When Easter told her of Lehmann's suggestion Madame was amazed. "What! You a chit who only have a a voice and a pretty face to go to Lehmann before you know how to sing? If Lilli heard you once she wouldn't be so generous with her invitation. Why, child, you must stay with me two or three years, then it may be time to think of Isolde. Lilli and her Grünewald villa!" Easter drawled out that she proposed singing for Lehmann after the Christmas holidays so that Lilli wouldn't be buying a pig in a poke. Again, consternation on the part of Ash. Well, if you sing for Lilli suppose we get to work on some Bach. Easter loathed Bach, although she knew that his music was necessary to the formation of a sound vocal style. So she didn't demur, and presently she was delivering an old chorale, accompanying herself, and singing with such tonal richness and exaltation of feeling that the tears came unbidden to the eyes of the veteran teacher. Afterwards she told Stone that the girl was a torment but—a genius. Yes, the word was spoken. Why, she eats the words out of my mouth, cried Madame Frida. She anticipates me. Conceited? Yes. She has a good right to be. At the present rate—she will be singing Wagner in a couple of years ... Alfred, you think she has no temperament? She is bursting with it. When she kicks over the traces, I shouldn't like to be in the coach behind. But sly—selfishly sly. After this psychological diagnosis Madame emitted a sigh of satisfaction.
Stone still stuck to his post as vis-à-vis to Easter at dinner. But since the return of Ulick the table was too small for three, and, as Ulick couldn't very well be shaken off by Stone—who faintly hoped that Easter entertained the same idea—they had asked Papa Felicé for a larger table and were given a round one in the centre of the room. The Felicés were glad to see that the men were beginning to cluster about the Southern girl. As long as proprieties were outwardly observed no questions were asked in the Maison; they might have proved awkward. Wedding rings did not abound there, yet what a delightful oasis it was in the big, noisy city. A good dinner, cooked by an Alsatian chef, excellent wines, if you cared to order them, and a nice tight little game till any hour you cared to lose your money; it was a proverb in the Maison that Yankee guile, no matter the cards, could not prevail against the skill of the patron and his urbane wife. In sooth, it seldom did. Stone played when in funds and always cursed the house, his luck, when he lost. Ulick didn't know how to play cards, or, indeed, any games indoor or out-door. He agreed with Huysmans, who wrote that a monument should be erected to the memory of the inventor of playing cards, for had he not done something toward the suppression of free-speech among imbeciles? He forgot the women, said Ulick. They always gabble, even on their death bed.
Ulick adored the lunar sex, minions of the moon, subject in the profoundest tides of their being to our attendant planets' influence. Apart from his studies nothing interested him like sex. Sex is the salt of life, he had declared one night in the presence of his companions. Stone growled, but Easter gave him a long, penetrating look and he went hot and cold, and was all gooseflesh in a minute. "Presently," chimed in Stone, "you will be quoting Walt Whitman's The Woman that Waits for Me." "What did she wait for?" eagerly inquired the girl. Ulick groaned and put his hands to his ears. "All is lacking, if sex is lacking, or if the moisture of the right man is lacking! There you have it, Easter." She steadily regarded Ulick, who was blushing. "Who is this Walt Whitman? Isn't he a dirty-minded person, or is he an ex-medical student?" "He was an old woman and a windbag," answered Alfred. "I knew him well when I was in Philadelphia writing for the 'Evening Bulletin.'" He boasted of a virility he never had." "I hear the eunuchs singing and trilling," interrupted Ulick who was fond of Heine.... "No, I won't say that," continued Stone dispassionately; "Whitman wasn't a eunuch, at least, not mentally...." "Oh! what's the use of talking so much about the horrid thing?" broke in Easter. "Actions speak louder than words. When a man begins boasting about past performances—Alfred there's a jockey phrase for you—make up your mind that man's through with women, whether he is a poet or a policeman...." "Easter!" exclaimed in unison the two young men. She had succeeded in shocking both the student and the cynic. Easter laughed at their hypocritical expression.
They went to Invern's rooms. Her lungs were too full of food to sing, she said, so she drummed some Chopin nocturnes and valses. Stone lolled at length on the couch and studied the Albrecht Dürer Melancolia which hung level with his gaze. He appreciated the artistic tastes of his friend and often wondered over his future. The easy-going friendship of Ulick and the girl didn't disturb him; she was hail-fellow-well-met with every man she knew; yet he also knew that no one presumed too much with her. Invern re-appeared. They gossiped. And then came a discreet tapping on the glass door. All three simultaneously said "damn!" They were in no receptive mood for strangers. Ulick peevishly cried: "Entrez." It was Paul Godard. Without allowing a moment to elapse Paul blithely sped into the room, made a mock-reverence before Easter, said "hallo!" to Stone, and beamed on the annoyed Ulick, who politely but frigidly, bade his unwelcome guest be seated. Paul paid no attention to the request. He faced the girl. "Don't mind my entering in this rude fashion, do you? Madame told me you were all here and she audibly wondered if you were having a little game. I informed her in turn that Invern hated poker too much to run a rival establishment under the same roof. Ha! ha! Now, good people, what I've come here to propose is this: I've a new touring-car, a jolly big one. It's moonlight, and the roads are fairly clear of snow, my fellow says. Let's all go for a ride in the park and stop at Delmonico's for a little supper afterwards." The other men frowned. Behind Godard, Ulick shook his head in significant negation at Easter. But she was entranced by the invitation. Delmonico's and champagne. And a real motor-car, novel enough in those days. The name was music in her ears. From a child she had heard of, had read of, Delmonico's. In the little Virginian town where she was born Harvey's at Washington had been the shibboleth of the provincial epicures. But in Richmond they said Delmonico and Harvey. Fashionable weddings and banquets took place under the roof of the famous restaurant only a couple of blocks distant. The snob, which lurks under the skin of every woman, came to life with the beckoning words of Paul Godard. Would she go? She at once accepted and went upstairs to get a warm wrap and to prink up, although she wore her best and only dinner-gown. Let the others do what they pleased. She wouldn't miss a chance like that, no, not even if she had to go alone. Alone? She looked at her image in the glass of her dressing table. Alone! No, that wouldn't do. She must have a chaperone. That was inevitable. But where to find the treasure—a blind, dumb, deaf, sleepy chaperone. Easter realized the difficulties of the campaign ahead of her. She resigned herself to the superfluous presence of Stone or Invern, or horrors, to the pair of them.
She hurried downstairs. To her astonishment there was no light in Invern's room. She shook the door. It was locked. She flared-up at once. Her watch told her that she hadn't been dressing more than a quarter of an hour—a generous fifteen or twenty minutes. This looked like a planned insult. Were those two boys jealous because Mr. Godard had invited her? Thoroughly ruffled she marched through the drawing-room determined to go for a walk, when she heard Paul's voice: "Miss Brandès, Miss Brandès. Come to this door, the car is waiting." Aglow, his handsome face betrayed his joy at having her near him. She looked blank. "Oh! Invern and Stone have gone on the job, as they put it. I presume to some theatre or concert. But," he lightly assured her, not without a tinge of malice, "I think they are both huffed because they can't come along with us." Easter didn't pause. In the car speeding under a frosty moon, she said: "Of course, they are mad. There is no opera or theatre to write about tonight. They are quite free. That was an excuse." "Aren't some men small potatoes?" cried Paul as he cuddled as closely as he dared.
... Ulick went with Stone to the opera, but he didn't enjoy himself. It was repetition night of "Les Huguenots" with the celebrated cast: Melba, Nordica, the two De Reszkes, Maurel, Plançon; but Meyerbeer —who was surely a syndicate—had ceased to interest the young man. His companion seldom sat in the "Chanticleer's" seats, consoling himself with cigarettes in the press-room. Ulick wandered about the lobby dodging De Vivo and other ghosts from the musical past who could give you all the famous casts of the opera since it was produced. He chatted with Max Hirsh and Tom Bull, shook Maurice Grau by the hand and no longer able to endure the heated house he strolled out into Broadway and irresolutely stood at the corner. A drinking man would have passed the time more agreeably; neither a smoker nor a drinker he was bored to death. Past eleven o'clock and nowhere to go but home. Why not? Tomorrow was to be a busy day. He had to write his Sunday screed. Ibsen again. No one else to write about. The New York theatre was simply disgusting. Poor plays reeking with greasy sensuality thinly varnished with sloppy sentimentality. That's your theatre-goer for you, he said to himself as he slowly walked down Broadway to 25th Street; either filth or tears, or both. But, then, sentimental souls are only one remove from sensuality; they call it "sensuousness" in fiction, but it's plain, everyday eroticism. I wonder what that girl is doing now? It was like an aching nerve, this question.
