A BROKEN SYMBOL
Vera by this time was in high, romantic quest of that which cannot be found outside oneself. She had a passion to be utterly free. It was a cold, intellectual phantasy, defeated in every possibility by some strange, morbid no-saying of her emotional nature. Her delusion had been that circumstances enthralled her. That refuge now was gone. Wealth gave her control over the circumstances of her life. She could do what she pleased. She was free to seek freedom and her mind was strong and daring.
She leased an old house in West Tenth Street and had it all made over into studio apartments, four above to be let by favor to whom she liked and one very grand on the ground floor for herself. Then she became a patron of the arts. It is an easy road. Art is hungry for praise and attention. Artists are democratic. They keep no rules, go anywhere, have lots of time and love to be entertained by wealth, if only to put their contempt upon it. The hospitality of a buyer must be bad indeed if they refuse it. Vera’s hospitality was attractive in itself. Her teas were man teas. Her dinners were gay and excellent. They were popular at once and soon became smart in a special, exotic way. Her private exhibitions were written up in the art columns.
She had first a conventional phase and harbored academic art. That passed. Her taste became more and more radical; so also of course did her company. I went often to see her there,—to her teas and sometimes to her dinners, because one could seldom see her anywhere else. But it was a trial for both of us. She introduced me always with an air which meant, “He doesn’t belong, as you see, but he is all right.” I was accepted for her sake. The men were not polite with each other. They quarrelled and squabbled incessantly, mulishly, pettishly, in terms as strange to me as the language of my trade would have been to them. They were polite to me. That was the distinction they made.
As Vera progressed, her understanding of art becoming higher and higher, new figures appeared, some of them grossly uncouth, either naturally so or by affectation. She discovered a sculptor who brought his things with him to be admired,—small ones in his pockets, larger ones in his arms. I could not understand them. They resembled the monstrosities children dream of when they need paregoric. He had been stoker, prize-fighter, mason, poet, tramp,—heaven knows what!—with this marvellous gift inside of him all the time. He wore brogans, trousers that sagged, a shirt open to the middle of his hairy chest, a red handkerchief around his neck and often no hat at all.
Vera seemed quite mad about him. She took me one day to his studio, saying particularly that she had never been there. It was a small room at the top of a palsied fire trap near Gramercy Park, reached by many turnings through dark hallways with sudden steps up and down. In it, besides the sculptor in a gunny-sack smock, there was nothing but some planks laid over the tops of barrels, some heaps of clay, and his things, which he called pieces of form. On the walls, scrawled in pencil, were his social engagements, all with women. Vera’s name was there.
Once he came to tea with nothing of his own to show, but from under his coat he produced and held solemnly aloft an object which proved to be a stuffed toy beast,—dog, cow, bear or what you couldn’t tell, it was so battered. One of its shoe-button eyes, one ear and the tail were gone. Its hide was cotton flannel, now the color of grimy hands.
“What is it?” everybody asked.
He wouldn’t tell until he had found something to stand it on. A book would serve. Then he held it out at arm’s length.
“I found it on the East Side in a rag picker’s place!” he said. “I seem to see something in it ... what?... a force ... something elemental ... something.”
The respect with which this twaddle was received by a sane company, some of it distinguished, even by Vera herself, filled me with indignation.
Later the sculptor sat by me and asked ingratiatingly how matters were in Wall Street.
“You are the third man who has asked me that question today,” I said. “Why are artists so much interested in Wall Street?”
“I’m not,” he said. “I only thought it was a proper question to ask. Some of them are. I hear them talking about it. Pictures sell better when people are making money in Wall Street. Sculpture never sells anyway. Mine won’t.”
I said men were doing very well in Wall Street. Times were prosperous again.
“So I understand,” he replied. “It seems very easy to make money there if you get in right. Do you know of anything sure?”
I said I didn’t.
“You are with Mr. Galt?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“He is a great money maker, isn’t he? What is he like?”
