which she was accustomed; but it was to be her first meeting with a
noble dame, whose name was historic, at whose feet the poets of the
Second Empire had prostrated themselves, passionately plucking their
lyres; the friend of Liszt, Wagner, Berlioz, of Manet, Degas, Monet; the
new school--this wonderful old woman knew them all, from Goncourt and
Flaubert to Daudet and Maupassant. Had she not, Ermentrude remembered as
she divested herself of her cloak, sent a famous romancer out of the
house because he spoke slightingly of the Pope? Had she not cut the
emperor dead when she saw him with a lady not his empress? What a night
this would be in the American girl's orderly existence! And _he_ was to
be there, he had promised the princess.
Her heart was overflowing when she was graciously received by the great
lady who stood in the centre of a group at the back of the
drawing-room--a lofty apartment in white and gold, the panels painted by
Baudry, the furniture purest Empire. She noted the height and majestic
bearing of this cousin of kings, noted the aquiline nose drooped over a
contracted mouth--which could assume most winning curves, withal shaded
by suspicious down, that echoed in hue her inky eyebrows. The eyes of
the princess were small and green and her glance penetrating. Her white
hair rolled imperially from a high, narrow forehead.
Ermentrude bore herself with the utmost composure. She adored the Old
World, adored genius, but after all she was an Adams of New Hampshire,
her sister the wife of a former ambassador. It was more curiosity than
_gaucherie_ that prompted her to hold the hand offered her and
scrutinize the features as if to evoke from the significant, etched
wrinkles the tremendous past of this hostess. The princess was pleased.
"Ah, Miss Adams," she said, in idiomatic English, "you have candid eyes.
You make me feel like telling stories when you gaze at me so
appealingly. Don't be shocked"--the girl had coloured--"perhaps I shall,
after a while."
Mr. Sheldam had slipped into a corner behind a very broad table and
under the shaded lamps examined some engravings. Mrs. Sheldam talked in
hesitating French to the Marquis de Potachre, an old fellow of venerable
and burlesque appearance. His fierce little white mustaches were curled
ceilingward, but his voice was as timid as honey. He flourished his
wizened hand toward Miss Adams.
"Charming! Delightful! She has something English in her _insouciant_
pose, and is wholly American in her cerebral quality. And what
colouring, what gorgeous brown hair! What a race, madame, is yours!"
Mrs. Sheldam began to explain that the Adams stock was famous, but the
marquis did not heed her. He peered at her niece through a gold-rimmed
monocle. The princess had left the group near the table and with two
young men slowly moved down the salon. Miss Adams was immediately
surrounded by some antiquated gentlemen wearing orders, who paid her
compliments in the manner of the eighteenth century. She answered them
with composure, for she was sure of her French, sure of herself--the
princess had not annihilated her. Her aunt, accompanied by the marquis,
crossed to her, and the old nobleman amused her with his saturnine
remarks.
"Time was," he said, "when one met here the cream of Parisian wit and
fashion: the great Flaubert, a noisy fellow at times, I vow; Dumas
_fils_; Cabanel, Gérôme, Duran; ever-winning Carolus--ah, what men! Now
we get Polish pianists, crazy Belgians, anarchistic poets, and
Neo-impressionists. I have warned the princess again and again."
"_Bécasse!_" interrupted the lady herself. "Monsieur Rajewski has
consented to play a Chopin nocturne. And here are my two painters, Miss
Adams--Messieurs Bla and Maugre. They hate each other like the Jesuits
and Jansenists of the good old days of Pascal."
"She likes to display her learning," grumbled the marquis to Mrs.
Sheldam. "That younger man, Bla, swears by divided tones; his neighbour,
Maugre, paints in dots. One is always to be recognized a half-mile away
by his vibrating waterscapes--he calls them Symphonies of the Wet; the
other goes in for turkeys in the grass, fowls that are cobalt-blue
daubs, with grass a scarlet. It's awful on the optic nerves.
