III CYNARA: The Sculptor

I

I was looking once again at Sidney Bush’s Cynara in the Metropolitan, when Courtney Valentine’s wife touched me on the arm.

“So you come, too!” she said. “Do you know there is nearly always some man or other here, staring at it?”

“I didn’t know it. But I can understand it.”

She eyed me. “I suppose every man has been true to somebody, after his fashion. Even you!”

“Where is he? I haven’t heard of him for a dozen years. Not since—”

“Nor I. Come and see me, Maurice, won’t you? I had no idea you were in town.”

She wandered off, and I stood gazing at the Cynara.

II

I suppose once in every creative life there comes the sublime moment, the consecrated hour when, not from within but from without, there comes the onrush of true greatness. Then, out of paint or clay or whatever sordid material may lie to hand, the artist creates; beauty out of ugliness, purity out of filth.

A Baudelaire imagines his mistress dead and rotting, and writes a great poem: “Alors, o ma beauté . . . .”

And out of the scum of a Paris brothel poor Sidney Bush had built his Cynara.

He was no poet, God knows. I don’t even know how he had happened on the poem. But I had wandered into his studio at Saint Cloud one day to find Julie Termonde cowering in a corner and muttering that he had tried to kill her, and Sidney himself paying no attention to her—or to me, for that matter—but standing at a window with a book in his hand.

I don’t believe he had Anne Worthington in his mind at all at that time. All that lay pretty far behind him then, but it may have pleased his vanity and excited his imagination to fancy that he had been faithful to Anne, in his fashion, through the years.

Anyhow, he started the Cynara that day, and if the body and the face were Julie Termonde, the expression, the soul of the thing, was Anne . . .

It almost made an honest woman of Julie, did the Cynara. Almost, but not quite. But it did change her. She took to wearing about the studio, instead of the sketchy garments of the pre-Cynara period, a stiff black silk dress, a long gold chain and a crucifix, and as nearly as she could copy it the expression of the Cynara itself. But she only achieved a sort of hypocritical wistfulness for the pathos of the sculptured figure.

The Cynara itself, of course, is steadfastness and loyalty, the woman who rises in a man’s mind after a debauch and makes him groan. And seeing that little French guttersnipe assuming the pose, while she was both living with Sidney and deceiving him, made me sick. What was even worse was seeing Anne behind the thing. Seeing her eyes and her spirit breathe purity into that harlot body, and the whole thing perpetualised in marble.

For it was done in marble, finally, from one of those greyish blocks held by the French government for such purposes at the Dépôt des Marbres in Paris. Sidney was like a madman during the plaster casting, and Julie Termonde left him for a time, I doubt if he knew she was gone. But it came out very well.

It made him famous, of course. And when Anne came to Paris the next year he took her to see it. The Metropolitan was dickering for it at the time. I don’t believe even then that Sidney was in love with Anne, but he must have known that she stood behind his success. She had given him the memory on which he had built. Simplicity and purity, and a sort of humble steadfastness—that was Anne in those days.

But Anne was still in love with him.

Poor Anne. . . .

III

I suppose nobody but the creative artist knows the agony that follows a great success. For once Sidney had touched the stars, and his hands were impatient to reach them again. In the months that followed he was like a caged demon, creating and destroying, brooding. He even drank absinthe, a thing he had always been afraid of, and finally in a fit of what was probably more anguish than anger, he threw Julie out of the house for good. She seemed, I imagine, to shorten his grasp. I know he formulated a theory at that time as to the connection between celibacy and inspiration, and he and Father Alexis, the curé, mustered between them an imposing list to prove their case.

But it did not come back, the thing that had created Cynara. Indeed, it was twelve years in coming, and that twelve years forgot Julie, wrecked Anne and did more things to me than I care to remember.

For he married Anne.

