THEY didn’t dine together at Annan’s house in Governor’s Place; or anywhere else.
Eris tried desperately to get him on the telephone. A few minutes before train time she telegraphed:
“Am leaving unexpectedly at three o’clock this afternoon for the Pacific Coast. Heart-broken on account of our engagement. Shall write from train.
“Eris.”
When Annan returned about six to order dinner and flowers, and to dress for the rôle of host, he found her telegram.
Whatever is snatched away from man or beast instantly becomes disproportionately desirable.
It was so with Annan. Suddenly he realised how much he wanted Eris. Really he had not thought much about this dinner, except immediately after their meeting at the Looking Glass.
He had borne it in mind, impatiently the first day, pleasurably the second, with complacent equanimity thereafter. But he had remembered it.
For the moments of surprise and emotion so charmingly experienced in the projection room had little else except surprise for a foundation. Curiosity alone perpetuated them.
To a young man agreeably immersed in his own affairs such episodes became incidents very quickly. Only an unexpected obstacle evokes afresh circumstances and emotions which have become vague.
Her telegram did this. Disappointment, retrospection, regret, annoyance, sentimental impatience,—these in sequence possessed the young man as he sat holding her telegram. The only mitigation seemed to be in her statement concerning her broken heart. That flattered and helped.
He was in no mood to dine out, but he didn’t want to dine at home alone. The conflict continued, full of sentimental indecision.
It ended by his ringing for Mrs. Sniffen, ordering a cold bite on a tray, stripping to undershirt, chamber-robe, and slippers, and plunging into his novel, now well under way.
About eleven next morning, in similar attire, and with an electric fan whizzing in the room, he interrupted work long enough to open the envelope which Mrs. Sniffen brought him and which bore a special delivery stamp:
“Dear Mr. Annan:
“I tried to get you on the telephone up to the last moment. The disappointment seemed too much for me after I had waited so long. I could have wept. I didn’t; I don’t weep easily. But the vision of the evening we might have had haunts me every moment.
“This is what happened. The directors who finance the Betsy Blythe Films suddenly decided to send us to the Coast for the new pictures. The reasons, I believe, are economical.
“Can you imagine the company’s consternation? We had no time to prepare ourselves. If Mr. Smull and Betsy hadn’t stopped and taken me in Mr. Smull’s car I couldn’t have caught the train.
“My only consolation is that the play seems to be a good one and they have given me a part—a darling part if I do it decently. I was to have had only a maid’s part but Miss Cassell refused to go to the Coast and there wasn’t time to recast the part.
“Even then I don’t think they’d have given it to me if Mr. Smull hadn’t said that he’d like me to have it. I pray humbly that I may be equal to it. Never has anything so excited me as this chance.
“But if only I could have known it, and spent every second talking it over with you! I don’t mean that Mr. Donnell is not my hope and salvation; but you are you, Mr. Annan, and there is no other man’s mind that stimulates and enthralls mine as yours does.
“Please don’t forget me. Please write to me. I know it is a very great deal to ask of such a man. But you are kind, and you are famous; and I am ignorant and a nobody. Whatever you say helps. Just your voice, even your smile, acts on me like intellectual tonics—that lazy, wise, kindly, perplexing smile, so mischievously experienced, that encourages yet warns! I wanted it so desperately. I needed it—and you—just when I felt that my career was beginning. Oh, Mr. Annan, please understand and please, please don’t forget me.
“Eris.”
In a postscript she gave her address in Los Angeles.
Much flattered and genuinely touched, he wrote her immediately.
The glamour lasted for the next few weeks. Complacency is a great stimulation to memory. A bland satisfaction in the ardent mental attitude of Eris toward himself incited him to real effort in his letters. He became expansive—a trifle sentimental when he thought of the girl’s beauty—but only airily so—and he rather settled down to a Chesterfieldian attitude toward his unusual and odd little protégée.
Wisdom in wads he administered with a surprising solemnity foreign to his accustomed attitude toward himself.
However, his flippancy was an attitude as far as it concerned his belief in himself. Because this young man really took himself very devoutly.
He prescribed a course of reading for Eris. He formulated rules of conduct, exposed pitfalls, impressed maxims in epigrams, discoursed on creative and interpretive art. It was perversely clever. He used some of the material in his novel.
