Querida called on them and was very agreeable and lively and fascinating; and when he went away Valerie asked him to come again. He did; and again after that. She and Rita dined with him once or twice; and things gradually slipped back to their old footing; and Querida remained on his best behaviour.
Neville had prolonged the visit to the parental roof. He did not explain to her why, but the reason was that he had made up his mind to tell his parents that he wished to marry and to find out once and for all what their attitudes would be toward such a girl as Valerie West. But he had not yet found courage to do it, and he was lingering on, trying to find it and the proper moment to employ it.
His father was a gentleman so utterly devoid of imagination that he had never even ventured into business, but had been emotionlessly content to marry and live upon an income sufficient to maintain the material and intellectual traditions of the house of Neville.
Tall, transparently pale, negative in character, he had made it a life object to get through life without increasing the number of his acquaintances—legacies in the second generation left him by his father, whose father before him had left the grandfathers of these friends as legacies to his son.
It was a pallid and limited society that Henry Neville and his wife frequented—a coterie of elderly, intellectual people, and their prematurely dried-out offspring. And intellectual in-breeding was thinning it to attenuation—to a bloodless meagreness in which they, who composed it, conceived a mournful pride.
Old New Yorkers all, knowing no other city, no other bourne north of Tenth Street or west of Chelsea—silent, serene, drab-toned people, whose drawing-rooms were musty with what had been fragrance once, whose science, religion, interests, desires were the beliefs, interests and emotions of a century ago, their colourless existence and passive snobbishness affronted nobody who did not come seeking affront.
To them Theodore Thomas had been the last conductor; his orchestra the last musical expression fit for a cultivated society; the Academy of Music remained their last symphonic temple, Wallack's the last refuge of a drama now dead for ever.
Delmonico's had been their northern limit, Stuyvesant Square their eastern, old Trinity their southern, and their western, Chelsea. Outside there was nothing. The blatancy and gilt of the million-voiced metropolis fell on closed eyes, and on ears attuned only to the murmurs of the past. They lived in their ancient houses and went abroad and summered in some simple old-time hamlet hallowed by the headstones of their grandsires, and existed as meaninglessly and blamelessly as the old catalpa trees spreading above their dooryards.
And into this narrow circle Louis Neville and his sister Lily had been born.
It had been a shock to her parents when Lily married Gordon Collis, a mining engineer from Denver. She came to see them with her husband every year; Collis loved her enough to endure it.
As for Louis' career, his achievements, his work, they regarded it without approval. Their last great painters had been Bierstadt and Hart, their last great sculptor, Powers. Blankly they gazed upon the splendours of the mural symphonies achieved by the son and heir of all the Nevilles; they could not comprehend the art of the Uitlanders; their comment was silence and dignity.
To them all had become only shadowy tradition; even affection and human emotion, and the relationship of kin to kin, of friend to friend, had become only part of a negative existence which conformed to precedent, temporal and spiritual, as written in the archives of a worn-out civilisation.
So, under the circumstances, it was scarcely to be wondered that Neville hesitated to introduce the subject of Valerie West as he sat in the parlour at Spindrift House with his father and mother, reading the Tribune or the Evening Post or poring over some ancient tome of travels, or looking out across the cliffs at an icy sea splintering and glittering against a coast of frozen adamant.
At length he could remain no longer; commissions awaited him in town; hunger for Valerie gnawed ceaselessly, unsubdued by his letters or by hers to him.
"Mother," he said, the evening before his departure, "would it surprise you very much if I told you that I wished to marry?"
"No," she said, tranquilly; "you mean Stephanie Swift, I suppose."
His father glanced up over his spectacles, and he hesitated; then, as his father resumed his reading:
"I don't mean Stephanie, mother."
His father laid aside his book and removed, the thin gold-rimmed spectacles.
"I understand from Lily that we are to be prepared to receive Stephanie Swift as your affianced wife," he said. "I shall be gratified. Stephen Swift was my oldest friend."
"Lily was mistaken, father. Stephanie and I are merely very good friends. I have no idea of asking her to marry me."
"I had been given to understand otherwise, Louis. I am disappointed."
Louis Neville looked out of the window, considering, yet conscious of the hopelessness of it all.
"Who is this girl, Louis?" asked his mother, pulling the white-and-lilac wool shawl closer around her thin shoulders.
"Her name is Valerie West."
"One of the Wests of West Eighth Street?" demanded his father.
