MALVINA GOUCHERA GENTLE WOMAN
MALVINA GOUCHERA GENTLE WOMAN
On one point Susan was from the first determined: Miss Goucher's death should make no difference in her struggle for independence; she would go on as she had begun, and fight things through to a finish alone. Neither Phil nor I could persuade her to take even a few days for a complete change of scene, a period of rest and recuperation. Simply, she would not. She settled down at once to work harder than ever, turning out quotable paragraphs forWhim, as daring as they were sprightly; and she resolutely kept her black hours of loneliness to herself. That she had many such hours I then suspected and now know, but on my frequent visits to New York—I had been appointed administrator of Miss Goucher's more than modest estate—she ignored them, and skillfully turned all my inquiries aside. These weeks following on Miss Goucher's death were for many reasons the unhappiest of my life.
Never since I had known Susan, never until now, had our minds met otherwise than candidly and freely. Now, through no crying fault on either side—unless through a lack of imagination on mine—barriers were getting piled up between us, barriers composed of the subtlest, yet stubbornest misunderstandings. Our occasional hours together soon became a drab tissue of evasions and cross purposes and suppressed desires. Only frankness can serve me here or make plain all that was secretly at work to deform the natural development of our lives.
There are plays—we have all attended them to our indignation—in which some unhappy train of events seems to have been irrationally forced upon his puppets by the author; if he would only let them speak out freely and sensibly, all their needless difficulties would vanish! Such plays infuriate the public and are never successful.
"Good Lord!" we exclaim. "Why didn't shesayshe loved him in the first place!"—or, "If he had only told her his reasons for leaving home that night!"
We, the enlightened public, feel that in the shoes ofeither the hero or the heroine we must have acted more wisely, and we refuse our sympathy to misfortunes that need never have occurred. Our reaction is perhaps inevitable and æsthetically justified; but I am wondering—I am wondering whether two-thirds of the unhappiness of most mortals is not due to their failure clearly to read another's thoughts or clearly to reveal their own? Is not half, at least, of the misery in our hearts born of futile misunderstandings, misunderstandings with which any sane onlooker in full possession of the facts on both sides, can have little patience, since he instinctively feels they ought never to have taken place? But it is only in the theater that we find such an onlooker, the audience, miraculously in possession of the facts on both sides. In active life, we are doing pretty well if we can partly understand our own motives; we are supermen if we divine the concealed, genuine motives of another. Certainly at this period Susan, with all her insight, did not seize my motives, nor was I able to interpret hers. Hence, we could not speak out! What needed to be said between us could not be said. And the best proof that it could not is, after all, that it was not. . . .
The conversation that ought to have taken place between us might not unreasonably have run something like this:
Susan: Ambo dear—whatisthe matter? Heaven knows there's enough!—but I mean betweenus?You've never been more wonderful to me than these past weeks—and never so remote. I can feel you edging farther and farther away. Why, dear?I: I've been a nuisance to you too long, Susan. Whatever I am from now on, I won't be that.Susan: As if you could be; or ever had been!I: Don't try to spare my feelings because you like me—because you're grateful to me and sorry for me! I've had a glimpse of fact, you see. It's the great moral antiseptic. My illusions are done for.Susan: What illusions?I: The illusion that you ever have really loved me. The illusion that you might some day grow to love me. The illusion that you might some day be my wife.Susan: Only the last is illusion, Ambo. I do love you. I'm growing more in love with you every day. But I can't be your wife, ever. If I've seemed changed and sad—apart from Sister's death, and everything else that's happened—it'sthat, dear. It's killing me by half-inches to know I can never be completely part of your life—yours!I:[But I can't even imagine what babble of sorrow and joy such words must have wrung from me! Suppose a decent interval, and a partial recovery of verbal control.]Susan: You shouldn't have rescued me from Birch Street, Ambo. Everything's made it plain to me, at last. But I've already ground the mud of it into your life now—in spite of myself. You'll never feel really clean again.I: What nonsense! Susan, Susan—dearest!Susan: It isn't nonsense. You forget; I'm a specialist in nonsense nowadays. Oh, Ambo, how can you care for me! I've been so insufferably self-satisfied; so childishly blind! My eyes are wide open now. I've had the whole story of what happened that awful night—all of it—from Doctor Askew. He thought he was psycho-analyzing me, while I pumped it out of him, drop by drop. And I've been to Maltby, too; yes, I've been to Maltby, behind your back. Ambo, he isn't really certain yet that I didn't go crazy that night and kill your wife. Neither, I'm sure, is Mrs. Arthur. They've given me the benefit of the doubt simply because they dread being dragged through a horrible scandal, that's all. But they're not convinced. Of course, Maltby didn't say so in so many words, but it was plain as plain! He was afraid of me—afraid! I could feel his fear. He thinks madness is in my blood. Well, he's right. Not just as he means it, but asSetebosmeans it—the cruel, jealous God of this world! . . . No, wait, dear! Let me say it out to you, once for all. My father ended a brutal life by an insanely brutal murder, thenkilled himself; my own father. And I've never all these years honestly realized that as part of my life—part ofme!But now I do. It's there, back of me. I can never escape from it. Oh, how could I have imagined myself like others—a woman like others, free to love and marry and have children and a home! How could I!I: Susan! Is that all? Is it really all that's holding you from me? Good God, dear! Why, I thought you—secretly—perhaps even unknown to yourself—loved Jimmy!Susan: Jimmy? You thought——I: I think so even now. How can I help it? Look. . . . [And here you must suppose me to show her those first scrawled sheets, written automatically by her hand.] Perhaps I'm revealing your own heart to you, Susan—dragging to light what you've tried to keep hidden even from yourself. See, dear. "A net. No means of escape from it. To escape—somehow. Jimmy——"[And then Susan would perhaps have handed back those scrawled pages to me with a pitying and pitiful smile.]Susan:[Author's Note:This carefully written, imaginary speech has been deletedin totoby Censor Susan from the page proof—at considerable expense to me—and the following authentic confession substituted for it in her own hand. But she doesn't know I am making this explanation, which will account to you for the form and manner of her confession, purposely designed to be a continuation of my own imaginary flight. In admitting this, I am risking Susan's displeasure; but conscience forbids me to let you mistake a "genuine human document"—so dear to the modern heart—for a mere effort at interpretation by an amateur psychologist. What follows, then, is veracious, is essentially that solemn thing so dear to a truth-loving generation—sheerfact.]Ambo dear, I can explain that, but not without a long, unhappy confession. Must I? It's a shadowy, inside-of-me story, awfully mixed and muddled; not a nice storyat all. Won't it be better, all round, if I simply say again that I loveyou, not Jimmy, with all my heart?