“Who said I was? I’m exultant.”
“Then you were exulting with the corners of your mouth down just now. Well, I must be going. Will you get a taxi to flounder over to the Subway with me?” While Erlcort was telephoning she was talking to him. “I believe the magazines will revive public interest in your scheme. Put them in your window. Try to get advance copies for it.”
“You have a commercial genius, Margaret Green.”
“When it comes to selling literature, I have. Selling art is where I fall down.”
“That’s because you always try to sell your own art. I should fall down, too, if I tried to sell my own literature.”
They got quite back to their old friendliness; the coming of the taxi gave them plenty of time. The electric lights were turned brilliantly on, but there, at the far end of the store, before the Franklin stove, they had a cozy privacy. At the moment of parting she said:
“If I were you I should take out these settles. They simply invite loafing.”
“I’ve noticed that they seem to do that.”
“And better paint out that motto.”
“I’ve sometimes fancied I’d better. That invites loafing, too; though some nice people like it.”
“Nice people? Why haven’t some of them bought a picture?” He perceived that she had taken in the persistent presence of the sketches when removing the mirrors, and he shared the indignation she expressed: “Shabby things!”
She stood with the mirrors under her arm, and he asked what she was going to do with them, as he followed her to the door with her other things.
“Put them around the studio. But you needn’t come to see the effect.”
“No. I shall come to see you.”
But when he came in a lull of February, and he could walk part of the way up through the Park on the sunny Saturday afternoon, she said:
“I suppose you’ve come to pour out some more of your griefs. Well, pour away! Has the magazine project failed?”
“On the contrary, it has been a succès fou. But I don’t feel altogether easy in my mind about it. The fact is, they seem to print much more rubbish than I supposed.”
“Of course they do; they must; rubbish is the breath in their nostrils.”
She painted away, screwing her eyes almost shut and getting very close to her picture. He had never thought her so plain; she was letting her mouth hang open. He wondered why she was so charming; but when she stepped back rhythmically, tilting her pretty head this way and that, he saw why: it was her unfailing grace. She suddenly remembered her mouth and shut it to say, “Well?”
“Well, some people have come back at me. They’ve said, What a rotten number this or that was! They were right; and yet there were things in all those magazines better than anything they had ever printed. What’s to be done about it? I can’t ask people to buy truck or read truck because it comes bound up with essays and stories and poems of the first quality.”
“No. You can’t. Why,” she asked, drifting up to her picture again, “don’t you tear the bad out, and sell the good?”
Erlcort gave a disdainful sound, such as cannot be spelled in English. “Do you know how defiantly the bad is bound up with the good in the magazines? They’re wired together, and you could no more tear out the bad and leave the good than you could part vice from virtue in human nature.”
“I see,” Margaret Green said, but she saw no further, and she had to let him go disconsolate. After waiting a decent time she went to find him in his critical bookstore. It was late in an afternoon of the days that were getting longer, and only one electric was lighted in the rear of the room, where Erlcort sat before the fireless Franklin stove, so busy at something that he scarcely seemed aware of her.
“What in the world are you doing?” she demanded.
He looked up. “Who? I? Oh, it’s you! Why, I’m merely censoring the truck in the May number of this magazine.” He held up a little roller, as long as the magazine was wide, blacked with printer’s ink, which he had been applying to the open periodical. “I’ve taken a hint from the way the Russian censorship blots out seditious literature before it lets it go to the public.”
“And what a mess you’re making!”
“Of course it will have to dry before it’s put on sale.”
“I should think so. Listen to me, Frederick Erlcort: you’re going crazy.”
“I’ve sometimes thought so: crazy with conceit and vanity and arrogance. Who am I that I should set up for a critical bookstore-keeper? What is the Republic of Letters, anyway? A vast, benevolent, generous democracy, where one may have what one likes, or a cold oligarchy where he is compelled to take what is good for him? Is it a restricted citizenship, with a minority representation, or is it universal suffrage?”
“Now,” Margaret Green said, “you are talking sense. Why didn’t you think of this in the beginning?”
“Is it a world, a whole earth,” he went on, “where the weeds mostly outflourish the flowers, or is it a wretched little florist’s conservatory where the watering-pot assumes to better the instruction of the rain which falls upon the just and the unjust? What is all the worthy family of asses to do if there are no thistles to feed them? Because the succulent fruits and nourishing cereals are better for the finer organisms, are the coarser not to have fodder? No; I have made a mistake. Literature is the whole world; it is the expression of the gross, the fatuous, and the foolish, and it is the pleasure of the gross, the fatuous, and the foolish, as well as the expression and the pleasure of the wise, the fine, the elect. Let the multitude have their truck, their rubbish, their rot; it may not be the truck, the rubbish, the rot that it would be to us, or may slowly and by natural selection become to certain of them. But let there be no artificial selection, no survival of the fittest by main force — the force of the spectator, who thinks he knows better than the creator of the ugly and the beautiful, the fair and foul, the evil and good.”
“Oh, now if the Intellectual Club could hear you!” Margaret Green said, with a long, deep, admiring suspiration. “And what are you going to do with your critical bookstore?”
