Murder in Any Degree Part 1

Murder in Any Degree.

by Owen Johnson.

I

One Sunday in March they had been marooned at the club, Steingall the painter and Quinny the ill.u.s.trator, and, having lunched late, had bored themselves separately to their limits over the periodicals until, preferring to bore each other, they had gravitated together in easy arm-chairs before the big Renaissance fireplace.

Steingall, sunk in his collar, from behind the black-rimmed spectacles, which, with their trailing ribbon of black, gave a touch of Continental elegance to his cropped beard and colonel's mustaches, watched without enthusiasm the three mammoth logs, where occasional tiny flames gave forth an illusion of heat.

Quinny, as gaunt as a militant friar of the Middle Ages, aware of Steingall's protective reverie, spoke in desultory periods, addressing himself questions and supplying the answers, reserving his epigrams for a larger audience.

At three o'clock De Gollyer entered from a heavy social performance, raising his eyebrows in salute as others raise their hats, and slightly dragging one leg behind. He was an American critic who was busily engaged in discovering the talents of unrecognized geniuses of the European provinces. When reproached with his migratory enthusiasm, he would reply, with that quick, stiffening military click with which he always delivered his _bons mots_:

"My boy, I never criticize American art. I can't afford to. I have too many charming friends."

At four o'clock, which is the hour for the entree of those who escape from their homes to fling themselves on the sanctuary of the club, Rankin, the architect, arrived with Stibo, the fashionable painter of fashionable women, who brought with him the atmosphere of pleasant soap and an exclusive, smiling languor. A moment later a voice was heard from the anteroom, saying:

"If any one telephones, I'm not in the club--any one at all. Do you hear?"

Then Towsey, the decorator, appeared at the letterboxes in spats, militant checks, high collar and a choker tie, which, yearning toward his ears, gave him the appearance of one who had floundered up out of his clothes for the third and last time. He came forward, frowned at the group, scowled at the negative distractions of the reading-room, and finally dragged over his chair just as Quinny was saying:

"Queer thing--ever notice it?--two artists sit down together, each begins talking of what he's doing--to avoid complimenting the other, naturally. As soon as the third arrives they begin carving up another; only thing they can agree on, see? Soon as you get four or more of the species together, conversation always comes around to marriage. Ever notice that, eh?"

"My dear fellow," said De Gollyer, from the intolerant point of view of a bachelor, "that is because marriage is your one common affliction.

Artists, musicians, all the lower order of the intellect, marry. They must. They can't help it. It's the one thing you can't resist. You begin it when you're poor to save the expense of a servant, and you keep it up when you succeed to have some one over you to make you work. You belong psychologically to the intellectually dependent cla.s.ses, the clinging-vine family, the masculine parasites; and as you can't help being married, you are always d.a.m.ning it, holding it responsible for all your failures."

At this characteristic speech, the five artists shifted slightly, and looked at De Gollyer over their mustaches with a lingering appet.i.te, much as a group of terriers respect the family cat.

"My dear chaps, speaking as a critic," continued De Gollyer, pleasantly aware of the antagonism he had exploded, "you remain children afraid of the dark--afraid of being alone. Solitude frightens you. You lack the quality of self-sufficiency that is the characteristic of the higher critical faculties. You marry because you need a nurse."

He ceased, thoroughly satisfied with the prospect of having brought on a quarrel, raised thumb and first finger in a gingerly loop, ordered a dash of sherry and winked across the group to Tommers, who was listening around his paper from the reading-room.

"De Gollyer, you are only a 'who's who' of art," said Quinny, with, however, a hungry grat.i.tude for a topic of such possibilities. "You understand nothing of psychology. An artist is a multiple personality; with each picture he paints he seeks a new inspiration. What is inspiration?"

"Ah, that's the point--inspiration," said Steingall, waking up.

"Inspiration," said Quinny, eliminating Steingall from his preserves with the gesture of brushing away a fly--"inspiration is only a form of hypnosis, under the spell of which a man is capable of rising outside of and beyond himself, as a horse, under extraordinary stress, exerts a muscular force far beyond his accredited strength. The race of geniuses, little and big, are constantly seeking this outward force to hypnotize them into a supreme intellectual effort. Talent does not understand such a process; it is mechanical, unvarying, chop-chop, day in and day out.

Now, what you call inspiration may be communicated in many ways--by the spectacle of a mob, by a panorama of nature, by sudden and violent contrasts of points of view; but, above all, as a continual stimulus, it comes from that state of mental madness which is produced by love."

"Huh?" said Stibo.

"Anything that produces a mental obsession, _une idee fixe_, is a form of madness," said Quinny, rapidly. "A person in love sees only one face, hears only one voice; at the base of the brain only one thought is constantly drumming. Physically such a condition is a narcotic; mentally it is a form of madness that in the beneficent state is powerfully hypnotic."

At this deft disentanglement of a complicated idea, Rankin, who, like the professional juryman, wagged his head in agreement with each speaker and was convinced by the most violent, gazed upon Quinny with absolute adoration.

"We were speaking of woman," said Towsey, gruffly, who p.r.o.nounced the s.e.x with a peculiar staccato sound.

