Part 6

He didn't neglect the other arts. A brief stay in the atelier of Gérôme, later with Bonnat, failed to convince him that he had a painting hand. His eye was well-trained, not only by constant study and adventuring among the masterpieces in the Louvre, but also by sketching outdoors. The theatre was a thrice-told tale for him, his parents had been lovers of the drama, and Paris had everything to gratify his versatile tastes. In all the tohu-bohu of his activities, he did not lose sight of his chiefest ambition; to become a writer, one with an individual note. Playing the pianoforte was all very well; he knew that he had a friend for his old age; but the main business of his life was writing, and if he recognized his dilettante viewpoint he was assured that at some time this smattering of the Seven Arts--Jack of all, master of none--would prove useful in his avocation of criticism, for critic he had elected to become. Criticism was the best way to practice his scales in public and acquire a supple, steady touch on his intellectual instrument. In due time his own books would follow.

He wrote French as if it were his native tongue, as in a sense it was. English was always spoken in the Invern household; that had been a wise rule of a seldom wise father. Also French or Italian, not often German--because Ulick never met in Paris any of his old Jena associates; but, preferably French. Yet, when he essayed several flights, chiefly critical, he recognized that his was the Anglo-Saxon mind. He thought in French, the purity of which in diction could not be challenged; nevertheless, the fundamental structure of his thought was English. His French essays, which he showed to that most unselfish of professional egotists, most optimistic of pessimists, Remy de Gourmont, were soon touched on their sore spot.

"You are, my dear young friend, an Englishman, more than that, an Irishman, still more than that, an American, and, having known that beautiful lady, your dear mother, I may add, A New York American. You write well in our tongue, though not so well as Arthur Symons, anyhow, better than Oscar Wilde--who hasn't mastered our syntax--but, but--it's not vital, individual, your style. I overhear too many echoes of Flaubert, Goncourt, above all, Huysmans. That won't do. You have so saturated yourself with the ideas and methods of these masters that you have left no room for the growth of your own personality. Jeune homme, écoutez!"--and the kindly eyes peering through the big bowed glasses pierced to the inner consciousness of his listener--"Take the advice of an old doctor of vocables. Have you written much in English? No? I thought not. That is a virgin-field for you. Go home, go back to New York, you are deracinated in Paris, as my brilliant friend, Maurice Barrès puts it--what, haven't you read Barrès? Begin at once with that novel of national energy, Les Déracinés--and of a cosmopolite, detestable, person--pardon!--as detestable as the dilettante attitude. Perhaps the unexpected clash with a comparatively new language, new characters, and new environment may strike a personal spark from your little grind-stone in New York. Otherwise, Monsieur Ulick, you will become a replica of your brother Oswald, with whom I occasionally collaborate in a bock at the Café François-Premier; you will become a second-rate Parisian, writing excellent, colorless prose, the standardized prose of the college professor. The world over my dear chap, college professors are alike--the Eternal Sophomore, coprolites of the ideal. No, I repeat, don't expect to get your head above the turbid stream. Return to your native heath and astonish the Yanks, as your beloved Mark Twain says--there's a Yankee genius for you, racy, original, and one who should stand four-square with Emerson, Poe and Thoreau. But, then, you have no school of critique in America, so I suppose Mark Twain will be put in his true niche a half century hence. But do you love your country?" suddenly asked the master. Cornered, Ulick blurted out: "Certainly, I am an American, though born in Paris. Besides, I love baseball and mince pie."

"Bon, true American arts," said the writer and benevolently dismissed his ardent neophyte with the shining brow.

