Chapter 7

So I say I'll be sure to look in on her and her new friend. I reckoned she must be the Miss Smith and the glass blower I'd already heard about that morning. Of course "Miss Smith" didn't sound like much, but Vernabelle Smith was different. That name Vernabelle made all the difference in the world. You sort of forgot the ensuing Smith.

That same afternoon about four P.M. I dropped round to the Bigler house. Metta's mother let me in. She's a neat and precise old lady with careful hair, but she looked scared as she let me in and led me to the door of Metta's studio, which is a big room at the back of the house. She didn't go in herself. She pulled it open and shut it on me quick, like it was a lion's den or something.

All the curtains was down, candles lighted, and the room not only hot but full of cigarette smoke and smoke from about forty of these here punk sticks that smoldered away on different perches. It had the smell of a nice hot Chinese laundry on a busy winter's night. About eight or ten people was huddled round the couch, parties I could hardly make out through this gas attack, and everyone was gabbling. Metta come forward to see who it was, then she pulled something up out of the group and said "Meet dear Vernabelle."

Well, she was about Metta's age, a short thirty, a kind of a slaty blonde with bobbed hair--she'd been reached fore and aft--and dressed mostly in a pale-blue smock and no stockings. Nothing but sandals. I could hardly get my eyes off her feet at first. Very few of our justly famous sex can afford to brave the public gaze without their stockings on. Vernabelle could ill afford it. She was skinny, if you know what I mean, lots of tendons and so forth, though I learned later that Vernabelle called it being willowy. She had slaty-gray eyes and a pale, dramatic face with long teeth and a dignified and powerful-looking nose. She was kind of hungry-looking or soulful or something. And she wore about two yards of crockery necklace that rattled when she moved. Sounded like that Chinaman with his dishes out there in the kitchen. I learned later that this was art jewellery.

Vernabelle greeted me with many contortions like she was taking an exercise and said she had heard so much about me and how interesting it was to meet one who did things. I said I was merely in the cattle business. She said "How perfect!" and clasped her hands in ecstasy over the very idea. She said I was by way of being the ideal type for it. And did I employ real cowboys; and they, too, must be fascinating, because they did things. I said they did if watched; otherwise not. And did I acquire an ascendancy over their rough natures. I said we quickly parted forever if I didn't do that. Then she clanked across to the couch, where she set down on her feet. I give her credit for that much judgment. That girl never did just plain set down. It was either on one foot or on both feet, or she draped herself along the furniture to show how willowy she could be without its hurting.

She now lighted a new cigarette from her old one and went on telling the fish-faces about her how little colour she had found here. She said we was by way of being a mere flat expanse in dull tints. But what could be expected of a crude commercialism where the arts was by way of being starved. Ah, it was so different from dear old Washington Square, where one was by way of being at the heart of life. It took me some time to get this by-way-of-being stuff, but the others was eating it up. Metta Bigler hovered round proud as Lucifer and trying to smoke for the first time in her life, though making poor work of it, like she was eating the cigarette and every now and then finding bits she couldn't swallow, and holding it off at arm's length in between bites. Mrs. Henrietta Templeton Price was making better work of the cigarettes, and Beryl Mae Macomber, a wealthy young society heiress and debutante, aged seventeen, was saying that she had always felt this lack in Red Gap and would of been in the movies long since if her aunt had listened to reason. The only man present was Edgar Tomlinson, who is Red Gap's most prominent first-nighter and does the Lounger-in-the-Lobby column for the Recorder, reviewing all the new films in an able and fearless manner. Edgar was looking like he had come into his own at last. He was wearing a flowing tie and a collar that hardly come higher than his chest and big wind shields on a black cord, and had his hair mussed up like a regular Bohemian in a Sunday paper. Vernabelle was soon telling him how refreshing it was to meet away out here one who was by way of doing things, and she had read that very morning his review of the film entitled A Sister of Sin, and had found it masterly in its clear-cut analysis, but why did he waste himself here when the great world lay open. Edgar thrust back his falling hair with a weary hand and tried to look modest, but it was useless. Vernabelle devoted most of her chat to Edgar. She was an incessant person but it seemed to take a man to bring out all that was best in her.

