THE SITTER SAT UPON.
Wilkinson is a sculptor. I don't mean that he lives by sculping. No. As he puts it himself: "My lower self, the self that wants bread and meat and warmth and shelter, lives on unearned increment. My higher self, the only self that counts, lives on Art."
Wilkinson and I had been sworn pals from our boyhood till the day he said: "By the way, old thing, I've never had a turn at your headpiece. You might give me a few sittings."
For the first time I found myself seated on a sitter's throne, while Wilkinson stood at his modelling stand working away at a mass of clay that faintly suggested a human head and shoulders.
"Need you yawn so often?" There was a hint of savagery in Wilkinson's tone that was new to me.
"Why, you're not doing my mouth yet," I urged.
"No, but when a mouth like yours opens wide it alters the shape of the whole skull."
I was astonished and hurt, and took refuge in dignified silence.
"Shall you send it—I mean me—to the Academy?" I asked by-and-by.
"Depends on how it pans out," grunted Wilkinson, leaving the clay, twirling the movable throne round, and taking a frowning survey of me in various aspects. "I might send it in with Popplewell's bust, as a sort of make-weight."
"As a sort of make-weight!" I echoed indignantly; and then, more calmly, "Popplewell's finished, isn't he?"
"Yes—gone to be cast; and then comes the marble."
"Oh, Popplewell's to be done in marble, is he? What shall I be done in?"
Wilkinson was taking an upward view of my features now, with a look of extreme distaste on his countenance.
"You? Oh, if I decide to finish you, it'll be just the clay-burnt terra-cotta, you know. Tut, tut, tut!"
"Why tut, tut, tut?" I asked.
"No offence, old chap, but you have such queer facial bones;" and as he turned back to his modelling I heard him mutter: "You never really know what people are like till they sit to you."
Again I felt a bit hurt, and this time I indulged a retort. "Wonder if you'll get Popplewell into the Academy. You've never had anything in yet, have you?"
"We sculptors are so vilely handicapped by the wretched amount of space the Academy people give us!" said Wilkinson angrily. "Still, I've great hopes this time. Not only is my work improved, but it's a popular subject—Popplewell, the novelist. There—that'll do for to-day. I've got the construction all right," looking resentfully from the clay head to mine, "though no one would believe it who hadn't your head here to compare it with."
"Why, what's the matter with my head?" I asked irritably as I got gingerly off the movable throne. "And, anyhow, I didn't ask to be modelled. You made me sit here—I didn't want to do it."
"Oh, people make practice for one, whatever they're like."
"Good-bye," I said stiffly.
At the second sitting I tried to make allowances for the artistic temperament when Wilkinson prowled round me with a look of something like horror on his face, assaulted my features with compasses, and turned away gibbering. I even kept calm when informed that one of my eyes was considerably larger and wider open than the other and that I had "no drawing" in my face. "No offence, old chap," added my former friend with a grin. "You must remember it's the artist-eye that's responsible for these cursory reflections."
"I wonder," I remarked musingly, "whether the artist-eye is a feature that occasionally gets blacked by an indignant sitter."
At the third and fourth sittings more bitter so-called truths were handed out to me, and he was down on my "construction" like a hundred of bricks.
"That's a normal one," here he indicated a skull on a shelf; "his bones are all right. But if yours were stripped of the flesh——"
"I shan't be sorry when these sittings are over," I said; then, as I caught a side view of the clay head, "I say! Am I as frightful as that?"
"As frightful as that!" snorted Wilkinson; "why, I've flattered you, if anything. People never know what they're like. There's such a lot of rotten vanity knocking about."
When the last sitting was over my wrongs found voice.
"When I first sat to you," I said in a tense tone, "I was comparatively happy; my self-esteem was in a healthy state; I felt that I was well-looking at my best, even good-looking. I go from you to-day a broken man, my confidence shaken, my manners spoiled by the consciousness that my construction is wrong, that there is 'no drawing' in my face, and that neither my eyes nor my nostrils are a pair; and, not content with this, you have darkened my remote future by implying that when it is time for me to be merely a skull I shall be an absurd one. May Heaven forgive you, Wilkinson—I never can!"
For some weeks we stood apart, "like cliffs that had been rent asunder," and then one day Wilkinson came up and thumped me on the back. "It's always the unexpected that happens, old thing," he said. "Popplewell's bust was rejected at once, but yours——"
"Am I in?" In my excitement I forgot my wrongs.
"No, not in; but you were a doubtful. Only think—first doubtful I've ever had! To have a doubtful sculpture is as good as having two or three paintings on the line. You can't be such a bad subject after all. I'll have another touch at you, and next year see if you're not in! Come and have some lunch."
Candidate for medical degree being examined in the subject of "Bedside Manner."
"Notable things are done around a table. Corporations are formed...."
Westminster Teacher.
The beginnings of them, anyway.
