Part 9
The art consciousness is the great life consciousness, he began in his somewhat high-pitched voice. Its product and the appreciation of its product are the very flower of life.... Hutchins Hapgood's companion continued to finger lovingly the polished wooden African figure.... Its presence in man is Godliness on earth. It humanizes mankind. Were it spread broadcast it would do away with dry, cold intellectualism, which dead and unfired, always seeks refuge in pretending to be more than it is.... Bill Haywood, the giant Arimaspian, was pounding the seat of the brocaded sofa with his great fist.... Art or art consciousness is the real proof of genuine human sympathy. It oozes spiritual expression. Were it fostered it would sooner solve the great modern economic problem than any labour propaganda.... Helen Westley was yawning, with a great open jaw, which she made no effort to conceal.... A lack of this art consciousness--Weber was very earnest, but in no sense theatrical--, on the part of both capital and labour, is one cause of this great modern struggle. Were this art consciousness more general, material possession would be less valued; the covetous spirit would soon die out.... Yorska, a wraith of black satin and black tulle, her pale Pierrot face slit with crimson and punctuated with two black holes, lined with purple, stood in the doorway motionless, like another Rachel, with one hand lifted above her head, grasping the curtain, trying to look uncovetous.... Art socializes more than socialism with its platform and its platitudes.... Bravo! This from Hippolyte Havel.... Economists go not deep enough into the modern monetary disease. They deal only with materialism. They concentrate only on what is obvious, the physical starvation of the toiling class, but never do they see or seem to realize the spiritual starvation or the lack of an art consciousness to both capital and labour. They would argue that the material relief must come first. I reply, now as always, we must begin with the spiritual. I do not see, however, how the spiritual or æsthetic can be separated from the material.... Clara Barnes gave an angry shake to her long ear-rings, but Donald Evans had the rapt attentive air of a man hearing a great truth for the first time.... The common solution of this great problem is too dry, too matter of fact, too calculated, too technical, too scientifically intellectual and not enough intellectually imaginative. Art consciousness is not merely a form of etiquette, nor a phase of culture--it is life--the quality of sensitive breathing, seeing, hearing, developed to a high true spirituality. Man would value man more. The wonder of and the faith in other human beings would kindle a new social and spiritual life.
That's good talk, was Bill Haywood's comment.
What does it all mean? Clara Barnes caught my attention again; it was obvious that she could catch no one else's.
It means what you are willing or able to put into it, nothing more, I affirmed.
Well, said Clara, yawning, I guess I can't put much into it. This is worse than a party I went to last week, given by a baritone of the Aborn Opera Company.
At this point, a little school-marm type of person, with a sharp nose and eye-glasses, rose and shrilly began to complain.
I am a mere lay woman. I don't know a thing about modern art. I've been trying to learn something for five years. In the effort, I have attended all the meetings of this kind that I could in Paris, New York, and London. There's always a lot of talk but nothing is ever clear. Now I'd like to know if there isn't some explanation of modern art, an explanation that a mere lay woman could understand.
There was a ripple of amused laughter among the young artists and a rapid exchange of glances, but not one of them rose. Instead, a rather massive female, utterly unknown to me, with as many rows of gold braid across her chest as a French academician, a porter at the Crédit Lyonnais, or a soldier in the army of the Prince of Monaco, stood on her feet.
What, exactly, would you like to know? she asked in a voice in which authority and confidence were equal elements.
I'd like to know everything, but I'd be satisfied with anything. What, for instance, is the meaning of that picture?
She pointed to Andrew Dasburg's The Absence of Edith Dale, a cubistic contribution to æsthetic production in several planes and the colours of red, yellow, and blue.
The massive lady began with some hesitation. Her confidence had not deserted her but she seemed to be searching for precise words.
Well, she said, that picture is the kind of picture that gives pleasure to the kind of people who like that kind of picture. The arrangement of planes and colours is very satisfying. Perhaps I could explain it to you in terms of music. Do you understand the terminology of music?
Not at all, snapped the little woman with the eye-glasses.