This was all very well. The girl’s letters were charming and touching; the correspondence was excellent practice for him, and part of it could be salvaged for practical ends.
But there were in use at that time, among the semi-educated, two cant-words which the public, now, was working to rags;—psychology and complex.
And it was these words that suggested to Annan that his letters to Eris might, more profitably to himself, become experiments in research and vivisection.
Toward that angle,—and with all the delicacy and technical skill possessed by him,—he started a cautious exploration of her character as a “type,” including that untouched and undiscovered side which comprehended the impulses, material motives, emotional passions, popularly attributed to the human heart in contradistinction to phenomena purely intellectual.
Several letters came from her without any notice being taken of his investigations. Apparently she either possessed no such side to her character or else she did not understand him. Anyway, there was no response, and therefore no revelation of herself to satisfy his professional curiosity.
One thing seemed to become clearer and clearer; he had not appealed to this girl except intellectually. Of lesser sentiment in her there was not a hint or a trace in all her correspondence—only ardent gratitude for material kindness and passionate response to a generous mind that had offered itself to a starved one.
He had concluded that his subtle and mischievous epistolary philandering was not destined to reveal any dormant inclinations to response in Eris—much less any natural aptitude or acquired skill.
And he was debating in his leisure moments whether or not such total unconsciousness was normal or otherwise, when out of a serene sky came a letter from her in reply to his last and cleverest experiment in reactions:
“Dear Mr. Annan:
“Until rather lately it never occurred to me to analyse my feeling of friendship for you.
“I don’t know exactly how to. I have tried. It confuses me.
“I like everything you say. I didn’t realise I was silent concerning any phase of our friendship. But I had not thought of your having any liking for me outside of your natural kindness to me. Or that I had any personal charm for you; or that you might like to be with me even if we do not say a word to each other.
“That idea of companionship had not entered my head. But now that you have spoken of it—or your letters, lately, have seemed to suggest it—I am venturing to reply that, just being with you is a pleasure to me ... just to walk with you and remain mentally idle, I mean. I realised it only when you spoke of it.
“Friendship seems to be very complex. You must remember that this is my first intelligent friendship. It quite overshadows all other associations. So I really do not know just where my feeling for you could fail to include all the best that is in me.
“I’d like to talk to you about it. If only you were here! Do you know that if it were not for your letters I’d be unhappy here, in spite of my beloved profession?
“Is this what you would like to have me say to you?
“You drew a picture of yourself as a brain on two legs; and of me in academic cap and gown, with a silly expression on my face, clasping both hands in ecstasy before you. Out of your brain comes a balloon with something written in Latin—‘Animus est in patinis.’
“I asked Mr. Donnell. He said it meant, ‘My mind is among the sauce-pans.’ In other words, you mean that your mind sometimes harbours material thoughts, while mine is the stupid, empty mind of a horrid, unhuman, intellectual sponge!
“That is very impudent of you. Good heavens, if I am like that, it will ruin me for my profession!
“Experience is what I lack. I sit and actually beat my head with both hands when, at moments, I catch a glimmer of all that I ought to be and ought to have experienced, and ought to know.
“Education is everything! One’s career depends on it. Yet, is experience necessary to education? It can not always be. The prospect would seem terrifying. And of course any such theory becomes ridiculous in the last analysis.
“We were discussing that question the other evening—Mr. Donnell, Betsy, Mr. Smull—he arrived unexpectedly last Monday—and I was listening, not taking part in the discussion—when Mr. Smull said that nobody was fit to play a person in love unless he or she had actually been in love.
“You know that startled me. After a while it scared me, too.
“I asked Mr. Donnell, privately, if that were true, and he laughed and said that several perfectly respectable women, guiltless of murder, had successfully played Lady Macbeth.
“But I’m still wondering. Of course it isn’t necessary to murder somebody in order to play the part of an assassin.
“But murder is an overt act. A murderous state of mind need not have any concrete consequence.
“Love, also, must be a state of mind.
“So do you think that one must have been actually in love to interpret convincingly in a play whatever results of love are to be presented?
“I asked Betsy. She said yes. So I suppose she has been in love, because she does her part convincingly.
