by R. W. Heilig
"Hello, Chance! How are you, old man?" the intruder cried, with a laugh
in his voice. Then, noticing Gardner, he shook hands with the great man
unceremoniously, with the nonchalance of the healthy young animal bred
in the atmosphere of an American college.
His touch seemed to thrill Gardner, who breathed heavily and then stepped
to the window, as if to conceal the flush of vitality on his cheek.
It was a breath of springtide that Jack had brought with him. Youth is a
Prince Charming. To shrivelled veins the pressure of his hand imparts a
spark of animation, and middle age unfolds its petals in his presence,
as a sunflower gazing at late noon once more upon its lord.
"I have come to take Chance away from you," said Jack. "He looks a
trifle paler than usual, and a day's outing will stir the red corpuscles
in his blood."
"I have no doubt that you will take very good care of him," David
replied.
"Where shall we go?" Chance asked, absent-mindedly.
But he did not hear the answer, for David's scepticisms had more
deeply impressed him than he cared to confess to himself.
VII
The two boys had bathed their souls in the sea-breeze, and their eyes in
light.
The tide of pleasure-loving humanity jostling against them had carried
their feet to the "Lion Palace." From there, seated at table and
quenching their thirst with high-balls, they watched the feverish
palpitations of the city's life-blood pulsating in the veins of Coney
Island, to which they had drifted from Brighton Beach.
Chance blew thoughtful rings of smoke into the air.
"Do you notice the ferocious look in the mien of the average frequenter
of this island resort?" he said to Jack, whose eyes, following the
impulse of his more robust youth, were examining specimens of feminine
flotsam on the waves of the crowd.
"It is," he continued, speaking to himself for want of an audience,
"the American who is in for having a 'good time.' And he is going to get
it. Like a huntsman, he follows the scent of happiness; but I warrant
that always it eludes him. Perhaps his mad race is only the epitome of
humanity's vain pursuit of pleasure, the eternal cry that is never
answered."
But Jack was not listening. There are times in the life of every man
when a petticoat is more attractive to him than all the philosophy of
the world.
Chance was a little hurt, and it was not without some silent
remonstrance that he acquiesced when Jack invited to their table two
creatures that once were women.
"Why?"
"But they are interesting."
"I cannot find so."
They both had seen better times--of course. Then money losses came, with
work in shop or factory, and the voice of the tempter in the commercial
wilderness.
One, a frail nervous little creature, who had instinctively chosen a
seat at Chance's side, kept prattling in his ear, ready to tell the
story of her life to any one who was willing to treat her to a drink.
Something in her demeanour interested him.
"And then I had a stroke of luck. The manager of a vaudeville was my
friend and decided to give me a trial. He thought I had a voice. They
called me Betsy, the Hyacinth Girl. At first it seemed as if people
liked to hear me. But I suppose that was because I was new. After a
month or two they discharged me."
"And why?"
"I suppose I was just used up, that's all."
"Frightful!"
"I never had much of a voice--and the tobacco smoke--and the wine--I
love wine."
She gulped down her glass.
"And do you like your present occupation?"
"Why not? Am I not young? Am I not pretty?"
This she said not parrotwise, but with a simple coquettishness that was
all her own.
On the way to the steamer a few moments later, Chance asked,
half-reproachfully: "Jack--and you really enjoyed this conversation?"
"Didn't you?"
"Do you mean this?"
"Why, yes; she was--very agreeable."
Chance frowned.
"We're twenty, Chance. And then, you see, it's like a course in
sociology. Susie--"
"Susie, was that her name?"
"Yes."
"So she had a name?"
"Of course."
"She shouldn't. It should be a number."
"They may not be pillars of society; still, they're human."
"Yes," said Chance, "that is the most horrible part of it."
VIII
The moon was shining brightly.
Swift and sure the prow of the night-boat parted the silvery foam.
The smell of young flesh. Peals of laughter. A breathless pianola. The
tripping of dancing-feet. Voices husked with drink and voices soft with
love. The shrill accents of vulgarity. Hustling waiters. Shop-girls.
