Part 12
Though it is positively not true that Phil and I, having covenanted on a hands-off policy, were independently hoping for the worst, so far as Susan's ability to cope unaided with New York was concerned; nevertheless, the ease with which she made her way there, found her feet without us and danced ahead, proved for some reason oddly disturbing to us both. Here was a child, of high talents certainly, perhaps of genius--the like, at least, of whose mental precocity we had never met with in any other daughter--much less, son--of Eve! A woman, for we so loved her, endowed as are few women; yet assuredly a child, for she had but just counted twenty years on earth. And being men of careful maturity, once Susan had left us, our lonely anxieties fastened upon this crying fact of her youth; it was her youth, her inexperience, that made her venture suddenly pathetic and dreadful to us, made us yearn to watch over her, warn her of pitfalls, guide her steps.
True, she was not alone. Miss Goucher was admirable in her way; though a middle-aged spinster, after all, unused to the sharp temptations and fierce competitions of metropolitan life. It was not a house-mother Susan would need; the wolves lurked beyond the door--shrewd, soft-treading wolves, cunningly disguised. How could a child, a charming and too daring child--however gifted--be expected to deal with these creatures? The thought of these subtle, these patient ones, tracking her--tracking her--chilled us to hours-long wakefulness in the night! Then with the morning a letter would come, filled with strange men's names.
We compared notes, consulted together--shaking unhappy heads. We wrote tactful letters to Heywood Sampson, begging him, but always indirectly, to keep an eye. We ran down singly for nights in town, rescued--the verb was ours--Susan and Miss Goucher from their West 10th Street boarding-house, interfered with their work or other plans, haled them--the verb, I fear, was theirs--to dinner, to the opera or theater, or perhaps to call on someone of ribbed respectability who might prove an observant friend. God knows, in spite of all resolutions, we did our poor best to mind Susan's business for her, to brood over her destiny from afar!
And God knows our efforts were superfluous! The traps, stratagems, springes in her path, merely suspected by us and hence the more darkly dreaded, were clearly seen by Susan and laughed at for the ancient, pitiful frauds they were. The dull craft, the stale devices of avarice or lust were no novelties to her; she greeted them, _en passant_, with the old Birch Street terrier-look; just a half-mocking nod of recognition--an amused, half-wistful salute to her gamin past. It was her gamin past we had forgotten, Phil and I, when we agonized over Susan's inexperienced youth. Inexperienced? Bob Blake's kid! If there were things New York could yet teach Bob Blake's kid--and there were many--they were not those that had made her see in it "Birch Street--on a slightly exaggerated scale"!
But, as the Greeks discovered many generations ago, it is impossible to be high-minded or clear-sighted enough to outwit a secret unreason in the total scheme of things. Else the virtuous, in the Greek sense, would be always the fortunate; and perhaps then would grow too self-regarding. Does the last and austerest beauty of the ideal not flower from this, that it can promise us nothing but itself! You can choose a clear road, yet you shall never walk there in safety: Chance--that secret unreason--lurks in the hedgerows, myriad-formed, to plot against you. "_Helas!_" as the French heroine might say. "Diddle-diddle-dumpling!" as might say Susan.... Meaning: That strain, Ambo, was of a higher mood, doubtless; but do return to your muttons.
Susan had reached New York late in November, 1913, and the letter to Phil dates from the following January. Barely two months had passed since her first calls upon Maltby and Heywood Sampson, but every day of that period had been made up of crowded hours. Of the three manufactured-in-advance articles for the Garden Ex., Maltby had accepted one, paying thirty dollars for it, half-rate--Susan's first professional earnings; but the manner of his acceptance had convinced Susan it was a mere stroke of personal diplomacy on his part. He did not wish to encourage her as a business associate, for Maltby kept his business activities rigidly separate from what he held to be his life; neither did he wish to offend her. What he wholly desired was to draw her into the immediate circles he frequented as a social being, where he could act as her patron on a scale at once more brilliant and more impressive.
