The Cords of Vanity. A Comedy of Shirking

by James Branch Cabell

  "I had always known that somewhere, somehow, you would come into my life again. It has been my dream all these two years; but I dream carelessly. My visions had not included this—obstacle."

  She made wide eyes at me. "What?" said she.

  "Your husband," I suggested, delicately.

  The eyes flashed. And a view of Monaco, to all appearances, awoke some pleasing recollection. "I confess," said Mrs. Barry-Smith, "that—for the time—I had quite forgotten him. I—I reckon you must think me very horrid?"

  But she was at pains to accompany this query with a broadside that rendered such a supposition most unthinkable. And so—

  "I think you—" My speech was hushed and breathless, and ended in a click of the teeth. "Oh, don't let's go into the minor details," I pleaded.

  Then Mrs. Barry-Smith descended to a truism. "It is usually better not to," said she, with the air of an authority. And latterly, addressing the facade of Notre Dame, "You see, Mr. Barry-Smith being so much older than I—"

  "I would prefer that. Of course, though, it is none of my business."

  "You see, you came and went so suddenly that—of course I never thought to see you again—not that I ever thought about it, I reckon—" Her candour would have been cruel had it not been reassuringly over-emphasized. "And Mr. Barry-Smith was very pressing—"

  "He would be," I assented, after consideration. "It is, indeed, the single point in his outrageous conduct I am willing to condone."

  "—and he was a great friend of my father's, and I liked him—"

  "So you married him and lived together ever afterward, without ever throwing the tureen at each other. That is the most modern version; but there is usually a footnote concerning the bread-and-butter plates."

  She smiled, inscrutably, a sphinx in Dresden china. "And yet," she murmured, plaintively, "I would like to know what you think of me."

  "Why, prefacing with the announcement that I pray God I may never see you after to-night, I think you the most adorable creature He ever made. What does it matter now? I have lost you. I think—ah, desire o' the world, what can I think of you? The notion of you dazzles me like flame,—and I dare not think of you, for I love you."

  "Yes?" she queried, sweetly; "then I reckon Mrs. Dumby was right after all. She said you were a most depraved person and that, as a young and—well, she said it, you know—attractive widow—"

  "H'm!" said I; and I sat down. "Elena Barry-Smith," I added, "you are an unmitigated and unconscionable and unpardonable rascal. There is just one punishment which would be adequate to meet your case; and I warn you that I mean to inflict it. Why, how dare you be a widow! The court decides it is unable to put up with any such nonsense, and that you've got to stop it at once."

  "Really," said she, tossing her head and moving swiftly, "one would think we were on a desert island!"

  "Or a strange roof"—and I laughed, contentedly. "Meanwhile, about that ring—it should be, I think, a heavy, Byzantine ring, with the stones sunk deep in the dull gold. Yes, we'll have six stones in it; say, R, a ruby; O, an opal; B, a beryl; E, an emerald; R, a ruby again, I suppose; and T, a topaz. Elena, that's the very ring I mean to buy as soon as I've had breakfast, tomorrow, as a token of my mortgage on the desire of the world, and as the badge of your impendent slavery." And I reflected that Rosalind had, after all, behaved commendably in humiliating me by so promptly returning this ring.

  Very calmly Elena Barry-Smith regarded the Bay of Naples; very calmly she turned to the Taj Mahal. "An obese young Lochinvar," she reflected aloud, "who has seen me twice, unblushingly assumes he is about to marry me! Of course," she sighed, quite tolerantly, "I know he is clean out of his head, for otherwise—" "Yes,—otherwise?" I prompted.

  "—he would never ask me to wear an opal. Why," she cried in horror, "I couldn't think of it!" "You mean—?" said I.

  She closed the album, with firmness. "Why, you are just a child," said Mrs. Barry-Smith. "We are utter strangers to each other. Please remember that, for all you know, I may have an unbridled temper, or an imported complexion, or a liking for old man Ibsen. What you ask—only you don't, you simply assume it,—is preposterous. And besides, opals are unlucky."

