Robert W. Chambers

“ These phrases began to irritate Annan; but there seemed to be nothing he could do about it.
In New York, theatres were closing for the summer; roofs and beaches opening; synthetic fruit-drinks appeared. June did her pathetic best for the noisy, shabby city in park and square;—put on her prettiest in green leaves and blossoms. The Park Department ruined the effort with red and yellow cannas. God knows whether New York’s dull and bovine eyes notice such things at all. Does the ox notice the wild flowers he chews, or the ass admire the thistle blossoms before munching? ”

“ Annan’s house, stripped for summer, was cool and dusky and still, haunted by a starched and female phantom that flitted through the demi-light in eternal quest for moth and dust and rust.
The only inclination of a man really in love is to keep at work in the absence of the beloved. Nothing else helps to slay the intolerable hours and days.
It was thus with this young man. Eris on location was so tragic a calamity that he could endure it only by rushing headlong into the clutch of literature.
All day, in dressing-gown and slippers, pen in hand, he scratched madly at a pad. ”

“ Barry, you’ve merely had things come to you too easily. You’ve had your own way too much. You’re persuasive; you get it. You’ve been, perhaps, a little self-complacent, a bit smug, a trifle cocksure.... All strength is in danger of such phases. But weakness never is. Weakness must assert itself or silently acquiesce in its own visible inferiority. For the bragger is the weakling, not he who does not need to assert himself. ”

“ Two men in light clothes and straw hats, crossing the Park from West to East, paused on the asphalt path to gaze upon the thousands of prostrate figures.
“Yonder’s a sob-stuff story for you, Barry,” remarked the shorter man.
“There’s more than one story there,” said the other.
“No, only one. I’ll tell you that story: these people had rather work and die in their putrid tenements than work and live in the wholesome countryside. You can’t kick these town rats out of their rat-ridden city. They like to fester and swarm. And when any species swarms, Barry, Nature presently decimates it.” ”

“ It was the restlessness of the world’s youth that stirred her—Modern Youth opening millions of clear young eyes to gaze upon the wonders of a new Heaven and a new earth, and mad to explore it all from zenith to depths—sky, sea, land, and the waters under the earth. Youth, suddenly crazed by an overwhelming desire for Truth, after æons and æons of lies. ”

“ That is its only use in art.
“And it never should be the theme, nor bask in the spotlight, nor centre the composition. All its arrows point inward to that one divine and ultimate spot—the touch of highest value in Rembrandt’s canvasses—the supreme pinpoint of clarity and glory—Beauty—symmetrical, flawless, eternal.”
As they left the club together: “Almost thou persuadest me,” said Annan lightly.
Parting, they shook hands: “No, not I,” said Coltfoot. “Some sorrow will do that.... Or some woman.”
Annan turned down Fifth Avenue much amused. ”

“ You and Mike and Rosalind are more amusing than Sally Snitface or Percy Pinhead. And you’re far more moral.”
“I wonder if I am moral,” mused Rosalind, shaking the cracked ice in her glass.
“God, your mother and your native laziness incline you that way,” said Barry, gravely. “You’re better than good; you’re apathetic. Inertia will see you through.”
“It takes energy to be a devil,” added Coltfoot. “Your perfect angel snoozes on a cloud. She’s too lazy to walk. That’s why she grew wings and why you take taxi-cabs, Rosalind.” ”

“ Without the charm, symmetry, vivacity of the faces of her women, New York would be, indeed, the ugliest, dingiest, and stupidest metropolis in the world.
“Flower-like her pretty women bloom all over the arid, treeless agglomeration of mortar and metal, serene amid the asinine clamour; smiling, piquant, nourished by suffocating heat, flourishing in arctic cold, hardy, healthy, wonderful in the vast abiding place of the Great American Ass,—New York.
“Here is his stronghold and he runs it to suit himself. Any woman manages her own flat far better. ”

“ It was May in the world; and, in the heart of Eris, April. And a strange, ardent, restlessness in the heart of all youth [46] the whole world over—the renaissance, perhaps, of a primitive, lawless irresponsibility curbed into discipline æons ago. And, after ages, let loose again since the Twilight of the World fell over Armageddon.
Sooner or later she felt she must free mind, heart, body of whatever hampered, and go—go on about her business in life—whatever it might be—seek it throughout the world—ask the way—ask all things unknown to her—learn all things, understand, choose, achieve. ”

