Chambers Robert William
Iole
VIII
HARROW looked at his program, then, leaning toward Lissa, whispered: “That is the overture to Attitudes—the program explains it: ‘A series of pale gray notes’—what the deuce!—‘pale gray notes giving the value of the highest light in which the play is pitched’—” He paused, aghast.
“I understand,” whispered the girl, resting her lovely arm on the chair beside him. “Look! The curtain is rising! How my heart beats! Does yours?”
He nodded, unable to articulate.
The curtain rose very, very slowly, upon the first scene of Barnard Haw’s masterpiece of satire; and the lovely firing-line quivered, blue batteries opening very wide, lips half parted in breathless anticipation. And about that time Harrow almost expired as a soft, impulsive hand closed nervously over his.
And there, upon the stage, the human species was delicately vivisected in one act; human frailty exposed, human motives detected, human desire quenched in all the brilliancy of perverted epigram and the scalpel analysis of the astigmatic. Life, love, and folly were portrayed with the remorseless accuracy of an eye doubly sensitive through the stimulus of an intellectual strabismus. Barnard Haw at his greatest! And how he dissected attitudes; the attitude assumed by the lover, the father, the wife, the daughter, the mother, the mistress—proving that virtue, per se, is a pose. Attitudes! How he flayed those who assumed them. His attitude toward attitudes was remorseless, uncompromising, inexorable.
And the curtain fell on the first act, its gray and silver folds swaying in the half-crazed whirlwind of applause.
Lissa’s silky hand trembled in Harrow’s, her grasp relaxed. He dropped his hand and, searching, encountered hers again.
“What do you think of it?” she asked.
“I don’t think there’s any harm in it,” he stammered guiltily, supposing she meant the contact of their interlaced fingers.
“Harm? I didn’t mean harm,” she said. “The play is perfectly harmless, I think.”
“Oh—the play! Oh, that’s just that sort of play, you know. They’re all alike; a lot of people go about telling each other how black white is and that white is always black—until somebody suddenly discovers that black and white are a sort of greenish red. Then the audience applauds frantically in spite of the fact that everybody in it had concluded that black and white were really a shade of yellowish yellow!”
She had begun to laugh; and as he proceeded, excited by her approval, the most adorable gaiety possessed her.
“I never heard anything half so clever!” she said, leaning toward him.
“I? Clever!” he faltered. “You—you don’t really mean that!”
“Why? Don’t you know you are? Don’t you know in your heart that you have said the very thing that I in my heart found no words to explain?”
“Did I, really?”
“Yes. Isn’t it delightful!”
It was; Harrow, holding tightly to the soft little hand half hidden by the folds of her gown, cast a sneaking look behind him, and encountered the fixed and furious glare of his closest friend, who had pinched him.
“Pig!” hissed Lethbridge, “do I sit next or not?”
“I—I can’t; I’ll explain–”
“Do I?”
“You don’t understand–”
“I understand you!”
“No, you don’t. Lissa and I–”
“Lissa!”
“Ya—as! We’re talking very cleverly; I am, too. Wha’d’you wan’ to butt in for?” with sudden venom.
“Butt in! Do you think I want to sit here and look at tha’ damfool play! Fix it or I’ll run about biting!”
Harrow turned. “Lissa,” he whispered in an exquisitely modulated voice, “what would happen if I spoke to your sister Cybele?”
“Why, she’d answer you, silly!” said the girl, laughing. “Wouldn’t you, Cybele?”
“I’ll tell you what I’d like to do,” said Cybele, leaning forward: “I’d like very much to talk to that attractive man who is trying to look at me—only your head has been in the way.” And she smiled innocently at Lethbridge.
So Lissa moved down one. Harrow took her seat, and Cybele dropped gaily into Harrow’s vacant place.
“Now,” she said to Lethbridge, “we can tell each other all sorts of things. I was so glad that you looked at me all the while and so vexed that I couldn’t talk to you. How do you like my new gown? And what is your name? Have you ever before seen a play? I haven’t, and my name is Cybele.”
“It is per—perfectly heavenly to hear you talk,” stammered Lethbridge.