The massive lady seemed gratified and continued, In that case, you may have difficulty in following me, but if you take the first and second themes of a sonata, their statement, the development or working-out section, the recapitulation, the coda.... It has some relation to the sonata form certainly, but.... The artist is in the room, the artist who painted the picture. Won't you explain the picture, Mr. Dasburg?
Andrew, very much amused, did not take the trouble to rise.
The picture is there, he said. You can look at it. Then, after a pause, he added, Henry James says, Woe, in the æsthetic line, to any example that requires the escort of precept. It is like a guest arriving to dine accompanied by constables.
Then, said the little lady, solemnly, I say, Woe to that picture, woe to it, for it certainly requires the escort of precept. Moreover, I don't think any one here knows anything, not a thing! she cried, her voice rising to a shrill intensity, not a blessed thing. It's just like the last chapter of Alice. If I shouted, Why, you're only a pack of cards, you'd all fly up in the air, a lot of flat paste-boards with kings, queens, aces, and deuces painted on your faces! I shall never ask another question about modern art. My private impression is that it's just so much junk.
Very indignant now, she wrapped an ice-wool shawl around her bony shoulders and made her way out of the room.
There wasn't an instant's pause and her departure caused no comment. A new speaker began,
The world, it may be stated, for the purposes of classification, is divided into four groups: the proletariat, the aristocrats, the middle class, and the artist class. The artist class may be called by any other name, bohemians, anarchists, revolutionists, what you will. It includes those who think and act freely, without traditions or inhibitions, and not all people who write or paint belong to this class at all. The artist class lives the way it _wants_ to live. The proletariat and the aristocrats live the way they _have_ to live. The middle class is composed of members of the proletariat trying to live like the aristocrats....
My mind wandered. I glanced across at Peter. He was still absorbed in Mahalah Wiggins and did not appear to be listening to the speaker. Yet, if he were really writing a realistic novel, the talk, the whole atmosphere of the evening should have interested and enthralled him. He never looked up and he was whispering very rapidly.
Some people resemble animals; some, perhaps, minerals; assuredly, some resemble flowers. Mahalah Wiggins was like a pansy. Her hair was black with purple lights; her eyes were a pale pansy blue; her face bore an ingenuous pansy expression that made one wonder why pansies were for thoughts. She wore a purple velvet dress with long tight sleeves ending in points which reached her knuckles, and, around her throat, a chain of crystal beads that hung almost to her waist.
Intercepting the long look I gave the girl, Neith Boyce smiled.
Are you, too, interested in Mahalah? she asked.
I am interested in the effect she is making.
She always makes an effect, Neith rejoined.
Who is she?
An orphan. Her father left her a little money, which she is spending at the Art Students' League, trying to learn to draw. Her only real talents are obvious. She knows how to dress herself and she knows how to attract men. Your friend seems to like her.
He does, indeed.
Mahalah comes here often and always spends the evening in a corner with some man. She seems to prefer married men. Is your friend married?
No.
A fat woman in a grey crêpe dress, embroidered in steel beads, standing in the centre of the room, shifted my attention.
Who is that? I asked.
That is _Miss_ Gladys Waine, replied Neith. She is the wife of Horace Arlington, the sculptor.
_Miss_ and a wife? What is she then, herself?
Nothing. She does not write, or paint, or compose. She isn't an actress. She is nothing but a wife, but she insists on retaining her individuality and her name. If any one addresses her as Mrs. Arlington, she is furious, and if you telephone her house and ask for Mrs. Arlington, although she may answer the telephone herself, she will assure you that Mrs. Arlington is not in, does not, in fact, live there at all. She adores Horace, too. The curious thing is that Horace's first wife, who divorced him, has never given up his name, of which she appears to be very proud. She is always called Mrs. Horace Arlington and trembles with rage when some tactless person remembers her own name.
My anonymous companion was by my side again with a plate of chocolate ice cream which he offered me.
