The Tattooed Countess/Chapter 7
Gareth Johns lived on Oakdale Avenue in a large, frame house, which had been erected about 1890 in the best provincial style of that period, and at present was painted a dull buff, with green blinds. This house was set well back on a lawn which sloped down towards the cement side-walk. Following a design of the town two small rectangular parks separated the side-walk from the kerb. These were divided by a walk which ran from the porch, straight across the public side-walk, to the street. In these parks, which recurred in front of every house on Oakdale Avenue and all the other streets and avenues in Maple Valley, trees had been set out at regular intervals. The trees on this particular avenue were for the most part box-elders and cottonwoods, the first of which, a little later in the season, would litter the lawns with a myriad of seeds, about the size and appearance of grasshoppers, the second of which would whiten the ground with cotton-filament. On the lawn itself grew lilac and syringa bushes, which had done their blooming a month earlier. On either side of the house was a flower-bed in the shape of a crescent. One of these was a bed of coleus, harmoniously mottled plants, the leaves shading from green to scarlet, from grey to mauve. In the other bed, orange and vermilion cannas, castor-oil beans, and elephant ears, a precisely named vegetation, flourished. A circular spray, attached to a long hose, which crawled from a hydrant near the front porch, played somewhere on this lawn nearly all day, and one day a week, Mr. Arlington, an aged Negro, worked lazily with lawn-mower and sickle, cutting the grass. Robins, blue-birds, and yellow warblers hopped about on the turf, or settled in the trees and bushes, chirping cheerfully, and, in their passage from branch to grass, flashing their vivid plumage in the sunlight. Occasionally a hummingbird darted into the cup of a canna, while the trunk of a dead tree, shorn of its branches, was surmounted by a miniature house which furnished a dwelling-place for a family of wrens.
At the rear of the house, approached by a gravel driveway, stood a large, wooden barn, which at present had fallen into disuse, at least insofar as regarded the purpose of its construction. After a runaway, in which to be sure, no one had been hurt, Gareth's father determined to have nothing more to do with horses. He had, accordingly, sold the mare and discharged the hired-man, and now the barn was employed as a receptacle for tool-chests, boxes of discarded household goods, unstable furniture, carious mattresses, rakes, hoes, ice-cream freezers, and other articles which, when no longer of utility, are always given or thrown away in the city where there is no place to stow them, but which in the country are carefully preserved until the owner dies. On the rough pine inner walls of this barn it had been the pleasure of a former coachman to paste posters of bygone circuses, theatrical show-bills, portraits of race-horses and prize-fighters. There were lithographs of Louise Montague, Forepaugh's $25,000 beauty, James O'Neill exclaiming, The World is Mine! Frank Mayo as Davy Crockett, Janauschek as Meg Merrilies, Minnie Maddern in Fogg's Ferry, Emma Abbott as Yum Yum (a rôle affording her so few vocal opportunities that she had added to them the Lullaby from Erminie), the Hanlon Brothers in Le Voyage en Suisse, Rhea as Josephine, Empress of the French, Maggie Mitchell in The Little Maverick, Helena Modjeska as Rosalind, Maud S., John L. Sullivan, and many others.
Some years back, Gareth had annexed the hay-loft for his own purposes. For a time, while the young people of his neighbourhood still interested him, it had been the scene of "shows," wild west and otherwise, to which the infant sisters of the performers had paid pins or pennies as entrance fee to assist as spectators while Chet Porter, the son of a local judge, chinned himself or hung by his calves from the bar of a trapeze. Occasionally, too, it had been the privilege of these fortunate juveniles to witness Bill Munger in a cage with a bear-rug carefully pinned about him. These earlier pleasures soon ceasing to divert him, Gareth had transformed the loft into a kind of studio-museum where he might assemble and gloat over his collected treasures. Held to belong exclusively to him, no housemaid was ever permitted to invade this garret in the barn. A few of Gareth's friends had been invited to ascend to it, and his mother had frequently been a guest there, but such dusting and sweeping as were done at all were done by Gareth himself.
On the wall he had hung a few magazine posters by Archie Gunn, Maxfield Parrish, and Edward Penfield. There were lithographs by Frederic Remington, and half-tones of wash- and pen-drawings by Thure de Thulstrup, A. B. Wenzell, and Charles Dana Gibson, illustrations for stories, which Gareth had clipped from periodicals. The few articles of furniture, a black-walnut desk, the chairs, a bookcase, and a couch, Gareth had discovered on the floor below, and repaired sufficiently so that they might be useful.
