“A collaborator?”
“Yes.”
“I’m so sorry that I could not be useful.”
“Would you try?”
“What is the use? I am utterly unskilled and inexperienced.”
“I’d be very glad to have you try,” he repeated.
XI
After a moment she rose, went over and knelt down in the sand before the miniature city, studying the situation. All she could see of the lead hero in the bowler hat were his legs protruding from the drain.
“Is this battery of artillery still shelling him?” she inquired, looking over her shoulder at Smith.
He went over and dropped on his knees beside her.
“You see,” he explained, “our hero is still under water.”
“All this time!” she exclaimed in consternation. “He’ll drown, won’t he?”
“He’ll drown unless he can crawl into that drain.”
“Then he must crawl into it immediately,” she said with decision.
So he of the bowler was marched along a series of pegs indicating the subterranean drain, and set down in the court of the castle.
“Good heavens!” exclaimed the Lady Alene. “We can’t leave him here! They will know him by his bowler hat!”
“No,” said Smith gloomily, “we can’t leave him here. But what can we do? If he runs out they’ll fire at him by platoons.”
“Couldn’t they miss him?” pleaded the girl.
“I’m afraid not. He has already lived through several showers of bullets.”
“But he can’t die here! — here under the very eyes of the Princess!” she insisted.
“Then,” said Smith, “the Princess will have to pull him through. It’s up to her now.”
The girl knelt there in excited silence, studying the problem intently.
It was bad business. The battlements bristled with bayonets; outside, cavalry, infantry, artillery were massed to destroy the gentleman in the bowler hat.
Presently the flush deepened on the girl’s cheeks; she took the bowler hat between her gloved fingers and set its owner in the middle of the moat again.
“Doesn’t he crawl into the drain?” asked Smith anxiously.
“No. But the soldiers in the castle think he does. So,” she continued with animation, “the brutal commander rushes downstairs, seizes a candle, and enters the drain from the castle court with about a thousand soldiers!”
“But — —”
“With about ten thousand soldiers!” she repeated firmly. “And no sooner — no sooner — does their brutal and cowardly commander enter that drain with his lighted candle than the Princess runs downstairs, seizes a hatchet, severs the gas main with a single blow, and pokes the end of the pipe into the drain!”
“B-but — —” stammered Smith, “I think — —”
“Oh, please wait! You don’t understand what is coming.”
“What is coming?” ventured Smith timidly, instinctively closing both ears with his fingers.
“Bang!” said Lady Alene triumphantly. And struck the city of sand with her small, gloved hand.
After a silence, still kneeling there, they turned and looked at each other through the red sunset light.
“The explosion of gas killed them both,” said Smith, in an awed voice.
“No.”
“What?”
“No. The explosion killed everybody in the city except those two young lovers,” she said.
“But why?”
“Because!”
“By what logic — —”
“I desire it to be so, Mr. Smith.” And she picked up the bowler hat and the Princess and calmly set them side by side amid the ruins.
After a moment Smith reached over and turned the two lead figures so that they faced each other.
There was a long silence. The red sunset light faded from the sand.
Then, very slowly, the girl reached out, took the bowler hat between her small thumb and forefinger, and gently inclined the gentleman forward at the slightest of perceptible angles.
After a moment Smith inclined him still farther forward. Then, with infinite precaution, he tipped forward the Princess, so that between her lips and the lips of the bowler hat only the width of a grass blade remained.
The Lady Alene looked up at him over her left shoulder, hesitated, looked at bowler hat and at the Princess. Then, supporting her weight on one hand, with the other she merely touched the Princess — delicately — so that not even a blade of grass could have been slipped between their painted lips.
She was a trifle pale as she sank back on her knees in the sand. Smith was paler.
After both her gloved hands had rested across his palm for five full minutes, his fingers closed over them, tightly, and he leaned forward a little. She, too, swayed forward a trifle. Her eyes were closed when he kissed her.
Now, whatever misgivings and afterthoughts the Lady Alene Innesly may have had, she was nevertheless certain that to resist Smith was to fight against the stars in their courses. For not only was she in the toils of an American, but more hopeless still, an American who chronicled the most daring and headlong idiosyncrasies of the sort of young men of whom he was very certainly an irresistible example.
To her there was something Shakespearean about the relentless sequence of events since the moment when she had first succumbed to the small, oblong pink package, and her first American novel.
And, thinking Shakespeareanly as she stood in the purple evening light, with his arm clasping her waist, she looked up at him from her charming abstraction:
“‘If ‘twere done,’” she murmured, “‘when ’tis done, then ‘twere well it were done quickly.’” And then, gazing deep into his eyes, a noble idiom of her adopted country fell from her lips:
“Dearest,” she said, “my father won’t do a thing to you.”
And so she ran away with him to Miami where the authorities, civil and religious, are accustomed to quick action.
It was only fifty miles by train, and preliminary telephoning did the rest.
The big chartered launch that left for Verbena Inlet next morning poked its nose out of the rainbow mist into the full glory of the rising sun. Her golden head lay on his shoulder.
