 'Tisn't fair to ask, but if you could
stay a little."
"I'll stay," she said.
"And will you talk to me?"
"Yes."
"Tell me a story then--just as if I were a kid, a child. A man isn't
much more these times."
At the word "child" her arms went out to him, but dropped to her sides
again as he said "a man."
"Come under the porch, where the rain won't spoil your pretty silk.
That's better. Now tell away."
They sat side by side, and she began to talk. He must have been
listening for other sounds, or surely he would have been bewildered at
the very beginning of what she told.
"It's hard to remember when one was alive, but I used to be--yes,
hundreds of years ago. I lived--can't remember very well; there was a
high wall all around, and a tower and a bell that rang for prayers--and
long, long passages where we walked up and down to tell our beads.
Outside were mountains with snow caps like the heads of the sisters,
and it was cold as snow within, cold and pure as snow. I was sixteen
years old and very unhappy. We did not know how to smile; that I learnt
later and have forgotten since. There was the skull of a dead man upon
the table where we sat to eat, that we might never forget to what
favour we must come. There were no pretty rooms in that house."
"What would you call a pretty room?" he asked, for the last sentence
was the first of which he was aware.
"I don't know," she answered. "I think a room with little beds, and
wooden bars across the window, and a high fender would be a pretty
room."
"We have been busy making such a room as that," he said. "There's a
wall paper with pigs and chickens and huntsmen on it. But go on."
"There were iron bars to the window of my cell. He was very strong and
tore them out with his hands as he stood up on the saddle of his horse.
We rode into Florence as dawn broke, and the sun was an angry red;
while we rode his arm was around me and my head upon his shoulder. He
spoke in my ear and his voice trembled for love of me. We had thrown
away the raiment of the sisterhood to which I had belonged, and as I
lay across the saddle I was wrapped in a cloak as crimson as the sun."
"Been reading Tennyson, little lady?" asked the man.
She did not understand, and went on: "It was a palace to which he
brought me, bright with gold, mosaic and fine hangings that dazzled my
eyes after the grey they had been used to look upon. There were many
servants and richly clad friends, who frightened me with their laughter
and the boldness of their looks. On his shoulder he bore me into the
great dining hall, where they sat awaiting us, and one and all they
rose to their feet, leaping upon stools and tables with uplifted
goblets and shouting toasts.
"The noise was greater than any I had heard before and set my heart
a-beating like the clapper of the convent bell. But one only stayed in
his chair, and his looks were heavy with anger. At him the rest pointed
fingers and called on him derisively to pay the wager and be glad.
Whereat he tugged from his belt a bag of gold which he flung at us as
though with the will to injure. But he who held me caught the bag in
his free hand, broke the sealed cord at the neck of it and scattered
the coins in a golden rain among the servants.
"After this, he set me by his side at the board, gave me drink from a
brimming goblet and quails cooked in honey from wild bees and silver
dishes of nectarines and passion fruit. And presently by twos and
threes the guests departed, singing and reeling as they went, and he
and I were left alone. Alone," she repeated shuddering.
"Did you hear anything?" said the young man, raising his head. "A cry,
a little cry? No? I can hear footsteps moving up and down. Doctors'
boots always creak. There! Listen! It was nothing. What were you
saying?"
"Twice in the months that followed I tried to run away, to return to
the convent; but the servants whom I had counted my friends deceived
me, and I was brought back to a beating, brought back strapped to his
stirrup iron as I might have been a Nubian slave. Long since he had
ceased loving me; that lasted such a little while. He called me
Madonna, as though it were a term of shame, and cursed me for coldness
and my nunnery ways. He was only happy when he read in my face the fear
I held him in. And I was always afraid!"
"Afraid!" echoed the man. "Until to-night I was never afraid."
"And then my baby came, and I was not afraid any more, but contented
all through. I carried him always in my arms by day and night. So pink
and little and with a smile that warmed like sunshine." She paused and
added plaintively: "It's hard to remember when one was alive. My hands,
my arms have forgotten the feel of him."
