"I will tell you what you are," began Moncreith, "to I the eye of the
average beholder. Here, in the most splendid town of the western world,
at the turning of two centuries, you are possessed of youth, health and
wealth. That really tells the tale. Never in the history of the world
have youth and health and wealth meant so much as they do now. These
three open the gates to all the earthly paradise. Your forbears did
their duty by you so admirably that you wear a distinguished name
without any sacrifice to poverty. You are good to look at. You are a
young man of fashion. If you chose you could lead the mode; you have the
instincts of a beau, though neither the severe suppression of Brummell
nor the obtrusive splendor of D'Aurevilly would suit you. Our age seems
to have come to too high an average in man's apparel to permit of any
single dictator; to be singled out is to be lowered. Yet there can be no
denying that you have often, unwittingly, set the fashion in waistcoats
and cravats. That aping has not hurt you, because the others never gave
their raiment the fine note of personal distinction that you wear. You
are a favorite in the clubs; people never go out when you come in; you
listen to the most stupid talk with the most graceful air imaginable;
that is one of the sure roads to popularity in clubdom. When it is the
fashion to be artistic, you can be so as easily as the others; when
sport is the watchword your fine physique forbids you no achievement.
You play tennis and golf and polo quite well enough to make women split
their gloves in applause, and not too well to make men sneer at you for
a 'pro.' When you are riding to hounds in Virginia you are never far
from the kill, and there is no automobilist whom the Newport villagers
are happier to fine for fast driving. You are equally at home in a
cotillon and on the deck of a racing yacht. You could marry whenever you
liked. Your character is unspotted either by the excessive vice that
shocks the mob, or the excessive virtue that tires the smart. You have
means, manners and manner. Finally, you have the two cardinal qualities
of smartness, levity and tolerance." He paused, and gave a smile of
satisfaction. "There, do you like the portrait?"
"It is abominable," said Vane, "it is what I see in my most awful
dreams. And the horror of it is that it is so frightfully true. I am
merely one of the figures in the elaborate masquerade we call society. I
make no progress in life; I learn nothing except new fashions and
foibles. I am weary of the masquerade and the masks. Life in the smart
world is a game with masks; one shuffles them as one does cards. As for
me, I want to throw the whole pack into the fire. Everyone wears these
masks; nobody ever penetrates to the real soul behind the make-up."
"It is a game you play perfectly. One should hesitate long about giving
up anything that one has brought to perfection. These others dabble and
squabble in what you call the secondary imitations of life; you, at any
rate, are giving your imitation at first hand."
"Yes, but it no longer satisfies me. Listen, Luke. You must promise not
to laugh and not to frown. It will seem absurd to you; yet I am terribly
in earnest about it. When first I came out of college I went in for
science. When I gave it up, it was because I found it was leading me
away from the human interest. There is the butterfly I want to chase;
the human interest. I attempted all the arts; not one of them took me
far on my way. My failure, Luke, is an ironic sentence upon the vaunted
knowledge of the world."
"Your failure? My dear Orson; come to the point. What do you mean by the
human interest?"
"I mean that neither scientist nor scholar has yet shown the way to one
man's understanding of another's soul. The surgeon can take a body and
dissect its every fraction, arguing and proving each function of it. The
painter tries, with feeble success, to reach what he calls the spirit of
his subject. So does the author. He tries to put himself into the place
of each of his characters; he aims, always, for the nearest possible
approach to the lifelike. And, above all the others, there is the actor.
In this, as in its other qualities, the art of acting is the crudest,
the most obvious of them all; yet, in certain moments, it comes nearest
to the ideal. The actor in his mere self is--well, we all know the story
of the famous player being met by this greeting: 'And what art thou
to-night?' But he goes behind a door and he can come forth in a series
of selves. A trick or so with paint; a change of wig; a twist of the
face-muscles, and we have the same man appearing as _Napoleon_, as
_Richelieu_, as _Falstaff_. The thing is external, of course. Whether
there shall be anything more than the mere bodily mask depends upon the
actor's intelligence and his imagination. The supreme artist so
succeeds, by virtue of much study, much skill in imitating what he has
conceived to be the soul of his subject, in almost giving us a lifelike
portrait. And yet, and yet--it is not the real thing; the real soul of
his subject is as much a mystery to that actor as it is to you or me.
