Part 10

The Arena was cosy and inviting when, on a night during Easter week, Ulick entered and traversed the length of the room. All the tables were occupied. Mr. Muschenheim met him and for a few minutes they gossiped in German, which language Ulick spoke as well as he did French and English because of his sojourn at Jena. "Your friends are sitting in the next room, in the corner," said his host. Ulick cast inquiring eyes. To his surprise he saw Milt and with him, Alfred. Considering how heartily he had cursed him after their last encounter Ulick's power of social adaptation must have been in excellent working order. He went over to the pair and was welcomed by Milt with unfeigned cordiality. Alfred gave him two chilly fingers. "You here"? Ulick asked. "Yes," replied Milt. "I am home for a week, the Easter holidays, you know," "And he isn't ashamed to sit in a café with his collar buttoned behind," Stoned jeered. "Now, Alfred, what nonsense. On the continent even the clergy go to public places, such as concerts, opera, and restaurants. We must eat and drink like other men. Look at Mgr. Ducey. He is a man of the world, yet an irreproachable ecclesiastic," Alfred sniffed. Ulick didn't dare to ask news of Mona. His heart was heavy with anticipation. The sight of her brother revived his love. What a charming girl she was. What intelligence. How unlike other women? With her the expected never happened. He was annoyed at his false position, and not reassured when his eyes met the searching glance of Milt.

"Well, Ulick, how goes the culture of that famous ego of yours?" The tone was friendly, but for some reason, inexplicable to himself, Ulick felt annoyed. "My ego is all right, Milt. Anyhow, it is freer than yours. Convictions are prisons, you know?" "Ah, Nietzsche. I see you have absorbed his poison, too. My dear boy, those false prophets and corrupters of youth always preach freedom. Freedom for what? While I am not a determinist, yet I admit we can't be free from ourselves. Our personality is an ensemble of our ancestral characteristics. Our instincts are dangerous guides. Just now there is a tendency to place instinct over intellect. Reason unaided by God is a treacherous guide, but instinct alone! Heavens. In twenty years cosmos would be chaos." Milt wiped his forehead.

"Phew!" cried Alfred, "what a sermon you will preach some day, Milt. You will be a regular turkey-cock of God. Instinct or not, our country is galloping hellward. Watch. When it was half aristocratic there was some outward semblance of respect for the government, but today the individual, and his rights, are both growing less and less. Mob rules. The melting-pot! What not! We shall never melt the muckers who are overrunning us. I happen to have a good friend, an abbé from Luxembourg, little, plump, blond; the typical French abbé of the 18th century. He has a theory. He says: "The first swarm of locusts ate up the Indians; then came the Irish; and the English and Dutch disappeared. Followed the Germans, and now the Italians and Slavs. They have eaten up the native American. The Jews are the last and deadliest locusts of all; when they finish with America not a green leaf, a blade of grass, an ear of wheat, will be left in the land." The others were amused at his earnestness. Surely Alfred was of Jewish descent! Ulick interposed: "But Alfred you are a Jew. Why do you class them among the destructive elements? As for the Italians--well, I wish that America had been completely colonized by them. What a different atmosphere would be ours. The fine-arts, and the art of living, would be our heritage instead of our craze for commercialism, not to mention the growing menace of puritanism." "Don't abuse the Puritans," interrupted Milt. "They are a misrepresented people. It is their fanatical offspring who will lay waste America. A moribund branch of Christianity will attempt to shackle freedom and force its prejudices on a free people...."

