During those first months of Susan's absence, which for more than four
years were to prove the last months of almost world-wide and wholly
world-deceptive peace, several things occurred of more or less
importance to the present history. They marked, for one thing, the
auspicious sprouting and rapid initial growth of Susan's literary
reputation. Her poems appeared little more than a month after she had
left us, a well-printed volume of less than a hundred pages, in a sober
green cover. I had taken a lonely sort of joy in reading and rereading
the proof; and if even a split letter escaped me, it has not yet been
brought to my attention. These poems were issued under a quiet title and
an unobtrusive pen-name, slipping into the market-place without any
preliminary puffing, and I feared they were of too fine a texture to
attract the notice that I felt they deserved. But in some respects, at
least, Susan was born under a lucky star. An unforeseen combination of
events suddenly focused public attention--just long enough to send it
into a third edition--upon this inconspicuous little book.
Concurrently with its publication, _The Puppet Booth_ opened its
doors--its door, rather--on Macdougal Street; an artistic venture quite
as marked, you would say, for early oblivion as Susan's own. The cocoon
of _The Puppet Booth_ was a small stable where a few Italian venders of
fruit and vegetables had kept their scarecrow horses and shabby carts
and handcarts. From this drab cocoon issued a mailed and militant
dragon-fly; vivid, flashing, erratic; both ugly and beautiful--and
wholly alive! For there were in Greenwich Village--as there are, it
would seem, in all lesser villages, from Florida to Oregon--certain
mourners over and enthusiasts for the art called Drama, which they
believed to be virtually extinct. Shows, it is true, hundreds of them,
were each season produced on Broadway, and some of these delighted hosts
of the affluent, sentimental, and child-like American _bourgeoisie_.
Fortunate managers, playsmiths and actors, endowed with sympathy for the
crude tastes of this _bourgeoisie_, a sympathy partly instinctive and
partly developed by commercial acumen, waxed fat with a prosperity for
which the Village could not wearily enough express its contempt.
None of these creatures, said the Village--no, not one--was a genuine
artist! The Theater, they affirmed, had been raped by the Philistines
and prostituted to sophomoric merrymakers by cynical greed. The Theater!
Why, it should be a temple, inviolably dedicated to its peculiar god.
Since the death of religion, it was perhaps the one temple worthy of
pious preservation. Only in a Theater, sincerely consecrated to the
great god, Art, could the enlightened, the sophisticated, the
free--unite to worship. There only, they implied, could something
adumbrating a sacred ritual and a spiritual consolation be preserved.
Luckily for Susan, and indeed for us all--for we have all been gainers
from the spontaneous generation of "little theaters" all over America, a
phenomenon at its height just previous to the war--one village
enthusiast, Isidore Stalinski--by vocation an accompanist, by avocation
a vorticist, by race and nature a publicist--had succeeded in mildly
infecting Mona Leslie--who took everything in the air, though nothing
severely--with offhand zeal for his cause. The importance of her rather
casual conversion lay in the fact that her purse strings were
perpetually untied. Stalinski well knew that you cannot run even a tiny
temple for a handful of worshippers without vain oblations on the side
to the false gods of this world, and these imply--oh, Art's desire!--a
donor. And of all possible varieties of donor, that most to be desired
is the absentee donor--the donor who donates as God sends rain, unseen.
At precisely the right moment Stalinski whispered to Mona Leslie that
_entre them_--though he didn't care to be quoted--he preferred her
interpretation of Faure's _Clair de Lune_ to that of ----, the
particular _diva_ he had just been accompanying through a long,
rapturously advertised concert tour; and Mona Leslie, about to be off on
her European flight, became the absentee donor to _The Puppet Booth_.
The small stable was leased and cleansed and sufficiently reshaped to
live up to its anxiously chosen name. Much of the reshaping and all of
the decorating was done, after business hours, by the clever and pious
hands of the villagers. Then four one-act plays were selected from among
some hundreds poured forth by village genius to its rehabilitated god.
The clever and pious hands flew faster than ever, busying themselves
with scenery and costumes and properties and color and lighting--all
blended toward the creation of a thoroughly uncommercial atmosphere. And
the four plays were staged, directed, acted, and finally attended by the
Village. It was a perfectly lovely party and the pleasantest of times
was had by all.
And it only remains to drop this tone of patronizing persiflage and
admit, with humblest honesty, that the first night at _The Puppet Booth_
was that very rare thing, a complete success; what Broadway calls a
"knockout." Within a fortnight seats for _The Puppet Booth_ were at a
ruinous premium in all the ticket agencies on or near Times Square.
I happened to be there on that ecstatic opening night. Susan, in her
first letter, from Liverpool, had enjoined me to attend and report; Mona
would be glad to learn from an unprejudiced outsider how the affair went
off. But Susan did not mention the fact that one of the four selected
plays had been written by herself.
Jimmy was with me. Phil, who saw more of him than I did, thought he was
going stale from overwork, so I had made a point of hunting him up and
dragging him off with me for a night in town. He hadn't wanted to go;
said frankly, he wasn't in the mood. I'm convinced it was the first time
he had ever used the word "mood" in connection with himself or anybody
else. Jimmy and moods of any kind simply didn't belong together.
