Thus far the outward expression of their mutual affection had been conventional. They went to picture exhibitions, the horse-show at the Garden saw them many times, and also opera and theatre matinées; but, strictly speaking, they were never alone. He always left her at her house door. There were no twilit corridors, darkened vestibules, no sudden corners in entries where they might embrace. He did smuggle her hand into his at the theatre when the lights were lowered; during entr'actes they were a well-bred couple. Opportunity, which is the thief of virtue—sometimes—hadn't appeared on the scene. Occasionally, when walking after a copious luncheon, she would complain of enervation and her eyes would swim with mystic languour. He, fearing that she might think him virtuous, boasted of laborious nights of vice. She seemed to believe him and secretly applauded his conduct. No wonder young men can bob up with such smug faces when they call on nice girls. Oh, yes, they are quite virtuous. No fear of their misbehaving themselves. Their other "lady" friends have made them safe—housebroken, she added with a smile over the phrase. I believe grim law causes more suffering than license. When she communicated this original idea to Ulick he frankly asked her:
"See here, Mona, do you ever expect to have a child?" "I'm crazy for one, for two"—and she related the story of Dolly. He was at once sympathetic, slightly to her surprise. "It reminds me," he said, "of two French friends of mine. Married, but no children, though they were much desired. For several years they played at parenthood, they pretended they had a boy and a girl, very young, very troublesome, but beloved by them. They played this strange little comedy for several years. They never went out in the daytime without the "children." They held long conversations with them. They reproved, praised, admired, caressed them. At night when they visited the theatre or had a dinner they left their precious imaginary offspring in the care of an equally shadowy nurse, burdening her with all manner of instructions. And now comes the funny part of my story. A real child was born, a few years later, a second followed, and for all I know they may have had half a dozen since then. But those children of flesh and blood were not treated with the same sort of love the dream-children had received"—"Dream-children?" she repeated her eyes insistently seeking his, "what a pretty expression. Did you make it up?" "Certainly not. Haven't you read Charles Lamb's description of his dream-children, the children he never fathered—only dreamed of?" She didn't thank him for his explanation, but mused. "I should like to have some dream-children." "How many, five or six?" "No, two would be enough, a boy and a girl. I have already a real child, didn't I tell you?" He pretended to be shocked. "A real baby you have?" "Yes, my Dolly. She's a troublesome charge. If I could only have two dream-children"—"Who is to be the father?" "You," she replied, and her naive gravity impressed Ulick. "Won't you be the father of our twins?" Her voice was low, pleading, almost intense. They were sitting in the park on an April afternoon. He caught one of her wrists. "By God," he exclaimed, "if I could only believe you meant it." "I do mean it, dear Ulick. We shall never marry yet we may have children —dream-children, symbols of our friendship." "And what in the world do you mean by saying that we shall never marry?" His accent was one of astonishment and no little pique. She gazed demurely at her well-shaped hands.
"Didn't you say that you had to change mistresses every three months? And what about the obscene promiscuity of married life!" He went into a bad humour at once and impatiently answered: "Yes, I did say it and you know enough of life to know it was all brag. I've no mistresses—" "What! no mistresses, not one?" she blankly inquired. He didn't turn a hair. "Not one. I love only one woman in the world now. It's Mona Milton. I needn't tell her that." "No," she replied without affectation. "We do care for each other. Yet, Jewel, why harp on marriage?" He endeavoured not to show his surprise. To atavism, and to the Bartlett side of his ancestry, must be set down the reason for this surprise, and a faint, though well-defined, feeling of dissent. Really, a young girl should not say such things to a young man no matter how modern, how advanced she is; no matter if she is fond of him; and the curious part of the thing is that Mona does not boast being advanced or modern, nor, indeed, anything but a real girl.
She noted his confusion and helped him over the stile of perplexity. "Ulick, let's have dream-twins."
"I'll assume all the responsibility, all the cares, only let's have them—now." He glanced superstitiously about him as if he feared her speech would be overheard. And her home not ten minutes away! She divined the cause of his embarrassment and grasping his hand in her soothing clasp she asked with the naiveté of a childish mother: "What shall we call them, our darlings?" "That's important," he declared, humouring her. "Let me see. The boy? I have it. Shamus. My full name in baptism is Ulick Shamus Fitzgibbon Desmond Invern. It's a mouthful. I am the namesake of my uncle, my father's elder brother, now the head of our house and present Marquis of Invern and Desmond. Yes, there's a Marquis in the family, a poverty-stricken one at that, poor but proud. But it will do me no good, for he has a quiverful of children. My cousin, St. Alban, his heir, is my age, a regular prig. So, dear, it will be Shamus, if you don't mind." She nodded. Shamus would do. Now for the girl. He again made the nomination. "She is called Grane." Mona rebelled. "Why such an unusual name?" "Don't you remember the white horse of Brunnhilde in 'Siegfried'?" "Certainly, and I also remember the white horses in Rosmersholm which foretold trouble." "I like Grane, and you will like her, too." He was so firm that she acceded. "All right, dear, and now what are you going to do with the pair since they are born?" He took out his watch and started up. "Past five, and I've a first-night on. Good-bye, darling Mona," and he kissed her upon the mouth for the first time in the twilight and with a moon like an effaced silver coin looking at them over the synagogue. It was a consecration, she whispered; my first kiss. Then aloud: "Good-bye—darling—I'll take Shamus and Grane home, the dears might take cold. Good-bye Ulick, my husband and father of our children." As he strode away, not daring to look back, he ruminated: That's a case of suppressed maternal instinct. Mona ought to be married or—or—steady boy! Else you are in it either way you jump.
The new Ibsen play enjoyed a stormy première. After he had sounded its praise and expressed his personal opinion that critics who thought to the contrary were imbeciles not worth the powder to blow them hell ward, Ulick went to the Utopian Club there to relax. He ran into Edgar Saltus as he entered. That writer was then at his brilliant apogee. He had published The Anatomy of Negation, The Philosophy of Disenchantment, The Truth About Tristram Varick and Mr. Incoul's Misadventure, and was enjoying with his ironic humor the row raised by the moral bell-boys of criticism over his incomparable style and incomparable unmorality. Ulick had been his admirer in Paris and told the aristocratic author so in no measured manner. Saltus liked the young man and encouraged him. "Naturally, you should have remained in Paris. Here you commit spiritual suicide. I don't care what De Gourmont advised. You have the soul of a cosmopolitan. There is no nationality in art any more than there is democratic art. Demos dislikes art as much as he does a bathtub. Soap and social equality are akin. His self-constituted champion, Walt Whitman, who wrote some stunning head-lines, not to mention his catalogue of the human genitals, is not welcome to Mr. & Mrs. Demos. Longfellow about fills their lyric cup to overflowing. However, I was about to write you. I've an invitation for you." Then he went into details. Ulick was delighted. "Of course, I'll accept the invitation. It's very kind of you to think of me. What a jolly party it will be. I'm getting staler and staler in this town of my mother's. That party may bring back a whiff of dear old Paris." They shook hands and parted. Ulick went to the Maison Felicé, across Madison Square park, and after he had gone to bed he couldn't sleep; yet the noise of poker-chips in the next room didn't keep him awake. It's those damnable dream-brats, he irritably exclaimed and though it was long past two he donned a dressing gown and sat down to his desk in the music-room.
Either I've made a mistake in coming to New York, or else I'm going soft in the upper-story, he said aloud, as he opened his portfolio, crammed with papers, some scribbled over, some blank, some carefully folded. There is Edgar Saltus, who knows life in a broader sense, perhaps better, than De Gourmont—he says I made a mistake. Is Paris my real home, and am I deracinated as Maurice Barrès calls it, and only transplanted in America? Ah! abominable music-critics' jargon, how glad I am to have escaped your adjectives and repulsive technical terms. That is no way to find one's individuality, overpraising vain screaming sopranos, voluptuous contraltos—I wonder why contraltos are more temperamental than sopranos? worst of all those monkey tenors, with their lascivious bleatings like goats in rut. Why do women admire the miserable, whitewash whinneying of tenor singers? Baritones and basses are at least virile. Whether or not the tenor is castrated, he sings like a eunuch. No, they adore the eunuch voice in preference. Thank Apollo, I'm through with the lot, though dramatic criticism isn't much better. In the concert-world one at least listens to good music. A good play in New York is as rare as a well-written critique. I'm afraid that criticism is a poor proving-ground for one's intellectual development. Let me see what I've written the last few months. Only notations. This romantic rot must stop. Mona—oh, Mona is all right, but the waste of time, the waste of emotion. What of those factors?
