"Our distinguished alumnus," after being duly presented as such, had
with vivacity delivered much the usual sort of Commencement Address.
Yet John Charteris was in reality a trifle fagged.
The afternoon train had been vexatiously late. The little novelist had
found it tedious to interchange inanities with the committee awaiting
him at the Pullman steps. Nor had it amused him to huddle into
evening-dress, and hasten through a perfunctory supper in order to
reassure his audience at half-past eight precisely as to the
unmitigated delight of which he was now conscious.
Nevertheless, he alluded with enthusiasm to the arena of life, to the
dependence of America's destiny upon the younger generation, to the
enviable part King's College had without exception played in history,
and he depicted to Fairhaven the many glories of Fairhaven--past,
present and approaching--in superlatives that would hardly have seemed
inadequate if applied to Paradise. His oration, in short, was of a
piece with the amiable bombast that the college students and Fairhaven
at large were accustomed to applaud at every Finals--the sort of
linguistic debauch that John Charteris himself remembered to have
applauded as an undergraduate more years ago than he cared to
acknowledge.
Pauline Romeyne had sat beside him then--yonder, upon the fourth bench
from the front, where now another boy with painstakingly plastered hair
was clapping hands. There was a girl on the right of this boy, too.
There naturally would be. Mr. Charteris as he sat down was wondering
if Pauline was within reach of his voice? and if she were, what was
her surname nowadays?
Then presently the exercises were concluded, and the released auditors
arose with an outwelling noise of multitudinous chatter, of shuffling
feet, of rustling programs. Many of Mr. Charteris' audience, though,
were contending against the general human outflow and pushing toward
the platform, for Fairhaven was proud of John Charteris now that his
colorful tales had risen, from the semi-oblivion of being cherished
merely by people who cared seriously for beautiful things, to the
distinction of being purchasable in railway stations; so that, in
consequence, Fairhaven wished both to congratulate him and to renew
acquaintanceship.
He, standing there, alert and quizzical, found it odd to note how
unfamiliar beaming faces climbed out of the hurly-burly of retreating
backs, to say, "Don't you remember me? I'm so-and-so." These were the
people whom he had lived among once, and some of these had once been
people whom he loved. Now there was hardly any one whom at a glance he
would have recognized.
Nobody guessed as much. He was adjudged to be delightful, cordial,
"and not a bit stuck-up, not spoiled at all, you know." To appear this
was the talisman with which he banteringly encountered the universe.
But John Charteris, as has been said, was in reality a trifle fagged.
When everybody had removed to the Gymnasium, where the dancing was to
be, and he had been delightful there, too, for a whole half-hour, he
grasped with avidity at his first chance to slip away, and did so under
cover of a riotous two-step.
He went out upon the Campus.
He found this lawn untenanted, unless you chose to count the marble
figure of Lord Penniston, made aerial and fantastic by the moonlight,
standing as it it were on guard over the College. Mr. Charteris chose
to count him. Whimsically, Mr. Charteris reflected that this battered
nobleman's was the one familiar face he had exhumed in all Fairhaven.
And what a deal of mirth and folly, too, the old fellow must have
witnessed during his two hundred and odd years of sentry-duty! On
warm, clear nights like this, in particular, when by ordinary there
were only couples on the Campus, each couple discreetly remote from any
of the others. Then Penniston would be aware of most portentous pauses
(which a delectable and lazy conference of leaves made eloquent)
because of many unfinished sentences. "Oh, YOU know what I mean,
dear!" one would say as a last resort. And she-why, bless her heart!
of course, she always did. . . . Heigho, youth's was a pleasant
lunacy. . . .
Thus Charteris reflected, growing drowsy. She said, "You spoke very
well to-night. Is it too late for congratulations?"
Turning, Mr. Charteris remarked, "As you are perfectly aware, all that
I vented was just a deal of skimble-scamble stuff, a verbal syllabub of
balderdash. No, upon reflection, I think I should rather describe it
as a conglomeration of piffle, patriotism and pyrotechnics. Well,
Madam Do-as-you-would-be-done-by, what would you have? You must give
people what they want."
It was characteristic that he faced Pauline Romeyne--or was it still
Romeyne? he wondered--precisely as if it had been fifteen minutes,
rather than as many years, since they had last spoken together.
