I
The youth’s name was Apollos Rivers. We admired him, used him, and for a time, despised him, too. Why we admired and used, I can easily explain. Apollos was every inch his name—blond, athletic, superb; no model in New York posed as faithfully. Why we despised—well, the logic of that is more complicated. Our contempt was doubtless merely a habit, formed on sight unseen and strengthened by hearsay. Apollos, indeed! How absurd a name for the oldest Rivers boy, seeking work in studios! In vain he had politely explained to us that his late father, a bookish Montreal goldsmith, had so greatly admired the senior Paul Revere of colonial history (the Paul Revere whose Huguenot name had originally been Apollos Rivoire) that he himself, British subject though he was, had bestowed the name Apollos on his own firstborn. Later Rivers arrivals, less magnificent in physique, had to content themselves with names less proud—Tom, Chuck, Nipper, and plain Ellen.
Perhaps we would have accepted that explanation, if somebody (that eternally busy somebody) had not seen young Apollos at an Academy reception, his ears tinted rose-pink, with cheeks to match, and his vigorous young eyelashes weighted with whatever it is the chorus ladies use to veil and enhance their already too potent come-hither-of-the-eye. After this, do you wonder that we jumped at the conclusion that Apollos was merely a name the youth had wished on himself, a nom de pose, as it were? And why did he polish his nails? Unnatural in a boy of eighteen! Anyhow, we wouldn’t have done it, at that age. And I fear that with some of us, even his honest Canadian accent was against him. Take the word been, for instance. Those whose grandfathers had always said ben, and whose mothers had said bin, were repelled when the Montreal lad called it bean.
But the posing of Apollos (one can’t forget that!) was absolutely the best I had ever met anywhere. He first came to me when I was doing that big California thing; you know, the one they call Three Angels, two of the angels being winged marble youths in flat relief, kneeling, and the third a retributive sort of shrouded female figure in bronze, standing, of course, and dominating the other two. Get me? Oh, yes, in the round, she was. I had no trouble in finding her type, no trouble at all. Powerful women abound, these days. But the youths were a more difficult matter. Of course I didn’t want them to look Athenian, as if I’d just dislodged them from the Parthenon frieze, and given them a pair of wings apiece; but then, on the other hand, I didn’t care to have them suggest that I’d merely picked them up on the beach at Coney Island, the Sunday before. Angels mustn’t bear too personal a stamp, you know. To my thinking, no artist has ever surpassed Saint-Gaudens in creating the impersonal, other-worldly type. But he always used a lot of wonder-drapery for his angelic hosts; I had merely wings.
I had tried a good many youths from thirteen to thirty, before I finally decided to take with me to my summer studio, for a period of ten weeks, Apollos Rivers and Phineas Stickney. Remembering those tinted ears, I had some doubt about Apollos and his staying powers through a country summer, far from all but the most elementary sort of movies and like attractions; but I had a hope that the influence of Phineas Stickney, coupled with my own persuasions, would keep the boy on the side of the angels.
In fact, the angels were all that counted with me, that summer. The commission was an important one, and the contract ironclad. If within three years I couldn’t produce the Three Angels, “complete in place and in the final materials as hereinbefore specified,” my name, on the Golden Coast, would be mud instead of Jefferson. And the three years had by now dwindled to one year only! Time pressed. I’d been diligent and fore-handed enough, Heaven knows. If anything, I am diligent to a fault. The retributive woman was all done in bronze; but those two youths weren’t yet ready for the plaster, let alone the “final materials as hereinbefore specified.”
My work in the country studio was cut out for me. I had had an assistant there for some weeks, setting up the full-size work from a half-size study; but when I saw the thing sketched out in the large, I was not at all satisfied with my original idea of those figures. I wanted to make certain very drastic changes; I really needed both Apollos and Phineas, using each lad part of the day. Rough on me, rather; and I suppose fellows in shops and offices would open their eyes if they saw a mere artist—next door to a do-nothing, you know—beginning work every morning at five and quitting at summer sundown; yes, and perhaps stealing back for more study by twilight. For it’s twilight that wipes out all the pettiness that the day reveals; it’s twilight that knows all and tells only the good, in sculpture. If it were not for the healing touch of twilight on our work, how many of us sculptors would have abandoned the art, long ago! Well, I’ve often marvelled at the amount of work I put through that summer. Of course it makes a difference when a man’s work is such that he can make a lark out of it, as well as a living. Still, don’t run away with the idea that any art is pure ecstasy every minute. Nothing is.
