The Imitator Part 11

"Very well. You will find him in the library. Prim, show the gentleman to the library. If you can persuade him, Professor--" She smiled bitterly. "But then, anybody can persuade him nowadays." She turned to some embroidery as if to dismiss the subject, to show that she was resigned even to hopeless experiments. The very fact that she was plying the needle rather than the social sceptre was gauge of her descent from the heights. As a matter of fact Vanlief found Wentworth amenable enough. Wentworth was reading Marie Corelli. His mind was as empty as that. Nothing could better define his utter lapse from intelligence. He put the book down reluctantly as the Professor came in. He listened without much enthusiasm. A drive? Why not? He hadn't driven much of late, but if it was something that would please the Professor. He remembered, through a mist, that he had known Vanlief when he himself was a boy; his father had often spoken of Vanlief with respect. Nothing further in the way of mental exertion came to him. He followed Vanlief as a dog follows whoso speaks kindly to it.

The conversation between the two, in the brougham, would hardly tend to the general entertainment. It was a thing of shreds and patches. It led nowhither.

The brougham stopped at the door of Orson Vane's house. Nevins let them in, whispering an a.s.suring confidence to the professor. As they reached the door of the dressing-room Vanlief pushed Wentworth ahead of him, and bade him enter. He kept behind him, letting the other's body screen him from the staring mirror.

Wentworth looked at himself. A hand traveled slowly up to his forehead.

"By Jove!" he said, hesitatingly, "I never put the curtain back, after all." And he covered up the mirror. "Curious thing," he went on, with energy vitalizing each word, "what possessed me to come here just now, when I know for a fact that they're playing the Inter-State Golf championships to-day. Dashed if I know why I didn't go!" He walked out, plainly puzzled, clumsily heedless of Vanlief and Nevins, but--himself once more.

Orson Vane, at just that time, was on the links of the Fifeshire Golf Club. He was wearing a little red coat with yellow facings. He was in the act of stooping on a green, to look along the line of his putt, when he got to his feet in a hurried, bewildered way. He threw his putter down on the green. He blushed all over, shaming the tint of his scarlet coat.

"What a foolish game for a grown-up man!" he blurted out, and strode off the grounds.

The bystanders were aghast. They could not find words. Orson Vane, the very prophet of golf, to throw it over in that fashion! It was inexplicable! The episode was simply maddening.

But it was remarked that the decline of golf on this side of the water dated from that very day.

CHAPTER XII.

Orson Vane was taking lunch with Professor Vanlief. Jeannette, learning of Vane's coming, had absented herself.

"It is true," Vane was saying, "that I can a.s.sert what no other man has a.s.serted before,--that I know the exact mental machinery of two human beings. Yes; that is quite true. But--"

"I promised nothing more," remarked Vanlief.

"No. That is true, too. I have lived the lives of others; I have given their thoughts a dwelling. But I am none the happier for that."

"Oh," admitted Vanlief, "wisdom does not guarantee happiness...." He drummed with his fine, long fingers, upon the table-cloth. Vane, watching him, noted the almost transparent quality of his skin. Under that admirable mask of military uprightness there was an aging, a fading process going on, that no keen observer could miss. "It is the pursuit, not the capture of wisdom, that brings happiness. Wisdom is too often only a bubble that bursts when you touch it."

"Perhaps that is it. At any rate I know that I do not love my neighbor any more because I have fathomed some of his thoughts. Moreover, Professor, has it occurred to you that your discovery, your secret, carries elements of danger with it? Take my own experiments; there might have been tragic results; whole lives might have been ruined. In one case I was nearly the victim of a tragedy myself; I might have become, for all time, the dreadful creature I was giving house-room to. In the other, there was no more than a farce possible; the visiting spirit was, after all, in subjection to my own. I think you will have to simplify the details of your marvelous secret. It works a little clumsily, a little--"

"Oh," the Professor put in, "I am perfecting the process. I spend my days and my nights in elaborating the details. I mean to have it in the simplest, most unmistakable perfection before I hand it over to the human race."

"Sometimes I think," mused Vane, "that your boon will be a doubtful one.

I can see no good to be gained. My whole point of view is changing. I ached for such a chance of wisdom once; now that it has come to me I am sad because the things I have learned are so horrible, so silly. I had not thought there were such souls in the world; or not, at any rate, in the immediate world about me."

"Oh," the Professor went on, steadfastly, "there will be many benefits in the plan. Doctors will be able to go at once to the root of any ailments that have their seat in the brain. Witnesses cab be made to testify the truth. Oh--there are ever so many possibilities."