Pretty soon Metta went over to a table and brought back some glasses of wine on a tray, of which all partook with more or less relish. I recognized it from the bottle. It was elderberry wine that Metta's mother had put up. You have to be resourceful in a dry state.

"I'm afraid you'll all think me frightfully Bohemian," said Metta proudly.

Beryl Mae held her glass up to the light and said, "After all, does anything in life really matter?" She appeared very blase in all her desperate young beauty. She and Edgar Tomlinson looked as near right as anything you'd see in Washington Square. Vernabelle said the true spirit of Bohemia knew neither time nor place; it was wherever those gathered who were doing things, and wasn't it splendid that even here in this crude Western town a few of the real sort could meet and make their own little quarter and talk about the big things, the lasting things! Everyone said yes, quite so; and they all tried to handle their wine like it was a rare old vintage. But you can't hold much wassail on the juice of the elderberry; it ain't the most jocund stuff the world as fermented by Metta's mother.

However, it livened things up a bit and Vernabelle set down her glass and chattered some more. She said after all life was anything but selective, but didn't we think that all the arts rounded out one's appreciation of the beautiful. Several said "How true--how true indeed!" and sighed importantly. Then Metta said Vernabelle must show us some of her work and Vernabelle said she could hardly bring herself to do that; but yet she could and did, getting up promptly. She had designs for magazine covers and designs for war posters and designs for mural decorations and designs for oil paintings and so forth--"studies; crude, unfinished bits" she called 'em, but in a tone that didn't urge any one else to call 'em that.

It was mostly clouds and figures of females, some with ladies' wearing apparel and many not, engaged in dancing or plucking fruit or doing up their hair. Quite different stuff from Metta's innocent pictures of kittens and grapes and daffodils. After everyone was put on the easel Henrietta Templeton Price would stick her thumb up in the air and sight across it with one eye shut and say "A stunning bit, that!" and the others would gasp with delight and mutter to each other about its being simply wonderful.

Vernabelle listened in an all-too-negligent manner, putting in a tired word or two now and then. She admitted that one or two was by way of being precious bits. "Rather precious in an elemental way," she would say. "Of course I am trying to develop the psychology of the line." Everyone said "Oh, of course!"

While she had one up showing part of a mottled nude lady who was smiling and reaching one hand up over to about where her shoulder blades would meet in the back, who should be let in on the scene but Lon Price and Cousin Egbert Floud. Lon had called for Henrietta, and Cousin Egbert had trailed along, I suppose, with glass blowing in mind. Vernabelle forgot her picture and fluttered about the two new men. I guess Lon Price is a natural-born Bohemian. He took to her at once.

"Sit here and tell me all about yourself," says Vernabelle, and Lon did so while the girl hung breathless on his words. In no time at all he was telling her about Price's Addition to Red Gap, how you walk ten blocks and save ten dollars a block and your rent money buys a home in this, the choicest villa site on God's green earth. Vernabelle had sort of kept hold of Cousin Egbert's sleeve with an absent hand--that girl was a man hound if ever there was one--and pretty soon she turned from Lon to Egbert and told him also to tell her all about himself.

Cousin Egbert wasn't so glib as Lon. He looked nervous. He'd come expecting a little glass blowing and here was something strange. He didn't seem to be able to tell her all about himself. He couldn't start good.

"Tell me what you are reading, then," says Vernabelle; and Cousin Egbert kind of strangled at this, too. He finally manages to say that he tried to read Shakespere once but it was too fine print. The old liar! He wouldn't read a line of Shakespere in letters a foot high. It just showed that he, too, was trying to bluff along with the rest of 'em on this Bohemian chatter.

