Chambers Robert William
Iole
XIII
AT the poet’s third Franco-American Conference that afternoon the room was still vibrating with the echoes of Aphrodite’s harp accompaniment to her own singing, and gushing approbation had scarcely ceased, when the poet softly rose and stood with eyes half-closed as though concentrating all the sweetness within him upon the surface of his pursed lips.
A wan young man whose face figured only as a by-product of his hair whispered “Hush!” and several people, who seemed to be more or less out of drawing, assumed attitudes which emphasized the faulty draftsmanship.
“La Poésie!” breathed the poet; “Kesker say la poésie?”
“La poésie—say la vee!” murmured a young woman with profuse teeth.
“Wee, wee, say la vee!” cried several people triumphantly.
“Nong!” sighed the poet, spraying the hushed air with sweetness, “nong! Say pas le vee; say l’Immortalitay!”
After which the poet resumed his seat, and the by-product read, in French verse, “An Appreciation” of the works of Wilhelmina Ganderbury McNutt.
And that was the limit of the Franco portion of the Conference; the remainder being plain American.
Aphrodite, resting on her tall gilded harp, looked sullenly straight before her. Somebody lighted a Chinese joss-stick, perhaps to kill the aroma of defunct cigarettes.
“Verse,” said the poet, opening his heavy lids and gazing around him with the lambent-eyed wonder of a newly-wakened ram, “verse is a necklace of tinted sounds strung idly, yet lovingly, upon stray tinseled threads of thought.... Thank you for understanding; thank you.”
The by-product in the corner of the studio gathered arms and legs into a series of acute angles, and writhed; a lady ornamented with cheek-bones well sketched in, covered her eyes with one hand as though locked in jiu-jitsu with Richard Strauss.
Aphrodite’s slender fingers, barely resting on the harp-strings, suddenly contracted in a nervous tremor; a low twang echoed the involuntary reflex with a discord.
A young man, whose neck was swathed in a stock à la d’Orsay, bent close to her shoulder.
“I feel that our souls, blindfolded, are groping toward one another,” he whispered.
“Don’t—don’t talk like that!” she breathed almost fiercely; “I am tired—suffocated with sound, drugged with joss-sticks and sandal. I can’t stand much more, I warn you.”
“Are you not well, beloved.”
“Perfectly well—physically. I don’t know what it is—it has come so suddenly—this overwhelming revulsion—this exasperation with scents and sounds.... I could rip out these harp-strings and—and kick that chair over! I—I think I need something—sunlight and the wind blowing my hair loose–”
The young man with the stock nodded. “It is the exquisite pagan athirst in you, scorched by the fire of spring. Quench that sweet thirst at the fount beautiful–”
“What fount did you say?” she asked dangerously.
“The precious fount of verse, dear maid.”
“No!” she whispered violently. “I’m half drowned already. Words, smells, sounds, attitudes, rocking-chairs—and candles profaning the sunshine—I am suffocated, I need more air, more sense and less incense—less sound, less art–”
“Less—what?” he gasped.
“Less art!—what you call ‘l’arr’!—yes, I’ve said it; I’m sick! sick of art! I know what I require now.” And as he remained agape in shocked silence: “I don’t mean to be rude, Mr. Frawley, but I also require less of you.... So much less that father will scarcely expect me to play any more accompaniments to your ‘necklaces of precious tones’—so much less that the minimum of my interest in you vanishes to absolute negation.... So I shall not marry you.”
“Aphrodite—are—are you mad?”
Her sulky red mouth was mute.
Meanwhile the poet’s rich, resonant voice filled the studio with an agreeable and rambling monotone:
“Verse is a vehicle for expression; expression is a vehicle for verse; sound, in itself, is so subtly saturated with meaning that it requires nothing of added logic for its vindication. Sound, therefore, is sense, modified by the mysterious portent of tone. Thank you for understanding, thank you for a thought—very, very precious, a thought beautiful.”
He smeared the air with inverted thumb and smiled at Mr. Frawley, who rose, somewhat agitated, and, crooking one lank arm behind his back, made a mechanical pinch at an atmospheric atom.
“If—if you do that again—if you dare to recite those verses about me, I shall go! I tell you I can’t stand any more,” breathed Aphrodite between her clenched teeth.
The young man cast his large and rather sickly eyes upon her. For a moment he was in doubt, but belief in the witchery of sound prevailed, for he had yet to meet a being insensible to the “music of the soul,” and so with a fond and fatuous murmur he pinched the martyred atmosphere once more, and began, mousily:
All
A tear a year
My pale desire requires,
And that is all.
