“She asked me to come to a reception of the Five-Minute Club with
Louis,” said Valerie, laughing. “What is the Five-Minute Club, Louis?”
“Oh, it’s a semi-fashionable, semi-artistic affair — one of the incarnations of the latest group of revolting painters and sculptors and literary people, diluted with a little society and a good deal of near-society.”
Later, as they were dining together at Delmonico’s, he said:
“Would you care to go, Valerie?”
“Yes — if you think it best for us to accept such invitations together.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know…. Considering what we are to become to each other — I thought — perhaps the prejudices of your friends—”
He turned a dull red, said nothing for a moment, then, looking up at her, suddenly laid his hand over hers where it rested on the table’s edge.
“The world must take us as it finds us,” he said.
“I know; but is it quite fair to seek it?”
“You adorable girl! Didn’t the Countess seek us — or rather you? — and torment you until you promised to go to the up-to-date doings of her bally club! It’s across to her, now. And as half of society has exchanged husbands and half of the remainder doesn’t bother to, I don’t think a girl like you and a man like myself are likely to meet very many people as innately decent as ourselves.”
* * * * *
A reception at the Five-Minute Club was anything but an ordinary affair.
It was the ultra-modern school of positivists where realism was on the cards and romance in the discards; where muscle, biceps, and thumb-punching replaced technical mastery and delicate skill; where inspiration was physical, not intellectual; where writers called a spade a spade, and painters painted all sorts of similar bucolic instruments with candour and an inadequate knowledge of their art; where composers thumped their pianos the harder, the less their raucous inspiration responded, or maundered incapably into interminable incoherency, hunting for themes in grays and mauves and reds and yellows, determined to find in music what does not belong there and never did.
In spite of its apparent vigour and uncompromising modernity, one suspected a sub-stratum of weakness and a perversity slightly vicious.
Colour blindness might account for some of the canvases, strabismus for some of the draughtmanship; but not for all. There was an ugly deliberation in the glorification of the raw, the uncouth; there was a callous hardness in the deadly elaboration of ugliness for its own sake. And transcendentalism looked on in approval.
A near-sighted study of various masters, brilliant, morbid, or essentially rotten, was the basis of this cult — not originality. Its devotees were the devotees of Richard Strauss, of Huysmans, of Manet, of Degas, Rops, Louis Le Grand, Forain, Monticelli; its painters painted nakedness in footlight effects with blobs for faces and blue shadows where they were needed to conceal the defects of impudent drawing; its composers maundered with both ears spread wide for stray echoes of Salome; its sculptors, stupefied by Rodin, achieved sections of human anatomy protruding from lumps of clay and marble; its dramatists, drugged by Mallarmé and Maeterlinck, dabbled in dullness, platitude and mediocre psychology; its writers wrote as bloodily, as squalidly, and as immodestly as they dared; its poets blubbered with Verlaine, spat with Aristide Bruant, or leered with the alcoholic muses of the Dead Rat.
They were all young, all in deadly earnest, all imperfectly educated, all hard workers, brave workers, blind, incapable workers sweating and twisting and hammering in their impotence against the changeless laws of truth and beauty. With them it was not a case of a loose screw; all screws had been tightened so brutally that the machinery became deadlocked. They were neither lazy, languid, nor precious; they only thought they knew how and they didn’t. All their vigour was sterile; all their courage vain.
Several attractive women exquisitely gowned were receiving; there was just a little something unusual in their prettiness, in their toilets; and also a little something lacking; and its absence was as noticeable in them as it was in the majority of arriving or departing guests.
It could not have been self-possession and breeding which an outsider missed. For the slim Countess d’Enver possessed both, inherited from her Pittsburgh parents; and Mrs. Hind-Willet was born to a social security indisputable; and Latimer Varyck had been in the diplomatic service before he wrote “Unclothed,” and the handsome, dark-eyed Mrs. Atherstane divided social Manhattan with a blonder and lovelier rival.