  "Desire o' the world," I said, in dolorous wise, "I have just remembered the black-lace mitts and reticule you left upon the dinner-table. Oh, truly, I had meant to bring 'em to you—Only do you think it quite good form to put on those cloth-sided shoes when you've been invited to a real party?"

  For a moment Mrs. Barry-Smith regarded me critically. Then she shook her head, and tried to frown, and reopened the album, and inspected the crater of Vesuvius, and quite frankly laughed. And a tender, pink-tipped hand rested upon my arm for an instant,—a brief instant, yet pulsing with a sense of many lights and of music playing somewhere, and of a man's heart keeping time to it.

  "If you were to make it an onyx—" said Mrs. Barry-Smith.

  21. He is Urged to Desert His Galley

  1

  She had been a widow even when I first encountered her in Liege. I may have passed her dozens of times, only she was in mourning then, for Barry-Smith, and so I never really saw her.

  It seems, though, that "in the second year" it is permissible to wear pink garments in the privacy of your own apartments, and that if people see you in them, accidentally, it is simply their own fault.

  And very often they are punished for it; as most certainly was I, for Elena led me a devil's dance of jealousy, and rapture, and abject misery, and suspicion, and supreme content, that next four months. She and her mother had rented a house on Regis Avenue for the winter; and I frequented it with zeal. Mrs. Vokins said I "came reg'lar as the milkman."

  2

  Now of Mrs. Vokins I desire to speak with the greatest respect, if only for the reason that she was Elena Barry-Smith's mother. Mrs. Vokins had, no doubt, the kindest heart in the world; but she had spent the first thirty years of her life in a mountain-girdled village, and after her husband's wonderful luck—if you will permit me her vernacular,—in being "let in on the groundfloor" when the Amalgamated Tobacco Company was organised, I believe that Mrs. Vokins was never again quite at ease.

  I am abysmally sure she never grew accustomed to being waited on by any servant other than a girl who "came in by the day"; though, oddly enough, she was incessantly harassed by the suspicion that one or another "good-for-nothing nigger was getting ready to quit." Her time was about equally devoted to tending her canary, Bill Bryan, and to furthering an apparently diurnal desire to have supper served a quarter of an hour earlier to-night, "so that the servants can get off."

  Finally Mrs. Vokins considered that "a good woman's place was right in her own home, with a nice clean kitchen," and was used to declare that the fummadiddles of Mrs. Carrie Nation—who was in New York that winter, you may remember, advocating Prohibition,—would never have been stood for where Mrs. Vokins was riz. Them Yankee huzzies, she estimated, did beat her time.

  3

  It was, and is, the oddest thing I ever knew of that Elena could have been her daughter. Though, mind you, even to-day, I cannot commit myself to any statement whatever as concerns Elena Barry-Smith, beyond asserting that she was beautiful. I am willing to concede that since the world's creation there may have lived, say, six or seven women who were equally good to look upon; but at the bottom of my heart I know the concession is simply verbal. For she was not pretty; she was not handsome; she was beautiful. Indeed, I sometimes thought her beauty overshadowed any serious consideration of the woman who wore it, just as in admiration of a picture you rarely think to wonder what sort of canvas it is painted on.

  Yes, I am quite sure, upon reflection, that to Elena Barry-Smith her beauty was a sort of tyrant. She devoted her life, I think, to the retention of her charms; and what with the fixed seven hours for sleep—no more and not a moment less,—the rigid limits of her diet, the walking of exactly five miles a day, and her mathematical adherence to a predetermined programme of massage and hair-treatment a
nd manicuring and face-creams and so on, Elena had hardly two hours in a day at her own disposal.

  She would as soon have thought of sacrificing her afternoon walk to the Musgrave Monument and back, as of having a front-tooth unnecessarily removed; and would as willingly have partaken of prussic acid as of candy or potatoes. She was, in fine, an artist of the truest type, in that she immolated her body, and her own preferences, in the cause of beauty.