III

The toypond near the east driveway floated many miniature boats that Saturday afternoon in May. The golden-crested synagogue on the Avenue, a phallic emblem for the eyes of the initiated, stood massive, erect, well within view. Pretty children played sailors; at intervals their exigent nurses rescued them from a watery grave. The girl, straight to virginal primness, swinging a scarlet parasol, went on slow gliding feet around the basin. In her jade-colored eyes there was the sweet faint passion of a June morning; she evoked June rather than May, a late, not an early spring-tide. She was in gold and black and wore a wide-brimmed hat of black straw. Her eyes were not large, nor yet luminous; smothered fire would have been the verdict of a portraitist. Jewelled eyes, they were, but jewels that had the muffled radiance of a topaz. Introspective her glance, sympathetic and not without a nuance of melancholy. A young thing not over eighteen, tender but suspicious, proud and dependent on those she loved, Mona went into the park every day to escape the oppressive happiness of her home. She lived with her parents. Her brother was away ten months during the year at college. She had not many friends of her age and sex because she was the companion of her father and mother. She adored them. They were adorable; the mother like an old English painting of the eighteenth century; the father, a scholar, a futile fumbler in the misty mid-region of metaphysic; but as gentle as a gentle woman, for all women are not so. At times Mona fled, so deep was her love for them. She stood in the clear soft afternoon light, more brune than blonde, yet suggesting not twilight but dawn. Her Celtic name modulated with her character--a character, fluid, receptive, sceptical, above all, pagan in its worship of sun, moon, stars, and fair tempting nature. Her tiny beaked nose sniffed the candid air crammed with May odors. She was happy. Not a masculine shadow had projected itself across the snowy field of her virgin soul.

"By Jove! that's an interesting girl, I'll wager!" exclaimed Ulick Invern to his companion, who replied: "Come over and I'll introduce you. She is my sister Mona."

IV

They strolled to the Casino. With his accustomed flair for character Ulick recognized in the girl something out of the usual run of Americans. The charmless Yankee woman he had encountered to his discomfiture from the moment his steamer left Havre. She was the "life of the smoking-room"--on the French line ladies are permitted to invade the ship's fumoir--and he soon avoided that type. But he found her on the docks at New York and she fairly swarmed over the hotel, did this same aggressive, conceited, too well-dressed female. In Paris he had seen little of his ci-devant countrymen. He never visited the office of his father, and the recurrent advent of fresh consuls and their wives at the Embassy left him unmoved. His ideal of the American woman was the figure of his mother: exquisitely tactful, and of a veiled charm. And he enjoyed in Henry James the portraiture of the refined, if somewhat anaemic order, of lovely spinsters. But the raw native who gadded about Paris, confidently criticizing everything and everybody-- those women were repugnant to his sensibility. Daisy Miller was a reticent aristocrat in comparison.

Perhaps it was the Old-World texture of her manner, perhaps it was a brief sight of the exalted soul that peeped out of her timid eyes, perhaps--! but what reason can a young man or a young woman give for their first fugitive predilections? Ulick met Mona and liked her; Mona saw Ulick and liked him. As Paul Bourget would have said, they then and there "amalgamated their sublimes," which simply meant that they were two birds limed by nascent love. The sublimities and the mingling might come later.

But this youthful couple did not pin down their sensations to an artistic formula. They chatted, laughed, walked, and when the Casino was arrived at they sat on the Terrace and Ulick told them that the spot made him homesick for Paris; Paris, his patrie psychique. Mona incredulously smiled yet wondered; how could anyone prefer Paris to New York? She had never been in Paris. Ulick lightly reproached Milton for having kept such a sister locked up, as if in a gaol. Thereat, the theological student chuckled. Mona was free as a swallow. She preferred the company of her parents to that of the frivolous chits of her own social circle. Ulick had known that the Miltons were well-to-do people who lived without ostentation, a rapidly vanishing species of New Yorkers. Again he looked at Mona, again their gaze collided. Her eyes shone. They are the eyes of a rare soul, he commented to himself. And how different the expression from the calm, objective gaze of Easter. Toujours Easter!