Valerie entering with Neville, slender, self-possessed, a hint of inquiry in her level eyes, heard the man at the door announce them, and was conscious of many people turning as they passed into the big reception room. A woman near her murmured, “What a beauty!” Another added, “How intelligently gowned!” The slim Countess Hélène d’Enver, née Nellie Jackson, held out a perfectly gloved hand and nodded amiably to Neville. Then, smiling fixedly at Valerie:
“My dear, how nice of you,” she said. “And you, too, Louis; it is very amusing of you to come. José Querida has just departed. He gave us such a delightful five-minute talk on modernity. Quoting Huneker, he spoke of it as a ‘quality’ — and ‘that nervous, naked vibration’—”
She ended with a capricious gesture which might have meant anything ineffable, or an order for a Bronx cocktail.
“What’s a nervous, naked vibration?” demanded Neville, with an impatient shrug. “It sounds like a massage parlour — not,” he added with respect, “that Huneker doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Nobody doubts that. Only art is one delicious bouillabaisse to him.”
The Countess d’Enver laughed, still retaining Valerie’s hand:
“Your gown is charming — may I add that you are disturbingly beautiful, Miss West? When they have given you some tea, will you find me if I can’t find you?”
“Yes, I will,” said Valerie.
At the tea table Neville brought her a glass of sherry and a bite of something squashy; a number of people spoke to him and asked to be presented to Valerie. Her poise, her unconsciousness, the winning simplicity of her manner were noticed everywhere, and everywhere commented on. People betrayed a tendency to form groups around her; women, prepared by her unusual beauty for anything between mediocrity and inanity, were a little perplexed at her intelligence and candour.
To Mrs, Hind-Willet’s question she replied innocently: “To me there is no modern painter comparable to Mr. Neville, though I dearly love Wilson, Sorella and Querida.”
To Latimer Varyck’s whimsical insistence she finally was obliged to admit that her reasons for not liking Richard Strauss were because she thought him ugly, uninspired, and disreputable, which unexpected truism practically stunned that harmless dilettante and so delighted Neville that he was obliged to disguise his mirth with a scowl directed at the ceiling.
“Did I say anything very dreadful, Kelly?” she whispered, when opportunity offered.
“No, you darling. I couldn’t keep a civil face when you told the truth about Richard Strauss to that rickety old sensualist.”
[Illustration: “Her poise, her unconsciousness, the winning simplicity of her manner were noticed everywhere.”]
“I don’t really know enough to criticise anything. But Mr. Varyck would make me answer; and one must say something.”
Olaf Dennison, without preliminary, sat down at the piano, tossed aside his heavy hair, and gave a five-minute prelude to the second act of his new opera, “Yvonne of Bannalec.” The opera might as well have been called Mamie of Hoboken, for all the music signified to Neville.
Mrs. Hind-Willet, leaning over the chair where Valerie was seated, whispered fervently:
“Isn’t it graphic! The music describes an old Breton peasant going to market. You can hear the very click of his sabots and the gurgle of the cider in his jug. And that queer little slap-stick noise is where he’s striking palms with another peasant bargaining for his cider.”
“But where doe
s Yvonne come in?” inquired Valerie in soft bewilderment.
“He’s Yvonne’s father,” whispered Mrs. Hind-Willet. “The girl doesn’t appear during the entire opera. It’s a marvellously important advance beyond the tonal and graphic subtleties of Richard Strauss.”
Other earnest and worthy people consumed intervals of five minutes now and then; a “discuse,” — whom Neville insisted on calling a “disease,” — said a coy and rather dirty little French poem directly at her audience, leeringly assisted by an over-sophisticated piano accompaniment.
“If that’s modernity it’s certainly naked and nervous enough,” commented
Neville, drily.
“It’s — it’s perfectly horrid,” murmured Valerie, the blush still lingering on cheek and brow. “I can’t understand how intelligent people can even think about such things.”
“Modernity,” repeated Neville. “Hello; there’s Carrillo, the young apostle of Bruant, who makes such a hit with the elect.”
“How, Kelly?”
