The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Imitator, by Percival Pollard
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Title: The Imitator
Author: Percival Pollard
Release Date: May 18, 2012 [EBook #39724]
Language: English
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THE IMITATOR
A NOVEL
By
PERCIVAL POLLARD
SAINT LOUIS
WILLIAM MARION REEDY
1901
CHAPTER I.
"The thing is already on the wane," said young Orson Vane, making a wry
face over the entree, and sniffing at his glass, "and, if you ask me, I
think the general digestion of society will be the better for it."
"Yes, there is nothing, after all, so tedious as the sham variety of a
table d'hote. Though it certainly wasn't the fare one came to this hole
for."
Luke Moncreith turned his eyes, as he said that, over the place they sat
in, smiling at it with somewhat melancholy contempt. Its sanded floor,
its boisterously exposed wine-barrels, the meaningless vivacity of its
Hungarian orchestra, evidently stirred him no more.
"No; that was the last detail. It was the notion of dining below stairs,
as the servants do. It had, for a time, the charm of an imitation.
Nothing is so delightful as to imitate others; yet to be mistaken for
them is always dreadful. Of course, nobody would mistake us here for
servants."
The company, motley as it was, could not logically have come under any
such suspicion. Though it was dining in a cellar, on a sanded floor,
amid externals that were illegitimate offsprings of a _Studenten Kneipe_
and a crew of Christy minstrels, it still had, in the main, the air of
being recruited from the smart world. At every other table there were
people whom not to know was to argue oneself unknown. These persons
obviously treated the place, and their being there, as an elaborate
effort at gaiety; the others, the people who were plainly there for the
first time, took it with the bewildered manner of those whom each new
experience leaves mentally exhausted. The touch of rusticity, here and
there, did not suffice to spoil the sartorial sparkle of the smart
majority. The champagne that the sophisticated were wise enough to
oppose to the Magyar vintages sparkled into veins that ran beautifully
blue under skin that held curves the most aristocratic, tints the most
shell-like. Tinkling laughter, vocative of insincerity, rang between the
restless passion of the violins.
"When it is not below stairs," continued Vane, "it is up on the roof.
One might think we were a society without houses of our own. It is, I
suppose, the human craving for opposites. When we have stored our
sideboards with the finest glass you can get in Vienna or Carlsbad, we
turn our backs on it and go to drinking from pewter in a cellar. We pay
abominable wages to have servants who shall be noiseless, and then go to
places where the service is as guttural as a wilderness of monkeys.
Fortunately, these fancies do not last. Presently, I dare say, it will
be the fashion to dine at home. That will make us feel quite like the
original Puritans." He laughed, and took his glass of wine at a gulp.
"The fact of the matter is that variety has become the vice of life. We
have not, as a society, any inner steadfastness of soul; we depend upon
externals, and the externals pall with fearful speed. Think of seeing in
the mirror the face of the same butler for more than thirty days!" He
shuddered and shook his head.
"We are a restless lot," sighed the other, "but why discompose yourself
about it? Thank your stars you have nothing more important to worry
over!"
"My dear Luke, there is nothing more important than the attitude of
society at large. It is the only thing one should allow oneself to
discuss. To consider one's individual life is to be guilty of as bad
form as to wear anything that is conspicuous. Society admires us chiefly
only as we sink ourselves in it. If we let the note of personality rise,
our social position is sure to suffer. Imitation is the keynote of
smartness. The rank and file imitate the leaders consciously, and the
leaders unconsciously imitate the average. We frequent cellars, and
roofs, and such places, because in doing so we imagine we are imitating
the days of the Hanging Gardens and the Catacombs. We abhor the bohemian
taint, but we are willing to give a champagne and chicken imitation of
it. We do not really care for music and musicians, but we give excellent
imitations of doing so. At present we are giving the most lifelike
imitation of being passionately fond of outdoor life; I suppose England
feels flattered. I am afraid I have forgotten whose the first
fashionable divorce in our world was; it is far easier to remember the
names of the people who have never been divorced; at any rate those
pioneers ought to feel proud of the hugeness of their following. We have
adopted a vulgarity from Chicago and made it a fashionable institution;
divorce used to be a shuttlecock for the comic papers, and now it makes
the bulk of the social register."
Moncreith tapped his friend on the arm. "Drop it, Orson, drop it!" he
said. "I know this is a beastly bad dinner, but you shouldn't let it
make you maudlin. You know you don't really believe half you're saying.
Drop it, I say. These infernal poses make me ill." He attacked the
morsel of game on his plate with a zest that was beautiful to behold.
"If you go on in that biliously philosophic strain of yours, I shall
crunch this bird until I hear nothing but the grinding of bones. It is
really not a bad bit of quail. It is so small, and the casserole so
large, that you need an English setter to mark it, but once you've got
it,"--he wiped his lips with a flip of his napkin, "it's really worth
the search. Try it, and cheer up. The woman in rose, over there, under
the pseudo-palm, looks at you every time she sips her champagne; I have
no doubt she is calculating how untrue you could be to her. I suppose
your gloom strikes her as poetic; it strikes me as very absurd. You
really haven't a care in the world, and you sit here spouting
insincerity at a wasteful rate. If there's anything really and truly the
matter--tell me!"
Orson Vane dropped, as if it had been a mask, the ironical smile his
lips had worn. "You want sincerity," he said, "well, then I shall be
sincere. Sincerity makes wrinkles, but it is the privilege of our
friends to make us old before our time. Sincerely, then, Luke, I am
very, very tired."
"A fashionable imitation," mocked Moncreith.
"No; a personal aversion, to myself, to the world I live in. I wish the
dear old governor hadn't been such a fine fellow; if he had been of the
newer generation of fathers I suppose I wouldn't have had an ideal to
bless myself with."
Moncreith interrupted.
"Good Lord, Luke, did you say ideals? I swear I never knew it was as bad
as that." He beckoned to the waiter and ordered a Dominican. "It is so
ideal a liquor that when you have tasted it you crave only for
brutalities. Poor Orson! Ideals!" He sighed elaborately.
"If you imitate my manner of a while ago, I shall not say what I was
going to say. If I am to be sincere, so must you." He took the scarlet
drink the man set before him, and let it gurgle gently down his throat.
"It smacks of sin and I scent lies in it. I wish I had not taken it. It
is hard to be sincere after a drink that stirs the imagination. But I
shall try. And you are not to interrupt any more than you can help. If
we both shed the outer skin we wear for society, I believe we are
neither of us such bad sorts. That is just what I am getting at: I am
not quite bad enough to be blind to my own futility. Here I am, Luke,
young, decently looking, with money, position, and bodily health, and
yet I am cursed with thought of my own futility. When people have said
who I am, they have said it all; I have done nothing: I merely am. I
know others would sell their souls to be what I am; but it does not
content me. I have spent years considering my way. The arts have called
to me, but they have not held me. All arts are imitative, except music,
and music is not human enough for me; no people are so unhuman as
musical people, and no art is so entirely a creation of a self-centred
inventor. There can be no such thing as realism in music; the voices of
Nature can never be equalled on any humanly devised instruments or
notes. Painting and sculpture are mere imitations of what nature does
far better. When you see a beautiful woman as God made her you do not
care whether the Greeks colored their statues or not. Any average sunset
stamps the painted imitation as absurd. These arts, in fact, can never
be really great, since they are man's feeble efforts to copy God's
finest creations; between them and the ideal there must always be the
same distance as between man and his Creator. Then there is the art of
literature. It has the widest scope of them all. Whether it is imitative
or creative depends on the temperament of the individual; some men set
down what they see and hear, others invent a world of their own and busy
themselves with it. I believe it is the most human of the arts. Its
devotees not infrequently set themselves the task of discovering just
how their fellows think and live; they try to attune their souls to
other souls; they strive for an understanding of the larger humanity.
They--"
Moncreith interrupted with a gesture.
"Orson, you're not going to turn novelist? Don't tell me that! Your
enthusiasms fill me with melancholy forebodings."
"Not at all. But, as you know, I've seen much of this sort of thing
lately. In the first place I had my own temperamental leanings; in the
next place, you'll remember, we've had a season or two lately when
clever people have been the rage. To invite painters and singers and
writers to one's house has been the smart thing to do. We have had the
spectacle of a society, that goes through a flippant imitation of
living, engaged in being polite to people who imitate at second hand, in
song, and color, and story. Some smart people have even taken to those
arts, thus imitating the professional imitators. As far as the smart
point of view goes, I couldn't do anything better than go in for the
studio, or novelistic business. The dull people whom smartness has
rubbed to a thin polish would conspire in calling me clever. Is there
anything more dreadful than being called clever?"
"Nothing. It is the most damning adjective in the language. Whenever I
hear that a person is clever I am sure he will never amount to much.
There is only one word that approaches it in deadly significance. That
is 'rising.' I have known men whom the puffs have referred to as 'a
rising man' for twenty years. Can you imagine anything more dismal than
being called constantly by the same epithet? The very amiability in the
general opinion, permitting 'clever' and 'rising' to remain unalterable,
shows that the wearer of these terms is hopeless; a strong man would
have made enemies. I am glad you are wise enough to resist the
temptation of the Muses. Society's blessing would never console you for
anything short of a triumph. The triumphs are fearfully few; the clever
people--well, this cellar's full of them. There's Abbott Moore, for
instance."
"You're right; there he is. He's a case in point. One of the best cases;
a man who has really, in the worldly sense, succeeded tremendously. His
system of give and take is one of the most lovely schemes imaginable; we
all know that. When a mining millionaire with marriageable daughters
comes to town his first hostage to the smart set is to order a palace
near Central Park and to give Abbott Moore the contract for the
decorations. In return Abbott Moore asks the millionaire's womenfolk to
one of his studio carnivals. That section of the smart set which keeps
itself constantly poised on the border between smart and tart is awfully
keen on Abbott Moore's studio affairs. It has never forgotten the famous
episode when he served a tart within a tart, and it is still expecting
him to outdo that feat. To be seen at one of these affairs, especially
if you have millions, is to have got in the point of the wedge. I call
it a fair exchange; the millionaire gets his foot just inside the magic
portal; Moore gets a slice of the millions. All the world counts Moore a
success from every point of view, the smart, the professional, the
financial. Yet that isn't my notion of a full life. It's only a replica
of the very thing I'm tired of, my own life."
"Your life, my dear fellow, is generally considered a most enviable
article."
"Of course. I suppose it does have a glamour for the unobserving. Yet,
at the best, what am I?"
Moncreith laughed. "Another Dominican!" he said to the waiter. "The
liqueur," he said, "may enable me to rise to my subject." He smiled at
Vane over the glass, when it was brought to him, drained it under closed
eyes, and then settled himself well back into his chair.
CHAPTER II.
"I will tell you what you are," began Moncreith, "to I the eye of the
average beholder. Here, in the most splendid town of the western world,
at the turning of two centuries, you are possessed of youth, health and
wealth. That really tells the tale. Never in the history of the world
have youth and health and wealth meant so much as they do now. These
three open the gates to all the earthly paradise. Your forbears did
their duty by you so admirably that you wear a distinguished name
without any sacrifice to poverty. You are good to look at. You are a
young man of fashion. If you chose you could lead the mode; you have the
instincts of a beau, though neither the severe suppression of Brummell
nor the obtrusive splendor of D'Aurevilly would suit you. Our age seems
to have come to too high an average in man's apparel to permit of any
single dictator; to be singled out is to be lowered. Yet there can be no
denying that you have often, unwittingly, set the fashion in waistcoats
and cravats. That aping has not hurt you, because the others never gave
their raiment the fine note of personal distinction that you wear. You
are a favorite in the clubs; people never go out when you come in; you
listen to the most stupid talk with the most graceful air imaginable;
that is one of the sure roads to popularity in clubdom. When it is the
fashion to be artistic, you can be so as easily as the others; when
sport is the watchword your fine physique forbids you no achievement.
You play tennis and golf and polo quite well enough to make women split
their gloves in applause, and not too well to make men sneer at you for
a 'pro.' When you are riding to hounds in Virginia you are never far
from the kill, and there is no automobilist whom the Newport villagers
are happier to fine for fast driving. You are equally at home in a
cotillon and on the deck of a racing yacht. You could marry whenever you
liked. Your character is unspotted either by the excessive vice that
shocks the mob, or the excessive virtue that tires the smart. You have
means, manners and manner. Finally, you have the two cardinal qualities
of smartness, levity and tolerance." He paused, and gave a smile of
satisfaction. "There, do you like the portrait?"
"It is abominable," said Vane, "it is what I see in my most awful
dreams. And the horror of it is that it is so frightfully true. I am
merely one of the figures in the elaborate masquerade we call society. I
make no progress in life; I learn nothing except new fashions and
foibles. I am weary of the masquerade and the masks. Life in the smart
world is a game with masks; one shuffles them as one does cards. As for
me, I want to throw the whole pack into the fire. Everyone wears these
masks; nobody ever penetrates to the real soul behind the make-up."
"It is a game you play perfectly. One should hesitate long about giving
up anything that one has brought to perfection. These others dabble and
squabble in what you call the secondary imitations of life; you, at any
rate, are giving your imitation at first hand."
"Yes, but it no longer satisfies me. Listen, Luke. You must promise not
to laugh and not to frown. It will seem absurd to you; yet I am terribly
in earnest about it. When first I came out of college I went in for
science. When I gave it up, it was because I found it was leading me
away from the human interest. There is the butterfly I want to chase;
the human interest. I attempted all the arts; not one of them took me
far on my way. My failure, Luke, is an ironic sentence upon the vaunted
knowledge of the world."
"Your failure? My dear Orson; come to the point. What do you mean by the
human interest?"
"I mean that neither scientist nor scholar has yet shown the way to one
man's understanding of another's soul. The surgeon can take a body and
dissect its every fraction, arguing and proving each function of it. The
painter tries, with feeble success, to reach what he calls the spirit of
his subject. So does the author. He tries to put himself into the place
of each of his characters; he aims, always, for the nearest possible
approach to the lifelike. And, above all the others, there is the actor.
In this, as in its other qualities, the art of acting is the crudest,
the most obvious of them all; yet, in certain moments, it comes nearest
to the ideal. The actor in his mere self is--well, we all know the story
of the famous player being met by this greeting: 'And what art thou
to-night?' But he goes behind a door and he can come forth in a series
of selves. A trick or so with paint; a change of wig; a twist of the
face-muscles, and we have the same man appearing as _Napoleon_, as
_Richelieu_, as _Falstaff_. The thing is external, of course. Whether
there shall be anything more than the mere bodily mask depends upon the
actor's intelligence and his imagination. The supreme artist so
succeeds, by virtue of much study, much skill in imitating what he has
conceived to be the soul of his subject, in almost giving us a lifelike
portrait. And yet, and yet--it is not the real thing; the real soul of
his subject is as much a mystery to that actor as it is to you or me.
That is what I mean when I say that science fails us at the most
important point of all; the soul of my neighbor is as profound a mystery
to me as the soul of a man that lived a thousand years ago. I can know
your face, Luke, your clothes, your voice, the outward mask you wear;
but--can I reach the secrets of your soul? No. And if we cannot know how
others feel and think, how can we say we know the world? Bah! The world
is a realm of shadows in which all walk blindly. We touch hands every
day, but our souls are hidden in a veil that has not been passed since
God made the universe."
"You cry for the moon," said Moncreith. "You long for the unspeakable.
Is it not terrible enough to know your neighbor's face, his voice, his
coat, without burdening yourself with knowledge of his inner self? It is
merely an egoistic curiosity, my dear Orson; you cannot prove that the
human interest, as you term it, would benefit by the extension in wisdom
you want."
"Oh, you are wrong, you are wrong. The whole world of science undergoes
revolution, once you gain the point I speak of. Doctors will have the
mind as well as the body to diagnose; lovers will read each others
hearts as well as their voices; lies will become impossible, or, at
least, futile; oh--it would be a better world altogether. At any rate,
until this avenue of knowledge is opened to me, I shall call all the
rest a failure. I imitate; you imitate; we imitate; that is the
conjugation of life. When I think of the hopelessness of the thing,--do
you wonder I grow bitter? I want communion with real beings, and I meet
only masks. I tell you, Luke, it is abominable, this wall that stands
between each individual and the rest of the world. How can I love my
neighbor if I do not understand him? How can I understand him if I
cannot think his thoughts, dream his dreams, spell out his soul's
secrets?"
Moncreith smiled at his friend, and let his eyes wander a trifle
ironically about his figure. "One would not think, to look at you, that
you were possessed of a mania, an itch! If you take my advice you will
content yourself with living life as you find it. It is really a very
decent world. It has good meat and drink in it, and some sweet women,
and a strong man or two. Most of us are quite ignorant of the fact that
we are merely engaged in incomplete imitations of life, or that there is
a Chinese wall between us and the others; the chances are we are all the
happier for our innocence. Consider, for instance, that rosy little face
behind us--you can see it perfectly in that mirror--can you deny that it
looks all happiness and innocence?"
Vane looked, and presently sighed a little. The face of the girl, as he
found it in the glass, was the color of roses lying on a pool of clear
water. It was one of those faces that one scarce knows whether to think
finer in profile or in full view; the features were small, the hair
glistened with a tint of that burnish the moon sometimes wears on summer
nights, and the figure was a mere fillip to the imagination. A cluster
of lilies of the valley lay upon her hair; they seemed like countless
little cups pouring frost upon a copper glow. All about her radiated an
ineffable gentleness, a tenderness; she made all the other folk about
her seem garish and ugly and cruel. One wondered what she did in that
gallery.
"To the outer eye," said Vane, as he sighed, "she is certainly a flower,
a thing of daintiness and delight. But--do you suppose I believe it, for
a moment? I have no doubt she is merely one of those creatures whom God
has made for the destruction of our dreams; her mind is probably as
corrupt as her body seems fair. She is perhaps--"
He stopped, for the face in the mirror had its eyes thrown suddenly in
his direction. The eyes, in that reflex fashion, met, and something akin
to a smile, oh, an ever so wistful, wonderful a smile, crept upon the
lips and the eyes of the girl, while to the man there came only a sudden
silence.
"She is," continued Vane, in another voice altogether, and as if he were
thinking of distant affairs, "very beautiful."
The girl's eyes, meanwhile, had shifted towards Moncreith. He felt the
radiance of them and looked, too, and the girl's beauty came upon him
with a quick, personal force that was like pain. Vane's spoken
approbation of her angered him; he hardly knew why; for the first time
in his life he thought he could hate the man beside him.
The girl turned her head a little, put up her hand and so hid her face
from both young men, or there is no telling what sudden excuse the two
might not have seized for open enmity. It sounds fantastic, perhaps, but
there are more enmities sown in a single glance from a woman's eyes
than a Machiavelli could build up by ever so devilish devices. Neither
of the two, in this case, could have said just what they felt, or why.
Moncreith thought, vaguely enough perhaps, that it was a sin for so fair
a flower to waste even a look upon a fellow so shorn of faith as was
Orson Vane. As for Vane--
Vane brought his hand upon the table so that the glasses rocked.
"Oh," he exclaimed, "if one could only be sure! If one could see past
the mask! What would I not give to believe in beauty when I see it, to
trust to appearances! Oh, for the ability to put myself in the place of
another, to know life from another plane than my own, to--"
But here he was interrupted.
CHAPTER III.
"The secret you are seeking," said the man who had put his hand on Orson
Vane's shoulder, "is mine."
Vane's eyes widened slightly, roving the stranger up and down. He was a
man of six feet in height, of striking, white-haired beauty, of the type
made familiar to us by pictures of the Old Guard under Napoleon. Here
was still the Imperial under the strong chin, the white mustache over
the shapely lips; the high, clear forehead; the long, thin hands, where
veins showed blue, and the nails were rosy. The head was bowed forward
of the shoulders; the man, now old, had once been inches taller. You
looked, on the spur of first noting him, for the sword and the epaulets,
or, at least, for the ribbon of an order. But his clothes were quite
plain, nor had his voice any touch of the military.
"I overheard a part of your conversation," the stranger went on, "not
intentionally, yet unavoidably. I had either to move or to listen. And
you see the place is so full that moving was out of the question. Did
you mean what you were saying?"
"About the--"
"The Chinese wall," said the stranger.
"Every word of it," said Vane.
"If the chance to penetrate another's soul came to you, would you take
it?"
"At once."
Moncreith laughed aloud. "Where are we?" he said, "in Aladdin's cave?
What rubbish!" And he shook himself, as if to disturb a bad dream. He
was on the point of reaching for his hat, when he saw the face of the
girl in the mirror once more; the sight of it stayed him. He smiled to
himself, and waited for the curious conversation between Vane and the
stranger to continue.
"My name," the stranger was observing, taking a card from an _etui_,
"may possibly be known to you?"
Vane bent his head to the table, read, and looked at the white-haired
man with a quick access of interest.
"I am honored," he said. "My name is Orson Vane."
"Oh," said the other, "I knew that. I do not study the human interest in
mere theory; I delight in the tangible. That is why I presume upon
you"--he waved his hand gracefully--"thus."
"You must join us," said Vane; "there is plenty of room at this table."
"No; I must--if your friend will pardon me--see you alone. Will you come
to my place?"
He spoke as youthfully as if he were of Vane's own age.
Vane considered a second or so, and then sprang to his feet.
"Yes," he said, "I will come. Good-night, Luke. Stay on; enjoy yourself.
Shall I see you to-morrow? Good-night!"
They went out together, the young man and the one with the white hair.
One glance into the mirror flashed from Orson's eyes as he turned to go;
it brought him a memory of a burnished halo on a fragile, rosy, beauty.
He sighed to himself, wishing he could reach the truth behind the robe
of beauty, and, with that sigh, turned with a sort of fierceness upon
his companion.
"Well," said Vane, "well?"
They were passing through a most motley thoroughfare. Barrel-organs
dotted the asphalt; Italian and Sicilian poverty elbowed the poverty of
Russian and Polish Jews. The shops bore signs in Italian, Hebrew,
French--in anything but English. The Elevated roared above the music and
the chatter; the cool gloom of lower Broadway seemed far away.
"Patience," said the old man, "patience, Mr. Vane. Look about you! How
much of the heart of this humanity that reeks all about us do we know?
Think,--think of your Chinese wall! Oh--how strange, how very strange
that I should have come upon you to-night, when, in despair of ever
finding my man, I had gone for distraction to a place where, I thought,
philosophy nor science were but little welcome."
"My dear Professor," urged Vane finally, when they were come to a
stiller region, where many churches, some parks and ivy-sheltered houses
gave an air of age and sobriety and history, "I have no more patience
left. Did I not know your name for what it is I would not have followed
you. Even now I hardly know whether your name and your title suffice. If
it is an adventure, very well. But I have no more patience for
mysteries."
"Not even when you are about to penetrate the greatest mystery of all?
Oh, youth, youth! Well, we have still a little distance to go. I shall
employ it to impress upon you that I, Professor Vanlief, am not
over-fond of the title of Professor. It has, here in America, a taint of
the charlatan. But it came to me, this title, in a place where only
honors were implied. I was, indeed, a fellow student with many of whom
the world has since heard; Bismarck was one of them. I have eaten smoked
goose with him in Pommern. You see, I am very old, very old. I have
spent my life solving a riddle. It is the same riddle that has balked
you, my young friend. But I have striven for the solution; you have
merely wailed against the riddle's existence."
Vane felt a flush of shame.
"True," he murmured, "true. I never went further into any art, any
science, than to find its shortcomings."
"Yet even that," resumed the Professor, "is something. You are, at any
rate, the only man for my purpose."
"Your purpose?"
"Yes. It is the same as yours. You are to be the instrument; I furnish
the power. You are to be able to feel, to think, as others do."
"Oh!" muttered Vane, "impossible." Now that his wish was called possible
of fulfilment, he shrank a little from it. He followed the Professor up
a long flight of curving steps, through dim halls, to where a bluish
light flickered. As they passed this feeble glow it flared suddenly into
a brilliant jet of flame; a door swung open, revealing a somewhat bare
chamber fitted up partly as a study, partly as a laboratory. The door
closed behind them silently.
"Mere trickery," said the Professor, "the sort of thing that the knaves
of science fool the world with. Will you sit down? Here is where I have
worked for--for more years than you have lived, Mr. Vane. Here is where
I have succeeded. In pursuit of this success I have spent my life and
nearly all the fortune that my family made in generations gone. I have
this house, and my daughter, and my science. The world spins madly all
about me, in this splendid town; here, in this stillness, I have worked
to make that world richer than I found it. Will you help me?"
Vane had flung himself upon a wicker couch. He watched his host
striding up and down the room with a fervor that had nothing of senility
in it. The look of earnestness upon that fine old face was magnetic.
Vane's mistrust vanished at sight of it.