"Free fiddlesticks"! Alfred was in a rage. "Melting-pot be hanged. There wall be anarchy in this land if these rattlesnakes are not scotched--you can't kill them. A republic is doomed to tyranny; the worst sort of tyranny--public opinion. I grant you, Milt, that the modern breed of those Mayflower pests are more tyrannical than the original lot of religious degenerates--what else were they, crazy as lunatics with their private interpretations of biblical texts; the book of the Apocalypse is responsible for more madmen than any other so-called sacred script in existence--yet the neo-puritan means to put us all in a little hell of his own. He calls it heaven, but it will be hell. The country is overrun by astrologists, fortune-tellers, unchristian scientists, holy howlers. We are not far from being a nation of mad folk. One neurosis follows another. I tell you--anarchy looms ahead. And woman-suffrage--the worst of all our tyrants; woman, the eternal ninny. She is to rule, as if she doesn't play her sex now for all it's worth. Pardon me, Milt--she is right as a cook or a concubine, but as a ruler! Excuse me. And prohibition. It's coming, and in its train, drugs and other tyrannies. Men will smoke bad tobacco in fear and trembling. The melting-pot--I see the locusts swarming for their last attack on the good things of America. Poor old America! She succumbed because she was too sentimental, and sentimentality breeds altruism, and altruism breeds busybodies, and busy bodies breed war. War breeds more war, and then the final catastrophe...."

"Stop it!" commanded Milt, "stop that choral of pessimism. So bad things are not." "Didn't Nietzsche assert that Christianity and alcohol have been the two great means of corruption and still are the worst foes of civilization?" asked Ulick. "Why drag in alcohol?" "If he did, he was quite right," commented Alfred, as he emptied his stein and rapped for another. "Symptoms of mysticism are usually accompanied by sexual impotence." Milt was distressed. The turn of the talk didn't please him, besides, it was Ulick, not Alfred, in whom he was interested. The other, that little Jew atheist with his filthy vices--all the turpitudes, he felt assured--was a rotten branch lopped from his own religion and race. Christianity wanted none of such men; dessicated souls. Vases of iniquity. Vile, accursed, doomed to Gehenna. Nevertheless, with his paternal solicitude for the straying sinner, Milt placed his hand over Alfred's and smiled benignly. "Alfred," he adjured, "Alfred repent while there's time. Here is Ulick fuddling his wits with writings that are of no pith or moment. Their rhetoric it is that seduces him. The petticoats, too,--Hello! who's this? I vow if here isn't Paul Godard." Ulick groaned. Always Paul. He couldn't escape him. Nor did Alfred look overjoyed. Paul, accompanied by an insignificant chap, bustled to the table. "Oh! I say, isn't this a jolly go. You fellows look as if you had the affairs of state burdening your souls. You have? Well, it's time I intervened and brought a new atmosphere to cheer you up. How do, bishop? No, not yet? But soon will be, I hope, Milt. Some day, some day! as Tosti sings. How d'ye do, Ulick? When did you see Dodo last? Fascinating creature. I drink her health. And how are you, Stone? Your bones as sour as ever. Ah! yes, I forgot! This is my friend Bell. But, of course, you know him. He is working the same side of the street as you fellows--excepting the Rev. Milt. What is it you say, Invern? Once a newspaper man always a whore? Isn't that it? A jolly epigram, that...." He rattled on "What I really said was this," ....ly answered Ulick: "Once a millionaire always an imbecile." Paul laughed the loudest. "The tables turned, that deal, and speaking of table-turning, let's get the head-waiter to fetch a larger table. I need elbow room for I feel that I'm going to make a night of it." "What night isn't all night with you?" demanded Ulick. Paul sweetly grinned. "The night you are there," and jerked his hand in the direction of Lexington Avenue. Invern scowled, but kept his temper.