_Pointillisme_, Maugre names his stuff. Now, give me Corot--"
"Hush, hush!" came in energetic sibilants from the princess, who rapped
with her Japanese walking-stick for silence. Mr. Sheldam woke up and
fumbled the pictures as Rajewski, slowly bending his gold-dust aureole
until it almost grazed the keyboard, began with deliberate accents a
nocturne. Miss Adams knew his playing well, but its poetry was not for
her this evening; rather did the veiled tones of the instrument form a
misty background to the human tableau. So must Chopin have woven his
magic last century, and in a salon like this--the wax candles burning
with majestic steadiness in the sculptured sconces; the huge fireplace,
monumental in design, with its dull brass garnishing; the subdued
richness of the decoration into which fitted, as figures in a frame, the
various guests. Even the waxed floor seemed to take on new
reverberations as the pianoforte sounded the sweet despair of the Pole.
To her dismay Ermentrude caught herself drifting away from the moment's
hazy charm to thoughts of her poet. It annoyed her, she sharply
reminded herself, that she could not absolutely saturate herself with
the music and the manifold souvenirs of the old hôtel; perhaps this may
have been the spell of Rajewski's playing....
The music ceased. A dry voice whispered in her ear:--
"Great artist, that chap Rajewski. Had to leave Russia once because he
wouldn't play the Russian national hymn for the Czar. Bless me, but he
was almost sent to Siberia--and in irons too. Told me here in this very
room that he was much frightened. They lighted fires in Poland to honour
his patriotism. He acknowledged that _he_ would have played twenty
national hymns, but he couldn't remember the Russian one, or never knew
it--anyhow, he was christened a patriot, and all by a slip of the
memory. Now, that's luck, isn't it?"
She began to dislike this cynical old man with his depreciating tales of
genius. She knew that her idols often tottered on clay feet, but she
hated to be reminded of that disagreeable reality. She went to Monsieur
Rajewski and thanked him prettily in her cool new voice, and again the
princess nodded approval.
"She is _chic_, your little girl," she confided in her deep tones to
Mrs. Sheldam, whose tired New England face almost beamed at the
compliment.
"We were in Hamburg at the Zoölogical Garden; I always go to see
animals," declaimed the princess, in the midst of a thick silence. "For
you know, my friends, one studies humanity there in the raw. Well, I
dragged our party to the large monkey cage, and we enjoyed
ourselves--immensely! And what do you think we saw! A genuine novelty.
Some mischievous sailor had given an overgrown ape a mirror, and the
poor wretch spent its time staring at its image, neglecting its food and
snarling at its companions. The beast would catch the reflection of
another ape in the glass and quickly bound to a more remote perch. The
keeper told me that for a week his charge had barely eaten. It slept
with the mirror held tightly in its paws. Now, what did the mirror mean
to the animal! I believe"--here she became very vivacious--"I really
believe that it was developing self-consciousness, and in time it would
become human. On our way back from Heligoland, where we were entertained
on the emperor's yacht at the naval manœuvres, we paid another visit to
our monkey house. The poor, misguided brute had died of starvation. It
had become so vain, so egotistical, so superior, that it refused food
and wasted away in a corner, gazing at itself, a hairy Narcissus, or
rather the perfect type of your modern Superman, who contemplates his
ego until his brain sickens and he dies quite mad."
Every one laughed. Mrs. Sheldam wondered what a Superman was, and
Ermentrude felt annoyed. Zarathustra was another of her gods, and this
brusquely related anecdote did not seem to her very spirituelle. But
she had not formulated an answer when she heard a name announced, a name
that set her heart beating. At last! The poet had kept his word. She was
to meet in the flesh the man whose too few books were her bibles of art,
of philosophy, of all that stood for aspiration toward a lovely ideal in
a dull, matter-of-fact world.
"Now," said the princess, as if smiling at some hidden joke, "now you
will meet _my_ Superman." And she led the young American girl to Octave
Kéroulan and his wife, and, after greeting them in her masculine manner,
she burst forth:--
"Dear poet! here is one of your adorers from overseas. Guard your
husband well, Madame Lys."