That is what I mean when I say that science fails us at the most
important point of all; the soul of my neighbor is as profound a mystery
to me as the soul of a man that lived a thousand years ago. I can know
your face, Luke, your clothes, your voice, the outward mask you wear;
but--can I reach the secrets of your soul? No. And if we cannot know how
others feel and think, how can we say we know the world? Bah! The world
is a realm of shadows in which all walk blindly. We touch hands every
day, but our souls are hidden in a veil that has not been passed since
God made the universe."
"You cry for the moon," said Moncreith. "You long for the unspeakable.
Is it not terrible enough to know your neighbor's face, his voice, his
coat, without burdening yourself with knowledge of his inner self? It is
merely an egoistic curiosity, my dear Orson; you cannot prove that the
human interest, as you term it, would benefit by the extension in wisdom
you want."
"Oh, you are wrong, you are wrong. The whole world of science undergoes
revolution, once you gain the point I speak of. Doctors will have the
mind as well as the body to diagnose; lovers will read each others
hearts as well as their voices; lies will become impossible, or, at
least, futile; oh--it would be a better world altogether. At any rate,
until this avenue of knowledge is opened to me, I shall call all the
rest a failure. I imitate; you imitate; we imitate; that is the
conjugation of life. When I think of the hopelessness of the thing,--do
you wonder I grow bitter? I want communion with real beings, and I meet
only masks. I tell you, Luke, it is abominable, this wall that stands
between each individual and the rest of the world. How can I love my
neighbor if I do not understand him? How can I understand him if I
cannot think his thoughts, dream his dreams, spell out his soul's
secrets?"
Moncreith smiled at his friend, and let his eyes wander a trifle
ironically about his figure. "One would not think, to look at you, that
you were possessed of a mania, an itch! If you take my advice you will
content yourself with living life as you find it. It is really a very
decent world. It has good meat and drink in it, and some sweet women,
and a strong man or two. Most of us are quite ignorant of the fact that
we are merely engaged in incomplete imitations of life, or that there is
a Chinese wall between us and the others; the chances are we are all the
happier for our innocence. Consider, for instance, that rosy little face
behind us--you can see it perfectly in that mirror--can you deny that it
looks all happiness and innocence?"
Vane looked, and presently sighed a little. The face of the girl, as he
found it in the glass, was the color of roses lying on a pool of clear
water. It was one of those faces that one scarce knows whether to think
finer in profile or in full view; the features were small, the hair
glistened with a tint of that burnish the moon sometimes wears on summer
nights, and the figure was a mere fillip to the imagination. A cluster
of lilies of the valley lay upon her hair; they seemed like countless
little cups pouring frost upon a copper glow. All about her radiated an
ineffable gentleness, a tenderness; she made all the other folk about
her seem garish and ugly and cruel. One wondered what she did in that
gallery.
"To the outer eye," said Vane, as he sighed, "she is certainly a flower,
a thing of daintiness and delight. But--do you suppose I believe it, for
a moment? I have no doubt she is merely one of those creatures whom God
has made for the destruction of our dreams; her mind is probably as
corrupt as her body seems fair. She is perhaps--"
He stopped, for the face in the mirror had its eyes thrown suddenly in
his direction. The eyes, in that reflex fashion, met, and something akin
to a smile, oh, an ever so wistful, wonderful a smile, crept upon the
lips and the eyes of the girl, while to the man there came only a sudden
silence.
"She is," continued Vane, in another voice altogether, and as if he were
thinking of distant affairs, "very beautiful."
The girl's eyes, meanwhile, had shifted towards Moncreith. He felt the
radiance of them and looked, too, and the girl's beauty came upon him
with a quick, personal force that was like pain. Vane's spoken
approbation of her angered him; he hardly knew why; for the first time
in his life he thought he could hate the man beside him.
The girl turned her head a little, put up her hand and so hid her face
from both young men, or there is no telling what sudden excuse the two
might not have seized for open enmity. It sounds fantastic, perhaps, but
there are more enmities sown in a single glance from a woman's eyes
than a Machiavelli could build up by ever so devilish devices. Neither
of the two, in this case, could have said just what they felt, or why.
Moncreith thought, vaguely enough perhaps, that it was a sin for so fair
a flower to waste even a look upon a fellow so shorn of faith as was
Orson Vane. As for Vane--
Vane brought his hand upon the table so that the glasses rocked.
"Oh," he exclaimed, "if one could only be sure! If one could see past
the mask! What would I not give to believe in beauty when I see it, to
trust to appearances! Oh, for the ability to put myself in the place of
another, to know life from another plane than my own, to--"
But here he was interrupted.