Enlacements weary, passion tires,
Kisses are cinder-ghosts of fires
Smothered at birth with mortal earth;
And that is all.
A year of fear
My pallid soul desires
And that is all—
Terror of bliss and dread of happiness,
A subtle need of sorrow and distress
And you to weep one tear, no more, no less,
And that is all I ask—
And that is all.
People were breathing thickly; the poet unaffectedly distilled the suggested tear; it was a fat tear; it ran smoothly down his nose, twinkled, trembled, and fell.
Aphrodite’s features had become tense; she half rose, hesitated. Then, as the young man in the stock turned his invalid’s eyes in her direction and began:
Oh, sixteen tears
In sixteen years–
she transfixed her hat with one nervous gesture sprang to her feet, turned, and vanished through the door.
“She is too young to endure it,” sobbed the by-product to her of the sketchy face. And that was no idle epigram, either.
XIV
SHE had no definite idea; all she craved for was the open—or its metropolitan substitute—sunshine, air, the glimpse of sanely preoccupied faces, the dull, quickening tumult of traffic. The tumult grew, increasing in her ears as she crossed Washington Square under the sycamores and looked up through tender feathery foliage at the white arch of marble through which the noble avenue flows away between its splendid arid chasms of marble, bronze, and masonry to that blessed leafy oasis in the north—the Park.
She took an omnibus, impatient for the green rambles of the only breathing-place she knew of, and settled back in her seat, rebellious of eye, sullen of mouth, scarcely noticing the amused expression of the young man opposite.
Two passengers left at Twenty-third Street, three at Thirty-fourth Street, and seven at Forty-second Street.
Preoccupied, she glanced up at the only passenger remaining, caught the fleeting shadow of interest on his face, regarded him with natural indifference, and looked out of the window, forgetting him. A few moments later, accidentally aware of him again, she carelessly noted his superficially attractive qualities, and, approving, resumed her idle inspection of the passing throng. But the next time her pretty head swung round she found him looking rather fixedly at her, and involuntarily she returned the gaze with a childlike directness—a gaze which he sustained to the limit of good breeding, then evaded so amiably that it left an impression rather agreeable than otherwise.
“I don’t see,” thought Aphrodite, “why I never meet that sort of man. He hasn’t art nouveau legs, and his features are not by-products of his hair.... I have told my brothers-in-law that I am old enough to go out without coming out.... And I am.”
The lovely mouth grew sullen again: “I don’t wish to wait two years and be what dreadful newspapers call a ‘bud’! I wish to go to dinners and dances now!… Where I’ll meet that sort of man.... The sort one feels almost at liberty to talk to without anybody presenting anybody.... I’ve a mind to look amiable the next time he–”
He raised his eyes at that instant; but she did not smile.
“I—I suppose that is the effect of civilization on me,” she reflected—“metropolitan civilization. I felt like saying, ‘For goodness’ sake, let’s say something’—even in spite of all my sisters have told me. I can’t see why it would be dangerous for me to look amiable. If he glances at me again—so agreeably–”
He did; but she didn’t smile.
“You see!” she said, accusing herself discontentedly; “you don’t dare look human. Why? Because you’ve had it so drummed into you that you can never, never again do anything natural. Why? Oh, because they all begin to talk about mysterious dangers when you say you wish to be natural.... I’ve made up my mind to look interested the next time he turns.... Why shouldn’t he see that I’m quite willing to talk to him?… And I’m so tired of looking out of the window.... Before I came to this curious city I was never afraid to speak to anybody who attracted me.... And I’m not now.... So if he does look at me–”
He did.
The faintest glimmer of a smile troubled her lips. She thought: “I do wish he’d speak!”
There was a very becoming color in his face, partly because he was experienced enough not to mistake her; partly from a sudden and complete realization of her beauty.
“It’s so odd,” thought Aphrodite, “that attractive people consider it dangerous to speak to one another. I don’t see any danger.... I wonder what he has in that square box beside him? It can’t be a camera.... It can’t be a folding easel! It simply can’t be that he is an artist! a man like that–”
“Are you?” she asked quite involuntarily.
“What?” he replied, astonished, wheeling around.
“An—an artist. I can’t believe it, and I don’t wish to! You don’t look it, you know!”