No women! Balzac had sternly warned Théophile Gautier. The Emperor Honoré did not practise what he preached. Compact of sex himself he was ever preoccupied with petticoats. La crise juponnière overtook him once a week and oftener. Ulick recalled an anecdote of the great man when, after he had succumbed to the blind fury of eroticism—a chambermaid, or somebody feminine had crossed his path—he went about the boulevards bemoaning to his friends: "J'ai perdu un livre, j'ai perdu un livre!" his theory being that an orgasm valued an entire story, and in his case it may have. Save your seed for nobler purposes than copulation. That is the wisdom of the sages. And the transposition so painfully accomplished by the saints of all times, climes and creeds, has ever impressed mankind as a deed heroic. Women secretly admire the chaste man. He is a sum of ineluctable forces. Men deride the Josephs and Parsifals, not crediting them with self-control. But that is nonsense, asserted Ulick. A priest here and there succumbs, but as a rule, and notwithstanding the atrocious martyrdom of unsatisfied legitimate desires, the sacerdotal man emerges from the trial a conqueror. As for women, they are the self-contained sex. No one knows precisely what happens in the alchemy of their emotions. Some burn their smoke, others blaze coram publico; but the majority hide this sort of light under a bushel of hypocritical reservations.
I mustn't waste myself in little spasms then. How about correspondence? "ça forme le style," Balzac told Gautier, and rather grudged him that concession. Ulick smiled. He knew his master-weakness, his vice. He knew that when the flesh moved him the spirit took a holiday. No self abnegation for him, no transposition to his cortical cells of his sexual longing. Like a bull he saw red everywhere. It's a pity all the same, he sighed. I should marry, raise a family and be unfaithful to my wife not more than twice weekly. The programme of the majority of good fathers, good husbands. And the American man is the worst of the lot. A regular Turk plus a religious humbug. And some clergymen! Town bulls. Over in Brooklyn they put up statues to their piety—and virility. Bon! They should. A womanly woman is admirable, and she is not rare. A virile man is as rare nowadays as a chaste one.
What an enormous faculty of inattention I possess! I wander, I stray into the queerest pastures. What's this I've written? Philanthropy is inverted egotism. True. All the immortal turpitudes are to be found in the ranks of the philanthropists. A pecuniary heresy. The latrines of my soul were overflowing in Paris. Am I purer in New York? Here we buy our ecstasy, rent that brief syncope called passion. What's the difference? It's the début that counts. The fury of enlacement leaves me a cynic. I wonder if women feel the same? That eternal triangle of theirs. And the pensile penguin of the eternal masculine. Wicked Walt has in The Children of Adam made some stunning phrases about the procreative organs. People who rave over his rotten poetry wouldn't read him if he hadn't been an exhibitionist in print. No one with a particle of taste seduces a young girl nowadays; they wait till she is married—it saves time and trouble. "Sir," roared old Doctor Johnson, "maidenheads are for ploughboys." Oh, the delicious, pernicious conversation that depraves. Thought deforms. Seduction by starlight sometimes ends in a police court with a fornication and bastardy charge. Anyhow, we must have our psychic satisfactions, else spiritual atony. Why this mania of certitude in the choice of a phrase? Pure dandyism of style. Goethe said in his Truth and Poetry, "All herein is true; nothing exact." That is fine in its implications. Stained-glass socialism! Most of it is nothing else. Anything to keep out the daylight of reality. Like the tigress that has tasted human flesh and blood so is the woman who knows man; neither are satisfied but with human prey. That's why widows remarry or—: why seduced girls "fall" again—though Ulick smiled at that silly word—why, convents are peopled by disillusioned souls—and there is a waiting list!
Why does man crave self-abasement? Pascal is an example. Caesar wept when, after watching a ballet of beautiful girls dance, he saw them killed. But he didn't weep from pity, but with ecstasy because of their beauty. The aesthetic temperament. Love is not a sentiment, it's a sensation. The Japanese know that. An orchestra of sensations in which the silences are sonorous. What an Iliad of Imbecility is the history of mankind. My idealistic anxiety over my affairs is proof positive of their pettiness. We never escape the prison of self, though we attempt to project our personality into the thoughts of another; this process is called sympathy. But a thought and a thing are identical. There is no thought-stuff different from thing-stuff, says William James. We can never know anything outside of ourselves. Oh! the sour hair, the dark breath of these psychologists! In the cuisine of love there are flavours for all tastes. Else ugly women wouldn't be sought after. Are there any ugly women? my brother Oswald used to say that once a pillow over their face all women were alike to him. Discriminating person, Oswald. His mind must be a slop-jar of the infinite. How mirific to mingle our essences. What immaculate perception is required to pick the precise woman with whom to "amalgamate our sublimes." The vagabondage of my soul through the universe, fluid, profound, and choral, is a gift denied most men and women. Yet it is at my threshold for the asking. My conceit is character—I think; yours is merely apoplectic. The lassitudes of love are divine. The human plant does not best flourish in the sunlight of success; it needs darkness, sin, sorrow, crime, to bring it to a rich maturity. The ignoble dung of miseries demands the spade of adversity. And Flaubert has said that the ignoble is the lower slope of the sublime. Which is consoling. As Rabelais would remark: I am an abstractor of quintessences.
I once longed to unhook the sun from the wall of the firmament and now I would fain crawl into a certain sultry crevice. The prism of desire deceives the Jasons in search of the golden—or brunette—fleece. I have made love to virtuous women who gave me the sensation of the force and felicity that attends the commission of a rape. And the pure woman who teases is worse than a streetwalker. A course of anatomy on a pillow, says a fellow cynic. Ah! the rapture of her little solitudes, her ivory tower, her mimique in the "naked war." In this life all the rest is gesticulation or secular sorrow. Ideas may be domesticated like cats. The pathos of distance—memorable phrase of Nietzsche—boasts its obverse, the bathos of propinquity—Walter Littlefield's mot. Some men look like a carefully pared thumb-nail; perhaps they are; anyhow, it's better than being a noble débris. Lawyers earn their bread in the sweat of their brow-beating. Fais aux autres ce que tu ne veux pas qu'ils te fassent! Pity is inutile. Every one of our actions is an addition. Why then worry over free-will? Not to animal life, nor to machinery must we go when studying the human heart, but to vegetables and flowers. I believe that romantic feelings are much less common than we imagine; the vast majority of the race mimic the gestures of the stage and fiction. Food, shelter, fornication, the fight for daily existence—these are the prime levers; not sentiment. We fool ourselves. We take our religion and sentiment in small doses. There are souls of prey like birds of prayer. Few women are in harmony with the moral landscape. What music is comparable to the exquisite sighs of a woman satisfied? The orchestra of her soul and sensations plays a triumphant fortissimo, and what a cruel, piercing note is the supreme spasm; the entire gamut of dolor is compressed therein.
We owe the world a living, not t'other way round. How I loathe Gounod's Ave Maria with its slimy piety, slimy echoes from the brothel. This vibrion of music, Gounod, never touched masterpieces without blighting them. Think of the Bach prelude accompanying the song. Think of mighty Faust maimed, tortured to make an operatic holiday. The Truth, so-called, is not necessarily tonic to all souls. Free-thought is never free; sometimes it is not thought; and it is usually inverted dogmatism. The woman who gives an elderly man the illusion of virility will always be sought after. Man is the only animal who can imagine what is not. We think backwards, but live forwards, said the Scandinavian mystic, Søren Kierkegaard. There are no illegitimate children; babies are always born legitimately. Ask the women. What medical pathos. Is it not better to fall into the hands of a murderer than into the dreams of a lustful woman? That's Nietzsche. He never made the blunder of lying down in the dirty straw of the sex-trough. That's why he wrote as if with a diamond on a slate of crystal. Yet he could say in the same breath that chastity is a virtue with some, with the majority almost a vice. Every man knows that a woman has a dozen different ways to make him happy, and a hundred to make him unhappy. Nous nous promenions nos préjugés! Sounds like Stendhal, doesn't it? I imitated him when I paraphrased it in English: Let us promenade our prejudices. Just as I gave Baudelaire the credit of a line he never saw, though one I believe he would have approved. Here it is: Lo! the Lesbians, their sterile sex advancing. Curious, isn't it, how Baudelaire and Swinburne loved to write about Lesbians. The influence of the Sapphic legend, I fancy, not alone because of the sweet inversion.
