"The thing is already on the wane," said young Orson Vane, making a wry
face over the entree, and sniffing at his glass, "and, if you ask me, I
think the general digestion of society will be the better for it."
"Yes, there is nothing, after all, so tedious as the sham variety of a
table d'hote. Though it certainly wasn't the fare one came to this hole
for."
Luke Moncreith turned his eyes, as he said that, over the place they sat
in, smiling at it with somewhat melancholy contempt. Its sanded floor,
its boisterously exposed wine-barrels, the meaningless vivacity of its
Hungarian orchestra, evidently stirred him no more.
"No; that was the last detail. It was the notion of dining below stairs,
as the servants do. It had, for a time, the charm of an imitation.
Nothing is so delightful as to imitate others; yet to be mistaken for
them is always dreadful. Of course, nobody would mistake us here for
servants."
The company, motley as it was, could not logically have come under any
such suspicion. Though it was dining in a cellar, on a sanded floor,
amid externals that were illegitimate offsprings of a _Studenten Kneipe_
and a crew of Christy minstrels, it still had, in the main, the air of
being recruited from the smart world. At every other table there were
people whom not to know was to argue oneself unknown. These persons
obviously treated the place, and their being there, as an elaborate
effort at gaiety; the others, the people who were plainly there for the
first time, took it with the bewildered manner of those whom each new
experience leaves mentally exhausted. The touch of rusticity, here and
there, did not suffice to spoil the sartorial sparkle of the smart
majority. The champagne that the sophisticated were wise enough to
oppose to the Magyar vintages sparkled into veins that ran beautifully
blue under skin that held curves the most aristocratic, tints the most
shell-like. Tinkling laughter, vocative of insincerity, rang between the
restless passion of the violins.
"When it is not below stairs," continued Vane, "it is up on the roof.
One might think we were a society without houses of our own. It is, I
suppose, the human craving for opposites. When we have stored our
sideboards with the finest glass you can get in Vienna or Carlsbad, we
turn our backs on it and go to drinking from pewter in a cellar. We pay
abominable wages to have servants who shall be noiseless, and then go to
places where the service is as guttural as a wilderness of monkeys.
Fortunately, these fancies do not last. Presently, I dare say, it will
be the fashion to dine at home. That will make us feel quite like the
original Puritans." He laughed, and took his glass of wine at a gulp.
"The fact of the matter is that variety has become the vice of life. We
have not, as a society, any inner steadfastness of soul; we depend upon
externals, and the externals pall with fearful speed. Think of seeing in
the mirror the face of the same butler for more than thirty days!" He
shuddered and shook his head.
"We are a restless lot," sighed the other, "but why discompose yourself
about it? Thank your stars you have nothing more important to worry
over!"
"My dear Luke, there is nothing more important than the attitude of
society at large. It is the only thing one should allow oneself to
discuss. To consider one's individual life is to be guilty of as bad
form as to wear anything that is conspicuous. Society admires us chiefly
only as we sink ourselves in it. If we let the note of personality rise,
our social position is sure to suffer. Imitation is the keynote of
smartness. The rank and file imitate the leaders consciously, and the
leaders unconsciously imitate the average. We frequent cellars, and
roofs, and such places, because in doing so we imagine we are imitating
the days of the Hanging Gardens and the Catacombs. We abhor the bohemian
taint, but we are willing to give a champagne and chicken imitation of
it. We do not really care for music and musicians, but we give excellent
imitations of doing so. At present we are giving the most lifelike
imitation of being passionately fond of outdoor life; I suppose England
feels flattered. I am afraid I have forgotten whose the first
fashionable divorce in our world was; it is far easier to remember the
names of the people who have never been divorced; at any rate those
pioneers ought to feel proud of the hugeness of their following. We have
adopted a vulgarity from Chicago and made it a fashionable institution;
divorce used to be a shuttlecock for the comic papers, and now it makes
the bulk of the social register."
Moncreith tapped his friend on the arm. "Drop it, Orson, drop it!" he
said. "I know this is a beastly bad dinner, but you shouldn't let it
make you maudlin. You know you don't really believe half you're saying.
Drop it, I say. These infernal poses make me ill." He attacked the
morsel of game on his plate with a zest that was beautiful to behold.
"If you go on in that biliously philosophic strain of yours, I shall
crunch this bird until I hear nothing but the grinding of bones. It is
really not a bad bit of quail. It is so small, and the casserole so
large, that you need an English setter to mark it, but once you've got
it,"--he wiped his lips with a flip of his napkin, "it's really worth
the search. Try it, and cheer up. The woman in rose, over there, under
the pseudo-palm, looks at you every time she sips her champagne; I have
no doubt she is calculating how untrue you could be to her. I suppose
your gloom strikes her as poetic; it strikes me as very absurd. You
really haven't a care in the world, and you sit here spouting
insincerity at a wasteful rate. If there's anything really and truly the
matter--tell me!"
Orson Vane dropped, as if it had been a mask, the ironical smile his
lips had worn. "You want sincerity," he said, "well, then I shall be
sincere. Sincerity makes wrinkles, but it is the privilege of our
friends to make us old before our time. Sincerely, then, Luke, I am
very, very tired."
"A fashionable imitation," mocked Moncreith.