“He’s an elemental force,” I said, leaving him.
But Vera was shrewd and purposeful, having always her ends in view. Manifestations such as the sculptor person were kept in their place. They were not permitted to dominate the scene. They played against a background that was at once exquisite and reassuring. In a mysterious way she created an atmosphere of pagan, metaphysical tranquillity, which rejects nothing and refines whatever it accepts. No thought, no representation of fact or experience, however extreme, was forbidden. But you must perceive all things æsthetically. Vulgarity was the only sin. Emotions were objects. You might enjoy them in any way you liked save one. You must not touch them. For this was the higher sensuality, ethereal and philosophical,—a sensuality of the mind alone.
All of this was the unconscious expression of herself. Eros intellectualized! It can be done.
Her achievement became known in a cultish way. She made admission to her circle more and more difficult and the harder it was the more anxious people were to get in. On Mrs. Valentine’s world she turned the tables. She flouted society and it began to knock at her door. She had something it wanted and sold it dear.
There are always those who seek in art that which they have lost or used up or never dared take in life. There are those whose desires are projected upon the mind and obsess it long after the capacity for direct experience is ruined. There are those to whom anything esoteric and new is irresistible. There were those, besides, who sought Vera, notably among them a tall blond animal of the golden series.
He was the man I saw bring Vera home that evening I waited to have it out with her. I met him again in London on Galt’s business while soliciting proxies among our foreign stockholders. At that time he was acting for his father’s estate with an English syndicate that had large investments in American railroads. Since then, by the will of Providence, he had come into possession of the estate together with an hereditary title of great social distinction.
Enter, as he pleases, Lord Porteous. With a thin, cynical head, a definite simplicity of outline and an exaggerated, voluptuous grace of body, he remarkably resembled an old Greek drawing. How he had found Vera in the first place I never knew. That happened, at any rate, before she was rich. He had the trained British instinct for putting money with the right people, and it was true that the English discovered Galt from afar while he was yet almost unknown in Wall Street. But when I saw him that first time with Vera the Great Midwestern was on its way to bankruptcy and Galt’s interest in it was extremely precarious.
Well, no matter. It was inevitable however it happened. When he returned to this country as Lord Porteous he found her again and immediately added his prestige to her circle. Art bored him. He played the part of beguiled Philistine and amused himself by uttering bourgeoise comments of the most astonishing banality. Whether he truly meant them or not nobody knew for sure. He never by any chance betrayed his form. If satire, it was art; if not, it was incredible. Sensitive victims were reduced to a state of grinning horror. One who committed suicide was believed to have been driven to it by something Lord Porteous said to him in a moment of their being accidentally alone at the sideboard. The artist dropped his glass in a gibbering rage and went headlong forth. He was never seen alive again, and as m’lord couldn’t be asked we never knew what it was.
For all that, Lord Porteous was a capital social asset, and a valiant protagonist. He carried Vera’s name with him wherever he went, even to Mrs. Valentine’s table,—there especially, in fact, because he discovered how much it annoyed her. He disliked her; and she was helpless.
Like her father, Vera was adventurous with success. No measure was enough. She began to import art objects that were bound to be talked about,—not old masters, nothing so trite as that, but daring, controversial things, the latest word of a modern school or the most authentic fetich of a new movement in thought. Her grand stroke was the purchase in London of the rarest piece of antique negro sculpture then known to exist in the world. It had been miraculously discovered in Africa and was brought to England for sale. Its importance lay in the fact that a certain self-advertised cult, leading a revolt against classic Greek tradition, acclaimed it on sight as the perfect demonstration of some theory which only artists could pretend to understand. Modern sculpture, these people said, was pure in but two of its three dimensions. This African thing, wrought by savages in a time of great antiquity, was pure also in the third dimension. Therefore it excelled anything that was Greek or derived therefrom. A storm of controversy broke upon the absurd little idol’s head. Photographs of it were printed in hundreds of magazines and newspapers in Europe and the United States. And when it came to be sold at auction it was one of the most notorious objects on earth.