I don’t know why I felt so uneasy about Apollos. All sorts of sinister anxieties haunted me. Did I fear that he would burn up my barn of a studio? No, for he smoked neither cigarettes nor a pipe. Would he elope with the cook, leaving us with an empty larder and a desecrated hearth? No, for if his own words were to be trusted, skirts bored him. Would he paint his ears, and so make talk for the village folk? How could I tell? My chief hope was in the influence of Phineas. The two would naturally be thrown together at the farmhouse where they boarded. Phineas, as I had seen him in the city, was an unusually attractive lad. His posing, to be sure, left something to be desired. But then, very few models in this world, I knew, had both the figure and the posing power that Apollos possessed. A rare combination!
Phineas was a boy with no end of ancestry. His father had been a Mayor, filling out some one’s term, in a great New England city; his grandfather had been Governor of a near Western State; and to crown all, his grandfather’s great-grandfather had been a Signer. I wondered how he could stoop to pose, after all that! But for some reason, he wanted to study modelling, and so had begged me to take him on as assistant. When I declined the honor, he offered to pose; anything to forward his artistic studies. I engaged him, and naturally thinking that so august a personage deserved more consideration than Apollos, I allotted to the aristocrat the easier, briefer afternoon sessions, and took Apollos with the morning dews.
We had a routine. From five till quarter past, Apollos and I disposed of three buttered health biscuits and two hot doughnuts apiece, the whole made interesting by the very good coffee which I myself made over an oil stove; in the deep country, wise housekeepers ask no crack-of-dawn exploits from any cook, no matter how greatly underworked. The doughnuts down, we worked easily and steadily until my normal family breakfast, at which I sat down with appetite. No loafing, however! At eight, Apollos and I were in the studio again, working till noon. Thus Apollos posed six hours, and Phineas four.
From the first, I tried to work in a little fatherly counsel for Apollos during the pose. “That knee just a bit to the left, please, and the rear hoof as far back as you can get it. Fine! Well, you know you’re in luck, up here in the country air, along with a lad like Phineas! Not that he poses any better than you; no one does. But his manners are certainly good, aren’t they?”
“Are they, sir?”
I asked myself whether Apollos was perhaps jealous of his more fortunate co-worker. His face, however, showed only a perfect Apollonian calm, combined with a gratifying attention to business. It was a kneeling pose, you remember; and those who have never knelt much can’t know what grit it takes, when long drawn out. I thought it wiser to defer advice to a more convenient season. Next morning, when I was working on a comparatively easy place, I happened to say to Apollos that Phineas talked remarkably well for a boy of his age. Apollos preserved his pose and made no reply. I pressed the subject.
“Perfectly good talker, sir, just as you say,” replied Apollos, squirming ever so slightly with the foot I was not modelling, “but of course you hire us to pose, not talk. I rather fancied you liked the place kept quiet.”
“Righto, boy. But sometimes a little conversation helps the slow minutes to skip by.”
“That depends, sir.”
“On what?”
“Oh, on who does the talking, and what is said.”
The reply caught my fancy. I wondered what response Phineas, that excellent conversationalist, would have made; I decided to put the same question to him, in the afternoon. Unfortunately, his posing happened to be less satisfactory than usual that day, and it thrust me out of the mood for easy converse with him. Besides, he himself had so much to say of his ambitions, prospects, and great-grandfathers, that I did not care to add anything to the welter of talk. A few days later, however, I found occasion to remind him that with his inheritance—I meant blue blood, of course—he was fortunate in being able to help those boys with whom he came in contact.
“I’ve tried to help Apollos with his manners,” he replied, “but, confidentially, it’s rather uphill work.”
“Oh, I don’t know. Apollos doesn’t appear so badly. Seldom speaks unless spoken to, and then pretty sensibly, I find. Besides” (here I thought a helpful suggestion might be in order), “his posing is so absolutely perfect that anything else he does perhaps seems imperfect in comparison.”
