“I’m three inches taller than mother was,” she observed, cheerily. “Her size hand wouldn’t have looked at all well, on me.”
Really this girl had some sense. Besides, she was quick to divine that the commission she was offering me was not precisely attractive to me. She seemed to search for the cause.
“You know,” she said, eagerly, “I wouldn’t want to hamper you in your imagination! Oh, no, not that! I wouldn’t dream of asking you to copy the cast just as it is. It would be all right if you put in a Bible or something under the hand, and some lace around the wrist, or some knitting-work and knitting-needles sticking out from the book. Mother often left her knitting at a favorite passage, so that when I came to put away her work at night, as I always did, I might guess what text it was that interested her. We made a regular game of it. And” (here she flushed and hesitated) “I’m perfectly willing and able to pay the going price for any extras you put in. Only, I don’t really know much about such things.” Her smile was wistful, rather than embarrassed; but in an instant, it had widened into a boyish and wholly fascinating grin. “I don’t know whether it shows on me or not, but this is the first time I’ve ever been East. I suppose I’m not so—sophisticated and so on—as if I’d had a genuine Eastern education, as mother had. Oh, but you don’t know what it is to have first a Missouri uncle and then a Fifth Avenue aunt protecting you to death, every step you take! I might have asked Auntie all about this kind of thing, of course. She has lived in New York always, and knows the ropes. You see, I’m staying with her until I go abroad in June. But, I just didn’t want to talk with her about it. I’m my own mistress, now! The moment I saw that Dancer of yours, I said to myself, ‘When I come into my own money, I shall have that man carve a piece of marble for me, and do something to elevate American art!’ And now the time is come.”
What I ought to have said then was this: “My dear young lady, if you really want to advance your country’s art (and very laudable it is on your part!) and if you insist that your heart’s desire is to be carried out in marble, by my chisel, as you put it, why in the name of all that’s young and gay and jubilant don’t you ask me to do you a dancer, or a fountain figure, or a nymph, or a faun, or even a mantelpiece, with some joyous caryatids?” But I didn’t say anything of the kind. Besides, a horrid thought came to me that perhaps she might not understand caryatid, or might get the word confused with hermaphrodite, as I have observed that tourists returning from Italian galleries sometimes do, even when duly instructed. Indeed, the forget-me-not eyes rested so lovingly on the plaster cast that I hadn’t the heart to be coldly frank with her, and to tell her that in a few years the marble hand she now wanted might seem an encumbrance; something that for old sake’s sake she couldn’t bear to tuck away in the attic, and yet something that one really couldn’t, if one kept up with the times, put in a glass case on a library shelf, or on one’s own dressing-table. Some of our sculptors might have managed it. I can imagine that brute of a Schneider, for example, telling her that there was nothing in it for her; that a “marple hant would be too pig for a baber-wade, and too liddle for a lawn-tecoration.” He would be able to suggest that the proper move for her to make would be to build a fine large monument to her mother, with the hand “joost as a veature.” But since I’m not Schneider, all I could say was, “This cast is beautiful, indeed, but aren’t you afraid that when translated into marble, it will no longer seem so lovely and so living to you?”
“Ah, but,” persisted the girl, “the marble of it is part of all I want! All I want is mother’s hand, done by your hand.” She blushed, and so did I.
“It’s very kind of you to want my work,” I stammered. “Really, it makes me feel awfully grateful, and humble, too! But do you realize that very few of our sculptors carve in marble the things they model in clay? The custom is, to let some carver, generally an Italian, do most if not all of the marble-carving, just as it’s the custom to have a bronze foundry cast our bronze statues. You see,” I went on, warming to my task of educating this bright being, “things are different now from what they were in Cellini’s time, or Michael Angelo’s. In Renaissance days, a sculptor could do the whole job from start to finish, if he wanted to, but to-day, he can’t, and doesn’t want to. He saves himself for what he fondly thinks is the imaginative and intellectual part. He models in clay, of course, but there’s a lot besides that. There’s building armatures, and making plaster casts, and so on; and he generally lets Gigi do it.”
We glanced at Gigi, who, for the second time that afternoon, was sinning. Gigi had not retired to his customary labors behind the burlap curtain, but was standing near us, carving at a bit of plaster medallion, ostensibly turning it this way and that to get a better light on it, but in reality feasting his Latin eyes on Miss Chittenden’s beauty. And then Gigi, usually a silent soul, did a strange thing. He began to talk, very eagerly.
“The hand of the Signorina’s mother is truly beautiful.” (The Signorina giggled, and then was shocked by her own levity. She told me afterward that she couldn’t help laughing; she had felt as if Gigi were pouring out a page from a foreign-language grammar all over her.) “In marble,” continued Gigi, “the marble that grows in my part of the world, how very fine it would be! I myself could well begin it, and the Signor could finish it. You have seen the art of the Signor! Many sculptors cannot do what the Signor can. It is the morbidezza! The others do not attain it.”
Miss Chittenden flashed upon Gigi a smile more dazzling than any she had yet given to me. “Now as I understand it,” she cried, “he could rough out your design and do the heavy work on it, and then you could take the marble and finish it up, and give it the more—what-do-you-call-it?”
We all three laughed aloud at that, and while I was trying to explain to the girl, as tactfully as possible, that after she had been abroad and seen the works of art in many countries, she might not care for a marble hand on a book, even with lace at the wrist, and with knitting-needles sticking out of the book, Gigi returned to his den, from which one then heard the sound of hard labor. I was finding it rather difficult to convince Miss Chittenden that she was asking for what was obsolete, from the world’s point of view, and impossible, from mine. I tried to dissuade her by telling her that it would be only a fragment. With astounding quickness she replied, “Oh, but that wouldn’t matter, would it? Lots of those old part-gods in the Museum are only fragments, and yet the teachers in the Art Department are always praising them up, just the same!”