Part 1 (1/2)

Iole.

by Robert W. Chambers.

PREFACE

Does anybody remember the opera of _The Inca_, and that heartbreaking episode where the Court Undertaker, in a morbid desire to increase his professional skill, deliberately accomplishes the destruction of his middle-aged relatives in order to inter them for the sake of practise?

If I recollect, his dismal confession runs something like this:

”It was in a bleak November When I slew them, I remember, As I caught them unawares Drinking tea in rocking-chairs.”

And so he talked them to death, the subject being ”What Really is Art?”

Afterward he was sorry--

”The squeak of a door, The creak of the floor, My horrors and fears enhance; And I wake with a scream As I hear in my dream The shrieks of my maiden aunts!”

Now it is a very dreadful thing to suggest that those highly respectable pseudo-spinsters, the Sister Arts, supposedly cozily immune in their polygamous chast.i.ty (for every suitor for favor is popularly expected to be wedded to his particular art)--I repeat, it is very dreadful to suggest that these impeccable old ladies are in danger of being talked to death.

But the talkers are talking and Art Nouveau rockers are rocking, and the trousers of the prophet are patched with stained gla.s.s, and it is a day of d.i.n.kiness and of thumbs.

Let us find comfort in the ancient proverb: ”Art talked to death shall rise again.” Let us also recollect that ”d.i.n.ky is as d.i.n.ky does”; that ”All is not Shaw that Bernards”; that ”Better Yeates than Clever”; that words are so inexpensive that there is no moral crime in robbing Henry to pay James.

Firmly believing all this, abjuring all atom-pickers, slab furniture, and woodchuck literature--save only the immortal verse:

”And there the wooden-chuck doth tread; While from the oak trees' tops The red, red squirrel on thy head The frequent acorn drops.”

Abjuring, as I say, d.i.n.kiness in all its forms, we may still hope that those cleanly and respectable spinsters, the Sister Arts, will continue throughout the ages, rocking and drinking tea unterrified by the million-tongued clamor in the back yard and below stairs, where thumb and forefinger continue the question demanded by intellectual exhaustion: ”L'arr! Kesker say l'arr?”

[Ill.u.s.tration]

IOLE

I

[Ill.u.s.tration]

”I ain't never knowed no one like him,” continued the station-agent reflectively. ”He made us all look like monkeys, but he was good to us.

Ever see a ginuine poet, sir?”

”Years ago one was pointed out to me,” replied Briggs.

”Was yours smooth shaved, with large, fat, white fingers?” inquired the station-agent.

”If I remember correctly, he was thin,” said Briggs, sitting down on his suit-case and gazing apprehensively around at the landscape. There was nothing to see but low, forbidding mountains, and forests, and a railroad track curving into a tunnel.

The station-agent shoved his hairy hands into the pockets of his overalls, jingled an unseen bunch of keys, and chewed a dry gra.s.s stem, ruminating the while in an undertone:

”This poet come here five years ago with all them kids, an' the fust thing he done was to dress up his girls in boys' pants. Then he went an'

built a humpy sort o' house out of stones and boulders. Then he went to work an' wrote pieces for the papers about jay-birds an' woodchucks an'