"Must one?" she asked. "Oh, yes, I know you have always thought that,
but I do not quite see the necessity of it."
She sat upon the bench beside Lord Penniston's square marble pedestal.
"And all the while you spoke I was thinking of those Saturday nights
when your name was up for an oration or a debate before the Eclectics,
and you would stay away and pay the fine rather than brave an audience."
"The tooth of Time," he reminded her, "has since then written wrinkles
on my azure brow. The years slip away fugacious, and Time that brings
forth her children only to devour them grins most hellishly, for Time
changes all things and cultivates even in herself an appreciation of
irony,--and, therefore, why shouldn't I have changed a trifle? You
wouldn't have me put on exhibition as a _lusus naturae_?"
"Oh, but I wish you had not altered so entirely!" Pauline sighed.
"At least, you haven't," he declared. "Of course, I would be compelled
to say so, anyhow. But in this happy instance courtesy and veracity
come skipping arm-in-arm from my elated lips." And, indeed, it seemed
to him that Pauline was marvelously little altered. "I wonder now," he
said, and cocked his head, "I wonder now whose wife I am talking to?"
"No, Jack, I never married," she said quietly.
"It is selfish of me," he said, in the same tone, "but I am glad of
that."
And so they sat a while, each thinking.
"I wonder," said Pauline, with that small plaintive voice which
Charteris so poignantly remembered, "whether it is always like this?
Oh, do the Overlords of Life and Death ALWAYS provide some obstacle to
prevent what all of us have known in youth was possible from ever
coming true?"
And again there was a pause which a delectable and lazy conference of
leaves made eloquent.
"I suppose it is because they know that if it ever did come true, we
would be gods like them." The ordinary associates of John Charteris,
most certainly, would not have suspected him to be the speaker. "So
they contrive the obstacle, or else they send false dreams--out of the
gates of horn--and make the path smooth, very smooth, so that two
dreamers may not be hindered on their way to the divorce-courts."
"Yes, they are jealous gods! oh, and ironical gods also! They grant
the Dream, and chuckle while they grant it, I think, because they know
that later they will be bringing their playthings face to face--each
married, fat, inclined to optimism, very careful of decorum, and
perfectly indifferent to each other. And then they get their
fore-planned mirth, these Overlords of Life and Death. 'We gave you,'
they chuckle, 'the loveliest and greatest thing infinity contains. And
you bartered it because of a clerkship or a lying maxim or perhaps a
finger-ring.' I suppose that they must laugh a great deal."
"Eh, what? But then you never married?" For masculinity in argument
starts with the word it has found distasteful.
"Why, no."
"Nor I." And his tone implied that the two facts conjoined proved much.
"Miss Willoughby----?" she inquired.
Now, how in heaven's name, could a cloistered Fairhaven have surmised
his intention of proposing on the first convenient opportunity to
handsome, well-to-do Anne Willoughby? He shrugged his wonder off.
"Oh, people will talk, you know. Let any man once find a woman has a
tongue in her head, and the stage-direction is always 'Enter Rumor,
painted full of tongues.'"
Pauline did not appear to have remarked his protest. "Yes,--in the end
you will marry her. And her money will help, just as you have
contrived to make everything else help, toward making John Charteris
comfortable. She is not very clever, but she will always worship you,
and so you two will not prove uncongenial. That is your real tragedy,
if I could make you comprehend."
"So I am going to develop into a pig," he said, with relish,--"a
lovable, contented, unambitious porcine, who is alike indifferent to
the Tariff, the importance of Equal Suffrage and the market-price of
hams, for all that he really cares about is to have his sty as
comfortable as may be possible. That is exactly what I am going to
develop into,--now, isn't it?" And John Charteris, sitting, as was his
habitual fashion, with one foot tucked under him, laughed cheerily.
Oh, just to be alive (he thought) was ample cause for rejoicing! and
how deliciously her eyes, alert with slumbering fires, were peering
through the moon-made shadows of her brows!
"Well----! something of the sort." Pauline was smiling, but
restrainedly, and much as a woman does in condoning the naughtiness of
her child. "And, oh, if only----"
"Why, precisely. 'If only!' quotha. Why, there you word the key-note,
you touch the cornerstone, you ruthlessly illuminate the mainspring, of
an intractable unfeeling universe. For instance, if only
You were the Empress of Ayre and Skye,
And I were Ahkond of Kong,
We could dine every day on apple-pie,
And peddle potatoes, and sleep in a sty,
And people would say when we came to die,
'They _never_ did anything wrong.'