“Realism, New York, and the spade business. He saw a sign on a Bowery clothing store,— ‘Gents Pants Half Off Today,’ and he wrote a poem on it and all Manhattan sat up and welcomed him as a peerless realist; and dear old Dean Williams compared him to Tolstoy and Ed. Harrigan, and there was the deuce to pay artistically and generally. Listen to the Yankee Steinlen in five-minute verse, dear.”
Carrillo rose, glanced carelessly at his type-written manuscript and announced its title unconcernedly:
“Mutts In Madison Square.
”A sodden tramp sits scratching on a bench,
The S.C.D. cart trails a lengthening stench
Where White Wings scrape the asphalt; and a breeze
Ripples the fountain and the budding trees.
Now fat old women, waddling like hogs,
Arrive to exercise their various dogs;
And ‘round and ‘round the little mutts all run,
Grass-maddened, frantic, circling in the sun,
Wagging and nosing — see! beneath yon tree
One little mutt meets his affinity:
And, near, another madly wags his tail
Inquiringly; but his advances fail,
And, ‘yap-yap-yap!’ replies the shrewish tyke,
So off the other starts upon a hike,
Rushing at random, crazed with sun and air,
Circling and barking out his canine prayer:
”’Oh, Lord of dogs who made the Out-of-doors
And fashioned mutts to gambol on all fours,
Grant us a respite from the city’s stones!
Grant us a grassy place to bury bones! — A
grassy spot to roll on now and then,
Oh, Lord of dogs who also fashioned men,
Accept our thanks for this brief breath of air,
And grant, Oh, Lord, a humble mongrel’s prayer!’
* * * * *
The hoboe, sprawling, scratches in the sun;
While ‘round and ‘round the happy mongrels run.”
“Good Heavens,” breathed Neville, “that sort of thing may be modern and strong, but it’s too rank for me, Valerie. Shall we bolt?”
“I — I think we’d better,” she said miserably. “I don’t think I care for — for these interesting people very much.”
They rose and passed slowly along the walls of the room, which were hung with “five-minute sketches,” which probably took five seconds to conceive and five hours to execute — here an unclothed woman, chiefly remarkable for an extraordinary development of adipose tissue and house-maid’s knee; here a pathological gem that might have aptly illustrated a work on malformations; yonder a dashing dab of balderdash, and next it one of Rackin’s masterpieces, flanked by a gem of Stanley Pooks.
In the centre of the room, emerging from a chunk of marble, the back and neck and one ear of an unclothed lady protruded; and the sculptured achievement was labelled, “Beatrice Andante.”
“Oh, Lord,” whispered Neville, repressing a violent desire to laugh.
“Beatrice and Aunty! I didn’t know he had one.”
“Is it Dante’s Beatrice, Kelly? Where is Dante and his Aunty?”
“God knows. They made a mess of it anyway, those two — andante — which I suppose this mess in marble symbolises. Pity he didn’t have an aunty to tell him how.”
“Louis! How irreverent!” she whispered, eyes sparkling with laughter.
“Shall I try a five-minute fashionable impromptu, dear?” he asked:
”If Dante’d had an Aunty
Who ante-dated Dante
And scolded him
And tolded him
The way to win a winner,
It’s a cinch or I’m a sinner,
He’d have taken Trix to dinner,
He’d have given her the eye
Of the fish about to die,
And folded her,
And moulded her
Like dough within a pie —
sallow, pallid pie —
And cooked a scheme to marry her,
And hired a hack to carry her
To stately Harlem-by-the-Bronx,
Where now the lonely taxi honks—”
“Kelly!” she gasped.
They both were laughing so that they hastened their steps, fearful of offending, and barely contrived to compose their features when making their adieux to Mrs. Hind-Willet and the Countess d’Enver.
As they walked east along Fifty-ninth Street, breathing in the fresh, sparkling evening air, she said impulsively:
“And to think, Louis, that if I had been wicked enough to marry you I’d have driven you into that kind of society — or into something genetically similar!”
His face sobered:
“You could hold your own in any society.”