"There comes Paul Godard! Lord! with that creature Blanche in his car. Don't stare, Mona, please," begged her brother. "Don't be stupid," she answered, "you dear old priest. I'll look. The woman won't hurt me." Mona measured the handsome, bold dancer, over-dressed, bejewelled and resplendent in a picture hat, who majestically moved up the terrace followed by Paul and the maître-d'hôtel. Paul pretended not to see Ulick, and Ulick turned the other way. He wasn't interested in Paul or his concubines, though he still recalled with a sullen rage the caddish behaviour of Godard the night he made Easter half-drunk; that, and the inglorious hat episode he could never forgive nor forget. "So he didn't sail, after all," he muttered. But if he was indifferent, the young girl was not. "Is that the rich Mr. Godard I read of in the newspapers?" she asked Ulick who couldn't repress a slight shudder of disappointment. "She reads the newspapers like any other American virgin, and she speaks of money! Hopeless, all these dove-eyed maidens, with their profiles of a hawk; a sweet, domesticated hawk, a hawk all the same, ready to swoop down--" "Oh let's go home brother," broke in Mona, irrelevantly. She had sensitively noticed the inattention of her new friend and she was wounded without giving herself any reason for her slight feeling of resentment. They went away. Ulick accompanied them to the gate at 72nd Street. Mona gave him a wan smile at parting. Milton, as usual, was unaffectedly hearty. He was fond of Ulick and had made a vow to save his soul from the eternal bonfire. She seemed to like me at first, said Ulick after he left them, though she didn't invite me to call. Oh Lord, I wonder what mischief Easter Brandès is up to at this minute? Her name revived odious memories. Again that Paul Godard. To the devil with the exasperated poodle. Ulick went to the Utopian Club.

V

Mona Milton was what the French, with their feeling for nuance, would call "fausse-maigre"; she gave an impression of slenderness which her solidly-built figure contradicted. She was partial to draperies and that, perhaps, created the illusion of diaphaneity. Her health was excellent. Not even at the time when women are 'minions of the moon' did she relapse into that forlorn flabbiness noticeable even to the ordinary obtuse male. Her mother had reared her in the old-fashioned way and had put the fear of God in her heart (read: human respect for the polite conventions of a rapidly disintegrating social hierarchy). But her father, who called himself agnostic, had quietly pooh-poohed his wife's solicitousness regarding the little virtues. Hedges to be vaulted if needs must, he told his daughter, the chief companion of his long tramps through Central Park, when it was a green, delightful retreat from the city's menacing encroachment. Truth is stranger than morals, he also said. Mona loved the park. Every day saw her reading or walking through the less-footed by-ways. For her, mornings were mysteries. She would sit in the sun for hours, a book in her lap, her eyes dreaming. Her sub-conscious life was struggling for self-recognition. Her ego was transformed after puberty announced itself. She was an orchestra of cells; the multiplicity of her egos astonished, yet did not distress her. She accepted the new stream of consciousness in her that had burst its barriers and painted over her imagination a fresher, more beautiful world. Of physiology and psychology she had more than the rudiments. Sex did not puzzle her, only its cabined seclusion from the general current of daily life. Her mother had been frank with her since she had reached the age of curiousness; in turn Mona was frank with her father. She asked him questions that she would not ask her mother and he answered them unhesitatingly. He believed that insincerity cloaked a multitude of stupidities. One day when she was hardly sixteen she said: "Papa, why do I love dolls so much?" "The maternal instinct," he had replied. "Oh, yes, anybody knows that, but why am I different from other girls?" "Different, my dear?" "Yes, different. I haven't one friend who loves dolls. They are fond of dogs but laugh at me when I dress and undress my darling doll. Lydia Fuller says I'll be married at eighteen and have twins at nineteen--maybe sooner," added Mona, pensively. The old man only shook his head and resumed his Schopenhauer.

