Carl Van Vechten

“ I want you to possess me, to own me. I want to be your slave, your Nigger, your own Nigger!
As Lasca drew her body a little apart from Byron, she inquired. Aren't you hungry?
I don't know. I'm much too happy to know. I love you!
He kissed her throat reverently; it was almost as if it were a ceremony.
So you'd better. You'll never find any one like me for love. I'll spoil all the others for you.
You have already. Oh, Lasca, I want you and nobody but you. ”

“ Tell them to go away, Campaspe! Tell them to go away!
There, there, dear, be quiet. There's nobody here but me. Campaspe smoothed the sallow, fevered brow. The Countess, exhausted, sank back, her head once more cradled in the pillow. The tears flowed down her cheeks. I tried so hard to be happy, she sobbed. I wanted so much to be happy, only happy. I never did any one harm. But they all went away and left me alone. I cannot bear to be alone. Do you think God will forgive me for desiring just a little happiness?
I'm sure he will, dear. Campaspe continued to stroke the calid forehead. ”

“ For a stronger emotion controlled him: the consciousness that the more his father suffered, the more content he himself would be. He wanted his father to suffer; he wanted him to suffer as much as they had suffered—his mother and he—through him. So Gareth made no move, said not a word, and his father did not immediately speak again. The clock ticked on, while Gareth returned to his position by the window. The trees were bright green in the sunlight of the morning. Birds hopped from branch to branch. Life everywhere, and yet his mother had to die. ”

“ A book, Campaspe considered, should have the swiftness of melodrama, the lightness of farce, to be a real contribution to thought. Every time, had said the Rabbi Moses Maimonides, you find in our books a tale, the reality of which seems impossible, a story which is repugnant both to reason and common sense, then be sure that tale contains a profound allegory, veiling a deeply mysterious truth; and the greater the absurdity of the letter the deeper the wisdom of the spirit. How could anything serious be hidden more successfully than in a book which pretended to be light and gay? ”

“ Truth implies omniscience and no one is omniscient. Truth implies community of feeling and no two human beings feel alike about anything, except perhaps for a few shifting seconds. Truth, well if there is such a thing as truth, we may at least say that it is beyond human power to recognize it.
But it is not impossible to approach Truth, to play around her, to almost catch her, to vision her, so to speak. No, that is not impossible. Natheless, the artist, the writer, the critic who most nearly approaches Truth is he who contradicts himself the oftenest and the loudest. ”

“ Art has to do only with the creation of beauty, whether it be in words, or sounds, or colour, or outline, or rhythmical movement; and the man who writes music is no more truly an artist than the man who plays that music, the poet who composes rhythms in words no more truly an artist than the dancer who composes rhythms with the body, and the one is no more to be preferred to the other, than the painter is to be preferred to the sculptor, or the musician to the poet, in those forms of art which we have agreed to recognize as of equal value. ”

“ Too late to seek out the Sumners or their friends. Too late to ask Mary to forgive him. Whatever will become of me? he moaned.
This mood of self-reproach was not permanent. Fierce anger returned to control his spirit. How he loathed this woman who had made a fool of him! How he hated his successor in her affections! Governed by his rage, he clutched his revolver and cried aloud to the four walls of his room in which, like a dying animal, he had shut himself: I'll kill her! I'll kill him! I'll kill them both! ”

“ As we stood before them, Peter imagined tales of adventure and romance to suit the subjects, pinning his narratives to the expression of a face, the style of a sleeve, the embroidery of a doublet, or to some accompanying puppet or pet, some ill-featured hunch-back dwarf.
Thus the days passed and Peter became dreamy and wistful and the charm of his spirit, I believe, was never before so poignant, for his chameleon soul had taken on the hue of the renaissance and its accompanying spirituality, the spirituality of the artist, the happy working artist contriving works of genius. ”

“ Consideration of this naïve duplicity on the part of the Countess brought a smile to his lips. No advances, however, must come from him. She must decide in her own way, in her own time, what to do, and how to do it. One false move and the structure he had erected with so much careful appearance of inappetency might totter and crumble. She might find him too eager, too lacking in the essential innocence she seemed to crave. Without any more actual experience with women than that which his relationships with Clara Barnes and Lennie Colman had afforded him, his instinct taught him this. ”

“ They took long idyllic walks together: on the dunes. They bathed in the sea. The actual clouds drifted out of the sky and the tone of the atmosphere grew more mellow, less grey. Their evenings they passed on the settle. The morose Emma, having washed the dishes and arranged the neat punnets of berries in the ice-chest, left them alone, after fortifying herself for three hours of creative gossip with a nip of perry, a beverage she was skilful in brewing. In spite of the apparent calm, Alice's words ate deeper and deeper into Harold's consciousness. ”

