THE ARTIST’S BIRTHDAY
One winter evening, in a snugly built little stone cottage near the northern border of Vermont, a young family of three had gathered beside a glowing hearth and a cheerful lamp to enjoy an hour of that contentment which is most deeply felt when the fire is bright, the curtain closely drawn, and a storm is raging without. It was the birthday of the child Samuel. He was three years old, and as a birthday indulgence, he was to sit up until seven o’clock, and carve things with the jack-knife that his father, himself a carver of renown, had brought him as a birthday gift. This was by no means his first adventure with a knife. For a year or more he had managed a knife, at first feebly, but later with an astonishing ease. His father was proud of the infant Phidias, and even his mother had ceased to be terror-stricken at the conjunction of child and knife. The motions of the boy Samuel were happy and accurate. At the present hour, such gestures as his would be called eurhythmic, or something of that sort; even in those days of preposterous precocity, he was regarded with wonder.
It was the month and the year when for the first time there was a Confederacy, with a President to be prayed for, or else against. Stirring era! No lack of interesting items for the father to read aloud from his Weekly; Nancy, the young wife busy with her sewing, was as deeply interested as he himself in the doings at Fort Sumter. Her comments on Lincoln and Davis were no less keen than his. With eyes now bent on her work, a fine linen handkerchief to be hemmed on four sides, and now returning to the child seated on the braided rug at her feet, she still had time and thought to give to her husband’s reading; at twenty-three, she rejoiced to be living in portentous times. And pray do not imagine that because the home was remote from great cities, the mother necessarily comported herself as a poor rustic creature, or as one unfamiliar with the counsels of “Godey’s Lady’s Book.” Her ample gown was of the finest cashmere, triple-dyed of a deep rose-color, and it was well spread out upon a hoop-skirt which she managed with the kind of skill that a rose in full bloom must employ when keeping its petals in order.
The guests at the birthday feast had been a pair of grandparents, a young uncle and aunt, and a ten-year-old girl from the farmhouse down the road. The little girl, brave in her well-flounced, orange-spotted purple delaine, wore pantalets that had been made much too long for her, in anticipation of some prodigious growth which had not taken place; and these had been starched too stiffly, so that she creaked audibly during locomotion. But she was very happy at the party; and though her costume might appear but ill-suited to the rigors of a Vermont winter, it must be remembered that in those days female attire had no commerce with common sense. Promptly at half-past five her mother came for her, bustling competently into the house, with an accompaniment of impatient sleigh-bells outside; and she glanced with undisguised curiosity at the spread table, not yet cleared away, the birthday cake with its heathenish three candles, and the young heir himself.
“They say he hain’t never been punished none?”
Nancy flushed, and held back an angry answer. She was aware that the subject had already been torn to tatters by the village gossips. “Punished? No, not yet.”
“I want to know! Wal, I guess he’s needed it, afore now!” The farm-wife was emphatic; but there was motherly love as well as village curiosity in her scrutiny of little Samuel. “Looks jest like a young American flag, don’t he? Them blue pants, and red cheeks, and eyes stickin’ out so kinda starry. But all childern needs punishments,” she chirped. “They’re all of ’em limbs of Satan. I’ve had seven, and I guess I know.” She cast an eagle eye on the pantalets of her first “limb.” “Them Hamburg points allus ketch up every mite of dust,” she lamented, as she tucked her child under a buffalo robe and drove away through the snow.
“Wal, she knows a lot, if she knows all she thinks she doos,” was the grandmother’s placid comment, as she and the aunt cleared away the feast. “Nancy has no call to mind her.” It was evident that Nancy was a creature lovingly set apart in that little world. Having borne the brunt of the birthday preparations, she was not allowed to put on her all-enveloping kitchen apron again, but was forced down into her own chair in the bright sitting-room. Rather early, because of the bitter weather, the guests had gone, and the family was left to itself in a loving intimacy precious to each of the three.