Did you ever try eating chocolate ice cream and smoking a cigarette simultaneously? he asked. If you haven't, allow me to recommend the combination. The flavour of both cigarette and ice cream is immensely improved.
An old lady with an ear-trumpet, thinking she had been addressed, took the plate of ice cream from his outstretched hand, leaned over us and queried, Eh?
I say, said my incognito companion, that there is nothing like a good dose of castor oil.
Nothing like it for what? she shrieked.
As a carminative! he yelled.
But I don't suffer from that complaint, she argued.
Allow me to congratulate you, madame, and he bowed to her.
As we were saying, he continued, in a confidential manner, grasping my arm, one cannot be too careful in writing a drama. Weak, low-born people in trouble are pathetic; the middle classes in the same plight are subjects for melodrama or comedy; but tragedy should deal with kings and queens.
The groups separated, came together, separated, came together, separated, came together: syndicalists, capitalists, revolutionists, anarchists, artists, writers, actresses, "perfumed with botanical creams," feminists, and malthusians were all mixed in this strange salad. I talked with one and then another, smoking constantly and drinking a great deal of Scotch whisky. Somehow, my strange companion, like the Duchess in Alice, contrived always to be at my side. Remembering the situation at the Queen's croquet party, I could not help feeling grateful that his chin was square and that he was shorter than I. At one o'clock I had a headache and decided to go home. I looked for Edith.
She went to bed hours ago, Neith explained.
Then I made a vain search through the rooms for Peter.
One of the two young men who had dined with us stopped me.
If you are searching for your friend, he said, he went away with Mahalah Wiggins.
_Chapter VIII_
Friendship usually creates onerous obligations. Our friends are inclined to become exigent and demanding. They learn to expect attentions from us and are hurt when we do not live up to these expectations. Friends have an unpleasant habit of weighing on our consciences, occupying too much of our time, and chiding us because we have failed them in some unimportant particular. Is it strange that there are moments when we hate them? Friendship, indeed, is as perilous a relationship as marriage; it, too, entails responsibility, that great god whose existence burdens our lives. Seemingly we never escape from his influence. Each newly contracted friendship brings another sacrifice to the altar of this very Christian divinity. But there was no responsibility connected with my friendship for Peter. That is why I liked him so much. When he went away, he seldom notified me of his departure; he never wrote letters, and, when he returned, I usually re-encountered him by accident. In the whole of our long acquaintance, there never was a period in which he expected me to telephone him after a decent interval. We were both free in our relationship, as free as it is possible for two people, who are fond of each other, to be. There was a great charm in this.
A whole month went by, after Edith Dale's party, without my hearing from him. Then I sought him out. By this time, I knew him well enough to be prepared for some transmutation; but I was scarcely prepared for what I saw. His room on East Broadway had been painted ivory-white. On the walls hung three or four pictures, one of Marsden Hartley's mountain series, a Chinese juggler in water colour by Charles Demuth, a Picabia, which ostensibly represented the mechanism of a locomotive, with real convex brass piston-rods protruding from the canvas, a chocolate grinder by Marcel Duchamp, and an early Picasso, depicting a very sick-looking pale green woman, lying naked in the gutter of a dank green street. There were lovely desks and tables, Adam and Louis XIV and François I, a chaise longue, banked with striated taffeta cushions, purple bowls filled with spiked, blue flowers, Bergamo and Oushak rugs, and books bound in gay Florentine wall-papers. The bed was covered with a Hungarian homespun linen spread, embroidered in gay worsteds. The sun poured through the window over George Moore's ample back and he looked happier.
Peter was wearing green trousers, a white silk shirt, a tie of Chinese blue brocade, clasped with a black opal, and a most ornate black Chinese dressing-gown, around the skirt of which a silver dragon chased his tail. He was combed and brushed and there was a faint odour of toilet-water. His nails were manicured and on one of his little fingers I observed a ring which I had never seen him wear before. Later, when I examined it more closely, it proved to be an amethyst intaglio, with Leda and the Swan for its subject. It has been said, perhaps too often, that you cannot make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. It is even more true that you cannot make a sow's ear out of a silk purse.