Ah me! groaned the young man, as the light filtered through the curtains, here's another day, and I've been wasting good sleep over this twaddle instead of being in bed. But I couldn't sleep. Too much black coffee. It doesn't matter what. Only I wonder how many of these phrases are my own. I don't believe in originality. George Moore is quite right when he derides ideas; their expression is the only worth while to the artist prose. Truth—error? This side of the Pyrenees— and the other side. Map-morality. He paused, and ruefully reflected: Nor can I say much for the formal quality of these phrases. Ah! the precious pagodas of prose, pagan and subtle, built by those master artificers, Renan, Anatole France, Huysmans, Barrès. Nevertheless, Stendhal, who wrote drily, whose books are psychological labyrinths, is their ruling sun, one that shines in a frosty heaven of his own fashioning. De Gourmont—a prober of the soul. Bourget, another, though more mundane, decorative. Maurice Barrès is a metaphysical Chopin in his feeling for nuance. He promenades his incertitudes through many pages of perverse, cadenced prose. But perverse. He has now deserted his ivory tower for another illusion like his "culte du moi;"—nationalism, patriotism, as opposed to egoism and cosmopolitanism. Well, I'm following in his footsteps, trying to become a sturdy American citizen in my native city—where I wasn't born. I'll stick. I like mince-pie, baseball and a good rough-neck prize-fight. I must be a real Yankee.
As for these notes—heaven help any reader if I ever make of them a chapter in a book. That book! Fiction or criticism, or both? The novel as a literary form is stale. I should like to write a story, not all empty incident, nor yet all barren analysis. Neither Henry James, nor old Dumas—I'm not flying high, am I?—but one in which the idealogies of Barrès and the concrete narrative of De Maupassant would be merged. A second Dickens, a second Thackeray are inconceivable. A soul-biography framed in harmonious happenings—Ah! what an ideal is Walter Pater who, when his critical prose plays second-fiddle to his fiction, will be called the master-psychologist of them all. Marius, Imaginary Portraits, Gaston—those are unapproachable. Pater has revealed to us the rarest of souls. He achieves ecstasy in a prose-music never sounded since the Greeks. As Tristan is to Aida, so Marius to all fiction—oh, but now I'm going off my handle again, grumbled Ulick. Vanity Fair and Pickwick are good enough for me, even if I do admire Balzac, Flaubert, Stendhal, Mérimée and the Russians. The man who doesn't read Pickwick once a year is fit for treason. If only Dostoievsky, the greatest psychologist since Balzac, had mastered the compression of Turgenev? What a scooper of souls. There's too much descriptive padding in modern novels, too many landscapes, not enough characterization. I don't mean descriptive characterization— the clothes, the gait and the eternal simper of the pulchritudinous gum-chewing heroine—but a searching characterization that not only paints your man without, but also within. Think of Julien Sorel in Red and Black. Not the master that is Tolstoy could better Stendhal. A detestable character? Admitted, but what has that to do with the vitality of his characters, the validity of his portraiture? Too much cluttered-up with futile things our novel reminds me of a drawing-room which you can't see because of the furniture or the bric-à-brac, so crowded is it with everything.
To avoid conventional chapter transitions, to write swiftly with weight, emotion, also succinctly; to cram every inch of space with ideas as well as action—the fiction of the future—all this I fear is not in abundance. Henry James is the man who may solve the difficulty. Flaubert swore that the characters should reveal themselves by their acts, and loathed long-winded analyses, though he abused his powers of description. It is his narrative that is the pride and despair of his successors. Henry James says character is plot, but plot is not character. That's my notion. And Cardinal Newman was also correct when he gently insinuated that no one could make psychology easy reading. He didn't live long enough to read William James. Lord, Lord! And we go afield to burn incense under foreign nostrils and here we can boast of two such brothers of genius as William and Henry James. Magnificent genius. But to bed. I'm afraid I'm a confused thinker. I wonder what Easter—no I mean Mona—is doing now? Encore la femme! He fell asleep and dreamed of a strange blonde creature, all fun and fire and flame.
Ulick was shown into a room filled with carbon photographs by a coloured butler in sober livery. It was an ante-chamber on the first floor of a large, old-fashioned house on a side-street off the Avenue somewhere in the thirties; he forgot just where. When he entered the atelier, huge in size, he was greeted by a half dozen men he knew; some he had chummed with in Paris; one, Robbie Sanderson—the Bullrush, he was nicknamed—had been an intimate of Oswald Invern's. He, too, was a painter. The host, Ned Haldane, called the Zephyr, because he was so fat and light on his feet, welcomed the newcomer, as did big Stanley the sculptor and popular man-around-town. It was a group congenial to Ulick. All were graduated from the Parisian art treadmill; men who took a liberal view of life, men without puritan morals and with charming manners.
"We are not all here yet," proclaimed the Zephyr, "but I hope soon will be. We are only to be a dozen." "A baker's dozen," corrected Stanley, "for there's Jim the butler." "Oh, no, my boy, Jim isn't to do any butlering in this room tonight. He'll be busy in the cork-room with the fizz. Besides he is a respectable married man and we musn't make him forget his dusky spouse." The Zephyr laughed. "Are you going to give us another pony-ballet tonight? What's the lark, Ned?" asked Robbie Sanderson. "Never you mind, lad, be patient and just stick to the cocktails. What—you won't drink anything?" pursued Haldane when Ulick refused. He seemed puzzled, as if he were about to blurt out, "Then what the devil did you come for?" but he smiled and bowed. He liked the looks of the young aristocrat sponsored by Edgar Saltus and of whom he had heard so much from friends in Paris. The bell rang. A message from Saltus begging off. Illness the excuse. "I bet he's working on the chapter of a novel—he's not sick," laughed Haldane. Ulick's face was long. The Bullrush clapped him on the back and reassured him by whispering, "Don't worry, Ulick. There will be lots of fun. You won't be lonely. Girls!" The painter significantly winked. Again the bell rang—furiously. The Zephyr went out and received noisy salutes. Evidently belated guests. Ulick, now thoroughly bored, looked around him.
The studio was not particularly inviting; it was almost bare. No pictures, a few easy divans, the floor covered with rugs of fabulous weave—he recognized that—and nothing in the middle of the room, no tables, no preparatory symptoms of a banquet, much less a saturnalia. Tapestries adorned the walls. The doors were draped. He was disappointed at the absence of Saltus and annoyed with himself for coming. He did not join the men clustered about the buffet. He felt isolated and was mentally casting about what excuse would serve him to escape, when the room was invaded by the gang. There were introductions—not many. The crowd belonged to one family, the Seven Arts. And they were at home. Drinks speedily disappeared down parched gullets. There was a punch bowl, and early as was the hour the air was heavy with cigarette smoke. Haldane clapped his hands. Silence. Jim and his fat wife entered carrying a small table. Then another, and another, till six were placed around the room, close to the walls. Each table was set for two persons. Flowers, silver, napery and porcelain. Hurrah! came from a dozen throats. As usual Ned Haldane had royally spread himself. Anticipation floated in the air. After a minute's conference with the butler the master of ceremonies bade him good night. "And now get out Jim, and don't show your shiny face till noon tomorrow." Jim grinned and withdrew. He knew the ropes. Haldane cried: "Gentlemen, please be seated. The comedy is about to begin." Then he blew a silver whistle.
Folding-doors opened and there slowly defiled through them a band of beautiful girls, bearing silver platters. These girls were quite naked save for a scarf which depended from their shoulders, wound under their breasts and traversed their thighs. Blonde and brunette; all the intermediate flesh-tints. There were a dozen and not one was more than twenty. Their hair was filleted and their feet in sandals. A dazzling vision from some old Greek processional cult, thought Ulick as he clapped his palms in company with his companions. "My God, I'm hungry," roared Robbie, and the laughter was deafening. "Listen to the gourmand," commented the Zephyr. "Here I've gathered the finest choir of virgins he ever saw and the beggar yells for food. What guts you boast, Rob." The silver platters held hors d'oeuvres of quality. No sakuzka at a Russian dinner could show so many exotic delicacies. With these appetizers were tiny glasses of aperitives. The virgins vanished, only to reenter with fresh dishes. No soup was served. Oysters and shell fish. Birds. Salads. One half the band carried bottles. Champagne of the dryest sort. Ulick was hungry enough to forget that he was being waited upon by a plump blonde nude angel and ate as unconcernedly as if she were a plain waitress, clothed and from the hills of New Hampshire. Parisian training hath its uses. The candles in sconces at the side were grateful to the eyes, the rich yet subdued tones of the tapestry and Persian rugs evoked a harmonious atmosphere. To the memory of Ulick, furnished with images of European picture-galleries, there came Venetian episodes, festal suppers, and the mellow debaucheries of Tintoretto's days and the days of the Doges. Sensualist as he was he experienced a slight sensation of satiety.
