Chapter V

This is not my story. It is the story of Sidney and Anne Bush, and perhaps, in a way, of Julie Termonde, of Ellice Valentine and myself. But I have given Ellice’s letter to show the reason I did not see her for a time. A man may feel flattered by the knowledge that a woman has cared for him, but it is also an embarrassing matter. And when she cheerfully proclaims that she has long been “over” it, it also contains certain quite difficult elements of discomposure.

Thus a month went by and I did not see Ellice Valentine. I was preparing for another of those wanderings which have kept me fairly interested and fully occupied for the last few years, when a rather peremptory summons came from her by telephone. It had something to do with copying an antique marble mantel I had brought from Italy, and I gathered that she had found a firm to do it.

“In cement,” she explained. “They take casts of it in plaster, and then build it. It will only clean your mantel, Maurice. And I daresay it needs it!”

“Go ahead,” I said. “But what am I to do, outside of providing the mantel?”

“You’re to come and see the people with me. They haven’t the slightest respect for my ideas.”

I agree to do it. . . .

Does any one, I wonder, sit as often as I do, considering how the affairs of life would have worked out had they done this at a given time? Or not done that? All those milestones on the road, and all those little paths that lead to right and left—do all of them lead off Dover?

Are we free agents, or simply the slaves of some unknown inevitable law? Some happy through it, some wretched, and most of us, God knows, not one or the other. Puppets or kings?

I went. I remember stopping on the way out in the shrouded drawing room of my house to look at the mantel, and remembering that it was Sidney who had urged me to buy it and ship it back.

“It’s good,” he had said, running his long sculptor’s fingers over the relief. “It’s damned good, Maurice. The joke of it is, you’ll never know how good it is.”

And now it was to be copied—in cement. Shades of Sidney Bush, who loathed imitation, and had refused to eat his dinner one night because the hostess had garnished the wild duck with lilies cut out of turnips. And very well cut, it had seemed to me. Sidney, who had loved almost sensuously the feel of marble under the hand, and preferred the patina of old rubbed satinwood to the gloss of a woman’s hair.

Cement!

But I concealed all this from Ellice Valentine, and entered as well as I could into her enthusiasm. When my task was completed—I was, I found, to secure a reduction in the cost—we were asked if we cared to inspect the studio. It surprised me, rather. Cement had in my mind been a matter of noisy crushing machines on a city street, and yet here was an enormous and lofty room, where quiet workmen were doing deft things with their hands, and where, stretching almost across one end was a heroic and partially completed altar piece, the Crucifixion.