From the moment when they left Paul Godard, Ulick had not ceased to think of Easter. Her insensibility to the finer shades had irritated him before this. Her manners were superficially good. She was not a "noisy" girl, though evidently little restrained by convention in the matter of speech; she would blurt out the most appalling sentences, and with composed features. Is she on the other side of good and evil, as Nietzsche, his favorite philosopher phrased it? And how selfishly she had acceded to that snob Godard simply because he was rich and owned a motor-car. Of course, he would make love to her and, of course, she knew how to take care of herself. No doubt as to that. But Delmonico's and champagne. Oceans of it. What then? Where could they go afterwards? Would Easter be foolish enough to visit Godard's apartment—he had a swell suite on upper Madison Avenue. Surely not. But, added Ulick in a resigned mood, you never can tell with the rotten artistic temperament; always the excuse this same temperament to kick the decalogue in the midriff. Despite his grouchy humor he smiled at his acute attack of virtue.
It was within a half hour of midnight on the Hoffman House clock when he reached his street. Delmonico's was brilliantly illuminated. He paused and wondered whether he should cross, go into the café and eat a rabbit, but he feared meeting Godard. The young men hadn't parted amiably. Ulick naturally thought Paul a bit of a cad to invade his room and carry off his guest without a by-your-leave! Was he in love with Easter himself? Or was it only an itching curiosity to discover her feelings concerning a certain mysterious event? He didn't know, yet it was with mixed feelings that he saw Godard's motor-car in front of the Maison Felicé, the chauffeur on guard, smoking. So they're back, he said. No doubt in the drawing-room, or, perhaps, Godard has been drawn into the poker game. Mounting the steps that led to the second entrance, Ulick found himself in the hall at the end of which was his apartment. As he passed he peeped into the drawing-room. It was empty and as mournful as ever. He could hear the poker players in Madame's room, but he had no stomach for cards and he went to his own glass door. The lights had been extinguished in the music-room. The place, however, was faintly illuminated. Confused noises reached his ears. Voices, indistinct, unmistakably those of a man and a woman, startled him so that he stood arrested on the threshold. A struggle of some sort was under way. A man's voice pleaded. The woman's was suppressed as if with rage. At times there were outbursts and threats. A heavy object fell somewhere. Ulick's indignation boiled over. Turning up the lights at the switch he hastened into his bedroom. There he saw Easter in a half-sitting posture on the bed her strong arms outstretched against the assaulting male. She was fully dressed though her skirt was rolled above her knees, revealing her lithe legs encased in black silk stockings. Her features were discomposed by emotion. Her hair deranged. She was not agreeable to contemplate.
"Don't you dare!" she was gasping as Ulick entered. At once the action of the drama halted. Half-drunk, Paul stared at Ulick. He began babbling an excuse when he was violently shoved from the room and soon found himself in the hall. He didn't resist for he knew the grip of Ulick, saw his broad, deep chest, and was aware that the other was the stronger. "My chauffeur," he began, but was swiftly propelled to the street door. "You mean brute. Only because I don't want to make a scandal I'd kick you into the gutter. You cad. You rotter. Trying to assault a girl in my room—" "You want her for yourself," giggled Paul in drunken fashion. He was expelled without undue gentleness and staggered into the arms of his chauffeur. A minute later Ulick heard the honk of a horn as the machine sped toward Fifth Avenue. He returned to his room inwardly rejoicing that no one had witnessed the row.
Easter lay sprawling, her hat crushed over her eyes, her arms helpless. She was asleep and slightly snoring. Her red face proclaimed a certain congestion. She's drunk, too, exclaimed Ulick. What should he do now? Summon Madame Felicé? No, not to be thought of. The Madame never demanded a wedding certificate, but in the matter of behaviour she was inflexible. A half-drunken man was looked upon as a matter of course; a drunken woman, however, was invited to leave the house after the first transgression. The Maison Felicé was eminently respectable, and, thriving hotel as it was, the police had never been called in because of a recalcitrant guest. Ulick remembered that. Nevertheless, he shivered. The snoring of the girl increased in volume and intensity. He lifted her head and put a pillow under it; he feared she would strangle with her head so pushed into her neck. He pulled down her dress, but noted the generous proportions of the young woman who in her stupour was at his mercy. But such a temptation never came to him. His rage was not yet appeased over the ungentlemanly tactics of a clubman, who took a defenceless girl out, got her drunk because of her inexperience, and then had the insolence to bring her into the apartment of another man and attempt to rape her. What else was it? She was, thanks to her condition, nearly overpowered when he had entered. Ulick became almost heroic in his own eyes. Rescued from the ravisher—that vulgar cad! But what was he going to do with the lady? She looked as if she expected to spend the night in his bed. A pretty mess, this. Then he heard her voice:
"Ulick, darling man, my darling husband," she muttered, and opened her arms as if to embrace him. The champagne is telling the truth—at last, he thought, and lost no time in lying beside her and taking her in his arms. "Yes, you poor, dear Easter. How glad I am to be near you, I love you so"—he did love her as he felt her splendid body close to him. He kissed her on the mouth, but the champagne odor was repugnant. Easter, her eyes closed, returned his ardent hug. Suddenly she burst into hysterical laughter. Ulick relaxed his hold thinking it was the effects of the champagne. He became alarmed. Someone might hear this maniacal laughter. Sitting up he placed his hand over her mouth. She gasped and struggled pointing all the while at something. He looked in the open bath-room door. Nothing. Her laughter was become uncontrollable. Cursing his luck, for he had almost achieved felicity, Ulick dashed to the washstand and drew a glass of water. That would revive her and stop the damnable noise. She waved him away, chuckling: "Ulick, Ulick, look at yourself in the glass. Jewel, you've been making love to me all this time with your hat on. Oh! Jewel, I'll die over this joke"—fresh peals ensued. Chagrined, he touched his head. His silk hat was jammed over his ears. In his excitement he hadn't noticed it. With an oath he dropped the glass and turning to the bed was about to warn her that if she didn't stop he would turn her out. For the moment he hated her. What a sight he must have been. But too his consternation she was again in deep slumber. To hell with her! he exclaimed and went into the music-room where he turned on the lights and seated himself on a comfortable couch. He could not sleep. She snored on.... Stiff, in the dull morning, he found himself in the same spot. He tip-toed into the bedroom. Easter had gone. Mechanically he gazed into the mirror. The hat was still on his head....
On East 58th Street there once stood Peter Buckel's brewery. Opposite was, still is, Terrace Garden. A theatre now occupies the old brewery ground. Young people who preferred serious converse to the glitter and bang of the big Garden across the street went to Buckel's. A wooden terrace with a roof was pleasant to sit upon when the weather was warm. A huge tree grew in the middle of this esplanade and the owner had artfully made it serve as a decoration. Under its spreading foliage people supped and smoked. The town was then younger, less crowded by "undesirable citizens"—the phrase is of Theodore Roosevelt's making—and life more mellow, because less puritanical. An evening in middle May saw a group around the tree-table as it was called; the most coveted spot on the terrace. There were Ulick Invern and Alfred Stone. Next to him sat a tall thin young man addressed by his companions as Milton. He did not wear a clerical garb but the cut of him was unquestionably priestly. His harmonious features, extremely blond hair, prominent eye-balls, gray in color, denoted refinement of mind and body. He was not in the least priggish and gave himself no sacerdotal airs. If he had done so he would soon have been lonely. Ulick and Alfred were too easy-going to endure superior pretensions in anyone; besides, they had known Milton before he went to the Jesuits, and Ulick sincerely sorrowed when ill-health fostered by strenuous study had sent his friend temporarily back into the world he despised. He recognized that Milton had a genuine vocation.