So far as the Garden Ex. was concerned, his attitude from the first had been one of sympathetic discouragement. Susan hit off his manner perfectly in an earlier letter:
"'My dear Susan! You can write very delicate, distinctive verse, no doubt, and all that--and of course there's a fairly active market for verse nowadays, and I can put you in touch with some little magazines, _a cote_, that print such things, and even occasionally pay for them. They're your field, I'm convinced. But, frankly, I can't see you quite as one of our contributors--and I couldn't pay you a higher compliment!
"'You don't suppose, do you, I sit here like an old-fashioned editor, reading voluntary contributions? No, my dear girl; I have a small, well-broken staff of writers, and I tell them what to write. If I find myself, for example, with a lot of parade interiors taken in expensive homes, I select four or five, turn 'em over to Abramovitz, and tell him to do us something on "The More Dignified Dining-Room" or "The Period Salon, a Study in Restfulness." Abramovitz knows exactly what to say, and how to point the snobbish-but-not-too-snobbish captions and feature the best names. I've no need to experiment, you see. I count on Abramovitz. Just so with other matters. Here's an article, now, on "The Flaunting Paeony." Skeat did that, of course. It's signed "Winifred Snow"--all his flower-and-sundial stuff is--and it couldn't be better! I don't even have to read it.
"'Well, there you are! I'm simply a purveyor of standardized goods in standardized packages. Dull work, but it pays.'
"'Exactly!' I struck in. 'It pays! That's why I'm interested. Sister and Togo and I need the money!'"
As for the brilliant, intertwined circles frequented by Maltby as a social being, within which, he hoped to persuade Susan, lay true freedom, while habit slyly bound her with invisible chains--well, they are a little difficult to describe. Taken generally, we may think of them as the Artistic Smart Set. Maltby's acquaintance was wide, penetrating in many directions; but he felt most at home among those iridescent ones of earth whose money is as easy as their morals, and whose ruling passion for amusement is at least directed by aesthetic sensibilities and vivacious brains.
Within Maltby's intersecting circles were to be found, then, many a piquant contrast, many an anomalous combination. There the young, emancipated society matron, of fattest purse and slenderest figure, expressed her sophisticated paganism through interpretative dancing; and there the fashionable painter of portraits, solidly arrived, exhibited her slender figure on a daring canvas--made possible by the fatness of her purse--at one of his peculiarly intimate studio teas. There the reigning _ingenue_, whose graceful _diablerie_ in imagined situations on the stage was equalled only by her roguish effrontery in more real, if hardly less public situations off, played up to the affluent _amateur_--patron of all arts that require an unblushing cooeperation from pretty young women. There, in short, all were welcome who liked the game and were not hampered in playing it by dull inhibitions, material or immaterial. It was Bohemia _de luxe_--Bohemia in the same sense that Marie Antoinette's dairy-farm was Arcady.
That Susan--given her doting guardian, her furs, her Chow, her shadowy-gleaming, imaginative charm, her sharp audacities of speech--would bring a new and seductive personality to this perpetual carnival was Maltby's dream; she was predestined--he had long suspected the tug of that fate upon her--to shine there by his side. He best could offer the cup, and her gratitude for its heady drafts of life would be merely his due. It was an exciting prospect; it promised much; and it only remained to intoxicate Susan with the wine of an unguessed freedom. This, Maltby fondly assured himself, would prove no difficult task. Life was life, youth was youth, joy was joy; their natural affinities were all on his side and would play into his practiced hands.