"If you will trust me," he answered. He saw himself as the beneficiary,
his host as the giver of a great gift.
"I trust you. I heard enough, to-night, to believe you sincere in
wishing to see life from another soul than your own. But you must
promise to obey my instructions to the letter."
"I promise."
A sense of farce caught Vane. "And now," he said, "what is it? A powder
I must swallow, or a trance you pass me into, or what?"
The professor shook his head gravely. "It is none of those things. It is
much simpler. I should not wonder but that the ancients knew it. But
human life is so much more complex now; the experiences you will gain
will be larger than they could ever have been in other ages. Do you
realize what I am about to give you? The power to take upon you the soul
of another, just as an actor puts on the outer mask of another! And I
ask for no reward. Simply the joy of seeing my process active; and
afterwards, perhaps, to give my secret to the world. But you are to
enjoy it alone, first. Of course--there may be risks. Do you take
them?"
"I do," said Vane.
He could hear the whistling of steamers out in the harbor, and the noise
of the great town came to him faintly. All that seemed strangely remote.
His whole intelligence was centered upon his host, upon the sparsely
furnished room, and the secret whose solution he thought himself
approaching. He was, for almost the first time in his life, intense in
the mere act of existence; he was conscious of no imitation of others;
his analysis of self was sunk in an eagerness, a tenseness of
purposeness hitherto unfelt.
The professor went to a far, dark corner of the room, and rolled thence
a tall, sheeted thing that might have been a painting, or an easel. He
held it tenderly; his least motion with it revealed solicitude. When it
was immediately in front of where Vane reclined, Vanlief loosed his hold
of the thing, and began pacing up and down the room.
"The question of mirrors," he began, after what seemed to Vane an age,
"has never, I suppose, interested you."
"On the contrary," said Vane, "I have had Italy searched for the finest
of its cheval-glasses. In my dressing-room are several that would give
even a man of your fine height, sir, a complete reflection of every
detail, from a shoe-lace to an eyebrow. It is not altogether vanity; but
I never could do justice to my toilette before a mirror that showed me
only a shoulder, or a waist, or a foot, at a time; I want the
full-length portrait or nothing. I like to see myself as others will
see me; not in piece-meal. The Florentines made lovely mirrors."
"They did." Vanlief smiled sweetly. "Yet I have made a better." He paced
the floor again, and then resumed speech. "I am glad you like tall
mirrors. You will have learned how careful one must be of them. One more
or less in your dressing-room will not matter, eh?"
"I have an excellent man," said Vane. "There has not been a broken
mirror in my house for years. He looks after them as if they were his
own."
"Ah, better and better."
Vane interrupted the Professor's silence with, "It is a mirror, then?"
"Yes," said Vanlief, nodding at the sheeted mirror, "it is a mirror.
Have you ever thought of the wonderfulness of mirrors? What wonder, and
yet what simplicity! To think that I--I, a simple, plodding old man of
science--should be the only one to have come upon the magic of a
mirror!" His talk took the note of monologue. He was pacing, pacing,
pacing; smiling at Vane now and then, and fingering the covered mirror
with loving touch as he passed near it. "Have you ever, as a child,
looked into a mirror in the twilight, and seen there another face beside
your own? Have you never thought that to the mirror were revealed more
things than the human eye can note? Have you heard of the old, old
folk-superstitions; of the bride that may not see herself in a mirror
without tragedy touching her; of the Warwickshire mirror that must be
covered in a house of death, lest the corpse be seen in it; of the
future that some magic mirrors could reveal? Fanciful tales, all of
them; yet they have their germ of truth, and for my present discovery I
owe them something." He drew the sheet from the mirror, and revealed
another veil of gauze resting upon the glass, as, in some houses, the
most prized pictures are sometimes doubly covered. "You see; it is just
a mirror, a full-length mirror. But, oh, my dear Vane, the wonderfulness
of this mirror! I have only to look into this mirror; to veil it; and
then, when next you glance into it, if it be within the hour, my soul,
my spirit, my very self, passes from the face of the mirror to you! That
is the whole secret, or at least, the manifestation of it! Do you wish
to be the President, to think his thoughts, feel as he feels, dream as
he dreams? He has only to look into this mirror, and you have only to
take from it, as one plucks a lily from the pool, the spiritual image he
has left there! Think of it, Vane, think of it! Is this not seeing life?
Is this not riddling the secret of existence? To reach the innermost
depths of another's spirit; to put on his soul, as others can put on
your clothes, if you left them on a chair,--is this not a stupendous
thing?" In his fever and fervor the professor had exhausted his
strength; he flung himself into a chair. Vane saw the old man's eyes
glowing and his chest throbbing with passion; he hardly knew whether
the whole scene was real or a something imposed upon his senses by a
species of hypnotism. He passed his hand before his forehead; he shook
his head. Yet nothing changed. Vanlief, in the chair, still quaking with
excitement; the mirror, veiled and immobile.
For a time the room stood silent, save for Vanlief's heavy breathing.
"Of course," he resumed presently, in a quieter tone, "you cannot be
expected to believe, until you have tried. But trial is the easiest
thing in the world. I can teach you the mere externals to be observed in
five minutes. One trial will convince you. After that,--my dear Vane,
you have the gamut of humanity to go. You can be another man every day.
No secret of any human heart will be a secret to you. All wisdom can be
gained by you; all knowledge, all thought, can be yours. Oh, Orson Vane,
I wonder if you realize your fortune! Or--is it possible that you
withdraw?"
Vane got up resolutely.
"No," he said, "I have faith--at last. I am with you, heart and soul.
Life seems splendid to me, for the first time. When can I have the
mirror taken to my house?"
CHAPTER IV.
Vane's dressing-room was a tasteful chamber, cool and light. Its walls,
its furniture, and its hangings told of a wide range of interest. There
was nowhere any obvious bias; the æsthetic was no more insistent than
the sporting. Orson Vane loved red-haired women as Henner painted them,
and he played the aristocratic waltzes of Chopin; but he also valued the
cruel breaking-bit that he had brought home from Texas, and read the
racing-column in the newspaper quite as carefully as he did the doings
of his society. Some hint of this diversity of tastes showed in this,
the most intimate room of his early mornings. There were some of those
ruddy British prints that are now almost depressingly conventional with
men of sporting habits; signed photographs of more or less prominent and
personable personages were scattered pell-mell. All the chairs and
lounges were of wicker; so much so that some of the men who hobnobbed
with Vane declared that a visit to his dressing-room was as good as a
yachting cruise.
The morning was no longer young. On the avenue the advance guard of the
fashionable assault upon the shopping district was already astir. The
languorous heat that reflects from the town's asphalt was gaining in
power momentarily.
Orson Vane, fresh from a chilling, invigorating bath, a Japanese robe of
exquisite coolness his only covering, sat regarding an addition to his
furniture. It had come while he slept. It was proof that the adventure
of the night had not been a mere figment of his dreams.
He touched a bell. To the man who answered the call, he said:
"Nevins, I have bought a new mirror. You are to observe a few simple
rules in regard to this mirror. In the first place, to avoid confusion,
it is always to be called the New Mirror. Is that plain?
"Quite so, sir."
"I may have orders to give about it, or notes to send, or things of that
sort, and I want no mistakes made. In the next place, the cord that
uncovers the mirror is never to be pulled, never to be touched, save at
my express order. Not--under any circumstances. I do not wish the mirror
used. Have you any curiosity left, Nevins?
"None, sir."
"So much the better. In Lord Keswick's time, I think, you still had a
touch of that vice, curiosity. Your meddling got you into something of a
scrape. Do you remember?"
"Oh, sir," said the man, with a little gesture of shame and pain, "you
didn't need reminding me. Have I ever forgotten your saving me from that
foolishness?"
"You're right, Nevins; I think I can trust you. But this is a greater
trust than any of the others. A great deal depends; mark that; a very
great deal. It is not an ordinary mirror, this one; not one of the
others compares with it; it is the gem of my collection. Not a breath is
to touch it, save as I command."
"I'll see to it, sir."
"Any callers, Nevins?"
"Mr. Moncreith, sir, looked in, but left no word. And the postman."
"No duns, Nevins?"
"Not in person, sir."
"Dear me! Is my position on the wane? When a man is no longer dunned his
credit is either too good or too bad; or else his social position is
declining." He picked up the tray with the letters, ran his eye over
them quickly, and said, "Thank the stars; they still dun me by post.
There should be a law against it; yet it is as sweet to one's vanity as
an angry letter from a woman. Nevins, is the day dull or garish?"
"It's what I should call bright, sir."
"Then you may lay out some gloomy clothes for me. I would not add to the
heat wittingly. And, Nevins!"
"Yes sir."
"If anyone calls before I breakfast, unless it happens to be Professor
Vanlief,--Vanlief, Nevins, of the Vanliefs of New Amsterdam--say I am
indisposed."
He dressed himself leisurely, thinking of the wonderful adventures into
living that lay before him. He rehearsed the simple instructions that
Vanlief had given him the night before. It was all utterly simple. As
one looked into the mirror, the spirit of that one lay on the surface,
waiting for the next person that glanced that way. There followed a
complete exodus of the spirit from the one body into the other. The
recipient was himself plus the soul of the other. The exodus left that
other in a state something like physical collapse. There would be, for
the recipient of the new personality, a sense of double consciousness;
the mind would be like a palimpsest, the one will and the one habit
imposed upon the other. The fact that the person whose spirit passed
from him upon the magic mirror was left more or less a wreck was cause
for using the experiment charily, as the Professor took pains to warn
Orson. There was a certain risk. The mirror might be broken; one could
never tell. It would be better to pick one's subjects wisely, always
with a definite purpose. This man might be used to teach that side of
life; that man another. It was not a thing to toy with. It was to be
played with as little as human life itself. Vivisection was a pastime to
this; this implicated the spirit, the other only the body.
Consideration of the new avenues opening for his intelligence had
already begun to alter Vane's outlook on life. Persons who remarked him,
a little later, strolling the avenue, wondered at the brilliance of his
look. He seemed suddenly sprayed with a new youth, a new enthusiasm. It
was not, as some of his conversations of that morning proved, an utter
lapse into optimism on his part; but it was an exchange of the mere
passive side of pessimism for its healthier, more buoyant side. He was
able to smile to himself as he met the various human marionettes of the
avenue; the persons whose names you would be sure to read every Sunday
in the society columns, and who seemed, consequently, out of place in
any more aristocratic air. He bowed to the newest beauty, he waved a
hand to the most perennial of the faded beaux. The vociferous attire of
the actors, who idled conspicuously before the shop-windows, caused him
inward shouts of laughter; a day or so ago the same sight would have
embittered his hour for him.
At Twenty-third street something possessed him to patronize one of the
Sicilian flower-sellers. The man had, happily, not importuned him; he
merely held his wares, and waited, mutely. Orson put a sprig of
lily-of-the-valley into his coat.
Before he left his rooms he had spent an hour or so writing curt notes
to the smartest addresses in town. All his invitations were declined by
him; a trip to Cairo, he had written, would keep him from town for some
time. He took this ruse because he felt that the complications of his
coming experiment might be awkward; it was as well to pave the way.
Certainly he could not hope to fulfil his social obligations in the time
to come. An impression that he was abroad was the best way out of the
dilemma. The riddance from fashionable duties added to his gaiety; he
felt like a school-boy on holiday.
It was in this mood that he saw, on the other side of the avenue, a
figure that sent a flush to his skin. There was no mistaking that
wonderful hair; in the bright morning it shone with a glow a trifle less
garish than under the electric light, but it was the same, the same. To
make assurance surer, there, just under the hat--a hat that no mere male
could have expressed in phrases, a thing of gauze and shimmer--lay a
spray of lilies-of-the-valley. The gown--Vane knew at a glance that it
was a beautiful gown and a happy one, though as different as possible
from the filmy thing she had worn when first he saw her, in the mirror,
at night.
At first unconsciously, and then with quite brazen intent, he found
himself keeping pace, on his side of the street, with the girl opposite.
He knew not what emotion possessed him; no hint of anything despicable
came to him; he had forgotten himself utterly, and he was merely
following some sweet, blind impulse. Orson Vane was a man who had
tasted the froth and dregs of his town no less thoroughly than other
men; there were few sensations, few emotions, he had not tried. Almost
the only sort of woman he did not know was The woman. In the year of his
majority he had made a summer of it on the Sound in his steam yacht, and
his enemies declared that all the harbors he had anchored in were left
empty of both champagne and virtue. Yet not even his bitterest enemy had
ever accused him of anything vulgar, brazen, coarse, conspicuous.
Luke Moncreith was a friend of Vane's, there was no reason for doubting
that. But even he experienced a little shock when he met Vane, was
unseen of him, and was then conscious, in a quick turn of the head, that
Vane's eyes, his entire vitality, were upon a woman's figure across the
avenue.
"The population of the Bowery, of Forty-second street, and of the
Tenderloin," said Moncreith to himself, "have a name for that sort of
thing." He clicked his tongue upon his teeth once or twice. "Poor Orson!
Is it the beginning of the end? Last night he seemed a little mad. Poor
Orson!" Then, with furtive shame at his bad manners, he turned about and
watched the two. Even at that distance the sunlight glowed like a caress
upon the hair of her whom Orson followed. "The girl," exclaimed
Moncreith, "the girl of the mirror." He came to a halt before a
photographer's window, the angle of which gave him a view of several
blocks behind.
Orson Vane, in the meanwhile, was as if there was but one thing in life
for him: a meeting with this radiant creature with the lilies. Once he
thought he caught a sidelong glance of hers; a little smile even hovered
an instant upon her lips; yet, at that distance, he could not be sure.
None of the horrible things occurred to him as possibilities; that she
might be an adventuress, or a mere masquerading shop-girl, or an adroit
soubrette. No tangible intention came to the young man; he had not made
it clear to himself whether he would keep on, and on, and on, until she
came to her own door; whether he would accost her; whether he would
leave all to chance; or whether he would fashion circumstances to his
end.
The girl turned into a little bookshop that, as it happened, was one of
Vane's familiar haunts. It was a place where one could always find the
new French and German things, and where the shopman was not a mere
instrument for selling whatever rubbish publishers chose to shoot at the
public. When Vane entered he found this shopman, who nodded smilingly at
him, busy with a bearded German. The girl stood at a little table,
passing her slim fingers lovingly over the titles of the books that lay
there. It was evident that she had no wish for advice from the assistant
who hovered in the background. She did not so much as glance at him.
Her eyes were all for her friends in print. She did look up, the veriest
trifle, it is true, when Orson came in; it was so swift, so shy a look
that he, in a mist of emotions, could not have sworn to it. As for him,
a boyish boldness took him to the other side of the table at which she
stood; he bent over the books, and his hands almost touched her fingers.
In that little, quiet nook, he became, all of a moment, once more a
youth of twenty; he felt the first shy stirrings of tenderness, of
worship. The names of the volumes swam for him in a mere haze. He saw
nothing save only the little figure before him, the shimmer of rose upon
her face passing into the ruddier shimmer of her hair; the perfume of
her lilies and some yet subtler scent, redolent of fairest linen, most
fragile laces and the utterest purity, came over him like a glow.
And then the marvel, the miracle of her voice!
"Oh, Mr. Vane," he heard her saying, "do help me!" Their eyes met and he
was conscious of a bewildering beauty in hers; it was with quite an
effort that he did not, then and there, do something absurd and stupid.
His hesitation, his astonishment, cost him a second or so; before he
caught his composure again, she was explaining, sweetly, plaintively,
"Help me to make up my mind. About a book."
"Why did you add that?" he asked, his wits sharp now, and his voice
still a little unsteady. "There are so many other things I would like to
help you in. A book? What sort of a book? One of those stories where
the men are all eight feet high, and wear medals, and the women are all
models for Gibson? Or one of those aristocratic things where nobody is
less than a prince, except the inevitable American, who is a newspaper
man and an abomination? Or is it, by any chance," he paused, and dropped
his voice, as if he were approaching a dreadful disclosure, "poetry?"
She shook her head. The lilies in her hair nodded, and her smile came up
like a radiance in that dark little corner. And, oh, the music in her
laugh! It blew ennui away as effectually as a storm whirls away a leaf.
"No," she said, "it is none of those things. I told you I had not made
up my mind."
"It is a thing you should never attempt. Making up the mind is a
temptation only the bravest of us can resist. One should always delegate
the task to someone else."
The girl frowned gently. "If it is the fashion to talk like that," she
said, "I do not want to be in the fashion."
He took the rebuke with a laugh. "It is hard," he pleaded, "to keep out
of the fashion. Everything we do is a fashion of one sort or another."
He glanced at her wonderful hat, at the gown that held her so closely,
so tenderly. "I am sure you are in the fashion," he said.
"If Mr. Orson Vane tells me so, I must believe it," she answered. "But I
wear only what suits me; if the fashion does not suit me, I avoid the
fashion."
"But you cannot avoid beauty," he urged, "and to be fair is always the
fashion."
She turned her eyes to him full of reproach. They said, as plainly as
anything, "How crude! How stupidly obvious!" As if she had really
spoken, he went on, in plain embarassment:
"I beg your pardon. I--I am very silly this morning. Something has gone
to my head. I really don't think I'd better advise you about anything to
read. I--"
"Oh," she interrupted, already full of forgiveness, since it was not in
her nature to be cruel for more than a moment at a time, "but you must.
I am really desperate. All I ask is that you do not urge a fashionable
book, a book of the day, or a book that should be in the library of
every lady. I am afraid of those books. They are like the bores one
turns a corner to avoid."
"You make advice harder and harder. Is it possible you really want a
book to read, rather than to talk about?"
"I really do," she admitted, "I told you I had no thought about the
fashion."
"You are like a figure from the Middle Ages," he said, "with your notion
about books."
"Am I so very wrinkled?" she asked. She put her hand to her veil, with a
gesture of solicitous inquiry. "To be young," she sighed, with a pout,
"and yet to seem old. I am quite a tragedy."
"A goddess," he murmured, "but not of tragedy." He laughed sharply, and
took a book from the table, using it to keep his eyes from the witchery
of her as he continued: "Don't you see why I'm talking such nonsense? If
it meant prolonging the glimpse of you, there's no end, simply no end,
to the rubbish I could talk!"
"And no beginning," she put in, "to your sincerity."
"Oh, I don't know. One still has fits and starts of it! There's no
telling what might not be done; it might come back to one, like
childishness in old age." He put down the book, and looked at her in
something like appeal. "There is such a thing as a sincerity one is
ashamed of, that one hides, and disguises, and that the world refuses to
see. The world? The world always means an individual. In this case the
world is--"
"The world is yours, like _Monte Cristo_," she interposed, "how
embarassed you must feel. The responsibility must be enervating! I have
always thought the clever thing for _Monte Cristo_ to have done was to
lose the world; to hide it where nobody could find it again." She tapped
her boot with her parasol, charmingly impatient. "I suppose," she
sighed, "I shall have to ask that stupid clerk for a book, after all. He
looks as if he would far rather sell them by weight."
"No, no, I couldn't allow that. Consider me all eagerness to aid you. Is
it to be love, or ghosts, or laughter?"
"Love and laughter go well together," she said. "I want a book I can
love and laugh with, not at."
"I know," he nodded. "The tear that makes the smile come after. You want
something charming, something sweet, something that will taste
pleasantly no matter how often you read it. A trifle, and yet--a
treasure. Such a book as, I dare say, every writer dreams of doing once
in his life; the sort of book that should be bound in rose-leaves. And
you expect me to betray a treasure like that to you? And my reward? But
no, I beg your pardon; I have my reward now, and here, and the debt is
still mine. I can merely put you in the way of a printed page; while
you--" He stopped, roving for the right word. His eyes spoke what his
voice could not find. He finished, lamely, and yet aptly enough,
"You--are you."
"I don't believe," she declared, with the most arch elevation of the
darkest eyebrows, "that you know one book from another. You are an
impostor. You are sparring for time. I have given you too much time as
it is. I am going." She picked up her skirts with one slim hand, turned
on a tiny heel, and looked over her shoulder with an air, a
mischievousness, that made Orson ache, yes, simply ache with curiosity
about her. He put out a hand in expostulation.
"Please," he pleaded, "please don't go. I have found the book. I really
have. But you must take my word for it. You mustn't open it till you are
at home." He handed it to the clerk to be wrapped up. "And now," he went
on, "won't you tell me something? I--upon my honor, I can't think where
we met?"
"One hardly expects Mr. Orson Vane to remember all the young women in
society," she smiled. "Besides, if I must confess: I am only just what
society calls 'out.' I have seen Mr. Orson Vane: but he has not seen me.
Mr. Vane is a leader; I am--" She shrugged her shoulder, raised her
eyebrows, pursed up her mouth, oh, to a complete gesture that was the
prettiest, most bewildering finish to any sentence ever uttered.
"Oh," said Orson, "but you are mistaken. I have seen you. No longer ago
than last night. In--"
"In a mirror," she laughed. Then she grew suddenly quite solemn. "Oh,
you mustn't think I didn't know who you were. It was all very rash of
me, and very improper, my speaking to you, just now, but--"
"It was very sweet," he interposed.
"But," she went on, not heeding his remark at all, "I knew you so well
by sight, and I had really been introduced to you once,--one of a bevy
of debutantes, merely an item in a chorus--and, besides, my father--"
"Your father?" repeated Orson, jogging his memory, "you don't mean to
say--"
"My father is Augustus Vanlief," she said.
He took a little time to digest the news. The clerk handed him the book
and the change. He saw, now, whence that charm, that grace, that beauty
came; he recalled that the late Mrs. Vanlief had been one of the
Waddells; there was no better blood in the country. With the name, too,
there came the thought of the wonderful revelations that were presently
to come to him, thanks to this girl's father. A sort of dizziness
touched him: he felt a quick conflict between the wish to worship this
girl, and the wish to probe deeper into life. It was with a very real
effort that he brushed the charm of her from him, and relapsed, again,
into the man who meant to know more of human life than had ever been
known before.
He took out a silver pencil and held it poised above the book.
"This book," he said, "is for you, you know, not for your father. Your
father and I are to be great friends but--I want to be friends, also,
with--" he looked a smiling appeal, "with--whom?"
"With Miss Vanlief," she replied, mockingly. "My other name? I hate it;
really I do. Perhaps my father will tell you."
She had given him the tip of her fingers, her gown had swung perfume as
it followed her, and she was out and away before he could do more than
give her the book, bow her good-bye, and stand in amaze at her
impetuousness, her verve. The thought smote him that, on the night
before, he had seen her, in the mirror, and spurned the notion of her
being other than a sham, a mockery. How did he know, even now, that she
was other than that? Yet, what had happened to him that he had been able
so long to stay under her charm, to believe in her, to wish for her, to
feel that she was hardly mortal, but some strange, sweet, splendid
dream? Was he the same man who, only a few hours ago, had held himself
shorn of all the primal emotions? He beat these questionings back and
forth in his mind; now doubting himself, now doubting this girl. Surely
she had not, in that dining-room, been sitting with her father? Would he
not have seen them together? Perhaps she was with some of her family's
womenfolk? Yes; now he remembered; she had been at a table with several
other ladies, all elderly. He wished he knew the name one might call
her, if ... if....
Luke Moncreith came into the shop. Orson caught a shadow of a frown on
the other's face. Moncreith's voice was sharp and bitter when he spoke.
"Been buying the shop?" he asked.
"No," said Orson, in some wonder. "Only one book."
"Hope you'll like it," said the other, with a manner that meant the very
opposite.
"I? Oh, I read it ages ago. It was for somebody else. You seem very
curious about it?"
"I am. You aren't usually the man to dawdle in bookshops."
"Dawdle?" Orson turned on the other sharply. "What the deuce do you
mean? Are you my keeper, or what? If I choose to, I can _live_ in this
shop, can't I?"
"Oh, Lord, yes! Looks odd, just the same, you trailing in here after a
petticoat, and hanging around for--" he pulled out his watch,--"for a
good half hour."
Orson burst out in a sort of clenched breath of rage. He kept the
phrases down with difficulty. "Better choose your words," he said. "I
don't like your words, and your watch be damned. Since when have my--my
friends taken to timing my actions? It's a blessing I'm going abroad."
He turned and walked out of the shop, fiercely, swiftly. As the fresh
air struck his face, he put his hand to it, and shook his head,
wonderingly. "What's the matter with Moncreith? With me?" He thought of
the title of the book he had just given away. "Are we all as mad as
that?" he asked himself.
The title was "March Hares."
CHAPTER V.
A young man so prominent in the town as Orson Vane had naturally a very
large list of acquaintances. He knew, in the fashionable phrase,
"everybody," and "everybody" knew him. His acquaintances ranged beyond
the world of fashion; the theatre, the turf, and many other regions had
denizens who knew Orson Vane and held him in esteem. He had always lived
a careful, well-mannered life; his name had never been in the newspapers
save in the inescapable columns touching society.
