Visionaries Part 9

The grating of the carriage wheels awoke her from the dream which had lightly brushed away the night and the vision of the Arc de Triomphe--looming into the mystery of sky and stars, its monumental flanks sprawling across the Place de l'etoile. She heard her name called by Mrs. Sheldam as their coachman guided his horses through the gateway of the Princesse de Lancovani's palace.

"Now, Ermentrude! Wake up, dear; we are there," said Mrs. Sheldam, in her kind, drawling tones. Mr. Sheldam sighed and threw away the unlighted cigar he had bitten during the ride along the Champs elysees.

Whatever the evening meant for his wife and niece, he saw little entertainment in store for himself; he did not speak French very well, he disliked music and "tall talk"; all together he wished himself at the Grand Hotel, where he would be sure to meet some jolly Americans. Their carriage had halted in front of a s.p.a.cious marble stairway, lined on either side with palms, and though it was a June night, the gla.s.s doors were closed.

Ermentrude's heart was in her throat, not because of the splendour, to which she was accustomed; but it was to be her first meeting with a n.o.ble dame, whose name was historic, at whose feet the poets of the Second Empire had prostrated themselves, pa.s.sionately plucking their lyres; the friend of Liszt, Wagner, Berlioz, of Manet, Degas, Monet; the new school--this wonderful old woman knew them all, from Goncourt and Flaubert to Daudet and Maupa.s.sant. Had she not, Ermentrude remembered as she divested herself of her cloak, sent a famous romancer out of the house because he spoke slightingly of the Pope? Had she not cut the emperor dead when she saw him with a lady not his empress? What a night this would be in the American girl's orderly existence! And _he_ was to be there, he had promised the princess.

Her heart was overflowing when she was graciously received by the great lady who stood in the centre of a group at the back of the drawing-room--a lofty apartment in white and gold, the panels painted by Baudry, the furniture purest Empire. She noted the height and majestic bearing of this cousin of kings, noted the aquiline nose drooped over a contracted mouth--which could a.s.sume most winning curves, withal shaded by suspicious down, that echoed in hue her inky eyebrows. The eyes of the princess were small and green and her glance penetrating. Her white hair rolled imperially from a high, narrow forehead.

Ermentrude bore herself with the utmost composure. She adored the Old World, adored genius, but after all she was an Adams of New Hamps.h.i.+re, her sister the wife of a former amba.s.sador. It was more curiosity than _gaucherie_ that prompted her to hold the hand offered her and scrutinize the features as if to evoke from the significant, etched wrinkles the tremendous past of this hostess. The princess was pleased.

"Ah, Miss Adams," she said, in idiomatic English, "you have candid eyes.

You make me feel like telling stories when you gaze at me so appealingly. Don't be shocked"--the girl had coloured--"perhaps I shall, after a while."

Mr. Sheldam had slipped into a corner behind a very broad table and under the shaded lamps examined some engravings. Mrs. Sheldam talked in hesitating French to the Marquis de Potachre, an old fellow of venerable and burlesque appearance. His fierce little white mustaches were curled ceilingward, but his voice was as timid as honey. He flourished his wizened hand toward Miss Adams.

"Charming! Delightful! She has something English in her _insouciant_ pose, and is wholly American in her cerebral quality. And what colouring, what gorgeous brown hair! What a race, madame, is yours!"

Mrs. Sheldam began to explain that the Adams stock was famous, but the marquis did not heed her. He peered at her niece through a gold-rimmed monocle. The princess had left the group near the table and with two young men slowly moved down the salon. Miss Adams was immediately surrounded by some antiquated gentlemen wearing orders, who paid her compliments in the manner of the eighteenth century. She answered them with composure, for she was sure of her French, sure of herself--the princess had not annihilated her. Her aunt, accompanied by the marquis, crossed to her, and the old n.o.bleman amused her with his saturnine remarks.

