The Book of Susan Part 33

And I at last had a plan for her. You may or may not remember that Ashton Parker was a famous man thirty years ago; they called him "Hyena Parker" in Wall Street, and no doubt he deserved it; yet he faded gently out with consumption like any spring poet, having turned theosophist toward the end and made his peace with the Cosmic Urge. Mrs. Ashton Parker is an aunt of mine, long a widow, and a most delightful, easy-going, wide-awake, and sympathetic old lady, who has made her home in Santa Barbara ever since her husband's death there. Her Spanish villa and gardens are famous, and her always kindly eccentricities scarcely less famous than they. I could imagine no one more certain to captivate Susan or to be instantly captivated by her; and though I had not seen Aunt Belle for more than ten years, I knew I could count on her in advance to fall in with my plan. Her hospitality is notorious and would long since have beggared anyone with an income less absurd. Susan should go there at once, for a month at least; the whole thing could be arranged by telegraph. Why in heaven's name hadn't I thought of and insisted upon this plan before!

Miss O'Neill, in person, opened the front door for me.

"Oh, Mr. Hunt!" she wailed. "Thanks to goodness you're here early. I can't do nothing with Togo. He won't eat no breakfast, and he won't let n.o.body touch him. He's sitting up there like a--I don't know what, with his precious tail uncurled and his head sort of hanging down--it'll break your heart to look at him! I can't bear to myself, though I'd never no use for the beast, neither liking nor disliking! He's above his station, I say. But what with all---- And I've got to get that room cleared and redone by twelve, feelings or no feelings, and Gawd knows feelings _will_ enter in! Not half Miss Susan's cla.s.s either, the new party just now applied, and right beside my own room, too, though well recommended, so I can't complain!"

I broke through her dusty web of words with an impatient, "What on earth are you talking about, Miss O'Neill?"

"You don't know?" she gasped. "You don't----"

"I most certainly do not. Where's Miss Susan?"

"Oh, Mr. Hunt! If I'd-a knowed she hadn't even spoke to you! And you with her all evening--treating to dinner and all! But thank Gawd it's a reel lady she went away with! Miss Leslie, in her big limousine, that's often been here! _That_ I can swear to you with my own eyes!"

Susan was gone, and gone beyond hope of an immediate return. There is no need to labor the details of her flight. A letter, left for me with Miss O'Neill, gives all the surface facts essential.

"_Dear Ambo_: Try not to be angry with me; or too hurt. When I left you last night I decided to seize an opportunity which had to be seized instantly, or not at all. Mona Leslie has been planning for a long European sojourn all winter, and for the past two weeks has been trying to persuade me to go with her as a sort of overpaid companion and private secretary. She has dangled a salary before me out of all proportion to my possible value to her, but--never feeling very sympathetic toward her sudden whims and moods--that hasn't tempted me.

"Now, at the eleventh hour, literally, this chance for a complete break with my whole past and probable future has tempted me, and I've flopped.

You've been urging my need for rest and change; if that's what I do need this will supply it, the change at least--with no sacrifice of my hard-fought-for financial independence. It was the abysmal prospect, as I came in, of having to go straight to my room--with no Sister waiting for me--and beat my poor typewriter and poorer brains for some sparks of wit--when I knew in advance there wasn't a spark left in me--that sent me to the telephone.

"Now I'm packed--in half an hour--and waiting for Mona. The boat sails about three A.M.; I don't even know her name: we'll be on her by midnight.

Poor Miss O'Neill is flabbergasted--and so I'm afraid will you be, and Phil and Jimmy. I know it isn't kind of me simply to vanish like this; but try to feel that I don't mean to be unkind. Not even to Togo, though my treachery to him is villainous. It will be a black mark against me in Peter's book forever. But I can't take him, Ambo; I just can't. Please, please--will _you_? You see, dear, I can't help being a nuisance to you always, after all. And I can't even promise you Togo will learn to love you, any more than Tumps--though I hope he may. He'll grieve himself thin at first.

He knows something's in the air and he's grieving beside me now. His eyes---- If Mona doesn't come soon, I may collapse at his paws and promise him to stay.

"Mona talks of a year over there, from darkest Russia to lightest France; possibly two. Her plans are characteristically indefinite. She knows heaps of people all over, of course. I'll write often.

Please tell Hadow and Mr. Sampson I'm a physical wreck--or mental, if it sounds more convincing.

I'm neither; but I'm tired--tired--_tired_.

"If you can possibly help Phil and Jimmy to understand----

"Here's Mona now. Good-by, dear.

"Your ashamed, utterly grateful

"SUSAN.

"P. S. I'm wearing your furs."

