it--at once." All fire and imperiousness, she held out grasping fingers.
He shook. And then carefully he drew from the inside pocket of his coat,
the purse. She snatched it. Yes--it was her purse. And yet there was
something strange about it. Had the stones been tampered with? She
examined it searchingly. She boasted a jeweller's knowledge of diamonds
and rubies. One of the stones had been transposed, that she could have
sworn. And how different the expression of the serpent's eyes--small
carbuncles. No--it was not her purse! She looked at Ambroise. He was
paling and reddening in rapid succession.
"It is _not_ my purse! How did this come into your possession? It is
very valuable, quite as valuable as mine. But the eyes of my serpent
were not so large--I mean the carbuncles. Ambroise--look at me! I
command you! Where did you find this treasure--cher ami!" Her seductive
voice lingered on the last words as if they were a morsel of delicious
fruit. He leaned heavily on the table and closed his eyes to shut out
her face--but he only saw scarlet. He heard scarlet.
"I--I--bought the thing because--you missed the other--" He could get no
further. She smiled, showing her celebrated teeth.
"You bought the thing--_hein_? You must be a prince in
disguise--Ambroise! And I have just lost _my_ Prince! Perhaps--you
thought--you audacious boy--"
He kept his eyes closed. She was in a corner of the room--quite
empty--the other waiters were on the terrace. She weighed his appearance
and smiled mysteriously; her smile, her glance, and her scarlet gowns
were her dramatic assets. Then she spoke in a low voice--a contralto
like the darker tones of an English horn:--
"I fancy I'll keep your thoughtful _gift_--Ambroise. And now, like a
good boy, get a fiacre for me!" She went away, leaving him standing in
the middle of the room, a pillar of burning ice. When Joseph spoke to
him he did not answer. Then they took him by the arm, and he fell over
in a seizure which, asserted the practical head waiter, was caused by
indigestion.
II
ACROSS THE STYX
It was raining on the Left Bank. The chill of a November afternoon cut
its way through the doors of the Café La Source in the Boul' Mich' and
made shiver the groups of young medical students who were reading or
playing dominos. Ambroise Nettier, older, thinner, paler, waited
carefully on his patrons. He had been in the hospital with brain fever,
and after he was cured, one of the students secured him a position at
this café in the Quartier. He had been afraid to go back to the Café
Riche; Joseph had harshly discharged him on that terrible night; alone,
without a home, without a penny, his savings gone, his life insurance
hypothecated,--it had been intended for the benefit of his parents,--his
clothes, his very trunk gone, and plunged in debt to his fellow-waiters,
his brain had succumbed to the shock. But Ambroise was young and strong;
when he left the hospital he was relieved to find that he no longer saw
scarlet. He was a healed man. He had intended to seek for a place at the
Café Cardinal, but it was too near the Café Riche--he might meet old
acquaintances, might be asked embarrassing questions. So he gladly
accepted his present opportunity.
The dulness of the day waxed with its waning. It was nearly six o'clock
when the door slowly opened and Aholibah entered. She was alone. Her
scarlet plumage was wet, and she was painted like a Peruvian war-god.
She did not appear so brilliant a bird of paradise--or elsewhere--as at
the aviary across the water. Yet her gaze was as forthright as ever. She
sat on a divan between two domino parties, and was hardly noticed by the
fanatics of that bony diversion. Recognizing Ambroise, she made a sign
to him. It was some minutes before he could reach her table; he had
other orders. When he did, she said she wanted some absinthe. He stared
at her. Yes, absinthe--she had discarded iced wines. The doctor told her
that cold wine was dangerous. He still stared. Then she held up the
purse. It was a mere shell; all the stones save the amethyst in the
mouth of the serpent were gone. She laughed shrilly. He went for the
drink. She lighted a cigarette....
Every night for six months she haunted the café. She was always
unattended, always in excellent humour. She made few friends among the
students. Her scarlet dress grew shabbier. Her gloves and boots were
pitiful to Ambroise, who recalled her former splendours, her outrageous
extravagances. Why had fortune flouted her! Why had she let it, like
water, escape through her jewelled, indifferent fingers! He made no
inquiries. She vouchsafed none. They were now on a different footing.