"Time was," he said, "when one met here the cream of Parisian wit and fas.h.i.+on: the great Flaubert, a noisy fellow at times, I vow; Dumas _fils_; Cabanel, Gerome, Duran; ever-winning Carolus--ah, what men! Now we get Polish pianists, crazy Belgians, anarchistic poets, and Neo-impressionists. I have warned the princess again and again."

"_Beca.s.se!_" interrupted the lady herself. "Monsieur Rajewski has consented to play a Chopin nocturne. And here are my two painters, Miss Adams--Messieurs Bla and Maugre. They hate each other like the Jesuits and Jansenists of the good old days of Pascal."

"She likes to display her learning," grumbled the marquis to Mrs.

Sheldam. "That younger man, Bla, swears by divided tones; his neighbour, Maugre, paints in dots. One is always to be recognized a half-mile away by his vibrating waterscapes--he calls them Symphonies of the Wet; the other goes in for turkeys in the gra.s.s, fowls that are cobalt-blue daubs, with gra.s.s a scarlet. It's awful on the optic nerves.

_Pointillisme_, Maugre names his stuff. Now, give me Corot--"

"Hush, hus.h.!.+" came in energetic sibilants from the princess, who rapped with her j.a.panese walking-stick for silence. Mr. Sheldam woke up and fumbled the pictures as Rajewski, slowly bending his gold-dust aureole until it almost grazed the keyboard, began with deliberate accents a nocturne. Miss Adams knew his playing well, but its poetry was not for her this evening; rather did the veiled tones of the instrument form a misty background to the human tableau. So must Chopin have woven his magic last century, and in a salon like this--the wax candles burning with majestic steadiness in the sculptured sconces; the huge fireplace, monumental in design, with its dull bra.s.s garnis.h.i.+ng; the subdued richness of the decoration into which fitted, as figures in a frame, the various guests. Even the waxed floor seemed to take on new reverberations as the pianoforte sounded the sweet despair of the Pole.

To her dismay Ermentrude caught herself drifting away from the moment's hazy charm to thoughts of her poet. It annoyed her, she sharply reminded herself, that she could not absolutely saturate herself with the music and the manifold souvenirs of the old hotel; perhaps this may have been the spell of Rajewski's playing....

The music ceased. A dry voice whispered in her ear:--

"Great artist, that chap Rajewski. Had to leave Russia once because he wouldn't play the Russian national hymn for the Czar. Bless me, but he was almost sent to Siberia--and in irons too. Told me here in this very room that he was much frightened. They lighted fires in Poland to honour his patriotism. He acknowledged that _he_ would have played twenty national hymns, but he couldn't remember the Russian one, or never knew it--anyhow, he was christened a patriot, and all by a slip of the memory. Now, that's luck, isn't it?"

She began to dislike this cynical old man with his depreciating tales of genius. She knew that her idols often tottered on clay feet, but she hated to be reminded of that disagreeable reality. She went to Monsieur Rajewski and thanked him prettily in her cool new voice, and again the princess nodded approval.

"She is _chic_, your little girl," she confided in her deep tones to Mrs. Sheldam, whose tired New England face almost beamed at the compliment.

"We were in Hamburg at the Zoological Garden; I always go to see animals," declaimed the princess, in the midst of a thick silence. "For you know, my friends, one studies humanity there in the raw. Well, I dragged our party to the large monkey cage, and we enjoyed ourselves--immensely! And what do you think we saw! A genuine novelty.

Some mischievous sailor had given an overgrown ape a mirror, and the poor wretch spent its time staring at its image, neglecting its food and snarling at its companions. The beast would catch the reflection of another ape in the gla.s.s and quickly bound to a more remote perch. The keeper told me that for a week his charge had barely eaten. It slept with the mirror held tightly in its paws. Now, what did the mirror mean to the animal! I believe"--here she became very vivacious--"I really believe that it was developing self-consciousness, and in time it would become human. On our way back from Heligoland, where we were entertained on the emperor's yacht at the naval manuvres, we paid another visit to our monkey house. The poor, misguided brute had died of starvation. It had become so vain, so egotistical, so superior, that it refused food and wasted away in a corner, gazing at itself, a hairy Narcissus, or rather the perfect type of your modern Superman, who contemplates his ego until his brain sickens and he dies quite mad."

