Millington: Sculptor

by Oliver Onions

Millington: Sculptor

Written and Illustrated by

OLIVER ONIONS

I.

A BRASS plate on the narrow green door announced that he was James Millington and an ecclesiastical sculptor, and his yard and studio abutted on the venerable South Bar that was the sixth and last of the gates and posterns of the ancient city. Only to see this South Bar, American tourists commonly travelled a whole day; and of those of them who chanced to notice the brass plate that bore Millington’s name, one or other was sure to remark that it had verily been in some such place that the builders of the towering Minster had wrought. The hooves of the horses of kings had rung and echoed within the massive buttresses, and traitors’ heads had grinned in the sunshine from the Bar’s battlements. The heralds of Hereward had called to parley beneath it, and his staggering, storied Sow, hide-hung, and pushed from behind by two hundred yoke of oxen, had poured over the walls wild men who had sacked the Minster and put man and woman and babe to the sword. Now, the story of the Bar could be bought for a penny at a small kiosk under its eastern buttress; and in bad times it would sometimes occur to Millington that the occasional sacking of a Minster or two would be no bad thing for the trade of an ecclesiastical sculptor.

The courtyard within the green door was a litter of crumbling stone, broken fonts and holy-water stoups, gargoyles, bossy crockets and finials, fragments of marble and alabaster, and blackened grotesques. A few newer tombstones, unlettered, occupied an open penthouse in one corner. A crane stuck up against the sky behind this shed; and Millington, running his nervous fingers through his already greying hair, would pace this stone-yard of his when things went across with him, and notice how much of his father’s work was already overgrown with the green and grey lichen.

He was a spare man of two-and-forty, so shy and embarrassed in manner that a look of deference and timidity was never for long absent from his soft brown eyes. From his youth he had carved in the tradition of the Gothic that he had received from his father; it had moulded his face almost to the semblance of that of a monk; and only with the coming of his assistant Perry had it been revealed to him, to his great unsettling, that the Gothic was not the beginning and end and all-in-all of a sculptor’s business.

For Perry was the youngest child of the Movement, and did not scruple to speak of the Gothic as a “back-number.” Perry’s talk was of the vital relationship Art should bear to life as it is; and since Millington could never fully reckon up what life as it is, after all, consisted of, the effect of Perry’s truths on him was to bewilder him still further and to make him rumple his prematurely grizzled hair the more. The only Gothic thing about Perry was his own fair, centrally-parted hair; and even this approached the Moresque by reason of a perky curl over each temple.

Whenever there arrived from the Minster a saint or an apostle for restoration, Millington, his mind at peace in the severity of the Gothic, would measure distances, drill guiding-holes, and block out mechanically with his chisel fold after fold of rigid stone drapery; and this always moved Perry’s spleen. Perry’s own work consisted of a series of orgasms, and in the intervals of prostration he was always irritable.

“Good Heavens, man!” he exclaimed one morning, as Millington began the day with his rule and callipers: “that cookery-book business again! all absolutely alike—a straight line, then a break, then the little tuck-away. Haven’t you a soul?”

“What do you say, Perry?” Millington inquired gently, taking the cherrywood pipe from his lips.

“To the artist, each fresh task should be a fresh wonder and problem; not that. … Haven’t you a soul?”

“Yes,” Millington replied anxiously.

“Nobody ’d think it,” Perry complained; and Millington regarded his assistant anxiously.

“Perry,” he said slowly, “are you a Freethinker?”

“A what?”

“I’m afraid you’re a Freethinker,” said Millington, resuming his work: “you ought to decorate—theatres——”

“You speak as if there was no opportunity in theatres: why, man——”

“Opportunities terrify me, Perry. I could get frightfully wrong where you clever fellows wouldn't see any possibility. The Gothic saves me from that.”

Perry deprecated his own Gold Medal and Travelling Scholarship. “You don’t give yourself a chance, man,” he urged. “Why don’t you experiment? If you can’t get very far wrong in the Gothic, why,”—he added, triumphantly,—“you can’t get very right either!”

Millington looked sorrowfully at him. “I only want never to get very far wrong, Perry.”

