Part 33 (1/2)
For after all the realities of life are from within. Events, environment, fortune good or bad do not color life, or give it richness and form and value. But in living a creed one makes his picture. So let us look at Thomas Van Dorn, who boasted that he could beat G.o.d at his own game, and did. For all that he wanted came to him, wealth and fame and power, and the women he desired.
Judge and Mrs. Van Dorn and her dog are riding by in their smart rubber tired trap, behind a highly checked horse and with the dog between them.
They are not talking. The man is looking at his gloved hands, at the horse, at the street,--where occasionally he bows and smiles and never by any chance misses bowing and smiling to any woman who might be pa.s.sing. His wife, dressed stiffly and smartly, is looking straight ahead, with as weary a face as that of the Hungarian Spitz beside her.
Time, in the Temple of Love on the hill has not worn her bloom off; it is all there--and more; but the additional bloom, the artificial bloom, is visible. When she smiles, as she sometimes smiles at the men friends of the Judge who greet the pair, it is an elaborately mechanical smile, with a distinct beginning, climax, and ending. Some way it fails to convince one that she has any pleasure in it. The smile still is beautiful, exceedingly beautiful--but only as a picture. When the smile is garnished with words the voice is low and musical--but too low and too obviously musical. It does not reveal the soul of Margaret Van Dorn--the soul that glowed in the girl who came to Prospect Towns.h.i.+p fifteen years before, with banners flying to lay siege to Harvey. The soul that glowed through those wonderful eyes upon Henry Fenn--where is it? She has not been crossed in any desire of her life. She has enjoyed every form of pleasure that money could buy for her; she is delving into books that make the wrinkles come between her eyebrows, and is rubbing the wrinkles out and the ideas from the books as fast as they come. She is droning a formula for happiness, learned of the books that make her head ache, and is repeating over and over, ”G.o.d is good, and I am G.o.d,”
as one who would plaster truth upon his consciousness by the mere repet.i.tion of it. But the truth does not help her. So she sits beside her husband, a wax work figure of a woman, and he seems to treat her as a wax figure. For he is clearly occupied with his own affairs.
When he is not bowing and smiling, a sneer is on his face. And when he speaks to the horse his voice is harsh and mean. He holds an unlighted cigar in his mouth as a terrier might hold a loathed rat; working the muscles of his lips at times viciously but saying nothing. The soft, black hat of his youthful days is replaced by a high, stiff, squarely sawed felt hat which he imagines gives him great dignity. His clothes have become so painfully scrupulous in their exact conformation to the mode that he looks wooden. He has given so much thought to the subject of ”wherewithal shall ye be clothed,” that the thought in some queer spiritual curdling has appeared in the unyielding texture of his artificial tailored skin, that seems to be a part of another consciousness than his own.
Moreover, those first days he spent after the convention have chipped the suavity from his countenance, and have written upon the bland, complacent face all the cynicism of his nature. Triumph makes cynicism arrogant, so the man is losing his mask. His nature is leering out of his eyes, snarling out of his mouth, and where the little, lean lines have pared away the flesh from his nose, a greedy, self-seeking pride is peering from behind a great masterful nose. Thomas Van Dorn should be in the adolescence of maturity; but he is in the old age of adolescence.
His skin has no longer the soft olive texture of youth; it is brown and mottled and leathery. His lips--his lips once full and red, are pursing and leadening.
Thus the pair go through the May twilight; and when the electric lights begin to flash out at the corners, thus the Van Dorns ride before the big black ma.s.s of the temple of love that looms among the young trees upon the lawn. The woman alights from the trap. She pauses a moment upon the stone block at the curbing. The man makes no sign of moving. She takes the dog from the seat, and puts it on the ground. The man gathers the reins tightly in his hands, then drops them again, lights his cigar, and says behind his hands: ”I'm going back downtown.”
”Oh, you are?” echoes the woman.
”Yes, I am,” replies the man sharply.
The woman is walking up the wide parking, with the dog. She makes no reply. The man looks at her a second or two, and drives away, cutting the horse to a mad speed as he rounds the corner.
Through the wide doors into the broad hall, up the grand staircase, through the luxurious rooms goes the high Priestess of the Temple of Love. It is a lonely house. For it is still in a state of social siege.
So far as Harvey is concerned, no one has entered it. So they live rather quiet lives.
On that May evening the mistress of the great house sits in her bed room by the mild electric, trying book after book, and putting each down in disgust. Philosophy fails to hold her attention--poetry annoys her; fiction--the book of the moment, which happened to be ”The d.a.m.nation of Theron Ware,” makes her wince, and so she reaches under the reading stand, and brings out from the bottom of a pile of magazines a salacious novel filled with stories of illicit amours. This she reads until her cheeks burn and her lips grow dry and she hears the roll of a buggy down the street, and knows that it must be nearly midnight and that her mate is coming. She slips the book back into its place of concealment, picks up ”The Harmonious Universe,” and walks with some show of grandeur in her trailing garments down the stairs to greet her lord.
”You up?” he asks. He glances at the book and continues: ”Reading that d.a.m.n trash? Why don't you read Browning or Thackeray or--if you want philosophy Emerson or Carlyle? That's rot.”