“ Something like that sense of suspense seems to hang over the silent actors in pantomime, giving them a nervous exaltation, which has its subtle, immediate effect upon us, in tragic and comic situation. The silence becomes an atmosphere, and with a very curious power of giving distinction to form and motion. I do not see why people should ever break silence on the stage except to speak poetry. Here, in pantomime, you have a gracious, expressive silence, beauty of gesture, a perfectly discreet appeal to the emotions, a transposition of the world into an elegant accepted convention. ”

“ Finally comes the moment of release and here Isadora makes one of her great effects. She does not spread her arms apart with a wide gesture. She brings them forward slowly and we observe with horror that they have practically forgotten how to move at all! They are crushed, these hands, crushed and bleeding after their long serfdom; they are not hands at all but claws, broken, twisted piteous claws! The expression of frightened, almost uncomprehending, joy with which Isadora concludes the march is another stroke of her vivid imaginative genius. ”

“ The Countess lifted a palm-leaf fan and languidly waved it back and forth.
Clatter, clatter, clatter, rumble, rumble, rumble: hoofs and wheels on the pavement. . . . Tinkle, tinkle, from the mandolins. . . . You're out! . . . Shinny on your own side! . . . On the porch opposite the young people were singing:
Nita! Juanita!
Ask thy soul if we should part!
As she recognized this tune which she had not heard for so many years, the Countess smiled and began to hum it to herself. The chirping of a cricket caught her fleeting attention: good luck, she assured herself. ”

“ Charmed by the sun and the contradictory coolness of the day—nature, she had noted, could be as contradictory and perverse as life itself—, Campaspe, propped up against cushions, lay back in a comfortable chaise-longue. Frederika had followed her with a pile of books, which she placed on a table by the side of her mistress, but, for the moment, Campaspe did not disturb these. She closed her eyes and half-dreamed in the bliss of her security. She hoped that no one would call. She had too much to think about. Campaspe enjoyed being alone. ”

“ It was not alone the Sumners that he had neglected, to his own undoing, it was the social background they represented. He had missed all that and he had only himself to blame. His father had provided him with letters which would have opened all doors for him. His dear, old father who had forgiven him his misdeeds, who had even been patient during these last few awful months of futility and strife.
Byron began to comprehend vaguely how superficial his writing must have appeared. He had never suffered before, never really lived; certainly he had never had any self-understanding. ”

“ As we drove by the Opéra, I am certain that Cléo de Mérode and Leopold of Belgium descended the steps. Even the buses assumed the appearance of gorgeous chariots, bearing perfumed Watteauesque ladies on their journey to Cythera. As we drove through the Tuileries Gardens, the mood snapped for an instant as I viewed the statue of Gambetta, which, I thought at the time, and have always thought since, was amazingly like the portrait of a gentleman hailing a cab. What could more completely symbolize Paris than the statue of a gentleman perpetually hailing a cab and never getting one? ”

“ Life was amusing, after all. Work was amusing. Even Vera contributed her share to the savour of his happiness. She made so little trouble and she possessed such a delightfully unconscious vein of humour. As Paul stepped into a doorway to light a cigarette, he began to chuckle over a new idea which had occurred to him. How ironic, how ludicrously perverse, it would be to support Vera, supposing war or failure or some other great human or natural force should suddenly sweep away the Whittaker millions! ”

“ In a group of women you would pick her out to be a doctor, a lawyer, an intellectuelle. When I talked with her, impression followed impression—always I felt her intelligence, the play of her intellect upon the surfaces of her art, but always, too, I felt how narrow a chance had cast her lot upon the stage, how she easily might have been something else than a singing actress, how magnificently accidental her career was! ”

“ You're not yourself. Don't you understand that I love you? she pleaded. I came here because I love you. I couldn't help coming, but if you don't love me at all, if you won't talk to me, what can I do?
He was silent.
Dear Byron, if you ever want me, if you ever need me . . . With a pitiful little cry, she rose and swiftly left the room.
A moment later he heard the closing of the outer door. Then and then only he cried out of the misery in his soul, Mary! Mary! There was no reply. Rushing to the hallway he flung open the outer door. She had disappeared. He did not follow her downstairs. ”

“ Campaspe considered the picture: fantasy, fable, colour. She would think about it a good deal more in the future, she was certain. She realized that Laura's first question would be, What does it mean? That was, perhaps, its chief charm, that it did not mean anything; it was as meaningless as Mozart's E flat major symphony or life itself. The Rousseau was a splendid and definite jungle, with curiously exotic trees with long green fronds, plants with startling scarlet blossoms, monkeys, and a royal tiger. ”

“ Gunnar cried out in astonishment.
I believe, Campaspe asseverated as devoutly as though she were reciting another Credo, that we are born what we are, some one way, some another, that we cannot change, no matter how hard we strive to. All we can do, with whatever amount of effort, is to drag an unsuspected quality out of its hiding place in the unconscious. If it is there, in us, it can neither be virtue nor vice. It can only be ourselves. Whatever it is, if we admit that it belongs to us, we need it to complete ourselves. ”