[No doubt I should then have reached for her hands, and she would have drawn away.]Ah, no, dear, please not! I've never made a clean breast of it all, even to myself. It's got to be done, though, Ambo, sooner or later, for both our sakes. Be patient with me. I'll begin at the beginning.I'm ridiculously young, Ambo; we all keep forgetting how young I am! I'm an infant prodigy, really; you and Phil—and God first, I suppose—have made me so. And the main point about infant prodigies is that experience hasn't caught up with them. They live in things they've imagined from things they've been told or read, live on intuition and second-hand ideas; and they've no means of testing their real values in a real world. And they're childishly conceited, Ambo! I am. Less now than some months ago; but I'm still pretty bad. . . .Well, back in Birch Street, before I came to you, when I was honestly a child, I lived all alone inside of myself. I lived chiefly on stories I made up about myself; and of course my stories were all escapes from reality—from the things that hurt or disgusted me most. There was hardly anything in my life at home that I didn't long to escape from. You can understand that, in a general way. But there's one thing you perhaps haven't thought about; it's such an ugly thing to think about. I know it isn't modern of me, but I do hate to talk about it, even to you. I must, though. You'll never understand—oh, lots of later things—unless I do.Love, Ambo, human love, as I learned of it there at home—and I saw and heard much too much of it—frightened and sickened me. It was swinish—horrible. Most of all I longed to escape from all that! I couldn't. I wonder if anyone ever has or can? We are made as we are made. . . . Yes, I longed to escape from it; but my very made-up story of escape was a disguised romance. Jimmy was to be the gentle Galahad who would some day rescue me. Hehad done battle for me once already—with Joe Gonfarone. But some day he would come in white, shining armor and take me far away from all the mud and sweat of Birch Street to blue distant hills. Artemis was all mixed up in it, too; she was to be our special goddess; our free, swift, cool-eyed protector. There was to be no heartsick shame, no stuffiness in my life any more forever! But it wasn't Jimmy who rescued me, Ambo. You did.Only, when we've lived in a dream, wholly, for months and months and months, it doesn't vanish, Ambo; it never vanishes altogether; it's part of us—part of our lives. Isn't it? Gertrude was once your dream, dear; and the dream-Gertrude has never really vanished from your life, and never will. Ah, don't I know!Well, then you rescued me; and you and Phil and Maltby and Sister and books and Hillhouse Avenue and France and Italy and England, and my Magic Circle—everything—crowded upon me and changed me and made me what I am; if I'm anything at all! But Birch Street had made me first; and my dreams. . . .Ambo, I can never make you know what you've been to me, never! Cinderella's prince was nothing beside you, and my Galahad-Jimmy a pale phantom! I shan't try. And I can never make you know what a wild confusion of storm you sent whirling through me when I first felt the difference in you—felt your man's need of me, ofme, body and soul! You meant me not to feel that, Ambo; but I did. I was only seventeen. And my first reaction was all passionate joy, a turbulent desire to give, give, give—and damn the consequences! It was, Ambo. I loved you.But given you and me, Ambo, that couldn't last long. You're too moral—and I'm too complicated. My inner pattern's a labyrinth, full of queer magic; simple emotions soon get lost in me, lost and transformed. And please don't keep forgetting how young I was, and still am; how little I could understand of all I was conceited enough to think I understood! Well, dear, I saw you struggling to suppress your love for me as something wrong, unworthy;something that could only harm us both. And then all that first, swift, instinctive joy went out of me, and my old fear and distrust of what men call love seized me again. "Stuffiness, stuffiness everywhere—it leads to nothing but stuffiness!" I said. "I hate it. I won't let it rule my life. The great thing is to keep clear of it, clean of it, aloof and free!" The old Artemis-motive swept through me again like a hill-wind—but it came in gusts; and there were days—weeks, Ambo—when I simply wanted to be yours. And one night I threw myself into your arms. . . .But the next day I was afraid again. The phrase "passion's slave" got into my head and plagued me. Then you came to me and said, "It's the end of the road, dear. We can't go on." That changed everything once more, Ambo, in a flash. That was my crisis. From that moment, I was madly jealous of Gertrude; knew I always had been, from the first. My telegram to her was a challenge to battle. It was, dear—and I lost. She came back; she was wonderful, too—her way—and the old Gertrude-dream stirred in you again; just stirred, but that was enough. You said to yourself, didn't you? that perhaps after all the best solution for our wretched difficulties was for Gertrude to return to her home. At least, that would end things. But you couldn't have said that to yourself if Gertrude had been really repulsive to you. The old dream had fluttered its tired wings, once, Ambo; you know it had!And so I flopped again, dear! I was sick of love; I hated love! I said to myself, "I won't have this stupid, brutal, instinctive thing pushing and pulling me about like this! I'll rule my own life, thanks—my own thoughts and dreams!Freedom'sthe thing—the only good thing in life. I'll be free! Ambo, too, must learn to be free. We can only share what's honestly best in both of us when at last we are free!"My Galahad-Jimmy had turned up again, too. Perhaps that had something to do with my final fiercest revolt against you. I don't know. He was all I had wanted him to be, Ambo; simple and straightforward and clean. Oh,he had his white, shining armor on, bless him! But I didn't want him to rescue me, for all that; not in the old way. I was just glad my dream-boy had come a little true; that's all. You were jealous of him, weren't you? Confess! You needn't have been.But here in New York, with Sister, things happened that made a difference. . . .First of all, dear, I discovered all I had lost in losing you; discovered Icouldn'tbe free. All I could do was to make some kind of a life of it; for Sister, chiefly. And I tried; oh, I did try! Then those whispered scandals about us began. But it wasn't the scandal itself that did for me; it was something added to it—by Mrs. Arthur, I suppose—somethingtrue, Ambo, that I'd never honestly faced. Suddenly my father rose from the dead! Suddenly I was forced to feel that never, never under any conditions, would it have been possible for me to be yours—bear you children. . . . Suddenly I felt, saw—as I should have seen long ago—that the strain of evil, perhaps of madness, in my father—the strain that made his life a hell of black passions—must end with me!Here's where Jimmy comes back, Ambo—and it's the worst of all I have to confess. My anxiety was all for you now: not for myself, I happened to love you that way. "Suppose," I kept thinking, "suppose something should unexpectedly make it possible for Ambo to ask me to be his wife? Suppose Gertrude should fall in love herself and insist on divorce? Or suppose she should die? Ambo would be certain to come to me. And if he did? Should I have the moral courage to send him away? As I must—I must!"Dear, from that time on a sort of demon in me kept suggesting: "Jimmy—Jimmy's the solution! He's almost in love with you now; all he needs is a little encouragement. You could manage it, Susan. You could engage yourself to Jimmy; and then you could string him along! You could make it an interminable engagement, years and years of it, and break it off when Ambo was thoroughlydiscouraged or cured; you're clever enough for that. And Jimmy's ingenuousness itself. You could manage Jimmy." Oh, please don't think I ever really listened to my demon, was ever tempted by him! But I hated myself for the mere fact that such thoughts could even occur to me! They did, though, more than once; and each time I had to banish them, thrust them down into their native darkness.But they didn't die there, Ambo; they lived there, a hideous secret life, lying in wait to betray me. They never will betray me, of course; I loathe them. But they can still stir in their darkness, make themselves known. That's what the references to Jimmy mean, Ambo, in those pages I scribbled in my trance; and that'sallthey mean. For I don't love him; I love you.But I can't marry you, ever. I can't. That black strain concentrated in my father—oh, it must die out with me! Just as Sister's line ended with her. . . . She ran away from the one love of her life, Ambo—just as I must run away from you. You never knew that about Sister. But I knew it. Sonia told me. Sister toldher, the week before Sonia married. Sister felt then that Sonia ought to run away from all that, as she had. But Sonia wouldn't listen to her. . . .
Susan: Ambo dear—whatisthe matter? Heaven knows there's enough!—but I mean betweenus?You've never been more wonderful to me than these past weeks—and never so remote. I can feel you edging farther and farther away. Why, dear?
I: I've been a nuisance to you too long, Susan. Whatever I am from now on, I won't be that.
Susan: As if you could be; or ever had been!
I: Don't try to spare my feelings because you like me—because you're grateful to me and sorry for me! I've had a glimpse of fact, you see. It's the great moral antiseptic. My illusions are done for.
Susan: What illusions?
I: The illusion that you ever have really loved me. The illusion that you might some day grow to love me. The illusion that you might some day be my wife.
Susan: Only the last is illusion, Ambo. I do love you. I'm growing more in love with you every day. But I can't be your wife, ever. If I've seemed changed and sad—apart from Sister's death, and everything else that's happened—it'sthat, dear. It's killing me by half-inches to know I can never be completely part of your life—yours!
I:
[But I can't even imagine what babble of sorrow and joy such words must have wrung from me! Suppose a decent interval, and a partial recovery of verbal control.]
Susan: You shouldn't have rescued me from Birch Street, Ambo. Everything's made it plain to me, at last. But I've already ground the mud of it into your life now—in spite of myself. You'll never feel really clean again.
I: What nonsense! Susan, Susan—dearest!