When he was ready to proceed with the experiment of the mirror, the
largeness of his social register was at once a pleasure and a pain.
There were so many, so many! It was evident that he must use the types
most promising in eccentricity; he must adventure forth in company with
the strangest souls, not the mere ordinary ones.
Sitting in the twilight of his rooms one day, it occurred to him that he
was now ripe for his first decision. Whose soul should he seize? That
was the question. He had spent a week or so perfecting plans, stalling
off awkward episodes, schooling his servants. There was no telling what
might not happen.
He picked up a newspaper. A name caught his eye; he gave a little laugh.
"The very man!" he told himself, "the very man. Society's court fool; it
will be worth something to know what lies under his cap and bells."
He scrawled a note, enclosed it, and rang for Nevins.
"Have that taken, at once, to Mr. Reginald Hart. And then, presently,
have a hansom called and let it wait nearby."
"Reggie will be sure to come," he said, when alone. "I've told him there
was a pretty woman here."
He felt a nervous restlessness. He paced his room, fingering the frames
of his prints, trying the cord of his new mirror, adjusting the blinds
of the windows. He tingled with mental and physical expectation. He
wondered whether nothing, after all, would be the result. How insane it
was to expect any such thing to happen as Vanlief had vapored of! This
was the twentieth century rather than the tenth; miracles never
happened. Yet how fervently he wished for one! To feel the soul of
another superimposing itself upon his own; to know that he had committed
the grandest larceny under heaven, the theft of a soul, and to gain,
thereby, complete insight into the spiritual machinery of another
mortal!
Nevins returned, within a little time, bringing word that Mr. Hart had
been found at home, and would call directly.
Vane pushed the new mirror to a position where it would face the door.
He told Nevins not to enter the room after Mr. Hart; to let him enter,
and let the curtain fall behind him.
He took up a position by a window and waited. The minutes seemed heavy
as lead. The air was unnaturally still.
At last he heard Nevins, in gentle monosyllables. Another voice, high
almost to falsetto, clashed against the stillness.
Then the curtain swung back.
Reginald Hart, whom all the smart world never called other than Reggie
Hart, stood for a moment in the curtain-way, the mirror barring his
path. He caught his image there to the full, the effeminate, full face,
the narrow-waisted coat, the unpleasantly womanish hips. He put out his
right hand, as if groping in the dark. Then he said, shrilly,
stammeringly.
"Vane! Oh, Vane, where the de--"
He sank almost to his knees. Vane stepping forward, caught him by the
shoulder and put him into an arm-chair. Hart sat there, his head hunched
between his shoulders.
"Silly thing to do, Vane, old chappy. Beastly sorry for this--stunt of
mine. Too many tea-parties lately, Vane, too much dancing, too much--"
his voice went off into a sigh. "Better get a cab," he said, limply.
He had quite forgotten why he had come: he was simply in collapse,
mentally and physically. Vane, trembling with excitement and delight,
walked up to the mirror from behind and sent the veil upon its face
again. Then he had Nevins summon the cab. He watched Hart tottering out,
upon Nevins' shoulder, with a dry, forced smile.
So it was real! He could hardly believe it. In seconds, in the merest
flash, his visitor had faded like a flower whose root is plucked. The
man had come in, full of vitality, quite, in fact, himself; he had gone
out a mere husk, a shell.
But there was still the climax ahead. Had he courage for it, now that it
loomed imminent? Should he send for Hart and have him pick up his soul
where he had dropped it? Or should he, stern in his first purpose, fit
that soul upon his own, as one fits a glove upon the hand? There was yet
time. It depended only upon whether Hart or himself faced the mirror
when the veil was off.
He cut his knot of indecision sharply, with a stride to the mirror, a
jerk at the cord and a steady gaze into the clear pool of light,
darkened only by his own reflection.
* * * * *
Strain his eyes as he would, he could feel no change, not the faintest
stir of added emotion. He let the curtain drop upon the mirror
listlessly.
Walking to his window-seat again, he was suddenly struck by his image in
one of the other glasses. He was really very well shaped; he felt a wish
to strip to the buff; it was rather a shame to clothe limbs as fine as
those. He was quite sure there were friends of his who would appreciate
photographs of himself, in some picturesque costume that would hide as
little as possible. It was an age since he had any pictures taken. He
called for Nevins. His voice struck Nevins as having a taint of tenor in
it.
"Nevins," he said, "have the photographer call to-morrow, like a good
man, won't you? You know, the chap, I forget his name, who does all the
smart young women. I'll be glad to do the fellow a service; do him no
end of good to have his name on pictures of me. I'm thinking of
something a bit startling for the Cutter's costume ball, Nevins, so have
the man from Madame Boyer's come for instructions. And see if you can
find me some perfume at the chemist's; something heavy, Nevins. The
perfumes at once, that's a dear man. I want them in my pillows tonight."
When the man was gone, his master went to the sideboard, opened it, and
gave a gentle sigh of disappointment.
"Careless of me," he murmured, "to have no Red Ribbon in the place. How
can any gentleman afford to be without it? Dear, dear, if any of the
girls and boys had caught me without it. Another thing I must tell
Nevins. Nothing but whisky! Abominably vulgar stuff! Can't think,
really, 'pon honor I can't, how I ever came to lay any of it in. And no
cigarettes in the place. Goodness me! What sweet cigarettes those are
Mrs. Barrett Weston always has! Wonder if that woman will ask me to her
cottage this summer."
He strolled to the window, yawned, stretched out his arms, drawing his
hands towards him at the end of his gesture. He inspected the fingers
minutely. They needed manicuring. He began to put down a little list of
things to be done. He strolled over to the tabouret where invitations
lay scattered all about. That dear Mrs. Sclatersby was giving a
studio-dance; she was depending on him for a novel feature. Perhaps if
he did a little skirt-dance. Yes; the notion pleased him. He would sit
down, at once, and write a hint to a newspaper man who would be sure to
make a sensation of this skirt-dance.
That done, he heard Nevins knocking.
"Oh," he murmured, "the perfumes. So sweet!" He buried his nose in a
handful of the sachet-bags. He sprayed some Maria Farina on his
forehead. Perfumes, he considered, were worth worship just as much as
jewels or music. The more sinful a perfume seemed, the more stimulating
it was to the imagination. Some perfumes were like drawings by
Beardsley.
He looked at the walls. He really must get some Beardsleys put up. There
was nothing like a Beardsley for jogging a sluggish fancy; if you wanted
to see everything that milliners and dressmakers existed by hiding, all
you had to do was to sup sufficiently on Beardsley. He thought of
inventing a Beardsley cocktail; if he could find a mixture that would
make the brain quite pagan, he would certainly give it that name.
His mind roved to the feud between the Montagues and Capulets of the
town. It was one of those modern feuds, made up of little social
frictions, infinitesimal jealousies, magnified by a malicious press into
a national calamity. It was a feud, he told himself, that he would have
to mend. It would mean, for him, the lustre from both houses. And there
was nothing, in the smart world, like plenty of lustre. There were
several sorts of lustre: that of money, of birth, and of public honors.
Personally, he cared little for the origin of his lustre; so it put him
in the very forefront of smartness he asked for nothing more. Of course,
his own position was quite impeccable. The smart world might narrow year
by year; the Newport set, and the Millionaire set, and the Knickerbocker
set--they might all dwindle to one small world of smartness; yet nothing
that could happen could keep out an Orson Vane. The name struck him, as
it shaped itself in his mind, a trifle odd. An Orson Vane? Yes, of
course, of course. For that matter, who had presumed to doubt the
position of a Vane? He asked himself that, with a sort of defiance. An
Orson Vane, an Orson Vane? He repeated the syllables over and over, in a
whisper at first, and then aloud, until the shrillness of his tone gave
him a positive start.
He rang the bell for Nevins.
"Nevins," he said, and something in him fought against his speech, "tell
me, that's a good man,--is there anything, anything wrong with--me?"
"Nothing sir," said Nevins stolidly.
Orson Vane gave a sort of gasp as the man withdrew. It had come to him
suddenly; the under-self was struggling beneath the borrowed self. He
was Orson Vane, but he was also another.
Who? What other?
He gave a little shrill laugh as he remembered. Reggie Hart,--that was
it,--Reggie Hart.
He sat down to undress for sleep. He slipped into bed as daintily as a
woman, nestling to the perfumed pillows.
Nevins, in his part of the house, sat shaking his head. "If he hadn't
given me warning," he told himself, "I'd have sent for a doctor."
CHAPTER VI.
The smart world received the change in Orson Vane with no immediate
wonder. Wonder is, at the outset, a vulgarity; to let nothing astonish
you is part of a smart education. A good many of the smartest hostesses
in town were glad that Vane had emerged from his erstwhile air of
aristocratic aloofness; he took, with them, the place that Reggie Hart's
continuing illness left vacant.
In the regions where Vane had been actually intimate whispers began to
go about, it is true, and it was with no little difficulty that an
occasional story about him was kept out of the gossipy pages of the
papers. Vane was constantly busy seeking notoriety. His attentions to
several of the younger matrons were conspicuous. Yet he was so much of a
stimulating force, in a society where passivity was the rule, that he
was welcome everywhere.
He had become the court fool of the smart set.
To him, the position held nothing degrading. It was, he argued, a
reflection on smart society, rather on himself, that, to be prominent in
it, one must needs wear cap and bells. Moreover his position allowed
him, now and then, the utterance of grim truths that would not have
been listened to from anyone not wearing the jester's license.
At the now famous dinner given by Mrs. Sclatersby, Orson Vane seized a
lull in the conversation, by remarking, in his ladylike lisp:
"My dear Mrs. Sclatersby, I have such a charming idea. I am thinking of
syndicating myself."
Mrs. Sclatersby put up her lorgnettes and smiled encouragement at Orson.
"It sounds Wall Streety," she said, "you're not going to desert us, are
you?"
"Oh, nothing so dreadful. It would be an entirely smart syndicate, you
know; a syndicate of which you would be a member. I sometimes think, you
know, that I do not distribute myself to the best advantage. There have
been little jealousies, now and then, have there not?" He looked, in a
bird-like, perky way, at Mrs. Barrett Weston, and the only Mrs. Carlos.
"I have been unable to be in two places at once. Now a syndicate--a
syndicate could arrange things so that there would be no
disappointments, no clashings of engagements, no waste of opportunity.
"How clever you always are," said a lady at Orson's right. She had
chameleon hair, and her poise was that of a soubrette. The theatre was
tremendously popular as a society model that season. Orson blew a kiss
at her, and went on with his speech.
"Actors do it, you know. Painters have done it. Inventors do it. Why
not I?" He paused to nibble an olive. "To contribute to the gaiety of
our little world is, after all, the one thing worth while. Think how few
picturesque people we have! Eccentricity is terribly lacking in the
town. We have no Whistler; Mansfield is rather a dull imitation. Of
course there is George Francis Train; but he is a trifle, a trifle too
much of the larger world, don't you think?"
"I never saw the man in my life," asserted the hostess.
"Exactly," said Orson, "he makes himself too cheap. It keeps us from
seeing him. But Whistler; think of Whistler, in New York! He would wear
a French hat, fight duels every day, lampoon a critic every hour, and
paint nocturnes on the Fifth avenue pavement! He would make Diana fall
from the Tower in sheer envy. He would go through the Astoria with
monocle and mockery, and smile blue peacock smiles at Mr. Blashfield and
Mr. Simmons. He would etch himself upon the town. We would never let him
go again. We need that sort of thing. Our ambitions and our patience are
cosmopolitan; but we lack the public characters to properly give fire
and color to our streets. Now I--"
He let his eyes wander about the room, a delicate smile of invitation on
his lips.
"Don't you think," said one of the ladies, "that you are quite--quite
bohemian enough?"
Orson shuddered obviously. "My dear lady," he urged, "it is a dreadful
thing to be bohemian. It is no longer smart. If I am considered the one,
I cannot possibly be the other. There is, to be sure, a polite
imitation; but it is quite an art to imitate the thing with just
sufficient indolence. But I really wish you would think the thing over,
Mrs. Sclatersby. I know nobody who would do the thing better than I. Our
men are mostly too fond of fashion, and too afraid of fancy. One must
not be ashamed of being called foolish. Whistler uses butterflies;
somebody else used sunflowers and green carnations; I should
use--lilies, I think, lilies-of-the-valley. Emblematic of the pure folly
of my pose, you know. One must do something like that, you see, to gain
smart applause; impossible hats and improbable hair, except in the case
of actresses, are quite extinct."
A Polish orchestra that had been hitherto unsuccessful against the
shrill monologue of Orson, and the occasional laughter of the ladies,
now sent out a sudden, fierce stream of melody. It was evident that they
did not mean to take the insult of a large wage without offering some
stormy moments in exchange. The diners assumed a patient air, eating in
an abstracted manner, as if their stomachs were the only members of
their bodies left unstunned by the music. The assemblage wore, in its
furtive gluttony, an air of being in a plot of the most delicious
danger. Some rather dowdy anecdotes went about in whispers, and several
of the ladies made passionate efforts to blush. Orson Vane took a sip of
some apricotine, explaining to his neighbor that he took it for the
color; it was the color of verses by Verlaine. She had never heard of
the man. Ah; then of course Mallarmé, and Symons and Francis Saltus were
her gods? No; she said she liked Madame Louise; hers were by far the
most fragile hats purchasable; what was the use of a hat if it was not
fragile; to wear one twice was a crime, and to give one away unless it
was decently crushed was an indiscretion. Orson quite agreed with her.
To his other neighbor he confided that he was thinking of writing a
book. It would be something entirely in the key of blue. He was busy
explaining its future virtues, when an indiscreet lull came in the
orchestral tornado.
"I mean to bring the pink of youth to the sallowest old age," he was
saying, "and every page is to be as dangerous as a Bowery cocktail."
Then the storm howled forth again. Everyone talked to his or her
neighbor at top voice. Now and then pauses in the music left fag ends of
conversation struggling about the room.
"The decadents are simply the people who refuse to write twaddle for the
magazines...."
"The way to make a name in the world is to own a soap factory and ape
William Morris on the side...."
"I can always tell when it is Spring by looking at the haberdashers'
windows. To watch shirts and ties blooming is so much nicer than flowers
and those smelly things...."
"The pleasantest things in the world all begin with a P. Powders,
patches and poses--what should we do without them?..."
This sort of thing came out at loose ends now and then. Suddenly the
music ceased altogether. The diners all looked as if they had been
caught in a crime. The lights went out in the room, and there were
little smothered shrieks. After an interval, a rosy glow lit up the
conservatory beyond the palms; a little stage showed in the distance.
Some notorious people from the music-halls began to do songs and dances,
and offer comic monologues. The diners fell into a sort of lethargy.
They did not even notice that Orson Vane's chair was empty.
Vane was in a little boudoir lent him by the hostess. His nostrils
dilated with the perfume of her that he felt everywhere. He sank into a
silk-covered chair, before which he had arranged a full-length mirror,
and several smaller glasses, with candles glowing all about him. He was
conscious of a cloying sense of happiness over his physical perfections.
He stripped garment after garment from him with a care, a gentleness
that argued his belief that haste was a foe to beauty. He stretched
himself at full length, in epicurean enjoyment of himself. The flame of
life, he told himself, burnt the more steadily the less we wrapped it
up. If we could only return to the pagan life! And yet--what charm there
was in dress! The body had, after all, a monotony, a sameness; the
tenderest of its curves, the rosiest of its surfaces, must pall. But the
infinite variety of clothes! The delight of letting the most delicate
tints of gauze caress the flesh, while to the world only the soberest
stuffs were exposed! The rustle of fresh linen, the perfume that one
could filter through the layers of one's attire!
Orson Vane closed his eyes, lazily, musingly. At that moment his proper
soul was quite in subjection; the ecstasy in the usurping soul was
all-powerful.
He was thinking of what the cheval-glass in that little room must have
seen.
It would be unspeakably fine to be a mirror.
The little crystal clock ticking on the dressing-table tinkled an hour.
It brought him from his reveries with a start. He began gliding into
some shining, silken things of umber tints; they fitted him to the skin.
He was a falconer.
It was a costume to strike pale the idlers at a bathing beach. There was
not a crease, not a fold anywhere. A leathern thong upon a wrist, a
feathered cap upon his head, were almost the only points that rose away
from the body as God had fashioned it. Satisfaction filled him as he
surveyed himself. But there was more to do. Above this costume he put
the dress of a Spanish Queen. When he lifted the massively brocaded
train, there showed the most exquisitely chiseled ankles, the promise of
the most alluring legs. The corsage hinted a bust of the most soothing
softness. He spent fully ten minutes in happy admiration of his images
in the mirrors.
When he proceeded to the conservatory, it was by a secret corridor. The
diners were wearily watching a Frenchwoman who sang with her gloves,
which were black and always on the point of falling down. She was very
pathetic; she was trying to sing rag-time melodies because some idiot
had told her the Newport set preferred that music. A smart young woman
had danced a dance of her own invention; everyone agreed, as they did
about the man who paints with his toes, that, considering her smartness
in the fashionable world, it was not so much a wonder that she danced so
well, as that she danced at all. They were quite sure the professional
managers would offer her the most lavish sums; she would be quite as
much of an attraction as the foreign peer who was trying to be a
gentleman, where they are most needed, on the stage.
At a sign from Orson, the lights went out again, as the Frenchwoman
finished her song. Several of the guests began to talk scandal in the
dark; there are few occupations more fascinating than talking scandal in
the dark. The question of whether it was better to be a millionaire or
a fashionable and divorced beauty was beginning to agitate several
people into almost violent argument, when the lights flared to the full.
The chorus of little "Ohs" and "Ahs," of rapid whispered comment, and of
discreetly patted gloves, was quite fervid for so smart an assemblage.
Except in the rarest cases, to gush is as fatal, in the smart world, as
to be intolerant. There is a smart avenue between fervor and frowning;
when you can find that avenue unconsciously, in the dark, as it were,
you have little more to learn in the code of smartness.
Mrs. Sclatersby herself murmured, quite audibly:
"How sweet the dear boy looks!"
Her clan took the word up, and for a time the sibilance of it was like a
hiss in the room. A man or two in the company growled out something that
his fairer neighbor seemed unwilling to hear. These basso profundo
sounds, if one could formulate them into words at all, seemed more like
"Disgusting fool!" or "Sickening!" than anything else. But the company
had very few men in it; in this, as in many other respects, the room
resembled smart society itself. The smart world is engineered and
peopled chiefly by the feminine element. The male sex lends to it only
its more feminine side.
It is almost unnecessary to describe the picture that Orson Vane
presented on that little stage. His beauty as "Isabella, Queen of
Spain," has long since become public property; none of his later efforts
in suppression of the many photographs that were taken, shortly after
the Sclatersby dinner, have succeeded in quite expunging the portraits.
At that time he gave the sittings willingly. He felt that these
photographs represented the highest notch in his fame, the completest
image of his ability to be as beautiful as the most beautiful woman.
Shame or nervousness was not part of Orson Vane's personality that
night. He sat there, in the skillfully arranged scheme of lights, with
his whole body attuned only to accurate impersonation of the character
he represented. He got up. His motion, as he passed across the stage,
was so utterly feminine, so made of the swaying, undulating grace that
usually implies the woman; the gesture with his fan was so finically
alluring; the poise of his head above his bared shoulders so
coquettish,--that the women watching him almost held their breaths in
admiration.
It was, you see, the most adroit flattery that a man could pay the
entire sex of womankind.
Then the music, a little way off, began to strum a cachuca. The tempo
increased; when finally the pace was something infectious, Orson Vane
began a dance that remains, to this day, an episode in the annals of the
smart. The vigor of his poses, the charm of his skirt-manipulation,
carried the appreciation of his friends by storm. Some of the ladies
really had hard work to keep from rushing to the stage and kissing the
young man then and there. When we are emotional, we Americans--to what
lengths will we not go!
But the surprises were not yet over. A dash of darkness stayed the
music; a swishing and a flapping came from the stage; then the lights.
Vane stood, in statue position, as a falconer. You could almost, under
the umber silk, see the rippling of his veins.
Only a second he stood so, but it was a second of triumph. The company
was so agape with wonder, that there was no sound from it until the
music and the bare stage, following a brief period of blackness,
recalled it to its senses. Then it urged Mrs. Sclatersby to grant a
great favor.
Mr. Vane must be persuaded not take off his falconer's costume; to
mingle, for what little time remained, with the company without resuming
his more conventional attire.
Vane smiled when the message came to him. He nodded his head. Then he
sent for the Sclatersby butler.
"Plenty of Red Ribbon!" he said to that person.
"Plenty, sir."
"Make a note of your commissions; a cheque in the morning."
Then he mingled again with his fellow-guests, and there was much
toasting, and the bonds all loosened a little, and the sparkle came up
out of the glasses into the cheeks of the women. The other men, one by
one, took their way out.
Women crushed one another to touch the hero of the evening. Jealousies
shot savage glances about. Every increase in this emulation increased
the love that Orson Vane felt for himself. He caressed a hand here, a
lock there, with a king's condescension. If he felt a kiss upon his
hand, he smiled a splendid, slightly wearied smile. If he had hot eyes
turned on him, burning so fiercely as to spell out passion boldly, he
returned, with his own glances, the most ineffable promises.
There have been many things written and said about that curious affair
at the Sclatersbys, but for the entire history of it--well, there are
reasons why you will never be able to trace it. Orson Vane is perhaps
the only one who might tell some of the details; and he, as you will
find presently, has utterly forgotten that night.
"Time we went home, girls," said Vane, at last, disengaging himself
gently from a number of warm hands, and putting away, as he moved into
freedom, more than one beautiful pair of shoulders. He needed the fresh
air; he was really quite worn out. But he still had a madcap notion left
in him; he still had a trump to play.
"A pair of hose," he called out, "a pair of hose, with diamond-studded
garters, to the one who will play 'follow' to my 'leader!'"
And the end of that dare-devil scamper did not come until the whole
throng reached Madison Square.
Vane plunged to the knees in the fountain.
That chilled the chase. But one would not be denied. Hers was a dark
type of beauty that needed magnolias and the moon and the South to frame
it properly. She lifted her skirts with a little tinkling laugh, and ran
to where Orson stood, splashing her way bravely through the water.
Vane looked at her and took her hand.
"I envy the prize I offered," he said to her.
CHAPTER VII.
Dawn found Orson Vane nodding in a hansom. He had told the man to drive
to Claremont. The Palisades were just getting the first rosy streaks the
sun was putting forth. The Hudson still lay with a light mist on it. The
ascent to Claremont, in sunshine so clustered with beauty, was now
deserted. A few carts belonging to the city were dragging along
sleepily. Harlem was at the hour when the dregs of one day still taint
the morn of the next one.
Vane was drowsy. He felt the need of a fillip. He did not like to think
of getting back to his rooms and taking a nap. It was still too early,
it seemed, for anything to eat or drink. He spied the Fort Lee ferry,
and with it a notion came to him. The cabman was willing. In a few
minutes he was aboard the ferry, and the cooler air that sweeps the
Hudson was laving him. On the Jersey side he found a sleepy innkeeper
who patched up a breakfast for him. He had, fortunately, some smokable
cigars in his clothes. The day was well on when he reached the New York
side of the river again, and gave "The Park!" as the cabman's orders.
His body now restored to energy again, his mind recounted the successes
of the night. He really had nothing much to wish for. The men envied him
to the point of hatred; the women adored him. He was the pet of the
smartest people. He was shrewd enough, too, to be petted for a
consideration; his adroitness in sales of Red Ribbon added comfortably
to his income. He took pride in this, as if there had ever been a time,
for several generations, when the name of Vane had not stood good for a
million or so.
The Park was not well tenanted. Some robust members of the smart set
were cantering about the bridle paths, and now and then a carriage
turned a corner; but the people who preferred the Park for its own sake
to the Park of the afternoon drive were, evidently, but few. Vane felt
quite neglected; he was still able to count the number of times that he
had bowed to familiars. The deserted state of the Park somewhat
discounted the tonic effects of its morning freshness. Nature was
nothing unless it was a background for man. The country was a place from
which you could come to town. Still--there was really nothing better to
do, this fine morning. He rather dreaded the thought of his rooms after
the brilliance of the night.
His meditations ceased at approach of a girlish figure on horseback, a
groom at a discreet distance behind.
It was Miss Vanlief.
He saw that she saw him, yet he saw no welcome in her eyes. He rapped
for the hansom to stop; got out, and waved his hat elaborately at the
young woman. She, in sheer politeness, had reined in her horse.