For a moment he could scarcely realize that she had spoken; his keen gaze dissected the face before him, the unembarrassed eyes, the oval contour, the smooth, flawless loveliness of a child.
“Yes, I am an artist,” he said, considering her curiously.
“I am sorry,” she said, “no, not sorry—only unpleasantly surprised. You see I am so tired of art—and I thought you looked so—so wholesome–”
He began to laugh—a modulated laugh—rather infectious, too, for Aphrodite bit her lip, then smiled, not exactly understanding it all.
“Why do you laugh?” she asked, still smiling. “Have I said something I should not have said?”
But he replied with a question: “Have you found art unwholesome?”
“I—I don’t know,” she answered with a little sigh; “I am so tired of it all. Don’t let us talk about it—will you?”
“It isn’t often I talk about it,” he said, laughing again.
“Oh! That is unusual. Why don’t you talk about art?”
“I’m much too busy.”
“D—doing what? If that is not very impertinent.”
“Oh, making pictures of things,” he said, intensely amused.
“Pictures? You don’t talk about art, and you paint pictures!”
“Yes.”
“W—what kind? Do you mind my asking? You are so—so very unusual.”
“Well, to earn my living, I make full-page pictures for magazines; to satisfy an absurd desire, I paint people—things—anything that might satisfy my color senses.” He shrugged his shoulders gaily. “You see, I’m the sort you are so tired of–”
“But you paint! The artists I know don’t paint—except that way—” She raised her pretty gloved thumb and made a gesture in the air; and, before she had achieved it, they were both convulsed with laughter.
“You never do that, do you?” she asked at length.
“No, I never do. I can’t afford to decorate the atmosphere for nothing!”
“Then—then you are not interested in art nouveau?”
“No; and I never could see that beautiful music resembled frozen architecture.”
They were laughing again, looking with confidence and delight upon one another as though they had started life’s journey together in that ancient omnibus.
“What is a ‘necklace of precious tones’?” she asked.
“Precious stones?”
“No, tones!”
“Let me cite, as an example, those beautiful verses of Henry Haynes,” he replied gravely.
TO BE OR NOT TO BE
I’d rather be a Could Be,
If I can not be an Are;
For a Could Be is a May Be,
With a chance of touching par.
I had rather be a Has Been
Than a Might Have Been, by far;
For a Might Be is a Hasn’t Been
But a Has was once an Are!
Also an Are is Is and Am;
A Was was all of these;
So I’d rather be a Has Been
Than a Hasn’t, if you please.
And they fell a-laughing so shamelessly that the ’bus driver turned and squinted through his shutter at them, and the scandalized horses stopped of their own accord.
“Are you going to leave?” he asked as she rose.
“Yes; this is the Park,” she said. “Thank you, and good-by.”
He held the door for her; she nodded her thanks and descended, turning frankly to smile again in acknowledgment of his quickly lifted hat.
“He was nice,” she reflected a trifle guiltily, “and I had a good time, and I really don’t see any danger in it.”
XV
SHE drew a deep, sweet breath as she entered the leafy shade and looked up into the bluest of cloudless skies. Odors of syringa and lilac freshened her, cleansing her of the last lingering taint of joss-sticks. The cardinal birds were very busy in the scarlet masses of Japanese quince; orioles fluttered among golden Forsythia; here and there an exotic starling preened and peered at the burnished purple grackle, stalking solemnly through the tender grass.
For an hour she walked vigorously, enchanted with the sun and sky and living green, through arbors heavy with wistaria, iris hued and scented, through rambles under tall elms tufted with new leaves, past fountains splashing over, past lakes where water-fowl floated or stretched brilliant wings in the late afternoon sunlight. At times the summer wind blew her hair, and she lifted her lips to it, caressing it with every fiber of her; at times she walked pensively, wondering why she had been forbidden the Park unless accompanied.
“More danger, I suppose,” she thought impatiently.... “Well, what is this danger that seems to travel like one’s shadow, dogging a girl through the world? It seems to me that if all the pleasant things of life are so full of danger I’d better find out what it is.... I might as well look for it so that I’ll recognize it when I encounter it.... And learn to keep away.”
She scanned the flowery thickets attentively, looked behind her, then walked on.
“If it’s robbers they mean,” she reflected, “I’m a good wrestler, and I can make any one of my four brothers-in-law look foolish.... Besides, the Park is full of fat policemen.... And if they mean I’m likely to get lost, or run over, or arrested, or poisoned with soda-water and bonbons—” She laughed to herself, swinging on in her free-limbed, wholesome beauty, scarcely noticing a man ahead, occupying a bench half hidden under the maple’s foliage.