The room represented several eras in Gareth's collecting activities: the era of postage-stamps, the era of cigarette-pictures, and the era of birds'-eggs. Whether because he was of a sentimental or a cynical turn of mind, and it will presently be made apparent that he was paradoxically something of both, it had been Gareth's whim not to change too much from month to month the aspect of this chamber, notwithstanding the fact that he fully sensed that most of these objects were makeshift kickshaws. His present passion was for books and the crowded shelves of the oak case with its glass doors testified to his interest in this regard, but the cigarette-pictures and postage-stamps, accumulations of an earlier day, reminded him of space and distance and foreign climes. It was still pleasant, occasionally, to turn the leaves of his old—book, to examine the orange sun of Japan; the dragon of China, or the eagle of Germany, and wonder how soon he would be able to visit these places. The cigarette-pictures and the coloured cardboards given away with Newsboy plug tobacco, which he had paid for in the shop of a small local fruit and tobacco merchant at the rate of five cents a card until he possessed nearly the entire collection (he owned at least ninety-three out of a possible hundred) were now arranged in neat rows around the walls or, tied in orderly bundles, reposed in a drawer of his desk. These were the days of tights and although it is certain that some actresses of the period wore dresses, the manufacturers of the delectable plugs and of Sweet Caporal cigarettes apparently held a theory that chewers and smokers would, in the long run, find unsheathed limbs more satisfactory to contemplate than skirts. There were portraits of Della Fox, with her own peculiar curl, as Mataya, Crown Prince of Siam, in Wang, saucy Marie Tempest in The Fencing Master, Cissie Fitzgerald, with her celebrated wink, lift ing her skirts and one foot galleryward, Camille d'Arville, Saharet and Otero and Cléo de Merode, recent rages at Koster and Bial's in New York, Lulu Glaser in The Merry Monarch, Marie Jansen in The Oolah, Pauline Hall, Virginia Earle, Edna Wallace Hopper in El Capitan, Mrs. James Brown Potter, Julia Marlowe as Juliet, Georgia Cayvan, Lillian Russell in The Little Duke, Virginia Harned as Trilby, Adele Ritchie in The Algerian, Madge Lessing, Maurice Barrymore, Nat Goodwin, Blanche Walsh, Ada Rehan in Much Ado, Caroline Miskel Hoyt, Jessie Bartlett Davis, Lily Langtry: these were a few of the names. Some of these stage-folk (as many of them as had visited Maple Valley during his theatre-going days, which extended back for ten years) Gareth had seen; he knew all about the others through reading the Chicago papers and certain New York theatrical periodicals for which he subscribed.
He had become interested in birds and their eggs later than most boys. He delighted in the colours of the birds, and marvelled constantly at their wanderings. They flew, so he had read in books, to the great plains of South America, and he reminded himself that he could do what a bird could do. He liked the clusters of eggs, too, lying in their cabinet, embedded in the soft cotton. They were his jewels; they satisfied his esthetic sense. Long moments he would spend bending over them, gazing with rare pleasure at the greenish-blue eggs, spotted with reddish-brown, of the rose-breasted grosbeak, the mottled grey eggs of the bronzed grackle, the white eggs of the red-headed woodpecker, the brown eggs, spotted with olive, of the blue jay, the pinkish-white eggs of the house wren, the reddish-brown and purple speckled eggs of the meadowlark, the greenish-blue eggs, stippled with brown, of the scarlet tanager. He had devoted many hours to the cleaning of these eggs, preparing them for preservation, with the aid of blow-pipe, file, scissors, tweezers, and hooks. Sometimes the embryo would be partially formed and it would be necessary to remove the contents bit by bit through the tiny hole he had filed in the brittle shell. More than anything else he had enjoyed the days of search, the rambles through the woods and fields, days when he was usually entirely alone, dreaming of all the things he had to dream about.
Gareth possessed many books but only a few of them were favourites which he read again and again. This special list included: Daudet's Sapho and Maupassant's Bel-Ami, in translation, Henry Blake Fuller's Chevalier of Pensieri-Vani, and Frank Norris's McTeague. From Fuller's book he had learned to muse on Italy; there was something indescribable about the character of McTeague that corresponded with certain elements in his own nature, and as for Georges Duroy, he adored his career, and he read and reread the description of the seduction of Mme. Walter in the church. There were, of course, many other books: John Gabriel Borkman, in William Archer's translation, recently issued by Stone and Kimball in Chicago; he had bought D'Annunzio's Triumph of Death because Anthony Comstock had succeeded, for a week or two, in stopping the sale of this novel in New York, and he wanted to find out why; The Red Badge of Courage, The Third Violet, Chimmie Fadden, Quo Vadis? The Quest of the Golden Girl, The Descendant, Mrs. Cliff's Yacht: these were a few of the newer titles.
