Part 8

No women! Balzac had sternly warned Théophile Gautier. The Emperor Honoré did not practise what he preached. Compact of sex himself he was ever preoccupied with petticoats. La crise juponnière overtook him once a week and oftener. Ulick recalled an anecdote of the great man when, after he had succumbed to the blind fury of eroticism--a chambermaid, or somebody feminine had crossed his path--he went about the boulevards bemoaning to his friends: "J'ai perdu un livre, j'ai perdu un livre!" his theory being that an orgasm valued an entire story, and in his case it may have. Save your seed for nobler purposes than copulation. That is the wisdom of the sages. And the transposition so painfully accomplished by the saints of all times, climes and creeds, has ever impressed mankind as a deed heroic. Women secretly admire the chaste man. He is a sum of ineluctable forces. Men deride the Josephs and Parsifals, not crediting them with self-control. But that is nonsense, asserted Ulick. A priest here and there succumbs, but as a rule, and notwithstanding the atrocious martyrdom of unsatisfied legitimate desires, the sacerdotal man emerges from the trial a conqueror. As for women, they are the self-contained sex. No one knows precisely what happens in the alchemy of their emotions. Some burn their smoke, others blaze coram publico; but the majority hide this sort of light under a bushel of hypocritical reservations.

I mustn't waste myself in little spasms then. How about correspondence? "ça forme le style," Balzac told Gautier, and rather grudged him that concession. Ulick smiled. He knew his master-weakness, his vice. He knew that when the flesh moved him the spirit took a holiday. No self abnegation for him, no transposition to his cortical cells of his sexual longing. Like a bull he saw red everywhere. It's a pity all the same, he sighed. I should marry, raise a family and be unfaithful to my wife not more than twice weekly. The programme of the majority of good fathers, good husbands. And the American man is the worst of the lot. A regular Turk plus a religious humbug. And some clergymen! Town bulls. Over in Brooklyn they put up statues to their piety--and virility. Bon! They should. A womanly woman is admirable, and she is not rare. A virile man is as rare nowadays as a chaste one.

What an enormous faculty of inattention I possess! I wander, I stray into the queerest pastures. What's this I've written? Philanthropy is inverted egotism. True. All the immortal turpitudes are to be found in the ranks of the philanthropists. A pecuniary heresy. The latrines of my soul were overflowing in Paris. Am I purer in New York? Here we buy our ecstasy, rent that brief syncope called passion. What's the difference? It's the début that counts. The fury of enlacement leaves me a cynic. I wonder if women feel the same? That eternal triangle of theirs. And the pensile penguin of the eternal masculine. Wicked Walt has in The Children of Adam made some stunning phrases about the procreative organs. People who rave over his rotten poetry wouldn't read him if he hadn't been an exhibitionist in print. No one with a particle of taste seduces a young girl nowadays; they wait till she is married--it saves time and trouble. "Sir," roared old Doctor Johnson, "maidenheads are for ploughboys." Oh, the delicious, pernicious conversation that depraves. Thought deforms. Seduction by starlight sometimes ends in a police court with a fornication and bastardy charge. Anyhow, we must have our psychic satisfactions, else spiritual atony. Why this mania of certitude in the choice of a phrase? Pure dandyism of style. Goethe said in his Truth and Poetry, "All herein is true; nothing exact." That is fine in its implications. Stained-glass socialism! Most of it is nothing else. Anything to keep out the daylight of reality. Like the tigress that has tasted human flesh and blood so is the woman who knows man; neither are satisfied but with human prey. That's why widows remarry or--: why seduced girls "fall" again--though Ulick smiled at that silly word--why, convents are peopled by disillusioned souls--and there is a waiting list!