Possibly it was his method of attaining the ideal he had somehow lost. Anne, you see, was the Cynara to him. He must have felt that she would bring him again whatever it was that had come and gone. And of course she did not. He did not love her, for one thing. He had no lover’s illusion with which to cover her, once she had ceased to represent the lost woman of a man’s dreams.

“If only I hadn’t married him,” she said to me once, “I would have helped him more. I stood for something then, Maurice. Now—!”

The truth is, of course, that he was not capable of love. Not then, anyhow. His mind was entirely turned in on himself, not so much selfishly, as with the conviction that somewhere there, inside him, lay the thing he was waiting for.

The man who marries a woman only because of her aloofness and her essential virginity has little enough to go on, once the one is bridged and the other destroyed. And he had had little enough at the best. What Anne suffered was shown by what she did later.

IV

“What made her do it?” I asked Ellice Valentine, when I made my call a few days later. “She was the last woman in the world to make a break like that.”

“I suppose the answer is that she loved him.”

“Burke? I don’t believe it.”

“No. Sidney. She adored him. She was rather pathetic about it. And I have an idea that she never loved him as much as the day she ran away with the other man. Women are like that, sometimes, Maurice.”

“It sounds like insanity.”

“Maybe it is,” she said calmly. “Personally, I don’t think any woman in love is entirely sane. The things they do!” She stared for a moment at her wedding ring. “I saw her that last day, you know.”

Well, it was a pitiful enough picture as she drew it; Anne standing crying in a jumble of little slippers and bright negligées and garments, with a swollen-eyed maid packing, and a photograph of Sidney on one end of the dressing table and one of the Cynara on the other.

Anne, she said, picked up the Cynara and flung it, frame and all, into a waste-basket. She hated it, she said.

“She didn’t know of Julie?”

“No. But she felt it had hurt her, somehow. She didn’t know just how. She said that that was the way Sidney seemed to think of her—in marble or something of the sort. He’d been away for two days then; she didn’t know where he was.”

“She meant, probably, that he loved his dream of her, rather than herself.”

“Maybe,” said Ellice, rather vaguely. “He didn’t love her. Didn’t even pretend to. And she had learned to be loved, you see. He had been adorable at first.”

She gave me one of her quick searching glances.

“You see, women need to be loved,” she said. “They are not like some men, who just go on caring year after year, without any return whatever.”

“He must have cared; he shot himself.”

“Not for two years! Don’t lay that to Anne, Maurice. He shot himself because he couldn’t repeat Cynara, not because he couldn’t repeat—Anne.”

Yes. Sidney had reached the point of suicide, and had failed. I had been wandering about China when the word came, and I had had a very clear vision of that failure, and of Sidney recovering, lying there and stubbornly adding this to the list of his other failures.

Holy images about, and nuns, and probably Father Alexis, with his shameful old soutane and his faded, other world eyes, remonstrating against this crime against God-given life. And Sidney sneering and thinking perhaps of Julie and Anne, but mostly of how he had bared his soul to the world. That unbroken front of his broken; a confession made, not to his priest, but to the press!

He was a proud man, Sidney.

“I wrote him at once, when I heard,” said Ellice. “But he didn’t answer. I rather thought he wouldn’t.”

“What in the world did you say?”

“Oh, just a friendly letter. You know—about the children, and all that. He’d liked the children, in his—” she smiled, “—in his own fashion. But I did say something else. I told him not to worry about repeating Cynara; that things like that came as the result of an emotion, and that when the emotion came again so would everything else.”

Somebody came just then, and I left. But Ellice followed me out into the hall, and laid a detaining hand on my arm.

“You don’t know anything about Anne, do you, Maurice?”

“Nothing.”

“You’ve tried, haven’t you?”

“She left Burke after a year. In Vienna. That’s all I know.”

“You don’t think he ill-treated her?”

“No. I think she simply still cared for Sidney. That’s all. In spite of what you said a half hour ago, there are women like that, too, Ellice.”

She patted my arm and let me go.

