Jan of the Windmill Part 30

THE BUSINESS MAN AND THE PAINTER.--PICTURES AND POT BOILERS.-- CIMABUE AND GIOTTO.--THE SALMON-COLORED OMNIBUS.

The business men were half way to their business when the shadow of the sooty church still fell upon one or two of the congregation who dispersed more slowly; a few aged poor who lingered from infirmity as well as leisure; and a man neither very old nor very poor, whose strong limbs did not bear him away at a much quicker pace. His enjoyment of the peculiar pleasures of an early walk was deliberate as well as full, and bustle formed no necessary part of his trade.

He was a painter.

The business gentleman hurrying out of the Boys' Home stumbled against the painter, whom he knew, but whom just now he would not have been sorry to avoid. The very next salmon-colored omnibus that pa.s.sed the end of the street would only just enable him to be punctual if he could catch it, and the painter, in his opinion, had "no sense of the value of time." The painter, on the other hand, held as strong a conviction that his friend's sense of the monetary value of time was so exaggerated as to hinder his sense of many higher things in this beautiful world. But they were fast friends nevertheless, and with equal charity pitied each other respectively for a slovenly and a slavish way of life.

"My dear friend!" cried the artist, seizing the other by the elbow, "you are just coming from where I was thinking of going."

"By all means, my dear fellow," said Jan's friend, shaking hands to release his elbow, "the master will be delighted, and--my time is not my own, you know."

"I know well," said the artist, with a little humorous malice. "It belongs to others. That is your benevolence. So" -

"Come, come!" laughed the other. "I'm not a man of leisure like you. I must catch the next salmon-colored omnibus."

"I'll walk with you to it, and talk as we go. You can't propose to run at your time of life, and with your position in the city! Now tell me, my good friend, the boys in your Home are the offscouring of the streets, aren't they?"

"They are mostly dest.i.tute lads, but they have never been convicted of crime any more than yourself. It is the fundamental distinction between our Home and other industrial schools. Our effort is to save boys whom dest.i.tution has ALL BUT made criminal. It is not a reformatory."

"I beg your pardon, I know. But I was speaking of their bodily condition only. I want a model, and should be glad to get it without the nuisance of sketching in the slums. Such a ragged, pinched, eager, and yet stupid child as might sit homeless between the black walls of Newgate and the churchyard of St. Sepulchre,--a waif of the richest and most benevolent society in Christendom, for whom the alternative of the churchyard would be the better."

"Not the only one, I trust," said the business gentleman, almost pa.s.sionately. "I trust in G.o.d, not the only alternative. If I have a hope, it is that of greater and more effective efforts than hitherto to rescue the children of London from crime."

In the warmth of this outburst, he had permitted a salmon-colored omnibus to escape him, but, being much too good a man of business to waste time in regrets, he placed himself at a convenient point for catching the next, and went on speaking.

"I am glad to hear you have another picture in hand."

"Not a PICTURE--a POT BOILER," said the artist, testily. "Low art-- domestic sentiment--cheap pathos. My PICTURE no one would look at, even if it were finished, and if I could bring myself to part with it."

"Mind, you give me the first refusal."

"Of my PICTURE?"

"Yes, that is, I mean your street boy. It is just in my line. I delight in your things. But don't make it too pathetic, or my wife won't be able to bear it in the drawing room. Your things always make her cry."

"That's the pot boiler," said the artist; "I really wish you'd look at my picture, unfinished as it is. I should like you to have it.

Anybody'll take the pot boiler. I want a model for the picture too, and, oddly enough, a boy; but one you can't provide me with."

"No? The subject you say is"--said the man of business, dreamily, as he strove at the same time to make out if a distant omnibus were yellow or salmon-colored.

"Cimabue finding the boy Giotto drawing on the sand. Ah! my friend, can one realize that meeting? Can one picture the generous glow with which the mature and courtly artist recognized unconscious genius struggling under the form of a shepherd lad,--yearning out of his great Italian eyes over that glowing landscape whose beauties could not be written in the sand? Will the golden age of the arts ever return? We are hardly moving towards it, I fear. For I have found a model for my Cimabue,--an artist too, and a true one; but no boy Giotto! Still I should like you to see it. I flatter myself the coloring" -

"Salmon," said the man of business, briskly. "I thought it was yellow. My dear fellow--HI!--take as many boys as you like--TO THE CITY!"

The conductor of the salmon-colored omnibus touched his bell, and the painter was left alone.

CHAPTER x.x.xIV.

A CHOICE OF VOCATIONS.--RECREATION HOUR.--THE BOW LEGGED BOY.-- DRAWING BY HEART.--GIOTTO.

Jan found favor with his new friends. The master's sharp eyes noted that the prescribed ablutions seemed both pleasant and familiar to the new boy, and the superintendent of the wood-chopping department expressed his opinion that Jan's intelligence and dexterity were wasted among the f.a.gots, and that his vocation was to be a brushmaker at least, if not a joiner.