"I wish," said the man, "I'd had a second opinion. It might have
frightened her though. Oh, heaven, how much longer! Don't mind me,
little lady. You're helping no end. You were speaking of baby. Yes!"
"He killed my baby," said the little Madonna, "because he had killed my
fear of him. Then being done with me, he threw me out in the streets
alone. I thought to end it that night, because my arms were empty and
nothing could be good again. But I could not believe the baby was
indeed gone; I thought if I searched I would find him in the course of
time. Therefore I searched the city from end to end and spoke with
mothers and peeped into nurseries and knocked at many doors. And one
day a door was opened by a man with great eyes and bronze hair swept
back from his brow--a good man. He wore a loose smock over his doublet,
smeared with many colours, and in his left hand he held a palette and
brushes. When he saw me he fell back a pace and his mouth opened.
'Mother of mercy!' he breathed. 'A real Madonna at last!' His name was
Andrea del Sarto, and he was a painter."
"I am a painter, too," said the young man, forgetting his absorption at
the mention of a great name.
"He brought me into his room, which was bright with windows and a fire.
He bade me tell my story, and while I spoke never once did his eyes
desert me. When I had ended he rose and walked up and down. Then he
took from a chest a cloak of blue and gold and draped it round me.
'Stand upon that throne, Madonna,' said he, 'and I will put an infant
in your arms that shall live down all the ages.' And he painted me. So
with the child at my breast, I myself had passed into the picture and
found contentment there.
"When it was finished the great ones of many cities came to look upon
it, and the story of how I came to be painted went from mouth to mouth.
Among those who were there was he who had taken me from the nunnery,
and, seeing me in perfect happiness, a fury was born in him.
"I was hidden behind a hanging and watched the black anger rising up
and knotting his brow into ugly lines. He bought the canvas, and his
servants carried it away. But since the child was in my arms for all
time it mattered little to me.
"Then one night two men came to my lodging and without question took me
across the city and led me into the palace where I had lived with him.
And he came forward to meet me in the great hall. There was a mocking
smile on his lips and he pointed to a wall upon which a curtain was
hanging.
"'I took away that child,' he said, 'because you valued it higher than
the love of man. Look now.' At a gesture a servant threw back the
hanging and revealed the picture. The babe was gone and my arms crooked
to cradle him were empty with the palms upturned.
"I died then--to the sound of his laughter I died, and, looking down
from the canvas, I watched them carry me away. And long into the night
the man who twice had robbed me of my child sat at the long table
staring out before him, drinking great draughts and sometimes beating
the boards with his bare fists. As dawn broke he clapped his hands and
a servant entered. He pointed at me with a shaking hand. 'Take it
away,' he cried. 'To a cellar, and let masons brick up the door.' He
was weeping as they carried me down to the dark beneath the house."
"What a strange being you are!" said the young man. "You speak as
though these were real memories. What happened to the picture then?"
"I lay in the dark for so long--hundreds of years, I think--and there
was nowhere I might look. Afterward I was found and packed in a box and
presently put upon the wall in the sad room, where everything is so old
that I shall not find him there. This is the furthest I have dared to
look. Help me find him, please! Won't you help me find him?"
"Why, little lady," he answered soothingly, "how shall I help? That's a
woman's burden that heaven isn't merciful enough to let a man share."
He stopped abruptly and threw up his head. "Did you hear that--there?"
Through the still, early morning air came a faint, reedy cry.
The young man was upon his feet, fiercely fitting a key into the lock.
The little Madonna had risen, too, and her eyes were luminous, like
glowworms in the dark.
"He's calling me," she cried. "He's calling."
"Mine," said the young man.
She turned to follow, but the door closed between them.
