Well, I'm glad I met you tonight.... It was Sister Carrie that set
me right; at least I think it was Sister Carrie. What a book! What a
masterpiece! No style, no form, just _subject_. The devils flogged St.
Jerome in the fifth century because he was rather a Ciceronian than a
Christian in his beautiful writing, but they never will flog Theodore
Dreiser! He had an idea, he knew life, and he just wrote what he felt.
He wasn't thinking of _how_ to write it; he had something to write.
Have you read Sister Carrie?
I explained that Edna Kenton had given me the book to read when it
first appeared.
Strange as it may appear to you, for my way is not, perhaps, Dreiser's,
that book explains why I am here and why I dress in this manner. It
explains why I wander about the streets and talk with the people. It
explains why I am hoping for the REVOLUTION (Peter on this occasion
invariably pronounced this word in capitals). It explains why I am an
I.W.W. I would even join the Elks, if necessary. I think Dreiser at one
time must have been an Elk; else how could he describe Hurstwood so
perfectly?
It is amusing, however, that you who won't work should become an
international worker!
I dare say it is, drawled Peter, stroking George Moore's back, as the
superb cat lay purring on his knee. I dare say it is but I'd go a
good deal farther to get what I want; I'd even seek employment in a
department store or a Chinese laundry. However, it's coming without
that, it's coming fast. I found my heroine the other day, a little
Jewish girl, who works in a sweat-shop. She has one blue eye and one
black one. She has a club-foot, a hare-lip, and she is a hunch-back.
I nearly cried for joy when I discovered her. I met her on Rivington
Street walking with a stack of men's overcoats three feet high poised
on her head. She was limping under her burden. I followed her to the
shop and made some inquiries. Her name is Rosie Levenstein. I shall
leave in the deformities, but I shall change her name.
Isn't she just a trifle unpleasant, a little unsympathetic, for a
heroine?
My book, replied Peter, is going to be very unpleasant. It is about
life and because you and I enjoy life is little enough reason for
us to consider it other than a dirty business. Life for the average
person, for Rosie, for instance, simply will not do. It's bloody
awful and, if anything, I shall make it worse than it is. Now, if the
comrades succeed in starting the REVOLUTION, I am going through with
it, straight through, breaking into drawing-rooms with the others.
I'm going to pound up a Steinway grand with a hammer. Here Peter,
with a suitable gesture, brought his hand down rather heavily on
George Moore's head and that one, indignant, immediately rose and
jumped down from his lap, subsequently stretched himself on the floor,
catching his claws in the carpet, and after yawning once or twice,
retreated under the bed. George Sand now left Peter's shoulder to
fill the vacant place on his knee. As I told you, I'm going to wear
a red handkerchief round my brow and my face will be bloody. Then,
all I have to do is to transfer the whole experience, everything _I_
have done and felt, the thrill, the BOOM, to Rosie. Can't you see
the picture in my last chapter of the little, lame, hare-lipped
hunch-back, with one blue eye and one black one, marching up Fifth
Avenue with the comrades, wrapped in the red flag, her face stained
with blood, humbling the Guggenheimers and the Morgans, disturbing
the sleep of Henry Clay Frick, casting art treasures, bought with the
blood of the poor, out to the pavement, breaking windows, shooting,
torturing, devastating? Then the triumphant return to the East Side,
Rosie on the men's shoulders. Everybody tired and sweaty, satiated
and bloody. Now, all the realism of the interiors, gefillte fish and
schnaps. But Rosie will sit down to her dinner in a Bendel evening
gown, raped from one of the Kahn closets. The men come back for her.
Another procession down Canal Street. The police charge the mob. Shots.
The Vanderbilts and the Astors and the Schwabs in their Rolls-Royces
and their Pierce-Arrows, fitted with machine-guns, charge the mob.
Terrible slaughter. Rosie dead, a horrid mess, fully described, lying
on the pavement. Everything lost. Everything worse than it was before.
Deportation. Exile. Tenements razed. Old women, their sheitels awry,
wrapped in half a dozen petticoats and thick shawls, bearing the sacred
candlesticks, fleeing in all directions. Cries of Weh is mir! Moans.
Groans. Desolation. And, at the end, a lone figure standing just where
you and I were standing a little while ago, philosophizing, pointing
the dread moral, accenting the horror. The lights go out. Darkness. In
the distance, a band is heard playing The Star Spangled Banner. Finis.