We had a good man's dinner at a good man's chop-house that night, and,
once I got Jimmy to work on it, his normal appetite revived and he
engulfed oysters and steak and a deep-dish apple pie and a mug or so of
ale, with mounting gusto. We talked, of course, of Susan.
Jimmy, inclined to a rosier view by comfortable repletion, now
maintained that perhaps after all Susan had done the natural and
sensible thing in joining Miss Leslie. He emphasized all the obvious
advantages--complete change of environment, freedom from financial
worry, and so on; then he paused....
"And there's another point, Mr. Hunt," he began again, doubtfully this
time: "Prof. Farmer and I were talking about it only the other day. We
were wondering whether we oughtn't to speak to you. But it's not the
easiest thing to speak of--it's so sort of vague--kind of a feeling in
the air."
I knew at once what he referred to, and nodded my head. "So you and Phil
have noticed it too!"
"Oh, you're _on_ then? I'm glad of that, sir. You've never mentioned
anything, so Prof. Farmer and I couldn't be sure. But it's got under our
skins that it might make a lot of trouble and something ought to be done
about it. It's hard to see what."
"Very," I agreed. "Fire ahead, Jimmy. Tell me exactly what has come to
you--to you, personally, I mean."
"Well," said Jimmy, leaning across the table to me and lowering his
voice, "it was all of three weeks ago. I went to a dance at the Lawn
Club. I don't dance very well, but I figure a fellow ought to know how
if he ever has to, so I've slipped in a few lessons. I can keep off my
partner's feet, anyway. Well, Steve Putnam took me round that night and
introduced me to some girls. I guess if they'd known my mother was
living in New Haven and married to a grocer, they wouldn't have had
anything to do with me. Maybe I ought to advertise the fact, but I
don't--simply because I can't stand for my stepfather, and so mother
won't stand for me. Mother and I never could get on, though; and it's
funny, too--as a general rule I can get on with 'most everybody. I told
Prof. Farmer the other night there must be something wrong with a fellow
who can't get on with his own mother--but he only laughed. Of course,
Mr. Hunt, I'm not exactly sailing under false pretenses, either; if any
girl wanted to make real friends with me--I'd tell her all about myself
first."
"Of course," I murmured.
"And the same with men. Steve, for instance. He knows all about me, and
his father has a lot of money, but he made it in soap--and Steve's from
the West, anyway, and don't care. Gee, I'm wandering--it's the ale, I
guess, Mr. Hunt; I'm not used to it. The point is. Steve introduced me
round, and I like girls all right, but Susan's kind of spoiled me for
the way most of them gabble. I can't do that easy, quick-talk very good
yet; Steve's a bear at it. Well--I sat out a dance with one of the
girls, a Miss Simmons; pretty, too; but she's only a kid. It was her
idea, sitting out the dance in a corner--I thought she didn't like the
way I handled myself. But that wasn't it. Mr. Hunt, she wanted to pump
me; went right at it, too.
"'You know Mr. Hunt awfully well, don't you?' she asked; and after I'd
said yes, and we'd sort of sparred round a little, she suddenly got
confidential, and a kind of thrilled look came into her eyes, and then
she asked me straight out: 'Have you ever heard there was
something--_mysterious_--about poor Mrs. Hunt's death?'
"'No,' I said.
"'Haven't you!' she said, as much as to tell me she knew, all the same,
I must have. 'Why, Mr. Kane, it's all over town. Nobody knows anything,
but it's terribly exciting! Some people think she committed suicide, all
because of that queer Miss Blake.... She must be--_you_ know! And now
she's run away to Europe! I believe she was just afraid to stay over
here, afraid she might be found out or arrested--or something!'
"That's the way she went on, Mr. Hunt; and, well--naturally, I
pooh-poohed it and steered her off, and then she lost interest in me
right away. But she's right, Mr. Hunt. There's a lot of that kind of
whispered stuff in the air, and I'm mighty glad Susan's off for a year
or two where she can't run into it. It'll all die out before she's back
again, of course."
"I hope so," was my reply; "but the source of these rumors is very
persistent--and very discreet. They start from Mrs. Arthur; they must.
But it's impossible to trace them back to her. Jimmy, she means to make
New Haven impossible for me, and I've an idea she's likely to succeed.
Already, three or four old acquaintances have--well, avoided me, and the
general atmosphere's cooling pretty rapidly toward zero. So far as I'm
concerned, it doesn't much matter; but it does matter for Susan. She may
return to find her whole future clouded by a settled impression that in
some way--indirectly--or even, directly--she was responsible for my
wife's sudden death."
"It's a damned outrage!" exclaimed Jimmy. "I don't know Mrs. Arthur, but
I'd like to wring her neck!"
"So would I, Jimmy; and she knows it. That's why she's finding life
these days so supremely worth living."
Jimmy pondered this. "Gee, I hate to think that badly of any woman," he
finally achieved; "but I guess it doesn't do to be a fool and think
they're all angels--like Susan. Mother's not."
"No, Jimmy, it doesn't do," I responded. "Still, the price for that kind
of wisdom is always much higher than it's worth."
"Women," began Jimmy---- But his aphorism somehow escaped him; he
decided to light a cigarette instead....
And on this wave of cynicism I floated him off with me to _The Puppet
Booth_.