Part 13

“I didn’t mean to put the question so bluntly. The reason I ask is a simple one. I studied a case not unlike the one you narrated. It is just as sordid and commonplace. My artist, also a painter, had married a pupil whom he taught--as much as she could absorb. She hadn’t much talent; it was the sort you see expressed on fans and bon-bon boxes.

“She might have been all right if her admiring friends had not told her that she had more talent than her husband--really, there wasn’t enough between them both to set the river on fire. However, she devilled him so effectually that he took a separate studio to get away from the sound of her voice and from their home. Like your painter, he turned day into night, but with a difference; he made illustrations for the magazines and newspapers, painted cheap portraits, demeaned himself generally to get money enough to run the house. She enjoyed herself, flirted, went into society of some sort, a cheap compromise between Bohemia and the frayed fringe of Fifth Avenue--you may not know the variety, as you are a member of another profession. It is diverting, this society, because it is as false as the hair on the head of its women. The bohemian side largely consists of bad claret, worse music, and ghastly studio teas; its fashionable side, poverty-stricken grand ladies with tarnished reputations. I’ve seen it all. One of the sights of greater Gotham is this glittering set of fakirs. The woman I speak of was whirled off her feet by the cheap show. She was a fresh, pretty little girl when she came here from a small town up State. Her friends were ambitious fools, she was green--and very vain. So vain! Then her name crept into the newspapers; it’s hard work keeping out of them nowadays. She was called ‘The beautiful Mrs. Somebody, who painted exquisite miniatures of socially prominent ladies’; you know the style of such rot? The horror of it! Rather you don’t, for you have never lived in this particular set----”

“But, I do, I do!” cried Marden. “My client told me something of it.” Serle sneered.

“She didn’t tell you much or you might have asked her whether there wasn’t another side to her case. The girl I am talking about went the pace; and, as an old philosopher on the police force remarks: ‘When a woman is heading for hell, don’t try to stop her; it’s a waste of time.’ Her husband saw it and he did try. Her friends knew it and helped her on her merry way. The painter even sent her to Europe, and with her some of her friends to keep her company, if they couldn’t keep her straight. Well--Paris is worse than poison for such women. She was soon back in New York, leaving behind her a sweet record, many unpaid bills and with a half a dozen fools, picked up, God knows where, at her heels. And then he went away. It was too much. However, being a woman, she won all the sympathy. Her story was believed, not his, and----”

“Singular coincidence. But wasn’t the husband to blame a little?”

“Oh!” said Vincent. “Men are always to blame.”

“Could he have forgiven her?”

“He did better, he forgot her.”

“Did she go to the bad?” sympathetically inquired Marden.

“On the contrary. She married well--a professional man of some sort.” He smiled with good-humored malice.

“And is she--is she--right now? I mean is she happy?”

“She will be happy always, a selfish little soul. You mean is her present husband happy?”

“Yes.” Marden leaned back nonchalantly and his hands, lean-fingered, traversed the corner of the table. To Serle the air became as dense as a vapor-bath. He continued, mercilessly:

“Of course he is happy--her husband. Why shouldn’t he be? He doesn’t know.”

“Doesn’t know what? Really, you set me on edge,” exclaimed Marden. He tried to smile, but his upper lip lifted, displaying white eye-teeth. Vincent lighted a fresh cigar. His arm did not tremble now. Then, swallowing the last of his cold coffee, he continued:

“Her husband doesn’t dream the truth of her life in New York and Paris. She is, as I said, very pretty and can pull the wool over any man’s eyes. She is so interesting, so poetic, you know. She plays that little trick of the abused wife with the artistic temperament; plays it off on all the men she meets, on my friends----”

“Your friends?”

“My friends know her as a capricious vixen, masquerading as a delicate oversoul. I knew her once.” (Serle was cool; he had himself well in hand.) “And she always wins and still plays the game. At this moment she is probably fooling her husband, taking tea with some soft-head. She gets her wealthy male friends----”

“How does she get them? Tell me.” Marden’s voice was subdued. “Does she say to her husband that she must secure orders for miniatures by dining with rich fellows? Doesn’t she----”

“Really, my dear sir, I don’t know everything about this clever lady’s method. You seem quite taken with her story. It is, I pride myself, more exciting than your narrative of the artistic temperament.” Vincent’s intonations were markedly sarcastic. The older man’s face was afire.