"This little ABC introduction," said Quinny, pleasantly, "is necessary to understand the relation a woman plays to the artist. It is not the woman he seeks, but the hypnotic influence which the woman can exert on his faculties if she is able to inspire him with a pa.s.sion."

"Precisely why he marries," said De Gollyer.

"Precisely," said Quinny, who, having seized the argument by chance, was pleasantly surprised to find that he was going to convince himself. "But here is the great distinction: to be an inspiration, a woman should always represent to the artist a form of the unattainable. It is the search for something beyond him that makes him challenge the stars, and all that sort of rot, you know."

"The tragedy of life," said Rankin, sententiously, "is that one woman cannot mean all things to one man all the time."

It was a phrase which he had heard the night before, and which he flung off casually with an air of spontaneity, twisting the old Spanish ring on his bony, white fingers, which he held invariably in front of his long, sliding nose.

"Thank you, I said that about the year 1907," said Quinny, while Steingall gasped and nudged Towsey. "That is the tragedy of life, not the tragedy of art, two very different things. An artist has need of ten, fifteen, twenty women, according to the multiplicity of his ideas.

He should be always violently in love or violently reacting."

"And the wife?" said De Gollyer. "Has she any influence?"

"My dear fellow, the greatest. Without a wife, an artist falls a prey to the inspiration of the moment--condemned to it; and as he is not an a.n.a.lyst, he ends by imagining he really is in love. Take portrait-painting. Charming lady sits for portrait, painter takes up his brushes, arranges his palette, seeks inspiration,--what is below the surface?--something intangible to divine, seize, and affix to his canvas. He seeks to know the soul; he seeks how? As a man in love seeks, naturally. The more he imagines himself in love, the more completely does the idea obsess him from morning to night--plain as the nose on your face. Only there are other portraits to paint. Enter the wife."

"Charming," said Stibo, who had not ceased twining his mustaches in his pink fingers.

"Ah, that's the point. What of the wife?" said Steingall, violently.

"The wife--the ideal wife, mind you--is then the weapon, the refuge. To escape from the entanglement of his momentary inspiration, the artist becomes a man: my wife and _bonjour_. He returns home, takes off the duster of his illusion, cleans the palette of old memories, washes away his vows, protestations, and all that rot, you know, lies down on the sofa, and gives his head to his wife to be rubbed. Curtain. The comedy is over."

"But that's what they don't understand," said Steingall, with enthusiasm. "That's what they will _never_ understand."

"Such miracles exist?" said Towsey with a short, disagreeable laugh.

"I know the wife of an artist," said Quinny, "whom I consider the most remarkable woman I know--who sits and knits and smiles. She is one who understands. Her husband adores her, and he is in love with a woman a month. When he gets in too deep, ready for another inspiration, you know, she calls up the old love on the telephone and asks her to stop annoying her husband."

"Marvelous!" said Steingall, dropping his gla.s.ses.

"No, really?" said Rankin.

"Has she a sister?" said Towsey.

Stibo raised his eyes slowly to Quinny's but veiled as was the look, De Gollyer perceived it, and smilingly registered the knowledge on the ledger of his social secrets.

"That's it, by George! that is it," said Steingall, who hurled the enthusiasm of a reformer into his pessimism. "It's all so simple; but they won't understand. And why--do you know why? Because a woman is jealous. It isn't simply of other women. No, no, that's not it; it's worse than that, ten thousand times worse. She's jealous of your _art_!

That's it! There you have it! She's jealous because she can't understand it, because it takes you away from her, because she can't _share_ it.

That's what's terrible about marriage--no liberty, no individualism, no seclusion, having to account every night for your actions, for your thoughts, for the things you dream--ah, the dreams! The Chinese are right, the j.a.panese are right. It's we Westerners who are all wrong.

It's the creative only that counts. The woman should be subordinated, should be kept down, taught the voluptuousness of obedience. By Jove!

that's it. We don't a.s.sert ourselves. It's this confounded Anglo-Saxon sentimentality that's choking art--that's what it is."

At the familiar phrases of Steingall's outburst, Rankin wagged his head in unequivocal a.s.sent, Stibo smiled so as to show his fine upper teeth, and Towsey flung away his cigar, saying:

"Words, words."

At this moment when Quinny, who had digested Steingall's argument, was preparing to devour the whole topic, Britt Herkimer, the sculptor, joined them. He was a guest, just in from Paris, where he had been established twenty years, one of the five men in art whom one counted on the fingers when the word genius was p.r.o.nounced. Mentally and physically a German, he spoke English with a French accent. His hair was cropped _en brosse_, and in his brown j.a.panese face only the eyes, staccato, furtive, and drunk with curiosity, could be seen. He was direct, opinionated, bristling with energy, one of those tireless workers who disdain their youth and treat it as a disease. His entry into the group of his more socially domesticated confreres was like the return of a wolf-hound among the housedogs.

"Still smashing idols?" he said, slapping the shoulder of Steingall, with whom and Quinny he had pa.s.sed his student days, "Well, what's the row?"