Part 5

On East 58th Street there once stood Peter Buckel's brewery. Opposite was, still is, Terrace Garden. A theatre now occupies the old brewery ground. Young people who preferred serious converse to the glitter and bang of the big Garden across the street went to Buckel's. A wooden terrace with a roof was pleasant to sit upon when the weather was warm. A huge tree grew in the middle of this esplanade and the owner had artfully made it serve as a decoration. Under its spreading foliage people supped and smoked. The town was then younger, less crowded by "undesirable citizens"--the phrase is of Theodore Roosevelt's making--and life more mellow, because less puritanical. An evening in middle May saw a group around the tree-table as it was called; the most coveted spot on the terrace. There were Ulick Invern and Alfred Stone. Next to him sat a tall thin young man addressed by his companions as Milton. He did not wear a clerical garb but the cut of him was unquestionably priestly. His harmonious features, extremely blond hair, prominent eye-balls, gray in color, denoted refinement of mind and body. He was not in the least priggish and gave himself no sacerdotal airs. If he had done so he would soon have been lonely. Ulick and Alfred were too easy-going to endure superior pretensions in anyone; besides, they had known Milton before he went to the Jesuits, and Ulick sincerely sorrowed when ill-health fostered by strenuous study had sent his friend temporarily back into the world he despised. He recognized that Milton had a genuine vocation.

"That was a nice hot picnic," ejaculated Stone, mopping his brow as he dipped his nose into a long beaker of beer. "Never again," chimed in Ulick. Milton became nervous. "Where have you chaps been this hot afternoon?" "You wouldn't call this hot after Hoboken," cut in Stone. "Hotter than the hinges of hell," added Ulick as he emptied his lemonade glass. "I feel like a regular tosspot this evening," he continued. "We must have swilled a bathtub of liquid this afternoon over at Meyer's in Hoboken, eh, Alfred?" "You didn't, old herring-gut," was the rather surly retort;--"but I did. Why people of reputed sanity cross the Hudson on a sweltering day to wave handkerchiefs at their friends on out-bound steamers has always puzzled me. Now, why should we have given ourselves the bother to say farewell to Easter Brandès on a crowded dock, when we could just as well have wished her bon-voyage the night before at the Maison Felicé"--"Has Miss Brandès sailed to Europe?" inquired Milton, not without interest in his voice. "Yes, she goes to Berlin, to Lilli Lehmann, thence to emerge a full-fledged prima-donna and Wagner interpreter, et patiti et patita! I can't for the life of me see why she didn't stay under Madame Ash's wing a couple of seasons more. Mind you, I grant her talent. She is positively brilliant, but she needs steadying. Her voice, her delivery, her extraordinary memory--she already has fifteen rôles completely memorized, mastered--these are but a hint of what the future may bring forth; nevertheless, she is too young for Lehmann and--Oh, what's the use? Women don't think with their heads, they think with their matrix. They are too damned emotional. They are the sexual sex.... Putting an idea in their heads is like placing a razor in the hands of a child...."

"And men, I presume, think with their cortex," interposed the cool voice of Ulick. Milton deprecatingly lifted a white hand. "I can't say I admire the turn our talk is taking. Alfred is too literal, too fond of physiological details. I want to hear more of the art of Miss Brandès...." "And less about her coda--there's a musical term for you," cried Stone. All three young men laughed. At times Alfred could be amusingly immodest. "Well, she has gone to Germany despite your advice," declared Ulick. "She is a stubborn creature and I'm quite sure she has done the right thing. That young woman has a head of her own and instinct prompts her in the right direction. She may not always think with her head, yet she has managed to land on both feet. Think of it boys, Easter has only been here about six months. Behold! she goes to Berlin where she will be under the protection of the greatest living Wagner singer. How did she do it? Magnetism? Beauty? Talent? All three I fancy. And she is penniless. She told me so. Yet she dresses well, and someone must be putting up for her expenses while she is abroad".... "Oh Ulick! Thou art an ass," sang Stone in his most derisive manner. "Has she a banker? Yes, she is lucky, she has two. Paul Godard is one--" "It's a lie!" shouted Ulick, who was at once in a fighting mood. "And the other," continued Stone, unmoved, "is the young woman who is to play chaperone to her innocence while she remains abroad. I know, Frida Ash told me everything, and between you and me and this fat old tree, I think Madame Frida is glad to lose both of her pupils. They sat rather heavily on her betimes."