"That was a nice hot picnic," ejaculated Stone, mopping his brow as he dipped his nose into a long beaker of beer. "Never again," chimed in Ulick. Milton became nervous. "Where have you chaps been this hot afternoon?" "You wouldn't call this hot after Hoboken," cut in Stone. "Hotter than the hinges of hell," added Ulick as he emptied his lemonade glass. "I feel like a regular tosspot this evening," he continued. "We must have swilled a bathtub of liquid this afternoon over at Meyer's in Hoboken, eh, Alfred?" "You didn't, old herring-gut," was the rather surly retort;—"but I did. Why people of reputed sanity cross the Hudson on a sweltering day to wave handkerchiefs at their friends on out-bound steamers has always puzzled me. Now, why should we have given ourselves the bother to say farewell to Easter Brandès on a crowded dock, when we could just as well have wished her bon-voyage the night before at the Maison Felicé"—"Has Miss Brandès sailed to Europe?" inquired Milton, not without interest in his voice. "Yes, she goes to Berlin, to Lilli Lehmann, thence to emerge a full-fledged prima-donna and Wagner interpreter, et patiti et patita! I can't for the life of me see why she didn't stay under Madame Ash's wing a couple of seasons more. Mind you, I grant her talent. She is positively brilliant, but she needs steadying. Her voice, her delivery, her extraordinary memory—she already has fifteen rôles completely memorized, mastered—these are but a hint of what the future may bring forth; nevertheless, she is too young for Lehmann and—Oh, what's the use? Women don't think with their heads, they think with their matrix. They are too damned emotional. They are the sexual sex.... Putting an idea in their heads is like placing a razor in the hands of a child...."
"And men, I presume, think with their cortex," interposed the cool voice of Ulick. Milton deprecatingly lifted a white hand. "I can't say I admire the turn our talk is taking. Alfred is too literal, too fond of physiological details. I want to hear more of the art of Miss Brandès...." "And less about her coda—there's a musical term for you," cried Stone. All three young men laughed. At times Alfred could be amusingly immodest. "Well, she has gone to Germany despite your advice," declared Ulick. "She is a stubborn creature and I'm quite sure she has done the right thing. That young woman has a head of her own and instinct prompts her in the right direction. She may not always think with her head, yet she has managed to land on both feet. Think of it boys, Easter has only been here about six months. Behold! she goes to Berlin where she will be under the protection of the greatest living Wagner singer. How did she do it? Magnetism? Beauty? Talent? All three I fancy. And she is penniless. She told me so. Yet she dresses well, and someone must be putting up for her expenses while she is abroad".... "Oh Ulick! Thou art an ass," sang Stone in his most derisive manner. "Has she a banker? Yes, she is lucky, she has two. Paul Godard is one—" "It's a lie!" shouted Ulick, who was at once in a fighting mood. "And the other," continued Stone, unmoved, "is the young woman who is to play chaperone to her innocence while she remains abroad. I know, Frida Ash told me everything, and between you and me and this fat old tree, I think Madame Frida is glad to lose both of her pupils. They sat rather heavily on her betimes."
"Allie Wentworth is all right," returned the mollified Invern, "but I fail to see where Master Godard comes in. He is rich, to be sure, but as mean as sour-owl dirt...." "The Isles of Greece, the Isles of Greece, where burning Sappho loved and sung." Stone sneeringly quoted. Silence ensued. Then Milton spoke with his gentlest intonations: "I wonder why it is that so soon as a young woman sings or goes on the stage, mud-slinging is in order?" After that query the party broke up. Stone, as usual, was bored. Ulick felt that too much had been said of the girl he bade adieu a few hours before, radiant with happiness on the upper deck of the steamship, her arms holding a perfect sheaf of blush-roses. She had been cordial. She had kissed him on the cheek, whispering, "You dear old Jewel," and then Allie plucked at her sleeve, the whistle roared and that was the last he saw of Easter Brandès. He shook hands with Milton. Stone, as he languidly sauntered away said as a parting shot, over his shoulder: "I suppose you know the rumour 'round town that Paul Godard has been her banker? His name is on the passenger-list too. Gay bird, Paul. Ta! Ta!" Ulick went home in a sad humour.
At the fourth gate, the warder stripped her; he took off the jewels that adorn her breast....
Ulick Invern always declared that he was a New-Yorker born. This was a mild exaggeration; his mother—she had been a Bartlett before her marriage—was bred in the metropolis, but both her sons, Oswald, the elder, and Ulick, were born in Paris, where their father was Secretary at the American Legation. Needless to add, that under the American flag, they were registered as Americans. The elder Invern was the second son of a needy Irish peer, whose heir had retrieved the fallen fortunes of the family, an ancient one in Kerry, by marrying the only child of a wealthy Dublin iron-monger. Ulick's father through influence was sent to Washington where he served a few years in the British Embassy. But his marriage to Madge Bartlett, beautiful, brilliant girl, rich in her own right, caused a change of plans and her husband not only resigned his post, but in due course of time became a naturalized citizen of the United States. He entered the New York banking house of his father-in-law, who was not particularly impressed by his daughter's husband nor his capacity as a business man.
The elder Bartlett saw clearly. Handsome, like all the Inverns, Ulick Sr. became a pony-polo player of international renown; henceforward Wall Street and the bank only saw him when he dropped in to negotiate a domestic loan. No one could dislike this big, easy-going, young, blue-eyed Celt; even his father-in-law succumbed—after intervals of frigidity—to his personal charm. His wife adored him and wept over his gaming debts. He was a loose fish. Wine, women, and the wheel well nigh disrupted her family life. Paris offered him an escape from what he called the puritanism of New York—where, fancy! one's club shut down on you at 2 a.m.—and thus it happened that Ulick Invern, Jr., first saw the light in the French capital. With his brother, two years his senior, he received French training: The Ecole Normale, private tutors, ending with the Sorbonne. Oswald's painting talent soon manifested itself, and after eighteen the Paris of the Americans knew him no longer. He went to live on the Left Bank, in the Impasse du Maine, where, at his studio, he led the free, happy life of a monied artist. He had plenty of money, thanks to his indulgent mother, who, from time to time visited him, and, while he was on good terms with his brother, they didn't have much in common except their love for the Mater. They worshipped her. Their father they admired, but with well-defined reservations. He was a nee'r-do-well to the last, and died an aristocratic drunkard, leaving a malodorous memory, many mistresses and a cloud of debts. His widow never mentioned his name—that is, unless someone spoke disparagingly of him; then she betrayed resentment. The old chap was good form, but a charming black-guard, all the same—that was the verdict of his children, who speedily forgot him.
But his influence persisted beyond the grave, though the opposite of what might have been expected. Ulick told people who wondered over his abstinence that his father had drunk and smoked enough for a dozen families. So he let liquour and tobacco alone; besides, Oswald kept up the family tradition—a thirsty one. Following the mother's death, which occurred a few years after her husband's—there was heart malady in the history of the Bartletts—the two young men found themselves with a comfortable income, though not too rich. They saw little of one another. Tolerant as he was Ulick couldn't endure the sporting artistic crowd of the Latin Quarter atelier, and Oswald, on his side, found his brother a trifle pedantic, doctrinaire, even utopian. Wisely they kept asunder. A Frenchman in externals and by culture Ulick knew the men and women of the early nineties who made Paris a city of artistic and intellectual light. He was too young to have remembered Flaubert, but he visited Edmond de Goncourt at Auteuil and there encountered the group that had forsworn Zola and Naturalism. He admired the polished style of Edmond De Goncourt, a true aristocrat of letters; admired his Japonisme, his bibelots, pictures, and all that went to make the ensemble of that House Beautiful. A point of distain had begin to pierce the speech of the superb old gentleman, who confided to the sympathetic American youth that the younger generation didn't even knock at his door, that he and his dear dead brother, the illustrious Jules, had given those budding litterateurs a new opera-glass through which to view contemporary life. It was true. Dandys in their prose style, the De Goncourts had fashioned for themselves a personal vision and speech, feverish, staccato, intense. Their chief preoccupation was art, the pictorial, the tangible arts. No better book about artistic life has been written than Manette Salomon. And Madame Gervaisais is less an odyssey of a weak woman's soul, than an evocation of modern Rome. Alone, Edmond had written those exquisite notations of a girl's awakening consciousness to be found in the pages of Chérie. Ulick felt that he would not long tarry in that finely-filed, but chilly literature.