"A sweet day," he minced, "and jolly luck my meeting you! Thought it was
rather dull in the old Park, till you turned up. Sweet animal you're
on." He looked up with that air that, the night before, had been so
bewitching. Somehow, as the girl eyed him, he felt haggard. She was not
smiling, not the least little bit.
"I have read about the affair at Mrs. Sclatersby's," she said.
"Really? Dreadful hurry these newspapers are always in, to be sure. It
was really a great lark."
"It must have been," was her icy retort. She beckoned to the groom.
"That--that sheet," she ordered, sharply, holding out one gauntleted
hand. The groom gave her the folded newspaper. She began to read from
it, in a bitter monotone:
"The antics of Mr. Orson Vane," she read, "for some time the subject of
comment in society, have now reached the point where they deserve the
censure of publicity. His doings at a certain fashionable dinner of last
night were the subject of outspoken disgust at the prominent clubs
later. Now that the case is openly discussed, it may be repeated that a
prominent publication recently had occasion to refuse print to a
distinctly questionable photograph of this young man, submitted, it is
alleged, by himself. In the more staid social circles, one wonders how
much longer Mrs. Carlos and the other leaders of the smartest set will
continue to countenance such behavior."
Vane, as she read, was enjoying every inch of her. What freshness, what
grace! What a Lady Godiva she would have made!
"Sweet of you to take such interest," he observed, as she handed the
paper to the groom. "Malice, you know, sheer malice. Dare say I forgot
to give that paper some news that I gave the others; they take that sort
of thing so bitterly, you know. As for the photo--it was really awfully
cunning. I'll send you one. Oh, must you go? I'm so cut up! Charming
chat we've had, I'm sure."
She had given her horse a cut with the whip, had sent Vane a stare of
the most open contempt, and was now off and away. Vane stood staring
after her. "Very nice little filly," he murmured. "Very!"
Then he gave his house number to the cabman.
Turning into Park avenue, at Thirty-Ninth street, the horse slipped on
the asphalt. The hansom spun on one wheel, and then crashed against a
lamp-post. Vane was almost stunned, though there was no mark on him
anywhere. He felt himself all over, but he could feel not as much as a
lump. But his head ached horribly; he felt queerly incapable of thought.
Whatever it was that had happened to him, it had stunned something in
him. What that something was he did not realize even as he told Nevins,
who opened the door to him in some alarm:
"Send the cab over to Mr. Reginald Hart's. Say I must--do you hear,
Nevins?--I must have him here within the hour--if he has to come in a
chair!"
Not even when he let the veil glide from the new mirror did he
understand what part of him was stunned. He moved about in a sort of
half wakefulness. The time he spent before Hart's arrival was all a
stupor, spent on a couch, with eyes closed.
Hart came in feebly, leaning on a stick.
"Funny thing of you to do," he piped, "sending for me like this. What
the--" He straightened himself in front of the new mirror, and, for an
instant, swayed limply there. Then his stick took an upward swing, and
he minced across the room vigorously. "Why, Vane," he said, "not ill,
are you? Jove, you know, I've had a siege, myself. Feel nice and fit
this minute, though. Shouldn't wonder if the effort to get here had done
me good. What was the thing you wanted me for?"
Vane shook his head, feebly. "Upon my word, Hart, I don't know. I had an
accident; cab crushed me; I was a little off my head, I think. All a
mistake."
"Sorry, I'm sure," lisped Hart, "hope it won't be anything real. I tell
you I feel quite out of things. All the other way with you, eh! Hear
you're no end of a choice thing with the _cafe au lait_ gang. Well,
adios!"
Vane lay quite still after the other had gone. When he spoke, it was to
say, to the emptiness of the room, but nodding to where Hart had last
stood:
"What a worm! What an utter worm!"
The voice was once more the voice of Orson Vane.
As realization of that came to him, he spoke again, so loud that Nevins,
without, heard it.
"Thank God," he said.
CHAPTER VIII.
The time that had passed since he began the experiment with the
Professor's mirror now filled Vane with horror. The life that had seemed
so splendid, so triumphant to him a short while ago, now presented
itself to him as despicable, mean, hateful. Now that he had safely
ousted the soul of Reginald Hart he loathed the things that, under the
dominance of that soul, he had done. The quick feeling of success that
he had expected from his adventure into the realm of the mind was not
his at all; his emotions were mixed, and in that mixture hatred of
himself was uppermost. It was true: he had succeeded. The thoughts, the
deeds of another man had become his thoughts, his deeds. The entire
point of view had been, for the time, changed. But, where he had
expected to keep the outland spirit in subjection, it was the reverse
that had happened; the usurping soul had been in positive dominance; he
had been carried along relentlessly by the desires and the reflections
of that other.
The fact that he knew, now, to the very letter, the mind that animated
that fellow, Reginald Hart, was small consolation to him. The odium of
that reputation was inescapably his, Orson Vane's. Oh, the things he had
said,--and thought,--and done! He had not expected that any man's mind
could be so horrible as that. He thought of the visitation he had
conjured upon himself, and so thinking, shuddered. How was he ever to
elude the contempt that his masquerade, if he could call it so, would
bring him?
Above all, that scene with Miss Vanlief came back to him with a bitter
pang. What did it profit him, now, to fathom the foul depths of Reginald
Hart's mind concerning any ever so girlish creature? It was he, Orson
Vane, for all that it was possible to explain to the contrary, who had
phrased Miss Vanlief's beauty in such abominable terms.
Consternation sat on his face like a cloud. He could think of no way out
of the dark alley into which he had put himself.
Each public appearance of his now had its tortures. Men who had
respected him now avoided him; women to whom he had once condescended
were now on an aggravating plane of intimacy. Sometimes he could almost
feel himself being pointed out on the street.
The mental and physical reaction was beginning to trace itself on his
face. He feared his Florentine mirrors now almost as much as the
Professor's. The blithe poise had left him. He brooded a good deal. His
insight into another nature than his own filled him with a sense of
distaste for the human trend toward evil.
He spent some weeks away from town, merely to pick up his health again.
His strength returned a little, but the joy of life came back but
tardily.
On his first day in town he met Moncreith. There was an ominous wrinkle
gathering in the other's forehead, but Vane braved all chance of a
rebuff.
"Luke," he said, "don't you know I've been ill? You can't think how ill
I've been. Do you remember I told you I was going abroad? I've been
abroad, mentally; I have, Luke, really I have. It's like a bad dream to
me. You know what I mean."
Moncreith found his friend rather pathetic. At their last meeting he had
been hot in jealousy of Orson. Now he could afford to pity him. He had
made Jeannette Vanlief's acquaintance, and he stood quite well with her.
He had made up his mind to stand yet better; he was, in fact, in love
with her. He was quite sure that Vane had quite put himself out of that
race. So he took the other's hand, and walked amicably to the Town and
Country Club with him.
"You have been doing strange things," he ventured.
"Strange," echoed Vane, "strange isn't the word! Ghastly,
horrible--awful things I've been doing. I wish I could explain. But
it--it isn't my secret, Luke. All I can say is: I was ill. I am, I hope,
quite well again."
It seemed an age since he had spent an hour or so in his favorite club.
The air of the members was unmistakably frosty. The conversation shrank
audibly. He was glad when Moncreith found a secluded corner and bore him
to it. But he was not a bright companion; his own thoughts were too
depressing to allow of his presenting a sparkling surface to the world.
They talked in mere snatches, in curt syllables.
"I've seen a good deal of Miss Vanlief," said Moncreith, with conscious
triumph.
"Oh," said Vane, with a start, "Miss Vanlief? So you know her? Is
she--is she well?"
"Quite. I see her almost every day."
"Fortunate man!" sighed Vane. He was a little weary of life. He wanted
to tell somebody what his dreams about Miss Vanlief were; he wanted to
cry out loud, "She is the dearest, sweetest girl in the world!" merely
to efface, in his own mind, the alien thought of her that had come to
him weeks ago. Moncreith did not seem the one to utter this cry to.
Moncreith was too engrossed in his own success. He could bear
Moncreith's company no longer, not just then. He muttered lame words; he
stumbled out to the avenue.
Some echo of an instinct turned his steps to the little bookshop.
It was quite empty of customers. He passed his fingers over the back of
books that he thought Miss Vanlief might have handled. It was an absurd
whim, a childish trick. Yet it soothed him perceptibly. Our nerves
control our bodies and our nerves are slaves of our imaginations.
He was turning to go, when his eye fell on a parcel lying on the
counter. It was addressed to "Miss Jeannette Vanlief."
"Jeannette, Jeannette!" he said the name over to himself time and again.
It brought the image of her before him more plainly than ever. The
sunset glint in her hair, the roses and lilies of her skin, the melody
in her voice! The charm with which she had first met him, in that very
shop. It all came to him keenly. The more remote the possibility of his
gaining her seemed, the more he hugged the thought of her. He admitted
to himself now, all the more since his excursion into an abominable side
of human nature, that she was the most unspoilt creature in his world. A
girl with that face, that hair, that wit, was sure to be of a charm that
could never lose its flavor; the allurement of her was a thing that
could never die.
Nothing but thoughts of this girl came to him on the way to his rooms.
Once in his own place, he felt that his reflections on Miss Vanlief had
served him as a tonic. He felt an energy once more, a vigor, a desire
for action. In that mood he turned fiercely upon some of the drawings on
his walls. He called Nevins, and had a heap made of the things that now
filled him with loathing.
"All of the Beardsleys must come down," he ordered. "No; not all. The
portrait of Mantegna may stay. That has nobility; the others have the
genius of hidden evil. They take too much of the trapping from our
horrible human nature. The funeral procession by Willette may hang; his
Montmartre things are trivially indecent. Heine and his grotesqueries
may stay in jail for all I care. Leave one or two of Thoeny's blue
dragoons. Leandre's crowned heads will do me no harm; I can see past
their cruelties. But take the Gibsons away; they are relegated to the
matinee girl. What is to be done with them? Really, Nevins, don't worry
me about such things. Sell them, give them, lose them: I don't care.
There's only one man in the world who'd really adore them, and he--" he
clenched his hands as he thought of Hart,--"he is a worm, a worm that
dieth and yet corrupts everything about him."
He sat down, when this clearance was over, and wrote a rather long
letter to Professor Vanlief. He told as much as he could bring himself
to tell of the result of the experiment. He begged the Professor,
knowing the circumstances as no other did, to do what was possible to
reinstate him, Vane, in the esteem of Miss Vanlief. As to whether he
meant to go on with further experiments; he had not yet made up his
mind. There were consequences, obligations, following on this clear
reading of other men's souls, that he had not counted upon.
CHAPTER IX.
To cotton-batting and similar unromantic staples the great house of R.S.
Neargood & Co. first owed the prosperity that later developed into
world-wide fame. It was success in cotton-batting that enabled the firm
to make those speculations that eventually placed millions to its
credit, and familiarized the Bourse and Threadneedle Street with its
name.
What ever else can be said of cotton-batting, however, it is hardly a
topic of smart conversation. So in smart circles there was never any
mention of cotton-batting when the name of Neargood came up. Instead, it
was customary to refer to them as "the people, you know, who built the
Equator Palace for the Tropical Government, and all that sort of thing."
A certain vagueness is indispensable to polite talk.
Yet not even this detail of politics and finance counted most in the
smart world. The name of Neargood might never have been heard of in that
world if it had not been for the beautiful daughters of the house of
Neargood. There is nothing, nowadays, like having handsome daughters.
You may have made your millions in pig, or your thousands in whisky,
but, in the eyes of the complaisant present, the curse dies with the
debut of a beautiful daughter. It is true that the smart sometimes make
an absurd distinction between the older generation and the new;
sometimes a barrier is raised for the daughter that checks the mother;
but caprice was ever one of the qualities of smartness.
Through two seasons the beautiful Misses Neargood--Mary and
Alice--reigned as belles. They were both good to look at, tall, stately,
with distinct profiles. There was not much to choose, so to put it,
between them. Mary was the handsomer; Alice the cleverer. Through two
seasons the society reporters, on the newspapers that are yellow as well
as those that make one blue, exhausted the well of journalese in
chronicling the doings of these two young women.
The climax of descriptive eloquence was reached on the occasion of the
double wedding of Mary and Alice Neargood.
Mary changed the name of Neargood for that of Spalding-Wentworth; Alice
became Mrs. Van Fenno.
Up to this time--as far, at least, as was observable--these two sisters
had dwelt together in unity. Never had the spirits of envy or
uncharitableness entered them. But after marriage there came to each of
them that stormy petrel of Unhappiness, Ambition.
As a composer of several songs and light operas. Van Fenno was fairly
well known. Spalding-Wentworth was known as a man of Western wealth, of
Western blue blood, and of prominence in the smart set. For some time
the worldly successes of the Van Fennos did not disturb Mrs.
Spalding-Wentworth at all. Her husband was smart, since he moved with
the smart; he and his hyphen were the leaders in a great many famous
ways, notably in fashion and in golf. From the smart point of view the
Van Fennos were not in the hunt with the other family.
Mrs. Van Fenno chafed and churned a little in silence, but hope did not
die in her. She made up her mind to be as prominent as her sister or
perish in the attempt.
She did not have to perish. Things took a turn, as they will even in the
smart world, and there came a time when it was fashionable to be
intellectual. The smart set turned from the distractions of dinners and
divorces to the allurements of the arts. Music, painting and literature
became the idols of the hour. With that bland, heedless facility that
distinguishes To-day, the men and women of fashion became quickly versed
in the patter of the Muses.
The Van Fennos became the rage. Everybody talked of his music and her
charm. Where the reporters had once used space in describing
Spalding-Wentworth's leadership in a cotillon or conduct of a coach,
they were now required to spill ink in enumeration of "those present"
at Mrs. Van Fenno's "musical afternoons."
Wherefore there was a cloud on the fair brow of Mary Wentworth. Her
intimates were privileged to call her that. Ordinary mortals, omitting
the hyphen, would have been frozen with a look.
When there is a cloud on the wife's brow it bodes ill for the husband.
The follies of a married man should be dealt with leniently; they are
mostly of his wife's inspiration. One day the cloud cleared from Mary
Wentworth's brow. She was sitting at breakfast with her husband.
"Why, Clarence," she exclaimed, with a suddenness that made him drop his
toast, "there's literature!"
"Where?" said Clarence, anxiously. "Where?" He looked about, eager to
please.
"Stupid," said his wife. "I mean--why shouldn't we, that is, you--" She
looked at him, sure that he would understand without her putting the
thing into syllables. "Yes," she repeated, "literature is the thing.
There it is, as easy, as easy--"
"Hasn't it always been there?" asked her dear, dense husband. A woman
may brood over a thing, you see, for months, and the man will not get so
much as a suspicion.
She went on as if he had never spoken. "Literature is the easiest.
Clarence, you must write novels!"
He buttered himself another slice of toast.
"Certainly, my dear," he nodded, with a pleasant smile. "Quite as you
please."
It was in this way that the Spalding-Wentworth novels were incited. The
art of writing badly is, unfortunately, very easy. In painting and in
music some knowledge of technic is absolutely necessary, but in
literature the art of writing counts last, and technic is rarely
applauded. The fact remains that the smart set thought the
Spalding-Wentworth novels were "so clever!" Mrs. Van Fenno was utterly
crushed. Mary Wentworth informed an eager world that her husband's next
novel would be illustrated with caricatures by herself; she had
developed quite a trick in that direction. Now and again her husband
refused to bother his head with ambitions, and devoted himself entirely
to red coats and white balls. Mrs. Wentworth's only device at such times
was to take desperately to golf herself. She really played well; if she
had only had staying power, courage, she might have gone far. But, if
she could not win cups, she could look very charming on the clubhouse
lawn. One really does not expect more from even a queen.
It did not disturb Mrs. Wentworth at all to know that, where he was best
known, her husband's artistic efforts were considered merely a joke. She
knew that everyone had some mask or other to hold up to the world; and
she knew there was nothing to fear from a brute of a man or two. In her
heart she agreed with them; she knew her husband was a large, kindly,
clumsy creature; a useful, powerful person, who needed guidance.
Kindly and clumsy--Clarence Spalding-Wentworth had title to those two
adjectives: there was no denying that. It was his kindliness that moved
him, after a busy day at a metropolitan golf tournament, toward Orson
Vane's house. He had heard stories of Vane's illness; they had been at
college together; he wanted to see him, to have a chat, a smoke, a good,
chummy hour or two.
It was his clumsiness that brought about the incident that came to have
such memorable consequences. Nevins told him Mr. Vane was out; Wentworth
thought he would go in and have a look at Vane's rooms, anyway; sit
down, perhaps, and write him a note. Nevins had swung the curtain to
behind him when Wentworth's heel caught in the wrapping around the new
mirror.
He looked into the pool of glass blankly.
"Funny thing to cover up a mirror like that!" he told himself. He flung
the stuff over the frame carelessly. It merely hung by a thread. Almost
any passing wind would be sure to lift it off.
"Wonder where he keeps his smokes?" he hummed to himself, striding up
and down, like a good natured mammoth.
He found some cigars began puffing at one with an audible satisfaction,
and at last let himself down to an ebony escritoire that he could have
smashed with one hand. He wrote a scrawl; waited again, whistled, looked
out of the window, picked up a book, peered at the pictures, and then,
with a puff of regret, strode out.
As he passed the Professor's mirror the current of air he made swept the
curtain from the glass and left it exposed.
CHAPTER X.
At about the time that Wentworth was scrawling his note in Vane's rooms
a slender young woman, dressed in a grey that shimmered like the
winter-sea in sunlight, wearing a hat that had the air of having lit
upon her hair for the moment only,--merely to give the world an
instant's glance at the gracious combination that woman's beauty and
man's millinery could effect--was coming out from one of those huge
bazaars where you can buy almost everything in the world except the
things you want. As she reached the doors, a young man, entering,
brushed her arm; his sleeve caught her portemonnaie. He stooped for it,
offered it hastily, and then--and not until then, gave a little "Oh!"
of--what was it, joy? or mere wonder, or both?
"Oh," he repeated, "I can't go in--now. It's--it's ages since I could
say two words to you. 'Good-morning!' and 'How do you do?' has been the
limit of our talk. Besides, you have a parcel. It weighs, at the very
least, an ounce. I could never think of letting you tire yourself so."
He took the flimsy mite from her, and ranged his steps to hers.
It was true, what he had said about their brief encounters. Do what she
would to forget that morning in the Park, and the weeks before it,
Jeannette Vanlief had not quite succeeded. Not even the calm
dissertations of her father, the arguments pointing to the unfathomable
freakishness of human nature, had altogether ousted her aversion to
Orson Vane. It was an aversion made the more keen because it came on the
heels of a strong liking. She had been prepared to like this young man.
Something about him had drawn her; and then had come the something that
had simply flung her away. Yet, to-day, he seemed to be the Orson Vane
that she had been prepared to like.
She remembered some of the strange things her father had been talking
about. She noted, as Orson spoke, that the false tenor note was gone out
of his voice. But she was still a little fluttered; she could not quite
trust herself, or him.
"But I am only going to the car," she declared. "It will hardly be worth
while. I mustn't take you out of your way."
"I see," he regretted, "you've not forgotten. I can't explain; I was--I
think I was a little mad. Perhaps it is in the family. But--I wish you
would imagine, for to-day, that we had only just known each other a very
little while, that we had been in that little bookshop only a day or so
ago, that you had read the book, and we had met again, and--." He was
looking at her with a glow in his eyes, a tenderness--! Her eyes met his
for only an instant, but they fathomed, in that instant, that there was
only homage, and worship, and--and something that she dared not spell,
even to her soul--in them. That burning greed that she had seen in the
Park was not there.
She smiled, wistfully, hesitatingly. Yet it was enough for him to cling
to; it buoyed his mood to higher courage.
"Let us pretend," he went on, "that there are no streetcars in the town.
Let us be primitive; let us play we are going to take a peep-show from
the top of the Avenue stage! Oh--please! It gets you just as near, you
know; and if you like we can go on, and on, and do it all over again.
Think of the tops of the hats and bonnets one sees from the roof! It's
such a delightful picture of the avenue; you see all the little
marionettes going like beads along the string. And then, think of the
danger of the climb to the roof! It is like the Alps. You never know,
until you are there, whether you will arrive in one piece or in several.
Come," he laughed, for she was now really smiling, openly, sweetly, "let
us be good children, come in from Westchester County, to see the big
city."
"Perhaps," she ventured, "we will make it the fashion. And that would
spoil it for so many of the plainer people."
"Oh," and he waved his hand, "after us--the daily papers! Let us
pretend--I beg your pardon, let me pretend--youth, and high spirits,
and the intention to enjoy to-day."
A rattling and a scraping on the asphalt warned them of an approaching
stage, and after a scramble, that had its shy pleasures for both, they
found themselves on the top of the old relic.
"It is a bit of the Middle Ages," said Orson, "look at those horses!
Aren't they delightfully slender? And the paint! Do you notice the
paint? And the stories those plush seats down below us could tell! Think
of the misers and the millionaires, the dowagers and the drabs, that
have let these old stages bump them over Murray Hill! You can't have
that feeling about a street-car, not one of the electric ones, at any
rate. Do you know the story of the New Yorker who was trying to sleep in
a first-class compartment on a French railway? There was a collision,
and he was pitched ten feet onto a coal-heap. He said he thought he was
at home and he was getting off the stage at Forty-Second street."
They were passing through the most frequented part of the avenue. Noted
singers and famous players passed them; old beaux and fresh belles;
political notabilities and kings of corruption. A famous leader of
cotillions, a beauty whose profile vied with her Boston terriers for
being her chief distinction, and a noted polo-player came upon the scene
and vanished again. Vane and his companion gave, from time to time,
little nods to right and left. Their friends stared at them a little,
but that caused them no sorrow. Automobiles rushed by. They looked down
upon them, lofty in their ruined tower.
"As a show," said Vane, "it is admirably arranged. It moves with a
beautiful precision. There is nothing hurried about it; the illusion of
life is nearly complete. Some of them, I suppose, really are alive?"
"I am not sure," she answered, gravely. "Sometimes I think they merely
move because there is a button being pressed somewhere; a button we
cannot see, and that they spend their lives hiding from us."
"I dare say you are right. In the words of Fay Templeton, 'I've been
there and I know.' I have made my little detours: but the lane had,
thank fortune, a turning."
She saw through his playfulness, and her eyes went up to his in a
sympathy--oh, it made him reel for sweetness.
"I am glad," she said, simply.
"But we are getting serious again," he remonstrated, "that would never
do. Have we not sworn to be children? Let us pretend--let us pretend!"
He looked at the grey roofs, the spires oozing from the hill to the sky.
He looked at the grey dream beside him: so grey, so fair, so crowned
with the hue of the sun before the world had made him so brazen. "Let us
pretend," he went on, after a sigh, "that we are bound for the open
road, and that we are to come to an inn, and that we will order
something to eat. We--"
"Oh," she laughed, "you men, you men! Always something to eat!"
"You see, we are of coarse stuff; we cannot sup on star-dust, and dine
on bubbles. But--this is only to pretend! An imaginary meal is sometimes
so much more fun than a real one. At a real one, you see, I would have
to try to eat, and I could not spend the whole time looking at you, and
watching the sunshine on your hair, and the lilies--" He caught his
breath sharply, with a little clicking noise. "Dear God," he whispered,
"the lilies again! And I had never seen them until now."
"You are going to be absurd," she said, though her voice was hardly a
rebuke.
"And wouldn't I have excuse," he asked, "for all the absurdities in the
world! I want to be as absurd as I can; I want to think that there's
nothing in the world any uglier than--you."
"And will you dine off that thought?"
"Oh, no; that is merely one of the condiments. I keep that in reach,
while the other things come and go. I tell you: how would it be if we
began with a bisque of crab? The tenderest pink, you know, and not the
ghost of any spice that you can distinguish; a beautiful, creamy blend."
"You make it sound delicious," she admitted.
"We take it slowly, you know, religiously. The conversation is mostly
with the eyes. Dinner conversation is so often just as vapid as
dinner-music! The only point in favor of dinner-music is that we are
usually spared the sight of it. There is no truth more abused than the
one that music must be heard and not seen. When I am king I mean to
forbid any singing or playing of instruments within sight of the public;
it spoils all the pleasure of the music when one sees the uglinesses in
its execution."
"But people would not thank you if you kept the sight of Paderewski or
De Pachmann from them."