Sideways, with delicious indolence, she glanced at a small boat which they were passing close aboard. A fat gentleman, a fat lady, and a boatman occupied the boat. The fat gentleman was fast to a tarpon.
Up out of the dazzling Atlantic shot three hundred pounds of quivering silver. Splash!
“Why, Dad!” exclaimed the girl.
Her father and mother looked over their shoulders at her in wooden amazement.
“We are married — —” called out their pretty daughter across the sunlit water. “I will tell you all about it when you land your fish. Look sharp, Dad! Mind your reel!”
“Who is that damned rascal?” demanded the Duke.
“My husband, Dad! Don’t let him get away! — the fish, I mean. Put the drag on! Check!”
Said his Grace of Pillchester in a voice of mellow thunder:
“If I were not fast to my first tarpon — —”
“Reel in!” cried Smith sharply, “reel or you lose him!”
The Duke reeled with all the abandon of a squirrel in a wheel.
“Dearest,” said Mrs. John Smith to her petrified mother, “we will see you soon at Verbena. And don’t let Dad over-play that fish. He always over-plays a salmon, you know.”
The Duchess folded her fat hands and watched her departing offspring until the chartered launch was a speck on the horizon. Then she looked at her husband.
“Fancy!” she said.
“Nevertheless,” remarked the youthful novelist, coldly, “there is nothing on earth as ignoble as a best-seller.”
“I wonder,” ventured Duane, “whether you know which books actually do sell the best.”
“Or which books of bygone days were the best-sellers?”
“Some among them ar
e still best-sellers,” added Athalie.
“A truly important book — —” began the novelist, but Athalie interrupted him:
“O solemn child,” she said, “write on! — and thank the gods for their important gifts to you of hand and mind! So that you keep tired eyes awake that otherwise would droop to brood on pain or sorrow you have done well; and what you have written to this end will come nearer being important than anything you ever write.”
“True, by the nine muses!” exclaimed Stafford with emphasis. Athalie glanced at him out of sweetly humourous eyes.
“There is a tenth muse,” she said. “Did you never hear of her?”
“Never! Where did you discover her, Athalie?”
“Where I discover many, many things, my friend.”
“In your crystal?” I said. She nodded slowly while the sweetmeat was dissolving in her mouth.
Through the summer silence a bell here and there in the dusky city sounded the hour.
“The tenth muse,” she repeated, “and I believe there are other sisters, also. Many a star is suspected before its unseen existence is proven.... Please — a glass of water?”
XII
She sipped the water pensively as we all returned to our places. Then, placing the partly empty glass beside her jar of sweetmeats, she opened her incomparable lips.
It is a fine thing when a young man, born to travel the speedway of luxury, voluntarily leaves it to hew out a pathway for himself through life. Brown thought so, too. And at twenty-four he resolutely graduated from Harvard, stepped out into the world, and looked about him very sternly.
All was not well with the world. Brown knew it. He was there to correct whatever was wrong. And he had chosen Good Literature as the vehicle for self expression.
Now, the nine sister goddesses are born flirts; and every one of them immediately glanced sideways at Brown, who was a nice young man with modesty, principles, and a deep and reverent belief in Good Literature.
The nine daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne seemed very attractive to him until the tenth and most recent addition to the Olympian family sauntered by with a flirt of her narrow skirt — the jade!
One glance into the starry blue wells of her baby eyes bowled him over. Henceforth she was to be his steady — Thalomene, a casual daughter of Zeus, and muse of all that is sacredly obvious in the literature of modern realism.
From early infancy Brown’s had been a career of richest promise. His mother’s desk was full of his earlier impressions of life. He had, in course of time, edited his school paper, his college paper; and, as an undergraduate, he had appeared in the contributor’s columns of various periodicals.
His was not only a wealthy but a cultivated lineage as well. The love of literature was born in him.
To love literature is all right in its way; to love it too well is to mistake the appreciative for the creative genius. Reverence and devotion are no equipment for creative authorship. It is not enough to have something to say about what other people have said. And the inspiration which comes from what others have done is never the true one. But Brown didn’t know these things. They were not revealed unto him at Harvard; no inward instinct made them plain to him.
He began by foregathering with authors. Many, many authors foregather, from various causes — tradition, inclination, general shiftlessness. When they do that they produce a sort of serum called literary atmosphere, which is said to be delightful. And so Brown found it. However, there are authors who seem to be too busy with their profession to foregather and exhale atmosphere. But these are doubtless either literary hacks or the degraded producers of best-sellers. They are not authors, either; they are merely writers.
Now, in all the world there is only one thing funnier than an author; and that is a number of them. But Brown didn’t know that, either.
All authors are reformers. Said one of them to Brown in the Empyrean Club:
“When an author in his own heart ceases to be a reformer he begins to be a menace!”
It was a fine sentiment, and Brown wrote it in his note-book. Afterward, the more he analyzed it the less it seemed to mean.
Another author informed him that the proper study for man is man. He’d heard that before, but the repetition steeled his resolve. And his resolve was to reproduce in literature exactly what he observed about him; nothing more, nothing less.
There was to be no concession to imagination, none to convention, none to that insidious form of human weakness known as good taste. As for art, Brown already knew what Art really was.