They now sat in the middle of the room around a bigger table. Bell, who had been blinking at the company, blurted out: "Paul, I saw a divorced wife of mine today." "Which one"? asked Paul, winking at Stone. "I think it was the one who plays the violoncello--or should I say, 'cello, Stone? Thank you. Yes, it was Ida. She set me crazy with her practising. That bullfiddle always between her knees--she complained of corns on her knees--always rumbling or buzzing like a big bumble-bee with a basso-profundo stinger. No, I simply couldn't stand it. I gave her grounds for divorce, miles and miles of grounds"--"Don't boast, Bell," admonished Paul--"I don't boast Godard. Whatever fruit fails we men all know that the co-respondent crop never fails. I might add, never frosts." And then he went off into an hysterical burst of laughter. No one smiled. Undaunted, Bell dried his eyes and resumed: "Ida is O. K. She married a house-painter. I don't think any the less of her for that. House-painters make more money than journalists--I beg pardon, Stone--I mean, newspaper men. That constipated gargoyle, Snapgood, he hates the word. He calls himself a journalist. I'm a newspaper man, I am...." "And as ignorant as one, too," sarcastically added Alfred. A chorus of dissent followed. Because Bell was a born ass, the tribe he belonged to was not, necessarily the same. "You should go to London, Alfred. There it takes four newspaper men combined to understand a Yankee joke." It was Milt who spoke. "I don't wonder," retorted Alfred.

Bell was a much-married, much-harried, much-divorced man. Some wags said that he was more divorced than married, more sinning than sinned against. He admitted that he had to pay common-law alimony, as he called it, to his common-law wives. They were legion. This small, stupid-looking chap had a passion for getting into scrapes with girls. He had been divorced four times in four different states by duped women, whose indignation was boundless when they failed to get alimony; rather, failed to collect. Their man was quicksilver. He always escaped. Twice, death had obligingly stepped in and divorced him. In these cases he even escaped paying posthumous alimony; he wouldn't foot the undertaker's bill. His motto was: "Let the dead bury the dead." And so it came to pass, he had married in succession his land-lady's daughter, a greasy frump, a widow with an annuity, a pianiste, a 'cellist. Bell was also musical. He had successively lived with a fat chorus girl, a professional prostitute--he kept this particular episode to himself--a circus-rider, a servant girl, an octoroon, and with two sisters, who worked in an artificial flowershop. He was versatile, Bell. As he was glib of pen and tongue he earned plenty of money and the women flocked about him. He had a certain goatish reputation. Girls giggled when he passed, his eyes lecherously ogling. Little riders! they whispered, and giggled again. Ulick despised him, but his own morals were hardly a whit better; only his tastes were more discriminating; thus he consoled himself.

XVIII

Without a transposition the conversation glided to the theme of women. Bell, who was beginning to feel his liqueur, intoned a toast which he swore he had heard at a dentists' banquet, but a nudge under the table from Alfred kept him from further rambling. Milt wasn't annoyed. He calmly sipped his beer, his hearing keen for fluctuations in the moral market. He had said that a priest must know the human soul inside and out. To be in the world, yet not of it, to wade through the sins and heresies of this ignominious age, yet never wallow in them. To stand in front of the monkey-cage we call life, watch the antics of the inmates but never imperil his soul by approving of the sarabande of sex surrounding him. That was the ideal of Milt. He had the makings in him of a lover, a thinker, a rebel. But never did he lapse into that stupration of the soul, that orgasm of the intellect, we call desire and pride; that mass of confused emotion evoked by the curves of the female form he never indulged in. The brief, dizzy syncope which ensues during the frantic bundling of the two sexes he had never experienced, though he yearned for it, during moments of weakness. But he was a level-headed young man. He knew the strait way, and also the path of flaming ecstacy. He meant to work long and faithfully in the vineyard of the Lord, and to accomplish his self-imposed mission he prepared by studying life from all angles, dubious or beautiful. His heart was a reservoir overflowing with love for his fellow-men. He cherished profound affection for his sister, also profound distrust. Her many excellent, even superlative, qualities were offset by a perverse twist, not congenital. It might prove her undoing. He fervently prayed for her conversion, and by some odd association of ideas he prayed for the salvation of Ulick Invern's soul; that he, with his splendid heritage of faith, family, fortune, talent, be given the boon of light. Ulick and Mona made a pleasant picture in the mind of this candidate for the order of Melchizedek.