"As many for evil as for good. Second-rate artists could steal the ideas, the inventions of others. No inventor, no scientist, would be sure of keeping his secrets. The thing would be a weapon in the hands of the unscrupulous."

"Ah, well," smiled Vanlief, "so far I have not made my discovery public, have I? It is a thing I must consider very carefully. As you say, there are arguments on either side. But you must bear in mind that you are somewhat embittered. It was your own fault; you chose the subject wittingly. If you were to read a really beautiful mind, you might turn to the other extreme; you might urge me to lose no time in giving the world my secret. The wise way is between the two; I must go forward with my plans, prepared for either course. I may take it to my grave with me, or I may give it to the world; but, so far, it is still a little incomplete; it is not ripe for general distribution. Instead of the one magic mirror there must be myriads of them. There are stupendous opportunities. All that you have told me of your own experiences in these experiments has proved my skill to have been wisely employed; your success was beyond my hopes. Do you think you will go on?"

Orson Vane did not answer at once. It was something he had been asking himself; he was not yet sure of the answer.

"I haven't made up my mind," he replied. "So far I have hardly been repaid for my time and the vital force employed. I almost feel toward these experiments as toward a vice that refines the mind while coa.r.s.ening the frame. That is the story of the most terrible vices, I think; they corrode the body while gilding the brain. But this much I know; if I use your mirror again it will not be to borrow a merely smart soul; I mean to go to some other sphere of life. That one is too contracted."

"Strange," said the Professor, "that you should have said that.

Jeannette pretends she thinks that, too. I cannot get her to take her proper position in the world. She is a little elusive. But then, to be sure, she is not, just now, at her best."

"She is not ill?" asked Vane, with a guilty start.

"Nothing tangible. But not--herself...."

Vane observed that he wished he might have found her in; he feared he had offended her; he hoped the Professor would use his kind offices again to soften the young lady's feelings toward him. Then he got up to go.

Strolling along the avenue he noted certain aspects of the town with an appreciation that he had not always given them. He had seen these things from so many other points of view of late; had been in sympathy with them, had made up a fraction of their more grotesque element; that to see them clearly with his own eyes had a sort of novelty. The life of to-day, as it appeared on the smartest surfaces, was, he reflected, a colorful if somewhat soulless picture....

The young men sit in the clubs and in the summer casinos, smoking and wondering what the new mode in trousers is to be; an acquaintance goes by; he has a hat that is not quite correct, and his friends comment on it yawningly; he has not the faintest notion of polite English, but n.o.body cares; a man who has written great things walks by, but he wears a creased coat, and the young men in the smoking-room sniff at him. In the drags and the yachts the women and the girls sit in radiance and gay colors and arrogant unconsciousness of position and power; they talk of golfing and fashion and mustachios; Mrs. Blank is going a hot pace and Mrs. Landthus is a thoroughbred; adjectives in the newest sporting slang fly about blindingly; the language is a curious argot, as distinct as the tortuous lingo of the Bowery. A coach goes rattling by, the horses throwing their heads in air, and their feet longing for the Westchester roads. The whip discusses bull-terriers; the people behind him are declaring that the only thing you can possibly find in the Waldorf rooms is an impossible lot of people. The complexions of all these people, intellectually presentable in many ways, and fashionable in yet more modes, are high in health. They look happy, prosperous and satisfied....

Yes, there was a superficial fairness to the picture, Vane admitted. If only, if only, he had not chosen to look under the surface! Now that he had seen the world with other eyes, its fairness could rarely seem the same to him.

A st.u.r.dy beggar approached him, with a whine that proved him an admirable actor. But Vane could not find it in him to reflect that if there is one thing more than another that lends distinction to a town it is an abundance of beggars.

He wondered how it would be to annex this healthy impostor's mite of a soul. But no; there could be little wisdom gained there.

He made, finally, for the Town and Country Club, and tried to immerse himself in the conversation that sped about. The talked turned to the eminent actor, Arthur Wantage. The subject of that man's alleged eccentricities invariably brought out a flood of the town's stalest anecdotes. Vane, listening in a lazy mood, made up his mind to see Wantage play that night. It would be a distraction. It would show him, once again, the present limit in one human being's portraiture of another; he would see the highest point to which external imitation could be brought; he could contrast it with the heights to which he himself had ascended.

It would be a chance for him to consider Wantage, for the first time in his life, as a merely second-rate actor. This player was an adept only in the making the sh.e.l.l, the husk, seem lifelike; since he could not read the character, how could he go deeper?