“But, hang it, there’s a Universal Principle—Compensation, you know—which means, my dear chap, that the man who is capable of the greatest heights is also capable of the lowest falls.”

“Does it mean that?—Poor devil!” said Millington.—“I was afraid you were a Freethinker, Perry.”

Across the open cobbled space before the South Bar lay the Hospital, and age had given to its façade of brick a bloom soft and harmonious as that of a plum. Here, on warm afternoons, red-shawled old women knitted in the sun and nurses tended children with crutches or cramp-irons on their legs. From the upper windows of his house behind the studio Millington could look forth on the Hospital lawns; and seldom a fine afternoon passed but he left the studio and passed up to his small sitting-room at the hour when Nurse Hemsley issued from the low doorway with her arm about the peevish old woman who dragged one foot in a semicircle. He never left the sitting-room window till the nurse had received her daily scolding from the old body and disappeared into the Hospital again; and it always puzzled him that the other nurses should seem, after Nurse Hemsley, a trifle restless and fussy. He had never spoken to her, and he hardly remembered by what odd solecism it had come to pass that, meeting her in the street, he always lifted his hat and she always bowed without embarrassment.

It was Millington’s habit, when trouble came to his spirit, to repair to the Minster; and it was thither that he bent his steps one June afternoon. To tell the truth, Perry had driven him out. The youth had again urged Millington to break his voluntary, ignoble bonds, and had quoted the Principle of Compensation with great effect. Failure in a lofty attempt, he had declared, was to be preferred to slothful adherence to a mechanical tradition. His lips had been touched with the coal; and it had come to Millington as never before that perhaps his glib-tongued assistant was right.

He had got no farther than the South Bar when the brushing of a white gown past him arrested him. Looking up, his eyes met the quiet grey eyes of Nurse Hemsley. He removed his hat; but she did not pass on, and he stood with the hat in his hand.

“I have met you luckily,” a contralto voice said; “I want to see you about one of our old women who died the other day.”

Millington had missed the ill-natured old woman: he murmured something, and the nurse continued:

“‘Who dragged her foot’?—Yes, that one: of course; you can see from your premises. … Her daughter, who is the wife of a tallow-chandler in the town, wants to provide a tombstone. Now you know what these poor people are—she certainly can’t afford for such a purpose the sum she mentioned to me——”

“No; I know,” said Millington.

“——and already I’ve been to two monumental masons.”

Yes, Millington thought: Richards was under a time-contract for the guttering of the chapter-house, and Shaw had probably made an oration to her on the eight-hours day … and he found himself noticing that the long lines of Nurse Hemsley’s white gown, gay in the subdued sunlight of the Bar, were those of the great Virgin in his studio. “You had better come to my own yard,” he said; and the two turned the corner of the Bar.

They passed through the green door, and stood among the fragments and grotesques and gargoyles. Nurse Hemsley passed from one carving to another, and by-and-by she turned to Millington.

“All this work seems to have great gravity and repose,” she observed.

“It is displeasing to you?” Millington said, troubled again.

She smiled a little. “It isn’t I who want a tombstone; I was thinking of the tallow-chandler’s wife,” she corrected.

Millington led the way to the small penthouse, and they stood before a tombstone by Perry.

“This—this is rather—new,” he said, hesitatingly; “I don’t understand it myself—I understand mouldings best.” (And indeed mouldings were Millington’s special refuge in the hours of his temptation.) The tombstone had a sort of standard rose-tree on either side and suave curves of beauty—an end-paper in alabaster; and its mouldings … Millington shook his head.

But Nurse Hemsley nodded. “I think that will do,” she said; and after some little talk, wherein she strove in vain to keep the sculptor to the subject of cost, she thanked him and took her leave.