He had encountered at one of the reunions in the famous Concourt grenier, Henry James and also Joris-Karel Huysmans, whose names in baptism were Charles Marie-George. For this misanthropic writer he had shown such a preference that he attracted the attention of his idol and was invited to call upon him at his home in the rue de Sèvres on the rive gauche. A friendship began which greatly influenced the development of the younger man's character. His father had been what is facetiously called a "hickory" Catholic. He went to church when the spirit moved him. Yet, Irish-like, he never let the lustral week preceding Easter pass without confessing and communicating, usually going to the Trinity church on the boulevard Malsherbes, where he found a friend in a little Irish priest long stationed there for the convenience and edification of English-speaking residents. But Ulick's mother had been a High Church Episcopalian, and while she was not a fervent church woman she had consented to the baptism of her sons in the Roman Catholic religion. It is not so far away from my faith, she had told her fashionable English friends when they remonstrated with her over this backsliding from the principles of the Church of England. She, too, lacked true moral fibre though her association with her characterless husband may have been the chief contributing cause.
Ulick, however, was not of the temperament religious. He believed, of course, in a deity, an immanent deity; his was a pleasing sort of personal pantheism. Oswald was become a Manichean, a devil-worshipper. He did not repudiate the authority of the Church. But, then, Oswald drank absinthe, and long before that artists' apotheosis, he had hitched his artistic wagon to the saturnine canvases of Paul Cézanne. Ulick, on the contrary, never indulged in parti-pris. He was born, if such a thing were possible, with an indifferent temperament concerning any particular religion. All gods were divine to him, from the fetish of a South-Sea islander to the sublime doctrine of transubstantiation. He would have agreed with Baudelaire that it is neither permissible nor prudent to mock at any idol. A deity may have once made its abode in the wood or stone. Not cynical, Ulick was never convinced that any act of his could alter the inflexible law of causality. He had absorbed from Taine his deterministic leaning, luckily tempered by a sensible toleration. Whatever God is, he certainly can't exist outside of my brain-cells, argued Ulick. Each man creates a god after his own image. If I stop thinking of my particular deity-concept then he ceases to exist—for me; and that is the history of every god, every religion. All the rest is theology. Mother Church with her magnificent ceremonial, her liturgy, music, painting, sculpture, above all, architecture—for him, Gothic—appealed to his imagination, historic and aesthetic. Ulick was principally aesthetic; morals played a minor rôle in his existence.
But M. Huysmans had traversed the seven dolorous stations of his own crucified spirit and he at once made a searching examination into the conscience of his youthful admirer. He related, not without a certain muted pride, the advice of Barbey d'Aurevilly, the same advice Barbey had given Charles Baudelaire: that either the author of Là-Bas must prostrate himself at the feet of Jesus crucified, or else blow out his brains. "C'est fait," added Huysmans. It was shortly after the epoch of En route that he told Ulick of his conversion, not an unexpected one to those who knew the umbrageous, slender writer. Had it not been for the curiously beautiful literature it produced the various states of soul of M. Huysmans would not have riveted the fancy of Invern. The mordant epithet, picturesque phrase, the lenten rhythms of this multicolored prose, its sharp, savoury imagery—Huysmans' spiritual landscapes are painted with the gusto of a hungry man at a banquet where the plates are composed by a chef of genius—all these and the vision of a profoundly pessimistic soul, attracted him to Huysmans as to no other modern writer. Only to Petronius Arbiter among earlier penmen would he accord an equal value. Also to St. Augustine and Thomas à Kempis. He did not apologize for this versatility in tastes.
Huysmans prodded his conscience to such good effect that he accompanied the master to St. Sulpice, and also went with him when he made the rounds of the bookstalls along the Left Bank of the Seine. It was during one of these fascinating excursions in pursuit of ancient Latin hymnal literature that Ulick was presented to Remy de Gourmont, another of his favorite writers. A second friendship began, that long outlived the death of Huysmans. Maurice Barrès and his deification of the ego, was to be the third and principalétapein his moral development. There was one thing, nevertheless, that M. Huysmans could not persuade him to do; to make peace with his church. Urged to the confessional, there to cleanse his soul, to the communion-table to assuage his thirst for the infinite, Ulick would reply with a shoulder-shrug. The truth was that his sceptical analytical mind and his passion for women kept him from taking the final leap-off into piety and purity. My friend, Huysmans would insist, it is so easy! But if I relapse, as I am sure to do? would query Ulick. Then, he was assured that there was always further grace for the sinner. The waters of purification were always on tap. He could lave himself weekly—and begin over again; even the very next day. It's too easy, and it elevates religion to the dignity of a Turkish-bath, Ulick retorted. M. Huysmans, in turn, shrugged his shoulders, and the evening would end in tobacco smoke and furious discussions about art and literature.
And what evenings of ambrosia they were, mingled with the venom of the Master's critiques! He spared no one. He called Monseigneur d'Hulot, a bellicose booby, that same erudite and amiable churchman, who later wrote so discriminatingly of his bitter-tongued friend. An arsenal of opinions passed into the possession of the neophyte. But even at that early age, the formative period, his general culture was wider, more generous than the Master's. Ulick had been a student from the precocious age of seven when he was discovered by his nurse reading La Fontaine's Fables and Pickwick Papers. This bi-lingual training had produced admirable results. He knew two literatures thoroughly; in addition to a fair acquaintance with German and Italian. His mother had insisted on a German university and he selected Jena because of its propinquity to Weimar. Those four years in Germany had been the white stones in his studious career. There he had learned and loved Bach and Beethoven; there he learned to know Goethe, the greatest among moderns—he detested Bismarck and the hard positivism of the Prussian pan-Germanists; Heine, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche were to come later. His reactions to the system, or lack of system in the case of Nietzsche, was like a crisis in a dangerous fever. He alternated between languour and exaltation. Schopenhauer cooled off his naturally buoyant temperament, but Nietzsche gave him ecstasy as if poured from an overflowing goblet.
He went twice weekly to Weimar there to study pianoforte and theory with a pupil of Franz Liszt. The drowsy old town on the Ilm, once the Athens of Germany, laid his imagination under a spell. He wandered through the deserted gardens on long summer afternoons, Faust in hand, or he would go to Liszt's house in the woods, hardly a quarter hour's stroll from the garden-house of Goethe, and ponder the extraordinary activities of poet and pianist. In this same Weimar Goethe had led an active, practical life, he, the pagan hedonist, accused by the ignorant of day-dreaming, of being a butterfly voluptuary. He was the real political ruler and administrator of Saxe-Weimar. Liszt, after a life that was Caesarian in its triumphs, had calmly entered into his hermitage, where he taught, prayed and composed. And this is the end of every man's desire, thought the young man, who greatly aspired, though not for the prizes of the market-place. Yonder, at Jena, in Dr. Bingswanger's sanitorium, was hidden the poet-philosopher Nietzsche whose melodious thunder-words had stirred to the core the self-satisfied materialism of his native land. But he was wounded, his eagle wings of rhapsody and rage were broken; they no longer supported him in his flights through the vasty firmament of ideas. Later he was to come to his last asylum in Upper Weimar there to be soothed and watched over by his devoted sister Elizabeth Foerster-Nietzsche. For Ulick he was a living presence, though the soul was absent from his body at Jena. Zarathustra and Faust, and the exquisite art of Frédéric Chopin were henceforth to be the three guiding stars in his constellation of thinkers and artists. Indeed, it was the difficulty of finding a suitable interpreter of Chopin that drove him back to Paris. His Weimar teacher believed in the motto: Aut Lizst, aut nihil! Ulick preferred the Pole to the Hungarian: besides, a teutonized Chopin was inconceivable.
One phrase of Huysmans he remembered: without personality, no talent. If I can't achieve a personality I shall never become a writer, thought Ulick. That's what this sweeping dictum means: but how to achieve a personality? He was forced to smile over the crudeness of his question. Either you have it or you haven't—personality. He had wished to ask M. Huysmans the road to perfection, but he put off doing so for he knew in advance the answer: Holy Mother the Church. Then one day he received a card inscribed: "Changement de domicile: J.-K. Huysmans. Maison Notre-Dame à Ligugé (Vienne)" and he felt that he would never again see his friend. Nor did he. Huysmans, become a saint, rather an acrimonious saint, had severed all earthly ties. Henceforth, till the day of his cruel death, he was with God.