But, as it is, our epitaphs will probably be nothing of the sort. So
that there lurks, you see, much virtue in this 'if only.'"
Impervious to nonsense, she asked, "And have I not earned the right to
lament that you are changed?"
"I haven't robbed more than six churches up to date," he grumbled.
"What would you have?"
The answer came, downright, and, as he knew, entirely truthful: "I
would have had you do all that you might have done."
But he must needs refine. "Why, no--you would have made me do it,
wrung out the last drop. You would have bullied me and shamed me into
being all that I might have been. I see that now." He spoke as if in
wonder, with quickening speech. "Pauline, I haven't been entirely not
worth while. Oh, yes, I know! I know I haven't written five-act
tragedies which would be immortal, as you probably expected me to do.
My books are not quite the books I was to write when you and I were
young. But I have made at worst some neat, precise and joyous little
tales which prevaricate tenderly about the universe and veil the
pettiness of human nature with screens of verbal jewelwork. It is not
the actual world they tell about, but a vastly superior place where the
Dream is realized and everything which in youth we knew was possible
comes true. It is a world we have all glimpsed, just once, and have
not ever entered, and have not ever forgotten. So people like my
little tales. . . . Do they induce delusions? Oh, well, you must give
people what they want, and literature is a vast bazaar where customers
come to purchase everything except mirrors."
She said soberly, "You need not make a jest of it. It is not
ridiculous that you write of beautiful and joyous things because there
was a time when living was really all one wonderful adventure, and you
remember it."
"But, oh, my dear, my dear! such glum discussions are so sadly
out-of-place on such a night as this," he lamented. "For it is a night
of pearl-like radiancies and velvet shadows and delicate odors and big
friendly stars that promise not to gossip, whatever happens. It is a
night that hungers, and all its undistinguishable little sounds are
voicing the night's hunger for masks and mandolins, for rope-ladders
and balconies and serenades. It is a night . . . a night wherein I
gratefully remember so many beautiful sad things that never
happened . . . to John Charteris, yet surely happened once upon a time
to me . . ."
"I think that I know what it is to remember--better than you do, Jack.
But what do you remember?"
"In faith, my dear, the most Bedlamitish occurrences! It is a night
that breeds deplorable insanities, I warn you. For I seem to remember
how I sat somewhere, under a peach-tree, in clear autumn weather, and
was content; but the importance had all gone out of things; and even
you did not seem very important, hardly worth lying to, as I spoke
lightly of my wasted love for you, half in hatred, and--yes, still half
in adoration. For you were there, of course. And I remember how I
came to you, in a sinister and brightly lighted place, where a
horrible, staring frail old man lay dead at your feet; and you had
murdered him; and heaven did not care, and we were old, and all our
lives seemed just to end in futile tangle-work. And, again, I remember
how we stood alone, with visible death crawling lazily toward us, as a
big sullen sea rose higher and higher; and we little tinseled creatures
waited, helpless, trapped and yearning. . . . There is a boat in that
picture; I suppose it was deeply laden with pirates coming to slit our
throats from ear to ear. I have forgotten that part, but I remember
the tiny spot of courtplaster just above your painted lips. . . . Such
are the jumbled pictures. They are bred of brain-fag, no doubt; yet,
whatever be their lineage," said Charteris, happily, "they render glum
discussion and platitudinous moralizing quite out of the question. So,
let's pretend, Pauline, that we are not a bit more worldly-wise than
those youngsters who are frisking yonder in the Gymnasium--for, upon my
word, I dispute if we have ever done anything to suggest that we are.
Don't let's be cowed a moment longer by those bits of paper with
figures on them which our too-credulous fellow-idiots consider to be
the only almanacs. Let's have back yesterday, let's tweak the nose of
Time intrepidly." Then Charteris caroled:
"For Yesterday! for Yesterday!
I cry a reward for a Yesterday
Now lost or stolen or gone astray,
With all the laughter of Yesterday!"
"And how slight a loss was laughter," she murmured--still with the
vague and gentle eyes of a day-dreamer--"as set against all that we
never earned in youth, and so will never earn."
He inadequately answered "Bosh!" and later, "Do you remember----?" he
began.
