“You know,” I said, “that I admired that piece of work greatly.”
Mrs. Ascher waved her hand towards a table in the darkest corner of the room.
“It’s not finished,” she said, “and never will be. I’ve lost all interest in it. If you like it take it away. I’ll give it to you with pleasure.”
I found poor Tim, not even swathed in wet bandages, among a litter of half finished fauns and nymphs and several attempts at a smooth-haired dog. Mrs. Ascher had done very little work at him since I saw him before. She had, in pursuance of her own idea, turned half the saucer on which the head stood into a mat of water-lily leaves. The other half—and I felt gratified when I saw this—was worked up into an unmistakable hammer and a number of disproportionately large nails. Tim’s face and head still expressed lofty idealism in the way which had fascinated me when I first saw the thing. But Mrs. Ascher had evidently neglected some necessary precaution in dealing with her material. The neck—and Tim’s neck is an unusually long one—had collapsed. A jagged crack ran half round it close under the right ear. The left side of the neck was curiously crumpled. The head leaned rakishly towards the water-lily side of the saucer.
I remember hearing once of an irreverent choir boy. At a Christmas party, a sort of feast of an Abbot of Unreason held in the less sacred parts of the cathedral precincts, the brat decorated the statue of an Archbishop with a pink and blue paper cap taken from a cracker. The effect must have been much the same as that produced by the subsidence of Tim Gorman’s neck.
“Do you really mean to give it to me?” I said. “I should like to have it very much. I should set it up on my writing table and call it ‘Disillusion.’ But do you think it will collapse any more?”
“Has it collapsed? I suppose it did not dry properly.”
Mrs. Ascher did not even look at it.
“Oh,” I said, “the present effect, the cynical contempt for the original noble spirituality, is the result of an accident? What tricks circumstances play on us! A slight irregularity in drying and a hero becomes a clown. The case of ‘Imperial Caesar dead and turned to clay’ is not so bad as that of an idealist whose neck has cracked.”
“I’m dreadfully disappointed in that boy,” said Mrs. Ascher. “Will you forgive me if I do not talk of him? Even now I cannot bear to.”