"Allie Wentworth is all right," returned the mollified Invern, "but I fail to see where Master Godard comes in. He is rich, to be sure, but as mean as sour-owl dirt...." "The Isles of Greece, the Isles of Greece, where burning Sappho loved and sung." Stone sneeringly quoted. Silence ensued. Then Milton spoke with his gentlest intonations: "I wonder why it is that so soon as a young woman sings or goes on the stage, mud-slinging is in order?" After that query the party broke up. Stone, as usual, was bored. Ulick felt that too much had been said of the girl he bade adieu a few hours before, radiant with happiness on the upper deck of the steamship, her arms holding a perfect sheaf of blush-roses. She had been cordial. She had kissed him on the cheek, whispering, "You dear old Jewel," and then Allie plucked at her sleeve, the whistle roared and that was the last he saw of Easter Brandès. He shook hands with Milton. Stone, as he languidly sauntered away said as a parting shot, over his shoulder: "I suppose you know the rumour 'round town that Paul Godard has been her banker? His name is on the passenger-list too. Gay bird, Paul. Ta! Ta!" Ulick went home in a sad humour.

THE FOURTH GATE

_At the fourth gate, the warder stripped her; he took off the jewels that adorn her breast_....

I

Ulick Invern always declared that he was a New-Yorker born. This was a mild exaggeration; his mother--she had been a Bartlett before her marriage--was bred in the metropolis, but both her sons, Oswald, the elder, and Ulick, were born in Paris, where their father was Secretary at the American Legation. Needless to add, that under the American flag, they were registered as Americans. The elder Invern was the second son of a needy Irish peer, whose heir had retrieved the fallen fortunes of the family, an ancient one in Kerry, by marrying the only child of a wealthy Dublin iron-monger. Ulick's father through influence was sent to Washington where he served a few years in the British Embassy. But his marriage to Madge Bartlett, beautiful, brilliant girl, rich in her own right, caused a change of plans and her husband not only resigned his post, but in due course of time became a naturalized citizen of the United States. He entered the New York banking house of his father-in-law, who was not particularly impressed by his daughter's husband nor his capacity as a business man.

The elder Bartlett saw clearly. Handsome, like all the Inverns, Ulick Sr. became a pony-polo player of international renown; henceforward Wall Street and the bank only saw him when he dropped in to negotiate a domestic loan. No one could dislike this big, easy-going, young, blue-eyed Celt; even his father-in-law succumbed--after intervals of frigidity--to his personal charm. His wife adored him and wept over his gaming debts. He was a loose fish. Wine, women, and the wheel well nigh disrupted her family life. Paris offered him an escape from what he called the puritanism of New York--where, fancy! one's club shut down on you at 2 a.m.--and thus it happened that Ulick Invern, Jr., first saw the light in the French capital. With his brother, two years his senior, he received French training: The Ecole Normale, private tutors, ending with the Sorbonne. Oswald's painting talent soon manifested itself, and after eighteen the Paris of the Americans knew him no longer. He went to live on the Left Bank, in the Impasse du Maine, where, at his studio, he led the free, happy life of a monied artist. He had plenty of money, thanks to his indulgent mother, who, from time to time visited him, and, while he was on good terms with his brother, they didn't have much in common except their love for the Mater. They worshipped her. Their father they admired, but with well-defined reservations. He was a nee'r-do-well to the last, and died an aristocratic drunkard, leaving a malodorous memory, many mistresses and a cloud of debts. His widow never mentioned his name--that is, unless someone spoke disparagingly of him; then she betrayed resentment. The old chap was good form, but a charming black-guard, all the same--that was the verdict of his children, who speedily forgot him.