  Nor was she vain, or stupid either, though what I have written vaguely sounds as though she were both. She was just Elena Barry-Smith, of whom your memory was always how beautiful she had been at this or that particular moment, rather than what she said or did. And I believe that every man in Lichfield was in love with her.

  But, in recollection of any person with whom you have had intimate and tender intercourse, the pre-eminent feature is the big host of questions which you cannot answer, or not, at least, with certainty….

  4

  For instance: the night of the Allardyce dance, after seeing Elena home, I stepped in for a moment to get warm and have her mix me a highball. We sat for a considerable while on the long sofa in the dimly-lighted dining room, talking in whispers so as not to disturb the rest of the house: and Elena was unusually beautiful that night, and I was more than usually in love, more thanks to three of the five drinks she mixed….

  "You ought to be ashamed of yourself," she stated, sighing.

  I did not say anything.

  "Oh, well, then—! If you will just promise me," she stipulated, "that you will never in any way refer to it afterwards—"

  So I promised…. And the next day she met me, cool as the proverbial cucumber, and never once did she "refer to it afterwards," nor did I think it wise to do so either. But the incident, however delightful, puzzled me. It puzzles me even now….

  5

  In any event, she was not only beautiful but exceedingly well-to-do likewise, since her dead father and her husband also had provided for her amply; and Lichfield sniggered in consequence, and as a matter of course assumed my devotion to be of astute and mercenary origin. But I had, in this period, a variety of reasons to know that Lichfield was for once entirely in the wrong; and that what Lichfield mistook to be the begetter of, was in reality—so we will phrase it—the almost unnecessary augmenter of my infatuation. Of course I did not exactly object to her having money….

  Meantime Elena was profoundly various. I told her once that being married to her would be the very next thing to owning a harem. And in consequence of this same mutability, it was as late as March before Elena Barry-Smith made up her mind to marry me; and I was so deliciously perturbed that the same night I wrote to tell Bettie Hamlyn all about it. I had accepted Rosalind more calmly somehow. Now I was dithyrambic; and you would never have suspected I had lived within fifty miles of Bettie for an entire two years without attempting to communicate with her, for very certainly my letter did not touch upon the fact. I was, in fine, supremely happy, and I wanted Bettie, first of all, to know of this circumstance, because my happiness had always made her happy too.

  The act was natural enough; only Elena telephoned, at nine the following morning, that she had altered her intention.

  "My regret is beyond expression," said I, politely, "I shall come for my tea at five, however."

  She entered upon a blurred protest. "You have already broken my heart," I said, with some severity, "and now it would appear you contemplate swindling the remainder of my anatomy out of its deserts. You are a curmudgeon." And I hung up the receiver.

  And my first thought was, "Oh, how gladly I would give the gold of Ormus and of Alaska just to have my letter back!" But I had mailed it, shuffling to the corner in my slippers, and without any collar on, in the hushed middle of the night, because my letter had seemed so important then.

  6

  "Will you not have me, lady?" I began that afternoon.

  "No, my lord," she demurely responded, "for I've decided it would be too much like living in my Sunday-clothes."

  And "I give it up. So what's the answer?" was my annotation.

  "Oh, I'm not making jokes to-day. Why are you so—Oh, as we used to say at school," she re-began, "Que diable allais-tu faire dans cette galere?"

  "I was born in a vale of tears, Elena, and must take the consequences of being found in such a situation."

  She came to me, and her finger-tips touched my hand ever so lightly. "That is another quotation, I suppose. And it is one other reason why I mean not to marry you. Frankly, you bore me to death with your erudition; you are three-quarters in love with me, but you pay heaps less attention to what I say about anything than to what Aristotle or some other old fellow said about it. Oh, that I should have lived to be jealous of Aristotle! Indeed I am, for I have the misfortune to be hideously in love with you. You are so exactly the sort of infant I would like to adopt."

  "Love," I suggested, "while no longer an excuse for marriage, is at least a palliation."