He puts what scorn he can into the word rot, and in her sweetest, falsest, baby voice the woman answers:
”My soul craves communion with the infinite and would seek the deeper harmonies. I just love to wander the wide wastes between the worlds like I've been doing to-night.”
The man grabs the book from her, and finding her finger in a place far beyond the end of the cut leaves, he looks at her, and sneers a profane sneer and pa.s.ses up the stairs. She stares after him as he slowly mounts, without joy in his tread, and she follows him lightly as he goes to his room. She pauses before the closed door for a lonely moment and then sighs and goes her way. She mumbles, ”G.o.d is good and I am G.o.d,”
many times to herself, but she lies down to sleep wondering whimperingly in a half-doze if Pelleas and Melisande found things so dreadfully disillusioning after all they suffered for love and for each other. As a footnote to this picture may we not ask:
Is the thing called love worth having at the cost of character? The trouble with the poets is that they take their ladies and gentlemen of pliable virtue and uncertain rect.i.tude, only to the altar. One may ask with some degree of propriety if the duplicity they practiced, the lying they did and justified by the sacredness of their pa.s.sion, the crimes they committed and the meannesses they went through to attain their ends were after all worth while. Also one may ask if the characters they made--or perhaps only revealed, were not such as to make them wholly miserable when they began to ”live happily ever after”? A symposium ent.i.tled ”Is Love Really Worth It?” by such distinguished characters as Helen of Troy, Mrs. Potiphar and Cleopatra, might be improving reading, if the ladies were capable of telling the truth after lives of dissimulation and deceit.
But let us leave philosophy and look at another picture. This time we have the Morton family.
The Captain's feet are upon the s.h.i.+ning fender. There is no fire in the stove. It is May. But it is the Captain's habit to warm his feet there when he is in the house at night, and he never fails to put them upon the fender and go through his evening routine. First it is his paper; then it is his feet; then it is his apple, and finally a formal discussion of what they will have for breakfast, with the Captain always voting for hash, and declaring that there are potatoes enough left over and meat enough unused to make hash enough for a regiment. But before he gets to the hash question, the Captain this evening leads off with this:
”Curious thing about spring.” The world of education, reading its examination papers, concurs in silence. The worlds of fas.h.i.+on and of the fine arts also a.s.senting, the Captain goes on: ”Down in South Harvey to-day; kind o' dirty down there; looks kind of smoky and tin cannery, and woe-begone, like that cla.s.s of people always looks, but 'y gory, girls, it's just as much spring down there as it is up here, only more so! eh? I says to Laura, looking like a full bloom peach tree herself in her kindergarten, says I, 'Laura, it's terrible pretty down here when you get under the smoke and the dirt. Every one just a lovin',' says I, 'and going galloping into life kind of regardless. There's Nate and Anne, and there's Violet and Hogan, and there's a whole mess of fresh married couples in Little Italy, and the Huns and Belgians are all broke out with the blamedest dose of love y' ever see! And they's whole rafts of 'em to be married before June!' Well, Laura, she laughed and if it wasn't like pouring spring itself out of a jug. Spring,” he mused, ”ain't it curious about spring!”
Champing his apple the Captain gesticulates slowly with his open pocket knife, ”Love”--he reflects; then backs away from his discussion and begins anew: ”Less take--say Anne and Nate, a happy couple--him a lean, eagle-beaked New England kind of a man; her--a little quick-gaited, big-eyed woman and sping! out of the Providence of G.o.ddlemighty comes a streak of some kind of creepy, fuzzy lightning and they're struck dumb and blind and plumb crazy--eh?”
He champs for a time on the apple, ”Eighteen sixty-one--May, sixty-one--me a tidy looking young buck--girl--beautiful girl with reddish brown hair and bluest eyes in the world. Sping! comes the lightning, and melts us together and the whole universe goes pink and rose-colored. No sense--neither of us--no more'n Anne and Nate, just one idea. I can't think of nothing but her--war isn't much; shackles on four millions slaves--no consequence; the Colonel caught us kissing in his tent the day I left for the army; union forever--mere circ.u.mstance in the lives of two crazy people--in a world mostly eyes and lips and soft hands and whispers and flowers, eh--and--” The Captain does not finish his sentence.
He rises, puts his apple core on the table, and says after a great sigh: ”And so we bloomed and blossomed and come to fruit and dried up and blowed away, and here they are--all the rest of 'em--ready to bloom--and may G.o.d help 'em and keep 'em.” He pauses, ”Help 'em and keep 'em and when they have dried up and blowed away--let 'em remember the perfume clean to the end!” He turns away from the girls, wipes his eyes with his gnarled fingers, and after clearing his throat says: ”Well, girls, how about hash for breakfast--what say?”
The wheels of the Judge's buggy grate upon the curbing nearby and the Captain remarks: ”Judge Tom gets in a little later every night now. I heard him dump her in at eight, and here it is nearly eleven--pretty careless,--pretty careless; he oughtn't to be getting in this late for four or five years yet--what say?” Public opinion again is divided.