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Phases of an
Inferior Planet
_By_ ELLEN GLASGOW
_Author of "The Descendant"_
[Illustration]
HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
NEW YORK AND LONDON
1898
BY THE SAME AUTHOR.
THE DESCENDANT. A Novel. Post 8vo, Cloth,
Ornamental, $1 25.
The writer has a sure touch, a firm and philosophically consistent hold
upon his theme, much delicacy of perception, and a sane sense of humor.
The style, if not of the fastidiously fine school, is fluent and often
brilliant. ... The character drawing is vivid and realistic.--_Boston
Transcript._
The characters here are skilfully drawn, and the drama in which they
take part is unusually novel and impressive. ... The work of an author
who has not written at random, but who has woven into a strong story
some of the cardinal truths of modern science.--_N. Y. Herald._
NEW YORK AND LONDON:
HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS.
Copyright, 1898, by HARPER & BROTHERS.
_All rights reserved._
TO
CARY McC.
_"I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the
swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise,
nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of
skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all."_
Phase First
_"Some turned to folly and the sweet works of the flesh."_
--Hymn to Zeus.
CHAPTER I
Along Broadway at six o'clock a throng of pedestrians was stepping
northward. A grayish day was settling into a gray evening, and a
negative lack of color and elasticity had matured into a positive
condition of atmospheric flatness. The air exhaled a limp and insipid
moisture, like that given forth by a sponge newly steeped in an
anaesthetic. Upon the sombre fretwork of leafless trees, bare against
red-brick buildings, drops of water hung trembling, though as yet there
had been no rainfall, and the straggling tufts of grass in the city
parks drooped earthward like the damp and uncurled fringe of a woman's
hair.
Spanning the remote west as a rainbow stretched an unfulfilled pledge of
better things, for beyond the smoke-begrimed battalion of tenement
chimney-pots a faint streak of mauve defined the line of the horizon--an
ineffectual and transparent sheet of rose-tinted vapor, through which
the indomitable neutrality of background was revealed. The city swam in
a sea of mist, and the electric lights, coming slowly into being, must
have seemed to a far-off observer a galaxy of wandering stars that had
burst the woof of heaven and fallen from their allotted spheres to be
caught like blossoms in the white obscurity of fog. Above them their
deserted habitation frowned blackly down with closed doors and
impenetrable walls.
The effect of the immortal transformation of day into night was
singularly elusive. It had come so stealthily that the fleet-footed
hours seemed to have tripped one another in the fever of the race, the
monotonous grayness of their garments shrouding, as they fluttered past,
the form of each sprightly elf.
Along Broadway the throng moved hurriedly. At a distance indescribably
homogeneous, as it passed the lighted windows of shops it was seen to be
composed of individual atoms, and their outlines were relieved against
the garish interiors like a panorama of automatic silhouettes. Then, as
they neared a crossing, a flood of radiant electricity, revealing minute
details of face and figure, the atoms were revivified from automatic
into animal existence.
With an inhuman disregard of caste and custom, the aberrant shadows of
the passers-by met and mingled one into another. A phantasmagoric
procession took place upon the sidewalk. The ethereal accompaniment of
the physical substance of a Wall Street plutocrat glided sedately after
that of a bedizened daughter of the people, whose way, beginning in the
glare of the workhouse, was ending in the dusk of the river; a lady of
quality, whose very shadow seemed pregnant with the odor of spice and
sables, melted before the encroaching presence of a boot-black fresh
from the Bowery; a gentleman of fashion gave place to the dull phantom
of a woman with burning brows and fingers purple with the stain of many
stitches. It was as if each material substance, warm with the lust of
the flesh and reeking with a burnt-offering of vanity, was pursued by
the inevitable presence of a tragic destiny.
At the corner of Seventeenth Street, a girl in a last season's coat left
the crowd and paused before a photographer's window. As she passed from
shadow into light the play of her limbs was suggested by the close folds
of her shabby skirt. She had the light and steadfast gait of one to whom
exercise is as essential as food, and more easily attained.
A man coming from Union Square turned to look at her as she passed.