“But what about me if ever I am cast for such a part? Yet, it seems to me that I ought to have enough instinct and intelligence to know how to be convincing.
“You see Mr. Smull wants me to play second to Betsy in the next production; and the part is a girl in love who has a most unhappy time until the very end of the play.
“One can study, read up, and prepare; but one can not enter into that state of mind at will.
“So, if they give me the part I have concluded to approximate by thinking of my friendship for you, which is the most important event in my life.
“It ought to represent the state of mind in question. It’s got to. Do you think I could play that part convincingly? Why not? Because my idea of a person in love is that there is only one object of supreme affection. And I don’t care for anybody as much as I do for you. Why can’t I build on that?——”
Charmed, humiliated, thrilled by her candour, the humour of her appeal went straight home to Annan.
For here was this girl innocently proposing to analyse and use her friendship for him to aid her in her profession;—the very thing that he had been doing so cynically.
Every word she wrote was helping him, professionally. Every line he had written in reply was evidently a source of professional inspiration to her.
It was not flattering to him, but it was funny. And, somehow, it knocked sentiment out of his letters: knocked out the letters, too, toward the end of the year.
The anesthetic of old Doctor Time is certain and irresistible. Sooner or later constancy fades, memory evaporates, humanity succumbs. Only the dog resists the anesthetic of old Doctor Time.
By February Annan had been in arrears for two months; and the effort to re-open the correspondence bored him.
Pigeon-holed, the memory of her would keep sufficiently fresh until such time—if ever—she was resurrected in the flesh and came again into the trail he travelled through life.
He heard of her occasionally when he encountered Rosalind, who corresponded with Betsy.
Eris was being favourably discussed on the Coast.
In March a Betsy Blythe film was shown at The Looking Glass,—following that first film, parts of which he had seen the previous autumn in the projection room.
Once or twice he attempted to see the new picture—rather as a sort of obligation—but the place was crowded. Somehow time passed very swiftly for Annan; and when again he thought about it the picture was gone; and a new Betsy Blythe picture had replaced it,—playing to a crowded house as before;—and Annan went once, failed to get in, and let it slip his memory.
Not that his conscience did not meddle with his complacency at times. It did.
Her last three letters still remained unanswered.
But his novel was the vital, supreme thing which crowded out all else—even the several pretty and receptive girls whose stellar orbits had intersected his during the winter and early spring.
The joy of literary achievement was his chiefest pleasure; its perils his excitement, its fatigue the principal sleep-inducer that sent him at last to a tardy pillow.
Coltfoot read a typed copy.
“It’ll be the making of you, I suppose,” he said, “but it’s all wrong, Barry. Popular and punk!”
“Why the devil do you say that?”
“It is wrong.”
They were dining at Annan’s à deux, and had strolled into the living-room with their cigars.
“You sit down, Mike, and tell me why my book is popular and punk!” said Annan wrathfully.
Coltfoot dropped onto the piano stool, sounded a few dissonances evolved by a master-modernist; sneered.
“Barry,” he said, “if art isn’t wholesome it’s only near-art. What is good is also healthy. If art is good it is sane, always; and always beautiful.”
“I’ve heard that song you sing. It’s an ancient rag, Mike.”
“It’s real music, Barry—not this!—” he struck a series of dissonant, ugly, half-crazed chords from the most modern creation of the most modern of modernists. “That’s diseased,” he said. “There is no virtue, no beauty, no art in disease.”
“Of course,” remarked Annan, “I might mention ambergris, paté-de-fois-gras, the virtues of ergot, the play of colour, and the flower-like perfume of a dying grayling, and the——”
“If you’re going to be flippant——”
“No. Go on, Mike.”
“Barry, do you understand the origin of this modern ‘revolt’—this sinister cult of dullness, perversity, ugliness? It was born in Bolshevism. Which is degeneracy. It is the worship of ugliness. It is known to scientists as Satanism.
“Once the prisons and asylums were the ultimate destinations of the degenerate. Because degenerates, then, had no safe outlet in the fine arts. Their manifestations were matters for police control.
“Now, they have their outlets in literature, drama, music, sculpture, painting. And their vicious or crazy creations profoundly impress The Great American Ass. Why? Because he’s ignorant, and art awes him. But he’s also, physically, a healthy beast, and he doesn’t understand the degeneracy that masquerades as art.