Susan: It isn't nonsense. You forget; I'm a specialist in nonsense nowadays. Oh, Ambo, how can you care for me! I've been so insufferably self-satisfied; so childishly blind! My eyes are wide open now. I've had the whole story of what happened that awful night—all of it—from Doctor Askew. He thought he was psycho-analyzing me, while I pumped it out of him, drop by drop. And I've been to Maltby, too; yes, I've been to Maltby, behind your back. Ambo, he isn't really certain yet that I didn't go crazy that night and kill your wife. Neither, I'm sure, is Mrs. Arthur. They've given me the benefit of the doubt simply because they dread being dragged through a horrible scandal, that's all. But they're not convinced. Of course, Maltby didn't say so in so many words, but it was plain as plain! He was afraid of me—afraid! I could feel his fear. He thinks madness is in my blood. Well, he's right. Not just as he means it, but asSetebosmeans it—the cruel, jealous God of this world! . . . No, wait, dear! Let me say it out to you, once for all. My father ended a brutal life by an insanely brutal murder, thenkilled himself; my own father. And I've never all these years honestly realized that as part of my life—part ofme!But now I do. It's there, back of me. I can never escape from it. Oh, how could I have imagined myself like others—a woman like others, free to love and marry and have children and a home! How could I!
I: Susan! Is that all? Is it really all that's holding you from me? Good God, dear! Why, I thought you—secretly—perhaps even unknown to yourself—loved Jimmy!
Susan: Jimmy? You thought——
I: I think so even now. How can I help it? Look. . . . [And here you must suppose me to show her those first scrawled sheets, written automatically by her hand.] Perhaps I'm revealing your own heart to you, Susan—dragging to light what you've tried to keep hidden even from yourself. See, dear. "A net. No means of escape from it. To escape—somehow. Jimmy——"
[And then Susan would perhaps have handed back those scrawled pages to me with a pitying and pitiful smile.]
Susan:
[Author's Note:This carefully written, imaginary speech has been deletedin totoby Censor Susan from the page proof—at considerable expense to me—and the following authentic confession substituted for it in her own hand. But she doesn't know I am making this explanation, which will account to you for the form and manner of her confession, purposely designed to be a continuation of my own imaginary flight. In admitting this, I am risking Susan's displeasure; but conscience forbids me to let you mistake a "genuine human document"—so dear to the modern heart—for a mere effort at interpretation by an amateur psychologist. What follows, then, is veracious, is essentially that solemn thing so dear to a truth-loving generation—sheerfact.]
Ambo dear, I can explain that, but not without a long, unhappy confession. Must I? It's a shadowy, inside-of-me story, awfully mixed and muddled; not a nice storyat all. Won't it be better, all round, if I simply say again that I loveyou, not Jimmy, with all my heart?
[No doubt I should then have reached for her hands, and she would have drawn away.]
Ah, no, dear, please not! I've never made a clean breast of it all, even to myself. It's got to be done, though, Ambo, sooner or later, for both our sakes. Be patient with me. I'll begin at the beginning.
I'm ridiculously young, Ambo; we all keep forgetting how young I am! I'm an infant prodigy, really; you and Phil—and God first, I suppose—have made me so. And the main point about infant prodigies is that experience hasn't caught up with them. They live in things they've imagined from things they've been told or read, live on intuition and second-hand ideas; and they've no means of testing their real values in a real world. And they're childishly conceited, Ambo! I am. Less now than some months ago; but I'm still pretty bad. . . .
Well, back in Birch Street, before I came to you, when I was honestly a child, I lived all alone inside of myself. I lived chiefly on stories I made up about myself; and of course my stories were all escapes from reality—from the things that hurt or disgusted me most. There was hardly anything in my life at home that I didn't long to escape from. You can understand that, in a general way. But there's one thing you perhaps haven't thought about; it's such an ugly thing to think about. I know it isn't modern of me, but I do hate to talk about it, even to you. I must, though. You'll never understand—oh, lots of later things—unless I do.
Love, Ambo, human love, as I learned of it there at home—and I saw and heard much too much of it—frightened and sickened me. It was swinish—horrible. Most of all I longed to escape from all that! I couldn't. I wonder if anyone ever has or can? We are made as we are made. . . . Yes, I longed to escape from it; but my very made-up story of escape was a disguised romance. Jimmy was to be the gentle Galahad who would some day rescue me. Hehad done battle for me once already—with Joe Gonfarone. But some day he would come in white, shining armor and take me far away from all the mud and sweat of Birch Street to blue distant hills. Artemis was all mixed up in it, too; she was to be our special goddess; our free, swift, cool-eyed protector. There was to be no heartsick shame, no stuffiness in my life any more forever! But it wasn't Jimmy who rescued me, Ambo. You did.
Only, when we've lived in a dream, wholly, for months and months and months, it doesn't vanish, Ambo; it never vanishes altogether; it's part of us—part of our lives. Isn't it? Gertrude was once your dream, dear; and the dream-Gertrude has never really vanished from your life, and never will. Ah, don't I know!
Well, then you rescued me; and you and Phil and Maltby and Sister and books and Hillhouse Avenue and France and Italy and England, and my Magic Circle—everything—crowded upon me and changed me and made me what I am; if I'm anything at all! But Birch Street had made me first; and my dreams. . . .
Ambo, I can never make you know what you've been to me, never! Cinderella's prince was nothing beside you, and my Galahad-Jimmy a pale phantom! I shan't try. And I can never make you know what a wild confusion of storm you sent whirling through me when I first felt the difference in you—felt your man's need of me, ofme, body and soul! You meant me not to feel that, Ambo; but I did. I was only seventeen. And my first reaction was all passionate joy, a turbulent desire to give, give, give—and damn the consequences! It was, Ambo. I loved you.
But given you and me, Ambo, that couldn't last long. You're too moral—and I'm too complicated. My inner pattern's a labyrinth, full of queer magic; simple emotions soon get lost in me, lost and transformed. And please don't keep forgetting how young I was, and still am; how little I could understand of all I was conceited enough to think I understood! Well, dear, I saw you struggling to suppress your love for me as something wrong, unworthy;something that could only harm us both. And then all that first, swift, instinctive joy went out of me, and my old fear and distrust of what men call love seized me again. "Stuffiness, stuffiness everywhere—it leads to nothing but stuffiness!" I said. "I hate it. I won't let it rule my life. The great thing is to keep clear of it, clean of it, aloof and free!" The old Artemis-motive swept through me again like a hill-wind—but it came in gusts; and there were days—weeks, Ambo—when I simply wanted to be yours. And one night I threw myself into your arms. . . .
But the next day I was afraid again. The phrase "passion's slave" got into my head and plagued me. Then you came to me and said, "It's the end of the road, dear. We can't go on." That changed everything once more, Ambo, in a flash. That was my crisis. From that moment, I was madly jealous of Gertrude; knew I always had been, from the first. My telegram to her was a challenge to battle. It was, dear—and I lost. She came back; she was wonderful, too—her way—and the old Gertrude-dream stirred in you again; just stirred, but that was enough. You said to yourself, didn't you? that perhaps after all the best solution for our wretched difficulties was for Gertrude to return to her home. At least, that would end things. But you couldn't have said that to yourself if Gertrude had been really repulsive to you. The old dream had fluttered its tired wings, once, Ambo; you know it had!
And so I flopped again, dear! I was sick of love; I hated love! I said to myself, "I won't have this stupid, brutal, instinctive thing pushing and pulling me about like this! I'll rule my own life, thanks—my own thoughts and dreams!Freedom'sthe thing—the only good thing in life. I'll be free! Ambo, too, must learn to be free. We can only share what's honestly best in both of us when at last we are free!"
My Galahad-Jimmy had turned up again, too. Perhaps that had something to do with my final fiercest revolt against you. I don't know. He was all I had wanted him to be, Ambo; simple and straightforward and clean. Oh,he had his white, shining armor on, bless him! But I didn't want him to rescue me, for all that; not in the old way. I was just glad my dream-boy had come a little true; that's all. You were jealous of him, weren't you? Confess! You needn't have been.
But here in New York, with Sister, things happened that made a difference. . . .
First of all, dear, I discovered all I had lost in losing you; discovered Icouldn'tbe free. All I could do was to make some kind of a life of it; for Sister, chiefly. And I tried; oh, I did try! Then those whispered scandals about us began. But it wasn't the scandal itself that did for me; it was something added to it—by Mrs. Arthur, I suppose—somethingtrue, Ambo, that I'd never honestly faced. Suddenly my father rose from the dead! Suddenly I was forced to feel that never, never under any conditions, would it have been possible for me to be yours—bear you children. . . . Suddenly I felt, saw—as I should have seen long ago—that the strain of evil, perhaps of madness, in my father—the strain that made his life a hell of black passions—must end with me!
