CHAPTER XVI.

It was the fashionable bathing hour at the most exclusive summer resort on the Atlantic coast. The sand in front of the Surf Club was dotted with gaudy tents and umbrellas. Persons whom not to know was to be unknowable were picturesquely distributed about the club verandahs in wicker chairs and lounges. The eye of an artist would have been distracted by the beauties that were suggested in the half-lifted skirts of this beauty, and revealed in the bathing-suit of that one. The little waves that came politely rippling up the slope of sand seemed to know what was expected of them; they were in nowise rude. They may have longed to ruffle this or that bit of feminine frippery, but they refrained. They may have ached to drown out Orson Vane's voice as he said "good morning" to everybody in and out of the water; but they permitted themselves no such luxury.

Orson Vane was a beautiful picture as he entered the water. His suit was immaculate; a belt prevented the least wrinkle in his jersey; a rakish sombrero gave his head a sort of halo. He poised a cigarette in one hand, keeping himself afloat with the other. He bowed obsequiously to all the pretty women; he invited all the rich ones to tea and toast--"We always have a little tea and toast at my cottage on Sundays, you know; you'll meet only nice-looking people, really; we have a jolly time." Most of the men he was unable to see; the sunlight on the water did make such a glare.

On the raft Orson Vane found the only Mrs. Carlos.

"If it were not for you, Mrs. Carlos," he assured her, "the ocean would be quite unfashionable."

Mrs. Carlos smiled amiably. Speeches of that sort were part of the tribute the world was expected to pay her. She asked him if the yachts in the harbor were not too pretty for anything.

"No," said Vane, "no. Most melancholy sight. Bring up the wickedness of man, whenever I look at them. I bought a yacht you know, early in the summer. Liked her looks, made an offer, bought her. A swindle, Mrs. Carlos, an utter swindle. A disgraceful hulk. And now I can't sell her. And my cook is a rascal. Oh--don't mention yachts! And my private car, Mrs. Carlos, you cannot imagine the trials I endure over that! The railroads overcharge me, and the mob comes pottering about with those beastly cameras. Really, you know, I am thinking of living abroad. The theatre is better supported in Europe. I am thinking of devoting my life to the theatre altogether. It is the one true passion. It shows people how life should be lived; it is at once a school of morals and comportment." He peered into the water near the raft. Then he plunged prettily into the sea. "I see that dear little Imogene," he told Mrs. Carlos, as he swam off. Imogene was the little heiress of the house of Carlos; a mere schoolgirl. It was one of Vane's most deliberate appeals for public admiration, this worship of the society of children. He gamboled with all the tots and blossoms he could find. He knew them all by name; they dispelled his shortsightedness marvelously.

After a proper interval Vane appeared, in the coolest of flannels, on the verandah of the Club. He bowed to all the women, whether he knew them or not; he peered under the largest picture hats with an air that said "What sweet creature is hidden here?" as plainly as words.

Someone asked him why he had not been to the Casino the night before.

"Oh," he sighed, "I was fearfully busy."

"Busy?" The word came in a tone of reproach. A suspicion of any sort of toil will brand one more hopelessly in the smart set of America than in any other; one may pretend an occupation but one may not profess it in actuality.

"Oh, terribly busy," said Vane. "I am writing a comedy. I have decided that we must make authorship smarter than it has been. I shall sacrifice myself in that attempt. You've noticed that not one writing-chap in a million knows anything about our little world except what is not true? Yes; it's unmistakable. An entirely false impression of us is given to the world at large. The real picture of us must come from one of ourselves."

"And you will try it?"

"Yes. I shall do my very best. When it is finished I want you all to play parts in it. We must do something for the arts, you know. Why not the arts, as well as tailors and milliners? By the way, I want you all to come to my little lantern-dance to-night, on the _Beaurivage_. It is something quite novel. You must all come disguised as flowers. There will be no lights but Chinese lanterns. I shall have launches ready for you at the Casino landing. My cook is quite sober to-day, and the yacht is as presentable as if she were not an arrant fraud. I mean to have a dance that shall fit the history of society in America. For that reason the newspapers must know nothing about it. There can be no history where there are newspapers. I shall invite nobody who knows how to write; I am the only one whose taste I can trust. Some people write to live, and some live to write, and the worst class of all are merely dying to write. They are all barred to-night. We must try and break all the conventions. Conventions are like the strolling players: made to be broke."

He rattled on in this way, with painful efforts at brilliance, for quite a time. His hearers really considered it brilliance and listened patiently. Summer was not their season for intellectual exertion; it might be a virtue in others, in themselves it would have been a mistake.

The lantern-dance on Orson Vane's _Beaurivage_ was, as everyone will remember, an event of exceeding picturesqueness. Mrs. Sclatersby appeared as a carnation; Mrs. Carlos as a rose. Some of the younger and divinely figured women appeared as various blossoms that necessitated imitation of part of Rosalind's costume under the trees. The slender, tapering stem of one white lily, fragrant and delicious, lingered long in the memories of the men who were there.