Tantalizingly she dangled the purse under his nose as he brought her
absinthe--always this opalescent absinthe. She drank it in the morning,
in the afternoon, at night. She seldom spoke save to Ambroise. And
he--he no longer saw scarlet, for the glorious tone of her hat and gown
had vanished. They were rusty red, a carroty tint. Her face was like the
mask of La Buveuse d'Absinthe, by Felicien Rops; her eyes, black wells
of regard; her hair without lustre, and coarse as the mane of a horse.
Aholibah no longer manifested interest in the life of Paris. She did not
read or gossip. But she still had money to spend.
The night he quarrelled with his new patron, Ambroise was not well. All
the day his head had pained him. When he reached La Source, the dame at
the cashier's desk told him that he was in for a scolding. He shrugged
his thin shoulders. He didn't care very much. Later the prophesied event
occurred. He had been much too attentive to the solitary woman who drank
absinthe day and night. The patron did not propose to see his
establishment, patronized as it was by the shining lights of medicine--!
Ambroise changed his clothes and went away without a word. He was weary
of his existence, and a friend who shared his wretched room in the Rue
Mouffetard had apprised him of a vacant job at a livelier resort, the
Café Vachette, commonly known as the Café Rasta. There he would earn
more tips, though the work would be more fatiguing. And--the Morocco
Woman might not follow him. He hurried away.
III
AVERNUS
She sat on a divan in the corner when he entered the Vachette for the
first time. He said nothing, nor did he experience either a thrill of
pleasure or disgust. The other waiters assured him that she was an old
customer, sometimes better dressed, yet never without money. And she was
liberal. He took her usual order, but did not speak to her, though she
played with the purse as if to tempt him--it had become for him a symbol
of their lives. A quick glance assured him that the amethyst had
disappeared. She was literally drinking _his_ gift away in absinthe. The
spring passed, and Ambroise did not regain his former health. His limbs
were leaden, his head always heavy. The alert waiter was transformed. He
took his orders soberly, executed them soberly,--he was still a good
routinier; but his early enthusiasm was absent. Something had gone from
him that night; as she went to her carriage with her scornful, snapping,
petulant _Ça_!--he felt that his life was over. Aholibah watched like a
cat every night; he was not on for day duty. She never came to the Rasta
before dark. The story of her infatuation for the well-bred, melancholy
garçon was noised about; but it did not endanger his position, as at La
Source. He paid little attention to the jesting, and was scrupulously
exact in his work. But the sense of his double personality began to
worry him again. He did not see scarlet as of old; he noticed when his
eyes were closed that the apparition of a second Ambroise swam into the
field of his vision. And he was positively certain that this spectre of
himself saw scarlet--the attitude of his double assured him of the fact.
Simple-minded, ignorant of cerebral disorders, loyal, and laborious,
Ambroise could not speak of these disquieting things--indeed, he only
worked the more....
At last, one night in late summer, she did not appear. It was after a
day when she had sung more insolently than ever, drunk more than her
accustomed allowance, and had shown Ambroise the purse--the sockets of
the serpent's eyes untenanted by the beautiful carbuncles. Apathetic as
he had become, he was surprised at her absence. It was either caprice or
serious illness. She had dwindled to a skeleton, with a maleficent
smile. Her teeth were yellow, her hands become claws, the scarlet of her
clothes a drab hue, the plumes on her hat gone. Ambroise wondered. About
midnight a mean-looking fellow entered and asked for him. A lady, a very
ill lady, was in a coupé at the door. He hurried out. It was Aholibah.
Her eyes were glazed and her lips black and cracked. She tried to croon,
in a hoarse voice:--
"I am the Woman of Morocco!" But her head fell on the window-sill of the
carriage. Ambroise lifted the weary head on his shoulder. His eyes were
so dry that they seemed thirsty. The old glamour gripped him. The cabman
held the reins and waited; it was an every-night occurrence for him. The
starlight could not penetrate to the Boulevard through the harsh
electric glare; and the whirring of wheels and laughter of the café's
guests entered the soul of Ambroise like steel nails. She opened her
eyes.