"They might not thank me at first, but they would learn gratitude in the
end, A contortionist is quite as oppressive a sight as an automaton. No;
I repeat, performers of music should never, never be visible. It is a
blow in the face of the art of music; it puts it on the plane of the
theatre. What persons of culture want to do is to listen, to listen, to
listen; to shut the eyes, and weave fancies about the strains as they
come from an unseen corner. Is there not always a subtle charm about
music floating over a distance? That is a case in point; that same charm
should always be preserved. The pianist, the soloist of any sort, as
well as the orchestra, or the band--except in the case of the regimental
band, in battle or in review, where actual spectacle, and visible
encouragement are the intention--should never be seen. There should
always be a screen, a curtain, between us and the players. It would make
the trick of music criticism harder, but it would still leave us the
real judges. Take out of music criticism the part that covers fingering,
throat manipulation, pedaling, and the like, and what have you left?
These fellows judge what they see more than what they hear. To give a
proper judgment of the music that comes from the unseen; that is the
only test of criticism. There can be no tricks, no paddings."
"But the opera?" wondered the girl.
"The opera? Oh, the opera is, at best, a contradiction in terms. But I
do not waive my theory for the sake of opera. It should be seen as
little as any other form of music. The audience, supplied with the story
of the dramatic action, should follow the incidents by ear, not by eye.
That would be the true test of dramatic writing in music. We would,
moreover, be spared the absurdity of watching singers with beautiful
voices make themselves ridiculous by clumsy actions. As to comic
opera--the music's appeal would suffer no tarnish from the merely
physical fascination of the star or the chorus ... I know the thought is
radical; it seems impossible to imagine a piano recital without long
hair, electric fingers, or visible melancholia; opera with only the
box-holders as appeals to the eye seems too good to be true; but--I
assure you it would emancipate music from all that now makes it the
most vicious of the arts. Painters do not expect us to watch them
painting, nor does the average breed of authors--I except the Manx--like
to be seen writing. Yet the musician--take away the visible part of his
art, and he is shorn of his self-esteem. I assure you I admire actors
much more than musicians; actors are frankly exponents of nothing that
requires genius, while musicians pretend to have an art that is over and
above the art of the composer.... Music--"
"Do you realize," interrupted the girl, with a laugh that was melody
itself, "that you are feasting me upon dinner-music without dinner. It
must be ages since we began that imaginary feast. But now, I am quite
sure we are at the black coffee. And I have been able to notice nothing
except your ardor in debate. You were as eager as if you were being
contradicted."
"You see," he said, "it only proves my point. Dinner-music is an
abomination. It takes the taste of the food away. While I was playing,
you admit, you tasted nothing between the soup and the coffee. Whereas,
in point of fact--"
"Or fancy?"
"As you please. At any rate--the menu was really something out of the
common. There were some delightful wines. A sherry that the innkeeper
had bought of a bankrupt nobleman; so would run his fable for the
occasion, and we would believe it, because, in cases of that sort, it
takes a very bad wine to make one pooh-pooh its pedigree. A Madeira that
had been hidden in a cellar since 1812. We would believe that, every
word of it, because we would know that there was really no Madeira in
all the world; and we must choose between insulting our stomachs or our
intelligence. And then the coffee. It would come in the tiniest, most
transparent, most fragile--"
"Yes," she laughed, "I dare say. As transparent and as fragile as the
entire fabric of our repast, I have no doubt. But--pity me, do!--I shall
have to leave the beautiful banquet about where you have put it, in the
air. I have a ticking conscience here that says--"
"Oh, hide it," he supplicated, "hide it. Watches are nothing but
mechanisms that are jealous of happiness; whenever there is a happy hour
a watch tries to end it. When I am king I shall prohibit the manufacture
and sale of watches. The fact that they may be carried about so easily
is one of their chief vices; one never knows nowadays from what corner a
woman will not bring one; they carry them on their wrists, their
parasols, their waists, their shoulders. Can you be so cruel as to let
that little golden monster spoil me my hour of happiness--"
"But I would have to be cruel one way or the other. You see, my father
will wonder what has become of me. He expects me to dinner."
"Ah, well," he admitted soberly, if a little sadly, "we must not keep
him waiting. You must tell the Professor where we have been, and what we
said, and how silly I was, and--Heigho, I wish I could tell you how the
little hour with you has buoyed me up. Your presence seems to stir my
possibilities for good. I wish I could see you oftener. I feel like the
provincial who says good-bye with a: 'May I come 'round this evening?'
as a rider."
"A doubtful compliment, if I make you rustic," she said. "But I have
something on this evening; an appointment with a man. The most beautiful
man in the world, and the best, and the kindest--"
"His name?" he cried, with elaborate pretense of melodrama, for he saw
that she was full of whimsies.
"Professor Vanlief," she curtsied.
They were walking, by now, in the shade of the afternoon sun. Vane saw a
stage approaching them, one that would take him back to the lower town.
She saw it, too, and his intention. She shook hands with him, and took
time to say, softly:
"Do you never ride in the Park any more?"
"Oh," he said, "tell me when. To-morrow morning? At McGowan's Pass? At
ten? Oh, how I wish that stage was not coming so fast!"
In their confusion, and their joyous sense of having the same absurd
thought in common, they both laughed at the notion of a Fifth avenue
stage ever being too fast. Yet this one, and Time, sped so swiftly that
Vane could only shake hands hastily with his fair companion, look at her
worshipfully, and jump upon the clattering vehicle.
He would never have believed that so ramshackle a conveyance could have
harbored so many dreams as had been his that day.
That thought was his companion all the way home. That, and efforts to
define his feelings toward Miss Vanlief. Was it love? What else could it
be! And if it was, was he ready, for her, to give up those ambitions of
still further sounding hitherto unexplored avenues of the human mind?
Was this fragile bit of grace and glamour to come between him and the
chance of opening a new field to science? Had he not the opportunity to
become famous, or, at the very least, to become omnipotent in reading
the hearts, the souls, of men? Were not the possibilities of the
Professor's discovery unlimited? Was it not easy by means of that mirror
in his rooms, for any chief of police in the world to read the guilt or
innocence of every accused man? Yet, on the other hand, would marriage
interfere? Yes; it would. One could not serve two such goddesses as
woman and science. He would have to make up his mind, to decide.
But, in the meanwhile, there was plenty of time. Surely, for the
present, he could be happy in the thought of the morrow, of the ride
they were to take in the Park, of the cantering, the chattering
together, the chance to see the morning wind spin the twists of gold
about her cheeks and bring the sparkle to her eyes.
He let himself into his house without disturbing any of the servants. He
passed into his room. He lifted the curtain of the doorway with one
hand, and with the other turned the button that lighted the room. As the
globes filled with light they showed him his image in the new mirror.
He reeled against the wall with the surprise of the thing. He noted the
mirror's curtain in a heap at the foot of the frame. Perhaps, after all,
it had been merely the wind.
He summoned Nevins. The curtain he replaced on the staring face of the
mirror. Whence the thought came from, he did not know, but it occurred
to him that the scene was like a scene from a novel.
"Nevins," he asked, "was anyone in my rooms?"
"Mr. Spalding-Wentworth, sir."
Orson Vane laughed,--a loud, gusty, trumpeting laugh.
He understood. But he understood, also, that the accident that had
brought the soul of Spalding-Wentworth into his keeping had decreed,
also, that the dominance should not be, as on a former time, with the
usurper.
He knew that the soul of Spalding-Wentworth, to which he gave the refuge
of his own body, was a small soul.
Yet even little souls have their spheres of influence.
CHAPTER XI.
It was a morning such as the wild flowers, out in the suburban meadows,
must have thought fit for a birthday party. As for the town, it lost,
under that keen air and gentle sun, whatever of garish and unhealthy
glamour it had displayed the night before.
"The morning," Orson Vane had once declared, in a moment of revelation,
"is God's, and the night is man's." He was speaking, of course, of the
town. In the severe selectiveness that had grown upon him after much
rout and riot through other lands, he pretended that the town was the
only spot on the map. Certainly this particular morning seemed to bear
out something of this saying; it swept away the smoke and the taint, the
fever and the flush of the night before; the visions of limelights and
glittering crystals and enmillioned vice fled before the gust of ozone
that came pouring into the streets. Before night, to be sure, man would
have asserted himself once more; the pomp and pageant of the primrose
path would have ousted, with its artificial charm, the clean, sweet
freshness of the morning.
The grim houses on upper Fifth avenue put on semblance of life
reluctantly that morning. Houses take on the air of their inmates; these
houses wore their best manner only under artificial lights. Surly grooms
and housemaids went muttering and stumbling about the areas. Sad-faced
wheelmen flashed over the asphalt, cursing the sprinkling carts. It was
not too early for the time-honored preoccupation of the butcher cart,
which consists of turning corners as if the world's end was coming.
Pallid clubmen strode furtively in the growing sunshine. To them, as to
the whole town, the sun and its friend, the breeze, came as a tonic and
a cure.
So strange a thing is the soul of man that Orson Vane, riding towards
the Park that morning, caught only vague, fleeting impressions of the
actual beauty of the day. He simply wondered, every foot of the way to
McGowan's Pass, whether Miss Vanlief played golf. The first thing he
said to her after they had exchanged greetings, was:
"Of course you golf?"
She looked at him in alarm. There was something--something, but what was
it?--in his voice, in his eye. She had expected a reference to the day
before, to their infantile escapade on the roof of the coach. Instead,
this banale, this stupid, this stereotyped phrase! Her flowerlike face
clouded; she gave her mare the whip.
"No," she called out, "I cannot bear the game." His horse caught the
pace with difficulty; the groom was left far out of sight, beyond a
corner. But the diversion had not touched Vane's trend of thought at
all.
"Oh," he assured her, when the horses were at an amble again, "it's one
of those things one has to do. Some things have to be done, you know;
society won't stand for anything less, you know, oh, no. I have to play
golf, you know; part of my reputation."
"I didn't know," she faltered. She tried to remember when Orson Vane had
ever been seen on either the expert or the duffer list at the golf
matches.
"Oh, yes; people expect it of me. If I don't play I have to arrange
tournaments. Handicapping is great fun; ever try it? No? You should.
Makes one feel quite like a judge at sessions. Oh, there's nothing like
golf. Not this year, at least. Next year it may be something else. I may
have to take to polo or tennis. One is expected to show the way, you
know; a man in my position--" He looked at her with a kind of 'bland,
blunt, clumsy egoism, that made her wonder where was the Orson Vane of
yesterday. This riddle began to sadden her. Perhaps it was true, as she
had heard somewhere, that the man was mentally unbalanced; that he had
his--well, his bad days. She sighed. She had looked forward to this ride
in the Park; she admitted that to herself. Not in a whole afternoon
spent with Luke Moncreith had she felt such happy childishness stirring
in her as yesterday, in the hour with Orson Vane. And now--She sighed.
The hum of an approaching automobile reached them, the glittering
vehicle proclaiming its progress in that purring stage whisper that is
still the inalienable right of even the newest "bubble" machine. The
coat worn by the smart young person on the seat would have shocked the
unenlightened, for that sparkling, tingling morning it struck the exact
harmonious note of artifice.
Orson Vane bowed. It was "the" Miss Carlos. Just as there is only one
Mrs. Carlos, so there is only one Miss Carlos.
"She plays a decent game," said Vane to his companion.
"Of life?"
"No; golf." He looked at her in amazement. Life! What was life compared
to golf? Life? For most people it was, at best, a foozle. Nearly
everybody pressed; very few followed through, and the bunkers--good
Lord, the bunkers!
"I'm thinking of writing a golfing novel," began Orson, after an
interval in which he managed to wonder whether one couldn't play golf
from horseback.
"Oh," said Miss Vanlief wearily, "how does one set about it!"
He was quite unaware of her weariness. He chirped his answer with blind
enthusiasm.
"It's very easy," he declared. "There are always a lot of women, you
know, who are aching to do things in that line. You give them the
prestige of your name, that's all. One of them writes the thing; you
simply keep them from foozling the phrases now and then. Another
illustrates it."
"And does anyone buy it?"
"Oh, all the smart people do. It's one of those things one is supposed
to do. There's no particular reason or sense in it; but smart people
expect one another to read things like that. The newspapers get quite
silly over such books. Then, after novels, I think, I shall take to
having them done over for the stage? Don't you think a golfing comedy,
with a sprinkling of profanity and Scotch whiskey, would be all the
rage?"
Jeannette Vanlief reined in her mare. She looked at Orson Vane; looked
him, as much as she could, through and through. Was it all a stupid
jest? She could find nothing but dense earnestness in her face, in his
eyes. Oh, the riddle was too tiresome, too hopeless. It was simply not
the same man at all! She gave it up, gave him up.
"Do you mind," she said, "if I ride home now? I'm tired."
It should have been a blow in the face, but Orson Vane never so much as
noticed it.
"Tired?" he repeated. "Oh; all right. We'll turn about. Rather go back
alone? Oh, all right. Wish you'd learn to play golf; you really must!"
And upon that he let her canter away, the groom following, some little
wonder on his impassive front.
As for Jeannette Vanlief she burst into her father's room a little
later, and then into tears.
"And I wanted to love him!" she wailed presently, from out her confusion
and her distress.
The Professor was patting her hair, and wondering what in all the world
was the matter. At her speech, he thought he saw a light.
"And why not?" he asked, soothingly, "He seems quite estimable. He was
here only a moment ago?"
"Who was here?" she asked in bewilderment.
"Mr. Moncreith."
At that she laughed. The storm was over, the sunshine peeped out again.
"You dear, blind comfort, you!" she said, "What do I care if a thousand
Moncreiths--"
"Then it's Orson Vane," said the Professor, not so blind after all.
"Well, dear, and what has he been doing now?"
He listened to her rather rambling, rather spasmodic recital; listened
and grew moody, though he could scarce keep away some little mirth. He
saw through these masquerades, of course. Who else, if not he? Poor
Jeannette! So she had set her happy little heart upon that young man? A
young man who, to serve both their ends, was playing chameleon. A young
man who was mining greater secrets from the deeps of the human soul than
had ever been mined before. A wonderful young man, but--would that make
for Jeannette's happiness? At any rate he, the Professor, would have to
keep an eye open for Vane's doings. There was no knowing what strange
ways these borrowed souls might lead to. He wondered who it was that,
this time, had been rifled of his soul.
Wonder did not long remain the adjuncts of the Professor and his
daughter only. The whole world of society began to wonder, as time went
on, at the new activities of Orson Vane. Wonder ceased, presently, and
there was passive acceptance of him in his new role. Fashions, after
all, are changed so often in the more external things, that the smart
set would not take it as a surprising innovation if some people took to
changing their souls to suit the social breeze.
Orson Vane took a definite place in the world of fashion that season. He
became the arbiter of golf; he gave little putting contests for women
and children; he looked after the putting greens of a number of smart
clubs with as much care as a woman gives her favorite embroideries. He
took to the study of the Turkish language. There were rumors that he
meant to become the Minister to Turkey. He traveled a great deal, and he
published a book called "The Land of the Fez." Another little brochure
bearing his name was "The Caddy; His Ailments and Diseases." It was
rumored that he was busy in dramatization of his novel, "Five Loaves and
Two Fishes!" When Storman Pasha made his memorable visit to the States
it was Orson Vane who became his guide and friend. A jovial club of
newspaper roysterers poked fun at him by nominating him for Mayor. He
went through it all with a bland humorlessness and stubborn dignity that
nothing could affront. His indomitable energy, his intense seriousness
about everything, kept smart society unalterably loyal. He led its
cotillions, arranged its more sober functions, and was a household word
with the outsiders that reach society only through the printed page. His
novels--whether they were his own or done for him hardly matters--were
just dull enough to offend nobody. The most indolent dweller in Vanity
Fair could affect his books without the least mental exertion. The lives
of our fashionables are too full, too replete with a multitude of
interests and excitements, to allow of the concentration proper for the
reading of scintillating dialogue, or brilliant observations. Orson Vane
appeared to gauge his public admirably; he predominated in the outdoor
life, in golf, in yachting, in coaching, yet he did not allow anyone
else to dispute the region of the intellect, of indoors, with him. He
shone, with a severe dimness, in both fields.
Jeannette Vanlief, meanwhile, lost much of the sparkle she had hitherto
worn. She drooped perceptibly. The courtship of Luke Moncreith left her
listless; he persevered on the strength of his own ambition rather than
her encouragement. His daughter's looks at last began seriously to worry
Professor Vanlief. Something ought to be done. But what? It was
apparently Orson Vane's intention to keep that borrowed soul with him
for a long time. In the meanwhile Jeannette.... The Professor, the more
he considered the matter, felt the more strongly that just as he was the
one who had given Vane this power, so had he the right, if need be, to
interfere. The need was urgent. The masquerade must be put an end to.
His resolve finally taken, Professor Vanlief paid a visit to Orson
Vane's house. Vane was, as he had hoped, not at home. He
cross-questioned Nevins.
The man was only too willing to admit that his master's actions were
queer. But Mr. Vane had given him warning to that effect; he must have
felt it coming on. It was a malady, no doubt. For his part he thought it
was something that Mr. Vane would wish to cure rather than endure. He
didn't pretend to understand his master of late, but--
The Professor put a period to the man's volubility with some effort.
"I want you," he urged, "to jog your memory a little. Never mind the
symptoms. Give me straightforward answers. Now--did you touch the new
mirror, leaving it uncovered, at any time within the past few weeks?"
"Oh," was the answer, "the new mirror, is it! I knows well the uncanny
thing was sure to make trouble for me. But I gives you my word, as I
hopes to be saved, that I've never so much as brushed the dust off it,
much less taken the curtain off. It's fearsome, is that mirror, I'm
thinking. It's--"
"Then think back," pressed the Professor, again stemming the tide of the
other's talk relentlessly, "think back: was anyone, ever, at any time,
alone in Mr. Vane's rooms? Think, think!"
"I disremember," stammered Nevins. "I think not--Oh, wait! It was a long
time ago, but I think a gentleman wrote Mr. Vane a note once, and I,
having work in the other rooms, let him be undisturbed. But I told the
master about it, the minute he came in, sir. He was not the least vexed,
sir. Oh, I'm easy in my mind about that time."
"Yes, yes,--but the gentleman's name!" The Professor shook the man's
shoulder quite roughly.
"His name? Oh, it was just Mr. Spalding-Wentworth, sir, that was all."
The Professor sat down with a laugh. Spalding-Wentworth! He laughed
again.
Nevins had the air of one aggrieved. "Mr. Vane laughed, too, I remember,
when I told him. Just the minute I told him, sir, he laughed. I've
puzzled over it, time and again, why--"
The Professor left Nevins puzzling. There was no time to be lost. He
remembered now that Spalding-Wentworth had for some time been ailing.
The world, in its devotion to Orson Vane, had forgotten, almost, that
such a person as Spalding-Wentworth had ever existed. To be forgotten
one has only to disappear. Dead men's shoes are filled nowhere so
quickly as in Vanity Fair; though, to be paradoxic, for the most part
they are high-heeled slippers.
It took some little time, some work, to arrange what the Professor had
decided must be done. He went about his plans with care and skill. He
suborned Nevins easily enough, using, chiefly, the plain truth. Nevins,
with the superstition of his class, was willing to believe far greater
mysteries than the Professor half hinted at. By Nevins' aid it happened
that Orson Vane slept, one night, face to face with the polished surface
of the new mirror. In the morning it was curtained as usual.
That morning Augustus Vanlief called at the Wentworth house. He asked
for Mrs. Wentworth. He went to his point at once.
"You know who I am, I dare say, Mrs. Wentworth. You love your husband, I
am sure; you will pardon my intrusion when I tell you that perhaps I can
do something the best thing of all--for him. It is, in its way, a
matter of life and death. Do the doctors give you any hope?"
Mrs. Wentworth, her beauty now tired and touched by traces of spoilt
ambition, made a listless motion with her hands.
"I don't know why I should tell you," she said, "or why I should not.
They tell me vague things, the doctors do, but I don't believe they know
what is the matter."
"Do you?"
"I?" she looked at Vanlief, and found a challenge in his regard. "It
seems," she admitted, "as if--I hardly like to say it,--but it seems as
if there was no soul in him any more. He is a shell, a husk. The life in
him seems purely muscular. It is very depressing. Why do you think you
can do anything for Clarence, Professor? I did not know your researches
took you into medicine?"
"Ah, but you admit this is not a matter for medicine, but for the mind.
Will you allow me an experiment madame? I give you my word of honor, my
honor and my reputation, that there is no risk, and there may
be--perhaps, an entire restoration. There is--a certain operation that I
wish to try--"
"An operation? The most eminent doctors have told me such a thing would
be useless. We might as well leave my poor husband clear of the knife,
Professor."
"Oh, it is no operation, in that sense. Nothing surgical. I can hardly
explain; professional secrets are involved. If you did not know that I
am but a plodding old man of science--if I were an unknown charlatan--I
would not ask you to put faith in me. But--I give you my word, my
promise, that if you will let Mr. Wentworth come with me in my brougham
I will return with him within the hour. He will be either as he is now,
or--as he once was."
"As he once was--!" Mrs. Wentworth repeated the phrase, and the thought
brought her a keen moment of anguish that left a visible impress on her
features. "Ah," she sighed, "if I could only think such a thing
possible!" She brooded in silence a moment or two. Then she spoke.
"Very well. You will find him in the library. Prim, show the gentleman
to the library. If you can persuade him, Professor--" She smiled
bitterly. "But then, anybody can persuade him nowadays." She turned to
some embroidery as if to dismiss the subject, to show that she was
resigned even to hopeless experiments. The very fact that she was plying
the needle rather than the social sceptre was gauge of her descent from
the heights. As a matter of fact Vanlief found Wentworth amenable
enough. Wentworth was reading Marie Corelli. His mind was as empty as
that. Nothing could better define his utter lapse from intelligence. He
put the book down reluctantly as the Professor came in. He listened
without much enthusiasm. A drive? Why not? He hadn't driven much of
late, but if it was something that would please the Professor. He
remembered, through a mist, that he had known Vanlief when he himself
was a boy; his father had often spoken of Vanlief with respect. Nothing
further in the way of mental exertion came to him. He followed Vanlief
as a dog follows whoso speaks kindly to it.
The conversation between the two, in the brougham, would hardly tend to
the general entertainment. It was a thing of shreds and patches. It led
nowhither.
The brougham stopped at the door of Orson Vane's house. Nevins let them
in, whispering an assuring confidence to the professor. As they reached
the door of the dressing-room Vanlief pushed Wentworth ahead of him, and
bade him enter. He kept behind him, letting the other's body screen him
from the staring mirror.
Wentworth looked at himself. A hand traveled slowly up to his forehead.
"By Jove!" he said, hesitatingly, "I never put the curtain back, after
all." And he covered up the mirror. "Curious thing," he went on, with
energy vitalizing each word, "what possessed me to come here just now,
when I know for a fact that they're playing the Inter-State Golf
championships to-day. Dashed if I know why I didn't go!" He walked out,
plainly puzzled, clumsily heedless of Vanlief and Nevins, but--himself
once more.
Orson Vane, at just that time, was on the links of the Fifeshire Golf
Club. He was wearing a little red coat with yellow facings. He was in
the act of stooping on a green, to look along the line of his putt, when
he got to his feet in a hurried, bewildered way. He threw his putter
down on the green. He blushed all over, shaming the tint of his scarlet
coat.
"What a foolish game for a grown-up man!" he blurted out, and strode off
the grounds.
The bystanders were aghast. They could not find words. Orson Vane, the
very prophet of golf, to throw it over in that fashion! It was
inexplicable! The episode was simply maddening.
But it was remarked that the decline of golf on this side of the water
dated from that very day.
CHAPTER XII.
Orson Vane was taking lunch with Professor Vanlief. Jeannette, learning
of Vane's coming, had absented herself.
"It is true," Vane was saying, "that I can assert what no other man has
asserted before,--that I know the exact mental machinery of two human
beings. Yes; that is quite true. But--"
"I promised nothing more," remarked Vanlief.
"No. That is true, too. I have lived the lives of others; I have given
their thoughts a dwelling. But I am none the happier for that."
"Oh," admitted Vanlief, "wisdom does not guarantee happiness...." He
drummed with his fine, long fingers, upon the table-cloth. Vane,
watching him, noted the almost transparent quality of his skin. Under
that admirable mask of military uprightness there was an aging, a fading
process going on, that no keen observer could miss. "It is the pursuit,
not the capture of wisdom, that brings happiness. Wisdom is too often
only a bubble that bursts when you touch it."
"Perhaps that is it. At any rate I know that I do not love my neighbor
any more because I have fathomed some of his thoughts. Moreover,
Professor, has it occurred to you that your discovery, your secret,
carries elements of danger with it? Take my own experiments; there might
have been tragic results; whole lives might have been ruined. In one
case I was nearly the victim of a tragedy myself; I might have become,
for all time, the dreadful creature I was giving house-room to. In the
other, there was no more than a farce possible; the visiting spirit was,
after all, in subjection to my own. I think you will have to simplify
the details of your marvelous secret. It works a little clumsily, a
little--"
"Oh," the Professor put in, "I am perfecting the process. I spend my
days and my nights in elaborating the details. I mean to have it in the
simplest, most unmistakable perfection before I hand it over to the
human race."