But it was not, after all, through his books that Gareth had learned the most. His books, like his tobacco-pictures and his birds'-eggs offered him another means of escape from the environment which he detested. Quite possibly, however, his imagination was his principal aid in this respect. He possessed a curious gift of divination; he divined what he had not experienced. Before he fell asleep at night pictures of faces often formed themselves behind his closed eyelids. Changing expression, rapidly they shifted into other forms. The strange thing was that none of these faces he remembered ever having seen before. Frequently the heads were attired in fantastic foreign head-dresses; often a face and its expression would be so sinister as to suggest that of a murderer; again, one would appear to interpret perfect innocence. He had inherited a power to dream which lent him the ability to create beauty even out of the ugliness which surrounded him. When he wrote, his fables and vignettes never dealt with the life he was acquainted with; always they were in the nature of a release from it. This side of his nature, it is probable, was due to the Welsh strain in his blood. Henry Johns, his father, was descended from a Welsh family which had settled in Pennsylvania; Gareth was named after his grandfather. His grandmother, however, had been Pennsylvania Dutch, and Gareth's father had derived his character from her. Gareth, too, was beholden to her for the hard, practical side of his curiously blended disposition.
From his father, who was unnaturally reticent especially in regard to questions of sex, Gareth had learned nothing. A weaker character, under these circumstances, turned into the world later to shift for himself, might have sunk in the sea of experience. But Gareth had no intention either of becoming a sciolist or of living without touching life. One definite act, he felt (and the result proved that he was correct in this assumption) would completely release his imagination. Therefore, without taking any obvious initiative himself, without, even, any desire, simply through curiosity, he had, on two occasions, accepted the readily proffered attentions of Clara Barnes. There was nothing sweet about the memory of these moments; rather they had made him harder, more sophisticated. They had, in a sense, been responsible for his oppugnancy towards his environment, for his present disregard for his former boy friends, healthy, young animals, who played games, smoked cigarettes in private, and boasted, furtively, of certain desirable relationships they had formed with girls in the Bohemian quarter. To himself, Gareth now, quite justifiably, seemed ages older than these untutored savages. They, to be frank, regarded Gareth with even greater disfavour.
He had begun his imaginative understanding of the world even earlier by understanding his father and mother. From a very tender age there had always been a sharp division in his feeling for these two parents. It was through his mother, who sympathized quite blindly with his efforts at mental escape, that he eventually got everything he wanted; wants always opposed at first, and frequently to the end, by his father. He had come to sense at last that his father's course, long established and now habitual, traditional even, a routine that could be depended upon, was, to a large extent, dictated by jealousy, jealousy of Gareth's love for his mother and her love for him. To Mrs. Johns, indeed, Gareth was the whole excuse for God having created the world, and she was not always clever enough to conceal this exaggerated emotion for her son from her husband. As for the boy, he was well aware that his mother was the only human being he had yet met capable of arousing any successful response in him. He did not analyze his love for her; he simply acknowledged it. This was practically the only weakness in his nature.
Mrs. Johns was what is known in a small town as a "bright woman." She belonged to the Ladies' Home Study Club, and read papers on Emerson and Henry Thoreau when the club occupied itself with American literature, and on the Egyptian pyramids or the wisdom of the Chinese, when the club spent a year in vicarious travelling. She was a good housekeeper. She was liked by her friends, of which she had plenty. In appearance she was slight and rather short. Her dark hair was rapidly turning grey, but she still looked young in spite of the glasses she always wore before her eyes. She was not exactly pretty; it would be said of her that she had a pleasant face.
Gareth's father conducted a wholesale grocery business, in which he was entirely successful. He negotiated his affairs, by the aid of travelling salesmen, throughout the depth and breadth of Iowa. He belonged to the local lodge of Elks and the Knights Templars of the Masons. His great hat with its white plumes, his gold-braided coat, and his sword, hung in the closet of the guest bed-chamber, ready for an infrequent parade in honour of the death of some member of the lodge or for some other equally solemn occasion. He was a member of the Maple Valley Board of Trade and a director in one of the local banks. One year, in the interest of better politics, he had been persuaded to run for alderman, but he had been defeated by the saloon interests and the ring. He was, it may seem unnecessary to add, a Republican and an Episcopalian. Nobody of any social standing in Maple Valley was a Democrat or a Roman Catholic. That fact, however, did not prevent the Catholic Democrats from occasionally gaining control of the local government. There were so few Jews in Maple Valley that the Jewish question had never become a problem. Sam Adler, who ran a clothing emporium, belonged to the Methodist Church and the Elks just like anybody else, while Isaac Goldberg was considered one of the brightest lawyers in the state, and was the life of any party where men played poker around a table spread with bottles of Budweiser and plates of American cheese and crackers.
Henry Johns was a tall, pompous man. He weighed about two hundred and fifty pounds and wore side-whiskers. He was growing bald around the top of his head. A gold watch chain, hung with a walrus-tooth and a Masonic emblem, was always stretched across his expansive belly, while the head of an elk, set with diamonds and rubies, invariably embellished the button-hole of his coat-lapel. When he walked to church on Sunday morning he carried a gold-headed stick and wore a high silk hat and a Prince Albert coat.