But his influence persisted beyond the grave, though the opposite of what might have been expected. Ulick told people who wondered over his abstinence that his father had drunk and smoked enough for a dozen families. So he let liquour and tobacco alone; besides, Oswald kept up the family tradition--a thirsty one. Following the mother's death, which occurred a few years after her husband's--there was heart malady in the history of the Bartletts--the two young men found themselves with a comfortable income, though not too rich. They saw little of one another. Tolerant as he was Ulick couldn't endure the sporting artistic crowd of the Latin Quarter atelier, and Oswald, on his side, found his brother a trifle pedantic, doctrinaire, even utopian. Wisely they kept asunder. A Frenchman in externals and by culture Ulick knew the men and women of the early nineties who made Paris a city of artistic and intellectual light. He was too young to have remembered Flaubert, but he visited Edmond de Goncourt at Auteuil and there encountered the group that had forsworn Zola and Naturalism. He admired the polished style of Edmond De Goncourt, a true aristocrat of letters; admired his Japonisme, his bibelots, pictures, and all that went to make the ensemble of that House Beautiful. A point of distain had begin to pierce the speech of the superb old gentleman, who confided to the sympathetic American youth that the younger generation didn't even knock at his door, that he and his dear dead brother, the illustrious Jules, had given those budding litterateurs a new opera-glass through which to view contemporary life. It was true. Dandys in their prose style, the De Goncourts had fashioned for themselves a personal vision and speech, feverish, staccato, intense. Their chief preoccupation was art, the pictorial, the tangible arts. No better book about artistic life has been written than Manette Salomon. And Madame Gervaisais is less an odyssey of a weak woman's soul, than an evocation of modern Rome. Alone, Edmond had written those exquisite notations of a girl's awakening consciousness to be found in the pages of Chérie. Ulick felt that he would not long tarry in that finely-filed, but chilly literature.

He had encountered at one of the reunions in the famous Concourt grenier, Henry James and also Joris-Karel Huysmans, whose names in baptism were Charles Marie-George. For this misanthropic writer he had shown such a preference that he attracted the attention of his idol and was invited to call upon him at his home in the rue de Sèvres on the rive gauche. A friendship began which greatly influenced the development of the younger man's character. His father had been what is facetiously called a "hickory" Catholic. He went to church when the spirit moved him. Yet, Irish-like, he never let the lustral week preceding Easter pass without confessing and communicating, usually going to the Trinity church on the boulevard Malsherbes, where he found a friend in a little Irish priest long stationed there for the convenience and edification of English-speaking residents. But Ulick's mother had been a High Church Episcopalian, and while she was not a fervent church woman she had consented to the baptism of her sons in the Roman Catholic religion. It is not so far away from my faith, she had told her fashionable English friends when they remonstrated with her over this backsliding from the principles of the Church of England. She, too, lacked true moral fibre though her association with her characterless husband may have been the chief contributing cause.

Ulick, however, was not of the temperament religious. He believed, of course, in a deity, an immanent deity; his was a pleasing sort of personal pantheism. Oswald was become a Manichean, a devil-worshipper. He did not repudiate the authority of the Church. But, then, Oswald drank absinthe, and long before that artists' apotheosis, he had hitched his artistic wagon to the saturnine canvases of Paul Cézanne. Ulick, on the contrary, never indulged in parti-pris. He was born, if such a thing were possible, with an indifferent temperament concerning any particular religion. All gods were divine to him, from the fetish of a South-Sea islander to the sublime doctrine of transubstantiation. He would have agreed with Baudelaire that it is neither permissible nor prudent to mock at any idol. A deity may have once made its abode in the wood or stone. Not cynical, Ulick was never convinced that any act of his could alter the inflexible law of causality. He had absorbed from Taine his deterministic leaning, luckily tempered by a sensible toleration. Whatever God is, he certainly can't exist outside of my brain-cells, argued Ulick. Each man creates a god after his own image. If I stop thinking of my particular deity-concept then he ceases to exist--for me; and that is the history of every god, every religion. All the rest is theology. Mother Church with her magnificent ceremonial, her liturgy, music, painting, sculpture, above all, architecture--for him, Gothic--appealed to his imagination, historic and aesthetic. Ulick was principally aesthetic; morals played a minor rôle in his existence.