The young mother’s face, softly banded with dark hair, rose flower-like above a lace collar, fastened at the throat by a large elliptical shell cameo representing Ganymede teasing the eagles of Jupiter. To the wearer that brooch was a pleasing and a precious thing. It had been her mother’s, and had been bought in Rome by her father, our first American translator of Tasso. Whether or not as an aid to his own understanding of the Italian poet, the New England scholar had married a gentle Sicilian girl, and Nancy herself had been born in Rome and christened Annunziata, an outlandish name that American relatives, after the scholar’s return, had promptly transformed into Nancy. And all her life Nancy had been conscious, not without joy, of her twofold nature as a New Englander and an Italian. Nancy and Annunziata were both of them under her skin. She never knew which one triumphed the oftener. In the kitchen, Nancy, perhaps; in the sitting-room, Annunziata.
That evening, as she sewed her fine seam, the ample roseate sleeves of her gown and the white undersleeves flowing beneath them moved in and out of the lamplight in a kind of stately melody as for a minuet. Watching the child at his carving, she hoped and dreamed for him the life beautiful, the life of a sculptor. Had Raphael been there, she would have been a Madonna; a Madonna of the hoop-skirt, but not of the rocking-chair. No, indeed! The chair she sat in was one that her husband had made and carved for her, after a drawing in an ancient book on Italian furniture; its beauty and strength were a constant delight to her. And even without the chair, and the Ganymede, and the crimson curtains, it would have been evident that this young pair were among the aristocrats of the village; they felt that they belonged to the only aristocracy the place permitted, the aristocracy of mind. They had more books than the minister even. And no doubt Nancy’s birth in Rome, that far-off city where the Pope lives, had added a secretly savored pagan touch to the picture the hamlet had made of her.
Still more than the woman with her Madonna vision, the man exulted in the child’s rapt industry. With vigilant eye he noted the process of creation. A cat, it seemed; Samuel was carving a cat; no, the cat! Once in a while, as if to refresh a memory perhaps somewhat dimmed by his three years’ stay among mortals, Samuel would glance toward Pharaoh, the great green-eyed old black torn; but mostly his head with its long fair curls was bent over his work. Samuel was not copying a cat; he was rather evolving the cat from the deeps of his inner consciousness. Samuel’s cat was not the lithe and lordly beast of Barye, nor yet the affable companion that Frémiet has given to the world; it was rather a cat of the Egyptians, the mystery of cathood incarnate. And just as Michelangelo knew that an angel slept in his marble block, so Samuel knew that all cathood crouched within a wooden chip. The father, seeing the child’s difficulty in separating the cat-mass from the scrap of board in his tiny hand, would gladly have performed the rude preliminaries. But the boy had drawn back, and clasping the wood to his chest, had said firmly, in his usual way of speaking only the key-words of a situation, “Self do all!” Samuel knew no baby-talk. From his mother and her New England forbears (scholars, theologians, translators, and the like) he had inherited a great fund of words fit to be spoken, and from his father a passion for perfection in all things. He had a natural longing to say things rightly, and so saved his larynx for the essential syllables. The father, well-pleased with that confident “Self do all,” returned to his reading. But Samuel, rather than Fort Sumter, filled his mind that night.
An odd-looking creature, one would say, if Samuel should suddenly appear in our modern circle. Yet his oddity was rather in what had been done to him than in what he was. His yellow hair was arranged in seven tight spirals hanging to his shoulders; an eighth spiral made a sort of shining ridgepole on the roof of his head, from the brow backwards. Beyond question, a pretty child, with the delicately brilliant coloring of the Nordic; and his fine strong hands and feet had a definite character of their own. He wore a low-necked, short-sleeved tunic, very voluminous as to its skirt; it was made of thick blue woollen material woven by his grandmother. Beneath the tunic were ridiculous shapeless breeches of the same stuff; then came a section of bare calf, and after that, white wool socks and stout, copper-toed ankle-ties. As he sat on the braided rug, among his blue homespun billows, his back against his adoring slave, the sheep-dog Ajax, and his heart and soul bound up in his job of carving, he was at once the most absurd and lovable object in all Vermont. Disquieting, too, perhaps, for his next of kin.
Seven o’clock was to be his bed-knell; and now seven o’clock suddenly sounded from the tall shape in the corner. At once the mother rose, smoothed her ample skirt, and held out her hand. “Bedtime, Samuel.”
Samuel looked at her beseechingly, but he knew that his look was lost. Already in his short life he had learned that in the realm of prohibitions, woman is of sterner stuff than man. He therefore gazed toward the spot where help was more likely to be found. Still seated firmly, clutching his cat in one hand and his new knife in the other, he stretched out his arms to his father, and cried aloud, “None done, papa!” Invincible argument from creator to creator, “None done!”
