The Plutocrat (Tarkington)/Chapter 3
WHEN he opened the door his first impression was that someone had been burning incense. It seemed an odd thing to do in a room that had a bar and a barkeeper in it; but these were inconspicuous, the bar being a short one of lustreless dark wood in a corner and the barkeeper a studious young man enclosed, as it might be, in a library alcove, for he was intent upon a serious-looking book. High-backed chairs and deep leather divans permitted the tops of a few heads to be seen; but there was audible not even a murmur of conversation, and in the centre of the room three ladies and a youth were playing bridge with the noiseless contemplation appropriate to their pastime;—to Ogle's surprise this appeared to be the quietest place on the whole boat. Windows of stained glass sent amber and azure and ruby filtrations of sunshine to swing slowly to and fro upon the walls of dull blackish wood; and the smell of incense seemed not so mis placed after all.
It was traceable, however, not to a censer, but to the bridge table and a cigarette in a remarkable holder of yellow ivory and green jade poised in the interesting long white hand of one of the players. Ogle had never felt anything except pitying amazement for a person who smoked scented cigarettes; but his first glance at this lady destroyed a lifelong prejudice against them; she was instantly of so compelling a presence.
In the dark-walled room with its dark furniture she was as conspicuous as a tall lady in a Sargent portrait. She had a long face, long limbs, a long body; but all with a slender amplitude and no meagreness. Her long aquiline face was not thin, but sleekly contoured, like her vivid hair which seemed to be composed of long, pale bronze threads laid close to one another and polished to a soft brilliancy. And with her length she had grace; her long gestures, as she played, were exquisitely accurate and restrained—Ogle immediately found the word "musical" to describe them—and she sat beautifully poised in her chair, neither resting against its back nor leaning forward to the card table. Moreover, he was as pleased with what she wore as with her grace and lengthiness; a high distinction being marked by that, too, he thought. In a whole shipload of tailors' woollen "sport clothes," here was a Parisian afternoon gown of bronze green and black and silver, silk and metal and a little lace, worn by one who quietly knew herself to be above both the ordinary conception of maritime utilities and the advice of fashion journals. Her independenc went so far as to treat the smoking-room to a kind of intimacy; no hat covered fhe polished pale bronze hair; beyond question this was a woman who would need to know a better reason for doing anything than that other women did it.
Never, Ogle felt, had he known that badgered word "elegance" so vividly expressed to a glance of the eye; though he took more than a glance. She had no definite age; she might have been a marvellous forty or twenty-five; but the latter would have been precocious, the pleased and impressed young dramatist concluded. For no one under thirty could be so completely what he thought the picture of the perfect woman of the world; and, deciding that she must surely be French, he found it appropriate to describe her to himself in her own tongue. In spite of the difficulty lately attending his steward's attempt to communicate with him in that language, he sometimes used French phrases as the only ones that would fully express his meaning; so now he felt that "woman of the world" was but a pale definition of the Parisian exquisite before him, and in his mind repeated, "Femme du monde"—and added further Gallicism to that: "Femme du monde parfaitement et parfaitement Parisienne!"
She seemed entirely occupied with the cards before her, or else, absently, with the long tube of ivory and jade and the perfumed little cigarette it held; but Ogle nevertheless had the impression that she might be aware of him and of his almost startled interest in her; for although she did not glance at all in his direction she had the cool and competent air of a person whom nothing whatever escapes. So, after standing near the doorway a moment or two longer, pretending to be looking in a general way over the whole room, which was not of the heroic dimensions displayed in the great salons below, he walked on, seeking his friend.
Passing round a high-backed double divan, he came upon two lounging young men deeply sunk in soft leather cushions and languidly preoccupied with amber liquids. Each held a tall glass in his hand, sipping at intervals in a communion probably satisfying, since neither showed any other sign of life; but as Ogle appeared one of them became slightly animated. He was a frail-bodied, fair young man, with a long, pale nose, a faint chin, eye-glasses over greenish twinklings, and, for the semblance of a moustache, a few tiny spikes apparently of fine hay.
"Laurence Ogle!" he said, bestirring himself to extend a hand. "I was wondering when you'd show up. Have something? Anyhow, sit down with us, won't you? This is Mr. Macklyn—George Wilmer Macklyn—you ought to know each other. I was just telling him you were on board."
"He didn't need to tell me," Mr. Macklyn said, as Ogle took a chair facing the divan. "This idiot of an Albert Jones thinks all other people are idiots because he is. I saw that you were to be on the 'Duumvir' in the theatrical notes of a newspaper the morning before we sailed. Naturally I was interested, because I'd seen your new play only the night before. I considered it a very impressive piece of work."