“So I’ll just look about for this danger they are all afraid of, and when I see it, I’ll know what to do,” she concluded, paying not the slightest heed to the man on the bench until he rose, as she passed him, and took off his hat.
“You!” she exclaimed.
She had stopped short, confronting him with the fearless and charming directness natural to her. “What an amusing accident,” she said frankly.
“The truth is,” he began, “it is not exactly an accident.”
“Isn’t it?”
“N—no.... Are you offended?”
“Offended? No. Should I be? Why?… Besides, I suppose when we have finished this conversation you are going the other way.”
“I—no, I wasn’t.”
“Oh! Then you are going to sit here?”
“Y—yes—I suppose so.... But I don’t want to.”
“Then why do you?”
“Well, if I’m not going the other way, and if I’m not going to remain here—” He looked at her, half laughing. She laughed, too, not exactly knowing why.
“Don’t you really mind my walking a little way with you?” he asked.
“No, I don’t. Why should I? Is there any reason? Am I not old enough to know why we should not walk together? Is it because the sun is going down? Is there what people call ‘danger’?”
He was so plainly taken aback that her fair young face became seriously curious.
“Is there any reason why you should not walk with me?” she persisted.
The clear, direct gaze challenged him. He hesitated.
“Yes, there is,” he said.
“A—a reason why you should not walk with me?”
“Yes.”
“What is it?”
And, as he did not find words to answer, she studied him for a moment, glanced up and down the woodland walk, then impulsively seated herself and motioned him to a place beside her on the bench.
“Now,” she said, “I’m in a position to find out just what this danger is that they all warn me about. You know, don’t you?”
“Know what?” he answered.
“About the danger that I seem to run every time I manage to enjoy myself.... And you do know; I see it by the way you look at me—and your expression is just like their expression when they tell me not to do things I find most natural.”
“But—I—you–”
“You must tell me! I shall be thoroughly vexed with you if you don’t.”
Then he began to laugh, and she let him, leaning back to watch him with uncertain and speculative blue eyes. After a moment he said:
“You are absolutely unlike any girl I ever heard of. I am trying to get used to it—to adjust things. Will you help me?”
“How?” she asked innocently.
“Well, by telling me”—he looked at her a moment—“your age. You look about nineteen.”
“I am sixteen and a half. I and all my sisters have developed our bodies so perfectly because, until we came to New York last autumn, we had lived all our lives out-of-doors.” She looked at him with a friendly smile. “Would you really like to know about us?”
“Intensely.”
“Well, there are eight of us: Chlorippe, thirteen; Philodice, fourteen; Dione, fifteen; Aphrodite, sixteen—I am Aphrodite; Cybele, seventeen, married; Lissa, eighteen, married; Iole, nineteen, married, and Vanessa, twenty, married.” She raised one small, gloved finger to emphasize the narrative. “All our lives we were brought up to be perfectly natural, to live, act, eat, sleep, play like primitive people. Our father dressed us like youths—boys, you know. Why,” she said earnestly, “until we came to New York we had no idea that girls wore such lovely, fluffy underwear—but I believe I am not to mention such things; at least they have told me not to—but my straight front is still a novelty to me, and so are my stockings, so you won’t mind if I’ve said something I shouldn’t, will you?”
“No,” he said; his face was expressionless.
“Then that’s all right. So you see how it is; we don’t quite know what we may do in this city. At first we were delighted to see so many attractive men, and we wanted to speak to some of them who seemed to want to speak to us, but my father put a stop to that—but it’s absurd to think all those men might be robbers, isn’t it?”
“Very.” There was not an atom of intelligence left in his face.
“So that’s all right, then. Let me see, what was I saying? Oh, yes, I know! So four of my sisters were married, and we four remaining are being civilized.... But, oh—I wish I could be in the country for a little while! I’m so homesick for the meadows and brooks and my pajamas and my bare feet in sandals again.... And people seem to know so little in New York, and nobody understands us when we make little jests in Greek, or Latin, or Arabic, and nobody seems to have been very well educated and accomplished, so we feel strange at times.”
“D—d—do you do all those things?”
“What things?”
“M—make jests in Arabic?”
“Why, yes. Don’t you?”
“No. What else do you do?”
“Why, not many things.”
“Music?”
“Oh, of course.”
“Piano?”