Doubtless Phil and I must have agreed with him--from how differently anxious a spirit!--but all three of us would then have proved quite wrong. To intoxicate Susan, Maltby did find a difficult, in the end an impossible, task. He took her--not unwilling to enter and appraise any circle from high heaven to nether hell--to all the right, magical places, exposed her to all the heady influences of his world; and she found them enormously stimulating--to her sense of the ironic. Maltby's sensuous, quick-witted friends simply would not come true for Susan when she first moved among them; they were not serious about anything but refined sensation and she could not take their refined sensations seriously; but for a time they amused her, and she relished them much as Charles Lamb relished the belles and rakes of Restoration Drama: "They are a world of themselves almost as much as fairyland."
To their intimate dinners, their intimate musical evenings, their intimate studio revels--she came on occasion with Maltby as to a play: "altogether a speculative scene of things." She could, in those early weeks, have borrowed Lamb's words for her own comedic detachment: "We are amongst a chaotic people. We are not to judge them by our usages. No reverend institutions are insulted by their proceedings--for they have none among them. No peace of families is violated--for no family ties exist among them.... No deep affections are disquieted, no holy-wedlock bands are snapped asunder--for affection's depth and wedded faith are not the growth of that soil. There is neither right nor wrong.... Of what consequence is it to Virtue or how is she at all concerned?... The whole thing is a passing pageant."
It is probable that Maltby at first mistook her interest in the spectacle for the preliminary stirrings of its spell within her; but he must soon have been aware--for he had intelligence--that Susan was not precisely flinging herself among his maskers with the thrilled abandon that would betoken surrender. She was not afraid of these clever, beauty-loving maskers, some of whom bore celebrated names; it was not timidity that restrained her; she, too, loved beauty and lilting wit and could feel joyously at ease among them--for an hour or two--once in a while. But to remain permanently within those twining circles, held to a limited dream, when she was conscious of wilder, freer, more adventurous spaces without----! Why should she narrow her sympathies like that? It never occurred to her as a temptation to do so. She had drunk of a headier cup, and had known a vaster intoxication. From the magic circle of her cedar trees, in that lonely abandoned field back of Mount Carmel, the imagination of her heart had long since streamed outward beyond all such passing pageants, questing after a dream that does not pass....
No gilded nutshell could bound her now; she could become the slave of no _intersected_ ring.... Lesser incantations were powerless.
So much, then, for my own broad annotation of Susan's letter to Phil! But I leave you with generalizations, when your interest is in concrete fact. Patience. In my too fumbling way I am ready for you there, as well.
VI
SUSAN TO JIMMY
"I suppose you'd really like to know what I've lately been up to; but I hardly know myself. It's absurd, of course, but I almost think I'm having a weeny little fit of the blues to-night--not dark-blue devils exactly--say, light-blue gnomes! I hate being pushed about, and things have pushed me about, rather. It's that, I think. There's been too much--of everything--somehow----
"You see, my social life just now is divided into three parts, like all Gaul, and as my business opportunities--Midas forgive them!--have all come out of my social contacts, I'll have to begin with them. Maltby's the golden key to the first part; Mr. Heywood Sampson, the great old-school publisher and editor-author, is the iron key to the second; and chance--our settling down here on the fringes of Greenwich Village--is the skeleton key to the third.
"I seem to be getting all Gaul mixed up with Bluebeard's closets and things, but I'll try to straighten my kinky metaphors out for you, Jimmy, if it takes me all night. But I assume you're more or less up to date on me, since I find you all most brazenly hand me round, and since I wrote Phil--and got severely scolded in return; deserved it, too--all about Maltby's patiently snubbing me as a starving author and impatiently rushing me as a possible member for his Emancipated Order of AEsthetic May-Flies--I call it his, for he certainly thinks of it that way. Now--Maltby and I have not precisely quarreled, but the north wind doth blow and we've already had snow enough to cool his enthusiasm. The whole thing's unpleasant; but I've learned something. Result--my occasional flutterings among the AEsthetic May-Flies grow beautifully less. They'd cease altogether if I hadn't made friends--to call them that--with a May-Fly or two.