Vernabelle continued full of blandishment for the two men and poured 'em out stiff hookers of this demon elderberry wine and lighted cigarettes for 'em from hers. I don't know whether this beverage got to Lon Price or not, but in a minute he was telling her that beauty in her sex was a common-enough heritage, but how all-too rare it was to find beauty and brains in the same woman! Vernabelle called him comrade after that, and then she was telling Cousin Egbert that he was of the great outdoors--a man's man! Egbert looked kind of silly and puzzled at this. He didn't seem to be so darned sure about it.

Then Vernabelle worked over by the easel--it took her about six attitudes leaning against things, to get there--and showed her oil paintings to the newcomers. Lon Price was full of talk and admiration and said she must do a poster for him showing a creature of rare beauty up in the clouds beckoning home-buyers out to Price's Addition, where it was Big Lots, Little Payments, and all Nature seemed to smile. He said this figure, however, had better have something in the shape of a garment on it because the poster would go into homes where art in its broader extent was still regarded in a suspicious or even hostile manner, if she caught what he meant. The artist says she can readily understand, and that life after all is anything but selective.

Cousin Egbert just looked at the pictures in an uncomfortable manner. He spoke only once and that was about the mottled lady reaching over her shoulder and smiling. "Grinitch," says he with a knowing leer. But Vernabelle only says, yes, it was painted in the dear old village.

Then the crowd sort of got together on the couch and in chairs and Vernabelle talked for one and all. She said how stimulating it was for a few of the real people who did things to come together in this way after the day's turmoil--to get away from it all! Beryl Mae said she had often wanted to get away from it all, but her aunt was narrow-minded. Henrietta Price lighted her ninth cigarette and said how it reminded her of the Latin Quarter of Paris, which she had never been to, but her cousin had spent a whole afternoon there once and had been simply wild about it. Vernabelle said it was times like this, with a few real people, that she got her biggest ideas; that life in the rough was too terribly a labyrinth, didn't we think, stunning one with its immensity, while in these dear little half-lighted moments the real came out unafraid, if we understood what she meant. Many of us said we did.

It was when we got up to go that Vernabelle told me things about Cousin Egbert. She said he must have great reserve strength in his personality. She said he fairly frightened her, he was so superbly elemental.

"It is not so much Mr. Floud that frightens me," says she, "as the inevitability of him--just beautifully that! And such sang fraw!"

Poor Egbert was where he had to overhear this, and I had never seen him less sang fraw--if that's the word. He looked more like a case of nettle rash, especially when Vernabelle gripped his hand at parting and called him comrade!

We finally groped our way through the smoke of the door and said what a lovely time we'd had, and Metta said we must make a practice of dropping in at this hour. Vernabelle called us all comrade and said the time had been by way of being a series of precious moments to her, even if these little studio affairs did always leave poor her like a limp lily. Yep; that's the term she used and she was draped down a bookcase when she said it, trying to look as near as possible like a limp lily.

The awestruck group split up outside. Nothing like this had ever entered our dull lives, and it was too soon to talk about it. Cousin Egbert walked downtown with me and even he said only a few little things. He still called the lady a glass blower, and said if she must paint at all why not paint family pictures that could be hung in the home. He said, what with every barroom in the state closed, there couldn't be much demand for them Grinitch paintings. He also said, after another block, that if he owned this lady and wanted to get her in shape to sell he'd put her out on short sand grass, short almost to the roots, where she'd wear her teeth down. And a block later he said she hadn't ought to be calling everyone comrade that way--it sounded too much like a German. Still and all, he said, there was something about her. He didn't say what.

So now the Latin Quarter had begun, and in no time at all it was going strong. It seemed like everybody had long been wanting to get away from it all but hadn't known how. They gathered daily in Metta's studio, the women setting round in smocks, they all took to wearing smocks, of course, while hungry-eyed Vernabelle got the men to tell her all about themselves, and said wasn't it precious that a few choice spirits could thus meet in the little half-lighted hour, away from it all, and be by way of forgetting that outer world where human souls are bartered in the market place.