Bourgeois couples. Tired families of four and upward. Sleeping children.
A boy selling candy. The crying of babies.
The two friends were sitting on the upper deck, muffled in their long
rain-coats.
In the distance the Empire City rose radiant from the mist.
"Say, Chance, you should spout some poetry as of old. Are your lips
stricken mute, or are you still thinking of Coney Island?"
"Oh, no, the swift wind has taken it away. I am clean, I am pure. Life
has passed me. It has kissed me, but it has left no trace."
He looked upon the face of his friend. Their hands met. They felt, with
keen enjoyment, the beauty of the night, of their friendship, and of the
city beyond.
Then Chance's lips moved softly, musically, twitching with a strange
ascetic passion that trembled in his voice as he began:
_"Huge steel-ribbed monsters rise into the air
Her Babylonian towers, while on high,
Like gilt-scaled serpents, glide the swift trains by,
Or, underfoot, creep to their secret lair.
A thousand lights are jewels in her hair,
The sea her girdle, and her crown the sky;
Her life-blood throbs, the fevered pulses fly.
Immense, defiant, breathless she stands there.
"And ever listens in the ceaseless din,
Waiting for him, her lover, who shall come,
Whose singing lips shall boldly claim their own,
And render sonant what in her was dumb,
The splendour, and the madness, and the sin,
Her dreams in iron and her thoughts of stone."_
He paused. The boat glided on. For a long time neither spoke a word.
After a while Jack broke the silence: "And are you dreaming of becoming
the lyric mouth of the city, of giving utterance to all its yearnings,
its 'dreams in iron and its thoughts of stone'?"
"No," replied Chance, simply, "not yet. It is strange to what
impressions the brain will respond. In Gardner's house, in the midst of
inspiring things, inspiration failed me. But while I was with that girl
an idea came to me--an idea, big, real."
"Will it deal with her?"
Chance smiled: "Oh, no. She personally has nothing to do with it. At
least not directly. It was the commotion of blood and--brain. The
air--the change. I don't know
what."
"What will it be?" asked Jack, with interest all alert.
"A play, a wonderful play. And its heroine will be a princess, a little
princess, with a yellow veil."
"What of the plot?"
"That I shall not tell you to-day. In fact, I shall not breathe a word
to any one. It will take you all by surprise--and the public by storm."
"So it will be playable?"
"If I am not very much mistaken, you will see it on Broadway within a
year. And," he added graciously, "I will let you have two box-seats for
the first night."
They both chuckled at the thought, and their hearts leaped within them.
"I hope you will finish it soon," Jack observed after a while. "You
haven't done much of late."
"A similar reflection was on my mind when you came yesterday. That
accounts for the low spirits in which you found me."
"Ah, indeed," Jack replied, measuring Chance with a look of wonder. "But
now your face is aglow. It seems that the blood rushes to your head
swifter at the call of an idea than at the kiss of a girl."
"Thank God!" Chance remarked with a sigh of relief. "Mighty forces
within me are fashioning the limpid thought. Passion may grip us by the
throat momentarily; upon our backs we may feel the lashes of desire and
bathe our souls in flames of many hues; but the joy of activity is the
ultimate passion."
IX
It seemed, indeed, as if work was to Chance what the sting of pleasure
is to the average human animal. The inter-play of his mental forces gave
him the sensuous satisfaction of a woman's embrace. His eyes sparkled.
His muscle tightened. The joy of creation was upon him.
Often very material reasons, like stone weights tied to the wings of a
bird, stayed the flight of his imagination. Magazines were waiting for
his copy, and he was not in the position to let them wait. They supplied
his bread and butter.
