XVI
HOA-HAKA-NANA-IA
It doesn't much matter how early in the autumn we come back to London; upon our return we always find the season has stolen a march upon us. Paul arrived in town on a dark, rainy afternoon. The impatient, scowling skies were already beginning the ruin of the short-lived English summer. Beyond the railway terminus the streets, with their stream of jostling umbrellas, their straining horses and shiny-coated drivers, were both bewildering and disheartening. Victoria was full of belated holiday makers setting an anxious face seaward. And on all sides, from the railway announcements with which the walls of the vestibule were placarded, from the covers of the summer magazines that still heaped the book-stalls, from advertisements of soap and jam and pickles and liquors, girl faces simpered and ogled. Girls in punts, dabbling their hands in lilied water: sunburnt girls in orchards, carrying baskets filled with apples: languid girls in hammocks, with shapely ankles peeping discreetly from their frilled skirts: girls smiling from carriage windows, or standing with hounds in leash on windy moors—but always girls, always women. In some of these journals there might be food for thought or fruit of experience: here and there—though rarely—an author's name seemed earnest of this; but in every case, for the written word as for bottled mineral water or patent cereal, the lure was the same—some pretty, foolish face; something to excite and feed for a moment the idle desire of the eye. Paul, as he viewed these things biliously, wondered whether it were true after all, as his French captain had declared to him once with cursing and swearing, that the Anglo-Saxon was the most woman-ridden race in the world; and, alas! remembering how he himself had been employed during the last fortnight, a spasm of self-contempt contracted and hardened his heart. He felt degraded, commonplace, banal; caught in the toils of the delusion that has deposed woman from her proper place as man's helpmeet and propounds her, tricked and adorned and set on a pedestal, as his reward.
He put his baggage in the cloak-room, and made first of all for my lodgings in Pimlico. This was particularly unfortunate, as Mrs. McNaughten, deceived by the morning's fair promise, had driven me forth betimes, bidding me, under pain of her displeasure, which is no light threat, not to return till night, the while my room should be swept and scoured, "before the murk days comes, and a body canna tell dir-rt frae darkness." Scribbling a message in the narrow hall, while his umbrella made a pool upon its shabby oilcloth and Dulcinea, with pail and broom, ascended laboriously to her attack upon matter in the wrong place, Paul had an opportunity for contemplating the rewards of literature, the sort that does get into print. It cannot have been inspiriting.
His own rooms were in Cowley Street, Westminster. He approached them, through Broad Sanctuary, with the sense of expectancy that every one feels after even a short absence who nears the spot upon which the activities of his life converge. He had not left his French address—and so much can happen in a fortnight!
There was only one letter and a packet: the harvest of two weeks! The package contained his bank pass-book. He glanced at it hastily and tossed it aside. The letter was from America, from the lawyers who managed a slender inheritance that had devolved upon him some years ago, as a tardy act of justice, years after the foreclosure upon his mother's farm. As he read it, the blood left his cheeks under their superficial sunburn. He pocketed it, and made a hasty calculation upon his fingers—counting months perhaps—or even weeks. He looked round his sitting-room with hunted eyes. They were particularly pleasant quarters, these rooms of Ingram's, in a charming old early Georgian house behind the Abbey. Their windows had deep seats and looked across the cloistral calm of Cowley Street to similar quaint windows, curtained with art fabrics and with a hint of pottery and brass beyond. Actresses of the serious sort, journalists, an artist or two, one junior Cabinet Minister, were his neighbors. He was proud and fond of the old-world parlor—of its panelled walls, the slight list of its floor, its grotesque fire-back and grate. It had been his home now for two years; even the dust and stillness that lay on it after a fortnight's absence seemed consecrated—seemedhis. All the books and most of the furniture was his own. It is marvellous how much wandering and uprooting the instinct of a home-making race will survive. As, give a couple of beavers in an exhibition tank a few logs, and watch the poor beasts start building!
He had a hasty lunch and went to the Museum. He read hard: he was too disturbed to write. In its untroubled atmosphere little by little his agitation left him. A pleasant sense of comradeship reached him from silent neighbors, many of whom had grown gray in the same thankless task. He felt he would always be able to breathe freely here. There was a respite after all, and projects would suggest themselves once his mind was at rest. Once it was at rest! For certain distractions must be put out of his way once and for all. He was sorry, truly sorry, for the girl who used to sit quietly beside him reading "Who's Who" or turning the leaves of some illustrated book—there, in the seat where the mad poet was mowing and scribbling this afternoon, but he was sorry for her only in the same impersonal sense that he was sorry for the woes with which the musty volume before him was filled:
"Old unhappy, far-off thingsAnd battles long ago."
"Old unhappy, far-off thingsAnd battles long ago."
"Old unhappy, far-off thingsAnd battles long ago."
"Old unhappy, far-off things
And battles long ago."
After all, self-preservation was the first law, and one could not accept a real responsibility for anything that was as inevitable as this. He was quite cheerful when I met him for dinner at theÀ-peu-près, and even pleasantly ironic at the expense of a white shirt-front and black tie which I was weak enough to think an evening call upon a lady in Portland Place demanded.