Curiously enough, she wrote me a letter that very night, and I received it the next morning. “Somehow your face haunted me to-day, Maurice,” she said. “And you know my old habit of impulsively writing letters. But you see, my dear, I was once so very badly in love with you, and so I feel tenderly toward you, as we do to all old loves. Don’t worry! It’s all over ages ago, but it is true. The hours we all spent together, with me caring for you, and you in love with Anne, and Anne only living for Sidney! Luckily the chain stopped there, for Sidney only cared for himself, but if the Director of all has a sense of humour, how funny we must have seemed!

“But this is what I want to say. Aren’t you cherishing a dream at the expense of reality? And aren’t you exactly as bad as Sidney if you do? Think it over.

“And don’t stay away because of this letter. Come in and see the children have their tea, and you will know what I mean.”

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.

VI

The preliminary modelling had been done in plaster, and only at one end had the cement work been begun. The unearthly skill of the thing seized me. But it was horrible, too. There was hate in it, as well as beauty; there was a sneer on the face of the Roman centurion as he gazed up at the Cross, and such malignity and lust of suffering on the countenances of the Jews who stared as fairly shook me.

“Come away, Maurice! It’s terrible,” said Ellice Valentine, and caught me by the arm.

“It is incomplete, madame,” said the Italian who escorted us. “It is right that this portion should be terrible. But the figure of Our Lady will redeem it. The sculptor is working on that now, but he is not satisfied.”

And then it happened. Behind us, on the floor—of cement, of course!—I heard the sharp and regular tapping of a cane. Ellice turned around, and I felt her grip on my arm tighten.

“Maurice!” she said, and caught her breath.

It was Sidney Bush, and he was blind.

He walked without hesitation toward the composition at the end of the studio. He was on familiar ground here, evidently, and the tap-tapping of his stick ceased. He took off his coat and hat, laid the cane carefully away, felt for and picked up a smock and drew it over his head.

Ellice Valentine was crying.

“Take me away, Maurice,” she whispered. “It is too pitiful.”

But—let me be clear about this—there was tragedy, but nothing pitiful about Sidney. He had lost no trace of his old arrogance. Fallen, the sculptor of Cynara, to a worker in cement, there was something imperious in the very tilt of his head as he marched the length of the studio. And as we turned to go we heard him calling to his helper in his old insolent voice.

In the cement factory, with only his hands now for eyes, he still was king.

The Italian stood for an instant, staring at him as he swung himself to the high platform.

“He is a good workman. A real artist,” he said. “But he is a hard man to work with. He has made already a dozen beautiful figures of the Holy Mother, but he is not satisfied.”

Thinking it over later, I read the old struggle still going on in Sidney, as revealed in the altar piece. Ellice Valentine had been right. He could only do the thing he felt, and he was feeling now—had been for years—only hate and bitterness. Suffering he could do, too; the Christ was the epitome of the anguish of the world. The Jews summarised hatred, resentment and the spirit of revenge. But love and sacrifice were not in him.

I did not believe he would ever do the Mother.

VII

It was two weeks before I went to see him at his home. Two weeks of indecision. Ellice Valentine had gone, and had been refused admission, and there was no question but that he both hated and feared any intrusion from his old life.

Ellice reported the place as comfortable.

“A hideous little house in a row,” she said. “But as well as I could see, past the woman who opened the door, well enough furnished.”

“What sort of woman?”

“Elderly. I know what you are thinking. It wasn’t Julie.”

I had thought of Julie. She might still be trying to live up to the Cynara. And, in a way, I was sorry it was not. She had the Frenchwoman’s gift of making a man comfortable, at least, and Sidney must have needed that. It was, in a sense, all he had left.

“You sent in your name?”

“Yes. He just told her there was a mistake. And she added that he received no visitors.”

But not even that, after his violent gregariousness of early days, brought the changed conditions so vividly to me as did my first visit.