The British Museum retired after the second bid. Agents acting for private collectors ran the price up rapidly. The bidding, according to the news reports cabled to this country the next morning, was “very spirited,” and the treasure passed at a fabulous price to the agent of “Miss Vera Galt, the well known American collector.” She had engaged the assistance of a dealer who knew how to get publicity in these high matters. English art critics politely regretted that an object of such rare æsthetic interest should leave Europe; American critics exulted accordingly and praised Miss Galt’s enterprise.
I was at the studio the day the thing arrived and was unpacked. Besides the initiates, votaries and friends, a number of art critics were present by invitation. Vera, as usual, was detached and tentative, with no air of proprietorship whatever. She was like one of the spectators. Yet every detail of the ceremony had been rigidly ordained. The place prepared to receive the idol was not too conspicuous. It was to be important but not paramount. It must not dominate the scene.
As one not entitled to participate in the chatter I was free to listen. There were oh’s and ah’s and guttural sounds, meant in each case to express that person’s whole unique comprehension and theory of art. The more articulate had almost done better, I thought, to limit themselves to similar exclamations. What they said was quite meaningless, to me at least. With the enthusiasm of original discovery one declared that it was wholly free of any representational quality. Another said with profound wisdom that it was neither the symbol nor the representation of anything, but purely and miraculously a thing in itself. Its unrepresentationalness and thing-in-itselfness were thereupon asserted over and over, everyone perceiving that to be the safe slant of opinion. They were wonderfully excited. No lay person may hope to understand these commotions of æsthetic feeling. The idea was to me grotesque that this strange, discolored figure, not more than fifteen inches high, with its upturned nose, its cylindrical trunk, cylindrical arms not pertaining to the trunk, cylindrical legs pertaining to neither the trunk nor the arms, terminating in block feet, should be an august event in the world of art.
Lord Porteous came in. He helped himself to tea and sat down with Vera at some distance from the murmuring group that surrounded the idol. Voices kept calling him to come. He went, holding his tea and munching his cake, and gave it one casual look.
“How very ugly,” he said, and returned to Vera’s side.
I hated him for having the assurance to say it. No one else would have dared. I hated him for his possessive ways. I hated him for all the reasons there were. A malicious spirit invaded me. I sat near them, wishing my proximity to be disagreeable. He was very polite and friendly, which gave me extra reasons. He made some reference to a recent occurrence in Wall Street. He asked me what I made of the negro carving.
“I don’t understand it,” I said.
“We are the barbarians here,” he said. “They understand it. Look at them.”
Vera was silent.
Gradually the party dispersed, everyone stopping on the way forth to inform Vera of her greatness, her service to art, her hold upon their adoration and affection. At length only Lord Porteous and I remained. The tea things were removed, twilight passed, lights were made, and still we lingered, making artificial conversation. Suddenly, with a subtle air of declining the competition, he took his leave.
Vera lay in a great black, ivory-mounted chair, her head far back, her feet on a hassock, smoking a cigarette in a long shell holder, staring into the smoke as a man does. The presence of Lord Porteous seemed to linger between us long after his corporeal entity was gone.
“He says he thinks it very ugly,” I remarked.
“Yes?” she said with that unresolved, rising inflexion which provokes a man to open the quarrel.
“No one else could have carried off that audacity,” I said.
She let that pass.
“I wonder what your archaic sculptor man would think of it?” I said. “He wasn’t here.... We haven’t seen him for a long time.”
She shrugged her shoulders and continued to gaze into the smoke of her cigarette.
“So you are bored,” I said. “A world of your own, a lord at your feet, and still you are bored.”
“Do you mean to pick a quarrel with me?” she asked.
“I wish to cancel our bargain,” I said. “The one we made that time long ago in the tea shop.”
