The Book of Susan Part 34

"'No,' I said.

"'Haven't you!' she said, as much as to tell me she knew, all the same, I must have. 'Why, Mr. Kane, it's all over town. n.o.body knows anything, but it's terribly exciting! Some people think she committed suicide, all because of that queer Miss Blake.... She must be--_you_ know! And now she's run away to Europe! I believe she was just afraid to stay over here, afraid she might be found out or arrested--or something!'

"That's the way she went on, Mr. Hunt; and, well--naturally, I pooh-poohed it and steered her off, and then she lost interest in me right away. But she's right, Mr. Hunt. There's a lot of that kind of whispered stuff in the air, and I'm mighty glad Susan's off for a year or two where she can't run into it. It'll all die out before she's back again, of course."

"I hope so," was my reply; "but the source of these rumors is very persistent--and very discreet. They start from Mrs. Arthur; they must.

But it's impossible to trace them back to her. Jimmy, she means to make New Haven impossible for me, and I've an idea she's likely to succeed.

Already, three or four old acquaintances have--well, avoided me, and the general atmosphere's cooling pretty rapidly toward zero. So far as I'm concerned, it doesn't much matter; but it does matter for Susan. She may return to find her whole future clouded by a settled impression that in some way--indirectly--or even, directly--she was responsible for my wife's sudden death."

"It's a d.a.m.ned outrage!" exclaimed Jimmy. "I don't know Mrs. Arthur, but I'd like to wring her neck!"

"So would I, Jimmy; and she knows it. That's why she's finding life these days so supremely worth living."

Jimmy pondered this. "Gee, I hate to think that badly of any woman," he finally achieved; "but I guess it doesn't do to be a fool and think they're all angels--like Susan. Mother's not."

"No, Jimmy, it doesn't do," I responded. "Still, the price for that kind of wisdom is always much higher than it's worth."

"Women," began Jimmy---- But his aphorism somehow escaped him; he decided to light a cigarette instead....

And on this wave of cynicism I floated him off with me to _The Puppet Booth_.

IV

From the point of view of eccentric effectiveness and _reclame_ wonders had been wrought with the small, ancient, brick stable on Macdougal Street; but very little had been or could be done for the comfort of its guests. The flat exterior wall had been stuccoed and brilliantly frescoed to suggest the entrance to some probably questionable side-show at a French village fair; and a gay clown with a drum, an adept at amusing local patter, had been stationed before the door to emphasize the _funambulesque_ illusion. Within, this atmosphere--as of something gaudy and transitory, the mere lath-and-canvas pitch of a vagabond _banquiste_--had been cleverly carried out. The cramped little theater itself struck one as mere scenery, which was precisely the intention.

There was clean sawdust on the floor, and the spectators--one hundred of them suffocatingly filled the hall--were provided only with wooden benches, painted a vivid Paris green. These benches had been thoughtfully selected, however, and were less excruciating to sit on than you would suppose. There was, naturally, no balcony; a false pitch-roof had been constructed of rough stable beams, from which hung bannerets in a crying, carefully studied dissonance of strong color, worthy of the barbaric Bakst. The proscenium arch was necessarily a toylike affair, copied, you would say, from the _Guinol_ in the Tuileries Gardens; and the curtain, for a final touch, looked authentic--had almost certainly been acquired, at some expenditure of thought and trouble, from a traveling Elks' Carnival. There was even a false set of footlights to complete the masquerade; a row of oil lamps with tin reflectors. It was all very restless and amusing--and extravagantly make-believe....

Jimmy and I arrived just in time to squeeze down the single narrow side-aisle and into our places in the fourth row. We had no opportunity to glance about us or consult our broad-sheet programs, none to acquire the proper mood of tense expectancy we later succ.u.mbed to, before the lights were lowered and the curtain was rolled up in the true antique style. "Gee!" muttered Jimmy, on my left, with involuntary dislike.

"Ah!" breathed a maiden, on my right, with entirely voluntary rapture.

Someone in the front row giggled, probably a cub reporter doing duty that evening as a dramatic critic; but he was silenced by a sharp hiss from the rear.