I rang the bell and was refused admission, as I had expected. But I stepped past the woman into the hall, and called to him sharply.

“Don’t be a fool, Sidney,” I said. “It’s Maurice, and I’m not going away.”

Something dropped in a room nearby, and I heard him swearing softly. I opened the door and walked in.

The room was perfectly dark.

Nothing could have brought home to me the catastrophe as did the black night of that room. For he had been working there. By the ray of light from the hall, I saw him standing, modelling tool in hand, before a small sketch model in clay. His head was uplifted irritably, and his body crouched almost ready to spring.

“Get the hell out of here,” he snarled.

“What’s the use?” I said. “Now I’m here. I needn’t come back, but I’m not going now.”

He said nothing for a minute. Then I suppose he saw the futility of further concealment, for he said:

“You’ll find an electric light switch behind the door. I don’t need it—as I suppose you know.”

“Yes,” I said, and turned on the light.

“Just what else do you know?” he asked rather sharply.

“I happened into the studio the other day. I had no idea—I suppose you know the altar piece is magnificent.”

“Cement!” he commented bitterly. “Imitation stuff, imitation art!” But he added: “It’s good, as far as it’s gone. And it’s to be stared at by a lot of European peasants! Has it struck you that the best art has always gone into the churches, to be lost there for generations?”

I repeated an old quotation of Father Alexis, that, if religion did not exist, the artists would have had to invent it. And he countered it with his old jibe: that behind real sculptor lies essential truth, and what did the churches know of truth?

But it seemed to me that he was talking against time. He was not easy; he seemed to be listening, almost waiting. Once, at a sound outside, he turned his face toward the door, and I felt that his body stiffened.

When nothing occurred, however, he grew gradually easier. But the talk was unsatisfactory; there were too many roads he refused to follow. He would not discuss the old days at Saint Cloud, nor his present circumstances, beyond saying that he was comfortable. He grumbled about the studio, and sneered about American art. And he asked me what I had been doing. He smiled a little when I said I had been wandering.

“You’re a faithful soul, Maurice!” he said. “They’re not worth it. Not a God-damned one of them.”

When I finally rose to go, he did a curious thing. He moved rather quickly to the door into the hall and opening it, stood there for a moment, apparently listening. He seemed satisfied then, and threw the door wide.

“Good-night, Sidney.”

“Good-bye, Maurice.” And then, after a pause and with difficulty, “I appreciate your coming.”

“But you don’t want me to come back?”

“What’s the use?” And after a pause, “Christ, man! Don’t try to bring the dead to life.”

“You’re doing magnificent work.”

“Then let me alone to do it,” he said, and closed the door in my face.

He had, I felt, every right to close the door of his life to me. If he chose to crawl under a porch like a sick dog, at least he was entitled to his isolation. But I wished I had summoned my courage to ask about Anne. Somehow I felt that he knew.

Then—curious how the Cynara figures in all this—I went once more to see it, before I started away again. It had, you remember, the look of Anne; not the Anne who had run away with Martin Burke, but of Anne the girl.

And standing looking at the Cynara was Anne herself. Not even a changed Anne, except that she was a little thinner. Just Anne.

How unimportant I was in her scheme of life was shown by her greeting of me. She neither flushed nor paled. She came straight to me and held out a hand in a rather shabby glove.

“You haven’t forgotten me, Maurice, have you?” she asked. She did not smile; Anne was never a smiling woman.

“No,” I said. And again, “No, Anne.”

“I wanted to see you the other night, but I thought I’d better not.”

“The other night? Anne, you haven’t gone back to him?”

“What else was there to do? He was so awfully helpless at first. And, of course, I was responsible for it, Maurice. I—had to see him through.”

I did not undeceive her. She had not been responsible, but if she thought so—

“And he took you back?”

She did smile a little, then, but it was the sad ghost of a smile.

“Not as his wife. I had made that impossible, of course. But he supports me, and I—look after him.”