That night Millington slept little. The temporary peace the Nurse’s composed face had given fled again, and the thought returned that Perry might be right. And what then? … His earliest recollections were that as a child, while his father had chipped at saint or imp or devil, he had roamed the Minster from crypt to lofty staging, lost in awe when the solemn organ played, silent before the towering dim windows; and now, at forty-two, every experience of his life had been dominated by the great church. That apart, he was ignorant of the age to which, Perry said, his art should bear a vital relationship. Had he, then, been wrong all his life? … And she too had passed the immemorial sheltering Gothic that was not merely his—was in very fact himself; she had preferred the work of Perry. True, she had not chosen for herself, but poor Millington groaned. …

On the morrow he inquired at the Hospital for Nurse Hemsley. He was shown into a bare ante-room that had a faint, disquieting smell—soap, carbolic, iodoform. When she appeared her sleeves were rolled up and a bunch of bright keys jingled at her waist. He spoke briefly, seeing her own business-like air.

“I omitted to ask you the woman’s name and age, and where the stone is to be taken,” he said; and she furnished him with the particulars.

“I should like some day to come again to your work place,” she said: “I was interested.”

“I am afraid,” said Millington slowly, “that I know few people here”; and she laughed a little that he should think of the proprieties.

“You may call me Nurse Hemsley instead of Miss Hemsley,” she said; “one gets a different point of view—here.” She gathered up the chatelaine of bright keys, and he, with that faint suggestive smell in his nostrils, knew too well the care that this poor body of flesh requires from such as she, to answer.

But many afternoons passed and she did not come. Millington delegated entirely to Perry the setting up of the new tombstone, and that done, Perry busied himself with a Winged Sorrow. It had yet another standard rose-tree, and thorns bent into French-curves, and a winding ribbon of river. Perry smoked cigarettes as he worked at it; and as he continued to twit Millington that his interminable running mouldings might proceed from machines, Millington, in his heart of hearts, could not see that a machine could not also be devised that would turn out such work as Perry’s. He helped Perry to cast the Sorrow in plaster and to paint it to the hue of green bronze, the hue of the lichens of the fragments of the courtyard. That done, having no commission for the moment on hand, he smoked until even his cherrywood pipe became distasteful to him.

And then happened a thing that Perry considered enormously funny. He came in one afternoon choking with laughter at it. “Such a lark!” he bubbled. “You know the stone we set up a little while ago? Well, I saw the curator of the cemetery to-day. It seems the tallow-chandler’s wife—you know—is tremendously set up about it. The cemetery’s always full of loafers in the afternoon—they gather round each fresh stone as if it were a morning paper—and this woman, by Jove, she sits behind the next stone, to hear what they say about it!—Lord, how I laughed!”

“Ah!” said Millington; and he permitted himself one of his rare criticisms. “You ought to go and sit there too, Perry.”

“So you must stick it on the bill for that,” said Perry. “Well—I say, really, Millington, you are an idle devil, you know! Why don’t you set to work and do something?”

There was a beseeching look in Millington’s brown eyes, but Perry did not heed it. He began again to talk.

And as he talked, Millington, clutching his hair, reflected that he could get rid of Perry,—but then, Perry might be right. The horrible blank opened again before him. Perry continued the wise charming, and then began to whistle. Millington rose heavily. Whether Perry was right or wrong, to waste time was certainly a sin. A piece of leaden piping lay at his elbow, and he bent it into a loop and straightened it again. He bent it again; and when next Perry looked up he exclaimed, “Hallo!—going to do a bust?”

A tripod turn-table stood to hand, its pivot sticking empty up; with a pair of pliers Millington wired the piping to the pivot. The foundation was secured, and he turned his gentle eyes on Perry.

“I’ll try, Perry,” he said.

“Good man! Shall I hunt you up a model?”

“No,” Millington replied.

II.

One of the roof-blinds of the studio was withdrawn, and motes floated lazily in the shafts of morning sunlight. Casts and replicas glowed with soft luminous shadows, and the anatomised limbs on nails and shelves showed the lines of dust in their crevices. Millington worked at his bust, and his brow was heavy and his mouth dragged sourly down.

For ten days now he had been conscious that he was a fool, but he still stuck doggedly to his task, Perry had told him that infinite realms were open to him; it appeared now that the utmost use he was able to make of such a liberty was to demonstrate to the world that he, James Millington, was a fool. And more than that. In all his reading, the artist who had made a poem or a painting in honour of his mistress had punctually achieved a masterpiece—not his own, but Love’s. Why then was he, Millington, alone forsaken, unaided by Love?