The cause for these significant reactions was the _mise en scene_ of the tiny vacant stage. It consisted of three dead-black walls, a dead-black ceiling, and a dead-black floor-cloth. In the back wall there was a high, narrow crimson door with a black k.n.o.b. A tall straight-legged table and one straight high-backed chair, both lacquered in crimson, were the only furniture, except for a slender crimson-lacquered perch, down right, to which was chained a yellow, green and crimson macaw. And through the crimson door presently entered--undulated, rather--a personable though poisonous young woman in a trailing robe of vivid yellow and green.

The play that followed, happily a brief one, was called--as Jimmy and I learned from our programs at its conclusion--"Polly." It consisted of a monologue delivered by the poisonous young woman to the macaw, occasionally varied by _ad lib._ screams and chuckles from that evil white-eyed bird. From the staccato remarks of the poisonous young woman, we, the audience, were to deduce the erratic eroticism of an _ame d.a.m.nee_. It was not particularly difficult to do so, nor was it particularly entertaining. As a little adventure in supercynicism, "Polly," in short, was not particularly successful. It needed, and had not been able to obtain, the boulevard wit of a Sacha Guitry to carry it off. But the poisonous young woman had an exquisitely proportioned figure, and her arms, bare to the slight shoulder-straps, were quite faultless. Minor effects of this kind have, even on Broadway, been known to save more than one bad quarter hour from complete collapse.... No, it was not the author's lines that carried us safely through this first fifteen minutes of diluted Strindberg-Schnitzler! And the too deliberately bizarre _mise en scene_, though for a moment it piqued curiosity, had soon proved wearisome, and we were glad--at least, Jimmy and I were--to have it veiled from our eyes.

The curtain rolled down, nevertheless, to ecstatic cries and stubbornly sustained applause. Raised lights revealed an excited, chattering band of the faithful. The poisonous young woman took four curtain calls and would seemingly, from her parting gesture, have drawn us collectively to her fine bosom with those faultless, unreluctant arms. And the maiden on my right shuddered forth to her escort, "I'm thrilled, darling! Feel them--feel my hands--they're _moon-cold_! They always are, you know, when I'm thrilled!"

"You can't beat this much, Mr. Hunt," whispered Jimmy, on my left. "It's bughouse."

In a sense, it was; in a truer sense, it was not. A careful a.n.a.lysis of the audience would, I was quickly convinced, have disclosed not merely a saving remnant, but a saving majority of honest workmen in the arts--men and women too solidly endowed with brains and humor for any self-conscious posing or public exhibition of temperament. The genuine freaks among us were a scant handful; but it is the special talent and purpose of your freak to--in Whitman's phrase--"positively appear." Ten able freaks to the hundred can turn any public gathering into a side show; and the freaks of the Village, particularly the females of the species, are nothing if not able. Minna Freund, for example, who was sitting just in front of Jimmy; it would be difficult for any a.s.sembly to obliterate Minna Freund! She was, that night, exceptionally repulsive in a sort of yellow silk wrapper, with her sparrow's nest of bobbed Henner hair, and her long, bare, olive-green neck, that so obviously needed to be scrubbed!

Having strung certain entirely unrelated words together and called them "Portents," she had in those days acquired a minor notoriety, and Susan--impishly enjoying my consequent embarra.s.sment--had once introduced me to her as an admirer of her work, at an exhibition of Cubist sculpture. Minna was standing at the time, I recalled, before Pannino's "Study of a Morbid Complex," and she at once informed me that the morbid complex in question had been studied from the life. She had posed her own destiny for Pannino, so she a.s.sured me, at three separate moments of psychic crisis, and the inevitable result had been a masterpiece. "How it writhes!" she had exclaimed: but to my uninstructed eyes Pannino's Study did anything but writhe; it was stolidly pa.s.sive; it looked precisely as an ostrich egg on a pedestal would look if viewed in a slightly convex mirror.... How far away all that stupid nonsense seems!