“Yes, poor fellow! Pity that just posing should be what a fellow’s fitted for, isn’t it? For my part—”
“For your part,” I interrupted rather testily, “if you will kindly keep that left leg of yours—well, ever so slightly reminiscent of what it was when you began to pose it for me, I shall be most appreciative.” I had never before spoken like that to the scion of a Signer, but I saw he needed it. It was gradually being revealed to me that long descent is by no means the main desideratum in a model. Phineas had developed a rather unusual and uncanny gift for slumping in his pose;—making it easier and easier for himself, minute by minute, so that at the end of the half-hour, there was really nothing left that was of the slightest use to me. I had to do my work from knowledge, instead of from Phineas. Of course, most models have this infirmity of self-protection, but Phineas could give all comers cards and spades in the game of slumping.
Still, in the excellent séances I had with Apollos, I would sometimes enlarge upon Phineas’s advantages. Once I expressed a hope that Apollos was profiting duly by the companionship.
“It profiteth me nothing,” was the unexpected reply. “Phineas talked me over once. Never again, sir!”
“How so?”
“Oh, nothing of any importance, really. A silly fool business. I couldn’t make any one, an adult, I mean, understand just how it happened.”
“Try me! Boy myself once.”
A slow color shot up over Apollos’s classic torso, and flamed fiercely in his ears. He even became white around the mouth, as if the blood had receded from that part to concentrate in his listening apparatus. Then his confidence gushed forth, as if long pent up.
“I wanted some money to get my little sister a birthday present. She’d been ill in bed for five weeks, and was peevish as a wasp, driving Aunt Lise distracted asking for a big doll. Much as ever we could pay for the doctor and medicines, let alone a French doll, but I wanted to get it for her. She’s the only girl we have. Well, I was walking by Flatto’s one day, with Phineas, and I was fool enough to say I’d give my boots if I could get her a beauty doll we saw there in the window. ‘Gosh,’ says Phin, ‘I can tell you how you can earn that doll, on the side, without working.’ ‘How so?’ says I. ‘Well,’ says Phinny, ever so thoughtful, ‘a rich feller and I got talking about the way girls paint up their faces, and I said men sometimes did it too. He said rats, and I bet him ten I could prove it, and he took me up on it. I was thinking about the Academy exhibition,’ says Phinny, ‘and I knew Mr. Lucas was sending his self-portrait to the show. But now,’ says Phinny, ‘I’ve found out that portrait wasn’t accepted; and maybe my friend wouldn’t ante, just for a painted portrait, not a real person. But,’ says Phinny, very earnestly, ‘if I could get a regular feller, like you, to make up with paint, I’d give him half what I make; and that would net you the five plunks for the doll.’”
Apollos paused as if ashamed of “telling.” But his recollections were too much for him, and upon my encouragement, he went on.
“Well, I fell for it. I didn’t stop to think how it would look; I only knew the money would look good to me. And I knew Phinny was a little brother to the rich; some of his fool-friends just wallow in coin. So on the spur of the moment, we went round to Phin’s house for him to do me. He’s in with the set that do private theatricals, and he has all the stuff from a rabbit’s-foot down. I thought it would be funny if he would do my nose good and red; but, no, he just did my cheeks and ears, and blackened up my eyelashes, and we went right over to the Academy exhibition then and there, and met his fool-friend. One of the artists had given Phinny tickets on account of his ancestors. I had no idea what I looked like. People stared, of course, but I thought that was part of the programme.”
Evidently a very painful thought still lurked in Apollos’s mind.
“You got the money,” I remarked, casually.
“Oh, no.” Apollos rapidly wiggled all his ten toes. “I threw it back at him and told him to go to Hell with it.”
“For Heaven’s sake, why?”
Again a bright red suffused the boy’s face.
“When I got up to the L station and looked in the mirror, I saw for the first time that he’d made me up to look like a girl!” Clearly the horror of that realization had not yet departed from Apollos. “It was a low-down trick, and I beat him up for it.”
With a new respect for the kneeling boy, I watched the blush die away from his countenance; it lingered last of all in his ears. How often I myself had repeated that stupid tattle about Apollos and his ears at the Academy! I dare say I may have turned red myself, when I recognized how small the talk was, and what a small thing had started it. Perhaps Apollos observed this, for he continued, “You know what it is to have a habit of blushing, don’t you? The more you try not to, the more it happens. Well, Phineas noticed it on me, my Canadian ears, you know, that first day we met in your New York studio. So he thought he could put one over on me. And I’ll say he did.”
“So I suppose you two down there at the boarding-house never speak as you pass pie?”