Here's where Jimmy comes back, Ambo—and it's the worst of all I have to confess. My anxiety was all for you now: not for myself, I happened to love you that way. "Suppose," I kept thinking, "suppose something should unexpectedly make it possible for Ambo to ask me to be his wife? Suppose Gertrude should fall in love herself and insist on divorce? Or suppose she should die? Ambo would be certain to come to me. And if he did? Should I have the moral courage to send him away? As I must—I must!"
Dear, from that time on a sort of demon in me kept suggesting: "Jimmy—Jimmy's the solution! He's almost in love with you now; all he needs is a little encouragement. You could manage it, Susan. You could engage yourself to Jimmy; and then you could string him along! You could make it an interminable engagement, years and years of it, and break it off when Ambo was thoroughlydiscouraged or cured; you're clever enough for that. And Jimmy's ingenuousness itself. You could manage Jimmy." Oh, please don't think I ever really listened to my demon, was ever tempted by him! But I hated myself for the mere fact that such thoughts could even occur to me! They did, though, more than once; and each time I had to banish them, thrust them down into their native darkness.
But they didn't die there, Ambo; they lived there, a hideous secret life, lying in wait to betray me. They never will betray me, of course; I loathe them. But they can still stir in their darkness, make themselves known. That's what the references to Jimmy mean, Ambo, in those pages I scribbled in my trance; and that'sallthey mean. For I don't love him; I love you.
But I can't marry you, ever. I can't. That black strain concentrated in my father—oh, it must die out with me! Just as Sister's line ended with her. . . . She ran away from the one love of her life, Ambo—just as I must run away from you. You never knew that about Sister. But I knew it. Sonia told me. Sister toldher, the week before Sonia married. Sister felt then that Sonia ought to run away from all that, as she had. But Sonia wouldn't listen to her. . . .
"Good for Sonia!" I might then have cried out. "God bless her! Hasn't she made her husband happy? Aren't her children his pride? Why in heaven's name should she have denied herself the right to live! And for a mere possibility of evil! As if the blood of any human family on earth were wholly sound, wholly blameless! Sonia was selfish, but right, dear; and Miss Goucher was brave, but wrong! So are you wrong! Actually inherited feeble-mindedness, or insanity, or disease—that's one thing; but a dread of mere future possibilities, of mere supposed tendencies! Good Lord! The human race might as well commit suicideen bloc!It's you I love—you—just as you are. And you say you love me. Well, that settles it!"
But who knows? It might have settled it and it might not—could any such imaginary conversation conceivably have taken place. It did not take place. We are dealing, worse luck, with history.
Perhaps six weeks after Miss Goucher's death one little conversation, just skirting these hidden matters, did take place between us; but how different was its atmosphere, and how drearily different its conclusion! You will understand it better now that—like a theater audience, or like God—you are in full possession of Susan's facts and of mine; but I fear it will interest you less. To know all may sometimes be to forgive all; but more often, alas, it is to be bored by everything. . . .
[Firmly inserted note, by Susan: "Rubbish! It's only when wethinkwe know it all, and don't really, that we are bored."]
I had taken Susan for dinner that night to a quiet hotel uptown where I knew the dining-room, mercifully lacking an orchestra and a cabaret, was not well patronized, though the cooking was exceptionally good. At this hotel, by a proper manipulation of the head waiter, it is often possible to get a table a little apart from the other diners—an advantage, if one desires to talk intimately without the annoyance of being overheard. It troubled me to find Susan's appetite practically nonexistent; I had ordered one or two special dishes to tempt her, but I saw that she took no pleasure in them, merely forcing herself to eat so as not to disquiet me. She was looking badly, too, all gleamless shadow, and fighting off a physical and mental languor by a stubborn effort which she might have concealed from another, but not from me. It was only too plain to me that her wish was to keep the conversation safely away from whatever was busying and saddening her private thoughts. In this, till the coffee was placed before us, I thought bestto humor her, and we had discussed at great length the proper format for her first book of poems, which was to appear within the next month. Also, we had discussed Heywood Sampson's now rapidly maturing plans for his new critical review.
"He really wants me on his staff, Ambo, and I really want to be on it—just for the pleasure of working with him. It's an absolutely unbelievable chance for me! And yet——"
"And yet——? Is there any reason why you shouldn't accept?"
"At least two reasons, yes. I'm afraid both of them will surprise you."
"I wonder."
"Won't they? If not, Ambo, you must suppose you've guessed them. What are they?"
Susan rather had me here. I had not guessed them, but wasn't willing to admit even to myself that I could not if I tried. I puckered my brows, judicially.
"Well," I hesitated, "you may very naturally feel that 'Dax' is too plump a bird in the hand to be sacrificed for Heywood's slim bluebird in the bush. Any new publication's a gamble, of course. On the other hand, Heywood isn't the kind to leave his associates high and dry. Even if the review should fail, he'll stand by you somehow. He has a comfy fortune, you know; he could carry on the review as a personal hobby if he cares to, even if it never cleared a penny."
Susan smiled, gravely shaking her head: "Cold, dear; stone cold. I'm pretty mercenary these days, but I'm not quite so mercenary as that. Now that I've discovered I can make a living, I'm not nearly so interested in it; hardly at all. It's the stupid side of life, always; I shouldn't like it to make much difference to me now, when it comes to real decisions. I did want a nice home for Sister, though. As for me, any old room most anywhere will do. It will, Ambo; don't laugh; I'm in earnest. But what's your second guess?" she added quickly.
"You've some writing you want to do—a book, maybe? You're afraid the review will interfere?"
"Ah, now you're a tiny bit warmer! I am afraid it will interfere, but in a much deeper way than that; interfere withme."
"I don't quite follow that, do I!"
"Good gracious, no—since you ask. It's simple enough, though—and pretty vague. Only it feels important—here." For an instant her hand just touched her breast. "I hate so to be roped in, Ambo, have things staked out for me—spiritually, I mean. Mr. Sampson's a darling; I love him! But he's a great believer in ropes and stakes and fences—even barbed wire. I'm beginning to see that the whole idea of his review is a scheme for mending political and moral and social fences, stopping up gaps in them made by irresponsible idealists—anarchists, revolutionary socialists—people like that. People like me, really!—There! Now you do look surprised."
I was; but I smiled.
"You've turnedRed, Susan? How long since? Overnight?"
"Not red," answered Susan, with bravely forced gayety; "pinkish, say! I haven't fixed on my special shade till I'm sure it becomes me."
"It's certain to do that, dear."
She bobbed me a little bow across the cloth, much in the old happy style—alas, not quite. "But I never did like washed-out colors," she threw in for good measure.
"Youareirresponsible, then! Suppose Phil could hear you—or Jimmy. Jimmy'd say your Greenwich Village friends were corrupting you. Perhaps they are?"
"Perhaps they are," echoed Susan, "but I think not. I'm afraid it goes farther back, Ambo. It's left-over Birch Street; that's what it is. So much of me's that. All of me, I sometimes believe."
"Not quite. You'll never escape Hillhouse, either, Susan. You've had both."
"Yes, I've had both," she echoed again, almost on a sigh, pushing her untasteddemi-tassefrom her.
Suddenly her elbows were planted on the cloth before her, her face—shadowed and too finely drawn—dropped between her hands, her eyes sought and held mine. They dizzied me, her eyes. . . .
"Ambo," she said earnestly, "I suppose I'm a dreadful egotist, but more and more I'm feeling the real me isn't a true child of this world! I love this world—and I hate it. I don't know whether I love it most or hate it most. I bless it and damn it every day of my life—in the same breath often. But sometimes I feel I hate it most—hate it for its cold dullness of head and heart! Why can't we care more to make it worth living in, this beautiful, frightful world! What's the matter with us? Why are we what we are? Half angels—and half pigs or goats or saber-toothed tigers or snakes! Each and every one of us, by and large! And oh, how we do distrust our three-quarters angels—while they're living, anyway! Dreamers—mad visionaries—social rebels—outcasts! Crucify them, crucify them! Time enough to worship them—ages of to-be-wasted time enough—when they're dead!" She paused, still holding my eyes, and drawing in a slow breath, a breath that caught midway and was almost a sob; then her eyes left mine.