And, suddenly, Jimmy leaped on the bench beside me as if punctured by a pin: "Oh, good Lord, Mr. Hunt!" he groaned. "Look here!"

He had thrust his program before me and was pointing to the third play of the series with an unsteady finger.

"It's the same name," he whispered hoa.r.s.ely; "the one she's used for her book. Do you think----"

"I'll soon find out," was my answer. "We must know what we're in for, Jimmy!" And just as the lights were lowered for the second play I rose, defying audible unpopularity, and squeezed my way out to the door. That is why I cannot describe for you the second play, a harsh little tragedy of the sweatshops--"Horrible," Jimmy affirmed, "but it kind of _got_ me!"--written by an impecunious young man with expensive tastes, who has since won the means of gratifying them along Broadway by concocting for that golden glade his innocently naughty librettos--"_Tra-la, Therese!_"

and "_Oh, Mercy, Modestine!_"

Having sought and interviewed Stalinski--I found him huddled in the tiny box-office, perspiring unpleasantly from nervousness and many soaring emotions--I was back in my seat, more unpopular than ever, in good time for Susan's--it was unquestionably Susan's--play.

But most of you have read, or have seen, or have read about, Susan's play....

It was the sensation of the evening, of many subsequent evenings; and I have often wondered precisely why--for there is in it nothing sensational. Its atmosphere is delicately fantastic; remote, you would say, from the sympathies of a matter-of-fact world, particularly as its fantasy is not the highly sentimentalized make-believe of some popular fairy tale. This fantasy of Susan's is ironic and grave; simple in movement, too--just a few subtle modulations on a single poignant theme.

And I ask myself wherein lies its throat-tightening quality, its irresistible appeal? And I find but one answer; an answer which I had always supposed, in my long intellectual sn.o.bbery, an undeserved compliment to the human race; a compliment no critic, who was not either dishonest or a fool, could pay mankind.

But what other explanation can be given for the success of Susan's play, both here and in England, than its sheer _beauty_? Beauty of substance, of mood, of form, of quiet, heart-searching phrase! It is not called "The Magic Circle," but it might have been; for its magic is genuine, distilled from the depths of Nature, and it casts an unescapable spell--on poets and bankers, on publicans and prost.i.tutes and priests, on all and sundry, equally and alike. It even casts its spell on those who act in it, and no truer triumph can come to an author. I have never seen it really badly played. Susan has never seen it played at all.

On the first wave of this astonishing triumph, Susan's pen-name was swept into the newspapers and critical journals of America and England, and a piquant point for gossip was added by the revelation that "Dax,"

who for several months had so wittily enlivened the columns of _Whim_, was one and the same person. Moreover, it was soon bruited about that the author was a slip of a girl--radiantly beautiful, of course; or why romance concerning her!--and that there was something mysterious, even sinister, in her history.

"A child of the underworld," said one metropolitan journal, in its review of her poems. Popular legend presently connected her, though vaguely, with the criminal cla.s.ses. I have heard an overdressed woman in a theater lobby earnestly a.s.suring another that she knew for a fact that ---- (Susan) had been born in a brothel--"one of those houses, my dear"--and brought up--like Oliver Twist, though the comparison escaped her--to be a thief.

And so it was that the public eye lighted for a little hour on Susan's shy poems. Poetry was said to be looking up in those days; and influential critics in their influential, uninfluenced way suddenly boomed these, saying mostly the wrong things about them, but saying them over and over with energy and persistence. The first edition vanished overnight; a larger second edition was printed and sold out within a week or two; a still larger third edition was launched and disposed of more slowly. Then came the war....

V

If I can say anything good of the war, it is this: Since seemingly it must have come anyway, sooner or later, so far as Susan is concerned it came just in time. A letter from Phil to Susan, received toward the close of July, 1914, at the chateau of the Comtesse de Bligny, near Brussels, will tell you why.