I rose to the room: It's nicer than Edith's.
It's not bad, Peter admitted. I didn't get it fixed up at first. I like it better now, don't you?
I liked your friend, the other night, he continued.
You mean Edith?
Yes, you must take me there again.
I'm sorry but that is impossible. She has given up her apartment and returned to Florence. But, I added, I didn't know that you had talked together.
We didn't exchange three words, not even two, he said, but I took her in and she took me in. We like each other, I'm sure, and some day we'll meet again. Look, he added, sweeping his arm around, see what her glamour has given me, a new life!
But why did you leave so early?
I met a girl....
The next few weeks have left a rather confused impression in my mind, perhaps because Peter himself seemed to be confused. He never spoke of his book. Occasionally we went to the theatre or to a concert. I remember a concert of Negro music at Carnegie Hall, when there were twenty-four pianos and thirty banjos in the band and the Negroes sang G'wine up, Go Down, Moses, Rise and Shine, Run Mary, Run, and Swing Low, Sweet Chariot, with less of the old plantation spirit than either Peter or I could have assumed, but when the band broke into ragtime, the banjos twanged, the pianos banged, the blacks swayed back and forth, the roof was raised, and glory was upon us. Once, coming out of Æolian Hall, after a concert given by Elena Gerhardt, we were confronted by a wagon-load of double basses in their trunks. Two of the monsters, with their fat bellies and their long necks, stood vis-à-vis on the sidewalk and seemed to be conversing, while their brothers on the wagon, a full nine, wore the most ridiculously dégagé air of dignity. We will not sit down, not here at any rate, they plainly said, but they did not complain. Peter laughed a good deal at them and remarked that the aristocrats in the French Revolution must have gone to the guillotine in much the same manner, only the absurd double basses in their trunks had no roses to smell. Never have I seen inanimate objects so animate save once, at a rehearsal in the darkened Belasco Theatre, when the curly gold backs of the ornate chairs, peeping over the rails of the boxes, assumed the exact appearance of Louis XIV wigs on stately gentlemen. We heard Toscanini conduct the Ninth Symphony at the Metropolitan Opera House and we went to see Mrs. Leslie Carter play Paula Tanqueray. Often, in those days, we dined at the Pavillon d'Orient, an Armenian restaurant on Lexington Avenue. Peter particularly enjoyed a pudding called Tavouk Gheoksu, made of shredded chicken-breasts, pounded rice flour, powdered sugar, and cinnamon, and Midia Dolma, which are mussels stuffed with raisins and rice and pignolia nuts. Studying the menu one night, it occurred to him that the names of the dishes would make excellent names for the characters of a play. The heroine, of course, he said, would be Lahana Sarma and the adventuress, Sgara Keofté; Enguinar is a splendid name for a hero, and the villain should be called Ajem Pilaf! There was a negro café in the basement of a building on Thirty-eighth street, which we frequently visited to see a most amazing mulatto girl, apparently boneless, fling herself about while a pitch-black boy with ivory teeth pummelled his drum, at intervals tossing his sticks high in the air and catching them dexterously, and the pianist pounded Will Tyers's Maori out of the piano. Occasionally we patronized more conventional cafés, one especially, where Peter was interested in a dancer, who painted her face with Armenian bole and said she was a descendant of a Hindu Rajah.
It was during this period that Peter nourished a desire to be tattooed and we sought out masters of the art on the Bowery and at Coney Island. For hours at a time he would examine the albums of designs or watch the artist at work decorating sailors and stevedores. One of these young men came nearly every day until his entire body, with the exception of his eye-balls, lips, and nails, had become a living Persian carpet, a subtle tracery of arabesques and fantastic beasts, birds and reptiles. The process of application was interesting. First, the pattern must be pricked out on glazed paper, smeared with lamp-black; this was laid on the surface to be tattooed and the outline left by the lamp-black was worked over with needles. The artist utilized a piece of wood into which were fixed with wires, nine or ten sharp points. The victims seemed to suffer a good deal of pain, but they suffered in silence. It was not, however, fear of pain that caused Peter to hesitate. I think he would have been frescoed from head to foot, could he have once decided upon a design. Day after day, he looked over the sketches, professional symbols, military, patriotic, and religious, symbols of love, metaphorical emblems and emblems fantastic and historical, frogs, tarantulas, serpents, hearts transfixed with arrows, crosses surmounted by spheres, and cannon. He was most tempted, I think, by the design of an Indian holding aloft the flag of the United States.