Althea received us in her own sanctum upon the second floor: a long, beautiful Adams room with creamy white walls hung sparsely with Carpacciesque Italian drawings in red chalk, a few water-colors of the old English school, and one great painting of the mad Venetian master, all splash and impasto, which, seen close at hand, was like a lichen stain on an old red wall, but, at a little distance, teemed with form and color. A bookcase of dark carved wood ran breast-high round the walls. Along its deep shelf were ranged bronzes, old Nankin jars, fragmental majolica figures—with an occasional faded embroidery or red morocco missal clasped with hammered silver. The carpet was of thick, dead-leaf-colored pile, and a brass railed fender with a wide leather seat ran across the low marble mantelpiece. Althea's room always struck me, personally, as the last word in that austere taste which roams the world, seeking and rejecting, in its quest of the beautiful.
She rose to meet us, and Paul had the impression of a woman, still young, in a loose pale satin gown, rather clumsy of figure but graceful of movement, with chestnut hair dressed low on her forehead, gray eyes under thick dark brows, a heavy jaw and just a hint of sensuality in the mouth. Her arms and hands were white and perfectly shaped; her ears finely modelled, and set as close to the head as though they had been carved from it in low relief.
As long as I was there we only talked commonplace, and I left them early, pleading the editorial discipline. I thought I had done my part in bringing them together, and walked back to Pimlico "on eggshells." But no sooner was I gone, (so I have heard since,) than she recrossed the room and, seating herself upon the fender, gazed at Ingram in silence for a long while. Try to imagine what balm to the misunderstood, thwarted spirit that level, frankly admiring regard must have been.
"Tell me all about it!" she said at last, abruptly and impulsively.
Paul smiled back into the intense gray eyes.
"All about what?"
"How you ever came to write such a story."
She reached to the mantel-shelf, and, taking down a square silver cigarette-box, scrawled all over its top and sides with well-known women's names, handed it across to him. She lit one herself and arranged her satin draperies.
"You speak as though I had 'arrived!'"
"Oh! success will come," she said confidently. "It's the beginnings that are most fascinating. I want to be taken behind the scenes. Come, wizard!" she pleaded "let me be inquisitorial and curious while I'm under your spell. To-morrow you'll be my rival. Who knows but that I may hate you then?"
Ingram considered a moment, and flicked the ashes from his cigarette.
"There's not much to tell," he said slowly. "You may have heard or guessed that I'm a poor man's son. We have our decayed families in Massachusetts, though I suppose we haven't quite so far back to decay. I didn't learn much more at free school than to read and write and figure, but you know with what care and reverence the first steps are guarded in our country. Nothing so trivial and hopeless as the average English taste in letters could leave even our primaries. I may say 'our country,' 'our primaries,' may I not?"
She flashed her sympathy.
"Afterward I led a very lonely life for years. I don't mean comparative loneliness, or even such loneliness as a man may achieve for himself in any big city. I mean weeks, months, with never a human face. And during that time I think"—he laughed—"I think I read every book in the world."
"No writing? No early efforts?"
"I was twenty-eight before I tried. When I wrote my first essay I'd almost forgotten how to hold a pen. Please," he urged quickly, "you must try and believe it."
"I am believing every word you say."
"I was a soldier in the French army. Oh! no glory—just drudgery. Very good society though: I still believe my corporal was an Austrian bishop. We were on detachment in the desert, and of course English books weren't to be had. Besides, some of the lads from Alsace were eager to learn, and it seemed a chance before I forgot it myself. I had met all sorts of strange characters, and began to try and set them down as I remembered them. Then it was only a step to putting them in new situations and figuring out how they'd make good. And then—and then—it seemed to me I made a discovery."
He stopped, a little agitated, filled his lungs with smoke, and emptied them before he spoke again. Althea sat quite still.
"Go on, please," she said in a low voice.
"In all the stories I had read the character seemed to start, full-fledged, on the first page. All the action of the book develops it and shows it up. Now that might be literature, but it wasn't life. What was the reason? Not a mistake; because the best men do it. No. But I think unconsciously they are following the line of least resistance. They start the first chapter under a disadvantage: with the last one in their heads. And they even get praise for preserving the unities—theunities!—oflife! What a lot of guessing it would save! I ended by believing there's no such thing as a consistent character at all. There's something we hang our convictions on as we hang clothes on pegs, but all the rest is just things happening—things happening—things happening. And in the intervals"—he laughed again, "as much character as you like to indulge in: as much as you feel you can stand yourself. Am I tiring you?"
"Oh, no!"
"Take my book. You've read it through?"
"And through again."
"What's Patty Holt? Only a ranch-woman who broils, and bakes, and washes, and irons, and has wandering loves. What's her husband? An Indian trader, who holds up trains and has views on the revision of Hamilton's masterpiece, the Constitution of the United States. Neither of them know either how good or how bad they are. Conviction for him would come with the rope round his neck, and for her when the Ashplant Vigilance Committee gave her twenty-four hours to bisect the state boundary line at right angles."