Yes, she remembered that, it developed. And "Do you remember----?" she
in turn was asking later. It was to seem to him in retrospection that
neither for the next half-hour began a sentence without this formula.
It was as if they sought to use it as a master-word wherewith to
reanimate the happinesses and sorrows of their common past, and as if
they found the charm was potent to awaken the thin, powerless ghosts of
emotions that were once despotic. For it was as if frail shadows and
half-caught echoes were all they could evoke, it seemed to Charteris;
and yet these shadows trooped with a wild grace, and the echoes
thrilled him with the sweet and piercing surprise of a bird's call at
midnight or of a bugle heard in prison.
Then twelve o'clock was heralded by the College bell, and Pauline arose
as though this equable deep-throated interruption of the music's levity
had been a signal. John Charteris saw her clearly now; and she was
beautiful.
"I must go. You will not ever quite forget me, Jack. Such is my sorry
comfort." It seemed to Charteris that she smiled as in mockery, and
yet it was a very tender sort of derision. "Yes, you have made your
books. You have done what you most desired to do. You have got all
from life that you have asked of life. Oh, yes, you have got much from
life. One prize, though, Jack, you missed."
He, too, had risen, quiet and perfectly sure of himself. "I haven't
missed it. For you love me."
This widened her eyes. "Did I not always love you, Jack? Yes, even
when you went away forever, and there were no letters, and the days
were long. Yes, even knowing you, I loved you, John Charteris."
"Oh, I was wrong, all wrong," he cried; "and yet there is something to
be said upon the other side, as always. . . ." Now Charteris was still
for a while. The little man's chin was uplifted so that it was toward
the stars he looked rather than at Pauline Romeyne, and when he spoke
he seemed to meditate aloud. "I was born, I think, with the desire to
make beautiful books--brave books that would preserve the glories of
the Dream untarnished, and would re-create them for battered people,
and re-awaken joy and magnanimity." Here he laughed, a little
ruefully. "No, I do not think I can explain this obsession to any one
who has never suffered from it. But I have never in my life permitted
anything to stand in the way of my fulfilling this desire to serve the
Dream by re-creating it for others with picked words, and that has cost
me something. Yes, the Dream is an exacting master. My books, such as
they are, have been made what they are at the dear price of never
permitting myself to care seriously for anything else. I might not
dare to dissipate my energies by taking any part in the drama I was
attempting to re-write, because I must so jealously conserve all the
force that was in me for the perfection of my lovelier version. That
may not be the best way of making books, but it is the only one that
was possible for me. I had so little natural talent, you see," said
Charteris, wistfully, "and I was anxious to do so much with it. So I
had always to be careful. It has been rather lonely, my dear. Now,
looking back, it seems to me that the part I have played in all other
people's lives has been the role of a tourist who enters a cafe
chantant, a fortress, or a cathedral, with much the same forlorn sense
of detachment, and observes what there is to see that may be worth
remembering, and takes a note or two, perhaps, and then leaves the
place forever. Yes, that is how I served the Dream and that is how I
got my books. They are very beautiful books, I think, but they cost me
fifteen years of human living and human intimacy, and they are hardly
worth so much."
He turned to her, and his voice changed. "Oh, I was wrong, all wrong,
and chance is kindlier than I deserve. For I have wandered after
unprofitable gods, like a man blundering through a day of mist and fog,
and I win home now in its golden sunset. I have laughed very much, my
dear, but I was never happy until to-night. The Dream, as I now know,
is not best served by making parodies of it, and it does not greatly
matter after all whether a book be an epic or a directory. What really
matters is that there is so much faith and love and kindliness which we
can share with and provoke in others, and that by cleanly, simple,
generous living we approach perfection in the highest and most lovely
of all arts. . . . But you, I think, have always comprehended this.
My dear, if I were worthy to kneel and kiss the dust you tread in I
would do it. As it happens, I am not worthy. Pauline, there was a
time when you and I were young together, when we aspired, when life
passed as if it were to the measures of a noble music--a
heart-wringing, an obdurate, an intolerable music, it might be, but
always a lofty music. One strutted, no doubt--it was because one knew
oneself to be indomitable. Eh, it is true I have won all I asked of
life, very horribly true. All that I asked, poor fool! oh, I am weary
of loneliness, and I know now that all the phantoms I have raised are
only colorless shadows which belie the Dream, and they are hateful to
me. I want just to recapture that old time we know of, and we two
alone. I want to know the Dream again, Pauline,--the Dream which I had
lost, had half forgotten, and have so pitifully parodied. I want to
know the Dream again, Pauline, and you alone can help me."