Peter's excitement became so great that he almost shrieked; he waved
his arms and he half rose out of his chair. George Sand, too, found it
expedient to retreat under the bed. The kittens, tumbling mewing out
of their baskets, their little tails, like Christmas trees, straight
in the air, followed her, and soon were pushing their paws valiantly
against her belly and drinking greedily from her dugs.
It's wonderful, I said when Peter, at last, was silent. Then, as it
seemed, rather inconsequentially, Do you know Edith Dale?
Who is Edith Dale?
Well, she's a woman, but a new kind of woman, or else the oldest kind;
I'm not sure which. I'm going to take you there. Bill Haywood goes
there. So does Doris Keane. Everybody goes there. Everything is all
mixed up. Everybody talks his own kind of talk and Edith, inscrutable
Edith, sits back and listens. You can listen too.
Is she writing a book?
No, she never does anything like that. She spends her energy in living,
in watching other people live, in watching them make their silly
mistakes, in helping them make their silly mistakes. She is a dynamo.
She will give you a good deal. At least, these gatherings will give
you a good deal. I think you might carry a chapter or two of your novel
through one of Edith Dale's evenings.
Must I change my clothes?
No, you are right just as you are. She will like you the better for
them.
That's good. I couldn't change my clothes. My friends, the comrades,
wouldn't understand if they saw me. But you must have a drink. I had
nearly forgotten that I had promised you one.
Peter opened the polished oak wardrobe and extracted therefrom a bottle
of Christopher's Finest Old White Scotch Whisky and he began to speak
of the advantage of allowing spirits to retain their natural colour,
which rarely happens in the case of whisky, although gin is ordinarily
to be distinguished in this manner.
_Chapter VII_
Edith Dale had returned to New York after three years in Florence.
Near the old renaissance city, she had purchased an ancient villa in
the mountains and had occupied herself during her sojourn there in
transforming it into a perfect environment for the amusing people
with whom she surrounded herself. The villa originally had been built
without a loggia; this was added, together with a salone in the general
style of the old house. The lovely Italian garden was restored.
Cypresses pointed their dark green cones towards the sky and gardenias
bloomed. White peacocks and statues were imported. Then, with her
superlatively excellent taste at her elbow, Edith rushed about Italy
in her motor, ravishing prie-Dieu, old pictures, fans, china dogs,
tapestries, majolica, and Capo di Monte porcelains, carved and gilded
renaissance boxes, fantastic Venetian glass girandoles, refectory
tables, divans, and divers bibelots, until the villa became a perfect
expression of her mood. When every possible accent had been added,
she entertained in the evening. Eleanora Duse, a mournful figure
in black velvet, stood on the loggia and gazed out over the hills
towards Certosa; Gordon Craig postured in the salone; and Gertrude
Stein commemorated the occasion in a pamphlet, printed and bound in
a Florentine floral wall-paper, which today fetches a good sum in old
bookshops, when it can be found at all. To those present at this festa,
it seemed, doubtless, like the inauguration of the reign of another
Lorenzo the Magnificent. There was, indeed, the prospect that Ease and
Grace, Beauty, Wit, and Knowledge, would stroll through these stately
and ornate chambers for indefinite months, while hungry artists were
being fed in the dining-room. But to Edith, this culminating dreary
festivity was the end. She had decorated her villa with its last china
dog, and the greatest actress in the world was standing on her loggia.
Under the circumstances, further progress in this direction seemed
impossible. She was even somewhat chagrined to recall that it had
taken her three years to accomplish these things and she resolved to
move more quickly in the future. So, packing enough of her treasures
to furnish an apartment in New York, she shut the villa door without
looking behind her, and booked a passage on the next boat sailing from
Genoa.
In New York she found the top floor of an old mansion in Washington
Square exactly what she wanted and installed green glass, lovely
fabrics, and old Italian furniture against the ivory-white of the
walls and the hangings. She accomplished the setting in a week; now
she required the further decoration which the human element would
afford. Art, for the moment, was her preoccupation and, with her
tremendous energy and her rare sagacity and taste, she set about,
quite spontaneously, arranging for an exhibition, the first great
exhibition of the post-impressionist and cubist painters in New York.