“Perhaps I could. But they wouldn’t let me.”
“Are you afraid to fight it out?”
“Yes, dear — at your expense. Otherwise—” She gazed smilingly into space, a slight colour in either cheek.
CHAPTER XI
Valerie West was twenty-two years old in February. One year of life lay behind her; her future stretched away into sunlit infinity.
Neville attained his twenty-eighth year in March. Years still lay before him, a few lay behind him; but in a single month he had waded so swiftly forward through the sea of life that the shallows were already passed, the last shoal was deepening rapidly. Only immeasurable and menacing depths remained between him and the horizon — that pale, dead line dividing the noonday of to-day from the phantom suns of blank eternity.
It was that winter that he began the picture destined to fix definitely his position among the painters of his times — began it humbly, yet somehow aware of what it was to be; afraid, for all his courage, yet conscious of something inevitable impending. It was Destiny; and, instinctively, he arose to meet it.
He called the picture “A Bride.” A sapphire sky fading to turquoise, in which great clouds crowded high in argent splendour — a young girl naked of feet, her snowy body cinctured at the waist with straight and silvered folds, standing amid a riot of wild flowers, head slightly dropped back, white arms inert, pendant. And in her eyes’ deep velvet depths the mystery of the Annunciation.
All of humanity and of maturity — of adolescence and of divinity was in that face; in the exquisitely sensitive wisdom of the woman’s eyes, in the full sweet innocence of the childish mouth — in the smooth little hands so unsoiled, so pure — in the nun-like pallor and slender beauty of the throat.
[Illustration: “‘Where do you keep those pretty models, Louis?’ he demanded.”]
Whatever had been his inspiration — whether spiritual conviction, or the physical beauty of Valerie, neither he nor she considered very deeply. But that he was embodying and creating something of the existence of which neither he nor she had been aware a month ago, was awaking something within them that had never before stirred or given sign of life.
Since the
last section of the mural decoration for the new court house had been shipped to its destination, he had busied himself on two canvases, a portrait of his sister in furs, and the portrait of Valerie.
Lily Collis came in the mornings twice a week to sit for her; and once or twice Stephanie Swift came with her; also Sandy Cameron, ruddy, bald, jovial, scoffing, and insatiably curious.
“Where do you keep all those pretty models, Louis?” he demanded, prying aside the tapestry with the crook of his walking stick, and peeping behind furniture and hangings and big piles of canvases. “Be a sport and introduce us; Stephanie wants to see a few as well as I do.”
Neville shrugged and went on painting, which exasperated Cameron.
“It’s a fraud,” he observed, in a loud, confidential aside to Stephanie; “this studio ought to be full of young men in velvet coats and bunchy ties, singing, ‘Oh la — la!’ and dextrously balancing on their baggy knees a series of assorted soubrettes. It’s a bluff, a hoax, a con game! Are you going to stand for it? I don’t see any absinthe either — or even any Vin ordinaire! Only a tea-pot — a tea-pot!” he repeated in unutterable scorn. “Why, there’s more of Bohemia in a Broad Street Trust Company than there is in this Pullman car studio!”
Mrs. Collis was laughing so that her brother had difficulty in going on with her portrait.
“Get out of here, Sandy,” he said— “or take Stephanie into the rest of the apartment, somewhere, and tell her your woes.”
Stephanie, who had been exploring, turning over piles of chassis and investigating canvases and charcoal studies stacked up here and there against the wainscot, pulled aside an easel which impeded her progress, and in so doing accidentally turned the canvas affixed to it toward the light.
“Hello!” exclaimed Cameron briskly, “who is this?”
Lily turned her small, aristocratic head, and Stephanie looked around.
“What a perfectly beautiful girl!” she exclaimed impulsively; “who is she, Louis?”
“A model,” he said calmly; but the careless and casual exposure of the canvas had angered him so suddenly that his own swift emotion astonished him.
Lily had risen from her seat, and now stood looking fixedly at the portrait of Valerie West, her furs trailing from one shoulder to the chair.
Works of Robert W Chambers Page 539