The humour of it all twitched for a moment at his son's grimly set jaws, then a slight flush mantled his face:
"No, father."
"Do you mean the Chelsea Wests, Louis?"
"No."
"Then we—don't know them," concluded his father with a shrug of his shoulders, which dismissed many, many things from any possibility of further discussion. But his mother's face grew troubled.
"Who is this Miss West?" she asked in a colourless voice.
"She is a very good, very noble, very cultivated, very beautiful young girl—an orphan—who is supporting herself by her own endeavours."
"What!" said his father, astonished.
"Mother, I know how it sounds to you, but you and father have only to meet her to recognise in her every quality that you could possibly wish for in my wife."
"Who is she, Louis!" demanded his father, casting aside the evening newspaper and folding up his spectacles.
"I've told you, father."
"I beg to differ with you. Who is this girl? In what description of business is she actually engaged?"
The young fellow's face grew red:
"She was engaged in—the drama."
"What!"
"She was an actress," he said, realising now the utter absurdity of any hope from the beginning, yet now committed and determined to see it through to the bitter end.
"An actress! Louis!" faltered his mother.
There was a silence, cut like a knife by the thin edge of his father's voice:
"If she was an actress, what is she now?"
"She has helped me with my painting."
"Helped you? How?"
"By—posing."
"Do you desire me to understand that the girl is an artist's model!"
"Yes."
His father stared at him a moment, then:
"And is this the woman you propose to have your mother meet?"
"Father," he said, hopelessly, "there is no use in my saying anything more. Miss West is a sweet, good, generous young girl, fully my peer in education, my superior in many things…. You and mother can never believe that the ideas, standards—even the ideals of civilisation change—have changed since your youth—are changing every hour. In your youth the word actress had a dubious significance; to-day it signifies only what the character of her who wears the title signifies. In your youth it was immodest, unmaidenly, reprehensible, for a woman to be anything except timid, easily abashed, ignorant of vital truths, and submissive to every social convention; to-day women are neither ignorant nor timid; they are innocent because they choose to be; they are fearless, intelligent, ambitious, and self-reliant—and lose nothing in feminine charm by daring to be themselves instead of admitting their fitness only for the seraglio of some Occidental monogamist—"
"Louis! Your mother is present!"
"Good heavens, father, I know it! Isn't it possible even for a man's own mother to hear a little truth once in a while—"
His father rose in pallid wrath:
"Be silent!" he said, unsteadily; "the subject is definitely ended."
* * * * *
It was ended. His father gave him a thin, chilly hand at parting. But his mother met him at the outer door and laid her trembling lips to his forehead.
"You won't bring this shame on us, Louis, I know. Nor on yourself, nor on the name you bear…. It is an honourable name in the land, Louis…. I pray God to bless you and counsel you, my son—" She turned away, adding in a whisper—"and—and comfort you."
And so he went away from Spindrift House through a snow-storm, and arrived in New York late that evening; but not too late to call Valerie on the telephone and hear again the dear voice with its happy little cry of greeting—and the promise of to-morrow's meeting before the day of duty should begin.
* * * * *
Love grew as the winter sped glittering toward the far primrose dawn of spring; work filled their days; evening brought the happiness of a reunion eternally charming in its surprises, its endless novelty. New, forever new, love seemed; and youth, too, seemed immortal.
On various occasions when Valerie chanced to be at his studio, pouring tea for him, friends of his sister came unannounced—agreeable women more or less fashionable, who pleaded his sister's sanction of an unceremonious call to see the great painted frieze before it was sent to the Court House.
He was perfectly nice to them; and Valerie was perfectly at ease; and it was very plain that these people were interested and charmed with this lovely Miss West, whom they found pouring tea in the studio of an artist already celebrated; and every one of them expressed themselves and their curiosity to his sister, Mrs. Collis, who, never having heard of Valerie West, prudently conveyed the contrary in smiling but silent acquiescence, and finally wrote to her brother and told him what was being said.
Before he determined to reply, another friend—or rather acquaintance of the Collis family—came in to see the picture—the slim and pretty Countess d'Enver. And went quite mad over Valerie—so much so that she remained for an hour talking to her, almost oblivious of Neville and his picture and of Ogilvy and Annan, who consumed time and cocktails in the modest background.
When she finally went away, and Neville had returned from putting her into her over-elaborate carriage, Ogilvy said:
"Gee, Valerie, you sure did make a hit with the lady. What was she trying to make you do?"
"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."
"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 does 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.