Every one laughed. Mrs. Sheldam wondered what a Superman was, and Ermentrude felt annoyed. Zarathustra was another of her G.o.ds, and this brusquely related anecdote did not seem to her very spirituelle. But she had not formulated an answer when she heard a name announced, a name that set her heart beating. At last! The poet had kept his word. She was to meet in the flesh the man whose too few books were her bibles of art, of philosophy, of all that stood for aspiration toward a lovely ideal in a dull, matter-of-fact world.

"Now," said the princess, as if smiling at some hidden joke, "now you will meet _my_ Superman." And she led the young American girl to Octave Keroulan and his wife, and, after greeting them in her masculine manner, she burst forth:--

"Dear poet! here is one of your adorers from overseas. Guard your husband well, Madame Lys."

So he was married. Well, that was not such a shocking fact. Nor was Madame Keroulan either--a very tall, slim, English-looking blonde, who dressed modishly and evidently knew that she was the wife of a famous man. Ermentrude found her insipid; she had studied her face first before comparing the mental photograph of the poet with the original. Nor did she feel, with unconscious s.e.x rivalry, any sense of inferiority to the wife of her admired one. He was nearly forty, but he looked older; gray hairs tinged his finely modelled head. His face was shaven, and with the bulging brow and full jaw he was more of the German or Belgian than French. Black hair thrown off his broad forehead accented this resemblance; a composer rather than a prose-poet and dramatist, was the rapid verdict of Ermentrude. She was not disappointed, though she had expected a more fragile type. The weaver of moons.h.i.+ne, of mystic phrases, of sweet gestures and veiled sonorities should not have worn the guise of one who ate three meals a day and slept soundly after his mellow incantations. Yet she was not--inheriting, as she did, a modic.u.m of sense from her father--disappointed.

The conversation did not move more briskly with the entrance of the Keroulans. The marquis sullenly gossiped with Mr. Sheldam; the princess withdrew herself to the far end of the room with her two painters.

Rajewski was going to a _soiree_, he informed them, where he would play before a new picture by Carriere, as it was slowly undraped; no one less in rank than a d.u.c.h.ess would be present! A little stiffly, Ermentrude Adams a.s.sured the Keroulans of her pleasure in meeting them. The poet took it as a matter of course, simply, without a suspicion of posed grandeur. Ermentrude saw this with satisfaction. If he had clay feet,--and he must have them; all men do,--at least he wore his genius with a sense of its responsibility. She held tightly her hands and leaned back, awaiting the precious moment when the oracle would speak, when this modern magician of art would display his cunning. But he was fatuously commonplace in his remarks.

"I have often told Madame Keroulan that my successes in Europe do not appeal to me as those in far-away America. Dear America--how it must enjoy a breath of real literature!"

Mrs. Sheldam sat up primly, and Ermentrude was vastly amused. With a flash of fun she replied:--

"Yes, America does, Monsieur Keroulan. We have so many Europeans over there now that our standard has fallen off from the days of Emerson and Whitman. And didn't America give Europe Poe?" She knew that this boast had the ring of the amateur, but it pleased her to see how it startled him.

"America is the Great Bribe," he pursued. "You have no artists in New York."

"Nor have we New Yorkers," the girl retorted. "The original writing natives live in Europe."

He looked puzzled, but did not stop. "You have depressed literature to the point of publication," he solemnly a.s.serted. This was too much and she laughed in mockery. Husband and wife joined her, while Mrs. Sheldam trembled at the audacity of her niece--whose irony was as much lost on her as it was on the poet.

"But _you_ publish plays and books, do you not?" Ermentrude navely asked.