There was art enough for anybody in sheer truth, enough in the realism made up of photographic detail, recorded uncompromisingly in ordered processional sequence. After all, there was really no beauty in the world except the beauty of absolute truth. All other alleged beauty was only some form of weakness. Thus Brown, after inhaling literary atmosphere.
Like the majority of young men, Brown realised that only a man, and a perfectly fearless, honest, and unprejudiced one, was properly equipped to study woman and tell the entire truth about her in literature.
So he began his first great novel— “The Unquiet Sex” — and he made heavy weather of it that autumn — what with contributing to the literary atmosphere every afternoon and evening at various clubs and cafés — not to mention the social purlieus into which he ventured with the immortal lustre already phosphorescent on his brow. Which left him little time for mere writing. It is hard to be an author and a writer, too.
The proper study for man being woman, Brown studied her solemnly and earnestly. He studied his mother and his sisters, boring them to the verge of distraction; he attempted to dissect the motives which governed the behaviour of assorted feminine relatives, scaring several of the more aged and timorous, agitating others, and infuriating one or two — until his father ordered him to desist.
House-maids, parlour-maids, ladies’-maids, waitresses, all fought very shy of him; for true to his art, he had cast convention aside and had striven to fathom the souls and discover the hidden motives imbedded in Milesian, Scandinavian and Briton.
“The thing for me to do,” said Brown rather bitterly to his father, “is to go out into the world and investigate far and wide.”
“Investigate what?” asked his father.
“Woman!” said Brown sturdily.
“There’s only one trouble about that.”
“What’s that?”
“Woman,” said his father, “is likely to do the investigating. This household knows more about you than you do about it.”
Brown smiled. So did his father.
“Son,” said the latter, “what have you learned about women without knowing anything about them?”
“Nothing, naturally,” said Brown.
“Then you will never have anything more than that to say about them,” remarked Brown senior.
“Why not?”
“Because the only thing possible for a man to say about them is what his imagination dictates. He’ll never learn any more concerning women than that.”
“Imagination is not literature,” said Brown junior, with polite toleration.
“Imagination is often the truer truth,” said the old gentleman.
“Father, that is rot.”
“Yes, my son — and it is almost Good Literature, too. Go ahead, shake us if you like. But, if you do, you’ll come back married.”
XIII
So Brown, who was nourishing a theory, shook his family and, requiring mental solitude to develop his idea, he went to Verbena Inlet. Not to the enormous and expensive caravansary swarming with wealth, ennui, envy, and fashion; not even to its sister hotel similarly infested. But to West Verbena, where for a mile along the white shell road modest hotels, boarding houses, and cottages nestled behind mosquito screens under the dingy cabbage-palmettos.
Here was stranded the winter driftwood from the North — that peculiar flotsam and jetsam which summered in similar resorts in the North, rocked in rocking chairs on d
reary rural verandas, congregated at the village post-office, awaited its men folk every week-end from the filthy and sweltering metropolis.
It was at a shabby but pretentious hostelry called the Villa Hibiscus that Brown took up his quarters. Several rusty cabbage-palmettos waved above the whitish, sandy soil surrounding it; one or two discouraged orange trees fruited despondently near the veranda. And the place swarmed with human beings from all over the United States, lured from inclement climes, into the land of the orange and the palm — wistfully seeking in the land of advertised perpetual sunshine what the restless world has never yet discovered anywhere — surcease from care, from longing, from the unkindliness of its fellow seekers.
Dowdiness filled the veranda rocking chairs; unlovely hands were folded; faded eyes gazed vacantly at the white road, at the oranges; enviously at the flashing wheels and fluttering lingerie from the great Hotel Verbena.
Womanhood was there in all its ages and average phases; infancy, youth, middle age, age — all were there in the rusty villas and hotels ranged for a mile along the smooth shell road.
The region, thought Brown to himself, was rich in material. And the reflection helped him somewhat with his dinner, which needed a fillip or two.
In his faultless dinner jacket he sauntered out after the evening meal; and the idea which possessed and even thrilled him aided him to forget what he had eaten.
The lagoon glimmered mysteriously in the starlight; the royal palms bordering it rustled high in the night breeze from the sea. Perfume from oleander hedges smote softly the olfactories of Brown; the southern whip-poor-wills’ hurried whisper thrilled the darkness with a deeper mystery.
Here was the place to study woman. There could be no doubt about that. Here, untrammelled, uninterrupted, unvexed by the jarring of the world, he could place his model, turn her loose, and observe her.
To concentrate all his powers of analytical observation upon a single specimen of woman was his plan. Painters and sculptors used models. He meant to use one, too.
It would be simple. First, he must discover what he wanted. This accomplished, he had decided to make a plain business proposition to her. She was to go about her own affairs and her pleasure without embarrassment or self-consciousness — behave naturally; do whatever it pleased her to do. But he was to be permitted to observe her, follow her, make what notes he chose; and, as a resumé of each day, they were to meet in some quiet spot in order that he might question her as he chose, concerning whatever interested him, or whatever in her movements or behaviour had seemed to him involved or inexplicable.
Works of Robert W Chambers Page 677