Why does man crave self-abasement? Pascal is an example. Caesar wept when, after watching a ballet of beautiful girls dance, he saw them killed. But he didn't weep from pity, but with ecstasy because of their beauty. The aesthetic temperament. Love is not a sentiment, it's a sensation. The Japanese know that. An orchestra of sensations in which the silences are sonorous. What an Iliad of Imbecility is the history of mankind. My idealistic anxiety over my affairs is proof positive of their pettiness. We never escape the prison of self, though we attempt to project our personality into the thoughts of another; this process is called sympathy. But a thought and a thing are identical. There is no thought-stuff different from thing-stuff, says William James. We can never know anything outside of ourselves. Oh! the sour hair, the dark breath of these psychologists! In the cuisine of love there are flavours for all tastes. Else ugly women wouldn't be sought after. Are there any ugly women? my brother Oswald used to say that once a pillow over their face all women were alike to him. Discriminating person, Oswald. His mind must be a slop-jar of the infinite. How mirific to mingle our essences. What immaculate perception is required to pick the precise woman with whom to "amalgamate our sublimes." The vagabondage of my soul through the universe, fluid, profound, and choral, is a gift denied most men and women. Yet it is at my threshold for the asking. My conceit is character--I think; yours is merely apoplectic. The lassitudes of love are divine. The human plant does not best flourish in the sunlight of success; it needs darkness, sin, sorrow, crime, to bring it to a rich maturity. The ignoble dung of miseries demands the spade of adversity. And Flaubert has said that the ignoble is the lower slope of the sublime. Which is consoling. As Rabelais would remark: I am an abstractor of quintessences.

I once longed to unhook the sun from the wall of the firmament and now I would fain crawl into a certain sultry crevice. The prism of desire deceives the Jasons in search of the golden--or brunette--fleece. I have made love to virtuous women who gave me the sensation of the force and felicity that attends the commission of a rape. And the pure woman who teases is worse than a streetwalker. A course of anatomy on a pillow, says a fellow cynic. Ah! the rapture of her little solitudes, her ivory tower, her mimique in the "naked war." In this life all the rest is gesticulation or secular sorrow. Ideas may be domesticated like cats. The pathos of distance--memorable phrase of Nietzsche--boasts its obverse, the bathos of propinquity--Walter Littlefield's mot. Some men look like a carefully pared thumb-nail; perhaps they are; anyhow, it's better than being a noble débris. Lawyers earn their bread in the sweat of their brow-beating. Fais aux autres ce que tu ne veux pas qu'ils te fassent! Pity is inutile. Every one of our actions is an addition. Why then worry over free-will? Not to animal life, nor to machinery must we go when studying the human heart, but to vegetables and flowers. I believe that romantic feelings are much less common than we imagine; the vast majority of the race mimic the gestures of the stage and fiction. Food, shelter, fornication, the fight for daily existence--these are the prime levers; not sentiment. We fool ourselves. We take our religion and sentiment in small doses. There are souls of prey like birds of prayer. Few women are in harmony with the moral landscape. What music is comparable to the exquisite sighs of a woman satisfied? The orchestra of her soul and sensations plays a triumphant fortissimo, and what a cruel, piercing note is the supreme spasm; the entire gamut of dolor is compressed therein.

We owe the world a living, not t'other way round. How I loathe Gounod's Ave Maria with its slimy piety, slimy echoes from the brothel. This vibrion of music, Gounod, never touched masterpieces without blighting them. Think of the Bach prelude accompanying the song. Think of mighty Faust maimed, tortured to make an operatic holiday. The Truth, so-called, is not necessarily tonic to all souls. Free-thought is never free; sometimes it is not thought; and it is usually inverted dogmatism. The woman who gives an elderly man the illusion of virility will always be sought after. Man is the only animal who can imagine what is not. We think backwards, but live forwards, said the Scandinavian mystic, Søren Kierkegaard. There are no illegitimate children; babies are always born legitimately. Ask the women. What medical pathos. Is it not better to fall into the hands of a murderer than into the dreams of a lustful woman? That's Nietzsche. He never made the blunder of lying down in the dirty straw of the sex-trough. That's why he wrote as if with a diamond on a slate of crystal. Yet he could say in the same breath that chastity is a virtue with some, with the majority almost a vice. Every man knows that a woman has a dozen different ways to make him happy, and a hundred to make him unhappy. Nous nous promenions nos préjugés! Sounds like Stendhal, doesn't it? I imitated him when I paraphrased it in English: Let us promenade our prejudices. Just as I gave Baudelaire the credit of a line he never saw, though one I believe he would have approved. Here it is: Lo! the Lesbians, their sterile sex advancing. Curious, isn't it, how Baudelaire and Swinburne loved to write about Lesbians. The influence of the Sapphic legend, I fancy, not alone because of the sweet inversion.