THE SIXTH CHAPTER

I

SO Togo and I went home. My misery craving company, I rode with him all the way up in the baggage-car, on the self-deceptive theory that he needed an everpresent friend. It is true, however, that he did; and it gratified me and a little cheered me that he seemed really to appreciate my attentions. I sat on a trunk, lighting each cigarette from the end of the last, and he sat at my feet, leaned wearily against the calf of my right leg and permitted me to fondle his ears....

II

"Spring, the sweet spring!" Then birds do sing, hey-ding-a-ding--and so on.... Sweet lovers love the spring.... Jimmy, Phil and I saw little of each other those days. Jimmy clouded his sunny brow and started in working overtime. Phil plunged headlong into what was to have proved his philosophical _magnum opus_--"The Pluralistic Fallacy; a Critical Study of Pragmatism." I also plunged headlong into a series of interpretative essays for Heywood Sampson's forthcoming review. My first essay was to be on Tolstoy; my second, on Nietzsche; my third, on Anatole France; my fourth, on Samuel Butler and Bernard Shaw; my fifth, on Thomas Hardy; and my sixth and last, on Walt Whitman. From the works of these writers it was my purpose to ill.u.s.trate and clarify for the semicultured the more significant intellectual and spiritual tendencies of our enlightened and humane civilization. It is characteristic that I supposed myself well equipped for this task. But I never got beyond my detached, urbane appreciation of Nietzsche; just as I had concluded it--our enlightened and humane civilization suddenly blew to atoms with a _cliche_-shattering report and a vile stench as of too-long-imprisoned gas....

III

During those first months of Susan's absence, which for more than four years were to prove the last months of almost world-wide and wholly world-deceptive peace, several things occurred of more or less importance to the present history. They marked, for one thing, the auspicious sprouting and rapid initial growth of Susan's literary reputation. Her poems appeared little more than a month after she had left us, a well-printed volume of less than a hundred pages, in a sober green cover. I had taken a lonely sort of joy in reading and rereading the proof; and if even a split letter escaped me, it has not yet been brought to my attention. These poems were issued under a quiet t.i.tle and an un.o.btrusive pen-name, slipping into the market-place without any preliminary puffing, and I feared they were of too fine a texture to attract the notice that I felt they deserved. But in some respects, at least, Susan was born under a lucky star. An unforeseen combination of events suddenly focused public attention--just long enough to send it into a third edition--upon this inconspicuous little book.

Concurrently with its publication, _The Puppet Booth_ opened its doors--its door, rather--on Macdougal Street; an artistic venture quite as marked, you would say, for early oblivion as Susan's own. The coc.o.o.n of _The Puppet Booth_ was a small stable where a few Italian venders of fruit and vegetables had kept their scarecrow horses and shabby carts and handcarts. From this drab coc.o.o.n issued a mailed and militant dragon-fly; vivid, flashing, erratic; both ugly and beautiful--and wholly alive! For there were in Greenwich Village--as there are, it would seem, in all lesser villages, from Florida to Oregon--certain mourners over and enthusiasts for the art called Drama, which they believed to be virtually extinct. Shows, it is true, hundreds of them, were each season produced on Broadway, and some of these delighted hosts of the affluent, sentimental, and child-like American _bourgeoisie_.

Fortunate managers, playsmiths and actors, endowed with sympathy for the crude tastes of this _bourgeoisie_, a sympathy partly instinctive and partly developed by commercial ac.u.men, waxed fat with a prosperity for which the Village could not wearily enough express its contempt.

None of these creatures, said the Village--no, not one--was a genuine artist! The Theater, they affirmed, had been raped by the Philistines and prost.i.tuted to soph.o.m.oric merrymakers by cynical greed. The Theater!

Why, it should be a temple, inviolably dedicated to its peculiar G.o.d.

Since the death of religion, it was perhaps the one temple worthy of pious preservation. Only in a Theater, sincerely consecrated to the great G.o.d, Art, could the enlightened, the sophisticated, the free--unite to worship. There only, they implied, could something adumbrating a sacred ritual and a spiritual consolation be preserved.

Luckily for Susan, and indeed for us all--for we have all been gainers from the spontaneous generation of "little theaters" all over America, a phenomenon at its height just previous to the war--one village enthusiast, Isidore Stalinski--by vocation an accompanist, by avocation a vorticist, by race and nature a publicist--had succeeded in mildly infecting Mona Leslie--who took everything in the air, though nothing severely--with offhand zeal for his cause. The importance of her rather casual conversion lay in the fact that her purse strings were perpetually untied. Stalinski well knew that you cannot run even a tiny temple for a handful of worshippers without vain oblations on the side to the false G.o.ds of this world, and these imply--oh, Art's desire!--a donor. And of all possible varieties of donor, that most to be desired is the absentee donor--the donor who donates as G.o.d sends rain, unseen.