"Sometimes I think," mused Vane, "that your boon will be a doubtful one.
I can see no good to be gained. My whole point of view is changing. I
ached for such a chance of wisdom once; now that it has come to me I am
sad because the things I have learned are so horrible, so silly. I had
not thought there were such souls in the world; or not, at any rate, in
the immediate world about me."
"Oh," the Professor went on, steadfastly, "there will be many benefits
in the plan. Doctors will be able to go at once to the root of any
ailments that have their seat in the brain. Witnesses cab be made to
testify the truth. Oh--there are ever so many possibilities."
"As many for evil as for good. Second-rate artists could steal the
ideas, the inventions of others. No inventor, no scientist, would be
sure of keeping his secrets. The thing would be a weapon in the hands of
the unscrupulous."
"Ah, well," smiled Vanlief, "so far I have not made my discovery public,
have I? It is a thing I must consider very carefully. As you say, there
are arguments on either side. But you must bear in mind that you are
somewhat embittered. It was your own fault; you chose the subject
wittingly. If you were to read a really beautiful mind, you might turn
to the other extreme; you might urge me to lose no time in giving the
world my secret. The wise way is between the two; I must go forward with
my plans, prepared for either course. I may take it to my grave with me,
or I may give it to the world; but, so far, it is still a little
incomplete; it is not ripe for general distribution. Instead of the one
magic mirror there must be myriads of them. There are stupendous
opportunities. All that you have told me of your own experiences in
these experiments has proved my skill to have been wisely employed; your
success was beyond my hopes. Do you think you will go on?"
Orson Vane did not answer at once. It was something he had been asking
himself; he was not yet sure of the answer.
"I haven't made up my mind," he replied. "So far I have hardly been
repaid for my time and the vital force employed. I almost feel toward
these experiments as toward a vice that refines the mind while
coarsening the frame. That is the story of the most terrible vices, I
think; they corrode the body while gilding the brain. But this much I
know; if I use your mirror again it will not be to borrow a merely smart
soul; I mean to go to some other sphere of life. That one is too
contracted."
"Strange," said the Professor, "that you should have said that.
Jeannette pretends she thinks that, too. I cannot get her to take her
proper position in the world. She is a little elusive. But then, to be
sure, she is not, just now, at her best."
"She is not ill?" asked Vane, with a guilty start.
"Nothing tangible. But not--herself...."
Vane observed that he wished he might have found her in; he feared he
had offended her; he hoped the Professor would use his kind offices
again to soften the young lady's feelings toward him. Then he got up to
go.
Strolling along the avenue he noted certain aspects of the town with an
appreciation that he had not always given them. He had seen these things
from so many other points of view of late; had been in sympathy with
them, had made up a fraction of their more grotesque element; that to
see them clearly with his own eyes had a sort of novelty. The life of
to-day, as it appeared on the smartest surfaces, was, he reflected, a
colorful if somewhat soulless picture....
The young men sit in the clubs and in the summer casinos, smoking and
wondering what the new mode in trousers is to be; an acquaintance goes
by; he has a hat that is not quite correct, and his friends comment on
it yawningly; he has not the faintest notion of polite English, but
nobody cares; a man who has written great things walks by, but he wears
a creased coat, and the young men in the smoking-room sniff at him. In
the drags and the yachts the women and the girls sit in radiance and gay
colors and arrogant unconsciousness of position and power; they talk of
golfing and fashion and mustachios; Mrs. Blank is going a hot pace and
Mrs. Landthus is a thoroughbred; adjectives in the newest sporting slang
fly about blindingly; the language is a curious argot, as distinct as
the tortuous lingo of the Bowery. A coach goes rattling by, the horses
throwing their heads in air, and their feet longing for the Westchester
roads. The whip discusses bull-terriers; the people behind him are
declaring that the only thing you can possibly find in the Waldorf rooms
is an impossible lot of people. The complexions of all these people,
intellectually presentable in many ways, and fashionable in yet more
modes, are high in health. They look happy, prosperous and
satisfied....
Yes, there was a superficial fairness to the picture, Vane admitted. If
only, if only, he had not chosen to look under the surface! Now that he
had seen the world with other eyes, its fairness could rarely seem the
same to him.
A sturdy beggar approached him, with a whine that proved him an
admirable actor. But Vane could not find it in him to reflect that if
there is one thing more than another that lends distinction to a town it
is an abundance of beggars.
He wondered how it would be to annex this healthy impostor's mite of a
soul. But no; there could be little wisdom gained there.
He made, finally, for the Town and Country Club, and tried to immerse
himself in the conversation that sped about. The talked turned to the
eminent actor, Arthur Wantage. The subject of that man's alleged
eccentricities invariably brought out a flood of the town's stalest
anecdotes. Vane, listening in a lazy mood, made up his mind to see
Wantage play that night. It would be a distraction. It would show him,
once again, the present limit in one human being's portraiture of
another; he would see the highest point to which external imitation
could be brought; he could contrast it with the heights to which he
himself had ascended.
It would be a chance for him to consider Wantage, for the first time in
his life, as a merely second-rate actor. This player was an adept only
in the making the shell, the husk, seem lifelike; since he could not
read the character, how could he go deeper?
The opportunities the theatre held for him suddenly loomed vast before
Vane.
CHAPTER XIII.
The fact that Arthur Wantage was to be seen and heard, nightly, in a
brilliant comedy by the author of "Pious Aeneas," was not so much the
attraction that drew people to his theatre, as was the fact that he had
not yet, that season, delivered himself of a curtain speech. His curtain
speeches were wont to be insults delivered in an elaborately honeyed
manner; he took the pose of considering his audiences with contempt; he
admired himself far more for his condescension in playing to them than
he respected his audiences for having the taste to admire him.
The comedy in which he was now appearing was the perfection of paradox.
It pretended to be frivolous and was really philosophic. The kernel of
real wisdom was behind the elaborately poised mask of wit. A delightful
impertinence and exaggeration informed every line of the dialogue. The
pose of inimitable, candid egoism showed under every situation. The play
was typical of the author as well as of the player. It veiled, as thinly
as possible, a deal of irony at the expense of the play going public; it
took some of that public's dearest foibles and riddled them to shreds.
It was currently reported that the only excuse for comparatively
amicable relations between Wantage and O'Deigh, who had written this
comedy, was the fact of there being an ocean between them. Even at that
Wantage found it difficult to suffer the many praises he heard bestowed,
not upon himself but O'Deigh. He had burst out in spleen at this
adulation, once, in the hearing of an intimate.
"My dear Arthur," said the other, "you strike me as very ungrateful. For
my part, when I see your theatre crowded nightly, when I see how your
exchequer fills steadily, it occurs to me that you should go down on
your knees every night, and thank God that O'Deigh has done you such a
stunning play."
"Oh," was Wantage's grudging answer, "I do, you know I do. But I also
say: Oh, God, why did it have to be by O'Deigh?"
The secret of his hatred for O'Deigh was the secret of his hatred for
all dramatists. He was a curious compound of egoism, childishness and
shrewdness. Part of his shrewdness--or was it his childishness?--showed
in his aversion to paying authors' royalties. He always tried to
re-write all the plays he accepted; if the playwrights objected there
was sure to be a row of some sort. When he could find no writers willing
to make him a present of plays, for the sake, as he put it, of having it
done by as eminent an actor as himself, and in so beautiful a theatre,
he was in the habit of announcing that he would forsake the theatre, and
turn critic. He pretended that the world--the public, the press, even
the minor players--were in league against him. There was a conspiracy to
drive him from the theatre; the riff-raff resented that a man of genius
should be so successful. They lied about him; he was sure they lied; for
stories, of preposterous import, came to him; he vowed he never read the
newspapers--never. As for London--oh, he could spin you the most
fascinating yarn of the cabal that had dampened his London triumph. He
mentioned, with a world of meaning in his tone, the name of the other
great player of the time; he insinuated that to have him, Wantage,
succeed in London, had not been to that other player's mind; so the
wires had been pulled; oh, it was all very well done. He laughed at the
reminiscence,--a brave, bluff laugh, that told you he could afford to
let such petty jealousies amuse him.
The riddle of Arthur Wantage's character had never yet been read. There
were those who averred he was never doing anything but acting, not in
the most intimate moments of his life; some called him a keen
moneymaker, retaining the mummer's pose off the stage for the mere
effect of it on the press and the public. What the man's really honest,
unrehearsed thoughts were,--or if he ever had such--no man could say. To
many earnest students of life this puzzle had presented itself. It
began to present itself, now, to Orson Vane.
This, surely, was a secret worth the reading. Here were, so to say, two
masks to lift at once. This man, Arthur Wantage, who came out before the
curtain now as this, now as that, character of fancy or history, what
shred of vital, individual personality had he retained through all these
changings? The enthusiasm of discovery, of adventure came upon Vane with
a sharpness that he had not felt since the day he had mocked the
futility of human science because it could not unlock other men's
brains.
The horseshoe-shaped space that held the audience glittered with babble
and beauty as Orson Vane took his seat in the stalls. The presence of
the smart set gave the theatre a very garland of charm, of grace, and of
beauty's bud and blossom. The stalls were radiant, and full of polite
chatter. The boxes wore an air of dignified twilight,--a twilight of
goddesses. The least garish of the goddesses, yet the one holding the
subtlest sway, was Jeanette Vanlief. She sat, in the shadow of an upper
box, with her father and Luke Moncreith. On her pale face the veins
showed, now and then; the flush of rose came to it like a surprise--like
the birth of a new world. She radiated no obvious, blatant fascination.
Her hands slim and white; her voice firm and low; her eyes of a hue like
that of bronze, streaked like the tiger-lilies; her profile sharp as a
cameo's; the nose, with its finely-chiseled nostrils, curved in Roman
mode; the mouth, thin and of the faintest possible red, slightly
drooping. And then, her hair! It held, again, a spray of lilies of the
valley; the artificial lights discovered in the waves and the curls of
it the most unexpected shades, the most mercurial tints. The slight
touch of melancholy that hovered over her merely enhanced her charm.
Moncreith told himself that he would go to the uttermost ends of evil to
win this woman. He had come, the afternoon of that day, through the most
dangerous stream in the world, the stream of loveliness that flows over
certain portions of the town at certain fashionable hours. It is a
stream the eddies of which are of lace and silk; its pools are the blue
of eye and the rose of mouth; its cataracts are skirts that swirl and
whisper and sing of ivory outlines and velvet shadows. Yet, as he looked
at Jeannette Vanlief, all that fascinating, dangerous stream lost its
enticement for him; he saw her as a dream too high for comparison with
the mere earthiness of the town. He felt, with a grim resolution, that
nothing human should come between him and Jeannette.
Orson Vane, from his chair, paid scant attention to his fellow
spectators. He was intent upon the dish that O'Deigh and Wantage had
prepared for his delectation. He felt a delicious interest in every
line, every situation. He had made up his mind that he would go to the
root of the mystery that men called Arthur Wantage. Whether that mask
concealed a real, high intelligence, or a mere, cunning, monkeylike
facility in imitation--his was to be the solution of that question.
Wrapped up in that thought he never so much as glanced toward the box
where his friends sat.
At the end of the first act Vane strolled out into the lobby. He nodded
hither and thither, but he felt no desire for nearer converse. A hand on
his shoulder brought him face to face with Professor Vanlief. He was
asked to come up to the box. He listened, gravely, to the Professor's
words, and thanked him. So Moncreith was smitten? He smiled in a kindly
way; he understood, now, the many brusqueries of his friend. That day,
long ago, when he had been so inexplicable in the little bookshop; the
many other occasions, since then, when Luke had been rude and bitter. A
man in love was never to be reckoned on. He wished Luke all the luck in
the world. It struck him but faintly that he himself had once longed for
that sweet daughter of Augustus Vanlief's; he told himself that it was a
dream he must put away. He was a mariner bent on many deep-sea voyages
and many hazards of fate; it would be unfair to ask any woman to share
in any such life. His life would be devoted to furthering the
Professor's discoveries; he meant to be an adventurer into the regions
of the human soul; it was a land whither none could follow.
Perhaps, if he had seen Jeannette, he might have felt no such
resignation. His mood was so tense in its devotion to the puzzle
presented by the player, Wantage, that the news brought him by Vanlief
did not suffice to rouse him. He had a field of his own; that other one
he was content to leave to Moncreith.
Moncreith, in the meanwhile, was making the most of the opportunity the
Professor, in the kindness of his heart, had given him. The orchestra
was playing a Puccini potpourri. It rose feebly against the prattle and
the chatter and the hissing of the human voices. Moncreith, at first,
found only the most obvious words.
"A trifle bitter, the play," he said, "rather like a sneer, don't you
think?"
"Well," granted Jeannette, indolently, "I suppose it is not called
'Voltaire' for nothing. And there are moods that such a play might
suit."
"No doubt. But--do you think one can be bitter, when one loves?"
The girl looked up in wonder. She blushed. The melancholy did not leave
her face. "Bitter? Love?" she echoed. "They spell the same thing."
"Oh," he urged, "the play has made you morbid. As for me, I have heard
nothing, seen nothing, but you. The bitterness of the play has skimmed
by me, that is all; I have been in too sweet a dream to let those people
on the stage--"
"How Wantage would rage if he heard you," said the girl. She felt what
was coming, and she meant to fence as well as she could to avoid it.
"Wantage? Bother Wantage!" He leaned down to her, and whispered,
"Jeannette!"
The flush on her cheek deepened, but she did not stir. It was as if she
had not heard. She shut her eyes. All her weapons dropped at once. She
knew it had to come; she knew, too, that, in this crisis, her heart
stood plainly legible to her. Moncreith's name was not there.
"Jeannette," Moncreith went on, in his vibrant whisper, "don't you guess
what dream I have been living in for so long? Don't you know that it is
you, you, you--" He faltered, his emotions outstriding his words. "It is
you," he finished, "that spell happiness for me. I--oh, is there no
other, less crude way of putting it?--I love you, Jeannette! And you?"
He waited. The chattering and light laughter in the stalls and
throughout the house seemed to lull into a mere hushed murmur, like the
fluttering and twittering of a thousand birds. Moncreith, in his tense
expectation, had heed only for the face of the girl beside him. He did
not see, in the aisle below, Orson Vane, sauntering to his seat. He did
not follow the direction of Jeannette Vanlief's eyes, the instant before
she turned, and answered.
"I wish you had not spoken. I can't say anything--anything that you
would like. Please, please--" She shook her head, in evident distress.
"Ah," he burst out, "then it is true, after all, what I have feared. It
is true that you prefer that--that--"
She stayed him with a quick look.
"I did not say I preferred anyone. I simply said that you must consider
the question closed. I am sorry, oh, so sorry. I wish a man and a woman
could ever be friends, in this world, without risking either love or
hate."
"All the same," he muttered, fiercely, "I believe you prefer that
fellow--"
"Orson Vane's downstairs," said the Professor entering the box at that
moment.
"That damned chameleon!" So Moncreith closed, under his breath, his just
interrupted speech.
CHAPTER XIV.
A little before the end of that performance of "Voltaire," Orson Vane
made his way to Arthur Wantage's dressing-room. They had, in their
character of men in some position of eminence in different phases of the
town's life, a slight acquaintance. They met, now and then, at the
Mummers' Club. Vane's position put him above possibility of affront by
Wantage in even the most arrogant and mannerless of the latter's moods.
Vane's invitation to a little supper, a little chat, and a little smoke,
just for the duet of them, brought forth Wantage's most winning smile of
acquiescence.
"Delighted, dear chap," he vowed. He could be, when he chose, the most
winning of mortals. He was, during the drive to Vane's house, an
admirable companion. He told stories, he made polite rejoinders, he was
all glitter and graciousness. But it was when he was seated to an
appetizing little supper that he became most splendid.
"My dear Vane," he said, lifting a glass to the light, "you should write
me a play. I am sure you could do it. These fellows who are in the mere
business of it,--well, they are really impossible. They are so vulgar,
so dreadful to do business with. I hate business, I am a child in such
affairs; everyone cheats me. I mean to have none but gentlemen on my
business staff next season. The others grate on me, Vane, they grate.
And if I could only gather a company of actors who were also
gentlemen--Oh, I assure you, one cannot believe what things I endure.
The stupidity of actors!" He pronounced the word as if it were accented
on the last syllable. He raised his eyes to heaven as he faltered in
description of the stupidities he had to contend with.
"Write a play?" said Orson, "I fear that would be out of my line. I
merely live, you know; I do not describe."
"Oh, I think you would be just the man. You would give me a play that
society would like. You would make no mistakes of taste. And think, my
dear fellow, just think of the prestige my performance would give you.
It would be the making of you. You would be launched. You would need no
other recommendation. When you approach any of these manager fellows all
you have to do is to say, 'Wantage is doing a play of mine.' That is a
hallmark; it means success for a young man."
"Perhaps. But I have no ambitions in that way. How do you like my
Bonnheimer?"
"H'm--not bad, Vane, not bad. But you should taste my St. Innesse. It is
a '74. I got it from the cellars of the Duke of Arran. You know Merrill,
the wine-merchant on Broadway? Shrewd fellow! Always keeps me in mind;
whenever he sees a sale of a good cellar on the other side, he puts in a
bid; knows he can always depend on Wantage taking the bouquet of it off
his hands. You must take dinner with me some night, and try that St.
Innesse. Ex-President Richards told me, the other evening, that it was
the mellowest vintage he had tasted in years. You know Richards? Oh, you
should, you should!"
Vane listened, quietly amused. The vanity, the egoism of this player
were so obvious, so transparent, so blatant. He wondered, more than
ever, what was under that mask of arrogance and conceit. The perfect
frankness of the conceit made it almost admirable.
"You know," Wantage remarked presently, "I'm really playing truant,
taking supper with you. I ought to be studying."
"A new play?"
"No. My curtain speech for to-morrow night. It's the last night of the
season, and they expect it of me, you know. I've vowed, time and again,
I would never make another curtain-speech in my life, but they will have
them, they will have them!" He sighed, in submission to his fate. Then
he returned to a previous thought. "I wish, though," he said, "that I
could persuade you to do a play for me. Think it over! Think of the name
it would give you. Or you might try managing me. Eh, how does that
strike you? Such a relief to me if I could deal with a gentleman. You
have no idea--the cads there are in the theatre! They resent my being a
man who tries to prove a little better educated than themselves. They
hate me because I am college-bred, you know; they prefer actors who
never read. How many books do you think I read before I attempted
_Voltaire_? A little library, I tell you. And then the days I spent in
noting the portraits! I traveled France in my search. For the actor who
takes historic characters there cannot be too many documents.
Imagination alone is not enough. And then the labor of making the play
presentable; I wish you could see the thing as it first came to me! You
would think a man like O'Deigh would have taken into consideration the
actor? But no; the play, as O'Deigh left it, might have been for a stock
company. _Frederick the Great_ was as fine a part as my own. Oh, they
are numbskulls. And the rehearsals! Actors are sheep, simply sheep. The
papers say I am a brute at rehearsals. My dear Vane, I swear to you that
if Nero were in my place he would massacre all the minor actors in the
land. And they expect the salaries of intelligent persons!"
Vane, listening, wondered why Wantage, under such an avalanche of
irritations, continued such life. Gradually it dawned on him that all
this fume and fret was merely part of the man's mummery; it was his
appeal to the sympathy of his audience; his argument against the
reputation his occasional exhibitions of rage and waywardness had given
him.
Vane's desire to penetrate the surface of this conscious imitator, this
fellow who slipped off this character to assume that, grew keener and
keener. Where, under all this crust of alien form and action, was the
individual, human thought and feeling? Or was there any left? Had the
constant corrosion of simulated emotions burnt out all the original
character of the mind?
Vane could not sufficiently hasten the end for which he had invited
Wantage.
"You are," he said presently, as a lull in the other's monologue allowed
him an opening, "something of an amateur of tapestry, of pictures, of
bijouterie. I have a little thing or two, in my dressing-room, that I
wish you would give me an opinion on."
They took their cigarettes into the adjoining dressing-room. Wantage
went, at once, to the mirrors.
"Ah, Florence, I see." He frowned, in critical judgment; he went humming
about the room, singing little German phrases to the pictures, snatches
of chansonettes to the tapestries. He was very enjoyable as a spectacle,
Vane told himself. He tiptoed over the room, now in the mode of his
earliest success, "The King of Dandies," now in the half limping style
of his "Rigoletto."
"You should have seen the Flemish things I had!" he declared. That was
his usual way of noting the belongings of others; they reminded him of
his own superior specimens. "I sold them for a song, at auction. Don't
you think one tires of one's surroundings, after a time? People go to
the hills and the seashore, because they tire of town. I have the same
feeling about pictures, and furniture, and bric-a-brac. After a time,
they tire me. I have to get rid of them. I sell them at auction. People
are always glad to bid for something that has belonged to Arthur
Wantage. But everything goes for a song. Oh, it is ruinous, ruinous." He
peered, and pirouetted about the corners. "Ah," he exclaimed, "and here
is something covered up! A portrait? Something rare?" He posed in front
of it, affecting the most devouring curiosity.
"A sort of portrait," said Vane, touching the cord at back of the
mirror.
"Ah," said Wantage, gazing, "you are right. A sort of portrait." And he
laughed, feebly, feebly. "That Bonnheimer," he muttered, "a deuce of a
wine!" He clutched at a chair, reeling into it.
Vane, passing to the mirror's face, took what image it turned to him,
and then, leisurely, replaced the curtain.
He surveyed the figure in the chair for a moment or so. Then he called
Nevins. "Nevins," he said, "where the devil are you? Never where you're
wanted. What does one pay servants outrageous wages for! They conspire
to cheat one, they all do. Nevins!" Nevins appeared, wide-eyed at this
outburst. He was prepared for many queer exhibitions on the part of his
master, but this--this, to a faithful servant! He stood silent,
expectant, reproachful.
"Nevins," his master commanded, "have this--this actor put to bed. Use
the library; make the two couches serve. He'll stay here for twenty-four
hours; you understand, twenty-four hours. You will take care of him. The
wine was badly corked, to-night, Nevins. You grow worse every day. You
are in league to drive me distracted. It is an outrage. Why do you stand
there, and shake, in that absurd fashion? It makes me quite nervous. Do
go away, Nevins, go away!"
CHAPTER XV.
The papers of that period are all agreed that the eminent actor, Arthur
Wantage, was never seen to more advantage than on the last night of that
particular season. His _Voltaire_ had never been a more brilliant
impersonation. The irony, the cruelty of the character had rarely come
out more effectively; the ingenuity of the dialogue was displayed at its
best.
Yet, as a matter of fact, Arthur Wantage, all that day and evening, was
in Orson Vane's house, subject to a curious mental and spiritual aphasia
that afterwards became a puzzle to many famous physicians.
The _Voltaire_ was Orson Vane.
It was the final triumph of Professor Vanlief's thaumaturgy. Vane was
now in possession of the entire mental vitality sufficient for playing
the part of the evening; the lines, the every pose, came to him
spontaneously, as if he were machinery moving at another's guidance. The
detail of entering the theatre unobserved had been easy; it was dusk and
he was muffled to the eyes. Afterwards, it was merely a matter of
pigment and paints. His fingers found the use of the colors and powders
as easily as his mind held the words to be spoken. There was not a
soul, in the company, in the audience, that did not not find the
_Voltaire_ of that night the _Voltaire_ of the entire season.
Above the mere current of his speeches and his displayed emotions Orson
Vane found a tide of exaltation bearing him on to a triumphant feeling
of contempt for his audience. These sheep, these herdlings, these
creatures of the fashion, how fine it was to fling into their faces the
bitter taunts of a _Voltaire_, to see them take them smilingly,
indulgently. They paid him his price, and he hated them for it. He felt
that they did not really understand the half of the play's delicate
finesse; he felt their appreciation was a sham, a pose, a bit of mummery
even more contemptible than his own, since they paid to pose, while he,
at least, had the satisfaction of their money.
The curtain-fall found him aglow with the splendor of his success. The
two personalties in him joined in a fever of triumph. He, Orson Vane,
had been _Voltaire_; he would yet be all the other geniuses of history.
He would prove himself the greatest of them all, since he could simulate
them all. A certain vein of petty cunning ran under the major emotion;
Orson Vane laughed to think how he had despoiled Arthur Wantage of his
very temperament, his art, his spirit. This same cunning admonished,
too, the prompt return of Wantage's person, after the night was over, to
the Wantage residence.