"There—that's over. Saying things like that doesn't help us a bit; it's—silly. . . . And half the idealistsaremad, no doubt, and have plenty of pig and snake in them, too. I've simply coils and coils of unregenerate serpent in me—and worse. Oh, Ambo dear—but I've a dream in me beyond all that, and a great longing to help it come true! But it doesn't—it won't. I'm afraid it never will—here. Will itthere, Ambo? Is there athere?. . . Have we got all of Sister that clean fire couldn't take, shut up in that tiny vase?"
"We can hope not, at least," I replied.
"Hope isn't enough," said Susan. "Why don't yousay you know we haven't! I know we haven't. I do know it. It's the only thing I—know!"
A nervous waiter sidled up to us and softly slipped a small metal tray before me; it held my bill, carefully turned face downward.
"Anything more, sir?" he murmured.
"A liqueur?" I suggested to Susan. She sat upright in her chair again, with a slight impatient shake of the head.
I ordered a cigar and afine champagne. The waiter, still nervously fearful of having approached us at a moment when he suspected some intimate question of the heart had grown critically tense, faded from us with the slightest, discreetest cough of reassurance. He was not one, he would have us know, to obtrude material considerations when they were out of place.
"No; I can't go with Mr. Sampson," Susan was saying; "and he'll be hurt—he won't be able to see why. But I'm not made to be an editor—of anything. Editors have to weigh other people's words. I can't even weigh my own. And I talk of nothing but myself. Ugh!"
"You're tired out, overwrought," I stupidly began.
"Don't tell me so!" cried Susan. "If I should believe you, I'd be lost."
"But," I blundered on, "it's only common sense to let down a little, at such a time. If you'd only take a real rest——"
"There is no such thing," said Susan. "We just struggle on and on. It's rather awful, isn't it?" And presently, very quietly, as if to herself, she said over those words, surely among the saddest and loveliest ever written by mortal man:
From too much love of living,From hope and fear set free,We thank with brief thanksgivingWhatever gods may beThat no life lives forever,That dead men rise up never;That even the weariest riverWinds somewhere safe to sea.
"To sea," she repeated; "to sea. . . . As if the sea itself knew rest!—Now please pay your big fat bill from your nice fat pocketbook, Ambo; and take me home."
"If I only could!" was my despairing thought; and I astounded the coat-room boy, as I tipped him, by muttering aloud, "Oh, damn Jimmy Kane!"
"Yes, sir—thank you, sir—I will, sir," grinned the coat-room boy.
On our way downtown in the taxi Susan withdrew until we reached her West Tenth Street door. "Good-night, Ambo," she then said; "don't come with me; and thank you for everything—always." I crossed the pavement with her to the loutish brownstone front-stoop of the boarding house; there she turned to dismiss me.
"You didn't ask my second reason for not going on the review, Ambo. You must know it though, sooner or later. I can'twriteany more—not well, I mean. Even my Dax paragraphs are falling off; Hadow Bury mentioned it yesterday. But nothing comes. I'm sterile, Ambo. I'm written out at twenty. Bless you. Good-night."
"Susan," I cried, "come back here at once!" But she just turned in the doorway to smile back at me, waved her hand, and was gone.
I was of two minds whether to follow her or stay. Then, "A whim," I thought; "the whim of a tired child. And I've often felt that way myself—all writers do. But she must take a vacation of some kind—she must!"
She did.
I woke up the next morning, broad awake before seven o'clock, a full hour earlier than my habit. I woke to findmyself greatly troubled by Susan's parting words of the night before, and lay in bed for perhaps twenty minutes turning them over fretfully in my mind. Then I could stand it no longer and rose, bathed, dressed and ate my breakfast in self-exasperating haste, yet with no very clear idea of why I was hurrying or what was to follow. I had an appointment with my lawyer for eleven; I was to lunch with Heywood Sampson at one; after lunch—my immediate business in town being completed—I had purposed to return to New Haven.
Susan would be expecting me for my daily morning call at half-past nine. That call was a fixed custom between us when I was stopping in New York. It seldom lasted over twenty minutes and was really just an opportunity to say good-morning and arrange conveniently for any further plans for the day or evening. But it was now only a few minutes past eight. No matter, Susan was both a nighthawk and a lark, retiring always too late and rising too early—though it must be said she seemed to need little sleep; and I felt that I must see her at once and try somehow to encourage her about her work and bring her back to a more reasonable and normal point of view. "Overstrain," I kept mumbling to myself, idiotically enough, as I charged rather than walked down Fifth Avenue from my hotel: "Overstrain—overstrain. . . ."
However, the brisk physical exertion of my walk gradually quieted my nerves, and as I turned west on Tenth Street I was beginning to feel a little ashamed of my unreasonable anxiety, was even beginning to poke a little fun at myself and preparing to amuse Susan if I could by a whimsical account of my morning brainstorm. I had now persuaded myself that I should find her quietly at work, as I so usually did, and quite prepared to talk things over more calmly. I meant this time to make a supreme effort, and really hoped to persuade her to do two sensible things: First, to accept Heywood Sampson's offer; second, to give up all other work for the present, and get a complete restand change of scene until her services were needed for the review. That would not be for six or eight weeks at the very least.
And I at last had a plan for her. You may or may not remember that Ashton Parker was a famous man thirty years ago; they called him "Hyena Parker" in Wall Street, and no doubt he deserved it; yet he faded gently out with consumption like any spring poet, having turned theosophist toward the end and made his peace with the Cosmic Urge. Mrs. Ashton Parker is an aunt of mine, long a widow, and a most delightful, easy-going, wide-awake, and sympathetic old lady, who has made her home in Santa Barbara ever since her husband's death there. Her Spanish villa and gardens are famous, and her always kindly eccentricities scarcely less famous than they. I could imagine no one more certain to captivate Susan or to be instantly captivated by her; and though I had not seen Aunt Belle for more than ten years, I knew I could count on her in advance to fall in with my plan. Her hospitality is notorious and would long since have beggared anyone with an income less absurd. Susan should go there at once, for a month at least; the whole thing could be arranged by telegraph. Why in heaven's name hadn't I thought of and insisted upon this plan before!
Miss O'Neill, in person, opened the front door for me.
"Oh, Mr. Hunt!" she wailed. "Thanks to goodness you're here early. I can't do nothing with Togo. He won't eat no breakfast, and he won't let nobody touch him. He's sitting up there like a—I don't know what, with his precious tail uncurled and his head sort of hanging down—it'll break your heart to look at him! I can't bear to myself, though I'd never no use for the beast, neither liking nor disliking! He's above his station, I say. But what with all—— And I've got to get that room cleared and redone by twelve, feelings or no feelings, and Gawd knows feelingswillenter in! Not half Miss Susan's class either, the new party just now applied, and right besidemy own room, too, though well recommended, so I can't complain!"
I broke through her dusty web of words with an impatient, "What on earth are you talking about, Miss O'Neill?"
"You don't know?" she gasped. "You don't——"
"I most certainly do not. Where's Miss Susan?"
"Oh, Mr. Hunt! If I'd-a knowed she hadn't even spoke to you! And you with her all evening—treating to dinner and all! But thank Gawd it's a reel lady she went away with! Miss Leslie, in her big limousine, that's often been here!ThatI can swear to you with my own eyes!"
Susan was gone, and gone beyond hope of an immediate return. There is no need to labor the details of her flight. A letter, left for me with Miss O'Neill, gives all the surface facts essential.