"_Dear Susan_: If the two or three notes I've sent you previously have been brief and dull, I knew you would make the inevitable allowances and forgive me. In the first place, G.o.d didn't create me to scintillate, as you've long had reason to know; and since you left us I've been buried in a Sahara of work, living so retired a life in my desert that little news comes my way. But Jimmy breaks in on me, always welcomely, with an occasional bulletin, and last night Hunt came over and we had a long evening together. He's worried, Susan, not without great cause, I fear; he looks tired and ill; and after mulling things over, with my usual plodding caution--I've thought best to explain the situation to you.

"It can be put in very few words. The deserved success of your play and the poems, following a natural law that one too helplessly wishes otherwise, has led to a crisis in the gossip--malicious in origin, certainly--which has fastened upon you and Hunt; and this gossip lately has taken a more sinister turn. More and more openly it is being said that the circ.u.mstances surrounding Mrs. Hunt's death ought to be probed--'probed' is just now the popular word in this connection. The feeling is widespread that you were in some way responsible for it.

"I must use brutal phrases to lay the truth before you. You are not, seemingly, suspected of murder.

You are suspected of having killed Mrs. Hunt during a sudden access of mental irresponsibility.

It is whispered that Hunt, improperly, in some devious way, got the matter hushed up and the affair reported as an accident. As a result of these absurd and terrible rumors, Hunt finds himself a pariah--many of his oldest acquaintances no longer recognize him when they meet. It is a thoroughly distressing situation, and it's difficult to see how the mad injustice of it can be easily righted.

"The danger is, of course, that some misguided person will get the whole matter into the newspapers; it is really a miracle that it has not already been seized on by some yellow sheet, the opportunity for a sensational story is so obviously ripe. Happily"--oh, Phil! oh, philosopher!--"the present curious tension in European politics is for the moment turning journalistic eyes far from home. But as all such diplomatic flurries do, this one will pa.s.s, leaving the flatness of the silly season upon us.

This is what Hunt most fears; and when you next see him you will find him grayer and older because of this anxiety.

"He dreads, for you, a sudden journalistic demand for a public investigation, and feels--though in this I can hardly agree with him--that such a demand could end only in a public trial, in view of the peculiar nature of all the circ.u.mstances involved--a veritable _cause celebre_.

"How shocking all this must be to you. The sense of the mental anguish I'm causing you is a horror to me. Nothing could have induced me to write in this way but the compulsion of my love for Hunt and you. It seems to me imperative that your names should be publicly cleared, in advance of any public outcry.

"So I urge you, Susan--fully conscious of my personal responsibility in doing so--to return at once and to join with Hunt and your true friends in quashing finally and fully these d.a.m.nable lies.

It is my strong conviction that this is your duty to yourself, to Hunt, and to us all. If you and Hunt, together or separately, make a public statement, in view of the rumors now current, and yourselves demand the fullest public investigation of the facts, there can be but one issue. Your good names will be cleared; the truth will prevail. Dreadful as this prospect must be for you both, it now seems to me--and let me add, to Jimmy--the one wise course for you to take. But only you, if you agree with me, can persuade Hunt to such a course...."

It is unnecessary to quote the remaining paragraphs of Phil's so characteristic letter.

No doubt Susan would have returned immediately if she could, but, less than a week after the receipt of Phil's letter, the diplomatic flurry in Europe had taken a German army through Luxemburg and into Belgium, and within less than two weeks Susan and Mona Leslie and the Comtesse de Bligny were in uniform, working a little less than twenty-four hours a day with the Belgian Red Cross....

It is no purpose of mine to attempt any description of Susan's war experience or service. Those first corroding weeks and months of the war have left ineffaceable scars on the consciousness of the present generation. I was not a part of them, and can add nothing to them by talking about them at second hand. It might, however, repay you to read--if you have not already done so--a small anonymous volume which has pa.s.sed through some twenty or thirty editions, ent.i.tled _Stupidity Triumphant_, and containing the brief, sharply etched personal impressions of a Red Cross nurse in Flanders during the early days of Belgium's long agony. It is now an open secret that this little book was written by Susan; and among the countless doc.u.ments on frightfulness this one, surely, by reason of its simplicity and restraint, its entire absence of merely hysterical outcry, is not the least d.a.m.ning and not--I venture to believe--the least permanent.