A sensation was caused by the arrival of Mrs. Barrett Weston. She came in a scow, seated on her automobile. A shriek of delight from the company greeted her. The weary minds of the elect were really tickled by this conceit. The automobile was arranged to imitate a crysanthemum. Just before she alighted Mrs. Barrett Weston touched a hidden lever and the automobile began to grind out a rag-time tune.

A stranger, approaching the _Beaurivage_ at that moment, might have fancied himself in the politest ward of the most insane of asylums. But Orson Vane found it all most delightful. It was the affair of the season.

"Look," he cried, in the midst of a game of leapfrog in which a number of the younger guests had plunged with desperate glee, "there is the moon. How pitably weak she seems, against this brilliance here! It bears out the theory that art is always finer than nature, and that the theatre is more picturesque than life. Look at what we are doing, this moment! We are imitating pleasure. And will you show me any unconscious pleasure that is so delightful as this?"

By the time people had begun to feel a polite hunger Vane had completed his scheme of having several unwieldy barges brought alongside the _Beaurivage_. There were two of the clumsy but roomy decks on either side of the slender, shapely yacht. Over this now quite wide space the tables were arranged. While the supper went on, Orson Vane did a little monologue of his own. Nobody paid any attention, but everyone applauded.

"What a scene for a comedy," he explained, proudly surveying the picture of the gaiety before him, "what a delicious scene! It is almost real. I must write a play around it. I have quite made up my mind to devote my life to the theatre. It is the only real life. It touches the emotions at all points; it is not isolated in one narrow field of personality. Have I your permission to put you all in my play? How sweet of you! I shall have a scene where we all race in automobiles. We will be quite like dear little children who have their donkey-races. But I think automobiles are so much more intelligent than donkeys, don't you? And they have such profound voices! Have you ever noticed the intonation of the automobiles here? That one of Mrs. Barrett Weston has a delicate tenor; it is always singing love-songs as if it were tired of life. Then we have bassos, and baritones, and repulsive falsettos. My automobile has a voice like a phonograph. When it bubbles along the avenue I can hear, as plainly as anything, that it is imitating one of the other automobiles. Some automobiles, I suppose, have the true instinct for the theatre. Have you noticed how theatric some of the things are, how they contrive to run away just when everyone is looking?"

"Just like horses," murmured one of his listeners.

"Oh, no; I wouldn't say that. Horses have a merely natural intelligence; it is nothing like the splendidly artificial reasoning of the automobile. The poor horse, I really pity him! He has nothing before him but polo. But how thankful he should be to polo. He was a broncho with disreputable manners; now he is a polo-pony with a neat tail. In time, I dare say, the horse can learn some of the higher civilization of the automobile, just as society may still manage to be as intelligent as the theatre."

The conclusion of that entertainment marked the height of Orson Vane's peculiar fame. The radical newspapers caught echoes of it and invented what they could not transcribe. The young men who owned newspapers had not been invited by Orson Vane, because, in spite of his theatric mania, he had no illusions about the decency of metropolitan journalism. He avowed that the theatre might be a trifle highflavored, but it had, at the least, nothing of the hypocrisy that smothers the town in lies to-day and reads it a sermon to-morrow. The most conspicuous of these newspaper owners went into something like convulsions over what he called the degeneracy of our society. Himself most lamentably in a state of table-d'hotage, this young man trumpeted forth the most bitter editorials against Orson Vane and his doings. He frothed with anarchistic ravings. Finally, since the world will always listen if you only make noise loud enough and long enough, the general public began to believe that Vane was really a dreadful person. He was a leader in the smart set; he stood for the entire family. His taste for the theater would debauch all society. His egoisms would spoil what little of the natural was left in the regions of Vanity Fair. So went the chatter of the man-on-the-street, that mighty power, whom the most insignificant of little men-behind-the-pen can move at will.

One may be ever so immersed in affairs that are not of the world and its superficial doings, yet it is almost impossible to escape some faint echo of what the world is chattering about. Professor Vanlief, who had betaken himself and Jeanette, for the summer, to a little place in the mountains, was finally routed out of his peace by the rumors concerning Orson Vane. The give and take of conversation, even at a little farm-house in the hills, does not long leave any prominent subject untouched. So Augustus Vanlief one morning bought all the morning papers.

He found more than he had wanted. The editorials against the doings of the smart set, the reports of the sermons preached against their goings-on, were especially pregnant that morning.

In another part of the paper he found a line or two, however, that brought him sharply to a sense of necessary action. The lines were these:

"Mr. Arthur Wantage is still seriously ill at Framley Lodge. Unless a decided turn for the better takes place very shortly, it is doubtful if he can undertake his starring season at the usual time this year."

Augustus Vanlief saw what no other mortal could have guessed. He saw the connection between those two newspaper items, the one about Vane and the one about Wantage.