"She'll be compared with Madame Bovary, you know."
"Very unfairly, then. Emma Bovary is a romantic-minded woman set amid prosaic surroundings, and Holt's wife is a commonplace woman set in romantic ones. What's wanting to romance? Her lovers ride and kill. I suppose if they rode—what's the word—destriersinstead of cow-ponies, and carried two-handed swords instead of thirty-thirties, they'd be legitimate subjects for the most full-blooded cap and sword romance. And there was—I mean there is—violent and horrid death at hand any time the Ute bucks lift a demijohn of fifty overproof Peach Bloom Rye going up to a mining camp. No, what weighs them both down is just the sordidness of the transplanted civilization around them, and when the crash comes all they have to turn to is the little meeting-house God of their youth, which the woman has outgrown unconsciously during her emotional experiences."
"But surely——What about Mr. Ffoulkes? You don't think that he——?"
Paul jumped to his feet and thrust his hands into his pockets with an impatient movement.
"Everard Ffoulkes! The cowboy bishop! Isn't it funny how unerringly even good criticism puts his finger on the one true thing, and declares 'That couldn't happen.' Why he's 'vécu'—'erlebt,' every word and action of him. I've ridden with him, camped with him, bunked with him, and even prayed with him."
Althea regarded him awhile, through the smoke haze, with eyes narrowed to slits.
"Mr. Ingram," she said, flinging her cigarette away, "I'm going to help you publish your book, but I'm going to hurt you first. Now—are you ready?"
"Go right ahead."
"You'll have to modify it. Oh! don't bristle and scold. I know I've touched a nerve. But on your own confession you've lived away from the world a long time, and you have no conception of"—she paused for a strong enough word—"the impregnable determination of our race that certain things shall not be—I won't say discussed, but even postulated. It's too strong for the strongest of us. The Inquisition and the Index are indulgent beside it. It's begun to hurt social progress; but even social progress has to mark time and wait its pleasure. Right in the midst of our civilization, Mr. Ingram, a great, rough-hewn granite god uprears his bulk. I always imagine him something like the Easter Island deity you have to pass on your right going into the Museum—no forehead, cavernous eye-sockets, vast nostrils and mouth—Hoa-haka-nana-ia: the god of things as they must be supposed to be. And his thighs and stomach are simply larded with the smoke of intellectual sacrifice. There is a legend, you know, that no great literary work, once carried through, has failed to somehow or another reach the world. I fancy Hoa could throw some light on that tale. Shall we go on the balcony? It's rather warm in here."
She put her hand to her forehead as he followed her down the room. Outside the rain had ceased, and the September night was clear and fresh. Across the nobly planned street, the broadest and most effective prospect in London, the windows of the great stuccoed mansions were dark and shuttered, with only here and there a pale glow in fanlight or upper window, but the many storied Langham Hotel, filled with trans-Atlantic birds of passage, closed the vista cheerily, and a broad flare of light round the corner showed where Regent Street and the shops and restaurants began.
"Do you know French well?" she asked, presently.
"Only everyday French and a few curiosities I'm trying to forget."
"It is a pity. You could have turned your book into a French novel, and then translated it."
Paul shook his head. "I wouldn't do that. It's here or nowhere. The very houses, the very self-satisfied faces, are a challenge."
"Isn't it wonderful?" Althea mused, leaning on the rail and regarding the houses opposite. "And this is only one street. There are hundreds like it. House after house, wealth upon wealth, millions running to milliards till the brain reels. And in hardly one a single misgiving, a single suspicion that the same fate which measures can re-measure. Only pleasure, food, fine raiment, and the stealthy rapture of possession. But it can't go on forever." She shook her head. "No, here in the cradle of the race the racial revolution will come about. These sober, policed streets will be the theatre of the completest subversion the world has ever known. It's one of the charms of living in London, where thingswillhappen. I have my visions. Westminster Cathedral full of little beds is one—I don't know why—and nurses and doctors with their sleeves rolled up.... What made you call your book 'Sad Company,' Mr. Ingram?" she asked, with a sudden inconsequence. "Did you know it was a quotation?"
"I don't think so. I may have seen it somewhere and forgotten."
"It wasn't this, was it?—
"'Go from me! I am one of those that fall.What! has no cold wind swept your heart at allIn my sad company?...'
"'Go from me! I am one of those that fall.What! has no cold wind swept your heart at allIn my sad company?...'
"'Go from me! I am one of those that fall.What! has no cold wind swept your heart at allIn my sad company?...'
"'Go from me! I am one of those that fall.
What! has no cold wind swept your heart at all
In my sad company?...'
"—Let us go in. It's not as warm as I thought. I'll ring for coffee, and introduce you to my father. I've let him dip into your manuscript. You don't mind? He's one of the proprietors of theParthenon, so be very pleasant and alert. He's been in Colorado, too, and thinks a lot of your scenery passages." She turned and, smiling, held up a finger impressively. "Mind! I say yourscenery."