The commotion "in front" brought Orson to a sense of the immediate
moment. The cries for a speech came over a crackling of hand-claps. He
waited for several minutes. It was not well to be too complaisant with
one's public. Then he gave the signal to the man at the curtain, and
moved past him, to the narrow space behind the lights. He bowed. It had
the very air of irony, had that bow. It does not seem humanly possible
to express irony in a curving in the spine, a declension of the head, a
certain pose of the hands, but Vane succeeded, just as Wantage had so
often succeeded, in giving that impression. The bow over, he turned to
withdraw. Let them wait, let them chafe I Commuters were missing the
last trains for the night? So much the better! They would not forget him
so easily.
When he finally condescended to stride before the curtain again, it was
a lift of the eyebrows, a little gesture, an air that said, quite
plainly: Really, it is very annoying of you. If I were not very gracious
indeed I should refuse to come out again. I do so, I assure you, under
protest.
He gave a little, delicate cough, he lifted his eyes. At that the house
became still, utterly still.
He began without any vocative at all.
"The actor," he said, "who wins the applause of so distinguished a
company is exceedingly fortunate. The applause of such a very
distinguished company--" he succeeded in emphasizing his phrase to the
point where it became a subtle insult--"is very sweet to the actor. It
reconciles him to what he must take to be a breach of true art, the
introduction of his own person on the scene where he has appeared as an
impersonator of character. Some actors are expected to make speeches
after their exertions should be over. I am one of those poor actors. In
the name of myself, a poor actor, and the poor actors in my company, I
must thank this distinguished body of ladies and gentlemen for the
patience with which they have listened to Mr. O'Deigh's little trifle.
It is, of course, merely a trifle, _pour passer le temps_. Next season,
I hope, I may give you a really serious production. Mr. O'Deigh cables
me that he is happy such distinguished persons in such a critical town
have applauded his little effort. I am sure ever so many of you would
rather be at home than listening to the apologies of a poor actor. For I
feel I must apologize for presenting so inconsiderable a trifle. A mere
summer night's amusement. I have played it as a sort of rest for myself,
as preparation for larger productions. If I have amused you, I am
pleased. The actors' province is to please. The poor actor thanks you."
He bowed, and the bewildered company who had heard him to the end,
clapped their hands a little. The newspaper men smiled at one another;
they had been there before. The old question of "Why does he do it?" no
longer stirred in them. They were used to Wantage's vagaries.
The newspapers of the following day had Wantage's speech in full. The
critics wrote editorials on the necessity for curbing this player's
arrogance. The public was astonished to find that it had been insulted,
but it took the press' word for it. Wantage had made that sort of thing
the convention; it was the fashion to call these curtain speeches an
insult, yet to invoke them as eagerly as possible. The widespread
advertising that accrued to Wantage from this episode enabled his
manager to obtain, in his bookings for the following season, an even
higher percentage than usual. To that extent Orson Vane's imitation of
an imitator benefited his subject. In other respects it left Wantage a
mere walking automaton.
It was fortunate that the closing time for Wantage's theatre was now on.
There was no hitch in Vane's plan of transporting Wantage to his home
quarters; the servants at the Wantage establishment found nothing
unusual in their master having been away for a day and a night; he was
too frequently in the habit, when his house displeased him in some
detail, to stay at hotels for weeks and months at a time; his household
was ready for any vagary. Indisposition was nothing new with him,
either; in reality and affectation these lapses from well-being were not
infrequent with the great player. The doctor told him he needed
rest--rest and sea-air; there was nothing to worry over; he had been
working too hard, that was all.
So the shell of what had been Wantage proceeded to a watering-place,
while the kernel, now a part of Orson Vane, proceeded to astonish the
town with its doings and sayings.
Practice had now enabled Vane to control, with a certain amount of
consciousness, whatsoever alien spirit he took to himself. Vigorous and
alert as was the mumming temperament he was now in possession of, he yet
contrived to exert a species of dominance over it; he submitted to it in
the mode, the expression of his character, yet in the main-spring of his
action he had it in subjection. He had reached, too, a plane from which
he was able, more than on any of the other occasions, to enjoy the
masquerade he knew himself taking part in. He realized, with a
contemptuous irony, that he was playing the part of one who played many
parts. The actor in him seemed, intellectually, merely a personified
palimpsest; the mind was receptive, ready to echo all it heard, keen to
reproduce traits and tricks of other characters.
He held in himself, to be brief, a mirror that reflected whatever
crossed its face; the base of that mirror itself was as characterless,
as colorless, as the mere metal and glass. Superficialities were caught
with a skill that was astonishing; little tricks of manner and speech
were reproduced to the very dot upon the i; yet, under all the raiment
of other men's merely material attributes, there was no change of soul
at all; no transformation touched the little ego-screaming soul of the
actor.
The superficial, in the meanwhile, was enough to make the town gossip
not a little about the newest diversions of Orson Vane. He talked, now,
of nothing but the theatre and the arts allied to it. He purposed doing
some little comedies at Newport in the course of the summer that was now
beginning. He eyed all the smart women of his acquaintance with an air
that implied either, "I wonder whether you could be cast for a girl I
must make love to," or, "You would be passable in _Prince Hal_ attire."
At home, to his servants, Vane was abominable. When the dreadful
champagne, that some impulse possessed him to buy of a Broadway
swindler, proved as flat as the Gowanus, his language to Nevins was
quite contemptible. "What," he shrieked, "do I pay you for? Tell me
that! This splendid wine spoiled, spoiled, utterly unfit for a gentleman
to drink, and all by your negligence. It is enough to turn one's mind.
It is an outrage. A splendid wine. And now--look at it!" As a conclusion
he threw the stuff in Nevins' face. Nevins made no answer at all. He
wiped the sour mess from his coat with the same air of apology that he
would have used had he spilt a glass himself. But his emotions were none
the less. They caused him, in the privacy of the servants' quarters, to
do what he had not done in years, to drop his h's. "It's the 'ost's
place," said Nevins, mournfully, "to entertain his guests, and not
bully the butler." Which, as a maxim, was valid enough, save that, in
this special case, the guests had come to look upon Vane's treatment of
the servants as part of the entertainment a dinner with him would
provide.
Another distress that fell to the lot of poor Nevins was the fact that
his master was become averse to the paying of bills. The profanity fell
upon Nevins from both the duns and the dunned.
"The man from Basser's, Mr. Vane, sir," Nevins would announce, timidly.
"Can't get him to go away at all, sir."
"Basser's, Basser's? Oh--that tailor fellow. An impudent creature, to
plague me so, when I do him the honor of wearing his coats; they fit
very badly, but I put up with that because I want to help the fellow on.
And what is my reward? He pesters me, pesters me. Tell him--tell him
anything, Nevins. Only do leave me alone; I am very busy, very nervous.
I am going to write a comedy for myself. I have some water-colors to
paint for Mrs. Carlos; I have a ride in the Park, and ever so many other
things to do to-day, and you bother me with pestiferous tailors. Nevins,
you are, you are--"
But Nevins quietly bowed himself out before he learned what new thing he
was in his master's eyes.
A malady--for it surely is no less than a malady--for attempting cutting
speeches at any time and place possessed Vane. Shortsightedness was
another quality now obvious in him. He knew you to-day, to-morrow he
looked at you with the most unseeing eyes. His voice was the most
prominent organ in whatever room or club he happened to be; when he
spoke none else could be intelligible. When he knew himself observed,
though alone, he hummed little snatches to himself. His gait took on a
mincing step. There was not a moment, not a pose of his that had not its
forethought, its deliberation, its premeditated effect.
The gradual increase in the publicity that was part of the penalty of
being in the smart world had made approachment between the stage and
society easier than ever before. Orson Vane's bias toward the theatre
did not displease the modish. Rumors as to this and that heroine of a
romantic divorce having theatric intentions became frequent. The gowns
of actresses were copied by the smart quite as much as the smart set's
gowns were copied by actresses. The intellectual factor had never been
very prominent in the social attitude toward the stage; it was now
frankly admitted that good-looking men and handsome dresses were as much
as one went to the theatre for. Theatrical people had a wonderful claim
upon the printer's ink of the continent; society was not averse to
borrowing as much of that claim as was possible. Compliments were
exchanged with amiable frequence; smart people married stage favorites,
and the stage looked to the smart for its recruits.
Orson Vane could not have shown his devotion to the mummeries of the
stage at a better time. He gained, rather than lost, prestige.
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.
CHAPTER XVII
Professor Vanlief lost no time in inventing an excuse for his immediate
departure. Jeannette would be well looked after. He got a few
necessaries together and started for Framley Lodge. After some delay he
obtained an interview with the distinguished patient.
"Try," urged Vanlief, "to tell me when this illness came upon you. Was
it after your curtain-speech at the end of last season?"
Wantage looked with blank and futile eyes. "Curtain-speech? I made
none."
"Oh, yes. Try to remember! It made a stir, did that speech of yours. Try
to think what happened that day!"
"I made no speech. I remember nothing. I am Wantage, I think. Wantage. I
used to act, did I not?" He laughed, feebly. It was melancholy to watch
him. He could eat and drink and sleep; he had the intelligence of an
echo. Each thought of his needed a stimulant.
Vanlief persisted, in spite of melancholy rebuffs. There was so much at
stake. This man's whole career was at stake. And, if matters were not
mended soon, the evil would be under way; the harm would have begun. It
meant loss, actual loss now, and one could scarcely compute how much
ruin afterwards. And he, Vanlief, would be the secret agent of this
ruin! Oh, it was monstrous! Something must be done. Yet, he could do
nothing until he was sure. To meddle, without absolute certainty, would
be criminal.
"What do you remember before you fell ill?" he repeated.
"Oh, leave me alone!" said Wantage. "Isn't the doctor bad enough,
without you. I tell you I remember nothing. I was well, and now I am
ill. Perhaps it was something Orson Vane gave me at supper that night, I
don't remember--"
"At supper? Vane?" The Professor leaped at the words.
"Yes. I said so, didn't I? I had supper in his rooms, and then--"
But Vanlief was gone. He had no time for the amenities now. His age
seemed to leave him as his purpose warmed, and his goal neared. All the
fine military bearing came out again. The people who traveled with him
that day took him for nothing less than a distinguished General.
At the end of the day he reached Vane's town house. Nevins was all alone
there; all the other servants were on the _Beaurivage_. The man looked
worn and aged. He trembled visibly when he walked; his nerves were
gone, and he had the taint of spirits on him.
"Mr. Vanlief, sir," he whined, "it'll be the death of me, will this
place. First he buys a yacht, sir, like I buy a 'at, if you please; and
now I'm to sell the furniture and all the antics. These antics, sir, as
the master 'as collected all over the world, sir. It goes to me 'eart."
Vanlief, even in his desperate mood, could not keep his smile back.
"Sell the antiques, eh? Well, they'll fetch plenty, I've no doubt. But
if I were you I wouldn't hurry; Mr. Vane may change his mind, you know."
"Ah," nodded Nevins, brightening, "that's true, sir. You're right; I'll
wait the least bit. It's never too soon to do what you don't want to,
eh, sir? And I gives you my word, as a man that's 'ad places with the
nobility, sir, that the last year's been a sad drain on me system. What
with swearing, sir, and letters I wouldn't read to my father confessor,
sir, Mr. Vane's simply not the man he was at all. Of course, if he says
to sell the furniture, out it goes! But, like as not, he'll come in here
some line day and ask where I've got all his trappings. And then I'll
show him his own letter, and he'll say he never wrote it. Oh, it's a bad
life I've led of late, sir. Never knowing when I could call my soul my
own."
The phrase struck the Professor with a sort of chill. It was true; if
his discovery went forth upon the world, no man would, in very truth,
know when he could call his soul his own. It would be at the mercy of
every poacher. But he could not, just now, afford reflections of such
wide scope; there was a nearer, more immediate duty.
"Nevins," he said, "I came about that mirror of mine."
"Yes, sir. I'm glad of that, sir; uncommon glad. You'll betaking it
away, sir? It's bad luck I've 'ad since that bit of plate come in the
house."
"You're right. I mean to take it away. But only for a time. Seeing Mr.
Vane's thinking of selling up, perhaps it's just as well if I have this
out of the way for a time, eh? Might avoid any confusion. I set store by
that mirror, Nevins; I'd not like it sold by mistake."
"Well, sir, if you sets more store by it than the master, I'd like to
see it done, sir. The master's made me life a burden about that there
glass. I've 'ad to watch it like a cat watches a mouse. I don't know now
whether I'd rightly let you take it or not." He scratched his head, and
looked in some quandary.
"Nonsense, Nevins. You know it's mine as well as you know your own name.
Didn't you fetch it over from my house in the first place, and didn't
you pack it and wrap it under my very eyes?"
"True, sir; I did. My memory's a bit shaky, sir, these days. You may do
as you like with your own, I'll never dispute that. But Mr. Vane's
orders was mighty strict about the plaguey thing. I wish I may never
see it again. It's been, 'Nevins, let nobody disturb the new mirror!'
and 'Nevins, did anyone touch the new mirror while I was gone?' and
'Nevins, was the window open near the new mirror?' until I fair feel
sick at the sight of it."
"No doubt," said the professor, impatiently. "Then you'll oblige me by
wrapping it up for shipping purposes as soon as ever you can. I'm going
to take it away with me at once. I suppose there's no chance of Mr. Vane
dropping in here before I bring the glass back, but, if he does, tell
him you acted under my orders."
"A good riddance," muttered Nevins, losing no time over his task of
covering and securing the mirror. "I'll pray it never comes this way
again," he remarked.
The professor, after seeing that all danger of injury to the mirror's
exposed parts was over, walked nervously up and down the rooms. He would
have to carry his plan through with force of arms, with sheer
impertinence and energy of purpose. It was an interference in two lives
that he had in view. Had he any right to that? But was he not, after
all, to blame for the fact of the curious transfusion of soul that had
left one man a mental wreck, and stimulated the other's forces to a
course of life out of all character with the strivings of his real soul?
If he had not tempted Orson Vane to these experiments, Arthur Wantage
would never be drooping in the shadow of collapse, and in danger of
losing his proper place in the roll of prosperity. Vanlief shuddered at
thought of what an unscrupulous man might not do with this discovery of
his; what lives might be ruined, what successes built on fraud and
theft? Fraud and theft? Those words were foul enough in the material
things of life; but how much more horrid would they be when they covered
the spiritual realm. To steal a purse, in the old dramatic phrase, was a
petty thing; but to steal a soul--Professor Vanlief found himself
launched into a whirlpool of doubt and confusion.
He had opened a new, vast region of mental science. He had enabled one
man to pass the wall with which nature had hedged the unforeseen forces
of humanity. Was he to learn that, in opening this new avenue of psychic
activity, he had gone counter to the eternal Scheme of Things, and let
in no divine light, but rather the fierce glare of diabolism?
His thoughts traversed argument upon argument while Nevins completed his
work. He heard the man's voice, finally, with an actual relief, a
gladness at being recalled to the daring and doing that lay before him.
When the Professor was gone, a wagon bearing away the precious mirror,
Nevins poured himself out a notably stiff glass of Five-Star.
"Here's hoping," he toasted the silent room, "the silly thing gets
smashed into everlasting smithereens!"
And he drowned any fears he might have had to the contrary. This
particular species of time-killing was now a daily matter with Nevins;
the incessant strain upon his nerves of some months past had finally
brought him to the pitch where he had only one haven of refuge left.
The Professor sped over the miles to Framley Lodge. He took little
thought about meals or sleep. The excitement was marking him deeply; but
he paid no heed to, or was unaware of, that. Arrived at the Lodge a
campaign of bribery and corruption began. Servant after servant had to
be suborned. Nothing but the well-known fame and name of Augustus
Vanlief enabled him, even with his desperate expenditures of tips, to
avert the suspicion that he had some deadly, some covertly inimical end
in view. One does not, at this age of the world, burst into another
man's house and order that man's servants about, without coming under
suspicion, to put it mildly. Fortunately Vanlief encountered, just as
his plot seemed shattering against the rigor of the household
arrangements, the doctor who was in attendance on Wantage. The man
happened to be on the staff of the University where Vanlief held a
chair. He held the older man in the greatest respect; he listened to his
rapid talk with all the patience in the world. He looked astonished,
even uncomprehending, but he shook his shoulders up and down a few times
with complaisance. "There seems no possible harm," he assented.
"Don't ask me to believe in the curative possibilities, Professor;
but--there can be no harm, that I see. He is not to be unduly excited. A
mirror, you say? You don't think vanity can send a man from illness to
health, do you? Not even an actor can be as vain as that, surely.
However, I shall tell the attendants to see that the thing is done as
quietly as possible. I trust you, you see, to let nothing detrimental
happen. I have to get over to the Port of Pines. I shall give the
orders. Goodbye. I wish I could see the result of your little--h'm,
notion--but I dare say to-morrow will be soon enough."
And he smiled the somewhat condescending smile of the successful
practitioner who fancies he is addressing a campaigner whose usefulness
is passing.
The setting up of the professor's mirror, so as to face Wantage's
sickbed, took no little time, no little care, no little exertion. When
it was in place, the professor tiptoed to the actor's side.
"Well," queried Wantage, "what is it? Medicine? Lord, I thought I'd
taken all there was in the world. Where is it?"
"No," said the professor, "not medicine. I am going to ask you to look
quite hard at that curtain by the foot of the bed for a moment. I have
something I think may interest you and--"
As the actor's eyes, in mere physical obedience to the other's
suggestion, took the desired direction, Vanlief tugged at a cord that
rolled the curtain aside, revealing the mirror, which gave Wantage back
the somewhat haggard apparition of himself.
A few seconds went by in silence. Then Wantage frowned sharply.
"Gad," he exclaimed, vigorously and petulantly, "what a beastly bad bit
of make-up!"
The voice was the voice of the man whom the town had a thousand times
applauded as "The King of the Dandies."
An exceedingly bad quarter of an hour followed for Vanlief. Wantage, now
in full possession of all his mental faculties, abused the Professor up
hill and down dale. What was he doing there? What business had that
mirror there? What good was a covered-up mirror? Where were the
servants? The doctor had given orders? The doctor was a fool. Only the
mere physical infirmity consequent upon being bedridden for so long
prevented Wantage from becoming violent in his rage. Vanlief, sharp as
was his sense of relief at the success of his venture, was yet more
relieved when his bribes finally got his mirror and himself out of the
Lodge. The incident had its humors, but he was too tired, too enervated,
to enjoy them. The very moment of Wantage's recovery of his soul had its
note of ironic comedy; the succeeding vituperation from the restored
actor; Vanlief's own meekness; the marvel and rapacity of the
servants--all these were abrim with chances for merriment. But Vanlief
found himself, for, perhaps, the first time in his life, too old to
enjoy the happy interpretations of life. Into all his rejoicings over
the outcome of this affair there crept the constant doubts, the
ceaseless questionings, as to whether he had discovered a mine of wisdom
and benefit, or a mere addition to man's chances for evil.
His return journey, his delivery of the mirror into Nevins' unwilling
care, were accomplished by him in a species of daze.
He had hardly counted upon the danger of his discovery. Was he still
young enough to contend with them?
Nevins almost flung the mirror to its accustomed place. He unwrapped it
spitefully. When he left the room, the curtain of the glass was flapping
in the wind. Nevins heard the sound quite distinctly; he went to the
sideboard and poured out a brimming potion.
"I 'opes the wind'll play the Old 'Arry with it," he smiled to himself.
He smiled often that night; he went to bed smiling. His was the cheerful
mode of intoxication.
Augustus Vanlief reached the cottage in the hills a sheer wreck. He had
left it a hale figure of a man who had ever kept himself keyed up to the
best; now he was old, shaking, trembling in nerves and muscles.
Jeannette rushed toward him and put her arms around him. She looked her
loving, silent wonder into his weary eyes.
"Sleep, dear, sleep," said this old, tired man of science, "first let me
sleep."
CHAPTER XVIII.
Orson Vane, scintillating theatrically by the sea, was in a fine rage
when Nevins ceased to answer his telegrams. Telegrams struck Vane as the
most dramatic of epistles; there was always a certain pictorial effect
in tearing open the envelope, in imagining the hushed expectation of an
audience. A letter--pooh! A letter might be anything from a bill to a
billet. But a telegram! Those little slips of paper struck immediate
terror, or joy, or despair, or confusion; they hit hard, and swiftly.
Certainly he had been hitting Nevins hard enough of late. He had
peppered him with telegrams about the furniture, about the pictures; he
had forbidden one day what he had ordered the day before. It never
occurred to him that Nevins might seek escape from these torments. Yet
that was what Nevins had done. He had tippled himself into a condition
where he signed sweetly for each telegram and put it in the hall-rack.
They made a beautiful, yellow festoon on the mahogany background.
"Those," Nevins told himself, "is for a gentleman as is far too busy to
notice little things like telegrams."
Nevins watched that yellow border growing daily with fresh delight.
He could keep on accepting telegrams just as long as the sideboard held
its strength. Each new arrival from the Western Union drove him to more
glee and more spirits--of the kind one can buy bottled.
At last Orson Vane felt some alarm creeping through his armor of
dramatic pose. Could Nevins have come to any harm? It was very annoying,
but he would have to go to town for a day or so. That seemed
unavoidable. Just as he had made up his mind to it, he happened to slip
on a bit of lemon-peel. At once he fell into a towering rage. He cursed
the entire service on the _Beaurivage_ up hill and down dale. You could
hear him all over the harbor. It was the voice of a profane Voltaire.
That night, at the Casino, his rage found vent in action. He sold the
_Beaurivage_ as hastily as he had bought her.
He left for town, by morning, full of bitterness at the world's
conspiracy to cheat him. He felt that for a careless deck-hand to leave
lemon-peel on the deck of the Beaurivage was nothing less than part of
the world-wide cabal against his peace of mind.
He reached his town-house in a towering passion, all the accumulated
ill-temper of the last few days bubbling in him. He flung the housedoor
wide, stamped through the halls. "Nevins!" he shouted, "Nevins!"
Nothing stirred in the house. He entered room after room. Passing into
his dressing-room he almost tore the hanging from its rod. A gust of air
struck him from the wide-open window. Before he proceeded another step
this gust, that his opening of the curtain had produced, lifted the veil
from the mirror facing him. The veil swung up gently, revealed the
glass, and dropped again.
Then he realized the figure of Nevins on a couch. He walked up to him.
The smell of spirits met him at once.
"Poor Nevins!" he muttered.
Then he fell to further realizations.
The whole history of his three experiments unfolded itself before him.
What, after them all, had he gained? What, save the knowledge of the
littleness of the motives controlling those lives? This actor, this man
the world thought great, whose soul he had held in usurpation, up to a
little while ago, what was he? A very batch of vanities, a mountain of
egoisms. Had there been, in any of the thoughts, the moods he had
experienced from out the mental repertoire of that player, anything
indicative of nobility, of large benevolence, of sweet and light in the
finest human sense? Nothing, nothing. The ambition to imitate the
obvious points of human action and conduct, to the end that one be
called a character-actor; the striving for an echoed fame rightly
belonging to the supreme names of history; a yearning for the stimulus
of immediate acclamation--these things were not worth gaining. To have
experienced them was to have caught nothing beneficial.
Orson Vane began to consider himself with contempt. Upon himself must
fall the odium of what the souls he had borrowed had induced in him. The
littleness he had fathomed, the depths of character to which he had
sunk, all left their petty brands on him. He had penetrated the barriers
of other men's minds, but what had it profited him? As a ship becalmed
in foul waters takes on barnacles, so had he brought forth, from the
realm of alien springs and motives he had made his own, a dreadful
incrustation of painful conjectures on the supremacy of evil in the
world.
It needed only a glance at the man, Nevins, to force home the
destructiveness born of these incursions into other lives. That
trembling, cowering thing had been, before Orson Vane's departure from
the limitations of his own temperament, a decent, self-respecting
fellow. While now--
Vane paced about the house in bitter unrest. In the outer hall he
noticed the yellow envelopes bordering the coat-rack. He took one of
them down, opened it, and smiled. "Poor Nevins!" he murmured. The next
moment a lad from the Telegraph office appeared in the doorway. Vane
went forward himself; there was no use disturbing Nevins.
The wire had followed him on from the _Beaurivage_, or rather from the
man to whom he had sold her. It was from Augustus Vanlief. Its brevity
was like a blow in the face.
"Am ill," it said, "must see you."
It was still possible, that very hour, to get an express to the
Professor's mountain retreat. There was nothing to prevent immediate
departure. Nothing--except Nevins. The man really must exercise more
care about that mirror. He was safely out of all his experiments now,
but the thing was dangerous none the less; if it had been his own
property, he would have known how to deal with it. But it was the
Professor's secret, the discovery of a lifetime. For elaborate
precautions, or even for hiding the thing in some closet, there was no
time. He could only rouse Nevins as energetically as possible to a sense
of his previous defection from duty; gently and quite kindly he
admonished him to take every care of the new mirror in the time coming.
