The Blind Bow-boy/Chapter 6
The morning after his first lesson with Paul Moody, Harold's mail contained an envelope which he tore open in febrile haste. Within the envelope he found a sheet of folded note-paper, but there was no writing thereon. The paper merely served as a garment for a crisp new one hundred dollar bill. Not a word! She had already thanked him, he recalled, but she might have found the heart to say something more. His life, begun so pleasantly on his first day in New York, now seemed to be caught in a perilous and inextricable tangle. The matchless Alice Blake had vanished, while a more motley crew than he had imagined could exist outside of literature had taken official possession of him. These wasters, apparently, incessantly staggered about seeking sensation. They had, it would appear, no other consistent aim. Sensation, in itself, was at the farthest pole from Harold's true desire. What he thought he wanted was a little grey home in the east with Alice Blake. Instead, he had been delivered, uncompromisingly, by an eccentric father, whom he was beginning to hate, into the hands of Paul Moody, a strange, cynical fellow. Worse even than Paul was his entourage, Bunny Hugg, John Armstrong, and now, this beastly little animal, Zimbule O'Grady. Would she and Bunny go on living together frankly at Paul's, or was that simply a lodging for the night? He could not answer this question from his limited experience. He realized that the conventions of this new existence, if there were any, were entirely unknown to him. What—he summed up his distrust in one vague, generalizing query—what did people do who lived as these people lived? What, indeed, did they not do? Had they any beliefs or faiths? Had they any responsibilities or duties or consciences? Were their days compounded of visits to Coney Island and the discovery of snakecharmers? The prey of such meditations—phantoms to which his tranquil past had not accustomed him—, Harold felt terribly alone. There was, to be sure, the horrible Drains, more horrible than ever in his massive attempts to be sympathetic. And there was . . . Mrs. Lorillard. But was she laughing at him? At moments, in her frankness, her ease, her buoyant assertion of personality, she had reminded him irresistibly of his aunt. Could he, however, he wondered, count on her as an ally in this thicket of foes? Were they, definitely, foes? In his ignorance he was unable to decide. He only was aware of how uncomfortable they made him feel, and he fortified himself with the assurance that the more they advanced, the more he would retreat.
He determined, as the day wore on, to write to Alice. Sitting down before his desk, he tried to compose a letter. It was a difficult matter, he soon discovered, to compose a letter—the first—to a girl with whom he was in love, a girl whom, at the same time, he scarcely knew. Dear Miss Blake, he began; after a moment of perturbed reflection he drew his pen through these words. Dear lady; too formal. Dear friend; how absurd! She might even deny this. Dear stranger; more absurd still. Finally, he decided to begin his letter without any address at all, and now he found that he could write it quite easily.
You have frightened me, his pen traced. I know nobody in New York. Absolutely nobody. I haven't had time to tell you my story, and so you will not understand, but I cannot hope ever to be formally introduced to you. Couldn't you, in some way, explain to your father? I do so want to see you, to know you. We have met under such strange circumstances that there has been no opportunity for a quiet talk. Can't you arrange something? Please do. I must see you. I eagerly await your reply.
He gave the letter to Drains to post, but immediately after Drains had departed on this mission, he felt the need of going out himself. A novel restlessness had beseiged him. Drawing on his rain-coat, he left the house. Without being particularly conscious of where he was walking, without any desire to walk to any definite place, he directed his steps towards Gramercy Park. The rain-drops pelted his face with a welcome freshness. He did not want to go to Paul's but he craved the opportunity of talking to somebody, and to whom else could he talk? Ki, at the door, informed him that Paul had gone out. Would he come in and wait? He declined. Too nervous to sit still, he preferred to walk around the iron-grating enclosing the park. The benches in the enclosure were deserted. The trees, drenched by the windy rain, shook drops of water on the vivid green grass. . . . Harold walked round and round the iron fence. A policeman in a rubber-coat stood on the corner of Lexington Avenue. On the other side of the park, Harold passed a sailor under an umbrella. . . . What would Alice say? Would she answer his letter at all? He felt completely miserable. Why couldn't his father give him a position in his own home where he could meet people? He was, he assured himself, to all intents and purposes an outcast. He returned to Paul's. Paul had not yet come in. Ki smiled. Would the gentleman wait? Harold again declined. Round and round the grating. The rain continued to fall. It was twilight.