“Sure we do! What’s the use of holding a grudge? We’ve got on fine since we fought.” A big generous smile swept the shadows from his eyes. “And the best of it was, Ellie got her doll, after all. Who from? From Phinny, to be sure. Said he couldn’t feel right about it, any other way, so I let him.” Having been a boy myself, I saw the point; and I marvelled once more at the intricacies of boy nature.
At that moment, I was modelling a hand, one of the important details, as it happened. Apollos had superb hands, strong and sinewy, with those noble bones we sculptors are always looking for. To my surprise, I found that I was actually copying the youth’s hand, every bit of it. And that’s something one can’t often do; one generally has to juggle with Nature, in the interest of Art. It’s part of the game, especially if you are doing angels.
“Say, ’Pollos, what’s the idea, manicuring your nails? Thank Heaven you do, as far as I’m concerned; all I have to do is to copy that left hand of yours.”
Not a trace of embarrassment appeared in the lad’s reply. “I’m very pleased if it’s right, sir. You see, I studied it all out, from the hands on Michael Angelo’s David. I saw that most of you sculptors use that type of hand, nails all trued up, and so on; and I concluded I’d better dress the part, as long as I was on the job.”
So then, the manicuring was but a part of the amazing Apollonian thoroughness!—the same thoroughness that I had remarked in him when he went out one afternoon with an old gun of mine, and brought me back three pairs of wings—a sapsucker’s, a crow’s, and a goose’s. The goose’s wings, in particular, he told me in his serious, smiling way, might perhaps give me some suggestion for the other angel, “the Phineas feller.” He was right, too. In making an angel’s wing, one does not copy a goose’s, but one gets light from on high.
“I suppose you mean to go on with this work, don’t you? Posing, studio jobs, and so on?”
Apollos opened wide eyes. “Not I, sir! For me, it’s only a pis-aller, if you’ll excuse my saying so. Faute de mieux, you know.”
I was astonished, for I had no idea that Apollos knew a word of French, even the tags he had just used. I thought I would be jocose.
“What are you going to do, then? Teach languages?”
“I’ve tried that,” replied the best model I ever saw, “but I found it unsatisfactory. You see my mother was French, born in Strasbourg. So while she lived, we always spoke the three languages at home, meal-times; English for breakfast, German for dinner, and French for supper. Father liked it so, and we boys couldn’t look back on a time when it wasn’t so. I had the French conversation classes for two terms at the Elmdale High School, and I got on fine until one of the trustees wanted the job for his wife’s sister. So he went ahead and found out that I was a minor, and had me fired.”
“What a shame!”
“Why, no, it didn’t matter much. If I might rest this elbow just a moment, it seems a bit dead—I meant to quit, anyway. There was nothing in it for me, it wasn’t leading to anything I wanted.”
“Well, what was it you wanted?”
Apollos made no answer other than that slow blush of his, swarming all over his face and finally demobilizing in his ears. For a moment, his whole figure had an expression that would have been wistful in a smaller lad; even as it was, there was something very touching about it. I could only hope that his ambition, however humble, was at least honorable. I reminded myself that I must not expect, in a Canadian boy, the same lofty impulses that would quicken the blood of a Signer’s descendant.
Meanwhile, my work with Phineas was going rather badly. I could not teach his aristocratic spirit to get down to brass tacks. His posing became worse instead of better. Before long, I found myself doing over again, every morning, from Apollos, all that I had bungled in doing, every afternoon, from Phineas. It occurred to me that perhaps I was too tired, in the afternoon, to do justice to Phineas, and that possibly Phineas’s pose was the more difficult one. However, when I changed about, things were still worse. I realized at last that my sprig of nobility was a hindrance rather than a help. What to do? I had promised him work through the summer. If I should pay him handsomely and discharge him, with his part of the bargain unfulfilled, I should write myself down an easy mark for models—a reputation no serious artist seeks. It would be complicity after the crime. Besides, Apollos might well become discontented, on beholding the rewards of the ungodly.
Toward the middle of the summer, the tension became too great. Precious as time was, with that ironclad contract haunting my dreams, I saw that perhaps I should gain, in the end, if I should leave my studio, for a double-size week-end, and go a-fishing from Friday to the following Tuesday. I was working in plastiline instead of clay, and I could safely leave my angels, without fear of their drying up on me as soon as my back was turned. The holiday might not hurt the boys, either. Apollos had stuck valiantly to his “pis-aller” job; perhaps Phineas would do better after a few days’ change; at any rate, I told myself, he couldn’t do worse. In that, however, I was mistaken.