“Who the devil----”

Benedict came to the table and placatingly asked:

“Is this Mr. Marden?”

“I’m Mr. Marden. What do you want?”

“Madame, your wife, has just arrived. She is in the large salon with a gentleman, and she desires me to ask you to join her.” The men arose.

“It was quite a pleasant afternoon, was it not?” In his most charming manner Serle put out his hand and Marden took it, grudgingly, his shrewd face surly, his little eyes suspiciously fastened on the smiling countenance of his companion. Then he followed the obsequious garçon, and Serle went into the street, first looking after the pair. He discerned Marden at a table on the Fifth Avenue side; with him was a fresh-colored, graceful woman, in elaborate afternoon toilette; a big, overdressed man sat beside her.

Once in a taxi Vincent Serle gave the order to cross over to Madison Avenue.

“I’ll not risk passing that window,” he muttered. “It was a mean trick, but it served the meddling fool right. I wonder which one of us lied the more? And I never saw Amy look so bewitching!”

III

GRINDSTONES

“Yet each man kills the thing he loves, By each let this be heard; Some do it with a bitter look, Some with a flattering word. The coward does it with a kiss, The brave man with a sword.”

--_Oscar Wilde._

It was nearly nine o’clock in the evening when the young ladies entered the fashionable boarding-house drawing-room. Madame Recamier’s, on the upper West Side, was large enough to defy the heated spell; yet the group seemed languid on this tepid night in June, fluttered fans and were not disposed to chatter. No one had called. Miss Anstruther, a brilliant brunette, cried out:

“Oh, my kingdom for a man!” Mild laughter was heard. The girl went to the grand piano and said: “What shall it be?”

“No Chopin,” exclaimed Miss Beeslay.

“Do play a Chopin nocturne. Why, it’s the very night for nocturnes. There’s thunder in the air,” protested Miss Pickett.

“Listen to Anne. Isn’t she poetic--” By this time the young women were quite animated. Tea served, Madame Recamier sent down word by the black page to ask Miss Anstruther for a little music. The dark girl pouted, yawned, and finally began the nocturne in F minor. Before she had played two bars the door-bell rang, and its echoes were not stilled before a silvery gong sounded somewhere in the rear. The drawing-room was instantly deserted.

Presently the page brought in two young men, both in evening dress.

“We should like to see Miss Anstruther and Miss Pickett,” said the delicate-looking fellow. “Say that Mr. Harold and a friend are here.” The page departed. Mr. Harold and his companion paced the long apartment in a curious mood.

“Tea! They don’t drink tea, do they?” asked the other man, a tall blond, who wore his hair like a pianist.

“I’m afraid that’s all we’ll get, Alfred; unless Madame Recamier comes down-stairs or else is magnetized by your playing. She keeps a mighty particular boarding-house.”

“For God’s sake, Ned, don’t ask me to touch a piano. I’ve only come with you because you’ve raved about this dark girl and her playing. There they are!” Two came in; introductions followed, and the conversation soon became lively.

“We drink tea,” said Anne Pickett, “because Madame Recamier believes it is good for the complexion.”

“You have a hygiene like a young misses’ school, haven’t you?” said Ned, while Harold, fascinated by the rather gloomy beauty of Miss Anstruther, watched closely and encouraged her talk. She had a square jaw; her cheek-bones were prominent. She was not pretty. The charm of her face--it was more compelling than charming--lay in her eyes and mouth. Brown, with a hazel nuance, the eyes emitted a light like a cat’s in the dark. Her mouth was a contradiction of the jaw. The lips were full and indicated a rich, generous nature, but the mask was one of a Madonna--a Madonna who had forsaken heaven for earth. Harold found her extremely interesting.

“Of course, you are musical?” he asked.

“Yes; I studied at Stuttgart, and have regretted it all my life. I can never get rid of the technical stiffness.”