Of course the elderberry wine was by way of giving plumb out after the second half-lighted hour, but others come forward with cherished offerings. Mrs. Dr. Percy Hailey Martingale brought round some currant wine that had been laid down in her cellar over a year ago, and Beryl Mae Macomber pilfered a quart of homemade cherry brandy that her aunt had been saving against sickness, and even Mrs. Judge Ballard kicked in with some blackberry cordial made from her own berries, though originally meant for medicine.

Lon Price was a feverish Bohemian from the start, dropping in almost every day to tell Vernabelle all about himself and get out of convention's shell into the raw throb of life, as it was now being called. Lon always was kind of light-minded, even after the state went dry. He told Vernabelle he had a treasured keepsake hid away which he would sacrifice to Bohemia at the last moment, consisting of one quart bottle of prime old rye. And he was going to make over to her a choice building lot in Price's Addition, right near the proposed site of the Carnegie library, if Vernabelle would put up something snappy on it in the way of a Latin Quarter bungalow.

Lon also added Jeff Tuttle to the Bohemians the day that old horned toad got down from his ranch. After going once Jeff said darned if he hadn't been a Bohemian all his life and never knew what was the matter with him. Vernabelle had him telling her all about himself instantly. She said he was such a colourful bit, so virile and red-blooded, and she just knew that when he was in his untamed wilderness he put vine leaves in his hair and went beautifully barefoot. She said it wasn't so much him as the inevitability of him. She'd said this about Cousin Egbert, too, but she was now saying of this old silly that he had a nameless pathos that cut to her artist's heart. It seems Cousin Egbert had gone round a couple times more looking for glass blowing and getting disappointed.

And there was new Bohemians every day. Otto Gashwiler, that keeps books for the canning factory, and Hugo Jennings, night clerk of the Occidental Hotel, was now prominent lights of the good old Latin Quarter passing their spare moments there where they could get away from it all, instead of shaking dice at the Owl cigar store, like they used to. And Oswald Cummings of the Elite Bootery, was another. Oswald is a big fair-haired lummox that sings tenor in the Presbyterian choir and has the young men's Bible class in the Sabbath School. Vernabelle lost no time in telling him that he was oh, so frankly a pagan creature, born for splendid sins; and Otto seemed to believe it for a couple of weeks, going round absent like as if trying to think up some sins that would be splendid, though if any one but a Bohemian had told him this he'd have blushed himself to death. It shows you what a hold Vernabelle was by way of getting on Red Gap.

It was sure one season of triumph for Metta Bigler, who lurked proudly in the background as manager. Metta's mother wasn't near so thrilled as Metta, though. She confided to me that Bohemians was a messy lot to clean up after, raining cigarette ashes over everything; and also it was pretty hard to have raised a child to Metta's age only to see her become a cigarette fiend overnight, and having these mad revels with currant wine and other intoxicants--and Metta was even using a lip stick!

And Metta's mother wasn't the only one in town looking sidewise at these Bohemian doings. There was them that held aloof from the beginning and would give their bitter reasons at every opportunity. These was the ultra-conservative element of the North Side set, and what they said about the new Latin Quarter was a plenty. They said it was mostly an excuse for drunken orgies in which all sense of decency was cast aside, to say nothing of cigarettes being brazenly smoked by so-called ladies. They said this here talk about getting away from it all meant the ruin of the home upon which all durable civilization must be built; and as for wives and mothers going round without their stockings look at what befell proud Rome! And it was time something was done to stem this tide of corruption.

Mrs. Cora Wales and Mrs. Tracy Bangs, president and vice-president of our anti-tobacco league, was the leaders of this movement and sent in a long complaint to the chamber of commerce urging instant action or a foul blot would be splashed on the fair name of our city, to say nothing of homes being broken up. They was ably backed up in this move by a committee from the civic purity league.