The parents exchanged irresolute glances. “Very well, Samuel, just ten minutes more.” Samuel, victorious, returned to his art. But what are minutes to him whom the dream has possessed? At the end of ten minutes, when the mother rose again, and delicately flicked her cashmere folds, Samuel was far more unready than before. And now, his clear infantine voice with its uncannily correct enunciation had lost its former coaxing grace. The tone was haughty, argumentative. “None done, papa!”
“It’s his birthday, caro mio.” The young mother spoke softly, hesitating; the father, in secret delight, relinquished responsibility. “May as well make it half-past seven,” he growled. “Perhaps he’ll be tired out by then.” But when he said that, he must have forgotten his own elation in carving his violins of an evening. By day he worked on patterns for huge machinery, shaping them with deft mechanical skill. But every night, between nine and eleven, when the evening reading was over and the little house under the pines was very still, he used to bring out one of his violins, and carve and caress and polish its exquisite surfaces. The patterns for machines were his livelihood, but the violins were his love. How could he have forgotten his own raptures of carving! Ah, no, Samuel was by no means “tired out by then!”
When the half-hour sounded, the husband stood up, beckoning to the wife to remain seated. No more woman’s foolishness; the boy must to bed. “Come on, young man! Time’s up!” Yet his voice did not sound so commanding as he had hoped. Samuel felt its indecision; and indeed he was at the moment too high in the clouds of carving to give any attention whatsoever to things beneath. “None done, papa!” The voice was no longer coaxing; it was not even argumentative; it was hostile, truculent to a degree. And when his father approached him, to make an end, the boy looked wildly around as if praying to the gods to take his work of art under their protection. But no gods intervened, and Samuel, at bay before his universe, seized his carving in all its cathood, hid it among his back breadths, and sat down strongly upon it, glaring defiance at his progenitors. “None done!”
The mother rose quickly, Nancy trampling on Annunziata. Her face was pale. “This is disobedience,” she said in a shaken voice, “and it must have its punishment. It is the third time, within three months, that he has needed punishment. The first time was the eggs. The second time it was the spectacles. And now, it is—insubordination.” Her heart contracted with suffering. Insubordination! A large word to use on so small a being!
Ah, yes, the eggs, and the spectacles! The young father remembered the eggs and the spectacles; and even in the midst of a misery scarcely less acute than the mother’s, a smile twitched his lips. The eggs!
In brief, little Samuel, at the age of quarter before three, had noted with a curious eye that Matilda, the brown hen, had one egg that differed from others. It was hard, white, shiny; it had nothing of the soft, pale-brown, pleasant egg-color the other eggs had. One day he took it out of the nest to consider it. He put it on the barn floor. There was a hammer near at hand. Samuel liked hammers. With the hammer, he struck the china egg once, twice, thrice. Nothing happened. Curious! He then put one of the pleasant egg-colored eggs on the floor. He struck it but once, and his whole world dissolved into a filthy chaos not to be borne. Overwhelmed with remorse and bad-egg juice, he fled in terror to his mother. He wept so long and earnestly that she considered him punished enough.
As for the spectacles, there was an evil deed for you! His grandmother had set her spectacles on the tall mantel-shelf, just under the picture of sorrowful flowers made from the hair of young and old. Most of the flowers were black, or white, or brownish drab. Samuel did not like the picture, but the spectacles had always interested him. He dragged a chair to the mantel, and by heroic climbing, reached them. He seldom broke things, his motions being accurate, and he came down to earth with the spectacles unharmed. What to do with them? And there was grandmother’s lace cap, too. How about Ajax, the sheep-dog? Not without difficulty, but without mishap, Samuel was forcing the glasses upon Ajax, when help came to the good dog, and in the person of the master of the house. At the sight of the woe-begone spectacled animal, and the lace cap, no longer what it once was, Samuel’s father had laughed so loud and long that both parents agreed that punishment would be inconsistency itself.
But now, with little Samuel sitting defiant on his work of art, a picture of insubordination, punishment could no longer be delayed. The mother put her arms around her husband’s neck. “Oh, remember how tiny he is, Abel,” she wailed. “I shall stay in the kitchen till it’s done.” She ran into the cold, dark kitchen, where she knelt in anguish, an ear against the keyhole.