This show has now become almost a legend but it was the reality of
that winter. It was the first, and possibly the last, exhibition of
paintings held in New York which everybody attended. Everybody went
and everybody talked about it. Street-car conductors asked for your
opinion of the Nude Descending the Staircase, as they asked you for
your nickel. Elevator boys grinned about Matisse's Le Madras Rouge,
Picabia's La Danse à la Source, and Brancusi's Mademoiselle Pogany,
as they lifted you to the twenty-third floor. Ladies, you met at
dinner, found Archipenko's sculpture very amusing, but was it art?
Alfred Stieglitz, whose 291 Gallery had nourished similar ideas for
years, spouted like a geyser for three weeks and then, after a proper
interval, like Old Faithful, began again. Actresses began to prefer
Odilon Redon to Raphael Kirchner. To sum up, the show was a bang-up,
whale of a success, quite overshadowing the coeval appearance of the
Irish Players, chaperoned by Lady Gregory. It was cartooned, it was
caricatured, it was Dr. Frank Craned. Scenes in the current revues at
the theatres were devoted to it; it was even mentioned in a burlesque
at the Columbia. John Wanamaker advertised cubist gowns and ladies
began to wear green, blue, and violet wigs, and to paint their faces
emerald and purple. The effects of this æsthetic saturnalia are
manifest even today.
Fresh from the quieter insanity of Florence, Edith was intensely amused
by all this. It seemed so extraordinarily droll to find the great
public awake to the excitement of art. She surrounded herself with as
many storm centres as possible. The crowds flocked to her place and
she made them comfortable. Pinchbottles and Curtis Cigarettes, poured
by the hundreds from their neat pine boxes into white bowls, trays of
Virginia ham and white Gorgonzola sandwiches, pale Italian boys in
aprons, and a Knabe piano were added to the decorations. Arthur Lee
and Lee Simonson, Marsden Hartley, Andrew Dasburg, Max Weber, Charles
Demuth, Bobby Jones--just out of college and not yet a designer of
scenery--, Bobby Parker, all the jeunes were confronted with dowagers
from the upper East Side, old family friends, Hutchins Hapgood, Ridgely
Torrence, Edwin Arlington Robinson, and pretty women. Arguments and
discussions floated in the air, were caught and twisted and hauled and
tied, until the white salon itself was no longer static. There were
undercurrents of emotion and sex.
Edith was the focus of the group, grasping this faint idea or that
frail theory, tossing it back a complete or wrecked formula, or she
sat quietly with her hands folded, like a Madonna who had lived long
enough to learn to listen. Sometimes she was not even at home, for the
drawing-room was generally occupied from ten in the morning until
midnight. Sometimes--very often, indeed--, she left her guests without
a sign and went to bed. Sometimes--and this happened still oftener--,
she remained in the room without being present. Andrew Dasburg
commemorated this aspect in a painting which he called The Absence of
Edith Dale. But always, and Dasburg suggested this in his flame-like
portrait, her electric energy presided. She was the amalgam which held
the incongruous group together; she was the alembic that turned the
dross to gold.
When dulness, beating its tiresome wings, seemed about to hover over
the group, she had a habit of introducing new elements into the
discussion, or new figures into the group itself, and one day it
must have occurred to her that, if people could become so excited
about art, they might be persuaded to become excited about themselves
too, and so she transferred her interest to the labouring man, to
unions, to strikes, to the I.W.W. I remember the first time I saw her
talking earnestly with a rough member of the garment-maker's union.
Two days later, Bill Haywood, himself, came in and the tremendous
presence of the one-eyed giant filled the room, seeming to give it a
new consecration. Débutantes knelt on the floor beside him, while he
talked simply, but with an enthralling intensity, about the things
that interested him, reinforcing his points by crushing the heels
of his huge boots into the Shirvan rug or digging his great hands
into the mauve tapestry with which the divan was upholstered. Miners,
garment-workers, and silk-weavers were the honoured guests in those
days. The artists still came but the centre of interest had shifted.
Almost half of every day, Edith now spent in Paterson, New Jersey,
where the strike of the hour was going on, attending union meetings and
helping to carry pickets back and forth in her motor. She continued to
be diverted by the ironies and complexities of life.
Recruits to the circle arrived from Europe--for Edith knew half of
Europe--; solemn celebrities, tramps, upper Fifth Avenue, Gramercy
Park, Greenwich Village, a few actresses--I took Fania Marinoff there
several times--were all mixed up with green glass vases, filled
with fragrant white lilies, salmon snapdragons, and blue larkspurs,
pinchbottles, cigarette stubs, Lincoln Steffens, and the paintings
of Marsden Hartley and Arthur B. Davies. Over the whole floated the
dominant odours of Coty's chypre and stale beer.