“Yes, piano, violin, harp, guitar, zither—all that sort of thing.... Don’t you?”
“No. What else?”
“Why—just various things, ride, swim, fence, box—I box pretty well—all those things–”
“Science, too?”
“Rudiments. Of course I couldn’t, for example, discourse with authority upon the heteropterous mictidæ or tell you in what genus or genera the prothorax and femora are digitate; or whether climatic and polymorphic forms of certain diurnal lepidoptera occur within certain boreal limits. I have only a vague and superficial knowledge of any science, you see.”
“I see,” he said gravely.
She leaned forward thoughtfully, her pretty hands loosely interlaced upon her knee.
“Now,” she said, “tell me about this danger that such a girl as I must guard against.”
“There is no danger,” he said slowly.
“But they told me–”
“Let them tell you what it is, then.”
“No; you tell me?”
“I can’t.”
“Why?”
“Because—I simply can’t.”
“Are you ashamed to?”
“Perhaps—” He lifted his boxed sketching-kit by the strap, swung it, then set it carefully upon the ground: “Perhaps it is because I am ashamed to admit that there could be any danger to any woman in this world of men.”
She looked at him so seriously that he straightened up and began to laugh. But she did not forget anything he had said, and she began her questions at once:
“Why should you not walk with me?”
“I’ll take that back,” he said, still laughing; “there is every reason why I should walk with you.”
“Oh!… But you said–”
“All I meant was not for you, but for the ordinary sort of girl. Now, the ordinary, every-day, garden girl does not concern you–”
“Yes, she does! Why am I not like her?”
“Don’t attempt to be–”
“Am I different—very different?”
“Superbly different!” The flush came to his face with the impulsive words.
She considered him in silence, then: “Should I have been offended because you came into the Park to find me? And why did you? Do you find me interesting?”
“So interesting,” he said, “that I don’t know what I shall do when you go away.”
Another pause; she was deeply absorbed with her own thoughts. He watched her, the color still in his face, and in his eyes a growing fascination.
“I’m not out,” she said, resting her chin on one gloved hand, “so we’re not likely to meet at any of those jolly things you go to. What do you think we’d better do?—because they’ve all warned me against doing just what you and I have done.”
“Speaking without knowing each other?” he asked guiltily.
“Yes.... But I did it first to you. Still, when I tell them about it, they won’t let you come to visit me. I tried it once. I was in a car, and such an attractive man looked at me as though he wanted to speak, and so when I got out of the car he got out, and I thought he seemed rather timid, so I asked him where Tiffany’s was. I really didn’t know, either. So we had such a jolly walk together up Fifth Avenue, and when I said good-by he was so anxious to see me again, and I told him where I lived. But—do you know?—when I explained about it at home they acted so strangely, and they never would tell me whether or not he ever came.”
“Then you intend to tell them all about—us?”
“Of course. I’ve disobeyed them.”
“And—and I am never to see you again?”
“Oh, I’m very disobedient,” she said innocently. “If I wanted to see you I’d do it.”
“But do you?”
“I—I am not sure. Do you want to see me?”
His answer was stammered and almost incoherent. That, and the color in his face and the something in his eyes, interested her.
“Do you really find me so attractive?” she asked, looking him directly in the eyes. “You must answer me quickly; see how dark it is growing! I must go. Tell me, do you like me?”
“I never cared so much for—for any woman–.”
She dimpled with delight and lay back regarding him under level, unembarrassed brows.
“That is very pleasant,” she said. “I’ve often wished that a man—of your kind—would say that to me. I do wish we could be together a great deal, because you like me so much already and I truly do find you agreeable.... Say it to me again—about how much you like me.”
“I—I—there is no woman—none I ever saw so—so interesting.... I mean more than that.”
“Say it then.”
“Say what I mean?”
“Yes.”
“I am afraid–”
“Afraid? Of what?”
“Of offending you–”
“Is it an offense to me to tell me how much you like me? How can it offend me?”
“But—it is incredible! You won’t believe–”
“Believe what?”
“That in so short a time I—I could care for you so much–”
“But I shall believe you. I know how I feel toward you. And every time you speak to me I feel more so.”
“Feel more so?” he stammered.
“Yes, I experience more delight in what you say. Do you think I am insensible to the way you look at me?”
“You—you mean—” He simply could not find words.
She leaned back, watching him with sweet composure; then laughed a little and said: “Do you suppose that you and I are going to fall in love with one another?”