"I am that Aholibah ... a witness through waste Asia ... that the strong
men and the Captains knew ..." This line of Swinburne's was pronounced
in the purest English. Ambroise did not understand. Then followed some
rapidly uttered jargon that might have been Moorish. He soothed her, and
softly passed his hand over her rough and dishevelled hair. His heart
was bursting. She was after all his Aholibah, his first love. A crowd
gathered. He asked for a doctor. A dozen students ran in a dozen
different directions. The tired horse stamped its feet impatiently, and
once it whinnied. The coachman lighted his pipe and watched his dying
fare. Some wag sang a drunken lyric, and Ambroise repeated at
intervals:--
"Please not so close, Messieurs. She needs air." Then she moved her head
and murmured:
"Where's--my Prince? My--Prince Ambroise--I have something--" Her head
fell back on his shoulder with a rigid jerk. In her clenched fingers he
recognized his purse--smudged, torn, the serpent mouth gaping, the eyes
empty.... And for the last time Ambroise saw scarlet--saw scarlet
double. His two personalities had separated, never to merge again.
IV
REBELS OF THE MOON
"On my honour, friend," Zarathustra answered, "what thou speakest
of doth not exist: there is no devil nor hell. Thy soul will be
dead even sooner than thy body: henceforth fear naught."
The moon, a spiritual gray wafer, fainted in the red wind of a summer
morning as the two men leaped a ditch soft with mud. The wall was not
high, the escape an easy one. Crouching, their clothes the colour of
clay, they trod cautiously the trench, until opposite a wood whose trees
blackened the slow dawn. Then, without a word, they ran across the road,
and, in a few minutes, were lost in the thick underbrush of the little
forest. It was past four o'clock and the dawn began to trill over the
rim of night; the east burst into stinging sun rays, while the moving
air awoke the birds and sent scurrying around the smooth green park a
cloud of golden powdery dust....
Arved and Quell stood in a secret glade and looked at each other
solemnly--but only for a moment. Laughter, unrestrained laughter,
frightened the squirrels and warned them that they were still in
danger.
"Well, we've escaped this time," said the poet.
"Yes; but how long?" was the sardonic rejoinder of the painter.
"See here, Quell, you're a pessimist. You are never satisfied; which, I
take it, is a neat definition of pessimism."
"I don't propose to chop logic so early in the morning," was the surly
reply. "I'm cold and nervous. Say, did you lift anything before we got
away?" Arved smiled the significant smile of a drinking man.
"Yes, I did. I waited until Doc McKracken left his office, and then I
sneaked _this_." The severe lines in Quell's face began to swim
together. He reached out his hand, took the flask, and then threw back
his head. Arved watched him with patient resignation.
"Hold on there! Leave a dozen drops for a poor maker of rhymes," he
chuckled, and soon was himself gurgling the liquor.
They arose, and after despairing glances at their bespattered garments,
trudged on. In an hour, the pair had reached the edge of the forest,
and, as the sun sat high and warm, a rest was agreed upon. But this time
they did not easily find a hiding-place. Fearing to venture nearer the
turnpike, hearing human sounds, they finally retired from the clearing,
and behind a moss-etched rock discovered a cool resting-place on the
leafy floor.
At full length, hands under heads, brains mellowed by brandy, the men
summed up the situation. Arved was the first to speak. He was tall,
blond, heavy of figure, and his beard hung upon his chest. His
dissatisfied eyes were cynical when he rallied his companion. A man of
brains this, but careless as the grass.
"Quell, let us think this thing out carefully. It is nearly six o'clock.
At six o'clock the cells will be unlocked, and then,--well, McKracken
will damn our bones, for he gets a fat board fee from my people, and the
table is not so cursed good at the Hermitage that he misses a margin of
profit! What will he do? Set the dogs after us? No, he daren't; we're
not convicts--we're only mad folk." He smiled good-humouredly, though
his white brow was dented as if by harsh thoughts.
Quell's little bloodshot eyes stared up into a narrow channel of
foliage, at the end of which was a splash of blue sky. He was
mean-appearing, with a horselike head, his mustache twisted into a
savage curl. His forehead was abnormal in breadth and the irritable
flashes of fire in his eyes told the story of a restless soul. The
nostrils expanded as he spoke:--
"We're only mad folk, as you say; nevertheless, the Lord High Keeper
will send his police patrol wagon after us in a jiffy. He went to bed
dead full last night, so his humour won't be any too sweet when he hears
that several of his boarders have vanished. He'll miss you more than me;
I'm not at the first table with you swells."
Quell ended his speech with so disagreeable an inflection that Arved was
astonished. He looked around and spat at a beetle.