They had reached the cognac and were now smoking, gabbling. His table companion was the Bullrush who already felt his wine. He saluted the virgins by their names, and when he forgot them he invented new ones; sometimes his inventions weren't tasteful. One girl, fatter than the others, he called rumpsteak and patted her when she passed. But it was a well-trained orchestra; not by the movement of an eye-brow did she notice his rudeness. After a brief interlude, during which every one bawled or guzzled, there was heard the premonitary tinkling of little bells. The twelve virgins emerged in Indian file; they had changed their scanty costume; they no longer wore sashes. Instead, sleigh-bells were fastened to their ankles, and to the insistent clicking of castanets they danced the Dance of the Seven Devils. This spawn of Satan, these devil's daughters, had been drilled in the technique of the ballet infernal. Monotone of castanets and tufted footfalls framed rhythmic obscenities. At times Ulick gasped, and he had been in Oriental brothels where sex is become a delirium. The Ctéis was appropriately worshipped. They sprawled and postured, they reared their polished posteriors in porcine rhythms, as if to invite their brethren, who ringed them with applause, urging them to audaciously lascivious acts. The air was charged with cigarettes, the acrid smell of wine and odor di femina. Ulick's head began to ache.
Suddenly from languourous weavings, from legs and arms in unholy embrace, the current changed to crazy gallopings. The dancing mania seized the men, all except the Zephyr, who leaned against a wall and coolly regarded the spectacle, surely not a novel one to him. Ulick was caught by the plump blonde and furiously whirled. She was an enticing houri with gold-coloured eyes and scarlet lips—rouged. Her breath was extra-dry. He turned his head away as she repeatedly kissed him. But the heated curves of her finely modelled torso made him a helpless prisoner. Sweetness exhaled from her. Young, pretty, absolutely depraved, she had fancied the handsome youth who sat so still and haughty, coldly refusing her libations and unconsciously frowning when Robbie Sanderson pinched her cheeks. She drank with the others each time they went out to the service-room, and she found her tongue as the night wore on in frenzied intoxication. The men were in their shirtsleeves. Everyone sang. The heat and noise were terrific. And all this pagan revelry in a drab, respectable quarter of New York! No matter, Ulick breathlessly exclaimed, it's a relief from the accursed hypocricy of puritanical Yankeedom. Again the whistle sounded. A lull followed. The girls, their smooth bodies glistening with moisture, slipped away. A fresh attack was made on the wine stacked in ice-pails.
"What's up?" asked a jolly, white-bearded old reprobate, a great swell, whose granddaughter had "come out" that winter at a débutante's ball of exceeding splendour. Haldane smiled. "Wait!" he begged. However, no one seemed to care. The intermezzo proved a breathing-spell. Ulick debated whether he would be committing an offense against good manners if he deserted. He could pretend to go into the ante-room—but there was a hush. A trestle was borne in by the twelve virgins. Upon it was a monstrous pie, a fabulous confection, the crust ermine-white, like the souls of the votive maidens, icy as their virtue, and surmounted by an iridescent plumage of flowers. The pagan priestesses, who with difficulty carried this offering to Ceres—or was it Bacchus!—had once more changed their costumes; each wore a dainty liberty cap in tricolor. They sang, and their voices were heavy with wine, passion and incipient catarrh. At a signal they placed their burden upon the middle rug, then encircled it. Someone clapped hands. The top of the pie was thrown off, birds, doves, canaries and nightingales, flew out in every direction seeking shelter and piteously piping to the flappings of their wings. A shining child of exquisite beauty arose in the centre of the pie and made graceful weaving motions. She, too, was newly-born. Her breasts were lilliputian, tender, rose-colored. Her evasive hips proclaimed precocious puberty and Jason himself would not have become inflamed over further search for the toison d'or. As a picture she is admirable, thought Ulick; as a spectacle decidedly suggestive. He was wrong. There was not the slightest evocation of evil in the posed gestures of this pretty maid; the evil lay in the lewd imaginings of the men, blasé from indulgence, brain-sick with wine, their nerves taut from morbid imaginings. The Zephyr went to the sacrificial pastry and lifted the pink darling to the floor, then cradling her in his arms he disappeared behind the arras to the choral accompaniment of his jeering guests. The storm burst. A tornado of twirling flesh, the atmosphere punctured by shrieks of laughter, and growlings of wild-men. It became too much for Ulick and he begged his girl to desist. She had sunk on the floor and imploringly grasped his hand. Kneeling, he told her to dress and he would go home with her. For some reason his proposition pleased. She went to the retiring-room, he to get his own things. Their presence was not missed on the carnal battlefield.
"What's the difference?" he asked himself in disgust as he found his top-coat and sat down to wait for the girl, "what's the difference between this crowd, cultured, artistic men and pretty sluts, and the ugly howling fanatics up in New England?" Inevitably the image of Easter arose in his slightly smoky brain. What tremendous minutes they had been when he held her close to him in the mystic blackness; held and possessed her. The present was but the mimique of a monkey-cage. No enchantment of the senses beyond optical titillation. Without strong drink such carnivals of turpitude appal. He almost regretted the champagne. He hadn't long to wait. The girl appeared, slightly tipsy, but very appealing in her innocence—for her youth made her innocent, notwithstanding her frivolity. He recognized her with difficulty, so genteel her externals. A picture-hat shaded her baby face. She was in evening dress, ivory-coloured silk cut low revealing a young bosom. Charming, said Ulick, and how much more provocative her charm when properly clothed. "Oh, Ulick, you are such a dear to wait so long. Let's go home. I love you already." Drunk or sober, she spoke with the accent of truth. As they went out, the door opened by the discreet butler, his features as impassive as an undertaker's, big, red-haired Stanley spied them and joyously shouted after them: "Good-bye, Ulick. You've picked a winner! Dora is a darling. Look out for the newspaper buzzards. There's a bunch of them at the corner. They will try to flash-light you!" As the street door closed behind them, a night-hawk drove to the curb. Ulick bundled Dora in and asked her the address. Up on Lexington Avenue somewhere in the nineties. A tall apartment house. The driver nodded, and turned his horse's head eastward. Footsteps were heard. Ulick peeped through the back glass. "It's the newspaper men and some policemen. I hope they won't pull the place." "Never fear! the Zephyr knows how to butter their bun!" replied Dora, snuggling close to him. "No cops will ever enter that house, but I suppose the newspapers will print the shocking news. They never got in yet, but they will tell what happened just the same. In their minds." And then she promptly fell asleep, her head on his shoulder. She smelt of champagne. Another wasted night, he sighed, as the ramshackle cab rattled through the empty avenue, gray dawn thrusting its cold nozzle into the dreary city-scape. He, too, began to doze....
Through muddy dreams he struggled into half-consciousness. He fought with naked spectres for the possession of Mona. There were centaurs but they battled among themselves. He ran through endless vistas of magnificent halls, as full of flowers as a hothouse, and as he ran, himself naked, the flowers became alluring nude women, each with a pie and gluttonously eating. It was a nightmare full of mare's nests. Nothing happened, yet every moment was fraught with tragedy—the tragedy of indigestion. Ulick struggled. He put out a hand. It touched human flesh, a face, a nose. His chest was oppressed by a strange weight. Something living lay across him, the owner of the face. He could feel regular breathing. Releasing an arm he rubbed his eyes trying hard to locate himself. Who the woman so closely embracing him? A woman without peradventure of a doubt. It was not the first time that he had awakened in the company of a stranger; toujours la femme! Such happenings are not unusual in the life of adventurous youth. If he had been a drinking man he could have understood his slippery memory. Drinking? Wine? There was a distinct scent of stale alcohol about him, and then he realized that it was the hot breath of Dora. He gently lifted her head and placed it on the pillow. She murmured, nothing intelligible. Ulick greatly desired to know the time, greatly desired to bathe, dress and escape. It is an instinct of a healthy animal that as soon as it has coupled with its female it hastens away to sleep elsewhere. Homo sapiens invented affection, and then followed sentimentality. He got out of bed without disturbing the girl. The room was in semi-obscurity. Tip-toeing, he reached one of the heavily-curtained windows. Peeping out he saw that it must be midday, or later. What to do? He tried several door-knobs, finally found himself in a bath-room where he speedily switched on light. His clock told him a quarter past eleven, but it had run down. Some one tried the door and asked: "Are you up dearie? What time is it, I wonder? Oh! my poor head! I must have a cup of tea or I'll go crazy." Dearie! It was the classic phrase in all its perfection, consecrated by the generations of women, thought Ulick, and he called out: "All right, Dora I'll be with you in two minutes."