Music, already a passion with Ulick, began to dominate his life. He lost interest in various absurd or depraved "movements" that floated on the surface of artistic and literary life in Paris like greasy scum on clear soup. He changed his apartment and went out on the northern line, to Villiers-le-Bel, where in a rented maisonette, he could patrol the keyboard five or six hours daily without disturbing his neighbors. He had mastered technical difficulties years before, it was the higher reaches of interpretation he sought. He played Bach and Beethoven with a fervour that was religious. For him, as for Hans von Billow, the Well-Tempered Clavichord and the Sonatas were the Old and New Testaments of music. Chopin came third in this immortal trio of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit; Chopin, whose Preludes and Studies contain the past, present and future of the pianoforte. Even at this period Ulick saw clearly into the classic genius of the Polish tone-poet. Schumann ran a close second to Chopin in his affections. The glowing heart of romance, of great still forests, tangled underwoods, secret, sudden little lakes, clear and shining in the mystic daylight, their waters washed at dusk by the silver of a tender young moon; lover's vows in the dense darkness, sighs over their hapless fate—all passion and mystery, shy, hesitating, are in his music. He, not Chopin, is the real Romantic. Brahms and the moderns were not neglected. The elusive genius of Claude Debussy was then new. Ulick admired him. He loved certain phases of Brahms; not Dr. Johannes Brahms, the ponderous philosopher, but Brahms, the romantic, the follower in the trail of Schumann. There are pages in the pianoforte music that evoke grey days when the soul in its reverse aspirations recoils on itself, half articulate, divinely stammering, to express sensations that had lain buried in its convulutions since the birth of the monad. Brahms, too, is a mystic. His music sometimes registers moods recondite, moods that transcend normal psychic experiences. After Mendelssohn, and his crystalline shallowness, the utterances of Brahms are seemingly prophetic; a prophet who does not comprehend his own speech, though the fiery coal has touched his lips into eloquence. But the Forty-eight Preludes and Fugues, with the Beethoven sonatas were the daily musical sustenance, the bread of life, for Ulick. They quite filled his emotional and intellectual cravings.
He didn't neglect the other arts. A brief stay in the atelier of Gérôme, later with Bonnat, failed to convince him that he had a painting hand. His eye was well-trained, not only by constant study and adventuring among the masterpieces in the Louvre, but also by sketching outdoors. The theatre was a thrice-told tale for him, his parents had been lovers of the drama, and Paris had everything to gratify his versatile tastes. In all the tohu-bohu of his activities, he did not lose sight of his chiefest ambition; to become a writer, one with an individual note. Playing the pianoforte was all very well; he knew that he had a friend for his old age; but the main business of his life was writing, and if he recognized his dilettante viewpoint he was assured that at some time this smattering of the Seven Arts—Jack of all, master of none—would prove useful in his avocation of criticism, for critic he had elected to become. Criticism was the best way to practice his scales in public and acquire a supple, steady touch on his intellectual instrument. In due time his own books would follow.
He wrote French as if it were his native tongue, as in a sense it was. English was always spoken in the Invern household; that had been a wise rule of a seldom wise father. Also French or Italian, not often German—because Ulick never met in Paris any of his old Jena associates; but, preferably French. Yet, when he essayed several flights, chiefly critical, he recognized that his was the Anglo-Saxon mind. He thought in French, the purity of which in diction could not be challenged; nevertheless, the fundamental structure of his thought was English. His French essays, which he showed to that most unselfish of professional egotists, most optimistic of pessimists, Remy de Gourmont, were soon touched on their sore spot.
"You are, my dear young friend, an Englishman, more than that, an Irishman, still more than that, an American, and, having known that beautiful lady, your dear mother, I may add, A New York American. You write well in our tongue, though not so well as Arthur Symons, anyhow, better than Oscar Wilde—who hasn't mastered our syntax—but, but—it's not vital, individual, your style. I overhear too many echoes of Flaubert, Goncourt, above all, Huysmans. That won't do. You have so saturated yourself with the ideas and methods of these masters that you have left no room for the growth of your own personality. Jeune homme, écoutez!"—and the kindly eyes peering through the big bowed glasses pierced to the inner consciousness of his listener—"Take the advice of an old doctor of vocables. Have you written much in English? No? I thought not. That is a virgin-field for you. Go home, go back to New York, you are deracinated in Paris, as my brilliant friend, Maurice Barrès puts it—what, haven't you read Barrès? Begin at once with that novel of national energy, Les Déracinés—and of a cosmopolite, detestable, person—pardon!—as detestable as the dilettante attitude. Perhaps the unexpected clash with a comparatively new language, new characters, and new environment may strike a personal spark from your little grind-stone in New York. Otherwise, Monsieur Ulick, you will become a replica of your brother Oswald, with whom I occasionally collaborate in a bock at the Café François-Premier; you will become a second-rate Parisian, writing excellent, colorless prose, the standardized prose of the college professor. The world over my dear chap, college professors are alike—the Eternal Sophomore, coprolites of the ideal. No, I repeat, don't expect to get your head above the turbid stream. Return to your native heath and astonish the Yanks, as your beloved Mark Twain says—there's a Yankee genius for you, racy, original, and one who should stand four-square with Emerson, Poe and Thoreau. But, then, you have no school of critique in America, so I suppose Mark Twain will be put in his true niche a half century hence. But do you love your country?" suddenly asked the master. Cornered, Ulick blurted out: "Certainly, I am an American, though born in Paris. Besides, I love baseball and mince pie."
"Bon, true American arts," said the writer and benevolently dismissed his ardent neophyte with the shining brow.
The toypond near the east driveway floated many miniature boats that Saturday afternoon in May. The golden-crested synagogue on the Avenue, a phallic emblem for the eyes of the initiated, stood massive, erect, well within view. Pretty children played sailors; at intervals their exigent nurses rescued them from a watery grave. The girl, straight to virginal primness, swinging a scarlet parasol, went on slow gliding feet around the basin. In her jade-colored eyes there was the sweet faint passion of a June morning; she evoked June rather than May, a late, not an early spring-tide. She was in gold and black and wore a wide-brimmed hat of black straw. Her eyes were not large, nor yet luminous; smothered fire would have been the verdict of a portraitist. Jewelled eyes, they were, but jewels that had the muffled radiance of a topaz. Introspective her glance, sympathetic and not without a nuance of melancholy. A young thing not over eighteen, tender but suspicious, proud and dependent on those she loved, Mona went into the park every day to escape the oppressive happiness of her home. She lived with her parents. Her brother was away ten months during the year at college. She had not many friends of her age and sex because she was the companion of her father and mother. She adored them. They were adorable; the mother like an old English painting of the eighteenth century; the father, a scholar, a futile fumbler in the misty mid-region of metaphysic; but as gentle as a gentle woman, for all women are not so. At times Mona fled, so deep was her love for them. She stood in the clear soft afternoon light, more brune than blonde, yet suggesting not twilight but dawn. Her Celtic name modulated with her character—a character, fluid, receptive, sceptical, above all, pagan in its worship of sun, moon, stars, and fair tempting nature. Her tiny beaked nose sniffed the candid air crammed with May odors. She was happy. Not a masculine shadow had projected itself across the snowy field of her virgin soul.
"By Jove! that's an interesting girl, I'll wager!" exclaimed Ulick Invern to his companion, who replied: "Come over and I'll introduce you. She is my sister Mona."
They strolled to the Casino. With his accustomed flair for character Ulick recognized in the girl something out of the usual run of Americans. The charmless Yankee woman he had encountered to his discomfiture from the moment his steamer left Havre. She was the "life of the smoking-room"—on the French line ladies are permitted to invade the ship's fumoir—and he soon avoided that type. But he found her on the docks at New York and she fairly swarmed over the hotel, did this same aggressive, conceited, too well-dressed female. In Paris he had seen little of his ci-devant countrymen. He never visited the office of his father, and the recurrent advent of fresh consuls and their wives at the Embassy left him unmoved. His ideal of the American woman was the figure of his mother: exquisitely tactful, and of a veiled charm. And he enjoyed in Henry James the portraiture of the refined, if somewhat anaemic order, of lovely spinsters. But the raw native who gadded about Paris, confidently criticizing everything and everybody— those women were repugnant to his sensibility. Daisy Miller was a reticent aristocrat in comparison.