Henry Johns had never understood his son. It may be said, indeed, that he never made the slightest attempt to understand him. No American small-town father ever understands boys like Gareth Johns, boys with imagination and the creative impulse; they are looked upon with vague distrust and suspicion, at best, with a certain condescension. It seems incredible, indeed, to most small-town minds that any boy should not grow up with the ideal of becoming a retail boot and shoe merchant. Gareth, from almost the moment he had begun to talk, had developed uncomfortably unconventional traits which his father had tried to deracinate. These attempts, it may be added, were entirely vain. Gareth's mother, so far as it lay in her power, saw to it that the boy should follow his own interests. They were allies these two, and had many secrets from Johns senior, more every year, as time passed. One of their secrets concerned the room in the barn. Mr. Johns, of course, was aware that Gareth spent a great deal of time in the barn, but he had never climbed the stairs to see how, and, indeed, only thought of the hay-loft, when he thought of it at all, which was seldom, as a sort of play-room for an underdeveloped boy. With Gareth's bed-chamber in the house he could have found no fault. That was entirely devoid of any personal character. Aside from a tennis racket and a mandolin, both of which had long since lost their interest for Gareth, this room was bare of adornment, save for a framed picture or two of a kind which might have been transferred congruously to any other room in the house.
When Gareth wanted to do something which required money or outside aid of any kind, he went directly to his mother, and between them they usually were able to devise some furtive or clandestine achievement of his plan. When this was impossible, when the character of his desire demanded a conference with the head of the house, sallies and excursions, battles and truces, were always foreseen and studied out in advance so far as was humanly possible. The college project was a case in point, for, obviously, it was unfeasible to carry out such an undertaking without Henry Johns's consent, a consent which, up to this time, had been completely withheld. Mr. Johns had emerged victor in every campaign; he had proved adamant in every encounter; he had been firm in the face of implorings, arguments, tears, and rage. Nothing had as yet moved him, but Mrs. Johns had by no means lifted the siege which now seemed to be pretty much in her hands, as Gareth was incapacitated for further action, partly because he had to a large extent lost interest, and partly because he knew that anything further he might have to say in the matter would merely succeed in making his father more obstinate.
Mr. Johns had definitely determined that his son should embrace a business career, and day after day he insisted that the boy's apprenticeship should begin at once, first as an underclerk in his establishment, with the promise of a travelling salesman's job waiting a few months ahead. This was the present deadlock, but Gareth foresaw victory in the future, assured, perhaps, by the memory that his mother had eventually won in every similar encounter. Only one terrible obstacle, aside from his present indifference, stood between him and the goal. His mother, he knew, was suffering both from heart trouble and a tumorous growth. In a short time, whatever the condition of her heart, Dr. Sinclair had informed her, an operation would be necessary. Under these unfavourable conditions, Gareth could not bear to see her continue to struggle with his boorish father.
It was not his parents alone, however, that Gareth understood; they and his books and his relations with Clara had helped him to understand himself and through himself to understand others, at least as they reacted towards him. He was not vain, or conceited, but he was quite aware that he possessed his fair share of good looks, and a certain magnetism, largely due, he had come to believe, to his congenital indifference (as a child, he remembered, ladies used to stop to pet him on the street, partly, he now fancied, because he had been so bored by these attentions), and that his mind worked at a rate several hundred degrees higher than the town average. Therefore, since the day that he had gone birds'-nesting with Miss Colman, he had sensed the fact that she was in love with him. This, he knew, quite destroyed any possibility of future intercourse with her. He had liked her in his fashion; she had been useful to him; had given him a great deal in their impersonal discussions, but he knew now that this was the end. Miss Colman was not Clara Barnes. She would always be dreading a complete communion and always desiring it; she might even want to marry him. On the plane of emotion to which her desire might conceivably carry her, future communication with her would be decidedly unpleasant.
In these hours, after he had considered Lennie, his thought invariably drifted forward to the Countess Nattatorrini, whose name associated itself quite naturally in his imagination with all that he felt about the life of Paris. She might even, he reasoned, have met Alphonse Daudet or Guy de Maupassant. She had, he assured himself, seen all the openings in the Paris theatres in the past two decades. What excitement conversation about these matters might provoke! Somehow, however, the longed-for meeting had not come about. His mother had met her several times, but his mother gave few entertainments, and she could scarcely presume—Lou Poore was not one of her intimate friends—to open her house suddenly to this visiting guest. It was, he was beginning to believe more and more, through Lennie Colman that he was ironically destined to be introduced to the Countess Nattatorrini.