"That girl is a _danseuse_," he said to his companion, "or she ought to
be. She walks to music."
"Your induction is false," retorted the other. "She happens to be--"
And they passed on.
As the girl paused before the lighted window the outlines of head and
shoulders were accentuated, while the rest of her body remained in
obscurity. Her head was shapely and well poised. Beneath the small toque
of black velvet, an aureole of dry brown hair framed her sensitive
profile like a setting of old mahogany. Even in the half-light
silhouette it could be noticed that eyes, hair, and complexion differed
in tone rather than in color. Her sallow skin blended in peculiar
harmony with the gray-green of her eyes and the brown of her hair. Her
face was long, with irregular features and straight brows. The bones of
cheek and chin were rendered sharper by extreme thinness.
A new photograph of Alvary was displayed, and a small group had
assembled about the window.
The girl looked at it for a moment; then, as some one in the crowd
jostled against her, she turned with an exclamation of annoyance and
entered the shop. Hesitating an instant, she drew a worn purse from her
pocket, looked into it, gave a decisive little shrug, and approached the
counter.
The shop-girl came up, and, recognizing her, nodded.
"Music?" she inquired, glancing at the leather roll which the other
carried.
The girl shook her head slowly.
"No," she replied, "I want a photograph of Alvary--as Lohengrin. Oh, the
Swan Song--"
A man who was sorting a pile of music in the rear of the shop came
forward smiling. He was small and dark and foreign.
"Ah, mademoiselle," he said, "it ees a plaisir for w'ich I live, ees ze
Elsa of your."
The girl smiled in return. In the clear light the glint of green in her
eyes deepened.
"No," she replied, "this is Elsa." She pointed to a photograph in the
case. "This is the only Elsa. I should not dare."
He bowed deprecatingly.
"Zat ees ontil you come," he said. "I live for ze day w'en we sing
togezzer, you an' I. I live to sing wiss you in ze grand opera."
"Ah, monsieur," lamented the girl, regretfully, "one cannot live
forever. The Lord has allotted a term."
She took her change, nodded gayly, and departed.
In the street she passed unheeded. She was as ignored by the crowd
around her as the colorless shadow at her side. Upon a massive woman in
a feather boa a dozen men gazed with evident desire, and after the
sables enveloping the lady of quality the eyes of the boot-black
yearned. But the girl moved among them unnoticed--she was insignificant
and easily overlooked.
A violet falling upon the pavement from the breast of a woman in front
of her, the girl lifted her skirt, and, to avoid crushing it, made a
slight divergence from her path. Then impulsively she turned to rescue
it from the cold sidewalk, but in so doing she stumbled against a man
whose heel had been its Juggernaut. A tiny blot of purple marked the
scene of its destruction.
Over the girl's face a shadow fell; she glanced up and caught the
courteous smile of an acquaintance, and the shadow was lifted. But
before her upward glance tended earthward it rested upon an overdriven
horse standing in the gutter, and the shadow that returned had gathered
to itself the force of a rain-cloud.
An impressionable and emotional temperament cast its light and darkness
upon her features, as the shifting clouds cast their varying shades upon
an evening landscape. With such a face, her moods must be as evanescent
as the colors of a kaleidoscope.
As she neared an electric light she slipped the photograph she carried
from its envelope, and surveyed it with warming eyes. She spoke in a
soft whisper--
"I shall never sing Elsa--never--never! Lehmann is Elsa. But what does
it matter? By the time I reach grand opera I shall have dinners--real
dinners--with napkins the size of a sheet and vegetables of curious
kinds. Then I'll grow fat and become famous. I may even sing Isolde."
She broke into a regretful little sigh. "And Alvary will be too old to
be my Tristan."
At the corner of Twenty-third Street she took a cross-town car. It was
crowded, and, with half-suppressed disgust, she rested the tips of her
fingers upon a leather strap. The gloves covering the fingers were worn
and badly mended, but the touch was delicate.
Something graceful and feminine and fragile in her unsteady figure
caused half a dozen men to rise hastily, and she accepted a proffered
seat with the merest inclination of her head.