“ 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! ”

“ Suddenly a glimpse of Graydon in the living-room beyond brought the girl to her shocked senses.
There seemed to be another man there, too—a fat, bald, bland little man who smiled and bowed to her, flourished a straw hat, clapped it on his shiny head, and immediately waddled out of the apartment.
For one dreadful moment a premonition of disaster paralysed the girl, blanched her face.
Then she walked straight into the living-room where her husband slouched against the mantel, his hands in his pockets, an unlighted cigarette sagging over his chin. ”

“ A mile south, buried among elms and maples, lay White Hills Village, the spires of its three churches piercing the foliage.
All around, east, west, south, rose low hills, patched with [43] woods, a barn or two in silhouette on some grassy ridge. Ploughed fields, pastures, squares of vivid winter wheat checkered the panorama, the tender green of hard-wood groves alternating with the dark beauty of hemlock and white pine.
Overhead a blue sky, quite cloudless; over all, May sunshine; the young world melodious with the songs of birds. And Eris, twenty, with the heart and experience of sixteen. ”

“ For all his fluency he found no word to link the liaison—nothing to smooth the slight contact of caress.
She drew his attention to the rose beside his service plate: he leaned toward her; she picked up the bud and drew it through his lapel without embarrassment.
In the girl’s slight smile suddenly Annan found his tongue. And now, as always, his easy flow of speech began to stimulate her to an increasing facility of response. ”

“ Youth’s physical instinct is to gather at the water-hole of this vast veldt we call the world, and wallow in the inviting mire of a thousand hoofs, and feel and hear and see the perpetual milling of the human herds that gather there.
Only in quality did Eris differ from her brothers. It was her mind—and the untasted pleasures of the mind—that drove her to the common fount. ”

“ There was a letter from his aunt on his desk. He tore it open; glanced through it without the usual grin; laid it aside.
A slight, rather vacant smile remained on his lips: he kept moving the lapel of his coat and inhaling the odour of a white clove-pink—one of a cluster that had stood in a little rose-bowl between Eris and himself at breakfast.
A pencil, dislodged, rolled over his pad and dropped onto the floor. He let it lie.
Neither work nor sleep attracted him. ”

“ Mrs. Sniffen arrived presently. She seemed as starched, as rigid, as angular and prim as ever. But there was no disdainful tilt to her sharp nose. For the Mrs. Sniffen who now approached Eris was not the chilling automaton who had just admitted Annan’s dinner guests with priggish disapproval.
Eris, shy of her, looked up at her in some apprehension.
“Well,” exclaimed Mrs. Sniffen with a wintry smile, “you did eat it all, didn’t you? That’s the way to grow ’ealthy and wealthy, not to say wise, isn’t it, now? ’Ome vittles ’elps all ’urts, big or little, to my way of thinking.” ”

“ Eris said, thoughtfully: “Only where are many people gathered is there the foundation for a real education.... Good and evil are.... Only truth matters. The important thing is to know.”
“Who told you that?” demanded Mrs. Sniffen, amazed to hear such authoritative language.
“Nobody. But I’m quite sure it’s so. Books alone do not educate. They are like roughage for cattle. There is no nourishment in them but they help to digest Truth. I wish to see and hear for myself, and learn to understand in my own way.... What my eyes and ears tell me is what I ought to think about and try to understand. ”

“ But why New York is not nauseated by its floral display remains a mystery.
The only dose the aborigine notices is an emetic. But even red and yellow cannas in combination left New York’s bowels unaffected.
Still, ailanthus and catalpa in Governor’s Place spread once more their cool, green pools of shade over parched sidewalks; ampelopsis on Annan’s house and an ancient wistaria [221] twisted over the iron balcony did their missionary part to touch the encysted hearts of those who ‘have eyes but see not.’ A white butterfly or two fluttered through Governor’s Place. ”

