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?”