"What's wrong with you, my hearty? I believe you miss your soft iron
couch. Or did you leave it this morning left foot foremost? Anyhow,
Quell, don't get on your ear. We'll push to town as soon as it's
twilight, and I know a little crib near the river where we can have all
we want to eat and drink. Do you hear--drink!" Quell made no answer. The
other continued:--
"Besides, I don't see why you've turned sulky simply because your family
sent you up to the Hermitage. It's no disgrace. In fact, it steadies the
nerves, and you can get plenty of booze."
"If you have the price," snapped his friend.
"Money or no money, McKracken's asylum--no, it's bad taste to call it
that; his retreat, ah, there's the word!--is not so awful. I've a theory
that our keepers are crazy as loons; though you can't blame them,
watching us, as they must, from six o'clock in the morning until
midnight. Say, why were you put away?"
"Crazy, like yourself, I suppose." Quell grinned.
"And now we're cured. We cured ourselves by flight. How can they call us
crazy when we planned the job so neatly?"
Arved began to be interested in the sound of his own voice. He searched
his pockets and after some vain fumbling found a half package of
cigarettes.
"Take some and be happy, my boy. They are boon-sticks indeed." Quell
suddenly arose.
"Arved, what were you sent up for, may I ask?"
The poet stretched his big legs, rolled over on his back again, and
scratching his tangled beard, smoked the cigarette he had just lighted.
In the hot hum of the woods there was heard the occasional dropping of
pine cones as the wind fanned lazy music from the leaves. They could not
see the sun; its power was felt. Perspiration beaded their shiny faces
and presently they removed collars and coats, sitting at ease in
shirt-sleeves.... Arved's tongue began to speed:--
"Though I've only known you twenty-four hours, my son, I feel impelled
to tell you the history of my happy life--for happiness has its
histories, no matter what the poets say. But the day is hot, our time
limited. Wait until we are recaptured, then I'll spin you a yarn."
"You expect to get caught for sure?"
"I do. So do you. No need to argue--your face tells me that. But we'll
have the time of our life before they gather us in. Anyhow, we'll want
to go back. The whole world is crazy, but ashamed to acknowledge it. We
are not. Pascal said men are so mad that he who would not be is a madman
of a new kind. To escape ineffable dulness is the privilege of the
lunatic; the lunatic, who is the true aristocrat of nature--the unique
man in a tower of ivory, the elect, who, in samite robes, traverses
moody gardens. Really, I shudder at the idea of ever living again in
yonder stewpot of humanity, with all its bad smells. To struggle with
the fools for their idiotic prizes is beyond me. The lunatic asylum--"
"Can't you find some other word?" asked Quell, dryly.
"--is the best modern equivalent for the tub of Diogenes--he who was the
first Solitary, the first Individualist. To dream one's dreams, to be
alone--"
"How about McKracken and the keepers?"
"From the volatile intellects of madmen are fashioned the truths of
humanity. Mental repose is death. All our modern theocrats,
politicians,--whose minds are sewers for the people,--and lawyers are
corpses, their brains dead from feeding on dead ideas. Motion is
life--mad minds are always in motion."
"Let up there! You talk like the doctor chaps over at the crazy crib,"
interrupted Quell.
"Ah, if we could only arrange our dreams in chapters--as in a novel.
Sometimes Nature does it for us. There is really a beginning, a
development, a dénouement. But, for the most of us, life is a crooked
road with weeds so high that we can't see the turn of the path. Now, my
case--I'm telling you my story after all--my case is a typical one of
the artistic sort. I wrote prose, verse, and dissipated with true
poetic regularity. It was after reading Nietzsche that I decided to quit
my stupid, sinful ways. Yes, you may smile! It was Nietzsche who
converted me. I left the old crowd, the old life in Paris, went to
Brittany, studied new rhythms, new forms, studied the moon; and then
people began to touch their foreheads knowingly. I was suspected simply
because I did not want to turn out sweet sonnets about the pretty stars.
Why, man, I have a star in my stomach! Every poet has. We are of the
same stuff as the stars. It was Marlowe who said, 'A sound magician is a
mighty god.' He was wrong. Only the mentally unsound are really wise.