With an involuntary coquetry she perceived that, as the newest feminine
arrival, she was being stealthily regarded from behind the wall of
newspapers skirting the opposite seat. She raised her hand to her
loosened hair, half frowned, and glanced at the floor with demure
indifference.
Beside her sat an Irishwoman with a heavy basket and a black bruise upon
her temple. The girl looked at the woman and the bruise with an
expression of repugnance. The repugnance was succeeded by a tidal wave
of self-commiseration. She pitied herself that she was forced to make
use of public means of conveyance. The onions in the Irishwoman's basket
offended her nostrils.
Her gaze returned to her lap. As daintily as she had withdrawn her
person from contact with the woman beside her, she withdrew her finely
strung senses from contact with the odor of onions and the closeness of
the humanity hemming her in.
She sat in disdainful self-absorption. Her sensitive features became
impassive, her head drooped, the green in her eyes faded into gray, and
the lashes obscured them. The shadow of her heavy hair rested like a
veil upon her face.
When the car reached Ninth Avenue she got out, walked to Thirtieth
Street, and crossed westward. Facing her stood the immense and
unpicturesque apartment-house known as "The Gotham"--a monument of human
Philistinism and brownstone-finished effrontery. She entered and passed
through the unventilated hall to the restaurant at the rear.
As she crossed the threshold, a man seated at one of the larger tables
looked up.
"My dear girl," he said, reproachfully, "lateness for dinner at The
Gotham entails serious consequences. We were just planning a
search-party."
His right-hand neighbor spoke warningly. "Don't believe him, Miss Musin;
he refused to get uneasy until he had finished his dinner."
"When one is empty," retorted the first, "one can't get even uneasy.
Anxiety can't be produced from a void."
The girl nodded good-evening, took her seat, and unfolded her napkin.
The first gentleman passed her the butter, the second the water-bottle.
The first was named Nevins. He was fair and pallid, with a long face
that would have been round had nature supplied gratification as well as
instinct. His shoulders were high and narrow, suggesting the perpetual
shrug with which he met his fate. He was starving upon an artistic
career. The second gentleman--Mr. Sellars--was sleek and middle-aged.
Providence had intended him for a poet; life had made of him a
philosopher--and a plumber. He was still a man of sentiment.
At the head of the table sat Mr. Paul--an apostle of pessimism, whose
general flavor marked the pessimist rather than the apostle. The
peculiarity of his face was its construction--the features which should
have gone up coming down, and the features which should have come down
going up. Perhaps had Mr. Paul himself moralized upon the fact, which is
not likely, he would have concluded that it was merely a physical
expression of his mental attitude towards the universe. He had long
since arrived at the belief that whatever came in life was the thing of
all others which should have kept away, and its coming was sufficient
proof of its inappropriateness. He had become a pessimist, not from
passion, but from principle. He had chosen his view of the eternal
condition of things as deliberately as he would have selected the
glasses with which to survey a given landscape. Having made his choice,
he stood to it. No surreptitious favors at the hands of Providence were
able to modify his honest conviction of its general unpleasantness.
The remaining persons at this particular table were of less importance.
There was Miss Ramsey, the journalist, who was pretty and faded and
harassed, and who ate her cold dinner, to which she usually arrived an
hour late, in exhausted silence. Miss Ramsey was one whom, her friends
said, adversity had softened; but Miss Ramsey herself knew that the
softness of adversity is the softness of decay. There was Mr. Ardly, a
handsome young fellow, who did the dramatic column of a large daily, and
who regarded life as a gigantic jag, facing failure with facetiousness
and gout with inconsequence. There was Mr. Morris, who was thin, and Mr.
Mason, who was fat, and Mr. Hogarth, who was neither.
The restaurant consisted of a long and queerly shaped room. It had
originally been divided into two apartments, but when the house had
passed into the present management the partition had been torn down, and
two long and narrow tables marked the line where the division had been.
The walls were dingy and unpapered. Where the plaster was of an unusual
degree of smokiness, several cheap chromos, in cheaper frames, had been
hung, like brilliant patches laid upon a dingy background. Above the
chromos lingered small bunches of evergreen--faded and dried remnants of
the last holiday season--and from the tarnished and fly-specked
chandelier hung a withered spray of mistletoe.