But M. Huysmans had traversed the seven dolorous stations of his own crucified spirit and he at once made a searching examination into the conscience of his youthful admirer. He related, not without a certain muted pride, the advice of Barbey d'Aurevilly, the same advice Barbey had given Charles Baudelaire: that either the author of Là-Bas must prostrate himself at the feet of Jesus crucified, or else blow out his brains. "C'est fait," added Huysmans. It was shortly after the epoch of En route that he told Ulick of his conversion, not an unexpected one to those who knew the umbrageous, slender writer. Had it not been for the curiously beautiful literature it produced the various states of soul of M. Huysmans would not have riveted the fancy of Invern. The mordant epithet, picturesque phrase, the lenten rhythms of this multicolored prose, its sharp, savoury imagery--Huysmans' spiritual landscapes are painted with the gusto of a hungry man at a banquet where the plates are composed by a chef of genius--all these and the vision of a profoundly pessimistic soul, attracted him to Huysmans as to no other modern writer. Only to Petronius Arbiter among earlier penmen would he accord an equal value. Also to St. Augustine and Thomas à Kempis. He did not apologize for this versatility in tastes.

Huysmans prodded his conscience to such good effect that he accompanied the master to St. Sulpice, and also went with him when he made the rounds of the bookstalls along the Left Bank of the Seine. It was during one of these fascinating excursions in pursuit of ancient Latin hymnal literature that Ulick was presented to Remy de Gourmont, another of his favorite writers. A second friendship began, that long outlived the death of Huysmans. Maurice Barrès and his deification of the ego, was to be the third and principal _étape_ in his moral development. There was one thing, nevertheless, that M. Huysmans could not persuade him to do; to make peace with his church. Urged to the confessional, there to cleanse his soul, to the communion-table to assuage his thirst for the infinite, Ulick would reply with a shoulder-shrug. The truth was that his sceptical analytical mind and his passion for women kept him from taking the final leap-off into piety and purity. My friend, Huysmans would insist, it is so easy! But if I relapse, as I am sure to do? would query Ulick. Then, he was assured that there was always further grace for the sinner. The waters of purification were always on tap. He could lave himself weekly--and begin over again; even the very next day. It's too easy, and it elevates religion to the dignity of a Turkish-bath, Ulick retorted. M. Huysmans, in turn, shrugged his shoulders, and the evening would end in tobacco smoke and furious discussions about art and literature.

And what evenings of ambrosia they were, mingled with the venom of the Master's critiques! He spared no one. He called Monseigneur d'Hulot, a bellicose booby, that same erudite and amiable churchman, who later wrote so discriminatingly of his bitter-tongued friend. An arsenal of opinions passed into the possession of the neophyte. But even at that early age, the formative period, his general culture was wider, more generous than the Master's. Ulick had been a student from the precocious age of seven when he was discovered by his nurse reading La Fontaine's Fables and Pickwick Papers. This bi-lingual training had produced admirable results. He knew two literatures thoroughly; in addition to a fair acquaintance with German and Italian. His mother had insisted on a German university and he selected Jena because of its propinquity to Weimar. Those four years in Germany had been the white stones in his studious career. There he had learned and loved Bach and Beethoven; there he learned to know Goethe, the greatest among moderns--he detested Bismarck and the hard positivism of the Prussian pan-Germanists; Heine, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche were to come later. His reactions to the system, or lack of system in the case of Nietzsche, was like a crisis in a dangerous fever. He alternated between languour and exaltation. Schopenhauer cooled off his naturally buoyant temperament, but Nietzsche gave him ecstasy as if poured from an overflowing goblet.