The rearing of the girl, withal superficial, covered a wide variety of authors and subjects. She knew French fiction so well that she couldn't become interested in the hypocritical half-way house of English-writing novelists. What's the use of writing about life, she complained to her mother, and leave life out of the story? The scabrous element in Gallic light literature amused her, but she preferred Flaubert to Paul de Kock, Balzac to Zola. Memoirs enchained her fancy. The utterances and actions of real men and women appealed. Casanova, who has left the world its most frank and complete autobiography, was for Mona as is romance to other girls of her age; Casanova, Benvenuto Cellini and the Memoirs of the Duc de Saint-Simon. Rabelais she dismissed and for Benjamin Constant and Stendhal she only entertained mild respect. She admired the electric energy of Julien Sorel and Mathilde de la Môle, but they left her cold. As for the pessimists, Senacour, Amiel and them that confide to diaries, their pen dipped in their own salty tears, she spoke contemptuously. Weaklings, all. What if they did write charmingly? She longed for virility; that spelled charm for her. The more violent pages in the Old Testament, Shakespeare and Faust; but she held the revelation of the New Testament in moderate esteem. Too much oriental fatalism. Too much turning the "other cheek," to please her. The person of Christ seemed apochryphal. Such a man couldn't exist twenty-four hours without being killed on our murder-loving planet. Notwithstanding all these contradictions in her undeveloped character, Mona was far from being an "advanced" young woman; indeed, her classmates at college had voted her desperately old-fashioned; worse--a womanly woman. Secretly she wished that her soul could be like a jungle at night, filled with the cries of monstrous sins. But it wasn't.

She continued to love her doll, not that she disliked cats and dogs and birds, only that the doll, the simulacrum of the future child, touched her to her innermost fibres. She had the brother-cult, yet she loved no one, except her father, so much as the absurdly big French doll, the last of a long line dating back to her babyhood, that slept with her every night. The old folks were at first amused, then edified by this stubborn reaction to a profound instinct. In time they became accustomed to seeing a staring wax effigy on the pillow of their daughter's couch, attired in a neat nightdress and lace cap. Ah, well! had said the father, it is a premonitory symptom, yet she is happier now, dear child, than she will be with her future husband. Considering her self-effacing nature, the reply of his wife was rather tart: "If you read less Schopenhauer you wouldn't be so prejudiced against my sex. To hear you talk one might suppose that your married life had been a vale of tears." To which the old man humbly and affectionately replied: "Instead of a bed of roses, as it is," and surprised his spouse by warmly kissing her.

They didn't forbid Mona the company of young men but she made no attempt to meet anyone. Her brother was away most of the time at the seminary and his friends were theological students, neuter persons she evaded rather than despised. Voluntary eunuchs, enemies of the very source of life, she felt uncomfortable in their presence, as she would have been embarrassed if a hermaphrodite had been pointed out to her. The unnatural was merely a mediaeval idea, but the anti-natural was to be feared and avoided. She did not say this to her brother, who in her eyes was a saint, but she said as much to her father who sympathised with her. Another confusion in her mind was the degrading of the major instinct of life--after hunger; Reproduction. If, as the Bible says, fornication is a rank sin, why do a few words mumbled over a man and woman by a clergyman or magistrate make it less a sin? It's the same vile act isn't it, even in marriage? Her mother was more shocked at her expression than at the idea which prompted it--an idea as old as the hills. "But Mona, people don't think such things, much less speak them." "They do mother. There isn't a girl in the world who hasn't had this same thought, though she may keep it in the secret cabinet of her mind." Her mother shook her head but didn't dare speak of sin, or redemption or the holy sacrament of matrimony instituted by the Church to bless the most animal of the functions, to lend it dignity, to create a safeguard for the children, not to mention the fact that this sacrament screens the shock and doubts and hesitations of pure-minded girls, to whom physical union with a man would be otherwise repulsive. No, this "theological bric-à-brac" as Mr. Milton called the tenets of religion, his wife had been forbidden to speak of to her children. Her son was to her a surprise, like a swan hatched from a brood of ducklings, and now Mona was beginning to disquiet her. A good girl, a loving dutiful daughter--nevertheless, disquieting because of her absolutely natural attitude toward forbidden themes, so natural that she often embarrassed her mother.

"Mother," she had abruptly exclaimed about this time, "Mother, I wonder why brother is so inclined to piety. He should have been the girl, I the boy. Mother--I am beginning to believe that something was wrong in your marriage--" "Oh!" ejaculated the unhappy woman, who didn't know what terrible speech would follow: "I firmly believe, you dear old fraidcat Mother, that papa has never been unfaithful to you since you two darling old sillies were married." Mrs. Milton refused to unbend during an entire evening.