“Play for me,” he begged. But playing was not to the girl’s disposition. Sultry was the night, and a few faint flashes of heat-lightning near the horizon told of a storm to come. Anne Pickett was laughing very loudly at her companion’s remarks and did not appear to notice the pair. Several times, at the other end of the long drawing-room, eyes peeped in, and once the black page put his head in the door and coughed discreetly.

It seemed a dull hour at Madame Recamier’s.

Suddenly Harold placed his hand on Miss Anstruther’s and said: “Come to the piano,” and, as one hypnotized, she went with him. He lifted the fall-board, put back the lid, glanced carelessly at the maker’s name, and fixed the seat for the young woman. Anne Pickett was watching him from the other side of the room.

“Who’s your friend? He acts like a piano man. There were three here last night.”

“H’sh!” said Ned, as the pianist struck a firm chord in C-sharp minor and then raced through the Fantaisie-Impromptu. The man beside her listened and watched rather cynically as her strong fingers unlaced the involved figures of the music. That he knew the work was evident. When she had finished he congratulated her on her touch, observing: “What a pity you don’t cultivate your rhythms!” She started.

“You are a musician, then?” Before he could answer, the page came in and whispered in her ear: “Madame Recamier wants to know if the gentlemen will have some wine.”

Miss Anstruther blushed, got up from the piano and walked toward the window. Harold followed her, and Miss Pickett called out: “Ned, we can have some champagne; old Mumsey says so.”

When Harold reached the girl she was leaning out of the window regarding the western sky. Darkness was swallowing up the summer stars: he put his hand on her shoulder, for she was weeping silently, hopelessly.

“How can you stand it?” he murmured, and the ring in his voice caused the girl to turn about and face him, her eyes blurred but full of resentment.

“Don’t pity me--don’t pity me; whatever you feel, don’t pity me,” she said in a low, choked voice.

“My dear Miss Anstruther, let me understand you. I admire you, but I don’t see why I should pity you.” Harold was puzzled.

“Anne, he doesn’t know; Harold doesn’t know,” cried Miss Anstruther, and Anne laughed, when a sharp flash of lightning almost caused the page to drop the tray with the bottles and glasses.

It grew hot; the wine was nicely iced, so the four young people drank and were greatly refreshed. Madame Recamier was justly proud of her cellar. Anne pledged Ned, and Harold touched glasses with Miss Anstruther, while the first thunder boomed in the windows, and the other boarders out in the back conservatory shivered and thirsted.

Harold went to the piano. He felt wrought up in a singular manner. The electricity in the atmosphere, the spell of the dark woman’s sad eyes, her harsh reproof and her undoubted musical temperament acted on him like a whiplash. He called the page and rambled over the keyboard. Miss Anstruther sat near the pianist. Soon the vague modulations resolved into a definite shape, and the march from the Fantaisie in F minor was heard. It took form, it leaped into rhythmical life, and when the rolling arpeggios were reached, a crash over the house caused Miss Pickett to scream, and then the page entered with a tray.

Harold stopped playing. Miss Anstruther, her low, broad brow dark with resentment, said something to the boy, who showed his gums and grinned. “It’s de wine, missy,” he said, and went out on ostentatious tiptoe. The group in the conservatory watched the comedy in the drawing-room with unrelaxed interest, though little Miss Belt declared the thunder made her so nervous that she was going to bed. Madame Recamier rang the gong twice, and a few minutes later a smell of cooking mounted from the area kitchen. Harold started afresh. The storm without modulated clamorously into the distance, and orange-colored lightning played in at the window as he reached the big theme of the bass. It was that wonderful melody in F minor which Beethoven might have been proud to pen, and was followed by the exquisite group of double notes, so fragrant, so tender, so uplifting, that Anne Pickett forgot her wine; and the other girl, her eyes blazing, her cheek-bones etched against the skin, sat and knotted her fingers and followed with dazed attention the dance of the atoms in her brain. She saw Harold watching her as she went to school; Harold peeping in at the lodge of her college; Harold waiting to waylay her when she left her father’s house, and she saw Harold that terrible night! He had reached the meditation in B and her pulses slackened. After the crash of the storm, after the breathless rush of octaves, Miss Anstruther felt a stillness that did not come often into her life. The other pair were sitting very close, and the storm was growling a diminuendo in the east. Already a pungent and refreshing smell of earth that had been rained upon floated into the apartment, and Harold, his eyes fixed on hers, was rushing away with her soul on the broad torrent of Chopin’s magic music. She was enthralled, she was hurt; her heart stuck against her ribs and it pained her to breathe. When the last harp-like figure had flattened her to the very wall, she sank back in her chair and closed her eyes.

