The following April, Mariellen Clarenden wrote to me from Paris, to tell me that I might expect her in my studio about the middle of May. She had visited the Salon, she said, and had seen strange sights in the world of art. Also, she had worked hard on her French; luckily, she added, she had a good Missouri foundation. The closing sentence of her letter went to my head a little. “Mon Dieu,” she wrote, “Mon Dieu, how great you are—you and Auguste Rodin!” “Mon Dieu,” indeed! Was this girl becoming sophisticated, like the others? Time would tell.
Early in the morning, on May 15th, I had a telephone message to the effect that Miss Clarenden, according to promise, would revisit my studio promptly at ten, if I would permit. As I have always been a collector of coincidences, I noted with zest that May 15th was exactly one year from the date of my absurd one-sided party-of-the-first-part contract concerning the marble hand. I further noted, not without dismay, that Senator Bullwinkle was to have his final sitting that very afternoon. Still adding to my collection, I recalled that it had happened like that the year before; Clarenden day had been Bullwinkle day, a day of mingled sun and cloud.
Now that Bullwinkle bust had always been a vexation to my spirit, partly because old Bullwinkle had so often played truant, instead of giving me the necessary sittings. He was forever travelling about the country for political purposes, or else attending the funerals of near relatives. Sometimes I fancied that he would go to any lengths, no matter how criminal, rather than face me from the sitter’s chair. The commission, given to me by a group of Bullwinkle enthusiasts, was to be handsomely paid, but was to be kept a profound secret from the world until the finished bronze bust should be set in place as the crowning ornament of the celebrated five-million-dollar Bullwinkle Building, at that time under way. To me, there was something rather childish about this pseudo-secrecy, openly kept up for nearly two years. But above all, that bust bothered me because I myself had not yet mastered it. As it stood there in the searching May light, I saw in its loose ends, its uninteresting planes, its prosaic light-and-dark, its flabbiness of brow and cheek, its dreary wastes of shirt bosom and lapel, only a monument to my own incapacity to seize and reveal the characteristics of my subject;—to tell in my clay all the news that was fit to print about him, with just enough more to keep the spectator guessing. Lord, how I had tried, and failed, to penetrate the Bullwinkle personality! At first, I had privately laughed at the Senator as a ridiculous old card, holding on to the present and yearning toward the future, but in reality, living only on the past and its triumphs. Indeed, his middle years had been a pageant of triumphs. Very soon, however, I found I was not getting on with my work. The man worried me. I could not discover what there was within him that had lifted him above the shoulders of the crowd. I could not for the life of me isolate his own private germ of human grandeur, and inoculate my clay with it. Yet I acknowledged grandeur in him. It would be absurd to attribute to anything so blind as chance his astounding command over human votes.
To be baffled by a Bullwinkle was a chastening lesson. I dreaded that afternoon sitting. My wife was away, and there could be no readings from the “Congressional Record.” What would that do to him? Would it bring him out, or shut him in? To get a running start, I had pulled the bust out into the fresh morning light, and like a dull child trying to find his place in yesterday’s lesson, I was fumbling about on the pedestal, the shirt-front, and the senatorial dewlaps, when a ring at my door and voices in the anteroom warned me to slip a cover over this work of high secrecy.
What a contrast to the various Bullwinkles of my career was the young lady in blue, who now stood before me! This time, she was followed, not by a mere footman, but by a young man wearing her colors in his tie and his heart on his sleeve. There they were in their victorious springtide, the suitor and the suited; for there could be no earthly doubt that this young man was hers, and that the two were lovers forever. That was evidently what was most of all in their minds, and I, for one, thought they were right. Incredible as it would have seemed to me if I had not been there, Miss Clarenden’s former radiancy was enhanced by her new experiences, her bright garments. What an exquisite thrilling azure was that of her veil as it fluttered against the discreet dark blue of her costume! Maxfield Parrish should have been there to immortalize it. Yet I did not regret his absence, at the time. There were all kinds of lovely blue tones about her, and these tones in their very harmony conspired together to make the blue of her eyes something beyond description matchless and unforgettable. She was one of those girls who, whether they put on a pinafore or a Paquin gown, manage to make mankind believe two things: first, that they are more beautiful than ever, and next, that what they have on does not look too expensive. There are a few such girls left, I am told. The mere sight of her smoothed out my Bullwinkle worries.
She came to the point at once, taking advantage of a moment when her cavalier’s manly attention was caught by the workings of an enlarging machine in the corner; her Jack was an engineer, it appeared. She paused an instant, then plunged in, somewhat breathlessly, as if she were not quite sure of her ground.
“Jack and I,” she said,—“well, we think now that perhaps you were right in what you told me a year ago. Yes, you were right! I was mistaken when I thought I would be fully satisfied if I could have forever with me the marble copy of mother’s hand, carved by your hand. Travel is so broadening, isn’t it? And now, since I’ve seen all Italy and France” (here she smiled widely at her own fatuity), “I’ve learned better, indeed I have! And if you don’t mind, I’ll take away the plaster cast. I shall want to keep it always, of course. But it’s nature, not art, that makes me want to.”
I stood aghast. The girl was actually taking me at my word, and repudiating the contract of yesteryear. What a change in a twelvemonth, and, O Education, what crimes are committed in thy name! She saw me looking about for her cast, and very gently begged me not to bother, unless it was quite handy. Resisting an ironic impulse to tell her that of course a plaster cast of a hand was always more or less handy, I dusted off her confounded box, and gave it to her with what courtesy I could muster. I remembered Gigi’s saying that to do otherwise would have been impossibile, she was si bella, bella.
It chanced that not six feet away from the lady in blue, and behind a little curtain adroitly arranged by Gigi, the marble hand was enshrined. And strange as it will seem to you after all I have said, there was something interesting about it, something that would compel your pleased attention, even if you were an artist, or only a lover of art. Paul Manship liked parts of it; and a painter friend of mine said—but no matter about that now. Gigi had poured his whole Mediterranean soul into his part of the work, and I had designed, as best I could, the open book and the drapery. To be candid, I had taken real pleasure in finishing the marble, with the desired morbidezza. I had enjoyed every stroke I had given to that most beautiful stone, for Gigi had kept my tools in exquisite condition all the time. He seemed to know just how I wanted every tool to feel in my hand when I was modelling the marble. I longed to show the girl what we had done for her. But how could I do that, after all I had said to her, a year ago, and all she had said to me, to-day? Was there not a certain sprightly finality in her remarks? With decision, she took the box from my hands and entrusted it to her Jack.