“ It is a picturesque habit, and one of the most imbecile, because sound work is done only with a normal mind.
He made himself some coffee. A rush of genius to the head followed stimulation. He had a grand time, revelling with pen and pad and littering the floor with inked sheets unnumbered and still wet. His was a messy genius. His plot-logic held by the grace of God and a hair-line. Even the Leaning Tower of Pisa can be plumbed; and the lead dangled inside Achilles’ tendon when one held the string to the medulla of Annan’s stories. ”

“ Flares burning redly on push-carts threw smoky glares here and there as far as Greenwich Avenue, where the light-smeared darkness was turbulent with human herd.
Into this dissonance and clamour, clothed in silk, came Eris, daughter of Discord. As in a walking dream she descended from her taxi; fumbled in her silken reticule to find the fare; paid, scarcely knowing what she was paying.
As she turned and ascended the low steps of her house, still searching about in the reticule for her latch-key, she became aware that a man was standing in the vestibule. ”

“ And in the rest of your story try to help people to endure those nine-tenths by forgetting them while they read about the other tenth.”
“I’m not going to mutilate truth,” retorted Annan.
“You do mutilate it. The school that influences you mutilates truth as was mutilated the body of Osiris! The school that stains you with its shadow is a school of mutilators. I’m not squeamish, Barry. I’m for plain writing. The truths leered at or slurred over or ignored by convention can be decently presented in proportion to their importance in any story. ”

“ Over the telephone he told Hattie to place these in her bed-room before she returned.
So now he picked up the evening paper in the little living-room and composed himself to wait.
The culinary clatter of Hattie in the kitchen came to him fitfully; shrill voices from ragged children at play in the sunset-flooded street; the grinding roar of motor trucks herded like leviathans toward their west-side corrals; the eternal jar and quiver of the vast, iron city. Otherwise, silence; a heated stillness in the isolated abode of Eris, “Daughter of Discord” ”

“ Shabby red brick buildings with rusty fire-escapes, lofts, stables, a vista of swarming tenements through which runs a sagging pavement set with pools of water—and, on the south side, half a dozen rickety three-story-and-basement houses—this is Jane Street.
The little children of the poor shrilled and milled about him as he threaded his way among push-cart men and trucks and mounted the low stoop of the house where Eris lived. ”

“ Every capitalist involved was discussed, and pulled to quivering pieces; every officer and director in the Betsy Blythe Company, Inc. was dissected under the merciless scrutiny of four young people who already had learned in New York to believe only what happened, and to turn deaf ears to mere words.
“Listen, Betsy,” said Rosalind Shore, “Mom says you’re all right with Cairo Cotton and Levant Tobacco behind you.”
“The main thing,” remarked Coltfoot, “is to begin in a businesslike way. Don’t start off staggering under a load of overheads, Betsy. Don’t let them take expensive offices. ”

“ New York is the wastrel among states. Her sons pollute [118] streams; her country roads are vistas of bill-boards; even the ‘eternal’ hills that line the Hudson crumble daily into cement. Here the Great American Ass found a Paradise and created a Dump. He ravages, stamps out, obliterates the lovely face of nature,—digs, burns, crushes, tramples. Hundreds of miles of ghastly, charred forests mark the trail of the Great American Ass among his mountains. ”

“ 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——”
[146] “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 girlhood of Bettina—or Betsy—Blythe, had been very different. She was one of a swiftly increasing number of well-born girls whom society had welcomed as débutantes, and who, after a first season, and great amateur success in the Junior League, had calmly informed her family that she had made a contract with some celluloid corporation to appear in moving pictures.
New York society was becoming accustomed to this sort of behaviour. It had to be. From the time that the nation’s war-bugles sounded assembly at Armageddon, the younger generation had taken the bit between its firm teeth. ”