Of such trades as were open to him in the Home Jan inclined to cabinet-making. It must be amusing to dab little bunches of bristles so deftly into little holes with hot pitch as to produce a hearth-brush, but as a life-work it does not satisfy ambition. For boot-making he felt no fancy, and the tailor's shop had a dash of corduroy and closeness in the atmosphere not grateful to nostrils so long refreshed by the breezes of the plains. But, when an elder boy led him into the airy room of the cabinet-maker, Jan found a subject of interest. The man was making a piece of furniture to order; the boys had done the rough work, and he was finishing it. It was a combination of shelves and cupboard, and was something like an old oak cabinet which stood in Master Chuter's parlor, and which, in Jan's opinion, was both handsomer and more convenient than this.

When the joiner, amused by the keen gaze of Jan's black eyes, asked him good-naturedly "how he liked it," Jan expressed his opinion, to ill.u.s.trate which he involuntarily took up the fat pencil lying on the bench, and made a sketch of Master Chuter's cabinet upon a bit of wood.

News spreads with mysterious swiftness in all communities, large and small. Before dinner-time, it was known throughout the Home that the master joiner had applied for the new boy as a pupil, and that he could draw with a black-lead pencil, and set his betters to rights.

The master had pa.s.sed through several phases of feeling over Jan during that morning. His first impression had been dispelled by Jan's orderly ways, and the absence of any vagrant restlessness about him. The joiner's report awoke a hope that he would become a star of the inst.i.tution, but as his acquirements came to the light, and he proved not merely to have a good voice, but to have been in a choir, the master's generous hopes received a check, and as the day pa.s.sed on he became more and more convinced that it was a case to be "restored to his friends."

When two o'clock came, and the boys were all out for "recreation,"

Jan had to endure some chaff on the subject of his accomplishments.

But the banter of London street boys was familiar to him, and he took it in good part. When they found him good-tempered, he was soon popular, and they asked his history with friendly curiosity.

"And vot sort of a mansion did you hang out in ven you wos at home?"

inquired a little lad, whose rosy cheeks and dancing eyes would have qualified him to sit as a model for the hero of some little tale of rustic life and simplicity, but who had graduated in the lowest lore of the streets so much before he was properly able to walk that he was bandy-legged in consequence. There must have been some blood in him that was domestic and not vagrant in its currents, for he was as a rule one of the steadiest and best-behaved boys in the establishment. Only from time to time he burst out into street slang of the strongest description, apparently as a relief to his feelings. Happily for the cause it had at heart, the Boys' Home was guided by large-minded counsels, and if the eyes of the master were as the eyes of Argus, they could also wink on occasion. "Hout with it!" said the bow-legged boy, straddling before Jan. "If it wos Buckingham Palace as you resided in, make a clean breast of it, and hease your mind."

"Thee knows more of palaces than the likes of me. Thee manners be so fine," said Jan; and the repartee drew a roar of laughter, in which the bandy-legged boy joined. "But I've lived in a windmill,"

Jan added, "and that be more than thee've done, I fancy."

Some of the boys had seen windmills, and some had not; and there was a strong tendency among the boys who had to give exaggerated, not to say totally fict.i.tious, descriptions of those buildings to the boys who had not. There was a quick, prevailing impression, however, that Jan's word could be trusted, and he was appealed to. "Take it off in a picter," said the bandy-legged boy. "We heered as you took off a SWEET OF FURNITUR in the Master's face. Take off the windmill, if you lived in it."

There was a bit of chalk in Jan's pocket, and the courtyard was paved. He knelt down, and the boys gathered round him. They were sharp enough to be sympathetic, and when he begged them to be quiet they kept a breathless silence, which was broken only by the distant roar of London outside, and by the Master's voice speaking in an adjoining pa.s.sage.

"I can hardly say, sir, that I FEAR, but I think you'll find most of them look too hearty and comfortable for your purpose."

About Jan the silence was breathless. The bow-legged boy literally laid his hand upon his mouth, and he had better have laid it over his eyes, for they seemed in danger of falling out of their sockets.

Jan covered his for a moment, and then looked upwards. Back upon his sensitive memory rolled the past, like a returning tide which sweeps every thing before it. Much clearer than those roofs and chimney-stacks the windmill stood against the sky, with arms outstretched as if to recall its truant son. If he had needed it to draw from, it was there, plain enough. But how should he need to see it, on whose heart every line of it was written? He could have laid his hand in the dark upon the bricks that were weather-stained into fanciful landscapes upon its walls, and planted his feet on the spot where the gra.s.s was most worn down about its base.

He drew with such power and rapidity that only some awe of the look upon his face could have kept silence in the little crowd whom he had forgotten. And when the last sc.r.a.p of chalk had crumbled, and he dragged his blackened finger over the foreground till it bled, the voice which broke the silence was the voice of a stranger, who stood with the master on the threshold of the court-yard.

Never perhaps was more conveyed in one word than in that which he spoke, though its meaning was known to himself alone, -

"GIOTTO!"

CHAPTER x.x.xV.

"WITHOUT CHARACTER?"--THE WIDOW.--THE BOW-LEGGED BOY TAKES SERVICE.- -STUDIOS AND PAINTERS.

"Manage it as you like," the artist had said to the master of the Boys' Home. "Lend him, sell him, apprentice him, give him to me,-- whichever you prefer. Say I want a boot-black--a clothes-brusher--a palette-setter--a bound slave--or an adopted son, as you please.

The boy I must have: in what capacity I get him is nothing to me."

"I am bound to remind you, sir," said the master, "that he was picked up in the streets, and has had no training, and earned no outfit from us. He comes to you without clothes, without character"