"No; a personal aversion, to myself, to the world I live in. I wish the
dear old governor hadn't been such a fine fellow; if he had been of the
newer generation of fathers I suppose I wouldn't have had an ideal to
bless myself with."
Moncreith interrupted.
"Good Lord, Luke, did you say ideals? I swear I never knew it was as bad
as that." He beckoned to the waiter and ordered a Dominican. "It is so
ideal a liquor that when you have tasted it you crave only for
brutalities. Poor Orson! Ideals!" He sighed elaborately.
"If you imitate my manner of a while ago, I shall not say what I was
going to say. If I am to be sincere, so must you." He took the scarlet
drink the man set before him, and let it gurgle gently down his throat.
"It smacks of sin and I scent lies in it. I wish I had not taken it. It
is hard to be sincere after a drink that stirs the imagination. But I
shall try. And you are not to interrupt any more than you can help. If
we both shed the outer skin we wear for society, I believe we are
neither of us such bad sorts. That is just what I am getting at: I am
not quite bad enough to be blind to my own futility. Here I am, Luke,
young, decently looking, with money, position, and bodily health, and
yet I am cursed with thought of my own futility. When people have said
who I am, they have said it all; I have done nothing: I merely am. I
know others would sell their souls to be what I am; but it does not
content me. I have spent years considering my way. The arts have called
to me, but they have not held me. All arts are imitative, except music,
and music is not human enough for me; no people are so unhuman as
musical people, and no art is so entirely a creation of a self-centred
inventor. There can be no such thing as realism in music; the voices of
Nature can never be equalled on any humanly devised instruments or
notes. Painting and sculpture are mere imitations of what nature does
far better. When you see a beautiful woman as God made her you do not
care whether the Greeks colored their statues or not. Any average sunset
stamps the painted imitation as absurd. These arts, in fact, can never
be really great, since they are man's feeble efforts to copy God's
finest creations; between them and the ideal there must always be the
same distance as between man and his Creator. Then there is the art of
literature. It has the widest scope of them all. Whether it is imitative
or creative depends on the temperament of the individual; some men set
down what they see and hear, others invent a world of their own and busy
themselves with it. I believe it is the most human of the arts. Its
devotees not infrequently set themselves the task of discovering just
how their fellows think and live; they try to attune their souls to
other souls; they strive for an understanding of the larger humanity.
They--"
Moncreith interrupted with a gesture.
"Orson, you're not going to turn novelist? Don't tell me that! Your
enthusiasms fill me with melancholy forebodings."
"Not at all. But, as you know, I've seen much of this sort of thing
lately. In the first place I had my own temperamental leanings; in the
next place, you'll remember, we've had a season or two lately when
clever people have been the rage. To invite painters and singers and
writers to one's house has been the smart thing to do. We have had the
spectacle of a society, that goes through a flippant imitation of
living, engaged in being polite to people who imitate at second hand, in
song, and color, and story. Some smart people have even taken to those
arts, thus imitating the professional imitators. As far as the smart
point of view goes, I couldn't do anything better than go in for the
studio, or novelistic business. The dull people whom smartness has
rubbed to a thin polish would conspire in calling me clever. Is there
anything more dreadful than being called clever?"
"Nothing. It is the most damning adjective in the language. Whenever I
hear that a person is clever I am sure he will never amount to much.
There is only one word that approaches it in deadly significance. That
is 'rising.' I have known men whom the puffs have referred to as 'a
rising man' for twenty years. Can you imagine anything more dismal than
being called constantly by the same epithet? The very amiability in the
general opinion, permitting 'clever' and 'rising' to remain unalterable,
shows that the wearer of these terms is hopeless; a strong man would
have made enemies. I am glad you are wise enough to resist the
temptation of the Muses. Society's blessing would never console you for
anything short of a triumph. The triumphs are fearfully few; the clever
people--well, this cellar's full of them. There's Abbott Moore, for
instance."
"You're right; there he is. He's a case in point. One of the best cases;
a man who has really, in the worldly sense, succeeded tremendously. His
system of give and take is one of the most lovely schemes imaginable; we
all know that. When a mining millionaire with marriageable daughters
comes to town his first hostage to the smart set is to order a palace
near Central Park and to give Abbott Moore the contract for the
decorations. In return Abbott Moore asks the millionaire's womenfolk to
one of his studio carnivals. That section of the smart set which keeps
itself constantly poised on the border between smart and tart is awfully
keen on Abbott Moore's studio affairs. It has never forgotten the famous
episode when he served a tart within a tart, and it is still expecting
him to outdo that feat. To be seen at one of these affairs, especially
if you have millions, is to have got in the point of the wedge. I call
it a fair exchange; the millionaire gets his foot just inside the magic
portal; Moore gets a slice of the millions. All the world counts Moore a
success from every point of view, the smart, the professional, the
financial. Yet that isn't my notion of a full life. It's only a replica
of the very thing I'm tired of, my own life."
"Your life, my dear fellow, is generally considered a most enviable
article."
"Of course. I suppose it does have a glamour for the unobserving. Yet,
at the best, what am I?"
Moncreith laughed. "Another Dominican!" he said to the waiter. "The
liqueur," he said, "may enable me to rise to my subject." He smiled at
Vane over the glass, when it was brought to him, drained it under closed
eyes, and then settled himself well back into his chair.