Fairfax and His Pride: A Novel

by Marie Van Vorst

Glancing as he did from face to face, Cedersholm turned toward the Columbia students who adored him and whose professor in art he was. Searching the young faces for sympathy, he caught sight of Fairfax. He remembered who he was, their eyes met. Cedersholm drank a glass of water at his hand, bowed to his audience, and stepped down. He moved briskly, his head a little bent, crossed the enclosure, and joined the lady whom Fairfax had observed.

"That," Fairfax heard one of his neighbours say, "is Mr. Cedersholm's fiancée, Mrs. Faversham."

Fairfax raised his eyes to the statue. There was a slight commotion as the workmen ranged the ropes. Then, very gracefully, evidently proud as a queen, the lady, followed by Mr. Cedersholm, went up to the pedestal, took the ropes in her gloved hands, and there was a flutter and the conventional covering slipped and fell to the earth. There was an exclamation, a murmur, the released voices murmured their praise, Cedersholm was surrounded. Fairfax, immovable, stood and gazed.

The pedestal was of shell-pink marble, carved in delicate bas-relief. Many of the drawings Antony had made. Isis with her cap of Upper and Lower Egypt, Hathor with the eternal oblation—the Sphinx.... God and the Immortals alone knew who had made it.

On its great, impassive face, on its ponderous body, there was no signature, no name. Under the four corners, between Sphinx and pedestal, crouched four bronze

creatures, their forms and bodies visible between the stones of the pink pedestal and the soft blue of the Egyptian granite. The bold, severe modelling, their curious primitive conception, the life and realism of the creatures were poignant in their suggestion of power. The colour of the bronze was beautiful, would be more beautiful still as the years went on. The beasts supported the Egyptian monument. They rested between the pedestal and the Sphinx; they were the support and they were his. They seemed, to the man who had made them, beautiful indeed. Forgetting his outrage and his revenge, in the artist, Fairfax listened timidly, eagerly, for some word to be murmured in the crowd, some praise for his Beasts.

He heard many.

The students at his side were enthusiastic, they had made studies from the moulds; moulds of the Beasts were already in the Metropolitan Museum. The young critics were lavish, profuse. They compared the creatures with the productions of the Ancients.

"Cedersholm is a magician, he is one of the greatest men of his time...."

The man in working clothes smiled, but his expression was gentler than it had been hitherto. He lifted his soft hat and ran his fingers through his blond hair and remained bareheaded in the May air that blew about him; his fascinated eyes were fastened on the Abydos Sphinx, magnetized by the calm, inscrutable melancholy, by the serene indifference. The stony eyes were fixed on the vistas of the new world, the crude Western continent, as they had been fixed for centuries on the sands of the pathless desert, on the shifting sands that relentlessly effaced footsteps of artist and Pharaoh, dynasty and race.