Madame Keroulan interposed in icy tones:--

"Mademoiselle Adams misunderstands. Monsieur Keroulan is the Grand Disdainer. Like his bosom friend, Monsieur Mallarme, he cares little for the Philistine public--"

He interrupted her: "Lys, dear friend, you must not bore Miss Adams with my theories of art and life. _She_ has read me--"

Ermentrude gave him a grateful glance. He seemed, despite his self-consciousness, a great man--how great she could not exactly define.

His eyes--two black diamonds full of golden reflections, the eyes of a conqueror, a seer--began to burn little bright spots into her consciousness, and, selfishly, she admitted, she wished the two women would go away and leave her to interrogate her idol in peace. There were so many things to ask him, so many difficult pa.s.sages in The Golden Glaze and Hesitations, above all in that great dramatic poem, The Voices, which she had witnessed in Paris, with its mystic atmosphere of pity and terror. She would never forget her complex feelings, when at a Paris theatre, she saw slowly file before her in a Dream-Masque the wraith-like figures of the poet, their voices their only corporeal gift.

Picture had dissolved into picture, and in the vapours of these crooning enchantments she heard voices of various timbres enunciating in monosyllables the wisdom of the ages, the poetry of the future. This play was, for her, and for Paris, too, the last word in dramatic art, the supreme _nuance_ of beauty. Everything had been accomplished: Shakespeare, Moliere, Ibsen; yet here was a new evocation, a fresh peep at untrodden paths. In bliss that almost dissolved her being, the emotional American girl reached her hotel, where she tried to sleep.

When her aunt told her of the invitation tendered by the princess, a rare one socially, she was in the ninth heaven of the Swedenborgians.

Any place to meet Octave Keroulan!

And now he sat near her signalling, she knew, her sympathies, and as the fates would have it two dragons, her aunt and his wife, guarded the gateway to the precious garden of his imagination. She could have cried aloud her chagrin. Such an inestimable treasure was genius that to see it under lock and key invited indignation. The time was running on, and her great man had said nothing. He could, if he wished, give her a million extraordinary glimpses of the earth and the air and the waters below them, for his eyes were mirrors of his marvellous and many-coloured soul; but what chance had he with a conjugal iceberg on one side, a cloud of smoke--poor Aunt Sheldam--on the other! She felt in her fine, rhapsodic way like a young priestess before the altar, ready to touch with a live coal the lips of the G.o.ds, but withheld by a malignant power. For the first time in her life Ermentrude Adams, delicately nurtured in a social hothouse, realized in wrath the major tyranny of caste.

The evening wore away. Mrs. Sheldam aroused her husband as she cast a horrified glance at the cla.s.sic prints he had been studying. The princess dismissed her two impressionists and came over to the poet.

She, too plainly, did not care for his wife, and as the party broke up there was a sense of relief, though Ermentrude could not conceal her dissatisfaction. Her joy was sincere when Madame Keroulan asked Miss Adams and her aunt to call. It was slightly gelid, the invitation, though accepted immediately by Ermentrude. The _convenances_ could look out for themselves; she would not go back to America without an interview. The princess raised her hand mockingly.

"What, I go to one of your conferences! Not I, _cher poete_. Keep your mysteries for your youthful disciples." She looked at Ermentrude, who did not lower her eyes--she was triumphant now. Perhaps _he_ might say something before they parted. He did not, but the princess did.

"Beware, young America, of my Superman! You remember the story of the ape with the mirror!"

Ermentrude flushed with mortification. This princess was decidedly rude at times. But she kept her temper and thanked the lady for a unique evening. Her exquisite youth and grace pleased the terrible old woman, who then varied her warning.

"Beware," she called out in comical accents as they slowly descended the naked marble staircase, "of the Sleeping Princess!"

The American girl looked over her shoulder.

"I don't think your Superman has a mirror at all."

"Yes, but his princess holds one for him!" was the jesting reply.

The carriage door slammed. They rolled homeward, and Ermentrude suffered from a desperate sense of the unachieved. The princess had been impertinent, the Keroulans rather ba.n.a.l. Mrs. Sheldam watched her charge's face in the intermittent lights of the Rue de Rivoli.