So he was married. Well, that was not such a shocking fact. Nor was
Madame Kéroulan either--a very tall, slim, English-looking blonde, who
dressed modishly and evidently knew that she was the wife of a famous
man. Ermentrude found her insipid; she had studied her face first before
comparing the mental photograph of the poet with the original. Nor did
she feel, with unconscious sex rivalry, any sense of inferiority to the
wife of her admired one. He was nearly forty, but he looked older; gray
hairs tinged his finely modelled head. His face was shaven, and with the
bulging brow and full jaw he was more of the German or Belgian than
French. Black hair thrown off his broad forehead accented this
resemblance; a composer rather than a prose-poet and dramatist, was the
rapid verdict of Ermentrude. She was not disappointed, though she had
expected a more fragile type. The weaver of moonshine, of mystic
phrases, of sweet gestures and veiled sonorities should not have worn
the guise of one who ate three meals a day and slept soundly after his
mellow incantations. Yet she was not--inheriting, as she did, a modicum
of sense from her father--disappointed.
The conversation did not move more briskly with the entrance of the
Kéroulans. The marquis sullenly gossiped with Mr. Sheldam; the princess
withdrew herself to the far end of the room with her two painters.
Rajewski was going to a _soirée_, he informed them, where he would play
before a new picture by Carrière, as it was slowly undraped; no one less
in rank than a duchess would be present! A little stiffly, Ermentrude
Adams assured the Kéroulans of her pleasure in meeting them. The poet
took it as a matter of course, simply, without a suspicion of posed
grandeur. Ermentrude saw this with satisfaction. If he had clay
feet,--and he must have them; all men do,--at least he wore his genius
with a sense of its responsibility. She held tightly her hands and
leaned back, awaiting the precious moment when the oracle would speak,
when this modern magician of art would display his cunning. But he was
fatuously commonplace in his remarks.
"I have often told Madame Kéroulan that my successes in Europe do not
appeal to me as those in far-away America. Dear America--how it must
enjoy a breath of real literature!"
Mrs. Sheldam sat up primly, and Ermentrude was vastly amused. With a
flash of fun she replied:--
"Yes, America does, Monsieur Kéroulan. We have so many Europeans over
there now that our standard has fallen off from the days of Emerson and
Whitman. And didn't America give Europe Poe?" She knew that this boast
had the ring of the amateur, but it pleased her to see how it startled
him.
"America is the Great Bribe," he pursued. "You have no artists in New
York."
"Nor have we New Yorkers," the girl retorted. "The original writing
natives live in Europe."
He looked puzzled, but did not stop. "You have depressed literature to
the point of publication," he solemnly asserted. This was too much and
she laughed in mockery. Husband and wife joined her, while Mrs. Sheldam
trembled at the audacity of her niece--whose irony was as much lost on
her as it was on the poet.
"But _you_ publish plays and books, do you not?" Ermentrude naïvely
asked.
Madame Kéroulan interposed in icy tones:--
"Mademoiselle Adams misunderstands. Monsieur Kéroulan is the Grand
Disdainer. Like his bosom friend, Monsieur Mallarmé, he cares little for
the Philistine public--"
He interrupted her: "Lys, dear friend, you must not bore Miss Adams with
my theories of art and life. _She_ has read me--"
Ermentrude gave him a grateful glance. He seemed, despite his
self-consciousness, a great man--how great she could not exactly define.
His eyes--two black diamonds full of golden reflections, the eyes of a
conqueror, a seer--began to burn little bright spots into her
consciousness, and, selfishly, she admitted, she wished the two women
would go away and leave her to interrogate her idol in peace. There were
so many things to ask him, so many difficult passages in The Golden
Glaze and Hesitations, above all in that great dramatic poem, The
Voices, which she had witnessed in Paris, with its mystic atmosphere of
pity and terror. She would never forget her complex feelings, when at a
Paris theatre, she saw slowly file before her in a Dream-Masque the
wraith-like figures of the poet, their voices their only corporeal gift.
Picture had dissolved into picture, and in the vapours of these crooning
enchantments she heard voices of various timbres enunciating in
monosyllables the wisdom of the ages, the poetry of the future. This
play was, for her, and for Paris, too, the last word in dramatic art,
the supreme _nuance_ of beauty. Everything had been accomplished:
Shakespeare, Molière, Ibsen; yet here was a new evocation, a fresh peep
at untrodden paths. In bliss that almost dissolved her being, the
emotional American girl reached her hotel, where she tried to sleep.
When her aunt told her of the invitation tendered by the princess, a
rare one socially, she was in the ninth heaven of the Swedenborgians.
Any place to meet Octave Kéroulan!