Nevins listened to him wide-eyed; his senses were still too much agog
for him to realize whence this change of voice and manner had come to
his master. It was merely another page in the chapter of bewilderment
that piled upon him. He bowed his promise to be careful, he assented to
a number of things he could not fathom, and when Vane was gone he
cleared the momentary trouble in his mind by an ardent drink. The liquor
brought him a most humorous notion, and one that he felt sure would
relieve him of all further anxieties on the score of the new mirror. He
approached the back of it, tore the curtain from its face, wheeled it to
the centre of the room, and placed all the other cheval-glasses close
by. Throughout this he had wit enough, or fear enough--for his memory
brought him just enough picture of Orson's own handling of this mirror
to inspire a certain awe of the front of the thing--never to pass in
face of the mirror. When he had the mirrors grouped in close ranks, he
spun about on his heels quickly, as if seized with the devout frenzy of
a dervish. He fell, finally, in a daze of dizziness and liquor. Yet he
had cunning enough left. He crept out of the room on his stomach, like a
snake with fiery breath. He knew that the angle at which the mirrors
were tilted would keep him, belly to the carpet, out of range. Then he
reeled, shouting, into the corridors.
He had accomplished his desire. He no longer knew one mirror from the
other.
Orson Vane, in the meanwhile, was being rushed to the mountains. It was
with a new shock of shame that he saw the ravages illness was making on
the fine face of Vanlief. This, too, was one of the items in the
profit-and-loss column of his experiments. Yet this burden was,
perhaps, a shared one.
"Ah," said Vanlief, with a quick breath of gladness, "thank God!" He
knew, the instant Vane spoke, that it was Orson Vane himself who had
come; he knew that there was no more doubt as to the success of his own
recent headlong journeyings. They had prostrated him; but--they had won.
Yet there was no knowing how far this illness might go; it was still
imperative to come to final, frank conclusions with the partner in his
secret.
The instant that Vane had been announced Jeannette Vanlief had left her
father's side. She withdrew to the adjoining room, where only a curtain
concealed her; the doors had all been taken down for the summer. She did
not wish to meet Orson Vane. Over her real feelings for him had come a
cloud of doubts and distastes. She had never admitted to herself,
openly, that she loved him; she tried to persuade herself that his
notorious vagaries had put him beyond her pale. She was determined, now,
to be an unseen ear to what might pass between Orson and her father. It
was not a nice thing to do, but, for all she knew, her father's very
life was at stake. What dire influence might Vane not have over her
father? She suspected there was some bond between them; in her father's
weakened state it seemed her duty to watch over him with every devotion
and alertness.
Yet, for a long time, the purport of the conversation quite eluded her.
"I have not gone the gamut of humanity," said Orson, "but I have almost,
it seems to me, gone the gamut of my own courage."
Vanlief nodded. He, too, understood. Consequences! Consequences! How the
consequences of this world do spoil the castles one builds in it!
Castles in the air may be as pretty as you please, but they are sure to
obstruct some other mortal's view of the sky.
"If I were younger," sighed Vanlief, "if I were only younger."
They did not yet, either of them, dare to be open, brutal, forthright.
"I could declare, I suppose," Vanlief went on, "that it was somewhat
your own fault. You chose your victims badly. You have, I presume, been
disenchanted. You found little that was beautiful, many things that were
despicable. The spectacles you borrowed have all turned out smoky. Yet,
consider--there are sure to be just as many rosy spectacles as dark ones
in the world."
"No doubt," assented Vane, though without enthusiasm, "but there are
still--the consequences. There is still the chance that I could never
repay the soul I take on loan; still the horror of being left to face
the rest of my days with a cuckoo in my brain. Mind, I have no
reproaches, none at all. You overstated nothing. I have felt, have
thought, have done as other men have felt and thought and done; their
very inner secret souls have been completely in my keeping. The
experiment has been a triumph. Yet it leaves me joyless."
"It has made me old," said Vanlief, simply. "Ah," he repeated, "if only
I were younger!"
"The strain," he began again, "of putting an end to your last experiment
has told on me. I overdid it. Such emotion, and such physical tension,
is more than I should have attempted. I begin to fear I may not last
very long. And in that case I think I shall have to take my secret with
me. Orson, it comes to this; I am too old to perfect this marvelous
thing to the point where it will be safe for humanity at large. It is
still unsafe,--you will agree to that. You might wreck your own life and
that of others. The chances are one in a thousand of your ever finding a
human being whom God has so graciously endowed with the divine spirit as
to be able to lose part of it without collapse. I have hoped and hoped,
that such a thing would happen; then there would be two perfectly even,
exactly tempered creatures; even if, upon that transfusion, the mirror
disappeared, there would be no unhappiness as a reproach. But we have
found nothing like that. You have embittered yourself; the glimpses of
other souls you have had have almost stripped you of your belief in an
eternal Good."
"You mean to send for the mirror?"
"It would be better, wiser. If I live, it will still be here. If I die,
it must be destroyed. In any event--"
At the actual approach of this conclusion to his experiments Orson Vane
felt a sense of coming loss. With all the dangers, all the loom of
possible disaster, he was not yet rid of the awful fascination of this
soul-snatching he had been engaged in.
"Perhaps," he argued, "my next experiment might find the one in a
thousand you spoke of."
"I think you had better not try again. Tell me, what was Wantage's soul
like?"
"Oh, I cannot put it into words. A little, feverish, fretful soul,
shouting, all the time: I, I, I! Plotting, planning for public
attention, worldly prominence. No thoughts save those of self. An active
brain, all bent on the ego. A brain that deliberately chose the theatre
because it seems the most spectacular avenue to eminence. A magnetism
that keeps outsiders wondering whether childishness or genius lurks
behind the mask. The bacillus of restlessness is in that brain; it is
never idle, always planning a new pose for the body and the voice."
"Well," urged Vanlief, "think what might have been had I not put a stop
to the thing. You don't realize the terrible anxiety I was in. You might
have ruined the man's career. However petty we, you and I, may hold
him, there are things the world expects of him; we came close to
spoiling all that. I had to act, and quickly. You may fancy the
difficulties of getting the mirror to Wantage. Oh, it is still all like
an evil dream." He lay silent a while, then resumed: "Is the mirror in
the old room?"
"Yes. With the others, in the dressing-room."
"Nevins looks out for it?"
"As always. Though he grows old, too."
Vanlief looked sharply at Orson, he suspected something behind that
phrase about Nevins. Again he urged:
"Better have Nevins bring the mirror back to me."
Vane hesitated. He murmured a reply that Jeannette no longer cared to
hear. The whole secret was open to her, now; she saw that the Orson Vane
she loved--she exulted now in her admission of that--was still the man
she thought him, that all his inexplicable divagations had been part of
this awful juggling with the soul that her father had found the trick
of. She realized, too, by the manner of Vane, that he had not yet given
up all thought of these experiments; he wanted one more. One more; one
more; it was the cry of the drunkard, the opium-eater, the victim of
every form of mania.
It should never be, that one more trial. What her father had done, she
could do. She glided out of the room, on the heels of her quick
resolution.
The two men, in their arguments, their widening discussions, did not
bring her to mind for hours. By that that time she was well on her way
to town.
Her purpose was clear to her; nothing should hinder its achievement. She
must destroy the mirror. There were sciences that were better killed at
the outset. She did not enter deeply into those phases of the question,
but she had the clear determination to prevent further mischief, further
follies on the part of Vane, further chances of her father's collapse.
The mirror must be destroyed. That was plain and simple.
It took a tremendous ringing and knocking to bring Nevins to the door of
Vane's house.
"I am Miss Vanlief," she said, "I want to see my father's mirror."
"Certainly, miss, certainly." He tottered before her, chuckling and
chattering to himself. He was in the condition now when nothing
surprised him; any rascal could have led him with a word or a hint; he
was immeasurably gay at everything in the world. He reeled to the
dressing-room with an elaborate air of courtesy.
"At your service, miss, there you are, miss. You walk straight on, and
there you are, miss. There's the mirror, miss, plain as pudding."
She strode past him, drawing her skirt away from the horrible taint of
his breath. She knew she would find the mirror at once, curtained and
solitary sentinel before the doorway. She would simply break it with her
parasol, stab it, viciously, from behind.
But, once past the portal, she gave a little cry.
All the mirrors were jumbled together, all looked alike, and all faced
her, mysterious, glaringly.
"Nevins," she called out, "which--which is the one?"
"Ah, miss," he said, leeringly, "don't I wish I knew."
No sense of possible danger to herself, only a despair at failure, came
upon Jeannette. Failure! Failure! She had meant to avert disaster, and
she had accomplished--nothing, nothing at all.
She left the house almost in tears. She felt sure Vane would yield again
to the temptation of these frightful experiments. She could do nothing,
nothing. She had felt justified in attempting destruction of what was
her father's; but she could not wantonly offer all that array of mirrors
on the altar of her purpose. She stumbled along the street, suffering,
full of tears. It was with a sigh of relief that she saw a hansom and
hailed it. The cab had hardly turned a corner before Orson Vane, coming
from another direction, let himself into his house. His conference with
Vanlief had ceased at his own promise to make just one more trial of the
mirror. He could not go about the business of the life he led in town
without assuring himself the mirror was safe.
He found Nevins incoherent and useless. He began to consider seriously
the advisability of discharging the man; still, he hated to do that to
an old servant, and the man might come to his senses and his duties.
He spent some little time re-arranging the mirrors in his room. He was
sure there had been no intrusion since he was there himself, and he knew
Nevins well enough to know that individual's horror of facing the
mirror. He himself faced the new mirror boldly enough, sure that his own
image was the only one resting there. He knew the mirror easily, in
spite of the robbery that the wind, as he thought, had committed.
Nevins, hiding in the corridor, watched him, in drunken amusement.
CHAPTER XIX.
The sun, glittering along the avenue, shimmering on the rustling gowns
of the women and smoothing the coats of the horses, smote Orson Vane
gently; the fairness of the day flooded his soul with a tide of
well-being. In the air and on the town there seemed some subtle
radiance, some glamour of enchantment. The smell of violets was all
about him. The colors of new fashions dotted the vision like a painting
by Hassam; a haze of warmth covered the town like a kiss.
His thoughts, keyed, in some strange, sweet way, to all the pleasant,
happy, pretty things in life, brought him the vision of Jeannette
Vanlief. How long, how far away seemed that day when she had been at his
side, when her voice had enveloped him in its silver echoes!
As carriage after carriage passed him, he began to fancy Jeannette, in
all her roseate beauty, driving toward him. He saw the curve of her
ankle as she stepped into the carriage; he dreamed of her flower-like
attitude as she leaned to the cushions.
Then the miracle happened; Jeannette, a little tired, a little pale, a
little more fragile than when last he had seen her, was coming toward
him. A smile, a gentle, tender, slightly sad--but yet so sweet, so
sweet!--a smile was on her lips. He took her hand and held it and looked
into her eyes, and the two souls in that instant kissed and became one.
"This time," he said--and as he spoke all that had happened since they
had pretended, childishly, on the top of the old stage on the Avenue,
seemed to slip away, to fade, to be forgotten--"it must be a real
luncheon. You are fagged. So am I. You are like a breath of
lilies-of-the-valley. Come!"
They took a table by an open window. The procession of the town nearly
touched them, so close was it. To them both it seemed, to-day, a happy,
joyous, fine procession.
"Will you tell me something?" asked the girl, presently, after they had
laughed and chattered like two children for awhile.
"Anything in the world."
"Well, then--are you ever, ever going to face that dreadful mirror
again?"
He smiled, as if there was nothing astonishing in her knowledge, her
question.
"Do you want me not to?"
She nodded.
He put his hand across the table, on one of hers. "Jeannette," he
whispered, "I promise. Why do you care? It is not possible that you
care because, because--Jeannette, will you promise me something, too?"
They have excellent waiters at the Mayfair. They can be absolutely blind
at times. This was such a time. The particular waiter who was serving
Vane's table, took a sudden, rapt interest in the procession on the
avenue.
Jeanette crumbled a macaroon with her free hand.
"You have my hand," she pouted.
"I need it," he said. "It is a very pretty hand. And very strong. I
think it must have lifted all my ills from me to-day. I feel nothing but
kindness toward the whole world. I could kiss--the whole world."
"Oh," said Jeannette, pulling her hand away a little, "you monster! You
are worse than Nero."
"Do you think my kisses would be so awful, then? Or is it simply the
piggishness of me that makes you call me a monster. That's not the right
way to look at it. Think of all the dreadful people there are in the
world; think how philanthropic you must make me feel if I want to kiss
even those."
"Ah, but the world is full of beautiful women."
"I do not believe it," he vowed. "I do not think God had any beauty left
after he fashioned--you."
He was not ashamed, not one iota of the grossness of that fable. He
really felt so. Indeed, all his life he never felt otherwise than that
toward Jeannette. And she took the shocking compliment quite serenely.
"You are absurd," she said, but she looked as if she loved absurdity.
"Please, may I take my hand?"
"If you will be very good and promise--"
"What?"
"To give me something in exchange."
"Something in exchange?"
"Yes. The sweetest thing in the world, the best, and the dearest. You,
dear, yourself. Oh! dearest, if I could tell you what I feel.
Speech--what a silly thing speech is! It can only hint clumsily,
futilely. If I could only tell you, for instance, how the world has
suddenly taken on brightness for me since you smiled. I feel a
tenderness to all nature. I believe at heart there is good in everyone,
don't you? To-day I seem to see nothing but good. I could find you a
lovable spot in the worst villain you might name. I suppose it is the
stream of sweetness that comes from you, dear. Why can't this hour last
forever. I want it to, oh, I want it to!"
"It is," she whispered, "an hour I shall always remember."
"Yes, but it must last, it can't die; it sha'n't! Jeannette, let us make
this hour last us our lives! Can't we?"
"Our lives?" she whispered.
"Yes, our lives. This is only the first minute of our life. We must
never part again. I seem to have been behind a cloud of doubt and
distrust until this moment. I hardly realize what has happened to me. Is
love so refining a thing as all this? Does it turn bitter into sweet,
and make all the ups and downs of the world shine like one level,
beautiful sea of tenderness? It can be nothing else, but that--my love,
our--can I say our love, Jeannette?"
The sun streamed in at the window, kissing the tendrils of her hair and
bringing to their copper shimmer a yet brighter blush. The day, with all
its perfume, the splendor of its people, the riot of color of its gowns,
the pride and pomp of its statues and its fountains, flushed the most
secret rills of life.
"It is a marvel of a day," said Jeannette.
"A marvel? It is an impossible day; it is not a day at all--it is merely
the hour of hours, the supreme instant, the melody so sweet that it must
break or blind our hearts. You are right, dear, it is a marvelous hour.
You make me repeat myself. Can we let this hour--escape, Jeannette?"
"It goes fast."
"Fast--fast as the wind. Fleet as air and fair as heaven are the
instants that bring happiness to common mortals. But we must hold the
hour, cage it, leash it to our lives."
"Do you think we can?"
She had used the "we!" Oh yes, and she had said it; she had said it; he
sang the refrain over to himself in a swoon of bliss.
"I am sure of it," he urged. "Will you try?"
"You are so much the stronger," she mocked.
"Oh--if it depends on me--! Try? I shall succeed! I know it. Such love
as mine cannot fail. If only you will let me try. That is all; just
that.
"I wish you luck!" she smiled.
"You have said it," he jubilated, "you have said it!" And then,
realizing that she had meant it all the time, he threatened her with a
look, a shake of the head--oh, you would have said he wanted to punish
her in some terrible way, some way that was filled with kisses.
"Jeannette," he whispered, "I have never heard you speak my name."
"A pretty name, too," she said. "I have wondered if I might not spoil it
in my pronunciation."
"You beautiful bit of mockery, you," he said, "will you condescend to
repeat a little sentence after me? You will say it far more prettily
than I, but perhaps you will forgive my lack of music. I am only a man.
You--ah, you are a goddess."
"For how long?" she asked. "Men marry goddesses and find them clay,
don't they?"
"You are not clay, dear, you are star-dust, and flowers, and fragrance.
There is not a thought in your dear head that is in tune with mere
clay. But listen! You must say this after me: I--"
"I--"
"Love--"
"Love--"
"You--"
"You--"
"Jeannette--"
Her lips began to frame the consonant for her own name, but at sight of
the pleading in his gaze she stilled the playfulness of her, and
finished, shyly, but oh, so sweetly.
"Orson."
The dear, delightful absurdities of the hour when men and women tell
each other they love, how silly, and how pathetic they must seem to the
all-seeing force that flings our destinies back and forth at its will!
Yet how fair, how ineffably fair, those moments are to their heroes and
heroines; how vastly absurd the rest of the sad, serious world seems to
such lovers, and how happy are the mortals, after all, who through
fastnesses of doubt and darkness, come to the free spaces where the
heart, in tenderness and grace, rules supreme over the intellect, and
keeps in subjection, wisdom, ignorance and all the ills men plague their
minds with!
When they left the Mayfair together their precious secret was anything
but a secret. Their dream lay fair and open to the world; one must have
been very blind not to see how much these two were in love with each
other. They had gone over every incident of their friendship; they had
stirred the embers of their earliest longings; they had touched their
growing happiness at every point save where Orson's steps aside had hurt
his sweetheart's memory. Those periods both avoided. All else they made
subject for, oh, the tenderest, the most lovelorn conversation
thinkable. It was enough, if overheard, to have sickened the whole day
for any ordinary mortal.
One must, to repeat, have been very stupid not to see, when they issued
upon the avenue, that they shared the secret that this world appears to
have been created to keep alive. Love clothed them like a visible
garment.
Luke Moncreith could never have been called blind or stupid. He saw the
truth at once. The truth; it rushed over him like a salt, bitter, acrid
sea. He swallowed it as a drowning man swallows what overwhelms him. One
instant of terrible rage spun him as if he had been a top; he faced
about and was for making, then and there, a scene with this shamelessly
happy pair. But the futility of that struck him on the following second.
He kept his way down the avenue, emotions surging in him; he felt that
his passions were becoming visible and conspicuous; he took a turning
into one of the streets leading eastward. A sign of a wineshop flashed
across his dancing vision, and he clung to it as to an anchor or a
poison. He found a table. He wanted nothing else, only rest, rest. The
wine stood untasted on the bare wood before him. He peered, through it,
into an unfathomable mystery. This chameleon, this fellow Vane--how was
it possible that he had won this glorious, flower-like creature,
Jeannette? This man had been, as the fancy took him, a court fool, a
sporting nonentity, and a blatant mummer. And what was he now? By the
looks of him, he was, to-day--and for how long, Moncreith wondered--a
very essence of meekness and sweetness; butter would not think of
melting in his mouth. What, in the devil's name, what was this riddle!
He might have repeated that question to himself until the end of his
life if the door had not opened then and let in Nevins.
Nevins ordered the strongest liquor in the place. The sideboard on
Vanthuysen Square might be empty, but Nevins had still the money. As for
the gloomy old Vane house, he really could not stand it any longer. He
toasted himself, did Nevins, and he talked to himself.
"'An now," he murmured, thickly, "'ere's to the mirror. May I never see
it again as long as I 'as breath in my body and wits in me 'ead. Which,"
he observed, with a fatuous grin, "aint for long. No, sir; me nerves is
that a-shake I aint good for nothin' any more. And I asks you, is it
any wonder? 'Ere's Mr. Vane, one day, pleasant as pie. Next day, comes
in, takes a look at that dratted mirror of the Perfessor's, and takes to
'igh jinks. Yes, sir, 'igh jinks, very 'igh jinks. 'As pink tea-fights
in his rooms, 'angs up pictures I wouldn't let me own father see--no,
sir, not if 'e begged me on his bended knee, I wouldn't--and wears what
you might call a tenor voice. Then--one day, while you says 'One for his
Nob' 'e's 'imself again. An' it's always the mirror this, an' the mirror
that. I must look out for it, an' it mustn't be touched, and nobody must
come in. And what's the result of it all? Me nerves is gone, and me
self-respect is gone, and I'm a poor miserable drunkard!"
He gulped down some of his misery.
"Join me," said a voice nearby, "in another of those things!"
Nevins turned, with a swaying motion, to note Moncreith, whose hand was
pointing to the empty glass before Nevins.
"You are quite right," he went on, when the other's glass had been
filled again, "Mr. Vane's conduct has been most scandalous of late. You
say he has a mirror?"
All circumspection had long since passed from Nevins. He was simply an
individual with a grievance. The many episodes that, in his filmy mind,
seemed to center about that mirror, shifted and twisted in him to where
they forced utterance. He began to talk, circuitously, wildly, rapidly,
of the many things that rankled in him. He told all he knew, all he had
observed. From out of the mass of inane, not pertinent ramblings,
Moncreith caught a glimmer of the facts.
What a terrible power this must be that was in Orson Vane's possession!
Moncreith shuddered at the thought. Why, the man might turn himself, in
all but externals--and what, after all, was the husk, the shell, the
body?--into the finest wit, the most lovable hero of his time; he might
fare about the world wrecking now this, now that, happiness; he might
win--perhaps he actually had, even now, won Jeannette Vanlief? If he
had, if--perhaps there was yet time! There was need for sharp, desperate
action.
He plunged out of the place and toward Vanthuysen Square. Then he
remembered that he could not get in. He aroused Nevins from his brutish
doze. He dragged him over the intervening space. Nevins gave him the
key, and dropped into one of the hall chairs. Moncreith leaped upstairs,
and entered the room where the mirror stood, white, silent, stately.
He contemplated everything for a time. He conjured up the picture he had
been able to piece together from the rambling monologues of Nevins. He
wondered whether to simply smash in the mirrors--he would destroy them
all, to make sure--by taking a chair-leg to them, or whether he would
carefully pour some acid over them.
The simpler plan appealed most to him. It was the quickest, the most
thorough. He took a little wooden chair that stood by an ebon
escritoire, swung it high in the air and brought it with a shattering
crash upon the face of the Professor's mirror.
But there was more than a mere crash. A deadly, sickening, stifling fume
arose from the space the clinking glass unbared; a flame burst out,
leaped at Moncreith and seized him. The deadly white smoke flowed
through the room; flame followed flame, curtains, hangings, screens
went, one after the other, to feed the ravenous beast that Moncreith's
blow had liberated. The room was presently a seething furnace that
rattled in the cage of the walls and windows. Moncreith lay, choked with
the horrid smoke, on the floor. The flames licked at him again and
again; finally one took him on the tip of its tongue, twisted him about,
and shriveled him to black, charred shapelessness.
The windows fell, finally, out upon the street below. The fire sneaked
downward, laughing and leaping.
When the firemen came to save Orson Vane's house, they found a grinning,
sodden creature in the hall.
It was Nevins. "That settles the mirror!" was all he kept repeating.
CHAPTER XX.
The Professor shivered a little when Jeannette came to him with her
budget of wonderful news. She told him of her engagement. He patted her
head, and blessed her and wished her happiness. Then she told him of her
visit to Vane's house. It was at that he shivered.
He wondered if Vane had taken her image from that fatal glass. If he
had, how, he wondered, would this experiment end? Surely it could not
have happened; Jeannette was quite herself; there was no visible
diminution of charm, of vitality.
When Vane arrived, presently, the Professor questioned him. The answer
brought the Professor wonder, but he did not count it altogether a
calamity. There could be no doubt that Orson Vane was now wearing
Jeannette's sweet and beautiful soul as a halo round his own. Well,
mused Vanlief, if anything should happen to Jeannette one can always--
"Oh, father!"
Jeannette burst into the room with the morning paper from town. "Orson's
house is burnt to the ground. And who do you think is suspected? Luke
Moncreith! They found his body. Read it!"
The Professor took the report and scanned it. There could be no doubt;
the mirror, the work of his life, was gone. He could never fashion one
like it. Never--Yet--He looked at the two young people at the window,
whither they had turned together, each with an arm about the other.
"What a marvel of a day!" Jeannette was saying.
"The days will all be marvels for us," said Orson.
"The days, I think, must have souls, just as we have. Some days seem to
have such dark, such bitter thoughts.
"Yes, I think you are right. There are days that strike one as having
souls; others that seem quite soulless. Beautiful, empty shells, some of
them; others, dim, yet tender, full of graciousness."
"Orson!"
"Sweetheart!"
"Do you know how wonderfully you are changed? Do you know you once
talked bitterly, as one who was full of disappointments and
disenchantments?"
"You have set me, dear, in a garden of enchantment from which I mean
never to escape. The garden is your heart."
Something glistened in the Professor's eyes as he listened. "God, in
his infinite wisdom," he said, in a reverent whisper, "gave her so much
of grace; she had enough for both!"
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