  "Listen, dear. From the first I have liked you, but that was not very strange, because I like almost everybody; but it was strange I should have remembered you and have liked the idea of you ever since you went away that first time."

  "Oh, well, this once I will excuse you—"

  "But it happened in this way: I had found everybody—very nice, you know—particularly the men,—and the things which cannot be laughed at I had always put aside as not worth thinking about. You like to laugh, too, but I have always known—and sometimes it gets me real mad to think about it, I can tell you—that you could be in earnest if you chose, and I can't. And that makes me a little sorry and tremendously glad, because, quite frankly, I am head over heels in love with you. That is why I don't intend to marry you."

  And I was not a little at sea. "Oh, very well!" I pleasantly announced, "I shall become a prominent citizen at once, if that's all that is necessary. I will join every one of the patriotic societies, and sit perpetually on platforms with a perspiring water-pitcher, and unveil things every week, with felicitous allusions to the glorious past of our grand old State; and have columns of applause in brackets on the front page of the Courier-Herald. I will even go into civic politics, if you insist upon it, and leave round-cornered cards at all the drugstores, so that everybody who buys a cigar will know I am subject to the Democratic primary. I wonder, by the way, if people ever survive that malady? It sounds to me a deal more dangerous that epilepsy, say, yet lots of persons seem to have it—"

  But Elena was not listening. "You know," she re-began, "I could get out of it all very gracefully by telling you you drink too much. You couldn't argue it, you know—particularly after your behavior last Tuesday."

  "Oh, now and then one must be sociable. You aren't a prude, Elena—"

  "However, I am not really afraid of that, somehow. I even confess I don't actually mind your being rather good for nothing. No woman ever really does, though she has her preference, and pretends, of course, to mind a great deal. What I mean, then, is this: You don't marry just me. I—I have very few relations, just two brothers and my mother; yet, in a sense, you know, you marry them as well. But I don't believe you would like being married to them. They are so different from you, dear. Your whole view-point of life is different—"

  I had begun to speak when she broke in: "No, don't say anything, please, until I'm quite, quite through. My brothers are the most admirable men I ever knew. I love them more than I can say. I trust them more than I do you. But they are just good. They don't fail in the really important things of life, but they are remiss in little ways, they—they don't care for the little elegantnesses, if that's a word. Even Arthur chews tobacco when he feels inclined. And he thinks no man would smoke a cigarette. Oh, I can't explain just what I mean—"

  "I think I understand, Elena. Suppose we let it pass as said."

  "And Mamma is not—we'll say, particularly highly educated. Oh, you've been very nice to her. She adores you. You won her over completely when you took so much trouble to get her
the out-of-print paper novels—about the village maidens and the wicked dukes—in that idiotic Carnation Series she is always reading. The whole affair was just like both of you, I think."

  "But, oh, my dear—!" I laughed.

  "No, not one man in a thousand would have remembered it after she had said she did think the titles 'were real tasty'; and I don't believe any other man in the world would have spent a week in rummaging the second-hand bookstores, until he found them. Only I don't know, even yet, whether it was really kindness, or just cleverness that put you up to it—on account of me. And I do know that you are nice to her in pretty much the same way you were nice to the negro cook yesterday. And I have had more advantages than she's had. But at bottom I'm really just like her. You'd find it out some day. And—and that is what I mean, I think."

  I spoke at some length. It was atrocious nonsense which I spoke; in any event, it looked like atrocious nonsense when I wrote it down just now, and so I tore it up. But I was quite sincere throughout that moment; it is the Townsend handicap, I suspect, always to be perfectly sincere for the moment.

  "Oh, well!" she said; "I'll think about it."

  7

  That night Elena and I played bridge against Nannie Allsotts and Warwick Risby. I was very much in love with Elena, but I hold it against her, even now, that she insisted on discarding from strength. However, there was to be a little supper afterward, and you may depend upon it that Mrs. Vokins was seeing to its preparation.

  She came into the room about eleven o'clock, beaming with kindliness and flushed—I am sure,—by some slight previous commerce with the kitchen-fire.