Harrow heard him, turned and looked him full in the eyes, then slowly resumed his attitude of attention: for the poet was speaking:
“The Art of Barnard Haw is the quintessence of simplicity. What is the quintessence of simplicity?” He lifted one heavy pudgy hand, joined the tips of his soft thumb and forefinger, and selecting an atom of air, deftly captured it. “That is the quintessence of simplicity; that is Art!”
He smiled largely on Harrow, whose eyes had become wild again.
“That!” he repeated, pinching out another molecule of atmosphere, “and that!” punching dent after dent in the viewless void with inverted thumb.
On the hapless youth the overpowering sweetness of his smile acted like an anesthetic; he saw things waver, even wabble; and his hidden clutch on Lissa’s fingers tightened spasmodically.
“Thank you,” said the poet, leaning forward to fix the young man with his heavy-lidded eyes. “Thank you for the precious thoughts you inspire in me. Bless you. Our mental and esthetic commune has been very precious to me—very, very precious,” he mooned bulkily, his rich voice dying to a resonant, soothing drone.
Lissa turned to the petrified young man. “Please be clever some more,” she whispered. “You were so perfectly delightful about this play.”
“Child!” he groaned, “I have scarcely sufficient intellect to keep me overnight. You must know that I haven’t understood one single thing your father has been kind enough to say.”
“What didn’t you understand?” she asked, surprised.
“’That!’” He flourished his thumb. “What does ’That!’ mean?”
“Oh, that is only a trick father has caught from painters who tell you how they’re going to use their brushes. But the truth is I’ve usually noticed that they do most of their work in the air with their thumbs.... What else did you not understand?”
“Oh—Art!” he said wearily. “What is it? Or, as Barnard Haw, the higher exponent of the Webberfield philosophy, might say: ‘What it iss? Yess?’”
“I don’t know what the Webberfield philosophy is,” said Lissa innocently, “but Art is only things one believes. And it’s awfully hard, too, because nobody sees the same thing in the same way, or believes the same things that others believe. So there are all kinds of Art. I think the only way to be sure is when the artist makes himself and his audience happier; then that is Art.... But one need not use one’s thumb, you know.”
“The—the way you make me happy? Is that Art?”
“Do I?” she laughed. “Perhaps; for I am happy, too—far, far happier than when I read the works of Henry Haynes. And Henry Haynes is Art. Oh, dear!”
But Harrow knew nothing of the intellectual obstetrics which produced that great master’s monotypes.
“Have you read Double or Quits?” he ventured shyly. “It’s a humming Wall Street story showing up the entire bunch and exposing the trading-stamp swindle of the great department stores. The heroine is a detective and—” She was looking at him so intently that he feared he had said something he shouldn’t. “But I don’t suppose that would interest you,” he muttered, ashamed.
“It does! It is new! I—I never read that sort of a novel. Tell me!”
“Are you serious?”
“Of course. It is perfectly wonderful to think of a heroine being a detective.”
“Oh, she’s a dream!” he said with cautious enthusiasm. “She falls in love with the worst stock-washer in Wall Street, and pushes him off a ferry-boat when she finds he has cornered the trading-stamp market and is bankrupting her father, who is president of the department store trust–”
“Go on!” she whispered breathlessly.
“I will, but–”
“What is it? Oh—is it my hand you are looking for? Here it is; I only wanted to smooth my hair a moment. Now tell me; for I never, never knew that such books were written. The books my father permits us to read are not concerned with all those vital episodes of every-day life. Nobody ever does anything in the few novels I am allowed to read—except, once, in Cranford, somebody gets up out of a chair in one chapter—but sits down again in the next,” she added wearily.
“I’ll send you something to make anybody sit up and stay up,” he said indignantly. “Baffles, the Gent Burglar; Love Militant, by Nora Norris Newman; The Crown-Snatcher, by Reginald Rodman Roony—oh, it’s simply ghastly to think of what you’ve missed! This is the Victorian era; you have a right to be fully cognizant of the great literary movements of the twentieth century!”