“ For health and comfort alone, tree-shaded streets are a necessity; but in New York there is a strange hostility to trees. The few that survive mutilation by vandals,—animal and human,—are species that ought not to be planted in such a city.
A few miserable elms, distorted poplars, crippled maples, accentuate barren vistas. Lamp posts and fire boxes fill up the iron void, stark as the blasted woods of no-man’s land.
[81] Annan found Coltfoot, the Sunday editor, in his undershirt, drops of sweat spangling the copy he was pencilling. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I don’t have to tell you that, either.”
“No interior ever made a picture,” agreed Annan, “and no exterior ever saved one. But I’d go as far as I liked on the scenery that you don’t have to pay God for.”
Miss Blythe laughed: “Are you going to do a story for me, Barry?” she asked. “You promised—when you were in love with me.”
“I am yet. But your people don’t like sob-stuff any better than does Rosalind’s audience.”
“You don’t have to squirt tears into every story you write,” retorted Betsy. “Did you ever see me cry? There are people, Barry, who manage to get on without snivelling every minute.” ”

“ Except in recesses of parks, New York is never fragrant. Once it was—when the odour of lindens filled the Broad-Way from the Fort to St. Paul’s. Wild birds sang in every street. Washington was President. Green leaves and scent and song are gone where “The Almond Tree shall flourish,” deep planted in the heart of man.
As far as perfume is concerned, neither the eastward avenues nor cross-streets suggested Araby to Annan. He carried, as usual, a large pasteboard box full of flowers.
Jane Street runs west out of Greenwich Avenue. ”

“ The story of Eris was Barry Annan at his easiest and most persuasive. There was the characteristic and ungodly skill in it, the subtle partnership with a mindless public that seduces to mental speculation; the reassuring caress as reward for intellectual penetration; that inborn cleverness that makes the reader see, applaud, or [79] pity him or herself in the sympathetic rôle of a plaything of Chance and Fate.
And always Barry Annan left the victim of his tact and technique agreeably trapped, suffering gratefully, excited by self-approval to the verge of sentimental tears. ”

“ At that Betsy’s clear laughter rang out in the room. Eris blushed furiously; then, suddenly and swiftly en rapport, laughed too.
“He’s so nice and so spoiled,” said Betsy. “That bland grin of his!—and he is clever—oh, very. He knows how to make your heart jump when he writes. In private character he’s kind but mischievous. He’ll experiment with a girl if she’ll let him. It interests him to try cause and effect on us. Don’t you let him. He has that terrible talent for swift intimacy. ”

“ Sob-stuff is wasted on her. Health never snivels. Do you get that, Barry? Health! That’s the key. And by the Eternal, it is the usual, not the unusual that is wholesome. The great majority are healthy. That’s realism. And when health is your keynote you have beauty, too. And that is Realism, my clever friend!”
“Am I real because I am beautiful, Mike?” drawled Rosalind, “or beautiful because I am real?”
So these three parted with the light jest of Rosalind floating between them in the sunshine.
But Annan went on, a trifle out of countenance, to keep a rendezvous with Eris at the Ritz. ”

“ Watching her, he said: “It’s hard for me to realise that you’ve ever had troubles.”
“It’s hard for me, too,” she brushed her lips against the delicate, crisp petals. “Troubles,” she said, “become unreal when one’s mind remains interested.... I can’t even remember how it feels to be unhappy.... A busy mind forgets unessentials like trouble.”
He said: “You’re rather amazing at times, do you know it?”
“Why?”
He smiled: “Also,” he said, “there’s an incongruity about this honeymoon of ours, Eris.” ”

“ She ought to give every moment to her art,” explained the girl naïvely.
“Is—that—so? Well, you can chase that idea outa your head, my girl, because you ain’t never going to be no actress. And that’s that!”
“Some day,” said Eris, with a flushed smile, “I shall follow my own judgment and give myself to art.... And that’s that!”
As they stood there, father and daughter, confronting each other in the pale April sunshine, the great herd-bull bellowed from the cattle-barn, shaking the still air with his thunderous reverberations. ”

“ A woman can tell, no matter what a pig of a man might think. I like you, Eris. I want you to get on. I’d love to have you make good some day.” She added naïvely: “—If only to put Barry Annan’s nose out of joint.”
Eris had covered her wet lashes with her fore-arm. Now she removed it.
“Mr. Annan has been wonderful,” she said in a tear-congested voice.
“Three cheers!” said Betsy, laughing. “You’re a loyal youngster, aren’t you? Everybody likes Barry Annan. Several love him. But you mustn’t,” she added with a gravity that deceived Eris. ”