He went twice weekly to Weimar there to study pianoforte and theory with a pupil of Franz Liszt. The drowsy old town on the Ilm, once the Athens of Germany, laid his imagination under a spell. He wandered through the deserted gardens on long summer afternoons, Faust in hand, or he would go to Liszt's house in the woods, hardly a quarter hour's stroll from the garden-house of Goethe, and ponder the extraordinary activities of poet and pianist. In this same Weimar Goethe had led an active, practical life, he, the pagan hedonist, accused by the ignorant of day-dreaming, of being a butterfly voluptuary. He was the real political ruler and administrator of Saxe-Weimar. Liszt, after a life that was Caesarian in its triumphs, had calmly entered into his hermitage, where he taught, prayed and composed. And this is the end of every man's desire, thought the young man, who greatly aspired, though not for the prizes of the market-place. Yonder, at Jena, in Dr. Bingswanger's sanitorium, was hidden the poet-philosopher Nietzsche whose melodious thunder-words had stirred to the core the self-satisfied materialism of his native land. But he was wounded, his eagle wings of rhapsody and rage were broken; they no longer supported him in his flights through the vasty firmament of ideas. Later he was to come to his last asylum in Upper Weimar there to be soothed and watched over by his devoted sister Elizabeth Foerster-Nietzsche. For Ulick he was a living presence, though the soul was absent from his body at Jena. Zarathustra and Faust, and the exquisite art of Frédéric Chopin were henceforth to be the three guiding stars in his constellation of thinkers and artists. Indeed, it was the difficulty of finding a suitable interpreter of Chopin that drove him back to Paris. His Weimar teacher believed in the motto: Aut Lizst, aut nihil! Ulick preferred the Pole to the Hungarian: besides, a teutonized Chopin was inconceivable.

II

One phrase of Huysmans he remembered: without personality, no talent. If I can't achieve a personality I shall never become a writer, thought Ulick. That's what this sweeping dictum means: but how to achieve a personality? He was forced to smile over the crudeness of his question. Either you have it or you haven't--personality. He had wished to ask M. Huysmans the road to perfection, but he put off doing so for he knew in advance the answer: Holy Mother the Church. Then one day he received a card inscribed: "Changement de domicile: J.-K. Huysmans. Maison Notre-Dame à Ligugé (Vienne)" and he felt that he would never again see his friend. Nor did he. Huysmans, become a saint, rather an acrimonious saint, had severed all earthly ties. Henceforth, till the day of his cruel death, he was with God.

Music, already a passion with Ulick, began to dominate his life. He lost interest in various absurd or depraved "movements" that floated on the surface of artistic and literary life in Paris like greasy scum on clear soup. He changed his apartment and went out on the northern line, to Villiers-le-Bel, where in a rented maisonette, he could patrol the keyboard five or six hours daily without disturbing his neighbors. He had mastered technical difficulties years before, it was the higher reaches of interpretation he sought. He played Bach and Beethoven with a fervour that was religious. For him, as for Hans von Billow, the Well-Tempered Clavichord and the Sonatas were the Old and New Testaments of music. Chopin came third in this immortal trio of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit; Chopin, whose Preludes and Studies contain the past, present and future of the pianoforte. Even at this period Ulick saw clearly into the classic genius of the Polish tone-poet. Schumann ran a close second to Chopin in his affections. The glowing heart of romance, of great still forests, tangled underwoods, secret, sudden little lakes, clear and shining in the mystic daylight, their waters washed at dusk by the silver of a tender young moon; lover's vows in the dense darkness, sighs over their hapless fate--all passion and mystery, shy, hesitating, are in his music. He, not Chopin, is the real Romantic. Brahms and the moderns were not neglected. The elusive genius of Claude Debussy was then new. Ulick admired him. He loved certain phases of Brahms; not Dr. Johannes Brahms, the ponderous philosopher, but Brahms, the romantic, the follower in the trail of Schumann. There are pages in the pianoforte music that evoke grey days when the soul in its reverse aspirations recoils on itself, half articulate, divinely stammering, to express sensations that had lain buried in its convulutions since the birth of the monad. Brahms, too, is a mystic. His music sometimes registers moods recondite, moods that transcend normal psychic experiences. After Mendelssohn, and his crystalline shallowness, the utterances of Brahms are seemingly prophetic; a prophet who does not comprehend his own speech, though the fiery coal has touched his lips into eloquence. But the Forty-eight Preludes and Fugues, with the Beethoven sonatas were the daily musical sustenance, the bread of life, for Ulick. They quite filled his emotional and intellectual cravings.