He looked again at the clay bust of Nurse Hemsley, and recognised it fairly for what it was—pathetically feeble. And even in looking, hope tantalised him again. Miss Hemsley’s hair flowed on one side, like a boy’s, but that of the bust he had left unmodelled, for fear of Perry’s recognition, Perhaps with the fashioning of the hair all else would fall into order and truth; and then, even in its birth, the hope vanished again. He knew that it would do no such thing. He, a reliable worker within the strict convention of the Gothic, was a fool outside it. He continued to work, stupidly, for no other reason than that he had begun.

The day grew hot, and the lichens in the courtyard became parched and shrivelled. Perry came in, announced that he intended to spend the afternoon on the river, and went out again. The old women and crippled children of the Hospital came out, and then retired as the heat became intense. From far over the meadows came the whirring of a reaper and the faint regular clash of a machine-rake; and at last Millington drew the blinds of the studio, swathed the bust in wet clouts, and dozed in his chair.

The sudden clanging of the outer bell roused him, and he crossed the courtyard and opened the green door. Nurse Hemsley stood there in her white uniform and black bonnet. She carried a paper fan in her hand.

“May I come in?” she asked.

Millington, still only half awake, conducted her to the studio, and she sat down in the chair he had vacated,—This is deliciously cool!” she said; and Millington, first asking her to remove her bonnet, began to prepare tea for her. As he pottered about the stove she rose and began to pass from cast to cast; and soon she paused for a moment before the anatomised legs and arms.

“H’m! Your operating-room is familiar, at any rate,” she said by-and-by, turning away.

“Yes—I am sorry,” Millington replied foolishly.

“Why? That—if you are speaking of my own business—it seems odd to say so—is the picturesque part—bearable——”

“Pardon me—do you take sugar?—You were saying ——?”

She took the cup of tea from him and made a little grimace.—“Was I saying? Then I oughtn’t to have been. But neither need you have been sorry.”

“No,” Millington replied gravely; and he thought again of what she called the picturesque part of her occupation, and of the other mean and thankless requirements that were not picturesque. It seemed a beauty past the comprehension of Perry that she should devote her life to them; perhaps it was the secret of the peace in her tranquil eyes.

And then, as she began to move about again, a daring resolution took shape in Millington’s mind. The bust stood on the tripod, covered with the wet cloths, and Miss Hemsley was approaching it. Should he? … He hesitated for a full minute: then he removed the wrappings.

One glance at her face told him that she was quite unenlightened; then he stood with his head bowed before he replaced the cloths. He murmured, scarcely audibly, “What—what I really understand, Miss Hemsley, is mouldings,—I do understand mouldings.”

“Mouldings?” she inquired, and at that moment the five o'clock chime pealed from the Minster. Nurse Hemsley started.

“Oh, my bonnet, please! Indeed I must be back: another time——”

“Yes—yes,—but I do, I truly do, understand mouldings,” said Millington,

On the following day there arrived from the Minster a great Saint Agnes for restoration; and Millington was busy again. He and Perry and a couple of labourers prepared a massive base for the reception of the statue, and then the Saint was sawn through the upper third, for she was to have a new head and shoulders. Millington began to take measurements, to work out sums on the wall, and to draw cartoons on sheets of paper; and Nurse Hemsley, making a totally unexpected call to pay the bill for Perry’s tombstone, paused before the decapitated Saint.

“Ah!” she said,—“and so the unfinished head you showed me was for this?”

Millington took this second blow patiently.—“Yes,” he said; “it weathers unequally—the stone—according to position and exposure.—Perry, let Miss Hemsley see your Bambino. …”

Late, very late that night, Millington entered his studio with a small lamp in his hand, which he set on a bench. A thin night-mist had crept up from the river, and the still flame that burned in a faint halo barely lighted the grey saint and the tackle that surrounded her. A single star, blurred by the roof-glass, shone tremulously overhead; and Millington uncovered the fatal bust, and sat down in a low chair opposite to it.