“How long has this been going on?”

“Eight years now,” she said. And turning away, stood staring at the Cynara. “I think he is coming back, Maurice. He’s doing some work now that is really good. At first it was—ghastly.”

Still thinking only of him, you see. He had both imprisoned and enslaved her for years, and she saw neither prison nor slavery, but only the man and his work.

“It is very good work, Anne. I’ve seen it. But what about you? Have you no friends? Have you let him shut off the entire horizon?”

“I haven’t minded it, Maurice.”

“Is he kind to you?”

“He never forgets what I did, of course. But now he’s working again, things are better.” She hesitated. “Sometimes I think lately he has to force himself to remember. You know what I mean.”

She would not let me see her home, and she asked me not to come again.

“He did not go to bed at all the night you were there,” she explained. “I could hear him walking the floor. And he has been very—uncertain ever since.”

I could guess what his being “uncertain” would mean. I remember the day Julie Termonde said he had tried to kill her, when I had found her cowering in a corner. And I had a clear vision of that blind man going berserk in the little house, throwing things about, yelling at the frightened servant, and hurling all the venom stored in his embittered heart at the very soul in the world who loved him. Enraged at her very silence and submission; torturing himself with old memories; jealous with that fiercest jealousy of all, the jealousy of pride and not of love.

For he was jealous and suspicious. I knew that, looking back. Jealous of me! He had not wanted me to see Anne. He had taunted me with being a loyal soul. He had forbidden me to come back. Jealous of me and suspicious of Anne.

That, I think, may be the heaviest cross a woman who has once gone wrong may have to bear. Suspicion. She was more his prisoner than his slave. He did not love her, but he watched her.

I did not sleep that night. It was I who walked the floor, enraging myself against him. He who had gone from a mistress into marriage, and from marriage to unfaithfulness, condemning Anne for her one error to a living death! Virtue in him, as in most men, was as hypocritical as had been Julie Termonde’s black silk dress and gold crucifix.

VIII

A certain amount of blundering is allowable to a man who cares for a woman and sees her wretched. I offer only this excuse for myself. I expected no happiness, but it seemed to me some one should have the right to look after her and protect her.

It was Ellice who told me later where the fallacy lay in my reasoning.

“When a woman is childless,” she said, “she makes her man her child. You might as well have asked Anne to give up a son. And of course this being a bad child made no difference.”

For that is what I did.

She was very gentle with me, but from the moment I began I saw it was hopeless. He needed her. She did a good many things for him that he thought were done by the servant. Everything in the house had its own place, so he could find it, and was never moved from that place. She read to him, too. Only the night before she had had a bad time; she was reading aloud.

“Last night, ah yesternight, betwixt her lips and mine

There fell thy shadow, Cynara! thy breath was shed

Upon my soul between the kisses and the wine;

And I was desolate and sick of an old passion,

Yea, I was desolate and bowed my head.

I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.”

She had tried to stop when she found what it was, but he made her read on. Then she had heard him laugh, rather dreadfully. And the next moment he had taken the book from her and flung it into the fire.

She had been composed enough up to that, but there she broke. It seemed that she had heard him outside her door later that night, and she had thought perhaps he meant to kill her and then himself. He had stood there, very still, for some time, and then had gone away.

But I was not to worry. She had only been over-wrought. He had really been much gentler with her lately.

I had to go away with that. . . .

I suppose I would never have found the solution had it not been for Ellice Valentine and her absurd mantel. The final arrangements were to be made for the casts before my departure, and we went together to the studio to complete them.

“At noon,” her note said. “I don’t want to meet him, and I want to study the altar piece.”

There was nobody around, and we sauntered alone into the studio. The group was complete now. The Mother stood below the cross, looking up, and Ellice gazed at it for some time without speaking.

It was Anne.

I suppose nothing he will ever do, and he has done some big things since, will be as truly great as that figure, buried to-day in a small Lithuanian Church. Courage, anguish and love are epitomised in it; all the suffering of all the motherhood of the world.

