The Untilled Field | Page 6

day he realised quite clearly that
the only way for him to become a sculptor was by winning scholarships.
There were two waiting to be won by him, and he felt that he would
have no difficulty in winning them. That year there was a scholarship
for twenty-five pounds, and there was another scholarship that he might
win in the following year, and he thought of nothing else but these
scholarships until he had won them; then he started for Paris with fifty
pounds in his pocket, and a resolve in his heart that he would live for a
year and pay his fees out of this sum of money. Those were hard days,
but they were likewise great days. He had been talking to Harding
about those days in Paris the night before last, and he had told him of
the room at the top of the house for which he paid thirty francs a month.
There was a policeman on one side and there was a footman on the
other. It was a bare little room, and he lived principally on bread. In
those days his only regret was that he had not the necessary threepence
to go to the cafe. "One can't go to the cafe without threepence to pay
for the harmless bock, and if one has threepence one can sit in the cafe
discussing Carpeaux, Rodin, and the mysteries, until two in the

morning, when one is at last ejected by an exhausted proprietor at the
head of numerous waiters."
Rodney's resolutions were not broken; he had managed to live for
nearly a year in Paris upon fifty pounds, and when he came to the end
of his money he went to London in search of work. He found himself in
London with two pounds, but he had got work from a sculptor, a pupil
of Dalous: "a clever man," Rodney said, "a good sculptor; it is a pity he
died." At this time Garvier was in fairly good health and had plenty of
orders, and besides Rodney he employed three Italian carvers, and from
these Italians Rodney learned Italian, and he spent two years in London
earning three pounds a week. But the time came when the sculptor had
no more work for Rodney, and one day he told him that he would not
require him that week, there was no work for him, nor was there the
next week or the next, and Rodney kicked his heels and pondered Elgin
marbles for a month. Then he got a letter from the sculptor saying he
had some work for him to do; and it was a good job of work, and
Rodney remained with Garvier for two months, knowing very well that
his three pounds a week was precarious fortune. Some time after, the
sculptor's health began to fail him and he had to leave London. Rodney
received news of his death two years afterwards. He was then teaching
sculpture in the art schools of Northampton, and he wondered whether,
if Garvier had lived, he would have succeeded in doing better work
than he had done.
From Northampton he went to Edinburgh, he wandered even as far as
Inverness. From Inverness he had been called back to Dublin, and for
seven years he had taught in the School of Art, saving money every
year, putting by a small sum of money out of the two hundred pounds
that he received from the Government, and all the money he got for
commissions. He accepted any commission, he had executed bas-reliefs
from photographs. He was determined to purchase his freedom, and a
sculptor requires money more than any other artist.
Rodney had always looked upon Dublin as a place to escape from. He
had always desired a country where there was sunshine and sculpture.
The day his father took him to the School of Art he had left his father

talking to the head-master, and had wandered away to look at a
Florentine bust, and this first glimpse of Italy had convinced him that
he must go to Italy and study Michael Angelo and Donatello. Only
twice had he relaxed the severity of his rule of life and spent his
holidays in Italy. He had gone there with forty pounds in his pocket,
and had studied art where art had grown up naturally, independent of
Government grants and mechanical instruction, in a mountain town like
Perugia; and his natural home had seemed to him those narrow, white
streets streaked with blue shadows. "Oh, how blue the shadows are
there in the morning," he had said the other night to Harding, "and the
magnificent sculpture and painting! In the afternoon the sun is too hot,
but at evening one stands at the walls of the town and sees sunsets