“Ho, Margery, wake up; your wine’s getting warm!” cried lively Anne Pickett as she sipped her glass, and Ned rang the bell for the page. Harold sat self-absorbed, his hands resting on the ivory keys. He divined that he had won the soul of the woman who sat near him, and he wondered. He looked at her face, a strong face, in repose with a few hard lines about the eyes and mouth. He gazed so earnestly that she opened her eyes, and catching his regard, blushed--blushed ever so lightly. But he saw it and wondered again. More wine came, but Miss Anstruther refused and so did Harold. By this time the other pair were jolly. Ned called out:

“Harold, play something lively. Wake up the bones, old man! Your girl isn’t getting gay.” Harold looked at her, and she walked slowly toward the conservatory. Miss Pickett, crazy Anne, as they called her, went to the piano and dashed into a lively galop. Ned drank another glass of wine and began to dance from the end of the room to the piano.

“Come on, let’s have a good racket!” he yelled, as the piano rattled off in rag-time while Miss Anstruther and Harold sat on near the conservatory. The whispering increased behind them, but the girl did not hear it. The music unlocked her heart, and her commonplace surroundings faded. If she had but met a man like him that other time! She realized his innate purity, his nobility of nature. Little wonder that his playing aroused her, made live anew the old pantomime of her life. She unconsciously placed in the foreground of her history the figure of the man beside her, yet she had never before seen him. It was wonderful, this spiritual rebirth. Only that morning she told the girls at breakfast she could never love again--she hated men and their ways. “They are animals, the best of them!” and Madame Recamier laughed the loudest.

Harold left her, took another glass of wine, and seeing Miss Pickett light a cigarette, asked permission to do the same.

“Can’t I bring you another glass of wine?” Harold tenderly asked. The gang of girls in the conservatory nudged one another and stared with burning eyes at Miss Anstruther through the lattice. She gently shook her head, and again he saw her blush. She did not stir. He began the luscious nocturne in B--the Tuberose Nocturne, and Madame Recamier’s gong sounded. The page entered and said:

“No more piano playing to-night. Madame wants to sleep.”

Miss Anstruther started so angrily that there was a titter behind the lattice. But she did not notice it; her whole soul was bent on watching Harold. He spoke to Ned, and Miss Pickett’s jarring laugh was heard.

Then he went over to her, and, sitting down beside her, leaned and touched her face with his finger. The girl grew white and she felt her heart beat. At the next word, the old, tired, cold look came back, and she faced him as she had first received him.

Then suddenly the laughter behind the lattice grew noisy. Anne Pickett screamed out:

“Another of Margery’s dreams shattered!”

Ned laughed and rang for more wine.

As they came down the steps the next morning Harold said to Ned:

“My boy, there are worse crimes than murdering a woman.”

“Oh, let’s get a cocktail,” croaked Ned.

IV

VENUS OR VALKYR?

Paul Godard found the ride between Nuremberg and Baireuth discomforting. The hot July breezes that blew into the first-class coupé of the train were almost breath-arresting; and Paul had left Stuttgart that morning in a savage mood. The slowness of the railway service irritated him, the faces of his travelling companions irritated him, and he had shocked an Englishman by remarking early in the afternoon:

“If the old engine doesn’t run any faster than this we had better get out and walk, or--push.”

The other simply peered at the speaker and then resumed Wolzogen’s book on Leading-Motives.

Three Roumanian ladies laughed in oily Eastern accents. They understood English, and the sight of a human being, a strong young man, in a passion about such a little matter as European railroad punctuality struck them as ridiculous. So they laughed again and Paul finally joined in, for he was an American.

He had been rude, but he couldn’t help it; besides, it looked as if they would reach Baireuth too late for the opening performance, and his was the laughter of despair.