And it was Anne.

Ellice did not speak until we were outside again. Then she said:

“How terribly he loves her!”

I do not think she had reasoned it out then. She simply felt it. But later on she explained it.

“He couldn’t have done it if he hadn’t loved her,” she said. “And he couldn’t have done it if—everything had been happy between them. Don’t you see?”

“You mean, he has to reach for a star?”

“Don’t you? Cynara was the dream of a lost love. This is the dream of a lost motherhood. Probably he doesn’t know it himself, but it is true.”

But he did know it. It was that fact which brought about the tragedy.

Anne, it seems, went to the studio that evening to bring him home, for the streets had turned icy. She saw the Madonna, and had a moment, I gather, of sheer happiness. But he only stood near her, saying nothing and brooding. And on the way home he had told her a man could build out of the mud, if he had his gaze on the stars. He had built the Cynara out of his mistress at the time, and now—this.

She went upstairs very quietly when they got home, and even laid out his night things and turned down his bed. I can see her seeing that there were matches and tobacco beside the bed. She had an idea, I suppose, that what she meant to do would only touch the surface of his life. Her being there or not being there had seemed to matter so little.

Then she got his revolver—he was still downstairs—and shot herself in the chest. . . .

He was standing outside the door when I got there. They were keeping him out. You see, he had never been in Anne’s room, and he knocked against things and got in the way. And besides, he kept yelling at them to do something, when they were doing all they could.

He refused to let me pass, although Anne had sent for me, and somehow or other he had got hold of the revolver, and would not give it up. It took me a good half hour to get him away from the door and downstairs, and even then he kept hold of the revolver. If Anne died I knew he would shoot himself, and I wasn’t at all sure he wouldn’t shoot me.

It was a nightmare. He insisted on talking—anything that welled to the surface of his mind. He said the Italian at the studio was not an Italian but a Levantine Jew, and that he wouldn’t keep the place warm. From that he began to boast about the way he got about the streets, and what he said to the people who offered to help him. His terrible pride again. And all the time he was listening. Just listening.

He broke in once, however, on this monologue to ask me how I knew, and why I had come.

“Did she send for you?”

“Yes. We were old friends, Sidney.”

“Ah, I know what she wants.” He turned his distorted face toward me. “She wants you to promise to take care of me. I’ll see you in hell first.”

After a time he began groping around the room, and at last he found a small model of the Madonna for the altar piece. He stood holding it, running his fingers lightly over it.

“I tried to keep her out of it,” he said. “I tried. But I couldn’t.”

He put the figure back, and then he dropped on his knees before it and raised his face.

“Oh, holy mother of God,” he said. “Intervene for us. Forgive me and save her. For without her there is nothing.”

IX

So it seems that there are times when a man may raise up a graven image and worship it, and yet receive an answer to his prayer. For Anne did not die.

At dawn they took him up into that unfamiliar room of hers, and led him carefully to her bed so he would not strike against it, and after a time they left him there. He hardly left it for weeks.

He spent hours, they said, locating the little things in the room, so that whatever she wanted he could get it quickly for her. Before they let her up, he had practised the movement from the bed to the chair where she was to sit, so that when the time came he lifted her and deposited her with one movement.

I am not trying to prove that he had changed fundamentally. He has never done that. A good many people, by and large, detest him, and others only tolerate him for his genius. For genius it is, of course. He still blusters and bellows, he still boasts when he is happy and sulks when he is hurt.

I have heard him enter the house at Saint Cloud—they are back there now—and call Anne at the top of an angry and imperious voice. And I have seen her come, as quietly as ever, and as ready to serve him.

But I have seen something of Anne in everything worth while that he has done since. And whether he makes love to her or not, every new bit of work he does is a love song to her, imperishable in marble or in bronze.

He will always be faithful to her, in his fashion.