And now he sat near her signalling, she knew, her sympathies, and as the
fates would have it two dragons, her aunt and his wife, guarded the
gateway to the precious garden of his imagination. She could have cried
aloud her chagrin. Such an inestimable treasure was genius that to see
it under lock and key invited indignation. The time was running on, and
her great man had said nothing. He could, if he wished, give her a
million extraordinary glimpses of the earth and the air and the waters
below them, for his eyes were mirrors of his marvellous and
many-coloured soul; but what chance had he with a conjugal iceberg on
one side, a cloud of smoke--poor Aunt Sheldam--on the other! She felt in
her fine, rhapsodic way like a young priestess before the altar, ready
to touch with a live coal the lips of the gods, but withheld by a
malignant power. For the first time in her life Ermentrude Adams,
delicately nurtured in a social hothouse, realized in wrath the major
tyranny of caste.
The evening wore away. Mrs. Sheldam aroused her husband as she cast a
horrified glance at the classic prints he had been studying. The
princess dismissed her two impressionists and came over to the poet.
She, too plainly, did not care for his wife, and as the party broke up
there was a sense of relief, though Ermentrude could not conceal her
dissatisfaction. Her joy was sincere when Madame Kéroulan asked Miss
Adams and her aunt to call. It was slightly gelid, the invitation,
though accepted immediately by Ermentrude. The _convenances_ could look
out for themselves; she would not go back to America without an
interview. The princess raised her hand mockingly.
"What, I go to one of your conferences! Not I, _cher poète_. Keep your
mysteries for your youthful disciples." She looked at Ermentrude, who
did not lower her eyes--she was triumphant now. Perhaps _he_ might say
something before they parted. He did not, but the princess did.
"Beware, young America, of my Superman! You remember the story of the
ape with the mirror!"
Ermentrude flushed with mortification. This princess was decidedly rude
at times. But she kept her temper and thanked the lady for a unique
evening. Her exquisite youth and grace pleased the terrible old woman,
who then varied her warning.
"Beware," she called out in comical accents as they slowly descended the
naked marble staircase, "of the Sleeping Princess!"
The American girl looked over her shoulder.
"I don't think your Superman has a mirror at all."
"Yes, but his princess holds one for him!" was the jesting reply.
The carriage door slammed. They rolled homeward, and Ermentrude suffered
from a desperate sense of the unachieved. The princess had been
impertinent, the Kéroulans rather banal. Mrs. Sheldam watched her
charge's face in the intermittent lights of the Rue de Rivoli.
"I think your poet a bore," she essayed. Then she shook her
husband--they had reached their hôtel.
II
It was the garden of a poet, she declared, as, with the Kéroulans and
her aunt, Ermentrude sat and slowly fanned herself, watching the Bois de
Boulogne, which foamed like a cascade of green opposite this pretty
little house in Neuilly. The day was warm and the drive, despite the
shaded, watered avenues, a dusty, fatiguing one. Mrs. Sheldam had,
doubtfully, it is true, suggested the bourgeois comfort of the
Métropolitain, but she was frowned on by her enthusiastic niece. What!
ride underground in such weather? So they arrived at the poet's not in
the best of humour, for Mrs. Sheldam had quietly chidden her charge on
the score of her "flightiness." These foreign celebrities were well
enough in their way, but--! And now Ermentrude, instead of looking
Octave Kéroulan in the face, preferred the vista of the pale blue sky,
awash with a scattered, fleecy white cloud, the rolling edges of which
echoed the dazzling sunshine. The garden was not large, its few trees
were of ample girth, and their shadows most satisfying to eyes weary of
the city's bright, hard surfaces. There were no sentimental plaster
casts to disturb the soft harmonies of this walled-in retreat, and if
Ermentrude preferred to regard with obstinacy unusual in her mobile
temperament the picture of Paris below them, it was because she felt
that Kéroulan was literally staring at her.
A few moments after their arrival and with the advent of tea, he had
accomplished what she had fervently wished for the night she had met
him--he succeeded, by several easy moves, in isolating her from her
aunt, and, notwithstanding her admiration, her desire to tap with her
knuckles the metal of her idol and listen for a ring of hollowness, she
was alarmed. Yet, perversely, she knew that he would not exhibit his
paces before his wife--naturally a disinterested spectator--or before
her aunt, who was hardly "intimate" enough. The long-desired hour found
her disquieted. She did not have many moments to analyze these mixed
emotions, for he spoke, and his voice was agreeably modulated.