The opportunities the theatre held for him suddenly loomed vast before Vane.

CHAPTER XIII.

The fact that Arthur Wantage was to be seen and heard, nightly, in a brilliant comedy by the author of "Pious Aeneas," was not so much the attraction that drew people to his theatre, as was the fact that he had not yet, that season, delivered himself of a curtain speech. His curtain speeches were wont to be insults delivered in an elaborately honeyed manner; he took the pose of considering his audiences with contempt; he admired himself far more for his condescension in playing to them than he respected his audiences for having the taste to admire him.

The comedy in which he was now appearing was the perfection of paradox.

It pretended to be frivolous and was really philosophic. The kernel of real wisdom was behind the elaborately poised mask of wit. A delightful impertinence and exaggeration informed every line of the dialogue. The pose of inimitable, candid egoism showed under every situation. The play was typical of the author as well as of the player. It veiled, as thinly as possible, a deal of irony at the expense of the play going public; it took some of that public's dearest foibles and riddled them to shreds.

It was currently reported that the only excuse for comparatively amicable relations between Wantage and O'Deigh, who had written this comedy, was the fact of there being an ocean between them. Even at that Wantage found it difficult to suffer the many praises he heard bestowed, not upon himself but O'Deigh. He had burst out in spleen at this adulation, once, in the hearing of an intimate.

"My dear Arthur," said the other, "you strike me as very ungrateful. For my part, when I see your theatre crowded nightly, when I see how your exchequer fills steadily, it occurs to me that you should go down on your knees every night, and thank G.o.d that O'Deigh has done you such a stunning play."

"Oh," was Wantage's grudging answer, "I do, you know I do. But I also say: Oh, G.o.d, why did it have to be by O'Deigh?"

The secret of his hatred for O'Deigh was the secret of his hatred for all dramatists. He was a curious compound of egoism, childishness and shrewdness. Part of his shrewdness--or was it his childishness?--showed in his aversion to paying authors' royalties. He always tried to re-write all the plays he accepted; if the playwrights objected there was sure to be a row of some sort. When he could find no writers willing to make him a present of plays, for the sake, as he put it, of having it done by as eminent an actor as himself, and in so beautiful a theatre, he was in the habit of announcing that he would forsake the theatre, and turn critic. He pretended that the world--the public, the press, even the minor players--were in league against him. There was a conspiracy to drive him from the theatre; the riff-raff resented that a man of genius should be so successful. They lied about him; he was sure they lied; for stories, of preposterous import, came to him; he vowed he never read the newspapers--never. As for London--oh, he could spin you the most fascinating yarn of the cabal that had dampened his London triumph. He mentioned, with a world of meaning in his tone, the name of the other great player of the time; he insinuated that to have him, Wantage, succeed in London, had not been to that other player's mind; so the wires had been pulled; oh, it was all very well done. He laughed at the reminiscence,--a brave, bluff laugh, that told you he could afford to let such petty jealousies amuse him.

The riddle of Arthur Wantage's character had never yet been read. There were those who averred he was never doing anything but acting, not in the most intimate moments of his life; some called him a keen moneymaker, retaining the mummer's pose off the stage for the mere effect of it on the press and the public. What the man's really honest, unrehea.r.s.ed thoughts were,--or if he ever had such--no man could say. To many earnest students of life this puzzle had presented itself. It began to present itself, now, to Orson Vane.

This, surely, was a secret worth the reading. Here were, so to say, two masks to lift at once. This man, Arthur Wantage, who came out before the curtain now as this, now as that, character of fancy or history, what shred of vital, individual personality had he retained through all these changings? The enthusiasm of discovery, of adventure came upon Vane with a sharpness that he had not felt since the day he had mocked the futility of human science because it could not unlock other men's brains.

The horseshoe-shaped s.p.a.ce that held the audience glittered with babble and beauty as Orson Vane took his seat in the stalls. The presence of the smart set gave the theatre a very garland of charm, of grace, and of beauty's bud and blossom. The stalls were radiant, and full of polite chatter. The boxes wore an air of dignified twilight,--a twilight of G.o.ddesses. The least garish of the G.o.ddesses, yet the one holding the subtlest sway, was Jeanette Vanlief. She sat, in the shadow of an upper box, with her father and Luke Moncreith. On her pale face the veins showed, now and then; the flush of rose came to it like a surprise--like the birth of a new world. She radiated no obvious, blatant fascination.