“Very well,” she said. “It is cancelled.”
“Is that all?”
“What more could there be?” she asked, looking at me for the first time, with that naïve expression of blameless innocence which was Eve’s fig leaf.
“You have nothing to say?”
“No,” she said. “Women are not as vocal about these things as men seem to be.”
“You were vocal enough when we were making the bargain,” I said. “Have you no curiosity to know why I wish to cancel it?”
“Friendship does not satisfy a man,” she said.
“Have you made the same bargain with others? ... with Lord Porteous?” I asked.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Please don’t be stupid,” she said, lighting another cigarette and beginning to toy with the smoke. “Are you staying for dinner?”
“I’m going,” I said, “but not until I have told you.”
“What?”
“Why I ask to cancel our bargain.”
“Oh,” she said. “I thought that was quite done with.”
“Well, then, why you are bored.”
“Yes,” she said, “why I am bored. You will tell me that?”
Her profile was in silhouette against the black of the chair. She was smiling derisively.
“It is because you have imprisoned yourself in a lonely castle,” I said. “You used that figure of speech yourself when we were making the bargain. ‘It is my castle,’ you said. Therefore you know it. The name of that castle is Selfishness. The name of your jailer is Vera Afraid. What you fear is life, for its pain and scars. You hail it from afar. You call it inside the walls under penalities. It must be good. It shall not bite or scratch or kiss you. You are too precious to be touched.”
“You haven’t named the prisoner,” she said, slowly.
“She is Vera Desireful,” I said. “She is starved for life, for the bread of participation.... She lives upon the poisonous crusts of phantasy. She is probably in danger of going mad. Her dreams are terrible.”
“You cannot be saying these things to me!” she exclaimed, with a startled, incredulous face.
“Long ago I might have said them just as well,” I answered. “I have known always what an unnatural, self-saving woman you are, how treacherous you are to the impulse which brings you again and again to the verge of experience. There, in the act of embracing life, you suddenly freeze with selfish fear. Do you think life can be so cheated? If it cannot burn you it will wither you. When it is too late you may realize that to have one must give. Well, it is impossible of course. You cannot give yourself. The impulse is betrayed on the threshold. I knew it when I was fool enough to ask you to marry me.”
“You never asked me,” she said, thoughtfully, as reviewing a state of facts. “You only said you wanted to marry me.”
I construed it as a challenge. No, that is as I think of it now. What happened to me then was beyond any process of thought. It occurred outside of me, if that means anything. There was a sense of dissolving. Objects, ideas, place, planes, dimensions, my own egoistic importance, all seemed to dissolve in one significant sensation. There is a recollection that at this moment something became extremely vivid. What it was that became vivid I do not know. The word that comprehends without defining it is completion. In the whole world there was nothing else of consequence or meaning.
“I ask you now,” I said.
I heard my own words from afar. They were uttered by someone who had been sitting where I sat and for all I knew or cared might be sitting there still. I was a body moving through space, with a single anxiety, which was to meet another body in space for a purpose I could not stop to examine. I remember thinking, “I may. I may. The bargain is cancelled.”
She leaped to her feet, evading me, and laughed with her head tossed back,—an icy, brilliant laugh that made me rigid. I could not interpret it. I do not know yet what it meant. Nor do I comprehend the astonishing gesture that followed.
Slowly she moved to the African idol, picked it up, brought it to the mantel under a strong light and began to examine it carefully. She explored every plane of its surface and became apparently quite lost in contemplation of its hideous beauty. Holding it at arm’s length and still looking at it she spoke.
“Lord Porteous thinks it very ugly?”
“So he said,” I replied.
“He may be right,” she said. “Perhaps it is. So many things turn ugly when you look at them closely ... friendship even.”
Then she dropped it.
As it crashed on the hearthstone she turned, without a glance at the fragments or at me, and walked out of the room.
Three days later her engagement to Lord Porteous was announced.