Ah me! groaned the young man, as the light filtered through the curtains, here's another day, and I've been wasting good sleep over this twaddle instead of being in bed. But I couldn't sleep. Too much black coffee. It doesn't matter what. Only I wonder how many of these phrases are my own. I don't believe in originality. George Moore is quite right when he derides ideas; their expression is the only worth while to the artist prose. Truth--error? This side of the Pyrenees-- and the other side. Map-morality. He paused, and ruefully reflected: Nor can I say much for the formal quality of these phrases. Ah! the precious pagodas of prose, pagan and subtle, built by those master artificers, Renan, Anatole France, Huysmans, Barrès. Nevertheless, Stendhal, who wrote drily, whose books are psychological labyrinths, is their ruling sun, one that shines in a frosty heaven of his own fashioning. De Gourmont--a prober of the soul. Bourget, another, though more mundane, decorative. Maurice Barrès is a metaphysical Chopin in his feeling for nuance. He promenades his incertitudes through many pages of perverse, cadenced prose. But perverse. He has now deserted his ivory tower for another illusion like his "culte du moi;"--nationalism, patriotism, as opposed to egoism and cosmopolitanism. Well, I'm following in his footsteps, trying to become a sturdy American citizen in my native city--where I wasn't born. I'll stick. I like mince-pie, baseball and a good rough-neck prize-fight. I must be a real Yankee.

As for these notes--heaven help any reader if I ever make of them a chapter in a book. That book! Fiction or criticism, or both? The novel as a literary form is stale. I should like to write a story, not all empty incident, nor yet all barren analysis. Neither Henry James, nor old Dumas--I'm not flying high, am I?--but one in which the idealogies of Barrès and the concrete narrative of De Maupassant would be merged. A second Dickens, a second Thackeray are inconceivable. A soul-biography framed in harmonious happenings--Ah! what an ideal is Walter Pater who, when his critical prose plays second-fiddle to his fiction, will be called the master-psychologist of them all. Marius, Imaginary Portraits, Gaston--those are unapproachable. Pater has revealed to us the rarest of souls. He achieves ecstasy in a prose-music never sounded since the Greeks. As Tristan is to Aida, so Marius to all fiction--oh, but now I'm going off my handle again, grumbled Ulick. Vanity Fair and Pickwick are good enough for me, even if I do admire Balzac, Flaubert, Stendhal, Mérimée and the Russians. The man who doesn't read Pickwick once a year is fit for treason. If only Dostoievsky, the greatest psychologist since Balzac, had mastered the compression of Turgenev? What a scooper of souls. There's too much descriptive padding in modern novels, too many landscapes, not enough characterization. I don't mean descriptive characterization-- the clothes, the gait and the eternal simper of the pulchritudinous gum-chewing heroine--but a searching characterization that not only paints your man without, but also within. Think of Julien Sorel in Red and Black. Not the master that is Tolstoy could better Stendhal. A detestable character? Admitted, but what has that to do with the vitality of his characters, the validity of his portraiture? Too much cluttered-up with futile things our novel reminds me of a drawing-room which you can't see because of the furniture or the bric-à-brac, so crowded is it with everything.