Drains, too, was smiling, as he opened the door for Harold. How could everybody smile? And they all smiled cynically, as if they knew some secret of which he was not aware. Did they all understand why life was so cruel? Did they all comprehend the jest of the cruelty? The evening was almost a replica of his first evening in his own apartment. Drains asked what he would have for dinner . . . and gave him chops, etc. Again he went early to bed with books and magazines which he did not read. He could not tolerate this waiting. He, who had been patient all his life, was becoming impatient. He lifted the receiver from the hook and put it back again. She had asked him, he forced himself to remember, not to telephone. Drains departed for the night. The driving rain was still beating against the window-panes. The lightning flashed occasionally and there were heavy crashes of thunder. Harold shuddered. How lonely he was! He who had been alone so much formerly, now could not suffer being alone. His circumstances had been so different then. Now he felt that the world was against him, had separated him from the one person he wanted to see. His heart almost stopped beating when the telephone bell tinkled. It was Paul. Harold's voice registered his disappointment. Yes, he had called. No, nothing in particular. Yes, he would drop in tomorrow.
What are we going to do? Harold asked desperately.
Anything you like. We'll decide when you arrive.
Then, quite suddenly, after the naïve manner of youth, Harold cried out for sympathy: Can I come over tonight?
Sorry, old man, Paul answered; it's quite impossible. I have a rendezvous in a doss-house with my aged grandmother.
Realizing that he had made a mistake, Harold mumbled a good-bye. Tears streamed out of the corners of his eyes. He felt more alone, more miserable than ever. At this moment, he would have been glad to see even Drains. He tried to read, but nothing held his interest. At last, he got up and walked about, his restlessness increasing as he fed it. Suddenly his eye fell on a carafe, half-full of brandy, standing on the side-board. Grasping it, he poured out enough to fill a wineglass, and, with much gulping, he contrived to swallow the burning fluid. Then and then only was he able to fall asleep.
The answer to his letter was delivered by messenger in the afternoon. The envelope, he noted, was addressed in a different hand from that which had penned the envelope containing the hundred dollar bill. Still it must be . . . He tore it open. His own note, the top of the envelope neatly slit, tumbled out first. Then a letter:
Sir:—
My daughter has informed me of the manner in which you have become implicated in her affairs. I take this occasion to thank you for your assistance, if you have given assistance, but I must ask you not to pursue my daughter further. If you seek more than gratitude for what you have done, I shall be glad to send you a check. Under no circumstances, however, are you to address another letter to my daughter. Any such I shall be obliged to open and, if you persist in making her the butt of your unwelcome attentions, I shall be obliged to pay a visit to the police court myself.
What an insult! The hideous mortification of receiving such a letter burned Harold's cheeks with shame. And poor Alice. How must she feel? What had her father done to her? Then he suddenly remembered that he had been on the verge of telling the whole story to Paul. If he had seen Paul last evening he certainly would have told him, and Paul would have laughed. Paul surely would laugh at this story; so would Drains. With a sort of furtive intuition he began to believe that no women were innocent in the eyes of Paul and Drains. Harold felt more than ever a martyr. His life, which, it seemed, began with a mistake on the day he was born, would, he was convinced, never shape itself. All his existence, apparently, would continue to be one long mistake. Again, quite spontaneously, the idea recurred to him that he hated his father for, however unconsciously, shaping it for him. It wasn't, he began to realize, his college years which had proved his present undoing, but his early bringing up, the inadequate and unworldly supervision of Aunt Sadi and Persia Blaine. And this was his father's doing! To be sure, his aunt and Persia had meant well; they had loved him . . . but they had not been capable of preparing him for the perils he had to face.
Paul, that day, and for several days following, was rather inclined to be distrait, and Harold, silent concerning the only matter which really interested him, on his part found comparatively little to say. He encountered Campaspe on several occasions, and once or twice, he fancied, he saw her looking at him with sympathy, but they were never alone, and mainly she was preoccupied with gossip about the Duke of Middlebottom, who had arrived, unaccountably, in New York in June.
June, he had remarked to Campaspe, is the London season; why not make it the New York season as well? I told him, Campaspe repeated in her narrative to Paul, that all he would need was an impresario to produce an opera or two, three or four ladies of society, and a climate. His answer was direct. He said, and it is perfectly true, that New York is cooler than London in the summer, that wherever I was there was sure to be society, and that he would give the opera himself. He is committed to some such plan.
Bunny and Zimbule, also, offered matter for discussion. They were much talked about and, when one wasn't talking about them, they ran in to talk about themselves. They were settled in Bunny's small apartment in Greenwich Village and were living a life in which love and ambition played equal parts. Bunny was composing his two bar songs and piano pieces, and he had succeeded, without much difficulty, in securing Zimbule a situation on the stage for, after a day's reflection, she had decided that she would rather go on the stage than do anything else.