Edith herself was young--about thirty-four--and comely, with a face
that could express anything or nothing more easily than any face I have
ever seen. It was a perfect mask. She wore lovely gowns of clinging
turquoise blue, spinel, and jacinth silks from Liberty's. When she went
out, she wrapped herself in more soft silks of contrasting shades, and
donned such a hat as Donatello's David wears, graceful with its waving
plumes and an avalanche of drooping veils.
I spent whole days at Edith's and was nearly as much amused as she.
To be truthful, I dare say I was more amused, because she tired of it
before I did. But before these days were over I brought in Peter. I had
telephoned Edith that we were coming for dinner and, when we arrived,
the rooms were nearly empty, for she found it as easy to rid herself
of people as to gather them in. Neith Boyce was there, I remember, her
lovely red hair caught in a low knot and her lithe body swathed in a
deep blue brocade. There were two young men whose names I never knew,
for Edith never introduced anybody and these young men did not interest
me sufficiently to compel me to converse with them and they interested
Edith so little that they were never allowed to appear again. The
dinner, as always, was simple: a soup, roast beef and browned potatoes,
peas, a salad of broccoli, a loaf of Italian bread, pats of sweet
butter, and cheese and coffee. Bottles of whisky, red and white wine,
and beer stood at intervals along the unclothed refectory table. The
cynical Tuscan butler, who had once been in the service of Lady Paget,
never interrupted the meals to serve these. You poured out what you
wanted when you wanted it. The dinner was dull. The young men tried to
make an impression on Edith, with a succession of witty remarks of the
sort which would have made them exceedingly popular in anything like
what Ward McAllister describes as Society as I Have Found It, but it
was apparent that their hostess was unaware of their very existence.
Neith and I exchanged a few inconsequential phrases concerning D.H.
Lawrence's Sons and Lovers. Peter, dressed as he had been when I met
him in the Chinese shop, and even dirtier, was utterly silent. Long
before coffee was served, Edith left the table and went into the salon
to write letters.
When we followed her later, there were already a few people there,
talking in corners, and more were arriving. Now and again, Edith
glanced up from her letters to greet one of the newcomers but she did
not rise. Peter wandered about the room, looking at the pictures,
occasionally picking up a book, of which there were a great number
lying about on the tables. Donald Evans, correct and rather portentous
in his studied dignity, made an early appearance. At this period he was
involved in the composition of the Sonnets from the Patagonian. He drew
a manuscript from his pocket and laid it on the desk before Edith. Over
her shoulder I read the line,
She triumphed in the tragic turnip field.
Hutchins Hapgood, haggard and restless and yet strangely sympathetic,
came in and joined uneasily in an eager conversation with a young
woman with bobbed hair who stood in a corner, fingering an African
primitive carving in wood of a naked woman with long pointed breasts.
Yorska was there, the exotic Yorska with her long nose, her tragic
eyes, her mouth like a crimson slit in a face as white as Pierrot's,
a modern Judith looking for a modern Holofernes and never finding
him; Jo Davidson with his jovial black beard, Bacchus or satyr in
evening clothes; Edna Kenton, in a pale green floating tunic of her
own design; Max Eastman, poet and Socialist, and his wife, Ida Rauh;
Helen Westley, a tall angular scrag with something of the aristocracy
of the Remsen-Meseroles informing her spine, who had acquired a
considerable reputation for being "paintable" by never paying the
slightest attention to her clothes; Henrietta Rodman, the round-faced,
cherubic Max Weber.... I caught all these and, quite suddenly, although
for some time, I remembered afterward, I had been aware of the odour
of Cœur de Jeannette, Clara Barnes. She was sitting, when I discovered
her, on a sofa before the fire-place, in which the coals were glowing.
She was more matronly in figure and was dressed with some attempt at
stylization. She was wearing a robe of batik, iridescent in the shades
of the black opal, with a belt of moonstones set in copper, and huge
ear-rings fashioned of human hair. On her feet were copper-coloured
sandals and I was pleased to note that her dress was long enough to
cover her ankles. I leaned over the back of the sofa and addressed her,
Miss Barnes, I believe....
She turned.
Oh, it's you. What a long time it's been since Paris.