But if he was in prime condition after a cold dip and a rub, his lady friend was not. The dainty Dora of the bacchanale had given place to a girl with puffy eyelids, discoloured complexion, bloated cheeks, sagging mouth, bad breath and tarnished glance. She was suffering, and hardly took time to twist her abundant hair into shape. Withal, a charming creature, as she stood in the daylight before her glass. An expression of discontent, bred of late hours and dissipation was contradicted by her young eyes, which incessantly smiled. She couldn't have been more than eighteen and her figure was nubile in its firm flesh and flowing contours. Decidedly a treasure-trove for an erotic man. Ulick went to her and she met him half-way. They embraced so desperately that she cried: "You are such a dear, you are such a man!" And again they made the eternal gesture which mankind shares in common with his simian cousins at the Zoo or of the jungle. Youth must have its fling and the almighty has set his seal upon the multiplication of the species. And youth is better so employed than killing, or swindling, or guzzling, believed Ulick. Dora and Ulick were now thoroughly satisfied with one another and they made room in their consciousness for the play of a still more powerful instinct than reproduction. They were both hungry at the same time. Dora declared her headache vanished; Ulick, glad of the news, nevertheless wished she wouldn't address him with the inevitable "dearie." It sounded as naked as a cornet solo, this familiar appellation of the bordel. How unoriginal is man, how little he changes with the ages. In every tongue since the Babel scandal there is the equivalent of "dearie"; only, it is the property, this vocable, of the women of whom Dante wrote: "As the rill that runs from Bulicamé, to be portioned out among the sinful women...." Ulick felt relieved when breakfast was announced.
Dora, thanks to her invincible youth, had partly recovered. Last night was a thousand years ago for her; only the present existed. Eternity is now. She wore a morning-gown as pretty as herself. And she was pretty; in his eyes she kept growing prettier each time he looked at her. He said so. She rushed round the table to kiss him. A tempestuous temperament. The breakfast-room was also the living-room. It was in a tasteful key, the furnishing banal. The view gave on a sea of roofs and spires. The park, with its sunburnt foliage, even then a green that had decayed for want of proper soil, lay across the west prospect. Dora informed him that the apartment was in the tallest building on upper Lexington Avenue. He believed her. There was one balcony, and of stone. Together they stood upon it smoking their first cigarette. Both were in an expansive mood. Strong tea, buttered toast and marmalade unloosed their tongues. Before they left the room she had rung and another pretty girl entered. She was a quadroon, lovely of hair, complexion, and with a profile that would not have been out of place on an antique medal. Ulick, who Paris born and bred, had no "democratic" prejudices on the score of colour, admiringly stared at the girl as she noiselessly went about her task. Dora didn't like his look. "I see," she primly remarked, "you for the black-and-tan!" His inquiring expression, for he didn't understand, caused her to jerk her head in the direction of the maid. "I mean the slavey." "Oh!" he carelessly confessed, "I had a little chocolate-coloured mistress from Mauritius when I lived in Paris, and she wasn't half as pretty as this girl. Since Baudelaire set the fashion young French poets and artists have gone in for dusky concubines. I hear that at the time there was such a demand that the Isle de France was positively emptied of those young women. You know, Dora, Manet painted a marvellous negress in his Olympe, the slim, nude courtesan with the depraved eyes in the Luxembourg. It ought to be in the Louvre—perhaps it will be some day—"
Dora pouted. "I don't care a snap for your old poets and their nigger brides. Give me a cigarette. Be nice to me. Can't you cuddle me a little bit?" Perfect, said he, mentally. The type, he reasoned, is confined to no particular race. Customs differ; women, never. He became impatient. He mentioned an afternoon engagement at 5 o'clock. It must be all that now, and he kissed Dora good-bye. She was nettled. "You are just a man, after all. You are all alike as peas in a pod. I expected you to take me out to dinner, then to some show. What a dull night I've before me." He was sorry. "I'll be back by seven," he assured her, and she gave a little cry of mingled joy and triumph. "You are a dear, Ulick. I'll be ready for you. Change your clothes. You look a sight in those togs." "Thanks—one reason why I must get down town. Fresh linen, my love." "Where do you live?" He gave the Utopian Club address. He didn't like women to track him home; unless it were Easter or Mona. What were those two girls doing now? And why did he dream of Mona Milton, Mona of all girls, instead of Easter—or Dora? Dreams are silly, meaningless, and you can't rationalize them. He started to go, when Dora significantly said: "Don't forget the mantelpiece." For the second time that afternoon he was puzzled. "The mantelpiece," he echoed and searched for one with his eyes. Dora was not embarrassed. "The rent, angel-child, must be punctually paid on the first of the month. Our landlord is a terror. This apartment house is filled with well kept ladies. No questions are asked. The elevator runs all night. We don't bother with the police. So, my sweet laddybuck plank down the mazuma, or must I make a noise like a dollar-mark for this stupid young chap from Paris?" He understood. He opened his wallet and gave her a handful of notes; thereat she ecstatically screamed and hugged him. He escaped.
Ulick was fond of Dora. No mistake as to the order of his sentiment. She was the average lust-cat of commerce; yet she was "different." Yes, he quoted Stendhal to her, and after he had related a certain anecdote of Stendhal's life in Milan, she put fingers in her ears; "Don't tell me another thing about the dirty old man, or I'll hate you." "Dirty old man" was a critical pronouncement that wouldn't please the Stendhalians. Nevertheless it somehow suits Henry Beyle, who, genius that he was, must have been precisely what Dora called him. Well, most men are that; they don't have to be old, either. "What is life? A dirty business. Birth is repulsive, death horrible. You can't escape either, though you can cheat the worms by cremation—that foretaste of the lower regions." They went out to dinner. Ulick had hoped to see again the dark girl with the soft strange eyes. How often he had tried to analyze that expression to be found only in the eyes of a negress. A touch of melancholy, a hint of fear, a sweet submissiveness, and the naiveté of a child—these, with the heavy, slumberous lids, the full cup of the eyeball and the unconcealed languourous passion, pleased the aesthetic sense of the young man. Alas! she was not in sight. She had been released for the evening. Dora knew her business. The young man was entirely too susceptible; besides, she didn't like a "coon" servant, as she called her, butting-in. The girl's fate was assured.
They dined in the city, then visited a music-hall. He was mildly amused though sleepy and he made up his mind not to spend that night under Dora's roof. He went out during the entr'acte for a puff of fresh air and was annoyed on his return to find Paul Godard planted in the box beside Dora and calmly twisting the rings on her left hand. The men bowed; Ulick distantly. But good-tempered, irrepressible Paul exclaimed: "I say, Invern, we do coincide in our tastes, don't we?" Ulick nodded, not in the gayest spirit. Dora divined his irritation and was flattered. He is jealous of me, she thought, and plucked at his sleeve. "Old cross-patch, sit nearer. Mr. Godard won't mind." (The hell he won't! muttered Ulick.) "You won't mind, Paul, will you? Ulick is such a bear—no, I mean a dear. Ulick," she shook his listless arm, "Ulick, you ought to have heard Paul sing your praises just before you came back. He said you were the only critic whose criticisms he read. Now, be good—old crank!" The atmosphere became frigid. Paul felt it, and he was not exactly thin-skinned. He kissed Dora's hand, whispered, and inclining his head in Ulick's direction, went away. Silent, Ulick accompanied Dora to her apartment and excused himself. To his slight surprise she accepted his excuse, and pleaded sleepiness herself; to his jealously acute perception there was an absence of heartiness in their final embrace, but perhaps that was because the chauffeur was watching them. She named a day and he promised. As he left the taxi at the club the man confidentially whispered: "Some girl, that?" Ulick wasn't annoyed. Why should he be? Dora belonged to the public. She came from the people. Her daintiness was superficial. A pretty vulgarian, her appeal was universal to males in rut. The wealthy Paul and the humble mechanician both longed for her. So had Ulick, and he would again. She was aware of her attractions and like the busy little merchant she was she sold her wares to the highest bidder. But a demure harlot in demeanor occasionally refined. Silver plate that showed prosaic brass when she was angry or offguard; then her language darkened the air; profanity, abuse, obscenity. The filthiest words in the mud-lard vocabulary hurtled by the heads of her antagonist, whether a sister-cocotte, a chauffeur, or a clubman. Ulick was yet to pass through that verbal ordeal; but it would surely come to him as it did to the rest. She drank too much, and that was her vice. Her profession was in her estimation as honourable as any other. What's the difference between me and the poor dirty wife with a dozen brats? A woman is always kept by a man, wedding-ring or no. Don't I love babies? I dote on them. Thus her philosophy and her preference. She adored children. She loved all the nice young chaps who made her presents and helped to pay her steadily mounting household expenses. If she could only put aside a few dollars every week for the rainy day sure to come. But she never could. The weekly bills were so numerous and so tame, that they ate out of her hands, she would joke. And Paul Godard would surely sleep under her roof this very night, said Ulick, as he wearily undressed himself. I shan't worry much. Dora is a commodity. So is Paul. So am I—for Dora. So is Mona. We are all chattels of chance.
