Chapter 5

Her voice was drowned in the cries and laughter; Wayne, with his hands to his ears, stared up at the piquant figure in its pink pajamas and sandals, then his distracted gaze swept the groups of parlor maids and footmen around the doors: "Great guns!" he thundered, "this is the limit and they'll pull the house! Morton!"--to a footman--"ring up 7--00--9B Murray Hill. My compliments and congratulations to Mr. Lethbridge and to Mr. Harrow, and say that we usually dine at eight! Philodice! stop that howling! Oh, just you wait until Iole has a talk with you all for running about the house half-dressed----"

"I _won't_ wear straight fronts indoors, and my garters hurt!" cried Aphrodite defiantly, preparing to slide down the banisters.

"Help!" said Wayne faintly, looking from Dione to Chlorippe, from Chlorippe to Philodice, from Philodice to Aphrodite. "I won't have my house turned into a confounded Art Nouveau music hall. I tell you----"

"Let _me_ tell them," said Iole, laughing and kissing her hand to the poet as she descended the stairs in her pretty bride's traveling gown.

She checked Aphrodite, looked wisely around at her lovely sisters, then turned to remount the stairs, summoning them with a gay little confidential gesture.

And when the breathless crew had trooped after her, and the pad of little, eager, sandaled feet had died away on the thick rugs of the landing above, the poet, clasping his fat white hands, thumbs joined, across his rotund abdomen, stole a glance at his dazed son-in-law, which was partly apprehensive and partly significant, almost cunning. "An innocent saturnalia," he murmured. "The charming abandon of children." He unclasped one hand and waved it. "Did you note the unstudied beauty of the composition as my babes glided in and out following the natural and archaic yet exquisitely balanced symmetry of the laws which govern mass and line composition, all unconsciously, yet perhaps"--he reversed his thumb and left his sign manual upon the atmosphere--"perhaps," he mused, overflowing with sweetness--"perhaps the laws of Art Nouveau are divine!--perhaps angels and cherubim, unseen, watch fondly o'er my babes, lest all unaware they guiltlessly violate some subtle canon of Art, marring the perfect symmetry of eternal preciousness."

Wayne's mouth was partly open, his eyes hopeless yet fixed upon the poet with a fearful fascination.

"Art," breathed the poet, "is a solemn, a fearful responsibility. _You_ are responsible, George, and some day you must answer for every violation of Art, to the eternal outraged fitness of things. _You_ must answer, _I_ must answer, every soul must answer!"

"A-ans--answer! What, for God's sake?" stammered Wayne.

The poet, deliberately joining thumb and forefinger, pinched out a portion of the atmosphere.

"That! _That_ George! For that is Art! And Art is justice! And justice, affronted, demands an answer."

He refolded his arms, mused for a space, then stealing a veiled glance sideways:

"You--you are--ah--convinced that my two lost lambs need dread no bodily vicissitudes----"

"Cybele and Lissa?"

"Ah--yes----"

"Lethbridge will have money to burn if he likes the aroma of the smoke. Harrow has burnt several stacks already; but his father will continue to fire the furnace. Is _that_ what you mean?"

"No!" said the poet softly, "no, George, that is not what I mean. Wealth is a great thing. Only the little things are precious to me. And the most precious of all is absolutely nothing!" But, as he wandered away into the great luxurious habitation of his son-in-law, his smile grew sweeter and sweeter and his half-closed eyes swam, melting into a saccharine reverie.

"The little things," he murmured, thumbing the air absently--"the little things are precious, but not as precious as absolutely nothing. For nothing is perfection. Thank you," he said sweetly to a petrified footman, "thank you for understanding. It is precious--very, very precious to know that I am understood."

XII

By early springtide the poet had taken an old-fashioned house on the south side of Washington Square; his sons-in-law standing for it--as the poet was actually beginning to droop amid the civilized luxury of Madison Avenue. He missed what he called his own "den." So he got it, rent free, and furnished it sparingly with furniture of a slabby variety until the effect produced might, profanely speaking, be described as dinky.

His friends, too, who haunted the house, bore curious conformity to the furnishing, being individually in various degrees either squatty, slabby or dinky; and twice a week they gathered for "Conferences" upon what he and they described as "L'Arr Noovo."

L'Arr Noovo, a pleasing variation of the slab style in Art, had profoundly impressed the poet. Glass window-panes, designed with tulip patterns, were cunningly inserted into all sorts of furniture where window-glass didn't belong, and the effect appeared to be profitable; for up-stairs in his "shop," workmen were very busy creating extraordinary designs and setting tulip-patterned glass into everything with, as the poet explained, "a loving care" and considerable glue.

His four unmarried daughters came to see him, wandering unconcernedly between the four handsome residences of their four brothers-in-law and the "den" of the author of their being--Chlorippe, aged thirteen; Philodice, fourteen; Dione, fifteen, and Aphrodite, sixteen--lovely, fresh-skinned, free-limbed young girls with the delicate bloom of sun and wind still creaming their cheeks--lingering effects of a life lived ever in the open, until the poet's sons-in-law were able to support him in town in the style to which he had been unaccustomed.

To the Conferences of the poet came the mentally, morally, and physically dinky--and a few badgered but normal husbands, hustled thither by wives whose intellectual development was tending toward the precious.

People read poems, discussed Yeats, Shaw, Fiona, Mendes, and L'Arr Noovo; sang, wandered about pinching or thumbing the atmosphere under stimulus of a cunningly and unexpectedly set window-pane in the back of a "mission" rocking-chair. And when the proper moment arrived the poet would rise, exhaling sweetness from every pore of his bulky entity, to interpret what he called a "Thought." Sometimes it was a demonstration of the priceless value of "nothings"; sometimes it was a naive suggestion that no house could afford to be without an "Art"-rocker with Arr Noovo insertions. Such indispensable luxuries were on sale up-stairs. Again, he performed a "necklace of precious sounds"--in other words, some verses upon various topics, nature, woodchucks, and the dinkified in Art.

And it was upon one of these occasions that Aphrodite ran away.

Aphrodite, the sweet, the reasonable, the self-possessed--Aphrodite ran away, having without any apparent reason been stricken with an overpowering aversion for civilization and Arr Noovo.

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.