She spent days in Campaspe's motor, and out of it in smart shops, outfitting herself at Campaspe's expense. She was aware of her beauty and not without taste, it was discovered, when it came to adorning it, withal this taste was somewhat bizarre. She had begun by assuming such ready-made dresses as could be easily summoned from the backs of models at Bendel's, Tappe's and Gilbert Clark's, but very soon, under the spell of the compliments which her really exquisite loveliness won from the lips of the attendants in these shops, she was encouraged by Campaspe, whose desire in life was to amuse herself, and whose purse was sufficiently heavy to make the carrying out of this desire facile, to go a little further along the route of self-expression. Campaspe's philosophy was as sure at this point as at another. It was only, she frequently said, those who expected to find amusement in themselves who wandered about disconsolate and bored. Amusement was to be derived from watching others, when one permitted them to be entirely themselves. One was born with oneself and, if one were intelligent, one got to know oneself thoroughly at the age of four. Thereafter, a life of boredom intervened until the grave yawned, unless one surrounded oneself with people who were individual enough to comport themselves with some eccentricity, not to say perversity. Zimbule was not cut to any conventional pattern. She filled Campaspe's bill.
Soon the child began to notice the difference between stuffs, the difference between patterns and colours. Warm as it was, she affected an interest in kinkob and camel's-hair shawls, and she became aware of the sacred names of Reboux, Premet, Chéruit, and Maria Guy.
I adore her! Campaspe ejaculated one day. I can never cease to thank God that we captured her from those embracing snakes. She is the most amusing person we've ever discovered. She's wholly natural, wholly an animal. I've never met a woman like her. When she's hungry she eats; when she's sleepy, she sleeps; and when she's amorous, she loves. She's imitative like an animal too. Having observed that I wear geraniums, she's clever enough to realize that geraniums are not her flower. When I called for her the other day she was sporting a great bouquet of orchids. Bunny, of course, can never pay for them and so I have taken to sending her orchids every morning, developing an expensive taste. Her next lover may be rich enough to afford them. But you can never tell with Zimbule. Animals are not interested in money. If she falls in love with a rich man it will be an accident.
Bunny, it was certain, was deeply in love with Zimbule. He had no eyes for her eccentricities, but he was delighted that Campaspe had dressed her up. The practical side of these attentions dawned on him more fully when she was engaged, solely on her looks, for a good part in support of a female star. Zimbule took this engagement entirely as a matter of course. Everything with, Zimbule was a matter of course. She ate, slept, lived, loved as a matter of course. And, quite naturally, like the little animal she was, she never thought at all.
One afternoon, the Duke of Middlebottom appeared at Paul's apartment, and Harold was astonished by the grace and charm of Drains's former master. The Duke immediately manifested an interest in Harold which appeared to be sincere. As for Harold, the Duke appealed to him from the beginning, without giving him the sense, which the others made him feel so constantly, that he was being made game of. The Duke was younger than Harold had expected to find him. Somehow, Harold had thought of all Dukes as middle-aged men, and this particular Duke was but scantily past thirty. He was a tall, blond Englishman; his hair, of course, was curly; his cheeks were rosy, and his eyes were blue. He was always dressed to perfection, wore a monocle, and had the habit of flaunting three cornflowers as a boutonniere. His trousers flared at the bottom and his small feet were encased in round-toed French boots with cloth tops. He had very ugly hands, thick across, with short, stubby fingers with spatulate terminations, and nails which seemed never to have permitted the attentions of a manicure. Not only were they unevenly clipped; often, they were actually dirty. Another peculiarity of the Duke was that he stammered, but this apparent defect actually added to his attractiveness. His name was eponymous for a certain group that frequented the Cafe Royal in London and with his crest on his stationery was the motto: A thing of beauty is a boy for ever. The Duke made it a point to live by the Julian Calendar, thirteen days behind the Gregorian. In this wise he contrived to evade all unsatisfactory engagements, especially if they were complicated in any way by daylight-saving time, an American refinement of which he was utterly ignorant.
Harold found him very delightful and wondered if Drains's strictures were part of that valet's demoniacal cynicism. He judges everybody, thought Harold, in terms of himself and his own rotten life. It was plainly to be seen that the Duke of Middlebottom never entertained an evil thought.
Campaspe and the Duke were old friends, and they talked of Capri, from whence the Duke had recently emerged, the new English plays, the best of which, the Duke appeared to believe, were by Beaumont and Fletcher, Poiret's inventions for the grues at Auteuil, Cocteau's café, Le Bœuf sur le Toit, and kindred subjects. He was a charming and engaging conversationalist, and the most winning quality of his manner was its utter frankness and apparent absence of guile. Harold had been fully prepared, by advance reports, to meet an ironic epigrammatist, who perhaps removed his coat in public to inject a shot of morphia into his arm. The Duke seemed free from a mania for exhibitionism. Not only was he delightful to Harold, he was equally at his ease with Paul, and he had bestowed upon Zimbule, whom he playfully described as a sciurine oread, the accolade of his particular interest. He had made her his friend at once by promising to present her with a long string of coral beads of the valuable and rare colour of the berries of wintergreen.