Perhaps it was the Old-World texture of her manner, perhaps it was a brief sight of the exalted soul that peeped out of her timid eyes, perhaps—! but what reason can a young man or a young woman give for their first fugitive predilections? Ulick met Mona and liked her; Mona saw Ulick and liked him. As Paul Bourget would have said, they then and there "amalgamated their sublimes," which simply meant that they were two birds limed by nascent love. The sublimities and the mingling might come later.
But this youthful couple did not pin down their sensations to an artistic formula. They chatted, laughed, walked, and when the Casino was arrived at they sat on the Terrace and Ulick told them that the spot made him homesick for Paris; Paris, his patrie psychique. Mona incredulously smiled yet wondered; how could anyone prefer Paris to New York? She had never been in Paris. Ulick lightly reproached Milton for having kept such a sister locked up, as if in a gaol. Thereat, the theological student chuckled. Mona was free as a swallow. She preferred the company of her parents to that of the frivolous chits of her own social circle. Ulick had known that the Miltons were well-to-do people who lived without ostentation, a rapidly vanishing species of New Yorkers. Again he looked at Mona, again their gaze collided. Her eyes shone. They are the eyes of a rare soul, he commented to himself. And how different the expression from the calm, objective gaze of Easter. Toujours Easter!
"There comes Paul Godard! Lord! with that creature Blanche in his car. Don't stare, Mona, please," begged her brother. "Don't be stupid," she answered, "you dear old priest. I'll look. The woman won't hurt me." Mona measured the handsome, bold dancer, over-dressed, bejewelled and resplendent in a picture hat, who majestically moved up the terrace followed by Paul and the maître-d'hôtel. Paul pretended not to see Ulick, and Ulick turned the other way. He wasn't interested in Paul or his concubines, though he still recalled with a sullen rage the caddish behaviour of Godard the night he made Easter half-drunk; that, and the inglorious hat episode he could never forgive nor forget. "So he didn't sail, after all," he muttered. But if he was indifferent, the young girl was not. "Is that the rich Mr. Godard I read of in the newspapers?" she asked Ulick who couldn't repress a slight shudder of disappointment. "She reads the newspapers like any other American virgin, and she speaks of money! Hopeless, all these dove-eyed maidens, with their profiles of a hawk; a sweet, domesticated hawk, a hawk all the same, ready to swoop down—" "Oh let's go home brother," broke in Mona, irrelevantly. She had sensitively noticed the inattention of her new friend and she was wounded without giving herself any reason for her slight feeling of resentment. They went away. Ulick accompanied them to the gate at 72nd Street. Mona gave him a wan smile at parting. Milton, as usual, was unaffectedly hearty. He was fond of Ulick and had made a vow to save his soul from the eternal bonfire. She seemed to like me at first, said Ulick after he left them, though she didn't invite me to call. Oh Lord, I wonder what mischief Easter Brandès is up to at this minute? Her name revived odious memories. Again that Paul Godard. To the devil with the exasperated poodle. Ulick went to the Utopian Club.
Mona Milton was what the French, with their feeling for nuance, would call "fausse-maigre"; she gave an impression of slenderness which her solidly-built figure contradicted. She was partial to draperies and that, perhaps, created the illusion of diaphaneity. Her health was excellent. Not even at the time when women are 'minions of the moon' did she relapse into that forlorn flabbiness noticeable even to the ordinary obtuse male. Her mother had reared her in the old-fashioned way and had put the fear of God in her heart (read: human respect for the polite conventions of a rapidly disintegrating social hierarchy). But her father, who called himself agnostic, had quietly pooh-poohed his wife's solicitousness regarding the little virtues. Hedges to be vaulted if needs must, he told his daughter, the chief companion of his long tramps through Central Park, when it was a green, delightful retreat from the city's menacing encroachment. Truth is stranger than morals, he also said. Mona loved the park. Every day saw her reading or walking through the less-footed by-ways. For her, mornings were mysteries. She would sit in the sun for hours, a book in her lap, her eyes dreaming. Her sub-conscious life was struggling for self-recognition. Her ego was transformed after puberty announced itself. She was an orchestra of cells; the multiplicity of her egos astonished, yet did not distress her. She accepted the new stream of consciousness in her that had burst its barriers and painted over her imagination a fresher, more beautiful world. Of physiology and psychology she had more than the rudiments. Sex did not puzzle her, only its cabined seclusion from the general current of daily life. Her mother had been frank with her since she had reached the age of curiousness; in turn Mona was frank with her father. She asked him questions that she would not ask her mother and he answered them unhesitatingly. He believed that insincerity cloaked a multitude of stupidities. One day when she was hardly sixteen she said: "Papa, why do I love dolls so much?" "The maternal instinct," he had replied. "Oh, yes, anybody knows that, but why am I different from other girls?" "Different, my dear?" "Yes, different. I haven't one friend who loves dolls. They are fond of dogs but laugh at me when I dress and undress my darling doll. Lydia Fuller says I'll be married at eighteen and have twins at nineteen—maybe sooner," added Mona, pensively. The old man only shook his head and resumed his Schopenhauer.
The rearing of the girl, withal superficial, covered a wide variety of authors and subjects. She knew French fiction so well that she couldn't become interested in the hypocritical half-way house of English-writing novelists. What's the use of writing about life, she complained to her mother, and leave life out of the story? The scabrous element in Gallic light literature amused her, but she preferred Flaubert to Paul de Kock, Balzac to Zola. Memoirs enchained her fancy. The utterances and actions of real men and women appealed. Casanova, who has left the world its most frank and complete autobiography, was for Mona as is romance to other girls of her age; Casanova, Benvenuto Cellini and the Memoirs of the Duc de Saint-Simon. Rabelais she dismissed and for Benjamin Constant and Stendhal she only entertained mild respect. She admired the electric energy of Julien Sorel and Mathilde de la Môle, but they left her cold. As for the pessimists, Senacour, Amiel and them that confide to diaries, their pen dipped in their own salty tears, she spoke contemptuously. Weaklings, all. What if they did write charmingly? She longed for virility; that spelled charm for her. The more violent pages in the Old Testament, Shakespeare and Faust; but she held the revelation of the New Testament in moderate esteem. Too much oriental fatalism. Too much turning the "other cheek," to please her. The person of Christ seemed apochryphal. Such a man couldn't exist twenty-four hours without being killed on our murder-loving planet. Notwithstanding all these contradictions in her undeveloped character, Mona was far from being an "advanced" young woman; indeed, her classmates at college had voted her desperately old-fashioned; worse—a womanly woman. Secretly she wished that her soul could be like a jungle at night, filled with the cries of monstrous sins. But it wasn't.
She continued to love her doll, not that she disliked cats and dogs and birds, only that the doll, the simulacrum of the future child, touched her to her innermost fibres. She had the brother-cult, yet she loved no one, except her father, so much as the absurdly big French doll, the last of a long line dating back to her babyhood, that slept with her every night. The old folks were at first amused, then edified by this stubborn reaction to a profound instinct. In time they became accustomed to seeing a staring wax effigy on the pillow of their daughter's couch, attired in a neat nightdress and lace cap. Ah, well! had said the father, it is a premonitory symptom, yet she is happier now, dear child, than she will be with her future husband. Considering her self-effacing nature, the reply of his wife was rather tart: "If you read less Schopenhauer you wouldn't be so prejudiced against my sex. To hear you talk one might suppose that your married life had been a vale of tears." To which the old man humbly and affectionately replied: "Instead of a bed of roses, as it is," and surprised his spouse by warmly kissing her.
