Fairfax and His Pride: A Novel

by Marie Van Vorst

"The ideas," he told Fairfax, "are expensive, and I think, old man, that I shall have to buy some. I find that they will not come unless I invite them to dinner!"

Neither of the young men had made a hearty meal for an unconsciously long time. The weather grew colder and they lived as they could on Fairfax's day wage.

At this time, when during the hours of his freedom he was housed with his companion, Fairfax was overwhelmed by the rush of his ideas and his desire to create. He would not let himself long for solitude, for he was devoted to his friend and grateful for his companionship and affection, but a certain piece of work had haunted him since his first Sunday afternoon at the Louvre, and he was eager to finish the statue he had begun and to send it to the Salon.

The Visions no longer eluded him—ever present, sometimes they overpowered him by their obsession. They flattered the young man, seeming to embrace him, called to him, uplifted him until heights levelled before his eyes and became roads upon which he walked lightly, and his pride in his own power grew. Antony forgot to be humble. He was his own master—he had scorned the Academies. For several weeks, when he first came to Paris, he had posed as a model. Sitting there before the students, glowing with shame and pride, his heart was defiant, and not one of the students, who modelled the

fine bust and head, imagined how ardent his heart was or what an artist posed for them. Often he longed to seize a tool from inefficient hands and say, "Here, my children, like this, don't you see?"

He learned much from the rare visits of the Master and his cursory, hasty criticism, but he welcomed the impersonal labour in the atelier of Barye, where he was not a student but a worker, mechanical supposedly, yet creative to his fingertips. And as he watched Barye work, admiring him profoundly, eager for the man's praise, crushing down his own individuality, careful to do nothing but the technical, mechanical things he was given to do there—before his hand grew tired, while his brain was fresh, he would plan and dream of what he would do in his own attic, and he went back as a thirsty man to a source.

There came the dead season. Barye shut his atelier and went to Spain. There was nothing to do for Antony Fairfax and he was without any means of making his bread. After a few days of idleness, when his hands and feet were chilblained and he could hardly pass the cafés and restaurants, where the meals were cooking, without a tightening of the chest, he thought to himself, "Now is the time for the competition money to fall among us like a shower of gold"; but he had not heard one word from America or from Falutini, to whom the result was to have been written and who had Fairfax's address.

Dearborn, in a pair of old tennis trousers, a shabby black velvet jacket, sat Turkish fashion on his divan, his writing tablet on his knees. For weeks past he had been writing a five-act play—

"Too hungry, Tony, by Jove, to go on. Every time I start to write, the lines of some old-time menu run across the page—Canards à la presse, Potage à la Reine. Just now it was only pie and yellow cheese, such as we have out in Cincinnati."

Fairfax was breaking a mould. By common consent a fire had been built in the stove. Tony had taken advantage of the warm water to mix his plaster. Dearborn came over from his sofa.