The room was crowded. There was not so much as a vacant seat at the
tables. The hum of voices passed through the doors and into the rumble
of the street without. In a far corner a lady in a blouse of geranium
pink was engaged in catching reckless flies for the sustenance of the
chameleon upon her breast; nearer at hand a gentleman was polishing his
plate and knife with his napkin. It was warm and oppressive, and the
voices sounded shrilly through the glare. The girl whom they had called
"Miss Musin" looked up with absent-minded abruptness.
"I had as soon wear wooden shoes as eat with a pewter fork!" she
remarked, irritably.
Mr. Nevins shook his flaxen head and laid down his spoon.
"So long as it remains a question of forks," he observed, "let us give
thanks. Who knows when it may become one of food?" Then he sighed. "If
it is only a sacrifice of decency, I'm equal to it, but I refuse to live
without food."
"The audacity of youth!" commented Mr. Sellars, the philosopher. "I said
the same at your age. But for taking the conceit out of one, commend me
to experience."
"From a profound study of the subject," broke in Mr. Paul, grimly, "I
have been able to calculate to a nicety that each one of these potatoes,
taken internally, lessens an hour of one's existence. As a method of
self-destruction"--and he proceeded to help himself--"there is none more
efficacious than an exclusive diet of Gotham potatoes. Allow me to pass
them." He looked at Miss Musin, but Mr. Nevins rose to the occasion.
"After such an analysis, my gallantry forbids," and he intercepted the
dish.
The girl glanced up at him.
"Extinction long drawn out is boring," she said. "And is food the only
factor of human life? It may be the most important, I admit, but
important things should not always be talked of."
"I declare it quite staggers me," interrupted a cheerful individual, who
was Mr. Morris, "to think of the number of things that should not be
talked of--some amazingly interesting things, too! Do you know,
sometimes I wonder if social intercourse will not finally be reduced to
a number of persons assembling to sit in silent meditation upon the
subjects which are not to be spoken of? One so soon exhausts the
absolutely correct topics."
"We are a nation of prudes," declared Mr. Paul, with emphasis, "and
there is no vice that rots a people to the core so rapidly as the vice
of prudery. All our good red blood has passed into a limbo of social
ostracism along with ladies' legs."
"I was just thinking," commented Mr. Hogarth, who aspired to the rakish
and achieved the asinine, "that the last-named subject had been
particularly in evidence of late. What with the ballet and the
bicycle--" He blushed and glanced at Miss Musin.
She was smiling. "Oh, I don't object," she said, "so long as they are
well shaped."
Mr. Nevins upheld her from an artistic stand-point.
"I hold," he said, authoritatively, "that indecency can only exist where
beauty is wanting. All beauty is moral. I have noticed in regard to my
models--"
"On the contrary," interrupted Mr. Paul, "there is no such thing as
beauty. It is merely the creation of a diseased imagination pursuing
novelty. We call nature beautiful, but it is only a term we employ to
express a chimera of the senses. Nature is not beautiful. Its colors are
glaringly defective. It is ugly. The universe is ugly. Civilization is
ugly. We are ugly--"
"Oh, Mr. Paul!" said Miss Musin, reproachfully.
"Our one consolation," continued Mr. Paul, in an unmoved voice, "is the
knowledge that if we could possibly have been uglier we should have been
so created. Providence would have seen to it."
"When Providence provided ugliness," put in Mr. Morris, good-naturedly,
"it provided ignorance along with it."
Mr. Ardly, who was eating his dinner with a copy of the _Evening Post_
spread out upon his knees, looked up languidly.
"We are becoming unpleasantly personal," he remarked. "Personalities in
conversation should be avoided as sedulously as onions in soup. They are
stimulating, but vulgar."
Mr. Paul seized the bait of the unconscious thrower with avidity.
"Vulgarity," he announced, with ringing emphasis, "is the most prominent
factor in the universe. It is as essential to our existence as the
original slime from which we and it emanated. If there is one thing more
vulgar than nature, it is civilization. Whatever remnant of innocence
nature left in the mind of man civilization has wiped out. It has
debased the human intellect--"
"And deformed the human figure," interpolated Mr. Nevins, with a sigh.