"Dear Ambo:Try not to be angry with me; or too hurt. When I left you last night I decided to seize an opportunity which had to be seized instantly, or not at all. Mona Leslie has been planning for a long European sojourn all winter, and for the past two weeks has been trying to persuade me to go with her as a sort of overpaid companion and private secretary. She has dangled a salary before me out of all proportion to my possible value to her, but—never feeling very sympathetic toward her sudden whims and moods—that hasn't tempted me."Now, at the eleventh hour, literally, this chance for a complete break with my whole past and probable future has tempted me, and I've flopped. You've been urging my need for rest and change; if that's what I do need this will supply it, the change at least—with no sacrifice of my hard-fought-for financial independence. It was the abysmal prospect, as I came in, of having to go straight to my room—with no Sister waiting for me—and beat my poor typewriter and poorer brains for some sparks of wit—whenI knew in advance there wasn't a spark left in me—that sent me to the telephone."Now I'm packed—in half an hour—and waiting for Mona. The boat sails about threea.m.; I don't even know her name: we'll be on her by midnight. Poor Miss O'Neill is flabbergasted—and so I'm afraid will you be, and Phil and Jimmy. I know it isn't kind of me simply to vanish like this; but try to feel that I don't mean to be unkind. Not even to Togo, though my treachery to him is villainous. It will be a black mark against me in Peter's book forever. But I can't take him, Ambo; I just can't. Please, please—willyou?You see, dear, I can't help being a nuisance to you always, after all. And I can't even promise you Togo will learn to love you, any more than Tumps—though I hope he may. He'll grieve himself thin at first. He knows something's in the air and he's grieving beside me now. His eyes—— If Mona doesn't come soon, I may collapse at his paws and promise him to stay."Mona talks of a year over there, from darkest Russia to lightest France; possibly two. Her plans are characteristically indefinite. She knows heaps of people all over, of course. I'll write often. Please tell Hadow and Mr. Sampson I'm a physical wreck—or mental, if it sounds more convincing. I'm neither; but I'm tired—tired—tired."If you can possibly help Phil and Jimmy to understand——"Here's Mona now. Good-by, dear."Your ashamed, utterly grateful"Susan."P. S. I'm wearing your furs."
"Dear Ambo:Try not to be angry with me; or too hurt. When I left you last night I decided to seize an opportunity which had to be seized instantly, or not at all. Mona Leslie has been planning for a long European sojourn all winter, and for the past two weeks has been trying to persuade me to go with her as a sort of overpaid companion and private secretary. She has dangled a salary before me out of all proportion to my possible value to her, but—never feeling very sympathetic toward her sudden whims and moods—that hasn't tempted me.
"Now, at the eleventh hour, literally, this chance for a complete break with my whole past and probable future has tempted me, and I've flopped. You've been urging my need for rest and change; if that's what I do need this will supply it, the change at least—with no sacrifice of my hard-fought-for financial independence. It was the abysmal prospect, as I came in, of having to go straight to my room—with no Sister waiting for me—and beat my poor typewriter and poorer brains for some sparks of wit—whenI knew in advance there wasn't a spark left in me—that sent me to the telephone.
"Now I'm packed—in half an hour—and waiting for Mona. The boat sails about threea.m.; I don't even know her name: we'll be on her by midnight. Poor Miss O'Neill is flabbergasted—and so I'm afraid will you be, and Phil and Jimmy. I know it isn't kind of me simply to vanish like this; but try to feel that I don't mean to be unkind. Not even to Togo, though my treachery to him is villainous. It will be a black mark against me in Peter's book forever. But I can't take him, Ambo; I just can't. Please, please—willyou?You see, dear, I can't help being a nuisance to you always, after all. And I can't even promise you Togo will learn to love you, any more than Tumps—though I hope he may. He'll grieve himself thin at first. He knows something's in the air and he's grieving beside me now. His eyes—— If Mona doesn't come soon, I may collapse at his paws and promise him to stay.
"Mona talks of a year over there, from darkest Russia to lightest France; possibly two. Her plans are characteristically indefinite. She knows heaps of people all over, of course. I'll write often. Please tell Hadow and Mr. Sampson I'm a physical wreck—or mental, if it sounds more convincing. I'm neither; but I'm tired—tired—tired.
"If you can possibly help Phil and Jimmy to understand——
"Here's Mona now. Good-by, dear.
"Your ashamed, utterly grateful
"Susan.
"P. S. I'm wearing your furs."
SO Togo and I went home. My misery craving company, I rode with him all the way up in the baggage-car, on the self-deceptive theory that he needed an everpresent friend. It is true, however, that he did; and it gratified me and a little cheered me that he seemed really to appreciate my attentions. I sat on a trunk, lighting each cigarette from the end of the last, and he sat at my feet, leaned wearily against the calf of my right leg and permitted me to fondle his ears. . . .
"Spring, the sweet spring!" Then birds do sing, hey-ding-a-ding—and so on. . . . Sweet lovers love the spring. . . . Jimmy, Phil and I saw little of each other those days. Jimmy clouded his sunny brow and started in working overtime. Phil plunged headlong into what was to have proved his philosophicalmagnum opus—"The Pluralistic Fallacy; a Critical Study of Pragmatism." I also plunged headlong into a series of interpretative essays for Heywood Sampson's forthcoming review. My first essay was to be on Tolstoy; my second, on Nietzsche; my third, on Anatole France; my fourth, on Samuel Butler and Bernard Shaw; my fifth, on Thomas Hardy; and my sixth and last, on Walt Whitman. From the works of these writers it was my purpose to illustrate and clarify for the semicultured the more significant intellectual and spiritual tendencies of our enlightened and humane civilization. It is characteristic that I supposed myself well equipped for this task.But I never got beyond my detached, urbane appreciation of Nietzsche; just as I had concluded it—our enlightened and humane civilization suddenly blew to atoms with acliché-shattering report and a vile stench as of too-long-imprisoned gas. . . .
During those first months of Susan's absence, which for more than four years were to prove the last months of almost world-wide and wholly world-deceptive peace, several things occurred of more or less importance to the present history. They marked, for one thing, the auspicious sprouting and rapid initial growth of Susan's literary reputation. Her poems appeared little more than a month after she had left us, a well-printed volume of less than a hundred pages, in a sober green cover. I had taken a lonely sort of joy in reading and rereading the proof; and if even a split letter escaped me, it has not yet been brought to my attention. These poems were issued under a quiet title and an unobtrusive pen-name, slipping into the market-place without any preliminary puffing, and I feared they were of too fine a texture to attract the notice that I felt they deserved. But in some respects, at least, Susan was born under a lucky star. An unforeseen combination of events suddenly focused public attention—just long enough to send it into a third edition—upon this inconspicuous little book.
Concurrently with its publication,The Puppet Boothopened its doors—its door, rather—on Macdougal Street; an artistic venture quite as marked, you would say, for early oblivion as Susan's own. The cocoon ofThe Puppet Boothwas a small stable where a few Italian venders of fruit and vegetables had kept their scarecrow horses and shabby carts and handcarts. From this drab cocoon issued a mailed and militant dragon-fly; vivid, flashing, erratic; both ugly and beautiful—and wholly alive! For there were in Greenwich Village—as there are, it would seem, in all lesser villages, from Florida to Oregon—certainmourners over and enthusiasts for the art called Drama, which they believed to be virtually extinct. Shows, it is true, hundreds of them, were each season produced on Broadway, and some of these delighted hosts of the affluent, sentimental, and child-like Americanbourgeoisie. Fortunate managers, playsmiths and actors, endowed with sympathy for the crude tastes of thisbourgeoisie, a sympathy partly instinctive and partly developed by commercial acumen, waxed fat with a prosperity for which the Village could not wearily enough express its contempt.
None of these creatures, said the Village—no, not one—was a genuine artist! The Theater, they affirmed, had been raped by the Philistines and prostituted to sophomoric merrymakers by cynical greed. The Theater! Why, it should be a temple, inviolably dedicated to its peculiar god. Since the death of religion, it was perhaps the one temple worthy of pious preservation. Only in a Theater, sincerely consecrated to the great god, Art, could the enlightened, the sophisticated, the free—unite to worship. There only, they implied, could something adumbrating a sacred ritual and a spiritual consolation be preserved.
Luckily for Susan, and indeed for us all—for we have all been gainers from the spontaneous generation of "little theaters" all over America, a phenomenon at its height just previous to the war—one village enthusiast, Isidore Stalinski—by vocation an accompanist, by avocation a vorticist, by race and nature a publicist—had succeeded in mildly infecting Mona Leslie—who took everything in the air, though nothing severely—with offhand zeal for his cause. The importance of her rather casual conversion lay in the fact that her purse strings were perpetually untied. Stalinski well knew that you cannot run even a tiny temple for a handful of worshippers without vain oblations on the side to the false gods of this world, and these imply—oh, Art's desire!—a donor. And of all possible varieties of donor, that most to be desired is the absentee donor—the donor who donates as God sends rain, unseen.
