“I take it your parents do not approve of Art?”
“No, and I believe they must have threatened him also.”
He nodded.
“Such is the way of society with genius. I, too, in my small way, have worked for its betterment and received but scorn for my labors.”
“Really?”
“Yes. If we stop in the Modern Period on the way back, you can see my Achilles Fallen.”
A very dry chuckle halted them.
“Who is there?” he inquired, cautiously.
No reply. They stood in the Glory of Rome, and the stone senators were still.
“Someone laughed,” she observed.
“We are not alone,” he stated, shrugging. “There’ve been other indications of such, but whoever they are, they’re as talkative as Trappists—which is good.
Remember, though art but stone,” he called gaily, and they continued on to the cafeteria. One night they sat together at dinner in the Modern Period.
“Had you a name, in life?” he asked.
“Gloria,” she whispered. “And yours?”
“Smith, Jay.”
“What prompted you to become a statue, Smith—if it is not too bold of me to ask?”
“Not at all,” he smiled, invisibly. “Some are born to obscurity and others only achieve it through diligent effort. I am one of the latter. Being an artistic failure, and broke, I decided to become my own monument. It’s warm in here, and there’s food below. The environment is congenial, and I’ll never be found out because no one ever looks at anything standing around museums.”
“No one?”
“Not a soul, as you must have noticed. Children come here against their wills, young people come to flirt with one another, and when one develops sufficient sensibility to look at anything,” he lectured bitterly, “he is either myopic or subject to hallucinations. In the former case he would not notice, in the latter he would not talk. The parade passes.”
“Then what good are museums?”
“My dear girl! That the former affianced of a true artist should speak in such a manner indicates that your relationship was but brief—”
“Really!” she interrupted. “The proper word is ‘companionship’.”
“Very well,” he amended, “‘companionship’. But museums mirror the past, which is dead, the present, which never notices, and transmit the race’s cultural heritage to the future, which is not yet born. In this, they are near to being temples of religion.”
“I never thought of it that way,” she mused. “Rather a beautiful thought, too. You should really be a teacher.”
“It doesn’t pay well enough, but the thought consoles me. Come, let us raid the icebox again.”
They nibbled their final ice cream bars and discussed Achilles Fallen, seated beneath the great mobile which resembled a starved octopus. He told her of his other great projects and of the nasty reviewers, crabbed and bloodless, who lurked in Sunday editions and hated life. She, in turn, told him of her parents, who knew Art and also knew why she shouldn’t like him, and of her parents’ vast fortunes, equally distributed in timber, real estate, and petroleum. He, in turn, patted her arm and she, in turn, blinked heavily and smiled Hellenically.
“You know,” he said, finally, “as I sat upon my pedestal, day after day, I often thought to myself: Perhaps I should return and make one more effort to pierce the cataract in the eye of the public—perhaps if I were as secure and at ease in all things material—perhaps if I could find the proper woman—but nay! There is no such a one!”
“Continue! Pray continue!” cried she. “I, too, have, over the past days, thought that, perhaps, another artist could remove the sting. Perhaps the poison of loneliness could be drawn by a creator of beauty—If we—” At this point a small and ugly man in a toga cleared his throat.
“It is as I feared,” he announced.
Lean, wrinkled, and grubby was he; a man of ulcerous bowel and much spleen. He pointed an accusing finger.
“It is as I feared,” he repeated.
“Wh-who are you?” asked Gloria.
“Cassius,” he replied, “Cassius Fitzmullen—art critic, retired, for the Dalton Times. You are planning to defect.”
“And what concern is it of yours if we leave?” asked Smith, flexing his Beaten Gladiator halfback muscles.