"Oh, for the days of Praxiteles!"
The emotionless tones of Mr. Paul flowed smoothly on.
"And if there is one thing more vulgar than civilization, it is art."
Mr. Nevins retorted in a voice of storm.
"Sir," he cried, "art is my divinity!"
"A vulgar superstition," commented Mr. Paul, calmly; and he pointed to a
poster beside Mr. Nevins's plate. "You call that art, I suppose?"
Mr. Nevins colored, but met him valiantly. "No," he returned; "I call
that bread and meat."
As the girl next him rose from her chair she bestowed upon him an
approving smile, which he returned with sentimental interest.
"You haven't finished," he remonstrated, in an aside. "My posters aren't
only bread and meat; they are pie--principally pie."
The girl laughed and shook her head.
"And principally pumpkin," she returned. "No, thank you!"
She left the dining-room and mounted the stairs to the fourth landing.
Her room was in the front of the house, and the way to it lay through a
long and dimly lighted corridor, the floor of which was covered with
figured oil-cloth.
As she slipped the key into the lock the door swung back, and a blast of
damp air from the open window blew into her face. She crossed the room
and stood for a moment with her hand upon the sash, looking down into
the street. A train upon the elevated road was passing, and she saw the
profiles of the passengers dark against the lighted interior. Clouds of
white smoke, blown rearward by the engine's breath, hovered about the
track, too light to fall. Then, as the wind chased westward, the clouds
were torn asunder, and stray wreaths, deepening into gray, drifted along
the cross street leading to the river.
The girl reached out and drew in a can of condensed milk from the
fire-escape. Then she lowered the window and turned on the steam-heater
in the corner, which set up a hissing monotone.
The room was small and square. There was a half-worn carpet upon the
floor, and the walls were covered with cheap paper, the conspicuous
feature of which was a sprawling design in green and yellow cornucopias.
In one corner stood a small iron bedstead, partially concealed by a
Japanese screen, which extended nominal protection to the wash-stand as
well. On the wall above the screen an iron hook was visible, from which
hung a couple of bath-towels and a scrubbing-brush suspended by a
string. Nearer the window there was an upright piano, with a scarf of
terra-cotta flung across it and a row of photographs of great singers
arranged along the ledge. Here and there on the furniture vivid bits of
drapery were pinned over barren places.
But with the proof of a sensuous craving for color a latent untidiness
was discernible. Her slippers lay upon the hearth-rug where she had
tossed them when dressing for the street; a box of hair-pins had been
upset upon the bureau, and a half-open drawer revealed a tangled mass of
net veiling.
Throwing her hat and coat upon the bed, the girl turned up the lights,
selected a score of "Lucia" from a portfolio under the piano, and,
seating herself at the music-stool, struck the key-board with sudden
fervor. The light soprano notes rang out, filling the small room with a
frail yet penetrating sweetness. It was a clear and brilliant voice, but
it was a voice in miniature, of which the first freshness was
marred--and it was not the voice for Lucia.
With quick dismay the girl realized it, and rising impatiently, tossed
the score upon the carpet and left the piano.
Standing before the long mirror on the wall, she slipped off her
walking-gown, letting it fall in a black heap to her feet. Then stepping
over it, she kicked it aside and stood with gleaming arms and breast in
the flickering gas-light. She loosened her heavy hair, drawing the pins
from it one by one, until it fell in a brown mane upon her shoulders.
Doffing her conventional dress, she doffed conventionality as well. She
was transformed into something seductive and subtle--something in
woman's flesh as ethereal as sea-foam and as vivid as flame.
She smiled suddenly. Then to a humming accompaniment she twirled upon
her toes, her steps growing faster and faster until her figure was
obscured in the blur of action and her hair flew about her face like the
hair of a painted witch.
The words of the air she hummed came with a dash of bravado from between
her lips:
"--Ange ou diable,
Ecume de la mer?"
Still smiling, she sank in an exhausted heap upon the floor.
Then she went to bed and fell asleep, lamenting that her head rested
upon a cotton pillow-slip.