For more than a week Ulick hadn't seen Mona. He hadn't much missed her in the swelter of the new passion, but after ten days passed he began to worry. What if she were sick? Or angry? And that was an unpleasant contingency. The worst of it was that he had no way of knowing the truth. Milt was at the seminary and seldom wrote. Ulick didn't know Mona's parents, not even by sight. Should he risk a call? No, anything but calling. She would be angry with him for breaking her most rigid rule. For some unearthly reason she had made him promise not to visit her, not to seek to know her father and mother; above all, not to divulge the fact of their friendship to her brother. That would be the one unforgivable sin. Ulick had promised, though reluctantly. Why this mystery! He was not married. He was not a criminal; far from it, he was considered a very good catch, not only because of his family connections and youth, but his income was a bait for ambitious mothers with unmarried daughters. He knew all this, so he was surprised at the little shifts and tactics of Mona. She is romantic. She is oversexed—he summoned to his memory her deep-set, passionate eyes; and she likes to make herself not too easy, he decided; but what in the devil has become of her?
He went to their old trysting place in the park. He went—with Dora—to the Casino and pumped M. Dorval. No, that amiable man hadn't seen either Mile. Milton or her student-brother. Suppose she came in now and found me sitting here with Dora. I shouldn't be frightened. She is too sensible not to know the nature of the animal man. But Milt might cut me and put an end to our friendship. I'll wager Mona would continue to meet me. He saw Alfred Stone one afternoon and heard from this indefatigable gossip and news-gatherer that Mrs. Milton and Mona had gone to Hot Springs for a month. He had been to see them (he calls, I can't, ruminated Ulick) and found Mrs. Milton not at all well. Nor was Mona in the best of health. She was snappy and said she needed a change. A change was good for every one, and, continued Alfred, she gave me such a disagreeable look that I beat a retreat. Say, Ulick, what are you up to with that young woman? She's not the Dora kind, you know, not even the Easter kind, and she is Milt's sister. Ulick was aghast. This busybody telling him of his moral remissness, of his intimacy with Mona. How did he find that out? And Dora. And Easter. It was too much for his irritable nerves.
"Mind your own business, Al, and I'll attend to mine." He turned and walked in another direction. He fumed with anger. Dora, too! But Stone was a visitor to every theatre and concert-hall in town. Alfred must have seen Dora with him. What did it matter, anyhow? Dora is all right. A hired woman, nothing more. But it was infernal impudence on Alfred's part to drag in Mona's name, and so suddenly. What could he know in reality? Very little. But he knew. That was the worst of it; and there was the implication of a threat in the use of Milt's name. A warning? That sink of all the iniquities, Alfred Stone, to preach to him. He deserved a kicking. He was too contemptible to punch. Ulick felt his biceps harden. And for heaven's sake why did he bring in the name of Easter? He was certain that Alfred had been jealous from the start about the way Easter deserted him for Ulick. His amour-propre was scratched. He had known her first. He had taken her to the Conservatoire, to Madame Ash, and if he missed introducing her to Lilli Lehmann, had he not urged upon that great artiste the advisability of developing the young singer? And there were the chances to make the connection a profitable one for Alfred. He never forgets self, bitterly said Ulick. He is a rotten little egotist and I wouldn't put him above chantage, polite chantage, if you will, but plain extortion at the end. Parasite, pimp, gambler. He recited a litany of abusive names. If Alfred had a hint of that New Hampshire affair, God help Easter! He would dog her like a detective. The hound. In that case the only resort for me would be to give him a horse-whipping. Would that keep his vile tongue in his mouth? I doubt it. But I'll take his advice. I'll go slow. Why hasn't Mona written me?
That idea haunted him. Why, at least, hadn't she dropped him a line saying she was going away? Had the miserable spy, Alfred, given her a hint of Dora? He had spoken of the "orgy"—that's what the newspapers called it—at the studio. It made the fortune of the pie-girl, and the list of guest's names had been scrupulously printed, Ulick Invern's among the rest. It gave him vogue at the clubs, did that wretched bacchanale, and at the opera or theatre he saw women curiously regard him. Pulpits had expounded upon the Scarlet Woman sitting, on the Seven Hills of Babylon; meaning both Rome and New York. Why, then, shouldn't Mona have heard, perhaps read, of his complicity in the horrid debauch? Not that it was so horrid to him. More stupid, in fact, than horrid. Nevertheless, she might have written him a sweet scolding letter. No, it wasn't Ned Haldane's abridged version of a Thousand and One Nights that had angered her; it was Dora; Dora and nothing else. He shrugged his shoulders over this solution and went at once to see that bewitching young person. There, the nymph making her orisons, sitting on his lap, he became moody, absent-minded, and surly, so much so that the girl exclaimed: "Ulick Invern, what's the woman's name?" He didn't answer. He was glad she hadn't called him Jewel. Only Mona called him Jewel. Mona and Easter. He softly swore that Dora must never use his pet name, and in that resolution the character of Ulick flew like a flag. His was indeed a multiple personality.
The Arena was cosy and inviting when, on a night during Easter week, Ulick entered and traversed the length of the room. All the tables were occupied. Mr. Muschenheim met him and for a few minutes they gossiped in German, which language Ulick spoke as well as he did French and English because of his sojourn at Jena. "Your friends are sitting in the next room, in the corner," said his host. Ulick cast inquiring eyes. To his surprise he saw Milt and with him, Alfred. Considering how heartily he had cursed him after their last encounter Ulick's power of social adaptation must have been in excellent working order. He went over to the pair and was welcomed by Milt with unfeigned cordiality. Alfred gave him two chilly fingers. "You here"? Ulick asked. "Yes," replied Milt. "I am home for a week, the Easter holidays, you know," "And he isn't ashamed to sit in a café with his collar buttoned behind," Stoned jeered. "Now, Alfred, what nonsense. On the continent even the clergy go to public places, such as concerts, opera, and restaurants. We must eat and drink like other men. Look at Mgr. Ducey. He is a man of the world, yet an irreproachable ecclesiastic," Alfred sniffed. Ulick didn't dare to ask news of Mona. His heart was heavy with anticipation. The sight of her brother revived his love. What a charming girl she was. What intelligence. How unlike other women? With her the expected never happened. He was annoyed at his false position, and not reassured when his eyes met the searching glance of Milt.
"Well, Ulick, how goes the culture of that famous ego of yours?" The tone was friendly, but for some reason, inexplicable to himself, Ulick felt annoyed. "My ego is all right, Milt. Anyhow, it is freer than yours. Convictions are prisons, you know?" "Ah, Nietzsche. I see you have absorbed his poison, too. My dear boy, those false prophets and corrupters of youth always preach freedom. Freedom for what? While I am not a determinist, yet I admit we can't be free from ourselves. Our personality is an ensemble of our ancestral characteristics. Our instincts are dangerous guides. Just now there is a tendency to place instinct over intellect. Reason unaided by God is a treacherous guide, but instinct alone! Heavens. In twenty years cosmos would be chaos." Milt wiped his forehead.