At precisely the right moment Stalinski whispered toMona Leslie thatentre them—though he didn't care to be quoted—he preferred her interpretation of Faure'sClair de Luneto that of ——, the particulardivahe had just been accompanying through a long, rapturously advertised concert tour; and Mona Leslie, about to be off on her European flight, became the absentee donor toThe Puppet Booth.
The small stable was leased and cleansed and sufficiently reshaped to live up to its anxiously chosen name. Much of the reshaping and all of the decorating was done, after business hours, by the clever and pious hands of the villagers. Then four one-act plays were selected from among some hundreds poured forth by village genius to its rehabilitated god. The clever and pious hands flew faster than ever, busying themselves with scenery and costumes and properties and color and lighting—all blended toward the creation of a thoroughly uncommercial atmosphere. And the four plays were staged, directed, acted, and finally attended by the Village. It was a perfectly lovely party and the pleasantest of times was had by all.
And it only remains to drop this tone of patronizing persiflage and admit, with humblest honesty, that the first night atThe Puppet Boothwas that very rare thing, a complete success; what Broadway calls a "knockout." Within a fortnight seats forThe Puppet Boothwere at a ruinous premium in all the ticket agencies on or near Times Square.
I happened to be there on that ecstatic opening night. Susan, in her first letter, from Liverpool, had enjoined me to attend and report; Mona would be glad to learn from an unprejudiced outsider how the affair went off. But Susan did not mention the fact that one of the four selected plays had been written by herself.
Jimmy was with me. Phil, who saw more of him than I did, thought he was going stale from overwork, so I had made a point of hunting him up and dragging him off with me for a night in town. He hadn't wanted to go; said frankly, he wasn't in the mood. I'm convinced it was the first time he had ever used the word "mood" inconnection with himself or anybody else. Jimmy and moods of any kind simply didn't belong together.
We had a good man's dinner at a good man's chop-house that night, and, once I got Jimmy to work on it, his normal appetite revived and he engulfed oysters and steak and a deep-dish apple pie and a mug or so of ale, with mounting gusto. We talked, of course, of Susan.
Jimmy, inclined to a rosier view by comfortable repletion, now maintained that perhaps after all Susan had done the natural and sensible thing in joining Miss Leslie. He emphasized all the obvious advantages—complete change of environment, freedom from financial worry, and so on; then he paused. . . .
"And there's another point, Mr. Hunt," he began again, doubtfully this time: "Prof. Farmer and I were talking about it only the other day. We were wondering whether we oughtn't to speak to you. But it's not the easiest thing to speak of—it's so sort of vague—kind of a feeling in the air."
I knew at once what he referred to, and nodded my head. "So you and Phil have noticed it too!"
"Oh, you'reonthen? I'm glad of that, sir. You've never mentioned anything, so Prof. Farmer and I couldn't be sure. But it's got under our skins that it might make a lot of trouble and something ought to be done about it. It's hard to see what."
"Very," I agreed. "Fire ahead, Jimmy. Tell me exactly what has come to you—to you, personally, I mean."
"Well," said Jimmy, leaning across the table to me and lowering his voice, "it was all of three weeks ago. I went to a dance at the Lawn Club. I don't dance very well, but I figure a fellow ought to know how if he ever has to, so I've slipped in a few lessons. I can keep off my partner's feet, anyway. Well, Steve Putnam took me round that night and introduced me to some girls. I guess if they'd known my mother was living in New Haven and married to a grocer, they wouldn't have had anything to do with me. Maybe I ought to advertise the fact, but Idon't—simply because I can't stand for my stepfather, and so mother won't stand for me. Mother and I never could get on, though; and it's funny, too—as a general rule I can get on with 'most everybody. I told Prof. Farmer the other night there must be something wrong with a fellow who can't get on with his own mother—but he only laughed. Of course, Mr. Hunt, I'm not exactly sailing under false pretenses, either; if any girl wanted to make real friends with me—I'd tell her all about myself first."
"Of course," I murmured.
"And the same with men. Steve, for instance. He knows all about me, and his father has a lot of money, but he made it in soap—and Steve's from the West, anyway, and don't care. Gee, I'm wandering—it's the ale, I guess, Mr. Hunt; I'm not used to it. The point is. Steve introduced me round, and I like girls all right, but Susan's kind of spoiled me for the way most of them gabble. I can't do that easy, quick-talk very good yet; Steve's a bear at it. Well—I sat out a dance with one of the girls, a Miss Simmons; pretty, too; but she's only a kid. It was her idea, sitting out the dance in a corner—I thought she didn't like the way I handled myself. But that wasn't it. Mr. Hunt, she wanted to pump me; went right at it, too.
"'You know Mr. Hunt awfully well, don't you?' she asked; and after I'd said yes, and we'd sort of sparred round a little, she suddenly got confidential, and a kind of thrilled look came into her eyes, and then she asked me straight out: 'Have you ever heard there was something—mysterious—about poor Mrs. Hunt's death?'
"'No,' I said.
"'Haven't you!' she said, as much as to tell me she knew, all the same, I must have. 'Why, Mr. Kane, it's all over town. Nobody knows anything, but it's terribly exciting! Some people think she committed suicide, all because of that queer Miss Blake. . . . She must be—youknow! And now she's run away to Europe! I believe she was just afraid to stay over here, afraid she might be found out or arrested—or something!'
"That's the way she went on, Mr. Hunt; and, well—naturally, I pooh-poohed it and steered her off, and then she lost interest in me right away. But she's right, Mr. Hunt. There's a lot of that kind of whispered stuff in the air, and I'm mighty glad Susan's off for a year or two where she can't run into it. It'll all die out before she's back again, of course."
"I hope so," was my reply; "but the source of these rumors is very persistent—and very discreet. They start from Mrs. Arthur; they must. But it's impossible to trace them back to her. Jimmy, she means to make New Haven impossible for me, and I've an idea she's likely to succeed. Already, three or four old acquaintances have—well, avoided me, and the general atmosphere's cooling pretty rapidly toward zero. So far as I'm concerned, it doesn't much matter; but it does matter for Susan. She may return to find her whole future clouded by a settled impression that in some way—indirectly—or even, directly—she was responsible for my wife's sudden death."
"It's a damned outrage!" exclaimed Jimmy. "I don't know Mrs. Arthur, but I'd like to wring her neck!"
"So would I, Jimmy; and she knows it. That's why she's finding life these days so supremely worth living."
Jimmy pondered this. "Gee, I hate to think that badly of any woman," he finally achieved; "but I guess it doesn't do to be a fool and think they're all angels—like Susan. Mother's not."
"No, Jimmy, it doesn't do," I responded. "Still, the price for that kind of wisdom is always much higher than it's worth."
"Women," began Jimmy—— But his aphorism somehow escaped him; he decided to light a cigarette instead. . . .
And on this wave of cynicism I floated him off with me toThe Puppet Booth.
From the point of view of eccentric effectiveness andréclamewonders had been wrought with the small, ancient, brick stable on Macdougal Street; but very little had been or could be done for the comfort of its guests. The flat exterior wall had been stuccoed and brilliantly frescoed to suggest the entrance to some probably questionable side-show at a French village fair; and a gay clown with a drum, an adept at amusing local patter, had been stationed before the door to emphasize thefunambulesqueillusion. Within, this atmosphere—as of something gaudy and transitory, the mere lath-and-canvas pitch of a vagabondbanquiste—had been cleverly carried out. The cramped little theater itself struck one as mere scenery, which was precisely the intention. There was clean sawdust on the floor, and the spectators—one hundred of them suffocatingly filled the hall—were provided only with wooden benches, painted a vivid Paris green. These benches had been thoughtfully selected, however, and were less excruciating to sit on than you would suppose. There was, naturally, no balcony; a false pitch-roof had been constructed of rough stable beams, from which hung bannerets in a crying, carefully studied dissonance of strong color, worthy of the barbaric Bakst. The proscenium arch was necessarily a toylike affair, copied, you would say, from theGuinolin the Tuileries Gardens; and the curtain, for a final touch, looked authentic—had almost certainly been acquired, at some expenditure of thought and trouble, from a traveling Elks' Carnival. There was even a false set of footlights to complete the masquerade; a row of oil lamps with tin reflectors. It was all very restless and amusing—and extravagantly make-believe. . . .