This the ancients knew. Even if Gerard de Nerval did walk the boulevards
trolling a lobster by a blue ribbon--that is no reason for judging him
crazy. As he truly said, 'Lobsters neither bark nor bite; and they know
the secrets of the sea!' His dreams simply overflowed into his daily
existence. He had the courage of his dreams. Do you remember his
declaring that the sun never appears in dreams? How true! But the moon
does, 'sexton of the planets,' as the crazy poet Lenau called it--the
moon which is the patron sky-saint of men with brains. Ah, brains! What
unhappiness they cause in this brainless world, a world rotten with
hypocrisy. A poet polishes words until they glitter with beauty,
charging them with fulminating meaning--straightway he is called mad by
men who sweat and toil on the stock exchange. Have you ever, my dear
Quell, watched those little, grotesque brokers on a busy day? No? Well,
you will say that no lunatic grimacing beneath the horns of the moon
ever made such ludicrous, such useless, gestures. And for what? Money!
Money to spend as idiotically as it is garnered. The world is crazy, I
tell you, crazy, to toil as it does. How much cleverer are the apes who
won't talk, because, if they did, they would be forced to abandon their
lovely free life, put on ugly garments, and work for a living. These
animals, for which we have such contempt, are freer than men; they are
the Supermen of Nietzsche--Nietzsche whose brain mirrored both a
Prometheus and a Napoleon." Quell listened to this speech with
indifference. Arved continued:--
"Nor was Nietzsche insane when he went to the asylum. His sanity was
blinding in its brilliancy; he voluntarily renounced the world of
foolish faces and had himself locked away where he would not hear its
foolish clacking. O Silence! gift of the gods, deified by Carlyle in
many volumes and praised by me in many silly words! My good fellow,
society, which is always hypocritical, has to build lunatic asylums in
self-defence. These polite jails keep the world in countenance; they
give it a standard. If _you_ are behind the bars--"
"Speak for yourself," growled Quell.
"Then the world knows that you are crazy and that _it_ is not. There is
no other way of telling the difference. So a conspiracy of fools,
lawyers, and doctors is formed. If you do not live the life of the
stupid: cheat, lie, steal, smirk, eat, dance, and drink--then you are
crazy! That fact agreed upon, the hypocrites, who are quite mad, but
cunning enough to dissemble, lock behind bolted doors those free souls,
the poets, painters, musicians--artistic folk in general. They brand our
gifts with fancy scientific names, such as Megalomania, Paranoia, _Folie
des grandeurs_. Show me a genius and I'll show you a madman--according
to the world's notion."
"There you go again," cried Quell, arising to his knees. "Genius, _I_
believe, is a disease of the nerves; and I don't mind telling you that I
consider poets and musicians quite crazy."
Arved's eyes were blazing blue signals.
"But, my dear Quell, are not all men mad at some time or another? Madly
in love, religiously mad, patriotically insane, and idiotic on the
subject of clothes, blood, social precedence, handsome persons, money?
And is it not a sign of insanity when one man claims sanity for his own
particular art? Painting, I admit, is--"
"What the devil do you know about painting?" Quell roughly interposed;
"you are a poet and, pretending to love all creation,--altruism, I think
your sentimental philosophers call it,--have the conceit to believe you
bear a star in your stomach when it is only a craving for rum. I've
been through the game."
He began to pace the sward, chewing a blade of grass. He spoke in
hurried, staccato phrases:--
"Why was I put away? Listen: I tried to paint the sun,--for I hate your
moon and its misty madness. To put this glorious furnace on canvas is,
as you will acknowledge, the task of a god. It never came to me in my
dreams, so I wooed it by day. Above all, I wished to express truth; the
sun is black. Think of an ebon sun fringed with its dazzling
photosphere! I tried to paint sun-rhythms, the rhythms of the quivering
sky, which is never still even when it seems most immobile; I tried to
paint the rhythms of the atmosphere, shivering as it is with chords of
sunlight and chromatic scales as yet unpainted. Like Oswald Alving in
Ibsen's Ghosts, my last cry will be for 'the sun.' How did my friends
act? What did the critics say? A black sun was too much for the world,
though astronomers have proven my theory correct. The doctors swore I
drank too much absinthe; the critics said a species of optical madness
had set in; that I saw only the peripheral tints--I was yellow and blue
crazy. Perhaps I was, perhaps I am. So is the fellow crazy who invented
wireless telegraphy; so is the man off his base who invents a folding
bird cage. We are all crazy, and the craziest gang are our doctors at
the Hermitage." He jerked his thumb over his shoulder. Arved rolled his
handsome head acquiescingly.