"Phew!" cried Alfred, "what a sermon you will preach some day, Milt. You will be a regular turkey-cock of God. Instinct or not, our country is galloping hellward. Watch. When it was half aristocratic there was some outward semblance of respect for the government, but today the individual, and his rights, are both growing less and less. Mob rules. The melting-pot! What not! We shall never melt the muckers who are overrunning us. I happen to have a good friend, an abbé from Luxembourg, little, plump, blond; the typical French abbé of the 18th century. He has a theory. He says: "The first swarm of locusts ate up the Indians; then came the Irish; and the English and Dutch disappeared. Followed the Germans, and now the Italians and Slavs. They have eaten up the native American. The Jews are the last and deadliest locusts of all; when they finish with America not a green leaf, a blade of grass, an ear of wheat, will be left in the land." The others were amused at his earnestness. Surely Alfred was of Jewish descent! Ulick interposed: "But Alfred you are a Jew. Why do you class them among the destructive elements? As for the Italians—well, I wish that America had been completely colonized by them. What a different atmosphere would be ours. The fine-arts, and the art of living, would be our heritage instead of our craze for commercialism, not to mention the growing menace of puritanism." "Don't abuse the Puritans," interrupted Milt. "They are a misrepresented people. It is their fanatical offspring who will lay waste America. A moribund branch of Christianity will attempt to shackle freedom and force its prejudices on a free people...."
"Free fiddlesticks"! Alfred was in a rage. "Melting-pot be hanged. There wall be anarchy in this land if these rattlesnakes are not scotched—you can't kill them. A republic is doomed to tyranny; the worst sort of tyranny—public opinion. I grant you, Milt, that the modern breed of those Mayflower pests are more tyrannical than the original lot of religious degenerates—what else were they, crazy as lunatics with their private interpretations of biblical texts; the book of the Apocalypse is responsible for more madmen than any other so-called sacred script in existence—yet the neo-puritan means to put us all in a little hell of his own. He calls it heaven, but it will be hell. The country is overrun by astrologists, fortune-tellers, unchristian scientists, holy howlers. We are not far from being a nation of mad folk. One neurosis follows another. I tell you—anarchy looms ahead. And woman-suffrage—the worst of all our tyrants; woman, the eternal ninny. She is to rule, as if she doesn't play her sex now for all it's worth. Pardon me, Milt—she is right as a cook or a concubine, but as a ruler! Excuse me. And prohibition. It's coming, and in its train, drugs and other tyrannies. Men will smoke bad tobacco in fear and trembling. The melting-pot—I see the locusts swarming for their last attack on the good things of America. Poor old America! She succumbed because she was too sentimental, and sentimentality breeds altruism, and altruism breeds busybodies, and busy bodies breed war. War breeds more war, and then the final catastrophe...."
"Stop it!" commanded Milt, "stop that choral of pessimism. So bad things are not." "Didn't Nietzsche assert that Christianity and alcohol have been the two great means of corruption and still are the worst foes of civilization?" asked Ulick. "Why drag in alcohol?" "If he did, he was quite right," commented Alfred, as he emptied his stein and rapped for another. "Symptoms of mysticism are usually accompanied by sexual impotence." Milt was distressed. The turn of the talk didn't please him, besides, it was Ulick, not Alfred, in whom he was interested. The other, that little Jew atheist with his filthy vices—all the turpitudes, he felt assured—was a rotten branch lopped from his own religion and race. Christianity wanted none of such men; dessicated souls. Vases of iniquity. Vile, accursed, doomed to Gehenna. Nevertheless, with his paternal solicitude for the straying sinner, Milt placed his hand over Alfred's and smiled benignly. "Alfred," he adjured, "Alfred repent while there's time. Here is Ulick fuddling his wits with writings that are of no pith or moment. Their rhetoric it is that seduces him. The petticoats, too,—Hello! who's this? I vow if here isn't Paul Godard." Ulick groaned. Always Paul. He couldn't escape him. Nor did Alfred look overjoyed. Paul, accompanied by an insignificant chap, bustled to the table. "Oh! I say, isn't this a jolly go. You fellows look as if you had the affairs of state burdening your souls. You have? Well, it's time I intervened and brought a new atmosphere to cheer you up. How do, bishop? No, not yet? But soon will be, I hope, Milt. Some day, some day! as Tosti sings. How d'ye do, Ulick? When did you see Dodo last? Fascinating creature. I drink her health. And how are you, Stone? Your bones as sour as ever. Ah! yes, I forgot! This is my friend Bell. But, of course, you know him. He is working the same side of the street as you fellows—excepting the Rev. Milt. What is it you say, Invern? Once a newspaper man always a whore? Isn't that it? A jolly epigram, that...." He rattled on "What I really said was this," ....ly answered Ulick: "Once a millionaire always an imbecile." Paul laughed the loudest. "The tables turned, that deal, and speaking of table-turning, let's get the head-waiter to fetch a larger table. I need elbow room for I feel that I'm going to make a night of it." "What night isn't all night with you?" demanded Ulick. Paul sweetly grinned. "The night you are there," and jerked his hand in the direction of Lexington Avenue. Invern scowled, but kept his temper.
They now sat in the middle of the room around a bigger table. Bell, who had been blinking at the company, blurted out: "Paul, I saw a divorced wife of mine today." "Which one"? asked Paul, winking at Stone. "I think it was the one who plays the violoncello—or should I say, 'cello, Stone? Thank you. Yes, it was Ida. She set me crazy with her practising. That bullfiddle always between her knees—she complained of corns on her knees—always rumbling or buzzing like a big bumble-bee with a basso-profundo stinger. No, I simply couldn't stand it. I gave her grounds for divorce, miles and miles of grounds"—"Don't boast, Bell," admonished Paul—"I don't boast Godard. Whatever fruit fails we men all know that the co-respondent crop never fails. I might add, never frosts." And then he went off into an hysterical burst of laughter. No one smiled. Undaunted, Bell dried his eyes and resumed: "Ida is O. K. She married a house-painter. I don't think any the less of her for that. House-painters make more money than journalists—I beg pardon, Stone—I mean, newspaper men. That constipated gargoyle, Snapgood, he hates the word. He calls himself a journalist. I'm a newspaper man, I am...." "And as ignorant as one, too," sarcastically added Alfred. A chorus of dissent followed. Because Bell was a born ass, the tribe he belonged to was not, necessarily the same. "You should go to London, Alfred. There it takes four newspaper men combined to understand a Yankee joke." It was Milt who spoke. "I don't wonder," retorted Alfred.
Bell was a much-married, much-harried, much-divorced man. Some wags said that he was more divorced than married, more sinning than sinned against. He admitted that he had to pay common-law alimony, as he called it, to his common-law wives. They were legion. This small, stupid-looking chap had a passion for getting into scrapes with girls. He had been divorced four times in four different states by duped women, whose indignation was boundless when they failed to get alimony; rather, failed to collect. Their man was quicksilver. He always escaped. Twice, death had obligingly stepped in and divorced him. In these cases he even escaped paying posthumous alimony; he wouldn't foot the undertaker's bill. His motto was: "Let the dead bury the dead." And so it came to pass, he had married in succession his land-lady's daughter, a greasy frump, a widow with an annuity, a pianiste, a 'cellist. Bell was also musical. He had successively lived with a fat chorus girl, a professional prostitute—he kept this particular episode to himself—a circus-rider, a servant girl, an octoroon, and with two sisters, who worked in an artificial flowershop. He was versatile, Bell. As he was glib of pen and tongue he earned plenty of money and the women flocked about him. He had a certain goatish reputation. Girls giggled when he passed, his eyes lecherously ogling. Little riders! they whispered, and giggled again. Ulick despised him, but his own morals were hardly a whit better; only his tastes were more discriminating; thus he consoled himself.
Without a transposition the conversation glided to the theme of women. Bell, who was beginning to feel his liqueur, intoned a toast which he swore he had heard at a dentists' banquet, but a nudge under the table from Alfred kept him from further rambling. Milt wasn't annoyed. He calmly sipped his beer, his hearing keen for fluctuations in the moral market. He had said that a priest must know the human soul inside and out. To be in the world, yet not of it, to wade through the sins and heresies of this ignominious age, yet never wallow in them. To stand in front of the monkey-cage we call life, watch the antics of the inmates but never imperil his soul by approving of the sarabande of sex surrounding him. That was the ideal of Milt. He had the makings in him of a lover, a thinker, a rebel. But never did he lapse into that stupration of the soul, that orgasm of the intellect, we call desire and pride; that mass of confused emotion evoked by the curves of the female form he never indulged in. The brief, dizzy syncope which ensues during the frantic bundling of the two sexes he had never experienced, though he yearned for it, during moments of weakness. But he was a level-headed young man. He knew the strait way, and also the path of flaming ecstacy. He meant to work long and faithfully in the vineyard of the Lord, and to accomplish his self-imposed mission he prepared by studying life from all angles, dubious or beautiful. His heart was a reservoir overflowing with love for his fellow-men. He cherished profound affection for his sister, also profound distrust. Her many excellent, even superlative, qualities were offset by a perverse twist, not congenital. It might prove her undoing. He fervently prayed for her conversion, and by some odd association of ideas he prayed for the salvation of Ulick Invern's soul; that he, with his splendid heritage of faith, family, fortune, talent, be given the boon of light. Ulick and Mona made a pleasant picture in the mind of this candidate for the order of Melchizedek.