Jimmy and I arrived just in time to squeeze down the single narrow side-aisle and into our places in the fourth row. We had no opportunity to glance about us or consult our broad-sheet programs, none to acquire the proper mood of tense expectancy we later succumbed to, before thelights were lowered and the curtain was rolled up in the true antique style. "Gee!" muttered Jimmy, on my left, with involuntary dislike. "Ah!" breathed a maiden, on my right, with entirely voluntary rapture. Someone in the front row giggled, probably a cub reporter doing duty that evening as a dramatic critic; but he was silenced by a sharp hiss from the rear.
The cause for these significant reactions was themise en scèneof the tiny vacant stage. It consisted of three dead-black walls, a dead-black ceiling, and a dead-black floor-cloth. In the back wall there was a high, narrow crimson door with a black knob. A tall straight-legged table and one straight high-backed chair, both lacquered in crimson, were the only furniture, except for a slender crimson-lacquered perch, down right, to which was chained a yellow, green and crimson macaw. And through the crimson door presently entered—undulated, rather—a personable though poisonous young woman in a trailing robe of vivid yellow and green.
The play that followed, happily a brief one, was called—as Jimmy and I learned from our programs at its conclusion—"Polly." It consisted of a monologue delivered by the poisonous young woman to the macaw, occasionally varied byad lib.screams and chuckles from that evil white-eyed bird. From the staccato remarks of the poisonous young woman, we, the audience, were to deduce the erratic eroticism of anâme damnée. It was not particularly difficult to do so, nor was it particularly entertaining. As a little adventure in supercynicism, "Polly," in short, was not particularly successful. It needed, and had not been able to obtain, the boulevard wit of a Sacha Guitry to carry it off. But the poisonous young woman had an exquisitely proportioned figure, and her arms, bare to the slight shoulder-straps, were quite faultless. Minor effects of this kind have, even on Broadway, been known to save more than one bad quarter hour from complete collapse. . . . No, it was not the author's lines that carried us safely through this first fifteen minutes of diluted Strindberg-Schnitzler!And the too deliberately bizarremise en scène, though for a moment it piqued curiosity, had soon proved wearisome, and we were glad—at least, Jimmy and I were—to have it veiled from our eyes.
The curtain rolled down, nevertheless, to ecstatic cries and stubbornly sustained applause. Raised lights revealed an excited, chattering band of the faithful. The poisonous young woman took four curtain calls and would seemingly, from her parting gesture, have drawn us collectively to her fine bosom with those faultless, unreluctant arms. And the maiden on my right shuddered forth to her escort, "I'm thrilled, darling! Feel them—feel my hands—they'remoon-cold!They always are, you know, when I'm thrilled!"
"You can't beat this much, Mr. Hunt," whispered Jimmy, on my left. "It's bughouse."
In a sense, it was; in a truer sense, it was not. A careful analysis of the audience would, I was quickly convinced, have disclosed not merely a saving remnant, but a saving majority of honest workmen in the arts—men and women too solidly endowed with brains and humor for any self-conscious posing or public exhibition of temperament. The genuine freaks among us were a scant handful; but it is the special talent and purpose of your freak to—in Whitman's phrase—"positively appear." Ten able freaks to the hundred can turn any public gathering into a side show; and the freaks of the Village, particularly the females of the species, are nothing if not able. Minna Freund, for example, who was sitting just in front of Jimmy; it would be difficult for any assembly to obliterate Minna Freund! She was, that night, exceptionally repulsive in a sort of yellow silk wrapper, with her sparrow's nest of bobbed Henner hair, and her long, bare, olive-green neck, that so obviously needed to be scrubbed!
Having strung certain entirely unrelated words together and called them "Portents," she had in those days acquired a minor notoriety, and Susan—impishly enjoying my consequent embarrassment—had once introduced me to heras an admirer of her work, at an exhibition of Cubist sculpture. Minna was standing at the time, I recalled, before Pannino's "Study of a Morbid Complex," and she at once informed me that the morbid complex in question had been studied from the life. She had posed her own destiny for Pannino, so she assured me, at three separate moments of psychic crisis, and the inevitable result had been a masterpiece. "How it writhes!" she had exclaimed: but to my uninstructed eyes Pannino's Study did anything but writhe; it was stolidly passive; it looked precisely as an ostrich egg on a pedestal would look if viewed in a slightly convex mirror. . . . How far away all that stupid nonsense seems!
And, suddenly, Jimmy leaped on the bench beside me as if punctured by a pin: "Oh, good Lord, Mr. Hunt!" he groaned. "Look here!"
He had thrust his program before me and was pointing to the third play of the series with an unsteady finger.
"It's the same name," he whispered hoarsely; "the one she's used for her book. Do you think——"
"I'll soon find out," was my answer. "We must know what we're in for, Jimmy!" And just as the lights were lowered for the second play I rose, defying audible unpopularity, and squeezed my way out to the door. That is why I cannot describe for you the second play, a harsh little tragedy of the sweatshops—"Horrible," Jimmy affirmed, "but it kind ofgotme!"—written by an impecunious young man with expensive tastes, who has since won the means of gratifying them along Broadway by concocting for that golden glade his innocently naughty librettos—"Tra-la, Thérèse!" and "Oh, Mercy, Modestine!"
Having sought and interviewed Stalinski—I found him huddled in the tiny box-office, perspiring unpleasantly from nervousness and many soaring emotions—I was back in my seat, more unpopular than ever, in good time for Susan's—it was unquestionably Susan's—play.
But most of you have read, or have seen, or have read about, Susan's play. . . .
It was the sensation of the evening, of many subsequent evenings; and I have often wondered precisely why—for there is in it nothing sensational. Its atmosphere is delicately fantastic; remote, you would say, from the sympathies of a matter-of-fact world, particularly as its fantasy is not the highly sentimentalized make-believe of some popular fairy tale. This fantasy of Susan's is ironic and grave; simple in movement, too—just a few subtle modulations on a single poignant theme. And I ask myself wherein lies its throat-tightening quality, its irresistible appeal? And I find but one answer; an answer which I had always supposed, in my long intellectual snobbery, an undeserved compliment to the human race; a compliment no critic, who was not either dishonest or a fool, could pay mankind.
But what other explanation can be given for the success of Susan's play, both here and in England, than its sheerbeauty?Beauty of substance, of mood, of form, of quiet, heart-searching phrase! It is not called "The Magic Circle," but it might have been; for its magic is genuine, distilled from the depths of Nature, and it casts an unescapable spell—on poets and bankers, on publicans and prostitutes and priests, on all and sundry, equally and alike. It even casts its spell on those who act in it, and no truer triumph can come to an author. I have never seen it really badly played. Susan has never seen it played at all.
On the first wave of this astonishing triumph, Susan's pen-name was swept into the newspapers and critical journals of America and England, and a piquant point for gossip was added by the revelation that "Dax," who for several months had so wittily enlivened the columns ofWhim, was one and the same person. Moreover, it was soon bruited about that the author was a slip of a girl—radiantly beautiful, of course; or why romance concerning her!—and that there was something mysterious, even sinister, in her history.
"A child of the underworld," said one metropolitan journal, in its review of her poems. Popular legend presently connected her, though vaguely, with the criminal classes. I have heard an overdressed woman in a theater lobby earnestly assuring another that she knew for a fact that —— (Susan) had been born in a brothel—"one of those houses, my dear"—and brought up—like Oliver Twist, though the comparison escaped her—to be a thief.
And so it was that the public eye lighted for a little hour on Susan's shy poems. Poetry was said to be looking up in those days; and influential critics in their influential, uninfluenced way suddenly boomed these, saying mostly the wrong things about them, but saying them over and over with energy and persistence. The first edition vanished overnight; a larger second edition was printed and sold out within a week or two; a still larger third edition was launched and disposed of more slowly. Then came the war. . . .
If I can say anything good of the war, it is this: Since seemingly it must have come anyway, sooner or later, so far as Susan is concerned it came just in time. A letter from Phil to Susan, received toward the close of July, 1914, at the château of the Comtesse de Bligny, near Brussels, will tell you why.