* * * * *
To the firm of Messrs. Ridgewell, Ridgewell, Hitchcock and Plum was
given the task of disposing of the furniture and effects of the late
Sabina Prestwich, spinster, of 22a Cambridge Avenue, Hyde Park, W.
As Mr. Ridgewell, junior, remarked to Mr. Plum while engaged in
compiling the sale list and supplying appropriate encomiums to describe
an upright grand by Rubenthal, Berlin: "Victorian muck! Lucky if we
clean up two-fifty on the lot."
Mr. Plum was disposed to agree. "Though I must say," he added, "it
wouldn't surprise me if that picture was worth a bit. Half a mind to
let old Kineagie have a squint at it."
"Please yourself," responded Mr. Ridgewell, junior, "but to my mind
it's ten guineas for nix."
It was the chance discovery of an old document amongst a litter of
receipts and papers that persuaded them to engage an expert opinion.
The document stated that the picture had been discovered bricked up in
a Florentine cellar some fifty years before and had been successfully
smuggled out of Italy. But the man who found it died, and it passed
with a few other unvalued possessions to Sabina Prestwich, now
deceased.
The result of Eden Kineagie's visit to the house in Cambridge Avenue
was the immediate transference of the canvas to Sotheby's Sale Rooms, a
concerted rush on the part of every European and American connoisseur,
a threatening letter from the Italian Foreign Office, some extravagant
bidding and the ultimate purchase of the picture for the nation, after
a heated debate on the part of twenty-two Royal Academicians and five
painters of the new school, who would have accepted death rather than
the letters; R.A., after their names. Extensive correspondence appeared
in the leading papers; persons wrote expressing the opinion that the
picture had never been painted by Del Sarto, that it was the finest
example of his work, that the price paid was a further example of
government waste, and that the money would have been better employed
repairing the main road between Croydon Town Hall and Sydenham High
Street, the condition of which constituted a menace to motor-cyclists.
For nearly ten days scarcely a single publication appeared that failed
to reproduce a comment or criticism upon the subject; but, strangely
enough, no single leader, writer or casual contributor remarked upon
the oddness of the composition or the absence of the Infant from the
Madonna's arms. In the course of time--that is to say, on the eleventh
day--the matter passed from the public mind, a circumstance explainable
perhaps by the decent interment of the canvas in the National Gallery,
where it affected no one save those mysterious folk who look at
pictures for their pleasure and the umbrellaless refugee who is driven
to take shelter from the fierceness of storms.
The little Madonna was placed upon a south wall, whence she could look
out upon a brave company. And sometimes people would pause to gaze at
her and then shake their heads. And once a girl said, "How sad she
looks! I wonder why." And once a little old lady with industrious hands
set up an easel before her and squeezed little twists of colour upon a
palette, then thought a long time and pursed her lips, and puzzled her
brow and finally murmured, "I could never copy it. It's so--so
changing." And she, too, went away.
The little Madonna did not dare to step from her frame at night, for
other mothers were at hand cradling their babes and the sound of her
footfalls might have wakened them. But it was hard to stay still and
alone in that happy nursery. She could see through an archway to the
right a picture Rubens had painted, and it was all aglow with babies
like roses clustered at a porch--fat, dimpled babies who rolled and
laughed in aërial garlands. It would have been nice to pick one and
carry it back with her. Yet perhaps they were not really mothers'
children, but sprites and joys that had not learned the way to nestle.
Had it been otherwise surely the very call of her spirit must have
brought one leaping to her arms.
And then one day came a man and girl, who stopped before her. The girl
was half child, half woman, and the man grey and bearded, but with
brave blue eyes. It was seventeen years since the night she had stolen
across the way and talked with this man in his hour of terror, but time
did not cloud the little Madonna's memory with the dust of
forgetfulness.
"That's the new Del Sarto," said the girl, who was reading from a small
blue book. "See, daddy?"
Then the man turned and looked at her, fell back a step, came forward
again, passed a hand across his mouth and gasped. "What is it?" asked
the girl.