"Say, Milt," speculated Stone in his most aggressively malicious manner, "whenever I look at a fresh-colored young priest like you, I don't wonder that the girls swarm about you like flies in a molasses cask. Your purity is written in your eyes. It oozes from your expression. It's an aura. The female ever in pursuit of masculine honey feels this, and you are her idol, as is, in a different fashion, a tenor." Milt protested. Paul suddenly lost his head, crying: "Woman is the split-infinitive in the grammar of life," which was capped by Bell: "Woman is an ecstasy-breeding machine." "I hate speeches beginning with--Woman is this, woman is that," proclaimed Ulick. "When men foregather and booze they suddenly land in that bohemia of dead-sea fruit, the woman question. Women are human like men, and the little difference"--"Bless de Lawd fer de difference, as the darky preacher said--" It was the thick voice of Bell--"is the cause for the lot of rotten talk and theorizing." "Bravo, Ulick"! said Milt, with sentimental vehemence. "Faire remonter tout son sexe dans son cerveau," he added. But Stone was curious. "I'd like to know the trick of that sex-transposition. Women are a nuisance--sometimes; often I should like to do without them; but I acknowledge I can't. What's the method, Milt, camphor or prayer"? Milt, scandalized, didn't reply. To break the embarrassing silence Ulick turned to Paul and asked him if he knew anything new.

"Oh, yes, Marie, the singing comedienne, had just had a row with her last husband. You know that fastidious baronet of hers who wears a bangle on his ankle. The other night at Lady Murchison's dinner I sat next to her. I wished to be friendly so I asked how she was getting along with her young man. "Oh nicely," she said, with that dazzling Celtic smile, "we never quarrel unless we fall in love with the same man." A roar followed. Milt groaned.

"Only the women a man doesn't win are desirable." "Listen to the Rochefoucauld! Bell, where do you get your novel ideas"? "Such ideas should be caged like monkeys"--this from Milt. Then he arose, disgusted. "You chaps are rubbing it in. One would suppose that sex ruled this planet, instead of being perhaps, only a necessary incident, or by-product. I'll move homewards. Will you be seen tomorrow afternoon, Ulick"? He knows something, thought Ulick, but he cordially invited Milt assuring him that he would be found any time after the midday breakfast. Couldn't Milt take that meal with him? Milt consented. "Then sit down a moment, Milt, I should like to tell you of a theory advanced by Remy de Gourmont concerning sex. You spoke of a "necessary incident." Milt sat down. "It's this," resumed Ulick. "De Gourmont insisted that the real protagonist of humanity, indeed, of all organic life, is to be found in the procreative process, which act epitomizes all creation. This theory may not be found in his remarkable Physique de l'Amour, it was something he thought out later. Briefly, we are not the rulers of our personal destiny, but only an envelope of flesh and blood to protect the chief factor of our being, our sex-organs. As long as they are vital our organism flourishes; when they weaken, men and women weaken with them, wither and die. It has a sinister ring, hasn't it, this idea of a hidden force directing our energies, our very fate. It is supported by the seers who through the ages have recognized a blind, remorseless power in whose grip our individual happiness is as helpless as a straw in a hurricane. Only the species counts. Love is always tragic, even the amours of a ragpicker and a gutter-wench. Fatality is stamped on the forehead of every human. Little wonder primitive nations in the dusky depths of Asiatic mystic groves have prostrated themselves before the carved images of the lingam and yoni, the male and female principles. Sex is in the background of every modern religion, from the phallic symbol of the churchspire to the worshipping of the matrix." "I'm off," cried Milt, as he jumped up. "I can't stay here any longer in such a fetid atmosphere to have religion bespattered. Good-night, boys. Ulick--I'll be with you at the Maison Felicé at one o'clock, or thereabouts" He disappeared.

"I say, Ulick," remarked Paul, "you do draw the longbow, don't you, about sex-worship? Did you yarn for Milt's benefit or is it all gospel truth?" "It is in the gospels that you will find it," answered Ulick, who was distrait and feeling anxious over that projected visit. What did it presage! Stone nudged Bell who was in his cups and snoring.