The blond Mr. Jones laughed. "You can believe Macklyn means it, Laurence," he was kind enough to say. "Macklyn is one of those fearful people who are always honest. You know his work, don't you?"
"Ah"—Ogle said, and then after a moment, risked a lie of courtesy. "Oh, yes—yes, indeed."
Mr. Macklyn shook his head, frowning. He was a serious-looking, bushy-brawed, swarthy young man; and although for the moment his attitude might be languid his expression was earnest, even severe, seeming to be so habitually. "I fear you say that out of mere kindness, Mr. Ogle. My work is not well known. Necessarily it can be for only the few. I should much prefer to write frankly for the many as you do; but I doubt if I'd know how. It requires another technique, one that I admire none the less. I don't underrate the importance of any man who can reach the mob, Mr. Ogle. The rewards are enormous and the art can be sincere where perhaps it can't always be searching."
"'Searching'?" Ogle said inquiringly; and with no very hearty approval he looked upon this friend of his friend and wondered how Mr. Macklyn happened upon the particular word. "Searching" was precisely what his new play had been called by all of the five most intelligent critics he knew. Not one of them had omitted it, and with so emphatic a corroboration he looked upon searchingness as pretty much his accepted specialty. "You write, yourself, Mr. Macklyn?" he inquired, a little coldly.
"Macklyn's a poet," Mr. Jones informed him. "I thought you wouldn't know his things. Nobody does. He tries to make people notice him by using no punctuation and omitting capital letters; but it hasn't got him very far. I think I'll leave frames off my pictures and see if somebody won't write a few more articles about them."
"You'd do well whether the articles were written or not," the serious Macklyn said. "Does life frame its pictures? Does nature? Albert speaks flippantly of my method, Mr. Ogle; but he knows well enough why I deliberately use it, though it costs me all but a few readers and even some of them read me only to mock. He paints his pictures with the loose stroke of a Gauguin and the colour of a Picasso, knowing that he, too, can reach but one here, another there, and never the mob; and yet he chaffs me for assuming the same privilege. I write poems that have no rhymes, no metre and no punctuation because I am expressing my searchings in that way."
"'Searchings'?" Ogle said. "There might be several definitions of that word. What kind of searchings do you mean?"
"Within myself. Within life. Within this formlessness we call the universe. Do you find capital letters and metres and semi-colons in passion, in desire, in the disturbing and despairing deep wonder that besets us as we succumb to this shapelessness we call life? Why, even you, Mr. Ogle, popular playwright as you are—you at least broke away from the old, stupid rigidities imposed by the dead art of yesterday when you closed your play without concluding it, so to speak. I thought that was very fine. You not only resisted the temptation for the detestable 'happy ending,' you bravely left your characters just where they were—groping, getting nowhere, caught in the relentlessness of their own blind desires and deafened by the clashings of a remorseless chance from which there was no escape. You showed them struggling, entangled, prompted by only the two primal impulses of sex and greed, as we all are; and you left them to go on helplessly and drearily and wonderingly realizing their own tragic condition, but unable to escape from it. Gorki and Turgeniev and Dostoieffsky would applaud you. It was like some great, gloomy, keyless fugue played upon an organ with no cheap and pretty sounds at the command of the stops. I'm glad of the opportunity to give you my opinion of 'The Pastoral Scene,' Mr. Ogle. I thought it 'popular,' I admit it. 'Popular,' yes; but nevertheless magnificent. It expressed for the many the same ideologism—if I may say so—that I attempt in my own work for the few."
Ogle, at first not too favourably impressed with the bushy-browed young man, began to like him better and to feel willing for him to go on talking. "You're very kind," the playwright said. "As a matter of fact, both the manager and I were nervous about putting on 'The Pastoral Scene' for the very reason that it did not seem possible it would find an audience. Popularity was the one thing we couldn't imagine its possessing, and no one could have been more surprised than I was by its showing that after all there is a great sophisticated and intelligent public for an uncompromising realism. I hope you didn't find the play quite without that searchingness you seem to admire in art, Mr. Macklyn."
The serious young man made no response and appeared to be unaware that an inquiry had been addressed to him. Upon concluding his own remarks he had applied himself frowningly to his glass, but without looking either at it or at his companions. Under his bushy brows, in fact, his gaze quickly fixed itself upon the lady whose appearance Ogle had found so interesting. Her chair was only a few feet from the end of the divan where Macklyn sat and her attention seemed impassively upon the card table; nevertheless, there was something in the sidelong eyes of the poet, as they sought her, that made Ogle suspect this new acquaintance of having talked for her benefit, or at least in the hope that she would hear and be impressed. Macklyn had neither looked at her as he talked, nor by any emphasis of voice shown himself selfishly unconscious that people were playing bridge close by; but the playwright, accustomed to look for the significant in the small, and marking the sidelong eye, could not resist suspicion. The next moment he found himself suspecting his friend Albert Jones of the same thing.