“I love to hear you say such things,” she said, her beautiful face afire. “I desire to be modern—intensely, humanly modern. All my life I have been nourished on the classics of ages dead; the literature of the Orient, of Asia, of Europe I am familiar with; the literature of England—as far as Andrew Bang’s boyhood verses. I—all my sisters—read, write, speak, even think, in ten languages. I long for something to read which is vital, familiar, friendly—something of my own time, my own day. I wish to know what young people do and dare; what they really think, what they believe, strive for, desire!”
“Well—well, I don’t think people really do and say and think the things that you read in interesting modern novels,” he said doubtfully. “Fact is, only the tiresome novels seem to tell a portion of the truth; but they end by overdoing it and leave you yawning with a nasty taste in your mouth. I—I think you’d better let your father pick out your novels.”
“I don’t want to,” she said rebelliously. “I want you to.”
He looked at the beautiful, rebellious face and took a closer hold on the hidden hand.
“I wish you—I wish I could choose—everything for you,” he said unsteadily.
“I wish so, too. You are exactly the sort of man I like.”
“Do—do you mean it?”
“Why, yes,” she replied, opening her splendid eyes. “Don’t I show the pleasure I take in being with you?”
“But—would you tire of me if—if we always—forever–”
“Were friends? No.”
“Mo-m-m-more than friends?” Then he choked.
The speculation in her wide eyes deepened. “What do you mean?” she asked curiously.
But again the lone note of the thumped piano signaled silence. In the sudden hush the poet opened his lids with a sticky smile and folded his hands over his abdomen, plump thumbs joined.
“What do you mean?” repeated Lissa hurriedly, tightening her slender fingers around Harrow’s.
“I mean—I mean–”
He turned in silence and their eyes met. A moment later her fingers relaxed limply in his; their hands were still in contact—but scarcely so; and so remained while the Attitudes of Barnard Haw held the stage.
IX
THERE was a young wife behind the footlights explaining to a young man who was not her husband that her marriage vows need not be too seriously considered if he, the young man, found them too inconvenient. Which scared the young man, who was plainly a purveyor of heated air and a short sport. And, although she explained very clearly that if he needed her in his business he had better say so quick, the author’s invention gave out just there and he called in the young wife’s husband to help him out.
And all the while the battery of round blue eyes gazed on unwinking; the poet’s dewlaps quivered with stored emotion, and the spellbound audience breathed as people breathe when the hostess at table attempts to smooth over a bad break by her husband.
“Is that life?” whispered Cybele to Lethbridge, her sensitive mouth aquiver. “Did the author actually know such people? Do you? Is conscience really only an attitude? Is instinct the only guide? Am I—really—bad–”
“No, no,” whispered Lethbridge; “all that is only a dramatist’s attitude. Don’t—don’t look grieved! Why, every now and then some man discovers he can attract more attention by standing on his head. That is all—really, that is all. Barnard Haw on his feet is not amusing; but the same gentleman on his head is worth an orchestra-chair. When a man wears his trousers where other men wear their coats, people are bound to turn around. It is not a new trick. Mystes, the Argive comic poet, and the White Queen, taught this author the value of substituting ‘is’ for ‘is not,’ until, from standing so long inverted, he himself forgets what he means, and at this point the eminent brothers Rogers take up the important work.... Please, please, Cybele, don’t take it seriously!… If you look that way—if you are unhappy, I—I–”
A gentle snore from the poet transfixed the firing-line, but the snore woke up the poet and he mechanically pinched an atom out of the atmosphere, blinking at the stage.
“Precious—very, very precious,” he murmured drowsily. “Thank you—thank everybody—” And he sank into an obese and noiseless slumber as the gray and silver curtain slowly fell. The applause, far from rousing him, merely soothed him; a honeyed smile hovered on his lips which formed the words “Thank you.” That was all; the firing-line stirred, breathed deeply, and folded twelve soft white hands. Chlorippe, twelve, and Philodice, thirteen, yawned, pink-mouthed, sleepy-eyed; Dione, fourteen, laid her golden head on the shoulder of Aphrodite, fifteen.