To avoid conventional chapter transitions, to write swiftly with weight, emotion, also succinctly; to cram every inch of space with ideas as well as action--the fiction of the future--all this I fear is not in abundance. Henry James is the man who may solve the difficulty. Flaubert swore that the characters should reveal themselves by their acts, and loathed long-winded analyses, though he abused his powers of description. It is his narrative that is the pride and despair of his successors. Henry James says character is plot, but plot is not character. That's my notion. And Cardinal Newman was also correct when he gently insinuated that no one could make psychology easy reading. He didn't live long enough to read William James. Lord, Lord! And we go afield to burn incense under foreign nostrils and here we can boast of two such brothers of genius as William and Henry James. Magnificent genius. But to bed. I'm afraid I'm a confused thinker. I wonder what Easter--no I mean Mona--is doing now? Encore la femme! He fell asleep and dreamed of a strange blonde creature, all fun and fire and flame.

XII

Ulick was shown into a room filled with carbon photographs by a coloured butler in sober livery. It was an ante-chamber on the first floor of a large, old-fashioned house on a side-street off the Avenue somewhere in the thirties; he forgot just where. When he entered the atelier, huge in size, he was greeted by a half dozen men he knew; some he had chummed with in Paris; one, Robbie Sanderson--the Bullrush, he was nicknamed--had been an intimate of Oswald Invern's. He, too, was a painter. The host, Ned Haldane, called the Zephyr, because he was so fat and light on his feet, welcomed the newcomer, as did big Stanley the sculptor and popular man-around-town. It was a group congenial to Ulick. All were graduated from the Parisian art treadmill; men who took a liberal view of life, men without puritan morals and with charming manners.

"We are not all here yet," proclaimed the Zephyr, "but I hope soon will be. We are only to be a dozen." "A baker's dozen," corrected Stanley, "for there's Jim the butler." "Oh, no, my boy, Jim isn't to do any butlering in this room tonight. He'll be busy in the cork-room with the fizz. Besides he is a respectable married man and we musn't make him forget his dusky spouse." The Zephyr laughed. "Are you going to give us another pony-ballet tonight? What's the lark, Ned?" asked Robbie Sanderson. "Never you mind, lad, be patient and just stick to the cocktails. What--you won't drink anything?" pursued Haldane when Ulick refused. He seemed puzzled, as if he were about to blurt out, "Then what the devil did you come for?" but he smiled and bowed. He liked the looks of the young aristocrat sponsored by Edgar Saltus and of whom he had heard so much from friends in Paris. The bell rang. A message from Saltus begging off. Illness the excuse. "I bet he's working on the chapter of a novel--he's not sick," laughed Haldane. Ulick's face was long. The Bullrush clapped him on the back and reassured him by whispering, "Don't worry, Ulick. There will be lots of fun. You won't be lonely. Girls!" The painter significantly winked. Again the bell rang--furiously. The Zephyr went out and received noisy salutes. Evidently belated guests. Ulick, now thoroughly bored, looked around him.

The studio was not particularly inviting; it was almost bare. No pictures, a few easy divans, the floor covered with rugs of fabulous weave--he recognized that--and nothing in the middle of the room, no tables, no preparatory symptoms of a banquet, much less a saturnalia. Tapestries adorned the walls. The doors were draped. He was disappointed at the absence of Saltus and annoyed with himself for coming. He did not join the men clustered about the buffet. He felt isolated and was mentally casting about what excuse would serve him to escape, when the room was invaded by the gang. There were introductions--not many. The crowd belonged to one family, the Seven Arts. And they were at home. Drinks speedily disappeared down parched gullets. There was a punch bowl, and early as was the hour the air was heavy with cigarette smoke. Haldane clapped his hands. Silence. Jim and his fat wife entered carrying a small table. Then another, and another, till six were placed around the room, close to the walls. Each table was set for two persons. Flowers, silver, napery and porcelain. Hurrah! came from a dozen throats. As usual Ned Haldane had royally spread himself. Anticipation floated in the air. After a minute's conference with the butler the master of ceremonies bade him good night. "And now get out Jim, and don't show your shiny face till noon tomorrow." Jim grinned and withdrew. He knew the ropes. Haldane cried: "Gentlemen, please be seated. The comedy is about to begin." Then he blew a silver whistle.