"One of them's the novelist, Clifton Young, a May-Fly at heart--but there's a strain of Honeybee in his blood somewhere. It's an unhappy combination--all the talents and few of the virtues; but I like him in spite of himself. For one thing, he doesn't pose; and he can _write_! He's a lost soul, though--thinks life is a tragic farce. Almost all the May-Flies try to think that; it's a sort of guaranty of the last sophistication; but it's genuine with Clifton, he must have been born thinking it. He doesn't ask for sympathy, either; if he did, I couldn't pity him--and get jeered at wittily for my pains!
"Then there's Mona Leslie, who might have been a true Honeybee if everybody belonging to her hadn't died too soon, leaving her hopeless numbers of millions. Mona, for some reason, has taken a passing fancy to me; all her fancies pass. She sings like an angel, and might have made a career--if it had seemed worth while. It never has. Nothing has, but vivid sensation--from ascetic religion to sloppy love; and, at thirty, she's exhausted the whole show. So she spends her time now in a mad duel with boredom. Poor woman! Luckily the fairies gave her a selfishly kind heart, and there's a piece of it left, I think. It may even win the duel for her in the end. More and more she's the reckless patron of all the arts, almost smothering ennui under her benefactions. She'd smother poor me, too, if I'd let her; but I can't; I'm either not brazen enough or not Christian enough to let her patronize me for her own amusement. And that's her one new sensation for the last three years!
"Still, I've one thing to thank her for, and I wish I could feel grateful. She introduced me, at one of her Arabian-Nightish _soirees musicales_, to Hadow Bury, proprietor of _Whim_, the smarty-party weekly review. In two years it's made a sky-rocketing success, by printing the harum-scarumest possible comment on all the social and aesthetic fads and freaks of the day--just the iris froth of the wave, that and that only. Hadow's a big, black, bleak man-mountain. You'd take him for an undertaker by special appointment to coal-beef-and-iron kings. You'd never suspect him of having capitalized the Frivolous. But he's found it means bagfuls of reelers for him, so he takes it seriously. He's after the _goods_. He gets and delivers the goods, no matter what they cost. He's ready to pay any price now for a new brand of cerebral champagne.
"Well, I didn't know _what_ he was when Mona casually dropped me beside him, but he loomed so big and black and bleak he frightened me--till my thoughts chattered! I rattled on--like this, Jimmy--only not because I wanted to, but because having madly started I didn't know how to stop. I made a fool of myself--utter; with the result that he detected a slightly different flavor in my folly, a possibly novel _bouquet_--let's call it the 'Birch Street _bouquet_.' At any rate, he finally silenced me to ask whether I could write as I talked, and I said I hoped not; and he looked bleaker and blacker than ever and said that was the worst of it, so few amusing young women could! It seemed to be one of the more annoying laws of Nature.
"The upshot was, I found out all about him and his ambitions for _Whim_; and the fantastic upshot of _that_ was, I'm now doing a nonsense column a week for him--have been for the past five--and getting fifty dollars a week for my nonsense, too! I sign the thing "Dax"--a signature invented by shutting both eyes and punching at my typewriter three times, just to see what would happen. "Dax" happened, and I'm to be allowed to burble on as him--I think Dax is a him--for ten weeks; then, if my stuff goes, catches on, gets over--I'm to have a year's contract. And farewell to double-room-and-alcove for aye! Else, farewell _Whim_! So it _must_ get over--I'm determined! I stick at nothing. I even test my burble on poor Sister every week before sending it in. If she smiles sadly, twice, I seal up the envelope and breathe again.
"That's my bird in the hand, Jimmy--a sort of crazily screaming jay--but I mustn't let it escape.
"There's another bird, though. A real bluebird, still in the bush--and oh, so shy! And he lures me into the second and beautifulest part of all Gaul----
"It's no use, I'm dished! Sister says no one ever wrote or read such a monstrous letter, and commands me to stop now and go to bed. There's a look in her eye--she means it. Good-night and good luck--I'll tell you about my other two parts of Gaul as soon as I can, unless you wire me--collect--'Cut it out!' Or unless you run down--you never have--and learn of them that way. Why not--_soon_?"