“I’m going to sell it. I’ve had an offer from the author of that best-seller — I’ve told you about him. I was just trying to censor that magazine while I was thinking it over. He’s got an idea. He’s going to keep it a critical bookstore, but the criticism is to be made by universal suffrage and the will of the majority. The latest books will be put to a vote; and the one getting the greatest number of votes will be the first offered for sale, and the author will receive a free passage to Europe by the southern route.”
“The southern route!” Margaret mused. “I’ve never been that way. It must be delightful.”
“Then come with me! I’m going.”
“But how can I?”
“By marrying me!”
“I never thought of that,” she said. Then, with the conscientious resolution of an elderly girl who puts her fate to the touch of any risk the truth compels, she added: “Or, yes! I have. But I never supposed you would ask me.” She stared at him, and she was aware she was letting her mouth hang open. While she was trying for some word to close it with he closed it for her.
A FEAST OF REASON
Florindo and Lindora had come to the end of another winter in town, and had packed up for another summer in the country. They were sitting together over their last breakfast until the taxi should arrive to whirl them away to the station, and were brooding in a joint gloom from the effect of the dinner they had eaten at the house of a friend the night before, and, “Well, thank goodness,” she said, “there is an end to that sort of thing for one while.”
“An end to that thing,” he partially assented, “but not that sort of thing.”
“What do you mean?” she demanded excitedly, almost resentfully.
“I mean that the lunch is of the nature of the dinner, and that in the country we shall begin lunching where we left off dining.”
“Not instantly
,” she protested shrilly. “There will be nobody there for a while — not for a whole month, nearly.”
“They will be there before you can turn round, almost; and then you women will begin feeding one another there before you have well left off here.”
“We women!” she protested.
“Yes, you — you women. You give the dinners. Can you deny it?”
“It’s because we can’t get you to the lunches.”
“In the country you can; and so you will give the lunches.”
“We would give dinners if it were not for the distance, and the darkness on those bad roads.”
“I don’t see where your reasoning is carrying you.”
“No,” she despaired, “there is no reason in it. No sense. How tired of it all I am! And, as you say, it will be no time before it is all going on again.”
They computed the number of dinners they had given during the winter; that was not hard, and the sum was not great: six or seven at the most, large and small. When it came to the dinners they had received, it was another thing; but still she considered, “Were they really so few? It’s nothing to what the English do. They never dine alone at home, and they never dine alone abroad — of course not! I wonder they can stand it. I think a dinner, the happy-to-accept kind, is always loathsome: the everlasting soup, if there aren’t oysters first, or grape-fruit, or melon, and the fish, and the entrée, and the roast and salad, and the ice-cream and the fruit nobody touches, and the coffee and cigarettes and cigars — how I hate it all!”
Lindora sank back in her chair and toyed desperately with the fragment of bacon on her plate.
“And yet,” Florindo said, “there is a charm about the first dinner of autumn, after you’ve got back.”
“Oh, yes,” she assented; “it’s like a part of our lost youth. We think all the dinners of the winter will be like that, and we come away beaming.”
“But when it keeps on and there’s more and more of our lost youth, till it comes to being the whole—”
“Florindo!” she stopped him. He pretended that he was not going to have said it, and she resumed, dreamily, “I wonder what it is makes it so detestable as the winter goes on.”
“All customs are detestable, the best of them,” he suggested, “and I should say, in spite of the first autumnal dinner, that the society dinner was an unlovely rite. You try to carry if off with china and glass, and silver and linen, and if people could fix their minds on these, or even on the dishes of the dinner as they come successively on, it would be all very well; but the diners, the diners!”
“Yes,” she said, “the old men are hideous, certainly; and the young ones — I try not to look at them, poking things into the hollows of their faces with spoons and forks—”
“Better than when it was done with knives! Still, it’s a horror! A veteran diner-out in full action is certainly a hideous spectacle. Often he has few teeth of his own, and the dentists don’t serve him perfectly. He is in danger of dropping things out of his mouth, both liquids and solids: better not look! His eyes bulge and roll in his head in the stress of mastication and deglutition; his color rises and spreads to his gray hair or over his baldness; his person seems to swell vividly in his chair, and when he laughs—”
“Don’t, Florindo! It is awful.”
“Well, perhaps no worse than the sight of a middle-aged matron tending to overweight and bulking above her plate—”
“Yes, yes! That’s dreadful, too. But when people are young—”
“Oh, when people are young!” He said this in despair. Then he went on in an audible muse. “When people are young they are not only in their own youth; they are in the youth of the world, the race. They dine, but they don’t think of the dinner or the unpleasantness of the diners, and the grotesqueness of feeding in common. They think—” he broke off in defect of other ideas, and concluded with a laugh, “they think of themselves. And they don’t think of how they are looking.”