Between the bread and butter, however, the play was growing scene by
scene. In the lone hours of the night he spun upon the loom of his fancy
a brilliant weft of swift desire--heavy, perfumed, Oriental--interwoven
with bits of gruesome tenderness. The thread of his own life intertwined
with the thread of the story. All genuine art is autobiography. It is
not, however, necessarily a revelation of the artist's actual self, but
of a myriad of potential selves. Ah, our own potential selves! They are
sometimes beautiful, often horrible, and always fascinating. They loom
to heavens none too high for our reach; they stray to yawning hells
beneath our very feet.
The man who encompasses heaven and hell is a perfect man. But there are
many heavens and more hells. The artist snatches fire from both. Surely
the assassin feels no more intensely the lust of murder than the poet
who depicts it in glowing words. The things he writes are as real to him
as the things that he lives. But in his realm the poet is supreme. His
hands may be red with blood or white with leprosy: he still remains
king. Woe to him, however, if he transcends the limits of his kingdom
and translates into action the secret of his dreams. The throng that
before applauded him will stone his quivering body or nail to the cross
his delicate hands and feet.
Sometimes days passed before Chance could concentrate his mind upon his
play. Then the fever seized him again, and he strung pearl on pearl,
line on line, without entrusting a word to paper. Even to discuss his
work before it had received the final brush-strokes would have seemed
indecent to him.
David, too, seemed to be in a turmoil of work. Chance had little
chance to speak to him. And to drop even a hint of his plans between the
courses at breakfast would have been desecration.
Sunset followed sunset, night followed night. The stripling April had
made room for the lady May. The play was almost completed in Chance's
mind, and he thought, with a little shudder, of the physical travail of
the actual writing. He felt that the transcript from brain to paper
would demand all his powers. For, of late, his thoughts seemed strangely
evanescent; they seemed to run away from him whenever he attempted to
seize them.
The day was glad with sunshine, and he decided to take a long walk in
the solitude of the Palisades, to steady hand and nerve for the final
task.
He told David of his intention, but met with little response.
David's face was wan and bore the peculiar pallor of one who had
worked late at night.
"You must be frightfully busy?" Chance asked, with genuine concern.
"So I am," David replied. "I always work in a white heat. I am
restless, nervous, feverish, and can find no peace until I have given
utterance to all that clamours after birth."
"What is it that is so engaging your mind, the epic of the French
Revolution?"
"Oh, no. I should never have undertaken that. I haven't done a stroke of
work on it for several weeks. In fact, ever since Walkham called, I
simply couldn't. It seemed as if a rough hand had in some way destroyed
the web of my thought. Poetry in the writing is like red hot glass
before the master-blower has fashioned it into birds and trees and
strange fantastic shapes. A draught, caused by the opening of a door may
distort it. But at present I am engaged upon more important work. I am
modelling a vessel not of fine-spun glass, but of molten gold."
"You make me exceedingly anxious to know what you have in store for us.
It seems to me you have reached a point where even you can no longer
surpass yourself."
David smiled. "Your praise is too generous, yet it warms like
sunshine. I will confess that my conception is unique. It combines with
the ripeness of my technique the freshness of a second spring."
Chance was bubbling with anticipated delights. His soul responded to
David's touch as a harp to the winds. "When," he cried, "shall we be
privileged to see it?"
David's eyes were already straying back to his writing table. "If the
gods are propitious," he remarked, "I shall complete it to-night.
To-morrow is my reception, and I have half promised to read it then."
"Perhaps I shall be in the position soon to let you see my play."
"Let us hope so," David replied absent-mindedly. The egotism of the
artist had once more chained him to his work.
X
That night a brilliant crowd had gathered in David Gardner's house.
From the studio and the adjoining salon arose a continual murmur of
well-tuned voices. On bare white throats jewels shone as if in each a
soul were imprisoned, and voluptuously rustled the silk that clung to
the fair slim forms of its bearers in an undulating caress. Subtle
perfumes emanated from the hair and the hands of syren women,
commingling with the soft plump scent of their flesh. Fragrant tapers,
burning in precious crystal globules stained with exquisite colours,
sprinkled their shimmering light over the fashionable assemblage and
lent a false radiance to the faces of the men, while in the hair and the
;