This was his bitter hour, and he remained for long motionless. A little clock ticked loudly and hurriedly, and, as if with its quick monotonous beat, Millington’s brain too began to work. He tried to tell himself that it was not much, the shape that a man could fashion out of clay, the line he could draw with a pencil, the word that issued from his mouth; and he knew that he lied. In themselves these were nothing; but they were all a man had to show for his years of experience and agony and sweat. These truly were the man—brains, blood, and soul. Perry’s Bambinos and Sorrows were Perry, his own foolish bust was himself; and he knew that, fool as he was, he had never been so great a fool as in this pretence to be otherwise. He had written himself down as inexorably as if in a book; and though few read the language, to the first artist, not of the breed of Perry, who should chance to cast an eye on his work he had proclaimed himself empty and a fool. … And suddenly a warmth and gladness stirred at his heart that Nurse Hemsley knew nothing of these things, and that she had stood before the bust of herself as if it had been another’s.

He lifted his head, and again his gaze fell on the bust and the headless saint. He rose. The lamp gave light enough for what he meant to do, and first he took one of the wooden tools that lay on the tripod. Deliberately he pared away the clay of the hair with it, and with his thumb ran the strips down the sides of the face to form the wimple. He crossed to his cartoon, and began with a rule to take measurements. The hint that Helen Hemsley had unconsciously given him became a purpose, and he worked the quicker feeling the old comfort of the Gothic near at hand. With steady fingers he smoothed away the personal, trivial traits, and in their place appeared the conventional austerity of the saint—of the saints whom, Perry reproached him, he could turn out in his sleep. There was a block of millstone at hand … a few holes drilled with the pointer on the morrow … the morrow would see him gravely, automatically chiselling again. He worked till midnight; then he turned down the lamp, sought a rug, and fell asleep in his chair.

III.

Hammers rang, and the chains of the crane rattled as the group of workmen made the completed St. Agnes ready for hoisting to her niche over the West Porch of the Minster. Millington, hatted and gloved, directed the work, and he glanced frequently across the railed-off grass-plot to where the pavement began. He had asked Helen Hemsley to walk to the Minster that afternoon; and a foreman stood by to take charge of the work as soon as she should appear. Passers-by stopped to look at the renovated Agnes, and to gaze up at the tall scaffolding where the steam of the winch made little puffs in the sun.

A white uniform approached on the pavement, and Millington strode over the low chain railings. They passed round to the façade of the Minster, and together entered the vast church.

One or two slippered attendants nodded to Millington, knowing him; but save for these and a couple of sight-seers the Minster was empty. They passed up the nave to the chancel, and there sat down, talking in subdued tones. They talked about ordinary matters; and by-and-by, as the quietness of the church seemed to steal on them, they ceased to talk. So they sat for the space of ten minutes; and then Millington bent slightly towards her.

“My trouble is gone,” he said.

She gave him one brief inquiring glance, and looked down again. “I was not aware you had been in trouble,” she answered.

“No, you could hardly have guessed; but—may I tell you?”

“Do you wish to tell me?”

Helen Hemsley folded a glove mechanically as he talked, with many breaks and pauses. A bright, tender colour came into her cheeks, and she only turned her head now and then to ask a question. High up the lofty tower the soft reverberation of the quarter sounded, and then Millington, ceasing as if for a moment, did not resume again. It was hardly necessary, after all, that she should know all about the bust.

“That was my trouble,” he said; “and that it is gone is due to you.”

“How to me?”

“To you, Helen, for you have given me …”

It seemed that she was able to divine what it was she had given him, for her head was very low and the colour flashed brighter in her cheeks.

“You would not take that away?” he murmured, close to her.

“I would not.”

“Then, Helen … oh for a Gothic in speech, for I am a fool without it … then? …”

“I do not consider you a fool,” she answered simply, “nor shall you yourself.”

“Not a fool?”

“Hush!—no,” she replied.

“Then … Helen …”

—And somehow it seemed fitting to Millington, and of a piece with the rest of his life, that the word with which she betrothed herself to him should be so mingled with the failing harmonies of the quarter that again pealed from the Minster tower as to be almost inseparable from them.