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Strictly Business | O Henry | |
IV. The Day Resurgent |
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I can see the artist bite the end of his pencil and frown when it comes to drawing his Easter picture; for his legitimate pictorial conceptions of figures pertinent to the festival are but four in number. First comes Easter, pagan goddess of spring. Here his fancy may have free play. A beautiful maiden with decorative hair and the proper number of toes will fill the bill. Miss Clarice St. Vavasour, the well-known model, will pose for it in the "Lethergogallagher," or whatever it was that Trilby called it. Second--the melancholy lady with upturned eyes in a framework of lilies. This is magazine-covery, but reliable. Third--Miss Manhattan in the Fifth Avenue Easter Sunday parade. Fourth--Maggie Murphy with a new red feather in her old straw hat, happy and self-conscious, in the Grand Street turnout. Of course, the rabbits do not count. Nor the Easter eggs, since the higher criticism has hard-boiled them. The limited field of its pictorial possibilities proves that Easter, of all our festival days, is the most vague and shifting in our conception. It belongs to all religions, although the pagans invented it. Going back still further to the first spring, we can see Eve choosing with pride a new green leaf from the tree ficus carica. Now, the object of this critical and learned preamble is to set forth the theorem that Easter is neither a date, a season, a festival, a holiday nor an occasion. What it is you shall find out if you follow in the footsteps of Danny McCree. |
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