VII
Jimmy Kane took the hint, or obeyed the open request, in Susan's letter and went down to New York for the week-end; and on the following Monday Miss Goucher wrote her first considerable letter to me. It was a long letter, for her, written--recopied, I fancy--in precise script, though it would have been a mere note for Susan.
_My dear Mr. Hunt:_ I promised to let you know from time to time the exact truth about our experiment. It is already a success financially. Susan is now earning from sixty to seventy dollars a week, with every prospect of earning substantially more in the near future. Her satirical paragraphs and verses in "Whim" are quoted and copied everywhere. They do not seem to me quite the Susan I love, but then, I am not a clever person; and it is undeniable that "Who is Dax?" is being asked now on every hand. If this interest continues, I am assured it can only mean fame and fortune. I am very proud of Susan, as you must be.
But, Mr. Hunt, there is another side to my picture. In alluding to it I feel a sense of guilt toward Susan; I know she would not wish me to do so. Yet I feel that I must. If I may say so to you, Susan has quickened in me many starved affections, and they all center in her. In this, may I not feel without offense that we are of one mind?
If I had Susan's pen I could tell you more clearly why I am troubled. I lack her gift, which is also yours, of expressing what I feel is going on secretly in another's mind. Mr. Phar and a Mr. Young, a writer, have been giving Susan some cause for annoyance lately; but that is not it. Mr. Hunt, she is deeply unhappy. She would deny it, even to you or me; but it is true.
My mind is too commonplace for this task. If my attempt to explain sounds crude, please forgive it and supply what is beyond me.
I can only say now that when I once told you Susan could stand alone, I was mistaken. In a sense she can. If her health does not give way, life will never beat her down. But--there are the needs of women, older than art. They tear at us, Mr. Hunt; at least while we are young. I could not say this to you, but I must manage somehow to write it. I do not refer to passion, taken by itself. I am old enough to be shocked, Mr. Hunt, to find that many brilliant women to-day have advanced beyond certain boundaries so long established. You will understand.
A woman's need is greater than passion, greater even than motherhood. It is so hard for me to express it. But she can only find rest when these things are not lived separately; when, with many other elements, they build up a living whole--what we call a _home_. How badly I put it; for I feel so much more than the conventional sentiments. Will you understand me at all if I say that Susan is homesick--for a home she has never known and may never be privileged to know? With all her insight I think she doesn't realize this yet; but I once suffered acutely in this way, and it perhaps gives me the right to speak. Of course I may be quite wrong. I am more often wrong than right.
I venture to inclose a copy of some lines, rescued last week from our scrap-basket. I'm not a critic, but am I wrong in thinking it would have been a pity to burn them? As they are not in free verse, which I do not appreciate as I should, they affected me very much; and I feel they will tell you, far more than my letter, why I am a little worried about Susan.
Young Mr. Kane informed me, when he was here on Sunday, that you and Professor Farmer are well. He seems a nice boy, though still a little crude perhaps; nothing offensive. I am confined to the room to-day by a slight cold of no consequence; I hope I may not pass it on to Susan. Kindly give my love to Sonia, if you should see her, and to little Ivan. I trust the new housekeeper I obtained for you is reasonably efficient, and that Tumps is not proving too great a burden. I am,
Respectfully yours, MALVINA GOUCHER.
The inclosed "copy of some lines" affected me quite as much as they had Miss Goucher, and it was inconceivable to me that Susan, having written them, could have tossed them away. As a matter of fact she had not. Like Calais in the queen's heart, they were engraven in her own. They were too deeply hers; she had meant merely to hide them from the world; and it is even now with a curious reluctance that I give them to you here. The lines bore no title, but I have ventured, with Susan's consent, to call them
_MENDICANTS_