VI

After Ulick had given his hat and stick to the garderobe he walked through the café to the dining room on the University Place side. Martin's was his favourite rendezvous. The cuisine, the cellar, the service, were the best in town. Ulick lived at the Maison Felicé, but liked a change of menu and venue. He was known at Martin's and was soon taken to a window table when, astonished, he noted his immediate neighbor. She held out her hand: "Such coincidences do occur, outside of novels," she said. He sank into a seat facing her. "May I?" he begged. She nodded. Mona was fond of good things to eat. At home if the cook had served stewed potato-peelings her parents would have meekly swallowed them. They had little appetite for food or drink, none at all for the finer shades of cookery for the gentle art of the gourmet. Mona went daily into the kitchen and conspired in company with the cook; therefore, she occasionally ate something that had flavour. But when she was hard-pressed by artistic hunger, as she called it, she walked down the Avenue to 9th Street, there turned eastward and reached Martin's, always in a famished condition.

"You haven't ordered, have you, Miss Milton?" asked Ulick. She shook her head, negatively. He beckoned to the captain of the dining-room and after some whispering a waiter was instructed. No wine was commanded, neither drank wine. Vichy Celestins and wonderful coffee with cream made their appearance in company with French rolls and butter, followed by a variation on the theme of eggs--oeufs à la Martin--then a filet de sole au gratin--and a Chateaubriand steak with a Salade Russe--good heavens, mused the girl, he has a master-palate. It was true. Ulick, despite his fondness for mince pie and Philadelphia scrapple, could not endure the national cuisine. We are barbarians compared with the French, he openly asserted, who know how to eat, drink and think.

"And now my dear Miss Milton, I shall apologise for my rudeness. I never asked you if you expected anyone, but took for granted that my company would be agreeable. I ask your pardon. How are you, and how is your very good brother? Dear old Milt." She was all animation.

"I'm glad you like Milt. I adore him. What a pity he is going to be a priest." Ulick looked surprised. She coloured. "I mean," she pursued, "he should have picked out a more liberal profession."

"Religion is so narrowing,"--"Religion is an ensemble of scruples that impede the faculty of reason," he interrupted in sing-song tones. "Who said that?" she quickly asked. "I think the learned Professor Salomon Reinach." "You are right but your quotation is incorrect." For the third time that morning he was surprised. A blue-stocking, a theologian in petticoats; perhaps an agnostic. Yet she didn't seem "modern" or of the over-cultured type. "What Reinach wrote is this: 'Religion is a sum of scruples which impede the free exercise of our faculties.'" She pronounced this little speech as if such definitions were the daily bread of her discourse. "Aren't those eggs delicious?" he asked. He was nettled. He wished to change the tide of conversation. She assented and smiled at him with such a mischievous smile, both a challenge and a conciliation, that he laughed. She laughed, and she extended her hand to him. He took it. The incident became a memory.

Her hands were not small; shapely and capable, they were white and carefully tended. He had made a study of the hand. Why shouldn't he? A pianist, a writer, who hated the type-machine, believing that only with the pen, the stylus, could a man create prose and poetry; all the rest is commercial. Yet the hands of Mona were not what he called the hands of an artist. Their forms were largely-moulded, the fingers, charged with character; the tips were not spatula-shaped. His curiosity was aroused. They awaited the fish. "Let me look at the palm of your left hand," he pleaded. She showed it without coquetry. He noted the deeply graven and long life-line, but the abnormal development of the Venus-hill caused him to ejaculate: "Dio mio! you must have an affectionate disposition." She said without a suspicion of mock-modesty: "I love children," and then they attacked the sole. He couldn't help admiring her forthright manner. A candid girl. Therefore a good girl. And how interesting. She thought: If he doesn't like my plain speaking he isn't the man for me. Love me, love my doll, she whimsically concluded. If the secrets of a maiden's and youth's souls could be spilled on the table, as salt is sometimes spilled, many a marriage made in heaven or hell would never be consummated. For ten minutes their teeth were busy.