“What is ugly, morbid, dull, rotten, cynical, pessimistic, is degenerate. To dwell upon disease in creative work is degeneracy. To seek out, analyse, celebrate, perpetuate ugliness, deformity, decay, is degeneracy.
“Yet, that is modernism. That is the trend. That is what is being done. That is what the new generation of creative genius offers,—and what it calls realism,—a dreary multiplicity of photographic items; a sordid recapitulation of daily and meaningless details; inspiration from models of distorted minds and bodies; ugliness lovingly delved for and dragged out into clean sunshine; triumphant exposure of the mentally, morally, and physically crippled.
“But there is the worse phenomenon—the degenerate writer, painter, sculptor, who sees ugliness in beauty, decay in health, atrophy in the normal,—and who caricatures the healthy and beautiful living model to evolve the ugly and obscene spectres that haunt his brain.
“Such are the so-called modernists. Their outer limit inside the bounds of sanity are Manet and Degas.
“Beyond that is the bedlam of Cezanne and Gauguin——”
“Say, old chap——”
“I am saying it. It’s the same old crisis—Rome or the Barbarians; Europe or Attila; the Prussians or Civilization.
“I tell you these half-crazed brains are beating at the gates of the world’s sanity to overthrow Reason from her very seat!
“Any alienist can tell you what the cult of ugliness means—what the morbid desire to mutilate means. What does it matter whether the living human body be the victim, or the attack be made upon figments of the imagination—whether upon the established order of harmony in music, or upon the pure standard of Greek sculpture, or upon the immortal beauty and symmetry in the pictures of the Great Masters!
“The point is this: the desire to mutilate is there; the murderous mania has discovered a safe outlet with pen, brush, chisel for weapons instead of pistol and butcher knife.
“The modernist is no longer a Ripper, except by intention. His degenerate fury wreaks itself on Art.
“Go to a Modernist Exhibition. Once the walls of an asylum would have been decorated with these drawings. Read modernist literature. Scrawled in prison bath-rooms would have been these lines in saner days. Listen to the music of your modernist. Only Bedlam could have produced and enjoyed it, once.
“But to-day all crack-brains are being drawn together under the Bolshevistic impulse to swarm, mutilate what is beautiful, destroy what lies within the eternal laws, annihilate all order, all that has withstood the test of civilisation.
“The Great American Ass hears the pandemonium and looks over the walls at the crazed herd of his demented fellows milling around the citadel.
“He looks at them and wags his ears, interested, perplexed. They’ll tear him to pieces if they get in——”
“Good God!” burst out Annan, “—what has this to do with my novel——”
“It’s tainted. It’s infected with the cult of ugliness. So were your short stories in the Planet that gave you a name! You’re stained with modernism.”
“Damn it, I’m personally decent——”
“Some of the lunatics are, too. But the hullabaloo they’re making is bound to affect—and infect—impressionable minds. All healthy and creative minds are impressionable. Yours is. This satanic cult of ugliness has influenced your mind to more sombre, more incredulous, less wholesome creations.
“All genius is imitative in some degree. You don’t escape, Barry. The body-vermin of literature—the so-called modern critics—all are applauding you and tempting you to perpetuate more of that sinister ugliness which deformed your first work.
“Don’t do it. Remember the real standards. They never change; only fashion changes. Stick to the clean master-jobs of the real giants in your profession. Those are the standards. Life is splendid. Man is fine. The beauty of both are best worth recording in art. Leave degeneracy to medicine. Leave modernism to the asylum. Make the cleavage definite between art and science. Find your themes in goodness, in beauty, in the nobility of the human mind——”
“Good heavens, Mike, are you one of those moral fanatics who evoke blue-laws even for literature?”
Coltfoot slowly shook his head: “Barry, you won’t win out until you change your attitude toward the God who made you without a blemish. I’m telling you. The lunatic can’t last. The dirty, greedy, commercial Jew or Christian art dealer or publisher who exploits Satanism, Bolshevism, insanity, for the sake of dirty dollars,—he has his thirty pieces of silver. And that’s all.... I took mine—and published your stories. I’m through. I’m a he-Magdalen. I’m off that stuff.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ve chucked the Planet,” said Coltfoot carelessly.