“They needn’t; they are looking very well. Don’t keep harping on that! I remember when we first began going to dinners, I thought it was the most beautiful thing in the world. I don’t mean when I was a girl; a girl only goes to a dinner because it comes before a dance. I mean when we were young married people; and I pinned up my dress and we went in the horse-cars, or even walked. I enjoyed every instant of it: the finding who was going to take me in and who you were; and the going in; and the hovering round the table to find our places from the cards; and the seeing how you looked next some one else, and wondering how you thought I looked; and the beads sparkling up through the champagne and getting into one’s nose; and the laughing and joking and talking! Oh, the talking! What’s become of it? The talking, last night, it bored me to death! And what good stories people used to tell, women as well as men! You can’t deny it was beautiful.”
“I don’t; and I don’t deny that the forms of dining are still charming. It’s the dining itself that I object to.”
“That’s because your digestion is bad.”
“Isn’t yours?”
“Of course it is. What has that got to do with it?”
“It seems to me that we have arrived at what is called an impasse in French.” He looked up at the clock on the wall, and she gave a little jump in her chair. “Oh, there’s plenty of time. The taxi won’t be here for half an hour yet. Is there any heat left in that coffee?”
“There will be,” she said, and she lighted the lamp under the pot. “But I don’t like being scared out of half a year’s growth.”
“I’m sorry. I won’t look at the clock any more; I don’t care if we’re left. Where were we? Oh, I remember — the objection to dining itself. If we could have the forms without the facts, dining would be all right. Our superstition is that we can’t be gay without gorging; that society can’t be run without meat and drink. But don’t you remember when we first went to Italy there was no supper at Italian houses where we thought it such a favor to be asked?”
“I remember that the young Italian swells wouldn’t go to the American and English houses where they weren’t sure of supper. They didn’t give supper at the Italian houses because they couldn’t afford it.”
“I know that. I believe they do, now. But —
‘Sweet are the uses of adversity,’
and the fasting made for beauty then more than the feasting does now. It was a lovelier sight to see the guests of those Italian houses conversing together without the grossness of feeding or being fed — the sort of thing one saw at our houses when people went out to supper.”
“I wonder,” Lindora said, “whether the same sort of thing goes on at evening parties still — it’s so long since I’ve been at one. It was awful standing jammed up in a corner or behind a door and eating vis-à-vis with a man who brought you a plate; and it wasn’t much better when you sat down and he stood over you gabbling and gobbling, with his plate in one hand and his fork in the other. I was always afraid of his dropping things into my lap; and the sight of his jaws champing as you looked up at them from below!”
“Yes, ridiculous. But there was an element of the grotesque in a bird’s-eye view of a lady making shots at her mouth with a spoon and trying to smile and look spirituelle between the shots.”
Lindora as she laughed bowed her forehead on the back of her hand in the way Florindo thought so pretty when they were both young. “Yes,” she said, “awful, awful! Why should people want to flock together when they feed? Do you suppose it’s a survival of the primitive hospitality when those who had something to eat hurried to share it with those who had nothing?”
“Possibly,” Florindo said, flattered into consequence by her momentary deference, or show of it. “But the people who mostly meet to feed together now are not hungry; they are already so stuffed that they loathe the sight of the things. Some of them shirk the consequences by frankly dining at home first, and then openly or covertly dodging the courses.”
“Yes, and you hear that praised as a mark of h
igh civilization, or social wisdom. I call it wicked, and an insult to the very genius of hospitality.”
“Well, I don’t know. It must give the faster a good chance of seeing how funny the feeders all look.”
“I wonder, I do wonder, how the feeding in common came to be the custom,” she said, thoughtfully. “Of course where it’s done for convenience, like hotels or in boarding-houses — but to do it wantonly, as people do in society, it ought to be stopped.”
“We might call art to our aid — have a large tableful of people kodaked in the moments of ingulfing, chewing, or swallowing, as the act varied from guest to guest; might be reproduced as picture postals, or from films for the movies. That would give the ten and twenty cent audiences a chance to see what life in the exclusive circles was.”
She listened in dreamy inattention. “It was a step in the right direction when people began to have afternoon teas. To be sure, there was the biting and chewing sandwiches, but you needn’t take them, and most women could manage their teacups gracefully.”
“Or hide their faces in them when they couldn’t.”
“Only,” she continued, “the men wouldn’t come after the first go off. It was as bad as lunches. Now that the English way of serving tea to callers has come in, it’s better. You really get the men, and it keeps them from taking cocktails so much.”
“They’re rather glad of that. But still, still, there’s the guttling and guzzling.”
“It’s reduced to a minimum.”
“But it’s there. And the first thing you know you’ve loaded yourself up with cake or bread-and-butter and spoiled your appetite for dinner. No, afternoon tea must go with the rest of it, if we’re going to be truly civilized. If people could come to one another’s tables with full minds instead of stomachs, there would be some excuse for hospitality. Perhaps if we reversed the practice of the professional diner-out, and read up at home as he now eats at home, and — No, I don’t see how it could be done. But we might take a leaf from the book of people who are not in society. They never ask anybody to meals if they can possibly help it; if some one happens in at meal-times they tell him to pull up a chair — if they have to, or he shows no signs first of going. But even among these people the instinct of hospitality — the feeding form of it — lurks somewhere. In our farm-boarding days—”
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells Page 1032