At their first meeting, she had challenged his monocle.
What'd you do if it dropped and broke? she asked.
For answer, the Duke relaxed the muscles around his eye, and the glass fell to the floor, shivering into fragments. Immediately, he took another glass from his waistcoat pocket, and adjusted it.
The Duke questioned Harold regarding his tastes, and told him long stories of harmless adventures among the Italian peasantry, in which shepherd boys and bersaglieri figured in sympathetic guises. Sheep were saved, and ladies escorted through perilous mountain-passes, while banditi rained down shot from convenient posts above. There was also a harrowing, but amusing, account of the birth of a child in the compartment of a railway carriage during the prolonged passage through the Simplon Tunnel. Only once did Harold betray what he thought was a trace of affectation in the Duke when that one, being questioned, declared that he had never seen the Blue Grotto.
But you have just come from Capri!
The boy does not believe you, Campaspe interposed. Ronald never lies, Harold. Think a moment. How long have you been in New York?
Nearly three weeks.
Have you seen the Statue of Liberty?
No.
Or Grant's Tomb?
No.
Or the Metropolitan Museum of Art?
No-o.
Or Poe's house?
No.
Or the Bronx Zoo?
No.
Or Fraunces' Tavern?
No.
Or the Aquarium?
No.
And you have been here three weeks. The Duke spent two or three weeks in Capri and yet you expect him to have seen the Blue Grotto!
During the progress of this dialogue there was a crescendo in Harold's abashment, but the Duke only smiled and did not seem to be at all put out.
Youth, he remarked, is always incredulous. The Firebird, however, hasn't t-t-t-told you the whole truth. I pass t-t-two or three weeks in Capri every year, and yet I have never seen the B-B-B-Blue Grotto.
I believe you, said Harold fervently.
I would never see Mount Ætna at T-T-Taormina, or Vesuvius at Naples if it were possible to escape them. But they see me first and then they insist that I look.
Why, asked Harold, quite ready to let this subject drop, do you call Campaspe the Firebird?
It seems natural, even inevitable, to do so. Her p-p-plumage is so brilliant. It glistens and d-d-dazzles.
Oh!
Wait. There is more. I am not thinking of the Zhar-Ptitsa of Russian legend. Rather I am making an impious in-t-t-terpretation of certain passages in the Comte de Gabalis. Probably you have not yet read that fascinating seventeenth century satirical romance in which the author, the Abbe de Montfaucon de Villars, was undoubtedly poking fun at the occultists. Ironically enough, the modern Rosicrucians have taken the b-b-b-book seriously and use it as their B-B-Bible. In this delicious capolavoro, the Comte discourses with the author, somewhat after the fashion of . . . Well, certainly such works as W. H. Mallock's New Republic and Aldous Huxley's Crome Yellow stem from this book.
The Comte recommends marriage with one of the immortal beings who people the elements rather than with a human; he advises cohabitation with the nymphs who swim in the water, the gnomes who inhabit the earth, the sylphs who fly in the air, or the salamanders who thrive in the fire. Campaspe, I am convinced, has married a salamander and has embraced his element. She b-b-b-burns like a clear white flame, using our emotions for fuel. Wherever there is passion, Campaspe's incandescence increases, but she remains faithful, under all circumstances, to her salamander. Occasionally, in one of her soaring flights, she drops a fiery feather, and some poor mortal mistakes it for the living bird.
But I have married a mortal, Campaspe objected.
Your children are salamanders, was the Duke's final word.
Harold was uncertain whether to tell Drains that he had met the Duke, but Drains saved him the trouble. As he brought in Harold's coffee one morning, the man remarked:
I saw my old master yesterday, sir.
The Duke . . . Yes, I know. I've met him. He isn't a bit the sort you described.
Drains raised his eyebrows.
I described the Duke! he exclaimed. I told you that I had been in his employ, sir, but I scarcely permitted myself to go further.
You told me why you had left him, dared Harold.
Drains's face had regained its customary imperturbability.
I cannot, of course, contradict you, sir, but I assure you, sir, that you are labouring under some misapprehension. I could never have discussed the affairs of the Duke. He is a fine gentleman, sir.
Well, for once we agree, said Harold, and he began to wonder if he had misjudged Drains.