"Say, Milt," speculated Stone in his most aggressively malicious manner, "whenever I look at a fresh-colored young priest like you, I don't wonder that the girls swarm about you like flies in a molasses cask. Your purity is written in your eyes. It oozes from your expression. It's an aura. The female ever in pursuit of masculine honey feels this, and you are her idol, as is, in a different fashion, a tenor." Milt protested. Paul suddenly lost his head, crying: "Woman is the split-infinitive in the grammar of life," which was capped by Bell: "Woman is an ecstasy-breeding machine." "I hate speeches beginning with—Woman is this, woman is that," proclaimed Ulick. "When men foregather and booze they suddenly land in that bohemia of dead-sea fruit, the woman question. Women are human like men, and the little difference"—"Bless de Lawd fer de difference, as the darky preacher said—" It was the thick voice of Bell—"is the cause for the lot of rotten talk and theorizing." "Bravo, Ulick"! said Milt, with sentimental vehemence. "Faire remonter tout son sexe dans son cerveau," he added. But Stone was curious. "I'd like to know the trick of that sex-transposition. Women are a nuisance—sometimes; often I should like to do without them; but I acknowledge I can't. What's the method, Milt, camphor or prayer"? Milt, scandalized, didn't reply. To break the embarrassing silence Ulick turned to Paul and asked him if he knew anything new.
"Oh, yes, Marie, the singing comedienne, had just had a row with her last husband. You know that fastidious baronet of hers who wears a bangle on his ankle. The other night at Lady Murchison's dinner I sat next to her. I wished to be friendly so I asked how she was getting along with her young man. "Oh nicely," she said, with that dazzling Celtic smile, "we never quarrel unless we fall in love with the same man." A roar followed. Milt groaned.
"Only the women a man doesn't win are desirable." "Listen to the Rochefoucauld! Bell, where do you get your novel ideas"? "Such ideas should be caged like monkeys"—this from Milt. Then he arose, disgusted. "You chaps are rubbing it in. One would suppose that sex ruled this planet, instead of being perhaps, only a necessary incident, or by-product. I'll move homewards. Will you be seen tomorrow afternoon, Ulick"? He knows something, thought Ulick, but he cordially invited Milt assuring him that he would be found any time after the midday breakfast. Couldn't Milt take that meal with him? Milt consented. "Then sit down a moment, Milt, I should like to tell you of a theory advanced by Remy de Gourmont concerning sex. You spoke of a "necessary incident." Milt sat down. "It's this," resumed Ulick. "De Gourmont insisted that the real protagonist of humanity, indeed, of all organic life, is to be found in the procreative process, which act epitomizes all creation. This theory may not be found in his remarkable Physique de l'Amour, it was something he thought out later. Briefly, we are not the rulers of our personal destiny, but only an envelope of flesh and blood to protect the chief factor of our being, our sex-organs. As long as they are vital our organism flourishes; when they weaken, men and women weaken with them, wither and die. It has a sinister ring, hasn't it, this idea of a hidden force directing our energies, our very fate. It is supported by the seers who through the ages have recognized a blind, remorseless power in whose grip our individual happiness is as helpless as a straw in a hurricane. Only the species counts. Love is always tragic, even the amours of a ragpicker and a gutter-wench. Fatality is stamped on the forehead of every human. Little wonder primitive nations in the dusky depths of Asiatic mystic groves have prostrated themselves before the carved images of the lingam and yoni, the male and female principles. Sex is in the background of every modern religion, from the phallic symbol of the churchspire to the worshipping of the matrix." "I'm off," cried Milt, as he jumped up. "I can't stay here any longer in such a fetid atmosphere to have religion bespattered. Good-night, boys. Ulick—I'll be with you at the Maison Felicé at one o'clock, or thereabouts" He disappeared.
"I say, Ulick," remarked Paul, "you do draw the longbow, don't you, about sex-worship? Did you yarn for Milt's benefit or is it all gospel truth?" "It is in the gospels that you will find it," answered Ulick, who was distrait and feeling anxious over that projected visit. What did it presage! Stone nudged Bell who was in his cups and snoring.
"Give us a rest with your sex-symbolism. I heard a good story this afternoon—wake up Bell, this will fit your case someday—from Dr. Williams. He's my doctor. The best ever. Hasn't sent me a bill for years because the last one we shook dice for and I won. He has a patient, an old chap of sixty who came to him one day and begged, on his knees, the Doc said, for once more, only once! His doctor bluntly told him a man isn't like a woman—toujours prête—but given by nature a certain number of cartridges which he is to use as suits his temperament. If he fires them off in his youth, in middle-age he will be empty-handed and must avoid targets and rifle-ranges. The wise space their shooting and we sometimes, not often, witness the spectacle of an old man, hale and hearty, buying a buxom young target and actually scoring bullseyes. This, however, is an exceptional occurrence. The offspring of aged men are not taken seriously, as is evidenced by the brutal query: 'Who is the other fellow?' Horns seldom decorate the brows of youthful males. To make a short story long the doctor gave the poor old top a doze of some devilish compound, a Brown-Séquard cocktail containing picric acid with mountain oysters, or lamb-fries as a chaser. He was curious enough to ask his patient where he would fire off his last cartridge. The chap became voluble. He had an old wife whom he loved very much, but he kept all physical manifestations for his mistress, a younger woman, who supported her husband and a large family in the sweat of her deceit. A conscientious hard-working woman, who never deceived her lover, except with the aid of her legitimate husband—an arrangement understood, I believe. But the funny thing was that the old fellow became jealous of this same husband. He had boasted so much of the naked conflicts he had waged when young that he greatly desired to give the lady of his affections a touch of his early quality. With the potent fluid of the doctor's drug sizzling in him he literally, so the Doc averred to me, scampered off helter-skelter to his beloved. Not his wife, mind you. Oh, no! That would be wasting powder and shot on a fortress already captured. He had telephoned the faithful concubine, who awaited him, her curiosity aroused. She felt certain that he would again make his usual fiasco. As the rejuvenated old goat bounded over the sidewalk, his blood tingling with the passion of youth and Damiana Mormon Elder's Wafers, a pretty puss of eighteen touched his elbow. She was an impudent mutt, but provocative. She winked and whispered:
"Hello Pop! Come along and I'll give you the time of your life"! and by God he went with her, and that patient Griselda waiting for him in his second home, not to mention the wife of his bosom, at home (where she played a stiff Bridge every afternoon and never bothered her head about her foolish matrimonial partner). Yes, he went to the new rifle-range and heaven knows what lie he invented for the benefit of his mistress. The affair only proves that any woman who can give to an old man the illusion of virility, he will not only marry her, but he will wear her on his heart of hearts; become her slave, in fact. Sex dies hard in us, and despite popular belief, it is the last of the passions, pushing out avarice and gluttony, which pair of entertaining passions are supposed to illuminate the dusty lonesome years of a man's existence. Goethe married his cook, a stout country wench who drank herself into her grave in the august presence of her husband-poet. And all those old women titled and otherwise who marry coachmen, gardeners and grooms, husky young fellows—do they do this for intellectual companionship? The darky woman who said when asked as to her sex emotions: "I'se over eighty. You've got to ask some lady older than me, illustrates that sex fights as long as it can. The original Adam in us. That de Gourmont theory, Ulick, is a horrible idea; sex is hideous if you study it. Let the boys and girls keep their illusions and don't let them believe old Schopenhauer and his instinct of the species dictating their destiny"—"For the sake of sanity, Alfred, shut your trap and let's go home. Wake up, Bell. There's a fresh wife waiting you," said Ulick, glad to get away. "Which wife?" sleepily inquired Bell. "It seems as if a crowd of men can't end the evening without talking sex," grumbled Ulick. "I'm sick of sex." "So are we all," Stone assented, "because sex is a sickly thing. It's not health and conservation, but destruction, disease, death." Ulick fairly ran from him when they reached the street. Sex and damnation! he said between his teeth.