The finger-tips of Lissa and Harrow still touched, scarcely clinging; they had turned toward one another when the curtain fell. But the play, to them, had been a pantomime of silhouettes, the stage, a void edged with flame—the scene, the audience, the theater, the poet himself as unreal and meaningless as the shadowy attitudes of the shapes that vanished when the phantom curtain closed its folds.
And through the subdued light, turning noiselessly, they peered at one another, conscious that naught else was real in the misty, golden-tinted gloom; that they were alone together there in a formless, soundless chaos peopled by shapes impalpable as dreams.
“Now tell me,” she said, her lips scarcely moving as the soft voice stirred them like carmine petals stirring in a scented breeze.
“Tell you that it is—love?”
“Yes, tell me.”
“That I love you, Lissa?”
“Yes; that!”
He stooped nearer; his voice was steady and very low, and she leaned with bent head to listen, clear-eyed, intelligent, absorbed.
“So that is love—what you tell me?”
“Yes—partly.”
“And the other part?”
“The other part is when you find you love me.”
“I—do. I think it must be love, because I can’t bear to have you go away. Besides, I wish you to tell me—things.”
“Ask me.”
“Well—when two—like you and me, begin to love—what happens?”
“We confess it–”
“I do; I’m not ashamed.... Should I be? And then?”
“Then?” he faltered.
“Yes; do we kiss?… For I am curious to have you do it—I am so certain I shall adore you when you do.... I wish we could go away somewhere together.... But we can’t do that until I am a bride, can we? Oh—do you really want me?”
“Can you ask?” he breathed.
“Ask? Yes—yes.... I love to ask! Your hand thrills me. We can’t go away now, can we? It took Iole so long to be permitted to go away with Mr. Wayne—all that time lost in so many foolish ways—when a girl is so impatient.... Is it not strange how my heart beats when I look into your eyes? Oh, there can be no doubt about it, I am dreadfully in love.... And so quickly, too. I suppose it’s because I am in such splendid health; don’t you?”
“I—I—well–”
“Oh, I do want to get up at once and go away with you! Can’t we? I could explain to father.”
“Wait!” he gasped, “he—he’s asleep. Don’t speak—don’t touch him.”
“How unselfish you are,” she breathed. “No, you are not hurting my fingers. Tell me more—about love and the blessed years awaiting us, and about our children—oh, is it not wonderful!”
“Ex—extremely,” he managed to mutter, touching his suddenly dampened forehead with his handkerchief, and attempting to set his thoughts in some sort of order. He could not; the incoherence held him speechless, dazed, under the magic of this superb young being instinct with the soft fire of life.
Her loveliness, her innocence, the beautiful, direct gaze, the childlike fulness of mouth and contour of cheek and throat, left him spellbound. The very air around them seemed suffused with the vital glow of her youth and beauty; each breath they drew increased their wonder, till the whole rosy universe seemed thrilling and singing at their feet, and they two, love-crowned, alone, saw Time and Eternity flowing like a golden tide under the spell of Paradise.
“Jim!”
The hoarse whisper of Lethbridge shook the vision from him; he turned a flushed countenance to his friend; but Cybele spoke:
“We are very tired sitting here. We would like to take some tea at Sherry’s,” she whispered. “What do you think we had better do? It seems so—so futile to sit here—when we wish to be alone together–”
“You and Henry, too!” gasped Harrow.
“Yes; do you wonder?” She leaned swiftly in front of him; a fragrant breeze stirred his hair. “Lissa, I’m desperately infatuated with Mr. Lethbridge. Do you see any use in our staying here when I’m simply dying to have him all to myself somewhere?”
“No, it is silly. I wish to go, too. Shall we?”
“You need not go,” began Cybele; then stopped, aware of the new magic in her sister’s eyes. “Lissa! Lissa!” she said softly. “You, too! Oh, my dear—my dearest!”
“Dear, is it not heavenly? I—I—was quite sure that if I ever had a good chance to talk to a man I really liked something would happen. And it has.”
“If Philodice might awaken father perhaps he would let us go now,” whispered Cybele. “Henry says it does not take more than an hour–”
“To become a bride?”