And of course this added to the attractions of the Latin Quarter, giving each Bohemian a new thrill. Vernabelle said it was by way of being ancient history; that from time immemorial these little groups of choice spirits who did things had been scorned and persecuted, but that every true Bohemian would give a light laugh and pursue his carefree way, regardless of the Philistine And so it went, venomous on both sides, but with Vernabelle holding the bridge. She'd brought new stuff to town and had a good working majority in favour of it.

Downtown one day I met Metta in the Red Front grocery buying olives and sardines in an excited way. I suppose it's for one of her unspeakable orgies, but she tells me it's something special and I must be sure to come.

"Dear Vernabelle," she says, "has consented to give an evening cycle of dance portrayals for just a few of the choicer spirits. I know there has been dreadful talk about our little group, but this will be a stunning bit and you are broad-minded, so do come."

I could just see Vernabelle consenting, almost peevishly; but it sounded like it might be disorderly enough, so I says I'll come if she promises to leave at least one window down at the top, me not having a gas mask.

Metta thinks a minute, then says she guesses she can leave one window down a mite; not much, on account of the nature of Vernabelle's dance costume. I says if such is to be the nature of her costume I'll come anyway and risk being gassed. Metta chides me gravely. She says the costume is perfectly proper to the artist eye, being a darling little early Greek thing; built on simple lines that follow the figure, it is true, yet suggest rather than reveal, and if the early Greeks saw no harm in it why should we? I tell her to say no more, but reserve me a ringside seat, though near a window if one can be opened; say, as far as the early Greeks would have done at such a time, on account of the punk sticks.

And of course I wouldn't miss it. I'm there at eight-thirty and find quite a bunch of Latin Quarter denizens already gathered and full of suppressed emotion. The punk sticks, of course, are going strong. Vernabelle in a pink kimono says they supply atmosphere; which is the only joke I ever heard her get off, if she knew it was one. Bohemians Lon Price and Jeff Tuttle are hanging over the punch bowl, into which something illegal has been poured. Jeff is calling Vernabelle little woman and telling her if worse comes to worst they might try being Bohemians on a mixture his men up on the ranch thought of for a New Year's celebration. He says they took a whole case of vanilla extract and mixed it with one dozen cans of condensed milk, the vanilla having a surprising kick in it and making 'em all feel like the good old days next morning.

Vernabelle says he reminds her of some untamed creature of the open, some woodsy monster of the dells, and Jeff says that's just what he feels like. He's going on to tell her some more about what he feels like, but Vernabelle is now greeting Oswald Cummings, the pagan of splendid sins, from the Elite Bootery. She tells Oswald there is a cold cruelty in the lines of his face that reminds her of the emperor Nero.

Finally about twenty choice spirits who did things was gathered for this half-lighted hour, so everybody set down on chairs and the couch and the floor, leaving a clear space for Vernabelle; and Professor Gluckstein, our music teacher, puts down his meerschaum pipe and goes to the piano and plays a soft piece. The prof is a German, but not a pro-German, and plays first rate in the old-fashioned way, with his hands. Then, when all the comrades get settled and their cigarettes lighted, the prof drifted into something quite mournful and Vernabelle appeared from behind a screen without her kimono.

The early Greeks must of been strong on art jewellery. Vernabelle clanked at every step with bracelets and anklets and necklaces. She had a priceless ruby weighing half a pound fastened to the middle of her bony forehead. Her costume was spangled, but not many spangles had been needed. The early Greeks couldn't of been a dressy lot. If Vernabelle had been my daughter I could of give her what she deserved with almost no trouble. The costume, as Metta had said, not only followed the lines of the figure, so far as it went anywhere at all, but it suggested and almost revealed that Vernabelle had been badly assembled. The Bohemians kind of gasped and shivered, all except Jeff Tuttle, who applauded loudly. They seemed to feel that Vernabelle was indeed getting away from it all.