He did not answer at once, then: "The night you were born----" he said.
"I'm certain.... It's--it's Del Sarto too! And the poor empty arms.
Just how she looked, and I closed the door on her."
"Daddy, what are you saying?" There was a frightened tone in the girl's
voice.
"It's all right, dear, don't mind me. I must find the keeper of the
gallery. Poor little lady! Run back home, tell your mother I may be
late."
"But, daddy----"
"There are more things in heaven and earth," he began, but did not
finish. It seemed as though the Madonna's eyes were pleading to him,
and it seemed as if he could still hear her say, "Help me find him,
please!"
He told his story to the Committee of the National Gallery and, to do
them credit, it was received with the utmost courtesy.
They did not require him to leave them while their decision was made.
This was arrived at by a mere exchange of glances, a nod answered by a
tilt of the head, a wave of the hand, a kindly smile; and the thing was
done.
As the chairman remarked: "We must not forget that this gentleman was
living at the time opposite to the house in which the picture was
hanging, and it is possible that a light had been left burning in the
room that contained it.
"Those of us who are fathers--and I regret for my own part that I
cannot claim the distinction--will bear me out that the condition of a
man's mind during the painful period of waiting for news as to his
wife's progress is apt to depart from the normal and make room for
imaginings that in saner moments he must dismiss as absurd. There has
been a great deal of discussion and not a little criticism on the part
of the public as to the committee's wisdom in purchasing this picture,
and I am confident you will all agree with me that we could be
responsible for no greater folly than to work upon the canvas with
various removers on the bare hypothesis, unsupported by surface
suggestion, that the Madonna's arms actually contain a child painted in
the first intention. For my own part, I am well assured that at no
period of its being has the picture been tampered with, and it is a
matter of no small surprise to me, sir, that an artist of your
undoubted quality and achievement should hold a contrary opinion. We
are, greatly obliged for the courtesy of your visit and trust that you
will feel after this liberal discussion that your conscience is free
from further responsibility in the matter. Good-day."
That was the end of the interview. Once again the door was slammed in
the little Madonna's face.
That night the man told his wife all about it. "So you see," he
concluded, "there is nothing more I can do."
But she lay awake and puzzled and yearned long after he had fallen
asleep. And once she rose and peeped into the room that used to be the
nursery. It was a changed room now, for the child had grown up, and
where once pigs and chickens and huntsmen had jostled in happy,
farmyard disorder upon the walls, now there were likenesses of Owen
Nares and Henry Ainley, obligingly autographed.
But for her the spirit prevailed, the kindly bars still ribbed the
windows and the sense of sleeping children still haunted the air.
And she it was who told the man what he must do; and although it scared
him a great deal he agreed, for in the end all good husbands obey their
wives.
It felt very eerie to be alone in the National Gallery in the dead of
the night with a tiny electric lamp in one's buttonhole and a sponge of
alcohol and turpentine in one's hand. While he worked the little
Madonna's eyes rested upon him and it could hardly have been mere fancy
that made him believe they were full of gratitude and trust. At the end
of an hour the outline of a child, faint and misty, appeared in her
arms, its head, circled by a tiny white halo, snuggling against the
curve of her little breast.
Then the man stepped back and gave a shout of joy and, remembering the
words the painter had used, he cried out, "I will put an infant in your
arms that shall live down all the ages."
He had thought perhaps there would come an answering gladness from the
Madonna herself and looked into her face to find it. And truly enough
it was there. Her eyes, which for centuries had looked questingly forth
from the canvas, now drooped and rested upon the baby. Her mouth, so
sadly downturned at the corners, had sweetened to a smile of perfect
and serene content.
But the men will not believe he washed away the sadness of her looks
with alcohol and turpentine. "I did not touch the head. I am certain I
did not," he repeated.
"Then how can you explain----"
"Oh, heaven!" he answered. "Put a child in any woman's arms."