Folding-doors opened and there slowly defiled through them a band of beautiful girls, bearing silver platters. These girls were quite naked save for a scarf which depended from their shoulders, wound under their breasts and traversed their thighs. Blonde and brunette; all the intermediate flesh-tints. There were a dozen and not one was more than twenty. Their hair was filleted and their feet in sandals. A dazzling vision from some old Greek processional cult, thought Ulick as he clapped his palms in company with his companions. "My God, I'm hungry," roared Robbie, and the laughter was deafening. "Listen to the gourmand," commented the Zephyr. "Here I've gathered the finest choir of virgins he ever saw and the beggar yells for food. What guts you boast, Rob." The silver platters held hors d'oeuvres of quality. No sakuzka at a Russian dinner could show so many exotic delicacies. With these appetizers were tiny glasses of aperitives. The virgins vanished, only to reenter with fresh dishes. No soup was served. Oysters and shell fish. Birds. Salads. One half the band carried bottles. Champagne of the dryest sort. Ulick was hungry enough to forget that he was being waited upon by a plump blonde nude angel and ate as unconcernedly as if she were a plain waitress, clothed and from the hills of New Hampshire. Parisian training hath its uses. The candles in sconces at the side were grateful to the eyes, the rich yet subdued tones of the tapestry and Persian rugs evoked a harmonious atmosphere. To the memory of Ulick, furnished with images of European picture-galleries, there came Venetian episodes, festal suppers, and the mellow debaucheries of Tintoretto's days and the days of the Doges. Sensualist as he was he experienced a slight sensation of satiety.

They had reached the cognac and were now smoking, gabbling. His table companion was the Bullrush who already felt his wine. He saluted the virgins by their names, and when he forgot them he invented new ones; sometimes his inventions weren't tasteful. One girl, fatter than the others, he called rumpsteak and patted her when she passed. But it was a well-trained orchestra; not by the movement of an eye-brow did she notice his rudeness. After a brief interlude, during which every one bawled or guzzled, there was heard the premonitary tinkling of little bells. The twelve virgins emerged in Indian file; they had changed their scanty costume; they no longer wore sashes. Instead, sleigh-bells were fastened to their ankles, and to the insistent clicking of castanets they danced the Dance of the Seven Devils. This spawn of Satan, these devil's daughters, had been drilled in the technique of the ballet infernal. Monotone of castanets and tufted footfalls framed rhythmic obscenities. At times Ulick gasped, and he had been in Oriental brothels where sex is become a delirium. The Ctéis was appropriately worshipped. They sprawled and postured, they reared their polished posteriors in porcine rhythms, as if to invite their brethren, who ringed them with applause, urging them to audaciously lascivious acts. The air was charged with cigarettes, the acrid smell of wine and odor di femina. Ulick's head began to ache.

Suddenly from languourous weavings, from legs and arms in unholy embrace, the current changed to crazy gallopings. The dancing mania seized the men, all except the Zephyr, who leaned against a wall and coolly regarded the spectacle, surely not a novel one to him. Ulick was caught by the plump blonde and furiously whirled. She was an enticing houri with gold-coloured eyes and scarlet lips--rouged. Her breath was extra-dry. He turned his head away as she repeatedly kissed him. But the heated curves of her finely modelled torso made him a helpless prisoner. Sweetness exhaled from her. Young, pretty, absolutely depraved, she had fancied the handsome youth who sat so still and haughty, coldly refusing her libations and unconsciously frowning when Robbie Sanderson pinched her cheeks. She drank with the others each time they went out to the service-room, and she found her tongue as the night wore on in frenzied intoxication. The men were in their shirtsleeves. Everyone sang. The heat and noise were terrific. And all this pagan revelry in a drab, respectable quarter of New York! No matter, Ulick breathlessly exclaimed, it's a relief from the accursed hypocricy of puritanical Yankeedom. Again the whistle sounded. A lull followed. The girls, their smooth bodies glistening with moisture, slipped away. A fresh attack was made on the wine stacked in ice-pails.