Iole Part 14

"A-ans--answer! What, for G.o.d's sake?" stammered Wayne.

The poet, deliberately joining thumb and forefinger, pinched out a portion of the atmosphere.

"That! _That_ George! For that is Art! And Art is justice! And justice, affronted, demands an answer."

He refolded his arms, mused for a s.p.a.ce, then stealing a veiled glance sideways:

"You--you are--ah--convinced that my two lost lambs need dread no bodily vicissitudes----"

"Cybele and Lissa?"

"Ah--yes----"

"Lethbridge will have money to burn if he likes the aroma of the smoke.

Harrow has burnt several stacks already; but his father will continue to fire the furnace. Is _that_ what you mean?"

"No!" said the poet softly, "no, George, that is not what I mean. Wealth is a great thing. Only the little things are precious to me. And the most precious of all is absolutely nothing!" But, as he wandered away into the great luxurious habitation of his son-in-law, his smile grew sweeter and sweeter and his half-closed eyes swam, melting into a saccharine reverie.

"The little things," he murmured, thumbing the air absently--"the little things are precious, but not as precious as absolutely nothing. For nothing is perfection. Thank you," he said sweetly to a petrified footman, "thank you for understanding. It is precious--very, very precious to know that I am understood."

[Ill.u.s.tration]

XII

[Ill.u.s.tration]

By early springtide the poet had taken an old-fas.h.i.+oned house on the south side of Was.h.i.+ngton Square; his sons-in-law standing for it--as the poet was actually beginning to droop amid the civilized luxury of Madison Avenue. He missed what he called his own "den." So he got it, rent free, and furnished it sparingly with furniture of a slabby variety until the effect produced might, profanely speaking, be described as d.i.n.ky.

His friends, too, who haunted the house, bore curious conformity to the furnis.h.i.+ng, being individually in various degrees either squatty, slabby or d.i.n.ky; and twice a week they gathered for "Conferences" upon what he and they described as "L'Arr Noovo."

L'Arr Noovo, a pleasing variation of the slab style in Art, had profoundly impressed the poet. Gla.s.s window-panes, designed with tulip patterns, were cunningly inserted into all sorts of furniture where window-gla.s.s didn't belong, and the effect appeared to be profitable; for up-stairs in his "shop," workmen were very busy creating extraordinary designs and setting tulip-patterned gla.s.s into everything with, as the poet explained, "a loving care" and considerable glue.

His four unmarried daughters came to see him, wandering unconcernedly between the four handsome residences of their four brothers-in-law and the "den" of the author of their being--Chlorippe, aged thirteen; Philodice, fourteen; Dione, fifteen, and Aphrodite, sixteen--lovely, fresh-skinned, free-limbed young girls with the delicate bloom of sun and wind still creaming their cheeks--lingering effects of a life lived ever in the open, until the poet's sons-in-law were able to support him in town in the style to which he had been unaccustomed.

To the Conferences of the poet came the mentally, morally, and physically d.i.n.ky--and a few badgered but normal husbands, hustled thither by wives whose intellectual development was tending toward the precious.

People read poems, discussed Yeats, Shaw, Fiona, Mendes, and L'Arr Noovo; sang, wandered about pinching or thumbing the atmosphere under stimulus of a cunningly and unexpectedly set window-pane in the back of a "mission" rocking-chair. And when the proper moment arrived the poet would rise, exhaling sweetness from every pore of his bulky ent.i.ty, to interpret what he called a "Thought." Sometimes it was a demonstration of the priceless value of "nothings"; sometimes it was a naive suggestion that no house could afford to be without an "Art"-rocker with Arr Noovo insertions. Such indispensable luxuries were on sale up-stairs. Again, he performed a "necklace of precious sounds"--in other words, some verses upon various topics, nature, woodchucks, and the d.i.n.kified in Art.

And it was upon one of these occasions that Aphrodite ran away.

Aphrodite, the sweet, the reasonable, the self-possessed--Aphrodite ran away, having without any apparent reason been stricken with an overpowering aversion for civilization and Arr Noovo.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

XIII

[Ill.u.s.tration]

At the poet's third Franco-American Conference that afternoon the room was still vibrating with the echoes of Aphrodite's harp accompaniment to her own singing, and gus.h.i.+ng approbation had scarcely ceased, when the poet softly rose and stood with eyes half-closed as though concentrating all the sweetness within him upon the surface of his pursed lips.

A wan young man whose face figured only as a by-product of his hair whispered "Hus.h.!.+" and several people, who seemed to be more or less out of drawing, a.s.sumed att.i.tudes which emphasized the faulty draftsmans.h.i.+p.

"La Poesie!" breathed the poet; "Kesker say la poesie?"

"La poesie--say la vee!" murmured a young woman with profuse teeth.

"Wee, wee, say la vee!" cried several people triumphantly.

"Nong!" sighed the poet, spraying the hushed air with sweetness, "nong!

Say pas le vee; say l'Immortalitay!"

After which the poet resumed his seat, and the by-product read, in French verse, "An Appreciation" of the works of Wilhelmina Ganderbury Mc.n.u.tt.

And that was the limit of the Franco portion of the Conference; the remainder being plain American.

Aphrodite, resting on her tall gilded harp, looked sullenly straight before her. Somebody lighted a Chinese joss-stick, perhaps to kill the aroma of defunct cigarettes.

"Verse," said the poet, opening his heavy lids and gazing around him with the lambent-eyed wonder of a newly-wakened ram, "verse is a necklace of tinted sounds strung idly, yet lovingly, upon stray tinseled threads of thought.... Thank you for understanding; thank you."

The by-product in the corner of the studio gathered arms and legs into a series of acute angles, and writhed; a lady ornamented with cheek-bones well sketched in, covered her eyes with one hand as though locked in jiu-jitsu with Richard Strauss.

Aphrodite's slender fingers, barely resting on the harp-strings, suddenly contracted in a nervous tremor; a low tw.a.n.g echoed the involuntary reflex with a discord.

A young man, whose neck was swathed in a stock a la d'Orsay, bent close to her shoulder.

"I feel that our souls, blindfolded, are groping toward one another,"

he whispered.

"Don't--don't talk like that!" she breathed almost fiercely; "I am tired--suffocated with sound, drugged with joss-sticks and sandal.

I can't stand much more, I warn you."

"Are you not well, beloved."

"Perfectly well--physically. I don't know what it is--it has come so suddenly--this overwhelming revulsion--this exasperation with scents and sounds.... I could rip out these harp-strings and--and kick that chair over! I--I think I need something--sunlight and the wind blowing my hair loose----"

[Ill.u.s.tration: Aphrodite's slender fingers, barely resting on the harp-strings, suddenly contracted in a nervous tremor.]

The young man with the stock nodded. "It is the exquisite pagan athirst in you, scorched by the fire of spring. Quench that sweet thirst at the fount beautiful----"

"What fount did you say?" she asked dangerously.