The youthful pilgrim journeying to Baireuth was born in New York. He had studied music like most young people in his country, and had begun with that camel, that musical beast of all burdens, the piano. This he practised most assiduously at intervals, because he really loved music; but college, lawn-tennis, golfing, dancing, and motor-boating had claims not easily put aside. Naturally, the piano suffered until Paul left college; then for want of something better to do he took lessons from Joseffy and edified that master by his spurts of industry. His club began to encroach on his attention, and again the piano was forgotten. Paul, whose parents were rich, was not a society butterfly, but his training, instincts, and associations forced him to regard a good dinner, a good tailor, and a racing motor-car as necessary to his existence. From his mother he inherited his love of music, and his father, dead many years, had bequeathed him a library; better still, a taste for reading.

An average cultivated American, intensely self-conscious, too self-conscious to show himself at his best, ashamed of his finer emotions, like most of his countrymen, and a trifle spoiled and shallow.

One day Edgar Saltus told Paul he should read Schopenhauer, and he at once ordered the two volumes of The World as Will and Representation. It was not difficult reading, because he had been in Professor Bowne’s class at college and enjoyed the cracking of metaphysical nuts. He began to get side glimpses of Wagner’s philosophy, but despite the wit of the German Diogenes his pessimism repelled him. He could not agree with Saltus’s ingenious defense of pessimism in his two early books, and he looked about for diversion elsewhere. Walter Pater’s silken chords, velvety verbal music, had seduced Paul from the astringencies of Herbert Spencer, and Chopin made moonlight for his soul on morbid nights.

Yet Paul, with his selfish, well-bred, easy life, had encountered no soul-racking convulsions; he had never been in love, therefore he played the nocturnes of Chopin in a very unconvincing manner.

He always declared that Poe was bilious, and this remark gained for him the reputation of wit and scholar among his club associates.

The Calumel Club is not given to velléités of speech....

II

Then Paul Godard fell into the clutches of Richard Wagner and swallowed much of him.

Chopin seemed tiny, exotic, and feminine compared to the sirocco blasts of the Baireuth master. Paul was not too critical, and, like most Americans, he measured music by its immediate emotional result. The greater the assault upon the senses, the greater the music. The logic was inescapable.

Friedrich Nietzsche was the next milestone in Paul’s mental journeyings. The attack on Wagner, the attack on the morals that made our state stable, the savage irony, sparkling wit, and brilliant onslaught on all the idols, filled the mind of the young man with joy. He dearly loved a row, and though he recognized Nordau’s borrowed polemical plumage, he liked him because of his cockiness.

So he devoured Nietzsche, reckless of his logical inferences, reckless of the feelings of his poor mother, a most devoted Episcopalian of the High Church variety. Paul always pained her with his sudden somersaults, his amazing change of attitude, and, above all, his heartless contempt for her idols, the Church and good society. Society sufficed her soul hunger, and Paul’s renunciation of Mozart and Donizetti--she simply loved Lucia--his sarcastic flouting of churchgoers and his refusal to range himself, were additional weeds of woe in her mourning life.

There was Edith Vicker; but Paul was such a hopeless case and wouldn’t see that a nice, pretty, rich, moderately intelligent, well-reared young woman was slipping through his fingers. Mrs. Godard often sighed that winter in her sumptuous uptown apartment.

Nietzsche revealed new intellectual vistas for Paul and he actually became serious. The notion of regarding one’s own personality as a possible work of art to be labored upon and polished to perfection’s point, set him thinking hard. What had he done with his life? What wasted opportunities! He deserted his club and began piano-playing again, and when reproached by his friends for his fickleness he excused himself by quoting Nietzsche; a thinker, as well as a snake, must shed his skin once a year, else death. He also was ready with Emerson’s phrase about fools being consistent, and felt altogether very fine, and superior to his fellow-beings. Nietzsche feeds the flame of one’s vanity, and Paul was sure that he belonged to the quintessential band of elect souls that is making for the Uebermensch--the Superman!

He really was a nice, boyish lad, and he could never pass a pretty girl--whether a countess or a chambermaid--without making soft eyes at her. Paul was popular; and so the Roumanian ladies laughed at him admiringly. Paul had left his mother in Paris, the heat was too trying for travel, and he was close to Baireuth on this torrid summer day, one Sunday afternoon in July.