Late in March, he suggested a trip to Bermuda.
We must go somewhere, he explained, and why not Bermuda? It's not too far away.
I had been working hard and welcomed the idea of a vacation. To the question of a destination I was comparatively indifferent. It was, however, not too easy to arrange for even a brief leave of absence from the Times during the busy Winter months. By pleading incipient nervous prostration, however, I managed to accomplish my purpose.
On the day marked for our departure, I set out, bags in hands, for the office of the steamship company on lower Broadway, where Peter had commissioned me to stop for the tickets. There, a clerk behind the counter gave me a note. It was from Peter.
Dear Carl, it ran, I've cancelled our bookings. I can't go. Come in to see me today and we'll arrange another trip.
An hour later I found Peter in bed in his room on East Broadway. He was consuming a raw-beef sandwich but he laid it down to grasp my hand.
I'm sorry, he began, but I don't know how I ever happened to hit on the idea of Bermuda. When I awoke this morning, the thought appalled me; I couldn't get out of bed.
The counterpane was strewn with pamphlets relating to foreign travel. The telephone rang.
Excuse me, he said, as he clutched the receiver. Then, by way of explanation, It's the agent of the Cunard Line. I want to ask about the southern route.
He did. He asked about sailings for Italy, Africa, India, and even Liverpool and then he told the agent that he could not decide what to do but he would let him know later.
Carl, he exclaimed suddenly, let's go to Alaska!
I shook my head.
It may be that we shall meet there by chance some day, but I don't believe you can make up your mind to go there this week.
I'm afraid not, he assented ruefully. I suppose it's hard for you to understand.
I understand well enough, I replied, but under the circumstances you will have to travel alone or get some one else to go with you. While you are deciding, my leave of absence will expire.
A few days later he telephoned me.
I'm really going to Bermuda, was his message. I've had bookings on every boat sailing for Europe the past week and cancelled them all. My first idea was the right one. Bermuda is a change, it's near at hand, and I can get back quickly if I don't like it. Come to Bermuda with me, Carl!
When are you sailing? I asked. I'll come down to see you off.
On the day set, I went to the wharf, and to my great surprise, found Peter there, just as he had promised he would be, an hour before sailing time. If he kept an engagement at all, he always kept it on time. He had made preparations, buying new summer clothes, he explained, and a new innovation trunk. As he never knew how long he would stay in one place or where he would go from there, he always carried a great deal of apparently unnecessary baggage. This time he had five trunks with him and several bags, including two for the cats. As we stood on the wharf together, we saw these trunks being hoisted aboard. Then we walked up the gang-plank and went to seek out his cabin. He did not like it, of course, and he hunted up the purser and asked to be transferred to another part of the boat. The ship was crowded and no other cabin was vacant, but the purser, spurred to extra effort by the tip which Peter handed him, promised to try to get him one of the officers' rooms. A little later this transfer was effected and, before I left the boat, Peter was installed in his new quarters. As I bade him farewell, I thought he looked a little wistful. I watched the boat pull out into the river.
Five hours later, as I was working in the tower of the New York Times, I was called to the telephone.
I said, Hello, and almost dropped the receiver, for I had heard Peter's voice from the other end of the wire.
I'm back on East Broadway, he groaned. Do come down.
When I arrived, I found him propped up in bed, drinking tea, which he shared with me.
I just couldn't go! It wouldn't have been right to go feeling the way I did about it. Something dreadful would have happened.
But I saw the boat cast off her moorings.
Peter grinned.