"Give us a rest with your sex-symbolism. I heard a good story this afternoon--wake up Bell, this will fit your case someday--from Dr. Williams. He's my doctor. The best ever. Hasn't sent me a bill for years because the last one we shook dice for and I won. He has a patient, an old chap of sixty who came to him one day and begged, on his knees, the Doc said, for once more, only once! His doctor bluntly told him a man isn't like a woman--toujours prête--but given by nature a certain number of cartridges which he is to use as suits his temperament. If he fires them off in his youth, in middle-age he will be empty-handed and must avoid targets and rifle-ranges. The wise space their shooting and we sometimes, not often, witness the spectacle of an old man, hale and hearty, buying a buxom young target and actually scoring bullseyes. This, however, is an exceptional occurrence. The offspring of aged men are not taken seriously, as is evidenced by the brutal query: 'Who is the other fellow?' Horns seldom decorate the brows of youthful males. To make a short story long the doctor gave the poor old top a doze of some devilish compound, a Brown-Séquard cocktail containing picric acid with mountain oysters, or lamb-fries as a chaser. He was curious enough to ask his patient where he would fire off his last cartridge. The chap became voluble. He had an old wife whom he loved very much, but he kept all physical manifestations for his mistress, a younger woman, who supported her husband and a large family in the sweat of her deceit. A conscientious hard-working woman, who never deceived her lover, except with the aid of her legitimate husband--an arrangement understood, I believe. But the funny thing was that the old fellow became jealous of this same husband. He had boasted so much of the naked conflicts he had waged when young that he greatly desired to give the lady of his affections a touch of his early quality. With the potent fluid of the doctor's drug sizzling in him he literally, so the Doc averred to me, scampered off helter-skelter to his beloved. Not his wife, mind you. Oh, no! That would be wasting powder and shot on a fortress already captured. He had telephoned the faithful concubine, who awaited him, her curiosity aroused. She felt certain that he would again make his usual fiasco. As the rejuvenated old goat bounded over the sidewalk, his blood tingling with the passion of youth and Damiana Mormon Elder's Wafers, a pretty puss of eighteen touched his elbow. She was an impudent mutt, but provocative. She winked and whispered:

"Hello Pop! Come along and I'll give you the time of your life"! and by God he went with her, and that patient Griselda waiting for him in his second home, not to mention the wife of his bosom, at home (where she played a stiff Bridge every afternoon and never bothered her head about her foolish matrimonial partner). Yes, he went to the new rifle-range and heaven knows what lie he invented for the benefit of his mistress. The affair only proves that any woman who can give to an old man the illusion of virility, he will not only marry her, but he will wear her on his heart of hearts; become her slave, in fact. Sex dies hard in us, and despite popular belief, it is the last of the passions, pushing out avarice and gluttony, which pair of entertaining passions are supposed to illuminate the dusty lonesome years of a man's existence. Goethe married his cook, a stout country wench who drank herself into her grave in the august presence of her husband-poet. And all those old women titled and otherwise who marry coachmen, gardeners and grooms, husky young fellows--do they do this for intellectual companionship? The darky woman who said when asked as to her sex emotions: "I'se over eighty. You've got to ask some lady older than me, illustrates that sex fights as long as it can. The original Adam in us. That de Gourmont theory, Ulick, is a horrible idea; sex is hideous if you study it. Let the boys and girls keep their illusions and don't let them believe old Schopenhauer and his instinct of the species dictating their destiny"--"For the sake of sanity, Alfred, shut your trap and let's go home. Wake up, Bell. There's a fresh wife waiting you," said Ulick, glad to get away. "Which wife?" sleepily inquired Bell. "It seems as if a crowd of men can't end the evening without talking sex," grumbled Ulick. "I'm sick of sex." "So are we all," Stone assented, "because sex is a sickly thing. It's not health and conservation, but destruction, disease, death." Ulick fairly ran from him when they reached the street. Sex and damnation! he said between his teeth.

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