The father, alone with his offspring, was agitated too. His hands were so strong! Surely, in a better world than this, a better way could be found. How was he to know how much he ought to hurt his own child? He groaned as he picked up the boy, slipped down those absurd and shapeless breeches, and with firm hand directed toward the infirm, time-honored spot, administered chastisement. A shriek of surprise and anger, a burst of sobs, then silence. The woman at the keyhole could bear the shriek and the sobs, but not the silence. She bounded into the room, and clasped the insubordinate one to her heart. In truth, even the dog Ajax was disturbed by that homely scene of punishment; the hair on his shoulders stiffened, and he made an evil noise in the back of his throat. Of all those present, the cat Pharaoh alone remained unmoved, detached as the Pyramids themselves, in a stony indifference to human woe. Pharaoh, though in a sense connected with the origin of the trouble, washed his paws of it, and kept his calm.
Silent tears ran down Samuel’s cheeks, from which, as the mother saw with terror, the dazzling rosy color had now quite faded. The Nancy in her died; only the Annunziata was left. Oh, what if, what if?—But her alarm was needless. Samuel had the proud blood of survivors in his veins. Not for nothing was he a Vermonter born. Welsh seers and Norman craftsmen and Scottish covenanters had stubbornly watched his cradle; his fair substance had come all the way to Vermont from old Rome via Bunker Hill. The father brought from the adjoining bedroom the child’s woolly nightgown, ugly and comfortable and orange-dyed. He warmed it before the blaze. As the parents undressed the culprit, they noted, with an almost guilty surprise, how much smaller he seemed now that his blue tunic was off. The father held the boy in his arms before the fire, while the mother, kneeling, wiped away the soundless tears welling continually. No word was spoken. At last the father carried the dusky orange cocoon into the bedroom, and set it in its crib, and covered it gently. The mother, worn out by the artist’s birthday, crept away to bed, leaving her husband to console himself with his violins, if he could.
That hour with the violins was always very dear to Abel. As he busied his hands with their beautiful bodies, his soul lost itself in happy reveries in which Samuel played no small part. Annunziata also shone, in rich, incredible rainbow robings from foreign looms, and with the wealth of foreign continents on her neck and fingers; from the first moment when he saw her, he had been mad about her touch of foreignness; he had seen it as a sure amulet against the encroaching hated drabness of New England milltown life. It was Annunziata who had set his spirit free. He always called her Annunziata in those golden visions; never Nancy. And sometimes he thought it odd, indeed, that in his violin hours, when wife and child were away, safe in a dreamland of their own, he felt and cherished their existences even more deeply than when they were at his side.
But to-night he had no joy in craftsmanship; he stared helplessly at the scrolled neck-piece in his hand. “The little shaver!” he muttered. “He took it like a soldier. The little shaver! Damned if I’ll do it again, in a hurry.” Then he smiled that sudden whimsical smile of his. “But perhaps he’ll be damned if I don’t! Queer world.” He was startled to find that for the first time in his life, his violins had no interest for him; he put away his veneers and glue-pot. He could not wait any longer; he must see for himself whether those silent tears had ceased.
Samuel in his crib lay very quiet, eyes wide open, tears still coursing into the collar of his orange nightgown. The perplexed father decided to meet the situation with jocularity. “Say, laddie, aren’t you going to shut those peepers?” And the child, as before, answered with what was uppermost in his mind, “None done, papa!”
A long time the parents lay in their great square bed, saying nothing, but each guessing at the other’s thought. Annunziata was trying to be Nancy, as Vermont expected, and Abel was seeking to be Providence for his all. At last he stretched out a cautious hand toward the crib, to find that the child also was awake. Without more ado, he lifted Samuel into the big bed, and there the parents cherished the child between them, until the small body relaxed in the pleasant warmth. Next morning, when the carver went to his work, Samuel was still sleeping, as rosy and peaceful as if he had never known either insubordination or punishment.