At precisely the right moment Stalinski whispered to Mona Leslie that _entre them_--though he didn't care to be quoted--he preferred her interpretation of Faure's _Clair de Lune_ to that of ----, the particular _diva_ he had just been accompanying through a long, rapturously advertised concert tour; and Mona Leslie, about to be off on her European flight, became the absentee donor to _The Puppet Booth_.

The small stable was leased and cleansed and sufficiently reshaped to live up to its anxiously chosen name. Much of the reshaping and all of the decorating was done, after business hours, by the clever and pious hands of the villagers. Then four one-act plays were selected from among some hundreds poured forth by village genius to its rehabilitated G.o.d.

The clever and pious hands flew faster than ever, busying themselves with scenery and costumes and properties and color and lighting--all blended toward the creation of a thoroughly uncommercial atmosphere. And the four plays were staged, directed, acted, and finally attended by the Village. It was a perfectly lovely party and the pleasantest of times was had by all.

And it only remains to drop this tone of patronizing persiflage and admit, with humblest honesty, that the first night at _The Puppet Booth_ was that very rare thing, a complete success; what Broadway calls a "knockout." Within a fortnight seats for _The Puppet Booth_ were at a ruinous premium in all the ticket agencies on or near Times Square.

I happened to be there on that ecstatic opening night. Susan, in her first letter, from Liverpool, had enjoined me to attend and report; Mona would be glad to learn from an unprejudiced outsider how the affair went off. But Susan did not mention the fact that one of the four selected plays had been written by herself.

Jimmy was with me. Phil, who saw more of him than I did, thought he was going stale from overwork, so I had made a point of hunting him up and dragging him off with me for a night in town. He hadn't wanted to go; said frankly, he wasn't in the mood. I'm convinced it was the first time he had ever used the word "mood" in connection with himself or anybody else. Jimmy and moods of any kind simply didn't belong together.

We had a good man's dinner at a good man's chop-house that night, and, once I got Jimmy to work on it, his normal appet.i.te revived and he engulfed oysters and steak and a deep-dish apple pie and a mug or so of ale, with mounting gusto. We talked, of course, of Susan.

Jimmy, inclined to a rosier view by comfortable repletion, now maintained that perhaps after all Susan had done the natural and sensible thing in joining Miss Leslie. He emphasized all the obvious advantages--complete change of environment, freedom from financial worry, and so on; then he paused....

"And there's another point, Mr. Hunt," he began again, doubtfully this time: "Prof. Farmer and I were talking about it only the other day. We were wondering whether we oughtn't to speak to you. But it's not the easiest thing to speak of--it's so sort of vague--kind of a feeling in the air."

I knew at once what he referred to, and nodded my head. "So you and Phil have noticed it too!"

"Oh, you're _on_ then? I'm glad of that, sir. You've never mentioned anything, so Prof. Farmer and I couldn't be sure. But it's got under our skins that it might make a lot of trouble and something ought to be done about it. It's hard to see what."

"Very," I agreed. "Fire ahead, Jimmy. Tell me exactly what has come to you--to you, personally, I mean."

"Well," said Jimmy, leaning across the table to me and lowering his voice, "it was all of three weeks ago. I went to a dance at the Lawn Club. I don't dance very well, but I figure a fellow ought to know how if he ever has to, so I've slipped in a few lessons. I can keep off my partner's feet, anyway. Well, Steve Putnam took me round that night and introduced me to some girls. I guess if they'd known my mother was living in New Haven and married to a grocer, they wouldn't have had anything to do with me. Maybe I ought to advertise the fact, but I don't--simply because I can't stand for my stepfather, and so mother won't stand for me. Mother and I never could get on, though; and it's funny, too--as a general rule I can get on with 'most everybody. I told Prof. Farmer the other night there must be something wrong with a fellow who can't get on with his own mother--but he only laughed. Of course, Mr. Hunt, I'm not exactly sailing under false pretenses, either; if any girl wanted to make real friends with me--I'd tell her all about myself first."

"Of course," I murmured.

"And the same with men. Steve, for instance. He knows all about me, and his father has a lot of money, but he made it in soap--and Steve's from the West, anyway, and don't care. Gee, I'm wandering--it's the ale, I guess, Mr. Hunt; I'm not used to it. The point is. Steve introduced me round, and I like girls all right, but Susan's kind of spoiled me for the way most of them gabble. I can't do that easy, quick-talk very good yet; Steve's a bear at it. Well--I sat out a dance with one of the girls, a Miss Simmons; pretty, too; but she's only a kid. It was her idea, sitting out the dance in a corner--I thought she didn't like the way I handled myself. But that wasn't it. Mr. Hunt, she wanted to pump me; went right at it, too.

"'You know Mr. Hunt awfully well, don't you?' she asked; and after I'd said yes, and we'd sort of sparred round a little, she suddenly got confidential, and a kind of thrilled look came into her eyes, and then she asked me straight out: 'Have you ever heard there was something--_mysterious_--about poor Mrs. Hunt's death?'