"No wonder you had doubts of your play's success with the crowd, Laurence," Mr. Jones said; and Ogle, familiar with the speaker's ordinary voice, was momentarily surprised to find it improved to sound a more suave and musical note than it did usually. "It's always surprising to find one's obscure ideologisms appreciated. Last year I sent a brace of my things to the Salon d'Automne—little pictures analysing a thought of Verlaine's about windows; that was all. When I found the Parisian critics were taking them seriously, I almost fainted away!" And the glance of the painter immediately imitated the glance of the poet, darting sidelong to the lady at the card table.
The appearance of the two adults, Albert Jones and George Wilmer Macklyn, bore no resemblance to that of little children; and yet, somewhat to the irritation of the gentlemen observing them, each of them was so ingenuous as to wear precisely the air of a child who hopes he has said something important and looks quickly to Mamma to see how favourably it has affected her. Unmistakably, they were offering little exhibitions before the unknown lady; and Ogle was annoyed to think that she might perceive that they were doing so and associate him in her mind with blunderers so naïve. She looked clever enough to comprehend performances for her benefit much more subtle than these; and he decided to detach himself in her thoughts from the two performers.
"Oh, I don't know," he said, and, without realizing that he might himself be performing a little, he laughed more musically than was customary with him in moments of amusement. "Ideologism is rather a broad term, after all. We were talking of that the other evening at a country-house dinner. A French officer was staying there—a colonel of engineers on a mission, the Comte du Bourg—and he and I were arguing about the difference between the new ideologism and the old. A member of the Cabinet was up from Washington for the week-end, a very practical man; and he and Du Bourg preferred the old, I the new. As a matter of fact I was rather astonished to find that a member of the American President's Cabinet knew what the word meant. One doesn't look to our native politicians for even the things any fourteen-year-old schoolboy is familiar with nowadays."
With that, wondering if the lady at the bridge table might possibly know the Comte du Bourg, he could not refrain from glancing at her to see if her attention had been at all arrested. Apparently it had not. She sat in profile to him, and a comely long profile her whole person offered to view, ending in a silver-buckled black slipper, tapered from a high instep of silvered silk. But she merely played a card from her hand, and gave no sign that ideologism, old or new, or engineers of France, or statesmen of America, had place in her thoughts.
"Quite a blow we had off the old Hook," Mr. Jones remarked, returning a preoccupied gaze to his glass. "Wonderful how everything's quieted down and keeps on flattening. You could hardly tell now that you aren't on a Fall River boat coming up the Sound. That first night out the only well people on the whole boat seemed to be Macklyn here and me."
"No," Macklyn said, also giving up his scrutiny of the card table. "There was that impossible man who kept blatting at us."
"Oh, I shouldn't count him," Mr. Jones returned. "I'd hardly call him 'people'; he's just one of those things our glorious country seems to love to breed. Kept trying to get us to talk to him, Laurence, telling us how he'd never been on a boat before in his life, and how sick his wife and daughter were, but he never touched by a hair; and all about how good business is this year. Pretty awful! By the way, you weren't laid by the heels, were you? Didn't see you about, though."
"No," Ogle said. "I decided to keep below. I'm a little susceptible in a hurricane, and I took that precaution."
"'Hurricane'?" His friend stared at him. "My dear fellow, that wasn't a hurricane. It was only a gale. You've never been in a hurricane at sea."
"Why haven't I?"
"Because, if you had, you wouldn't call a northeast gale one. Why, the fourth time I crossed" He began a narrative of the sea, including a mathematical description of waves encountered and quotations from the solemn declarations of ships' officers; but the attention he obtained was scant, and presently he discontinued his account and turned, as his companions did, to look at the bridge table.
The lady for whom the three had been all along performing now made her voice audible for the first time in their hearing, a contralto voice of great richness. "Hyacinthe," she said, addressing the youth opposite her with a little sharpness, though nevertheless indulgently;—"c'est à toi, bébé."
"Madame Momoro!" the playwright exclaimed to himself, "Madame Momoro!" This was she whose musical name had sounded a melody to him even from the prosaic passenger list, setting him to build a new play, with her for the heroine. Delighted, he asked for no better. "C'est à toi, bébé," she said. How charming that was, Ogle thought, and how adorable the word! Only a Frenchwoman could have said it.