The new day was a marvel of sunshine. During the night, the snow had changed to rain; this in turn had given way to colder weather, and now myriads of jewels hung from enchanted apple trees. A white fairyland! The child clapped his hands with delight as his mother wrapped him warm in his various rabbit-skin garments, and gathered his curls up under a raccoon cap, and led him down the garden path to frolic with old Ajax in the clean snow. When she brought him in, he was glowing and sparkling with unearthly glee. She thought she had never dreamed of anything so beautiful. She wondered whether Joseph and Mary in the carpenter’s shop had ever punished Jesus for playing too long among the shavings, and what the Child had said. Probably something much more moving than “None done, papa.” But if so, she wondered how Mary could bear it.
Samuel’s elfin merriment quieted down in the warm room. No longer insubordinate, he allowed his mother to take him up on her lap, and to brush the tangled curls over a round stick, until they became orderly spirals once more. He had not yet learned that curls were effeminate; that battle was to be much later. He made no move to take up his carving, or to defend his past, reserving such discussions as these for a meeting with the masculine mind. All the afternoon he seemed a creature both isolate and expectant, darting to the window whenever a vagrom sleigh-bell tinkled in fairyland. Isolate and expectant! His mother wondered whether all artists were doomed to be so. Once she caught him up in her arms, and cried out to him in her childhood’s tongue, “O caro, caro, perché?” And Samuel passed his fingers over her forehead, and then over the Ganymede brooch, saying three words that his father had taught him in jest, but which he had learned in earnest, “Beau, bello, beau-ti-ful!” He loved those three words, and very often, apropos of nothing, he spoke them in his incredibly distinct way. But to-day his mother felt his aloofness; she knew that he was waiting for something, something not in her power to give.
The young carver was a privileged person in the shop where he worked. That day he could not fix his mind on those wooden models of wheel and shaft. He was unsatisfied about his child, and in the middle of the afternoon abruptly put away his tools and went home. Early as it was, Samuel was already waiting. The child had been listening for that step in the passage. There was something to be explained; the indignity of yesterday’s happening had not yet passed into forgetfulness. He took his unfinished cat in hand, and hitched his trousers higher. If last night’s encounter was to be repeated, he would not easily be separated from his defensive armor!
The father, coming in glowingly from the freshness of the winter day, was dazed by that militant figure and its immediate challenge, “None done, papa!” He hardly knew how to answer whatever demand was thereby made upon him. No parent relishes the rôle of Goliath! But love aided him. He warmed his hands at the blaze, and seizing the belligerent, tossed him high in the air many times, knowing that Samuel had never yet had enough of that sport. Then he sat down before the fire, the boy in his arms, and poured out a thousand foolish tendernesses over the seven spirals, and the shining ridgepole. The sensitive child caught the shadow of anxiety, even as it was vanishing from his father’s face. What sorrow was this? His own sorrows had been two: a work of art undone, a first whipping. His father was the one who gave, not took whippings; his father’s sorrow was therefore about the work of art. Ah, that was something he himself could well understand, and perhaps console; though the cat was unfinished, there was many another work not yet begun. He laid a valiant hand on his blue woollen chest, and declared, “Self make more!” Perhaps he saw a long vista of bright shapes clamoring to be carved for the comfort and delight of the world.
Hastily he slipped down from his father’s arms to his own place on the hearthrug, and brought out his little box of clean chips from beneath the sofa. A great company of living beings was hidden there, waiting, waiting in the wood. Samuel looked up, and announced with jubilation, “Self—make—all!” He pondered a moment on his next subject. The carving of a cat had ended in disaster; let us then attempt the dog, the friend of man, not the heartless watcher by his fire. The child passed a thumb over the knife-edge, as the elders do, then chose a block, and addressed himself to it. “Dog.” No more.
The parents looked at each other, understanding profoundly that Samuel was no longer a child of three. Overnight, he had become a boy in the fourth year of his age. In mingled joy and anxiety they perceived also that for a certainty their wish had been granted; there was an artist in the family. And an artist, they supposed, would have his isolations, and tremulous expectancies; his aspirations, too, and perhaps his anguish in high enterprises, “None done.” But joy alone radiated from Samuel and his shining spirals. From the sorrow of a dream never to be finished he had passed to the incalculable rapture of a vision newly begun. “Dog,” he murmured, “dog.” He knew that the creature was lying low there in the chip, just for the express purpose of being summoned forth by him, Samuel. In his abounding bliss he had time to bestow on his parents three words to describe what he was about to make; and he spoke these words as if they were three priceless jewels, “Beau—bello—beautiful!”
THE END