"Oh, if I could! if even I could now, my dear!" Pauline Romeyne left
him upon a sudden, crying this. And "So!" said Mr. Charteris.
He had been deeply shaken and very much in earnest; but he was never
the man to give for any lengthy while too slack a rein to emotion; and
so he now sat down upon the bench and lighted a cigarette and smiled.
Yet he fully recognized himself to be the most enviable of men and an
inhabitant of the most glorious world imaginable--a world wherein he
very assuredly meant to marry Pauline Romeyne say, in the ensuing
September. Yes, that would fit in well enough, although, of course, he
would have to cancel the engagement to lecture in Milwaukee. . . . How
lucky, too, it was that he had never actually committed himself with
Anne Willoughby! for while money was an excellent thing to have, how
infinitely less desirable it was to live perked up in golden sorrow
than to feed flocks upon the Grampian Hills, where Freedom from the
mountain height cried, "I go on forever, a prince can make a belted
knight, and let who will be clever. . . ."
"--and besides, you'll catch your death of cold," lamented Rudolph
Musgrave, who was now shaking Mr. Charteris' shoulder.
"Eh, what? Oh, yes, I daresay I was napping," the other mumbled. He
stood and stretched himself luxuriously. "Well, anyhow, don't be such
an unmitigated grandmother. You see, I have a bit of rather important
business to attend to. Which way is Miss Romeyne?"
"Pauline Romeyne? why, but she married old General Ashmeade, you know.
She was the gray-haired woman in purple who carried out her squalling
brat when Taylor was introducing you, if you remember. She told me,
while the General was getting the horses around, how sorry she was to
miss your address, but they live three miles out, and Mrs. Ashmeade is
simply a slave to the children. . . . Why, what in the world have you
been dreaming about?"
"Eh, what? Oh, yes, I daresay I was only napping," Mr. Charteris
observed. He was aware that within they were still playing a riotous
two-step.
_BALLAD OF PLAGIARY_
"_Frères et matres, vous qui cultivez_"--PAUL VERVILLE.
Hey, my masters, lords and brothers, ye that till the fields of rhyme,
Are ye deaf ye will not hearken to the clamor of your time?
Still ye blot and change and polish--vary, heighten and transpose--
Old sonorous metres marching grandly to their tranquil close.
Ye have toiled and ye have fretted; ye attain perfected speech:
Ye have nothing new to utter and but platitudes to preach.
And your rhymes are all of loving, as within the old days when
Love was lord of the ascendant in the horoscopes of men.
Still ye make of love the utmost end and scope of all your art;
And, more blind than he you write of, note not what a modest part
Loving now may claim in living, when we have scant time to spare,
Who are plundering the sea-depths, taking tribute of the air,--
Whilst the sun makes pictures for us; since to-day, for good or ill,
Earth and sky and sea are harnessed, and the lightnings work our will.
Hey, my masters, all these love-songs by dust-hidden mouths were sung
That ye mimic and re-echo with an artful-artless tongue,--
Sung by poets close to nature, free to touch her garments' hem
Whom to-day ye know not truly; for ye only copy them.
Them ye copy--copy always, with your backs turned to the sun,
Caring not what man is doing, noting that which man has done.
_We are talking over telephones, as Shakespeare could not talk;_
_We are riding out in motor-cars where Homer had to walk;_
_And pictures Dante labored on of mediaeval Hell_
_The nearest cinematograph paints quicker, and as well._
But ye copy, copy always;--and ye marvel when ye find
This new beauty, that new meaning,--while a model stands behind,
Waiting, young and fair as ever, till some singer turn and trace
Something of the deathless wonder of life lived in any place.
Hey, my masters, turn from piddling to the turmoil and the strife!
Cease from sonneting, my brothers; let us fashion songs from life.
_Thus I wrote ere Percie passed me. . . . Then did I epitomize_
_All life's beauty in one poem, and make haste to eulogize_
_Quite the fairest thing life boasts of, for I wrote of Percie's eyes._