They didn't forbid Mona the company of young men but she made no attempt to meet anyone. Her brother was away most of the time at the seminary and his friends were theological students, neuter persons she evaded rather than despised. Voluntary eunuchs, enemies of the very source of life, she felt uncomfortable in their presence, as she would have been embarrassed if a hermaphrodite had been pointed out to her. The unnatural was merely a mediaeval idea, but the anti-natural was to be feared and avoided. She did not say this to her brother, who in her eyes was a saint, but she said as much to her father who sympathised with her. Another confusion in her mind was the degrading of the major instinct of life—after hunger; Reproduction. If, as the Bible says, fornication is a rank sin, why do a few words mumbled over a man and woman by a clergyman or magistrate make it less a sin? It's the same vile act isn't it, even in marriage? Her mother was more shocked at her expression than at the idea which prompted it—an idea as old as the hills. "But Mona, people don't think such things, much less speak them." "They do mother. There isn't a girl in the world who hasn't had this same thought, though she may keep it in the secret cabinet of her mind." Her mother shook her head but didn't dare speak of sin, or redemption or the holy sacrament of matrimony instituted by the Church to bless the most animal of the functions, to lend it dignity, to create a safeguard for the children, not to mention the fact that this sacrament screens the shock and doubts and hesitations of pure-minded girls, to whom physical union with a man would be otherwise repulsive. No, this "theological bric-à-brac" as Mr. Milton called the tenets of religion, his wife had been forbidden to speak of to her children. Her son was to her a surprise, like a swan hatched from a brood of ducklings, and now Mona was beginning to disquiet her. A good girl, a loving dutiful daughter—nevertheless, disquieting because of her absolutely natural attitude toward forbidden themes, so natural that she often embarrassed her mother.
"Mother," she had abruptly exclaimed about this time, "Mother, I wonder why brother is so inclined to piety. He should have been the girl, I the boy. Mother—I am beginning to believe that something was wrong in your marriage—" "Oh!" ejaculated the unhappy woman, who didn't know what terrible speech would follow: "I firmly believe, you dear old fraidcat Mother, that papa has never been unfaithful to you since you two darling old sillies were married." Mrs. Milton refused to unbend during an entire evening.
After Ulick had given his hat and stick to the garderobe he walked through the café to the dining room on the University Place side. Martin's was his favourite rendezvous. The cuisine, the cellar, the service, were the best in town. Ulick lived at the Maison Felicé, but liked a change of menu and venue. He was known at Martin's and was soon taken to a window table when, astonished, he noted his immediate neighbor. She held out her hand: "Such coincidences do occur, outside of novels," she said. He sank into a seat facing her. "May I?" he begged. She nodded. Mona was fond of good things to eat. At home if the cook had served stewed potato-peelings her parents would have meekly swallowed them. They had little appetite for food or drink, none at all for the finer shades of cookery for the gentle art of the gourmet. Mona went daily into the kitchen and conspired in company with the cook; therefore, she occasionally ate something that had flavour. But when she was hard-pressed by artistic hunger, as she called it, she walked down the Avenue to 9th Street, there turned eastward and reached Martin's, always in a famished condition.
"You haven't ordered, have you, Miss Milton?" asked Ulick. She shook her head, negatively. He beckoned to the captain of the dining-room and after some whispering a waiter was instructed. No wine was commanded, neither drank wine. Vichy Celestins and wonderful coffee with cream made their appearance in company with French rolls and butter, followed by a variation on the theme of eggs—oeufs à la Martin—then a filet de sole au gratin—and a Chateaubriand steak with a Salade Russe—good heavens, mused the girl, he has a master-palate. It was true. Ulick, despite his fondness for mince pie and Philadelphia scrapple, could not endure the national cuisine. We are barbarians compared with the French, he openly asserted, who know how to eat, drink and think.
"And now my dear Miss Milton, I shall apologise for my rudeness. I never asked you if you expected anyone, but took for granted that my company would be agreeable. I ask your pardon. How are you, and how is your very good brother? Dear old Milt." She was all animation.
"I'm glad you like Milt. I adore him. What a pity he is going to be a priest." Ulick looked surprised. She coloured. "I mean," she pursued, "he should have picked out a more liberal profession."
"Religion is so narrowing,"—"Religion is an ensemble of scruples that impede the faculty of reason," he interrupted in sing-song tones. "Who said that?" she quickly asked. "I think the learned Professor Salomon Reinach." "You are right but your quotation is incorrect." For the third time that morning he was surprised. A blue-stocking, a theologian in petticoats; perhaps an agnostic. Yet she didn't seem "modern" or of the over-cultured type. "What Reinach wrote is this: 'Religion is a sum of scruples which impede the free exercise of our faculties.'" She pronounced this little speech as if such definitions were the daily bread of her discourse. "Aren't those eggs delicious?" he asked. He was nettled. He wished to change the tide of conversation. She assented and smiled at him with such a mischievous smile, both a challenge and a conciliation, that he laughed. She laughed, and she extended her hand to him. He took it. The incident became a memory.
Her hands were not small; shapely and capable, they were white and carefully tended. He had made a study of the hand. Why shouldn't he? A pianist, a writer, who hated the type-machine, believing that only with the pen, the stylus, could a man create prose and poetry; all the rest is commercial. Yet the hands of Mona were not what he called the hands of an artist. Their forms were largely-moulded, the fingers, charged with character; the tips were not spatula-shaped. His curiosity was aroused. They awaited the fish. "Let me look at the palm of your left hand," he pleaded. She showed it without coquetry. He noted the deeply graven and long life-line, but the abnormal development of the Venus-hill caused him to ejaculate: "Dio mio! you must have an affectionate disposition." She said without a suspicion of mock-modesty: "I love children," and then they attacked the sole. He couldn't help admiring her forthright manner. A candid girl. Therefore a good girl. And how interesting. She thought: If he doesn't like my plain speaking he isn't the man for me. Love me, love my doll, she whimsically concluded. If the secrets of a maiden's and youth's souls could be spilled on the table, as salt is sometimes spilled, many a marriage made in heaven or hell would never be consummated. For ten minutes their teeth were busy.
She didn't smoke because in those days ladies were not supposed to know the taste of cigarettes. There are minor drawbacks in every age. She saw his long, nervous fingers with their suggestion of finesse, of power, saw the oval face and the clear-cut features—his profile made her dream of the profiles of decadent emperors of the Lower Empire; saw that his nose and brow modulated in the Napoleonic way, a common enough trait throughout the Midi of France; saw his sensual lips, and simply loved the kindly glance of his heavily-lidded blue eyes; blue of a penetrating, celestial intensity. His vitality was concentrated in his eyes, which were always speculative, seldom tender. Ulick, thou art a jewel! she murmured, and thereafter to herself named him Jewel. (As had Easter, before her).
He saw, what he had with clairvoyance called an interesting girl. He didn't say pretty or beautiful; sympathetic, would be a more truthful ascription. His experienced glance roved over her face and figure. He measured, as would an architect, the latent powers of strength and resistance in her muscular conformation. Not a skinny bird, anyhow, he said with a sigh of relief. He is undressing me now, she thought. If he were, it was not in a salacious spirit. Voluptuary as he was, Ulick didn't feel a spark of erotic emotion for his companion. His admiration for her was sexually disinterested. She hasn't the pull of sex like Easter, yet I don't know—she is not awakened.
"Sir critic, when you have made all the specifications, registered the shortcomings, won't you please say something? I'm dying to hear about myself. Milt has told me of your ambitions. I wonder, though, that you should have left Paris for this noisy Tophet of a New York." It was his turn to color. The damned girl seemed to know exactly the nature of the stew simmering in his mental laboratory. But no young man of spirit needs a second invitation to talk about himself, his ways, his days, his mighty ambitions. He broke loose and at once she was swirled along on the swift crest of his eloquence.
He told her of his family, of his Parisian life, of his distinguished friends, of Jena, Weimar, Liszt and Nietzsche. He explained why he had selected New York as the best vantage-ground, the best waiting spot from which to wage war with his future public. He spoke of his music. He spoke of his physical strength. She interrupted to inquire why he, Paris-born, neither smoked nor drank. Surely not because of puritanical reasons. He violently demurred; then in an indiscreet burst of confidence he related the reason why Goethe didn't use tobacco; he didn't mince words; she understood, but didn't blush, as another girl might have done. Tobacco, he ingenuously declared, attenuates the virile quality of a man, wine is also dangerous no matter what the poets sing. Yes, but what will-power is yours, she commented. He expanded his chest and straightway stared into her eager eyes. Then it was, for the first time since they met, each looked another way. They had both seen things not set down every day on the human slate. She felt positively uncomfortable, and he said to himself: Steady old chap is the mot d'ordre. She is Milt's sister!