"You, indeed, honour the poor poet's abode with your youth and your
responsive soul, Miss Adams. I thank you, though my gratitude will seem
as poor as my hospitality." She looked at him now, a little fluttered.
"You bring to me across seas the homage of a fresh nation, a fresh
nature." She beat a mental retreat at these calm, confident phrases;
what could he know of her homage? "And if Amiel has said, 'Un paysage
est un état de l'âme,' I may amend it by calling _my_ soul a state of
landscape, since it has been visited by your image." This was more
reassuring, if exuberant.
"Man is mere inert matter when born, but his soul is his own work.
Hence, I assert: the Creator of man is--man." _Now_ she felt at ease.
This wisdom, hewn from the vast quarry of his genius, she had
encountered before in his Golden Glaze, that book which had built
temples of worship in America wherein men and women sought and found the
pabulum for living beautifully. He was "talking" his book. Why not? It
was certainly delightful plagiarism!
"You know, dear young lady," he continued, and his eyes, with their
contracting and expanding disks, held her attention like a clear flame,
"do you know that my plays, my books, are but the drama of my conscience
exteriorized? Out of the reservoirs of my soul I draw my inspiration. I
have an æsthetic horror of evidence; like Renan, I loathe the deadly
heresy of affirmation; I have the certitude of doubt, for are we poets
not the lovers of the truth decorated? When I built my lordly palace of
art, it was not with the ugly durability of marble. No; like the
Mohammedan who constructed his mosque and mingled with the cement
sweet-smelling musk, so I dreamed my mosque into existence with music
wedded to philosophy. Music and philosophy are the twin edges of my
sword. Ah! you smile and ask, Where is Woman in this sanctuary? She is
not barred, I assure you. My music--is Woman. Beauty is a promise of
happiness, Stendhal says. I go further: Life--the woman one has;
Art--the woman one loves!"
She was startled. Her aunt and Madame Kéroulan had retired to the end of
the garden, and only a big bee, brumming overhead, was near. He had
arisen with the pontifical air of a man who has a weighty gospel to
expound. He encircled with his potent personality the imagination of his
listener; the hypnotic quality of his written word was carried leagues
farther in effect by his trained, soothing voice. Flattered, no longer
frightened, her nerves deliciously assaulted by this coloured rhetoric,
Ermentrude yielded her intellectual assent. She did not comprehend. She
felt only the rhythms of his speech, as sound swallowed sense. He held
her captive with a pause, and his eloquent eyes--they were of an
extraordinary lustre--completed the subjugation of her will.
"Only kissed hands are white," he murmured, and suddenly she felt a
velvety kiss on her left hand. Ermentrude did not pretend to follow the
words of her aunt and Madame Kéroulan as they stopped before a bed of
June roses. Nor did she remember how she reached the pair. The one vivid
reality of her life was the cruel act of her idol. She was not conscious
of blushing, nor did she feel that she had grown pale. His wife treated
her with impartial indifference, at times a smile crossing her face,
with its implication--to Ermentrude--of selfish reserves. But this
hateful smile cut her to the soul--one more prisoner at his chariot
wheels, it proclaimed! Kéroulan was as unconcerned as if he had written
a poetic line. He had expected more of an outburst, more of a rebuff;
the absolute snapping of the web he had spun surprised him. His choicest
music had been spread for the eternal banquet, but the invited one
tarried. Very well! If not to-day, to-morrow! He repeated a verse of
Verlaine, and with his wife dutifully at his side bowed to the two
Americans and told them of the pleasure experienced. Ermentrude, her
candid eyes now reproachful and suspicious, did not flinch as she took
his hand--it seemed to melt in hers--but her farewell was conventional.
In the street, before they seated themselves in their carriage, Mrs.
Sheldam shook her head.
"Oh, my dear! What a woman! What a man! I have _such_ a story to tell
you. No wonder you admire these people. The wife is a genius--isn't she
handsome?--but the man--he is an angel!"
"I didn't see his wings, auntie," was the curt reply.
III