“Yes; he knows a clergyman very near–”
“Do you?” inquired Lissa. Lethbridge nodded and gave a scared glance at Harrow, who returned it as though stunned.
“But—but,” muttered the latter, “your father doesn’t know who we are–”
“Oh, yes, he does,” said Cybele calmly, “for he sent you the tickets and placed us near you so that if we found that we liked you we might talk to you–”
“Only he made a mistake in your name,” added Lissa to Harrow, “for he wrote ‘Stanley West, Esq.’ on the envelope. I know because I mailed it.”
“Invited West—put you where you could—good God!”
“What is the matter?” whispered Lissa in consternation; “have—have I said anything I should not?” And, as he was silent: “What is it? Have I hurt you—I who–”
There was a silence; she looked him through and through and, after a while, deep, deep in his soul, she saw, awaking once again, all he had deemed dead—the truth, the fearless reason, the sweet and faultless instinct of the child whose childhood had become a memory. Then, once more spiritually equal, they smiled at one another; and Lissa, pausing to gather up her ermine stole, passed noiselessly out to the aisle, where she stood, perfectly self-possessed, while her sister joined her, smiling vaguely down at the firing-line and their lifted battery of blue, inquiring eyes.
The poet—and whether he had slumbered or not nobody but himself is qualified to judge—the poet pensively opened one eye and peeped at Harrow as that young man bent beside him with Lethbridge at his elbow.
“In sending those two tickets you have taught us a new creed,” whispered Harrow; “you have taught us innocence and simplicity—you have taught us to be ourselves, to scorn convention, to say and do what we believe. Thank you.”
“Dear friend,” said the poet in an artistically-modulated whisper, “I have long, long followed you in the high course of your career. To me the priceless simplicity of poverty: to you the responsibility for millions. To me the daisy, the mountain stream, the woodchuck and my Art! To you the busy mart, the haunts of men, the ship of finance laden with a nation’s wealth, the awful burden of millions for which you are answerable to One higher!” He raised one soft, solemn finger.
The young men gazed at one another, astounded. Lethbridge’s startled eyes said, “He still takes you for Stanley West!”
“Let him!” flashed the grim answer back from the narrowing gaze of Harrow.
“Daughters,” whispered the poet playfully, “are you so soon tired of the brilliant gems of satire which our master dramatist scatters with a lavish–”
“No,” said Cybele; “we are only very much in love.”
The poet sat up briskly and looked hard at Harrow.
“Your—your friend?” he began—“doubtless associated with you in the high–”
“We are inseparable,” said Harrow calmly, “in the busy marts.”
The sweetness of the poet’s smile was almost overpowering.
“To discuss this sudden—ah—condition which so—ah—abruptly confronts a father, I can not welcome you to my little home in the wild—which I call the House Beautiful,” he said. “I would it were possible. There all is quiet and simple and exquisitely humble—though now, through the grace of my valued son, there is no mortgage hanging like the brand of Damocles above our lowly roof. But I bid you welcome in the name of my son-in-law, on whom—I should say, with whom—I and my babes are sojourning in this clamorous city. Come and let us talk, soul to soul, heart to heart; come and partake of what simples we have. Set the day, the hour. I thank you for understanding me.”
“The hour,” replied Harrow, “will be about five P.M. on Monday afternoon.... You see, we are going out now to—to–”
“To marry each other,” whispered Lissa with all her sweet fearlessness. “Oh, dear! there goes that monotonous piano and we’ll be blocking people’s view!”
The poet tried to rise upon his great flat feet, but he was wedged too tightly; he strove to speak, to call after them, but the loud thumping notes of the piano drowned his voice.
“Chlorippe! Dione! Philodice! Tell them to stop! Run after them and stay them!” panted the poet.
“You go!” pouted Dione.
“No, I don’t want to,” explained Chlorippe, “because the curtain is rising.”
“I’ll go,” sighed Philodice, rising to her slender height and moving up the aisle as the children of queens moved once upon a time. She came back presently, saying: “Dear me, they’re dreadfully in love, and they have driven away in two hansoms.”
“Gone!” wheezed the poet.
“Quite,” said Philodice, staring at the stage and calmly folding her smooth little hands.