"I write about the stage because I can no longer endure listening to music. I tried my hand at musical criticism when I first landed. Now, as the curtain goes up at the opera, I have a queer feeling in the pit of my stomach. I call it aesthetic nausea. To hear over and over again the same old arias, the same bad singing, and then the stale phrases that we are compelled to write after each performance—phew! What a waste of time, what a re-chewing of banal ideas. And then, the receptive frame of mind; always listening to other men's ideas, or the lack of them. Again I say—what a sheer waste of time for any one who wishes to be individual, to create, no matter how slight the performance." He paused for lack of wind. "Go on," she urged. "The theatres are pretty bad, but at least you are dealing with actuality. Once in a while a play comes along by Ibsen, and then you are in contact with the stuff of life. Music is technical, emotional as it may be; but just try to write of it in terms of emotion and your pathos is soon bathos. Pictures are easier to handle because they resemble something in the world. Music does not. It is dug out of our subliminal self, brought to the surface of our consciousness by the composer's art—self-explorer is a truer title than composer, who as a matter of fact decomposes his soul-states, distils his most precious essence into tone. But I fear I bore you—Miss Mona." "Go on," she commanded.
"Well there isn't much further to go on, I am glad for your sake. I soon abandoned music, which I love all the better for not being forced to write about it. I felt strange at the opera house, I didn't become closely acquainted with my colleagues, so I was glad when the "Clarion" gave me the berth of dramatic critic. Now I can fight every day with erudite William Winter—Lord! how that little man can write English— over the Ibsen problem. Wagner is accepted here, yet a more original thinker, Henrik Ibsen, is slighted, is even called immoral, he the most moral of dramatists. Let's go for a ride," he exclaimed, "a beautiful day wasted over sterile aesthetics. What do you say—Miss Mona?" (That's twice he called me Mona!) She consented. The prospect of a trip through the park sitting next to this lively young man pleased her. "We shan't take a cab. I like a hansom better. Don't you love the good old English hansom with the slightly shabby but always sympathetic driver wearing a battered silk hat tipped on the side of his disreputable skull? Besides Miss Mona—a hansom is Cupid's chariot. Let's go." When Ulick started in earnest he was irresistible. He hailed a hansom. They hopped in. To the park!
"Haven't I been rather discursive?" he had asked of her. "I don't think so," she had curtly contradicted. Forsooth, she didn't think that he had been discursive. She was rather disappointed. The brilliant verbal fireworks she had been taught by her brother to expect from Ulick had fizzled—she thought. It was only that night, after she had put Dolly to sleep, that she assembled her memories of the afternoon and then she realized the conversation might be truthfully described as discursive; fragmentary would be a better word. He is nice, she ruminated. Now you dear naughty dolly don't you pretend to be asleep when I see one of your eyes watching me ... little sneak, I believe you are jealous.... Oh! he is so nice Dolly.... She buried her face in the cool bed linen—There! I'll whip you for your mean jealousy—I'm fond of Ulick—my great Jewel of a man.... Dolly's head was lost under a pillow. Mona fell into a dreamless slumber.... She said nothing next morning to her mother about the impromptu luncheon and casually remarked that she would go for a walk in the afternoon, not far, she added. She didn't think it necessary to tell that she was going to the Metropolitan Museum, a few blocks away, there to meet Ulick Invern, who had promised to show her Manet's "Boy with a Sword" and to describe the personality of the painter, with whom he had been acquainted in Paris. It was to be a glorious afternoon devoted entirely to art. Ulick was so artistic and she so ignorant....
The modulation into an easy-going friendship was not difficult for these young people. An autumn without parallel, in its days of mellowness mingled with invigourating frosts, passed on rapid pinions. They did not bid Old Time to pause in his flight; the rhythms of their ardent blood were too insistent. They ceased to reason. Their affective life ruled. In the case of Ulick there was a throw-back to his Anglo-Saxon origins. His Parisian training and aptitudes melted in the gentle heat of new experiences. I am an American, after all, he often told himself, therefore sentimental, and sentimentality and sensuality are never far asunder. She, on the contrary, is a cerebrale, neither tepid nor tempestuous. Yet those moments when she seems on the verge of hysteria—I mean, when she goes off on those gales of laughter. She is oversexed, no doubt about that. She would rather discuss sex-problems than eat. A curious combination. So is her brother. He, too, likes to talk on forbidden subjects. People who have no outlet for their emotions are bound to brood over them and to unbosom themselves without realizing it. Steady, Ulick, steady! I'm not in love or I shouldn't be analyzing my feelings. Is she a trifle smitten? That way lies self-conceit. But she does like to be in my company, and I prefer hers to any woman's—yes, even to Easter's who never gave anyone a chance to breathe, so busy was she with herself. What egotists these mortals be! Puck should have said. I wonder what Easter is doing now? That wonderment had become a leading motive with him of late. He bitterly reflected that since the dramatic, the fatal, day in New Hampshire, she had not permitted him the slightest familiarity. She had kissed him on the steamer the day of her departure, but then she had kissed Tom, Dick and Harry with equal readiness, though she hadn't whispered to them: "You dear old Jewel." The memory of her voice, low, mysterious, tender, still fired his blood. I'm afraid I'm a sensual man. Be virtuous and you'll be bilious! He pondered the wise adage. Is physical love only a matter of hygiene? he asked himself. Tumescence; detumescence, as Havelock Ellis says. It's high time I went out on the trail after a few scalps. I'm getting a bit stale.
That winter they met nearly every day. But she didn't invite him to call at her home. He couldn't ask a reason for this strange omission. My intentions are perfectly honourable. I've told her I wouldn't marry the best woman even though she were the last of her sex on the globe. I've also told her that a man should never live under the same roof with his mistress; in that case what would be the difference between marriage and concubinage; one would be as stupid as the other. Poor Emma Bovary found out from experience that men and women bound by any bond live in the land of platitudes. I told her—heaven forgive my candor!—that I changed mistresses every three months, that the instant I found myself falling in love with one I got a new one. Boasts by a boaster. What is it that interests nice girls in irregular lives? I wonder. The inside of a brothel is not so interesting as an abatoir, where as Huysmans used to say—love is slain at a stroke, and the stroke usually costs the man a twenty-franc piece. But these girls don't realize the crudeness of such lives. Mystery. That's the attraction. The unknown. Silly, miserable women who go to bed the same night with a half dozen men—is that romantic! Demi-vierges, Marcel Prévost called the American girls, for some reason best known to himself. Yet I've met respectable married women who went to Paris crazy to see the sights, that is, certain sights. The puberty of adultery? Maxim's soon bored them. From the organized obscenities of Montmartre they went to the "peep-holes" only to see another show staged for imbeciles with a filthy curiosity. What is it? Mona, dear decent child, agrees with me that promiscuous married life is the most deadly blow of all to romance. She simply won't recognize evil as evil, only as vulgarity—worse, as stupidity. I absolutely agree with her in that matter.
But it was not such plain sailing for Mona through this unfamiliar and uncharted land of emotion. She had a hard time with that temperament of hers. I'm glad they give it such a name as temperament, she said. Robert Louis Stevenson calls love a mixture of pruriency and curiosity, which suggests a horrid itch. Young men have an easier time than girls, who must sit and sizzle while down in some sub-cellar of their being they hear the faint growlings of the untamed animal. Once unleashed it jumps all barriers, and then—well, then, the fat's in the fire. Mona shivered, a pleasing shiver of anticipation. Why not bravely go to her parents and confess that she loved Ulick? He was a presentable young man, of social standing, with abundant means—evidently; for outside of his critical work he seems to do little except to spend money, not a negligible quantity, with her—and, finally, he was liked, and liked very much by Milt. Some perverse devil lurking in the depths of her being bade her stay silent. Was it romance, sloppy, slimy sentimentality, after all? She couldn't say. She only knew that she wanted to keep her secret, that she didn't wish to marry, that she loved to be near the big, good-hearted young chap with the blue eyes; yes, why not tell the truth—she was wild to be loved by him. Everything. A young woman brought up in the practice of all the proprieties—save church going—by a mother who idolized her! Nevertheless, she was ready to throw her bonnet over the windmill like the veriest street slut. Where her maidenly reserve! She had none when self-confessing. Ulick had said to her, I think you were brought up on the wrong kind of reading. Do you force me to stick to Hannah More or Self-Help? she had impertinently demanded. You might do worse. Bernard Shaw is poor nourishment for a girl with too much imagination, he retorted. Wrong again, she said, I've absolutely no imagination. I'm only enthusiastic. And you have said that without enthusiasms life would be unsupportable.