“ Even a Guernsey ought to have one. But the nose of Eris was snow white. To what stock did this child throw back?
When Eris was seven she was sent to the village school, leading her eldest stepbrother thither by the hand. Both were scared and tearful. Nobody went with little Eris to mitigate the ordeal; and she was a most sensitive child.
Hers had been a deathless curiosity since she was old enough to ask her first question. An unquenchable desire for information seemed to possess her. Her eternal, “Will you tell me why?” became a nuisance. ”

“ Pretty, gloomy, lovely, dreary—oasis or desert, it doesn’t matter; I’m always in the market for spots.”
“Are you looking for a farm?” inquired Eris.
“Farm? Well, that’s in my line, too,—farms, mills, nice old stone bridges,—all that stuff is in my line,—in fact, everything is in my line,—and nothing on my line——” He lifted a dripping bait, lowered it again, winked at Eris.
“I suppose,” he said, “there isn’t a single thing in all the world that isn’t in my line. Why, even you are!” ”

“ And now Eris knew that their hour for understanding had arrived. She had much to say to him. Her clasped hands tightened nervously in her lap but the level eyes were steady.
She said, very slowly: “I have known unhappiness, Mr. Annan. And ugliness. And hardship. But I’d be ashamed to let my mind dwell upon these things.... Stories where life begins without hope and continues hopelessly, seem needless and more or less distorted. And rather cowardly.... One’s mind dwells most constantly on what one likes.... I do not like deformity. ”

“ Scores of communications came from various birds of prey who infest the fringes of the profession—the “don’t-do-anything-till-you-hear-from-me” boys; the noisy, persistent Gentile who lies for a living and whose only asset is the people he traps; the Jew, penniless and discredited, determined to make a commission out of anybody and undeterred by the dirt of the transaction.
All of these communications Eris laid before Frank Donnell. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ Smull in addition to the frozen mint offered to Eris—and smilingly declined.
After the grave one had retired with the empty coffee cups and had closed the folding glass doors, Eris looked enquiringly at Mr. Smull, awaiting the broaching of what most closely concerned her.
But Smull, half draining his frosted glass, assumed a familiarity almost boisterous.
“See here, Eris, you’re not going to get on unless you’re a good fellow. You’re not going to get anywhere if you don’t learn to keep up your end.” ”

“ He felt her breath lightly on his cheek:
“It’s all Frank Donnell: I wouldn’t know what to do. He tells me and shows me. I try to comprehend. I do exactly what he tells me.”
“If you weren’t a born actress, even Frank Donnell couldn’t do anything with you. It’s you, Eris. You’re intelligent; you’re lovely to look at. I can’t see why your future isn’t in your own hands.”
“I’m simply crazy to talk to you about it. Could I?” she whispered excitedly.
“Of course,” he said, much flattered.
“I’ve wanted to for so long. There are so many things, Mr. Annan—and you could tell me why.” ”

“ I’m off that schmeer,” she added.
Annan wanted to yawn but stifled the indiscretion.
“You know,” she drawled, “I’m sorry for Eris.”
“Why?”
“Well, she has picked a bum in Ratford Creevy, and in that Dutch souse, Emil Shunk. It isn’t agreeable to work with such people.... And I fancy Smull is beginning to bother her, too.”
A slight colour stained Annan’s temples: “Why do you fancy that?”
“Oh, I don’t know. One notices and hears. He’s always on her heels, always schmoozing around. Of course there’s gossip, there always is. But that’s the kind of man Smull is.... And there you are.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ He halted at the kitchen door, buttoning his snowy jacket, gaping stolidly at Fanny’s child.
For he knew her instantly—Eris, daughter of Discord.
“Hello, Dad,” she said uncertainly.
“Hello.... Waal, waal, I’ll be jiggered! Waal, dang it all!... So you took a notion to come back, did you?”
“If you’ll let me stay for a little while——”
“Why, Eris, how you talk!” exclaimed Mazie. “This is your home; ain’t it, Pa?”
Elmer buttoned the last button of his milking jacket:
“She can stay if she’s a mind to. She allus does as she’s a mind to,” he replied grimly. ”